The art of being human

Question 1:

Man's whole history is a history of torture, murder, rape. But in the past it was not possible to know about the whole world, what was happening; people knew only about local things. Now the earth has become so small that within minutes, wherever anything happens, it spreads all over the world.

The media has made people aware of man's reality. In the past it remained hidden. Now it has surfaced.

There are reasons why man is so inhuman. The reasons are many, but the few most important ones should be understood.

One, all the religions of the world have been teaching unnatural things to humanity - celibacy, renouncing the pleasures and comforts of life, living in poverty. For centuries they have been telling these things to people, and they have kept the people uneducated, illiterate.

But an explosion in the contemporary world of education has created a tremendous problem. Now people know that what has been told to them was not right - it was not according to nature, it was against nature. They are full of rage against the whole past.

The religions have corrupted their minds, have led them to perverted sexual practices. The religions have put one man against another. There are three hundred religions on the earth, and each claims that it is the only ultimate truth, all others are false.

Now, anybody who has a little intelligence can see the point that there can be only one kind of religiousness, unnamed - just like science. You don't call it Jewish science, Mohammedan science, Hindu science, Christian science. Just to call it science is enough; its rules are universal.

Religion is the science of the inner world. Its rules also are universal.

But these three hundred religions have been teaching you just the opposite. They have been teaching you rituals which don't lead you inside. They have been teaching you about a God who lives above the clouds; nobody has seen him. They have been teaching you commandments written three thousand years ago, written five thousand years ago - written, and you have to live according to them.

They have encaged you.

In every possible way you are chained - not only your body, but your spirit.

Hence, everywhere atrocities are surfacing. They have been surfacing down the ages, but the media to inform you about the reality that is happening all around the earth was missing. Education was missing. Now you are educated, whether you are a Jew or a Christian or a Hindu or a Buddhist, in the same way, in the same science, the same laws.

In every way science has made the whole humanity one. But religions go on carrying the hangover of the past, dividing man against man.

The violence that they have repressed for centuries has come to a climax. The people want to take revenge, because they have been mistreated, they have been deceived by the people they have trusted - by their prophets, their messiahs, their incarnations of God.

These people have been the greatest criminals.

They divided humanity.

They divided you, split you into body and soul: you have to torture your body if you want to know the soul. So for thousands of years people have been torturing their bodies; that was the only way to become saintly. But now it is difficult to convince people that by torturing their bodies they will become holy. There seems to be no sense in it.

Man has been divided into man and woman. Half of humanity consists of women, and they have lived a life of slavery, torture, indignity. They are rebelling.

Man is rebelling against the past unconsciously. He is enraged by the whole human history. And he is so full of anger, violence, that any small thing brings it up, and it starts spreading like a wildfire.

Secondly, man is tremendously frustrated because the leaders of mankind in the past have been giving him hope, hope of a paradise beyond death. Not a single person has returned after death and given his eyewitness evidence that there is a paradise, that there is a God, that your acts will be judged - you will be thrown into eternal hell or into the eternal blissfulness of paradise.

Nobody has ever returned. Nobody knows anything about life after death, and people have been sacrificing their present for an unknown future. Now they cannot do it anymore, they have done enough. They want paradise here and now. The leaders cannot supply the goods that they have been promising them. Beyond death, of course, they are ready to give you anything you want, but people want it now. That creates a great hopelessness, frustration, meaninglessness.

People have not been taught the art of living beautifully, the art of being graceful, the art of being silent, meditative. Instead of teaching these authentic realities which can be done right now, their minds were taken away from the present to some unknown future - nobody knows whether it exists or not.

Now, because people become literate, educated, they can see the great deceit. They have been cheated, and a great anger is there. Not only their life but millions of lives for centuries have been exploited by these cheaters.

Religious priests have parasites sucking your blood. Now it is absolutely impossible for those religions to exist anymore. They should disappear gracefully, and allow a new way of life which is centered in the present, so that something can be done to the human psychology.

Man has immense capacity to love.

If his love is given freedom, he will never commit anything that goes against love.

Man has immense capacity to be compassionate.

He will not commit violence on any slight excuse.

But he has to be awakened!

The religions have been giving him opium, and for thousands of years they have made him completely unconscious. It was good for them - they could exploit people easily.

All the vested interests were together: the politician, the priest, the pedagogue, all were together, because if man becomes awake then there is no need for politicians; he will see them as criminals.

There is no need for priests; he will see them as the greatest cheats that have existed ever.

These priests have been telling people, "Blessed are the poor." They themselves are not poor - pope the Polack is the richest man in the world. But nobody asks him the question, "Blessed are the poor - so what the hell are you doing in the Vatican? Go to Calcutta and start begging on the streets! - because if you remain the pope you will be the last to enter into paradise, and perhaps you will be thrown into hell."

The pope goes on quoting Jesus Christ, and for centuries you have listened to, "Blessed are the poor." The rich are cursed, because even a camel can pass through the eye of a needle, but the rich man cannot pass through the gates of paradise.

And why are people poor? Every religion has given some explanation, has to give one. The Christians are poor because God is very loving to you. You are the blessed; he is preparing you for paradise. This is a test of your trust.

In India, Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism have been telling people, "You are poor because in your past life you committed some grave sins, some evil acts, and this is the punishment. Don't do anything wrong in this life. Patiently suffer, gracefully accept the punishment - in the next life you will be rich."

Now this is distracting people from the reality. The reality is that they are being exploited in this life, right now.

And the explanation is really far-fetched. In a past life you put your hand on a candle flame - you did not burn yourself then, but you have a burned hand! Nobody knows about the past life; and cause and effect cannot be so distant. You do something, you hit your head against the wall and you will suffer now. You put your hand in the fire and you will be burned now. There is no explanation why the result comes in the next life.

So either past lives have been taken as an explanation to the poor, to give them consolation that they deserve this poverty; or God has to be brought in, that he is testing your trust. Strangely enough...

why is he not testing the rich people? Why is he against the rich people?

And in Christianity, Mohammedanism, Judaism, there is only one life. So the rich person is born without any past life in which he would have committed some evil acts; that's why God has not given him the test of trust and has taken away the opportunity of entering into paradise.

A strange God! He makes people rich, comfortable, luxurious, because he is against them. But why is he against them? They have not done anything. This is their only life! Why has he chosen a few people to be rich, and many people to be poor?

All these explanations are bogus; and the contemporary mind is becoming clear about all these explanations, that they were strategies to keep the poor, poor, and to make the rich, richer.

In a country like India no revolution has ever happened, although the whole country is poor. In the hands of only a few families all the riches of the country have gathered. The whole country is starving, hungry, but they have accepted it patiently up to now.

There is a limit to everything. Now they are burning. They know they have been cheated, badly cheated. So there are going to be riots, there are going to be killings. And the responsibility goes to your prophets, your messiahs, your messengers of God - and finally, to God. If God exists anywhere, he is the greatest criminal. To create a world with so much hatred, anger, rage, violence....

This is something strange. You make something wrong, and if it behaves wrongly then you punish it. Who has made you a sexual being? If God wanted celibacy, there was no problem for him. If he can create the whole world within six days, can't he manage that man is born without sex, without greed, without jealousy, without anger, without hate? No, He has made a man full of all these things.

And anger, hate, jealousy you need not learn; they are instinctive, they are God-given.

Meditation you will have to learn - God has not given that to you. This God must be nuts! He has not given you the most precious thing: the art of knowing yourself. In fact, he was against all knowledge.

He prevented Adam and Eve from eating from the tree of knowledge and from eating from the tree of eternal life.

Can you think of this God as divine, who is preventing his children from wisdom and from the taste of eternal life? These are the two things that he should have insisted on: "First taste these two trees, and then the whole Garden of Eden is yours."

But this God is the invention of the vested interests. The priests never wanted people to be educated, they never wanted the people to become intelligent, because there was danger. In their education, in their intelligence the people will start asking questions. And the priests don't have any authentic answers, because all that the priests have created in the name of religion is fiction - and ugly fiction.

Now the new generation is becoming aware everywhere that this God has to be dropped. Nietzsche said, "God is dead and man is free." But the younger generation wants God not to be dead, they want to murder him. Just an easy death does not appeal; they want to murder him. And you will see your temples, your synagogues, your churches on fire soon! Your Bible, your holy Koran, your holy Gita - you will soon see in bonfires.

Man has come of age, he is mature.

He can see how he has been deceived, and he has to destroy everything that has deceived him.

But the priests are very cunning; cunningness is their profession. They are professional exploiters, parasites, because for centuries they have done nothing else; they have become very skillful. So rather than allowing you to burn the Bible, to burn the Vatican, to kill God, they go on diverting you - Christians against Mohammedans, Mohammedans against Hindus, Hindus against Buddhists. And you are so full of rage that you have lost all reason, you simply want to destroy. And the priests are using this situation. If they don't use it, you will destroy them!

So all over the world religions are fighting, nations are fighting, races are fighting. Who is creating all this? The people who have dominated you for centuries know perfectly well that your anger, your hatred has to be diverted; otherwise, they will be the targets.

They are all against me for a single reason - that I want your rage to go in the right direction. I don't want to divert it. I want you to meditate and in silence see what has been done to man in the whole history. And out of your silence and peace, if you feel that something has to be destroyed because it has been hindering the growth of man, his consciousness, that destruction will be totally different.

It will not be of people. If will be of your holy books, it will be of your holy places, it will be of your synagogues, churches, mosques. It will not be directed to other human beings who belong to other groups. It will not be between Americans and Soviet people - they both have been exploited by different kinds of priests.

Communism is the latest religion.

It has its own priests, it has its own holy DAS KAPITAL. It has its own holy place of pilgrimage - the Kremlin. It has its own trinity - Marx, Engels, Lenin. It has replaced the old religion.

There is no need for Americans to destroy Russians, or Russians to destroy Americans. If we are intelligent, all the politicians - Russians and Americans - should be imprisoned immediately. And the masses can do it! They just have to be awakened as to who is the real enemy.

Boundaries of the countries should be dissolved. They don't exist on the earth, only on the map.

The whole humanity is one, and the whole humanity should pool all its energies. And we can make this earth a paradise....

You can see this small commune - only five thousand people are living here, and within four years we have changed the desert into an oasis. We are growing our food, our vegetables, our milk products; we are self-sufficient. And in four years not a single crime has happened. Nobody has been beaten, nobody has been raped, nobody has committed suicide, nobody has been murdered.

Five thousand people living together have pooled their energies. One kitchen is enough for five thousand people. Naturally, it saves immensely in money, in human power. Otherwise, there would have been at least one thousand kitchens, one thousand women would have been doing just one thing. Now only a few women manage; and far better food is provided to the commune than you can get from a nagging wife.

We are living comfortably, we are enjoying everything that is beautiful. We are rejoicing, dancing, singing - you will not see long faces here. And nobody is bothered about God - strange! Nobody is bothered about heaven and hell. Those are stupid questions. Why waste your intelligence on stupid questions?

People are concerned with how to be more creative, how to produce more, how to make the commune absolutely self-sufficient so that even if the whole world suddenly disappears leaving this commune alone, there will be no problem.

You say, "Everywhere atrocities are surfacing" - please, exclude my commune! There are no atrocities here.

People are so loving, so compassionate - they just need to be made aware of their great potential.

People are intelligent - they just have to be given a chance to sharpen their intelligence.

The whole world has been fed with the idea of belief. All the religions want you to believe, have faith. That destroys your intelligence. That's their way of destroying your intelligence, keeping you retarded.

In my commune, belief is non-existent.

We trust in doubt, because doubt sharpens intelligence, it creates questions for which you have to find answers. This is the way your intelligence becomes sharp. We teach doubt, we teach skepticism, we teach agnosticism. Agnosticism means, be sincere about one thing - what you know and what you don't know. And if you don't know something, accept it, that "I don't know."

This will be punished in the outside world. The outside world respects hypocrites. Whether you know or not, you have to pretend that you know.

The American scouts have just rejected and expelled one brilliant young man - just fourteen years of age. He was their best cadet, he was always first in everything. Why did he have to be expelled?

- for a single reason, because he was an intelligent boy.... They were filling in the form for higher promotion, in which it is asked, "Do you believe in God?" He simply said, "I don't know. I don't know God, how can I believe or disbelieve?"

Do you see how people's intelligence is killed? A boy is being agnostic, and absolutely correct: he says, "I don't know. And without knowing you ask me to believe?" Rather than answering him, they expelled him. Belief in God is absolutely necessary for every cadet.

Tricky ways of keeping people retarded!

In the first world war, for the first time, psychologists suggested that when soldiers were recruited their mental age should be checked. And they were all shocked, because the average mental age of all their soldiers was only thirteen years!

Things have not changed. You may be eighty years old with a thirteen-year-old mind. Naturally you will find anguish, tension, worries. You will find yourself in a very confused situation. Your body is allowed to grow, your mind is stopped.

From the very childhood you have to believe in some religion, in some absolutely fictitious ideas, ultimate lies. And once a child starts believing in ultimate lies, his intelligence stops growing.

In this commune and my other communes in the world, we don't have a belief system, we don't have any faith in which you have to be indoctrinated. We are allowing our people to be as deeply agnostic as possible.

And why fear? If God is there and you enquire, question, you will find him. The fear is that if you doubt and inquire you will not find him. That's why doubt has to be from the very beginning completely erased from your mind.

Doubt is the method of science. Scientists are not afraid; they go on doubting and questioning every hypothesis, experimenting. And only if they come to some conclusion which is supported by evidence, supported by experiments, supported by intelligence, and you cannot doubt it, is it accepted.

And then too, it is accepted only hypothetically, because perhaps tomorrow you may have better instruments, better minds, better people, and they may find some loopholes in it. They may find that something else is more accurate, more right.

So in science there is no belief, ever. Doubt brings you to a hypothesis. A hypothesis means, for the time being you believe in it - but only for the time being. If tomorrow somebody goes ahead and declares that we can move on, the old hypothesis is dissolved; then the new hypothesis takes its place until you come to something which is indubitable. But it is a great surprise. The moment you find the indubitable, you don't believe in it, there is no need. It is your own experience.

Truth needs no belief. Only lies need beliefs.

The whole young generation around the world is certainly at a great angry stage. But we have to make the young people aware... because if your leaders who have exploited you are still your leaders, they will exploit your anger too, they will direct it in wrong directions. And that is what is happening.

In India, my experience was that it was so easy to create a riot. For example, Mohammedans believe that music is something evil, so before their mosque you cannot go on playing music - a flute, or a band. You have to stop playing it, move silently before the mosque, and then you can start again.

Even in marriages....

In India, the marriage procession is something beautiful to see - music, dance.... But if the marriage party comes in front of a mosque and continues its music and dance, immediately there will be a riot. Soon Hindus will be killing Mohammedans, Mohammedans will be killing Hindus.

If you want to start a riot, then just hang a dead cow in front of a Hindu temple - the cow may have died by herself, that does not matter - and immediately you have put the whole city on fire.

Anybody can do it! Politicians are continuously doing it. Religious leaders are continuously doing it.

Whenever they see that the anger is turning towards them, they immediately do some small thing:

the anger moves, and people destroy themselves.

The other thing to understand very deeply is, scientists have discovered that every animal has a territorial imperative. He has a certain territory; for example, around him for thirty yards nobody should enter. If you remain out of his territory, he will not in any way be upset by you, you can remain there. But the moment you trespass the boundary line, immediately the animal becomes dangerous.

Every animal has a territorial imperative. Man comes from animals. You all feel once in a while to be left alone. Always in the crowd... what happened to your territory? Why do you feel at ease in your home? Why do you feel beautiful in a vast forest or sitting on the beach seeing the immense ocean? It gives you a vast area around you, which is something very essential.

But the world is overcrowded. Wherever you are, you are in a crowd. And the world goes on becoming more and more overcrowded. This overcrowding is one of the psychological reasons why people are so on edge. Any moment, anything, and they are ready to fight - in three thousand years man has fought five thousand wars.

Everybody is encroached upon; and the pope, the Hindu shankaracharya, the Mohammedan, Ayatollah Khomeini - they all go on preaching against birth control, against abortion, against the pill. They want the world to be so crowded - and it will be so crowded - that there is not going to be any elbow room. There will not be any need to go to any meeting; wherever you are, you will be in a meeting. But these idiots keep saying around the world....

India is fifty percent ready to become another Ethiopia. In Ethiopia one thousand people have been dying every day for the whole year. Now it is no longer news at all, nobody bothers. It has been accepted that Ethiopians die, one thousand every day.

The same will soon be the case in India. The same will be the case in other Third World countries, because they are all growing so fast. And nobody is ready to tell these people that they are teaching simple nonsense.

The pope is in South Africa, where the birthrate is the highest in the world. People are utterly poor, and he is teaching them that they should not use any birth control methods; it is against God!

But there is not much difference between Ethiopia and America, because here also Reverend Falwell is teaching against abortion, against birth control. And what is the reason? - because God is sending people children and you prevent him. This is against God.

But I cannot understand that a small pill - God cannot remove it? He managed to part the ocean for Moses and his whole company to pass. He went against the law of nature, he managed to give birth to Jesus Christ without a father. He seems to be a skillful man. He can remove the pill! He can change the nature of the pill so that the woman who takes the pill gives birth to two children instead of none. Naturally, people will stop taking the pill, because this is dangerous! you cannot go against God. If God wants people, he can create them.

There are so many millions of planets around, so many solar systems, but only this earth is evolved to the point of human consciousness, only on this earth have there been a few people who have reached to the ultimate in consciousness - enlightenment.

Why destroy this earth? It has enriched the whole existence, and the rest of existence is empty. God can manage to send people to any other planet, any other place.

But no, Reverend Falwell wants God to go on sending more people here. Mother Teresa wants more people here. The pope wants more people here, because these poor people are vulnerable, ready to become Christians, Catholics. These poor people and their children will be on the streets, and Mother Teresa can gather the orphans and make the Catholics.

These people go on distracting you from the real problems. Now, the pope in South Africa.... The real problem in South Africa is that fifteen percent of the population, the white people - who are all foreigners - are dominating the country. Eighty-five percent of the people are slaves, and the country belongs to them! They don't have even the voting rights. Naturally, the fifteen percent, the white people, cannot stay a single moment more if those eighty-five percent of the people have voting power.

The fifteen percent who are white have all the riches of the country. South Africa is one of the richest places, with gold minds, silver mines, diamond mines. But all those mines are under the control of the white people. The people to whom the country belongs are so poor, and the pope is preaching to those poor to become more poor, because from there he recruits his Catholics.

Poor people are needed because the religions cannot convert rich people. The uneducated are needed, the orphans are needed because Christians cannot get hold of the educated people. Their own educated young people are getting out of hand. Their churches are empty, the young generation does not go there anymore. They need to fill their churches, their congregations, and their numbers must come from poor countries.

And the poor people cannot argue against what they are saying, that God sends people. It has been accepted for centuries that God sends people.

Nobody knows about God, and if he is omnipotent, all-powerful, then whatever you do - any birth control method, anything, abortion, he is all-powerful - can't he do something so that you cannot prevent him from sending people?

God cannot do anything because he does not exist!

These reverends and popes and bishops, these are the people who want the world to become as poor as possible - because the poor man is ready to pray, he is ready to go to the church. The poor man is always ready for paradise, heaven, hell. He has no guts, no intelligence to deny anything.

Already he is so much in suffering, how can he deny the existence of paradise? That is his only hope, that after death.... It is only a question of a few years more of suffering, and then there is an eternity of pleasures - all the pleasures that religions deny here, renounce here! Strange argument...

strange logic.

Mohammedans are not allowed to drink alcoholic beverages here on the earth, but in their heaven there are rivers of wine, champagne, and all kinds of alcoholic beverages which you can choose.

Rivers flowing, not bottles! You can drink, you can jump in, you can swim, you can drown - you can do anything!

Here, alcohol is a sin. Can't you see the stupidity of the logic? Here it is sin. Those who don't drink will become virtuous, they will enter paradise. And there, these saints will be rewarded with beautiful women who always remain young, who do not perspire, who do not need any deodorant; they are always fresh and always virgin. Their virginity is unspoilable; all the saints can make love to them, they are still virgin.

Your saints who renounced here on the earth the woman, the home, the family and all comforts, and lived in poverty - you reward them with these things?

As far as I can see, these saints will be simply shocked when they enter paradise, that other popes are making love under the trees. They will not be able to believe it.

I have heard about one thing.... An old saint died. His whole teaching was celibacy. And after a few days one of his chief disciples died. The disciple was very excited that he would be meeting his master again. He enquired about him. People showed him: "You will find him under that tree near the river. Perhaps he may recognize you, or he may not recognize you because he is so drunk.

Somehow we have pulled him out of the river."

One thing is good: you cannot die in heaven, there is no death; so you can drown but you will live.

There is no way to commit suicide in heaven. "We have just pulled him out. He is lying there under the tree."

The disciple rushed there - he could not believe his eyes. He closed his eyes, because his old master, naked, had a beautiful woman in his lap, holding her and playing with her, swaying with her. He could not believe it. But then he thought, "Perhaps this is the reward for my master's great celibacy, renunciation, living in poverty, torture. This must be..." because such a beautiful woman he had never seen.

He just fell down at the feet of the master, and said, "Master, you are well rewarded."

Before the master could speak, the woman said, "You idiot, you don't understand anything! He is not being rewarded, I am being punished!"

But the poor people have always hoped for heaven. That hope keeps them suffering patiently; otherwise, there is no reason for them to suffer. Just a little understanding....

The population has to go down; and immediately, with the population going down, all these atrocities will stop.

People need space. Everybody needs a certain space; that space gives him a certain spiritual freedom. Everybody wants to live comfortably, luxuriously - that is natural. But this small earth cannot support so many people.

Popes, Ayatollah Khomeini, shankaracharyas, Reverend Falwell - all these people should be behind bars, sentenced for their whole life. These people are wild animals let loose in the world! They should be first tamed, and if they are tamed they can enter a circus - but not the world again.

The world's population has to be one fourth of what it is. Then everybody will have space, everybody will have enough - more than enough; everybody will be satisfied, contented, nourished.

And the world needs only one thing - not great scriptures, just a simple method of becoming silent, of becoming yourself, of coming to your innermost center. That center is the temple, the synagogue, the church. There is no other church, no other synagogue.

Don't go anywhere.

Go inside, inward.

And there is your paradise, your wisdom, your eternal life.

A man who knows his wisdom and his eternal life cannot behave the way people are behaving all around the world.

Every politician should be forced to participate in some school of meditation, and unless he graduates from there he cannot stand for any political post. All politicians, unless they are meditative, are disqualified. If they have any sense of dignity they should renounce, they should immediately resign from their posts. They don't know themselves, what are they doing there? They don't know themselves and they are controlling millions of people and their lives.

My religion consists only of one word: meditativeness. It has no prayer, because there is nobody to whom you can pray. You are here, a reality. Why not go in and find out from where your life comes, the source of your life? the source of your intelligence? the source of your love?

Go deep inside, and you will be surprised that hate, anger, jealousy all exist only on the periphery. In the innermost center of your being there is only love and love and love. And it blossoms the moment you reach there, and spreads all over your periphery.

And just as when you bring light in a dark room, darkness disappears, the moment you bring your silence, your peace, your love to your periphery, all the darkness that consisted of jealousy, violence, hatred, anger, competitiveness, disappears. You have not to do anything about it, you have not to control it: it is not there at all.

You cannot control darkness. Either it is there, or you bring a candle in, or light a candle which is already there. And after the light you never ask, "What to do about the darkness now?" It simply is not found.

Humanity has only one saving device available, and that is meditation.

Everything else has failed:

Give a try to meditation.

I told you, in four years' time there has not been any illegal act here. The reason is, people are meditating. There is no competition, no stealing, no hurting anybody. Nobody feels himself higher than the other. And we are not teaching equality, we are not communists. Communism is outdated.

We are teaching meditativeness, and the feeling of equality arises of its own accord. You need not have a dictatorship of the proletariat to enforce equality on people. Any enforced thing is not going to last long, because deep down whatever you have repressed is there. And it is gathering more and more energy, it is becoming a cancer. Equality cannot be imposed.

But a loving person does not feel himself superior to anybody or inferior to anybody. These two complexes, inferiority complex and superiority complex, simply disappear from his being. He is just like a tree or a cloud or a mountain, enjoying his being.

And the moment you start enjoying your being, rejoicing in your being, you cannot hurt anybody. It is impossible. You can hurt somebody only if you are yourself hurting, if you are carrying wounds within you. When you are healed and whole, your vision about everybody else simply changes. You cannot condemn, you cannot humiliate anybody. Your love will not allow you to do that.

Through meditation we have to create communes around the world - we have many already. We have to create them in every country.

In countries like the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, East Germany, China, where creating a commune will be almost impossible, we are creating underground communes. There are sannyasins in every communist country. They meditate in basements, they read books, they listen to the tapes - and they are immensely excited because for sixty years they have been repressed.

Communist Russia is the only country where revolution is almost impossible. Strange fate of a revolutionary country where the greatest revolution happened in 1917! But after that, they say "Revolution has happened, now there is no need for any complaint."

And the moment they suspect anybody, that he can sabotage the society, the man simply disappears. He is killed, imprisoned, poisoned, sent to a madhouse where they go on injecting chemicals into him which make him mad; or he is sent to Siberia where there are eternal snows and he cannot escape, there is no need even to chain him.

But the youth.... Wherever there is youth there is always a romance with revolution, with change.

Russian youth for seventy years has not tasted youthfulness. It has been missing one of the most beautiful experiences - of being in love with a revolutionary idea. You will be surprised to know that meditation is for them a revolutionary idea. In other communist countries the same is the case.

In other countries which are not communist, we are creating our communes. And we want our communes to be models for others to see that people can live without crime, without murder, without suicide, without frustration. People can be creative, people can be loving and friendly. And people can rejoice for no reason at all - just for the sake of rejoicing.

If we can make these existential experiments available to the whole humanity, there is a hope that we can free them from the long, long bondage of politicians and priests. In the future, if humanity is to exist, then politicians and priests are not to exist. We have to make a clear choice.

On one side is the whole humanity of innocent people, and on the other side is the company of all the criminals and conspirators against humanity: the politicians, the priests.

And the time has come. We have come to an ultimate crisis where decision is possible.

Politicians gone, nations are gone.

Priests gone, there is only one humanity.

And then every university can become a place, not only to teach you geography - which is stupid - history - which is just rubbish; but to teach you something very essential: meditation, love, the art of living, the art of being human.

Each university should become a temple of wisdom; it is not yet. It is called a university but it is not a university, because it is not universal - just a name. Inside.... I cannot believe it: there are Catholic universities, Mohammedan universities, Hindu universities! It seems man has gone mad.

The universe is not Mohammedan, not Hindu nor Catholic. The universities should be completely free of all politics, all religions, but they should teach you the basic arts of being human - which has not been done up to now. That's why there are so many atrocities, so many inhuman acts against human beings.

What man has done to man is inconceivable. Just Adolf Hitler alone is responsible for killing at least ten million people. Joseph Stalin is not far behind. In the twentieth century, are you going to allow all this to go on?

No, we are not going to allow it anymore.

Our ways of changing this world are certainly different. We are not going to create nuclear weapons to conquer the world and change it, no.

We have already the greatest weapon in our hands: meditation.

Spread it far and wide to everyone you love, to everyone you know.

Don't tell anybody that it is something to be believed in. Just say, "I experimented, and it is something not to be missed. You experiment. There is nothing to lose. If you don't get anything out of it, you have not lost anything. And it is such a simple thing that everybody, even a small child, can start doing it. And it can be done even by the dying man in the last moment of his life."

And if a dying man can do it, can reach his center, he will know that death is happening only to the house in which he used to live, but he is not going to die. He will know his eternity, his immortality.

And that knowledge, that wisdom is the greatest richness that one can achieve.

Question 2:

Not only possible, it is absolutely certain.

Just being happy is nothing. It is dangerous too, because somebody who is unhappy at least tries to find some way to get out of it.

You have been a sannyasin for eleven years. Naturally - my people are immensely happy people, and happiness is catching - you are caught by the happiness of everybody. And there is no reason to be sad here, there is no reason to be frustrated here, there is no reason to be disappointed here. But this happiness is not what I call blissfulness. This happiness is good, but just good is not enough.

You will have to enter into yourself.

And remember, in entering into yourself you are not going to lose your happiness. You are fortunate, because the person who starts from unhappiness will have to lose unhappiness.

You are not going to lose anything.

You will find more and more happiness.

And you will find the happiness turning, changing into blissfulness, and finally into enlightenment.

You are on the right track, but you are not moving!