"They have been separate disciplines. In the West theology has dominated, so much so that either a mystic had to talk in terms of theology or he had to be ready to be burnt alive.

"Dionysius must have felt the utter futility of all that he was saying. I can feel his pain. I can feel compassion and love for him. I can see the man knows. But the people who were in power were utterly ignorant of the truth. And he did not want to be burnt alive so he had to talk in a stupid way.

"Lao Tzu talks directly, Buddha's statements are absolutely clear; there is nothing airy-fairy about them. Mahavira says whatsoever he wants to say without creating a great camouflage of big words, theories, ideologies, philosophies. They are very, matter of fact people and very, precise too, almost mathematically precise.

"That's why in the East the statements of all the great enlightened masters are known as sutras. Sutra means a very condensed statement; all that is non-essential has been eliminated, only the very essential has been expressed. They are like seeds. You can sow those seeds in your soul and a big tree will start growing in you with millions of flowers and millions of seeds. But the statements themselves are very small. They don't go zigzag; they are straightforward, they go like an arrow. They don't go in a roundabout way because they are not afraid to say whatsoever they feel like saying.

"The West has not allowed that freedom. And now even in the East the Western disease is spreading. Now even in the East the freedom is disappearing.

"I am continuously condemned just because I go on saying the truth as it is without making any compromise with any kind of theology – of the Hindus, of the Jainas, of the Buddhists, of the Mohammedans, of the Christians. They are all against me. It is a strange phenomenon in the East. It has been the tradition in the West, but the disease has come to the East too. Otherwise in the East nobody has ever been crucified, nobody has ever been killed, poisoned, like Socrates, Jesus, al-Hillaj Mansoor and many others."