"Only one can be true – either your love can be true or your authority can be true. But these words have never been disassociated from each other, for the simple reason that the love and authority come from the same people: the mother is the authority and love, the father is the authority and love, the priest is the authority and love. They get entangled with each other. You have never entered deep enough to see that they are not only two absolutely separate phenomena, they are absolutely contradictory.

"The second thing: love does not grow. It is not grass! It is born suddenly, out of nowhere. You feel the song, the dance of love, and you are amazed. It does not come with any indication: 'I am coming.' It simply comes whenever you are ready, whenever your meditation is ready, whenever your being is silent – it suddenly comes, and all your being dances. It has an authority, but not authority over others. It has an authority in the sense that it is your own experience. You can say, 'I am not quoting scriptures, I am the scripture.'

"Ordinarily, authority is always a kind of domination. And authority is always derived from somebody else.

"Jesus derives his authority from God; otherwise he has no argument for what he is saying – just a villager's statements. He gets the authority because these are the words coming to him from his father who is above in heaven. And then the whole train starts – pope after pope. This Polack pope seems to have forgotten to die. Polacks are Polacks; you can't depend on their intelligence. Down through twenty centuries, popes have lived one year, six months, two years, at the most three years, but to get rid of this Polack is very difficult.

"From where does their authority come? From Jesus Christ. And all down the line – the cardinals, the bishops, the priests – they all derive their authority from above. It is not their own experience.

"I used to live in a neighborhood in Raipur, and a priest – a Catholic priest – also lived there. We used to go early in the morning for a walk."