“You don’t have anybody there — God, some messiah, some prophet. There is no one with whom you can have a dialogue. You, in utter silence, feel it. It is simply a state of mind at rest — and the heart throbbing in a deep harmony with existence.

I say there is no God, but there is godliness. So I destroy God as a person. He becomes more like a fragrance than a flower. I am not a theist because I don’t believe in God as a person creating the world. I am not an atheist because I am taking God higher than he has ever been. From a quantity I am transforming him into a quality. But I am not a theist and I am not an atheist. And for people to understand godliness is certainly a little difficult. It is as difficult as if you tell me that you come from a town where everybody is blind, and ask me to say something about light so those people can understand.

What can I say about light to people who are blind, who have never experienced light? There have been preachers around for centuries telling blind people what light looks like, what light is. And there are three hundred religions and three hundred different definitions of light. They all cannot be true, but they all can be false. In the first place to try to make an endeavor explaining light to the blind is stupid. What the blind man needs is not a priest, but a physician, not a teacher, but a surgeon who can give him eyes. It is not a question of giving him the definition of light. The question is to give him eyes. If he can see, he will never ask what light is — he will know. But the priests have been preventing people because they go on supplying definitions of light to the blind.”