You are my fellow travellers

Question 1:

You got it! This is the twenty-first century for me, and I am trying to push you towards it.

Sannyasins should live ahead of time. The people who are burdened with the past live five thousand years ago, ten thousand years ago, and they are stuck there.

You cannot live with the past. The past is dead, and to live with the past is to be dead. The only life possible is in the present, and the future is always changing into the present. It is always making the twenty-first century in the twentieth century. The farther ahead you can live in the moment, the more alive you will feel. And remember, it is better to be red than dead!

I had to wait for you to behave humanly. I was waiting for my people, because only they will understand that to be human is the highest value there is.

I was talking to the Christians, to the Hindus, to the Mohammedans, to the Jainas, to the Buddhists, and it was a difficult job. I could not behave humanly with them. They wanted me to be their messiah, their prophet, their messenger.

Just the other day I received two letters. One was from a woman in California. She said, "I have loved you for many years. I have been reading all your books - how beautiful it was when you spoke on Jesus! And now after three years of silence, what you are saying has enraged me so much that I have burned all your books. I will pray to Jesus Christ and God to forgive you. Perhaps you should go into silence again. And if you don't go into silence, then there is only one possibility for you to be saved: that is, when you expire the silence will descend on your grave."

Now this woman had all my literature, had loved me, she thinks. But do you think she loved me? She loved Jesus Christ, and because I had spoken on Jesus Christ, putting myself behind him. putting my gun on his shoulder, she was happy, immensely happy and grateful. The poor woman is not aware of the fact that she had never been in tune with me. Because I was speaking on Jesus as no one had spoken before, I was supporting her mind, her tradition, and she was feeling immensely happy. I was fulfilling her ego.

Now she is so against me, she has burned all the books, and she is praying to Jesus Christ, the God, to forgive me. She should also burn the house in which my books have been. They have already infected the air and the house.

Whenever you feel that you are supported in some way, you are happy. Hindus were happy, Mohammedans were happy, Christians were happy - everybody was happy. And I am not here to make you happy.

I want you to be blissful. I want you to know yourself, to know this vast existence. And you cannot know it being a Christian or a Hindu. Your eyes are covered with layers of dust that centuries have poured over you.

Now she is feeling very offended, but still she cannot see the point. I had to speak on Jesus, Buddha, Mahavira, and hundreds of other prophets, messiahs, saviors. But that speaking was very difficult for me, it broke my back, because I was doing something which was against my own nature. I was sorting out sentences from Jesus; those which I could not support I never mentioned. Those which I could support, I supported them with all the growth of the twenty centuries after him.

Naturally many Christians, priests, bishops, were influenced. They could not believe that a man who is not a Christian has such great insight into Jesus, his words, his implications. It was not like that.

I was using Jesus only to catch fish in the big ocean of Christianity; I have done that with all the religions. And then for three years I became silent, just to know how many people were hanging around my words because they supported their belief system.

In my silence this woman was happy. She said, "While you were silent, I loved you. Since you have started speaking again you have destroyed my love." So those who were here for their own ego fulfillment.... And the ego cannot be fulfilled by my silence; the ego need words, theologies, philosophy. She wants me to become silent again. She is furious. She wants me to be dead, but to be silent.

So in these three years I have sorted out my people, who can be with my silence. That means it does not matter to them whether I speak or not. It does not matter to them whether I say something which is against their conditioning or favoring their conditioning. They love me, not my words. Their communion is heart to heart.

And when I saw all the camels have moved towards Santa Fe - Santa Fe has become a great camel camp - I thought that the moment has come to speak directly to you. And now I will be speaking directly to you.

There will be no Jesus between me and you, no Buddha between me and you, just a pure communion. Only then can I reach to your heart; otherwise, I can reach only to your mind - and mind has no function in bringing you blissfulness, ecstasy, enlightenment. Mind can give you better technology, but it cannot give you the New Man.

I feel sorry for the woman, but she should understand that it is all her doing. I don't know her even, she is not a sannyasin. And her love was false; she was still a Christian, and she was being supported by my meanings that I had put through Jesus' mouth.

I know I have been doing a very risky job. If ever Jesus, Buddha, Mahavira meet me, they are all going to attack me and kill me. They will forget all their messages of love, their messages of peace.

And it will not be only Mohammed, it will be all those whom I have used. But there is no possibility of meeting these guys again.

Now I can be human to you. I always wanted to be an authentic human being. There was never a desire to be a prophet, a messiah, an avatar, a godman. To me, all these words are four-letter words. I wanted just to be simple, ordinary - the way I am. I wanted to expose my heart to you without thinking what is going to be the consequence. This was possible only when I had found my own people, who can understand.

You are fortunate that you have remained. All the sannyasins around the earth are fortunate, because what they have listened to before was not the truth. I tried hard to put the truth... I interpreted those people, who were just crackpots - but it was compulsory. In this vast world, it is very difficult to find your own people. They are already belonging to some group, some theology, some religion. They have their own church, their own mosque, their own temple, and they have great investments there. They are hoping to attain paradise; they are afraid of falling into hell.

We are not interested in heaven and hell or God. There is no need to go to hell to experience it - you can just go driving on the county road and you will know what kind of roads exist in hell. You need not travel long to heaven - you can be just here, dancing, singing, rejoicing, and you know heaven has come to you.

I emphasize the fact that nobody ever goes to heaven or hell. It is just vice versa: Hell comes to you, heaven comes to you. It is your doing, it is your heart that attracts it.

Hell is your misery, your suffering.

Heaven is your rejoicing.

I have also received another letter, one from a Zen master who wants to come and see me. And you will see the difference between a Christian, Mohammedan, Hindu, and a Zen monk.

The Zen monks have emphasized that they do not belong to Buddhism. In fact, Zen is a revolt against Buddhism. Buddha would not approve of these people, they are too human. They are so simple: chopping wood, drawing water from the well - you cannot conceive Buddha doing that.

This Zen master gives you a totally different vision. He is happy that I am here. He is immensely rejoiced that somebody is here who can even prevent the third world war. He just wants to sit by my side, to feel the vibe. He also knows what I am saying. He is also reading my books and he had read my old books too. But now he has decided that the time has come, that he should come here, because now I am speaking on my own authority. Now it is worth being close to a man who is not a commentator, but is an enlightened soul.

He says in his letter that Buddha had declared that he would be coming again after five thousand years. Twenty-five centuries have passed. The Zen monk declares, "We are exactly in the middle:

twenty-five centuries back there was a Buddha, and perhaps twenty-five centuries ahead there will be a Buddha. And you seem to be the bridge, just exactly in the middle - twenty-five centuries." He says he has not seen Buddha, but he would like to meet me, to have some taste of buddhahood, awakenedness.

This man has a totally different approach. He is a man of understanding, meditation. If he ever wants to burn, he will burn the old books and save the new ones, because the old books were commentaries, which I had to make under compulsion. Now it is no longer a commentary, I am telling you my experience. If Jesus or Buddha or Zarathustra agrees with me, good; if they don't agree, they can go to hell.

They had all pretended to be higher than you, holier than you, more special than you. They fulfilled a great need in you: you wanted to follow somebody who was the only begotten son of God. By following the son of God you were also participating in something divine. I have dissolved the very idea of following. You are my fellow travelers.

I want it to be declared throughout the earth, to all the corners of the earth, that someone has transcended, for the first time, even the experience of enlightenment - because that too is a way of creating distance, great distance: I am enlightened, you are not enlightened; I am always right, you are always wrong.

You are right as much as I am right. Accept the responsibility of your actions, of your thoughts, of your being, and fight every kind of trespass. You have to be yourself. If you cannot accept me being as human as you are just because I am enlightened, then I throw that enlightenment away. But I cannot allow you to be humiliated in a subtle way; I cannot allow you to go on becoming bigger egos.

To hell with enlightenment!

And I will do everything that will destroy it. No Buddha has laughed. What kind of miserable creatures...? No Buddha has danced. No Buddha has sung.

You just wait! You will be the first ones to see a buddha dancing. As your laughter and your love are making me stronger, soon I am going to dance. You should not be surprised when someday I appear in your disco or your playing cards room! I want to erase all kinds of stupidities that have arisen in the past, and have become bigger and bigger as time has passed.

My sannyasins and I are not different. Your faults are my faults, your errors are my errors. I accept you as you are; remember it, because if I come to your disco perhaps you will not be ready to accept me. I am preparing you for that, I don't want you freaking out. It has been a long and hard struggle for me to find my people, I am not going in any way to freak them out.

Slowly, slowly you will get accustomed to the idea that an enlightened man can come to a disco, dance with you, play cards with you, drink a little champagne with you. You should be immensely happy that you are with a man who claims no holier-than-thou attitude. It is ugly. There is nobody above human beings.

I have always loved one statement of Chandidas. He was thought to be mad, because he declared:

sabar uppe manu sut, tahar uppe nain - "Above all is the truth of man, and there is nothing above it."

Although he was in the past, I can recognize him as belonging to us, he is a contemporary. And he is courageous enough to enter the twenty-first century with us. What a great statement! SABAR UPPE MANU SUT... "Above all is the truth of man, and there is nothing above it." He dissolved all gods, all angles. He recognized that man's consciousness is the highest.

You don't see it because you are asleep, but there is not much difference between the man who is asleep and the man who is awake. The man who is awake was asleep just few moments ago, the man who is asleep may be awakened just in a few moments, but there is no basic difference.

I would like you to accept me as an ordinary human being. I don't want to be a leader, I don't want you to be led. I simply want to dance amongst you, completely lost.

You need not be afraid of me. All the followers of Jesus Christ were afraid of him, Buddha's followers were afraid of him - because these people have been continuously nagging their disciples. I think if Mohammed, Buddha, Mahavira, Zarathustra, Krishna had been housewives, the world would have been far better. They would have nagged only one man, not the whole of humanity. I hate nagging!

When I was a child and lived in a very small village where no train passes, no buses reach, my grandfather had a beautiful white horse. I used that white horse for roaming around the town, going along the river, going around the big lake. Slowly, slowly the horse started feeling some synchronicity with me. He started feeling when I wanted to return. But I never nagged even that horse. If he wanted to go north, I said, "Okay." If he wanted to go around the lake, I said, "Okay, you decide, but I am not going to nag you against your wishes."

And it was a strange thing, that he always went to the place where I wanted to go. Between his consciousness and mine, something must have been transpiring. There was a communion without words. And if a horse can go to the place where I want, without my nagging and forcing him to go there, certainly... even if I am amongst you, don't be afraid. All that is needed is not a superman to lead you, but a man with whom you can have a synchronicity. A subtle vibe of love joins you and me, and it will do miracles.

I have been receiving letters from sannyasins: "It feels tremendously beautiful to see you as a human being just like us, but still somewhere I want you to be extraordinary, not ordinary. I want you to be higher than your disciples." Why?

My being higher simply makes it difficult to communicate. That's why all these people have failed.

Jesus, Moses, Mohammed, Confucius, Lao Tzu - they all have failed, for a simple reason: they were there sitting on the clouds, and you were crawling on the earth. What communication is possible?

They maintained the distance; it was the fulfillment of their egos. And you stupidly wanted your prophet's cloud to be higher than those of other prophets. But do you know what it means? It means your communication with your leader, prophet, messiah, is even more difficult.

All the religions have been trying to prove they are higher. Buddhists say, "Buddha is higher than Jesus, than Moses, then Mahavira." And the other people are doing the same. I am starting a new history as far as enlightenment is concerned. The closer I am to you, holding your hand and dancing, the more is the possibility of communication.

I am going to wake you, because I am so close to you. If I can dance with you, you cannot remain asleep long; it is risky for you and your sleep! If I can drink a little champagne with you, then our hearts can melt into each other.

You need not look above to God the father, who is always above the roofs - I don't know what he is doing there! You can see me, look into my eyes, because I am standing on the same ground as you are. There is no distance, only a little difference - so little that I don't care much about it.

You will be awakened. When I am so close to you, it is impossible for you to go on sleeping. I can shake you, I can hit you - I am so close. I can throw cold water in your eyes - I am so close. Buddha cannot do it; he is sitting on a white cloud far away.

But that has been the conspiracy between the masters and the disciples. The disciple really loves the master to be far away. That gives him a satisfaction: "I am no ordinary man's follower, I follow an extraordinary master. Naturally, I am an extraordinary disciple."

If you are with me, a man who says that he is an ordinary human being, I am destroying your ego.

You cannot be an extraordinary disciple, you have to be ordinary. If your master himself is ordinary, what can you do? You have to be ordinary.

And this is my basic experience, that to be ordinary is the most beautiful thing in existence. To be ordinary means to be relaxed. There is nowhere to go, nothing has to be found; you have it already.

It was your ego that was blocking the way. Now the ego has disappeared, and you can see to your innermost being, crystal clear.

Seeing it, you are going to laugh - what a joke life has played upon you! Life has put the kohinoor inside you, and given you the desire to search for the kohinoor. And you are running all over the world - to the churches, to the synagogues, to the monasteries, and doing all kinds of stupidities to find that which you have never lost, to find that which even if you want to lose, you cannot. It is your very being.

I have heard about a man who was walking in the desert all alone... desert as far as he could see.

It was his own shoes making noise - that was the only noise - but it appeared as if somebody was following him. It takes a little time; sound travels six hundred miles per hour, so when your shoe makes some sound you don't hear it instantly, there is a gap. By the time you hear it your shoe has moved.

He was a logical, philosophic man. Certainly it was not the sound of his shoes; somebody was following him. He looked behind, saw his own shadow and figured out that this shadow seemed to be some kind of ghost, because shadows are not known to make noise. He started running and the sound became louder. He looked back - the shadow was also running faster. He said, "My God! It means I am not running fast enough!"

He did his best, till he was almost spent and fell under a tree near an oasis. Now he was even more afraid, but he looked around: there was no noise, and the shadow was not there, for the simple reason that he was under the shadow of the tree. His shadow was so clear-cut under the sun on the sand, and here, when he was sitting under the tree, the shadow had left. He laughed. He understood that he had been making the noise himself, and the faster he ran, the louder the noise became - and it was his own shadow.

The moment you become enlightened, the first thing will be a mad laughter - that this is the thing you have been searching for for many lives, and you had it always in your pocket! All that is needed is just a little shaking. And I have found many ways to shaking you, to help you open your eyes. And it is not a difficult job, in fact it is a great joy.

Try with some sleeping man just brushing his cheeks with a toothbrush slowly, and see what happens to him - how he tries to throw it away. Just tickle his feet, and he pulls up his leg. Just start playing with his belly, and he is bound to open his eyes - how long can he keep them shut? How long can he remain asleep? What is going on? And he will also join in your laughter.

I want you to live abundantly, with great laughter, rejoicing, and the only possibility is if your ego is destroyed. And the best way I have found is that I should be amongst you, not leading you, so that you forget completely that you are followers of a great master. I am perfectly ready to be your follower: you can walk ahead and I can follow you and do all kinds of tricks from the back - which is easier!

Question 2:

The first thing to be understood is that changing names does not change anything. You can call it God, you can call it Allah, you can call it Ishwar - there are three hundred languages on the earth.

There are three hundred ways to call God, or you can invent your own private name for God.

You say, "I have replaced God with the word 'It." What does it mean? You have only changed the label. Perhaps you can change even the container, but the question is of the content. And the content is there, I can see from your question, because you say, "it is alive and all around me." Now, "it" is used for things. You have changed just the word; you are giving him a new name, but "It" is all alike.

And the second thing you say is, "This is as far as my mind can go." That's true. Mind can play with words, that's as far as it can go. It can never attain to the state of wordlessness. Your "It" will dominate you, will keep you in slavery just as God has done for so long.

And the third thing... you ask me, "Should I drop 'It' also?" No, because then you will replace it by another word.

The women's liberation movement uses for God, "She." And I think it is a better word than "he", because in "she," "he" is present, but in "he", the "she" is absent. "She" is a bigger word. It is symbolic: in "woman" the man is there, but in the word "man," the woman is not there. But basically it does not make any difference - you can call God "she." So I will not tell you to drop calling God "It." It is not going to help in any way.

I would like you to drop the mind which is playing this game of changing one word for another. Drop the mind! Nothing else can help. Forget about God. You don't know him, you have not met him - how can you change his name, his address?

You are not to trespass the boundary. You cannot take it into your own hands, how God should be called. You don't know anything about God, and you will never know, because God does not exist at all. So you are changing the name of something non-existential.

If you are so good at dropping from "he" to "It", if you can even drop God from "he" to "It".... he stands for something, someone alive. It is used for things. If you can do such a great job, pulling down God from his golden throne, and making him a commodity in the market, then you can do a far easier thing: drop the mind.

It is a mind game, and the mind can play thousands of games. You reduce God to It, but from the back door the "It" becomes alive all around you. So what is the point? God is back. And it will give you great ego satisfaction that you managed something of immense importance: you have changed the name of God. It is not going to help. Your question is simply indicative of it. God has come from the back door, and is alive all around you.

Drop the mind. That is meditation.

In meditation we don't change the names of God. We don't allow ourselves in meditation to be identified with the mind. We are the witness, and all games the mind plays are in front of the witness. The witness is separate from all games.

You can be a Christian; then, fed up with being a Christian, for a few years you can become a Hindu - "Hare Krishna, Hare Rama..." - anything new gives a certain excitement. But soon Hare Krishna or Hare Rama is found in scientology - and you will not find him there long. If you go on following these people, perhaps now he is in EST. By the time you reach EST, the seeker has moved to Esalen. He will elude you, unless by some accident he ends up here. From here there is no way out.

We open the doors of inwardness, and the method is: just be watchful of your mind, how it fabricates philosophies, theologies, religions. Just watch. I am not telling you to do anything. In the beginning it is difficult, because you have never watched your mind. You have always thought you are the mind, you have always remained identified with the mind. So in the beginning it is going to be a little difficult, but it is not impossible. In fact, what you have done - identifying yourself with the mind - is something of the impossible. You have even managed that!

What I am saying to you is simple, natural, possible. You are not the mind. And when mind stops, who is going to change the name of God? And who cares? When the mind is silent, not even a ripple of thought, that serenity, that silence will give you the first taste of godliness - not of God, because to taste God will reduce you to a cannibal.

Please, don't try to eat God! But religions have been telling you to. Jesus, before departing from his company of fools, said to them, "Eat me, drink me." Don't do anything like that with me. I am an ordinary man, please - if you start eating me and drinking me, I will be finished soon. I will not last even one day.

The taste is not of God, but of godliness.

That too, you simply experience and feel.

It is a quality, a quality that makes you aware of your immortality, that makes you aware of the infinity of existence, that makes you aware of utter beauty, grace, peace, blissfulness.

But there is no person like God. There is nobody, there is pure emptiness. And only pure emptiness or nothingness is what I have been calling enlightenment.

Question 3:

This is one of the fundamental laws of life, that if you make anybody a slave, in return, unknowingly, you become a slave to your slave. Slavery is a double-edged sword. You cannot simply remain the master and the other a slave. You start becoming dependent on the slave. And to make somebody a slave is to create troubles for yourself, because the slave cannot love you, cannot respect you.

The slave will always hate you, the slave would like to kill you. He may not be able to, but these will be the thoughts moving around him. He may be bowing down to you, but deep in his heart he wants to destroy you, because freedom is an intrinsic necessity of every human being. Nobody can like slavery. One can pretend, just to save one's neck, but one goes on gathering fire against the master.

Jesus was crucified... one never thinks about Judas - there are so many implications in it. Why did he sell Jesus for thirty pieces of silver? Certainly he was more valuable a man - crazy, but beautiful; harmless, but with a charismatic personality. A little bit off his head, but that is not a crime. And Judas had been with him for years as a disciple. Why did he betray him?

My understanding is that being a disciple is a kind of slavery, and there is a limit to how long one can tolerate it. And it is not only with Jesus that it has happened; otherwise, it would be just an exception, not the rule. But it is the rule, not the exception.

Mahavira's own son-in-law tried to kill him. He had taken initiation and become a disciple. He was hoping that because he was the son-in-law.... And Mahavira had only one daughter; she was also initiated, they both were disciples. You can imagine, it is simple, that the son-in-law was hoping that Mahavira would declare him his successor. And when Mahavira declared that Gautam Gantha - a far more intelligent person - was going to be his successor, the son-in-law tried to kill him. And the son-in-law revolted against Mahavira, taking five hundred other disciples with him.

Now, these five hundred disciples had also been with Mahavira for years. What was boiling within them, that rather than remaining with Mahavira they went with an idiot who had nothing to offer?

And they all disappeared, evaporated, because he had nothing to offer. But they also must have been angry at the slavery that Mahavira was imposing on them.

In Jainism, things are really very strict. It is the most ascetic religion in the world. The Jaina monk has to remain naked in all the seasons around the year. It is difficult. The Jaina monk has to eat only one meal, begging. The Jaina monk cannot drink water in the night - even in the hot summers of Bihar where Mahavira was. As the sun sets, the Jaina monk cannot take anything in his mouth, not even water.

The Jaina monk, naked, with one meal a day, has to walk on hot days, on cold days, without any shoes - a naked man in shoes will look awkward. I have seen Jaina monks and nuns - their feet show the story of their asceticism: in the hot summer days they start bleeding, cracking.

These people who have had all these disciplines imposed on them are boiling within. They are following Mahavira because he is giving them the promise of moksha. You will be surprised that moksha is higher than what you know as paradise. So in Jainism there are three things: hell, the lowest; heaven, in the middle; and moksha, the ultimate.

From heaven you are going to fall back again into life. It is a kind of spiritual holiday, a holiday place on a beautiful beach. You earn virtue - that is a bank balance of good deeds. When you have enough bank balance, you are born in heaven. But no bank balance can last forever; once your bank balance is finished you are thrown back to the earth again to be human beings.Moksha is liberation forever.

These poor people who had gathered around Mahavira were torturing themselves in every possible way, because this life is not long enough. So much time has passed... somebody is fifty; perhaps twenty years more, and then the eternal moksha, blissfulness forever, freedom forever.

So on the one hand they were doing all the austerities. But when you torture yourself, you cannot love the man really who has somehow manipulated you to torture yourself. When in the hot night you start feeling thirsty, you will curse this man - silently, of course. Even if you are sick, you cannot take medicine, because that is materialistic. You want to live in the body - that is materialistic. So if the body is falling apart, so far so good: the sooner you reach moksha.

But one thing is certain and simple, that these people will be gathering anger against the so-called tirthankara, Mahavira. So when his son-in-law left the fold, five hundred followed him.

The same is the case with Gautam Buddha. His own cousin-brother had taken initiation. The same mind, the same ego.... He was older than Buddha, he had renounced his own kingdom - he had had his own kingdom. He was hoping that he was going to be the successor. But slowly, slowly he became aware that there were people like Sariputta, Mahakashyap, Moggalayan, who were very intimate with Gautam Buddha; there was not much chance for him. And he was not even worthy!

He left Gautam Buddha, and he also was followed by hundreds of monks. And this man tried in every way to kill Gautam Buddha. When Buddha was meditating one day under a tree in the valley by the side of a mountain, the cousin rolled a huge rock at him. The story is that the rock, seeing Buddha there, changed her route; Buddha was saved.

I don't think that rocks can change routes - what is more possible is that Buddha's cousin-brother missed the target. And it is difficult to calculate.... If from the high top of a mountain you roll a rock, the target will not be necessarily hit, because the rock will come against other rocks, trees, and will be going this way and that way until it reaches the valley. So I don't think that the rock was very compassionate.

Buddha's cousin used a mad elephant who was always kept in chains because he was very dangerous, he used to kill people. He brought the elephant near Gautam Buddha when he was sitting with closed eyes, and released the elephant.

The story is - but it is just a story - that the elephant, who was mad, came rushing, roaring towards Buddha. But as he saw Gautam Buddha he knelt down and touched Buddha's feet. I don't think that elephants are wiser than man. If the cousin-brother is not changed, what possibility is there for a mad elephant to change? Perhaps it was just out of his madness that he was doing it. You can expect from mad people anything.

The mad elephant may have seen so many people bowing down before Buddha and touching his feet. His screws were loose, but it is a well-known fact that elephants are very imitative. That's why they are used in circuses; they learn to imitate very easily. You will not have seen camels in the circuses, for the simple reason that camels are just idiots. Elephants are imitative. So if this mad elephant did it, it simply shows imitation. He had seen so many people every day doing it to Buddha.

He was mad enough not to bother about the cousin-brother who had released him - and he was not aware of the purpose either.

What I am pointing at is that the moment you claim to be higher, stronger, better in comparison to someone else, you are creating an enemy.

Man for centuries has been repressing the woman. Calling her the weaker sex, which is absolutely wrong: man is the weaker sex. But he has deprived the woman of education, deprived the woman of any financial independence, deprived the woman of the right to move in society freely, just as he moves. The woman is carrying immense anger accumulated for centuries, and she takes revenge in her own way. She nags the husband, she screams at him, she throws pillows at him. She turns the husband into a henpecked husband.

Slavery is always mutual.

Freedom is always mutual.

So I don't make any distinction between women's liberation and men's liberation. These are two sides of the same coin. If the woman is liberated, man's liberation follows automatically. If man wants not to be nagged, not to be screamed at, not to be a target of all kinds of things that the woman throws at him.... And this is an everyday scene in every family.

The man has reduced the woman to a slave; the woman has her own ways to reduce him to a slave. If you see a couple walking on the road, you can decide without asking them whether they are married or not, whether the woman is a wife or a girlfriend. With the girlfriend the man is so happy - you can see it. With the wife he is so bored, so utterly sad, for the simple reason that this woman has made his life a hell. But who is responsible?

First, you have made her a slave, now she is returning it to you in the same coins. Of course, the feminine way of taking revenge is different - her psychology is different. But no woman gives freedom to the husband. She keeps an eye on him - with whom he is talking, where he is going.

She goes on looking at his coat to see if there is any woman's hair on it. She goes on looking into his diary for phone numbers, and through phone numbers she easily can figure out with whom he is flirting.

It is an ugly relationship. Marriage is madness, because both are trying to overpower each other.

The women can never forgive the man for what he has done to her: deprived her of education, deprived her of financial freedom, deprived her of her human dignity.

So if the woman has liberation, man automatically becomes liberated. There is no need for a man's liberation movement, one movement is enough. That will help the man immensely. His joy will come back, he will be again chasing women, and that is the greatest game in the world. The poor man has to play tennis, football, volleyball, hockey - but nothing is a substitute! Chasing a woman is simply the most beautiful game.

Once marriage is dissolved completely and people are free to be with whomsoever they want to be - no barrier, no legality, no government, no society interfering - you will see this whole world smiling, happier, healthier, because you cannot get nourishment when you are in a state of slavery. Although you go on proclaiming to the world that you are the master of the house, you know perfectly well the moment you enter the house who is the master and who is the mistress. Certainly you are not the master.

This creates a strange split in you, it makes you a hypocrite. It makes you hurt, but that is an outcome of your own stupidity. Give freedom if you want freedom.

Just one movement is enough. The woman's liberation movement is enough, but it is not going in the right direction. It is not becoming a rebellion, it is becoming a reaction. The woman declares she is equal to man, so if the man is smoking she has to smoke; she is equal. If the man is drinking, she has to drink; she is equal. This is not rebellion, this is reaction.

Women are turning into lesbians. They feel so much hatred for men that millions of women don't want to have any love relationship with men, they would prefer an unnatural and perverted relationship with a woman. And it is easier, because a man will never be able to suspect that his wife has a girlfriend. Even if the two women go on making love in the house, the husband will never suspect.

But if a man comes on the scene and makes the triangle of all the stories and the films and the novels, it cannot be long before the husband discovers it.

It is the slavery of women that is turning the women towards lesbianism, but she thinks this is liberation from men. Dropping love for men is not liberation, you are becoming perverted.

Drop the marriage contract, drop the license which has been issued by the court. Make your man free. Tell him, "It is up to you if you want to have any love relationships - I have no jealousy, no argument about it. But I demand the same for myself." And if there is no slavery, no bondage between man and woman, perhaps there will be great love happening - as it happens in my commune.

I don't think so much love is happening anywhere else in the whole world, because nobody is jealous.

People change their partners very easily. It is just a game: you get tired of playing tennis with one partner, you find another partner. And nobody is harmed, everybody is happy.

You will not find in my commune people who are sad, with long faces. Even Britishers in my commune are no more British. Even Proper Sagar is becoming improper!