I belong to the whole world

QUESTIONS FROM The Rajneesh Times, GERMANY.

The first thing to be remembered: you cannot compare me to the pope. He represents Jesus Christ, and through Jesus Christ he represents God.

I represent no one.

I represent only myself.

He is a carbon copy; I am an original.

The whole idea that somebody else can represent the truth, the experience of somebody else, is basically false. Either you know the truth or you don't know it. Those who know it will not represent anybody else. Those who do not know it, their representation is a lie, is a fundamental falsehood.

They are pretending to be somebody they are not.

The pope is infallible; I am just a human being - more fallible than anybody else, because as I see it, the more mistakes you commit, the more mature you become. Every error is an opportunity to learn. Just don't commit the same mistake again and again - that is stupidity. But commit as many mistakes as you are capable of - don't be afraid - because that is the only way nature allows you to learn. Just think of a person who has never committed a mistake. He will not have any growth, any maturity, any centering, any consciousness. He will be just a vegetable.

The pope pretends to be infallible. He has to pretend it, because the logic is that he represents Jesus Christ: if he is fallible then Jesus Christ is fallible. Jesus Christ represents God: if he is fallible then God is fallible. To make God infallible you have to make Polacks infallible, for the sheer sake of logic - it has no existential truth in it.

His trip around the world is political, it is not religious. It has nothing to do with spirituality. It is an effort to convert more and more people to the Catholic church, because numbers mean power.

Particularly in a world which is ruled by mobocracy, numbers are the greatest power. Now the pope has six hundred million Catholics in the world, and they are increasing every day. But the conversion of people to Catholicism is not conversion to spiritualism....

Islam used to convert people forcibly, with a sword in one hand, a naked sword, and in another hand, the holy KORAN. You could choose. Now, it is very difficult for human beings to choose a life of something which they don't agree with, but they had to choose it because it was not a question of choosing between two doctrines, two philosophies: it was a choice between life and death. Life is good - and who cares about the KORAN?

Mohammedans have converted millions of people just by forcing them with the sword; their only argument was the sword. Now the world has changed; its strategies have changed. If you go to somebody with a sword you will be imprisoned.

Christian missionaries are still doing the same thing, with a little change: in one hand is THE HOLY BIBLE, in the other hand is bread and butter. The world is so poor... and these people want the world to remain poor because they have been able to convert only the poor. This point has to be remembered: Christianity has not been able to convert a single cultured, educated, high-class person around the world. It has been able only to convert the beggars, the orphans, the starving, the dying, the sick.

Those people are not choosing Christianity, they are choosing bread and butter. They are hungry.

They are choosing medicine and hospitals. They are choosing schools for their children. They have nothing to do with Christianity, but if all these things can come only through Christianity they are - unwillingly - ready to accept it.

But willingly or unwillingly, they go on increasing the number of Catholics in the world. That makes the pope more and more powerful: wherever he has the majority of Catholics, that nation is under his thumb. Its politicians have to listen to him.

You cannot compare my trip around the world to a political trip of the pope. In fact I am traveling around the world against the political structures.

For example, in your own land, in Germany: I have never been there, and they are so afraid - of a man who has never been there, who has never even applied for any visa for any tour - that they have made a law that I cannot enter Germany. Strange world! I have not committed any crime on their land, I have not been there; I have not even asked them. They could have refused the visa; there was no need to make any law, but to be on the safe side...

I am taking a trip around the world, not to convert anybody - I have never converted anybody in my life; it is the ugliest thing to do.

You have to understand the inner reality of converting a person. First you accept that you are right and the other is wrong, and he has to be put on the right path - by any means. Nobody has any right to decide that. Any effort to convert somebody is against the basic right of human beings. It is interfering in their freedom, thinking; it is trying to enslave them.

You can express whatever ideology you have and then leave it to people. If it is better than their own, they may accept; if it is not better, they may reject. But whether they accept it or reject it is not your concern.

Conversion is a beautiful name for spiritual enslavement.

I have never converted anybody.

The people who have become sannyasins have become sannyasins on their own. It was their decision. They felt something, they recognized something, they experienced something.

Truth has its own fragrance.

Love has its own power.

Silence has its own impact. But there is no question of converting anybody. Sannyas is not a conversion. You are not moving from one ideology to another ideology - from Hinduism to Christianity, from Christianity to Buddhism. That is simply changing prisons. Perhaps the other prison may be a little better, but a prison is a prison after all, and a better prison may be more imprisoning.

Sannyas is getting rid of all ideologies, of all prisons. It is not a new ideology that you have chosen - you have chosen freedom from all ideologies. I don't have any ideology to preach to you. I have no doctrine to give to you, no catechism, no religion.

I can simply tell you that I was imprisoned in the same way you are. And there are ways - just as I have come out of prisons, you can also. Nobody can prevent you, because your prison exists only through your agreement.

If you are a Christian it is your agreement; if you are a Buddhist it is your agreement - unconsciously.

In your very childhood they have forced the agreement on you and destroyed your innocence, your freedom, your search for truth.

My trip around the world is to make people free who are suffering under unnecessary slavery, suffering through belief systems - in churches, in synagogues, in temples, but it is the same story in different names; there is no basic difference. All the religions are preventing people from knowing the truth.

And unless you know the truth of your being, you will never feel the great benediction of life. You will never be able to overflow with joy just for the sheer fact of existence.

If you cannot experience truth, you will not be able to connect yourself with this vast cosmos which is your home, which has given birth to you, and which has the tremendous expectation of you that you will grow to the ultimate peak of consciousness... because through you, existence can become conscious; there is no other way.

Man is existence's most precious treasure - which is being wasted by Christians, by Jews, by Hindus, by Buddhists, by Mohammedans. He is existence's greatest experiment. In this vast, infinite universe, only on this small earth has existence been able to produce this humanity, which has the potential to become totally conscious.

Existence expects much from you.

Just think: if humanity disappears from the earth, the whole existence will be dead. Not only this earth, all those millions of solar systems and millions of planets and stars will be simply dead. It is through thousands of years of tremendous effort that nature has brought matter to a point where it becomes conscious, alive.

Now all the religions are preventing consciousness from growing. They are all against existence, they are all against nature, they are all against you.

My trip is to make people aware of their imprisonment, to make them aware of their potential - what they are and what they can become - to make them aware that existence is waiting for something tremendously ecstatic to happen in them and nobody has the right to prevent it. You owe it to existence. It has given you birth; it has given you everything. Just in gratitude, can't you give it back a conscious being?

Sannyas is not a religion, it is not a church.

I would love to see everybody on the earth being a sannyasin, but I would not make any effort to convert anybody into sannyas. I will simply explain the situation. I trust your intelligence; I don't see any need to convert you. Your intelligence has to be appealed to.

I know that there is not a single human being who would not like freedom, who would not like to be more loving and loved, who would not like to know the mysteries of existence, who would not like to live a life of joy, ecstasy, song and dance.

What is the need of converting anybody? I just have to explain to you things which somehow you already know, but your religions have covered them, forced them into your unconscious, and don't allow them to come to your conscious.

My work is deprogramming.

I am against all programs.

I don't have any program of my own. So I will go around the earth destroying the programs of people and making them free. I will not substitute any program, because that is again the same story:

another prison - maybe newly built, modern architecture, but it does not matter.

I want you to live in utter freedom under the stars, under the sky, and feel existence in as many ways as possible so that your life becomes poetry. That is what sannyas means to me.

When a man's life becomes poetry, becomes a song, becomes a work of art, a creativity, he has become a sannyasin. Whether he knows it or not, it does not matter. The word 'sannyas' does not matter; what matters is the content.

So I am not going to convert anybody. But millions of intelligent young people are ready - it is just that they are surrounded with so much garbage, so many rotten traditions, orthodoxies, they don't see that there is any way out of it.

There is a way out of it.

In fact all those conditionings are not imprisoning you; you are holding and clinging to them. And that is the whole art of sannyas: how to relax and let those conditionings fall down and be shattered on the ground, leaving you as innocent as you were born.

Sannyas is a rebirth, but very much more significant than the first birth, because in the first birth you were very helpless. You had parents, you were dependent. They exploited your helplessness, perhaps with good intentions; I never doubt anybody's intentions. They took you to the church, they took you to the priest; you were ceremoniously made part of the religion. And they were thinking they were doing good - without ever thinking what good it had done to them, what good it had done to their parents. They have been simply repeating a ritual, generation after generation.

Rebirth is a totally different phenomenon: you again become innocent like a child, but this time you are not dependent, this time you are not helpless. This time nobody can enforce anything on you:

you have enough intelligence, enough logic, enough argumentative power - it is not easy to force stupid beliefs on you. That's your safeguard. The second birth is the beginning of a new life.

I would like the whole earth to begin a new life. It has become stagnant. It is living in such misery and suffering, and still nobody is there to say it - that the people you depend on for your knowledge, your wisdom, are the cause of your misery.

All the religions of the world are against birth control. Naturally they have to be against it, because the more children there are, the more poverty there is going to be. And poverty is a great blessing to the religions: they can convert people, they can open hospitals, orphanages, schools. They can give just little pieces of bread, and comfort people very easily.

If the world is rich and there is nobody who is poor, the whole market from where religions get their slaves disappears. They are not worried about what no birth control can cause. It is causing great misery. This whole year in Ethiopia people have been dying continuously - one thousand people per day - and still Ethiopian priests are not for birth control. Not a single religious leader in the world has said that at least in Ethiopia birth control should be legalized, abortion should be legalized.

They call abortion a sin because it is God who is giving birth to children. It is all pure nonsense!

Either God is absolutely an idiot... He does not understand simple economics, that if you give birth to so many children at least send with these children a piece of land, a factory, something to support them.

The earth remains the same. Its productivity is lessening every day because you have been producing for millions of years. It is losing its power, it is becoming barren, and God is not doing anything for the earth, but he goes on sending children. And the priests and the representatives have their own designs - they are not concerned about God.

As far as I know, God himself practices birth control, because he has only one begotten son, Jesus Christ. What happened afterwards? The only possibility is that he started using birth control methods; otherwise, up to now he would have created millions of Jesus Christs.

If you follow God you can understand at least one thing: that in the whole of eternity he has produced only one son - that too, not from his own wife. He had not taken the risk of getting married, because women are women: they may start harassing, nagging, "I want another child; I want a girl. A boy is okay but I want a girl."

So he committed a crime and made the Virgin Mary pregnant. Nobody calls it a sin... and if it is virtue, then why has he stopped? There are so many virgins; particularly in Greece there are so many virgins - he should make them all pregnant.

My effort is to go around the world to meet my people, many of whom know me, many of whom do not know me. But I would like to have a look into their eyes; perhaps something transpires.

It is a transformation, not conversion.

Perhaps they fall in love with me. And to fall in love with somebody who is against all religions, who is against all nations, who is against all governments, who is against all politicians, takes guts.

Just as Germany has made a law that they will not allow me to enter Germany... They are the most afraid people, because I have the greatest number of sannyasins in Europe in Germany - for the simple reason that Adolf Hitler completely destroyed the trust of the new generation in politicians. It also destroyed their trust in the so-called religions.

The pope in Italy was blessing and praying to God for the victory of Benito Mussolini who was a fascist and a partner in the second world war with Adolf Hitler. The German church was praying for Adolf Hitler to win the war and Adolf Hitler was killing millions of Jews; still the church was praying for him, not for those poor Jews who had nothing to do with it at all. And in England the Church of England and the archbishop of England were praying for the victory of England. They were all praying to the same God, and they were all representatives of the same God! Can't you see the contradiction?

The German youth is the most frustrated youth in the whole world. The credit goes to Adolf Hitler; he has done the groundwork for me.

Now the German youth is not ready to get into any imprisonment, either of religion or of politics; they want to remain totally free. And these stupid politicians say they can prevent...

Now that I am here, all my German sannyasins will be coming here. I will be moving around Germany. Don't let me in, but you cannot prevent my sannyasins coming out.

In India, first they were trying to take my passport so that I could not move out of India. They informed all the Indian embassies around the world that nobody who wants to come to me should be given visas; no news media should be allowed to reach me, so that I can be isolated completely, disconnected from the people. But politicians, I have always thought, belong to the very retarded class of intelligence. They did not have the idea that I could move to Nepal where no passport is needed, no visa is needed.

I have challenged all the governments of the world, that if any government has guts and courage and any pride then I am willing to be a citizen of that land - give me a passport. And five governments have replied that they are willing; whatever the consequence they would like me to be their citizen.

Now I have to choose amongst five.

They cannot prevent me: I will go around the world. I will tell my sannyasins in Germany to fight against the government peacefully, to go to the court, because it is absolutely illegal to prevent a person from coming into the country who has not done any harm to the country, who has never been in the country. This is unprecedented.

I certainly believe that you are going to win the case - and it will be a good slap in the face of German politicians. I will come into Germany; just first you settle with your government. And they have turned it into a good opportunity, because before my coming there will be great publicity; the whole of Germany will be involved in it.

Why should a government make a law which has never been made in any country, ever? So fight with the government, peacefully; go to the court. The law is in your favor, the constitution is in your favor, and the sympathy of the public will be in your favor. Use it as a good groundwork for my coming. And the day you are victorious, I will enter Germany. Thousands of people who may not have come in contact with me... the government will have forced them to come in contact with me.

It is a totally different kind of trip. For five years many of my sannyasins I have not seen: America was too costly for them to come. And it has been a heaviness on my heart, that just because of money - which means nothing - people cannot come in close contact with me. So I have decided that if they cannot come, if the thirsty cannot come to the well...

It is a saying of Mohammed's: The well cannot go to the thirsty - but that is fourteen hundred years old. Now you can send pipes into every house! There is no need for the thirsty to come to the well; the well can come to the very innermost heart of the thirsty - just a pipe has to be connected!

Technology has changed; proverbs take a little longer to change according to technology. But I would like to change it: If the thirsty cannot come to the well, now the well is ready to come to the thirsty. And this is not going to be only one trip, and not just for one or two days: I am going to be in each country for two months, three months, so I can come in contact with people. And this is going to be an ongoing thing.

I will have some place as a headquarters, so just when I am tired I can be there; otherwise I will be on the tour. So no need for people to come to me, I will be coming to them. That seems to be simple, more economical. And in this way many people who may not have ever come in contact with me will come in contact.

I am going to knock on everybody's door. And even the hardest person cannot refuse to open the door, at least just to see who the person is. And that much is enough: before he closes the door, I will be in.

But it is not a conversion. It is spreading more love, more freedom, more individuality, more truth, more search, more light, more consciousness.

Question 2:

Socrates is one of the persons I love the most. And coming here I feel tremendously joyous, because it is the same air Socrates must have breathed, the same land he must have walked, the same people with whom he must have talked, communicated with.

To me, without Socrates Greece is nothing. With Socrates, it is everything. The day Athens chose to poison Socrates, it poisoned the whole Greek spirit. It has never again been to the same heights.

Twenty-five centuries have passed, but not a single man has been able to reach to the same glory, to the same light, the same insight.

Killing Socrates, Greece committed suicide.

And it can be seen easily. If they had listened to Socrates rather than poisoning him, and dropped their conditionings, which he was asking them to do, Greece would have been at the very top of the world today in intelligence, in consciousness, in the search for truth. But people are ignorant.

They have to be forgiven - but they should not be forgotten. If you forget them, you are bound to commit the same mistake again. Forgive those people who poisoned Socrates, but don't forget, so that it never happens again.

There have been great people on the earth, but Socrates has something unique. There is Gautam the Buddha, Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu - in Greece itself there has been Pythagoras, Heraclitus; in Persia, Zarathustra... and many others, but none of them had a certain quality which only Socrates has. And that is a scientific approach about everything - and that was his crime.

And you are all being benefited by science all over the world, not knowing that Socrates sacrificed himself for the same scientific enquiry. He was asking only one thing: that nothing should be believed. Everything should be experienced, experimented with, and unless there is evidence, evidence without exception, it should not be accepted. Even when you accept a thing as truth, if you are honest, accept it only as a hypothetical truth, because who knows? - tomorrow there may be new facts known, and you will have to change the truth.

Nobody has been in the service of truth as much as Socrates. Even if you have found the truth - today it looks absolutely true, not a single flaw, no possibility that it will ever be untrue - still he says the scientific spirit will accept it only as hypothetical, for the time being... because eternity is ahead.

Every day new facts will be discovered, and those facts may not go with your truth. You may have to change it, you may have to make place for those new truths. This is something absolutely unique in the whole world.

And the man was not like Jesus - proclaiming himself the only son of God, or proclaiming himself a prophet or a messiah. That makes me tremendously respectful towards Socrates, and disrespectful towards all those pretenders who have been talking about being prophets and saviors and messiahs.

Socrates was far more intelligent than any of them, but still so humble that he remained just a human being, with no claim of being special, being higher.

Twenty-five centuries ago it was even more difficult, because in every country there were messiahs, prophets, messengers of God, sons of God. In that climate the man's humbleness is really surprising and makes him one of the most respected human beings who has ever walked on the earth.

Socrates does not believe in any God, but he does not say that there is no God. He is very scientific.

He says, "As far as I have enquired, there seems to be no God, but who knows about the results of further enquiry? Take it as a hypothesis that there is no God, but if some day you discover God, hypotheses can be changed.

Socrates does not say that life survives after death. He says, "I will have to wait and see. When I die, only then can I see whether life survives after death or not, because nobody has come back from death and told us that life survives."

And never forget that this was twenty-five centuries ago. This man had such courage that when poison was given to him, he gathered all his disciples and said, "You have always been asking about whether life survives or not. This is a good chance, a great opportunity. If I had died an ordinary death then there would have been no opportunity. But now poison will be given to me" - and poison kills very slowly - "so I will report to you to the very last moment, till my tongue also becomes numb and I cannot say anything."

And as the poison is given he starts saying with closed eyes, "My legs up to the knees are dead. I don't feel them; even by touching them I don't feel them. Life has gone out of them. But one thing is to be remembered: I am still feeling as whole as I was always. So the death of the legs has not affected my consciousness."

Then he says, "Half of my body, the lower half, is dead, but I am completely whole; half of my consciousness is not dead." Then he says, "My hands are becoming numb, my eyes are drooping, and I can feel that my tongue will stop any moment, so this is perhaps the last statement I have to make to you - that life survives after death, because I can see death happening. Parts of my body are dead and I am fully alive. Nothing is missing. So I am certain that when my tongue stops, my eyes close, and my heart stops, it is not going to matter. But don't believe me; it is just a hypothesis for you. When you die, try it." Such a scientific spirit!

I feel immensely happy to be here.

I have loved Socrates much more than anyone else - for his humbleness, for his scientific enquiry, for not creating a religion, not creating a theology, not creating a following, not becoming a prophet...

which he was capable of, far more capable than Jesus or Moses or Mohammed. These people were all illiterate.

Socrates was far more sophisticated, as cultured as you can imagine. The temptation must have been there to proclaim himself a god, and by that proclamation he may have been worshiped and not poisoned. The same people who killed him would have worshiped him; they would have made churches, and they would have still been worshiping him.

It needs immense courage when you have such consciousness, such clarity, to remain humble and just human - knowing perfectly well that this is the way to death. Sooner or later these same people are going to kill you, these people whom you are trying to make free from all fetters. Still Socrates chose to remain human. That's why you don't see any religion after Socrates, no church, no theology, no holy scripture.

But the man did a great service: he made it clear that your prophets and your messiahs are pretenders. And you are such that you get into the traps of pretenders very easily, because they strengthen your conditioning; they help you to remain in your prison. And they call your prison by good names, so you are happy.

With a man like Socrates you are not happy because he says exactly what the situation is - that you are a prisoner, and you have to come out of it.

People are lazy; people want not to change.

People simply want consolations.

Somebody should come as if he is from somewhere higher, coming from God himself to tell them, "You are perfectly right - just go on believing in God. Go on praying to God every night for two minutes, and everything is perfectly okay with you." This you enjoy, because it saves you all the trouble of change.

People like Socrates seem to be very dangerous because they go on hitting hard on your consolations: they take away all your conditionings, they expose you to your reality. Their work is surgical. It hurts, it is painful, but that is the way a new man can be born.

What Socrates was doing twenty-five centuries ago, I am doing now.

Twenty-five centuries have gone by without any change as far as humanity is concerned. Three times they have tried to kill me... three attempts on my life. In every possible way the same people whom I am trying to make free, trying to take their chains away, are ready to kill me. Humanity has not changed. It will still do the same.

But what Socrates was not capable of doing, I am capable of doing.

He remained in the very small area of Athens, not even the whole of Greece. Athens was a city-state, and he remained an Athenian for his whole life.

I belong to the whole world.

In a small place you may not get people of courage, but in the whole world you are bound to come across thousands of people who have the capacity to become a Socrates. So I am in a better position.

And you are the evidence for it. All around the world now we have three to four million people whose hearts are with me. This is a great revolution. And their number is going to increase as I will be coming to every nook and corner of the world.

We have to create a world force against the ignorant masses, so there are no more poisonings of Socrates, so they cannot dare to do it. Otherwise you will go on moving in the same vicious circle:

every time a Socrates is there, you kill him.

In the whole history of Greece there is no other name comparable to this man's. Nobody comes even close to his shoulders. He stands high like a great mountain peak. Perhaps people become jealous seeing such a great man - such humbleness, such intelligence, such sharpness, such beauty.

Perhaps they start comparing themselves with him and feel very inferior, and the inferiority becomes revengeful.

In India there is a proverb that the camel does not want to go near a mountain - he likes to live in the desert. There, he is the mountain. But near the mountain he feels very bad - he becomes just a rat.

But if we have millions of people around the world, then the ignorant mob can be prevented - and it should be prevented, so that never again does any Socrates have to be crucified, poisoned, killed.

They are our very cream. We should learn their art of growth, transformation, and how they have attained to such humbleness, such silence, such peace, that even when he is dying...

The sentence was given that exactly at sunset Socrates should be given the poison. He looks from the window and he says, "The sun has set! The man outside who is preparing the poison - tell him that he is late and he should never be late when he is on duty."

The man came in. He said, "You are a strange person! Just out of love for you I am delaying the process so that you can live a little longer. I have given poison to many people - this is my profession - but my heart is trembling, my hands are trembling. What I am doing is not right. I want to delay it as long as I can."

Socrates says, "No, that is not right. You do your duty; your personal feelings should not come into it. And moreover, I am so curious to go into death because I have lived a long life, I have known all the secrets of it, but death is such a great adventure, such an unknown. So don't delay it, just bring the poison."

People who were not afraid of death, we have killed. And these were the people who had known life; that's why they were not afraid of death. Deep down they have known that there is something that is going to continue, but they didn't have any proof, any evidence. Hence Socrates will not say it; he will say it only when the evidence is there. Such devotion to the scientific spirit! That's why no religion has been created after him.

And my effort is that the future religion should be nothing but a science. Just as there are other sciences - they are the sciences of the objective world - there should be one more science, of the inner, subjective world. There is no space or scope for any religion at all. The scientific spirit is capable of revealing the truth of the object and it is capable of revealing the truth of the subject, of your interior.

I am immensely happy to be here because of Socrates, but immensely sad too because of the people of Greece who poisoned the man.

Question 3:

One thing is certain: you are German; otherwise you cannot ask, "Can a man be liberated without knowing it?"

Liberation comes with consciousness:

There is no unconscious liberation.

And your German programming, that nothing can be achieved without great effort, is the barrier. It is true as far as the outside world is concerned: nothing can be achieved without great effort. But the laws of the outside world are not applicable to the interiority of your being. In fact you will have to find just the opposite laws - you are moving in the opposite direction.

When you are moving outwards, that is one direction; when you are moving inwards, you are moving in exactly the opposite direction. So if the law is that nothing can be achieved in the outside world without great effort, then the law for the interior world will be that nothing can be achieved with great effort.

The only way to achieve something in the interior world is let-go - a kind of effortlessness, a relaxation. It is not a doing; it is nondoing. It is not action; it is inaction. And it seems difficult because everybody from the very beginning is told, "Do something; don't just go on sitting there!

Something is always better than nothing." In the inner world these are not the laws.

Nothing is better than everything.

In the inner world, don't do anything: just sit there! That will work because whenever you are doing something, you are involved with something else; when you are not doing anything then you relax in yourself. Where to go? Even going is not allowed, because it is part of action.

So just simply get centered in yourself, and in those moments when you get centered in yourself is the possibility of liberation, the first glimpse of the world of inner sky, of inner stars....

Your German programming is certainly a difficulty. I have never heard of any German becoming enlightened before Vimalkirti - Vimalkirti was my sannyasin. But I have never heard in the whole of history that any other German has ever become enlightened. Germany can produce two world wars. It has produced great warriors, great philosophers, great theologians, but it has not proved helpful in producing a single enlightened man, for the simple reason that the whole programming is such that it creates soldiers, not sannyasins. The German soldier has a beauty that no other soldier has.

When Vimalkirti came to me and became a sannyasin I had no idea that he was the great-grandson of the German emperor - he never told me. He was a rare human being: being a part of the oldest royal family in Europe, he was just working as a guard in front of my house. You will be surprised - for years he was there, meditating, doing his work, but he never told anybody.

When he died, only then did we become aware that he was the great-grandson of the German emperor. He was perhaps the first German man who had become enlightened, and the reason seems to be that he came from the royal family so he was not programmed as every other German is programmed. Because he came from the royal family, he had a certain rebelliousness in him.

His family was no longer in power; otherwise he would have been the emperor of Germany. He had a certain rebelliousness against the whole of Germany and the whole German spirit, which had thrown his family and him from power.

He rebelled in every way. He married a sannyasin. The family was against it because she was not of royal blood. And he certainly insisted on marrying her only for that reason, that she was not of royal blood. That's how he was breaking his programming. When he came to me and I asked him, "Vimalkirti, what work would you like?" he said, "You simply say - anything."

I loved the man from the very first moment I saw him. He had a certain quality. So I said, "Okay, you be my guard, because you are so silent you will not create any disturbance. You just sit by my door."

And he said, "I will remain grateful forever, because I would have never thought I would be so fortunate as to be so close to you. You will be sleeping just inside the door, and I will be sitting outside. You will be working inside, and I will be sitting outside. Just this closeness is enough for me; I don't ask for more. You have given me everything."

You have to understand that in the world the program that says you have to do much to get anywhere is perfectly right. If you are after money, if you are after position, power, then you have to do much.

But if you are just to realize yourself, you have not to do anything, because you have got it already.

Just a relaxed moment, a peaceful moment when your mind is not wandering anywhere and just settles within itself - in that settling is liberation.

It will be possible, more possible because of your German program. It is easy to move from a hard program for doing, towards relaxation. For example, if I tell you to close your fist as hard as you can - that is a German fist - how long can you keep it closed? Go on pressing as hard as you can, and there will come a moment when the fist will open by itself because you will not be able to press it anymore. There is a limit. To keep the hand open you don't need any energy; it is its natural state.

But to keep the fist closed is not its natural state; some force is needed.

So you have been keeping your fist very much closed. Just relax it. Just be a little less German and a little more human. And you will not be losing anything; you will be gaining immense treasures.

QUESTION FROM Rajneesh Times, HOLLAND.

Question 4:

Euthanasia, or the freedom to choose your death, should be accepted as a birthright of every human being.

A limit can be put to it, for example, seventy-five years. After the age of seventy-five the hospitals should be ready to help anybody who wants to get rid of their body. Every hospital should have a place for dying people, and those who have chosen to die should be given special consideration and help. Their death should be beautiful.

Every hospital should have a teacher of meditation. The person who is going to die should be given one month and will be allowed... if he changes his mind he can go back, because nobody is forcing him. Emotional people who want to commit suicide cannot remain emotional for one month - emotionality can be momentary. Most of the people who commit suicide, if they had waited one moment longer, they would not have committed suicide at all. It is out of anger, out of jealousy, out of hatred or something that they forget the value of life.

The whole problem is that the politicians think accepting euthanasia means suicide is no longer a crime. No, it does not mean that. Suicide is still a crime.

Euthanasia will be with the permission of the medical board. One month's rest in the hospital - every kind of help that can be given to the person to become calm and quiet... all friends coming to meet him, his wife, his children, because he is going on a long journey. There is no question of preventing him - he has lived long, and he does not want to go on living, his work is finished.

And he should be taught meditation in this one month, so that he can do meditation while death comes. And for death, medical help should be given so it comes like a sleep - slowly slowly, side by side with meditation, sleep going deeper. We can change thousands of people's deaths into enlightenment.

And there is no fear of suicide, because he is not going to commit suicide; if somebody tries to commit suicide he will still be committing a crime. He is asking permission. With the permission of the medical board... and he has one month's time in which he can change his mind at any moment.

On the last day he can say, "I don't want to die" - then he can go home. There is no problem in it: it is his decision.

Right now there is a very strange situation in many countries. People try to commit suicide - if they succeed, good; if they don't succeed, then the court gives them the death sentence. Strange! - they themselves were doing that. They were caught in the middle. Now for two years a trial will go on; judges and advocates will be arguing, and this and that, and finally the man has to be hanged, again. He was doing that in the very first place, by himself! Why all this nonsense?

And euthanasia is becoming more and more a need, because with medical science progressing people are living longer. Scientists have not come across any skeleton from five thousand years ago of a person who was more than forty years old when he died. Five thousand years ago the longest a person was going to live was forty, and out of ten children born nine were going to die within two years - only one would survive - so life was immensely valuable.

And Hippocrates gave the oath to the medical profession that you have to help life in every case. He was not aware, he was not a seer. He had not the insight to see that a day could come when out of ten children, all ten would survive. Now that is happening. On the one hand, nine more children are surviving; and on the other hand, medical science helps people to live longer - ninety years, one hundred years is not rare. In developed countries it is very easy to find a ninety-year-old person or a one-hundred-year-old person.

In the Soviet Union there are people who have reached one hundred and fifty years, and there are a few thousand people who have reached one hundred and eighty years of age - and they are still working. But now life has become boring. One hundred and eighty years, just think of it, doing the same thing... even the bones will be hurting. And they have yet no possibility of death; death still seems to be far away - they are still working and healthy.

In America there are thousands of people in the hospitals just lying in their beds with all kinds of instruments connected to them. Many are on artificial breathing machines. What is the point if the person himself cannot breathe? What do you expect him to do? And why are you burdening the whole nation with this person when there are many people dying on the streets, starving?

Thirty million people in America are on the streets without shelter, without food, without clothes, and thousands of people are taking up hospital beds, doctors, nurses - their work, their labor, medicines.

Everybody knows they will die sooner or later, but as long as you can you should keep them alive.

They want to die. They shout that they want to die, but the doctor cannot help in that. These people certainly need some rights; they are being forced to live, and force is in every way undemocratic.

So I want it to be a very rational thing. Make it seventy-five years or eighty years; then life is lived enough. The children are grown up... when you are eighty your children will be fifty, fifty-five; they are getting old. Now there is no need for you to be bothered and worried. You are retired; now you are simply a burden, you don't know what to do.

And that is why old people are so irritable: because they don't have any work, they don't have any respect, they don't have any dignity. Nobody bothers about them, nobody takes note of them. They are ready to fight and be angry and shout. These are simply their frustrations that are showing; the real thing is they want to die. But they cannot even say it. It is unchristian, it is irreligious - the very idea of death.

They should be given freedom, but not only to die; they should be given the freedom of one month's training in how to die. In that training meditation should be a basic part; physical care should be a basic part. They should die healthy, whole, silent, peaceful - slowly slipping deep into sleep.

And if meditation has been joined with sleep they may die enlightened. They may know that only the body is left behind, and they are part of eternity.

Their death will be better than the ordinary death, because in the ordinary death you don't have the chance of becoming enlightened. In fact more and more people will prefer to die in the hospitals, in the special institutes for death where every arrangement is made. You can leave life in a joyous, ecstatic way, with great thankfulness and gratitude.

I am all for euthanasia, but with these conditions.