"What they are really trying to do…they are trying to become absolutely passive. But their passivity is negativity. They have already chosen an attitude.

"First, these people were much too active in the world; running, desiring, ambitious. The mind was active, excited – with desire, future, hope. Then they got frustrated, because whatsoever you hope for is not going to be fulfilled. All hopes are hopeless and all desiring comes to frustration, and all expectations carry frustration as a seed within. So sooner or later, everybody is bound to come to a point in life when the active mind looks simply like a hell: too much activity and no result out of it, running and running and never arriving.

"If you are intelligent it happens soon, if you are stupid it takes a little longer time, but it happens all the same. If you are very intelligent then when you are young you will come to see it, if you are not that intelligent then in old age, but sooner or later. Everybody comes to feel that a life with the active mind is frustrating – it leads nowhere. It promises much but it never fulfills anything. It leaves a distaste in the mouth, a discontent in the being. One simply feels tired and wearied, defeated. One simply feels that the whole thing has been futile.

"Whenever the mind feels this, the mind immediately suggests, 'Try the opposite,' because the mind lives in polarity, in opposition. It says, 'You have tried activity, now try passivity.' You longed too much for the world, now you renounce. You were clinging to money, renounce money. You had become much too attached to the house, renounce the house. You got involved too much with a woman, children; now leave them and escape from all this. The mind suggests to try the opposite and it seems natural and logical: you have done one thing, failed; do the opposite, maybe the opposite succeeds.

"Then the old type of sannyasin – the monk, the monastery, the Himalayas – is born. Then you escape from activity, you try just the opposite. Then you try not to desire, but to not desire is still a desire."