Thoughts are always subversive

Question 1:

Thoughts are always subversive.

Only people who do not think are not subversive. Thinking is a crime. Jesus is crucified, Socrates is poisoned, Gautam Buddha is stoned. These people have not harmed anybody. They were the most loving, most compassionate human beings possible - but they committed a crime, and the crime's name is thinking.

No society wants any of its members to think.

Thinking is dangerous.

The society wants robots who simply do whatever is told to them, who cannot say no - that is impossible for them. They are machines.

It is not accidental that every developed society is replacing man by machines. Machines are obedient, never subversive. Have you ever heard of any machine being a revolutionary or a rebel?

It has not happened up to now that we had to crucify a machine.

Machines are very respectable people.

I am not a machine.

And there is no way of thinking, other than being subversive.

Thinking means you doubt; thinking means you are not ready to accept what is being told to you.

You want to decide on your own. Thinking means to be rational, to be logical; and humanity up to now has been superstitious.

When Galileo found that the earth moves around the sun, the pope called him to his court and asked him to change the sentence in his book because it goes against Christianity. The BIBLE says the sun goes around the earth, and it is everybody's experience too: it looks like the sun rises in the morning, goes around, and sets by the evening. We don't feel that the earth goes around the sun.

So what is stated in the BIBLE is simply common knowledge, not something scientific.

The pope said, "You have to change that statement because the BIBLE is a holy book, written by God: he cannot commit a mistake."

Galileo is one of the people I love. I love him for his genius, for his thinking, and I love him for his sense of humor. He said, "There is no problem. I will change the sentence, but your honor, remember that my changing the sentence will not change the fact: the earth will still go round the sun. You can kill me, you can burn my book, but nothing will change the course of the earth. It will still continue going around the sun."

Now Galileo is subversive. He is not listening to the authorities; he is not even listening to the HOLY BIBLE. He is only ready to listen to something rational, scientific, something which can be proved by evidence.

Yes, I am subversive. And only the subversive people are responsible for all the progress of the world. Whatever you have - all civilization, all scientific growth, all technology - is the contribution of subversive people. It is not the contribution of the superstitious.

So I am happy to declare that I am subversive, absolutely subversive.

To belong to that category is a great honor. Jesus Christ belongs to it, Socrates belongs to it, Galileo belongs to it, Gautam Buddha belongs to it. These are the real human beings. Others are only part of the crowd, cogs in the wheel.

The society decides what is right, and they never question. The society decides what is wrong, and they never question. What is the difference between animals and man?

Each human being has to be subversive if he wants to be a human being. That's the definition given by Aristotle: man is a thinking animal. Thinking is equivalent to subversiveness.

It is true that many countries of the world have decided that even a four week tourist visa cannot be granted to me. I have really enjoyed it, because never before in all of history have so many countries been afraid of a man that they cannot allow him to have a four week tourist visa.

Socrates lived a long life; then they poisoned him. Jesus preached for three years continuously, and then they crucified him. I was only in Greece for two weeks when they arrested me. And they threatened that they would burn the house, dynamite the house, if I didn't leave the house immediately. These are the same people who had poisoned Socrates two thousand years before.

And what can I do in two weeks' time? I had not even left the house! I had not gone out. But the archbishop was sending telegram upon telegram to the president, phoning the prime minister, giving interviews to the news media: "This man's stay here" - and I had only a four week visa, only two weeks more I could have stayed there - "this man's stay here is going to destroy our morality, our religion, our church, our tradition."

When I heard this I said, "If a religion, a church, a morality, a tradition, can be destroyed by a single human being in two weeks' time - something which you have created in two thousand years - then it is worth destroying; there is no question about it."

And a paranoia has spread all over Europe. Now in the European parliament there is a motion that I should not be allowed to land at any airport in Europe. Perhaps even my landing at the airport is going to destroy their morality, their religion, their tradition. It shows only one thing: they also know that they are standing on a rotten foundation. Just a push - which even a tourist for two weeks can manage - and your whole edifice will be shattered.

This is strange... in a civilized world if I do not agree with you we can discuss it, we can come to an agreement. But dynamiting my house is not the answer. It seems people have not learned anything.

Do you think crucifying Jesus was the answer? The crucifixion created Christianity.

Was poisoning Socrates the answer? Nobody is respected more in the whole history of Greece than Socrates. People have completely forgotten the names of those who had decided to poison him.

But Socrates' name will remain immortal as long as human beings are on the earth. Even today he is contemporary. His thinking must have had tremendous insight for two thousand years to have passed without him being out of date. He was their very cream - the genius of the whole Greek mind - and they destroyed him.

It seems that there has been a conspiracy, going on for centuries, of mediocre people against the genius. And of course the mediocre people are in the majority - they have all the power.

They have the government, they have the military, they have the police, they have the nuclear weapons. The genius has nothing except his intelligence, and intelligence is basically revolutionary; it cannot be otherwise. Its very quality, its intrinsic quality, is rebellion - rebellion against darkness, rebellion against untruth, rebellion against slavery, rebellion against everything that prevents man from becoming his total, grown-up self.

All these countries have simply proved that a single individual is still more powerful than countries who have nuclear weapons; otherwise there is no need to be so afraid.

In England they did not allow me to stay overnight in the airport lounge - which is meant for that.

I had my own jet, but just not to take a chance, I had also purchased two first-class tickets. The lounge is meant for people who are going to change their planes, but they would not allow me to stay in the lounge. One of my friends just happened to look into the file of a man... he had left his file on the table and gone to the bathroom. He just looked into the file. Everything in detail had been ordered by the government before I had even landed at the airport: if I come, then I should not be allowed to stay overnight in the lounge; I should be forced to stay in jail overnight because I am a dangerous man.

I said to the person, "What danger can I be? I will be sleeping. It is already eleven o'clock in the night, and I will simply be sleeping in the lounge. And from the lounge there is no way to enter England!"

But he said, "We cannot do anything about it. We cannot leave you free; you have to be in jail if you want to stay overnight."

In Sweden they did the same.

Germany has passed an order that no visa should be allowed to me from any embassy. Strange... and we call this "civilization."

Civilization has not happened yet.

This is all fake.

I was dangerous - now the cloud carrying the nuclear radiation from Chernobyl... prevent it and put it in a jail! It is not dangerous! Now they are all feeling impotent; they can't do anything. And I am subversive, because I have been saying for years, "Don't play with nuclear energy because you cannot control whether anything goes wrong." Now something has gone wrong, and they are all helpless. And it is not going to be a one day thing; its effects will continue for decades.

In the Ukraine, where the disaster has happened, they will not be able to grow food for thirty years, and that is the province which supplies food to the whole Soviet Union. Now the Soviet Union will be the most hungry country in the world. And everywhere in Europe the radiation level has gone up - to one hundred times, to two hundred times the amount which is tolerable for human beings.

To breathe that air, to drink that milk or water, to eat vegetables or fruits - everything is dangerous.

Now all those parliaments are silent.

I am dangerous... and nuclear weapons are not dangerous! It seems to be simply an insane world.

Question 2:

The question is a little complicated.

First you have to understand that your personality is not your reality; it is given by the culture, by the society.

Individuality is yours, but personality is not yours.

As personality you are always dead; only as individuality are you alive. But to be an individual you have to rebel against personality and against all those people who are forcing a certain personality on you.

Each child is born with a certain potential to be - and each society tries to make him something else.

I have heard about a man who was celebrating the golden jubilee of his marriage. All his friends, relatives, acquaintances, had gathered. There was much joy, laughter. But suddenly they realized that the man was missing. They could not understand where he had gone. They looked in the garden and he was sitting in the shadows, in darkness, by the side of a tree, very sad.

His friends said, "This is strange. You have called all of us to celebrate, and you are sitting here in such sadness as if somebody has died! What is the problem?"

He said, "The problem is... This woman that I married has tortured me so much that twenty-five years ago I enquired of my attorney, ?If I shoot her what will be the result?' and he said, ?Are you mad? If you shoot her you will get twenty-five years in jail!' I am feeling sad because today I would have been free. That idiot attorney has died; otherwise I would have killed him! He made me afraid."

A man has to live with a woman he does not love, which is simply misery. A woman has to live with a man... which is simply misery, hell. A man has to work in a certain profession he hates. Everybody becomes something that he does not like. This is your personality. Society distracts everybody from his natural individuality and makes him something other than he was destined to be.

So the first thing to be understood is that you are not a person, you are not a personality. The word ?person' comes from Greek drama. In Greek drama the actors used masks, and the mask... you could not see the person's real face; you could only hear his sound. Sona means sound. Persona means you don't know who is speaking; you just hear the sound, the face is missing. The word ?personality' comes from that Greek drama.

Everybody is wearing a mask. You can hear the sound but you can't see the face; you can't see the individual. So the first thing: you are not a ?person'. If you are a person, you are already dead. If you are only a personality, you have dragged yourself from the cradle to the grave but you never lived.

You live only when you are an individuality - when you assert yourself against every tradition, every religion, every past that wants you to be someone other than existence wants you to be. Then you live.

Again I am reminded: a great surgeon I used to know - perhaps he was the most famous surgeon in India - was retiring, and all his friends, his colleagues, had given him a party, a farewell party, but he was very sad. I asked him, "Why are you sad? You should be happy: you are the topmost surgeon in the whole country."

He said, "You don't understand. I never wanted to become a surgeon in the first place, so who cares that I am the topmost surgeon? I hate to hear that! I wanted to become a musician, but my parents forced me to become a surgeon - against my will I became a surgeon. By chance I became the topmost surgeon; perhaps I would not have been able to become the topmost musician. I am rich, I have everything, I have respectability, but that does not help me to be happy.

"Even if I had remained a beggar, as a musician I would have been blissful because I would have been myself. This surgeon seems to be somebody else; it is a role that I have played, but it is not me. These people are celebrating, and I am crying within myself that my whole life is lost."

So first, you are not a ?person'; otherwise you are dead before death. And there are millions of people who die thirty, forty, or fifty years before they actually die. You are an individual, and only individuality is capable of knowing your real self. Personality has no self - only an ego, as false as personality. Individuality has a self, a soul. The individual is a living principle of life.

If you know life you will never ask this kind of question. Knowing life authentically means you also know that it is immortal. The knowledge of its immortality is intrinsic. It is not something informed, from outside. Just living your true being in totality you slowly, slowly become aware of the immortal current of life within you. You know the body will die, but this soul, which is life's whole essence, cannot die.

In existence nothing is destructible.

And it is not something to believe in, it is a scientific truth that you cannot destroy anything. You cannot destroy even a small piece of stone. Whatever you do it will remain in some form or other.

Science enquires into the objective world and finds that even objective reality is immortal. Religion works exactly like science in the inner world and finds the dancing life is intrinsically immortal.

It will be good to remember Socrates at this point because he was not a man to believe anything.

If you had asked him whether your soul would survive after bodily death he would say, "Let me first die - because unless I die, how can I say?" And the day he was given poison is one of the most significant days in the history of man. His disciples were sitting around him and he was lying down.

He told his disciples, "I will tell you what is happening. As long as I can, I will go on informing you."

Then he said, "Up to my knees, my legs are dead. Please somebody pinch my legs so I can know whether I can feel it or not." Somebody pinched his legs. He said, "I cannot feel it; the legs have died. But remember one thing: I am as alive as I ever was. The death of the legs has not cut a part of my life; my life is as whole as it ever was." Then all of the legs became dead, half of the body. And he said, "Half of my body is dead, but I am whole, as whole as ever."

Then his hands became dead and he said, "I am still here and I am still whole. Perhaps now my heart will stop, but I can say to you that even though I may not be able to inform you, I will remain, because if all these parts are gone and I am whole, then it doesn't matter: the heart is only a part."

And when he died his face was so delighted, so joyous, that Plato, his disciple, remembers, "We have never seen his face so full of light, so radiant. Perhaps the last moment when the soul is leaving the body is just like the sunset when the sun is going down and the whole sky becomes so beautiful and radiant."

It is not a question of belief. I am not a believer in anything, so I will not say to you to believe me that the soul is immortal. But it is my experience that it is immortal because I can remember my past lives, and that is a solid proof that there are going to be future lives. I can teach you techniques for remembering past lives and that will become a solid proof for you that you have a future. You have an eternity of past and an eternity of future.

You have always been here and you will always be here.

But first drop your fake personality.

Grow into your authentic individuality.

Live the way existence wanted you to live. Your very life should be so intense and so total that you burn your life's torch from both ends. In that very intensity you will know that you have touched something of eternity. And if you have known it in your life, in your death you will find a deeper confirmation of the fact.

People who live in personality always die unconscious. They have never lived. They don't know what consciousness is, so before death they become unconscious. That's why we don't remember our past lives. You were unconscious, and death happened in your unconsciousness.

But if you live consciously, as an individual, then you will die consciously, the way Socrates is dying - so conscious to the last breath. And this memory will be with you in the next life too.

In the East there are three great religions: Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism. They disagree on every point - their philosophies are different about everything - but on one point they agree, and that is the eternal existence of the soul, because it is not a question of theoretical discussion, it is a question of existential experience. You can't disagree about it - it is exactly so.

Against these three religions in the East, outside of India there are three religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Mohammedanism. They all believe in one life, and that simply shows their poverty.

They have not explored deeply enough to find past lives, and they cannot guarantee anything about the future. These three religions born outside India are superficial. Their work is not in-depth research.

But in India for ten thousand years thousands of people have entered into self-realization and have found that there is some light that remains forever. It goes on moving from one body to another body but is indestructible.

I will not tell you to believe it, I will only tell you to experiment. I am against all beliefs, because every belief destroys you, destroys your thinking. I am in favor of experimenting, and there are techniques available.

That has been my whole life's work - to make those techniques available to anybody who really wants to search and to find, to one who is not only a curious person but is a seeker who is ready to risk everything for the search. And it is a search for which you need to risk everything because you are going to find the greatest treasure.

Question 3:

Freedom is a three-dimensional phenomenon. The first is the physical dimension: you can be enslaved physically. And for thousands of years man has been sold in the marketplace just like any other commodity. All the Negroes that came to America were purchased like a commodity.

Slaves have existed all over the world. They were not given human rights; they were not really accepted as human beings, they were subhuman. And they are still being treated as subhuman. In India there are sudras, the untouchables. One-fourth of India is still living in slavery: these people cannot be educated, these people cannot move into other professions than those decided by the tradition five thousand years ago, and to think of them as human is impossible... Even to touch them makes you impure: you have to take a bath immediately. Even if you don't touch the man, but only his shadow - then too you have to take a bath.

So there is physical slavery and there is physical freedom - that your body is not enchained, that it is not categorized as lower than anybody else's, that there is an equality as far as the body is concerned. But even today this is not true.

The woman's body is not considered equal to the man's body. She is not as free as man is. In China for centuries the husband had the right to kill his wife without being punished because the wife was his possession. Just like you can destroy your chair or you can burn your house because it is your chair, it is your house, it is your wife. In Chinese law there was no punishment for the husband if he killed his wife because she was thought to be soulless; she was just a reproductive mechanism, a factory to produce children.

Mohammedans marry four wives, which is absolutely ugly because nature keeps a balance in the world. There are an equal number of men and women, and if one man marries four women, then what about the other three men? They are going to become perverts, homosexuals, sodomists, and they will create AIDS and all kinds of diseases. Mohammed himself married nine wives.

But this is nothing! Just forty years ago, when India became free, in one of the Mohammedan states in India, in Hyderabad, the nizam had five hundred wives! But that too is not the limit.

The Hindu incarnation of God, Krishna, had sixteen thousand wives. At least the nizam's wives were his own - he had married them. Krishna had taken anybody's wife whom he liked... no consideration that she has children, that she has a husband, that she has to look after them - no consideration.

He had the power. But to have sixteen thousand wives is so stupid - you cannot even remember their names!

But it was thought that just because the woman in India is property, the more you have the better.

And of course an incarnation of God has to be allowed to have the largest number of wives to prove that he has more property than anybody else.

So there is a slavery of the body which still continues in different ways. It is becoming less and less but it has not disappeared completely.

Freedom of the body will mean that there is no distinction between black and white, that there is no distinction between man and woman, that there is no distinction of any kind as far as bodies are concerned. Nobody is pure, nobody is impure: all bodies are the same. This is the very basis of freedom.

Then there is the second dimension: psychological freedom. There are very few individuals in the world who are psychologically free... because if you are a Mohammedan you are not psychologically free; if you are a Hindu you are not psychologically free. Our whole way of bringing up children is to make them slaves - slaves of political ideologies, social ideologies, religious ideologies. We don't give them a chance to think on their own, to search on their own. We force their minds... we stuff their minds with things which we are also not experienced in.

Parents teach children that there is a God - and they know nothing of God. They tell their children that there is heaven and there is hell - and they know nothing of heaven and hell.

I have heard: it happened one day in New York, in New York's biggest church, that as the cardinal came in he found a young man, and he was puzzled whether he was a hippie or Jesus Christ. He looked like Jesus Christ, but you don't find Jesus Christ like this! He must be a hippie. The cardinal was afraid because Jesus was not his own experience - he could not recognize him.

He went close to him and asked, "Who are you?"

And the young man said, "You can't recognize me? And daily you pray to me, ?My Lord, Jesus Christ,' and now I have come and you have some nerve to ask me, ?Who are you?' "

The cardinal got really afraid that perhaps he is the Lord, Jesus Christ - he looks exactly like Jesus Christ. But what to do now? He had never been taught in the theological college where he studied and became a cardinal what you are supposed to do if Jesus Christ enters your church. There is no precedent!

He phoned the Vatican and asked the pope, "Just give me some hints about what to do? A man is here - I thought that he looks like a hippie, but he also looks like Jesus Christ. And I asked him and he said, ?I am your Lord, Jesus Christ.' Now what should I do?" And the pope said, "What? Such a case has never happened before! You do one thing: first, look busy! Second, phone the police!"

You are teaching your children things that you don't know yourself. You are just conditioning their minds, because your minds were conditioned by your parents. This way the disease goes on from one generation to another generation.

Psychological freedom will be possible when children are allowed to grow, helped to grow to more intellect, more intelligence, more consciousness, more alertness. No belief is given to them. They are not taught any kind of faith, but they are given as much incentive as possible to search for truth.

And they have to be reminded from the very beginning: your own truth, your own finding, is going to liberate you; nothing else can do that for you.

Truth cannot be borrowed.

It cannot be studied in books.

Nobody can inform you about it. You have to sharpen your intelligence yourself, so that you can look into existence and find it.

If a child is left open, receptive, alert, and given the incentive for search, he will have psychological freedom. And with psychological freedom comes tremendous responsibility. You don't have to teach it to him; it comes like the shadow of psychological freedom. And he will be grateful to you.

Otherwise every child is angry at his parents because they spoiled him: they destroyed his freedom, they conditioned his mind. Even before he asked any questions, they filled his mind with answers which are all bogus because they are not based on his own experience.

The world lives in a psychological slavery.

And the third dimension is the ultimate of freedom - which is knowing that you are not the body, knowing that you are not the mind, knowing that you are only pure consciousness. That knowledge comes through meditation.

It separates you from the body, it separates you from the mind, and ultimately only you are there as pure consciousness, as pure awareness. That is spiritual freedom.

These are the three basic dimensions of freedom for the individual.

You have asked about both the individual and the collective. For the collective there is no need.

Only all the individuals should be free, and the collective will be free. The collective has no soul, the collective has no mind, the collective has no body even: it is only a name. It is just a word. But we are very much impressed by words, so much so that we forget that words are not substantial. The collective, the society, the community, the religion, the church - they are all words. There is nothing real behind them.

I am reminded of a small story. In ALICE IN WONDERLAND, Alice is coming to the palace of the queen. When she arrives the queen asks her, "Did you meet a messenger on the way coming towards me?"

And the little girl says, "Nobody. I met nobody."

And the queen thought "nobody" is somebody, so she asks, "But then why has that nobody not reached yet?"

The little girl said, "Madam, nobody is NOBODY!"

And the queen said, "Don't be stupid! I understand: nobody must be nobody, but he must have reached before you. It seems nobody walks slower than you."

And Alice said, "That is absolutely wrong: nobody walks faster than me!"

And this way the dialogue continues. That "nobody" becomes somebody in the whole dialogue, and it is impossible for Alice to convince the queen that nobody is nobody. How to convince? She tries hard, and when she hears that the queen is saying, "Nobody walks slower than you," then she becomes angry: that is too much! Then she shouts, "Nobody walks faster than me!"

The queen said, "If that is the case then he should be here!"

The collective, the society - all these are just words. That which really exists is the individual; otherwise the Rotary Club, the Lions Club... then there will be a problem: what is the freedom of a Rotary Club? What is the freedom of the Lions Club? These are just names. The collective is a very dangerous word.

In the name of the collective the individual, the real, has always been sacrificed. I am absolutely against it.

Nations have been sacrificing individuals in the name of the nation - and ?nation' is just a word. The lines that you have drawn on the map are not anywhere on the earth. They are just your game. But on those lines that you have drawn on the map millions of people have died - real people, dying for unreal lines. And you make them heroes, national heroes!

This idea of the collective has to be destroyed completely; otherwise in some way or other we will continue sacrificing the individual. In the name of religion we have sacrificed him, in religious wars.

A Mohammedan dying in a religious war knows that his paradise is certain. He has been told by the priest, "If you are dying for the religion, Mohammedanism, then your paradise is absolutely certain, with all the pleasures you have ever imagined or dreamt of. And the person you have killed will also reach paradise because he has been killed by a Mohammedan. It is a privilege for him, so you need not feel guilty that you have killed a man."

Christians have crusades - a jihad, a religious war - and kill thousands of people, burn living human beings, for what? For some collectivity... for Christianity, for Buddhism, for Hinduism, for communism, for fascism - anything will do. Any word representing some collectivity, and the individual can be sacrificed.

There is no reason for the collectivity even to exist: individuals are enough. And if individuals have freedom, are psychologically free, are spiritually free, then naturally the collective will be spiritually free.

The collective consists of individuals, not vice versa. It has been said that the individual is only a part of the collective; that is not true. The individual is not just a part of the collective; the collective is only a symbolic word for individuals meeting together. They are not parts of anything; they remain independent. They remain organically independent, they don't become parts.

If we really want a world of freedom, then we have to understand that in the name of the collectivity so many massacres have happened that now it is time to stop.

All collective names should lose the grandeur that they have had in the past. Individuals should be the highest value.

Question 4:

The experience of knowing has two dimensions to it. One is objective knowing, the other is subjective knowing. Objective knowing is intellectual. That's what all of science goes on doing. It is intellectual knowing.

Intellect is enough to know the object. The object is outside - available to your eyes, available to experiments. You can dissect it, you can do whatsoever you want, all kinds of experimentation. It is available to the pure intellect. But your own being is not available to your intellect.

Your own being is available only in silence, not in intellectual activity, but in a silent awareness.

That is a totally different dimension and that is true knowing, knowing yourself. But that cannot be intellectual, because intellect is something that can only reach outwards; it has no way of reaching inwards.

You can see everything with your eyes, but you cannot see - with your eyes - your own eyes. In a mirror you can see, but those are not your eyes; that is only a reflection. Your intellect is capable of knowing everything that is outside, but you are behind the intellect and the intellect has no way to go there.

I am reminded... when Ford first made his cars they had no reverse gear. The very idea of the reverse gear had not happened. So even if you had gone only a few feet past your house and you had to come back to get something, you had to go around the whole city in order to come back. That was too tedious and stupid and a waste of time. So he added a reverse gear.

But as far as intellect is concerned, God is not a Ford. The intellect still has no reverse gear; it simply goes outwards. You can take it to the farthest stars, there is no problem; but it cannot reach within you, which is so close.

Albert Einstein, perhaps the most intelligent man who has explored the stars, died unhappy because he did not know himself. His unhappiness was: what is the point of knowing the whole world - knowing all about electrons and protons and neutrons and faraway galaxies - and not knowing about yourself, who you are?

Just before dying he said, "If I am born again I would rather be a plumber than be a physicist, so that I can have time enough to look within myself. This physics has been too much an involvement."

With intellect you can know everything except yourself.

And if you depend only on intellect then you are going to deny your soul - that's what atheists go on doing, that's what communists go on doing. The reason is simply that they have made it a point that to be true something has to be intellectually proved. And the intellect has no way to prove consciousness.

Consciousness has to be discovered in a totally different way. Intellect is thinking, and consciousness is discovered in a state of no-thinking - in such utter silence that not even a single thought moves as a disturbance.

In that silence you discover your very being.

It is as vast as the sky.

And to know it is really to know something worthwhile; otherwise all your knowledge is garbage. It may be useful, utilitarian, but it is not going to help you transform your being. It cannot bring you to fulfillment, to contentment, to enlightenment, to a point where you can say, "I have come home."

Question 5:

Almost nothing. Psychoanalysis is a futile exercise because it changes nothing: it does not create a new man, it does not bring peace to you. In fact even the founders of psychoanalysis like Sigmund Freud were so much afraid of death that you cannot believe it. No normal being is so afraid of death.

The founder of psychoanalysis was so afraid that even the word "death" was not to be pronounced in front of him - it was taboo. It was not to be talked about. Three times it had happened that somebody mentioned death and Sigmund Freud fell in a swoon, in a fit, became unconscious. He was so afraid of death that he avoided going to any cemetery, he avoided going to anybody who was dying, even a friend or disciple. Wherever there was anything concerning death he was absolutely panicked - and this man gives you psychoanalysis!

His problems are not solved. He gets angry just like anybody else. He is jealous, more jealous than anybody else. He is greedy. He wants to monopolize, he wants to dominate people. He creates almost an empire of psychoanalysts around the world, but everybody has to repeat like parrots whatever he says. Anybody who says anything different is immediately expelled. It seems it is not science but a political party or a fanatic religion - not scientific research.

And the same is true about Jung. Jung came to India to meet someone... because in the East people have been working on the mind for thousands of years. But they have never developed anything like psychoanalysis; they developed meditation - a totally different approach.

What is the use of analyzing the rubbish of the mind? - sorting it out... it takes years. There are people who have been in psychoanalysis for fifteen years and they have reached nowhere.

They have changed their psychoanalyst in the hope that perhaps somebody else will help, but they have not reached anywhere else. They cannot, because all that psychoanalysis does - all the schools, whether Adlerian or Jungian or Freudian - is to sort out the rubbish of your mind, interpret it according to their minds. And what is the point of it all?

In the East we have not developed psychoanalysis, we have developed meditation. Meditation simply takes you away from the garbage, takes you beyond the garbage - it is not worth bothering about. And if you want to bother about it you can go on bothering for lives. You will not come to an end.

But just being a witness to your mind, without doing anything to the mind - just being aloof, just seeing it as if thoughts are moving on a screen and simply watching it without any judgment of good and bad - a strange experience happens: thoughts slowly start disappearing. Soon a moment comes when there is only an empty screen - no thoughts. And when there is no object, no thought for your consciousness, it turns back upon itself because there is nothing preventing it; that is exactly the meaning of the word ?object' - it prevents, it objects.

When there is no object the consciousness goes... and just as everything moves in circles in existence, consciousness also moves in a circle. It comes back upon its own source. And the meeting of the consciousness with its own source is the explosion of light, the greatest celebration that a man is capable of, the greatest orgasmic experience.

And it is not something that happens and is finished. No, once it has happened, it continues. It remains with you. It becomes almost like your breathing. You live in it twenty-four hours a day.

Jung had come to India in search of someone, to find out what the East has done to create so many people like Gautam Buddha - not one but hundreds who have gone beyond mind and all its troubles and problems, worries, anxieties. What is the secret? He was going to universities, meeting psychoanalysts, and everywhere he was told, "You are wasting your time. These people are not the right people. These people have gone to the West to learn psychoanalysis and they are teaching psychoanalysis in the universities. You have come to search and seek somebody who is absolutely untouched by the West. And there is a man."

And there was a man - Shri Raman Maharshi. Wherever Jung went - and he was there for three months - everywhere the same name was given to him. "Go to Arunachal in South India and meet this man who is uneducated, who knows nothing of psychoanalysis; he is the man the East has been able to produce. Just go and sit with him and talk with him and listen to him. If you have some questions, ask him." But you will be surprised: Jung never went there.

And later on, feeling that he will be criticized, Jung wrote, "I consideredly did not go to Raman Maharshi because the East has its own way, the West has its own way, and they should not be mixed" - just to protect himself from criticism. Then why did he go to India at all? He was told again and again to go to a man who was available, which is rare, and he did not go there, although he went up to Madras, from where it was only a two hour journey to Arunachal!

Jung did not go to the man, whom just by meeting he would have seen how a clear man is, how a man is who has cleaned his mind completely - his eyes, his gestures, his words, his authority. He does not quote scriptures, he knows himself.

Jung did not go there, and he himself felt guilty. To defend himself he started writing that the East and the West have different ways. This is nonsense, because man - whether in the East or in the West - is the same. And it is strange that he was teaching Eastern students Western psychology.

He should have refused because this is mixing East and West. If he was really honest then he should have said, "You go back to the East."

He was teaching Eastern students Western psychology, but he was not ready to go to an Eastern meditator, just to meet him. What is the fear? The fear is that Jung is as normal a person as you are - just knowledgeable. He has gathered from books, but he has no authentic experience of his own.

Western psychoanalysis is just a business. It is cheating people. It is simply exploiting people without any help, and because there is no other alternative people have to go to it. The psychoanalysts themselves go to other psychoanalysts. And psychoanalysts go mad more than any other profession! They commit suicide more than any other profession; they are more perverted in every way than any other profession.

It is a very strange phenomenon. It is not a science at all, it is just a fiction. But it has become a big profession. In fact, Jews missed Jesus - who created the biggest firm, that of Christianity - and Jews have never been able to forgive themselves. Their own son was going to create such a big firm, and they crucified the poor boy!

Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx are also Jews - and these two have tried hard to compensate for what Jews missed when they crucified Jesus. This time they did not crucify Karl Marx. Neither did they crucify Sigmund Freud. They have learned the lesson that crucifixion is costly: the whole business goes into other people's hands!