Don't renounce the world, renounce the rubbish!

Question 1:

Michael Scott, it is one of the basics of human understanding that if you want to see the others as they are you have to be utterly empty, without any prejudices, without any preconceived ideas, without any judgmental attitudes.

Nobody ordinarily sees people as they are. They see them as they can. They see them through a thick barrier of their own mind, of their own conditionings. Unless you are capable of seeing... In pure seeing, philosia, you don't have anything to project from your side, you don't have any color to give to the object of your observation. Then only are you capable of seeing things, people, as they are in themselves.

One of the great German philosophers, Immanuel Kant, even dropped the idea that you can see things as they are in themselves, because he had no way of knowing meditatively.

He was a great mind -- but the greater the mind, the greater the difficulty of seeing clearly. Your mind grabs every information that reaches to you, screens it, sorts out whatever is adjustable with your existing knowledge, allows it, and whatever is going to disturb your mind -- anything new, unfamiliar, a stranger -- it rejects.

Science has discovered a surprising fact. Our mind used to be thought of in the past as a receiver of information from the world, and our eyes, our ears, our noses, all our senses as doors from where the existence can enter into us. This has been an ancient understanding prevailing for thousands of years. But just within these five years, science has become aware of a totally different situation. Your senses are not simple windows; your mind allows only two percent of information and discards ninety-eight percent of information. It is continuously on guard for what enters you. It should be in tune with your concepts, superstitions, ideologies, and if it is not, the mind is not going to get disturbed, to get in a chaos, by allowing a new idea which will not be fitting with you.

This makes things very different. It means your mind is not a vehicle of knowing, but a vehicle for preventing ninety-eight percent of the knowledge that was available to you.

And the two percent that is allowed in is worth nothing, because it adjusts to you; it means it is the same stuff of which you already have enough.

Only a meditator can know people, can know things, can experience beauty as it is in itself, because he does not interfere, he does not censor, he is not on guard, he has nothing to lose. He has already dropped all that could have been the cause of fear. It is utterly empty.

Once in a while you are empty. In this moment you can see things with a clarity, with transparency. But when your mind starts, covered with your own thoughts, they protect you: they protect the dead against the living, they protect the static against the dynamic, they protect what has been given to you as knowledge against existential experience.

You are right when you say, "As I look around me, at the people that have answered your call, my spirit flies with joy with the knowledge that these, my brothers and sisters, are some of the most extraordinary people on the planet."

If you are silent and your eyes are without any dust and your heart is just a pure mirror, this will be the experience of everyone. These people are certainly extraordinary! I am against the whole past, I am against all conditionings, I am against all ideologies, all organized religions. So only very few people, who have the courage to drop the whole past in its entirety, can have the opportunity to be with me.

To be with me is risky. It is dangerous -- dangerous to your mind. To be with me finally means you will have to lose your mind. Of course it will not be a loss because you will be attaining something greater, something vaster, something unbounded. You will be attaining a state of no-mind.

Only a state of no-mind is an open door; without any judgment it allows you to see things as they are, not as they should be, not as you would like them to be, not to fit with you.

Existence has no obligation to fit with your mind. But every mind is struggling somehow to make the existence fit with it. It is impossible; hence the misery, the frustration, the deep despair, the feeling of failure.

The great philosophers of the contemporary world, the existentialists, have lost all courage. They have lost their very nerve for the simple reason that they are the most refined, cultured, educated, rational minds. From their minds they cannot see any beauty anywhere, they cannot see any joy anywhere, they cannot see any hope anywhere. They are utterly in deep anguish.

But existence is celebrating. It goes on bringing new flowers, it goes on bringing new stars, it goes on bringing every moment something new. It is continuously renewing itself, and there is a song that surrounds the whole existence and there is a dance that you can see in the trees, in the birds, in the animals, in the children, in the sages. But to see this you have to put your mind aside.

Sometimes it happens on its own. Listening to me, if you become too attentive, you slip out of your mind. Those few moments when you slip out of your mind, you will become aware of this extraordinary gathering of brothers and sisters.

These people have taken a tremendous step. They have risked their established mind to enquire into the unfamiliar and the unknown -- and ultimately, the unknowable. They have put aside all their explanations in favor of the miracle and the mystery of existence.

They have dropped their ambitions, their desires for money, power, prestige, respectability. Now their whole concern is simple and single: how to know, Who am I?

Without knowing yourself, all knowledge is futile; and if you know yourself, you need not know anything that is unnecessary. Knowing oneself, one comes to know the very innermost core of existence, the very center. Experiencing that center is so blissful, so ecstatic that there is no need.... You are no longer a beggar; suddenly you have become an emperor. The whole kingdom of God has become yours.

These people have taken a courageous stand against the whole world. It is not ordinary, it is absolutely extraordinary. To stand alone like a lion, and not to be a sheep in the crowd, is the greatest courage in existence. Very few people are able to get out of the mass psychology, of the collective mind. The collective mind gives a certain sense of false security. Naturally it gives you the idea that so many people -- there are five billion people on the planet -- cannot be wrong. Naturally there is no need for you to search for the truth individually. All these people have discovered it; it is easier and cheaper just to follow them... just to be a Christian, or a Hindu, or a Mohammedan, or a communist. It is very easy when a crowd surrounds you to feel warm and cozy.

Standing alone like a tall Lebanon cedar, utterly alone in the sky, far away from the earth, almost reaching to the stars... But the beauty of the cedars of Lebanon -- their courage to go beyond the crowd, their courage to be alone...

Gautam Buddha used to call sannyas a lion's roar. So whenever I am in a gap, if you are in tune with me, you are in a gap. Then you will become aware that you are surrounded by a strange crowd. It is not the ordinary crowd of the marketplace -- these are seekers, these are enquirers. These are people who are ready to sacrifice everything for the truth.

These are the people who have renounced all borrowed knowledge and are in search of something of their own, because that which is not yours, is not right. It may have been right for Gautam Buddha, it may have been right for Jesus Christ, but it is not right for you.

You are a unique individual in your own right.

You have to find the truth alone, not by following somebody else's footsteps. The world of truth is something like the sky where birds fly but don't leave any footprints. The world of truth also has no footprints of Jesus or Gautam Buddha or Lao Tzu. It is the world of consciousness: where can you leave the footprints?

All followers, without exception, are wrong. They are following someone because they are not courageous enough to seek and search on their own. They are afraid that alone, "I may not be able to find anything. And what is the need when Gautam Buddha has found?"

But you never think that when Gautam Buddha drinks, his thirst is quenched -- but that will not help your thirst. Jesus eats, his hunger is gone, but that will not make you nourished. You have to eat, you have to drink; you cannot simply depend. So many great people have loved, what is the need for you to love? -- you can simply follow them. But that will not be love; that will be only a carbon copy. And to be a carbon copy in this world is the ugliest way of being.

The only authentic man is always original.

He is not a replica, not a repetition. He is a new song, a new dance, a new beginning, always and always.

But you are right, Michael Scott, that "seeing these extraordinary people on the planet, seeing them with this awareness makes me drop from my head to my heart."

That's a beautiful symbol. That is a great indication. If you can move from the head to the heart, you have attained something which society has been preventing. Society does not want you to be a man of heart. Society needs heads, not hearts.

I have never been anywhere... and I have been through many universities. I was visiting India's greatest university, in Varanasi, and one of the most famous scholars, Doctor Hajari Prasad Dwivedi, was presiding at the meeting I was going to address. He was the head and the dean of the faculty of arts. I asked him, "Have you ever wondered why you are called the head, and not the heart?"

He said, "You always ask strange questions" -- he was an old man, and now he is dead.

He said, "In my whole life nobody ever asked, 'Why are you called the head and not the heart?'" But he considered that although the question is very strange, "you have something significant in your question. You make me also wonder why people are not called the heart of the philosophy department -- that will be more authentic, more essential -- but they are called the head of the department of philosophy."

Society is divided between head and hands. Have you noticed that laborers are called hands? Poor people working with their hands, manual workers, are called hands... and there are people above them who are called heads. But the heart is completely missing; nobody is called the heart.

It is immensely significant that you start feeling a stirring in your heart, because your heart is far more valuable than your head. Your head is all borrowed... it has nothing of its own. But your heart is still yours. Your heart is not Christian, your heart is not Hindu, your heart is still existential. It has not been corrupted and polluted. Your heart is still original, and it is a tremendously great quantum leap from the head to the heart.

Now one step more -- from the heart to being -- and you have arrived home, the pilgrimage is over. Nobody can come directly from the head to the being. They are strangers; they are not at all connected with each other. They are not even introduced.

Neither your being knows anything about the head, nor your head knows anything about the being. They live in the same house but they are absolute strangers. Because their functioning is so different they never come across each other, they never encounter each other.

Heart is the bridge. Part of the heart knows the head, and part of the heart knows the being. The heart is a midway station. When you are moving towards your being, the heart is going to be an overnight stay. From the heart you will be able to see something of the being, but not from the head; hence, philosophers never turn into mystics. Poets turn, transform... painters, sculptors, dancers, musicians, singers are closer to the being.

But our whole society is dominated by the head, because the head is capable of earning money. It is very efficient -- machines are always more efficient -- it is capable of fulfilling all your ambitions. The head is being created by your educational systems, and your whole energy starts moving... bypassing the heart.

The heart is the most significant thing because it is the gateway to your being, to your eternal life source. I would like all the universities of the world to make people aware of the heart, to make them more esthetic, more sensitive... sensitive of all that surrounds us, the immense beauty, the immense joy.

But the heart cannot fulfill your egoist desires, that is the problem. It can give you a tremendous experience of love, an alchemical change. It can bring the best in you to its clearest and purest form, but it will not create money, power, prestige. And they have become the goals.

It is very significant that you go on slipping from your head to the heart. Just take a little more risk: slip from the heart to the being. That is the rock bottom of your life. But what happens to you? You are saying, "For in the heat of dealing with my own stuff, I forget to see them as they are, and not how I perceive them."

What is your own stuff? In the first place it is not yours. Just look at the stuff: it is all kinds of junk fed in by people, your parents, your society, your teachers, your leaders, your saints; nothing of it belongs to you. Your head has been used almost like a wastepaper basket -- anybody goes on dropping anything in. Your stuff is not yours: that is the first thing to be remembered, because it will change your vision. And the stuff is just an unnecessary burden, a luggage that you are carrying and are being crushed under it.

One sannyasin from Africa, Bhavani Dayal, had come for a pilgrimage of the Himalayas.

As he was climbing in the hot sun -- he was perspiring, his breathing was becoming difficult and he was carrying a bag on his shoulder -- just ahead of him he saw a girl not more than ten years old carrying perhaps her brother, a small boy, but very fat, on her shoulders. She was also perspiring, and as Bhavani Dayal came close to the girl, just out of compassion he said, "My daughter, your burden must be killing you."

The young girl was furious at the sannyasin. She said, "You are carrying the burden -- this is my brother, it is not a burden." On the weighing scale both will prove to be burdens, both will have weight, but on the scales of the heart the small girl was right, and the old sannyasin was wrong. He himself has written in his autobiography, "I have never come across such a situation in which a small girl pointed to a fact which I had never thought about."

The head can think only of burden, responsibility, duty. The heart knows nothing of responsibility, although it responds spontaneously. The heart knows nothing of burden because it knows love. Love makes everything weightless. Love is the only force which is not under the control of gravitation. It does not pull you down. It gives you wings and takes you to the beyond.

Your stuff, Michael Scott, is nothing special; everybody is full of the same bullshit. We have to cleanse this whole stuff. Make your mind without any stuff... and with the stuff disappearing, the mind also disappears. The mind is nothing but a collective name for your stuff.

The teacher asked her little pupils to tell about their acts of kindness to poor animals.

After several of the children had told heart-stirring stories of kindness, the teacher asked little Ernie if he had anything to tell.

"Well," said Ernie proudly, "I once kicked a boy for kicking his dog."

What is your stuff? Just observe.... We get lost into the jungle of it. Stand aside and see.

The local ladies group had invited their new neighbor to lunch. After she had left, the other ladies sat around discussing her.

"Well," said Mrs. Finkelstein, "she seems very sweet, but, my god! -- yakkety yakkety yak -- I thought she would never stop."

"Do you suppose," asked Mrs. Rosenbaum, "that everything she says is true?"

"I should say not," snorted Becky Goldberg, "therejust is not that much truth."

Just watch your stuff. It is our unawareness that goes on collecting all kinds of rubbish.

This rubbish becomes so thick that it does not allow you to see things as they are; neither does it allow you to enter into your own innermost subjectivity.

The religions of the world have been telling people to renounce the world. I say, Don't renounce the world. The world has not done any wrong to you. Renounce this rubbish, this stuff that you are are carrying within you.

But people have, for centuries, renounced the world but carried the stuff. Wherever you will be -- in the Himalayas, in the monasteries -- your stuff will be there. You can renounce the world because the world is not in any way preventing you, but how are you going to renounce your mind? And if the mind has to be renounced, there is no need to go to a monastery, there is no need to go to the Himalayas; then wherever you are, you can renounce it. There is no need for all kinds of austerities that people have to force upon themselves.

I have heard about a Trappist monastery. The rule of the monastery was that you can speak only once in seven years. A young man entered, and the abbot of the monastery asked him, "Are you aware that it is a very austere life, and particularly that you cannot speak for seven years? In seven years only one chance is given to speak; then again for seven years you have to be silent. So are you ready? -- because that is the most difficult part."

But the young man was determined, fanatically determined. He accepted the rule and was initiated into the monastery. He got a cell and he saw the situation.... The bed, the mattress, was so dirty -- it may have been used for centuries -- it was stinking. And for seven years he cannot even say to the abbot or anybody, "Please remove this mattress. It will kill me...." But there was no way to say, so he had to suffer that stinking stuff for seven years.

As the seven years were complete, he rushed to the abbot and said, "You have almost killed me. Remove that mattress immediately. It is so dirty it seems Adam and Eve have used it!"

The abbot ordered a new mattress. The new mattress came, but it was a little big for the small cell. So the workers somehow forced it in, and by forcing it in they broke one of the glasses of the window. But he could not say anything -- and now from that broken glass water started coming, rain would come, and on cold nights, ice would come in the cell.

He was in a more dangerous situation than he had been before. He had already become accustomed to that stinking mattress, but this was a more difficult situation. So much cold... he was shivering and it was always wet and no sun was reaching in the cell. He said, "My God, seven years... I hope that somehow things will become right. They have become even worse."

After seven years he again went to the abbot, and he said, "What kind of mattress have you sent? Those idiots have broken the window, and for seven years I have been suffering from cold, shivering day in day out, waiting just for when these seven years will end. It looked almost like eternity."

The abbot said, "Okay, the window should be mended." The window was mended, but in seven years of rain, snow, the mattress had become so rotten... but now there were again seven years to wait. That young man thought, "Now I cannot survive. Fourteen years have passed. I have come here to find truth, and what have I found? I had never dreamt about it. It is a nightmare." But finally all those seven years also passed. Now it was twenty-one years that he had suffered.

He went to the abbot and said, "This is a strange place. Twenty-one years and I am suffering the same thing in different forms."

The abbot was very angry. He said, "Since you have come, complaints, complaints, complaints... never a single word of appreciation! You are not worthy to be a monk. Get out of the monastery."

He said, "My God, twenty-one years unnecessarily suffering, and now you are throwing me out."

The abbot said, "We cannot allow such negative characters."

Just look at your stuff. It is absolutely unnecessary to suffer it, it can be thrown out. You should cleanse your mind. Why go on piling up garbage upon garbage? But because you call it "my" stuff, there has arisen an identity; it has become your treasure. So the first thing is: don't call it "my" stuff. It is stuff which has been forced into you by all kinds of stupid people around you.

My father had a friend who was thought to be the wisest man around that area, and he used to take me to him just so that I could also learn some wisdom. I used to sit there with my fingers in my ears. My father said, "I have brought you to understand something and you are sitting with your fingers in your ears. Are you mad?"

I said, "I am not mad, you are mad. This guy is throwing all kinds of rubbish, and I am not ready to allow it in my head. It will be unnecessary trouble: first gather it, then clean it -- what is the point? I am perfectly clean."

That old wise man was very angry. He said, "You have to take care of this boy. He has to be controlled and disciplined. This is very disrespectful towards me. Never in my life has anybody done such a thing."

I said, "Never in your life have you come across anybody who had guts; otherwise, what you are doing is collecting garbage from the scriptures" -- his house was full of ancient scriptures -- "and then throwing all that stuff into other peoples' heads. You should be taken to the court. You need to be put in a jail, because you are the greatest criminal in this area. You have destroyed so many people's minds, and their whole lives they will suffer and they will think this is their stuff."

If you can keep a clear distinction what is your own experience and what is enforced on you, then whatever is enforced, borrowed, has to be discarded. That is the only thing to be renounced.

The world is perfectly beautiful. Just your mind has to be silent, empty, open, and you will have the clarity to see people as they are... not only to see people, but to see yourself as you are. This understanding brings a transformation in your being. The world becomes a totally different place -- from despair to dance, from darkness to light, from death to eternal life.

Question 2:

Deva Agni, sexual energy is another name for your life force. The word sex has become condemned by the religions; otherwise there is nothing wrong in it. It is your very life.

Sexual energy is a natural energy: you are born out of it. It is your creative energy. When the painter paints or the poet composes or the musician plays or the dancer dances, these are all expressions of your life force.

Not only are children born out of your sexual energy, but everything that man has created on the earth has come out of sexual energy. Sexual energy can have many transformations: at the lowest it is biological; at the highest it is spiritual. It has to be understood that all creative people are highly sexual. You can see the poets, you can see the painters, you can see the dancers. All creative people are highly sexual, and the same is true about the people whom I call the mystics. Perhaps they are the most sexual people on the earth, because they are so full of life energy, abundant, overflowing....

But sexual power is a totally different thing. Sexual power is politics. It is using your sex to dominate people. Domination can be done in many ways: somebody dominates because he has money, somebody dominates because he has more physical strength, somebody dominates because he has more knowledge, somebody dominates because he is clever enough to befool people and collect their votes, somebody can dominate through her or his sexual power. More often it is the woman's way to dominate.

The woman can dominate because of her sexual appeal, but it is ugly and mean. It is selling your body just to dominate.

One of the most beautiful women in the world was Cleopatra. She was a queen in Egypt.

Her country never went into war; whenever there was an attack, she herself would go and offer her body to the invader, to the leader of the armies -- and she had such beauty that she easily persuaded the general of the army. She seduced the general by giving her body.

She was using her power -- her sex, her beauty, her charm -- and she remained the queen of Egypt without ever taking her armies to fight with anybody. A very strange woman...

But all women in different degrees dominate through their sex. They use it as a power. To use sex as a power is to degrade oneself, is to lose one's dignity and self-respect. It is pure prostitution.

The difference between British and French girls is this: they both know what men like, but the French girl does not mind.

Business was brisk for the pretty young prostitute in the bar.

"Bill," she said, "you can come over about seven-ish, and you, George around eight-ish, and Frank, I will have time for you about nine-ish." She then looked around the crowded bar and called out, "Anyone for tennish?"

Using your sexual energy as a profession, selling it as a commodity may give you a certain feeling of power, but you are destroying yourself by your own hands. Sexual energy is not to be used as a political means. Sexual energy is your potentiality for spiritual growth. You can become enlightened only because of your sexual energy.

I have been searching for almost thirty-five years, in all kinds of books, strange scriptures from Tibet and Ladakh and China and Japan -- India has the greatest number of scriptures in the world -- and I have been looking for one thing: has there ever been an enlightened impotent person? There is no incidence recorded anywhere. An impotent person has never been a great poet either, or a great singer, or a great sculptor, or a great scientist.

What is the problem with the impotent person? He has no life force; he is hollow. He cannot create anything -- and to create oneself as an enlightened being needs tremendous energy.

Never use your sex as a commodity, as a strategy to dominate, because you are committing suicide. You are destroying the power that can take you to the highest peak of consciousness.

Robert, an American, had been in Italy during the war and had made friends with Giovanni. A few years later he went back to Rome to visit his friend. As soon as Giovanni saw Bob, he could not do enough for him. He showed him the sights and then took him out for a beautiful meal of finest spaghetti. After the meal, Giovanni insisted that Bob meet his sister.

"Is she pretty?" asked Bob.

"Bella! Bella!" cried Giovanni.

"Is she young?" continued Bob.

"Si! Si!" cried Giovanni.

"And is she pure?" asked Bob.

"My god!" said Giovanni, "you Americans really are crazy!"

Sex has become a thing of the marketplace. On the one hand, religions have been repressing sexual energy and creating perversions which have culminated in the dangerous disease AIDS, which has no cure. The whole credit goes to religions, and if they have any sense of being human, then all the churches and all the monasteries and the Vatican itself should be turned into hospitals for the people suffering from AIDS, because these are the people who have created them. Theirs is the responsibility. They have forced men to live separately from women; they have insisted that celibacy is the very foundation of a religious life. But celibacy is unnatural, and anything unnatural cannot be the foundation of a religious life.

Because celibacy is unnatural, and religions have divided men and women into different monasteries, they have created the situation for homosexuality. They are the pioneers of homosexuality, and homosexuality has led to AIDS, which cannot be called simply a disease because it does not come in the category of diseases. It is death itself.

So on the one hand religions have created perversions; on the other hand they insisted on monogamy, which in fact means monotony. That has created the profession of the prostitute. The priest is responsible for the prostitute. It is so ugly and sick that we have created objects, commodities, things to be exploited out of so many beautiful women.

Even today, it is not understood exactly what sex is. It need not be repressed, because it is your very energy. It has to be transformed certainly; it has to be raised to its highest purity.

And as you start moving upwards... the name of the ladder is meditation... sex becomes love, sex becomes compassion, and ultimately sex becomes the explosion of your inner being, the illumination, the awakening, the enlightenment. But it is sexual energy... it can rot, it can go into perversions. But if it is to be understood naturally and helped through meditation to move upwards towards silent spaces, to pass through your heart and reach to the seventh center at the highest point in your body... you will feel grateful towards the energy. Right now you feel only ashamed.

This shame and guilt is created by the religious organizations, founders of religion.

Naturally the question arises, Why did they make sex a mess? And through making a mess of sex they have messed up the whole world and its mind and its growth. Why? -- because this was the simplest way to keep humanity in slavery. This was the simplest way to keep people guilty, and anybody who feels guilty can never raise his head in revolt. So all the vested interests wanted man to lose his dignity, self-respect, to feel guilty, ashamed. They have been condemning sex continuously, and their condemnation has lead the whole world into a very miserable, psychologically abnormal state. And they are still doing their work....

Just the other day, one shankaracharya, Jayendra Saraswati, has given a statement that no religious man can support family planning -- and all religions will agree with the Hindu shankaracharya. But I am puzzled. The Christian God has only one begotten son: if that is not family planning, then what is it? The Hindu God Shiva has only two sons: if that is not family planning, then what is it?

To say that no religious person can support family planning is simply madness. The world has already become overpopulated because of these religious people. By the end of this century almost half of humanity will have to die through starvation -- and who will be responsible for it? These religious people who are not in favor of family planning.

I would like to contradict Shankaracharya Jayendra Saraswati: without any exception, absolutely anyone who is religious is bound to support family planning. And those who don't support it are not religious; they are cunning politicians. They want the world to remain poor, they want the world to be always in a state of begging, so rich people can enjoy donations and can make reservations in paradise by those donations. If there is nobody poor in the world, who is going to accept their donations?

The politicians want people to remain starving because starving people are very obedient; they don't have the energy to revolt, to be disobedient. Nobody is concerned with humanity; everybody is concerned with his own power. And still in this century, when things are coming to such a great crisis, a shankaracharya -- who is the equivalent of a pope to the Hindus -- declares that family planning is against religion. Then starvation and millions of people dying through hunger seems to be religious, seems to be the will of God, who is called love, who is called compassionate.

What kind of compassion is this? But these religious people are more interested in the numbers; Jayendra Saraswati is interested in numbers. Hindu society should not follow any birth control methods, because if they follow birth control methods then their number will shrink -- and Christians will go on growing bigger and bigger. It is politics of numbers.

Mohammedans insist that they should be allowed to have four wives, without any consideration that in existence there is a certain balance, an equal number of women and men. If a man is allowed to have four wives, what about the three men who will be deprived of women? They are bound to go to the prostitutes, they are bound to become homosexuals, they are bound to practice sodomy.

All these crimes are perpetuated by your so-called virtuous leaders, religious saints. But they have been doing this harm for thousands of years. Rather than helping man to sublimate his energies, to make them creative, they have only been able to force man to repress his energies. And repressed energies become a cancer, repressed energies create all kinds of perversions.

The teacher asked her children's art class to draw on the blackboard their impressions of the most exciting thing they could think of.

Little Hymie got up and drew a long jagged line.

"What is that?" asked the teacher.

"Lightning," said Hymie. "Every time I see lightning I get so excited, I scream."

"Very good," said the teacher.

Next, little Sally drew a long wavy line. She explained that it was the sea which always excited her. The teacher thought that was excellent too.

Then little Ernie came up to the blackboard, made a single dot and sat down.

"What is that?" asked the puzzled teacher.

"It is a period," said Ernie.

"Well," said the teacher, "what is so exciting about a period?"

"I don't know," said Ernie to the teacher, "but my sister has missed two of them and my whole family is excited."

This excitement has made the whole world a mad asylum, and it goes on growing so fast that it always defeats all scientific calculations.

Just forty years ago, when India became free, it had four hundred million people. Now, after only forty years, it has nine hundred million people. Five hundred million people have been produced in forty years; and by the end of this century, the calculations of the scientists are that it will be the biggest nation in the world for the first time -- up to now China has been the first -- it will go beyond one billion people. And Jayendra Saraswati is talking about no family planning, no birth control....

Is this country capable of managing one billion people? -- their food, their clothes, their education, their medicine? It will not be even able to provide them with drinking water.

Food is impossible; even today, half the population of India sleeps hungry in the night because they cannot afford more than one meal a day.

I have seen people who have not been able to find even one meal a day. Then sleep is very difficult: your stomach is turning, asking for food, it is aching, it is painful. With my own eyes I have seen people putting a brick on their stomach and tying it around the waist, just to feel some weight, because inside the stomach there is nothing. These people suffering in misery are the responsibility of people like Shankaracharya Jayendra Saraswati -- these are the criminals.

When one thousand people were dying per day in Ethiopia, even then the pope was continuously talking about no birth control, Mother Teresa was talking about no birth control. You have to see the implications: Mother Teresa needs orphans; without orphans she does not have any qualifications to have a Nobel prize. But from where can you get orphans if birth control methods are applied? And strangely enough, they condemn birth control methods because they are not God's creation, but they don't condemn medicine, which is also not God's creation. At least there is no mention of medicine in those six days when he made the world.

Medicine has given man longer life. There are people in the Soviet Union who have passed their one hundred and eightieth year, and they are still young; there is every possibility that they will pass their second century. There are thousands who have passed beyond one hundred and fifty... and no religious leader condemns it, saying that medicine should be stopped from giving people health and longevity. No religious leader goes on saying that diseases should be allowed because they are God-created.

Medicine can be used; people can be made more healthy... and naturally when they are more healthy they are more sexually powerful. But birth control methods cannot be used because they will reduce the numbers of their congregations. It is a competition of numbers.

Catholics are six hundred million in number. It is the greatest religion in the world -- only because of the numbers; otherwise it is the most third-rate religion in the world, there is nothing much in it which can be called religious. But it is the biggest religion, the greatest religion, only on the strength of numbers. It cannot allow numbers to decline -- even if these numbers are going to kill the whole of humanity.

I am in absolute favor of birth control methods for two reasons: birth control methods will keep the world healthy, nourished; secondly, once birth control methods are used, sex loses its profanity -- or its sacredness. It becomes simple fun, it becomes just a joyful exchange of energies. According to me, the birth control pill is the greatest invention that man has made. It is the greatest revolution because it can make man and woman equal, liberated. Otherwise the woman is constantly pregnant, and because of her pregnancy she cannot be independent financially, she cannot be independent educationally, she cannot be independent from man's domination.

Once she is free from being pregnant compulsorily she will have as much time, as much energy to be creative. Until now half of humanity has remained uncreative... no great poets, no great saints, no great musicians, no great artists. Women have had no time. I was surprised to know that even the books on cookery are written by men, not by women.

And the best cooks are men, not women: in all the great five-star hotels you will find great cooks, always men. Strange... That has been the domain of the woman forever, but she has no energy left. Because of these religious people, she will never be liberated.

Sex energy has to be welcomed and transformed through the alchemy of meditation into higher states of being, into creativity in different dimensions, not only creating more and more children. Life has to be planned, it should not be accidental.

I have heard that when God was making the world, he called man aside and gave him twenty years of normal sex life. Man was horrified: "Only twenty years?!" he cried. But God would not budge. That was all he would give him.

Then God called the monkey and gave him twenty years. "But, God! I don't need that much," said the monkey, "ten is enough."

Man spoke up and said, "Can I have the other ten?" -- and the monkey agreed.

Then God called the lion and gave him twenty years. The lion, too, only wanted ten.

Again the man said, "Can I have the other ten?"

The lion roared, "Of course!"

Then came the donkey. He was given twenty years, but he also only wanted ten. Man asked for the extra ten, and got them.

This explains why man has twenty years of a normal sex life, then ten years of monkeying around, ten years of lion about it, and ten years of making an ass of himself.

Okay, Vimal?

Yes, Osho.

The Great Pilgrimage: From Here to Here