Whirlwind Of Awakening

[NOTE: This discourse is published in the book: The Last Testament, Volume 1, as Chapter 7.]

ANSWER: They certainly are tossing and turning in their sleep! But there is great hope. They are trying hard to remain asleep. I shock them, they take a turn, pull the blanket over, but I am not to be defeated by their stupidity. I am determined to wake them up by each and every means possible. I will say things which are not true, I will do things which I am not supposed to do, but I will wake them up. And a few are certainly waking up, coming closer, feeling more, understanding more. My efforts have not been in vain.

Perhaps nobody has been rewarded so much as I am rewarded. For the first time so many people are so much interested in a man just for his mere love and his presence. I do not walk on water, I do not do any miracles, because those are methods to attract people and their attention. But then the person comes to you not because of you, he comes to you because you are doing miracles. It is the miracles that are pulling him towards you. A few people gathered around Jesus; he was raising the dead, walking on water, turning water into wine, doing every kind of thing in which people are interested, although it was not of any worth.

But even then, not many came.

And I am consistently avoiding anything that can be a distraction to you. I am making it absolutely clear that you have to be here just for me, not for any other motive. If there is any other motive, you are not with me. If there is no motive, then there is the possibility of your being awakened.

So I have not given any excuse for my people to be around me. In fact, I have given them every excuse to escape from me, to avoid me. Being with me does not bring you respectability. That was well-considered by me from the very beginning, that with me you should have to lose your respect, your honor, your morality. These will be the tests whether you are going to risk anything to be with me. And if thousands of people have decided to be with me at any cost, that is a determination, a commitment of tremendous import. That means they have tasted something of my presence.

The people who are now around me are not here just for my words. By now they are perfectly aware that you can play with the words, there is nothing in it. They are perfectly aware that they are not to cling to my words, because tomorrow I am going to change. Why cling unnecessarily? I am absolutely unreliable. And to trust in a man who is so unreliable is authentic trust. It goes beyond thinking of consequences. It goes beyond fear. It goes beyond all words. I may contradict, I may say anything, it does not matter to my people. What matters is my presence, my love towards them, their love towards me.

And that is going to create a whirlwind of awakening around the whole world. It is just the beginning. The wildfire can take wings any moment. And, fortunately, we are in the right time, when people are already fed up with their sleep, fed up with all their sleeping pills, fed up with all the dreams they have been seeing, and fed up with all those people who have been simply providing drugs to console them.

This is the right moment when we can fetch people very easily, because they are themselves trying to get out of the bed; but they have been asleep so long, it has become almost their second nature. Hence, a little effort is needed to separate them from their second nature and make them aware of their original face.

Everybody has within him the eternal flame of awareness. Howsoever hidden behind walls, it is always there. Nothing can destroy it. All that we have to do is to destroy the walls -- and the walls are only of words, scriptures, beliefs.

I am training my people -- without calling it a training -- how to play with words, how to play with arguments, and how to destroy any argument without much effort. These are the ways those walls have to be broken. I am speaking against every prejudice, against every religion, every ideology, and giving you basic insight into how you can destroy all these hindrances. At the moment they are removed.... Awareness is not something that comes out of the blue. You suddenly find a great surprise: it has always been there -- you were just keeping your back towards it.

Many are waking up. They have slept for millions of years, so we need not be in a hurry. And whatever time they take is not much, because the sleep is so long that if they take a few years to wake up, they are waking up quite early.

It is happening, and it is a kind of happening that once it starts it is infectious, contagious. Then it goes on and on from one person to another person.

We have to make this whole earth fully awake, and we are capable now. I can say with confidence that I have the right people with me, the intelligent people who can do every kind of work to help humanity to become conscious.

So I am not worried at all about their unconsciousness, neither am I worried about our capacity to wake them up. Our capacity to wake them is far bigger and greater than their capacity to remain asleep. And this will be some miracle.

Walking on water is silly. You can cross the lake in a boat, there is no need....

In Ramakrishna's life there is a story. A man called Totapuri, a very famous saint of those days, came to Ramakrishna's ashram near Calcutta in Dakshineshwar. It was known that Totapuri walked on water. And it must be true because it is not a two-thousand-year-old history, it was just at the end of the past century. There are still people who have seen Ramakrishna and Totapuri alive. I have met those people, and they say that Totapuri was a man of miracles, but Ramakrishna reduced him to nothing. They were sitting on the bank of the Ganges and he just challenged Ramakrishna, "Come on, why not have a little walk on the Ganges?"

Now, poor Ramakrishna was not a man of miracles. He said, "That's a good idea, but I have disciples who have better ideas. Just look up." They both looked up.

On the cloud was sitting one of Ramakrishna's disciples. Ramakrishna said, "My people travel by clouds, they don't walk on water."

Totapuri was amazed, but he was more amazed when Ramakrishna said, "That was just a projection. There was nobody on the cloud. It was just my deep projection, the way a film is projected on the screen. I can project any idea through my eyes, forcibly, on to any screen. That cloud, that white cloud, functioned as a screen. There was nobody, and we don't do any stupid things like that. And I would like to ask how many years it took to learn the art of walking on water?" Totapuri said, "It was an arduous discipline. I had to go to Tibet to learn it. For thirty years I was under arduous training, and then finally I succeeded.

Ramakrishna laughed madly. He said, "You are crazy. When I want to go to the other side of the Ganges, I just tell the boatman." Anyway, in those days, just one paise -- one rupee consists of one hundred paise -- just one paise was enough.

And even that was not taken from Ramakrishna; no boatman would take from such a beautiful man, so pure, so innocent. So he said, "At the most, what you have learned in thirty years is worth one paise, and thirty years is a long time.

"And what is the point of it all? Even if you walk on water or sit on a cloud, how does it make you more peaceful, more silent, more aware, more meditative? In what way do you achieve godliness by walking on water? It is sheer stupidity.

You wasted your thirty years. And you wanted to brag about it. You forget all that you have learned, and start from scratch, because I can see you are just as fast asleep and ignorant as anybody else. You have just learned a few tricks.

Those tricks don't bring any transformation, but they bring millions of people to worship you.

Many saints in India have confessed to me that they do certain kinds of tricks just to attract people so that they can be thought religious. I used to tell them, "From the very beginning, you are cheating them. You yourself are becoming irreligious.

"And they are not coming here to become religious in the first place, they are just coming to see the tricks. Any magician in the street is doing all those things that you are doing. Magicians are doing even better things on the street corners. In the whole day perhaps they may gather five rupees. How can you think that you have attained to some spirituality just by attracting a crowd? And the crowd is going to be of wrong people." So from the very beginning my effort has been not to attract wrong people, not to attract people with motivations which have nothing to do with awakening.

And I can say to you that I have succeeded in attracting only the right people.

Even if once in a while a wrong person came in accidentally, I have managed to get rid of him not by telling him to leave -- because that is insulting somebody -- but by his having the idea to leave, that out of his freedom he is going into the world. And I have accepted it: "That's perfectly good. People should come in with their freedom, should go out with their freedom."

But this is not true. The people who have left had to leave because somehow I had already disconnected myself from them. They were no more nourished, they were hanging around but starving. Of this they cannot be aware in their sleep. I wanted them to go away for the simple reason that they were wasting their time in a wrong place. It is a wrong place for those people because it cannot fulfill their desires. They are wasting their time and they are wasting the time of my people. My people are working in some way to create an energy field where people can become awakened, and they are not here for that purpose. They are an unnecessary load.

So I gave them the idea to go to Santa Fe. All the camels are gathering there in Santa Fe. They are known as the dirty dozen; because only one dozen camels are there, they have become famous as the dirty dozen. A great achievement! And now they are hankering to come back; they are writing letters to people that they are dreaming of me, that they are dreaming of meeting me, that they are continuously missing the commune -- those letters are indications of their state -- but their egos are coming in the way. How long?... Sooner or later they will have to recognize the fact that they missed an opportunity.

And what are they doing in Santa Fe? What can they do? They are all asleep.

They will have to come back, but this time they will be coming with a right motive. So this gap of losing contact with the commune, with sannyas, was absolutely essential for their growth. Now they will be coming, not accidentally, but very consideredly. And this coming will be significant. They have to be welcomed with great joy.

Q: THERE IS A LOT OF OPPOSITION TO WHAT IS HAPPENING HERE.

YOUR ADVICE TO PEOPLE IS TO BE INTELLIGENT IN THE FIGHT AGAINST THE POLITICIANS, TO USE LEGAL METHODS, TO USE THE DEMOCRACY. IF THESE LEGAL METHODS WORK AND THE CASES ARE WON, WON'T THE POLITICIANS BE EVEN MORE FRUSTRATED, EVEN MORE ANGRY AT THIS COMMUNITY? OR DO YOU SEE A POSSIBILITY OF A CHANGE HAPPENING IN THE ATTITUDE TOWARDS RAJNEESHEES?

A: Both things will happen. We are not going to use any illegal means in the fight with the politicians. In their sleep they have written a constitution, not knowing that somebody can use it against them. And because they were writing in sleep, they have tried hard to make it as beautiful, as democratic, as freedom loving, as respectful of the individual as possible. They were not aware that there will come a time three hundred years afterwards when a few fully awake people will use their constitution against them.

So my effort is of multidimensional interest. One: I want to prove to the whole world that we are saving the Constitution of America from the Americans; that the Constitution of America has to be saved, not only from the Soviet Union, but from Americans, too. And these are the most dangerous enemies, because the Constitution is in their hands. They have not been challenged up to now, because nobody has ever thought that they were against the Constitution. Others were as asleep as they are. Now they are fighting a battle which is unique in history.

So when we can use their own Constitution, their own laws to defeat them, why should we lose that opportunity? We win, and we make the whole world aware that Americans are not doing what they say, that they are doing just the opposite. We are going to expose them to the whole world, that this is a hypocrisy, not democracy. And we want it to become democracy.

Our victory is absolutely certain unless they burn their Constitution and declare America a fascist state. In that way also, we will be the winners: we will have exposed the greatest hypocrisy in the whole history of man.

Secondly, the moment we win, many of the politicians who are intelligent enough will have a change of heart immediately. They will see now that it is not a question of the red people winning, it is a question that the red people have proved they are for the Constitution, "and we have fallen in the opposite camp."

It is good to be back with the Constitution because the American masses will not forgive anybody who is destroying their Constitution. While winning in the courts on the basis of democratic ideals and values, we will be able to convince the masses, too, that we are not enemies, that we are their friends, and that the people they used to think of as their friends are their enemies. So the politicians who are intelligent enough will be immediately on our side. Only the idiots will not change; but they don't matter, they will lose their respectability on each standpoint.

For example, this attorney general of Oregon imposed a $600,000 fine as punishment for making tents without permission. He never came here. He simply assumed by rumors that those tents were permanent structures -- only permanent structures need permission, tents don't. Of course, they were a new kind of tent. We had used material which is used in permanent structures, but nowhere in the American Constitution does it say that the material which is used in permanent structures cannot be used in tents. The definition of the tent is that you can put it up within ten minutes and you can fold it away within ten minutes. More than that, there is no constitutional way to define a tent. Of what it is made does not matter. It may be made of steel, that does not matter. The question is that it can be folded within ten minutes.

So I told my people, "You don't argue, you simply take a tent to the court. There is no need for any argument. Just ask permission to put up the tent which is in question, and the judges and the juries can decide whether it is a tent or a permanent structure. If it is a permanent structure, then we are punishable; but if it is not, then to put such a big amount of punishment -- $600,000 -- without any inquiry, without any inspection, without anything, is absolutely undemocratic.

And that's what they did. The magistrate could see that this is a temporary structure. Within ten minutes they can put it up, within ten minutes they can fold it away and put it into a bag. Who says this is a permanent structure? White Houses are not made in ten minutes and folded in ten minutes. He simply dismissed the case, that there was no case at all, these are tents. Now, this is a great slap on the face of the attorney general, that he does not even know how to apply law, how to apply the Constitution. A simple demonstration proved him wrong. No argumentation was needed, no legal fight was needed, and we had invited him, "First you come and see, and then whatever you want to do, you do."

Now we will be slapping these people in every case, and the higher the cases go, the more these politicians will be crushed. Soon it has to be understood by them.

In fact, the understanding has started arising, that to fight with these people they are going to be great losers, not only of the cases, but of their respectability, of their political status. It is better not to create any fight with these people. On the contrary, whatever you can do legally, help them.

This is going to happen, and there is nothing that we have done wrong. We have not gone against any democratic value, we have not gone against any law. We have functioned very carefully, and it is a good opportunity for us that now within America itself they find an enemy who is invincible. Now they cannot go on pretending to the world. We are here to expose them. We are going to take over the whole world media to expose America.

My reason is that I would like America to be a real democracy. And that is our stand. They are thinking that these are small matters of land use laws and this and that. We are not bothered about those small things. Soon we will drag them into the open, and they will have to decide whether they stand for democracy or they stand for a fascist regime.

And this is going to be the most difficult situation they have ever faced. They are frightened of a small commune of five thousand people. The world's biggest military power is frightened of five thousand people. This should give you some insight that if you are right, and if you are courageous enough to fight for it, then no might is bigger than right. It just needs courage, and we have enough courage because we have nothing to lose.

We have everything to gain and nothing to lose. They have everything to lose and nothing to gain. What can they gain? Even if they destroy this whole commune by dropping bombs on it, what are they going to gain? Just the Big Muddy Ranch. But they will spoil their whole reputation around the world, and the Soviet Union will say, "That's what we have been saying for sixty years, that America is a hypocritical country. It is not democracy. Innocent people who were not doing any harm to anybody...."

You will have the support of the whole world. That's why they cannot do any harm, and that's why I have started talking to the world media. Before they can do any harm, I want the whole world to know about the situation, about our commune, and about American hypocrisy. Before they take any step to destroy, I have already taken the step to make the whole world aware of the situation. That is creating fear in them. We don't have any power to fight, but there is no need for any power. Intelligence is enough. It is far more powerful than any nuclear weapons. And if five thousand people stand together intelligently, meditatively, they will create such a tremendous energy that no power can stand against them.

So don't be worried about anything. Just rejoice -- and fight!

Q: YOU SAY YOU ARE CONDEMNED BY SOCIETY BECAUSE THEY ARE MISERABLE AND YOU AND THOSE AROUND YOU ARE HAPPY. DOES SOCIETY SEE IT IN THOSE TERMS? ARE PEOPLE CONSCIOUS THAT THIS IS THE REASON THEY ARE AGAINST YOU?

A: The society will have to see it. Right now it is blind, but we will not leave it to remain blind. We are going to use every means to make the society aware of why they are against me, why there is a condemnation of a commune which is in no way doing any harm to anybody. We are just minding our own business. We don't have time to harass anybody.

It may take a little time for them to understand why they are condemning us, but they will have to come to that conclusion. It is so clear, how long can they deny it? It is not a fiction, it is the reality that the miserable person is always jealous of the person who is living joyously. The poor are jealous of the rich, the ugly are jealous of the beautiful, the sick are jealous of the healthy. This is a simple psychological phenomenon.

By this condemnation they try to hide their inferiority complex. But the inferiority complex is there; in fact, by their condemnation they have made it known to everybody. Otherwise, why not ignore these five thousand people? In the four billion population of the world, we are not even a drop in the ocean.

Why bother about us? Ignore us. But nobody is capable of ignoring us.

I am here, and they are talking about me in the German parliament, in the Dutch parliament, in the English parliament. Strange -- a man who never goes anywhere, who has nothing to do with anybody's country or politics -- why should they be so much concerned?

Sooner or later they will have to recognize the fact of their own getting disturbed -- because their condemnation makes no difference to us. We go on living the way we are living. Nothing makes any difference, neither in our laughter nor in our dance. Whatever happens is absolutely unrelated to our beings and our lives and our existence and our way of life. How long can it be ignored? Our laughter is going to resound around the earth. And when they see that it is happening not only here but also in every commune around the world, they will have to think again... perhaps something is wrong with them. And we will be insisting that something is wrong with their psychology.

Now we are using every means -- newspapers, magazines, radios, television. We are going to cover the whole world continuously with what we think and what is our analysis of the situation. And the media has understood one thing: that we cannot be ignored. Otherwise, who cares about a small commune of five thousand people here? Why should world media be interested?

They are interested because they know that these people are making a significant contribution. They are bringing into the light something which society has been hiding for centuries: its ugliness, its repressiveness, its sadness. We are uncovering their wounds. Naturally, when you uncover somebody's wound he gets angry, he tries to fight you; but how can he ignore the wound that you have uncovered? And we are not doing only one thing, uncovering the wound... I could have done that alone; no movement, no communes were needed for that.

But that would have been just a negative work. They would have covered it again.

Now we are opening their wounds and we are supplying every help so that those wounds can be removed, healed, and they can be as healthy and whole as our people. We are here not only to transform ourselves, but to bring to light the technique of transformation for everybody. Because they are are poor victims, they need all compassion. They may be against me, that does not make any difference. My compassion to them is the same. It becomes even deeper because they are so much against that they don't know whom they are opposing. A surgeon is trying to remove a cancer from them, and they are fighting with the surgeon. The situation is hilarious but it is not going to be for long.

And it does not matter whether it is long or not. We are living our every moment; we are not sacrificing any moment to any other idea, to any future. And we are becoming a more and more prominent reality in the whole world.

This situation is going to change at least the intelligent and young people very quickly, and if young people change, the old people start shaking in their determinations, in their conclusions. And in fact, we are not directly interested in the old people. Our interest is directed towards the young and the fresh, because they will understand us immediately. And their understanding us is going to change their old father, their old mother. We are putting a time bomb with every young man in every house in the world. It is going to explode. Of course, our time bombs are not made with gunpowder, so nobody can detect them. Our weapons are very subtle. They are invisible to the eyes.

I can see the work growing, maturing. More and more intelligent people are becoming sympathetic. I don't need everybody to become a sannyasin; I need only a small group in every country to be totally devoted to sannyas and turn the whole intelligentsia into sympathy. That's enough.

The coming revolution in the world is not going to be of the poor against the rich, the proletariat against the bourgeois. The coming revolution in the world is going to be between the stupidity of humanity and the intelligentsia. Nobody has yet proposed the whole program, but that's where I am leading you all: towards a new kind of revolution by human intelligence against human stupidity.

So we need not have everybody become a sannyasin. We need small groups of sannyasins everywhere who can radiate and make people aware of our reality.

All that is needed is the sympathy of the intelligentsia, the creative people in the world, the musicians, the poets, the Nobel prize winning scientists, the sculptors, the dancers, the engineers, the doctors -- all the people who are contributing something to human wisdom, life, beauty, health. We want those people's sympathy.

That's enough, and the revolution will be on its way. Without any effort to create a revolution, the revolution has already started. This is what old Lao Tzu called effortless effort. We are not making any effort for the revolution; our whole work is meditation. But the outcome is going to be a tremendous revolution, the only revolution which can change this earth into a paradise.

Q: YOU HAVE SPOKEN OF THE NEED FOR COURAGE. WHERE DOES COURAGE COME FROM? IS THERE ANY WAY TO STIMULATE PEOPLE'S COURAGE?

A: Everything that is valuable comes from your own innermost being. It may be love, it may be intelligence, it may be creativity, it may be courage, it does not matter what. Anything of value comes from your own innermost being. Many dimensions open up with your experience of yourself Yes, courage is needed, and for that you will have to go to the same source. It is in a way a very simple phenomenon. There is nothing complex in it because there is only one source for every great value. So by achieving one thing, you achieve all great values simultaneously.

You ask me, "Is there some way to stimulate courage?" That's what the commune is for. Everything in human life is contagious, because no man is an island. We are all part of one infinite continent. So anything that is happening in me, if you are available it immediately starts happening in you. Something is triggered.

Carl Gustav Jung has coined a new word for it: synchronicity. It is a beautiful word. And everybody experiences it. For example, here... silence is your synchronicity. Everybody is so silent that you are surrounded from everywhere by a pool of silence.

The same is true about love, about sadness, about blissfulness. Just sit with a few people who are sad, miserable, and soon you will find that something in you is becoming sad, something in you is becoming miserable. And when you leave this company of miserables, you will feel sucked, tired, as Lf your energy has been exploited.

Everybody in the world once in a while has experienced the other polarity, too.

You may be sad, but you meet a few friends who are laughing, joking, enjoying, dancing, and you forget all about your sadness, all about your worries.

Something overpowers you. Their energy is much bigger than your misery. Your misery simply slips out of you. You start dancing, singing, your face changes, and afterwards you will feel so much nourished, so much stronger that even though those people have left, the misery cannot enter you again. Now you are far stronger and far more nourished. Misery needs a certain weakness, certain loopholes, a certain readiness on your part to be miserable.

But we are living in a kind of human ocean which we cannot see -- just like the air which we cannot see, but which surrounds us all. What is my breath this moment may become your breath in the next moment. It is changing its place every moment. You are inhaling, exhaling; everybody is inhaling, exhaling.

Everybody is inhaling from somebody else; everybody is exhaling into somebody else. In the same way, you are continuously inhaling and exhaling all other inner values, which are even more subtle than the air. There is a constant exchange, uninterrupted even in your sleep.

I have made thousands of experiments about everything before I have said anything about it For example, I have tried to make a sleeping man miserable or happy in his sleep. He does not know what is happening, he is fast asleep. But in the darkness, twelve meditators are sitting, projecting sadness, misery. Soon the person starts moaning, may have nightmares that somebody is killing him, that something really terrible is happening to him. He starts grinding his teeth. He really wants to get out of it. We have observed his hands, holding his blanket as a last resort. Perhaps he is drowning, or who knows what.

And we have changed the same person by changing our projection. We have projected love, joy, rejoicing, dancing, laughter. Just a thought being projected towards the man by twelve people who have a certain capacity of meditation, and the moaning stops. His hands get relaxed on the blanket. His face is no more distorted. Soon he starts giggling. You cannot believe it when you see a sleeping person behaving in this way. He is smiling. You have never seen his face so beautiful as he is looking at this moment.

This is the function of the commune, where so many people are just happy for no reason at all, where life is just fun, every moment of it. We can radiate from this commune for miles around.

New people coming from some other country outside America have reported to me that the moment they enter Rancho Rajneesh something in the air changes.

Suddenly they feel as if they have come home, and they have never been here before. Perhaps never in their millions of lives -- I don't think they have been born in the Big Muddy Ranch, but suddenly they feel at home, as they have never felt even in their own home. And as they come closer to the commune, a great joy starts arising in them for no visible reason.

We have not only created an oasis in the desert, we have created an oasis of consciousness, too, which is far deeper, far more powerful, far more significant.

And soon, as our other communes in the world will be becoming more mature....

My idea is to make a belt of energy around the world, so in fact we become one commune as far as the energy belt is concerned. So all the communes may be far away from each other in space, but in the inner world they are all together. You don't have only five thousand people's strength, you have the strength of one million sannyasins, wherever they may be. And each commune has one million sannyasins' support. So if we have two hundred communes, the inner logic and arithmetic is that we have already 200,000,000 sannyasins -- that much energy, the quality, the quantity. And that is going to transform the world.

Never before has any experiment of this kind been made, so ordinarily nothing is known about it. But I have been experimenting on small scales until I have become absolutely certain of something. I have not tried to make any effort for expansion. We are in perfectly good shape -- it could not be better -- to do the job that we have chosen.

We can be so full of bliss that we can fill the whole universe with our bliss, our rejoicing our dance, our laughter. And to me, this is revolution, an absolute psychological change in the atmosphere of the world.