Only if love allows

Question 1:

My views on sexual ethics are against all the views that have been held up to now. They were all repressive of sex; they were condemnatory and created a split in the human mind. The whole schizophrenia and all the perversions of man are rooted in those wrong sexual ethics.

I conceive of sex as a natural phenomenon. There is nothing profane in it and there is nothing sacred in it. It is purely natural life energy of tremendous importance. If you cannot sublimate it, it can destroy you; and it has destroyed humanity.

It is the energy man is born out of; everything is born out of it. Naturally there is no higher energy than sexual energy, but biological reproduction is not its only function. The same energy can have different creative dimensions. The same energy, joined with meditative practices, can be sublimated to the highest peak of consciousness - what I call enlightenment.

My sexual ethics is not a law, it is love.

Two persons can be sexually related only if love allows. When there is no love, and only law remains as a binding force, it is sheer prostitution. And I am against prostitution.

It is strange that all the religions are the cause of prostitution in the world, but nobody stands up and says that prostitution exists because you have replaced love with law.

Law is not love. Marriage is valid only if there is love. The moment love disappears, the marriage is invalid. It means millions of people are living unlovingly, unethically, unnaturally, because of the religions that have forced the arbitrary bondage of marriage and have tried to make it permanent.

Life is continuously changing; nothing is permanent. Love also is not permanent. Only plastic flowers are permanent, real flowers cannot be permanent. If you are too addicted to permanence then you will end up with plastic flowers; that's how people have ended up with plastic marriages, plastic relationships - phony, hypocritical. And it gives no pleasure to anybody.

There is a vast prostitution all over the world. Ordinarily when you go to a prostitute, you purchase her for one night. At least it is straightforward. But when you marry a woman, promising her that you will love her always, even beyond death - and even before the honeymoon ends, the love disappears - then you live in deception. Now you are using a human being as a thing, as a sexual object. I condemn it.

According to me love should be the only law, the only deciding factor.

And the energy of sex should not remain confined to reproduction only. It is simple to see the fact that animals are not sexual all the year round, they just have their seasons. In those few months or few weeks they are sexual; otherwise sex disappears. Why has man the capacity to be sexual all the year round? There must be a purpose behind it. Existence never does anything meaninglessly.

My understanding is that reproduction could have been managed within a few weeks, just as it is being managed in all the animals. But man has been given so much sexual energy... it is a clear indication that existence wants you to transform this energy into higher levels of consciousness - and it can be transformed. Just as it can give birth to children, it can give birth to you. It can make you reborn, with a new vision, new bliss, new light, and a totally new being. All that is needed is that the sexual energy should be joined with meditation. And that has been my whole work.

That is my sexual ethics: sex energy plus meditation.

And it is the easiest thing to join them, because while making love, the moment you come to an orgasmic explosion your thoughts disappear, time stops. Suddenly you have melted into the other, you are no longer an ego. And these are the qualities of meditation: no ego, no time, no thinking.

Just pure awareness and a melting into the whole.

Where sexual orgasm ends, meditation begins. They can be joined very easily. The easiest thing to do is to join them, they are so close.

My own insight is that people came to discover meditation through sexual orgasm because of these qualities. They could see that when thoughts stop, time stops, ego disappears and you are in a tremendously beautiful space. Although it lasts only for seconds, it has given you the taste of something that is not of this world, something of the beyond.

We don't know who discovered meditation, perhaps thousands of years ago. In the East we have books at least ten thousand years old describing methods of meditation. But any method brings the same qualities.

This is my feeling, that without sexual orgasm nobody could have been able to discover these three qualities. Once they discovered these three qualities, people of intelligence must have tried to experience them without going into sexual orgasm. Is it possible to attain to such a consciousness?

Somebody must have succeeded, and since then millions of people have succeeded.

The whole of humanity lives in misery for the simple reason that they have the wrong kind of sexual ethics, a kind which teaches them to repress it. And the more you repress your sexuality, the farther away you are from meditation. The more you repress it, the closer you are to madness, not to meditation.

And now it is a fact established by psychoanalysis - by the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud - that repressed sex is the basic cause of human misery, of all kinds of perversions, of all kinds of mind sicknesses. But the religions still go on preaching the same thing.

Sigmund Freud should be remembered as one of the milestones in the history of man. But his work is only half. He simply fought against repression; his work is negative. In itself it takes you nowhere; it is fighting against darkness.

My sexual ethics are a completion. Repression has to be dropped. And a deep acceptance, a deep friendliness towards your own energies, a loving intimacy with your own energies so those energies can reveal all their secrets to you... And joining them with meditation, orgasm becomes the door to the temple of the divine.

To me, if sex is the creative force in the world, it must be nearest to the creative center of the world - whatever name you give to it. Creative energy must be closest to creation, to the creative source of it all.

People should be taught the art of converting sexual energy into spiritual enlightenment.

Question 2:

Yes, there are political reasons too. In India I was persecuted. Attempts were made on my life because I was criticizing the philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi, and his followers were in power after the British empire left India.

I will give you one example. I was against Mahatma Gandhi, not for any personal reason, not for his intentions, but for his very idiotic philosophy. He was teaching that everything that has been invented after the spinning wheel is the devil's work. The spinning wheel should be the last development in technology, and everything after it has to be dropped. Now this is such nonsense.

The world is starving, dying. India itself cannot provide enough food, clothes, shelter for its people; and now India's population is nine hundred million. Half of India is going to die by the end of this century, just starving. And Mahatma Gandhi will be one of the persons who has to accept the responsibility for it.

With the spinning wheel, if you work hard eight hours per day, you can manage enough clothes for yourself for the whole year. But eight hours per day you have to work on the spinning wheel. Who is going to give you bread? Who is going to give you a house to live in? And what about your children?

What about your wife? What about your old father and mother? What about times when you are sick, or when somebody else is sick, and you need medicine?

Stopping at the spinning wheel is more dangerous than anything man has ever conceived. It will bring more and more poverty to the world, more and more sickness to the world, more and more people without education. The possibility of civilization will disappear. We will fall into a state of barbaric, primitive aborigines.

Mahatma Gandhi was against railway trains. He was against the telegraph. He was against everything that has proved tremendously beneficial and a blessing to humanity. It is one thing to be against nuclear technology, but to be against technology as such is simply insane.

When Morarji Desai became the prime minister of India - he thinks of himself as the successor to Mahatma Gandhi - he tried to harm me as much as possible. When he was chief minister of Gujarat, he tried to pass a resolution in the assembly that I could not enter Gujarat. The assembly simply could not believe it: "What kind of thing are you talking about? We may not agree with somebody, we can criticize the man, but to prevent him from entering the state simply means you are a coward; it simply means you don't have any argument." And he didn't have any argument.

And finally he became the prime minister of India. Then he tried as much as he could to persecute me, to persecute my people, because I was simply saying the truth, that the country is dying - and he was teaching that if you start drinking your own urine all problems will be solved.

Certainly he seems to be the real successor to Mahatma Gandhi. While Mahatma Gandhi was alive, in his ashram one of his chief disciples, Professor Bhansali - a well-educated man, a retired professor of a university - lived for six months eating cow dung and drinking the urine of the cow. And Gandhi declared him to be a spiritual saint! Certainly Morarji Desai is Gandhi's spiritual successor.

Morarji Desai created so many legal troubles, without any foundation. He was gone within three years, but those troubles continue. He took away the tax-exempt status of the Trust which was working for me, without giving any cause. Now he is gone, but the bureaucracy is the bureaucracy:

the problem continues. And because the tax-exempt status has been taken away, in all these years one and a half million dollars' income tax has accumulated. So now the income tax office is asking for one and a half million dollars.

He prevented me from being allowed to purchase any land, any house, any property. I don't have any money, but he also prevented my friends who have been trying to spread my word. The commune in Poona has existed for twelve years, but all the properties that we have purchased are not in our name; they are still in the name of their old owners. We have paid the money but the ownership has not been transferred.

In every possible way... but the reason was political. They were all exploiting Mahatma Gandhi's name in elections, and I was the only person in the whole country who was saying, "It is time that you forget Mahatma Gandhi. Thank him for the last time for trying to gain the freedom of the country, but now it is time to be free of him. The country needs technological progress; otherwise people are going to die."

Mahatma Gandhi was against birth control; I have been in absolute support of birth control. If they had listened to me... I have been talking in favor of birth control for thirty years. If they had listened to me... at that time, the population was four hundred million, but they did not listen. Now it is nine hundred million.

The economists, the mathematicians, have all been surprised, because they did not think the population was going to expand so much. They were thinking that by the end of the century India would have one billion people. Now they have had to change it, and the change is big. Now they say that by the end of the century India will have one billion eight hundred million people. Their earth is dying, it is so exploited. They don't have any scientific development. And birth control cannot be preached; it is against the religion, and it is against Mahatma Gandhi's preachings.

There is certainly a political persecution side by side with the persecution that every truth has to go through.

In Russia I have my people, but they have to remain underground; they have to meet in basements to meditate. They are not going to harm anybody. I am not a terrorist, I am a nonviolent man; my whole philosophy is nonviolence. They are just sitting silently, but the communist government of the Soviet Union cannot tolerate it: "What are you doing?"

The KGB is after sannyasins; they have found at least two hundred people. By torturing one person they found out another person's name... and endless interrogation, and threats. They have taken my books from them, they have taken their malas, they have taken their red clothes, because I have been against Marxist communism.

Marxist communism simply distributes poverty equally, and to distribute poverty equally is not, and cannot be, the goal of human evolution. Everybody should be rich - and it is possible that everybody can be rich. There is no need of any revolution: all that is needed is a deep understanding that unless everybody is rich, you are also poor.

You may be rich - but surrounded by poor people, what is the meaning of being rich? You may be healthy - but surrounded by sick people, corpses, dead people, what is the meaning of your life?

Can you celebrate it? Can you sing a song? You will be more ashamed than anything else.

So all that is needed is a pure understanding that now the means are available so that wealth can be created and the population explosion can be stopped; there can be a society which is rich. I am all for a rich society. But I am not for a society which, in the name of equality, simply distributes poverty.

Seventy years have passed since the Russian revolution, and Russia is still a poor country. What has changed there? Only one thing has changed: instead of rich people, now there is a communist clique, the people who have the power. The classes have not disappeared: a new class has come into being which is more powerful than any rich class ever was. And the country has become a concentration camp. In the name of beautiful words, an ugly reality has happened. The country is a concentration camp, and the people are poor. There is no question of any justice, and there is no freedom of expression or thinking.

I have condemned this. Naturally, the Communist Party has written books against me; articles against me have been published in Russia.

In America I had made a beautiful commune of five thousand people, living joyously with no question of class struggle. There was not a single beggar. In five years there was not a single baby born.

They were working hard, they were meditating, and in the night they were dancing, playing on their flutes, playing on their guitars. It was a dream that had become real.

And we changed the whole desert that we had purchased. It was not a small place; it was one hundred and twenty-six square miles, a vast desert. We made dams, we cultivated land, we made houses for five thousand people. We had our own airplanes, our own buses, our own cars - we had everything of our own. We had our own hospital, our own school, our own university.

And what happened to America? Why did they become so worried about us, who were just an oasis in a desert? The nearest town was twenty miles away. And we were not concerned with anybody else. We were enjoying ourselves.

They became worried because visitors started coming to see. And the word started spreading. If these people can convert a desert - which was lying dead for fifty years and nobody was ready to purchase it - if they can make it an oasis, productive, feeding five thousand people with vegetables, fruits, milk, eggs, everything that was needed...

And there was no need for any dictatorship of the proletariat; it was real communism. And to me, real communism always means that it has to be joined with anarchism; otherwise it is not real. If communism and anarchism are together, then it is real. Communism helps you to become richer; anarchism helps you to become freer, to have more freedom. Finally there is no need of any government. And there was no government for us. Everybody had his own responsibility.

The American politicians became worried because we were creating an example that could be dangerous: people's minds could get fired up by it. Even in the richest country of the world there are thirty million people who are beggars, on the street - no house, no clothes, no food, no work. And America goes on destroying billions of dollars through stupid projects.

Just now a few rockets have blown up, and each rocket meant billions of dollars. And they are pouring their whole energy into nuclear weapons. I can't imagine who they want to kill, because already America and the Soviet Union together have enough nuclear energy to kill every man seven times. I don't think that everybody is a Jesus Christ, and that everybody is going to be resurrected seven times so you have to make so many arrangements. The truth is that even Jesus Christ was never resurrected; nature does not change its laws.

They became afraid of the commune because it was what all the great anarchists of the world, Prince Kropotkin and others, have been thinking of - that a day will come when no government will be needed. And it was communism because there were no classes, but that does not mean that everybody was equal. That's again where I am not in agreement with communism. People should be given an equal opportunity to grow, but people are not equal. They have different talents; there are geniuses, there are musicians, there are scientists. Everybody has a unique personality.

People are not equal - now it is a psychologically established truth, so the whole slogan about the equality of people is baseless - but they should be given equal opportunity. For what? - the equal opportunity to be unequal, the equal opportunity to be unique, to be themselves, to be whatever they can be.

I had invited the American politicians: "You should come and see before you decide anything." But they did not even have the guts to come and see what a beautiful oasis has come into being. And if we can create such oases around the world in many places, they will become models for the coming society, for the coming humanity.

There was no money used in the commune. You might have had millions of dollars with you... they were useless. Your needs were fulfilled, but money as a means of exchange was no longer used within the commune. You could donate it to the commune because the commune could use it with the outside world; but I came to realize that once money is not used, suddenly the person who has millions of dollars and the person who has nothing are equal - financially, economically. What they have does not matter; what they are matters.

America behaved absolutely illegally in destroying the commune. But they had to destroy it, they had to throw me out of America, because I could have created the same commune in another place.

And not only were they not satisfied with throwing me out of America, they have been forcing every nation that is under their pressure not to allow me to settle anywhere. And I have done no harm to anybody. But politicians are mediocre people. They cannot afford anything that goes beyond their mediocre minds; it becomes dangerous to them.

They have nothing against me, but my ideas seem to be more dangerous to them than their own nuclear weapons. In a world where one mad dog from America bombs a small country like Libya, where a Russian nuclear project just goes berserk almost like human beings... amongst all these problems, the parliaments of the world are discussing me, discussing whether to allow me into their country or not. It is hilarious.

Question 3:

It is not divine revelation, it is divine realization. And the difference is big. Divine revelation means something objective, like God, is revealed to you. You see some God, but you are separate from him and he is separate from you.

I don't believe in a God who is separate from us, who is separate from existence. I don't believe in a God who is a creator; I believe in a God who is creativity. To say it in other words, I don't believe in a God as a person, I believe in godliness as a quality.

So I say it is not divine revelation, but divine realization. You realize that you are God, and in realizing that you are God, you realize that everything is God - that only God exists and nothing else exists. In the stones, in the trees, in the birds, in the people - whether they know it or not - the same principle, the same quality, is hidden at the very center of every being.

Enlightenment is becoming so full of light that you can see your own center and realize your godliness.

It makes a lot of difference - with God as separate, man is only a puppet. He can never be free, he will always remain a slave. How can you be free of the creator? He created you. And why did he create you at a certain moment? - why not before?

There is eternity in the past - and Christianity says God created the world four thousand and four years before Jesus Christ. It must have been January 1st - obviously. But what had he been doing until then? Just sitting and doing nothing for the whole of eternity? And then suddenly he creates this world. Not a great idea either - a mess.

I was going on a trip. I went to my tailor and I told him, "You have to make my robe within seven days. And this time, no tricks: seven days means seven days."

He said, "As you wish. But remember one thing: God created the world in six days, and you can have a look at the world. I can create your robe in seven days, but then don't ask me, ?What have you done?' It will be a mess!" He was right.

In six days... and after six days God got tired and he rested, and he has been resting since then.

Strange tiredness! And it seems to be whimsical to suddenly decide to create the world. But you cannot depend on such a whimsical God. Tomorrow he may decide it is enough: destroy it. What can you do? With a God who is a creator you are just in the hands of somebody else who can make or mar you. Then your freedom and your individuality are meaningless.

Nietzsche is right when he says, "God is dead, and now man is free." He is putting two things together; that's his insight: God is dead, and now man is free. With God alive, man cannot be free.

I don't say God is dead - because he was never alive! God is not an object outside existence. He is not a creator, he is the innermost reality of existence. He is eternal; he has always been herenow, and he will always be herenow. The creation did not end in six days, it is still going on. It is an ongoing process. It is evolution.

But God has to be put inside it, not outside it. God outside, the world becomes dead and God becomes a dictator. God inside, in existence, makes the whole of life alive, everything vibrant - and God is no longer a danger.

So I will not say enlightenment is divine revelation, no. All those who have said they had a divine revelation have simply dreamed about it, have been hallucinating. It was an illusion and nothing else.

Enlightenment is the realization: "I am not just a mortal. I am not just material, I am divine. In my heart of hearts God is alive, and what is happening in me is happening in everyone else." The only difference between one whom we call enlightened and the others is that he knows; he has recognized his inner being, and the others are fast asleep. But there is no qualitative difference.

Those who are asleep may be awake tomorrow.

And in this eternity does it matter whether you wake up today or you wake up tomorrow? It doesn't matter. You can wake up early in the morning, you can wake up late in the morning - eternity is available. You are free to choose when to wake up. You are free to choose if you want to have a little more sleep. Then turn over, pull the blanket up and enjoy sleeping a little longer... because it is God who is enjoying it. Don't be worried. Why disturb God if he wants to sleep a little more? And sooner or later you will wake up. How long can you sleep?

Enlightenment is awakening from a deep sleep, coming to consciousness from a state of unconsciousness. It does not need any God outside.

God outside is very dangerous. Its implications are ugly, because God outside means worshipping, praising him, praying to him, going to the mosque, going to the church, going to the synagogue. God outside will never allow you to enter within yourself: your eyes are focused outside - and there is no God outside. You are looking into an empty sky.

The real juice of life is within you.

This very moment you can turn within yourself, look into yourself. No worship is needed, no prayer is needed. All that is needed is a silent journey to your own being. I call it meditation - a silent pilgrimage to your own being. And the moment you find your center, you have found the center of the whole existence.

Archimedes, one of the great scientists, used to say, "If I can find the center of the world, I can revolutionize everything." But the poor man never found it; he looked in the wrong direction. If by chance in some life I meet him, I will say, "Archimedes, are you still looking outside for the center?

The center is within you. And it is true: if you can find the center within you, you have found the center of the whole world, and you can revolutionize it."

That is the reason that all the governments of the world are against a single individual who has no weapons, who has no power. Strange! Sometimes I feel, have all these people gone insane, or what?

The European parliament has to decide whether to allow my airplane to land at any airport in Europe or not. Even my airplane landing... entering their country is not a question at all, just the airplane landing for refueling and they are afraid.

In London, my pilot said that his time was up; he could not fly any longer. He needed twelve hours rest by law, so he said, "You will have to stay overnight at the airport."

I said, "That's okay, there is no problem." But I did not have any idea that I am something like a nuclear missile! They wouldn't let me stay in the first-class lounge. My friends thought that perhaps they might create trouble: "It is your own jet plane; why should we allow you in the first-class lounge?"

So they purchased first-class tickets for all my friends who were on the plane.

And that actually happened. First they said, "We cannot allow you because you are not traveling by commercial plane. Where are your first-class tickets?" We produced the first-class tickets, and we said, "Tomorrow morning we will be flying by commercial plane." The man disappeared. After a few minutes he reappeared, and he said, "You cannot enter the first-class lounge."

While he was gone he left his file on the table, and one of my friends looked inside the file. All the instructions from the government were there: even before I had come to the airport the decision had been taken by the government that I should not be allowed in the first-class lounge, that I am a dangerous person. But what can a dangerous person do in the middle of the night in a first-class lounge from where he cannot even enter into the city?

So I asked him, "What is the alternative?"

He said, "There is only one alternative: you can remain in jail for the night." And I had to remain in jail for the night! Perhaps it was - it must be - something unprecedented: without any crime, with the jet plane waiting, with tickets in my hands, I had to wait in jail for the night.

And then in the parliament there were questions about why I was not allowed in the lounge; and the only answer was, "The man is dangerous." And nobody bothers to ask, "What dangerous thing could he have done? Is he a terrorist? Is he carrying bombs? What danger was possible?"

I was arrested in Greece. I had not gone out of the house; for fifteen days I was only in the house.

And the archbishop started creating a great movement in the government that if they didn't throw me out of the country he was going to set fire to my house. He was going to dynamite it, because "the man is dangerous - he can destroy our morality, he can destroy our religion, he can destroy our tradition, he can destroy our church. He cannot be allowed here."

And in the twentieth century a government decides that a person who is just a tourist and who will be there only two weeks more... I had not left the house for two weeks, and for the other two weeks I was not going to leave the house; I was just resting there in a friend's house. They decided that I am dangerous.

And nobody even thinks that if a morality can be destroyed in fifteen days - a morality which you have created in three thousand years - what kind of morality is it? It is not worth having. What kind of church is it? For two thousand years you have been creating it, and a tourist can destroy it in two weeks. Strange! And just sitting in his house!

But it seems there is a conspiracy from government to government. They are sending messages to each government that wherever I am, I should not be allowed to stay.

And I am not a political man, I am absolutely apolitical. I have no interest in politics; that I leave to the mediocre people. My interest is in the evolution of human consciousness. But perhaps that is dangerous for them. Perhaps that is the danger that they are talking about, that if people become more alert, more conscious, then they are not going to support the politicians.

People have to remain retarded, stupid, idiots, so Ronald Reagan can remain president of America.

Otherwise who is going to choose a third-rate cowboy play-actor to be the president of America?

Can't you find anybody intelligent?

Question 4:

Those who can understand me see clearly that I am the most anti-sex person in existence, because my whole work is to transform sexual energy into spiritual consciousness.

The pope can be the sex guru, the shankaracharya in India can be the sex guru, because these are the people who are repressing and teaching that sex should be repressed.

Whatever is repressed remains in you, and it takes perverted forms. It may become homosexuality, it may become sodomy; it may take the form of any perversion. The more you repress it, the more it will have to find some way out.

Homosexuality was born in monasteries - it is a religious phenomenon - because religions segregated their monks and nuns, and they were so adamant that men and women should not touch each other, should not talk to each other, should not even see each other. Where will their sex energy go? Nobody has bothered about their sex energy; they have simply been told, "You take the vow of celibacy." But the vow will not help because the vow is not heard by your biology.

In the monasteries monks became homosexuals, nuns became lesbians. And a very strange phenomenon... these people created the whole perversion of sexuality in the world because their insistence on a permanent marriage with no divorce created prostitutes. And because sex was repressed so much, their minds became full of sexuality.

Remember that sex is not in the genitals, it is in your head. There is a center in your head which controls your genitals; so if sex is repressed, it is not a question of the genitals.

There have been Christian sects who even cut off their genitals just so that their celibacy was absolute. But that will not make them sex-free, because the real center is in the head, from where sex is just an extension.

That's why you can just fantasize about sex and your genitals will be immediately affected; they are extensions of your mind. And once the mind becomes full of sexuality, then a new thing appears that your religions have created and are responsible for - pornography.

One does not see the connection so clearly because it is a very indirect route to PLAYBOY, or PENTHOUSE, or other pornographic magazines, and to the yellow newspapers that live on ugliness and obscenity. But the real reason is that the pope, the shankaracharya, and Ayatollah Khomeiniac...

these are the people who are giving juice to this pornographic literature.

If I am heard, and people accept sex as a natural thing and join it with meditation, all pornographic literature will disappear automatically.

Strange, that these religious leaders condemn pornography, and they are the originators of it.

Such is the unconsciousness of the mind. Perhaps even they don't recognize it. They condemn homosexuality, but they don't understand the simple fact that they have created it by forcing people to be celibate. Now celibacy is unnatural. There is only one way to be celibate and that is brain surgery. Unless the sex center in the brain is removed, you cannot be celibate.

Delgado, one of the famous psychologists, was working on the sex center of a white mouse. He opened the mouse's head and fixed an electrode to the sex center. He put a remote controller in front of the mouse, and he taught the mouse to touch the remote controller. As he would touch it, he would go into a tremendous orgasm, trembling all over with joy, but it had nothing to do with the genitals because the sex center is in the head. The food was there, the drink was there - everything delicious that the mouse liked - but he didn't bother to eat or drink. He went on pushing the remote controller till he died. Six hundred times he had an orgasm, and then he died. It was too much.

The only way to make anybody celibate is to remove the sex center from the head - which these religions have not been able to do. But once you remove the sex center from the head, strange things will happen to the person.

For example, we know that no impotent person has ever been enlightened. No impotent person has ever been a prophet or a messiah. No impotent person has ever been a genius in any field - science, music, art, dance. In the whole history of man, not a single impotent person has been able to contribute anything. It seems that all creativity consists of your sexual energy. And if a person doesn't have sexual energy, perhaps he will become absolutely dull, lusterless; his eyes will lose shine. He will lose interest in everything; he may not live long. And there is no need... because sex is the energy that has to be used as a ladder for your higher growth.

I am not the sex guru.

I am the anti-sex guru, if anything.

The sex guru you can find in the Vatican. His perversion is not to touch women but to touch the earth; that is a perversion. Not to kiss the woman but to kiss the earth! This is a perversion. You just try sometime on the street kissing the earth, and everybody will know, "This man is perverted!

What is he doing? Kissing the earth!" And particularly when the pope went to India... There, kissing the earth means you are kissing cow dung - all the earth there is cow dung. But this is sexual perversion, nothing else.

The previous pope was a confirmed homosexual. Before he became pope he was a cardinal in Milan. And the whole of Milan laughed; it was the talk of the town, because he was always hanging around with a boyfriend. Then he was chosen to be the pope - that was the last joke - and he appointed his boyfriend as his secretary.

The word "orgasm" is a beautiful word. It simply means two persons' energies merging, meeting in a joyful wholeness. Man and woman are half, half of one whole. So when the whole comes together, there is tremendous joy. But because of the religions, millions of people never experience orgasm.

In India, I know that at least ninety-eight percent of women have never had any orgasm. In Indian languages there is no word for orgasm, for the simple reason that the Indian woman has been taught that she has to just lie down silently when the man is making love. Only prostitutes move and enjoy; ladies don't do that. So a lady lies down just like a corpse, and the gentleman, without the lady supporting him, is finished alone. There never comes a meeting of both energies at the highest peak of dance, so they don't know what orgasm is.

Ejaculation is not orgasm. Your whole body should go into such a dance that each atom is dancing within you - and so should be the case with the woman.

But religions have prohibited it, saying that it is against a woman's grace to enjoy, so she remains with closed eyes. Even to open her eyes is against etiquette. And because the man cannot enjoy it alone... what he is doing is simply masturbation, it is not something that can create an orgasmic state. And he is destroying the woman; her whole life she will never know what tremendous sources of joy she had in her own body.

The man will find some prostitute in order to find joy. To keep the wife a lady, a prostitute is needed.

He is destroying two women. To make a woman a prostitute is the ugliest act that man can do - to force her to sell her body. But because he has to maintain the lady in grace, the prostitute is needed.

With the prostitute you may have a more vigorous sexual exercise, gymnastics, but you can't have orgasm there either because there is no love. Money cannot purchase love.

Only love and sex in their totality, accepted, blissfully enjoyed, can bring orgasm.

The word is very beautiful because it comes closest to the meditative state, which is orgasmic. It is orgasmic not in the sexual sense, but it has all the qualities of the orgasm. Buddha, sitting under his bodhi tree, is in an orgasmic state with the whole existence. His whole being is dancing with the wind, with the sun, with the rain.

The sexual orgasm is just a little window that opens into a wider and wider sky. You need not stay behind the window. You should thank your sexual energy that it opened the window - but go outside, because far bigger experiences are waiting for you.

So those who call me the "sex guru" are simply stupid. They don't understand a simple thing.

I repeat again: I am the most anti-sex person in the whole world. If I am listened to there will be no pornography, there will be no homosexuals, there will be no lesbians - there will be no perversions of any kind. And you call me the "sex guru"!

Question 5:

It is a strange question - strange, because Christianity does not have any philosophy, it has a theology. And there is a great difference between philosophy and theology.

Theology begins with a belief, with faith. And philosophy begins with doubt, logic, reason.

Philosophy is thinking; theology is believing without thinking. If you think, you cannot be a Christian; you cannot be a part of any religion at all. No religion allows thinking, so no religion has a philosophy:

they all have theologies.

So the first thing: Christianity has no philosophy. It says "believe" - believe in the savior, believe in Jesus Christ, believe that he is the only begotten son of God, believe in God, believe in the trinity.

But it is always "believe," and believing makes a man a hypocrite, because deep down you know that belief cannot become a truth. Deep down you know that this is only a belief; you have not experienced it. There is no base for it, it is baseless: a single doubt and the whole edifice will be shattered on the ground.

Now, a Christian believes that Jesus is born of a virgin mother. Can you think about it? If you think, doubt will be needed. You can only believe, and in believing... you know perfectly well that it is unnatural, it cannot happen.

Christianity says that Jesus was resurrected after his death. You have to believe it because there is no proof, no evidence. In the contemporary literature of Jesus Christ's life, even the name of Jesus is not mentioned. Do you think a phenomenon like a man getting crucified, getting resurrected, would go unnoticed? that a man who brings dead people to life would not be reported anywhere? that a man who walks on water...?

Do you think this man would have been crucified? He would have been hailed as the messiah by the Jews themselves, because what more do you want? - none of your other prophets have done anything of this kind. But there is not even a mention that there was such a person as Jesus Christ.

And he did not have a big following. Whatever following he had were uneducated, uncultured, poor people - you can count them just on your fingers - but not a single rabbi, and Judea was full of rabbis of great scholarship.

If you think, you cannot believe in these things. If you think about God, you cannot believe.

So Christianity has no philosophy. No religion can afford to be philosophical; it can only remain theological.

I said it is a strange question because I don't have any philosophy either, but for a different reason.

I don't have any theology either.

I don't believe in believing.

I don't believe in doubting.

I believe in searching, in seeking.

I have a way of life but I don't have a philosophy, so I cannot say, "These are the things that make my catechism."

And my whole way of life is simple, it does not need much philosophizing. It is simple: to learn to be silent, to learn to be watchful of your thoughts - because as you become more and more watchful of your thoughts, thoughts start disappearing. And there comes a time when you are in a state of no-mind - fully alert, fully aware, perfectly conscious, but there is nothing to be conscious of, there is nothing to be aware of. You are simply aware, simply conscious.

This is the most valuable moment in life, because in life and in existence all energy moves in a circle. When your consciousness cannot find any object to be conscious of - and remember the meaning of the word ?object'; it means a hindrance, an objection, a prevention. So when your consciousness has no objection anywhere and simply goes all the way, then it turns upon itself, because things in existence move in circles. A circle is the way in which all energy moves. And when your consciousness becomes conscious of itself, that's what I call enlightenment. It is a simple thing.

Philosophy is a big word. I don't like big words; they are always phony. My approach towards life is very simple and direct: I don't have any philosophy, I don't have any theology, I have only a methodology. And the name of my methodology is meditation.

So nobody needs to be converted, because I don't have a religion. The Mohammedans can come to me, the Hindus can come to me, the Jews can come to me, the Christians can come to me - they have come to me - because I don't require any kind of conversion.

I teach a simple method so that they can know their very source of life - and knowing it is knowing godliness.

Question 6:

My ideas are my actions; otherwise I am a lazy man. I have been telling my people that I am the lazy man's guide to enlightenment. Action! Just the very word freaks me out! But ideas are enough; they are more powerful than any action. I have only ideas, and I am persecuted for my ideas.

I have never done anything, good or bad, for which I can be condemned or praised. All that I have done in my life is to find out the truth about anything that is the concern of the moment and say it forcefully, emphatically, with the authority of my own experience.

And I don't think any action is needed. These thoughts will move on their own, from one mind to another mind, and will create the danger the politicians are afraid of. The danger is very imminent because they don't have any ideas to argue against me - neither the politicians nor the religious leaders. That is their weakness. Preventing me from coming to their lands will not help: my ideas will still reach there. If they can reach to the Soviet Union, they can reach anywhere else without any trouble. They can prevent me, but they cannot prevent my ideas.

There was one case in America in which the other party wanted to take a deposition from me, and the judge allowed a deposition by telephone. And now I have been denied entry into America for five years by a federal court. I told my attorney there, "Enquire of the judge if I have been barred from coming into America totally or partially - because my voice will be coming in, and in fact my voice is the thing. I don't have anything else. So why prevent me? If on the telephone I can talk to an American attorney, what is the point of preventing me, because I never do anything except talking."

The attorney said, "The point is very significant."

Because what else will I do? What else have I done in five years in America? I simply talk and go to my room.

No, I have no actions. And I don't believe in actions, because every action becomes somehow violent. And if they are so much afraid even of my ideas... if there were also some actions, then they would not tolerate me alive anymore.

They cannot kill me right now because they don't have any reason at all. They can try - and that's what they are doing - to prevent my ideas from reaching people. But that is impossible: I have my people all over the world. And ideas can be sent in different ways. For example, this is one of the ways of sending the ideas - your newspaper will be sending my ideas to thousands of people who may have never heard about me. And perhaps some of them will be turned on.

Question 7:

Yes, your individuality remains, but your personality disappears - and you have to understand the difference between the two.

The personality is something that is given by the society, by the religion, by education, by your profession. You have got a certain personality. That will be gone because it is a social product.

But you were born with an individuality of your own. With death, you will be taking your individuality with you. Everything else that you have earned on the way will be taken back; it does not belong to you. Your degrees, your prizes, your awards, your Nobel prizes, your prestige, your reputation - everything will be dropped. That I call your personality.

But you have an individuality - innocent, just the way you were born... utterly clean, a tabula rasa, nothing written on you, no name, nameless. You will go beyond death with that nameless, innocent individuality. That is your soul that never dies. It is eternal: it has always been here and it will always be here. It will take different forms - that means different personalities - until one day you become so fed up with personalities that before death drops them, you yourself drop them.

That's what I call renunciation, sannyas: what death does, you do on your own accord. Before death, you drop all your personality, all your degrees, all your respectability, your name, your fame, everything, and you become an innocent child, reborn. When you can have the taste of individuality here, why wait for death?

And this is one of the ways to defeat death, because then death won't have anything to take away from you. You will die consciously. The reason death has to make you unconscious is to take things from you; otherwise you will cling to those things and you will not leave them.

Sannyas is a suicide - a suicide of the personality - and a rebirth, a rebirth of individuality. And the innocence and the freshness and the beauty of it is just beyond words. It is simply an ecstasy that goes on growing every day bigger and bigger. It knows no limits.