"Consciousness is a promise, but one has to explore it. It is also a task. Consciousness is a possibility, but you can also miss it. Don't take it for granted: it is not yet a fact. You are a seed for it, but you have to grow into it.

"A seed can remain a seed and may never become a tree, may never become capable of blooming, may never be able to release its fragrance to the world, may never be able to offer itself to the divine. That possibility also exists. And remember always that many miss; only a few arrive.

"This creates an anxiety – that man is a promise, that man is an adventure, that man is not yet. It creates an anxiety in the wrong kind of person, but it creates joy in the right kind of person.

"Whom do I call the right kind of person and whom do I call the wrong kind? The coward is the wrong kind of person. In the coward it creates anxiety. At the very idea of going on an adventure, on a pilgrimage into the unknown, the coward shrinks. He stops breathing, his heart beats no more, he becomes stone deaf to this call, to this challenge. This challenge becomes an enemy. He becomes defensive against it.

"And the courageous I call the right kind of person. To him this is not an anxiety, this is thrill, this is challenge, this is adventure. God has called him forth. He starts moving, he starts seeking and searching. If you seek, there is a possibility of finding; if you don't seek, there is no possibility. If you start moving, then one day or other you will reach the ocean, as every river does. But if you have become very, very much afraid of movement, of dynamism, of life, of change, then you become a small pond. By and by you die. You become more and more dirty, dull, stale, stagnant. Then your whole life is ill. Then your whole life is a pathology. And many – the majority – live in a kind of pathology.

"A modern thinker, Lewis Yablonsky, has coined the right word for this pathology – he calls it robopathology."