If you can get it, get it

QUESTIONS FROM NBC TELEVISION, AMERICA.

Question 1:

I am just a mirror. When a crook looks at me, he sees a crook in me. It all depends on you.

As far as I am concerned, it is impossible to portray me... just a clean, empty mirror. That is my whole effort, to teach meditation to people.

Meditation is the art of cleaning your mirror from all the dust that the society, the religion, the educational system has poured on you, to take away everything that has not been born with you, to bring you to your absolute innocence as you were born as a child.

I call this rebirth. And after rebirth you are just a mirror. There are people who see a god in me, and there are people who see a crook in me, and there are people who see a monkey in me, and there are people who see a donkey in me, and there are people who see a yankee in me - it depends on them.

It is their own face.

I simply reflect.

Question 2:

I am against all kind of violence. The arms race is leading humanity to absolute destruction. And this is such a loss to the universe, that we cannot even imagine. This vast, infinite universe is alive only because of us. It is conscious only because of human beings; otherwise, those big stars, millions of solar systems, are just dead.

It is to the credit of this earth, that we have been able to produce people like Socrates, Gautam Buddha, Lao Tzu, Pythagoras. To destroy humanity means to destroy the effort of millions of years that existence has been making. Existence is trying to become conscious through us; it is trying to become aware through us.

It is a long journey from a stone to becoming a Gautam Buddha, and to destroy this whole effort by stupid politicians is unforgivable. The whole arms race should stop immediately.

The Russian prime minister said that he will stop producing nuclear weapons by the end of this century. If you are going to stop it by the end of this century, then why not now? Why waste money, labor, intelligence for fifteen years more?

And all this energy can change the poverty of the world. We have so many nuclear weapons already in the Soviet Union and America that we can destroy this earth seven hundred times. Now, it is going to be simply idiotic to produce more. For what? Do you think a person will resurrect seven hundred times? Even Jesus could not do it one time. Resurrection is not possible.

I am against all arms, but that does not mean that I am an old-fashioned nonviolent philosopher. I am not in favor of Jesus Christ's statement, that if somebody slaps you on one cheek, give him the other too. That is insulting - insulting to the other person. It makes him dehumanized. it reduces him below you. You become a god, by giving the other cheek.

There cannot be a bigger insult to anybody. No, I would like you to hit the other man more strongly than he has slapped you, to make him feel that you are also human and we are brothers; nobody is higher and nobody is lower.

But there is no need of arms. Man had created arms in the beginning because man is the most weak animal in the whole existence. No animal carries arms. Still you cannot fight with a lion or a tiger, or even a monkey. Man had to create arms to substitute the missing power in him. He was delicate, and he was surrounded by wild animals. There was a reason to have arms - and arms that can be used from far away, because if you are too close to the lion, even with the arms, you may not be able to survive. Arrows were invented, so that from far away, sitting behind the trees, you can kill.

Guns were created so that from far away, hiding, you can kill.

But now you are not surrounded by wild animals; you have killed them. You have destroyed so much of nature and wildness. You don't need any arms at all. You are surrounded by human beings. Be human to them, don't try to be a god to them. That is a very subtle insult, and inhuman.

You are asking me about AIDS. I will remain always against it, because I am against everything that is a perversion or a by-product of perversion. AIDS is the ultimate by-product of homosexuality. I am not only against AIDS, I am against homosexuality. I am not only against homosexuality, I am against all those people who have created homosexuality. You will be surprised to know that all your religions are responsible for homosexuality for two reasons.

First, they separated the monks to live with other monks, nuns with other nuns. Now, keeping men alone together for years, women together for years, is creating a situation where homosexuality is bound to happen. Homosexuality is a contribution of your religions.

Man is not born homosexual. In the wild, no animal is homosexual. But in the Zoo, if the females are not available, the animals turn to homosexuality. That shows intelligence - they have to find a way for their biology. And if in monasteries, nunneries, people became homosexuals and lesbians, who is responsible?

Religions have been teaching people to remain celibate. Celibacy is against nature. Just taking a vow of celibacy does not mean you will be able to remain celibate. You will have to find some way for your sexuality and its expression. Celibacy created homosexuality, because a celibate can have a friendship with a man, but cannot have a friendship with a woman. He will be afraid that people will start suspecting his celibacy.

All the religions have raised celibacy into something spiritual. It is not spiritual. AIDS is the ultimate result of all these teachings about celibacy, separating man from woman. I am not only against AIDS, I am against the basic root causes which have created it. Now there are countries, for example in Texas, America where they have made a law against homosexuality. Now it is a crime. And it was a great surprise to know that in a place like Texas, one million homosexuals protested against the law.

Laws don't change man. Those homosexuals will go underground - there is no need to say that you are a homosexual. And homosexuality going underground is more dangerous.

You can catch the disease AIDS without any sexual contact, just by kissing the person who has AIDS, because saliva carries the AIDS virus. Perhaps the whole of humanity has to follow the Eskimos. They are the most primitive people, but in this respect they are far ahead of us. They have never kissed; they hate the whole idea. And when they saw people kissing they felt nauseated. It is ugly mixing your saliva with somebody else's, exploring his mouth with your tongue... This seems to be a strange French stupidity!

Eskimos also have a way to show love: they rub their noses. That is far more hygienic, clean - no danger, no disease. At the most you can get a cold, which is not much of a disease. If you don't take any medicine, it goes away within seven days. If you take medicine it goes away in one week!

The AIDS virus is carried even in tears. A small child may be crying and weeping and just out of compassion you wipe the tears of the child with your hand, and you are unaware that you may be catching a deadly disease - a disease which should not be called a disease because it has no cure.

Scientists almost all agree that there is no possibility of any cure. The man or the woman is going to die at the most within two years, but mostly within six months. It is slow death.

I am against it. I am against celibacy. I am against the religions which have made men and women live separately, and caused this whole disease. Lesbians have not yet been able to produce any disease like AIDS - perhaps women are more patient and they will take a little more time. But this is certain, that one day they will also produce some disease which will be more fatal than AIDS itself.

Going against nature is not my way of looking at things. Going with nature, using nature as a stepping stone... Going higher than nature is not going against nature. Nature remains the foundation, and you can go beyond it.

People have gone beyond it, but not by opposing. By opposing it you simply become a pervert, and I am against perversion.

Question 3:

There was a person I wanted to meet. I met him thirty-five years ago: myself. Since then I have not had any desire to meet anybody.

Question 4:

I am disgusted by your question. You say "rather pretty" - they are real beauties! And I love beauty, whether it is in man or in woman, whether it is in flowers or in the birds, or in the sunrise or in the stars. I love beauty.

To me, the real trinity is not God, the holy ghost, and God's only begotten son, Jesus Christ. The real trinity of life and existence is: truth, goodness and beauty, satyam, shivam, sundram. This is the real trinity; it is not a hypothesis.

A man who is in search is bound to come across these three faces of reality: truth, beauty and goodness.

I love beauty, but don't say that they are pretty beautiful, they are real beauties. They are so beautiful because they are so natural. They are so beautiful because they have become so innocent, so meditative, so silent, so serene, so centered. Their beauty is not only physical. Their beauty is spiritual too.

Question 5:

They were totally free before, but they can become even more totally free!

Question 6:

No, I love America. I love the people of America, I love the land of America, but I certainly hate the American government, the bureaucracy. It is the most fascist government on the earth today, pretending to be democratic. It is deceiving the whole world, and it is deceiving its own people. I would like this government to go down the drain.

But America I love, and I will continue to love. And the day I can enter America... because right now the American government has prevented me from entering the country for five years - after five years, if I am alive, the first thing I am going to do is to enter America.

I have so many lovers there, so many friends, so many sympathizers. And what the government of America has done to me, has created a tremendous love and sympathy for me in the people of America.

QUESTIONS FROM Nieuwe Revue, HOLLAND.

Question 7:

"Survival of the fittest" appears to be true, but only to the superficial eye, because man is not the strongest animal on the earth.

Why he has survived, and destroyed other animals, is not his fitness, his strength, his power, but his intelligence. So I would like to change it to survival of the conscious.

Now we are facing a world crisis. If man does not prove conscious enough, then he is going to disappear from the earth. He proved more conscious than the animals; now he has to prove more intelligent and conscious than the politicians. These are the real animals now.

And if man can prove himself more conscious, more alert, more aware, then many things can disappear immediately. For example, the nations are all artificial. The earth is one. All the boundaries of the nations are fake; they are only on the map. If man is more alert and more aware, the first thing to be done is to dissolve all the nations.

Let the world be one. One world is the only guarantee, that there is not going to be any more war.

If man is conscious and aware, he can see that the essential religion is one. Only rituals differ, and rituals are meaningless. Drop the rituals and save the essential religion. Then Hinduism, Christianity, Buddhism, Jainism, Taoism - all will come to the same point: the enquiry of your interiority, the inward journey.

If we can let the boundaries of nations disappear and the boundaries of religion disappear if the world can be one world and religion can be without any adjective - just a quality, religiousness - we will have survived the greatest danger that is facing us.

A divided humanity - in religions - in nations is going to destroy itself. We need an undivided, one humanity. Anything that divides has to be dropped; it is against our survival.

And the second proverb, "you are what you eat," is certainly true.

A man who is vegetarian is basically nonviolent. You can see it: the people who have been vegetarians for centuries are absolutely non - violent. They have not created any wars; they have not created any crusades, any JIHADS. The people who are meat eaters are bound to have little sensitivity, they are more hard. Even in the name of love they will kill; even in the name of peace they will go to war. In the name of freedom, in the name of democracy, they will murder.

There are cannibals also still in existence - not many: a small tribe in South Africa, of three hundred people. Nobody passes through that area, because if you pass through that area you will never reach your goal - you will become food! Because nobody passes through that area, those people have been eating their own people. In the beginning of this century their population was three thousand. Now they are only three hundred.

I am reminded of a Christian priest, a missionary, who was the first man from the West to reach to the cannibals to convert them to Christianity. They immediately got hold of him. They put him in a big pot.

He said, "What are you doing?"

They said, "Just wait a little and you will know."

Then they started putting logs and wood under the pot. The missionary saw the situation, looked around at those people's faces... ferocious. Trying somehow to persuade them that this was not good, he said, "Before you do anything, listen to me. Have you ever had any taste of Christianity?"

They said, "Wait, we will have. We will make soup of you and then everybody will have the first taste of Christianity."

A cannibal cannot be called human. If he can eat living human beings, he has no heart, he has no love, he has no sensitivity. He is just a stone.

But you don't think the same way when somebody kills a lion or a deer, because you don't think that the deer has as much life as you have. The deer may have a beloved; the deer may have children.

You don't think of the lion, when you kill him, that he may have a family. His small cubs will be orphans. He is as alive as you are - in fact more alive than you are. Destroying him only for a few taste buds on your tongue, for the taste...

It seems to me that killing animals for eating is not very far away from killing human beings. They differ only in their body, in their shape, but it is the same life that you are destroying.

With new technology the earth is perfectly capable of giving you food. You can make it as tasteful as you want, and you can give it any flavor that you love. Just for taste, destroying life is simply disgusting. And destroying life, you are destroying many qualities in you. You cannot become a Gautam Buddha. You cannot have that purity of consciousness, that sensitivity.

One day Gautam Buddha is passing a street with his disciple Ananda, talking to him. A fly sits on his forehead and he is so much involved in talking that just mechanically he waves his hand - the way we do - and the fly is gone. But then he suddenly stops, closes his eyes, and raises his hand very slowly, very gracefully.

Ananda said, "What are you doing? The fly is no longer there."

Buddha said, "I misbehaved with the fly. That was not the right treatment - I should have been more graceful. I'm trying it, now I should have behaved, so that in future I don't commit the same mistake.

After all, a fly is also alive, and she was just sitting on my forehead."

Now this man, who cannot even mistreat a fly, will certainly have a far purer consciousness than anybody else, a far deeper serenity than anybody else.

Vegetarian food lacks only one thing: certain proteins, which are absolutely needed for intelligence to grow. That is the reason not a single vegetarian has been awarded the Nobel prize. Even in India three persons have been awarded the Nobel prize, but all the three persons were nonvegetarians.

I have looked into the matter deeply. I have enquired from scientists, medical people, and found a substitute, the unfertilized egg. Added to vegetarian food, it makes it complete. It gives all the proteins that the old vegetarian food misses. And the nonfertilized egg is just vegetable; it has no life.

A simple change, and we can make the whole of humanity more sensitive, more artistic, more full of reverence for life. You cannot be religious if you are not full of reverence for life.

God you have not seen, but life is all around you.

To you, life is the only representative that proves that existence is not dead, it is alive.

Eating anything by killing is irreligious, unspiritual, unaesthetic. And once the unfertilized egg is added to the vegetarian food, the food is perfect - better than the none vegetarian food. It fulfills all your needs without any destruction. A man who lives by destruction will die by destruction. It is not a coincidence that both the world wars were fought in the West. And the third world war will also begin - if it begins - in the west.

In the East - particularly the people who have been vegetarian for centuries - they have never fought a war. I have researched in India whether any vegetarian has ever been caught committing suicide or murder or theft and I was surprised that not a single vegetarian has ever been put into jail for committing murder - it is impossible.

I remember my childhood. My grandmother would not allow poor tomatoes in the house, because they look like meat.

I said, "You are mad. These poor tomatoes are not meat."

But she said, "Even the look... As long as I am alive, please don't bring any tomatoes into the house."

Do you think this woman can kill somebody? Can you imagine this woman can commit suicide?

Yes, it is true, you are what you eat, because what you eat makes your mind, makes your body, makes your senses, gives you qualities. In India, I have been watching - not a single vegetarian is a beggar. Where there are millions of beggars, not a single vegetarian is a beggar.

I have been visiting jails, and enquiring; I have never come across a vegetarian in the jail. They simply don't commit anything - their sensitivity prevents them. If we want a really human world, a world of loving people, respectful of each others' lives, then we will have to think about our food and about our other habits. They should be changed. They are not so valuable.

And if you love the flavor of meat, that flavor can be given to any food. Now it is a simple matter.

There is no need, just for that flavor, to kill a living, beautiful animal and destroy the ecology of the earth. They are our brothers and our sisters.

The day Saint Francis died - he used to travel on a donkey - the last thing he said is worth remembering. He addressed the donkey - the last thing - not his disciples. He said, "Brother donkey, please forgive me. I have been riding on you. I accept my guilt; it was not right to ride on a brother. Please forgive me before I die." But he addressed the donkey as brother.

We are part of this existence: these trees, these animals, these birds, they are our brothers and our sisters. This is our whole family. Just a slight understanding, and you can change your consciousness from being polluted, from being destroyed. You can rise as high as anybody has ever been able.

For example, in the West enlightenment is not a known phenomenon, for the simple reason that nobody was sensitive and alert and aware enough to attain it. Even a man like Jesus was eating meat, drinking wine.

Not only that, the Christians brag about his miracles, that he made water into wine - now that is a crime, not a miracle. If he had made water out of wine, I would call it a miracle. I cannot call this a miracle. Wine makes people unconscious; it cannot help them to become enlightened.

There have been great people in the West. I love them. Socrates could have become a Buddha, an awakened one, if he had been in the East. But there, the whole atmosphere is not supportive. He was a meat eater - not only that, he was a homosexual. Now, such a person cannot attain to the ultimate peaks of consciousness. He had the potential, he had the capacity, he had the intelligence, but just the little things missed.

So is the case with Moses; so is the case with Plato, Plotinus, Heraclitus, Pythagoras... beautiful people. I love them, and yet I feel sorry for them, because they were not in the right kind of atmosphere where they could have blossomed and flowered.

We don't know how many people in the world can become pinnacles, sky-high consciousnesses, because small things are preventing them. Food is very important. It is your body, it is your brain.

And without your body and brain's support, you cannot attain to your soul.

Question 8:

I said it because when you are in love there is no need to say it. It shows itself - from your eyes, from your every gesture. And moreover, for the first time you understand that you are experiencing something which cannot be put into words.

You can say, "I love you," but you will suddenly see that the feeling that you are calling love is so vast, and the word 'love' is so small, it does not do justice to it. Hence, when people are in love, they understand in their silence the feeling of each other. Lovers may sit for hours in the full-moon night, by the sea, not even speaking a single word, just holding hands, as if they are not two - with whom to talk, and what is there to talk about? In silence the love is so great, overpowering, that any word is going to disturb it.

But husbands and wives say it to each other. Their philosopher is an American, Dale Carnegie, who suggests that every husband should say at least three times a day to his wife, "I love you, darling."

And you will be surprised to know that the woman is more intuitive than the man; the man is more intellectual. These are the differences between the two sexes. They are complementary.

Whenever a husband hugs her and says so lovingly "I love you," she knows something is wrong. He has been with some other woman - this is just compensation! The day he suddenly brings flowers for her, or icecream, she knows what is the matter: he has done something and now he wants to cover it up.

When there is love, there is no need to say it. In the first place it cannot be said. Yes, your whole being will vibrate with it, and the person you love will get the vibrations. Everything in you will say, "I love you."

But words are very small, very inadequate. That's why I had said that when love dies, disappears, and leaves you empty, then the husband and wife start talking about anything. They don't sit in silence, because in silence they can feel the coldness that has come between them. It is no longer warm; that coziness of love has disappeared. Now this coldness has to be covered by words.

So they go on talking about any relevant, irrelevant thing, they cannot sit silently. In fact, the husband and wife always want somebody to be invited... a friend, so that they are not left alone. In aloneness there is fear. When they were in love they wanted to be alone, they wanted that nobody should be there.

One of my friends was very rich, and he asked me, "I have two daughters and both are married. I don't have any sons. Should I continue to be an active industrialist?"

I said, "There is no point. You are fifty; maybe twenty-five years more you may live. Now live totally, forget all about the industry. Retire, become a silent partner to all your businesses." He had many businesses. "You have enough, and more will be coming out of the businesses. Even if you are going to live three hundred or four hundred years, it is enough - so I don't see any point."

He said, "You are right. Just one thing - I cannot say it to anybody else, but I can say it to you - then I will be left alone with my wife in the home, the whole day, twenty-four hours. Right now I have excuses, that I am going to this factory, I am going to that factory, I am going to that farm... that tonight I will not be able to return because the farm is far away in the village, and I will stay there.

Once I retire it will kill me - twenty-four hours with a woman I hate to see, and I know she hates me."

I asked him, "How do you know? Have you ever heard her saying that she hates you? Have you ever said to her that you hate her?"

He said, "Do you want me to have unnecessary trouble? I have never said it, but whenever we are together we can feel the coldness. The warmth that used to flow, the joy that used to flow, is no longer there. Something has died. She is sitting just by my side, but there are thousands of miles distance. Neither she has said it to me, nor I have said it to her, but we both understand it."

If hate can be understood, which is a negative thing, why can love not be understood, which is a positive thing?

So don't just repeat dialogues you have seen in the movies, live authentically. If you love somebody, love totally. No need to utter the word love. It will reach; the message will reach - without words. All that is great in life has to be expressed without words, in silence.

When Jesus was facing Pontius Pilate, the last thing he asked him was, "What is truth?" And Jesus remained silent. This was not his way; he was continually teaching. Why did he remain silent? Truth cannot be said - or perhaps silence is the truth. If you can get it, get it. If you cannot get it, I am sorry! It is not my fault.

That is the most beautiful part in Jesus' life. When asked about truth, he remained completely silent.

There are things for which language is not made, and love is one of those great things.

Question 9:

No! This is how the priests, particularly in the East, have been deceiving people, cheating people, exploiting people. This is the reason why in the East in five thousand years there has not been any revolution. The priest says to the poor, "Your poverty is the result of your past life's bad karmas, bad actions, evil actions. And the rich man is being rewarded for his past life's good actions."

If you are miserable, if you are suffering, if you are in anguish, if you are sick, if you are dying - everything he connects with the past life. This is a very cunning device, because nobody can check whether he is right or wrong. And if you remain patient, in the coming life, after death, you will be rewarded. Now this is against the law of cause and effect. If you put your hand into a fire, you will be burnt now, not in your next life.

I do not agree with the law of karma as it is preached by Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism; it is ugly. It is an effort to keep the status quo of society. It protects the rich, the powerful, and it keeps the poor suffering in a kind of drugged state. Nothing can be done about your past life; you have to wait for the future life. Nothing can be done in this life.

If the East is so poor, these religions are responsible. You are miserable because you are not using your intelligence. You are miserable because you are still carrying conditions which make you miserable. You are poor, not because of your past life, but because of the stupidity of your parents who went on producing children: one dozen, two dozen. You are poor because you are being exploited. You are poor because you are living in a system which is immobile, no movement is allowed.

A sudra, the lowest caste in India, cannot move upwards. If, for centuries, his forefathers and their forefathers have been making shoes, he has to make shoes. If they have been cleaning toilets, he has to clean toilets. He is deprived of education. He is not allowed to read religious scriptures. He should revolt! Patience is not going to help - it has not helped in five thousand years.

The East needs a tremendous revolution that destroys the distinction between castes: the brahmins, the high caste; the sudras, the lowest; and other castes. The East needs a revolutionary attitude - that the law of cause and effect functions here and now; it does not wait for death to come. If you do something good, you will immediately be rewarded.

According to me, in the very act of doing good there is reward. If somebody has fallen on the ground, and you help him to get up, don't you feel happy? Doesn't your heart feel that you have done something human? If somebody is drowning in the ocean, and you turn your back and don't care what happens to him, do you think you will be able to sleep that night? Will not that drowning man become a nightmare?

Every action has its intrinsic reward or punishment. Existence does not wait that long. The whole law of karma is just an invention of the brahmins. It has kept the East poor, and it is keeping the east in tremendous suffering.

Just thirty years ago, when I started talking to people, I started talking about birth control - and stones were thrown at me. Three times attempts on my life were made. Now, in thirty years, India's population has more than doubled. When I started speaking, the population of India was four hundred million; now it is nine hundred million. If they had listened to me, there would have been no poverty. But they have increased the population by five hundred million.

Now from where are you going to get food for these five hundred million... jobs, clothes? And it was thought five years ago that India will have a population of nearly one billion by the end of the century.

For the first time India will become the most populated country. China will be left behind; up to now China has always been ahead.

But recently, seeing the population growing faster than the economists and the mathematicians had calculated, they have changed the idea. They say now that by the end of the century the population will not be one one billion, may be one billion and three hundred million.

In the times of Gautam Buddha the whole population of the world was only twenty million. The earth is overburdened. It is not your past life's karma.

You are doing it right now - you go on doing it. And they were against me because I was teaching something which goes against their philosophy and their religion. Their religion says, "God gives you the children. You cannot prevent them."

If God is giving you the children, then god is giving you the poverty, and then God will give you death too, to the whole country.

They go on clinging to old, out-of-date concepts. That is the reason for their misery, for their suffering; otherwise, every individual, if he takes his life in his own hands, and drops all conditionings and starts afresh, and looks into each suffering and each misery, can get rid of all suffering and all miseries.

There is no reason why anybody should be miserable.

Do you see any tree miserable?

Do you see any deer miserable?

Do you see any bird committing suicide?

The whole existence is so blissful - except man. Something is wrong with man's conditioning. He has to drop his conditioning and look into his miseries. And whatever is making him miserable, he can change it.

But it needs guts, it needs courage.

You will be surprised to hear when I say that it needs great courage to drop your misery - because you have become so familiar with it. You have become almost identified with it, you don't know what you are going to do without it. Right now your misery creates sympathy in other people.

It is a strange world. If you are happy, if you are blissful, if you are singing and dancing, people will think you are mad or you are on some drug or you are hypnotized - something is wrong with you!

But if you are sitting sad, almost looking dead, with a long british face, nobody thinks anything is wrong with you. This is how human beings are expected to be, and everybody is sympathetic to you.

But if you are happy, nobody has any sympathy for you, everybody is opposed to you. This is my experience with millions of my sannyasins. They become happy; they start rejoicing in small things; they become cheerful; they laugh, they love, they dance, they sing - and they are opposed. They are not doing any harm to anybody. All that they have done is they have dropped their misery. But the whole world is miserable; it cannot tolerate you. How dare you not be miserable? You have to be in tune with the whole world. You cannot get out of the prison so easily.

They will not believe you, that your meditation, that your being silent, that your art of living, has transformed you, and that this can happen to them, too. No, that is not possible. They are in the majority.

That's what happened in America. My commune had five thousand sannyasins. For four years they worked hard; they created a beautiful oasis in a desert, in a land which had been lying dead for fifty years and which nobody was ready to purchase. We made it self-sufficient. It was giving food to five thousand sannyasins: vegetables, milk products, everything that we needed. We created lakes, created all modern facilities.

The people were working hard, because it was their commune, it was their home, it was their creativity. In the morning they would start with meditation, then they would listen to me, then they would go to work. Five thousand people would eat together in one restaurant. It was a beauty to see.

Somebody was playing a guitar, somebody was singing, somebody was dancing. To any outsider it was insane: What is happening? - people are eating, but why are these people dancing? In the evening they would all dance. Late in the night they will sing and dance and play on their instruments.

This became the trouble!

Certainly these five thousand people had gone mad; they were not in their senses. And they were creating a deep anxiety in the neighbors. And the neighbors were not close, because I had chosen a land that was big enough so that we were far away from neighbors. It was one hundred and twenty- six square miles, so the nearest town was twenty miles away - just to avoid neighbors, because they would be disturbed; they are miserable and they don't want anybody else to be not miserable. But still, they would come from miles away. They would come in airplanes to see what was happening.

And the politicians became worried, because if these five thousand people can be so happy, then why can other people not be happy? The easiest way was to destroy the commune, so there was no comparison.

It has always been done. It has been done in Russia. They destroyed a small minority of rich people.

The poor people are still poor, but now they don't think of themselves as poor because there is no comparison. The poverty has been distributed equally. Now there are no rich men, everybody is poor, so it is taken for granted that this is how things have to be.

So in Russia people are poor, but they have no idea of any revolution. Seventy years living in poverty, but no idea of revolution because the comparison is not there.

That's what happened with the commune in America. They destroyed the commune, without any legal reason. They did everything illegal - but certainly they had power. But the basic problem was psychological, spiritual. They could not tolerate five thousand people living in such a dancing, joyous state.

That makes the whole country jealous. That makes the whole country question the politicians: If these people can maintain themselves in a desert - they are not rich, but still they are so happy that even your richest people are not that happy - then why should something not be done for the whole country? It was a big problem to change the whole country. It was easier to destroy a small commune which was creating a question mark - and they destroyed it.

They arrested me without any warrant, without showing me any cause why, what crime I had committed. They harassed me for twelve days in jail, for no reason at all.

They let me out on bail with the condition that I can not enter America for five years, and then they started destroying the commune. They took over the commune. Where five thousand people were immensely happ, there are only one hundred and thirty people left. They forced people to leave.

And they have accepted that these one hundred and thirty people can live there till they sell the land and the properties and the houses, so they can take care of the property.

It is a strange world. It is almost like being sane in a madhouse - only you will look mad and everybody else will be sane; they are the majority.

Your misery has nothing to do with the past. Your misery has something to do with your own understanding, your own courage to drop it and to not be worried what others will say. They would like you ro remain miserable, but if you don't like to be miserable, it is your birthright to drop it!

Find out the causes. And they are not many. I have been working with thousands of people who had the same problems, and the problems turn out to be very small. The basic problem seems to be that you cling to your misery because it brings you sympathy from others. And remember, sympathy is not love.

Drop the misery, and you will find the same people who were sympathizers becoming your enemies.

Let them become enemies, let them suffer - that is their problem. But more and more people have to become free, independent, joyous.

If we can create a great movement of happiness, then slowly, slowly the miserable people will have to think twice before they oppose you.