"But on the surface, he will remain loyal – he has to. It is not out of his joy, it is out of fear; it is not out of love, it is out of a conditioned mind which says that you have to be loyal to your master. It is the loyalty of the dog to his master.

"Love needs a more total response; it comes not out of duty, but out of your own heartbeats, out of your own experience of joy, out of the desire to share it.

"Loyalty is something ugly, but for thousands of years it has been a very respectable value because society has enslaved people in different ways. The wife is supposed to be loyal to the husband, to the point that, in this country, millions of women have died with their husband's death, jumping in the funeral pyre alive, and burning themselves to death. It was so respectable that any woman who could not do it had to live a very condemned life. She became almost an outcast; she was treated only as a servant in her own family. It was concluded that because she could not die with her husband, she was not loyal to him.

"In fact, just think of it the other way around: not a single man has jumped into the funeral pyre of his wife. Nobody has raised the question, 'Does it mean that no husband has ever been loyal to his wife?' But it is a society of double standards: one standard is for the master, the owner, the possessor, and the other standard is for the slave.

"Love is a dangerous experience, because you are possessed by something which is bigger than you, and it is not controllable – you cannot produce it on order. Once it is gone, there is no way to bring it back; all that you can do is to pretend, be a hypocrite.

"Loyalty is a totally different matter; it is manufactured by your own mind, it is not something beyond you. It is a training in a particular culture – just like any other training. You start acting; and by and by, you start believing your own acting."