This whole earth belongs to us

Question 1:

In this commune, you cannot betray anybody except yourself. In the outside world the situation is different. You can betray Christianity, you can betray Jesus Christ, Moses, Mohammed. You can betray communism, Karl Marx. You can betray a thousand and one things, for the simple reason that they are all asking for your faith. Betrayal comes as the other side of faith.

I am not asking for your belief, I am not asking for your faith. There is no way to betray me or anybody else here. This is a commune of individuals, totally independent, living out of their freedom and responsibility.

There is nobody above you. You are alone here! So if you betray, you can betray only yourself. Let this sink as deep as possible in you, because every faith creates rebels, and every belief creates disbelief. The very seed of betrayal is sown in the idea of obedience.

God thought that Adam and Eve had betrayed him. In fact, he had created the whole situation himself. The Christian-Judaic God is a fascist. He orders his own children not to be wise, not to have eternal life. He is provoking them to betray. If they have any guts, they will do just what he is telling them not to do. And then he dumps on them that they have betrayed, they have not followed, they have not been faithful, reliable, trustworthy. They have committed a sin, they should be punished for it. And not only are Adam and Eve punished; generation after generation, each human child is being punished because thousands of years ago Adam and Eve had betrayed God.

You cannot betray me. You cannot betray anybody else in this commune. You are here out of your freedom, you can leave out of your freedom. You are welcome to come in; you are welcome to go out. Our respect for your individuality, for your freedom, for your decision, is absolute.

So remember: either you can fulfill yourself or you can betray yourself. If you fulfill yourself, your freedom will become a fragrance. If you fulfill yourself, your individuality will reach to its ultimate potential.

If you betray yourself, you will remain retarded. But nobody is punishing you. It is your action and its consequence.

Question 2:

That is this enlightenment all about? What do you understand by enlightenment?

The first thing: it can never be in the future. You cannot make a goal of it; it can never be tomorrow.

Either it is here and now, or never. Remember those words: now or never!

You have misunderstood the idea of enlightenment. The idea of enlightenment is to remain in the present moment. I call it meditation - not to go into the past, which is no more, not to go into the future, which is not yet - because if you go into past and future, you are going to miss the present moment, which is the only reality.

Just be here, now. And if you are here and now, enlightenment comes of its own accord. It is not a goal that you have to reach. It is not somewhere far away, so that you have to travel a path to it. It comes to you, you never go to it. It is not your doing, it is a happening.

All that you have to understand is: be authentically in the present, because there is no other reality anywhere. This small moment, this silence - and suddenly you will feel something arising from the very depths of your being. It has always been there; you never gave it a chance. You have been wandering everywhere, but you have not allowed your innermost core just a little space, a little time.

All the other religions teach you that God is there far away; you need a savior, a messiah, a prophet, a holy book, a religion, to help you to reach there. They teach you that heaven is far away, and you have to accumulate virtue to deserve it. They are keeping your eyes focused on a faraway future.

This is a very cunning strategy so that life goes on slipping out of your hands. From the cradle to the grave, you are just hoping and hoping and hoping. And what comes is neither God nor heaven, but death. And you missed the tremendous opportunity of being alive! You simply vegetated, because you were not interested in life itself. Even great thinkers, theologians....

One Christian theologian, a great intellectual, respected all over the world, was Stanley Jones. He was traveling all around the world, preaching the gospel of Christ.

I met him in one of his discourses. After the discourse I asked him, "Your discourse was beautiful, but do you understand what you are doing? You are harming all these simple people. You are proving exactly what Karl Marx used to say, that religions are nothing but opium to the people. I don't agree with Karl Marx on anything else, but on this statement I cannot disagree. You are giving them dreams of the future, of an eternal life beyond death. Have you been beyond death?

"Being a Christian, certainly you cannot say that you have been beyond death. A Hindu may be able to say yes, because he believes in many lives; he has been many times through the process of death. But you cannot say that. Christians, Jews, Mohammedans believe only in one life, so there is going to be only one death. Have you been beyond death? Have you come experiencing what you are saying?

"Be sincere. And I hope that you will be honest. And if you don't know what is beyond death, then why destroy these people's lives? Focusing their mind on the future, which is unknown, is really murderous. In my eyes, you are not a theologian but a murderer! The law may not catch you as a murderer, but you cannot deny that you have murdered many people; you have taken them away from the present - and that is the only life there is. Live this moment in its totality."

Other religions have goals. This is not a religion, this is a mystery school. This is a religio - the root from where the word "religion" has come. Religio means putting you together. Nothing else - no God, no heaven, no hell, just putting you together, a crystallization. And that can happen only in the present.

I don't sell opium, I am not a dope dealer. For that you will have to go to Christian bishops and cardinals and the pope - they are dope dealers. The dope is so subtle that the law cannot catch them; it is invisible. But it is far more dangerous than the ordinary dope. Once you get accustomed to focusing your life, your longing, your hope, in the future, you are finished. You have committed suicide, you will not be able to live.

I teach you life.

I teach you love.

I teach you meditation.

They all mean the same thing: to be in the present. And see the beauty of being in the present - the silence that descends, the serenity that surrounds you, a tremendous contentment that arises for no reason at all.

And as you become more and more attuned to the present, as your depth within yourself grows, suddenly one fine morning you really wake up! Not the everyday waking - you really wake up, because you are at your very center, and you see the whole life in a new light. The whole existence becomes luminous. Everything becomes a glory unto itself. Small things start having tremendous meaning. And what God had forbidden.... You have eaten the fruit of wisdom and the fruit of eternal life; now you know those trees are not outside you, they are your very being.

The Garden of Eden is not somewhere outside, it is within you. And once it is felt, what a relief, what a blessing! This I call enlightenment. Then moment to moment you go on growing more and more into light, into life, into love. There is no end to it. Even the sky is not the end. You are far bigger than the whole universe. You are carrying within yourself all the millions of stars, all the flowers, all the music of the world. There is nothing that you are missing.

This experience I call enlightenment. But please, don't make it a goal; otherwise you will miss it.

Make it a goal and you have missed it. You simply learn how to be in the present, and enlightenment comes to you. You don't have to go anywhere.

Question 3:

Yes, a few things....

Tell my sannyasins in the Soviet Union: one, that not only are they underground, now my whole sannyas movement is underground. I have taken away everything outside and left you with only meditation. No government, no fanatic religion is capable of finding the treasure of meditation that you are carrying. And outer things don't matter.

Russian sannyasins have always felt sad because even though they live in a red country, they cannot use red clothes. Now there is no problem: we have claimed the whole rainbow. Now all colors are our sannyas colors, so they should not feel sad anymore. And now it is possible in the Soviet Union to spread meditation more easily; hence the Soviet Union is one of the most potential countries.

It needs meditation, because Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Lenin - the communist trinity - had no idea of meditation at all. They have never been to their inner being. They have never touched their own self and felt its benediction. They were poor people.

And in Russia, after the revolution, everything that is in any way related to religion has become a crime. But what I am giving, even the Soviet Union cannot deny, because we don't have any God, we don't have any heaven and hell, we don't have any priesthood, we don't have any prayer, we don't have any kind of ritual.

We have declared that we are no longer a religion. We don't have any theology. We are seekers of our own interiority - that has nothing to do with religion. And who can prevent you from going inwards? You can be prevented from going to some place outwards, but you cannot be prevented by any force, atomic, nuclear - no force can prevent you from going inwards.

And there is no principle in the whole literature of Marxism which says that going into your own being is against communism. It has nothing to do with communism. Communism is just a political phenomenon. To go inside is just like sleep; what has sleep to do with communism? Going inside is absolutely unconnected with any kind of politics.

So tell the sannyasins in the Soviet Union that they need not be afraid. The KGB is persecuting them - make it clear to them that we are not a religion, and we don't have any politics. What we are doing is an "insearch." And, according to the Soviet constitution, insearch is not a crime. So don't be afraid. Be straightforward and up front.

Meditation is not a prayer. Prayer needs a God: meditation needs no God. Meditation needs only you, ready to explore what is inside you: What is this life? What is this consciousness?

And Russia has more potential, because for sixty, seventy years the Russian people have been deprived of any inner journey. It is just like a land which has remained unused for seventy years. No crops have been grown. The land is ready to burst forth - just the seeds are needed. That's why I say Russia is one of the most potential countries. And meditation is the seed.

Meditation can become a wildfire in Russia, because everything else is difficult. The government is continuously after you; even walls have ears. Everybody is a detective - but nobody can detect your meditation. Spread it! Many people need it.

The second thing: tell the Russian sannyasins not to feel in any way sad that in other countries sannyasins are free. It is not true. Our experience in America proves it - that all democracy is simply talk. The American Constitution is beautiful, but the politicians are just as ugly as anywhere else. The Constitution is a dead book. The power is in the hands of the politicians, and they are doing everything that they can do to destroy sannyasins. That is the reason that I am telling my sannyasins to go underground. And it is so easy for my sannyasins to go underground: no red clothes, no mala - you are underground.

I am not a sadist. I don't want you to be unnecessarily persecuted, tortured, harassed. There is no need when you can go underground so easily. The politicians will prove absolutely impotent; they cannot do anything to you.

In Mohammedan countries we have sannyasins. They were also feeling bad that they cannot be like every other sannyasin, and the movement cannot grow. Now it can grow everywhere; now there are no barriers.

It is the same thing - the politicians may talk of democracy, they may talk of dictatorship, it doesn't matter. Politicians are simply politicians. Their minds function in the same way, their cunningness is the same. Yes, their masks may be different. In these four years we have seen that the American politician has only the mask of a democrat. Behind democracy is hypocrisy and nothing else.

This whole world is tortured by politicians in different names, exploited in different names. The only way to get out of this exploitation is to spread meditation to as many people as possible - because the meditator is no longer gullible. He has a maturity and an intelligence; words cannot deceive him.

And if the major part of the world becomes meditative, it will release such a great energy of peace, love, compassion.... That, to me, is the only possibility of preventing the third world war, because meditators will refuse to fight, meditators will refuse to be violent. It does not matter whether they are American or Russian or Indian, the quality of meditation is the same. It makes you so sensitive that you cannot be destructive.

And if the whole world simply refuses to fight, then if these politicians are so interested in fighting they can have wrestling matches, boxing matches, and meditators will enjoy it tremendously. But the world is not going to be destroyed by these idiots.

I am not a pacifist. I will not tell you to go on a protest march to Moscow or to the White House or to anywhere. Those protest marches have been going on - they don't make any difference. I want you to be peaceful - not pacifist, but just a deep pool of peace. That is the only possibility of saving humanity.

And if we can avoid the third world war, then many doors open. There is no need of nations... what is the need of nations? I don't see the point. It is because of the wars that nations are needed. It is a vicious circle; because of the nations, war is needed. If there is no need of any war, then there is no need of any boundaries.

Then why America? Why Soviet Russia? Why India? Why China? This whole earth belongs to us.

And if the whole earth becomes one organic whole, poverty can be destroyed very easily. Seventy- five percent of the whole world's energy, income, is going into the service of death, making more and more sophisticated nuclear weapons. If the world is one, all this energy can become creative; all these scientists can change the whole direction of their work, and this seventy-five percent energy and income will become available to people.

There is no need for any Ethiopia - one thousand people dying every day; there is no need. There is no need for India to remain undernourished. Fifty percent of the people - and that is a big number, four hundred million people - are eating only one time a day. Soon, within months, India will be another Ethiopia.

But if the world is one, if war is no longer needed, the whole energy devoted to war can be devoted to getting rid of poverty, can be released for people's comfort, luxury.

Meditation can bring the only revolution there is. All other revolutions have failed.

Question 4:

No, they are still relevant. A man like George Gurdjieff never becomes irrelevant. People of that category are eternally relevant. Politicians may be behaving in an ugly way - the only way they know - but America is not just the American politicians.

Gurdjieff's last words before he died were "Bravo, America." His disciples were at a loss to figure it out. Their whole life they had been in trouble with this man, and now at the last.... Nobody could have expected that his dying words would be, "Bravo, America." And he was dying in France! And now he is dead so you cannot even ask, "What do you mean?" But what he said was more significant, meaningful, than ordinary intellect can understand.

America is the youngest country in the whole world, its history is only three hundred years. It is nothing compared to the histories of China, India. In India, three hundred years mean nothing. The Indian astrologers prove - and nobody has been able to contradict them yet - that Indian civilization is at least ninety thousand years old.

In the RIGVEDA, the most ancient book in the whole world, a certain constellation of stars is described in detail, in every particular, precisely. That constellation happened ninety thousand years ago, according to the scientists. Since then that kind of constellation has not happened again.

There is no way for the people who were writing the RIGVEDA to describe the stars and their constellations in such precise and exact detail unless they had observed it. Now the proof is such that no argument can defeat it. A country which is ninety thousand years old - what does three hundred years mean to it? China perhaps is even older.

Gurdjieff's statement means first that America has no burden of past conditioning - one thing. It is a very thin layer of conditioning, three hundred years, in comparison to ninety thousand years. To change the Hindu mind is almost impossible. It is so old, so thick; so deep have gone the roots.

But the American mind is only very superficially conditioned - one thing which makes it possible that America can be deprogrammed, and Americans can become the first citizens of a new world.

Perhaps Gurdjieff was remembering the words, "brave new world," when he said, "Bravo, America."

Secondly, America is the only country where all kinds of people - Spanish, Italian, English, German, Swedish, Belgian, Swiss - all kinds of people have mixed. It is not a race; it is more cosmopolitan than any other country.

The man of the future has to be cosmopolitan. He cannot be an Italian, a German, an Indian, an African. No, he can only be a human being. There is more possibility in America for it to happen. All other countries are racial; America is a nonracial country. It is a tremendous opportunity to create a new world without any racial mind.

Thirdly, America is more receptive to new ideas, new technologies, new scientific research, than any other country, for the simple psychological reason that a child has no past, he has only a future. That's why he is always ready to learn - in fact, asking too many questions because he wants to know what this life is all about. He harasses his parents by asking questions which the parents themselves don't know how to answer. They don't know the answers either, and they are not courageous enough to say, "We don't know."

An old man has no future, only past. The old man looks backwards, not forwards. In the future there is only darkness and death, in the past are all his golden memories; he lives in the past. The same is true about countries. A country like India or China has such a long past - they live in the past.

India thinks it has seen its golden age.

You will not believe that in India the theory of evolution is not acceptable. India has another theory:

the theory of involution. Things are not going, growing, towards better states, evolving - no. Things are falling down - involution.

India has the idea that the best age was thousands of years ago; they call it the "age of truth." Then the second stage came, the fall started. They call it simply "the age of three legs." The reason is that the first age they compare to a table with four legs - completely balanced, with no possibility of falling. The second stage has lost one leg, so it is a tripod with three legs, treta - still not too bad, because even with three legs a tripod has a certain balance. The third stage they call dwapar - the age of two legs. Now things are becoming dangerous. A table with two legs - it is not a bicycle, it is bound to fall. The bicycle will also fall unless you go on riding it so that it has no chance to fall. Slow down and it starts wavering; stop and it falls. But a table is not a bicycle, so it is bound to fall. The fall is inevitable. The fourth stage has only one leg. They call it "the age of darkness" - kaliyuga.

We are living in the age of darkness.

Now, a country which thinks in such terms cannot accept evolution. It has happened - now there is no future. The golden age has come and gone; now there is only darkness and death.

America is just like a child. Three hundred years compared to ninety thousand years - it is just a small child. It has its eyes open, ready to evolve, to grow. It has no past to be bothered about.

Gurdjieff is still relevant, and will remain relevant always. People like him never become irrelevant.

In spite of the third-rate politicians, America is going to evolve, evolve into the new man, evolve into a new humanity.

I have chosen to be here, I have called you to be here, because I don't want Gurdjieff to become irrelevant. His prophecy has to be fulfilled.

Question 5:

Done!

Question 6:

It is time to start fresh communes. I am absolutely against centralization.

Question 7:

You are the reason!

Okay?