The old concept was to live according to a certain pattern: the Buddhist pattern, the Christian pattern, the Hindu pattern. The old was not in favor of the individual, it was in favor of a certain pattern. That pattern creates slavery.

I teach the individual, I teach the unique individual. Respect yourself, love yourself, because there has never been a person like you and there never will be again. Existence never repeats. You are utterly unique, incomparably unique. You need not be like somebody else, you need not be an imitator, you have to be authentically yourself, your own being. You have to do your own thing.

The moment you start accepting and respecting yourself you start becoming whole. Then there is nothing to divide you, then there is nothing to create the split. Hitherto, man has been schizophrenic. And I am not saying that a few people have been schizophrenic – the whole humanity has been schizophrenic. Leave a few exceptions: a Krishna, a Lao Tzu here and there – you can count them on your fingers. They don’t constitute humanity, they are exceptions, and the exceptions only prove the rule. But the greater part of humanity has lived a schizophrenic life, a divided life, fragmentary.

And why did man become so split? First thing: you are not acceptable as you are, so reject yourself. Rather than respecting yourself, reject yourself; rather than respecting yourself, respect some idea, some imaginary idea, of how you should be. Don’t live the real, try to live the “should” and you are split, you have become two. You are that which you are, but that you reject, repress. And you want to be that which you are not, and that which you are not you love and you respect and you worship. You have become two.

Not only that you have been split in two, you have been made many, because you were taught that the body is your enemy, that you have to get rid of the body. You were taught that many things in you have to be cut off, that you are not as you should be, that great changes have to be done.

Naturally you started rejecting your sex, you started rejecting your desires, you started rejecting your anger. And all these rejected parts are energies to be transformed. They are not your enemies, they are friends in disguise.

Anger transformed becomes compassion, sex transformed becomes prayerfulness, greed transformed becomes sharing. But in the past it was told again and again, repeated down the ages, that you had to reject this, reject that. If you listen to the old teachings you will be surprised – you are rejected almost ninety-nine percent. Only one percent, some imaginary soul, of which you are not aware at all, is accepted in you. And all that you are aware of is rejected.

These fragments do not allow you to become one piece, and unless you become one piece there is no peace possible. Unless you are a togetherness, integrated, crystallized, you will not know what existence is – because existence speaks only to those who are real, existence speaks only to those who are not a crowd, not noisy.