But for centuries the enlightened people have talked and the idiots have gathered all the beautiful words. It is very easy to talk about the ultimate, brahma, and quote a few statements from the scriptures. Every Indian is spiritual – but just on the surface. Deep down I have not seen a more materialistic people anywhere in the world: so much greed, so much ambition, so much repressed lust – and on the surface, a parrot-like spiritual talk.

The Indian consists not of one person, but two. The real population of India is not nine hundred million, it is double that, because each Indian is two Indians! One is the real, which is hidden in darkness, and one is the unreal, which goes on repeating beautiful phrases.

The Western seekers don’t have any understanding about these parrots, so when they hear great words about which their tradition knows nothing…. Their minds are conditioned by a very poor Christianity, mundane, ordinary, which does not have great philosophical flights.

But in India you can talk to anybody and you will be surprised that everybody knows about reincarnation, and everybody is afraid of death. Strange! If you know about reincarnation, why should you be afraid of death? Indians are the most cowardly people in the whole world. And when I say this I have absolute evidence for it. There is no other country in the world that has been enslaved for two thousand years continuously.

Why did India remain enslaved for two thousand years? A country that knows about reincarnation, which knows that the soul is eternal, which knows that you cannot be killed…. But this knowledge is only parrot-knowledge; when the time comes, this knowledge is not of any help.

Small tribes have ruled over this big, vast continent, because nobody wants to get into trouble unnecessarily. And because for centuries this country has been hearing beautiful words, tremendous revelations, by and by everybody has become saturated with them. So they are capable of rationalizing everything, even slavery.

For twenty centuries Indian scholars, Indian saints were even rationalizing the state of slavery: that it is a fire test of your patience, of your trust in God, of your nonviolence. And behind these beautiful words there was nothing but cowardliness – because Indians are afraid of being killed. That’s why they don’t kill others: it is dangerous. If you start killing others, you have to risk your life too. Indians have chosen not to fight and they have made a great philosophy out of it, of “nonviolence.” It is protective of their cowardly souls.

They are the poorest people in the world. Half of the population is starving and any day in the coming thirteen years, five hundred million people are going to die in this country. But still they will go on rationalizing that it is fate, it is destiny; that everything is in the hands of God. Not even a leaf on a tree moves without God’s orders; everything happens according to God. If he wants us to be slaves, what can we do? If he wants us to be poor, what can we do? If he wants us to have more and more children, what can we do?

The rich go on becoming richer and the poor go on producing more and more children.