Your mind is not yours

Question 1:

The mind is within you, but it is really a projection of the society inside you. It is not yours.

No child is born with a mind. He is born with a brain. The brain is the mechanism; the mind is the ideology. The brain is fed by the society, and every society creates a mind according to its own conditionings. That's why there are so many minds in the world. The Hindu mind is certainly separate from the Christian mind, and the communist mind is certainly separate from the Buddhist mind.

But a fallacy is created in the individual that the mind is yours, so the individual starts acting according to the society, following the society, but feeling as if he is functioning on his own. This is a very cunning device.

George Gurdjieff used to tell a story... A magician deep in the mountains had many sheep, and to avoid servants and to avoid looking after the sheep and going in search of them every day when they were lost in the forest, he hypnotized all the sheep, and told each sheep different stories. He gave different minds to each sheep.

To one he told, "You are not a sheep, you are a man, so you need not be afraid that one day you will be killed, sacrificed, like other sheep -- they are only sheep. So you need not be worried as far as returning home is concerned." To some he said, "You are a lion, not a sheep," and to some, "You are a tiger." And since that day the magician was at ease: the sheep started behaving according to the mind that was given to them.

He could kill a sheep -- every day he used to kill sheep for his own food, his family's food -- and the sheep who believed that they were lions or men or tigers would simply look and giggle, "This is what happens to sheep." But they were not afraid, not like in the old days.

When he killed a sheep before, all the sheep were trembling, afraid, "Tomorrow is going to be my day. How long can I live?" And that's why they used to escape in the forest -- to avoid the magician. But now nobody was escaping. There were tigers, there were lions...

all kinds of minds had been implanted in them.

Your mind is not your mind -- this is something basic to be remembered. Your mind is an implantation of the society in which you have accidentally been born. If you were born in a Christian home, but immediately transferred to a Mohammedan family and brought up by the Mohammedans, you would not have the same mind; you would have a totally different mind that you cannot conceive of.

Bertrand Russell, one of the geniuses of our times, tried hard to get rid of the Christian mind, not because it was Christian, but simply because it was given to him by others. He wanted his own fresh outlook about things. He did not want to see things from somebody else's glasses; he wanted to come in contact with reality immediately, and directly. He wanted his own mind.

So it was not a question of being against the Christian mind; if he had been a Hindu he would have done the same, if he had been a Mohammedan he would have done the same, if he had been a communist he would have done the same.

The question is whether the mind is your own or implanted by others -- because the others implant a mind in you which does not serve you, but serves their purposes. Now in the whole Soviet Union, each child is being brought up with a communist mind.

One of my friends, Rahul Sankritayana, was visiting the Soviet Union. He went to see a school and he asked a small boy, "Do you believe in God?" The small boy looked at him in shock and he said, "At your age, in this century, you ask such a question! In the past when people were ignorant they used to believe in God. There is no God." Now this child will believe for his whole life that this is his voice. It is not so. It is the voice of the society, and it serves the purposes of the vested interests of the society.

You are prepared by the parents, by the teachers, by the priests, by your educational system to have a certain kind of mind, and your whole life you go on living through that certain kind of mind. That is a borrowed life. And that is why there is so much misery in the world: because nobody is living authentically, nobody is living his own self; he is simply following orders implanted in him.

Bertrand Russell tried hard and wrote a book, WHY I AM NOT A CHRISTIAN. But in a letter to a friend he wrote, "Although I have written the book, although I do not believe that I am a Christian, I have dropped that mind, still, deep down... One day I asked myself, `Who is the greatest man in history?' Rationally I know it is Gautam Buddha, but I could not put Gautam Buddha above Jesus Christ.

"That day I felt that all my efforts have been futile. I am still a Christian. I know rationally that Jesus Christ stands no comparison with Gautam Buddha -- but it is only rational. Emotionally, sentimentally I cannot put Gautam Buddha above Jesus Christ.

Jesus Christ remains in my unconscious, still affecting my attitudes, my approaches, my behavior. The world thinks I am no longer a Christian, but I know... It seems difficult to get rid of this mind! They have cultivated it with such acumen, with such craftsmanship."

And it is a long process. You never think about it. A man lives at the most seventy-five years, and for twenty-five years he has to be in the schools, colleges, university; one third of life is devoted to cultivating a certain mind. Bertrand Russell failed because he had no knowledge of how to get rid of it. He was fighting, but groping in the dark.

There are absolutely certain methods of meditation which can take you away from the mind, and then it is very easy if you want to drop it. But without first becoming separate from the mind it is impossible to drop it -- who is going to drop whom?

Bertrand Russell is fighting with one half of his mind against the other half, and both are Christian -- it is impossible. And now it has been proved scientifically. One of the most important scientific contributions is from Delgado. He has found seven hundred centers in the brain. Each center is capable of containing an immense quantity of knowledge; it is just like a recording. And his experiments are very shocking: he touches a certain center in the brain with an electrode, and the man starts speaking. He takes away the electrode and the man stops. He puts the electrode back on the same center, and the man starts speaking again -- from the very beginning.

Delgado himself has not been able yet to figure out how the tape gets reversed -- because the man always starts from the beginning. Wherever you leave him makes no difference.

It is not that he starts where you left him. Some automatic process in the mind will be discovered...

Some electrode can be implanted in the mind, permanently, and it can be controlled from far away by remote control. Delgado exhibited it in Spain, in a bullfight. He planted an electrode in the mind of the toughest bull, and he stood in the field showing a red flag.

The bull rushed towards him ferociously, and the people almost stopped breathing: "The bull is going to kill one of our best geniuses!" But they did not know that he had a remote control switch in his pocket -- just a small box with a switch.

Just when the bull was about to attack, from one foot away, he pushed the button and the bull stopped, just frozen. And he did it many times. Again and again the bull came with the same ferocity, and again and again he stopped whenever Delgado pushed the button.

Delgado says, "Sooner or later, this discovery can either become a blessing to humanity, or it can become a curse."

Every child's mind can be easily implanted with an electrode. You will have very obedient people; you will not have any rebels, you will not have any revolutionaries, but the whole charm of life will be gone. People will be simply vegetables, enslaved scientifically. And they will not know, because the remote control unit may be in the capital, in the hands of the government.

It can be useful -- criminals can be prevented, murderers can be prevented, thieves can be changed, rapists can be transformed -- but it is dangerous also. Anybody who is in power can make the whole country just a crowd of slaves. And you cannot do anything, because you don't know. Remember one thing, inside the skull, where the brain is, you don't have any sensitivity. Even if a stone is put inside your skull, you will never know; you just don't have sensitive nerves there which can inform you.

This came to be known in the second world war. A man was shot with a bullet, and somehow the doctors thought that the bullet was not inside him, but had missed, just touching his head. So they treated the wound, it healed and the bullet remained inside his head for ten years -- and he was never aware of it. It was for some other reasons that he was being x-rayed, and they were surprised to find that there was a bullet inside him.

Then the wound was opened and the bullet was found. That made it clear that anything can be planted in the mind.

Delgado's mechanism is scientific, but society has been doing the same by planting ideas... It is an old bullock cart method. It takes so long, twenty-five years, and it is not foolproof, because a few revolutionaries escape, a few rebels are still born. And it is good that there are people who escape from the enslaving structure of the society, because these are the people who have advanced knowledge, who have given all scientific progress, who have changed all superstitions.

But the society wants you simply to be a carbon copy, never an original.

The strategy to create a mind in you is to go on repeating certain things continuously.

And even if a lie is repeated continuously it starts becoming a truth; you forget that it was a lie in the beginning.

Adolf Hitler started lying to the German people that all the misery of their country is because of the Jews. Now this is such an absurd thing -- like somebody saying that all the misery of the country is because of bicycles, so if we destroy all the bicycles all the misery will disappear.

In fact the Jews were the very backbone of Germany, they had created all the wealth of Germany. And they had no other nation, so any nation -- wherever they were -- was their nation. They had no other alternative in their minds; they could not betray, and they had been doing all the things that any other German was doing for the welfare of the country.

But Adolf Hitler in his autobiography writes, "It doesn't matter what you say, because there is no such thing as truth. Truth is a lie that has been repeated so often that you have forgotten that it is a lie." So the only difference, according to him, between truth and a lie is that the lie is fresh and truth is old; otherwise there is no difference. And he seems to have some insight in it.

For example, Christianity, Hinduism, Mohammedanism -- these three religions repeat to their children, "There is a God." Jainism, Buddhism, Taoism, three other religions, say "There is no God." The first group of three religions have a certain mind. Their whole life is filled with the idea of God, hell, heaven, prayer. The second group of three religions has no prayer because there is nobody to pray to, there is no God. And the very question does not arise.

Now, half of the world is communist. They don't believe even in the soul of man, and every child is continuously told that man is matter, that when man dies he simply dies, nothing remains; that there is no soul -- consciousness is a by-product. Now half of the humanity repeats it -- as the truth.

Adolf Hitler cannot be accused of being absolutely absurd. It seems to be the case that if you repeat anything to people, they will slowly, slowly start believing it. And if it has been repeated for centuries, it has become a heritage.

Your mind is not yours. And your mind is not young; it is centuries old -- three thousand years old, five thousand years old. That's why every society is afraid of anybody creating a doubt about the mind.

That's my crime: that I create a doubt in you about your mind. And I want you to understand that it is not your mind, and your search should be to find your own mind. To be under somebody else's impact is to remain psychologically a slave. And life is not for slavery. It is to taste freedom.

There is something like truth, but with this mind you can never know it, because this mind is full of lies, repeated for century after century. You can find the truth when you put this mind completely aside and look at existence with fresh eyes, like a newborn child; then whatever you experience is truth. And if you remain constantly alert not to allow others to interfere with your inner growth, there comes a moment when you become so attuned with existence, so one with existence...

Only this experience is religious experience. It is not Jewish, it is not Christian, it is not Hindu. How can any experience be Jewish, Hindu or Mohammedan? You never see its ridiculousness. You eat something and you say it is delicious, but is it Christian, or Hindu, or Buddhist? You taste something and you say it is sweet, but is it communist? -- is it materialist or spiritualist? These questions are nonsense. It is simply sweet, it is simply delicious.

When you feel existence immediately, without any mediator, with no mind given by anybody else to you, you taste something which transforms you, which makes you enlightened, awakened, which brings you to the highest peak of consciousness.

A greater fulfillment there is not. A higher contentment there is not. A deeper relaxation there is not.

You have come home.

Life becomes a joy, a song, a dance, a celebration.

And I call this life religious.

I want everybody to be religious, but I don't want anybody to be Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan, because those are the barriers which will never allow you to become religious. And you can see it clearly: Gautam Buddha is not a Buddhist, he never heard the word Buddhist; Jesus Christ is not a Christian, he never heard the word Christian and certainly he is not a Jew; otherwise Jews would not have crucified him.

If Jews decided to crucify Jesus, that simply means he has dropped the mind that they have given him to carry his whole life, that he is saying things that are not part of their given mind. And Jesus continuously reminds them of it. He says, "It has been said by the old prophets" -- and who were those old prophets? all Jews -- "it has been said, `An eye for an eye is the law.' But I say unto you that if somebody slaps you on one cheek, give him the other cheek too."

This was not part of the Jewish mind. The Jewish God declares, "I am not a nice person! I am a very angry God, I am very jealous. Remember that I am not your uncle." These are actually the words: "I am not your uncle, I am not nice, I am jealous, I am angry." And Jesus says, "God is love."

I am trying to show you that he has dropped the Jewish mind, and that's the reward he got -- the crucifixion. The crucifixion was the reward for dropping the Jewish mind. He was dangerous in the sense that he would create doubt in other people's minds: "Our God says he is angry, jealous -- he will destroy those who are against him, and Jesus is saying that God is love. He is going against our vested interest."

He was killed -- he was not a Jew; he was not Christian because the word `Christian' does not exist in the Hebrew language, the word `Christ' does not exist in the Hebrew language. He was called the messiah -- that is equivalent to `Christ.' `Christ' is a Greek word. It was three hundred years later that Jesus' sayings were translated into Greek; then messiah became Christ, and the followers became Christians.

What I am trying to say to you is that Gautam Buddha was not a Hindu. He was born in a Hindu family, but he has renounced it; he renounced it the very day he started his search for truth. See the simple point: the Hindu need not search for the truth; the Hindu has already got it ready-made. It has been given by the tradition, by the religion, by the scriptures; he need not go in search.

The day Gautam Buddha went in search for truth, he dropped the Hindu mind. And of course he was not a Buddhist; that was a name his followers were given later on by Hindus, to keep a distinction. But he had his own mind.

To have one's own mind in the world is the richest thing possible. But no society allows it; every society keeps you poor. On your account every society, particularly those who are in power -- either through money or through politics or through religion or through knowledge, or for any reason -- those who are in power don't want people to have their own minds. It is dangerous to their interests. They want not men but sheep, not individuals but crowds, who are always in need of being led, who are always in need of being told what to do, what not to do; who don't have their own minds, their own insights, their own consciousness. They are always dependent.

The fear of anybody being different, being a stranger, being an outsider, is always the same for the simple reason that no society will have the courage to accept you -- because that society has not made your mind, and that society cannot trust that you will always be obedient to it, that you will never object about anything, or create doubt about anything, or be skeptical about anything.

For example, in India the cow is worshipped as the mother. Anybody who has not been brought up as a Hindu is simply going to be skeptical, "This is nonsense!" And this is not all. Hindus do things that nobody can even conceive of: they drink the urine of the cow because it is holy, they eat cowdung because it is holy.

And it is not only the villagers or the uneducated, or the uncultured. In Mahatma Gandhi's ashram there was a man, a professor, who lived for six months only on the urine of cows and cowdung -- not eating anything else, not drinking anything else. And Mahatma Gandhi praised him, saying that he is a saint.

Now, Hindus are angry at me because I cannot accept this kind of stupidity -- that it can make somebody a saint. It simply proves that man was an idiot! But Mahatma Gandhi is a politician; he is also not a saint. If he was a saint he would also have said, "This is nonsense. You cannot become holy by eating cowdung." But he is a politician par excellence, in the garb of a religious saint. Saying that this man is a saint, he has satisfied the whole Hindu community; now he is the sole leader of all the Hindus. Anybody who has not been brought up by the Hindus will not be able to accept it.

So any deviation from the norm in any society... There are many people who you call mad, but they are not mad. They are simply not agreeing with your madness; they have a private madness of their own. You have a collective madness.

Now, for example, if all four hundred million Hindus accept without any question the idea that drinking the urine of cows makes you holy, and somebody starts drinking the urine of a horse, they say he is mad. I simply say that he is privately mad, you are collectively mad. But you both are mad!

I would like that man more than this collective madness; at least he has the courage to do something private, individual. It will look foolish to all the Hindus, but they will not look foolish to themselves, to their own mind.

No society wants strangers, outsiders. Why is the whole world afraid of me? I am not a terrorist; I am not making bombs and killing people. I am a nonviolent person. But they can accept terrorists.

In Germany it actually happened at the same time... They prevented me from entering Germany, passed a resolution that I am a dangerous man and I should not be allowed any entry into Germany, and at the same time they allowed all the terrorist groups of Europe to have a world conference.

I was simply amazed! All the terrorist groups that have been murdering people, that have hijacked airplanes, that have bombed embassies, that have kidnapped people -- their international conference is allowed, but I cannot be allowed four weeks of being a tourist in the country.

Those terrorists are not of a different mind.

It is a very strange phenomenon. When Pontius Pilate had asked... Three people were being crucified the same day as Jesus, and it was the convention that one can be forgiven -- and it was the people's decision. And Pontius Pilate was absolutely certain that they would ask, "Release Jesus." He was innocent; he had done no harm to anybody. But the Jews shouted, the high priests shouted, "We want Barabbas" -- and Barabbas was a confirmed criminal. He had committed seven murders, rapes... any kind of crime you name and he had done it.

But you should not be surprised, because Barabbas belongs to the Jews. He may be a murderer, but his mind is still of a Jew. This Jesus may be innocent, but his mind is no longer that of the Jews; he is an outsider, he is dangerous. Barabbas is not dangerous.

What can he do? A few more murders at the most. But this Jesus can destroy the whole structure of the society, because it is standing only on superstitions.

Even Barabbas could not believe it. He thought something must have gone wrong: "There is not another criminal in the whole country who can compete with me, and this poor Jesus, who has never done anything except talking to few people here and there... And nobody is asking for him." Not a single voice shouted for Jesus to be released, and thousands of people shouted, "Barabbas! We want Barabbas!"

If you go into the psychology of it, it is very simple. All those terrorists having a conference in Germany are acceptable: they have the same mind, the same politics. They belong to the same rotten society.

But I cannot be allowed. Against me they have the idea that I will corrupt people. The same was their condemnation of Socrates -- that he corrupts people -- and all that Socrates was doing was teaching people to have their own mind.

All the great masters in the world have been saying only one thing down the centuries, "Have your own mind and have your own individuality. Don't be a part of the crowd; don't be a wheel in the whole mechanism of a vast society. Be individual, on your own.

Live life with your own eyes; listen to music with your own ears."

But we are not doing anything with our own ears, with our own eyes, with our own minds; everything is being taught, and we are following it.

Deviation is dangerous to the rotten societies. And particularly in the West -- where no idea of enlightenment has ever existed -- it is more so, because enlightenment simply means going beyond the mind. And going beyond the mind you will be yourself.

The West has never nourished the idea of enlightenment. It is against the society, against the religion; they have never bothered about it.

Think about truth -- that is allowed! That's why in the West philosophy has grown to great heights and depths. But it is always thinking about truth. It is like madmen thinking about sanity, blind men thinking about light. However the blind man tries to think about light... he may create a big system of thought about what light is, but it is not going to be anything like light. For light, you need eyes.

You cannot think about truth, because thinking will be done by your mind -- which is full of lies, nothing but lies. How are you going to think about truth? Truth can be found only when you have put the mind aside.

In the East we say truth is the experience that happens in the state of no-mind or in the state of beyond mind. But in the West the very idea has not existed. And that will make one thing clear to you: philosophy is a Western thing. In the East there is nothing like philosophy.

It is very strange: the East is far older, at least ten thousand years old, but there is nothing like philosophy in the East. What is called Eastern philosophy is a wrong name. In the East it is called darshan -- darshan means "to see." It has nothing to do with thinking. The very word darshan means "to see."

I had to coin my own word for it: I call it philosia, as against philosophy, because philosophy means "to think," and philosia means "the love of seeing." Philosophy means "the love of thinking" -- but what can you think? Just to avoid the danger of people going beyond mind, and becoming dangerous to the society, a substitute, a toy has been created.

That is philosophy.

No philosopher comes to experience anything. No philosopher becomes enlightened or awakened; he remains on the same ground as you are, as unconscious as you are.

Darshan -- philosia -- is a totally different approach. It's approach is by witnessing your mind, not by thinking but just becoming a watcher of your mind and creating a distance between you and your thoughts. Just seeing them, as if you are on a hill and the whole mind and its traffic is going on down in the valley, a moment comes when thoughts start disappearing, because their life is in the identity. Their life is the life of a parasite; they suck your blood.

If you are far away and you are not giving any juice to your thoughts, they start shrinking and dying. And when there are no thoughts around you but immense silence, tremendous nothingness, just a watcher and nothing to watch... this is the moment you are freed from the fetters of the mind. And this is the moment of the beginning of a new life.

But you may look mad to people, because from this moment your behavior will be different. From this moment you will have an originality; you cannot be part of the crowd. People will think you have gone wrong somewhere. It is strange -- the people are wrong! But in a way it is not strange. If you go into a society of blind people with eyes, nobody is going to believe that you have eyes. You must be having some mad illusion -- eyes don't exist. Nobody has eyes, how can you have?

The enlightened person in the West will be condemned as mad.

The people who are mad in the West are mad because you have created so much tension and anxiety and anguish, and you have given them such a rotten mind, that it cannot manage. A point comes when it breaks down. When the mind breaks down, the person falls below the mind; hence psychoanalysis is a Western phenomenon. In the East there is nothing parallel to psychoanalysis.

In the East we have tried for a breakTHROUGH, not for a breakdown. The breakthrough takes you above the mind, and the breakdown simply pulls you to a subhuman level. But for that too society is responsible. It gives you too much ambition, which it cannot fulfill.

It gives you too much desire -- for money, for power -- which it cannot fulfill. It only teaches you how to go on climbing the ladder of success, higher and higher, and tells you to be quick, because you have only a small life, and so much has to be done! There is no time for living, no time for loving, no time for rejoicing.

People go on postponing everything that is meaningful. Tomorrow they will laugh; today, money has to be gathered... more money, more power, more things, more gadgets.

Tomorrow they will love -- today there is no time. But tomorrow never comes, and one day they find themselves burdened with all kinds of gadgets, burdened with money. They have come to the top of the ladder -- and there is nowhere to go except to jump in a lake.

But they cannot even say to other people, "Don't bother to come here -- there is nothing," because that will make them look stupid. You have become the president of the country and you are saying, "Here is nothing -- don't bother. This is simply a ladder which leads nowhere" -- you will feel stupid.

So they go on pretending that they have achieved, that they have found; and deep down they are empty, meaningless, and they have wasted their whole life. If they break down under such pressure, the society is responsible. The society is driving people mad.

In the East you will not find so many mad people, so many people committing suicide -- and the East is poor, so poor that people can't manage to have one meal a day. Logically there should be more people committing suicide, more people going mad. But no, they are not going mad, they are not committing suicide. they seem to be in a certain contentment, because ambition is not being part of the mind given by the society; their society also gives them ambition, but for the other world, not for this world. This world is condemned.

You try to understand... Their society also gives them ambition -- ambition to reach to paradise, to realize God -- but that ambition is against the ambitions of this world.

"Renounce this world! Here there is nothing but shadows; it is illusory." For thousands of years they have thought it is illusory, it is worthless to bother about it -- why not look for the real thing? So they don't go mad. In utter poverty, in sickness, in death... but you will not find them tense, anxious, and they don't need any psychotherapy.

Psychotherapy is absolutely Western; it is the need of the Western mind. First the Western mind creates all kinds of desires and ambitions, which are going to create a breakdown sooner or later; then psychotherapy comes in. It is now the most highly-paid profession, but the strangest thing is that psychotherapists commit suicide more than people from any other profession, twice as much as any other profession, and psychotherapists go mad twice as much as any other profession. And these are the people who are helping other people to be sane! It is really a mess.

It can be cleaned up. It is simply a question of understanding that the mind that we have is not capable of encountering reality, because reality is contemporary, and the mind is two thousand years old. The gap is big, and the mind fails to encounter reality. The mind has to go with reality, step by step; it has not to lag behind. And that is possible only if each individual has his own mind, his own individuality.

I am basically an individualist, because only the individual has a soul. No group can claim a soul -- they are all dead arrangements. Only the individual is a living phenomenon. We have to help the living phenomenon to be contemporary, and to remain contemporary, because what is contemporary today will not be contemporary tomorrow, so you have to learn the methods of flowing like a river with existence, each moment. Die each moment to the past, and be born each moment to the new.

Unless that becomes your religion, you are going to be in trouble, and your society is going to be in trouble.

Question 2:

I am reminded of Doctor Johnson. He had made one of the best dictionaries of his times.

It was a very big, voluminous book -- more than one thousand pages. Three old ladies came to him, very angry; they must have been seventy, seventy-five, eighty, they all had glasses. And they said, "Are you not ashamed of your book? There are three words in it which are obscene!"

Doctor Johnson said, "My God, in a book of one thousand pages, in which there are thousands of words, how could you manage at your age, with such thick glasses, to find three obscene words? You are great researchers. You must have been looking for them.

Nobody else has objected to me; nobody has even mentioned them."

I have almost four hundred books in my name. I have not written anything, but these are a collection of my talks. Out of four hundred books there is only one book on sex, and that too is not really on sex; it is basically on how to transcend sex, how to bring the energy of sex to a sublimated state, because it is our basic energy.

It can produce life... That is only one thing that we know about it, but that even animals manage. And scientists say even trees have their own kind of sexuality, so the whole of existence manages some kind of sexual energy. It is only man who has the privilege to change the character and the quality of sexual energy.

The name of the book is FROM SEX TO SUPERCONSCIOUSNESS -- but nobody talks about superconsciousness. The book is about superconsciousness; sex is only to be the beginning, where everybody is. There are methods that can start the energy moving upwards, and in the East, for at least ten thousand years, there has developed a special science, Tantra. There is no parallel in the West of such a science.

For ten thousand years people have experimented with how sexual energy can become your spirituality, how your sexuality can become your spirituality. It is proved beyond doubt -- thousands of people have gone through the transformation. Tantra seems to be the science that is, sooner or later, going to be accepted in the whole world, because people are suffering from all kinds of perversions. That's why they go on talking about sex as if that is my work, as if twenty-four hours a day I am talking about sex. Their repressed sexuality is the problem.

A great poet, Heinrich Heine, once got lost in the forest. For three days he could not find the way out. Hungry, tired, worried about wild animals the whole night, sitting in the trees, and the whole day stumbling, trying to find some human being... But for three days he could not meet anyone to show him the way. The third night was a full-moon night.

He was sitting in a tree, utterly exhausted. He looked at the moon, and suddenly he laughed.

He laughed because he had written so many poems about the moon and he has read so many poems about the moon. The moon is such a romantic phenomenon that no poet of any standing can leave it out, no painter can leave it out. Its impact is deep, its beauty is great. So why did he laugh? He laughed because when he looked at the moon, he didn't see all those romantic things that he was talking of in his poems; he saw a round loaf of bread, floating in the sky.

He said, "My God! What has happened to me?" After three days of hunger and tiredness, it is natural, but perhaps his experience was unique: nobody else has ever seen a floating round loaf of bread floating in the sky! He laughed at himself, and for the first time he understood that what he had been saying about the moon had nothing to do with the moon; it had something to do with himself.

So the people who talk about sex and condemn me don't understand that it is their repression. I have been speaking on thousands of subjects, but they are not concerned with them because that is not their repression. Sex has been repressed traditionally all over the world. Naturally it is bound to come up in some way or other. You cannot avoid it.

Even THE HOLY BIBLE has five hundred pages of pure pornography. And it is not an exception -- all other religious scriptures... Hindu scriptures are the worst. They go into such details that you will be worried, "Are these people talking about spirituality, or what?" They have even made temples like Khajuraho, Konarak, Puri. Each temple has thousands of naked women, naked men, in different sexual postures... temples! If you suppress something in man it is going to come up somewhere or other, in some way or other.

This repression of sex by all the religions has helped the pornographic literature of the world -- magazines like PLAYBOY -- to be read more than anything else. Now PLAYBOY is published in almost all languages, and there are many magazines of the same kind.

When I was in jail in America, in the first jail I was surprised: every inmate had a BIBLE, and one inmate, who was just next to me, every day ritually in the morning, in the evening, would put his head on THE BIBLE, kneel down on the floor -- THE BIBLE on the bed, his head on THE BIBLE -- and pray. He looked really pious.

But I asked him, "This is very beautiful, you are doing good, but why do you have all over the room these pictures of naked women that you have cut from magazines? and not a single picture of Jesus Christ? Jesus Christ among all these nudes would have looked very beautiful."

He was shocked he said, "I never thought about it. I am a very devoted Christian, a fundamentalist."

I said, "You must be a fundamentalist; otherwise how to explain all these pictures? For these pictures to exist, a fundamentalist Christian is absolutely necessary. Don't be worried! They are not contradictory, they are complementary. It is a conspiracy between the churches and the people who are exploiting your mind."

My whole effort has been how to make your sex a natural, accepted phenomenon, so there is no repression -- and then you don't need any pornography; so that there is no repression -- and then you don't dream of sex. Then the energy can be transformed. There are valid methods available through which the same energy that brings life to the world can bring a new life to you. That was the whole theme of the book. But nobody bothered about the theme, nobody bothered about why I have spoken on it. Just the word `sex' was in the title, and that was enough.

That word has created so many rumors that I am really amused! People are thinking that we are having sexual orgies the whole day. People really have imagination! Just because out of four hundred books, on one book the word `sex' has appeared in the title, their imagination has moved so far away. But it reflects their mind; it has nothing to do with me.

In Khajuraho, the Indian temple, the most famous temple in the world... there are thirty temples -- perhaps it would have taken thousands of years to make those temples. As sculptures they are just the best; you cannot create better. But the sexual postures are so absurd that you cannot even imagine...

Absolutely all kinds of postures that man -- sane and insane, whoever! -- has imagined are there: men are making love to animals, a man and a woman are standing on their heads and making love. Have you ever imagined...? But why has this happened? -- and these people must have worked hard! Repress anything and it will take pervert proportions.

Now there is homosexuality, lesbianism, sodomy, and all kinds of other perversions, and nobody ever thinks about who is responsible. Animals in the wild are never homosexual, but in a zoo, if females are not available, then animals turn homosexual. That gives a clue. It seems we have made our society a zoo, not a natural phenomenon. We have repressed sex so much that now it goes on taking strange shapes.

For example, homosexuality must have been born in monasteries, so I call it a religious thing. In monasteries men are kept separate -- no woman is available. In nunneries women are separate -- no men are available. In Athos, in Europe, there is one monastery, one thousand years old, which you can enter -- but you cannot get out alive. You renounce the world forever: Enter the monastery and the world is finished. In this monastery, not even a six-month-old baby girl is allowed. I sometimes wonder: are monks living inside, or monsters? A six-month-old baby girl is not allowed; no woman of any age has ever entered there, dead or alive.

Now, you are forcing people... These people will become homosexuals, the nuns will become lesbians, and you go on preaching celibacy! You still go on preaching that monks should be celibate, nuns should be celibate, and they are all reading pornographic literature... of course, hiding it in THE BIBLE!

We are living in a very sick society, which could have been very healthy, and can be healthy immediately... just a question of understanding.