The art of not planning life

QUESTIONS FROM QUICK MAGAZINE, GERMANY

Question 1:

Absolutely - otherwise there is no reason to make a law that I cannot enter Germany. I have never been in Germany; I have never committed any crime against German law. I have not even applied for any tourist visa, so from my side there has been no question of entering Germany. It must be his own phobia.

He is certainly afraid; that can be said categorically. And the reason for his fear is that the German youth is deeply in love with me. The German youth is finished with the politicians. The day Adolf Hitler died an ignominious death, German politicians died for the younger generation; all politics became ugly.

German priests are also afraid. They may be behind the chancellor in a joint conspiracy, because this is the first time in the whole of history that Christians are facing a man who is taking the youth, the very cream, the intelligent people, educated people, the talented people, out of their fold. Christians have been trying to do it for centuries around the world, but they have never been successful in changing the cultured, the educated, the intelligent, the talented. They have been successful only in changing the beggars, the starving, the orphans.

To change an orphan into a Christian or a beggar into a Christian is not much of a conversion, because the person is not going for Christianity, he is going against his poverty. The people who have come to me have not come against any poverty, they have come for a spiritual search, which the church has not been able to provide. To change a Hindu into a Christian, or a Jew into a Christian, or a Buddhist into a Christian, is an easy job; it is simply changing the prisoner from one prison to another prison.

I have taken you out of the prison into the open sky.

I don't have any prison to give to you.

The politicians are afraid, the religious heads are afraid - and it is a good sign. It means that we are winning and they are losing. People become afraid only when they are losing. Why should the German chancellor be so afraid? I was not coming into his country, but he is as afraid as if he is living in my country.

I will come to Germany, because the law is absolutely illegal, criminal. My sannyasins are going to fight it in every court of law, and I will come triumphant into Germany and challenge the chancellor to face me openly before the public.

He has taken a very idiotic step. He will repent for it.

Question 2:

I have many sannyasins in East Berlin - and very brave people. They wanted to make a commune in East Berlin; I had to stop them. I had to tell them, "Remain underground." The same is true about the Soviet Union. I have thousands of sannyasins who are underground.

The KGB has been able to find out about two hundred sannyasins and they are persecuting them, harassing them. They have taken their books, they have taken their tapes, they have taken their videos. But there is nothing that they can say is against... I stand for a higher communism than the Soviet Union stands for. According to me the Soviet Union is not communist yet.

The rich and the poor, the old classes, are no longer there, but now a bigger distance between people has arisen: the bureaucrats, the people who have power, and the people who don't have any power. The rich were never so powerful, and the poor were always able - if they had talent and intelligence - to move into higher strata of society. But in Russia there is no movement possible, it is a static society, a dead society.

I love the idea of communism, but a communism can only be true, authentic, when it is based on anarchism. If it is based on the dictatorship of the proletariat, it is not going to be authentic communism. It will be simply poverty distributed equally.

I would like no poverty at all; all the people should be rich in every possible way. My communism means equal opportunity for everybody to be unique and unequal - because psychologically nobody is equal, and if you want them to be equal you have to force them to be equal. And any equality which is dependent on force is not worth the name. You have to take all freedom, you have to take all individuality. You have to sacrifice the real individual at the feet of an unreal society.

The society does not exist - it is only a name. If you search for society you will not find it anywhere.

Wherever you will go, you will come across individuals. My communism is individualistic, and my communism is anarchistic.

I would love to go to East Berlin. Right now they allow me at least to pass on the road. I will use that opportunity - my people can meet me on the road.

And the number of sannyasins will be growing faster in Russia for a psychological reason: for seventy years Russian people have been denied every spiritual urge. It is going to explode any day.

The Russian youth is burning with a desire to know more about the mysteries of life, not only about materialism, which is already dead. Friedrich Nietzsche has said, "God is dead." He was wrong on two counts: first, God has never been there, so how can he be dead? On the second count, modern physics has found that there is no matter. Matter is illusion, it only appears. What exists is energy, not matter.

So the old God is dead, the old materialism is dead. A new world is arising which will be based on energy and its transformations. And that is my work: how to transform your energy from sleeping to waking, from conscious to superconscious; how to destroy all unconscious corners in your being and make your whole existence full of light and consciousness.

There is tremendous appeal for me in Russia. People are handwriting books, typing books, cyclostyling books and spreading them underground. This is the only movement in Russia which is going on underground, the only spiritual movement in Russia. Soon we will have enough people so that they will not need to be underground.

I will ask the permission of the Soviet Union to visit my people there. And it will be a good chance for the Soviet Union to slap the face of America. If they allow me, and stop persecuting my sannyasins - who are absolutely innocent, who have no political goals - I will support the Soviet Union against America all over the world.

But if they don't allow me to enter Russia, then sooner or later my people will have to fight, inside Russia, legal battles for my entry, because I do not want to break any country's law. I am a law- abiding person.

But I will find ways to meet them. I have been finding ways to send them literature, to send them tapes. I will be moving around Russia where people can come and meet me. Even if I'm against some law, I will not break it. I would like the law to be withdrawn, only then I will enter that country.

And it does not matter... My people in Russia are spreading so fast that soon they will have a tremendous force. They are all young people and all the bureaucrats are old, almost dead. For seventy years, since the revolution, the same clique of people has been ruling Russia with one leg almost in the grave. Soon younger people will be coming to power, and the moment younger people come to power in any country, then I am in power.

With the young heart I have a synchronicity.

My heart beats with the younger heart. There is a tremendous communion - not only with words, but even with silence. But I will try to reach East Berlin and I will try to reach the Soviet Union and other communist countries - because this whole world is one, and I don't believe in the bogus boundaries of nations. I don't believe in the discrimination of religions, and I don't believe in the discrimination of nations.

The world needs to be one, only then can this world be a paradise.

Question 3:

Certainly.

Question 4:

I never make plans; that is not my way of life. But existence may have some plan. If it has brought me so close to Rome, it may take me exactly to the Vatican.

I would love to encounter this bogus pope, who represents nobody because there is no God. Jesus represented God - he was a crackpot. And these popes are representing Jesus - these are bigger crackpots! And particularly this pope. He is not only a crackpot, he is a Polack too!

I would love to discuss openly, publicly with him amongst his own people, because I know there is no evidence for God. For centuries people have worked and have not been able to produce any evidence. There is no evidence that Jesus is the only son of God. When God is doubtful, Jesus becomes doubtful. And claiming to be the only begotten son of God is a really egoistic attitude, a megalomania. And that too, two thousand years ago, when there was no birth control!

Why is Jesus the only begotten son of God? Has he got birth control? As far as the pill is concerned, only recently it has been invented for men; up to now it has been only for women. I don't think that the pill for men was available for God. And there is no mother. The Christian trinity is ugly. It is derogatory to women.

It would have been far more natural: God the father, God the mother, God the son - that would have looked like a natural unit. This guy, the holy ghost, has no place in any family. What is his purpose?

And to what gender does he belong? Is he man or woman?

And Jesus is so fanatic about it. When his mother comes to meet him - he is preaching in a crowd - somebody in the crowd shouts, "Jesus, your mother has come to see you." And the way he answers is so ugly that all his preachings about love and peace are destroyed. He says, "Tell that woman" - he does not use the word 'mother' - "tell that woman that I know only my father, who is in heaven. I don't have any mother, any father, other than God."

These popes are representing Jesus. These popes are representing THE HOLY BIBLE - which is the most unholy book in existence. Five hundred pages in THE HOLY BIBLE are sheer pornography.

I would like to discuss with him that if this is not pornography, then what is?

The pope is thought to be infallible. Just five minutes before his election he was fallible, he was just a cardinal. And after the election some miracle happens - and this is an election! - and he becomes infallible.

Nobody can elect an enlightened person. Election is basically political.

Truth does not depend on an election. If truth were to depend on an election, you would have been primitive even today. Galileo would have been defeated. He was alone in saying that the earth goes round the sun, not vice-versa. In his old age, sick, dying, he was dragged to the court of the pope, and the pope forced him to change that sentence in his book. Galileo must have been a man of immense sense of humor. He said, "I have no difficulty. I will change the sentence, but I want to remind you that my changing the sentence is not going to change the earth from moving around the sun."

He changed the sentence in his book, and in the footnote he wrote, "I have changed the sentence because it goes against THE BIBLE, but the earth still goes round the sun. The earth has no obligation to follow THE BIBLE."

If truth were to be decided by majority voting, then Gautam Buddha would never have been chosen, because he was a rebellious person amongst the Hindus. He was condemning the VEDAS - which are worth condemning. He would not have got any votes. Then Lao Tzu would not have been chosen as a great enlightened man, because he was against Confucius, who had immense power over the whole land of China and all the politicians.

Truth stands on its own authority. I do not represent anybody except myself. Truth is never a carbon copy, it is never second hand. It is always fresh and new, and from its freshness comes the authority.

Truth is not authoritative.

I want to make a distinction between these two words. Truth has an authority; its very presence changes something in you. It is not authoritative. It cannot force you to change, to convert, to follow another ideology. It has no mundane power; its power is spiritual.

I would really love, if existence plans it that way... because I have never planned my life, and I have loved the art of not planning life. It has given me tremendous blissfulness, because nothing disappoints me and each day takes care of itself.

I have left myself in the hands of existence.

If it can manage millions of stars, millions of planets, millions of solar systems... I am just an ordinary man, it can manage life for me too.

I am in an utter let-go.

Wherever existence takes me, I am willing.

There is every possibility that you may find me in the Vatican. Please come. Don't miss the opportunity!

Question 5:

German people are fortunate that their population is decreasing. The problem is not with decreasing population, the problem is with increasing population. Thirty years ago when I started teaching about birth control and abortion in India I was stoned, attempts on my life were made because I was teaching something immoral, against God. But at that time India's population was four hundred million. If they had listened to me they would not have been in such a mess as they are now. Now India's population is nine hundred million, more than twice as much.

It was estimated five years ago that by the end of this century India will have a population of one billion. That will mean that for the first time India will be ahead of all nations as far as population is concerned - even ahead of China. But just now the population explosion has been going beyond the estimates of economists and mathematicians. Now they say, by the end of the century India will not have a population of one billion, it will have a population of one billion and eight hundred million - almost two billions.

Now, this country is going to die. No nuclear bombs are needed, its own hunger, its own starvation is going to kill it.

It always happens: poor countries increase their population, richer countries decrease their population. There is some fundamental law behind it. The poor countries increase their population because they don't have any entertainment other than sex. The rich countries have many other entertainments, have more exciting explorations available to them - sex becomes secondary.

Secondly, the richer a country is, the more women are going to be liberated from man's drawn-out slavery. In the poor countries a woman is simply a child-producing machine. Twelve children is normal; fifteen, eighteen, even two dozen children are not unheard of. Her whole life the woman goes on producing children. No education, no music, no art, no dance - there is no time - just bringing up children takes her whole life. It destroys her beauty, makes her body ugly.

In a richer country the woman is not going to allow it. She is now educated; she is now demanding liberation. And why should she destroy her body by producing children, when children can be produced in test tubes? Why destroy a beautiful woman, her proportionate body, her beautiful breasts? In no cultured country will a woman be ready to feed the child with her own breasts.

The breasts cannot remain round if children are going to feed from them. The round breast, as you see in the statues of great art, is very much against the child. If the breast remains round, the child will kill himself by drinking milk, because his nose will be closed by the breast. He cannot breathe and drink milk together - either he can breathe or he can drink the milk. The breast has to be long; then the child is capable of breathing and feeding together.

The scientists say that man has the capacity to go on renewing his life for at least three hundred years, if the right food, the right exercise, the right environment is made available. But man has been dying at nearabout seventy; that is the traditional time to die.

A woman, in a country like Germany, should insist that there is no need to increase the population.

You can adopt children from poor countries. That will help in two ways: it will help the rich countries and their people to keep their health and their bodies, and it will help the poor countries.

Secondly, the question is that the women in Germany are not ready to produce children by their own husbands. This is very significant to understand, that being a husband is one thing and being a father is another. The functions are totally different. Being a wife is one thing and being a mother is totally another.

You can fall in love with a woman - that's okay. You can get married, but as far as children are concerned, it is better that the scientists, the medical board, decides who is the right man for the woman, or the right woman for the man, to give the child a better life, a beautiful body, more intelligence. This should be simply a part of intelligent people's lives. Why insist that your child should be YOUR child? What difference does it make? Can you recognize your child when he is just a living atomic cell? Can you recognize which is your child?

Man's function in producing children is not more than a syringe. In each lovemaking the man releases almost one million living sperm, and that is where politics starts: a great race - because only one will be able to reach the mother's egg. It is a very small passage to us, but for those sperm proportionately it is almost two miles long. For two miles one million sperm are rushing madly to reach to the post of the chancellor! And my feeling is, the best ones will stand aside from the crowd.

The best people are not so mad, not so ambitious. The best people want to be left alone. In such a rush hour they would like to wait a little; when the crowd has gone, then they can move - but then they have lost the chance. Only one sperm will enter into the mother's egg, and then the egg closes.

Sometimes it happens that two sperm reach at exactly the same time - that's why twins are born.

Sometimes three, sometimes four... the record is nine, but that is a rare thing.

The person who reaches first may not be the best person in those one million sperm. He may not be an Albert Einstein, he may not be a Picasso, he may not be a Gautam Buddha... and I'm certain he is not; otherwise, the world would not be so full of stupid people. The mob, the masses, are almost retarded.

In the first world war for the first time intelligence was tested, the IQ was discovered. And it was a shock: the average individual on the earth has a mental age of only thirteen. He may be seventy physically, but mentally he is only thirteen years of age. This is a strange thing.

It is perfectly good that a woman should decide - and the husband should help her to decide. Take advice from the experts about who will be the right man for the woman. Finally, just as there are bloodbanks, there should be spermbanks. And generous people should go there and donate their sperm. Out of those millions of sperm, the best people can be chosen. We can fill the earth with geniuses.

So I am not against what is happening in Germany, it is just the beginning, the beginning of something more that is going to come. A sperm can be chosen by the medical people, and that can be injected in the woman. And one should be happy that one has a beautiful child; why insist that it should be yours? This possessiveness is primitive. It should be the best, it should be the most healthy; it should be a contribution to the world - its beauty, its grandeur, its fragrance.

It is one thing to live with one person; it is totally a different thing to give birth to a child. For that different laws are needed. And this stupid possessiveness - "The child should be mine" - has to be dropped. If the population is falling, it is very good. If all the rich countries follow the same pattern and their populations start falling, they all can adopt children from poor countries, and we can balance the world in a better way.

And remember, crossbreeding is not only helpful in animals, in birds, in fruits. Crossbreeding is a tremendous phenomenon, but man is so unscientific that he has not tried it. If more and more people from other, faraway countries - Ethiopia, India, Thailand, where people are dying from poverty - if their children are adopted by the rich countries, their blood will bring something new to you. Soon they will be able to produce children. Their children will be far higher in every possible way. This is a scientific truth that I am telling you.

Decreasing population is a blessing.

Increasing population is a curse.

Question 6:

It is more valid than it ever was. I am against marriage. Marriage is one of the sicknesses which have tortured humanity for centuries. It has not given anything, but it has taken away much.

My idea is, the family should disappear. It is out of date. People should live in communes - five thousand people living together. The whole village becomes a commune. Nobody is married to anybody, but whomever you love, you live with that person. There is no reason why law should come in between you and your lover. The policeman, the magistrate, the registrar of marriages, the priest and the church... why this whole queue?

Love is enough.

This queue was invented because people became aware: today you may be in love with someone and tomorrow the love disappears. All real things are changing; only unreal things don't change.

If your love is made of plastic, it won't change; but if it is made of roses, it is going to change. And love is a roseflower. In the morning it is so beautiful, it seems that it is immortal; shining in the sun with the dewdrops on it, dancing in the breeze, releasing its fragrance, it seems it is going to remain there forever. But by the evening the petals have fallen down, the rose has disappeared.

Existence is constant change, flux.

The idea of permanency is a product of man's own mind. To make love permanent has been one of the greatest crimes. You cannot do it; you cannot make a roseflower permanent. To make love permanent marriage was invented; to make it permanent laws were invented; to make it permanent, divorce or anything that changes it was condemned. The people who have lived their whole lives together have a certain respectability; nobody knows their inner agony.

I have heard about a couple who were known in the city as the best couple. They had lived for fifty years together, and nobody had ever heard anything against the couple. Their love seemed to be eternal.

Their friends were gathered on their fiftieth marriage anniversary to celebrate it. Everybody was celebrating, but they were surprised because the man was missing. Somebody went out. He was sitting in the garden under a tree, very sad. The friend asked him, "What is the matter? We are all celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of your marriage, and you are sitting here so sad."

He said, "There is a reason. Fifty years ago I went to my attorney to enquire about divorce. He said, 'In this country it is not possible, and if you try it you will get at least fifty years in prison.' And I am thinking that if I had not listened to that man, today I would have been free. Fifty years I have been in prison. That attorney is dead; otherwise I would have shot him. That idiot made me afraid; otherwise, I would be celebrating, dancing, because I would have come out of prison. There seems to be nowhere for me except death."

What happens? People fall in love. They are not pretending; it is true for the moment, and in that intensity of the moment they start promising, "I will love you forever"; and if you are born somewhere in India or in the Eastern part of the world, people even promise, "I will love you for many, many lives to come." The intensity of love of that moment makes them promise, not knowing what is going to come tomorrow.

A man of understanding never promises, because what can be said about the next moment? - I may be dead.

And once they get married... Nobody is made for anybody, remember. And even if somebody was made for you, it would be so difficult to find him or her among five billion people on the earth that for your whole life you would go on searching! By the time you had found them, life would have slipped out of your hands.

I have heard of a woman who said that she remained unmarried because she wanted a perfect husband. And she searched and searched...

The friend she was relating it to asked her, "Did you not find a single perfect man?"

She said, "I found one, but he was looking for a perfect woman."

Meeting on the beach, meeting in a disco, dancing, is one thing. Falling in love is very easy, but remaining twenty-four hours a day with the man or the woman is a totally different affair. Then you come to know the reality. What you had fallen in love with was a mask. You were pretending to be your best; she was pretending to be her best - but you cannot go on pretending twenty-four hours, year after year. Sooner or later you start seeing the reality of the person and both become disillusioned. At that point marriage prevents them from separating, religion prevents them from separating, the government prevents them from separating. Originally the problem was the children:

if they separate what will happen to the children? Their duty towards their children prevents them from separating.

My simple idea is that the family should disappear; people should live in communes. There should be no marriage; hence there will be no possibility of any divorce. People should love and be together as long as they feel love is still alive. The moment they see love declining, it is time to depart - and depart with friendship, depart with gratitude for all those moments that you have lived in the past; depart as friends.

As far as children are concerned, the commune should take care of the children. Everybody who is part of the commune should contribute to the commune, whether they have children or not. All children are the commune's.

This will give the children also a richness of experience: so many uncles, so many aunts. They will not get what psychologists call fixation: father fixation, mother fixation. Every boy gets a mother fixation because he comes to know only one woman and he becomes fixated with that idea of the woman. And his whole life, unconsciously, he is searching for the same woman.

He is not going to find her. He wanted to make love to his mother; she wanted to make love to her father. But that was not possible, and now they are searching for their fathers and their mothers. You cannot find them; existence does not produce similar people, it always produces unique people.

So the man is looking in his wife for his mother, and he does not find her; the woman is looking for her father and she does not find him - and both are disappointed. Psychologists say, if we can give the child a richer experience of many people, he will not have a fixation. He will have some idea of what a woman is, but the idea will be vague and it will be possible for him to adjust that idea to any woman he likes, or to any man the woman likes. She has known so many uncles, who were all loving. And remember, uncles are more loving than fathers, aunts are more loving than mothers - because they don't have to suffer your trouble and your nuisance.

In the TALMUD God says to the people, "I am not your uncle, I am not a nice person; I am a very jealous God." What is important is that he makes the statement, "I am not your uncle; I am your father."

If the commune takes the responsibility for the children, no burden of the children will be on the people. You can meet them - they can come to meet you. They will only see your beauty, your love.

They will not see the mother nagging the father; they will not see the father beating the mother; they will not see the mother throwing things around, breaking plates... throwing pillows at each other.

The child will not see all these ugly scenes, and he will not have any idea that these things have to be done. In his own life he will not repeat it because he has no conception of it.

If there is no marriage, jealousy will disappear automatically - which is almost a cancer of the soul.

Every man is jealous, every woman is jealous, and jealousy is pure poison; it destroys your love. You become each other's jailers. What we have done up to now has not been a blessing to humanity.

Things have to be changed from the very roots.

Question 7:

It is my joy.

In India I told sannyasins not to come to Kulu Manali because we wanted to purchase land and houses in Kulu Manali, and if thousands of sannyasins had started coming, immediately the orthodox, the old-fashioned people would have started freaking out. And the politicians are always looking for an opportunity...

Those few days that I was not with my sannyasins, not talking to them, not looking in their eyes, not looking at their faces, not listening to their laughter, I felt undernourished.

So it is not a responsibility, it is absolute blissfulness for me to be with my people.

And here, I can call them because here we are not going to have a commune, so we don't care what the government thinks, what the bishop thinks. And they are already thinking stupid things.

Just the other day I saw that the bishop of Crete called a meeting of other priests, because he has been informed that two thousand sannyasins are going to be here, and he is afraid for the traditional values. He is afraid that my sannyasins will not fit with their society, with their church.

Certainly I have the most misfit people around the whole world, who don't fit anywhere - but they fit with me absolutely! And I don't see the point. I have such nice people, such beautiful people, such loving people; you cannot find anywhere else such people together. But the society is afraid.

I had to leave Kulu Manali only for that reason, because the government was ready to give me land, to allow me to purchase houses there, but with conditions.

I don't accept any conditions.

The conditions were that no foreign sannyasins would be allowed, that no foreign news media would be allowed. So they were going to cut me off from my own people around the world. And this whole world belongs to me; there is nobody who is a foreigner.

I refused. I moved out of Kulu Manali immediately, the moment I heard their conditions. I said, "I would rather live in an airplane and move around the earth, meeting my people - so they need not worry about a commune and visas, and you preventing them and governments preventing them. I can move around the world; that is easier." And I am ready to do that.

If some government is not going to give me unconditionally a place where twenty to forty thousand sannyasins can gather at a time, then I am not going to stay anywhere. Then it means no country belongs to me. I am country-less, homeless. And I will remain a wanderer, moving around the world, meeting my people wherever they are.

It is not a responsibility, it is an immense joy to me.

QUESTIONS FROM NIEUWE REVUE, HOLLAND.

Question 8:

Question 9:

I may have nice eyes, but you have a wrong question. You should ask your poppa why he has been shaving his beard. I have not been growing it, it grows itself!

Just look at your poppa. I have seen him. He would look far more beautiful with a little beard, mustache. Ask him why he has been cutting something natural.

Just think, if a woman takes certain hormones and starts growing a beard and mustache, how she will look. Do you think she will look beautiful? She will be simply horrible.

And the same is true about man. The moment he starts shaving his beard and mustache, he is doing something unconsciously: because every woman looks beautiful to him, he thinks perhaps the beauty is because there is no mustache and no beard. So the poor fellow cuts his own beard and his own mustache. But he forgets that to a woman he will look just like another woman. Unless she is a lesbian, he will have no interest for her.

A woman loves a beard; a woman loves a mustache. Man and woman should remain as distinct as nature has made them. The more distinct they are, the more attractive they are to each other; the closer they come, the more the attraction disappears.

Now there is coming into fashion a certain dress which can be used by both the sexes. That will destroy much. And if you go to the logical conclusion, you should tell your poppa, "You should cut off your genitals also"!

I have never cut my beard. These are my original hairs. If they fall by themselves I cannot help it, but it will be very difficult for you to find a man who has his original hairs - and I love originality. I have never shaved, I have never cut them - it is ugly.

But there are people who are doing it simply because women look beautiful; they think they will also look beautiful. But women look beautiful from the man's eyes, from the man's hormones. The woman has different eyes and different hormones. Without a beard and mustache you will not look beautiful to her. She may tolerate you because it is the fashion, but once she understands what you are trying to do she is not going to tolerate you. No woman should ask her husband to shave his beard or the mustache, because by shaving his beard and mustache he loses something of his manliness.

Question 10:

I don't have any.

Question 11:

A difficult question, because I don't know the name.

Question 12:

I hate it!