Above all, the truth of man - beyond that, nothing

Question 1:

IT is a little bit complex, because a few other things will have to be understood first; then you can understand what intuition is.

Intuition is the highest rung of the ladder, the ladder of consciousness. It can be divided into three divisions: the lowest and the first is instinct; the second, the middle one, is intellect; and the third, the highest one, is intuition.

The word "in" is used in all three. It is significant. It means these are qualities inborn. You cannot learn them, there is no way to grow them with any outside help.

Instinct is the world of the animals - everything is instinct. Even if sometimes you see indications of other things, it is your projection. For example, you can see love in animals - the mother looking after her kids very lovingly, caringly - and you can think that it is not just instinct, it is something higher, not just biological. But it is not higher, it is simply biological. The mother is doing it like a robot in the hands of nature. She is helpless - she has to do it. In many animals the father has no instinctive fatherliness; on the contrary, many will kill their own kids and eat them.

55 For example in crocodiles, the life of the kids is in immense danger. The mother is protective and fights for the kids' life, but the father just wants to have a good breakfast. The father has no instinct; in fact the father is a human institution.

The mother crocodile has to keep the kids in her mouth to protect them from the father. She has a big mouth - all women have big mouths - she can manage to keep almost a dozen kids in her mouth. In the mother's mouth, just beside her dangerous teeth the kids are perfectly safe. The more difficult thing is for the kids to figure out who is the mother and who is the father, because they both look alike. And sometimes the kids go close to the father, go into his mouth and are gone forever; then they will never see the light again. But the mother tries to fight, to protect.

Perhaps that's why nature gives children in such abundance: the mother has one dozen each time, each year. If she can manage to save even two that keeps the population exactly the same, but she manages to protect almost half of the kids.

Anybody watching will feel that the father is really cruel, has no compassion, no love, and that the mother is really motherly. But you are just projecting your ideas. The mother is protecting, not for any conscious reason; it is in her hormones to protect them, and the father has nothing to do with those hormones. If he is injected with the same hormones then he will stop killing his own kids. So it is a question of chemistry, not of psychology or of anything higher than biochemistry.

Ninety percent of man's life is still part of the animal world. We live by instinct.

You fall in love with a woman, or a woman falls in love with you, and you think it is something great.

It is nothing great, it is simple instinctive infatuation: it is hormones being attracted by the opposite hormones. You are just a plaything in the hands of nature. No animal bothers about the delicacies and subtleties of love, but man feels that just to be instinctive is insulting, humiliating: your love is just biochemistry? Your love is poetry, your love is art, your love is philosophy - but biochemistry?

It seems as if you are ashamed of your biology, of your chemistry, of your nature. But this is not the way of understanding. You have to understand exactly what is what.

Distinctions have to be clear, otherwise you will remain always confused. Your ego will go on making you project as high as possible things which have nothing to do with anything higher than the lowest strata. Your love is just an illusion created by your chemistry.

Just think: if the romantic idea of love is taken away then I don't think any man or woman would be able to stand sex and its absurdity. It would look so stupid. Just take away the romantic idea and think in straight terms of biology and chemistry; then your sex will make you feel ashamed. There is nothing in it to brag about.

Just imagine yourself making love to a man or a woman with no romance, with no poetry, no Omar Khayyam, no Shelley, no Byron - just as a reproduction process because nature wants to procreate through you, because nature knows you are going to die. You are not permanent; before you die nature wants that life to continue. But man cannot go into sex unless he has something romantic about it, so he has created great smoke around sex, which he calls love. He pretends, even believes that it is love - but watch more carefully.

You are interested in a man or a woman. The natural instinct in a woman is to play hide-and-seek. It is very strange that in all the cultures, all over the world, the small kids play two games without fail.

Their religions are different, their cultures are different, their races are different, their societies, their languages - everything is different - but as far as these two games are concerned, whether they are born in Africa or China or America or India, it makes no difference.

One is the game of hide-and-seek. It is strange why, all over the world, not a single culture has existed on the earth where children have not played the game of hide-and-seek. It seems to be something to do with instinct, as if they are preparing for some bigger game of hide-and-seek. This is just a rehearsal, and then for the whole of life the game is continued.

The woman is always the one who tries to hide, and the man is always the macho who seeks. It is a challenge for him to seek. The more the woman hides, the more he is challenged and excited.

Hence, you will see that the more beautiful a woman is, the more expert she is in hiding, in escaping, in making you feel as thirsty and as hungry as possible. She goes on saying no - that no is her hiding. And everybody in the whole world knows that when a woman says no she means yes - in all the languages. If she is not ready to say yes, she will not even bother to say no.

In my university, a student, who was my neighbor in the hostel, was very shy of girls. And I, for some strange reason, from my very earliest childhood have been teaching people all kinds of things. Some strange fate! People trusted me, that they could confide their weaknesses to me; and that I was not going to tell anybody, and I might be able to give them some advice - particularly because I was never a seeker of women. On the contrary, in my university life, girls were seeking me and I was hiding.

So that young man asked me, "What is the secret? We are trying to find a girl, and they all escape.

And you go on escaping from them and they go on trying to find you. What is the secret?"

I said, "There is not much of a secret. One has to be the hider and one has to be the seeker. Once it has been decided that I am not going to be the seeker, then naturally they start seeking. It is just a reversal of the instincts, and because I know that one has to play the part."

In my class there were two girls. I was the only man there, and I was as uninterested in them as one could be. Now, naturally that was a challenge; it hurt. And particularly one of the girls was really beautiful. She was a Kashmiri girl, and they are the fairest and the most beautiful in India. She had never thought... and it had never happened in her life - everybody who came in contact with her was immediately interested in her. I was the only man who was not interested at all.

We were sitting at the same desk. It was I who had to go on keeping myself close to the wall, and she went on coming closer to me. I said, "You have enough space - just leave a little buffer zone between us."

This man asked me, "What to do, because whenever I approach them or say anything they immediately say, 'No, we are not interested."'

I said, "Have you heard the saying or not, that when a girl says no she means yes? Just take it for granted that it is yes: when you hear no, understand yes, and go ahead following the yes."

The next day I saw him; he was very wiped out. I asked, "What is the matter? What happened?"

He said, "This advice of yours I was thinking was going to work, but the girl didn't say no, she said,'Shit'! And I was at a loss what to do because you had given no instructions about that."

I said, "Now I will give you a general instruction that covers everything because if I give you instructions for a single thing and she says something else, again you will be in trouble: If she says ANYthing, she means yes; otherwise she wouldn't bother even to say that, she would simply turn around and go on her way. If she becomes angry, that is quite something, that means it is possible. She has shown some emotion towards you; her instincts are stirred. Now you have to be a little clever to turn her emotions in your favor.

"But if she says nothing and does not even look at you, then it is better you seek somewhere else.

She is going to be difficult for you. Right now she is very difficult, and if you get her then she is going to be really terrible. It is better you forget about her."

But all children, all over the world, play the game of hide-and-seek. Nobody teaches them, so how did it become universal? It must be coming out from their inner nature - some urge to seek, to find, some challenge. The girl must have some inner urge to escape as far as she can. The more beautiful she is, the more she will try to escape because she knows you will follow. A homely girl will not try hiding too much; she will hide, but in such a way that you can find her. An ugly girl will not even try hiding. She will not say no thinking that it will be understood as yes; she will simply say yes so as not to leave anything in confusion, in limbo.

The same is true about the man. The ugly man will be the greatest seeker; he will find you even if you are hiding in hell. He is not going to leave you alone. The middle-class, the middler, will try to find you but not so hard. If he can find you, good; otherwise he will seek somewhere else. The most beautiful will not try seeking at all, he will wait for you to come.

These things happen naturally - nobody decides these things, they are part of your biological nature.

But nature has been wise enough to give you the delusion of love; otherwise, just for reproduction purposes, for life to continue, you are not going to do all those exercises and eighty-four sex postures that Vatsyayana prescribes - strange, ugly, stupid. If you take love away then bare sex looks really very animal-like. That is one of the problems that humanity has been troubled by all along and is still troubled by. One can only hope that in the future we can make it more understandable.

The man goes on seeking, persuading, writing love letters, sending presents and doing everything in his power; but once his sex is satisfied he starts becoming uninterested. Now, it is not something that he is doing knowingly. He does not want to hurt; particularly the person whom he has loved he does not want to hurt. But this is the way of biology. All that romance and all the love was just smoke in which nature was trying to hide the sexual part, which in itself looks ugly, so it was giving it a beautiful cover.

But once nature's work is done through you, all that smoke disappears. Instinct knows only sex.

Love is only a sugar coating on a bitter pill just to help you swallow it. Don't go on keeping it in your mouth, otherwise you will not be able to swallow it; soon the thin coating of sugar will be gone and you are going to spit out the bitter pill.

Hence lovers are in a great hurry to make love. What is the hurry? Why can't they wait? The sugar is very thin and they are afraid that if it is too late the sugar may be gone and then it is all bitter, really bitter.

Instinct does not make you a man, it simply keeps you an animal, two-legged, but still you are an animal.

The second rung, intellect, gives you something which is higher than biology, chemistry, the animal nature. Intellect is also inborn, just as intuition is, just as instinct is. There is no way to increase your intelligence; all that can be done is to make your whole potential actual, which will look as if your intelligence has grown.

The reality is that the most intelligent person uses only fifteen percent of his potential; the normal, ordinary, common person uses only six to seven percent. Eighty-five percent of intelligence remains unused even in Albert Einstein or Bertrand Russell. That eighty-five percent can be made available and it will be a tremendous growth. You will think that certainly you have grown in intelligence, but you have simply recovered, reclaimed what was already yours.

We have found ways to teach intellect and to increase your power of memory. All the schools, colleges and universities - the whole system of education around the world is only doing one thing: sharpening your intellect. But there has arisen a problem which was not foreseen by the educationists: when your intelligence becomes a little powerful it starts interfering with your instinct.

A competition, a struggle for power starts.

The intellect tries to dominate, and because it has logic on its side - reason, argument, a thousand and one proofs - it can manage, as far as your conscious mind is concerned, to convince you that the instinct is something evil. That's why all the religions have been condemning instinct.

They are just intellectual games. Instinct is part of your unconscious mind and intellect is part of your conscious mind, but the problem is that the conscious mind is only one-tenth of the unconscious mind. It is just like an iceberg: only one-tenth shows above water, nine times more is hidden underneath. Your conscious mind is only a tenth part, but it shows; you know about it. You don't know anything about your unconscious mind.

The conscious mind is being taught in the schools, in the colleges, in the universities, in the churches, in the synagogues - everywhere. And they fill your conscious mind - against instinct.

This is a very ugly phenomenon; they are making you anti-nature, anti-yourself.

But the unconscious mind is always silent; it is deep in darkness. It is not worried about your conscious mind at all. Whatever you decide with your conscious mind can simply be thrown away by the unconscious any moment, because it is nine times more powerful. It does not bother about your logic, your reason, or anything.

It is not without reason that even a man like Gautam Buddha was against giving women initiation into his commune. He wanted it to be purely a male commune with no female in it.

I am against his attitude but I understand what the reason was. His reason has to be thought about.

He was aware that once women are there then what are you going to do with the unconscious mind of man? It was a question of psychology, not of religion. Sigmund Freud or Jung or Adler are just pygmies before Gautam Buddha.

It looks inhuman to prevent women, but if you look into his insight you will be surprised; the man had some solid ground. The ground was not the woman; he was not really saying to keep the woman out. He was saying, "l know you cannot be victorious over your unconscious." In reality it was not a condemnation of woman, it was a condemnation of the disciples. He was saying that in bringing the woman in, your unconscious will start overpowering you.

He tried every possible way to prevent that happening. He told his monks that they had to walk looking only four feet ahead so they could not see the face of a woman on the road or anywhere; at the most they might see her legs. He told his monks, "Don't touch a woman, don't talk to a woman."

One of his disciples was persistent. He said, "In some situation - for example a woman has fallen on the road and is sick or dying - do you want us not to talk to her, to ask her where she wants to go? Do you want us not to touch her and take her to her home?"

He said, "In rare situations like this, yes, you can touch her and you can talk to her - but be very aware that she is a woman."

Now his insistence, "Be very aware," is not against the woman, it is against your unconscious. If you are very aware then there is a possibility that your unconscious may not be able to penetrate and overpower the conscious mind.

All the religions have been against the woman - not that they were woman-haters, no; they were simply trying to protect the monk, the priest and the popes. Of course, I don't agree with their methodology because this is not a way to protect; in fact this makes you more inflammable. A monk who has not touched a woman, who has not talked to a woman and who has no idea about women, is bound to be more in the grip of his instinct than a man who has lived with women, talked with them, and has been as much at ease with them as with any man.

The monks and nuns have been more in the power of the instinct. If you split your instinct completely from satisfaction, it can become so powerful - almost like a drug - that it can intoxicate you, it can make you hallucinate. And in the Middle Ages there were monks who confessed before the special court that the pope had made. It was a grand jury court where all honest nuns and monks were called and asked to confess: "Are you having intercourse with devils, with witches?" And thousands of them confessed, "Yes, the witches come in the night, the devils come in the night."

The monastery walls and locks could not prevent them coming in, of course; they were devils and witches! They described exactly how a witch looks, how a devil looks, and how they were tempted into sexuality and were unable to resist. These nuns and monks were burned alive so that it became a lesson for others. But nobody has bothered to see: no witch comes to you; even if you keep your door open, no devil comes to you. Why were these devils and witches coming only to Catholics? - strange! What have poor Catholics done wrong?

The reason is simple. They repressed sex so much that it became a boiling hot thing inside the unconscious. And when they went to sleep, their dreams were so vivid and colorful and realistic - it depended on how much they had been deprived.

Just fast for two or three days and you will see: each night you will have a beautiful feast in your dream. And as the fast goes deeper and makes you more hungry, your feast will become more and more delicious, fragrant, colorful, realistic. There is a possibility that after twenty-one days of fasting you can dream of food with open eyes, fully awake. There is no need for sleep any more; now the unconscious starts infiltrating into the conscious even while you are waking.

Many of the nuns and the monks accepted that it was not only in the night; in the day also devils and witches came to visit them and made love to them. And they were unable to do anything, it was simply beyond their capacity.

Other religions have done the same thing.

My effort is just the opposite of all the religions, because I can see what they have done. The intention was good but their understanding was not deep enough. I want women and men to live together, to be acquainted with each other's bodies, differences, polarities, so that there is no need for your unconscious to carry something repressed in it.

Once your unconscious is completely free of repression, your instinct has a different quality to it. It is joined with intelligence. When your unconscious is no more repressed, when there is no Berlin wall between your conscious and your unconscious - the wall can be withdrawn because there is no repression so there is no need to keep the unconscious hidden - then you can move in and out of your unconscious as easily as you move from one room to another room in your house.

This is your house. Gurdjieff used to use this simile of the house, that man is a three-storied house. The first story is the unconscious, the second story is the conscious, the third story is the superconscious. Once your intelligence and instinct have no conflict, you become man for the first time; you are no longer part of the animal kingdom. And to me this is what is absolutely needed for anybody who wants to know truth, life, existence; for one who wants to know who he is.

In repressing nine parts of your own mind, how are you going to know yourself? You have repressed so much of yourself in a basement where you cannot bear to go. All religious people have lived in fear, trembling. What was their fear? The fear was of their own unconscious and their repressed instincts which were knocking on the door of their conscious: "Open the door, we want to come in!

We want realization, we want to be fulfilled."

The more starved they are, the more dangerous they are. You are surrounded by hungry wolves; each instinct becomes a hungry wolf And this is the torture in which so-called religious people have lived, surrounded by hungry wolves.

I want you to be friendly with your unconscious.

Just as Buddha had to prevent women because he wanted to create a wall between you and your unconscious... I have brought women into the commune with the same idea, the same intention:

to prevent your unconscious overpowering your conscious. But what Buddha did, failed; what I am doing is making it foolproof. It is impossible that it fail because I don't in any way support any kind of repression. Let it all be expressed.

Let your biology be satisfied to its full.

Just try to see the point: if your biology is completely satisfied, there is no fight between the conscious and the unconscious. You become one whole, as far as your mind is concerned; your mind is one whole.

It will release tremendous intelligence in you because most of your intelligence is involved in repressing. You are sitting on a volcano trying to keep the volcano from exploding. The volcano is going to explode. Your power is so small it cannot hold it for ever; on the contrary, when it explodes you will be thrown into such small pieces that to put you together again will be impossible.

The many mad people around the world, in your mad asylums, hospitals - what are they? Who are they? What has gone wrong with them? They have fallen in pieces and you can't put them together.

There is no possibility of putting them together unless you arrange that all their repressed instincts are fulfilled. But who is there to even say this? Because I have been saying it for all of thirty-five years continually, I have become the most notorious man in the world.

Just yesterday I saw in STERN a front cover page story of fifteen pages, and this is only the first part. It is going to be in five parts, in five consecutive issues of the magazine. Their heading on the title page is "The Sex State." I really liked it.

And the strangest thing is, if you go on looking beyond those fifteen pages, then you will be surprised.

Who is living in a sex state? The Stern staff, their editors and their board of members - or us? In the magazine are totally naked, nude women, and they are not only naked... because a totally naked woman is not so fascinating; you have to make her nakedness even more fascinating by giving her sexual clothes, which in a way show her body and in a way hide it too. So you can play the hide-and-seek game again.

You can start dreaming about how the woman looks behind these clothes. She may not be so beautiful behind these clothes. In fact all female bodies are the same and all male bodies are the same, once you put the light off and all colorfulness and all differences disappear. Darkness is such an equalizer, so communistic, that in darkness you can even love your own wife.

The whole magazine is full of sex, but we are the sex state. Even PLAYBOY writes against me! I wonder what a really strange world we are living in! But I know why Stern or PLAYBOY or magazines like that, which are third-rate and exploiting people's sexuality... they are sold in millions. Stern sells almost two million copies and each copy is estimated to be read by at least eight people; that means sixteen million people.

Why should they be against me? And they have been against me almost for six or seven years.

The reason is that if I succeed then these magazines will have to close their offices. They live upon repression. It is a simple logic, why they are against me.

The priests, who are against sex, are against me, and the people who are using sex as an exploitation - PLAYBOY, STERN, and there are thousands of magazines around the world - they are also against me! It seems strange, because they are not against the pope; there is not a single article against the pope. PLAYBOY should be against the pope who is continually condemning sex.

But no.

There is an intrinsic logic:

The more the pope condemns sex, the more he represses sex, the more PLAYBOY sells.

Only in my commune will nobody be interested in PLAYBOY or STERN - who bothers? If I succeed then all these pornographic magazines, literature and movies, are simply bound to disappear. And there is a great investment behind them, so they will all oppose me - and they will oppose me and condemn me in the name of sex, as if I am spreading sexuality!

If anybody has spread sexuality it must be your God. I have nothing to do with it. He goes on giving birth to children with sexual hormones. He should stop it! He should listen to the pope. But these magazines are not against God either because He is providing the whole market. Popes and priests are all in a deep conspiracy. They are both together against me because I am simply trying to spoil the game.

But that has been my habit from the very beginning, to spoil people's game. If they are playing football I will simply take the football and run away and then the whole team will be coming after me. Once I have reached my house, I will go immediately to the terrace and lock the door. Then my father and my mother and everybody will be knocking on the door, "Give back their football. Why do you continually take somebody's football, somebody's volleyball? The whole team is there and they are so angry and perspiring. Two miles they have been running after you."

And I would say, "Because I cannot tolerate any stupid kind of thing. Wherever I see anything idiotic happening I stop it.

"Now these people simply throw the ball to the other side; the other side throws the ball back to them. And I cannot tolerate it. I was just passing there. I had not gone there for any reason, just seeing these fools doing this.... They should thank me."

My father would say, "If they want to do something stupid let them do it. Why should you interfere?

You should not spoil anybody's game."

I used to spoil my father's game too. He was a good chess player, and he used to play with a Mohammedan, an old man, whose letters still come. He is now more than a hundred years old. He was my grandfather's friend - Abdul Baba. When India was divided he went to Pakistan because his son, daughter, and everybody else was going. He was not happy to leave - he left crying and weeping - but everybody was going and they did not want to leave the old man there, so they took him away. But he has been continually writing from there.

In my life I have received millions of letters, but no letter is so loving as that old man's. His letters still come here and just a few days ago a letter came from him. He continually writes, "bete" - that is "my son." In Hindi beta means my son, but when you make it bete you are making it as full of love as possible. Beta is simply my son. In English there is nothing compared to bete. Just a little change, but bete becomes "my beloved son" - and something more, something plus which is untranslatable.

He goes on writing, "Now I am more than a hundred years old, my only wish is to see you one more time before I die." He had come to India when my father died, but because he is a hajji.... He has been on the pilgrimage to Mecca, which is called hajj, and whoever makes the pilgrimage gets the title hajji. Each Mohammedan is required at least one time in his life to go to Mecca, otherwise he will not have entry into paradise.

But once you have been to Mecca, then you - a hajji - have to follow a few things. You cannot say anything untrue - and many other things. He had no idea that my father was with me in Poona so he got the permission of the Indian government to go to Gadawara, to my father's place - the permission was only for Gadawara.

He could have come - there was no problem in it - to visit Poona, because he had permission to be in India for fifteen days, but because he had said that he would be only visiting Gadawara he could not come to Poona. Now he says, "Perhaps I did wrong. I should have dropped my paradise.

I should have come to Poona to see you and your father. If through any sacrifice I can see you I am ready to make it: I am ready to drop paradise."

This old man was an expert in playing chess. He was my grandfather's chess companion, and when my grandfather died, my father started playing with this old man. It was my usual practice...

whenever I saw them playing, I would upturn their board! But that old man was never angry - he would say, "You are a man of principle."

I would say, "l cannot allow you to be so stupid: 'This is the elephant and this is the camel, this is the king and this is the queen.' Whom are you befooling? You are both unnecessarily wasting time.

It was good that I came by, otherwise you would have continued."

Many times my father would say, "This is too much! We are not wasting your time. We never disturb anything that you are doing because we know if we disturb you, you will create such a nuisance.

You go on doing everything in front of our eyes, dangerous things even" - because behind my house there was a neem tree, a very big neem tree, huge, very old, and it was very difficult to climb on it.

My father wanted it to be cut, but in fact he could not find any woodcutter who was ready to climb it and cut it, because all around were houses and the tree was vast; its branches were covering many houses.

All the woodcutters said, "lt is almost impossible, a difficult job. If we cut those branches they can fall, destroy somebody's house or take somebody's life - and our own life is at risk. The tree is not in an empty space where we can manage to cut it. Nothing can be done here."

I used to climb the tree. And the tree was known as having ghosts in it. In India it is thought that if you take a person who is possessed by a ghost to a tree which is well-known and famous for having many ghosts already living there, then naturally that ghost, seeing others of its society, leaves the man and enters the tree. And then immediately you have to hammer a long nail into the tree so the ghost is nailed to the tree; now he cannot come out. So that tree had many nails. Every day it was a joy to see people coming and their ghosts entering the tree. I used those nails for stepping on.

My father said, "Every day you see ghosts disappearing." I had seen it, that the person comes up to the tree simply mad, and just before the tree he starts trembling, shouting, saying something.

And the people who have brought him say, "Get into the tree, get out of this man! You have your whole society here - what are you doing with this man?" Then suddenly the man cools down, and as he cools down they immediately nail the ghost.

He said, "You see it every day."

I said, "l see it every day, and you also see every day that I go on stepping on those nails and no ghost has even troubled me. Perhaps they think I am also a ghost or something... an un-nailed ghost!"

And he said, "I see you and I fear for you, but I don't stop you because there is no point in stopping you; there would just be an argument." We had a small well. To clean the well they had put iron rods so you could just use those iron rods as steps to go down the well. It was a very deep well, but very small; it was just for family purposes. Once in a while I would go to take a bath in the well.

He would see me and he would say, "Okay, go. You know that we have to drink that water, but we cannot prevent you. And we know that some day you can be in danger; it is very deep, sixty feet at least. Even if you cry, nobody will hear."

I said, "I am not a one to cry. I will die silently, and live silently. I am not going to cry - don't be worried about that. And as far as the depth is concerned, I have fathomed it; there is no problem. I go to the very depth, and many times I have found your things; a bucket has been dropped in and I have brought it out. You know that I go to the very depth."

So he would say, "We never stop anything, and you just jump into...."

I said, "I jump only when I see something absurd going on. This is absolutely absurd - and I am a spoilsport."

Now this good sport is going on between the priest and the PLAYBOYS: the priest goes on repressing, and the pornographers go on printing more pornography. And their pornography is sold more than your bibles. People read PLAYBOY keeping the magazine inside THE BIBLE, so you may think, "What a holy man, always reading THE BIBLE." Whenever you see anybody reading THE BIBLE just go close and see, whether he is actually reading THE BIBLE. Ninety percent chances are it is a PLAYBOY magazine.

Both these types of people are exploiting repression; hence, it is logical in every way to be against me. They are both against me. At least STERN should not be against me if I have created a sex state. They should be happy and they should be favorable. But no, they are absolutely angry. They may not even be aware why they are angry with me; they may be doing it absolutely unconsciously, but the unconscious also has its own reasons. You may not be aware of them.

Repress anything and it becomes valuable.

Repress more, and it becomes more valuable.

Don't repress and it loses all value.

Express it, it evaporates.

I can say to the world that this is the only place where sex means nothing; it has no value.

Nobody is bothered by it; nobody is dreaming about it and nobody is fantasizing about it. In fact sannyasins continually write to me, "Osho, what to do? My sex life is completely disappearing."

I say, "What to do? Let it disappear. You need not do anything. This is the whole purpose here: it should disappear Don't make any effort to make it disappear, but when it is disappearing, please, don't make any effort to prevent it. Say goodbye. It is just great that it is disappearing."

But the trouble is that people think that when sex is disappearing perhaps now nothing is left because sex was all their excitement, their ecstasy and their joy. No, there is really so much waiting for you.

Just let sex disappear so that your energy becomes available for a higher kind of excitement, a higher kind of ecstasy.

When your unconscious and conscious meet because there is nothing repressed in the unconscious - and that is the moment of their meeting and their merger. At that very moment another great opportunity opens up for you because you are no longer involved with the lower; your whole energy is available for the higher. You are in the middle, the conscious mind.

But because the unconscious is there, you remain involved in repressing it, you go on repressing it. It is not a question that once you have repressed it you are finished with it; you have to repress it constantly, because it is coming up again and again. It is just like bouncing a ball; you hit it and it comes back to you. The greater force you put into hitting it, the greater is the force with which it comes towards you.

The same is the situation with instincts; you repress them, and the more energy you put in repressing, the more energy they will have coming back to you. From where can they get energy?

It is your energy. But when you are completely free from the unconscious and its involvements, it is clean and silent; then your whole energy is available.

Energy has a fundamental principle about it: it cannot remain static, it has to move. Movement is its nature. It is not a thing that you put somewhere and it remains there. No, it has to move - it is life.

So when there is no reason to move downwards, it has only one way to move - upwards. There is nowhere else to go. It starts hitting your superconscious, and just its hit to the superconscious is so pleasant and such a joy that all your sexual orgasms simply pale. You cannot imagine it because it is not a quantitative difference such that I can tell you that it is ten thousand times greater in quantity.

The difference is of quality.

So there is no way to imagine it. How to compare it to your sexual orgasm? But that is the only thing in your life through which something higher can be indicated. When your energy starts hitting your upper world, of which you were not even aware up to now there is a constant showering of joy. The sexual orgasm is so momentary that by the time you know it is there, it is gone. You only remember it in memory; you don't really realize when it is there. Because of this momentariness you become more and more addicted to it, because you remember there was something, something great was happening, so, "Let us go into it again, let us go into it again." But there is no way....

Before it comes - you know it is coming because the bell starts ringing in your head. It is really a bell which starts ringing in your head: it is coming. You know that it is coming... you know that it is gone. The bell has stopped, it is not ringing any more, and you look like a fool! Between the ringing of the bell and the stopping of the bell, you look like a fool. Perhaps man feels more ashamed; that's why after making love he simply turns and goes to sleep. Woman is not that much ashamed for the simple reason that she is not an active partner; the man looks foolish because he is the active partner.

Just the energy touching your higher level of consciousness, the superconscious - just the touch, and there is a shower of joy which continues. Slowly the energy goes on hitting and makes its way to the center of the superconsciousness. You have nothing to do: your work is finished when you have stopped repressing and you have cleaned your unconscious. Then you have nothing to do; then all that has to be done is done by your energy. And when you reach the center a new faculty starts functioning in you which is intuition.

At the center of the unconscious is instinct.

At the center of the conscious is intellect.

At the center of the superconscious is intuition.

Instinct makes you do things, forces you to do things even against your will. Intellect helps you to find ways if you want to do a certain thing, or to find ways if you don't want to do a certain thing.

Intellect's function is to find a way. If you want to go with the instinct, intellect will find a way.

If you are a so-called religious person, a pseudo-religious person, and you want to go against your instinct, intellect will find a way. They may be strange ways, but intellect is at your service: whatever you want it will do. It is not in favor of or against anything, it is simply at your disposal. If a man is sane he will use his intellect to help his unconscious be fulfilled. The sooner it is fulfilled the better, so that you are free from it. Fulfillment means freedom from it.

If you are some kind of crackpot, Catholic, Protestant, any kind - there are all sorts of crackpots available in the world. You can choose what kind of crackpot you want to be: Hindu, Mohammedan, Jaina, Buddhist - all kinds of varieties are available. You cannot say, "The variety I want is not available," you cannot say that. In thousands of years man has created almost every single variety of crackpot. You can choose, you can have your choice; but whatever you choose it is the same.

Nobody has told you how to use intellect to fulfill your unconscious, your nature, your biology, your chemistry. They are yours. What does it matter whether it is chemistry or biology or physiology?

They are part of you and nature never gives anything without reason. Fulfill it, and its fulfillment is going to make a path for the higher potential.

All religious people are hung up with the lowest part of their being - that's why they look so sad and so guilty. They cannot rejoice. Jesus goes on saying to these people, "Rejoice," and on the other hand he goes on saying to them, "Remember hell." He is creating a dilemma for people, showing them the way to hell - the way to hell is to fulfill your nature and the way to heaven is to go against your nature. But to go against your nature creates hell here on earth.

I want to create paradise here, now.

Why postpone such a good thing?

Things which are not worth your attention you can postpone - but paradise? I am not ready to postpone it for tomorrow or for the next second. You can have it herenow. All that you need is a clean unconscious: fulfilled, contented, biology settles; chemistry settles and gives you all the energy that was involved in those planes. The energy shoots upwards by itself, and it stops only at the very center of your superconscious mind. And there intuition starts functioning.

What is intuition? you have asked. Intuition is in some ways like instinct, in some ways absolutely unlike instinct; in some ways like intellect, in other ways absolutely against intellect. So you will have to understand, because it is the subtlest thing in you.

Intuition is like instinct because you cannot do anything about it. It is part of your consciousness, just as instinct is part of your body. You cannot do anything about your instinct and you cannot do anything about your intuition. But just as you can allow your instincts to be fulfilled, you can allow and give total freedom to your intuition to be fulfilled. And you will be surprised at what kinds of powers you have been carrying within you.

Intuition can give you answers for ultimate questions - not verbally but existentially. You need not ask, What is truth? Instinct won't hear, it is deaf. Intellect will hear but it can only philosophize; it is blind, it can't see. Intuition is a seer, it has eyes. It sees the truth - there is no question of thinking about it.

Instinct and intuition are both independent of you. Instinct is in the power of nature, of unconscious nature, and intuition is in the hands of the superconscious universe, the consciousness that surrounds the whole universe, the oceanic consciousness of which we are just small islands - or better, icebergs, because we can melt into it and become one with it.

In some ways intuition is exactly opposite to instinct.

Instinct always leads you to the other; its fulfillment is always dependent on something other than you.

Intuition leads you only to yourself.

It has no dependence, no need for the other; hence its beauty, its freedom and independence.

Intuition is an exalted state needing nothing. It is so full of itself that there is no space for anything else.

In some way intuition is like intellect because it is intelligence.

Intellect and intelligence are similar at least in appearance, but only in appearance. The intellectual person is not necessarily intelligent and the intelligent person is not necessarily intellectual. You can find a farmer so intelligent that even a very great professor, a very great intellectual, will look a pygmy in front of him.

It happened in Soviet Russia after the revolution, that they changed Petrograd, the city of Petrograd, to make it a new city named after Lenin, Leningrad. In front of Petrograd's huge, beautiful, and ancient castle there was a big rock which the czars had never thought to remove - there was no need. Now cars had come into existence and that rock was blocking the whole road, it had to be removed.

But the rock was so beautiful that they wanted to remove it and keep it as a memorial, so they did not want to destroy it or dynamite it. But all the great engineers - all they could think about was to dynamite it or to start cutting it up piece by piece and then later on to put the pieces together. But Lenin said, "That won't do - that will not be the same thing. The rock is so beautiful, that's why the czars have kept it just in front of their palace."

At that point a man came, a poor man on his donkey. He stood there listening to all this argument; then he laughed and started moving on. Lenin said, "Wait, why did you laugh?"

He said, "It is such a simple matter. Nothing much has to be done: all that you have to do is to dig around the rock. Don't touch the rock at all; just dig around the rock and the rock will settle deeper into the hole. You will not be disturbing the rock - the rock will remain there - but it will not be blocking anybody. There is no need to dynamite it or to destroy it."

Lenin said to his engineers, "You are great engineers and architects, but what this poor fellow is saying is more intelligent." And that's what was done. The rock was saved and the road was saved, but the idea came from a poor man who was nobody.

I have watched it, meeting thousands of people, that mostly, intellectual people are not intelligent because they don't have to be intelligent; their intellect, their knowledge is enough. But a man who has no knowledge, no intellect and no education has to find some intelligence within himself; he cannot look outside. And because he has to depend on intelligence, intelligence starts growing.

So intuition has something similar to intellect but it is not intellectual. It is intelligence.

The functioning of intellect and intelligence is totally different. Intellect functions through steps, step by step. It has a procedure, a methodology. If you are doing a question in mathematics then there are steps to be followed.

In India there is a woman, Shakuntala, who is still alive and who has been around the world, in almost all the universities, exhibiting her intuition. She is not a mathematician, she is not even much educated - just a matriculate. Even when Albert Einstein was alive she was giving her demonstration in front of him. And her demonstration was strange. She would sit with a chalk in her hand before the board: you would ask any kind of question about mathematics or arithmetic, and you would not have even finished the question and she would have started writing the answer.

Albert Einstein gave her a certificate - she showed the certificate to me when I was in Madras where she lives. She showed me all her certificates, and the one from Albert Einstein says, "I asked this woman a question which I take three hours to solve because I have to follow a whole method; I cannot just jump from the question to the answer. I know that nobody can do it in less time than I can, and that is three hours. Others may take even six hours hours or more, but I can do it in three hours because I have done it before. But the whole procedure has to be followed. If you miss even a single step...." The figures were so big that it took the whole board for her to write the answer. And before he had even finished the question, she started writing the answer.

He was puzzled, absolutely puzzled because it was impossible. He asked, "How do you do it?"

She said, "I don't know how I do it - it simply happens. You ask me and figures start appearing before my eyes, somewhere inside. I can see 1, 2, 3, and I just go on writing."

That woman was born with her intuition functioning, but I felt really sad for her because she became just an exhibition. Nobody cared that a woman who is born with intuition functioning can become enlightened very easily. She is just standing on the border; one step and she becomes the ultimate in consciousness. But she is not aware because this is just some freak of nature.

There was another boy, Shankaran, who used to pull a rickshaw in the city. There was a professor of mathematics, an Englishman, who used to go in his rickshaw to the university. Once or twice it happened that he was thinking about some problem, and the boy simply looked at him and said, "This is the answer." The professor had not spoken - he was simply thinking - and the boy was pulling the rickshaw, but he said, "This is the answer."

The professor went to the university, worked out the whole process and was surprised that that was the answer. When it happened two or three times, he asked the boy, "How do you do it?"

He said, "I don't do anything. I just feel you behind me, worried, and some figures start appearing.

I am not much educated but figures I can understand. And I see so many figures in your mind, just behind me - a line, a queue - and then suddenly a few figures appear in my mind, so I tell you that this is the answer. I don't know how it happens."

Shankaran was sent by the professor to Oxford, because he was even more advanced than this woman, Shakuntala. You have to ask her the question, then she can write; with Shankaran you just had to visualize the question in your mind and he would write the answer His intuition was functioning more fully, he was seeing both the answer and he was seeing the question - he could read your mind. And he was even more illiterate, so poor a man that he was pulling a rickshaw.

He became a phenomenon in himself in the history of mathematics because many questions which had remained unsolved for centuries, he solved - although he could not say how. He gave the answer, but how to judge whether the answer was right or wrong? It took many years. When a higher mathematics was developed, then they could work it out. Shankaran was dead but his answers were right.

Intuition functions in a quantum leap.

It has no methodological procedure, it simply sees things.

It has eyes to see.

It sees things which you have never even thought of as things - for example, love. You have never thought of it as a thing. But a man of intuition can see whether there is love in you or not, whether there is trust in you or not, whether there is doubt in you or not. He can see them as if these are things.

In my religion intuition holds the highest place.

That's where I am trying to push you.

An unclean unconscious is hindering you. Clean it; and the way to clean it is to satisfy it, to satisfy it so much that it starts telling you, "Please stop! It is more than I needed." Only leave it then. And with that, your intellect is filled with such a fresh flow of energy that it turns into intelligence. Then the energy goes on rising and opens the doors of intuition. Then you can see things which are not visible to your physical eyes, things which are not even things.

Love is not a thing, truth is not a thing, trust is not a thing, but they are realities - much more real than your things. But they are realities only for intuition, they are existential. And once your intuition starts functioning, you are for the first time really a man.

With the unconscious you are animal.

With the conscious you are no longer animal.

With the superconscious you are man.

I love to quote a Baul mystic, Chandidas, because that man, in a simple statement, has condensed my whole religion: Sabar upar manus satya; tahar upar nahin. 'Above all is the truth of man, and above that there is nothing'.

This man, Chandidas, must have been an authentically religious man. He is denying God, he is denying anything above human flowering: Sabar upar 'above all, above everything'; Manus satya 'the truth of man'; Tahar upar nahin 'and beyond that I have traveled long - there is nothing'.

Once you have reached to your human potential in its total flowering, you have arrived home.