"Secondly, that we are helpless, there is no way to avoid the fact. All are simply imaginations and dreams.

"Just to avoid one's helplessness one tries so many ways…one starts drinking alcohol, taking drugs, so that one can forget this utter helplessness in this vast empty universe, this aloneness in this infinity.

"There are people who are angry with me just for the simple reason that I want to make them aware of the fact, and not to live in fictions. There is no God whom you can depend on in times of trouble, in dark nights. There is nobody to hear your prayers. When I say this it creates in people antagonism against me. I am taking away their teddy bears.

"Just try to take a teddy bear from a small child and see how he freaks out. The teddy bear is his solace, his consolation, his companion, his God, his friend; he is his everything. Just watch, on the platforms of railway stations, in airports, in waiting halls, small children carrying their teddy bears. Dirty, greasy, looking like Italians, but carrying them…a deep solace somewhere that they are not alone, the teddy bear is here. If any calamity happens the teddy bear is going to help.

"But poor teddy bears at least are real. Your God is not even that real.

"When I see somebody raising his eyes to the sky and praying, I feel like crying. This man is living in dreams. There is nobody there above the clouds, but his prayer gives him a certain solace, a consolation.

"No prayer has ever been heard, except once:

"You can see Maneesha here. This is the prayer of Vimal – he prayed twenty-four hours to all kinds of gods, Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian, any kind of god, just come and help to take Maneesha's migraine – because he had started having a migraine! Every day he would have to be hammered – 'It is you, because of you, that poor Maneesha is having a migraine. And you are enjoying!'

"He started feeling guilty and shaky. Now today he is looking very happy, his prayer has been heard. Now nobody can raise a finger at him."