Your aloneness cannot be destroyed

Question 1:

Death is always there. You may be unaware of it, but it is always confronting you with immediacy.

You cannot be certain of the next moment.

But we go on living - and nobody believes that he is going to die; it is always the other who dies.

You have seen people dying, many people of all kinds - children, young people, old people - but you have never seen yourself dying. So obviously somewhere in your mind the idea persists that it is always the other who dies. But remember, those who are dead also had the same idea; for them you are the other. And one day you will be dying, and the people who will take you to the graveyard will not feel at all the immediacy of death.

It is always there - just like a shadow to you. From the very first moment of your birth you have been dying. It is a fallacy to think that death comes like an accident, suddenly when you are seventy, eighty, ninety. No. Death and life are together. The moment you are born you start dying.

But man is very clever in deceiving himself.

Each of your birthdays is an effort to forget that it is not your birthday, it is your death day; you have died one year more. But with flowers and candles and cakes, one forgets the immediacy of death.

It is always with you.

Birth is the beginning of death.

So AIDS in fact should not make you serious; on the contrary it should make you more alert, more aware, because you are a rare person for whom death is a certainty, and you cannot deceive yourself anymore.

Many who do not have AIDS will be dying before you, but their death will be coming without their knowing. And to know is always better than not to know. Something can be done when you know a fact is going to happen.

The AIDS patient knows that within two years he is going to die. This immediacy of death should wake you up. Now there is no more time for you to fool around, no time for you to deceive yourself.

Death is just there waiting for you, and you are fortunate that you know it.

Knowing of your death can become a transformation.

If you know you are going to die within two years, these two years can be devoted to meditation.

Otherwise people are always postponing; they will meditate tomorrow - and tomorrow never comes.

And there are so many other things to do, you don't have time for meditation.

But a man who is fully aware that now there is no way, that tomorrow is finished, all that you have in your hands is this moment.... This is the reality, AIDS or no AIDS, but AIDS makes it very profoundly felt, and that can become a blessing in disguise. The time for meditation has come. Now you can forget those small, stupid things in which you were involved.

There are millions of people who are playing cards, watching football matches - not at all aware of what they are doing. And if you ask them, they say they are killing time. Great! Time is killing you, and you remain with the idea that you are killing time. How can you kill time? You have never even seen it. Your swords cannot cut it, even your nuclear weapons are unable to touch it. How are you going to kill time?

But time is killing you every moment.

AIDS should be understood as a great blessing. Now you can stop playing cards, you can stop fooling around. You can stop watching stupid football matches. Now all the time is yours, and the only thing left before death comes, is to know thyself. And the death is so close that you cannot afford to remain ignorant about your own being.

The very closeness of death makes it possible for you to understand the deathless which is within you. That's the whole art of meditation: to go within as deep as you can to the very center of your being. And you will be surprised, amazed that at the center of your being you are eternal. There is no death, there has never been any death. Nothing dies in reality, it only changes forms.

AIDS can destroy your body - but it is going to be destroyed anyway, there is not much problem. It is better that it is being destroyed by AIDS, because you cannot hope to survive; with AIDS your hope has also died. Now there is no cure, you have to face the fact. No help from the outside is available, you have to depend on your inside. You are left alone.

In fact everybody has always been alone.

From birth to death, the whole journey is alone.

You may be in the crowd, but your aloneness cannot be destroyed. It is there. You make every effort to camouflage your aloneness, but nobody has ever succeeded in it. A truth is a truth - you may postpone it a little bit....

AIDS destroys all postponement.

Whatever has to be done has to be done now!

Yes, one thing is certain, that you are a victim - a victim of your religions, a victim of your so-called prophets, messiahs, incarnations of God, God himself. You are a victim. Don't try to hide the fact, that will not help.

AIDS is the ultimate outcome of homosexuality, and homosexuality is a religious disease. It was born in the monasteries where no woman was allowed. It was born because of the insistence of all the religions of the world on celibacy - which is simply stupid. You cannot be celibate unless you are impotent.

And remember, the impotent people have not given anything to the world. They don't have any creative energy. Your sexual energy is your creativity. The impotent person is a hollow bamboo, nothing inside. He somehow drags on, but he is not living. He cannot live, he has no energy for living. He is condemned from his very birth. Only these people can be monks, nuns authentically.

If others who are full of life and energy become celibate, they will be destroyed fighting with themselves. They will destroy themselves fighting with their nature, and they can never be victorious.

Nature is far bigger than you. You are just a tiny part, almost invisible. Nature is as big, as wide as the sky itself. You cannot fight with it.

And it is very strange that nobody has said that celibacy should be illegal, that anybody trying to be celibate is mad! But all the religions insist that celibacy is something spiritual, something respectable, something divine.

Strange, if there is a God, why does he go on giving you sexual energy? God gives you the sexual energy, and his representatives on the earth - the prophets, the messiahs, the popes, the imams - they are all against sex. To summarize: they are all against their God! And God has not listened to them even up to now. Each child comes fully equipped.

Celibacy is the root cause of homosexuality, of all kinds of sexual perversions. But the priests have been reaping a good crop out of your perversions. The more perverted you are, the more you are in the hands of the priest, for the simple reason that you start feeling guilty. Going against nature makes you feel guilty, makes you feel disgusting, makes you feel unacceptable to yourself. You cannot have the dignity of a man if you are perverted. You lose all pride of being a man, the highest expression of evolution - consciousness. You hide your perversions.

And remember, sex is not a problem, perversions are. Men have been making love to other men.

Men have been making love to animals. Naturally, you will try to hide the fact that you are making love to animals. You have degraded yourself. You have reduced yourself to the state of animals.

And it is strange that now Jerry Falwell-type idiots are telling people that AIDS is a punishment from God for homosexuality. That means all the people who have been the cause of creating it should be punished. Rather than punishing the popes, the imams, the shankaracharyas, the heads of other religions, he is punishing the poor victims. All shankaracharyas and all popes, and all imams, Ayatollah Khomeinis - these are the people who should suffer the punishment.

But this man, Jerry Falwell, is only a mouthpiece for all these popes, Ayatollah Khomeinis, shankaracharyas. He is saying that it is punishment from God for homosexuality.

But I would like to ask him a question. What has happened? God has suddenly changed his mind?

- he has never been favorable to women up to now but lesbians are not punished by AIDS. Strange!

God has always been a male chauvinist. For the first time he is punishing men. Lesbians are not suffering from AIDS, they are not being punished.

And you should understand that the Christian trinity is a gay company - there is not a single woman.

For the whole eternity, three male energies... what will they be doing? Your life is short - seventy years, eighty years, at the most ninety years. But this trinity, this triangle of homosexuals - what have they been doing all through eternity?

If AIDS has to happen, your God should be the first victim. Rather than being a victim, he is punishing you. Perhaps there is a reason in it.

Let me remind you about the story of Adam and Eve. God had forbidden his own creations to eat from the tree of knowledge and from the tree of life. These two trees were forbidden. It was the great revolutionary, the serpent - the first revolutionary in the world - who persuaded Eve, "This is strange - God is your father, and the father is preventing his children from being wise, is forcing his children to remain ignorant forever. God is your father and he is preventing you from becoming eternally alive, from having the taste of eternal life."

The serpent said, "Do you know why he is doing it? Because if you eat from these two trees, you yourselves will be gods - and he is jealous. He wants you to be slaves, not gods."

Perhaps that's why he is punishing homosexuals. His company is homosexual, and you have some nerve to become homosexual - to try to be equal to God! Except that, I don't see any reason that man should be punished.

And you have not worshipped the serpent. You have condemned him as the devil. He gave you freedom, he gave you intelligence, he gave you inquiry. He made you human! Otherwise, you would still be in the Garden of Eden chewing grass, naked, unashamed of being naked chewing grass. But that was the original idea of your God, the father who lives far away in heaven.

But the serpent could not do the full work. As God became aware that man had eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge, he drove him out of the Garden of Eden. Man was expelled, because now the next step was certainly going to be the tree of eternal life.

These two trees are very significant. The tree of knowledge you can call science, because science means knowledge. And the tree of eternal life you can call religion, because religion is an inquiry into the eternity of existence.

God has forbidden you from both science and religion. And his priests, his prophets, his messiahs and saviors and messengers - they have been doing the same: condemning the serpent as the devil, praising God as the compassionate one. What kind of compassion is this? Can you call a father compassionate who prohibits his children from tasting the juice of eternal life? who prohibits them from becoming wise, aware, knowing?

I cannot call God the compassionate one.

He is the most cruel father who has ever been.

And the serpent is not the devil. He has immense compassion. He could see the strategy of God, and he managed to persuade Eve. That too is significant to remember; he did not approach Adam.

To persuade a man is a difficult job. He will argue, because he lives in the head. The woman does not argue, she tries to understand; she lives in the heart.

Eve immediately understood the point that God is preventing them from becoming his equal. And on the part of the serpent, it was perfectly clever to persuade the woman - the husband is bound to follow the woman. There is no need to bother about the husband.

Since Adam, every husband has been henpecked. He could have argued with the serpent, but who can argue with a woman? Impossible, they don't understand each other's language. You say something, the woman understands immediately something else that you never imagined!

Conversation between a man and woman is an impossibility - particularly if they are husband and wife.

The serpent is the first blessing to humanity. If you want to worship, worship the serpent. God is not worth anything. His priests are the cause of creating homosexuality.

Even Gautam Buddha, the most intelligent man as far as the world of religion is concerned, was not ready to allow women into his commune. Why? What is the fear? The fear is, if women are in the commune, then the celibacy of his disciples is in danger. But celibacy is impossible, there is no question of danger. The woman will only make your disciples natural, otherwise, they will be making love to each other. And that's what Buddhist monks have been doing down the ages, Christian monks have been doing down the ages.

Nature has its own way of finding expression. If you repress the natural outlet, it will find something which is unnatural, which destroys you. AIDS is the culmination.

And now whatsoever is being done by the priests and the politicians is simply stupid - still the priests go on preaching celibacy, its beauty, its spirituality.

Sometimes I wonder why there has not been a religion which preaches control of urination. And you can be certain, if somebody were there to preach control of urination, there are enough retarded people on the earth who would start doing it. Of course, they cannot - they will be hypocrites.

Celibacy has made all the religions hypocritical, and has perverted them into unnatural ways. And they are still teaching celibacy.

Nobody looks at the cause of AIDS, at who is responsible for it. On the contrary, just the other day I came to know that in Texas they have made homosexuality illegal; and I was surprised that in Texas there are one million homosexuals. Now one million people have suddenly become criminals. Do you think your law against homosexuality is going to prevent homosexuality in those people?

Has any law ever prevented anybody from doing anything? There are laws against murder; murder goes on growing. There are laws against suicide; suicide goes on growing. There are laws against stealing; you have to go on expanding your prisons, your courts, because the number of thieves goes on growing. There are laws against drugs. That simply makes things go underground. And anything which is underground has an immense attraction. Now in Texas, one million people will go underground.

Homosexuality cannot be prevented by law. Law has never prevented anything! In fact, it makes the thing more attractive. These homosexuals going underground will cause the spread of AIDS more easily, because you will never know who is a homosexual. You will never know who has to be tested medically.

This stupid law in Texas is going to be followed everywhere! The homosexuals appealed it, but the court of appeals has rejected their appeal. The Texan law remains a law.

It is always good to bring things to the surface, then something can be done about them. Putting things underground is immensely dangerous. Now Texas will be spreading homosexuality, spreading AIDS, although those idiot politicians think that by making it illegal they have done some great job in preventing AIDS.

In England it used to be - just a hundred years ago - that thieves were hanged naked in the public square and beaten to unconsciousness. That was the punishment for the thieves. Why in the public square? So that everybody can see what happens if you steal, and can learn a lesson.

But soon they had to stop this practice of beating thieves, for the simple reason that a crowd gathered there to see a free show, and in the crowd there were pickpockets who were doing their job. People were focused on the criminal, they had forgotten their pockets. When it became known that even exactly on the spot where you are torturing a thief all the thieves are doing a great job....

No law can prevent anything; it only makes it more attractive. It only drives things deeper into the unconscious, deeper into darkness where you cannot do anything.

AIDS should be accepted.

Priests should be condemned.

Religions should be held responsible.

Don't be hard on the poor victims, help them. They are not going to live long.

In my own commune, every sannyasin is passing through the tests, because even if he has AIDS he is not going to be condemned for it. On the contrary, he will be given more respect, more love. He is a victim.

We have found only two persons who have AIDS. We have made for them the most beautiful house in the most scenic place. And we are giving them better treatment than any other sannyasin; they need it. They don't feel guilty.

And we have told them, "You read the literature that you always wanted to read, listen to the music that you always wanted to listen to but could not find the time, see the films.... Now you have enough time - two years! Nobody is so rich as to have a two-year period completely to himself! Meditate.

Use these two years for deep meditation, so that when death comes, you die in silence, in peace, in joy, because you will be knowing the fruit of the other tree - eternal life. You can die dancing, singing."

Death is not a problem at all. What does it matter whether it comes from tuberculosis, or cancer, or AIDS? AIDS is the best, because there is no cure for it.

But in the outside world, information is being repressed. No government wants to give the actual number of how many people are suffering from AIDS, because to give that information reveals that the country is homosexual, the country is perverted.

I had never known that Texas had one million homosexuals! It is because of the law that the homosexuals started protesting, came out to fight in the courts, declared their number.

You never know: if Texas has one million, how many million will California have? Perhaps everybody, except the lesbians.

To be a lesbian, for the first time has gained respect, spirituality. God has never been so favorable to woman - perhaps he is learning something from me. He has always mistreated women. He made man in a certain way, and the woman he made by taking out a rib of the man. Strange... if he can make man, why can't he also make the woman the same way? She has to be degraded, she is nothing but a bone.

Jerry Falwell is saying that the Bible is historical, and every word in it is truth and nothing else. The Bible's preaching for women is that you are a slave to man and your only function is to be a factory for reproduction. These are truths?

And this priest, Falwell, is going to meet Ronald Nixon - they both belong to the same group of fundamentalist Christians. He wants the Bible to be accepted by the government as the only holy and truthful book. And the Bible, if you ask me, is the worst pornographic book in the world. Even the Supreme Court, if they are fair, will have to categorize it "x-rated." It should be prohibited. Everything ugly is there.

Ronald Nixon... I am not committing a mistake. Just the mask is of Reagan, behind the mask is Nixon. They are great friends. What Nixon could not do, he is now persuading Reagan to do.

Reagan wants prayer to be introduced in all the schools, colleges, universities, academies - all kinds of educational institutions. What prayer? To whom?

God is still an unproved hypothesis. And do you pray to a hypothesis? - and that too, unproved?

Has any prayer been heard ever? Has the sky ever answered?

It did not answer even Jesus Christ, who was simply nuts - calling himself the only begotten son of God. He was just a bastard. Every bastard can claim that he is the only begotten son of God, because the ordinary father is not his father. His father lives high above in the sky.

Even Jesus Christ's prayer on the cross was not answered. In deep frustration he shouted at the sky, "Have you forsaken me?" Still, no answer. If that is the situation of the only begotten son, what about other poor human beings who are just born out of their father and mother, mortals?

This book is holy? Then magazines like PLAYBOY, PLAYGIRL should start calling themselves holy magazines - of course, in color... glossy.

You say, "AIDS confronts us with the immediacy of death...." It is good that you become aware that death is there, absolutely certain. Now is the time to find something in you which is deathless, which is beyond death.

You cannot find a better time for meditation, at least in my commune. And don't feel serious, because death is natural; what causes it is meaningless. Don't be in a paranoia. In fact, rejoice that you are the chosen few; everybody else is in darkness about his death, you are not. And the very fact that you know death is coming is bound to create space for you to know yourself.

This will not happen in the outside world where they are declaring homosexuality illegal. This will not happen in the outside world, because even if a person is found with AIDS, he will bribe the physicians to keep the information secret. Your wife may have told you, "I will die for you," but when she comes to know you have AIDS.... Your children, your parents, your friends - all will become your enemies. You will lose your job, you will lose your family, you will lose your dignity. You will be simply a condemned man.

Before AIDS kills you in the outside world, you will have to commit suicide. That is the only way for you, nothing else, because you will not be acceptable in any restaurant, you will not be acceptable in any club, you will not be acceptable anywhere, because the spread of AIDS is not confined only to sexual intercourse. Just kissing somebody is enough, or even a tear of somebody... out of compassion you just wipe off the tear, and you may get AIDS. Any liquid coming out of the body may carry the virus.

Hence I say to my people, stop kissing. Anyway, it is so unhygienic. Just think of the whole thing:

mixing your saliva with somebody else, exploring somebody's mouth with your tongue. Are you insane or something?

And there are better ways to show love. In the oldest sexology book, which is five thousand years old, from India, Vatsyayana has given few a very significant ideas. For example, he says that the lobes of the ears are very erotic. They are. You play with your beloved's earlobes, he plays with your earlobes. Perfectly hygienic, no stupidity involved, and a great adventure into new erotic spaces.

Eskimos rub their noses, they don't kiss. When they first saw Christian missionaries they could not believe it: "What are these idiots doing? And if this is what they are doing, what religion are they going to teach to us?"

Noses are so clean, so cool. Enjoy rubbing noses, except when you suffer from a cold. That is simply determined, there is no problem about it, because any liquid flowing from the nose may carry the virus.

Massage each other's body - that will be healthy, relaxing. Lie down with each other and meditate together; hugging each other, meditating together. And you will be surprised that you can reach better orgasmic, blissful moments than by having intercourse - which is very momentary. Find out new ways, and in finding new ways there is celebration.

Celebrate! Dance with your beloved, sing with your beloved, play on the guitar with your beloved.

For the new age, for the new man, there are going to be new ways of love too. And it is more sophisticated, more cultured.

Jesus says everybody has to carry his cross on his shoulders. I say to you, everybody has to carry his guitar. If you have to carry something, why not a guitar? Learn music, learn dancing. Your bedroom should become a temple. Right now it is a warfield.

Every night before you make love you have to fight; you have to throw pillows, you have to throw things, you have to argue about everything in the world - with no conclusion. And after all this nastiness, you make love. You don't understand at all that this love is nothing but a way somehow to go to sleep, somehow to finish this nightmare. This is not love.

Burn incense in your bedroom. No electricity, just candles. The dimmer the light, the more beautiful the body of your beloved looks. In darkness, all women become Cleopatra, all men become Romeo.

Such a small trick... and you have Cleopatra and Romeo in the bed.

And there is no need to make love either. Be loving, hug each other. Go to sleep together hugging, silently, meditatively, with the incense filling the room, with the candlelight....

If man can be taught the beauties of being loving, all homosexuality will disappear, all kinds of perversions will disappear. They cannot disappear by making laws. And strangely enough, the people who make laws - the senators and the members of the parliaments, assemblies - most of them are homosexuals. But they are in a position that they can go on keeping it a secret. Even your popes have been found to be homosexuals, and they are preaching sermons to the whole world to remain celibate.

We have created such a hypocritical world. It is time to be finished with it! Be authentic, be sincere!

Your question is significant.

We have those two unique sannyasins who have AIDS. Be respectful to them, be loving to them. Do everything that the commune can do for them, because their death is certain. Help them to meditate.

If before death they can manage to enter into their being, they will have tasted the fruit of the other tree which Adam and Eve missed.

It is within you.

And knowing your eternal being, knowing that you have been here always and you will be here always, is a tremendous revelation.

In that revelation is celebration.

Question 2:

I do not know, because I don't have any ego.

To know it one has to have it.

I have looked within myself, searched within myself; I have not found it anywhere.

And your question is strange. You say, "The ego is non-existent." Then why are you asking questions about things which don't exist? No, it is not non-existent for you, hence the question. Don't try to deceive yourself.

You say, "It is meaningless, it serves no purpose." That is not right. It serves great purpose. The purpose of the ego is to give you a false self - because the society, the religion, the country, the race in which you are born, does not want you to know your real self. That is dangerous, because the person who finds his real self is a rebel - and all the religions teach obedience.

What was the fault of Adam and Eve? They disobeyed - such a small thing. Every child disobeys. In fact, only idiots never disobey, because to disobey a certain intelligence is needed. For obedience, no intelligence at all is needed. All machines are obedient, very spiritual. All machines will enter into paradise; they have never disobeyed.

The societies don't want you to know your reality because that will make you an individual, that will give you courage and guts. That will make you brave enough to say no to a thousand and one things which have been imposed upon you. Your individuality will certainly make you capable of saying yes too, but only when your intelligence is convinced. The yes will come from within yourself, it will not be imposed from the outside.

That is the purpose of the ego. It is created by the societies, by the religions, by the politicians, by all the vested interests. And you are so foolish that you go on clinging to something which is arbitrary.

This is the whole art of meditation: to take you to your real self. The moment you come to your real self, the arbitrary ego disappears - in the same way that darkness disappears when you come with a burning torch inside the house.

The ego is the absence of your realization of your self. And it is there because your parents, your teachers, your priests, your leaders are all agreed that before you come to know who you are, you should be given a false substitute, a lollipop.

In India I have observed.... Poor people cannot afford to have their women remain at home, they both have to work. The work is hard, the country is hot, and they can get only unskilled work because they have never been able to be educated. In fact they have been prohibited from education for thousands of years. So they go on making the road, or cutting stones, or cutting wood.

The women also have to work, but what to do with the children? There may be a child so small...

where to leave him? So they have found a method. They give a little dose of opium to the child.

That is the common practice all over India. Then the child remains hungry but does not cry, he is hallucinating.

In his world of imagination he may be drinking, sucking milk from his mother's breast - and all that he has is his own thumb in his mouth. But under the impact of opium he remains silent, lying down under a tree; the mother can work, the father can work. Opium takes care of the child.

Your ego is the opium that has been given to you; otherwise, you were bound to discover your real self. But once you accept the ego as your real self, all inquiry stops. It has a purpose, but that purpose does not serve you or your interests. It serves the vested interests.

As far as you are concerned, your ego kills you, destroys your whole life. You are living in falsity, insincerity, inauthenticity - because everything you do is based on something which is not real!

But your question is not your realization. Making statements that "Ego has no purpose, no meaning, it is non-existent" - if this is your realization, why are you asking? It is not your realization.

Please, don't be deluded. The society is very cunning, and it has made the ego really strong so that you never go beyond it. But there are methods and techniques to go beyond it; and only when you are beyond it does it become meaningless, purposeless, non-existent.

That's my whole work: to make you realize your real center, so that the unreal can disappear.

Question 3:

Not to be split, not to be schizophrenic, is only the beginning. And then there is the whole infinity, the whole eternity of ecstasy, blissfulness, understanding, awareness. There is much more to it. My insistence on being total in each of your acts is just to give you the first step.

But the first step itself is so blissful, you would like to go a little more ahead, because the second step will be facing you.... There is no end, you simply go on and on and on, and everything goes on expanding. Even the sky is not the limit! You can spread yourself over the whole existence.

But a split person dies without knowing anything of life. And to make you split is very simple. Every society - cultured, uncultured, primitive, contemporary - they all have used the same methods to split you. The split is: they give you certain commandments - Do this, don't do that. And the strategy is, what they say to do is unnatural, and what they say not to do is natural. Now you are split.

The child is helpless. He has to listen to the parents, to the teachers. He has to do things which he never wanted to do. He cannot do things which he has always been wanting to do. The split has happened.

Now there are two persons in you: one, the unnatural, the conditioned; the other, the natural, that you have brought with yourself. And just as the method to split is easy, the method to drop the split is even more easy.

Do whatever you want to do.

Never do anything that goes against your nature.

Whoever has said it - Moses, Abraham, Jesus, Krishna, Buddha, Confucius - whoever has said it does not matter.

What matters is your natural self.

Follow your nature, and drop all conditionings, programs that have been given to you by others.

This makes you total.

And this is only the first step of the pilgrimage towards eternity.

Question 4:

Never!

That is something which can be very easily changed. Man can reach to the moon - and he cannot stop poor women from suffering "the indignities of the monthly blues." It is easy; science will find ways....

I will suggest that you be on the pill continuously; the blues will disappear, and the indignities will disappear. And the pain and the suffering that are bound to come with the blues will disappear.

The pill is the greatest revolution that has happened in the whole of history. And it is so cheap, so simple. But be on it continuously, don't stop. Soon science will be able to find something, but before science finds it, try my unscientific idea. I am not a medical man, but I know it works. You give it a try.

One thing you should also be made aware of: it is not only the woman who suffers the blues; man also suffers. But for centuries man has not been aware that he has a monthly course, for the simple reason that nothing comes out of his body, no blood - so he has been unaware.

But you just keep a diary. Go on writing down your moods for three, four months, and you will be surprised that every month, after twenty-eight days, comes the period of suffering, sadness, depression. And it comes always exactly every month.

Now it is a well-established fact that man also has his periods. But that I leave to men; when they ask, I will suggest something. Right now, my concern is the woman.