"You cannot sculpt God in a statue because God is the very source of life, and nothing else.

"The source of life has no face of its own, it has no hands of its own, it has no eyes of its own; but if you are silent, peaceful, loving, suddenly your hands start quivering with a new source of energy. Your hands become God's hands, your eyes start seeing in a totally different way – they become the eyes of God. Everything remains the same and yet everything changes, because you have changed. Godliness is a way of life, a style of life, living in tune with existence.

"God is not a person, but simply a certain way of falling in tune with existence, of falling in love with all that surrounds you. The true religion is nothing but love, unbounded, unfettered.

"Kahlil Gibran says,

Your daily life is your temple…

"In fact, to avoid it, we have created temples. The temples are not the places where God lives, those are the places which we have created to deceive ourselves. Godliness is all over the space, everywhere, but to be so overwhelmed, so possessed and enchanted by God that each single moment becomes flooded with him needs courage, needs guts, needs a heart uncluttered – open, available, receptive. To avoid this, we have created small temples. These temples are not to find God, but to avoid God.

"Your religions are not religion, but an escape from religion. They are like toys, poor substitutes, dead, with no life, with no song, with no dance. But it is strange that the whole of humanity has been deceiving itself. There must be some deep psychological reason.

"I am reminded of a beautiful story by Rabindranath Tagore. He says, 'I have been searching for God, for many, many lives. Once in a while I saw a glimpse of him near a far, faraway star, and I rushed toward that star. But by the time I reached there, he was gone.

"'Again I saw him somewhere else, far away, but it was always far away, and to travel that distance takes time. And God is not something dead – it is something flowing, constantly moving."