No Lower, No Higher

The first question:

Question 1:

Colin Doyle, simplicity is to live without ideals. Ideals create complexity; ideals create division in you and hence complexity. The moment you are interested in becoming somebody else you become complex. To be contented with yourself as you are is simplicity. The future brings complexity; when you are utterly in the present you are simple.

Simplicity does not mean to live a life of poverty. That is utterly stupid because the person who imposes a life of poverty on himself is not simple at all. He is a hypocrite. The need to impose poverty means, deep down, he hankers for the diametrically opposite; otherwise why should there be any need to impose it? You impose a certain character upon yourself because you are just the opposite of it.

The angry person wants to become compassionate; the violent person wants to become non-violent.

If you are non-violent you will not try to become non-violent. For what? The person who imposes poverty upon himself is simply trying to live out a life according to others, not according to his own innermost core, not according to his own spontaneity. And to live according to others is never to be simple.

To live according to others means to live a life of imitation. It will be a plastic life: you will be one thing on the surface and just the opposite of it in your depths. And only the depths matter, the surface never matters. You will be a saint on the surface and a sinner deep down. And that's what is going to be decisive about you because God is only in contact with your depth, not with your surface.

The surface is in contact with the society, the existence is in contact with the depth. The existence only knows what you are, it never knows what you are pretending. The existence never knows about your actings. You may be pretending to be a great saint, a mahatma, but existence will never know about it, because it never knows about anything false. Anything false happens out of existence. It knows only the real, the real you.

Simplicity means to be just yourself, whosoever you are, in tremendous acceptance, with no goal, with no ideal. All ideals are crap - scrap all of them.

It needs guts to be simple. It needs guts because you will be in constant rebellion. It needs guts because you will never be adjusted to the so-called, rotten society that exists around you. You will constantly be an outsider. But you will be simple, and simplicity has beauty. You will be utterly in harmony with yourself. There will be no conflict within you, there will be no split within you.

The ideal brings the split. The bigger the ideal, the bigger is goin g to be the split. The ideal means somewhere in the future one day, maybe in this life or another life, you will be a great saint.

Meanwhile you are a sinner. It helps you to go on hoping; it helps you to go on believing in the surface, that tomorrow everything will be okay, that tomorrow you will be as you should be. The today can be tolerated. You can ignore it, you need not note it, you need not take any notice of it.

The real thing is going to be tomorrow.

But the tomorrow never comes. It is always today... it is always today.

And the person who lives in ideals goes on missing reality because reality is now, here. To be now and to be here is to be simple: to be like trees, herenow, to be like clouds, herenow, to be like birds, herenow - to be like Buddhas, herenow. The ideal needs the future. Simplicity is not an ideal.

People have made an ideal out of simplicity too; such is human stupidity.

Simplicity can never be an ideal, because no ideal can create simplicity. It is the ideal which poisons you and makes you complex, divides you, makes two persons in you - the one that you are and the one that you would like to be. Now there is going to be a constant war, a civil war.

And when you are fighting with yourself - the violent person trying to be non-violent, the ugly person trying to be beautiful, and so on, so forth - when you are constantly trying, endeavoring to be something else that you are not, your energy is dissipated in that conflict, your energy goes on leaking. And energy is delight. And to have energy is to be alive, to be fresh, to be young.

Look at people's faces, how dull they appear. Look into their eyes, their eyes have lost all luster and all depth. Feel their presence and you will not feel any radiance, you will not feel any energy streaming from them. On the contrary you will feel as if they are sucking you. Rather then overflowing with energy they have become black holes: they suck you, they exploit your energy. Being with them you will become poorer. That's why when you go into a crowd and come back you feel tired, weary, you feel exhausted, you need rest. Why? Why after being in a crowd do you feel as if you have lost something? You certainly lose something, because the crowd consists of black holes. And the more unintelligent the crowd is, the more of a mob it is, the more you will feel exhausted.

That's why when you are alone, sitting silently, not with anybody - in a tremendous celibate state, just alone - one becomes replenished, rejuvenated. That's why meditation makes you younger, makes you livelier. You start sharing something with existence. Your energy is frozen no more; it starts flowing. You are in a kind of dance, as stars are. A song arises in you.

But in the crowd you always lose. In meditation you always gain. Why? What happens in meditation?

In meditation you become simple: the future is your concern no more. That's what meditation is all about: dropping the concern with past and future, being herenow. Only this moment exists. And whenever it happens, whenever only this moment exists - watching a sunrise, or looking at a white cloud floating in the sky, or just being with a tree, silently communing, or observing a bird on the wing - whenever you forget all about past and future and the present moment takes possession of you, when you are utterly possessed by this moment, you will feel rejuvenated. Why? The split disappears, the split created by the ideals. You are one in that moment, integrated; you are all together.

Simplicity is not an ideal; you cannot impose simplicity on yourself. That's why I never say that people like Mahatma Gandhi are simple. They are not, they cannot be. Simplicity is their ideal, they are trying to attain it. Simplicity is a goal far away in the future, distant, and they are striving, they are straining, they are in great effort. How can you create simplicity out of effort? Simplicity simply means that which is. Out of effort you are trying to improve upon existence.

Existence is perfect as it is, it needs no improvement. The so-called saints go on constantly improving upon themselves - drop this, drop that, repress this, impose that, this is not good, that is good.... Continuous effort, and in this very effort they are lost.

Simplicity is a state of effortlessness;it is humbleness - not the humbleness created against arrogance, not humbleness created against the ego, not humbleness opposite to the proud mind.

No, humbleness is not opposite to pride. Humbleness is simply absence of pride. Try to see the point. If your humbleness is against your pride, if you have strived to drop your pride, your ego, your arrogance, then what you have done is only repression. Now you will become proud about your humbleness; now you will start bragging, how humble you are. This is what happens. Just see the so-called humble people - they are constantly broadcasting that they are humble.

The really humble people will not know that they are humble; how can they then brag about it? How can the humble person know that he is humble? The humble person is a person no more. The humble person is in a state of fana: the humble person has dissolved. Now he is only a presence.

Humbleness is a presence, not a characteristic of personality, not a trait, but just a presence. Others will feel it, but you will not be able to feel it yourself. So is the case with simplicity.

Simplicity simply means living moment to moment spontaneously, not according to some philosophy, not according to Jainism, Buddhism, Hinduism, not according to any philosophy. Whenever you live according to a philosophy you have betrayed yourself, you are an enemy to yourself. Simplicity means to be in a deep friendship with oneself, to live your life with no idea interfering.

It needs guts, certainly, because you will be living constantly in insecurity. The man who lives with ideals is secure. He is predictable; that is his security. He knows what he is going to do tomorrow.

He knows, if a certain situation arises, this is the way he will react to it. He is always certain. The man who is simple knows nothing about tomorrow, knows nothing about the next moment, because he is not going to act out of his past. He will respond out of his present awareness.

The simple person has no "character", only the complex person has character. Good or bad, that is not the point. There are good characters and bad characters, but both are complex. The simple person is characterless, he is neither good nor bad, but he has a beauty which no good people, no bad people can ever have. And the good and the bad are not very different; they are aspects of the same coin. The good person is bad behind it and the bad person is good behind it.

You will be surprised to know that saints always dream that they are committing sins. If you look into the dreams of your so-called saints you will be very much surprised. What kinds of dreams do they go on seeing? That is their suppressed mind that bubbles up, surfaces into their dreams. Sinners always dream that they have become saints. Sinners have the most beautiful dreams, because they have been committing sins their whole life. They are tired of all those things. Now the denied part starts speaking to them in their dreams.

In dreams the denied part speaks to you, your unconscious speaks to you: the unconscious is the denied part. Remember, if you are good in your conscious, if you have cultivated good characteristics in your conscious, you will be bad: all that you have denied will become your unconscious, and vice versa.

The simple person has no conscious, no unconscious; he has no division. He is simply aware. His whole house is full of light. His whole being knows only one thing, awareness. He has not denied anything, hence he has not created the unconscious. This is something to be understood.

Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung and Alfred Adler and others think that the conscious and unconscious are something natural. They are not. The unconscious is a by-product of civilization.

The more a person is civilized, the bigger an unconscious he has, because civilization means repression. Repression means you are denying a few parts of your being from coming into light, you are pushing them into darkness, you are throwing them into your basement so that you never come across them.

People have thrown their sex, their anger, their violence into the basement and they have locked the doors. But violence, sex and anger and things like that cannot be locked up. They are like ghosts.

They can pass through the walls, there is no way to prevent them. If you succeed in preventing them in your daytime, they will come in the night - they will haunt you in your dreams.

It is because of the unconscious that people dream. The more civilized a person, the more he dreams. Go to the aboriginals, the natural people - a few are still in existence - and you will be again surprised to know that they don't dream much, very rarely, once in a while. Years pass and they never report any dreaming. They simply sleep, without dreams, because they have not repressed anything. They have been living naturally.

The simple person will not have the unconscious, the simple person will not have dreams, but the complex person will have dreams.

Mahatma Gandhi said that although he had succeeded in attaining celibacy as far as the waking consciousness is concerned, in dreams sexual imagery still floated into his being. To the very end he was having sexual dreams, and he was very much puzzled. He was puzzled because he was absolutely mis-educated about the whole phenomenon. He was thinking that he had done whatsoever one can do to be celibate. And he had done it; there is no question about his sincerity as far as his efforts are concerned, he was very sincere. He had done all that is said by the tradition, and he had failed.

In Mahatma Gandhi's failure the whole tradition has failed - the tradition of repression, the tradition of denying, the tradition of life negation, the tradition of imposing ideals. All has failed in his experiment, because in the night whenever he would sleep, the unconscious would start speaking and the denied parts would start playing in his mind. All that he had denied would surface.

That's what happens to you. If you have a fast one day, in the night you will have a feast in your dreams. In the dreams Deeksha is bound to invite you for a special treat! The fast creates the feast in the dream. And the people who are feasting in the day may start thinking of fasting; they always think about it.

It is only rich countries which become interested in fasting. Now only America is interested in fasting, dieting, and all things like that. A poor country cannot think of fasting. A poor country is always fasting, always dieting, always under nourished. Only rich people think of fasting. In India, Jainas are the richest community; their religion consists of fasting. Mohammedans are the poorest, their religion consists of feasting. When a poor man celebrates a religious day he gives a feast. When a rich man celebrates his religious day he fasts.

You can see the logic in it. We go on compensating. The dream is compensatory, it compensates your waking life. The simple man will not dream, the simple man will not have any unconscious.

The simple man will be simple. He will live moment to moment with no idea how to live; he will not have any philosophy of life. He will trust in his intelligence. What is the need of having a philosophy?

Why should one have a philosophy? - so that it can guide you. It means if you are stupid you need a philosophy of life so that it can guide you. If you are intelligent you don't need any philosophy of life. Intelligence is enough unto itself, a light unto itself.

A blind man asks for guidance: "Where is the door? In what direction should I move? Where is the turn?" Only the blind man prepares himself before he takes any move. The man who has eyes simply moves because he can see. When the door comes he will know and when the turn comes he will know. He can trust in his eyes.

And that is the case with the inner world too. Trust in your intelligence, don't trust in philosophies of life; otherwise you will remain stupid. The major part of humanity has remained unintelligent because it has trusted in philosophies of life - Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan.

Again, something of very great importance to be remembered: each child is born intelligent.

Intelligence is not something that a few have and a few don't have. Intelligence is the fragrance of life itself. Life has it - if you are alive you are intelligent - but then if you never trust in it it starts slowly, slowly disappearing from your life. If you don't use your legs you will lose the capacity to run.

If you don't use your eyes for three years and you remain with a blindfold you will become blind. You can keep your senses alive only if you go on continuously using them.

Intelligence is a natural phenomenon; every child is born intelligent. Very few people live intelligently, and very few people die intelligently. Ninety-nine point nine percent of people remain stupid their whole life - and they were not unintelligent in the beginning. So what happens? They never use their intelligence. When they are small children they trust their parents and their guidance.

In a better world the parents, if they really love their children, will teach them to trust their own intelligence. In a better world the parents will help the children to be independent as soon as possible, to be on their own.

Then, they have to trust the teachers in the school; then the professors in the college and in the university. By the time one third of their life is gone, they come out of the university utterly stupid.

One third of their life they have been taught to trust somebody else: that's how their intelligence has been prevented from functioning.

Look at small children, how intelligent they are, how alive, how fresh, how tremendously ready to learn. And look at older people, dull, insipid, not ready to learn a thing, clinging to all that they know, clinging to the known, never ready to go in any adventure.

In a better world children will be thrown upon themselves as fast as possible; the whole effort of the parents should be to make the child use his intelligence. And the whole effort, if education is right - if it is education and not MISeducation - will be to throw the child again and again to his own intelligence, so that he can function, so that he can use his intelligence. He may not be so efficient in the beginning, that is true - the teacher may have the right answer, and if the student has to work out his own answer the answer may not be so right - but that is not the point at all. The answer may not be so right, it may not correspond to the answers given in the books, but it will be intelligent. And that is the real crux of the matter.

A teacher told his students, "Make some pictures, paint something about Jesus, " and the children painted. The teacher had been talking about Jesus; it was a Christian Sunday school. One child painted one aeroplane. It was a very haphazard effort, it only looked like an aeroplane; and four windows were on the aeroplane. The teacher was intrigued. He said, "Who are these people looking from the windows?" The child said, "One is God the Father, the other is Jesus Christ the Son, and the third is the Holy Ghost." Certainly the teacher was even more curious. "And who is this fourth?"

- because three are okay, but who is this fourth? And the child said, "He is Pontius the Pilot."

The question may not be answered rightly - that is not the point - but look at the intelligence. Now the teacher would have never found it on his own, that "Who is the fourth?" Only a child can have such an intelligence, so fresh. Who bothers about your trinity! Just see the child and his intelligence.

Watch children and you will be constantly surprised. But we just start destroying their intelligence because we are too concerned about the right answer - not the intelligent answer, but the right answer. That is a wrong concern. Let the answer be intelligent, let the answer be a little bit original, let the answer be the child's own. Don't be bothered about the right, don't be in such a hurry; the right will come on its own. Let the child search for it, let him stumble upon it on his own. Why are we in such a hurry?

We simply drop the child's growth of intelligence; we supply the right answer. lust think: the whole process is that the child is never allowed to find the answer himself. We give him the answer. When the answer is given from the outside, intelligence need not grow, because intelligence only grows when it has to find the answer itself.

But we are so obsessed with the idea of the right. No wrong should ever be committed. Why not?

And the person who never commits any wrong never grows. Growth needs that you should go astray sometimes, that you should start playing around, fooling around, that you should find original things - they may be wrong; and you should come to the right by your own efforts, by your own growth; then there is intelligence.

To be simple means to be intelligent. Simplicity is intelligence, living without ideals, without guides, without maps, just living moment to moment without any security.

Our concern with the right and our fear of the wrong is nothing but our fear of the insecure. The right makes us secure, the wrong makes us insecure, but life is insecurity. There is no security anywhere.

You may have a bank balance, but the bank can go bankrupt any day. You may have the security of having a husband or a wife, but the wife can leave you any moment, she can fall in love; or the husband may die.

Life is insecure. The security is only an illusion that we create around ourselves, a cozy illusion. And because of this cozy illusion we kill our intelligence. The man who wants to live simply will have to live in insecurity, will have to accept the fact that nothing is secure and certain, that we are on an unknown journey, that nobody can be certain where we are going and nobody can be certain from where we are coming.

In fact, except for the stupid people nobody has illusions of certainty. The more intelligent you are, the more uncertain you are. The more intelligent you are, the more hesitant - because life is vast.

Life is immense, immeasurable, mysterious. How can you be certain?

Living in uncertainty, living in insecurity, is simplicity.

And that's what I mean by sannyas: a life of insecurity, a life without ideals, without character, a life not rooted in the past, not motivated by the future; a life utterly herenow.

The second question:

Question 2:

Curiosity is good, curiosity is beautiful, but don't stop at it. It is a good beginning, but not the end, because curiosity always remains lukewarm. It is an intellectual gymnastics.

It is good to be curious because that is how one starts the journey of inquiry into existence; but if one simply remains curious, then there will be no intensity in it. One can move from one curiosity to another - one will become a driftwood - from one wave to another wave, never getting anchored anywhere.

Curiosity is good as a beginning, but then one has to become more passionate. One has to make life a quest, not only a curiosity. And what do I mean when I say one has to make one's life a quest?

Curiosity creates questions, but your life never becomes a quest. Questions are many, a quest is one. When some question becomes so important to you that you are ready to sacrifice your life for it, then it is a quest. When some question has such importance, such significance that you can gamble, that you can stake all that you have, then it becomes a quest.

Curiosity is good as a triggering point for a quest, but there are many people who simply remain curious their whole life. Their life is a wastage; they are rolling stones - they never gather any moss.

They remain childish, they never become mature. They ask a thousand and one questions, but they are not really interested in answers. By the time you have answered them, they have prepared another question. In fact, when the Master is answering the question, if the disciple is only a curious one, he is already thinking about other questions to ask. He is not listening to the answer at all. He is not interested in the answer, he has enjoyed asking the question.

And then your curiosity can get you hooked on something utterly nonsensical. There are people who are curious as to who made the world. Now this is utter nonsense. Buddha said it so many times, that "How is it going to affect your life? It is not going to deepen your meditation, it is not going to help you become enlightened, it is not going to give you freedom, it is not going to give you any light; why are you concerned with who made the world?" Whether it was A or B or C, a Christian God, a Hindu God or a Mohammedan God, how does it matter to you? Even if it is decidedly known that A made the world, what are you going to do then? Then you will start asking something else; that question is finished.

But these questions are never finished, because these questions are utterly meaningless, absurd - so they are never finished. One can go on asking and asking and asking, and the whole life can become just a wastage.

It's good to be curious as a beginning, but don't remain curious forever. You will need some more passion in order to grow. Curiosity is not hot enough to transform your life. It is superficial, shallow.

You will have to create a longing to know truth, an immense, intense passion for truth.

Because that needs courage, because risk is involved, people go on thinking about questions. That is their substitute for the quest.

And this is the difference between philosophy and religion: religion is a quest, philosophy is only curiosity. The philosopher is never transformed by whatsoever he finds. He remains the same. For example, if you meet Aristotle you will not find any impact of his philosophy in his life, no, nothing of it. He will be as devoid of his own philosophy as you are. He only thinks, he does not live it. But if you meet the Buddha, then whatsoever he says, he lives it. He says only because he lives it; saying comes later on. Living comes first, living precedes it.

Make your life a quest. It is good that you have come here, but don't go as you have come. Go with a passion, a fire in your heart. Otherwise curiosity can be dangerous too.

I have heard...

Sam Jones, the most inquisitive man in New Haven, was riding down a branch line from Storrs, when an Englishman came into the car with a crutch and only one leg. After a long pause in which he was consumed with growing curiosity, Sam began talking:

"Guess you were in the army, stranger?" looking down at the leg.

"Oh, no, I have never been in the army."

"Fought a duel somewhere, maybe?"

"No, sir, never fought a duel."

"These streetcars are dangerous things," hazarded Sam.

"I was never in a streetcar or railroad accident," the Englishman expanded.

All of Sam's leading questions got him nowhere. At last he asked outright just how the man had lost his leg.

"I will tell you," said the Englishman, "on condition that you will promise not to ask me another question."

"Very well, just tell me how you lost that leg, and I won't ask another question."

The Englishman regarded him agreeably. "It was bit off," he said.

"Bit off!" exclaimed Sam. "Well, I declare. I should like to know what on earth - ."

"No, sir, not another question," glared the Englishman. "Not one. "

Sam Jones reached New Heaven with a sick headache.

He died within a week of unsatisfied curiosity.

Let your curiosity be transformed here. Let it become a flame in your being, a quest. You have come here philosophically. Go from here as a religious person.

Religion is the quest for truth. It wants to know it, and not on somebody else's authority, not borrowed from scriptures. Religion wants to know it on one's own, and to have that quality is one of the greatest blessings of life.

I create inquiry here, not an inquiry that can ever be satisfied by anybody else even I cannot satisfy it. I simply give you a thirst; I make you more and more thirsty. One day that very thirst will take you into your innermost shrine.

There truth waits for you. There God abides.

The third question:

Question 3:

Anand Maitreya, Morarji Desai has the mind of a fascist.

How does it matter whether he likes my philosophy of life or not? Who is he? By being the prime minister of this country, it does not mean that everybody has to agree with him, that only that which he likes can exist or has the right to exist. If he does not like my work, my activities, my philosophy of life, that is his problem. He should try to understand more; he should try to be a little more intelligent, a little more aware and meditative.

That does not mean that he has to prevent my work, but that's what he is doing, trying to do. And the strange thing is he has come to power in the name of democracy. What is democracy then?

Democracy means everybody has the right to think in his own way, to live in his own way.

Democracy means that the government is not going to impose its own ideology on everybody, that the government will keep away from interfering in people's freedom.

What I am saying, what I am, has nothing to do with him or his government. But this is how it happens to every politician: when he is out of power he talks about democracy; when he is in power he becomes a fascist. Morarji Desai is another illustration of Lord Acton's famous statement: Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Just within one and a half years he has forgotten all about democracy? It always happens.

It is something strange that power changes people. My own observation is that power does not change them, in fact, but only exposes them. It brings whatsoever is real in their being to the surface. When a person is not in power, he cannot be fascist; he has to hide that trait. He cannot be arrogant, he has to create a facade around himself so nobody comes to know about it; otherwise he will never be able to get into power. Once he gets into power, then there is no need; he is no more afraid of the people, now he is in power. Now he can do whatsoever he always wanted to do but was not capable of doing.

Morarji Desai has been against me all along. The conflict has continued at least for fifteen years, but because he was not in power, he could not do a thing. Now he is in power, so the fascist in him surfaces.

A group of former schoolmates had a reunion and were talking about old times. One of them, a great politician, said, "When I was a little boy, I wanted to be a pirate."

"I am glad one of us has fulfilled his ambition," said somebody.

Politics is the last shelter of the scoundrels.

Why do people seek power? Somewhere deep down there is a great desire to dominate, that's why they seek power. So naturally, when they have power, they want to dominate; they want to dominate each and every phenomenon that is happening.

My work is not political, not at all. Why should he be worried about my work? What I am doing is something psychological. It is none of his business, but the power wants to express itself. A deep desire has always been in him to prevent my work, but up to now he was not capable of doing it.

Now he is capable of doing it, and he cannot resist the temptation.

Once, when I started criticizing Mahatma Gandhi, he wanted that my entry into his province, Gujarat, should be prevented - even my entry - but he could not do a thing about it. Now he is in power, and he has had this wound about me in his heart for fifteen years. But his disliking is not any criterion. If he dislikes, he is perfectly free to dislike. My own feeling is that he does not understand what I am doing here.

In the first place, I have no philosophy of life. All that I am teaching to my people is to live without a philosophy of life - to just live! I am teaching life, not a philosophy of life!

Secondly, I am not teaching any doctrine, any dogma. I am not teaching thinking. On the contrary, I am teaching my people how to be without thought, how not to be in the thinking, how to disappear from the world of thinking, how to be utterly silent so not even a single thought moves in your mind.

When the screen of the mind is utterly empty, when the projector of thinking has stopped functioning, meditation arises. And meditation is the door to God.

I am not here teaching people how to think. This is not a school of philosophy. I am not trying to give you better minds. This is not a place to cultivate mind and knowledge, this is a place to drop all mind and all knowledge. This is a place where you learn how to be a no-mind. I teach no-mind.

So my feeling is that he does not understand a bit what is happening here. But he is a very prejudiced man and he thinks he knows. He thinks he knows all that is worth knowing.

And all that he knows is just playing the games of politics, and nothing else.

You say he said that "he did not like your thinking, your philosophy of life, and your work. He also showed strong dislike for our ashram and its activities. "

He is obsessed with me and with my ashram. Why should he have a strong dislike for me and for my ashram? He must be having great nightmares about me and my people. You must be doing Kundalini Meditation in his dreams, and Chaotic Meditation. This dislike shows that somewhere deep down there is a "like". This enmity shows that somehow deep down he is interested. If you hate somebody so much, that is an indication that you are attracted, that you are magnetically pulled.

And I know the reason is there for that magnetic pull. He cannot come because of his arrogance, but the pull is there. His whole life he has tried to meditate - and he has failed. Hence the attraction.

He wants to meditate, but it is difficult for his egoistic pattern of life to come here as a disciple, to come to learn. It is difficult.

But the pull is there, and whenever you are attracted and something prevents you, attraction becomes repulsion. When love starts being blocked, it becomes hate. Hate is nothing but love doing sirshasan - love standing on its own head. He is immensely attracted; that's why he goes on making statements about me, goes on criticizing me, and without any understanding at all.

He also said, somewhere, just a few days before, that he is willing to appoint a commission to inquire into the activities of my ashram, of this commune, but he said, "That is not going to profit Rajneesh and his work." Now what kind of commission will this be if he has already decided that that is not going to profit the ashram? A commission means an open inquiry. If the decision has already been taken, if he has already concluded that this is not going to help my work, that this is going to harm my work, what kind of inquiry will this be?

That's what he is doing with other people, with Indira. He has already decided, and then a commission is made. The commission only goes through empty gestures; the conclusion has already been reached. The commission has only to make a show that justice is being done.

This is not the way of a democratic person. This is the way of a fascist.

There is only one hope, that he is very old.... It is good that he is not young; otherwise this country would suffer very long.

It is very difficult for Indians to be democratic because India has lived down the centuries in a very fascist way. The Hindu mind is fascist. The Hindu mind believes that they are the purest people in the world, that they are the highest people of the world, that they are the most religious people of the world, that God has chosen them specially, that their country is not ordinary earth, it is divine land, that their scriptures are not ordinary scriptures like other scriptures of other religions - they have been written by God himself.

The Hindu mind is fascist, it is not religious, and the Hindu mind has lived with this attitude for at least five thousand years.

It has crushed the downtrodden, the poor; they have not been treated as human beings. They are called untouchables; they cannot even be touched. Not only can they not be touched, the Hindu mind has not even tolerated their shadows to fall upon them. When an untouchable in the ancient days used to pass, he had to shout that "I am passing through this street. Please, move yourself away from me." Otherwise who knows? Even if his shadow touches you, you will have to take a bath, you will have to purify. And naturally, if you have to take a bath, if unnecessarily you have to go back to the river and you have to do the whole ritual, prayer, et cetera, and then do your purification, you become annoyed.

Untouchables have even been killed just because their shadow has touched a brahmin, the highest Hindu caste. And even today they are being killed.

And since Morarji Desai has come to power, in this one and a half years, more untouchables have been killed than ever in the thirty years' history of Indian freedom. Their houses are burned, right now, in this day, the twentieth century. People are treated like cattle, not even like cattle, worse than that. People are treated as things. People are being burned and killed; their women are being raped, for no other reason: just because they are untouchables.

And small things annoy the Hindu mind. If the Untouchable wants to go into the temple he cannot. If he tries he will be killed. And these are the people who think they are religious, and even the temple is not democratic.

If the untouchable goes to the well, he is not allowed to draw water from the common well, because the well will become impure. If the untouchable wants his children to be in the same school, it is difficult, and so on, so forth.

So, small things annoy the Hindu mind; they have been fascist all along. And Morarji Desai is a Hindu chauvinist.

Hindus have been against women down the ages. No other country has repressed women like this.

The woman has been condemned as the door to hell. The woman is the source of all sins; the woman is the source of all degradation, immorality; the woman is the source of all that is bad in the world, all that is evil. She is the agent of evil.

Now, what kind of mind is this? And these people brag about their purity, their religiousness, their spirituality. Now these are the things that are creating trouble about me in Morarji Desai's mind I respect woman as much as I respect man; to me, they are equal. And I condemn all those scriptures which have condemned women as the source of evil. Those scriptures are the source of evil!

To me, the brahmin and the untouchable are the same. I don't believe in any castes. I don't believe in any distinctions between people - black and white, Hindu and Mohammedan, Christian and Jew.

And that is creating great turmoil in their minds. What am I doing? It seems blasphemous; it seems that I am betraying their tradition.

I am not betraying their tradition; I am simply destroying it! It needs to be burned, it needs to be thrown to the dogs, this whole tradition.

And then, the Hindus have been very much against life. And Morarji Desai is a representative: he is life negative. I am life affirmative. My only sin is that I love life and that I teach my people to live intensely, totally, wholly.

But in a democracy nobody can prevent me. Otherwise why go on bragging that this country is the greatest democracy of the world? Your actions show just the opposite. But the Hindu mind is hypocritical: it says one thing and does another.

Even the so-called greatest Hindus are hypocrites; their saying and doing are never the same. They have said that only God exists and all is illusion. And still the untouchable is not illusion. The distinction between the brahmin and the untouchable is real - and all is illusion, only God is real!

Even Shankara, the man who represents the essential Hindu teaching of God being the only reality and the world being illusory, even he, one day when he took his bath in the Ganges in Varanasi and was coming up the steps and was touched by an untouchable, was very angry, started abusing the untouchable. And the untouchable said, "Sir, you have said that all is illusion, only God is true.

Then why are you feeling so offended? One illusion has touched another illusion - and between two illusions can there be a real touch? The touch is also illusion. Why are you getting so annoyed?

"And if only God is real, and you say God is everywhere and all is God, then am I not part of God?

Only you are part of God? And if God has touched a God, how can one God make another God impure?"

But this is how the Hindu mind has functioned. It talks of great things, and it lives in a very opposite way. That has become its habit.

"Chandulal," said a rich Hindu grocer in Ahmedabad to his assistant, "have you mixed the glucose with the syrup?" "Yes, sir."

"And sanded the sugar?" "Yes, sir."

"Dampened the lettuce and mushrooms?" "Yes, sir."

"And put water in the milk?" "Yes, sir."

"Then you may come in to prayers."

This has been the way. Life is one thing - and the Hindus live it as disgustingly as anybody else in the world - and philosophy is another. They are beautiful talkers, immensely articulate, very philosophical and logical, but that seems to have nothing to do with their quality of life.

With me they are all angry because I am not a hypocrite. I live the way I like to live. I say things that go in tune with my life. For example, I am not against life and its joys - that's what I say, and that's how I live. They would have loved me very much if I was living like a beggar on the surface, if I was standing naked on the road, and carrying a deep desire inside me to reach sooner or later to heaven and enjoy all the joys there.

And what joys are these so-called saints thinking to enjoy in heaven? The same joys that they are renouncing here. They renounce love here, they renounce the woman here, and they are waiting for paradise where they will get beautiful women whose bodies are of gold and who never age - who remain stuck at the age of sixteen and whose bodies don't perspire. And they are waiting for heaven because there are trees; they are called kalpavrikshas - wish-fulfilling trees. You sit underneath the tree, and any wish that arises in you is immediately fulfilled - immediately. Not a single instant passes between the wish and its fulfillment.

But here, live a pretentious life. Don't enjoy, don't love, renounce everything and wait for eternal pleasures.

These people think that they are renunciates? What kind of renunciation is this? They are simply living a double life. Their inner life remains that of desire, longing, lust, and their outer life remains that of an ascetic.

I am not an ascetic. I am living herenow in paradise. And I teach you also to live herenow in paradise: this very earth the paradise, this very body the Buddha. I am not against life's pleasures; they are beautiful. I am not against all that life can shower on you. Its beauties, its joys, its blessings have to be received gratefully. I am not in any way condemnatory of anything.

I am not a worshiper of poverty, because poverty is the source of all sins. I would like the whole earth to become richer and richer, more affluent and more affluent. I would like everybody to have all that technology can provide now. Nobody need live starved, beggarly, dirty.

This is possible now. Technology can make this earth better than any paradise that you have invented in your scriptures.

But the Indian mind is against joys. And deep down, there is a great desire to have them too - which is natural! I am not saying that it should not be there inside you. I am saying you should not live against it. It is natural, it is God-given. Everyone wants to live a life of pleasure and not of pain, and this is natural, and I don't see that anything is wrong in it. Everybody would like to have a beautiful house surrounded by beautiful trees, and this is natural! The person who does not want it that way has something wrong in his head. He is neurotic.

Once a Hindu sannyasin came to see me. He saw all the beautiful trees and many flowers, and on the grounds where I was living I had a small pond, lotus flowers were there. He looked all around and he said, "Why all these trees? Why all these flowers? A man like you should live an ascetic life."

He was angry.

From where was this anger coming? He was living a neurotic life. To live with lotus flowers is beautiful, it is prayerful, it is meditative. Everybody should have a pond with lotus flowers.

But in India, people are even against flowers. And then they think they are great spiritualists; they think they are not hedonists. Their hedonism is only postponed, that's all. And because of that postponement they live a double life.

I am teaching my people to live a single, unitary life. There is no need to postpone. Be natural. I want Buddha, Gautam the Buddha, and Zorba the Greek to come closer and closer - to become one. My sannyasin has to be "Zorba the Buddha." Bring earth and heaven closer; let God and his world be joined together. Let your body and your soul be one - a song sung in togetherness, a dance where body and soul meet and merge.

I am a materialist-spiritualist. That is their trouble: they cannot conceive of it. They have always thought that materialism is something diametrically against, opposite to spiritualism, and I am trying to bring them closer. In fact, that's how it is. Your body is not opposed to your soul; otherwise why should they be together? And God is not opposed to the world; otherwise why should he create it?

There is tremendous harmony between the creator and his creation. In fact, when you attain to the space in which I am, you will see the creator has become his creation, he is not separate at all.

He has become the trees and the birds and the animals and the mountains and the rivers and the people: God has become his world.

This is my fundamental: that I am in tremendous love with existence, because it is God's manifestation, in all its forms. There is nothing lower and nothing higher, all is one. And the "lower"

and the "higher" have to be bridged because, down the centuries, you have been taught that the "lower" is far away from the "higher", so they have become unbridged. A gap has come into your being; that gap has to be bridged.

That's my whole work here, and I can understand why Morarji strongly dislikes it. He is a traditionalist, an orthodox Hindu, with no vision, with no insight into life. He is just a fascist Hindu, and my approach towards life is that of individual freedom - utter freedom for the individual.

The individual should not be interfered with unless he becomes dangerous to other people. Unless he starts interfering with other people's freedom he should not be interfered with. Each individual has to be himself and has to be given space enough to be himself.

That, the fascist mind cannot allow.

They have already decided against me. They have not come here, they have not seen what is happening here; he is not ready to appoint a commission so that our people can explain to their so-called experts what is happening here so they can have a more realistic approach. He is not willing to appoint a commission.

And he says if I go on insisting for a commission, then he will appoint one, but he wants that that will not be helpful in any way, that it will even harm. Why? The commission has to be open.

And I am not worried whether your commission harms or helps. We will have a good time, it will be fun. We will share a few jokes, that's all. I am not worried whether your commission helps me or harms me, what your commission can do.

But your commission may be helped. They may start thinking anew; it may be a blessing for them.

But the politicians go on thinking that they are creating great order. That's what Morarji Desai thinks, that he is creating great order in the society, and I am dangerous, that I am creating disorder.

I am not creating disorder. The society is in disorder. The society is already dying, it is rotten. You have become accustomed to its rottenness; that's why you can't see it. Just look around. What kind of society is this? Everybody is against everybody else; everybody is at each others' throats.

Everybody is jealous, violent, angry, full of hatred. Everybody is trying to dominate and kill the other in some way or other. And everybody is suicidal. Nobody seems to be dancing with joy, nobody seems to be in a state of celebration.

What more disorder can there be? The whole country is suffering from violence, hooliganism, murders; the whole country is in chaos. And these people think that I will destroy the order of the society I am trying to bring real order. The real order comes from the within; it comes out of understanding.

The real discipline is not that which is imposed from the outside.

That's the difference between religion and the irreligious mind. The irreligious mind is always behavioristic. The irreligious mind is represented by Pavlov, Skinner, and people like these. The Skinnerian approach is that you change the behavior of the person, and that will change his inner being. The religious approach is you change his inner being, and his behavior will follow. The outer is a shadow; it is not the center.

That's what I am doing here. My work is utterly religious. It is against Skinner and the behaviorists. I don't believe that you can change the person's soul by changing his outer behavior. You can change his outer behavior, and he can pretend, he can act, and deep down he will remain the same - because the center remains unaffected by the circumference.

You can start being simple outwardly - you can drop your clothes, you can renounce your home - but sitting in a Himalayan cave, what will you think? How is your thinking going to be different? How will your mind be different just by moving from the house to the cave? The mind does not change so easily. And if the mind changes, then you are alone even in the crowd, then you are in meditation even in the marketplace.

I am trying to make people aware that the change, the real change, comes from within and spreads outwards. But they are afraid that I may create a chaos.

A surgeon, an architect, and a politician were arguing about which of their professions was the oldest.

"Mine is, " said the surgeon. "It began when God removed Adam's rib to make Eve."

"My profession is older," said the architect. "It began when God created the world out of chaos."

"Yes, " said the politician, "but who created the chaos?"

And Morarji Desai and company think I am going to create chaos?

I am trying to bring order, real order. Their anger, their annoyance, is natural. If I am right, then they are wrong. And not only that they are wrong, but their whole tradition is wrong, their scriptures are wrong. They have lived up to now in illusions, without taking any note of the reality.

I am bringing a new vision, a new religion into the world - the religion which is wide enough to contain the world and God, both together, a vision big enough to contain the soul and the body both.

Up to now, the materialist was thought to be irreligious. He lived half, he lived the body part; and the spiritualist lived the other half, the soul part. And both were ugly, because both were incomplete.

Both had wounds because both needed the other to be whole and the other was missing. Both were unbalanced, both were neurotic.

Man can become sane only when man becomes whole. How to make man a perfect circle, a wholeness? The only way is to bring materialism and spiritualism closer and closer, so close that their boundaries disappear, that matter becomes divine, that God becomes matter. In that state only will man be able to be sane.

Traveling all over the country, while I was preparing for you people, I was studying all kinds of people - neurotic, psychotic, all kinds of people spiritual, material. Then I had seen Morarji Desai too - just to see this kind of neurosis, to watch, to observe what kind of neurosis creates a politician - and watching him I was so perfectly satisfied that I never went to see any other politician. Enough was enough.

If I am right, then they will have to drop many vested interests, and that is difficult. They would like rather to forget all about me. But I am not going to leave them so easily. I am going to insist, I am going to hammer the truth again and again.

This time, something is bound to happen. The world is ready; it has prepared for many centuries for this revolution to happen. It has become tired of materialists, it has become tired of spiritualists; it needs a new vision. And this new vision is going to be against both. The spiritualist, the old spiritualist, is going to be against me. And, you will be surprised, that the old materialist is also going to be against me.

Just the other day I was reading an article against me by Khwaza Ahmed Abbas - he is a communist, a materialist. Now Morarji Desai and Khwaza Ahmed Abbas are strange bedfellows! Morarji Desai thinks he is a spiritualist. Khwaza Ahmed Abbas thinks he is a communist, a materialist, a Marxist.

Both are against me. How can they both be against me? They can both be against me because the spiritualist will feel that I am betraying spiritualism by bringing materialism in, and the materialist will feel that I am betraying materialist philosophy by bringing spiritualism in.

So you have to be aware of that fact, that I will have more enemies than Jesus had, I will have more enemies than Buddha had. But I will also have more friends than Jesus had and I will also have more friends than Buddha had. And this time the division will be such that all the neurotic people - spiritualist, materialist - they will be against me; and all the sane people and people who would like the world to become sane will be with me.