And I would like you to be as much a materialist as a spiritualist. I don’t make the division. I don’t want to create any split in you. You are already split. Your so-called religions have already done much damage to you. They have created a schizophrenic world in which everybody is split. And of course then there is tension, anxiety, anguish, because you become two. By just calling yourself a spiritual being, you are condemning your body and you are creating a rift between the body and the soul, between God and the world.

You say God created the world? You state it in a very wrong way. I say God is the world. God has not created it, because he has never been able to become separate from it. It is not like a painter, that he paints something and then he is free of the painting and the painting becomes separate – the painter can die but the painting will live. No, God is not like that. God is more like a dancer. Hence I have so much love for dance. God is more like a dancer. You cannot separate the dancer from the dance. He is Nataraj: the dancer of all the dancers, the master of all the dancers. He is dancing in the leaf, in the flower, in the raindrops, in the river, in the peacock. All over is his dance.

He has not created the world; he is the world. The world is his dance, and the separation does not exist. If the world were not there, he would not be a dancer at all. If the dancer were not there, the world could not exist. They are not separate, they are inseparably together. In fact to say “together” is not right, because they are not two; how can they be together? They are one.

And I would like you to remember this unity always and always because you are prone to forget it. Your minds have been conditioned by dualists: matter and mind, body and soul, God and the world, samsara and nirvana.

My sannyasin is the unity, is the bridge between all duality. That’s why I have not told you to renounce the world, because it is God’s dance. Where are you going to renounce it? Have you gone mad? It is his market, it is his world. The noise is his. Once you recognize it, the noise turns into beautiful music. In all these relationships only he is there. In your wife he is, in you he is, in your children too. In your friends he is, in your enemies too. Only he is.

So don’t go anywhere, don’t renounce. Live it as totally as possible – and live it as an integrated being. My emphasis is for an integrated being. You are not in the body: you are the body. Drop that nonsense of “I am in the body.” From the very beginning that nonsense makes a distinction, and then you are very far away from the body and a conflict arises. You start manipulating your body, you start controlling your body, you start doing things to your body. You become destructive, you become violent.

Your so-called saints are all violent. Howsoever they talk about nonviolence, howsoever much, it makes no difference. They are violent people.

There are two types of violent people. The first type is violent with others; the other type is violent with himself. There are sadists and masochists. The sadists torture others; they become Adolf Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao. Then there are masochists, they torture themselves; they become Mahatma Gandhi, Vinoba Bhave, Lanza del Vasto, and so on, so forth. But both are violent people. One tortures himself, another tortures others.