Where do we go from here?

Question 1:

Nowhere! We are going to be here. It is a significant question. It represents many sannyasins' minds.

Basically, this is how mind functions. When you get rid of something which was binding you, enslaving you, which was a fascist thing, you feel relieved, ecstatic. The moment you heard that Sheela and her gang had left, you danced throughout the city's streets.

But I knew that the second part would be coming soon - because for three and a half years Sheela and her gang were taking every responsibility, were taking every care, and you were, in a way, unburdened.

Now that you are free, a question of responsibility arises, and that shakes you. You have been dependent, and now you are independent. It will take a little time for you to change yourself from dependence to independence. You will have to pass through this trauma.

This is simply a trauma.

You are worried because many of the people who were part of Sheela's group are still here. You should not be worried. They are here because they have revolted against Sheela and her group.

They have done more than you have done. You should be respectful to them.

Sheela had asked all of them to go with her. They refused. They wanted to be here with me and with you and the commune. They had not come here for Sheela; they had come here for me. One of the sannyasins, Ava, even went with Sheela, but came back - not even reaching the goal - the Black Forest in Germany, where they are hiding like criminals.

They are no more wearing sannyasin dress, so they cannot be recognized. And they are hiding in a small village, afraid - because they are going to be caught. Whatever they have done, they have to be rewarded for it.

Ava returned from the middle of the journey because, even being with them a few hours, she started feeling sick. The whole group was pathetic. She phoned here, and I told her it is her home, she can come back. These people were corrupted, led into things by Sheela, Puja, Shanti Bhadra, and they were as innocent as you are. They did whatever was told to them. Won't you give them a chance to change? Don't you have any love for your own people?

Even if Sheela, Puja, Savita, Shanti Bhadra - who have all committed crimes of the first degree - if they ask to come back, I will welcome them, because their very asking to come back means they have understood, and they won't be the same again. And whatever they did, good or bad, their intention was never bad. They were doing it for you. Their end was never bad, their means may have been.

And a commune of loving people should be forgiving too. Love knows no resentment. Love only knows how to give opportunities for transformation.

So please drop any ideas of the people who belonged to the group and have remained here. To be suspicious of them, or to keep away from them, is ugly on your part. They need more love to regain their dignity. They need more love to be transformed.

And always remember one thing very fundamental to my way of life: anything a person does is just a mere act. It does not qualify and color his whole being. Being is vast.

I will not punish even a murderer, because the murder happened in the past. Nobody has the right to destroy this man's future, because in the future he may turn into a poet, a painter, a scientist, a musician, a dancer. One thing is certain: he has energy. He misused it. All that you have to do is treat him psychologically, to make it clear to him that something is wrong in his mind, to make him aware of how to drop it and how to change the direction of his energies. What is destructive can become creative.

I am against all punishment, particularly the death sentence. It is inhuman, resentful, revengeful, and without any consideration of the person - in his situation even you would have done the same.

And past is past. Why distort the future of a person? Any individual is worthy of respect. Your respect will help him to change. Your trust will help him to change.

So the people who have remained here need more love, more respect, need to be more sheltered, protected, so they can drop their fear. And now we have a totally new regime. They will be working under it, and they can be of immense help, because they have worked for four years. We need a few experienced people. So anybody who is here, and anybody who wants to come back, is welcome.

This is not an ordinary society. You have to prove that it is extraordinary, that you are capable of trusting even those people who deceived you. That will make them feel ashamed, and that is the only way for their transformation.

And, whatever they did, once you accept them we will not need to find out and discover and investigate - they themselves will reveal all.

Trust creates such a space, and love gives such courage.

If a person can see, can say to the court, yes, he has murdered, and he is sorry for it, and he wants to be changed.... He does not know why he murdered. There must be something in his psychology which is wrong, which is destructive. But in the ordinary world outside he will be sentenced to death, or to remain in jail for his whole life, which is worse.

Naturally, the murderer cannot be changed by your courts, by your laws. And for thousands of years your laws have gone on growing, your courts go on becoming bigger, and you have more judges.

But do you know, your murders are not less. They are increasing far more rapidly than your judges.

Strange - there is something basically wrong.

Anything that is done should not be taken in the spirit of revenge, punishment; but the outside society lives only with greed and fear. Give respectability to a person who is obedient to the rotten society, and give punishment to anybody who does anything against the society. This society is not for transformation.

But my people should behave differently. You are to prepare the ground for the new man and for a new human existence. And these are the chances, opportunities.

Sheela has given you a great opportunity to learn the power of love and forgiveness, and to see that there is no alchemy which can transform a man other than love.

So if these people come back - and also those who have remained here - they should be specially treated, with love and great joy and dance and rejoicing that they have come home. And I promise you, your love will change them. There is no other way to change a person.

So don't unnecessarily get worried, seeing the same people still holding power posts. I know about it, but I know that they have revolted in favor of you, against Sheela - and now you are misbehaving with them. They should be rewarded. And they are the people who will bring out everything that has been done; they are the authentic witnesses.

But if you are behaving badly with them, you will not be able to win their hearts. And five thousand people, trusting, loving, cannot win the hearts of a dozen people? Then love is useless; trust is useless.

You are just functioning with your old, conditioned mind that you have carried from the outside world.

And you are feeling another thing which you have to be reminded of, because if you are not reminded, you will create another fascist regime.

Freedom does not mean license.

In Magdalena restaurant, people are not ready to prepare food. They are free. They want to meditate. Then what is going to happen to five thousand people?

People are not working the way they were working under Sheela. That means you need Sheela. You should be working more - to prove that Sheela's fascism was unnecessary. People are not coming to their work, and even if they come they don't work. Do you see the implication of it?

Five thousand people have to live self-sufficiently. You have to produce your food, your houses, your vegetables, your milk products - everything. And if you are not working, because you think that's what freedom means, then you are behaving stupidly.

You should do just the opposite. You should work more, not as a slave, but out of your freedom and love for the whole commune, and you will prove that Sheela was wrong. And that will be the guarantee that nobody ever again takes any fascist steps. But if you act this way, then perhaps another Sheela will be needed; otherwise you cannot survive. It is simple arithmetic.

In Soviet Russia, when the country became independent from the czarist rule in 1917, in the Moscow main street a woman was found walking in the middle of the road. And when she was told by the policeman, "Walking in the middle of the road is not allowed"....

There are two possibilities: if the country decides, then keep to the left or keep to the right. But no country in the whole world has the idea to keep in the middle. Traffic will become impossible.

Accidents will increase a thousandfold. Just think, traffic in the middle! from both sides cars and buses and people walking! It will be a tragedy.

But the woman said, "Then what is the meaning of freedom, if I still have to keep the old rule?"

Don't be so idiotic, like that woman. Nobody should impose any rule over you. If you are responsible, intelligent, you will create a life of discipline on your own.

So remember, you can choose. If you want Sheela back, I can call her and her whole gang, and give the commune to her. If you don't want anybody to be dictatorial to you, then take responsibility.

Then work, and work more sincerely, honestly. The need simply disappears.

And you are a group of very intelligent people, but this is the trouble with intelligent people. They always try to misuse freedom.

I would like to remind you that Germany is one of the most intellectual countries in the world. It has given to the world people like Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Martin Heidegger - great philosophers, great psychologists. And still a third-class crackpot, Adolf Hitler, managed to get all the intelligentsia of the country to follow him.

And I don't think humanity has learned anything out of it. If you don't learn, then history repeats. If you learn, then you can stop history repeating again.

Martin Heidegger was perhaps one of the most significant philosophers of the century, and he was a contemporary of Adolf Hitler. He supported Adolf Hitler - inconceivable! The whole youth, which is the cream of the society, its intelligence, all the universities' vice-chancellors, professors - they all supported Adolf Hitler, a man who was uneducated, a man who was refused from the school of art, who was refused from the school of architecture, because he had no intelligence.

This man became the leader of the most intelligent country in the world, and he created the greatest fascist regime. He killed almost ten million people, and still people were supporting him. It has to be psychoanalyzed.

What was the reason? The reason was, Germany was defeated in the first world war. And the intellectuals tend to fight among themselves. They argue, rationalize, philosophize; they are not physically active people. And they are egoists. They think they have found the secret of life, every one of them.

After its defeat in the first world war, Germany was in a chaos. The chaos created Adolf Hitler, because he promised, and he fulfilled the promise, "I can make this country again united, again strong, so strong that it can rule over the whole world."

It was something that was immensely needed. People were not working, people were not being creative. Somebody was needed to make the country again creative, disciplined. And Adolf Hitler filled the gap. Within ten years Germany was again a world power.

Strange - if you give people freedom, they become lazy, they don't want to work. But if you give them a fascist order, they work to their very potential; they create, they are united, they become strong.

Germany went on winning for five years. That proved that the people of Germany had chosen the right person - the whole world on one side, and he alone was enough.

He gave the intelligentsia their ego as nobody had given them before. He said to them that the Nordic German race is the purest Aryan race, and it is its destiny to rule over the world, because all others are subhuman. It was tremendously gratifying. The intellectual ego was very much fulfilled, and even a man like Martin Heidegger fell into the trap.

Only after Hitler was defeated and Germany was almost destroyed, then people started looking back at what they had done, what kind of man they were supporting: a monster, a murderer who has killed millions of people - perhaps the greatest murderer in the whole history.

So remember one thing: freedom is not license. Freedom is responsibility. And if you cannot take your responsibility yourself, then somebody is going to take the responsibility on your behalf. And then you are enslaved.

People have been asking me how it happened that five thousand people, almost all university graduates, having the best qualifications from the best universities of the world, could not see for four years.

The reason is, Sheela was not only doing something ugly and fascist, she was also creating the commune. She was also making the desert into an oasis. She was making the commune comfortable in every way. Every coin has two sides.

So you looked at the light side. And you were surrounded - which Sheela and her group created - with hostility in Oregon. That is a simple political strategy.

Adolf Hitler, in his autobiography MY STRUGGLE, says that if you want a nation to be strong, create enemies all around it; otherwise, people relax. Keep them continuously in paranoia, fearing that there is danger all around.

And Sheela created that. She created the hostility of the Oregon government. She created the hostility of Americans in general. That made you come close to each other, become strong: "Be ready so that nobody can harm you."

So if you don't take the responsibility, something like that is bound to happen again. History certainly repeats, because man does not learn.

Now I want no hostility with anybody. We have been here for four years. Others may have been for four generations - that makes no difference. If in four years you cannot be Americans, you cannot be Americans in four hundred years either. Years don't count.

We love this land, and we are pouring our perspiration into this desert to make it an oasis. We have fallen in love with this desert.

And to me, America is perhaps the only hope for humanity, because the American Constitution is the only constitution which is authentically democratic. That is creating a trouble for American politicians, because those politicians are not democratic. So they go on continuously against their own Constitution.

We will fight for the Constitution of America against those Americans who are prostituting it. But there is no question of hostility. We are part of this country, and we are going to be part of this country forever.

And we are withdrawing everything that Sheela and her group created - fear, paranoia. I would like the City of Rajneesh to change its name back to Antelope. There was no need to change the name - Antelope is so beautiful a name - and why hurt people?

And I would like that the people of Antelope who have sold their properties to us should take them back. We have improved on their properties, we have renovated their dilapidated houses, and

anyway, prices in four years have gone high. But I don't want - because it is not a question of profit.... I would give them back at the same price as we had purchased them. And if they can take all the properties back.... We have such a big land here, why should our people live anywhere else?

We have three times more land than New York. We can create three New Yorks here. We have one hundred and twenty-six square miles. But we are not going to make those ugly structures, skyscrapers, against nature, against aesthetics. We will make small cottages which mix with nature, and we will make this place lush green. We need greenery, because the red becomes very great when there is greenery all around. Even trees understand it. Green trees and red flowers.... These are two basic colors.

And we want the government of Oregon to understand that we are Oregonians.

Governor Atiyeh has come from Lebanon. His father may have come, that does not matter. If he can be an Oregonian, why cannot you be an Oregonian? In fact, everybody in America is a foreigner except the Red Indians. Others have invaded the country. They have entered the country without any visa. They have exploited the poor people of the country. Their forefathers had no green cards.

We have not invaded. We have given more money for this land than anybody else was ready to give.

This land was for sale for fifty years, and nobody came to purchase it. The greatest offer was three and a half million. We have given six million dollars for the land.

You should compare it. The forefathers of Americans who had come here purchased New York for thirty dollars. Just a little arithmetic: thirty dollars for the whole of New York? - then we should pay only ninety dollars for this whole land. Why six million dollars? But we want to be just and fair.

These people who have come, without a visa, with no green card, no American passport, are asking us.... They should feel a little ashamed.

We have come into the country legally, and I have chosen the place because I am in tremendous love with the American Constitution. It is far more holy than THE HOLY BIBLE, because it gives you all the democratic values of life: individuality, individual property, freedom of speech, freedom of information. It gives you everything that individual growth needs.

We are for the Constitution, but the politicians are just corrupting it, in every way. You will be surprised to know that half of Oregon is owned by the federal government. This is not right; this is not according to the Constitution.

Government should not nationalize anything. This is underground communism. The property should belong to individuals - what does the government have to do with it?

And they had ideas to own the whole of Oregon. That's why they are against us - because now they know they can never have the whole of Oregon. Rajneeshpuram is here and cannot be purchased. So they have been doing everything illegal, persecuting. But there is no fear. We have the Constitution in our favor, and we will win in every court, so there is no question of fear.

And as far as the general masses of Oregon and America are concerned, we love them for one reason: that this is the only place which does not have a very loaded past.

For example, India has at least ten thousand years of conditioning. To change the Indian mind is an Himalayan task. But to change the American mind, to transform the American is simple. America does not have any past - three hundred years only. Compared to countries like India or Europe, it has no past; it has only future. Its past is so small, it can be deprogrammed very easily.

My whole religion consists in deprogramming.

I don't have any program to give to you; and I don't want to give any program to you, because that is against humanity. I simply want to deprogram you - clean, fresh, unburdened, just a bird on the wing in the sky. And you have to find yourself out of your freedom.

But freedom brings great responsibility. And I am trying to make you free, not only from fascist types of structures. I am trying to free you from Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Mohammedanism, all religions. They are all fascist, because their basic idea is belief.

They destroy your reason, they destroy your inquiry, they destroy your intelligence. They give you borrowed, centuries-old rubbish and call it knowledge. You call the BIBLE holy and every day you worship it, with great respect, without knowing that this is the most pornographic book in the whole world. If the Supreme Court of America is really fair, the BIBLE should be X-rated. But the same is the situation of other religious scriptures. All are pornography.

I want you to be free from any ideology so that you can be yourself and you can search and you can go into the unknown. That inquiry into the unknown is such an ecstasy, such a great excitement - the only pilgrimage. There is no need to go to Israel, no need to go to the Kremlin, no need to go to Varanasi. These are not real pilgrimages.

The only pilgrimage is the move from the known into the unknown, and from the unknown into the unknowable.

I am not even giving you a God, because the whole idea of God is again fascist. God created you, so what are you? - just puppets. And he could not find anything better, he created you with mud.

Humus means mud; that's why you are called human beings - from the Big Muddy Ranch.

And he was even more unfair to women, as if all the mud was exhausted in creating one Adam. But just to create inferiority - this God is a male chauvinist - he created the woman out of a rib of man.

He was not a qualified surgeon, still he did surgery - a criminal act. And I have heard a story that because he created Eve from one of Adam's ribs, each night when Adam goes to sleep, Eve will count his ribs. She has been counting since then.

But to accept a God is to accept a bigger Adolf Hitler, supreme-most, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent. He can do anything. You are just puppets in his hands. He created you; he can de-create you any moment.

And the guy seems to be whimsical. According to Christianity he created you four thousand and four years before Jesus Christ, and I am always puzzled, what has he been doing for the whole eternity?

Six thousand years old, and what was the fellow doing all along? He has a company: a holy ghost, a son. The company is gay - and AIDS is the result.

At least one woman would not have been bad. There would have been a little excitement, a little gossiping, love affairs, fights - some story. But these three queens, what were they doing for the whole eternity? I have asked Christian theologians, "You have to answer me: What were they doing?"

I have rejected this unholy trinity completely. Existence has always been here. Nobody has created it.

And Friedrich Nietzsche is right at least on this point: that God is dead and man is free. Those two things together - God is dead and man is free - are very significant.

If God is alive, man cannot be free. He is always there, and he is everywhere.

I have heard about a nun who would not take her clothes off even while taking a bath in a closed bathroom. Other nuns said, "This seems to be a little crazy. Why don't you take your clothes off?"

She said, "How can I? God is everywhere. And he is all powerful and he can do anything, any stupid thing - he can send the Holy Ghost to rape a virgin girl, Mary."

No, with God, man's freedom is not possible. God is a dictatorial idea. Communists may accept it....

Although they don't accept it, it would fit perfectly with them, with their ideology. But any democratic mind cannot accept God.

So my whole work here is to deprogram you - from God, from hell and heaven, from all religions, from all political ideologies, which are nothing but exploitations of you.

Why has man been so much interested in heaven and hell? Poor man needs a promise; otherwise living will be impossible. Hope is his opium. He knows here there is nothing possible, only after death. That's why all the religions go on giving hope to the poor - after death you will be rewarded.

"Blessed are the poor for they shall inherit the kingdom of God."

I don't see any point in poverty, any virtue in poverty - that they should inherit the kingdom of God.

If being poor is virtue, then where is your pope, who is the richest man in the whole world, going to end up? All your popes will be found in hell. They are not poor people.

But it is a consolation, and it is also preventive of any revolution against the rich. The BIBLE says that a camel can pass through the eye of a needle, but the rich man cannot enter into the gates of heaven. At least rich people should throw out this BIBLE; this is not for them. But they go on worshipping, they go on making more churches, more cathedrals.

They go on donating, making trusts, because they know that this is simply a consolation for the poor.

They are going to inherit the kingdom of God. They are already enjoying something of paradise - and experience counts. The poor man will not be able to enjoy paradise. He will be so unacquainted with any comfort, with any luxury. He is accustomed to poverty. Hell will suit him better.

The rich man knows perfectly well that he is going to be in paradise. For the rich man the paradise is his greed: more and more and more. For the poor man it is a consolation: to live with less and less and less.

I want you to be freed completely from heaven and hell.

Hell is your fear projected.

Heaven is your greed projected.

And when we can create paradise here, why bother with something which nobody knows exists or not, because nobody has ever come after death to inform us.

Strange - the story is that Lazarus died. He was a poor man, so he must have got into paradise.

Jesus revived him, but in the BIBLE there is no reference at all - because he has been for four days in paradise - Lazarus does not give any information. The only man who has come back does not give any information about paradise.

The reality is he was a friend of Jesus, and this whole thing was fake. Many people must have died in Jesus' time. If the man was capable of reviving people then why only Lazarus? This seems unkind.

Other people are dying. You can revive them just by touching them or by calling them, "Come back."

Such a small effort on your part and you give them life back. He never did that.

My own understanding is that Lazarus played the part; it was a trick. He was not dead. He was placed in a cave, and his two sisters, who were also followers of Jesus, waited for him. Messengers were sent. He came and he simply called from outside the cave, "Lazarus, get up!" And he got up.

He was not even asleep. And he says nothing about paradise, or anything about what happened in those four days.

I want you to be freed from all this nonsense. Try to live here, now, as totally as possible.

And the paradise is now here. If there is a paradise after death, certainly you will inherit it, because you will have already practiced for it.

And don't be worried even if you are thrown into hell - because you have been with me. I will be with you there, and we can create a great commune in hell.

And in hell there are all the colorful people. In heaven there are only sad, long faces, saints, dry bones, no juice, nothing. In paradise there is not even a single newspaper, no movie, no film actors, no poets, no painters. All the geniuses are in hell. So if we end up in hell, we are going to have a great time.

If we end up in paradise, we are still going to have a great time, teasing those idiotic saints, teaching them how to dance, how to sing.... Because for eternity, what are you going to do? Teach them how to make love, because all those monks must have been homosexuals.

All the monasteries are full of homosexuals. All the nunneries are full of lesbians. That's why I call AIDS a religious disease. It is the greatest contribution of all your religions to humanity.

It is death and nothing else. It is not a disease, because it has no cure. There is only one thing that has no cure, and that is death.

We are trying to live a different kind of life than in the outside world. So there are only two ways:

either the way of Sheela or my way. I had chosen Sheela to be my secretary to give you a little taste of what fascism means. Now, live my way. Be responsible, so that there is no need for anybody to dictate to you.

Every individual should contribute to the commune. It is not an ordinary society. There are no families, it is an organic whole. Contribute... because I have been hearing that since Sheela has left, many people are saying, "I don't want to do this, I don't want to do that," and they were doing it for four years.

You can change your job if you feel like changing, you can do something else. But just because nobody is going to force you, don't let the commune become crippled. It has to become more healthy. It has to prove the truth of independence.

Question 2:

We will get rid of the guns, but you are a mouse, not a man.

How did you get initiated into sannyas? Those guns have done no harm to anybody, and those guns are not to do harm to anybody. Those guns are here so that no harm is done to you.

The whole world is full of guns, nuclear weapons, atomic bombs. It is perfectly right to have your own defense system.

It has nothing to do with Sheela's paranoia.

Just a simple understanding.... If you don't have guns, and tomorrow the fanatic religious groups which are there, they come on their motorbikes and start destroying your things, what are you going to do?

I am a nonviolent man, but that does not mean that I will allow anybody to practice violence on me.

We will never do any harm to anybody, but those guns are perfectly right.

Even big countries like America cannot drown their nuclear weapons in the ocean, for the simple reason that if they stop creating more nuclear weapons and the Soviet Union invades, they will be helpless. The same is the situation in the Soviet Union. They cannot stop.

But one thing is certain, and tremendously good, good news: America and the Soviet Union are so full of nuclear weapons that a third world war is impossible. Both the countries have enough nuclear

energy to destroy humanity seven hundred times, and there is no Jesus Christ around to make the dead alive seven hundred times.

Jesus had promised to come, but one time was enough. The way you treated him, that ugly cross, and he was thirsty and he was asking for water.... A man of miracles could not manage a small cloud to shower on him. He was asking for water; he died thirsty. That experience was enough. He had promised his disciples he would be coming soon, but to stretch "soon" for two thousand years is too much. Even I cannot do that.

Both the countries are aware that now a third world war is not going to happen, for the simple reason that both have so much power that they will destroy the whole planet, all living things on the planet.

So what is the point? War has meaning if you can be victorious, if you can defeat somebody. But there will be no victory, no one victorious, no one defeated, simply all dead.

So it is good that nuclear weapons have come to a point where war is impossible. It is not impossible because of the politicians; it is impossible because of the nuclear weapons.

A few security guards are here. There is no question of any paranoia; I have been poisoned twice.

Many attempts have been made on my life. The last one was made before I came here, and it is something that has to be understood - in what a dirty political world we are living.

Ten thousand sannyasins were listening to a morning discourse, as you are listening. Suddenly twenty police officers, topmost police officers, came running in and informed me that they have been anonymously phoned by somebody saying that "A fanatic Hindu group - the same group that assassinated Mahatma Gandhi - wants to assassinate you this morning."

So we told them to sit and listen to the discourse, and certainly one man stood up and threw a knife, trying to kill me. The most amazing part of the story is that with ten thousand eye witnesses - it is very rare to find ten thousand witnesses for any attempted murder - twenty topmost police officers, the knife, and the man caught red-handed, still he was released as if he had not done anything.

We did not bother. I told my people, "It is a police case; let them try it - because the police were present, they have caught the person, they have taken the knife; now let them try the case. It is a police case. If they want our witnesses, then ten thousand sannyasins are here."

They did not accept their own police officers, they did not accept any witnesses. Simply the case was dismissed, as if the knife was never thrown at me, as if the man was innocent.

Do you want such a thing to happen here? And it is more possible in America than anywhere else, because in India to carry a weapon is not easy; in America you can purchase any weapon.

If you are willing to see me assassinated, it will be a great experience. Those guards can be removed.

I would like you to raise your hands. Do you want the guards to be here? Then raise both of your hands.

And where is the mouse?

Okay?