"That's the way of the pseudo-man. The authentic man simply lives.

"Yes, if you ask the authentic man, he may tell you about certain rules, but they are not the rules that he has followed himself. He has just found them on the way of living, just like collecting seashells on the beach. He had not gone to collect the seashells, he had gone to enjoy the early morning, the fresh air, the sun, the sea, the sand. Just by the way, he found those seashells.

"All the rules are collected by people who have not lived according to them, because the people who have lived according to them have committed suicide long before. Anybody living according to a rule is destroying himself, poisoning himself, because the rule was found by somebody who was not you, somewhere where you will never be, in some time, in some space, which is not your time and not your space. It is very dangerous to follow that rule. You will be distracting your life away from its center, its grounding – you will misshape yourself. Trying to shape yourself you will only misshape yourself, disfigure yourself.

"So all the rules I have talked about these two or three days – you have to remember: before all of them comes the golden rule. But I had simply forgotten about it. I got so immersed in wrestling with Moses – and poor Moses has never done any harm to me, nor do I intend to do any harm to him – but the word commandment triggered something in me.

"It reminds me of when I was a postgraduate student. In India it became a rule that every student had to participate in a two year army training. I went to the vice-chancellor and said, 'I simply refuse. I will not participate in any army training; the very idea is nauseous – that somebody says to me, 'Left turn' and I have to turn left. Who is he? And why should I turn left in the first place? If I want to turn right or if I don't want to turn at all. It is going to be difficult. It is better you find some way to keep me out of it.'

"He said, 'I can understand you, and I can see the difficulty."