The Priest and the Politician - the Mafia of the Soul

Question 1:

It is the outcome of all the idiotic ideas that have dominated humanity in the past. It was bound to happen. All the religions are responsible for it. What they have done, whether knowingly or unknowingly, is the cause of the misery, suffering and anguish of the whole of humanity. Let us think of the most fundamental causes one by one.

The first: All the religions have been imposing the idea that God has created the world and God is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent. He knows all, he is all-powerful, he is everywhere.

This idea prevented man from doing anything to life to make it better, beautiful. When somebody all-knowing, all-powerful, everywhere present, is looking after the world, then what can you do?

How far can you see? What can be your contribution? If God is the creator of the world, you cannot improve upon it. If you do anything you can only harm it. You cannot inform it; you cannot be wiser than God. This idea is one of the most basic causes of the whole anguish through which humanity is passing, and perhaps may perish in. Just think: the way I see it, there is no God who is creating the world, who is looking after the world. Don't throw this responsibility onto someone who exists not. It is we who are here who are in every way responsible to make or mar the opportunity.

Remove God and put man in his place, and you will have a totally different world. The suffering is absolutely unwanted. The anguish is our stupidity. Man can live a tremendously rich, blissful, ecstatic life. But the first thing is, he has to accept his responsibility.

All the religions have been teaching you to shirk your responsibility. Throw it onto God... and there is no God. You don't do anything because you think God is going to do everything - and there is no God to do anything. Then what else can you expect? What is happening and has happened and is going to happen is the natural outcome of this idea of a creator.

If man was told, "This is your existence; you are responsible whatever you are, whatever you do, and whatever happens around you. Be mature. Don't remain childish...." But this God does not allow you to mature, his godness depends on your immaturity, on your childishness. The more stupid you are, the more gullible you are, the greater is the God. The more intelligent you are, the lesser is the God.

If you are really intelligent there is no God.

Then this existence is there, you are there; then create. But the creator does not allow you to become the creator.

My whole approach is that you are to become the creator. You have to release your creative energies. And this is possible only if this God, who is nothing but a Godot, is removed, absolutely removed from your vision of life. Yes, in the beginning you will feel very empty because that place of God in you has been filled... millions of years he was there; the sacred shrine in your heart was filled with the idea of God. Now, suddenly throwing it out, you will feel empty, afraid, lost. But it is good to feel empty. It is good to feel afraid. It is good to be lost - because this is the reality, and what you were feeling before was only fiction. Fictions cannot help much; they may give you some consolation, but consolation is not a good thing.

What is needed is transformation, not consolation. What is needed is treatment of all the diseases that you have been carrying, not consolation. So the first thing is: remove God. Don't wait for any Godot. There is none. There has never been any.

Friedrich Nietzsche said... I disagree with him, but my disagreement is totally different from the disagreement of others, of all others who disagree. Nietzsche says, "God is dead." Of course Christians have differed, Mohammedans have differed, Hindus have differed, Buddhists have differed, but everybody has been against Friedrich Nietzsche. I am also against him, but my reason for being different is that God is not dead because he has never been alive. Even to say, "God is dead," is to accept that he was there and now he is no more. No, he was never there in first place.

Man has lived under a fiction.

And this situation, this misery, this increasing tension.... The tension is so much that now in the most advanced countries, the second greatest factor causing death is not a disease but suicide. One feels so utterly tense, day after day, and there seems to be no way out. The anguish goes on increasing, and one cannot even see the reason for what we are suffering. Why should we be suffering? What have we done? Life itself seems to be worthless. A point comes in the intelligent man's life when he sees it is all futile, meaningless.

Then why go on dragging? Why not finish it? Why not get rid of it? It has not given you anything except pain. It is not going to give you anything else except pain. Yes, there is an opium somewhere - the hope: perhaps tomorrow things may be different. Perhaps, if not today, tomorrow you may be able to catch some moment of bliss. But even then it does not seem to be worth it. Such a long caravan of miseries, and then once in a while a moment when you can smile, laugh. And by the time you have smiled it is gone. Perhaps that moment is also your imagination. Just to keep yourself going you start dreaming of things which are not really there; you wanted them to be there. That's actually the function of dreaming.

Do you know... it has been a strange discovery of modern psychology.... For centuries we had thought that dreams are useless, just a disturbance in the night. To have a dreamless sleep has been thought a healthy goal. Yoga for ten thousand years has been teaching that dreamless sleep is the most beautiful experience; but what we have found recently goes just against this whole thing.

You can drop your dreamless moments of sleep without any harm to you, but you cannot drop your dreams.

If you sleep eight hours, then almost two hours you have - in fragments, in total two hours - sleep without dreams, and six hours sleep with dreams. It has been experimented with, now we know.

There are instruments which give the indication of whether the person is dreaming or not dreaming.

Even without instruments, if you watch his lids, eyelids, you can immediately know. If his eyes are moving inside the lids, he is dreaming - because he is seeing things, movement. If the eyes are static, not moving, and the lids show no movement of the eyes inside, that means dreams have stopped. No sophisticated instruments are needed. But now we have sophisticated instruments which make a graph when the person is dreaming, when the person is not dreaming - just like a cardiogram.

They disturbed a few sleepers when they were dreaming; they would disturb them immediately, they would wake them up. They would allow them only those two hours of nondreaming. In the morning they would be utterly exhausted, lusterless, with no desire to live even. This was strange, because all the old yoga in India, in Tibet, in China - different schools and different people not connected with each other at all - they have always been saying, "If you can have two hours of dreamless sleep, that is enough nourishment, enough to rejuvenate you." It has not been found true. But if you disturb those two hours when they are not dreaming, and allow them those six hours of dreaming, in the morning they get up so fresh, so young, so rejuvenated, so full of life and juice and so eager to live.

When for the first time it was discovered, it was a shock. Dreams are absolutely necessary for these people - for what reason? They have not been able to find the reason. They will never be able to find it because that reason can be found only through deep meditation, there is no other way to find it. By psychological experiments they will not be able to find out what is the reason.

But through meditation something happens which is dreamless, sleepless. Both are not there; neither the dream is there nor is the sleep there. You are fully awake. The body is fast asleep in a deep rest, but your consciousness is absolutely cloudless. There is no sleep. Inside like a flame you are alert, awake, watching - that there is nothing to watch! The body is asleep and there is nothing to watch. But the watcher is.

You can only watch the watcher. You can only observe the observer. You can only be aware of your awareness. But there is no sleep, no dream. And in the morning you are as fresh as it is possible to be. So the psychologists will not be able, they have not yet been able and will never be able to know, unless they start moving towards meditation. And there seems to be no sign of their movement. In fact they are very antagonistic to meditation, and I can understand why. They are antagonistic to meditation because meditation can dissolve all your problems, can dissolve all your psychic anxieties, and with them goes the whole profession of the psychologist.

Just as the priest has been afraid... God should not be doubted; the politician has been afraid:

the priest should not be doubted, because if God is doubted, the priest is gone, his priesthood is gone. And there are millions of priests in the world: Hindus, Catholics, Jews, rabbis, ministers, missionaries, pundits, imams, shankaracharyas - millions of priests in the world who depend on a single concept of God. Drop that idea and all these will be nowhere. Right now they have great prestige, power. Who will be the pope when there is no God? What will be his position? This pope, this Polack, will have to go back to Poland. And Poland is communist now. He will become a laughingstock.

God is not there. With him, the holy ghost disappears, the son disappears. God is the central focus of the whole fiction. Remove that central idea and the whole palace made of playing cards simply falls on the ground. Just a little whip is needed.

The psychologist is afraid of meditation. Now psychology is a big profession. Jews never do small things. They created this stupid Christianity, and for two thousand years they have been complaining:

"We missed the chance. We would have made the great profession that the Christians are making.

How did we miss Jesus? It was simply a great business, and we missed the point. We couldn't see that this man is going to be such a big deal." He proved the biggest business deal in the world. Jews cannot forgive him. If they get him again they will crucify him again, for another reason this time:

"Why didn't you tell us in the first place that this is going to be a big business? - and we would not have crucified you."

And then they nearly missed the second, Sigmund Freud. But this time they were more aware, they have not missed so much. Ninety percent of the profession is still in Jewish hands. All the great psychologists and psychoanalysts and therapists - ninety percent of them are Jews. It is their monopoly. And Freud singlehandedly created the whole profession, the whole science. He was very much afraid of meditation, tremendously afraid.

Jung, his most intimate disciple, and in the beginning the possible successor, was so much afraid of meditation.... When he came to India, wherever he went - and he went to Khajuraho, to the Taj Mahal, to Fatehpur Sikri, the old ancient places - everywhere it was suggested: "You should go to Arunachal in the south of India, the very south, deep south. There is a man, Sri Ramana, who can give you immense insight into human nature, about which you have been working your whole life."

But he was afraid to go there.

And Ramana was certainly the man who could have given him, shared with him, something of meditation. But he would not go. Outright he rejected it, saying, "All this meditation is unscientific."

Now his statement is unscientific, because nobody has tried to explore meditation scientifically. On what grounds is he saying that all this meditation business is unscientific?

I know the space when there is no sleep, no dream, and still I am there. Certainly dreams are needed, but not by me. Perhaps ninety-nine point nine percent of people, or even more, need dreams, six hours of dreams in the night. And do you think that's all? Are you not dreaming in the day too?

Any time, close your eyes and you will find the dream is there, running. The dream is always there.

You are listening to me, and a dream will be there. You are walking on the road, and the dream is moving inside you. Of course when you are walking your attention is divided: you have to be alert to the outside world, otherwise people think you are spaced-out. You are not spaced-out, you are spaced-in! Your attention is no more out. You are clouded with dreams and you have forgotten the objective world. Six hours in the night, and how many hours in the day? Nobody has yet measured how many hours in the day. I don't think that you have even two hours in a day, just as you have in the night, without dreams.

I don't think you have two hours in a day without dreams, because if you can have two hours without dreams, fully awake, those two hours will become your meditation. They will reveal immensely valuable secrets to you.

But the ordinary humanity, the average man, needs dreams. Why? - because life, in reality, is so unsatisfactory, so ugly, so stinkingly ugly. Those dreams substitute for it. They are beautiful. They bring fragrance in your life, hope, fiction. They help you to remain sane. The reality will drive you insane.

To me, God, the holy ghost and the son, and the pope, the infallible pope - of course he has to be infallible. He represents the messiah, the only begotten son of God; how can he be fallible? - the infallible pope.... And every religion has similar things. You need these people. They are fictions created by your misery, cunning people using your misery to exploit you and to have their power trip.

The politician needs these people also. Even a mad politician like Adolf Hitler needs the blessings of God. If there is no God, who is going to bless Adolf Hitler? And the chief Christian priest in Germany blesses him. Now see the miracle.... Adolf Hitler is being blessed by God's priest: "You will succeed." Churchill is being blessed in England by the same God's priest: "You will be successful."

Benito Mussolini is blessed by the pope himself: "You will be successful." And nobody sees the contradiction, that one God, one infallible pope... and this German priest is under the pope!

But the pope has to bless Benito Mussolini, otherwise Mussolini will throw him out and put somebody else as the pope who is ready to bless him. Benito Mussolini is not a fascist when he is in power.

Even the pope says, "He is the most wise man, the most democratic, most human" - Benito Mussolini! And the same pope, after Benito Mussolini is defeated, will declare him a fascist. And these are infallible people. Now another politician is there who has to be blessed, who is against Benito Mussolini; they will bless him too.

Can't you see a simple conspiracy between the priest and the politician? The masses are befooled.

The priest gives the sanction from God: certifies that this is the right man to be the president, this is the right man to be the vice-president, the prime minister. Of course the politician needs it because the masses will listen to the priest: the priest is impartial, he has nothing to do with politics, he is above politics.... He is not! The priest is in the hands of the politicians.

The Dalai Lama is the pope, in fact higher than the pope, for the Buddhists, because he is not a representative of Jesus, he is a reincarnation of Buddha himself - not a representative, but a reincarnation of Buddha himself. The Dalai Lama escaped from Tibet because China became communist and claimed that Tibet is part of China. Once it was - two hundred, three hundred years ago. There was a time when a Chinese emperor conquered Tibet, and Tibet was part of China. And of course Tibetans and Chinese belong to the same race.

The Dalai Lama had to escape from there, because he was both the religious head and the political head. And he had never thought that anybody is going to attack Tibet. It is so secluded a country, on top of the world, and so far away from every other place; no railway trains are there, no cars are there, no roads are there: no technology has reached there. People are still living at least five thousand years back.

He had to escape because he did not have a big army. He had never thought, his predecessors had never thought, that anybody is going to attack - to attack is so difficult, to reach Tibet is so difficult.

But Mao was determined to take it over. It was a very significant place for him not to leave alone, because Russia could take it, and then it would become a tremendously dangerous thing for China.

India could take it; then too it would become tremendously difficult for China. So before anybody else started thinking, China jumped in. Tibet is a small country, and the Dalai Lama had just a small police force, perhaps one hundred policemen, to guard the palace. That was all, there was no need for anything else. Army? - they had never thought about the army.

But the incarnation of Buddha escapes from Tibet, forgets about the people whom he has been exploiting, his predecessors have been exploiting, for thousands of years. Tibet is a poor country, but the Dalai Lama is one of the richest men in the world. The whole palace of Lhasa was filled with gold and nothing else. Strange even to think that the Dalai Lama escaped with all the gold from the Lhasa palace, not all the ancient scriptures - because there was a clear choice: you can take this or you can take.... There were so many scriptures that you would need thousands of cars to take them to India. And he had so much gold - and the gold had to reach first, because without gold what was he going to do in India? And the refugees that were following him from Tibet, what were they going to do? So scriptures were left; gold was carried - this is the incarnation of Buddha!

China immediately crowned his younger brother, Panchen Lama, as the head of the country.

Politicians can't do without it because the masses won't listen. Now the masses are perfectly happy. What difference does it make - the Dalai Lama or Panchen Lama? He was going to be his successor, he is the second in line. If the Dalai Lama dies, or anything happens, Panchen Lama will become the head. The Dalai Lama has escaped, and China made him a laughingstock: "You believed in him and he deceived you; not only that but he has stolen all your gold."

In India Jawarharlal Nehru was the prime minister when the Dalai Lama came there. He welcomed him. That was his politics, because in India, Buddhism once was the religion of almost the whole country. But then after Buddha's death Hindus destroyed everything that was possible. So either the Buddhist monks had to escape - that's how Tibet became Buddhist, Ceylon became Buddhist, Japan became Buddhist, China became Buddhist, Korea became Buddhist, Vietnam became Buddhist, Indo-China became Buddhist, Burma became Buddhist, the whole of Asia... except India, where Buddha was born and where he worked and where he transformed people.

In India Buddhism completely disappeared. Either the Buddhist monk had to leave India or he was killed, burned alive, or reduced to the lowest caste in India - the untouchable, sudra. The chamars in India, the shoemakers in India, they are all Buddhists - they were reduced, forced to make shoes only, and do nothing else. In a country like India where vegetarianism is thought to be one of the fundamentals of religion, who is going to kill animals and who is going to make shoes and other leather things? The Buddhists were forced..."If you want to be alive and you want to live here, then choose this profession." Everybody was happy; Hindus and Jainas all were happy that they had been put in their right place.

But what happened? After independence, one man, Doctor Ambedkar, started converting the chamars, the shoemakers, back to Buddhism. He converted thousands of people back to Buddhism.

He created a great movement back to Buddhism, and there was a possibility that millions would turn.

He died, but still he left a strong force of Buddhism behind him.

Now, Nehru wanted this force to be with him. The Dalai Lama was the perfectly right person, because all those Buddhists would listen to the Dalai Lama. And the Dalai Lama had to listen to Jawaharlal, otherwise..."Go back, or go anywhere else you want to go." Jawaharlal gave him space against China. China raised the question: "This will be a surety that we are no more friends. You hand over the Dalai Lama to us."

They wanted the Dalai Lama in their hands because Panchen Lama is not so powerful. Although the Tibetans have accepted him, the Dalai Lama was their chosen leader. This has been imposed by the Chinese; reluctantly they have accepted. If the Dalai Lama had been given back to China, they would have forced him to be in Tibet, to be the Dalai Lama again... but instructions were received from Mao Zedong: "The country will be under us." Nehru refused to deliver the Dalai Lama to him.

You will be surprised, even a country like America.... Just four years ago, the Dalai Lama was invited by American Buddhists. Because there are a few Zen monasteries and a few American Buddhists, they had invited the Dalai Lama. The American government stopped him from entering the country because that would create enmity with China. And for America, the Dalai Lama has no meaning because these few Buddhists don't count.

What I am telling you is that these politicians and these priests have been constantly in conspiracy, working together hand in hand. The politician has the political power; the priest has the religious power. The politician protects the priest, the priest blesses the politician - and the masses are exploited, sucked; their blood is sucked by both. Remove God and you remove the politicians, you remove the politics, you remove the priest, you remove the conspiracy between the priest and the politician. And with these two removed, fifty percent of your miseries will disappear.

The idea of God gives you dreams of a better life... after death, perhaps in paradise or in another incarnation. So there is not so much to be worried about - this life, it is a small thing, what does it matter? In millions and millions of light years, what does it matter, seventy years? It does not count at all.

There are stars so far away from us that the day you were born, their rays on that day started moving towards the earth - they have not reached here yet. You will die, perhaps sometime then those rays will reach. And rays move with a tremendous speed, one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per second. For that star, you never existed. Before you were born and before you died, no ray could reach here to see you, to touch you. As far as that star is concerned... and millions of stars are there, that far away. What to say about you - there are stars whose rays have not reached the earth since the earth came into existence. And it may go out of existence and those stars will never come to know that there has been a planet like earth.

So what to say about your Alexander the Great, Napoleon Bonaparte, Ivan the Terrible - they don't count at all anywhere in this vast universe. Seventy years... so religions have been telling people, "Seventy years don't count. This misery will pass away, and if you allow it to pass away without struggling against it, the next life, life beyond death, is going to be very rewarding to you." These are the people who have prevented you from changing any situation on the earth. Particularly, they have prevented the transformation of man, because all the suffering that you see all around is rooted in man. And if man remains the same, this tension will go on increasing, this anguish will go on increasing.

There is every possibility that by the end of this century the whole of humanity may commit suicide, a global war. And it is not very difficult to imagine its possibility, because the people who are in power, the people who have nuclear weapons, are so third rate. It seems that to be a successful politician you have to be absolutely unintelligent, fanatic, lying, promising continuously - knowing perfectly well that no promises are going to be fulfilled - cheating, using beautiful words and hiding ugly realities.

Now each big, powerful country is loaded with nuclear weapons... so much so that if we want we can destroy seven hundred earths like this right now. That much nuclear power is there, available, to destroy each person seven hundred times - although it is not needed, one time is enough. But politicians don't want to take any chances. Their faces are all masks: they say one thing, they do another thing. And the power is in such people's hands. Any crackpot can push a button and can finish the whole of humanity, the whole of life on the earth.

But perhaps deep down humanity also wants to get rid of it. Perhaps individually people are not courageous enough to commit suicide, but on the mass scale they are ready.

Always remember, individuals have not committed great crimes. It is always crowds which commit great crimes, because in a crowd no individual feels, "I am responsible for what is happening." He thinks, "I am just being with the people." Individually when you commit something, you have to think three times before committing it. What are you doing? Is it right? Does your consciousness permit it? But not when there is a crowd. You can be lost in the crowd, nobody will ever discover that you were also part of it.

Even a country like Germany, which can be said to be one of the most intelligent, cultured, sophisticated countries, has given great poets, painters, scientists, philosophers... in every dimension Germany's contribution is great. But one simply feels amazed that this country of Hegel, Feuerbach, Kant, Marx, Freud, Einstein - this country came under the power of Adolf Hitler, who was nothing but a madman.

What happened? Even a man like Martin Heidegger, who was the topmost philosopher of the contemporary world, supported Adolf Hitler. It is so shocking to think about.... I have always appreciated the man, because his intelligence is incomparable. Other philosophers are miles behind: Sartre, Marcel, Jaspers - miles behind. Nobody is even close to this man; even to understand him is not easy. But he supported Adolf Hitler. And when Germany lost the war and Adolf Hitler committed suicide, then he was as if awakened from a dream. Then he realized what he had done: "This man was simply mad, and I have supported him."

That's what I say: even when your eyes are fully open, you may be dreaming. Now he was dreaming, and he was projecting his dream on Adolf Hitler because he saw that this man has power, has the power to impress the masses, which Martin Heidegger had not. He could not even deliver a single address, because everybody would leave. The way he talked, the things he talked about, the complications that he brought in... now who was going to listen to him?

He was professor of philosophy in the university - in fact in many universities, for the simple reason that wherever he was a professor, students stopped coming to the department. He was far above them; he was way above your head. And if this man was going to be your examiner too, you were finished. And when he had been there for two, three years in one university, then the university would say to him, "You move; nobody is going to come here." Then finally they decided to make him the vice-chancellor of the university so he did not teach.

He had no power over the masses, and he saw Adolf Hitler - the masses were just spellbound, almost in a state of hypnosis. So he projected that what he dreamt - how the world should be - this man could make it possible. But he was innocent. He did not understand that this man had his own mad ideas what he was going to do to the world. He was not going to listen to any philosopher. And Martin Heidegger at least was absolutely beyond him. Hitler would not have even made intelligible conversation with him.

The religions have given man fictions to live in. Now all those fictions are broken and man has nothing left to live for - hence the anguish. Anguish is not an ordinary state of anxiety. Anxiety is always centered upon a certain problem. You don't have money, there is anxiety; you don't have enough clothes and the cold is coming, you have a certain anxiety; you are sick and you don't have medicine, and there is anxiety. Anxiety is about a certain problem.

Anguish has no problem as such. Just to be seems to be fruitless, futile. Just to breathe seems to be dragging yourself unnecessarily, because what is going to happen tomorrow? Yesterday also you were thinking that something is going to happen tomorrow... now, this is yesterday's tomorrow, which has come as today, and nothing has happened. And this has been going on for years. And you go on projecting for tomorrow. A moment comes when you start realizing that nothing is going to happen. Then there is the state of anguish.

In anguish, only one thing seems to be there: somehow to get out of this circle of life - hence suicide, the increasing rate of suicide. And an unconscious desire of humanity that the third world war happens..."so I am not responsible that I committed suicide. The world war killed everybody, and killed me too." But the whole situation can be changed. We just have to change the premises of the old man: remove God, remove heaven and hell, remove the idea of a future reward - and remove the idea that some messiah is to come to redeem you from your suffering.

Remove the idea that anybody else is responsible for your misery and suffering; remove the idea that somebody can give meaning to your life. Accept that you are alone, born alone, and you will die alone. And you have to accept the fact that you are living alone - maybe in a crowd, but you are living alone; maybe with your wife, girlfriend, boyfriend, but they are alone in their aloneness, you are alone in your aloneness, and those alonenesses don't touch each other, never touch each other.

That you may live with someone for twenty years, thirty years, fifty years - it makes no difference, you will remain strangers. Always and always you will be strangers. Accept the fact that we are strangers; that we don't know who you are, that you don't know who I am. I myself don't know who I am, so how can you know? But people are presuming that the wife should know the husband, the husband is assuming the wife should know the husband. Everybody is functioning as if everybody is a mind reader, and he should know, before you say it, your needs, your problems. He should know, she should know - and they should do something. Now this is all nonsense.

Nobody knows you, not even you, so don't expect that anybody else should know you; it is not possible in the very nature of things. We are strangers. Perhaps by chance we have met and we are together, but our aloneness is there. Don't forget it, because you have to work upon it. Only from there is your redemption, your salvation. But you are doing just the opposite: how to forget your aloneness? The boyfriend, the girlfriend; go to the movie, the football match; get lost in the crowd, dance in the disco, forget yourself, drink alcohol, take drugs, but somehow don't let this aloneness come to your conscious mind - and there lies the whole secret.

You have to accept your aloneness, which in no way you can avoid. And there is no way to change its nature. It is your authentic reality. It is you. And you are escaping from yourself. Then there will be misery, there will be problems. And in solving one problem you will create ten more, and so on and so forth. Soon there will be only problems surrounding you and you will be drowning in your own problems. Then you call out, "Why are the tensions increasing? Why is there so much suffering?

Why is there so much misery?" - as if somebody has a readymade answer for it. Yes, somebody has it; it is you.

Because I have found the answer within me, hence I say it to you with authority. The authority is not derived from any God, from any messiah, from any Veda, from any Koran, Bible, no. The authority is derived from my experience.

My whole life I have lived amongst millions of people, but never for a single moment forgetting that I am alone, that my aloneness is unreachable; nobody can reach to it. It is available only to me, because it is me.

So the moment you stop escaping from yourself, drowning yourself in all kinds of drugs, relationships, religions, service to humanity... now a few are doing that. It is nothing but escape from themselves. But their ego is fulfilled because they are doing service to humanity.

I know many servants, great servants, and when I talked with them, brought them to the point and nailed them down exactly, they all literally broke into tears and said, "Perhaps you are right - we are escaping. We were thinking we were going to serve these poor people, but it seems that we have not been able to solve any of our own problems." This seemed to be a very preferable escape; you can put aside problems. And how can you be so selfish, to be bothered by your problems when the whole of humanity is suffering? When everybody is suffering, help them. So you can, in a beautiful garb, put aside your problems - even to think about them is selfish.

But with those problems, whom are you going to help and how? You will dump all your problems on somebody whom you are going to serve. The husband will dump on the wife, the wife will dump on the husband. The parents will dump on the children, and everybody is dumping his problems on others without seeing that the other is also trying to do the same.

Stop dumping problems on others. You have to solve your problems, and every individual has to solve his own problems. And the problems are not so many. It is one problem which you have not solved which has created a chain of unsolved problems. The problem is: how to enter your aloneness without fear? And the moment you enter your aloneness without fear... it is such a beautiful and ecstatic experience that there is nothing compared to it.

It is not a problem at all. It is the solution of all your problems. But you have made it a problem because you have listened to others and followed them: the blind following blind leaders and priests.

They are all going in a circle, and everybody believes that the man ahead of him is capable of seeing, and the same is the case with the man who is ahead. He is holding somebody else's coat or shirt, believing that he knows where he is going, and they all are moving in a circle; nobody is going anywhere. The followers are following the leader, the leader is following the followers....

You have to stop and come out of this stupid game of followers and leaders. You have just to be yourself, and remember that you were born alone, so aloneness is your reality; that you will die alone, so aloneness is your reality. And between birth and death, between these two points where you are absolutely alone, how can life be anything else? It is in each moment alone. So accept it joyously; go into it as much as possible, as many times as possible.

This is the temple of my religion. It is not made of rocks, marbles; it is made of your consciousness.

Go into it, and the deeper you go, the farther away are the problems. The moment you touch the center of your being you have arrived home. And from that point you can come out and do whatsoever you want to do. It will be a help, it will be service, it will be sharing. You will not be dumping anything on anybody.

On the one hand the priest has given you the desire for the other world, the ambition for the other world, for the tomorrow. The politician is giving you this world: you can become the president....

Anybody in America can become the president, all citizens are equal. What nonsense! - no two citizens are equal. And only the most cunning is going to become the president, not all... at least not those who would have been of any help to anybody.

Only ambitious people can reach to the highest political post in any country, because it is a race, and you need to be utterly ambitious to stake everything on it. And you are not to bother what you are doing, whether it is right or wrong. The end you have to keep in mind and do whatsoever you feel right to reach the end; whether it is right or wrong, no question. If you fail, everything is wrong; if you succeed, everything is right. Success is right and failure is wrong. That's the way politicians have been training everybody.

Drop all that the priests and the politicians have put into you, and as you unburden yourself, you start having glimpses of your pure being.

That's what I call meditation.

Once tasted, it transforms forever.

Sheela, one question more.

Question 2:

There has been no creation. How can there be "the beginning"? The creation is continuous; it is creativity. Back you move, you will not find the beginning; ahead you go, you will not find the end. It is beginningless, endless creative energy. So in the first place there was no beginning. God never created the world - there is no God.

And the Bible says, "In the beginning was the word." That is the most ridiculous thing to say. If we assume just for the argument's sake that there was a beginning, then I will say, "In the beginning there was silence." How can there be "the word" in the beginning? Just look at the idea. How can the word be in the beginning? - then what was before the word? Of course there must have been silence, before the word disturbed it.

And silence means much more because that's the silence I am trying in many ways for you to go into. It was in the beginning, and it is in the middle, and it will be in the end, because at the very center of this whole creativity, of this tremendous creativity of existence, at the very center there is silence.

Okay Sheela?