"You have to attain it, achieve it, actualize it. It is given to you as a seed, just as a potentiality – something which can be, but which is not already there.

"You have every chance of missing it. You can be alive because you are born, but that is not synonymous with really being in life. Life is your effort to actualize the potentiality. Hence, the meaning of religion; otherwise there is no meaning in religion. If life begins with birth and ends in death, then there is no meaning for religion. Then religion is futile, nonsense. If life does not begin with birth, then religion has some meaning. Then it becomes the science of how to evolve life out of birth. And the more you move away from birth in life, the more you move away from death also because death and birth are parallel, similar, the same – two ends of one process. If you move away from the one, you are simultaneously moving away from the other.

"Religion is a science to achieve life. Life is beyond death. Birth dies; life, never. To achieve this life you have to do something. Birth is given to you. Your parents have done something: they have loved each other, they have been melting into each other, and out of their life force, melting into each other, a new phenomenon, a new seed – you – is born. But you have not done anything for it: it is a gift. Remember, birth is a gift. That is why all the cultures pay so much respect to parents – it is a gift, and you cannot repay it. The debt cannot be repaid. What can you do to repay it? Life has been given to you, but you have not done anything for it.

"Religion can give you a new birth, a rebirth. You can be reborn. But this birth will happen through some alchemical change within you. Just as the first birth happened through two life forces meeting without you – they created an opportunity for you to enter, to be born; that is a deep alchemy – so a similar thing has to be done now within you."