And when I say three hundred, I am not counting sects within religions. For example, I am counting Christianity as one religion, not Catholics, Protestants – in fact they are two religions. And then there are subsects. If you counted them all, then three hundred would be a very small number; there might be three thousand. Everybody is giving you the word of God, and all these religions are giving contradictory statements.

If you listen to all religions, you cannot even breathe for a single moment, because whatever you do is a sin. Fortunately you are conditioned by only one pseudo-religion, so you don’t become aware that there are other idiots also – you are not alone – who are doing the same thing. Their rules are different, but they are playing the same game.

For example, a Jaina monk…. Now Jainism is a very small religion, only three hundred thousand people. We have more sannyasins than there are followers of Jainism. But they have two major sects, just like Catholics and Protestants, and then there are at least thirty subsects. And each subsect believes that this is the true Jainism, and the other twenty-nine either are befooling themselves or are cheating others.

One of these sects is Terapanth. The word terapanth means “thine way,” God’s way. The monk of this sect keeps his nose covered, always covered – twenty-four hours a day, day and night, even in sleep – with cloth, because to breathe directly is a sin. You are all committing sin and you have committed so much that now there is no hope; your whole life you have been committing sin. Except these few, seven hundred people – there are only seven hundred monks in this sect – except these seven hundred people, the whole earth is full of sinners.

Just this much is enough to throw you to the seventh hell, because with each breath you are killing millions of germs. And, according to Jainism, the smallest germ that you cannot even see with your bare eyes – you need a microscope, you need to magnify it at least one thousand times, then you can see it – those smallest germs have the same soul as you have. There is no qualitative difference. Whether you kill a man or you kill a germ, it is all the same as far as God is concerned. In his eyes, you will not be given special treatment.

So the moment you breathe out, you throw out hot air. That hot air is enough to kill millions of germs in the air. When you breathe in, you breathe in millions of germs with your breathing, which will be killed inside you. So with each breath, what Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong did – what all three did in their whole life seems to be nothing – you are doing in a simple breath.

Even at night they cannot remove the cloth. To talk to these people is difficult, because the cloth is covering their nose and their mouth too, because when you speak, air comes from your mouth, air goes in from your mouth, so they can’t speak without the cover. So the direct hit is avoided. But to talk to these people is very difficult; even to understand what they are saying is very difficult. They are just mumbling inside the covered mouth, the nose cover.