Make It Clear To The World

[NOTE: This discourse is published in the book: The Last Testament, Volume 1, as Chapter 11.]

ANSWER: It is possible. Life functions very mysteriously. Just seeing a picture, reading a certain statement, seeing my face on the television, may prove the triggering point. There are millions of people in the world who are just on the borderline. A little push or a little pull and they will have crossed the line.

It is simply a matter of your heart being touched. It can be touched by anything, just my voice or just the gesture of my hand. It is unpredictable because what is going to happen to an individual's heart, what is going to touch it, is difficult to say. Perhaps my silence -- the pause that always happens between two sentences, or sometimes even in the middle of a sentence -- may stir something which is already there. Just a little push, a little pull, and the person will never be the same again.

And whatever he has tasted in that moment will grow, becoming a deep longing to come closer to me, to know more about me, to know more about the work that is happening, to know more about people who are around me. And these are the ways a person slowly enters into the energy field I am creating.

Talking to the world media is not just publicity. I have had enough of it. It is in fact using new methods of reaching people's hearts. So it does not matter what they ask, it does not matter what I answer. What matters is that people will be seeing my hands, my eyes, and they are bound to be affected -- this way or that.

Either they may fall into a certain love or they may start from that very moment to hate me. But whatever happens, hate or love, I have touched their heart.

To change their hate into love is not difficult. The most difficult thing was to reach to their heart, which has happened. Those who are in love will be looking for books, tapes, videos, and those who are in hate, they will also be looking for the same things.

And once a man becomes emotionally connected with me -- as a friend, as an enemy -- he is part of my people. The enemies also are part of me and my work.

Sometimes they do more work than the friends, because they are continuously talking against me.

Listening to them, many people start thinking, "Why are you so disturbed? If you are against, forget about the man." But they cannot forget me either.

And the people to whom they are talking about me will become interested, just as a curiosity in the beginning, but to change curiosity into a longing, a desire, a search, is not difficult. It happens almost automatically.

Q: BHAGWAN, YOU TALK OF CHANGING THE WORLD BY CREATING RAJNEESHEE OASES ALL OVER, BUT SOMETIMES EVEN YOUR OWN PEOPLE MISUNDERSTAND YOU OR DON'T HAVE THE COURAGE TO LIVE OUT YOUR VISION. IS IT REALLY POSSIBLE?

A: It is not only possible, it is going to happen. It is absolutely certain.

It is not a question of people understanding me or not -- even my own people may not understand me. There may be things which their old conditionings are still hindering them to understand. But it doesn't matter. What makes me so certain that this transformation of man is going to happen, whether people understand me or not, is the very situation in which humanity has suddenly landed.

It could have been predicted, but if they cannot understand now, it is impossible that they would have understood five thousand years ago. The seeds were in Moses, the seeds were in Manu, in Mahavira, in Jesus, in Zarathustra, in Krishna, in Gautam Buddha. What has happened was bound to happen. We are reaping the crop that humanity has been sowing for generations: stupid ideas, but once they become accepted, and for generations remain accepted and respectable, nobody inquires about them. For example, the idea of celibacy. For five thousand years in India it has existed as something spiritual that without celibacy there is no possibility of spiritual growth. And I am simply amazed that not a single person in five thousand years raised the question whether celibacy is possible -- because it is not under your control. It is not your mind which can manage it.

The mind has no connection with it.

Life is far more intelligent. It has not left essential things for you to decide. For example your breathing: if it was left for you to decide, nobody would be alive.

Sometimes you may hesitate whether to breathe or not, whether it is right or wrong, and sometimes you may simply forget. And what will happen when you will go to sleep?

So it is absolutely wrong to say, "I breathe." Breathing is not within your ego's power. It happens on its own. Life breathes in you, and you have no control over it. Man has tried. In yoga, and in other methods in different religions, man has tried, but nobody has succeeded. You cannot succeed against life.

The same is the question of celibacy, exactly the same. Just as breathing is needed for your life, sex is needed for humanity. Sex is as deeply concerned with humanity as breathing is concerned with you. It cannot be left in the hands of the individuals. There is no choice about it.

And for five thousand years around the world the idea became permanently settled, so whoever was not celibate -- and nobody has ever been celibate -- started feeling guilty. He thought, "Others are able to manage, and only I am not able to manage it. I have a very weak personality, subhuman." But he was not aware that that was the situation of all. They were all hypocrites. And just to keep that hypocrisy nobody was asking the simple question that if sex is a biological phenomenon, in the hands of life, how can you prevent it?

It is possible for a woman to be celibate because her role in sex is that of a receiver. She does not give anything in it. She gets something.

Man cannot be celibate, just the way no woman can avoid the period, the monthly menstrual course, there is no way. And you will be surprised to know that one of the oldest religions of the world, Jainism, has not allowed women directly, from women's bodies, to enter into their paradise. So whatever the woman does -- all her fasts, austerities, she can become a nun, she can renounce everything -- all this will give her only a man's body in the next birth, because only through a man's body will she be able to enter into enlightenment. There is no way from a woman's body.

And what was the reason? The monthly period -- because in the monthly period something comes out of the woman, and the woman cannot hide it. It is difficult for so many years to keep it a secret and pretend that it doesn't happen, that you have controlled it completely. It is impossible. The blood is coming out of the body. How are you going to prevent it? And the pain and the misery?

It was the monthly period that was given as the reason that women are not capable of controlling their bodies. They cannot rise above their bodies, so they cannot attain spirituality. But man... nobody asks what happens to his semen which is being created continuously by his food, exercise, breathing, whatever he is doing. It is a natural process, the same as the monthly period of the woman.

But there is a possibility to keep it a secret. That's how homosexuality entered into religions. That's how masturbation entered into religions.

It is strange that all the religions condemn masturbation, so much so that in India it is said by the religious leaders that the people who go mad, go mad because of masturbation. The reality may be otherwise. The people who go mad are the people who are not masturbating. The people who have been masturbating are simply releasing a certain force that goes on accumulating, and if it remains repressed inside you, it can drive you crazy.

I said to one saint, "This seems to be absurd that masturbation leads people to madness, because the man who is masturbating, he is masturbating because of you. You have separated men and women so cunningly, particularly in India, that it is impossible to have any contact. And if a man is a bachelor -- and he has to be a bachelor at least from fourteen to twenty-four, twenty-five years of age, and those are the most potential times. Nearabout eighteen he is at the highest peak of sexual energy, he will never again be so potent. Now what do you want him to do?"

In the hostels he is bound to become a homosexual. If he is a poor man, he may start making love to animals. Or if nothing else is possible, he may masturbate. If he is afraid -- because that can lead to madness -- he may not masturbate, but his semen will be released in sleep. It cannot remain inside.

Even Mahatma Gandhi at the age of seventy was having wet dreams, so what to say of others? And he was certainly a sincere man. Wrong about everything, but sincere. I never suspect his intentions. I criticize him totally on every single point, but he was a sincere man, honest; whatever he was doing he did it with totality.

Forty years he struggled to remain celibate, and the only result was that he was having wet dreams. Certainly he would not become a homosexual, he would not make love to animals, he would not masturbate, because he believed that unless sexual energy is controlled your spirituality remains imperfect.

That was the ancient idea that he was following blindly, without asking a relevant question: if you cannot control urination, how can you control your semen, which is being produced by you, by your body? And the body knows nothing about celibacy, there is no way to give the idea of celibacy to the body...

so now there is no need to produce any sexual energy. There is no communication between the mind and the body in that way. These people have dominated humanity and given them idiotic ideas. One may ask why all these people gave the same idiotic ideas. There is a reason.

The reason is to make spirituality a great challenge. The only way was to make man repress something which he cannot repress.

Naturally he cannot deny God. He knows he cannot even manage celibacy, what right does he have to deny God, heaven, and hell? Those who are celibate are talking about experiencing God, realizing God, seeing God, even bringing messages from God. Give some idea which is impossible for humanity to do, so only hypocrites, cunning people will be able to pretend....

That's why there is a similarity in all the religions. Of one thing everybody was aware: life depends on reproduction. And life will not allow the power of reproduction to be given into the hands of individuals, because it is the most important thing. Individuals come and go, the river of life should continue.

Hence sex is not within human power.

Once this was known -- and it was simple to know -- then all the religions exploited humanity with it. And it gave such good returns. Tell people that celibacy is spiritual, then these are the results that will follow: one, everybody becomes guilty. And the guilty person is gullible, the guilty person wants to get rid of his guilt. He does not bother whether God exists or not, what he wants is to be freed from guilt. Then use God as the compassionate one, the ultimate forgiver; you just have to confess to his priest. Open your heart and confess your guilt, and you will be forgiven. They have created a very fictitious circle.

A false principle of celibacy creates guilt. The guilty person feels burdened, he needs to be unburdened, and if God can help, if the Holy Bible can help, if the priest can help.... He is willing to accept all of them because the feeling of guilt is tremendously painful. You fall down in your own eyes. You lose all respect for yourself So it was easy for them to impose any fictitious ideas, and the guilty person cannot ask a question, because he is afraid if he asks questions and does not have faith, what is going to happen to his guilt, which he is accumulating every day, which is becoming bigger and bigger, a Himayalan load on his soul? He is ready to accept anything to get rid of this burden.

So it was easy for the priests, for the religious leaders, to impose ideas of God, heaven, and hell, or anything. Different religions have used different things, but the basic secret is the same.

Because he cannot follow celibacy he will become perverted. And to make man perverted means you have made him destroy his own individuality, freedom, his basic right to be proud of himself as a living, conscious being. Perverted, you have driven him into dark holes which lead nowhere. Every perversion leads to another perversion, because no perversion can be satisfying.

Natural sex can be satisfying, but perverted sex is unable to satisfy because nature has no provision for it. You can eat through your mouth -- nature has made that provision -- but if you start eating through your nose, then of course there will be difficulties. Nature has not made your teeth in your nose. Nature has no idea what kind of pervert you are going to be.

So no perversion is ever able to satisfy. Each perversion leads into another perversion; perhaps if this is not satisfying, the other one may be. And you go on farther and farther away from your natural instinct, which is the only place where you can get satisfaction, where you can relax and you can lose the tenseness of your being. But that is prohibited by your religion as sin.

This is a very cunning strategy. That's why when I say all these people have committed crimes against humanity, people get shocked because they don't understand what I mean about what these people have done. They have sown the seeds of all kinds of psychological diseases.

They have sown the seeds for poverty to remain in the world. They have consoled the poor. They have not allowed humanity to explore the material resources which are made available by life. Naturally, people have remained poor. For centuries how many million people have died, just because there was no food, no water? It is really a shame upon us all that it has been allowed, and it is being allowed still. Still nobody is raising his hand against these criminals who go on preaching against birth control, abortion....

They are respected people, they are doing great service to life. That's how they present the case. "Abortion is killing life" -- but for abortion they are responsible because they prevented the pill. You did not allow people to use the birth control methods. Now the child is there, and the only possibility is either to abort the child or to have the child.

One has to look into the strategies. First you condemn birth control -- it is against God. If God wants to send more people to the earth, you should not prevent it.

Now any intelligent person can say, "If God wants to send more people to the earth, then he should have a look at the earth."

It is already overpopulated; people are dying in thousands per day. Soon it will be more than five thousand per day. Can't God see? Is he blind? He cannot understand a simple thing, that so many people are dying of starvation now, there is no need to send more people to the earth.

And there are so many planets, millions of planets, millions of solar systems which are empty, lifeless, dead. Any sensible person would like to make other planets living, alive. And if your God can create the world, he can do anything. If the planet does not have water, he can send water, create water. If the planet does not have the right conditions for life, he can create them. He has created them. What is the point of having millions and millions of dead planets, and sending people here? Finally, these people will be the cause of the death of the whole planet.

The pope is concerned about one person's life, and he is responsible for abortion, all the abortions. Religious people are responsible for it because they are not allowing birth control methods. If birth control methods are applied, the question of abortion will not arise at all.

And why should you be worried? If the pill can manage, and your God cannot do anything against the pill, certainly the pill should be worshipped from now on. God is impotent against the pill. In every church and temple and mosque you should keep bottles of pills to worship. That seems to be reasonable, because this pill is so powerful that the omnipotent God cannot do anything about it.

So rather than doing the rational thing -- worshipping the pill -- these people are still roaming around telling people to give birth. Not to give birth is against God.

They don't know anything about God. Nobody has known anything about God ever.

It is such a foolish notion, but we are reaping the crop of thousands of years of stupid religious leaders. Poverty is there, sickness is there, perversion is there, which has culminated in AIDS. And it is strange that the pope is not proposing anything to prevent AIDS.

On the contrary, he is saying, and his followers are saying that it is a punishment against the homosexuals, as if the homosexuals have suddenly existed only in this last part of the twentieth century. Homosexuals have been here since the very beginning. And for thousands of years God never bothered about homosexuals, never punished them. In fact, most of the homosexuals were in the monasteries, spiritual leaders, spiritual guides to people. It took so many thousand years for God to make the decision that now homosexuals should be punished. This God seems to have a great bureaucracy. The file has been moving for thousands of years, and now comes the judgment.

And in the first place you create the homosexual, you create the perversion. If AIDS is going to be the punishment, then all the priests and the bishops and the cardinals and the rabbis and the Hindu monks and the Buddhist monks, these should be the people to suffer from AIDS, because they are the causes of it. This is very unfair. There is no justice behind it: victims are being punished, and the people who created the whole phenomenon will be rewarded in paradise.

From many directions these things have gathered to a point where either people have to listen to me or they have to accept global suicide. So it is not just a theoretical question anymore, it is something existential. That's why I think whether anybody understands or not, the world situation itself is forcing the intelligentsia to understand it clearly. They will have to understand it!

And there is nobody else who is giving any alternative, because nobody has the guts to accept all the condemnation that will come. But I am immune to condemnation, because except condemnation nothing has ever come to me. So it does not bother me at all. I have not lost a single moment's sleep for it. I have never thought about it.

I have gone on saying whatsoever feels right to me. Nobody has answered me in these thirty years, but everybody from every religion, from every political ideology, has condemned me. They have given no argument against my argument, nor have been able to propose another alternative.

If they propose a better alternative I will be the first one to accept it, because it is not a question of me or you; it is a question of the whole life of the planet:

centuries of painting and poetry, centuries of music, of literature, of philosophy, of high flights of intelligence, logic, and reason.

Everything would be simply erased. Life was doing such a tremendously important experiment here, and the whole universe around dead. This small earth may be very small in size, but in significance this is the most significant planet in the whole universe, because this is the only planet which has not only life, but has consciousness. Not only consciousness, but it has reached in a few people to the ultimate flowering of consciousness I call enlightenment.

It should not be destroyed. It took millions of years for life to grow to such a point where a few people at least can become enlightened. We can hope that if life survives, a day will come when we have many, many people enlightened, and perhaps one day the whole humanity. That day will be the greatest day in the history of the universe, when the whole planet is enlightened.

That's why I am so certain that they will have to accept it. They will have to understand it, even against their will. Otherwise they have to choose a global suicide.

So I am in a very fine position, because the alternative is such that nobody is going to choose it. We just have to make it clear to the world what the alternatives are, that these are the two alternatives. Your old world, your old ideologies have brought you to the climax where life cannot continue any more.

We are not at all rooted in the past. We have only future, no past. You have only past and no future.

We have to make it clear to them that what we are doing is creating a new man, because the old man has failed, utterly failed. All his efforts have led nowhere.

And at least when you are dying, let us, give us a chance. At the most we may also be failures, that's the worst that can happen. But you will not be a loser anyway-you were going to die. So we have to make the whole world aware that we are proposing an alternative to the old rotten structure which is dying, every day dying and coming closer to final death. Before it dies we can save the intelligent group of young people from this dying structure. If the old people are too old and cannot change, nothing to be worried about -- they were going to die anyway -- but the whole humanity should not die with them.

If we can save only the youth around the world, that's enough. Just Adam and Eve created the whole world. If we can save the youth, we can repopulate the world with new beings, higher in every possible way, better in every possible way. And we will not commit the same mistakes that have been committed in the past.

Q: BHAGWAN, HOW CAN PEOPLE TURN THE HUMAN PHENOMENON OF FALLING IN LOVE INTO A MEDITATION?

A: It is the easiest way. In human life, love is the closest phenomenon to meditation. The moment you fall in love with someone, what actually happens?

What transpires between those two who have fallen in love with each other?

They drop their egos -- at least for each other. They drop their hypocrisies, their masks. They want to be together, almost one soul within two bodies. That's the desire of love.

And this is a beautiful moment to change it into a meditation. Just nobody has ever told them. In fact, just the opposite has been told to them: that love is against meditation, so people who are falling in love can never become meditators.

The same people who make celibacy spiritual make love unspiritual, something dirty, condemned. But to me things are totally different. Love helps you to relax, which is part of meditation. Love helps you to be joyous, which is part of meditation. Love helps you, for a few moments at least, to be silent, which is the essential part of meditation. And finally, making love, if you attain to an orgasmic experience, gives you a glimpse of what meditation is, but it is millions of times more than this.

So to me love is a basic experience which can help you to become meditators. The old religions have been preventing it, and they have been preventing it for a certain reason. If people can transform their love into meditation, then the priests and the churches and the synagogues are no more needed, then people are totally free. No spiritual leadership is needed. And there are millions of priests around the world, like parasites on humanity. And naturally they will give you wrong ideas, against love, and they will give you ideas for meditation, but because you don't have the basic experience....

Love is just like when you enter into a swimming pool, step by step you are going into deeper water. Then the floor of the swimming pool is divided in two parts, one for those who cannot swim, so the water is up to your neck, and then the second part for those who can swim.

But those who want to learn swimming have to learn in the first part, which is not for swimmers. They have to learn it there. Once they have learned, then slowly they will gather courage and enter into deeper water, because for a swimmer it does not matter how deep the water is; the swimmer is always on the surface. The water may be a hundred feet deep, five hundred feet deep, or five miles deep, it makes no difference to the swimmer. It makes a difference only to the non-swimmer. Beyond five feet, everything is death. But the swimming pool is one -- shallow, deep -- it is one. And the boundary line is only a line until you learn to swim.

To me, love and meditation are just like that. Love is the shallow space in a swimming pool, for those who cannot meditate. But that is the place to learn meditation. And it is the same pool, it is the same water, it is the same kind of phenomenon. You are just unable to go deeper because you have been made afraid even to enter into it. The shallow part has been condemned, and you have been told to jump into the deeper part without knowing how to swim.

So they disturbed your love life by condemnation and they disturbed your meditative life by sheer strategy: because you don't know swimming, you cannot go so deep. And you don't have any experience of silence, peace, sheer joy, a little bit of ecstasy, something orgasmic -- these will give you the hints how meditation is not a myth. You have tasted it a little bit. It is the same energy field, just you have to go deeper into it.

What actually happens when one couple moves into the realm of orgasmic experience? What actually happens? Every point has to be understood. Time stops. For a moment the pendulum does not move, and that single moment seems to be almost eternity. The two persons are no more two -- for a moment.

They have melted into each other. There is no thought in the mind, for a moment. It is all empty and silent, and these are the things which have to be deepened in meditation.

And once you have tasted them, you will be surprised that it does not depend on the other person. Something happens within you. Something happens within the other person. But it is not dependent. If you can sit silently, if you can manage, by watching your thoughts, to bring a gap, a stop, you will suddenly see time has stopped again. And now it is in your hands, not in the hands of biology. You can keep this time stopped as long as you want. And once you know the secret key....

The key is: no thoughts, no ego, no time -- you just are.

That's why I have never been against love. I have been much condemned for it, naturally, because I was cutting the very roots of the business of all the religions.

Every religion is against me. Their profession depends on condemning love and praising meditation. They know you cannot attain to meditation, and they know now your love is condemned, it is a sin. You will never experience any orgasmic phenomenon, so meditation will remain just a philosophy, and your life will remain loveless, angry, full of rage, ready to explode at any excuse. Because where will your energy go?

It could have become peace, silence, joy, blissfulness. You did not allow it to become that. That repressed energy turns into poison. That's why everybody is irritable, annoyed, worried, tense. The simple reason is that they have lost the natural source of relaxation.

No animal looks irritated, annoyed, angry, because they don't understand the language the priests speak. They have never heard that celibacy is spiritual. Of course they cannot attain to meditation, but they are far better than those human beings who could have attained meditative heights, but have lost even the simple biological experience of orgasm.

Those are simply indications of your possibilities, potentialities. And it is easier to experiment with something natural in the beginning and then to try something which is supernatural, which belongs to higher nature.

And once you know how to be silent, how to be thoughtless, how to be in a state of no time, no mind, you experience such orgasmic joy, which has nothing to do with sex, it has such purity and such innocence. A man who has attained to that purity and innocence has no need of sex. It is no more a psychological problem for him, but there is no prohibition either. He can enjoy sex too, and he will enjoy it more than anybody else, because his orgasm will immediately become meditative.

Having experienced the meditative orgasm -- such a bigger phenomenon -- his sexual orgasm will immediately trigger the bigger orgasm. He can play with sex.

There is no harm in it. There is no need, but there is no prohibition either. It is up to him.

The meditative orgasm absorbs your sexual energy, because you don't have any other energy. Your whole energy is sexual energy, and that vast explosion of joy simply absorbs all your energy. Hence, you need not become a pervert, you need not make an effort to remain celibate. It is just your choice.

If you want to play old games once in a while, it is perfectly good. In fact, perhaps it should be a part of every enlightened man's life to have sex once in a while, because that will change the attitude of the whole world about sex.

Without that, it is very difficult to change. Then they can see that even an enlightened person can enjoy sex. There is nothing sin -- like in it. And it will join the enlightened man and unenlightened man in a bridge. At least on one point, both experience the same thing. And the enlightened one can guide the unenlightened to bigger orgasms. Start with this small one, but don't stop here.

Love is a natural kind of meditation. And meditation is a supernatural kind of love.

Q: BHAGWAN, THE PRESS IN COMMUNIST COUNTRIES SEEMS TO MAKE THE SAME ACCUSATIONS ABOUT YOU AS THE PRESS IN CAPITALIST COUNTRIES DOES. WOULD YOU COMMENT ON THAT?

A: They are not basically different. The capitalists and the communists are in the same relationship as father and son. Capitalism is the father, communism is the angry son, a son who has turned hippie. It is a by-product of capitalism.

So first, they are not as antagonistic as it appears. Communism is a state capitalism, that's the only difference. Capitalism allows people to have capital separately, individually. In fact, that too is more of a show than a reality.

For example, half of Oregon's land belongs to the federal government of America. Now what kind of capitalism is this? And they are making efforts to have the federal government own all the land in Oregon. The politicians' fear of our being here is basically rooted in this point.

Other things are not real. The real idea before we came here was: half the land they already own, and the other half they wanted to purchase from individuals, so they could make Oregon into a nuclear shelter. That's why they are so much against us, because we are just in the middle of their nuclear shelter. They don't want any stranger here, and we are stranger than strangers can be. In everything we are stranger.

So they want to throw us out of Oregon. They cannot do it because of their hypocrisy. Otherwise their mask will slip down and they will be exposed to the whole world. So they want to do it in such a way that it appears legal, but that is where they are wrong. Legally they cannot do anything against us, because whatever we are doing, we are doing absolutely in accordance with the American Constitution.

It is a strange situation: we are foreigners to them but we are going to fight for THEIR Constitution against them, because they are prostituting it. And their fear is certainly real. They cannot face us in the Supreme Court, and they cannot face us before the world.

And now they have become even more frightened because in four years they have not been able to do anything, and they are losing every case because all their cases are bogus, meaningless, stupid. And they are all against the democratic values of respecting individuals, individual property, respecting freedom, freedom of expression, respecting the minority -- not only respecting, but protecting the minority.

We are the smallest group in America. They cannot find a group which is smaller than us, a commune of just five thousand people. If this is not a minority, then what is? And if the Constitution exists to protect the minority against the majority then the Constitution is in our favor.

If the Constitution stands for individual property, then they should forget completely that Rajneeshpuram can ever be federal government land. If it respects individuals, does not make any discrimination between religions, then their discriminatory behavior against us -- which we can prove with evidence -- is enough to expose their whole conspiracy.

The very approach of our commune is neither communist nor capitalist. Our approach is beyond both, both are out of date. If we have to choose between the two, between communism and capitalism, I will choose capitalism because at least it gives freedom to the individual, freedom of expression, freedom to own things.

It is something tremendously significant to understand, that if all your belongings are taken away from you by the government and they belong to the state, and you are left alone, naked, they have destroyed a major part of your individuality. Your belongings are, in a subtle way, extensions of your individuality: your clothes, your style of wearing those clothes, your house, your furniture, your way of keeping your house clean or unclean, your garden. If everything belongs to the state and nothing belongs to you, you are just a naked animal who has been robbed completely. That is what they do in Soviet Russia.

For example, when Sakharov received the Nobel prize and accepted it against the government's will.... He was the director of the Soviet academy of sciences and is thought to be the most brilliant physicist today, who has gone higher and deeper than Albert Einstein, the best mind alive as far as physics is concerned. They immediately removed him from his directorship, his car was taken away, his salary was reduced from one thousand rubles to five hundred rubles. His chief called him and told him, "Listen, you are one person in millions of people who has a personal car. To have a personal car in the Soviet Union is a dignity, but you will have to lose it, and you will have to lose the house. You cannot live in this big, beautiful mansion anymore. Your directorship is gone."

And within fifteen days he was sent to Siberia. He is still alive. The best mind in the world is doing nothing. He does not even know that you can change your doing nothing into meditation. He is not aware of it. He will die there, nobody will know when he lived and when he died.

But the first thing they did was take away the car to make him go in the buses.

They reduced his individuality, made him a member of the common mass. Then they took away the beautiful old czarist mansion and sent him into an ordinary quarter where other laborers live.

Communism is anti-individual. It is basically state capitalism. Everything is owned by the state, but this is only theory, because the state does not exist. State means the clique, the gang, the mafia that is in power. And for sixty years the same gang has remained in power. People have changed, but the gang has remained the same. If there are twenty people who are powerful in the Soviet Union, those twenty people have remained the same. One dies, and another is replaced by the other nineteen unanimously. That's why the circle remains the same. And anybody who comes to replace someone is chosen by the older group unanimously -- otherwise not.

So for sixty years a small group of people has owned everything in the country.

There is no freedom for the press; only the government publishes books, newspapers, magazines. The people cannot even know whether what is printed is true or false. There is no way to compare it. People cannot even listen to radio stations from outside. If they are caught it is a great crime. They can be thrown into jail for five years, ten years. Nobody can even listen to foreign countries.

Mostly it is impossible because no foreign country releases information in Russian, and in Russia -- except for a few other small language groups -- only Russian is understood. They cannot understand anything from the outside world. The language is the barrier.

Secondly, if they are caught red-handed they are unnecessarily risking their life for a little information. Who wants to do that? They cannot read books of their own choice. For example, my books are banned. And the KGB has been against my sannyasins there, taking all their books, newspapers, photographs, and everything concerning me, and torturing and persecuting and interrogating them continuously to inform about other members, to inform who are the other people connected with this movement who have any other literature.

Now this kind of a society is inhuman. In Russia it is impossible even for Karl Marx to be born again, because he was a free thinker. England allowed him to publish his books against England, against capitalism. Russia would not allow him to publish a book against Russia and against communism. So in these sixty years Russia has not given any geniuses; and this is important to remember, because before the revolution Russia was one of the countries with the most potential for producing geniuses.

The best novelists were Russians. If you make a list of the ten greatest novelists in the whole history of the world, the first five have to be the Russian ones. There is no other way, because they produced the best novels, poetry, painting. All that creativity has been destroyed. In sixty years not a single Turgenev, Chekhov, Gorky, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky. Not a single person comparable to these has been able to assert himself.

The only way for genius to move is towards science, and that too has to remain unknown to the whole world. Sakharov was not known before the Nobel prize was declared. Nobody knew that a man existed who had gone deeper into the physical world than Albert Einstein. Now this man belongs to the whole world.

He is not a property of Russia. Genius cannot be a property of any nation, and a genius of such caliber is simply rotting in Siberia. And he is not alone there, there are three other Nobel prize winning scientists. Nobody had ever heard their names till they received the Nobel prize.

Russia does not want anybody outside to know who are the important people in the country, for fear that they may be contacted or bribed, and they think of the Nobel prize as a bribe. So the man becomes world famous, the man goes to Sweden to take the Nobel prize, comes in contact with world media, world scientists, comes to see the outside world and find out that Russia is thousands of years backwards. In Russia he was told that they are living the latest philosophy, communism, and outside they see what is happening, how people are free.

So they don't want anybody to go out of Russia. This Nobel prize becomes an excuse for him to go out. They refuse, but their refusal makes the man famous around the world. And if he disobeys, he is thrown into jail, thrown into a mental hospital, thrown into Siberia, and then nobody hears anything about him.

This is a criminal society.

So if I have to choose between communism and capitalism, I will certainly choose capitalism. Howsoever hypocritical, howsoever politically dishonest a system it is, it still gives loopholes so individuals can assert themselves, so people can show their minds, can connect with other people around the world. And even though the politicians may be corrupted, they can be dragged to the courts, which are quite fair -- particularly the Supreme Court, because no politician can do any damage to any judge of the Supreme Court.

The Constitution provides every protection to the Supreme Court. Once a person is made a judge in the Supreme Court, he is made one for his whole life, so you cannot retire him, you cannot demote him, you cannot punish him, you cannot do anything against him. So he has no fear. He need not be unfair. The Supreme Court of America perhaps is the fairest court in the whole world. It can give judgments against the president without any fear.

But this is if I am given the choice only between the two. Otherwise I have my own idea of a different society. I call it meritocracy. It should not be state ownership, communism. It should not be a cunning, criminal, political system behind the masks of democracy.

Otherwise how do you explain that in a democratic country like America, Nixon is possible? And Nixon reminds me of Mao Tse-tung's remark. When Nixon resigned, Mao Tse-tung could not believe it. He said, "This is strange. Every politician is doing the same everywhere. I am doing it here. Why are these people so much against it? And why do the courts and the newspapers have so much power?" But Nixon happened. Perhaps every politician is doing it, Mao is right, but Nixon was caught. Others are not caught.

So I don't want a system in which it is possible for a person like Nixon to reach to the highest post in the country. I do not want a system like in America where twenty percent of the presidents have been murdered, where Kennedy was murdered, where his brother, who was running for the presidency was murdered, and his other brother -- and there are only three brothers -- is threatened that if he runs for the presidency, he will be assassinated.

The poor woman, the mother of these three Kennedys, is ninety years old. She has seen the death of two sons*-young, immensely intelligent. She knows the third has the capacity to become president, but she has taken a promise from the third: "While I am alive, you should not run, because it will be too much. I have suffered too much: the two deaths of my two sons. You are my last son, I would not like you dead before my eyes. Let me first die, then you are free, you can run for president."

Now this kind of country, where criminals are ruling and people who can do immense good for the country are prevented.... Who is preventing them? Who killed the two Kennedys? Who is threatening the third one? And why are they not killing Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan? Nobody bothers. But it is simple:

anybody, any group, any gang, who has killed the Kennedys is somehow connected with Ronald Reagan, with Nixon.

Nixon did everything wrong and he was not shot, and Kennedy was not doing anything wrong. In fact, because he was trying to do something good, he was shot. This is a very corrupted state of affairs.

My political system is totally different. I call it meritocracy, because it will depend on merit. It will not be a political system, it will not have any political parties. People will be running for posts on their own merit. And each individual will decide on his own, because no political party will be pressurizing him. There will be no political party at all -- individual to individual -- no gang will be allowed.

And anybody who is chosen is chosen because of his merit. If you choose a secretary for finance, then you will choose the best economist in your country.

This does not happen at all. People who don't know anything of economics become finance secretaries, ministers. People who don't know anything about education become education ministers. In India I knew a man who was just an idiot. He knew nothing about medicine and he became the health minister. In a meritocracy this type of man can never become a health minister, because there will be more qualified people running for the post. Vice-chancellors who have an experience of the whole of life will be standing for the post of the education minister.

No political parties, because they pressurize. They accumulate money, they gather people into a certain group, make them faithful to a certain ideology, almost like religion. Political parties are dangerous just as religions are dangerous. I want religion to be individual. It is an individual search for truth, and politics is an individual search for a better society, better culture.

In meritocracy, my idea is to have communes rather than cities, communes rather than families. Families should dissolve, pour all their energies into one pool. Big cities should become divided into small communes, running their affairs on their own. The whole country becomes a country of communes, not of cities.

These communes will not enforce any kind of equality, which is being done in communist countries. But on the contrary, these communes will try to become as wealthy as possible, so the wealth is more than enough, more than needed. And everybody can have according to his need. I believe in abundance, I don't believe in poverty.

And I believe that man is capable of creating immense wealth. He has just to be given the right opportunity. Wealthy communes -- still no enforcement of equality, although without enforcement, out of love and compassion and friendship there will arise a different kind of equality. Nobody will think about it.

Now here everybody is eating the same food, equal. But we are not bragging that this is communism. This is simply human, that everybody who is here is part, an essential part of the commune, and should receive the same food, should receive, as far as possible, everything that he needs: medical care, recreation, entertainment.

But this is not forced. It has to come by itself Just as there is enough air -- nobody keeps it locked inside the house because sometimes air may be scarce and he may die of the scarcity of oxygen, so he should keep something stored. There is enough air. In the same way, there should be more than enough of everything available to everybody, without any discrimination: no political party, no religious party. Communes -- living out of love, no families, no equality imposed, but an equality coming on its own, just out of sheer love and brotherhood.

And finally, no crime should be punished. Every crime should be treated as a disease, a sickness of the mind.

And if meritocracy spreads all over the world, there is no need for nations. If you can have the best mind to be the education minister of the whole world, then why have a third-class mind just because he happens to be an Oregonian or American?

All that is essential -- academic institutions, scientific academies, art, everything that is useful -- should be international. Its branches can be all over the world, but it should be in the hands of the best people, the geniuses.

It is really amazing that an art school will exist, but Picasso will not be accepted as the director of it. They will accept his painting for millions of dollars, and somebody who is not known by anybody, not a single painting of his has been sold or exhibited in any exhibition, remains the director of the art institute, just because he has a degree, knowledgeability. But painting does not depend on knowledgeability. Otherwise, Mozart cannot be a director of a music institute, Nijinsky cannot be a director a dance institute, because these people have no knowledge, no degrees. But they have merit. They have experience, they have the magic, the charisma.

All the institutions of the world should be in the hands of charismatic people.

There are always enough charismatic people, but they are not allowed in the competition, for many reasons. These charismatic people are rebellious, so they rarely manage to get a university degree. Long before, they are expelled.

These charismatic people know too much, no institution can teach them any more, so there is no point in joining those institutions and wasting time. But then they cannot become directors. It is an ugly world, because we should like people like Mozart to be music directors. They will encourage their students to imbibe the spirit of music. Their third-rate students will be thrown out, and one who is accepted by Mozart has already got the degree, by his acceptance, by his entrance.

So my vision is the whole world finally becoming a meritocracy, but before the world becomes a meritocracy, nations should begin. Meritocracy will have all that is beautiful in democracy and all that is beautiful in communism. And it will not have all that is ugly in communism and all that is ugly and phony in democracy.

And it is time to give a chance to something new.

Okay, Isabel.