Silence is the highest music

Question 1:

I have said that awareness is the only virtue, and unawareness is the only sin.

Now I am in a difficulty. Who has told you to look for good in everything? How did you translate my statement about awareness to mean that you have to see the good in everything? And you say you have tried long to see good in everything, but there are children abused psychologically, sexually; woman are raped - how can these things be good?

But you seem to be just stupid. Being aware means not to make any judgment. And all this time you have been making judgments about what is good and what is not good. Then you are bound to be confused. And awareness will not arise out of this discrimination.

Awareness simply means witnessing anything just like a mirror, giving no judgment about it. And as your awareness grows, things that looked sinful to you will look only pathological. People are sick.

And they are sick as victims of thousands of years of teaching them what is good and what is not good.

With awareness there is no decision about any act. Awareness simply sees it whether it is good or not; it has no criterion. But the first thing is to attain to awareness. And then the same things may not look the same.

For example, the rape of a woman is certainly ugly. But who is responsible for it? The society, the culture, the religion - they have been trying to keep men and women apart. Your biology knows nothing of it, and when you see a beautiful woman on a dark night, alone, your biology takes over your so-called morality and religion.

But then too, it is not certain that raping the woman is certainly bad. Perhaps she was also waiting for it. Perhaps she was getting frustrated that nobody is raping her. There is a deep desire in every woman to be longed for, and the more drastically you long for her the more satisfied she feels. And rape is the ultimate in longing for a woman. You are ready to commit a crime just to have her. You may be imprisoned for years in a jail, you don't care.

In most of the cases you and the woman are both brought up by the same idiotic society. They have told the woman to remain away from men, they have given her a certain psychology to avoid men.

Even if somebody is attractive to her, she has to say no.

In all the languages the poets have been saying for centuries that when a woman says no she means yes. But this is not true in Rajneeshpuram. Here when a woman says no she means no, and when she says yes she means yes. You are fortunate if she says no! But there is no confusion about the meanings of the words.

No woman has been raped in four years' time in the commune here - but a few swamis have been raped! This is something new that is happening. The swamis are in such a fear, and wherever they turn there is somebody ready to rape them! We are writing human history from the very beginning again.

But you cannot decide these things superficially. All psychologists agree that a woman is raped because deep down she desires it. It gives her a great ego, that she is so beautiful, so lovable, that people are ready even to commit suicide - there are countries where for rape you will be sentenced for your whole life or you may be crucified; still the man wanted her. There is a great satisfaction - he risked his whole life!

So don't take things superficially. But an unaware man is bound to take things superficially. My emphasis is not to determine which act is wrong and which act is right. In one situation the same act may be wrong; in other situations, right.

Just a few days ago, one sannyasin wrote me a letter saying, "Osho, You have created a trouble"

- because I had said some time ago that many people, almost the majority of people in the world, men and women both, are untrained lovers. No training has been given to them. In fact everything has been kept from them, they have been kept ignorant. What does a virgin mean? Someone who has been kept absolutely ignorant.

So I had said that the best way to introduce your children to love will be that, while you are making love, children should be playing around. Let them be there. And in fact it is one of the most significant things because every child sooner or later discovers what you are doing to his mother. First he thinks that this father seems to be a barbarian, doing pushups on the poor woman. He wants to kill this man, but the child is so small... so he represses the desire, and he is not even allowed to admit that he has seen it.

And the child will never be able to forgive you, that you were secretive about things. You were not open, even with him. You talked about love, but love means many things: openness, honesty, sincerity. And about one of the most basic things in life you kept the child absolutely unaware.

Children are very intelligent, every child is born with a tremendous energy of intelligence. It is the society and the education and the religion-they start destroying his intelligence, so by the time he is a young man, he is just a fool. But the small children are very perceptive, you cannot deceive them.

So I had said that it is perfectly good - because the child has to learn and it is better he learns from the very beginning.

Now this woman wrote to me, "A problem has arisen: we allowed our child to be present while we were making love; now the child wants to make love to me. He says, 'If father can do it, why can't I do it?' Now we cannot say that this is sin, because if it is sin, then why is his father doing it, and why is he being allowed to commit sin?"

In a really human society there will be no sexual abuse of children. Such abuse exists only because children are kept in the dark; and they are curious, very curious, "What is it all about?" Then they get caught in somebody's net.

But children are very understanding too. The mother, the father, both should make him understand, "This is your training to see how love is made. The time will come when you will be a young man and you will be making love - then don't make the same mistakes that we have made."

Make your lovemaking a deep understanding for the child. Make him also aware that he is not your age. Make the place of your lovemaking a temple, so that the child from the very beginning starts feeling love is something sacred. And if he knows everything about it nobody can abuse him.

Now the question arises: who is responsible for sexual abuse of the child? You are responsible. You are keeping your children in darkness, and they are feeling that there is something that is being kept secret. They become curious; the more you hide it, the more curious they are.

If it is open and is made available so the child can understand it - yes, there will be a few problems, like the child wanting to make love to the mother. The mother can hug the child, the mother can help the child to understand: "Just look at my size and your size. Just grow up and you will find a beautiful woman, far more beautiful than me."

But every mother wants the child to feel that she is the greatest and the most beautiful woman in the world, not knowing that she is creating a tragedy for the child for his whole life because now he will be looking for her all around the world and he will not find her. No woman will come up to the standard of his mother. No woman is going to give him satisfaction.

The same is true about small girls. They should be made absolutely aware - not just verbally in a classroom. That does not help, they become even more curious.

Make it very honest. And when the experiment is happening every day in the house, where is the problem? Let your girl, your boy, be present. Let them see the beauty of it. Make the whole phenomenon as sacred as possible. And these children will always respect you because you were so honest with them, so sincere with them; you never kept anything secret from them.

And any problems like this - boys asking to make love to their mother - can be explained to them, that they are not yet ripe. One day they will be ripe; for that day we are preparing them. And children are very receptive, very understanding.

There is sexual abuse of children because they are kept in darkness by their parents, by their teachers. Love is something like a sin which has to be done in darkness, and nobody is to know about it. You are doing something ugly. In your own mind it is something ugly, something that should not be done. You are not rejoicing in it.

Rejoice! Make love a festive moment.

And of course, your children have to take part in it.

They can at least dance around you while you are making love, sing beautiful songs around you, play on their small guitars, drums.

They can make it really festive!

And they will understand that they are children and they are not of age, and soon they will get their own lovers. And if this experience has been part of their growing up, their love life will have a totally different flavor.

So in child abuse, the person who has abused the child is only a victim of a very neurotic society.

Why should there be rapes? I do not understand, because there are as many women as there are men, equal in numbers. Why should there be rapes?

And while you are raping a woman against her will, it cannot be a joyful experience. It is more like a fight, it is not like love. But people are doing that for the simple reason that the society has completely destroyed any possibility for them to have any love relationship. And society can keep you in such darkness that it is unbelievable.

In the Middle Ages it was thought that the queen of England did not have her legs separate, they were joined - because the way of dressing was such you could not figure out whether the legs were joined or separate. It was all over England an accepted fact that queens are different and unique.

And no queen or king had the guts to say this is nonsense.

Now nobody will fall into such a stupid belief, because the skirts are becoming smaller and smaller and smaller, and soon they are going to disappear. You can see the legs of the queen, and you will be really shocked that they are separate. They are just like your legs, everybody's legs. But this was not told to people. Joined legs gave queens uniqueness, a speciality: they are royal, you are common people.

The same is being done in many things, on many levels all around the world. You don't want your children to know that you make love.

You will be surprised: in India, the father cannot play with his small boy or girl in front of the elders, that is thought to be very unmannerly. No husband can talk to his wife in the day... because in India there are joint families. There are so many people in one family - fifty, sixty - and houses are small and overcrowded.

The husband and wife sometimes have to wait for years to see each other's faces, because they meet only in the darkness of the night without whispering a word, because all others are sleeping.

The house is small and overcrowded; in the same room other people are sleeping.

It is no wonder that in India divorce is a very late development, and that too happens only in a few well-educated, rich cities like Bombay, Delhi, Calcutta. But ninety-nine percent of India cannot think of divorce, for the simple reason that at least you have to see your wife before you can divorce her!

You have to talk to her before you know what a bitch she is! She has to talk with you to know, "My God! What a macho fellow I have got!"

But these things don't happen. Husbands and wives have no time, no space, no secrecy, no privacy.

They meet deep in the darkness of the night when everybody has fallen asleep. And they make love as quickly as possible, because somebody may wake up.

When my uncle got married... I used to sleep in the same room, and I wouldn't let him make love to his wife. Whenever he would get up from his bed and move towards his wife, I would start coughing.

He would go back to his bed.

After a few days he told me, "This seems to be strange, that the moment I get out of bed - the whole night you don't cough, only exactly at that time. What happens? Why do you start coughing?"

I said, "I don't know. I was also thinking that there must be some connection - your getting out of bed and my coughing. I have been thinking, 'What connection can there be?'"

But finally he had to open his heart. He said, "I know you. We have been married for five months and I have not even touched my wife's body. And we cannot say that you should be removed from the room to some other room, because no other room is ready to receive you. And they will ask me why, and I cannot tell the true story, that for five months this boy has been torturing me!"

I said, "I have been doing that simply to make you aware - why make it such a secrecy? Why make it something ugly that you have to hide behind darkness? I have never stopped you, you can make love to your wife; I will be there just to see that everything is going right! And someday I am going to be married, then...? Who is going to teach me? You be my teachers, you both be my teachers."

He said, "You are impossible. If you see us making love, you will spread the rumor all over the city.

And the truth is I myself don't know much about love, because it is never talked about, never taught.

You simply get married - an arranged marriage, you have not seen the girl."

In India, for ninety-nine percent of the people, marriage is still just fate; the astrologer decides it.

They don't even see the other's photograph, they don't know whom they are going to live their whole life with.

This kind of state causes many problems. Sexual abuse of children will be there; rapes will be there - because there are women who have not been able to find a husband, perhaps they have lost all hope of finding a husband. There are men who cannot afford to be married, who are somehow managing to survive, but what to do with the biology? They cannot even go to a prostitute, they don't have the money. So rape remains the only possible outlet for their biological instinct.

Don't be hard on the rapist. And don't be hard on the woman who has been raped. These are problems created by the society. Be hard on it!

In my commune it is absolutely impossible that anybody should rape. I receive letters every day from my women sannyasins: "What is happening to the swamis? They don't seem to be interested in us at all. They avoid, they escape, they make an appointment and never turn up. Is there something wrong?"

There is nothing wrong. This small section of humanity has made love, for the first time, a simple thing. And there is a saturation point. Now a male sannyasin has made love to many women; he feels simply tired. He wants to be left alone, he wants to meditate. Who is going to rape? Impossible!

In the outside world, men have been chasing women for thousands of years and it was thought that it is natural. It is not. In my commune, women are chasing men and men are escaping and hiding, finding excuses. This commune has proved your thousands of years were simply managed. It was not true, because man is sexually the weaker person; the woman is very strong sexually.

That's why for centuries there have been only female prostitutes. Only just now, in very sophisticated areas like London, Tokyo, have there appeared a few male prostitutes. But a male prostitute is finished in one love affair; then the whole night there is no business!

The woman can do business the whole night. She can finish many men very easily. Strange, that man was chasing her; it was absolutely against the reality. But man is an egoist - macho. He becomes interested only in things which are difficult, when things are a challenge.

The woman has understood it from the very beginning - that the man is interested only if she keeps herself far away and becomes a challenge to him, becomes a problem to his ego. But always remember, the woman was very clever: she kept away, but not too far away. Because if you are too far away, the man may lose interest, may start moving in some other direction. She has to be within reach, and yet beyond. It is a delicate territory.

So the woman has been playing with the man. Sometimes she will come closer and the man will feel, "Now, the moment is coming!" - and she will start moving away. This way man has been chasing woman. Otherwise, if we accept our realities and our nature, the woman will be the chaser and the man will be the chased.

Just the other day somebody sent me a question. A woman sannyasin asked me, "When I surrender to my man, something happens. I do not find him there, he is somewhere else in his mind." No, man does not like the woman to surrender. You are doing wrong, you are going against the male psychology. He wants to force you to surrender; that gives him great egoistic joy. But you simply surrender....

I am reminded of my school days.... There used to be every year a wrestling competition. Somehow we persuaded a very strong boy in our class that he should enter the competition, and we would make every arrangement that he should win.

He was very reluctant, but we praised him, his muscles and his body and his exercises. And we said, "This is the time! When are you going to use all your muscles that you have developed in the gym? - this is the time. And everybody in the class is agreed that you will come out on top."

But what happened on the wrestling ground was amazing and something really remarkable.... He had come into the semifinals, now he was facing students from other schools. The other school had hired a professional wrestler, and they pretended that he was a student, that "His age is a little more because he goes on failing." And everybody could understand - wrestlers are not great intellectuals.

But we were afraid for the boy that we had put forward. He looked a pygmy in front of that giant. But he did something immensely beautiful: As the drum started beating and the wrestling was to start, the boy that we had put there lay down on the ground, flat. That's the way Indian wrestling is: one party has to sit on the chest of the other party, and the other party's whole body has to touch the ground, his back has to touch the ground.

He lay down. The wrestler stood there; he could not figure out what was happening. And the student said, "Sit on my chest!"

The wrestler could not get the idea. He was still standing there looking very silly, and the whole crowd was clapping: this kind of wrestling nobody has seen!

Our principal called the boy in and asked, "Why did you do that?"

He said, "What else to do? To be beaten unnecessarily... that man is a professional wrestler. I came to know just before the match that the other school is deceiving, so I thought the best way is not to give him a chance to be victorious. On my own I surrendered." But the other man could not gather courage to sit on his chest. What is the point? - the man is lying down already. You sit on his chest and you are declared victorious? What kind of victory is this?

Never surrender. Pretend that you are not going to surrender, and that creates challenge. For the time being, please stop chasing men in the commune. Just forget all about them, let them meditate a little, and soon they will be after you.

Then remember that the old strategy, which has worked for thousands of years, is still in the psychology of everybody. Remain a challenge, and then the man becomes interested. He is not so much interested in the woman, he is much more interested in the challenge. And you will not find only one swami chasing you, you will find many swamis chasing you - if you create the challenge.

That is the whole secret of it.

But all this stupidity should stop. People should accept the reality, that the man is sexually not so strong as the woman. Although he has been calling her the fair sex, the fact is just the opposite: he is the fair sex. The woman is very strong.

But once things are accepted in their reality, and when no means no and yes means yes, you have sorted out a puzzle that has been going on for centuries. For centuries, poets have been singing songs that the woman is mysterious; even if you live with her your whole life, her mystery remains intact.

Somebody wrote a letter to me: "I also feel that the woman is very mysterious. I have lived with a woman for five years, but she is still unpredictable. When she will start fighting, and when she will start throwing things, and when she will be very loving, there is no way to know."

I said, "Now, there is no difficulty. Just go to our plastic surgeon, Leeladhar, and he will make you a woman. So you will know the mystery - both the male mystery and the female mystery."

It is so easy now for a man to become a woman, for a woman to become a man, that both can know each other's difficulties and each other's mysteries. And all those poets will be discarded, all those mysteries will be forgotten.

There is no mystery. That's why you cannot find it - because it does not exist! It is simply your polar opposite. Man and woman are polar opposites, that's why they attract each other. And only through polar opposition is creation possible. Only through polar opposition does life happen.

Homosexuality has ended in AIDS. It could have been predicted very easily, because similar energies meeting cannot create life, they can only create death. That's what AIDS is.

It has not happened to lesbians, for the simple reason that there is no transfer between negative polarities. Both are negative, both are receptive; neither of them is a donor. So lesbians are the safest in the world now. And if women are intelligent they will turn more and more to lesbianism.

The man is gone, he is finished.

AIDS has come out of homosexuality. AIDS is nothing but death. So learn a simple principle:

similar energies create death, opposite energies have the tension to create life. That's why I say homosexuality is unnatural - unless you want to commit a slow suicide, then it is perfectly good.

Lesbians will not create death because no transfer of energy happens between them. But they will not have the joy, the orgasmic experience which is possible only with the opposite pole.

From the very childhood every child has to be made aware of all possibilities of love, sex, and all deviations, perversions. Then there will be no sexual abuse of children.

And if everybody is aware of the reality, I don't think there is going to be any rape. There is no need, the man can simply ask the woman. It is far more cultured and human. If the woman has the desire, no rape is happening. And if the woman hasn't, then it is just human to leave her. Let her find her man, you start finding your woman.

There are so many women and so many men that it is a very rare possibility you will not get a woman. So why commit something like rape? You are not going to gain anything from it. In fact, you will feel guilty, you have done something inhuman. You have trespassed somebody's territory.

I don't say that rape is good, I don't say that child abuse is good. How did you manage to translate my statement about awareness and start looking into everything, making a hard effort to see good in it? You seem to be a strange fellow.

I had said, "Be aware without judgment," and what you are doing is just the opposite. You are trying to judge a situation. Of course you want to judge it as good - it is not possible.

There are bad things, there are good things; there is no need to force yourself to accept a bad thing as good. But the man of awareness has a different perception. Perhaps something that you think in your unawareness is bad may turn out to be good, or vice versa.

But the man of awareness is not in search of judgments, condemnation, appraisal. He is simply witnessing, with clarity. His clarity tells him what is right, without any effort - your hard effort is not needed. It is the easiest thing for the man of awareness to know what is right and what is wrong.

And also he will be able to see why something wrong goes on happening.

There must be roots somewhere in the culture, in the society, in the world, that poisonous flowers go on flowering. And somebody must be taking care of those plants, watering them.

Your priests are doing it, your politicians are doing it, your psychoanalysts are doing it, your professors are doing it - because these people live on your misery. They live on your being somewhere wrong. If you are perfectly right, they are useless.

Just the other night, one of my topmost therapists, Veeresh from Holland, asked me, "What is the future of our therapeutic efforts?"

I said to him, "Our therapy is just to destroy all that has made man miserable, split, schizophrenic, insane, sick. But once our therapy has destroyed all this poison in the world, then there is no future for our therapy. It has done its work and there is no need for it to exist anymore.

"That has to be understood very clearly, because once you start doing something, it becomes your vested interest. Then on the one hand you go on doing what you are supposed to do, destroying sickness - and on the other hand you go on creating it, because without it you will be nobody."

So my therapists have to understand from the very beginning that what they are doing is not something that is to be permanently there. It is only in the transitory period of humanity that therapy is needed. Therapy is needed because people have been made sick. Their sickness is not real, that's why it can be cured very easily, very simply.

But remember always that you are not to become a permanent phenomenon, because that means you will have to create sickness. You will have to create the same old game - perhaps under a new name. You have to be courageous enough, when the work is done, to retire from the work.

Become a gardener, become a farmer, a plumber or anything you can manage to do. But therapy should not be your profession. These are ugly professions. We have to have them because in the past man has suffered so many wounds, they have to be healed. But just heal them, and once they are healed you move to some creative work.

It was compassionate of you to help human beings to be psychologically healthy. And this will be even more compassionate, not to become a permanent source of dependence for all those people you have helped to be healthy. You have to know when the time is ripe for you to become farmers, gardeners - anything that you love, but be creative.

Therapy is not creative, therapy is destructive.

It is destroying sickness which has been imposed on humanity.

A better human world will simply accept realities and will not ask for fictions.

I have heard that a newly married couple came to a holiday resort to have their honeymoon, but both were looking a little afraid of each other. Both were sitting and talking and the night had almost half passed. The woman finally said, "We have come here for a honeymoon, not to talk about the weather; that we can do anywhere."

The man said, "That is true. But the problem is that I have a deep-rooted, lifelong habit: I undress only in darkness. So first you put the lights off so I can undress and go to bed."

The woman said, "This is a very strange idea. You could have said it before."

He said, "I knew that I would have to say it sometime. And I have to say one thing more - better to be finished with it. One of my legs is false, artificial; that's why I cannot undress in the light - you will see my leg."

The woman giggled. She said, "It is perfectly good, because my breasts are false, one of my eyes is false, my teeth are false. You opened the door, now everything is honest. We can undress in the light or darkness, whatever you prefer; it will not make any difference. I was also waiting... thinking, how to start, from where to start? This way the whole night will be lost, and this is supposed to be our greatest night, our honeymoon night."

This is the situation. Everybody is hiding something from everybody else - a false leg, a false breast, false teeth, a glass eye - everybody is trying to hide something. It is better to be honest and sincere.

If humanity decides to be honest and sincere, life can be a rejoicing. Life can be all that you need.

Life has given you the opportunity to live it totally, and you are getting caught in stupid things and wasting the opportunity. And life is going by continuously, it is not going to wait for you.

Now what business is this of yours, to find good in everything? Who told you to? Now, how are you going to find good in the false breasts? What good? Just a beautiful flat chest? What good are you going to find in false teeth? Naturally, you will be in trouble - making hard effort to believe that there must be something good in it.

Don't waste your time in unnecessary inquiries.

Life is short - rejoice in it, dance it, sing it.

My statement was totally different. That's why I say to you continually, don't just hear me, listen to me. You heard a certain statement and translated it in your mind, that you have to see good in everything.

Even I was puzzled - the translation seems to be so far away, absolutely unconnected. But I have the feeling that because I said, "Awareness is good, unawareness is bad," that created the trouble for you.

I have said awareness is good - so rather than being aware, you started being good and seeing good. It does not happen that way. Awareness has to be there first, only then can you be good.

Awareness has to happen first, then everything else follows. And being aware does not mean that everything becomes good. If everything becomes good, the very word 'good' will become meaningless.

Awareness will make you aware of what is good and what is not good. And awareness will give you the direction to move towards the good and not towards the bad.

Question 2:

Don't bother about anything intellectually.

You are right on both the points. Your feeling of energy, silence, your feeling your own centeredness in my presence - exactly that is understanding.

And your second statement is also true - not only about you. Because you are not literate, you are not educated, you got the point sooner: that when you start intellectually making an effort to understand me, you get puzzled. Everybody will get puzzled. That's the whole work of my talking:

to puzzle your heads so much that one day you simply drop the head and start functioning from the heart.

Your head is your master right now. It was not meant to be the master because it is only a mechanical thing, a bio-computer. Your heart has to be the master. And the head is dangerous when it is master; it is the worst master you can find. But when the head serves your heart it is the most beautiful servant that you can find. Things just have to be put into their right places.

It is good that you are not so full of rubbish in your head. You have not been to schools, colleges, universities. Feel fortunate that you have been on the streets. Your head will not create much trouble for you. Heads don't grow on the streets; they need the tremendous effort of thousands of teachers, professors, educationalists.

Don't be bothered intellectually with me. I am not interested in convincing you of any dogma, creed, theology, religion, philosophy - no. My effort is to help your heart beat a little faster, because it is from the heart that you live. Your life is from the heart. That is why people die of heart attack; nobody dies of head attack.

You simply forget the head. What is happening to you is exactly what I mean by understanding.

Question 3:

I do not believe in vegetarianism, because I do not believe in anything.

My disciples are vegetarian not as a cult, not as a creed. They are vegetarians because their meditations make them more human, more of the heart, and they can see the whole stupidity of people killing living beings for their food. It is their sensitivity, their aesthetic awareness that makes them vegetarians.

I don't teach vegetarianism; it is a by-product of meditation. Wherever meditation has happened, people have become vegetarian, always, for thousands of years.

The oldest religion in the world is Jainism. It is a small religion, that's why not much is known to the outside world; it exists only in India. Jainism has no God; hence, there is no possibility of prayer.

When God and prayer are discarded, then what is left for a religion? God is somewhere outside, your prayer is addressed to someone outside. Discarding God and prayer you are really saying, "I would like now to go inward." And meditation is a way of going inward.

For thousands of years Jainas have been vegetarians. You have to know this fact, that all their twenty-four teachers - they call them tirthankaras, their messiahs - came from the warrior caste.

They were all meat-eaters. They were professional warriors. What happened to these people?

Meditation transformed their whole vision. Not only did their swords fall from their hands, their warriorhood disappeared, but a new phenomenon started happening: a tremendous feeling of love towards existence. They became absolutely one with the whole. Vegetarianism is just a small part of that great revolution.

The same happened in Buddhism. Buddha did not believe in God, did not believe in prayer.

I want you to understand it: the moment God and prayer are discarded, the only thing that is left is to go in.

Buddha also was from the warrior caste, son of a king, trained to kill. He was not a vegetarian. But when meditation started blossoming in him, just as a by-product the vegetarian idea came into his being: you cannot kill animals for eating, you cannot destroy life. While every kind of delicious food is available, what is the need to kill living beings?

This is nothing to do with religion. This is simply to do with your sensitiveness, your aesthetic understanding.

Jainism and Buddhism are the only religions without God and without prayer, and both automatically became vegetarian. The same is happening to sannyasins.

Christianity is not vegetarian, Mohammedanism is not vegetarian, Judaism is not vegetarian - for the simple reason that these religions never came across the revolution that meditation brings. They never became aware of meditation.

They went on praying to a fictitious God - which brings no transformation in life, because he does not exist. Your prayers are just addressed to the empty sky. They never reach anywhere, they are never heard by anyone, they are never going to be answered. There is nobody to answer them. All the religions that have remained hooked with the idea of God have remained meat-eaters. So this is a simple phenomenon to understand.

Why are my sannyasins vegetarians? We don't enforce vegetarianism, we are not concerned with it.

My sannyasins are not like George Bernard Shaw and his Fabian Society, where vegetarianism was a religion. Neither George Bernard Shaw knows anything about meditation, nor does his Fabian Society. They are just eccentric people who want to do something different from everybody else so they look better, they look higher, they look holier. Vegetarianism is their philosophy.

It is not my philosophy, it is simply a by-product. I don't insist upon it. I insist upon meditation. Be more alert, more silent, more joyful, more ecstatic, and find your innermost center. Many things will follow of their own accord; and when they come of their own accord, there is no repression, there is no fight, no hardship, no torture.

But if you live vegetarianism as a religion or a philosophy, you will be continually hankering for meat, continually thinking, dreaming of meat, and your vegetarianism will be just a decoration for your ego.

With me, meditation is the only essential religion.

And everything that follows it is virtue, because it comes of its own accord. You don't have to drag it, you don't have to discipline yourself for it. I have nothing to do with vegetarianism, but I know that if you meditate you are going to grow new perceptivity, new sensitivity, and you cannot kill animals.

Have you observed one fact? - that the vegetarian societies have the most delicious kinds of foods.

The Buddhists, the Jainas - they have the best dishes in the world, for the simple reason that through their meditations they had to drop meat-eating. They became more inquiring into delicious food so they didn't miss meat, on which they had been brought up from their childhood - it had become almost their second nature.

There are millions of people who have never thought of vegetarianism. From the very childhood they have been killing living animals. It is not different from cannibalism. And since Charles Darwin it is absolutely a scientific fact that man has come, evolved, from the animals - so you are killing your own forefathers and eating them joyously. Don't do such a nasty thing!

And the earth is capable, man is capable of creating enough vegetarian food - vegetables, fruits, new fruits which have never existed before. Just crossbreeding is needed, and we can have the best kind of food available for everybody.

Your sensitivity and perceptivity, your aesthetic understanding is immediately understood by the animals. Here you can find so many deer - they have come because this is the only place in the whole of America where they are absolutely safe. Nobody is going to hunt them.

In Oregon, for ten days per year, the government allows people to hunt deer. The deer are such beautiful animals, so agile, so lovely.... We stopped hunting on our own ground, so from other ranches deer have moved to our place. And now they must be the best-fed deer in the whole world, because we are taking care of them. We are growing grass that they like, specially for them.

They would never have thought that people would be so considerate. They like a certain grass called alfalfa, and I have told my people, "Grow as much alfalfa as possible, so all the deer of the whole of Oregon by and by start moving to our commune. And they will be respected as members of the commune."

And they already understand it. They stand on the road - you go on honking your horn, they don't care; they are meditating in the middle of the road. And they understand one thing: that you are not going to do harm, so there is no need to be in a hurry.

In my garden I have three hundred peacocks. The moment they see my car, they all start moving in front of it. They know that they cannot be hurt, that nobody is going to run over them. They will not move; sometimes Vivek has to get out and push them. They are enjoying!

There are a few really crazy ones - the moment they see my car they come running from far away, just to stand in front of my car. I will move slowly, and they will move slowly backwards, but they will not move away from the road. They understand something, their hearts have felt something, that "these people are not enemies; these people are part of us, friends."

And the whole animal kingdom is part of us, even the trees. Now the scientists have come to an established conclusion that trees are living beings. Not only that, they have a very fine sensitivity, far more sensitive than you have.

They have placed machines around trees, plugged wires into the trees - machines like a cardiograph which shows your heartbeat. It shows the heartbeat of the tree, and if somebody is coming to chop the tree, immediately the graph on the cardiogram goes crazy. The tree is feeling really afraid and trembling.

Not only that, other trees around also go crazy, although they are not going to be cut. But someone, some friend is going to be cut and they have a great feeling for it.

And the most strange thing that has come to the knowledge of the scientists is that if the person who is coming with an axe is just pretending - he is not really going to cut the tree - the graph remains harmonious. This is something unbelievable, that the tree knows whether the man intends to cut it or is just pretending.

They are more sensitive than you. You will not be able to figure it out: if somebody comes with a sword at you, you will not be able to figure out whether he is really going to hit you or is just pretending, acting. You will not be able to find out through your sensitivity. The reason is, man has lived for millions of years so insensitively that he has lost one of the greatest qualities of his being.

Meditation slowly slowly gives you back your sensitivity; and a man who has reached to the ultimate ecstasy of meditation is as sensitive as any tree, any animal, anything in the whole existence.

This sensitivity makes my people vegetarians. And it is a gain, not a loss. It will make you simultaneously more loving, more compassionate, more feeling, more understanding of beauty.

It will make you aware of great music, even the music that happens when the wind blows through the pine trees, or the sound of the running water-even the music that happens, that is happening, in this gap, in this silence.

Silence is the highest music.

It is soundless, but it can be felt.

Can't you feel the silence here?

Can't you feel that the people who are here are all one, pulsating in the same rhythm, their hearts beating in the same rhythm?

Vegetarianism is a small thing. We have to create a world of really sensitive people, who can understand music, poetry, paintings, who can understand nature, who can understand human beauty, who can understand the world that surrounds them: the stars, the moon, the sun.

Just a bird on the wing can fill you with immense rejoicing. The freedom of the small bird, the song of the small bird, may make you dance, sing.

Humanity has lost its heart, and we have to give it back to everyone who is willing.

That's the meaning of my sannyas.