Chapter 03

[NOTE: This is a typed tape transcript and has not been edited or published, as of August 1992. It is for reference use only.]

BHAGWAN: Please will you start your questions.

Q: GOOD MORNING. YOU HAVE COME BACK TO INDIA AFTER FOUR YEARS. BHAGWAN DO YOU FIND ANY CHANGE?

A: There are many changes and changes for good.

The first thing that is the most important is that the politicians are out of the government and non-politicians have come into power.

The politician is always interested in himself and how to get higher and higher, how to reach to the highest point in the bureaucracy. He sacrifices all the interests of the people.

Unfortunately for forty years we have been under political minds. Hence forty years have been just a wastage. We have not used freedom to create, to become rich, to become more cultured, civilized, educated. But it is good that now a new generation has come into power.

This generation as yet is not polluted and there is a possibility that it will do some good for the country, it will not think only of its own power and its own position. And they are taking small steps in the direction, they are opening the country to technology which was impossible for forty years. Because for forty years the politicians who were in rule were dominated by Mahatma Gandhi and his philosophy of very primitive ideas.

To Mahatma Gandhi all science and all progress stopped with the spinning wheel. After the spinning wheel everything is evil. Even telephone, telegraph, railway -- Gandhi is not ready to accept them. These forty years the people who ruled the country were trained by Mahatma Gandhi, influenced by him, impressed by him. They did not help the country to bring more technology, that's the only way now with the population growing so fast. We have to grow technology faster than the population, then only we can survive.

We have to open the country to the wealth of the whole world. There is so much wealth lying around in the world, unused. We have labor but no wealth. There are people who have wealth but no labor. Our labor and their wealth together can create this country into a paradise. All that is needed is a guarantee to the whole world that, "Your wealth will not be nationalized, that your wealth will be in safe hands. And whenever you want it back it will be yours." With the collaboration of all the industries from all over the world we can create so much because we have labor and cheapest labor possible.

In America I saw everything is almost ten times costlier than here, and the reason is simply because the labor is costly, even the richest man cannot afford a servant. And here even a middle class man can afford three/four servants without any difficulty.

Open the country to the whole world.

These forty years we were creating barriers for other nations to bring their wealth into our country, for one single reason: to protect the Vila's(*), Tata's, Dalmears(*), because these were the people who were giving support, finances to the politicians in their elections.

So it was a conspiracy. These people were giving financial support to the politicians to remain in power and the politician was preventing all outside capital so that these people can go on creating third rate things.

Now in a world where you can have ten times better, beautiful, more highly technical car, cheaper than Ambassador... if in collaboration with Japan, in collaboration with other countries, you start creating cars which will be cheaper than Ambassador, who is going to buy Ambassador?

In forty years Ambassador has remained the same. There was no reason, only the price has gone higher and higher. So it was a conspiracy between the capitalists of this country and the politician to protect each other. Now that can be broken because the new people are not politicians and they have not come by support of any finances from these Tarta's and Vila's(*), and others. They have come into power on their own merit. They are under no obligation. So they can open the doors.

It does not matter if Ambassador disappears. It should disappear, it simply makes noise and nothing else. They say everything in it makes noise except the horn.

And this is the situation about everything else. The world is producing so refined mechanisms, we can produce the same mechanisms on a far lower price and sell them to the whole world and it will be tremendous earning. And why be afraid that a little bit of it will go to the people who will put their wealth in it -- it should go, it is natural... you put your labor, you get for your labor. They get for their wealth. You both are getting richer....

There is a difference but much more differences will be needed.

There are few things which go on continuing the same, perhaps the people who have come into power are unaware of many currents of ideologies which are against the growth of the nation.

For example, anybody teaching against birth control. He may be a Christian priest, he may be Hindu Shankaracharya, or he may be a Mohammedan Iman. It does not matter who he is, but anybody who is teaching against birth control and telling to people that using birth control methods is against God is committing a crime. He should be prevented with all the means possible.

By the end of this century the population of this country will be one billion, one hundred crore. We will be beggars, almost fifty percent will be dying and starving on the streets. It will be a nightmare and we will be utterly helpless to do anything.

It is better to be aware now. It is already late.

I started talking about birth control thirty years before and I was condemned because all the religions and their heads condemned me, because I am teaching people immorality. But when I started talking, the population of the country was only forty crore.

If they had listened to me today we would have been in a far prosperous state.

Today our population is eighty crore. In thirty years we have doubled. Now who is responsible?

All those religious leaders who condemned me are religious, are responsible for it. And they are still doing the same.

Christians want that the people should remain poor because only poor can be converted to Christianity. I have never come across a single person in India who is rich, educated and who has accepted Christianity as his religion. Only the beggars, orphans, aboriginals, so poor that it does not matter what religion is, what matters is bread, clothes, shelter.

Christianity wants people to remain poor because that is their politics. Now there are six hundred million Catholics in the world and they hope that if the world continues to be poor soon they will have the whole world in their grips.

If is a very subtle way of spreading an empire without armies, just by keeping people poor, it is enough that in one hand BIBLE, and another a bread, that's enough. There is no need for a sword, there is no need for any argument, there is no need to convince anybody philosophically that we are better than your thinking.

Hindus, Mohammedans, other religions -- it is strange that on one point they all agree... that birth control is something evil. But they don't see the consequences.

Birth control today is the only moral thing. Every religious person should adopt it if he has any sense of humanity and respect for life then birth control is not evil. But not to use birth control methods is evil because you are bringing so many people in the world who will be dying and starving. But all the religions somehow agree, and there must be some reason... there is, there is some vested interest.

Only the poor are easily exploited by the priests. The educated, the rich are not so easily gullible. They may formally belong to this religion or to that religion but it is just formality.

The poor is in absolute need for solace. He is hungry, he needs somebody to give him hope that, "In the next life -- life after death -- you will not be hungry. Not only that, you will not be hungry; the kingdom of God will be yours. That don't think that poverty is bad, you are blessed to be poor. It is a blessing in disguise, it is a test of your trust and if you can remain contented with it, in the next life you will be immensely rewarded."

The poor needs the hope of the next life. The rich has no need of any hope. He has everything that he needs right now, why he should bother about next life?

The poor needs some kind of opium and the priests of all the religions are giving some kind of opium, that gives him some hallucination of paradise and some consolation that rich will not enter into the kingdom of God. So some great consolation that rich will fall into the eternal darkness of hell and the poor will be raised to the golden glory of God.

These psychological reasons are there that the priest wants the poor because they are the only ones who hear him, who are gullible, who believe in him. But he is unaware what harm he is doing. There may not be any need of third world war, just the population itself increasing so fast....

India has never been bigger than China as far as population is concerned. But by the end of this century India will be bigger than China.

Out of five persons in the world, one will be Indian.

China is far more intelligent. It has slowed down its growth, it is not very rich but it is not poor either. It is comfortable. And the reason why China could do it was that communism destroyed all the priests of all the religions who were causing the whole problem.

I don't say that you should destroy your priests, but you should at least stop them talking nonsense. There are better things to talk.

About population something has to be done very fast, because it is growing fast and unless we are ahead of it, it is going to destroy us and destroy all our other efforts.

Secondly, we are still living with ideas that were developed five thousand years before -- everything has changed but our ideas have not changed. We are still believing in Manu, still believing in the brahmin, in the sudra; still burning the sudra alive. This seems to be a very ugly situation. We have to pull ourselves to be contemporaries even if though we have to say goodbye to Manu; say goodbye to Manu. It won't do any harm to anybody.

Manu has tortured us for five hundred years. It is time that in India there should be no brahmin, no kshatriya, no vaishya, no sudra.

Why we can't be just human beings? We are born human beings. There is no need for somebody to be higher and somebody to be lower and somebody to be so lower that he is untouchable.

We have done crimes against humanity. So we have to drop many old ideas and once we drop it we will find tremendous energy released which is blocked by those old ideas.

We have to start thinking more on our own than just quoting like parrots VEDAS, UPANISHADAS, just like parrots. A parrot can quote the VEDA but it means nothing.

And that's the situation for our scholars, our pundits, our so-called great wise men -- they are nothing but quotation marks. They have nothing of their own and it is time that a vast country like India which is almost a subcontinent should have its own thinkers, contemporary, because every problem has changed and your solutions never change -- that is creating the whole difficulty.

Your solutions were created for the bullock cart. You are flying in the airplane and you are still using the techniques of bullock cart. You are bound to create difficulties.

(Tape side B begins, no overlap) A contemporary India is needed. Almost a rebirth.

And it is not against the past, it is not against your forefathers. Each child has to go ahead than his father. That should be the blessing of the father, that the child should transcend him. Otherwise what is the need of the child? He has done.

If the child goes on doing the same he is useless, he is unnecessary.

Every teacher should think in terms that his student should defeat him, that will be his victory. And each father should think that his son should go ahead of him -- that will be his joy, that will be his pride.

So it is not against the past.

I have been continuously being misunderstood. It is easy to misunderstand me because what I am saying it is a lonely voice in a crowd of millions, but I am not speaking against the past... I am saying that the past can grow in you if you drop it and if you are fresh and young and you start thinking on your own. Then the country lives, grows, blossoms, otherwise it becomes retarded. That's how we have become retarded.

So much has to be done. It should be taken as a challenge, as a joy, because it is an opportunity to do something and it is only in such times when there are great challenges that you have to face that your real potential starts growing, exploding.

The people who fought for freedom had no idea what they are going to do after the freedom is achieved. My whole family was involved in the freedom struggle and I used to ask my father, my uncles, that "I can understand the struggle for freedom but I do not understand that nobody of you has any idea what you are going to do when you are free. You will be at a loss. Right now you are working with such joy, sacrificing with such joy... once you achieve freedom then you will be in difficulty -- what to do now? Because your whole training is to fight for freedom. You don't know what to do with freedom."

And that's why we wasted these forty years. Because the people who had fought for freedom became the rulers. They had no idea except going to jail. They had no idea what to do now.

It is good now we are finished with that generation and the new generation is there. It should be supported, helped by the whole country. Because these are young people -- if they get the support, the cooperation, they may be able to do miracles.

Q: BHAGWAN, YOU HAVE SAID TIME AND AGAIN THAT ONE WHO IS SLEEPING, HE WILL WAKE UP. WE HAVE SEEN THAT THE COUNTRY IS NOW INCREASINGLY RECEPTIVE TO YOUR MESSAGE -- CAN INDIA BE TRANSFORMED?

A: Certainly it can be transformed. And it is time, perfect time because if it is not transformed it cannot live. People change only under tremendous pressure, otherwise people are lazy, by nature. Who wants to change? Because every change means making new adjustments, learning new things.

One becomes accustomed of old habits, old things, and one knows about the old way of life -- everything. And he is comfortable, convenient.

Change is possible only when there is such a pressure on him that rather than choosing a comfortable, an old style of life, he has to choose something unknown, something new... and that pressure is present.

It is present in many ways. It is present in the population. The growing population is growing death. It is present in the nuclear weapons in the world, the growing nuclear weapons mean there is not much hope if man does not change. They have already so much nuclear weapons that they can kill humanity seven hundred times.

And in the West, in America, in Africa, a new disease AIDS is spreading which has no cure. It is spreading fast, like wildfire. It is out of homosexuality and sexual perversions. You can get it so easily -- it is not that you need a sexual contact, just kissing somebody the saliva is a carrier of it. Just wiping a tear of somebody, the tear is a carrier of it. And even children are born with the disease.

A child may be weeping and you may simply try to console the child and wipe his tears, not knowing at all that what you are doing is killing yourself.

Once the virus gets into you your life is at the most two years and there is no cure, and all the scientists are agreed that there seems to be no possibility in future that we will be able to find any cure. And that disease is spreading so fast.

These three things: population, nuclear weapons and AIDS are attacks -- a three- dimensional attack of death on man.

You cannot conceive of a greater pressure to change.

Just we have to make India conscious of the situation. And I don't think that India is an unintelligent country. It may be burdened with the past but still it has a certain intelligence which can be provoked, which can be sharpened.

It cannot lose it, because it had it when Buddha was here, it had it when Nanak was here, it had it when Kabir was here -- where it can go? It is still there; perhaps just under the dust we have lost the sharpness of it. Just the dust has to be removed.

And India's intelligence can be challenged that this is time to change all our old ways. And my feeling is that certainly it is more receptive to me now, it was good that I left the country for four years.

Sometimes distance creates love.

When I was here... one tends to take granted. I was surprised that people who had never come to see me in India came to see me in America, and poor people who had never thought that they will go ever out of India. And they came, they sold their houses, their lands, just to come to see me. And I was here and they never came.

So it has been good this gap for four years. Now I am back and I can see it is more receptive, more loving and perhaps ready for the revolution I have been always hoping for it.

Q: BHAGWAN, WHY HAVE YOU BEEN MISUNDERSTOOD?

A: It is absolutely natural. If you support people's old mind you are never misunderstood because you are saying exactly what they believe, you are supporting them, they feel very happy with you, you gain respectability, you support their ego.

I have been doing just the opposite. I have been trying to show you that your old mind is out of date, that you need a new mind, that your old ways of thinking and living, social behavior are all rotten and they need to be changed. Naturally, there are only two possibilities: if you are very intelligent, open, clear, straightforward you will agree with me. If you are not that intelligent, not open, not straightforward you will disagree with me.

But to disagree also needs intelligence. You have to argue against me if you want to disagree.

In that way agreement is easier but disagreement means you have to fight against me, argue against me and you don't have that intelligence. So the only way is: you cannot fight against what I am saying but you can distort what I am saying and then you can fight with it, with the distortion which I have never said. First create a misunderstanding then fight with it which is easier. You have already put loopholes in it and you are fighting with a bogus thing. I have never said it.

So the people who don't have enough intelligence and yet want to disagree naturally try to change the statements, make them according to their own ideas so that they can easily fight with them. For example, I have been speaking on sex that how it can be transformed into superconsciousness; and so much has been written about it. But everybody condemns about my statements on sex. Nobody talks about superconsciousness. And sex was not my purpose at all.

I was saying that the sex is a basic energy. Either it can reproduce children or it can create a new consciousness in you.

It is a creative force. If it goes downwards it creates children, if it goes upwards it creates the highest consciousness for which we have been for centuries searching.

We have called it buddhahood, enlightenment, awakening, illumination, samadhi, sambodhi... whatever the name, but it is the sexual energy that moves upwards. It is a creative force.

But strange that my basic point was not discussed at all. Those who have criticized me have criticized not me at all. They were criticizing their own imagined idea which has nothing to do with me.

But this is how lower class of intellectuals will do.

First they will make the argument in such a way that it can be uprooted, dissolved. They do both the things: they make the argument and then they destroy it, but it has nothing to do with me.

One of Hindu leaders, Karpatri Maharaj has written a book against me and he goes on making statements which I have never made. I wrote him a letter that `I simply want that wherever you make a statement as mine, at least give the source from where you got it; in which of my books, on what page that statement is because I have read your whole book. All your statements are just made up by yourself.'

Now ordinary people will never be able to find. They will not bother to go, and I have four hundred books, that they will look into those books and find whether this statement is true or not. They will simply think that Karpatri Maharaj has done great work. He has demolished every statement and all those statements are his own. He is demolishing himself. It has nothing to do with me, the whole book. And it propounds to be an argument against me. So it is very natural. I don't feel any grudge or any complaint, I understand that whatever I have been doing is bound to be misunderstood, misquoted.

But how long?

It takes just patience -- go on fighting, somebody somewhere who is intelligent and who has a heart to understand will understand.

And I don't need crowds to understand me, I need only few people of guts because it is always few people of courage who bring revolutions in the world; it not the masses.

And I have not been misunderstood by people of intelligence, by people of heart.

They have loved me.

I have received more love than perhaps anybody else in the world has ever received.

(Tape ends without Bhagwan saying Okay or Thank you; however, there is an inaudible sentence said by the interviewer at the end.)