You are the world

Question 1:

Yesterday, there was a question left, left for tomorrow; but just now I realized that tomorrow never comes. Unless tomorrow comes sometime, that question will have to wait.

J. Krishnamurti's statement that "You are the world" is not confusing at all. It is very simple; just a little intelligence is needed to understand it.

We can try to approach the statement from a few different directions.

The world is only a name; the individual is the reality. You can go on trying to find the world all over the world, and you will not find it; you will always find the individual.

Words like the 'world', the 'society', the 'religion', the 'nation', are mere words with no content behind them - empty containers.

Except you, there is no world.

This is one way of understanding the statement: that the individual is the only reality. And the world is nothing but the collectivity of individuals, so whatever it is, it is a contribution of individuals. If it is ugly, you have contributed to its ugliness. If it is full of hate, jealousy, anger, greed, ambition, you have contributed to this whole hell in which we are living. You cannot throw the responsibility on somebody else; you have to accept the responsibility on your own shoulders.

That is another way of understanding the statement, "You are the world."

We are continuously shifting the responsibility. If there is war, if there is an Adolf Hitler, a Ronald Reagan, it becomes easy for us to point to these people and say that they are responsible. But who creates them?

Adolf Hitler is our contribution. Without us, he is nobody.

Ronald Reagan is nothing but our opinion. It is our vote, it is our support.

So the moment you condemn anybody, remember: you are condemning yourself. However indirect your contribution may be, your contribution is there.

It is possible to live like a Jaina monk or a Buddhist monk or a Catholic monk in a monastery, completely closed as far as the world is concerned.

There are monasteries in Tibet... there used to be many in China before the communist revolution.

There are a few in Europe with a strange and long history.

The monastery at Athos in Europe is one thousand years old. In one thousand years, whoever has entered the monastery has not come out living. You only enter: once a monk, forever a monk. And the monastery does not allow its inmates to come out into the world; they are brought out only when they are dead.

Do you think they are not responsible for Adolf Hitler? they are not responsible for world wars?

Apparently it looks... How can you make these people responsible? - who have left the world, who have never looked back, who have disconnected themselves with the world.

But still I say to you they are responsible. They are responsible by escaping - they escaped their responsibility. It does not make any difference.

The Buddhist monks, the Jaina monks, the Hindu monks are not participating in worldly activities.

But you can contribute in a positive way or you can contribute in a negative way.

You can set fire to this house - that is the positive way, the active way. You can stand by the side of the road and not do anything to put the fire out - that is the negative way. But both are responsible.

The negative person does not look so responsible, but his responsibility is absolutely equal - because in life there is a balance.

You may be against war, you may be a pacifist, you may be a chronic protestant - always with a flag protesting against war, against violence. Naturally you can say, "How can I be held responsible?"

But life is a complex phenomenon.

Your protests, your pacifism, your fight against warmongers is still part of war; you are not a man of peace. And you can see it when people protest - their anger, their violence is so obvious that one wonders why these people are protesting against war. They should join some camp in the war - they are full of anger, rage. They have just chosen to have a third camp behind a beautiful name - "peace". A good mask, but inside is the same anger, the same rage, the same violence, the same destructiveness against anybody who does not agree with them.

They are contributing as much violence to the atmosphere as anybody else.

They may be talking about love, but they are also saying that you have to fight for love.

Hazrat Mohammed had words written on his sword meaning "peace is my message." He could find only a sword to write on, that "peace is my message"! And he gave birth to a religion he called Islam. Islam means peace, and Islam has done more violence in the world than any other religion has done. In the name of peace, at the point of a sword, Islam has been killing, converting millions of people.

You can choose beautiful words, but you cannot hide the reality.

J. Krishnamurti's statement that "You are the world" simply emphasizes the fact that every individual, wherever he is, whatever he is, should accept the responsibility of creating this world that exists around us.

If it is insane, you have contributed to that insanity in your own way. If it is sick, you are also a partner in making it sick.

And the emphasis is important - because unless you understand that "I am also responsible for this miserable and insane world," there is no possibility of change. Who is going to change? Everybody thinks somebody else is responsible.

One of India's great emperors was Akbar. There is an incident in his life recorded in AKBAR MAMAZ - "the biography of Akbar."

One day he was just chit-chatting with his friends.... And he had around him the very best, wisest, most creative people chosen from every part of the country.

His court jester was standing just by his side.

By the way, you should understand it: in all the courts of all great emperors there used to be a jester, whose whole function was to keep the court from becoming too serious, to keep the court light, playful - once in a while, an explosion of laughter.

It was a great insight to have a court jester, and he used to be one of the wisest men of those days - because it was not an easy phenomenon.

Birbal was Akbar's court jester. And as they were discussing, Akbar slapped Birbal - for no reason at all.

Now you cannot slap the emperor back, but the slap has to go somewhere - so he slapped the person who was standing next to him.

Everybody thought, "This is strange!" There was no reason in the first place. Suddenly, as if a madness had got hold of Akbar, he slapped poor Birbal. And that man is also strange. Rather than asking, "Why have you slapped me?" he simply slapped the man who was standing by his side!

And that man, thinking perhaps this was the rule of the court, slapped the next person. In a chain, it went all over the court.

And you will be surprised: that night, Akbar's wife slapped him! And he said, "Why are slapping me?"

She said, "That is not the question; a game is a game."

He said, "Who told you that this is a game?"

She said, "We have been hearing the whole day long that a great game has started in the court. The only rule is you cannot hit the person back, you have to find somebody else to hit. And somebody has hit me - so your slap has come back to you, the game is complete!"

In this big world, thousands of insane games are going on, and you are all participants - of course in very small measures, according to your capacity. But remember, the slap is going to come back to you sooner or later. Where else will it go?

Whatever comes to you, remember, it is your doing.

Perhaps you have forgotten when you started it. The world is big, it takes time. But everything comes back to its source - that is one of the fundamental rules of life, not a rule of a game.

So if you are suffering, if you are miserable, if you are tense, full of anxieties, anguish, don't just console yourself that this whole world is ugly, that everybody else is ugly, that you are a victim.

J. Krishnamurti is saying you are not a victim, you are a creator of this insane world; and naturally, you have to participate in the outcome of whatever you have contributed to it. You are participating in sowing the seeds, you will have to participate in reaping the crop too; you cannot escape.

To make the individual aware so that he stops throwing responsibilities on others - on the contrary, he starts looking inwards to see in what way he is contributing to this whole madness - there is a possibility he may stop contributing. Because he has to suffer too. If he comes to know that the whole world is nothing but his projection on a wider scale....

Because millions of individuals have contributed the same anger, the same hatred, the same competitiveness, the same violence, it has become mountainous. You cannot conceive that you can be responsible for it: "I may have contributed just a small piece..." But an ocean is nothing except millions and millions of dewdrops. A dewdrop cannot think that it is responsible for the ocean - but the dewdrop is responsible. Without the dewdrop there is going to be no ocean at all. The ocean is only a name; the reality is in the dewdrop.

To accept your responsibility will change you, and your change is the beginning of the change of the world - because you are the world. However small, a miniature world, but you carry all the seeds.

If revolution comes to you, it heralds the revolution for the whole world.

And when J. Krishnamurti says "You are the world" he is not saying it only to you; he is saying it to everybody:

You are the world.

If you want to change the world, don't start by changing the world - that is the wrong way humanity has followed up to now:

Change the society, change the economic structure.

Change this, change that.

But don't change the individual.

That's why all revolutions have failed. Only one revolution can succeed, which has not been tried up to now - and that is the revolution of the individual.

You change yourself.

Be alert not to contribute anything that makes the world a hell. And remember to contribute to the world something that makes it a paradise.

This is the whole secret of a religious man.

And if every individual starts doing it, there will be a revolution without any bloodshed.

In Akbar's life there is another incident.

He had built a very beautiful marble pond. He was bringing swans from Mansarovar, from the Himalayas. And he decided that in the pond there should not be water. This is the emperor's pond - instead of water, there should be milk. Everybody in the capital was to be informed that just one bucket of milk, not much, from every house had to reach the palace early the next morning, before sunrise.

Birbal told Akbar, "You don't understand human mind at all. Your pond will be full of water."

He said, "What nonsense...? It is my order!"

Birbal said, "Your order, or anybody's order - I understand human mind."

Akbar said, "Let us wait; tomorrow morning it will be decided who is right."

And the next morning both went to the garden, and the pond was full of water.

Akbar said, "This is strange. How did it happen? Catch a few people from the street, whoever is available, and ask how it happened." And the people were threatened: if they spoke any lie, their life would be at risk; if they said the truth, they would be set free.

They said, "The truth is, we thought the whole capital would bring buckets of milk. One bucket of water would be completely overlooked, nobody would ever know. But now I see that the pond is full of water; it seems that everybody had the same thought - the whole capital! Not a single man was different."

The human mind functions exactly the same.

So if the world is such a tragedy, it is our human minds which are creating it; we are contributing our bucketful of misery.

No revolution can be successful unless the human mind is understood by human beings and they start behaving in a different way - not hoping that "My bucketful of water is not going to be noticed at all." If everybody understands that this idea is what will come to every human mind, and decides, "At least I should bring a bucketful of milk. I should not behave in such an unconscious way as all human beings are behaving...."

It is possible to have the pond full of milk.

"You are the world" simply means: whatever it is, we cannot save ourselves from responsibility.

Our monks, our saints have tried only this. What they were trying to do, if you go deep into their psychology, was to say that, "We are no longer responsible for all this nonsense that is going on in the world." But they depended on the same world. For their food they were dependent on the same people; for their clothes they were dependent on the same people. They were not in any way separate from the world; they had only stopped being active in the world. They were silent partners in the whole insanity that is going on.

And they should be condemned more, because they were more intelligent people, wiser people.

Still they could not see the point that just standing aside is not enough; you have to do something against the normal human mind.

Escaping to the Himalayas is not going to help, because even in the Himalayas your mind will remain the same, just you will not have the opportunity to know it. And it is better to know the enemy than not to know it, because by knowing there is a possibility to change.

Not knowing is very dangerous.

When a disease is diagnosed, it is half cured. When a disease is not diagnosed, then comes the real problem. Medicine is not the problem; diagnosis is the problem.

One man lived for thirty years in the Himalayas. His problem was anger, and he wanted to get rid of it. In the Himalayas for thirty years he was not angry for a single moment - there was no reason.

The wife was not there, the children were not there, the parents were not there, the society was not there - there was no provocation.

His name became famous by and by, and people started coming to worship him. Now it was even more difficult to be aware that the anger was still there. When people are worshipping you, there is no question of anger.

Then came the Kumbha Mela in Allahabad. People said, "You are such a great saint. Without you, the Kumbha Mela, the greatest gathering of people on the earth in one place, will be missing something. You have to go."

And by now he was convinced that he had become a great saint. People were coming from far away to make the difficult, arduous journey through the mountains just to pay respects to him.

He went to Kumbha Mela, but there were millions of people - nobody knew him. Somebody stepped on his foot, and immediately he slapped the man, took hold of his neck and said, "What do you think you're doing?"

Suddenly he remembered that he was a saint. He said, "My God, what am I doing? What happened to thirty years? The anger came in such a flash, so instantaneously, not even a single moment of thought." He was going to kill the man.

That was the reason he had gone to the Himalayas - because he was afraid he would murder somebody and would be crucified or have to live for his whole life in jail.

Even his family had said, "It will be good if you go to the Himalayas because you will kill somebody, and that means you have killed yourself too. This way two lives are saved. You go."

But thirty years... What happened?

It is simple fact: the people who have escaped from the world are not to think that they are not responsible for this world. By escaping, they have not changed the world. By escaping, they have not contributed anything to make it more beautiful, more human, more intelligent, more meditative.

Neither have they changed the world nor have they gone through any inner change themselves.

Hence I am against renouncing the world.

Be in the world, however difficult it is - because it is only in the world that you will be reminded on every step what kind of mind you are carrying within.

And that mind is projected on the outside, and it becomes huge because so many minds are projecting in the same way.

"You are the world" is not a mathematical statement.

"You are the world" is a psychological insight.

And it can become the very key for the only revolution that can succeed.

Question 2:

David and Kaveesha, California needs all kinds of idiotic ideas.

It seems all the idiots of the world are born in California.

It is the land of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Everything is possible in California. But it remains only for a few years - three years, four years at the most; then the fashion changes.

In California everything is a fashion - and when something is in fashion everybody is involved in it, because not to be involved in it means you are out of date, lagging behind, not belonging to the contemporary world.

Channeling is simply a new name for an old disease.

In the past they used to call it 'being possessed by a ghost'.

Channeling is the new name for being possessed. Then the ghost speaks - but that is a very old idea, not very appealing. In old countries, it still continues to happen. There are people in villages in India who become possessed, and when they are possessed you can ask questions and they answer - and they answer in such a way that you can make anything out of it. It is never a certain, meaningful statement.

Channeling is an American translation of the old idea of being possessed.

There are many people in America - particularly in California and New York - who become possessed and start talking to you, answering you. And certainly their language is different from the old; it is more scientific. The very word 'channeling' has come from television - channel number one, channel number two.... Now, the poor old countries cannot think of channeling, that word is not yet meaningful to them.

And the idea of channeling has given a scope... you are channeling to a certain planet, a certain galaxy - and you can say any nonsense, there is no way to prove it right or wrong. Even scientists know nothing about galaxies.

There are at least fifty million galaxies. Scientists are still working with very refined instruments to count how many galaxies there are.

And one galaxy means... One sun and the planets that are attached to the sun is one solar system.

A galaxy means millions of suns, millions of solar systems - which are moving around a certain unknown center of gravity. Each galaxy is so huge.... Science has not been able to find out all the facts about even one galaxy, the galaxy in which we live.

Now there are the cunning and there are the stupid, and there are idiots who are channeling to other galaxies and bringing messages to humanity. Books are printed with their messages.

But the whole thing is that a person goes into a deep hypnotic sleep - if it is authentic. Out of ten, nine are not authentic. If somebody is authentic, then all that happens in reality is that he relaxes, his conscious mind goes to sleep, and from his unconscious mind, collective unconscious mind, cosmic unconscious mind, things start coming up.

You can say they are coming from ghosts. You can talk about them in psychological terms and say they are coming from the unconscious. Or you can talk about them in Californian terms: they are coming from channel number one, channel number two. But they are all coming from your own unconscious mind. This is about the authentic cases.

And when so many people are channeling, it becomes a competition. If somebody else is channeling, why can't you channel? No talent is needed, no intelligence is needed; all that is needed is insincerity, cunningness, fraud.

Every year in India, Mohammedans have their holy festival, Muharram. And during Muharram, holy spirits possess people. Those holy spirits - because Mohammedans, just like Christians and Jews, believe only in one life - those holy spirits will always be around until the last judgment day, which goes on being postponed, and I don't think it is going to happen ever.

I had a center in Jabalpur near a Mohammedan graveyard. And they reported to the collector that because of our meditations, the spirits in their graves were very much disturbed.

The collector called me: "Why are you disturbing their spirits?"

I said, "This is strange. What report have you received? Who has come?"

He said, "Mohammedans - and it may create a riot unnecessarily."

Jabalpur was one of the most vulnerable cities in India for Mohammedan and Hindu riots, any excuse....

And their excuse was that because when we were doing our meditation we would use the Sufi mantra "hoo."

So the Mohammedans had said, "Because they say, 'Hoo, hoo, hoo' the Mohammedan souls lying in their graves wake up. These are dangerous people - because nobody has ever heard of such a meditation. And after one hour these people are gone, but those spirits roam about and torture Mohammedans, and many are becoming possessed."

The collector said, "You stop. At least this 'hoo' mantra should be stopped because it can create trouble. And in your own book you have explained that 'hoo' is part of 'allah-hoo', it is a Sufi mantra.

So they have certain grounds against you, that you are disturbing the souls. They are sleeping well, and you 'hoo, hoo' every morning, and they get so disturbed that they start torturing Mohammedans."

So I had to close that center.

In my childhood in my village.... Each time that Mohammedans celebrate the holidays of Muharram, some people are "possessed by the holy spirit." The holy spirit is called wali. There are a few people who are thought to be very saintly - they are possessed by walis - and they dance and they shout, scream, and you can ask questions.

And they should not run away, so their hands are tied with ropes, and two persons keep them in control. There are many walis, and each wali has his own crowd, and people come with sweets and fruits - somebody has received a blessing last year and has got a boy, a child; somebody has got married, and somebody has come to get a blessing for the future.

Only Mohammedans participate in it.

But I always enjoyed every kind of entertainment. My parents used to tell me, "Listen, that is the Mohammedans' festival, and you are not supposed to be there."

I said, "I am neither Hindu nor Mohammedan nor Jaina nor anybody. What do you mean - that I cannot enjoy anything? All festivals belong to some religion. In fact, I belong to no religion so I can participate in all festivals." So I would go there.

Once I managed to hold the rope of one wali who was just an ordinary man and a fraud. I had told him before, "I will expose you if you don't allow me to hold your rope."

He said, "You can hold my rope, and you can share a few sweets also, but don't say anything to anybody."

We both used to go to the same gymnasium - that's how we became friends, and he himself told me that it was all fake. So I said, "That means I am coming; if it is fake, you have to share it."

I went there with a long needle, so I could make him jump. He became the most famous wali because no other wali was jumping so high!

He could not say anything about what was happening - because he is possessed by the wali and the wali cannot be afraid of a needle. So he could not say anything, and I went on sticking him with the needle. He managed to get almost four times more sweets, more fruit, more rupees... more people came to get his blessing.

He said, "That is great, but you tortured me so much!"

I was in such demand from that day - every wali wanted his rope to be given to me. Because whoever got me as his assistant would become the greatest wali - immediately, the very same day.

For ten days the function continued, and no wali wanted me again the next day!

They would say, "I will escape from town if you come again!"

I said, "There is no need. I am in so much demand by other fools who don't know what is happening.... You just give me half your share - because you will still have double."

And I found that almost everybody was a fraud - because I could make everybody jump with my needle. Not a single one in the whole town was an authentic person who was possessed or anything.

They were just pretending - shouting, screaming, saying things that you cannot understand, but you have to make sense out of it.

And the maulavis, the Mohammedan scholars, will explain to you what the meaning of it is - "You have been blessed, your desire will be fulfilled." And who bothers about whose desire is fulfilled or not? If a hundred people come, at least fifty people's desires are going to be fulfilled. These fifty will come back, and these fifty people will spread the idea. The other fifty will also come back - not to the same wali, but to other walis who are there, because the first wali they went to doesn't seem to work: "Perhaps he was not powerful enough."

And my walis were the most powerful, and their power was decided by how high they jumped, how much they screamed, how much they shouted.

And everybody asked me why my walis were making such gestures towards me....

I said, "That is a spiritual language - you will not understand."

In California, Kaveesha, you can start a new game. Don't bother about this channeling - within two years it will be past.

California is good. It has money, it has the young generation, unemployed, and it has a tradition of changing everything - changing the job, changing the wife, changing the town, changing the house.

In two or three years they become bored. So rather than being worried about their channeling...

It is absolute fraud.

And if there is someone sincere, that means he is relaxing to the point where the unconscious mind starts throwing up its repressed contents.

It has no spiritual value.

But it will be good to check. Go to any person who is channeling with the galaxies, but keep a good needle with you! With the needle, the person will start dancing, jumping, and his galaxies will start going higher - from one channel to nine channels. You can check: if your needle does not work, that means the person is at least not a fraud, but is simply falling into unconsciousness and allowing his unconscious to reveal its contents.

But they have no spiritual value.

But before you leave, try the needle - particularly on the famous ones!

Question 3:

Yes, I say yes totally to you as you are because that is the only way I can transform you.

My acceptance does not mean that you have to remain what you are; my acceptance means that whatever you are I respect you, I love you.

But at the same time, my acceptance means that you can be much more, that this is not the end of your journey. In fact, you have not even begun yet, but I can see the potential.

For centuries, this has been the way to challenge you to seek and search: you have been condemned; whatever you are, you are wrong. The emphasis has been that if you are proved to be wrong, a sinner, then you will start changing. But that whole technique has failed. People have accepted that they are wrong, they are sinners, and it is beyond them to be saints. So relax and be sinners - of course not in a joyous way, but with sadness. Their whole life becomes unworthy in their own eyes: guilty, sinful, sad... a long, dark story... useless, futile.

The past has condemned you with the hope that it would change you, but their hope has proved wrong.

I am going to try a totally different method.

I accept you as you are, but that does not mean that I want you to remain as you are. I love you as you are, but I love you because you have so much potential in you, such a great possibility of growth, that with just a little effort you can become a light unto yourself.

Whatever you are, enjoy it. But there is much more, so don't stop at it. You are on the first rung of the ladder - it is perfectly good, because without being on the first rung, how can you be on the second and how can you be on the final, the ultimate?

Nobody is a sinner.

Yes, there are people who commit mistakes, but nobody is a sinner. And everybody has a right to commit mistakes - because that is the only way to learn. And everybody has to stumble in the dark.

That is nothing special to you; everybody falls once in a while, and it is good training.

To me, whatever existence makes available to you is for your good. Just use it, and keep your eyes on the faraway stars - they belong to you. However far they are, they are not beyond your reach.

Question 4:

Anything that has to do with human beings can never be totally objective; it will have to allow a certain space for subjectivity.

It is not only true that the same medicine from different doctors has different effects; it is also true that the same medicine has different effects on different patients from the same doctor.

Man is not an object.

First you have to understand the word 'subject'.

A piece of stone is just an object. There is no interiority, there is no innerness to it. You can cut it in two; then there are two objects. You can cut it in four, and there are four objects. But you will not find any interiority.

Subjectivity means that from the outside a man is just as objective as any other object - a statue, a dead body, a living body, what is the difference? The statue is simply an object, it has no subjectivity.

The dead body has once been a house for a subjective phenomenon, but now it is empty. Now it is an empty house; the person who used to live in it has left it.

The living man has all the objectivity of the statue, the dead body, and something more - an interior dimension - which can change many things because it is the most powerful thing in existence.

For example, it has been noted that three persons can be suffering the same disease, but the same medicine will not work. On one person it is working; on another it is just fifty-fifty, working and not working; but on the third it is not working at all. The disease is the same, but the interiorities are different. And if you take the interiority into consideration, then perhaps the doctor will make a different impact on different people for different reasons.

One of my friends was a great surgeon in Nagpur - a great surgeon but not a good man. He never failed in his surgery, and he charged five times more than any other surgeon would charge.

I was staying with him and I told him, "This is too much. When other surgeons are charging a certain amount for the same disease, you charge five times as much."

He said to me, "My success in many other things also has this basis: when a person gives me five times more, he is determined to survive. It is not only because of money that I am greedy. If he is willing to give me five times more - when he could get the operation at cheaper rates - he is determined to survive whatsoever the cost. And his determination is almost fifty percent of my success."

There are people who don't want to survive; they are not willing to cooperate with the doctor. They are taking the medicine, but there is no will to survive; on the contrary, they are hoping that the medicine does not work so they will not be blamed for suicide, yet they can get rid of life. Now, from the inside that person has withdrawn already. Medicine cannot help his interiority, and without his interior support, the doctor is almost helpless - the medicine is not enough.

I came to know from this surgeon.... He said, "You don't know. Sometimes I do things which are absolutely immoral, but to help the patient I have to do them."

I said, "What do you mean?"

He said, "I am condemned by my profession...."

And all the doctors of Nagpur condemned him - "We have never seen such a cheat."

He would put the patient on the table in the operating theater - doctors are ready, nurses are ready, students are watching from the gallery above. And he would whisper in the patient's ear, "We had agreed on a fee of ten thousand - that will not do. Your problem is more serious. If you are ready to give me twenty thousand, I am going to take the instruments in my hands; otherwise, you get up and get out. You can find cheaper people."

Now, in such a situation.... And the person has money; otherwise, how can he say yes? And he accepts it: "I will give twenty thousand, but save me."

And he told me, "Any surgeon could have saved him, but not with such certainty. Now that he is paying twenty thousand, he is absolutely with me; his whole interior being is supportive. People condemn me because they don't understand me. Certainly it is immoral to agree on ten thousand and then put the person in the operating theater and whisper in his ear, 'Twenty thousand, thirty thousand... Otherwise get up and get out - because I had not realized that the disease had gone so deep. I am taking a risk, and I am putting my whole reputation on the line. For ten thousand I will not do that. And I have never failed in my life; success is my rule. I operate only when I am absolutely certain to succeed. So you decide. And I don't have much time, because there are other patients waiting. You just decide within two minutes: either agree, or get up and get lost.'

"Naturally the person will say, 'I will give you anything you want, but please do the operation.' It is illegal, it is immoral, but I cannot say that it is unpsychological."

Anything to do with man cannot be purely objective.

I used to have another friend, a doctor who is now in jail because he was not qualified at all. He had never been to any medical college; all the degrees that he had written on his sign were bogus.

But still I am of the opinion that an injustice has been done to the man - because it does not matter whether he had degrees or not. He helped thousands of people, and particularly those who were becoming hopeless, going from one doctor to another - who all had degrees - and getting tired.

And this man was able to save them.

He had a certain charisma - no degree. And he made his hospital almost a magic land. The moment a patient would enter his office, immediately he would be surprised. He had been everywhere...

because people used to go to him only as a last resort. Everybody knew that the man was bogus, it was not something hidden. It was an open secret.

But if you are going to die, what is the harm in trying?

And as you entered his garden - he had a beautiful garden - and then his office... He had beautiful women as his receptionists, and it was all part of his medical treatment - because even if a person is dying, looking at a beautiful woman his will to live takes a jump; he wants to live.

After the reception, the person would pass through his lab. It was absolutely unnecessary to take him through the lab, but he wanted the person to see that he was not an ordinary doctor. And the lab was a miracle - absolutely useless, there was nothing significant, but so many tubes, flasks, colored water moving from one tube into another tube, as if great experiments were going on.

Then you would reach the doctor. And he never used the ordinary methods of checking your pulse, no. You would have to lie down on an electric bed with a remote control. The bed would move far up into the air, and you are lying there looking up and hanging over you there are big tubes. And wires would be attached to your pulse and the pulse would make the water in the tubes jump.

The heart would be checked in the same way - not by ordinary stethoscope. He had made all his arrangements visual for the patient - so that he could see he had come to some genius, an expert.

And the man had no degrees, nothing at all. His pharmacist had all the degrees, and he used to prescribe the medicines because the man had no idea about medicine.

In fact, he never did any criminal thing. He never prescribed medicines, he never signed for them.

This was done by a man who had degrees, who was absolutely qualified to do it. But because he arranged all this, and because he had written strange degrees on his sign... and since those degrees don't exist I don't think they can be illegal. He was not claiming any legal degrees, he was not claiming that they were from any university that exists. It was all fiction - but the fiction was helpful.

I have seen patients half cured just in the examination. Coming out, they said, "We feel almost cured, and we have not taken the medicine yet. The prescription is here - now we will go and purchase the medicine."

But because he had done all this.... This is when I saw that the law is blind. He had not done anything illegal, he had not harmed anybody - but he is in jail because he was "cheating people."

He has not cheated anybody.

To help somebody to live longer, if that is cheating, then what is medical help?

Because of human beings, medicine can never become an absolutely solid, hundred-percent objective science. That's why there are so many medical schools - ayurveda, homeopathy, naturopathy, acupuncture, and many more - and they all help.

Now homeopathy is simply sugar pills, but it helps.

The question is whether the person believes.

There are people who are fanatic naturopaths - nothing else can help them, only naturopathy can help them. And it has no connection with the disease.

One of my professors was madly into naturopathy. Any problem... and a mud pack on your stomach.

I used to go to him to enjoy, because it was very relaxing, and he had a very good arrangement - a beautiful bath and showers.... And without any difficulty I used to go and say, "I have a very bad migraine."

He said, "Don't be worried. Just a mud pack on your stomach."

Now a mud pack on the stomach is not going to help a migraine. But it used to help me, because I had no migraine! A mud bath, the full bathtub, and you are drowned in the mud, just your head is out - it is very comfortable and very cool.

Soon he realized that, "You come again and again with new diseases."

I said, "That's true. Because I have got a book on naturopathy - from the book I get the disease, and then I come to you. First I read it, to see what you will do. If I want it to be done to me, I bring that disease; otherwise, unnecessarily lying down in the mud for half an hour...."

He said, "So you have been cheating me?"

I said, "I am not cheating you. I am your most prominent patient. In the university everybody else laughs at you, I am the only one who supports you. And the others who come here, come here because of me - because I say that my migraine disappeared."

He said, "My God, now I am suffering from migraine. Go!"

People used to become angry with me. They would tell me, "My migraine, instead of going, has become more intense - because a cold stomach does not help migraine!"

I would say, "Then your system must work differently. With my system, it helps me!"

There are homeopaths, fanatics who believe that homeopathy is the only right medicine and all other medicines are dangerous - particularly allopathy is poison. If you go to a homeopath, the first thing he will do is inquire about your whole history from your birth up to now. And you are suffering from a headache.

One of the homeopathic doctors used to live near me. Whenever my father came to see me, I would take him to the homeopath. The homeopath told me, "I pray you don't bring your father because he starts back three generations, that his grandfather had a disease...."

I said, "He is also a homeopath. He goes deeper into the roots."

He said, "But he wastes so much time, and I have to listen - and he just has a headache! About his grandfather and all his diseases, then his father and all his diseases... then himself. By the time he comes, almost the whole day is finished. My other patients are gone, and I am listening to him telling what kind of diseases he has suffered from his childhood, and finally it comes out that he has a headache.

"I say, 'My God, why didn't you tell me before?' and he says, 'Just as you are a homeopath, I am also a homeopath. And I want to give you a complete picture.'"

The first thing they will ask is about all your diseases because they believe that all diseases are connected, your whole life is one single whole. It does not matter whether you had something in your leg or your head - they are part of one body, and for the doctor to understand, he has to know everything.

The homeopath will ask you what kind of allopathic medicines you have been taking - because that is the root cause of all your diseases; all allopathic medicines are poison.

That is the attitude of naturopathy too, that allopathy is poison. So first you have to do fasting, enemas... just to clean you of all allopathy. Once you are clean of allopathy....

One of my relatives was very much interested in naturopathy. His wife had a small problem and that was that her hands once in a while would get what you call "pins and needles." It was not much of a problem, because for two, three minutes the sensation would remain, and then it would be gone. I told her many times, "Don't make much fuss about it. Enjoy it when it happens - it is not a pain, you just feel pins and needles. So enjoy it!"

But the husband was a naturopath, so he brought a bigger naturopath and they started working on her. I tried hard to stop them: "There is no need, it is not much of a disease, and it happens only once in a while. She is almost fifty - twenty years more she will live. In twenty years it will happen maybe sixty times, not more than that - just drop the idea and enjoy it."

But they were going to the very roots. They started putting her on a fast, enema, vomiting... they cleaned her completely. And when she was completely clean, she became mad.

And I told the husband, "I was afraid you would kill the woman! You cleaned her so much, she is just a skeleton. And because she is just a skeleton, all is cleaned, those pins and needles are now happening all over her body. You have succeeded!"

But they insisted that it was not naturopathy that was responsible for it; it was allopathy, she had been taking allopathic medicines for years.

Finally she became mad.

The last time I went to see her.... She used to love me very much. I had been chosen by my university to go with a delegation to Saudi Arabia. She was not in her senses, but when I told her that I had been chosen to go to Saudi Arabia with a cultural delegation, she heard it, she understood it, and she said, "Only two things you have to remember - don't forget."

I said, "I will not forget. You just tell me what those two things are."

"First, don't use wooden sandals" - because I used to wear wooden sandals in the university just to torture the whole university. I would be at one corner of the campus, and the whole university would know that I had entered, I was in the university. Wherever I was, I could be found just by the sound.

I said, "Why are you worried about my wooden sandals?"

She said, "It won't look right in a foreign country. What will they think of wooden sandals? No, you don't do that."

I said, "Okay, I will not use wooden sandals. What is your second advice?"

She said, "Second advice: You are going to a Mohammedan country. Don't speak against the KORAN."

And the same night she died.

And for perhaps three months those had been the only words of sanity from her.

My own explanation is that she loved me so much that even in this insane state her love took over her madness to give me suggestions - don't speak against Mohammedans, against the KORAN, and don't use the wooden sandals.

Man is a subjective being. If the patient loves the doctor, then water can function as medicine. And if the patient hates the doctor, then no medicine can help. If the patient feels the doctor is indifferent - which is ordinarily the case with doctors, because they are also human beings, the whole day long seeing patients, the whole day long somebody is dying... they slowly slowly become hard, they create a barrier to their emotions, sentiments, humanity. But this prevents their medicine from being effective. It is given almost in a robot-like way, as if a machine is giving you medicine.

With love, the patient is not only getting medicine; around the medicine something invisible is also coming to him.

Medicine will have to understand man's subjectivity, his love, and will have to create some kind of synthesis in which love and medicine together are used to help people.

But one thing is absolutely certain: that medicine can never become entirely objective. That has been the effort of medical science up to now, to make it absolutely objective.