Now meditation is needed even more

Question 1:

It seems you come from Poland: PO, PO, PO! Get to Poland as soon as possible. You may be the next pope chosen. You are showing all the qualities that are needed to be a pope.

I am surprised. Are there so many idiot-generals in Oregon with no sense of humor? Do you think a lazy man like me will hijack a plane? - a man who has never hijacked even a bicycle? Stone embassies? Just sometime come and touch my hand; it has never taken up a stone. You can feel the softness of it.

One of my friends came to see me from Russia. Shaking hands with me, he said, "I suggest you should never come to Russia."

I said, "Why?"

He said, "Your hands will create trouble. Anybody shaking hands with you will immediately take his hand back: your hand is bourgeois." It is true. I have never done anything with my hands.

I was joking with the journalists, but idiots can't understand any sense of humor. The attorney general of Oregon has immediately put the National Guard on alert. It is good. To be alert is always good. That's my whole teaching! Keep the National Guard, your armies, twenty-four hours alert.

That's what I want. And I can go on making statements so that you have to keep them alert.

But just for you - privately, don't tell it to anybody - we are nonviolent people, vegetarians: we don't do such things.

There is no need to do it. Our joy, our laughter, our love, our silence, our meditation, are a far bigger force than nuclear weapons. They can try, they can kill our bodies; they cannot kill our spirit. And the moment they kill our bodies they are really getting into greater danger, because then our spirits are free to go around the world, with no visa, no passport, no green card. I am preparing you for that.

Hijacking planes or throwing stones at embassies is for retarded politicians.

We have nothing to do with politics.

We are the only group of people in the whole world which is apolitical.

So you have to understand; you get confused. I am always speaking the truth - sometimes in a way that looks like a joke, sometimes in a way that looks like a contradiction, sometimes in a way that looks like a lie; but I am always saying the truth, and truth alone.

Those who understand me have no difficulty, no conflict, no confusion. So meditate a little more; otherwise I will send you to Poland. Po stands for Poland, where everybody is confused. Nobody knows what is right, what is wrong. Nobody knows when to say yes, when to say no.

Here, you have to attain to clarity, to insight into everything, and I am giving you all the opportunities to see. And I will be giving you bigger and bigger opportunities to see yourself, understand yourself.

Right now, you have missed the point. Try to see that it does not happen again. Next time, get it.

And it is my everyday business to create a situation in which you can miss or get it.

Just the other day I said that I am not anybody's master, and nobody is my disciple. One sannyasin, immensely happy, wrote a letter to me, "This is what I always wanted to be: your friend."

I have no objection. I want you all to be my friends - but you will have to travel a long way to be my friends.

You are living in the dark valley of your unconscious. You are fast asleep.

If you want to be my friends, then awake.

She has also asked, and that shows the mind of the sannyasin, "Now that we are your friends, is meditation needed anymore?"

Now meditation is needed even more.

A master-disciple relationship means the disciple can depend on the master, and the master has a certain responsibility. I dropped that responsibility yesterday. Now I am no longer responsible for anybody. You have to be responsible for yourself. You cannot depend on me. I am not your savior, I am not your leader. Now you have to become your own savior.

She got the idea of being a friend, but she missed the whole point.

Be as independent as I am.

Be as free of mind as I am.

Be as centered as I am.

Experience the same ecstasy, the same vast experience of ultimate blissfulness.

Then only can you be my friends.

Now you are to be more mature. A disciple can remain retarded, but a friend cannot be forgiven if he remains retarded. So every day I will be giving you chances. It is an effort to sharpen your intelligence, to give you integrity, individuality, to give you freedom from everything, to give you the beauty of your aloneness.

Question 2:

I am grateful for your understanding. But it is not that your love is not enough for me. You love me more than anybody has ever been loved. You cannot let me down.

Telling you that it is up to you to wear malas or not, it is up to you to be in red clothes or not, is not out of any hurt feeling in me. Nobody can hurt me - that is impossible, because in the first place I never expect anything from anybody. So disappointment is impossible.

I have said these things because I love you, and I want you to be responsible and to take decisions on your own so that no fascist kind of regime again fetters you and destroys you. I cannot be with you always. One day I will have to leave my body, and then there will be every possibility of people exploiting you, becoming your leaders.

That was the great hope of Sheela that I shattered. She wanted to be the high priestess of the latest religion. When I said nobody is going to succeed me, and nobody is going to represent me, that was the day she started thinking of leaving, because her whole desire was to become the high priestess.

I am not going to create popes, shankaracharyas, Ayatollah Khomeiniacs; each and every sannyasin who loves me individually inherits all the treasures of my being, experience, love, blissfulness.

Nobody is going to be the priest. Then you create another Vatican.

We are tortured by these popes, shankaracharyas, imams, rabbis. It is time that man is freed from all these fetters. It is out of my love that I want you to be free, totally free, no dependence, no father figure, nobody between you and your truth, no mediator. That's why I will destroy everything that can create the old mistake all religions have fallen into.

Tomorrow I am going to have a world press conference in which the book RAJNEESHISM will be put to fire and burned. I don't want you to be Rajneeshees; one Rajneesh is enough. You have to be yourself.

You loved me, I am grateful for it, but I don't want you to imitate me. Imitators are phony. Imitators are bound to be unnatural, because they are going against their potential.

Nature produces each individual as unique. In twenty-five centuries, how many Buddhist monks have been trying to become Gautam Buddha? Not a single one has succeeded. For two thousand years, how many Christian monks have been trying to become Jesus Christ? None of them has succeeded. And the same is the story around the earth in all the religions.

Still we are blind; we can't see a simple fact, that Jesus, Buddha, Moses, Mohammed - or anybody, known or unknown - is unique, unrepeatable.

Nature does not like carbon copies. Nature loves original faces.

My effort is to take away all the barriers so that you can discover your original face; to remove all the masks so that you can discover who, in reality, you are. And the moment you realize yourself, that will be the moment of your gratitude towards me, because then you will understand why I was destroying everything that you thought was a connection. It was not a connection, it was a dependence.

I hate the word "ism." I hate collectivities. I respect the individual. Collectivities are mobs, and the mob psychology has to follow the lowest denominator. Only individual peaks can become Everests.

Collectivities become only flat ground. Do you want to be just a flat ground? Wouldn't you like to be an Everest, reaching higher and higher towards the stars?

Whatever I am doing is out of my love.

I cannot see you dependent. I cannot see you being harassed, tortured, ordered, made to obey - no. Hence, I say to you: My way of life is not a religion. It is certainly a kind of religiousness.

To be religious without being attached to any religion is the most beautiful experience of life. Then religiousness is a quality, not a faith.

Slowly slowly, I am taking away all excuses for your faith. I have taken away God, I have taken away paradise. I have taken away the fear of hell, taken away the greed for heaven. And I don't want anybody after me to undo what I have done.

It all depends on you.

My guards, be on alert!

Question 3:

This is the only way it can be. We are all strangers to each other. The closer we come in friendship and love, the more we see the strangeness of the other, the uniqueness of the other, the unpredictability of the other.

When we are not friends and lovers, then just acquaintance is enough. You know the name of the person, you know his profession, you know his address. Do you think this is knowing the individual?

You may know that he is a doctor, or a shoemaker, but those are functions; they don't have anything to do with the reality of the being. The doctor can become a carpenter, can become a gardener.

And one day, he will be retired from the hospital.

You may not know why retired people become so irritable, so angry; any excuse is enough for them to explode. Why are old and retired people in such agony, anguish? The reason is, they have lost their identity.

When they were doctors, professors, they had a certain identity. Others believed them to be doctors - to be professors, to be engineers, to be scientists - and they also believed they were doctors. Now that mask has slipped. Now they don't know who they are.

It is a chaos in their mind, they cannot figure it out. And they are angry against the whole world which kept them in darkness about themselves for their whole life. And still there is no way made available by the society so they can find their real original face.

When you are acquainted with a person there is no need to bother about his anxieties, his future, his past. Your acquaintance is professional. You may meet him in the marketplace: he is a teacher, you are a student; things are quite defined. You are a patient, he is a doctor; things are quite defined.

But behind the patient there is a human being, behind the doctor there is a human being - they remain unknown to each other.

But when you love somebody the difficulty arises. When you are really a friend to somebody, a great question haunts you, because now your friendship, your love, cannot be satisfied by knowing that he is a doctor or a professor. You know those are his professional functions, but he is not exhausted by them: Who is he?

The closer you come, the more you become strangers to each other, because all false labels, identity cards, passports, nationalities, religions, start disappearing. You are facing a naked human being, and you are also a naked human being - just the way you were born. Even the name is just a label given by others.

Love reveals the stranger in the other.

This is one of the most significant questions in the human relationship, because you are afraid of the stranger - and the stranger is in your bed! And you don't know this man, you don't know this woman; it is risky. If you don't know this man, this woman, you cannot predict what he is going to do in the night. Perhaps he may steal everything and escape, or may kill you. So people start finding new, phony labels - husband and wife. Again you are going away from each other. You were not capable of remaining strangers and yet lovers.

I would like my people to know that it is a tremendous joy to discover the stranger in your friend, because this is the only reality. Don't camouflage it, don't cover it up. Don't go to a church to get married. Let him remain unpredictable; this is his independence and his birthright. And the same is true for you; this is your independence and your birthright.

In fact, nature does not allow anybody to enter into the privacy of any individual. Nature is immensely compassionate: you cannot trespass.

I can know myself, nobody else can know me. You can know yourself, nobody else can know you.

This is a blessing.

Only machines can be known by others. This is man and his privilege, that his privacy is absolutely guaranteed. Only he can enter into his center - experience, feel, understand, see. This is possible only if friends and lovers allow each other to remain strangers.

All your efforts to cover up the strangeness of the other are the causes of all the conflicts in every home. Husband and wife, mother and children, father and children, children and parents - they are all trying desperately to reduce you to a thing. They are trying to mold you in such a way that you become predictable, so that there is no fear about you.

But all these strategies create conflict. Instead of two persons, there are four persons in a bed. Two are the real - which are strangers, which have to hide behind a mask. Two are the masks, which are making love, kissing each other. Masks are kissing each other, promising each other that they will remain in love forever. But masks...?

And the stranger behind it already knows that this is false, what you are saying is untrue. You are simply saying it to make things convenient. You are creating a situation of consolation. But nobody wants to be encaged in a mask. He hates the person who has forced him to be someone he is not.

Every husband hates his wife, every wife hates her husband. Children hate their parents, parents hate their children. The whole world is full of hate, and the reason is that we have been denying reality.

Drop all the masks, and declare that you are a stranger. Say the truth, that "I cannot promise you that I will be loving you tomorrow too. Only tomorrow knows." Be truthful and authentic and sincere.

It may look a little harsh in the beginning, but soon you will see its beauty, its glory, its joy.

Yes, your question I can understand. You say, "I love you, you are my friend. But the more I love you the more I feel you are a stranger."

I am. You are too. Everybody is a stranger.

And it is good, tremendously good that everybody is a stranger, so that you can explore, inquire, and always remain excited. What is the woman going to turn into tomorrow? What is the man going to do tomorrow? No expectations - with strangers, you don't have expectations - no disappointments.

Whatever happens has to be accepted without any complaint.

Of course, a stranger is a stranger, and he will behave in his strange way. But life becomes really an excitement, every moment an ecstasy. And when you know that perhaps tomorrow the woman may not be in your hands, then only today is yours. In fact, only this moment is yours.

Squeeze the whole juice out of this moment. The next moment is uncertain.

If we accept the truth of the strangeness of everybody, people will start living in the present. Right now, people are only miserable in the present, they don't live in the present. They live in their hopes:

tomorrow everything will be good. And that tomorrow never comes. What comes is more misery, more trouble, more problems. And life becomes just a tragedy.

I would like your life to remain a beautiful comedy, an ongoing carnival.

And if your wife and you are strangers - and there is no way to change this situation, this is existential - if your children and you are strangers, how much joy there will be, because each time you meet your wife, you meet a new woman... a new husband... each time a new child, a new parent.

Otherwise, in ordinary life - people have lived for thirty years together, and ask the husband, "Just close your eyes and remember the face of your wife," and he cannot. Thirty years living together and he cannot remember the face of his wife! But he can remember the neighbor's wife's face perfectly well because she was a stranger, and his wife was just taken for granted.

Who loves one's own wife, one's own husband? If you can find somebody, he must be a crackpot.

But who can avoid being attracted to beautiful women in the neighborhood, to beautiful men in the neighborhood?

Have you observed a simple fact, that you never dream about your husband, you never dream about your wife? You dream about women, but they are never your wife - somebody else's wife. You dream of Cleopatra, of some Italian film actress... Lolita.... Who is going to waste his sleep dreaming about his own wife - who is sleeping by his side dreaming about Muhammad Ali!

The reason is simple. You reduce the other person, as if you know him or her. Your knowledge is false.

Let your wife become a stranger - which she has always been. Let your children be strangers. They have come from the beyond. They may have come through you, they have used you as a passage, but they don't belong to you.

You can love them, but you cannot make them Christians, Jews, Hindus, Americans, Russians, Indians. These are the strategies: labeling them from every side so the real stranger is hidden and remains hidden his whole life.

And the stranger cannot live, because that is not expected. The stranger has to be repressed, and the false goes on living, because the false is the one accepted by the culture, by the religion, by the society, by everybody. Everybody is living a phony, plastic, American life.

You can come out of it very easily, just the way a skin is dropped by a snake. Every year he slips out of it, leaving it behind. He does not even look backwards. Drop all your falsities which give you identity and just be yourself, which will make you a stranger, but which will also make your life a constant song, a dance, a rejoicing - at least with me.

I am just myself, I don't have any mask; so naturally if you love me and you come closer to me, you will find me more and more a stranger. Don't freak out! Come even closer. I will help you also to become a stranger.

If the whole humanity becomes real, everybody will be a stranger, and all hate, all repression, all dreaming, all psychoanalysis will disappear of its own accord.

I don't dream, for the simple reason that whatsoever I am, I am - the whole day. I don't repress anything, so there is no content in me which can become a dream. If I see a beautiful woman, I don't take my eyes away because this is not good.

Psychologists have found that to look at any woman more than three seconds is not mannerly; she will be offended. That is her problem. But if I like a woman, I will look at her to my heart's content.

If I can look at a beautiful roseflower more than three seconds, and I can look at a bird on the wing, and I can look at the stars.... Of course, human beauty is closer to me. I am sensitive to beauty.

And once I am satisfied, that woman cannot disturb my sleep.

There was one Egyptian king - a little bit of a crazy type - he declared to his kingdom, "A few people go on coming into my dreams, and that I don't like! So if anybody comes into my dream, he will be beheaded. So be aware!" Now, people were very much afraid. Nobody was coming into his dreams, they were his dreams; but many people were beheaded. It was his repression; but other people suffered.

I don't have any repression about anything. My sleep is simple and silent.

The more you come close to me, the more you will find a vast opening into a strange world. And this will happen to you with anybody; just the masks have to be dropped. And if you love through the mask, it is ugly. Then why not love through the servants?

I can send my servant to my girlfriend and tell him, "Give her a good kiss, make love to her on my behalf; but remember, you are only a servant."

Perhaps in the future, when people are very rich and they don't want to take the trouble of making love, they will hire people, because it is such a gymnastics; and fear of AIDS.... It is good that servants do it all. But the servants will be doing it on their own behalf, so they will enjoy it.

But this is actually happening! Your mask is kissing your woman - and not really the woman, but the mask of the woman. Two masks kissing each other, and two fools standing behind! The beds are made for two people, not for four, but in every bed there are four people. Hence, every bed is a bed of thorns, not of roses.

Remember one basic truth, that there is no way possible that you can know your friend. You can know only yourself. Socrates says, "Know thyself." Knowing yourself, you will have a glimpse of others too, but there is no way to know the other. Allow him to know himself or herself.

Wisdom comes in freedom. And love allows the space in which wisdom can descend.

This commune is a love commune. I have taken away the false God; now I have to point out to you the real God. It is love. Love is the greatest transformation you can have, but be ready for a great pilgrimage in an unknown territory.

Don't be afraid, there is nothing to fear. The territory may be unknown, but it is full of treasures. On each step you will find new treasures opening their doors. Don't stop until you have found yourself, because that is the treasure of all treasures. Nothing is beyond it.

Sabar upar manus satya, tahar upar nahin.

One of the mystics, Chandidas, says, "The truth of man is the highest truth, and there is nothing beyond it."

And you are that truth.

Question 4:

Read it again.

Question 5:

If you have not felt it about your own being - the preciousness, the ecstasy, the joy - how can you feel it about me? It is not possible. You are projecting, you are imagining. And this is the trouble.

Now think of your words - that's why I said, "Read it again." It was not for me, it was for you.

You say you have come upon the most precious experience upon the whole earth. What do you know of the whole earth? There are four billion people on the earth. Have you experienced all four billion people? Don't make exaggerated statements.

You may not even have experienced the five thousand sannyasins who are here in Rajneeshpuram.

You have not even experienced yourself. When you write a question, be very alert what you are writing. People are always getting misled by beautiful words.

This is your projection. But just think, tomorrow you come to my room and you find me smoking, or just drinking champagne. What will happen to your question? You will say, "My God!" All your great ideas will disappear; on the contrary, you will move to the other extreme. Again that will be a projection. It is unnecessary to make an opinion about me. What is the use? Why waste time? - because I don't know what you have projected on me.

My mother was saying to me, "This is too much: you have been shocking people all your life from your childhood, and now you are dancing with girls on the stage!"

Now, she is an old-fashioned, simple Indian woman, with a mind conditioned by centuries. She cannot conceive of Buddha dancing with girls, naturally. You cannot conceive of it either. Can you conceive of Jesus dancing with girls? But you can conceive of Jesus drinking wine, because that's what he was doing. So you are conditioned for that. But nobody in India can conceive of Buddha drinking wine.

Opinions are yours, and I am a stranger, unpredictable; I can do anything which can go against your expectations. Then you will feel frustration, then you will move to the very opposite extreme.

Sheela, in her statements to the press in Germany, has repeatedly said, "Rajneesh is the most corrupted man on the earth." One journalist was asking me what is my comment. I said, "It is a compliment! To be the most corrupted man on the earth - it is a unique thing."

And poor Sheela does not understand. She was accustomed to calling me "the most enlightened man upon the earth": it is the same sentence, just she has moved to the polar opposite. "The most enlightened man upon the earth" has become "the most corrupted man upon the earth." And I had been telling her, "Drop this idea of the most enlightened man, because I am afraid this may change any day into its opposite."

And now she is saying such lies, you cannot conceive. She is saying, "Rajneesh is not enlightened."

She has been with me for almost ten years. In ten years she could not realize that "Rajneesh is not an enlightened man"? A sudden revelation! But that is nothing; that I knew could happen any day. Whenever her power would go, she would turn sour, bitter, angry. What does she know about enlightenment? She knows nothing.

She is saying, in her statement, "Instead of an enlightened master and disciples, Rajneesh's relationship with his disciples is that of a pimp with prostitutes." I don't get angry at anything. I can understand.... But the problem is: she was the only prostitute coming to me! I never go out of my room. If I am the pimp, then who is the prostitute?

And the job of a pimp is a difficult job - particularly for a man like me who never leaves his room, never goes to the disco, never goes to the hotel, to the restaurant. Where will I find customers for the prostitutes? And if I am the pimp, then she was the only prostitute. She was coming to me, and she was carrying my messages. Perhaps all those twenty persons who have escaped with her are all prostitutes. There are a few male prostitutes also involved!

Can you conceive of Sheela saying that? I can. This is the problem with people who project ideas.

I was the most enlightened person, the most beautiful person, the greatest master who has lived in the world. But finally, it turns out that I am only a pimp.

I have no objection. The problem is, she has taken all my prostitutes, so how am I to earn my livelihood? A pimp without prostitutes is really in bad shape. And certainly, out of the five thousand sannyasins here, nobody can stand up and say that she is the prostitute and I am the pimp. Sheela should come here and face me directly! Is there anybody for whom I have worked like a pimp?

Stand up.

I have no objection to being called anything, because this is people's minds. But if there is no prostitute here, then the only possibility is that Sheela was the head prostitute, and the other twenty - the whole gang of prostitutes - have left the poor pimp alone.

Don't project, because your projection can change any day. I don't care about your projections, because they show your mind; they don't show anything about me. You use me just like a screen, and you project your mind. When your mind changes, you project something else. And the screen is always empty. Withdraw your projections and the screen is absolute silence and purity. There is nothing on it.

You are asking me, can you also be the same type of person as I am? Not exactly. But essentially, you can know yourself just the way I have known myself. You can explore your being the same way that I have done. And I am teaching you all the techniques, how to explore.

And please stop projecting anything on me; otherwise, I will have to suffer all these types of projections that Sheela is doing. Learn a lesson from it: leave me alone.

My prayer to you is: please don't project anything upon me. That will be a great favor to me. Just leave me alone the way I leave you alone. I never project anything on you. Please do the same to me.

Question 6:

Just be a witness of all those emotions, thoughts, which you call the cyclone. Just be a witness, and that point of witnessing is the center of the cyclone.

This is the simplest method to realize oneself.

Question 7:

There is nothing to explain, just read the BIBLE. Nearly five hundred pages, spread all over the BIBLE, are pornographic. If you find it difficult to read the whole BIBLE, then just read in the Old Testament, the "Song of Solomon," and you will be completely satisfied as to what I am talking about.

It is the worst pornographic literature ever. You will find all kinds of perversions - homosexuality, bisexuality, sodomy, making love to animals.

Perhaps, just reading, you are not conscious of it. So I am telling my people to prepare, from all those five hundred pages of pornography in the BIBLE, a pictorial, glossy book, so that you can see what sodomy means. Seeing a picture is easier....

If PLAYBOY had no pictures in it, just reading, I don't think anybody would bother about it. Nobody bothers about the written content, people are interested in the pictures.

So I am going to produce a BIBLE with really beautiful pictures, real living models doing all kinds of perverted sexual acts, with the quotations of the BIBLE to support them.

You will just have to wait a little!

Okay?