"Each society, each civilization has to pass through life to death, from death to life again.

"Indian culture is the only culture which has not died for thousands of years. There have been many cultures in the world: the Assyrian, the Babylonian, the Greek, the Roman, the Egyptian. They all flowered, blossomed: they contributed to the world their beauty, their sculpture, their music, their poetry, their drama, and then they disappeared without leaving a trace behind. This is how it should be.

"If all the old people in your family were alive – your father and your father's father and his father's father to the very end, to Adam and Eve and God the Father – then one thing is certain: you would have been crushed. So many old people, all corpses, are enough to crush a small child who is delicate like a rose.

"One of the greatest things that Friedrich Nietzsche did was to declare: God is dead and man is free.

"God as father has to be dead, otherwise his weight will be too much, it will be too mountainous. It won't allow the freshness of humanity. It won't allow exploration, it won't allow adventure. The old man will be too cautious, too cunning, too calculating, too Jewish. His whole experience of the past will be enough to destroy the child. The child needs exploration; and, of course, when you explore you commit many mistakes – that is part of growth. One should be allowed to commit mistakes. One should certainly be intelligent enough not to commit the same mistakes again and again; one should be creative enough to invent new mistakes. That's the way one expands, grows. That's the way consciousness becomes integrated.

"Life is a trial-and-error process. The old man drops all mistakes, errors. He becomes so accustomed to doing the right thing that exploration, adventure, disappears from his life. And because of his own fears he won't allow the new generations to go in new directions, into new dimensions. He will make them afraid, he will paralyze them, he will cripple them. That's what has been happening in India.

"India is a strange case. It is extraordinary in a way: this has never happened anywhere else."