Act according to your insight

Question 1:

It is very simple to understand.

To admire you is not difficult. In admiring you they are still higher than you. They are great intellectuals, scientists, politicians, artists, and their admiration in no way hurts their ego - in fact it fulfills it.

But if you point towards me as the source of your lifestyle, of your individuality, of your way of being, them they will not be able to admire it. Then a tremendous jealousy arises. They cannot put me down; they can only accept me as a higher source than their own intelligence - and that's where the trouble is.

It is better not to point to me; and have a good relation with all those people. If you point to me then you immediately hurt their egos. They cannot accept me because I am hitting at the very sources of their conditioning. I am not accepting their intellectuality as intelligence. I don't care about their Nobel Prizes, because those are all political games.

I have no respect for any politician in the world because all politicians are mentally sick, and they are suffering from an inferiority complex.

So if you point to me then certainly you hurt them, offend them. There is no need to do that. If they are admiring you, it is perfectly good. They expect to be admired by you in response. They cannot expect to be admired by me. Even if they admire me I am going to hit against their conditionings which are basically wrong, and which have lead humanity into a mess.

So it is better not to mention my name.

Question 2:

Gurdjieff is right, but I will not agree totally with his first statement, "Blessed are those who remain where they are." They are simply idiots.

They may not be in misery, they may not be in great turmoil and anguish, but they are not blessed.

I agree with the two other statements: "Blessed are those who travel to the end - but woe to those who are stuck somewhere in the middle."

Getting stuck in the middle is a very difficult situation. You have lost the world, and your roots in it, where everybody else lives; and you have not found a new world, new roots where you wanted to live. So you are without any roots, without any nourishment. You cannot go back, because that which is left is left, that which you have known as nonsense is now nonsense - you cannot make it sensible again.

So going back is impossible. And you are stuck in the middle because you are not finding guidance how to go ahead to the end.

Not much guidance is needed on my path, but as far as Gurdjieff is concerned, he is right. Without him his disciples will be stuck because he has never given a clear-cut direction to anyone. He has spoken in puzzles, and only he knows how to make any sense of them. So unless he is with the disciples, they are really in a state of woe - they are cursed. He has taken them out of their homes and there is no new home where they can be.

But with me it is totally different: I have not been giving you detailed directions. You don't need me the way Gurdjieff is needed by his followers - because I feel that kind of need is a sort of spiritual slavery.

My whole effort has been to tell you the whole truth.

You are feeling a little puzzled, not because you don't know how to go forward; your puzzlement is coming from missing the nourishment that my love and my presence can give you, not from a lack of guidance.

And particularly at this moment... because the whole effort of Anand Sheela and her gang was to create a very centered hierarchy, so everything got directed from above. And people like it, because that gives them freedom from responsibility. They are no longer responsible: whatever happens, the source of guidance is responsible - but simultaneously they are becoming slaves.

Seeing this I had to come out of silence, because it was absolutely against my work. I want a deconcentrated world of sannyasins. They should be given a clear-cut direction, understanding.

Their responsibility should not be taken away.

They remain responsible.

They remain free.

They remain their own masters.

And that's what I am trying to do now - undoing everything that, in those four years when I was in silence, has been done to you. And it is not a difficult job to undo it.

I would like all the communes that want to continue to be autonomous: not dependent on any central world headquarters; related, but not dependent; related just because they are sannyasins.

The world headquarters is their headquarters. It is not somebody else dominating them and making them do things whether they like it or not.

There are communes which are not satisfied with remaining together - they can disperse. They can have smaller groups, small centers, small ashramas. There are individuals who would like to remain individuals, not part of any collective group - they should be allowed, because my work is an individual work.

Gurdjieff called his work "school" work. The individuals don't count. The whole school together is needed.

To me, each individual is enough unto himself. He lacks nothing - just a little understanding of himself, a little awareness, a little more consciousness, of which everybody is capable.

And this is the purpose of my having a world tour - to make you aware that you are not dependent on anyone, that you are not part of any school work, that my approach is individualistic, that I want each individual to be absolutely independent in his spiritual growth.

And it is far easier than school work, but it depends on what kinds of methods are used. Gurdjieff was using the methods he had collected from the Sufis - they are all school methods: the individual has to surrender completely to the group. The group evolves, and with the group the individual evolves. If the group is stuck, then the individual is stuck. Then there is no way for the individual to find his own way, because from the very beginning it was a kind of collective growth.

My work differs totally from Gurdjieff's. It is individual from the very beginning. Even though you are living in a commune, it is not that you are part of the commune - no. On the contrary, the commune is simply a name: it has no existence of itself. Because you love each other and you feel to be together... it is just living together.

But your work remains individual.

Your growth remains individual.

And remember this, that the final freedom is possible only if from the very first step you are free.

If you are not free from the very first step, you cannot hope for the last step to be out of freedom, because the last step is essentially the growth of the first step. What was a seed at the first step has come to a flowering at the last step.

No sannyasin needs to feel that he is stuck in the middle. But right now the feeling may be there because I removed all the structure that was created to have a centralized system about everything - erasing individuality, dissolving it into collectivity. So there is a gap right now.

So I want to meet all the sannyasins around the world to tell them, "You need not be worried at all.

Wherever you are you can start growing individually."

And it is beautiful not to depend on others. It is dangerous to have a centralized system. It is efficient, but it is dangerous. It is efficient like any machine, but it reduces human beings to robots.

Their individuality is not respected. They are respected as a part, as a cog in the wheel, but in themselves they are just a cog, of no use. Their use is only in the wheel. If they fit in the centralized system completely, then they are useful, and they will be praised, and they will be rewarded.

It is good for politicians to work that way; it is good for dictators to work that way - and there is some element of dictatorship in George Gurdjieff.

It is not just a coincidence that Josef Stalin and George Gurdjieff were born in the same place - the Caucasus. Both were Caucasians; both have the same tradition; both grew in the same kind of atmosphere; and both were really hard men. That's why Josef Stalin got the name "Stalin." It is not his real name. "Man of steel" - that is the meaning of Stalin.

And the same was the situation with Gurdjieff, who was even far stronger than Josef Stalin. But they are coming from the same stock. Nobody has bothered to look into their backgrounds. They studied in the same monastery. They grew up in the same environment. They have the same kind of blood and the same kind of tradition. Their past is exactly the same.

And the first effort of Josef Stalin, after the revolution, was to kill Gurdjieff. Gurdjieff had to escape from Russia. Gurdjieff was not in politics, and there was no need for Stalin to be concerned about him, but the concern was that such a strong man cannot be tolerated - it is dangerous. He is the same type and more powerful and any time he can create some difficult situation.

The first group that was around Gurdjieff was all Russian - the refugees who had escaped from Russia because of the revolution; Ouspensky was a Russian.... The whole first group was of Russians. That too is symbolic, because the whole of Russia was turning into a dictatorship.

Although these people had escaped, they had the same type of conditioning and the same kind of mind. And they had not escaped from dictatorship, they had escaped because they had enough money. And that was the trouble - that it would be distributed.

So with all their money they escaped from Russia. This was the first group around Gurdjieff. And he created a small, dictatorial group. It was absolutely dictatorial: whatever he said had to be done.

There was no question of any discussion, no question of the other individual thinking about it, no question of freedom. Even things that were absurd had to be done because Gurdjieff said so.

You can see, anybody can see, it is absurd - but that was his way of working. He managed to use a dictatorial system to create a few really beautiful people, but none of them ever became enlightened.

He created very strong people, very beautiful people; but if you look deeply into it, their strength was not of humbleness, their strength was of willpower. It was not of egolessness, it was of the ego.

And all the methods of Gurdjieff strengthen the ego. They make it as strong, as powerful as possible.

One feels one is moving, growing, but none of his followers has reached to enlightenment. A man like Gurdjieff has failed for the simple reason that everything was centralized: his word was law, and nobody could argue about it. There was no question of freedom. He wanted everybody to melt into the group completely - and the group was absolutely in his hands.

It also reminds me of another failure - and that is of J. Krishnamurti. Gurdjieff failed because he destroyed the individual completely and made him only a part of a collectivity, and the collective soul had to grow.

Krishnamurti is on the other extreme. He left the individual completely free - so much so that of those who have been following his teachings for almost sixty years, none of them has had the benefit of the love of the master, the presence of the master.

Krishnamurti has given freedom, but he has removed himself totally out of your existence. Gurdjieff catches hold of you totally; and Krishnamurti leaves you totally - so totally that even his presence, his love, is not to be a support in moments when you start wobbling or in states when you start feeling discouraged. You can expect no help from him.

Gurdjieff was a dictator. Krishnamurti is not even a friend, he is simply indifferent. What happens to you is your business, he is not concerned. His concern ends the moment he has said what he wanted to say. His concern is with his teaching but not with the real individuals. He is not in love with the people who surround him. He will not give even that much warmth that can keep you on the path in the nights when it is very cold.

These are extremes - Gurdjieff and Krishnamurti - and extremes always fail. They fail for different reasons, diametrically opposite reasons, but they fail in the same way.

I am exactly in the middle.

I don't want to dictate to you in detail the whole program of your life. But I want to be close to you in case you fall, in case you need warmth, in case just a gesture of love will keep you moving on the way.

I will not take your freedom from you, because I want you to be ultimately free. But that does not mean that I have to be cold towards you.

So I will be coming.

And I don't see that there is any great problem - just a little chaos. And out of this chaos something good will happen. I could have remained silent and there would have been no chaos, but then I was seeing that you were being exploited; that you were working twelve hours, fourteen hours a day; that your whole life had become devoted to restaurants, discos....

There was no time for meditation. There was no inspiration for meditation. In fact, there was positively a condemnation of anybody who wanted time for meditation, time for friends or lovers...

wanted to play his guitar. He was thought to be sabotaging the system. He was thrown out. So all creativity was being destroyed.

The commune had become just a money-creating mechanism, and the sannyasins were being used just as slaves.

It was difficult for me. I had tried it - to make those people understand that this was not the reason why the communes were brought about. I had tried to explain what my idea of the commune was, and said that this was not what was happening: "You may be earning money, you may be having houses, you may be making roads - but that is not going to lead people to enlightenment. Those roads don't go to enlightenment!

"People's whole energy is being involved in it, and you have almost created a system which is cheating them. You are telling them, 'Work is worship, so you don't need any other meditation. The work is your meditation.'"

And the people thought this must be my direction. It was not. When I failed completely to convince those people to change.... They could not change because they had no interest in meditation. They had an interest in having a big empire in the world, having big money, having great power.

They did not want me to speak again.

That was the breaking point - why Sheela left; otherwise there was no reason for her to leave. She did not want me to speak again because she understood clearly that if I spoke again it would be a disturbance to the system she was creating. She could stop others but she could not stop me. And when I am speaking to my people, who is going to listen to her and her group?

So, because their whole system that they had created in four, five years, has been destroyed, you are feeling in chaos. But you are not stuck anywhere. You were stuck in that mechanism that was created; and if I had remained silent, you would have remained stuck - working your whole life...

reaching nowhere.

So before I help you to stand on your own, as individuals.... Whether you are in the commune or outside the commune, the individuality has not to be lost.

Freedom is one of the basic values.

Meditation has to be our innermost life.

Then whether you are living together in a small group or a big group does not matter. But these things should be preserved.

Remembering these things, you can live in a commune, or if you feel that the bigger group destroys these things.... It is difficult, because the bigger group has its own problems. Finance is one of the problems, because many sannyasins who join the commune have not contributed any money to the commune. Then the commune has to work more because they have to be fed, and they have to be clothed, and they have to be housed.

And if you start... the bigger the commune, the more the problems will be - which are unnecessary.

You will be in conflict with society. The politicians will become afraid of you, that you are so numerous that you can be dangerous to them. Then other religions may start feeling afraid of you, and they may start creating trouble, with cases in the courts - baseless, but they will waste time, they will waste money.

And they will finally get you involved in such situations that you don't have any time to play your guitar, sing a song, or just sit silently for a few hours. And that was your main idea in being part of the commune!

This is something to be remembered - it has always happened. People had come together with a very beautiful idea, but then they get involved in something else, and there is no time for the basic idea so they go on postponing it. By and by they forget about it. Finally they are simply running discos or restaurants. But that you could have done without becoming a sannyasin. That was not the purpose of being a sannyasin.

There are discos and there are restaurants, there are hotels - so what is the point?

You had not become a sannyasin to run a hotel.

So I want to see all the sannyasins, meet them, and make them aware what the purpose was for their becoming a sannyasin: that should never be lost sight of.

If it can be fulfilled in a commune, the commune is good. If it can be fulfilled only in smaller groups, then smaller groups are good. If it can be fulfilled better when you live individually, alone - so that then you have to work only six hours a day, five days a week, and the remaining time is totally free for you....

And to make it feasible I have allowed that you can now use any color of clothes; you can use the mala or you may not use the mala, as the situation permits.... Because if it comes against your job, if just because of your orange clothes you are thrown out from a school where you had a good job - where almost six months were holidays, and each year you have longer two-month holidays, when you could have always come to me....

And that was happening in Poona. People were coming to me every year, once or twice. And they were earning enough, working less time, earning more, and having more freedom. Once they had done their work - six hours - they were free for the remaining eighteen hours. They were coming once or twice a year to Poona; remaining there for two or three months, and then going back.

The same people, when they started communes, became so involved, and financially it became so difficult for them, that for four years many of them had not come to me. They wanted to come but in the commune they didn't have money in their hands, they didn't earn. The money was centralized in the commune - and the commune had its own needs.

The commune does not have a preference for your need to go and be with me for two months - and it cannot afford it either. And you are working twice the amount of time you have ever worked; and you are without any money. You are left with no time of your own; and you have got into so many troubles - financial, legal, social, political - that it is just wasting your life.

So if some commune is going successfully, and the people who are there are absolutely happy and contented, it is good. If some commune is going into bankruptcy and still they are pulling through somehow, they are breaking their own necks unnecessarily. Then it is better to let it go bankrupt - and you move alone, be separate.

There were hundreds of small centers which have been destroyed by the group who wanted to make as many big communes as possible, because those small centers could not earn much, could not produce much. Now the whole priority has become totally different from my idea.

It was beautiful - somebody was running a small center in his own home. He enjoyed it, he loved it that people came to his home to meditate. And people had no worry about making a place where they could meditate. They destroyed all the small centers and moved people into communes.

The whole idea lost touch with my basic attitude.

So I will be coming and reminding you why you have become a sannyasin. And that remains the priority; everything else is secondary. There can be communes, there can be small ashramas, there can be centers, and there can be individual sannyasins. And this way more people will be meditating, more people will be independent, more people will be able to come close to me.

First I want to have a world tour so I can talk to everybody and bring them out of the unnecessary chaos. And second, I am not going to live in a commune anymore, but I will be living in a place where five hundred people at least can be accommodated all the year round. So people can come and be there for two months, three months, and can go; other people can come and go.

We will dissolve those four ceremonies and make the whole year a festival - a three-hundred-and- sixty-five-day festival. So it is continuous; people go on changing but it is continuous. So people don't lose touch with me - they don't need to be directed in detail about everything, but they need to be given a clear insight so they can find out for themselves what to do as far as details are concerned.

Gurdjieff was giving even small details; you were not even free about that. Krishnamurti is not even bothered about giving you an insight so you can find what you have to do.

My own situation is that I don't want to interfere in your freedom in any way. Still, I don't want to leave you alone in the darkness, in the cold. Whatever I can do with my love and with my presence and with my words, I will do.

And you are not in any way becoming obliged to me. On the contrary, I am obliged that you allowed me to give you a helping hand, that you allowed me to be close enough, that you allowed me to make some clarity possible for your eyes - you could have rejected it. It was out of your freedom that you have allowed me - it does not interfere with your freedom.

So now the whole year will be the festival.

And the whole world will be our commune.

Every sannyasin will be carrying the smallest commune in his heart.

So there will be some bigger communes, and some even bigger communes, but the priority of your growth has not to be lost sight of.

Question 3:

It looks difficult. It looks almost impossible, but it only looks so; otherwise it is very simple. You just have to watch within yourself what the connection is you are keeping with the old - and why you are keeping it. Is it just a habit because from the very childhood you have been taught certain concepts, ideas, certain religions, cults, creeds? - or is there some nourishment that you get from them? Or, on the contrary, are they sucking your blood?

You just have to see within yourself about each thing - whether it is political, social, or religious - that you have carried from the past; that the past has given to you through education, and through other means in the society. You just have to see what the reason is that you are still holding on to it.

And my experience is that nobody is being nourished by it, so there is no reason to hold on to it.

Almost everybody is sucked by the dead, the old, the past. It does not allow you to be new, young, contemporary. It keeps pulling you back. It is not something friendly to you - you have just never looked at it and seen that you are carrying enemies within you, parasites within you. And you are simply carrying them because of old habits, because they have always been there - as long as you can remember they have been there. As long as you can remember you have been a Christian, or a Hindu, or a Mohammedan.

It is just a question of habit.

So you have to see exactly what traditions and past inheritances are doing to you. You have to be very clear-cut, and then the thing is very simple. If you see that you are carrying parasites just because of old habits, that you are nourishing your own enemies who are destroying your life, your youth, your newness - who are making you almost dead before death comes - it won't take any great effort not to cling to them. You will simply drop them, there is not much of a question. It is your decision to keep them or not to keep them. You will simply drop them.

The moment you see that you are carrying poison, something destructive, which is going to spoil everything in your life - not because I say so; you have to see it with your own eyes - then it is so easy to get rid of the past. And the moment you are discontinuous with the past, you have immense freedom to grow.

Suddenly you are fresh and young, free of the parasites, free of the burden, free of an unnecessary load, luggage which was nothing but junk. But you were carrying it because your fathers, your forefathers, everybody was carrying it.

It is simply a question of seeing what the past is doing to you.

Is it a friend or an enemy?

And just the insight will do the work.

I have heard about one patient who was having his session with the psychoanalyst. The psychoanalyst had been trying hard for months to convince him that his whole sickness was imaginary. His sickness was that he was feeling continuously that strange creatures were crawling all over his body; and all the time he was just throwing them off. And there was nothing.

For months the psychoanalyst was telling him that there was nothing: "You just look. I don't see anything - and you go on throwing off those strange creatures which are just your imagination." But the man had no time even to listen. While the psychoanalyst was talking he was just throwing...

from all over the body.

In this session he was sitting very close to the psychoanalyst. And as he started throwing off his strange creatures, the psychoanalyst said, "Wait! Don't throw them on me!" Because for six months, trying to convince him, the psychoanalyst himself had become convinced that there must be something there - because this man is intelligent, he is a professor, and if he goes on throwing off those things, there must be something there. So he said, "Wait! You can throw them anywhere else, but you can't throw them on ME."

The psychoanalyst himself became convinced: "And I don't want to deal any more with you, because I have started suspecting, once in a while, that some strange creature is crawling on me. I know that it is just imagination, but...."

You have to see that even imagination starts being active. Seeing certainly is action. You don't have to do anything after seeing. You see it, and that very moment you are disconnected from the thing if it is not nourishing you but torturing you. It is very simple.

And it is one of the most fundamental things... to get rid of the whole past, to be absolutely discontinuous with it. Then you have a simplicity, a lightness, because there is no load. And you have a health of mind, of soul - which was sucked away, so that you had never had any experience of it.

You feel new vitality and new blood running through your veins. And because you are now discontinuous with the past, you don't have memories, psychological memories. If you want to remember, you can remember, but they are no longer a force on you. They don't have any power over you so you have to remember them.

Now there are no memories, no connections with the past. You have only the present, and you have a vast future. Of course you cannot do anything in the future, you can only do anything you want to do in the present. But it goes on: as the future becomes the present, your growth, your action, your intelligence, your creativity - anything that you are working at - keeps growing.

And the pleasure of growth is immense.

To be stuck somewhere is one of the most horrible feelings.

Leo Tolstoy used to have a dream which tortured him his whole life - and it can torture anybody, that kind of dream. And it was not that he had it once, it was almost every night, the same dream - which is very rare. Very few people see the same dream, unless the dream is so significant that the unconscious has to remind you that you have to do something.

His dream was that he sees a vast desert - as far as he can see it is desert... sand and sand and nothing else. Hot sun... the sand is almost burning. And two shoes - they are his shoes - are walking. He is not in them - that was the most horrible thing - just the shoes going on and on, and the desert is endless. So the whole night may pass and the shoes are walking on, and the desert never comes to an end. There is nobody in those shoes, but the shoes are his. And he would always wake up perspiring, trembling.

This was his lifelong torture; and he was stuck with the dream. There was no way to move. He even started becoming afraid of going to sleep because he knew what was going to happen: the moment he falls asleep, the dream will be there. And it goes nowhere - just simply goes on and on. He talked to one of his friends, Chekhov - he was another great, creative novelist of the same caliber as Tolstoy - about the dream.

Chekhov said, "Unless you do something, the dream will continue, because the dream wants you to do something. It is about you. And even in your dream you are trying to deceive yourself - that's why you are not in your own shoes, so only the shoes have to walk. But the shoes are yours and you are in them. And this is something about your life. Anybody can see it - there is no need of any great psychoanalyst to analyze it."

Tolstoy had a wife who was a constant torture, but he was a man of no decision: he could not decide whether to divorce her or to continue. He had many children, and he lived like a poor man. He was a Christian, a practicing Christian. Although he was a count and had immense riches and had thousands of acres of land, he lived like a poor man, ate like a poor man, had clothes like a poor man.

His wife lived like a princess and tortured him continually because he was being stupid: trying to practice Christianity by being poor because, "Blessed are the poor." She would not even take him to social parties, to meetings, or to the royal family - no. She could not even stand to see him in his rags. And he had made himself a buffoon - the whole town laughed about it: "This is stupid. We have seen Christians - but that does not mean that you have to live like this."

And this man was one of the greatest creative novelists of the whole world; but he had no decisiveness about anything. Either renounce everything... but what is the point of living in a palace and wearing rags? having all his money in a bank account and never using it because he has to live like a poor man?

So he was torturing himself, he was being tortured by the wife, he was being taunted by everybody - and he belonged to the highest strata of the society. Even the czar, the king of Russia, was continually taunting him: "What are you doing? We are also Christians, but that does not mean....

And if you really want to be a Christian, then renounce everything - be a Christian!"

But the trouble with him was his indecisiveness. And that was his dream: that there is a desert, and he knows there is nothing else except this desert; it is hot and it is burning, and there is no end to this misery. The shoes go on walking - and only the shoes. That is very significant.

It seems as if deep down he does not want to be poor, deep down he does not want to live the way he is living. Just mentally he has got the idea that he has to be poor. So he is not in the shoes but the shoes are his - that he can see absolutely. And the day Chekhov analyzed his dream, that very night he left the palace and went far away in a train to one of his small farms, which was in the forest, to live there. That was the only night - in the train - that the dream did not appear.

But he was not young anymore. He was very old, he was weak, he could not live the life of a monk, of austerity. On the small station... he arrived in the morning, and the farm was far away; it was difficult for him to walk to the farm. So he was waiting for some vehicle.

The stationmaster said, "By the evening some vehicle comes which takes the post office things, and it passes through your farm, so you can go in it."

But he died on the station platform, on a bench waiting for the vehicle. But before dying he was happy because that dream had not occurred, and a great weight had disappeared from his chest.

So the moment you see something, don't be indecisive. Act according to your insight, and life is very simple and immensely beautiful. We just have to be clear about what has to be left behind, what is unnecessary to carry; and what has to be done: that which you feel, not because Jesus says, or Buddha says, or anybody else says.

But what you feel like doing - do it. Take the whole responsibility of doing it on yourself. And there is nothing much in it. You will be discontinuous with the past. And you will be the New Man.

Everybody has the capacity to be the New Man or to remain the old. Just a clear insight and action according to the insight is needed.

This much courage is certainly needed.

I think that even though Leo Tolstoy died on a railway station as a beggar on a bench, he died very peacefully, very blissfully. In his whole life this was the first time he had taken a decision - and the dream had disappeared.

It was simply an unconscious reminder, continuously, "Do something; you are unnecessarily caught in a net - you can get out of it. Nobody is holding you, you are simply sitting there."

Question 4:

They still have a function - and they will continue to function - but their function is not dictatorial.

Their function is to serve the whole world of sannyasins and the people who love me.

So their function is not to govern you, their function is to serve you.

And they are not organizations, they are simply institutes. And their function has become more important now, because for all the languages that books are being translated into, it has to be seen to it that they are not mistranslated - that the translation is right, that it does not harm the spirit of the message.

So it is a great work to take care of all the languages - we need the publication institute to check all the language publications before they are published.

Now there are many countries.... Just yesterday, a Korean woman was here, and she informed us that more than thirty of my books are translated into Korean, and thousands of copies are available in all the bookstalls all over the country. We have to take care of things. There are countries which are not members of the Bern Convention: they do not believe in copyright. Korea is one of those that do not believe in copyright, so they can translate any book, publish any book.

But we can at least keep an eye that the translation is done rightly, that the person who is doing the translation understands me. It is not only a question of copyright, it is a question that I should not be presented in a wrong way - which is possible. Because if they are just earning money, who cares whether the translation is right or wrong?

I informed the woman, "You send..." Because we don't even know: it may be happening in other countries. There are many countries which are not under the copyright convention. But we can help them, we can suggest to them, "We don't want any money from you, any royalty from you, but we would like you to represent every book exactly, without any distortion." And in many countries we will have to take publication into our own hands.

For example, it happened in England that one of the presses had published eight or ten books. We came to know later on that it was a Christian press, but to us it was not a problem. To them it became a problem, because when I spoke against Christianity, they simply pulled out all those books that they had published before - books which have nothing to do with Christianity - and informed us that they could not publish our books anymore.

The same has happened in Holland - another publisher, and for the same reason. When I was speaking on Christ, they had published twelve or fifteen books, and now because I have criticized him, they have simply stopped selling the books. They have informed us, "We will not sell them, and we will not publish any more books because ours is a Christian organization."

So it is going to happen everywhere sooner or later. Somebody will be a Mohammedan publisher, somebody will be a Hindu publisher, somebody will be a Christian publisher. So sooner or later we will have to take all our publication into our own hands. We will not be able to give it to others - they will not be ready.

So the Academy, and Friends International, they will still have their functions: publication, keeping contact with all the sannyasins of the world - not control but contact; otherwise all contact will be lost.

There is a need for an institute that keeps all the contacts, all the addresses, all the names of sannyasins; where they are, what they are doing. If we need them in some other place.... For example, if we want to keep an eye on all the languages, then we will need people with different languages to be in one place, at the headquarters.

So Friends International will be the headquarters for communication for all the sannyasins. If I am traveling around the world, then somebody, some agency, is needed to inform you where I am; otherwise I may pass through your country and you may not even know.

This is possible, because just now the pope has informed all the Christian publications in Italy, as he heard that I am coming to Italy, that they are not to give me any publicity - neither positive nor negative. They are not to even mention my name. Now, in Italy the pope has great powers - political powers - over the government and over the media.

We will need our own media, our own agencies, our own publications to inform you. And for any information that you want, you need headquarters from where you can get that information; otherwise it will become impossible even for you to find out where I am.

But their function is not to govern you; their function is to serve you, just to make me available to you as accurately as possible.

We may need our own radio station somewhere, we may need our own television stations, because these people are going to be cutting off all sources, so that I cannot reach the public.

Now there are countries like Germany who have already made laws that I cannot enter their country.

Others may follow in the same way if they see that I am traveling around the world. Then they simply won't let me in.

And there are political pressures, religious pressures. So we need our own independent media which can continue to inform you and other people - so these people cannot do any harm.

Now their only fear is that my words will reach people. This is a great victory for us. That means they have an absolute certainty that they cannot argue: they have no valid arguments against me.

Such steps are only taken when you cannot argue; otherwise, what is the need?

So this is the world we are in - which is dominated everywhere by rotten ideologies that have no logical support. And they will be trying to prevent us everywhere. And it is so easy.

So before they start preventing us, we have to have our own arrangements. So rather than making a commune, my effort is now just to have a perfect publication department for all the languages possible, a satellite somewhere so we can manage radio stations all over the world without any difficulty, and headquarters from where you can get all the information - and through which people can be made aware of where sannyasins are.

I will be living at the headquarters, and we will make arrangements for people so that they can come and be with me. If countries stop me from entering, then the only way is that I should be in some place where my sannyasins are close by, and they can come and be with me.

So we have to have these small groups which are not a centralization of power, but are only functionally serving the whole sannyas commune around the world.

And now every sannyasin is a small commune.