Bhagwan on Freedom as Awareness: Each individual has to become a meditator, a silent watcher, so that he can discover himself.

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

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

Even if you don’t touch the man, but only his shadow – then too you have to take a bath. So there is physical slavery and there is physical freedom – that your body is not enchained, that it is not categorized as lower than anybody else’s, that there is an equality as far as the body is concerned. But even today this is not true.

The woman’s body is not considered equal to the man’s body. She is not as free as man is. In China for centuries the husband had the right to kill his wife without being punished because the wife was his possession. Just like you can destroy your chair or you can burn your house because it is your chair, it is your house, it is your wife. In Chinese law there was no punishment for the husband if he killed his wife because she was thought to be soulless; she was just a reproductive mechanism, a factory to produce children. Mohammedans marry four wives, which is absolutely ugly because nature keeps a balance in the world. There are an equal number of men and women, and if one man marries four women, then what about the other three men? They are going to become perverts, homosexuals, sodomists, and they will create AIDS and all kinds of diseases. Mohammed himself married nine wives.

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

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

He had the power. But to have sixteen thousand wives is so stupid – you cannot even remember their names! But it was thought that just because the woman in India is property, the more you have the better.

And of course an incarnation of God has to be allowed So there is a slavery of the body which still continues in different ways. It is becoming less and less but it has not disappeared completely.

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

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

Parents teach children that there is a God – and they know nothing of God. They tell their children that there is heaven and there is hell – and they know nothing of heaven and hell. I have heard: it happened one day in New York, in New York’s biggest church, that as the cardinal came in he found a young man, and he was puzzled whether he was a hippie or Jesus Christ. He looked like Jesus Christ, but you don’t find Jesus Christ like this! He must be a hippie. The cardinal was afraid because Jesus was not his own experience – he could not recognize him.

He went close to him and asked, ”Who are you?” And the young man said, ”You can’t recognize me? And daily you pray to me, ‘My Lord, Jesus Christ,’ and now I have come and you have some nerve to ask me, ‘Who are you?’ ”

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

He phoned the Vatican and asked the pope, ”Just give me some hints about what to do? A man is here – I thought that he looks like a hippie, but he also looks like Jesus Christ. And I asked him and he said, ‘I am your Lord, Jesus Christ.’ Now what should I do?” And the pope said, ”What? Such a case has never happened before! You do one thing: first, look busy! Second, phone the police!” You are teaching your children things that you don’t know yourself. You are just conditioning their minds, because your minds were conditioned by your parents.

This way the disease goes on from one generation to another generation.

Psychological freedom will be possible when children are allowed to grow, helped to grow to more intellect, more intelligence, more consciousness, more alertness. No belief is given to them. They are not taught any kind of faith, but they are given as much incentive as possible to search for truth. And they have to be reminded from the very beginning: your own truth, your own finding, is going to liberate you; nothing else can do that for you.

Truth cannot be borrowed. It cannot be studied in books. Nobody can inform you about it. You have to sharpen your intelligence yourself, so that you can look into existence and find it.

If a child is left open, receptive, alert, and given the incentive for search, he will have psychological freedom. And with psychological freedom comes tremendous responsibility. You don’t have to teach it to him; it comes like the shadow of psychological freedom. And he will be grateful to you. Otherwise every child is angry at his parents because they spoiled him: they destroyed his freedom, they conditioned his mind. Even before he asked any questions, they filled his mind with answers which are all bogus because they are not based on his own experience.

The world lives in a psychological slavery. And the third dimension is the ultimate of freedom – which is knowing that you are not the body, knowing that you are not the mind, knowing that you are only pure consciousness. That knowledge comes through meditation. It separates you from the body, it separates you from the mind, and ultimately only you are there as pure consciousness, as pure awareness. That is spiritual freedom. These are the three basic dimensions of freedom for the individual. You have asked about both the individual and the collective. For the collective there is no need.

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

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

And the little girl says, ”Nobody. I met nobody.” And the queen thought ”nobody” is somebody, so she asks, ”But then why has that nobody not reached yet?”

The little girl said, ”Madam, nobody is NOBODY!” And the queen said, ”Don’t be stupid! I understand: nobody must be nobody, but he must have reached before you. It seems nobody walks slower than you.”

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

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

The queen said, ”If that is the case then he should be here!” The collective, the society – all these are just words. That which really exists is the individual; otherwise the Rotary Club, the Lions Club... then there will be a problem: what is the freedom of a Rotary Club? What is the freedom of the Lions Club? These are just names. The collective is a very dangerous word.

In the name of the collective the individual, the real, has always been sacrificed. I am absolutely against it. Nations have been sacrificing individuals in the name of the nation – and ‘nation’ is just a word. The lines that you have drawn on the map are not anywhere on the earth. They are just your game. But on those lines that you have drawn on the map millions of people have died – real people, dying for unreal lines. And you make them heroes, national heroes!

This idea of the collective has to be destroyed completely; otherwise in some way or other we will continue sacrificing the individual. In the name of religion we have sacrificed him, in religious wars. A Mohammedan dying in a religious war knows that his paradise is certain. He has been told by the priest, ”If you are dying for the religion, Mohammedanism, then your paradise is absolutely certain with all the pleasures you have ever imagined or dreamt of. And the person you have killed will also reach paradise because he has been killed by a Mohammedan. It is a privilege for him, so you need not feel guilty that you have killed a man.”

Christians have crusades – a jihad, a religious war – and kill thousands of people, burn living human beings, for what? For some collectivity... for Christianity, for Buddhism, for Hinduism, for communism, for fascism – anything will do. Any word representing some collectivity, and the individual can be sacrificed. There is no reason for the collectivity even to exist: individuals are enough. And if individuals have freedom, are psychologically free, are spiritually free, then naturally the collective will be spiritually free.

The collective consists of individuals, not vice versa. It has been said that the individual is only a part of the collective; that is not true. The individual is not just a part of the collective; the collective is only a symbolic word for individuals meeting together. They are not parts of anything; they remain independent. They remain organically independent, they don’t become parts. If we really want a world of freedom, then we have to understand that in the name of the collectivity so many massacres have happened that now it is time to stop. All collective names should lose the grandeur that they have had in the past. Individuals should be the highest value.

PLEASE EXPLAIN WHAT YOU MEAN BY FREEDOM. WHEN I TALK ABOUT FREEDOM, I MEAN FREEDOM FROM SOMETHING OR FREEDOM TO DO SOMETHING; IT IMPLIES MORE FREEDOM OF CHOICE. BUT MY IMPRESSION IS THAT CHOICELESS AWARENESS PRECEDES THE FREEDOM You TALK ABOUT. WHAT KIND OF FREEDOM DOES NOT INVOLVE CHOICE? CAN IT BE DEFINED, OR IS IT ONE OF THOSE QUALITIES LIKE LOVE WHICH MUST BE EXPERIENCED TO BE UNDERSTOOD?

The freedom from something is not true freedom.

The freedom to do anything you want to do is also not the freedom I am talking about.

My vision of freedom is to be yourself. It is not a question of getting freedom from something. That freedom will not be freedom, because it is still given to you; there is a cause to it. The thing that you were feeling dependent on is still there in your freedom. You are obliged to it. Without it you would not have been free.

The freedom to do anything you want is not freedom either, because wanting, desiring to do something, arises out of the mind – and mind is your bondage.

The true freedom certainly comes after choiceless awareness, but after choiceless awareness the freedom is neither dependent on things nor dependent on doing something. The freedom that follows choiceless awareness is the freedom just to be yourself. And you are yourself already, you are born with it; hence it is not dependent on anything else. Nobody can give it to you and nobody can take it from you. A sword can cut your head but it cannot cut your freedom, your being.

It is another way of saying that you are centered, rooted in your natural, existential self. It has nothing to do with outside.

Freedom from things is dependent on the outside. Freedom to do something is also dependent on the outside. Freedom to be ultimately pure has not to be dependent on anything outside you.

You are born as freedom. It is just that you have been conditioned to forget it.

Layers upon layers of conditionings have made you a puppet. The strings are in somebody else’s hands.

If you are a Christian, you are a puppet. Your strings are in the hand of a God which does not exist, so just to give you the sense that God exists there are prophets, messiahs, representing God. They represent nobody. They are just egoistic people – and even ego wants to reduce you to a puppet.

They tell you what to do, they give you the Ten Commandments. They give you your personality – that you are a Christian, a Jew, a Hindu, a Mohammedan. They give you your so-called knowledge. And naturally, under the great burden which they start giving you from the very beginning of your childhood, the Himalayan load you are carrying – underneath it, hidden, repressed, is your natural self.

If you can get rid of all conditionings, if you can think that you are neither a communist nor a fascist, that you are neither a Christian nor a Mohammedan.... You were not born a Christian or Mohammedan; you were born just pure, innocent consciousness.

To be again in that purity, in that innocence, in that consciousness, is what I mean be freedom. Freedom is the ultimate experience of life. There is nothing higher than that. And out of freedom many flowers blossom in you. Love is the flowering of your freedom. Compassion, another flowering of your freedom. All that is valuable in life flowers in the innocent, natural state of your being.

So don’t connect freedom with independence. Independence is naturally from something, from somebody. Don’t connect freedom with doing things that you want to do, because that is your mind, not you. Wanting to do something, desiring to do something, you are in the bondage of your wanting and your desiring.

But the freedom I have been talking about you simply are – in utter silence, serenity, beauty, bliss.

SOCIAL RULES SEEM TO BE A BASIC NEED FOR HUMAN BEINGS. YET NO SOCIETY HAS EVER HELPED MAN TO REALIZE HIMSELF. CAN YOU PLEASE EXPLAIN WHAT KIND OF RELATIONSHIP EXISTS BETWEEN INDIVIDUALS AND SOCIETY, AND HOW THEY CAN HELP EACH OTHER TO EVOLVE?

It is a very complex question, but very fundamental too. In the whole existence, only man needs rules. No other animal needs any rules. The first thing that has to be understood: there is something artificial about rules. The reason man needs them is that he has left being an animal and yet he has not become human; he is in a limbo.

That is the need for all the rules. If he was an animal, there would be no need. Animals live perfectly well without any rules, constitutions, laws, courts. If man really becomes man – not only in name but in reality... Very few people have realized that up to now; for example, for men like Socrates, Zarathustra,

Bodhidharma, there is no need of any rules. They are alert enough not to do any harm to anybody.

There is no need for any laws, for any constitutions. If the whole society evolves to be authentically human, there will be love but there will not be law. The problem is that man needed rules, laws, governments, courts, armies, police force, because he lost his natural behavior of being an animal and he has not gained another natural status again. He is just in between. He is nowhere. He is a chaos. To control that chaos all these things are needed.

The problem becomes more complex, because these forces which were evolved – religions, states, courts – to control man became so powerful. They had to be given power; otherwise how would they control? So we fell into a slavery on our own. Once they became powerful... now they don‘t want to drop their vested interests. They don‘t want man to evolve. You are asking me how man and the society, the individual and the society can evolve. You do not understand the problem at all. If the individual evolves, society dissolves. The society exists only

because the individual is not allowed to evolve. All these powers have for centuries been controlling man, and enjoying their power, their prestige. They are not ready to let man evolve, to let man grow to a point where they become useless.

There are many situations which will help you to understand. It happened in China, twenty-five centuries ago... Lao Tzu became very famous, a wise man, and he was without any doubt one of the wisest men ever. The emperor of China asked him very humbly to become his chief of the supreme court, because nobody could guide the country‘s laws better than him. He tried to persuade the emperor, ”I am not the right man,” but the emperor was insisting. Lao Tzu said, ”If you don‘t listen to me... Just one day in the court and you will be convinced that I am not the right man – because the system is wrong. Out of humbleness I was not saying the truth to you. Either I can exist or your law and your order and your society can exist. So let us try it.”

The first day a thief was brought into the court who had stolen almost half the treasures of the richest man in the capital. Lao Tzu listened to the case and then he said that the thief and the richest man should both go to jail for six months.

The rich man said, ”What are you saying? I have been stolen from, I have been robbed – and what kind of justice is this, that you are sending me to jail for the same time as the thief?”

Lao Tzu said, ”I am certainly being unfair to the thief. Your need to be in jail is more, because you have collected so much money, deprived so many people of money that thousands of people are down and you are collecting and collecting money – for what? Your very greed is creating these thieves. You are responsible. The first crime is yours.”

Lao Tzu’s logic is absolutely clear. If there are going to be too many poor people and only a few rich people, you cannot stop thieves, you cannot stop stealing. The only way to stop it is to have a society where everybody has enough to fulfill his needs, and nobody has unnecessary accumulation just out of greed. The rich man said, ”Before you send me to jail I want to see the emperor, because this is not according to the constitution; this is not according to the law of the country.”

Lao Tzu said, ”That is the fault of the constitution and the fault of the law of the country. I am not responsible for it. You can see the emperor.”

And the rich man said to the emperor, ”Listen, this man should be immediately deposed from his post; he is dangerous. Today I am going into jail, tomorrow you will be in jail. If you want to save yourself, this man has to be thrown out; he is absolutely dangerous. And he is very rational: what he is saying is right – I can understand it – but he will destroy us.” The king understood it perfectly well. ”If this rich man is a criminal, then I am the greatest criminal in the country. Lao Tzu will not hesitate to send me to jail.”

Lao Tzu was relieved of his post. He said, ”I had told you before, you are unnecessarily wasting my time. I was saying I am not the right man. The reality is, your society, your law, your constitution are not the right constitution, not the right law. You need wrong people to run this whole wrong system.” The problem is that the forces that we created to keep man from falling apart into chaos are now so powerful that they don’t want to leave you free to grow – because if you are capable of growing, becoming an individual, alert, aware and conscious, there will be no need of all these people.

They will lose all their jobs, and with their jobs, their prestige, their power, their leadership, their priesthood, their popehood – everything will be gone. So now those who were in the beginning needed for protection, have turned into the enemies of humanity. My approach is not to fight against these people, because they are powerful, they have armies, they have money, they have everything. You cannot fight with them, you will be destroyed. The only way out of this mess is to silently start growing your own consciousness, which they cannot prevent by any force. In fact they cannot even know what is going on inside you.

I give you the alchemy of inner transformation. Change your inner being. And the moment you are changed, completely transformed, you will suddenly see you are out of the imprisonment, you are no longer a slave. You were a slave because of your chaoticness.

It happened in the Russian revolution...

The day the revolution succeeded, one woman started walking in Moscow in the middle of the road. The policeman said, ”This is not right. You cannot walk in the middle of the road.” The woman said, ”Now we are free.”

Even if you are free, you will have to follow the rules of traffic; otherwise traffic will become impossible. If cars and people are running everywhere they want, turning wherever they want, don’t take any note of the lights, people will be simply getting into accidents, being killed. This will bring the army in, to enforce the law that you have to walk to the right or to the left, whichever is chosen by the country – but nobody can walk in the middle. Then at the point of a gun, you have to follow... I always remember that woman; she is very symbolic.

Freedom does not mean chaos. Freedom means more responsibility, so much responsibility that nobody need interfere in your life. That you have to be left alone, that the government need not interfere with you, that the police need not interfere with you, that the law has nothing to do with you – you are simply out of their world.

This is my approach if you really want to transform humanity: each individual should start growing on his own. And in fact a crowd is not needed for growth. Growth is something like a child growing in a mother’s womb: no crowd is needed; the mother has just to be careful.

A new man has to be born in you.

You have to become the womb of a new man.

Nobody will come to know about it, and it is better that nobody knows about it. You simply go on doing your ordinary work, living in the ordinary world, being simple and ordinary – not becoming revolutionaries, reactionaries, punks and skinheads. That is not going to help. That is sheer stupidity.

It is out of frustration, but still it is insane. The society is insane and out of frustration you become insane. The society is not afraid of these people; the society is afraid only of people who can become so centered, so conscious that laws become useless for them. They always do right. They are beyond the grip of the so-called powerful interests.

If individuals grow, society will diminish. The way they have known society – with the government, with the army, with the courts, with the policemen, with the jails – this society will diminish. Certainly, because there are so many human beings, new forms of collectivities will come into being. I would not like to call them society, just to avoid the confusion between the words. I call the new

collectivity a commune. The word is significant: it means a place where people are not only living together, but where people are in deep communion.

To live together is one thing; we are doing it: in every city, every town, thousands of people are living together – but what togetherness is there? People don’t even know their neighbors. They live in the same skyscraper, thousands of people, and they never come to know that they are living in the same house.

It is not togetherness, because there is no communion. It is simply a crowd, not a community. So I would like to replace the word ‘society’ with the word ‘commune’.

Society has existed on certain basic principles. You will have to remove them, otherwise the society will not disappear. The first and the most important unit of society has been the family: if the family remains the way it is, then the society cannot disappear, then the church cannot disappear, then religions cannot disappear. Then we cannot create one world, one humanity.

The family is psychologically out of date. It is not that it was always there; there was a time when there was no family, people lived in tribes. The family came into existence because of private property. There were powerful people who managed to have more private property than anybody else, and they wanted it to be given to their children. Up to now there was no question... Men and women were meeting out of love; there was no marriage and no family – but once property came into existence, the man became very possessive of the woman. He turned the woman also into part of the property.

In Indian languages the woman is called property. In China the woman has become so much a property that even if a husband killed his wife... there was no law against it, no crime was committed. You are absolutely free to destroy your property: you can burn your furniture, you can burn your house. It is not a crime, it is your house. You can kill your wife.... With private property the woman also became private property, and every strategy was used so that the man can be absolutely certain that the child that is born from his wife is really his own. Now, this is a difficult problem: the father can never be absolutely certain; only the mother knows. But the father created every kind of barrier for the movement of the woman so that she could not come into contact with other men. All possibilities and all doors are closed.

It is not a coincidence that only old women go into your churches and temples, because that is the only place they were allowed to go, knowing perfectly well that the church is defensive of the family. The church knows perfectly well that once the family is gone, the church is gone. And the church of course is the last place where some romantic affair can happen. They have made every certainty: the priest has to be celibate.... These are guarantees – that the priest is celibate, he is against sex, he is against women – in different religions in different ways.

The Jaina monk cannot touch a woman; in fact the woman should not come closer than eight feet to the Jaina monk. The Buddhist monk is not allowed to touch a woman. There are religions which don’t allow women to enter into their religious places, or they have separating partitions: man has the main part, the woman has a small corner – but separated. The men cannot even see them; meeting is impossible.

Many religions, like Mohammedanism, have covered their women’s faces. Mohammedan women’s faces have become pale, because they never see the sunlight. Their whole body is covered; their face is covered. In every possible way... The woman is not to be educated, because education gives people strange kinds of thoughts. People start thinking, people start arguing....The woman was not allowed to have any paid career – because that means independence. So she was cut off from every nook and corner, just for this simple reason: so that you are certain that your son is really your son. Those who were really powerful – for example kings – had male servants castrated, because they were moving in the palace, working, serving. They had to be castrated; otherwise, there was a danger... And there was danger, because every emperor had hundreds of wives, many of whom he would never see. Naturally they would fall in love with anybody... but only castrated men were allowed into the palace, so even if they fell in love they could not create children.

That was the basic thing. The family has to disappear and give place to the commune. A commune means that we have pooled all our energies, all our money, everything into a single pool – which will be taking care of all the people. The children will belong to the commune, so there is no question of individual heritage. And it is so economical... I have seen in my commune: five thousand people were there; that means two thousand five hundred kitchens would have been needed if they were living separately and two thousand five hundred women would be wasting their lives in the kitchen. There was only one kitchen for five thousand people, and only fifteen people were running it. And remember, every woman is not a good cook! In fact, the best cooks are always men. All the books on cookery are written by men, and in all the great hotels you will find the best cooks are men.

Two thousand five hundred people cannot afford the best cooks separately, but a five-thousand person commune can afford the best cooks, the best food. It can afford doctors to look into whether what they are eating is junk or food – most people are eating junk. To be right the food has to be medically decided. In my commune fifteen people were preparing the food, doctors were looking at it, its hygiene, its cleanliness and its nutritious value. It is nutrition that should be valued. Flavor is a small thing; that can be given to any kind of food, good flavor. You need not eat junk just for flavor – and if you eat junk, sooner or later you are going to become junk.

There are so many junkies all around! If you look in their heads you will find ice cream, nothing else... spaghetti!

You need a very proportionate, calculated food balance to keep all your needs completely fulfilled, food that helps consciousness to grow, food that makes you more loving, more peaceful, food that destroys your anger, your hatred. It is your chemistry that food changes, and all these things – anger, hatred, love, compassion – are connected with your chemistry. There should be a chemist to look at what kind of food is being given to people.

If you pool all your energies, all your money and all your resources, every commune can be rich and every commune can enjoy being alive equally.

Once individuals are growing and communes are growing side by side, society will disappear, and with society all the evils that the society has created. I will give you one example. Only in China was a tremendously revolutionary step taken two thousand years ago. This was that the doctor had to be paid by the patient while the patient remained healthy; if he fell sick, then the doctor had not to be paid. That looks very strange. We pay the doctor when we are sick, and he makes us healthy again. But this is dangerous, because you are making the doctor dependent on your sickness. Sickness becomes his interest: the more people fall sick, the more he can earn. His interest becomes not health, but sickness. If everybody remains healthy, then the doctor will be the only one who will be sick.

They made a revolutionary idea, practical, that every man has his physician, and while he remains healthy he has to pay the doctor every month. It is the duty of the doctor to keep him healthy – and naturally he will keep him healthy because he is being paid for it. If he falls sick, he loses money. When there are epidemics the doctor goes bankrupt. Right now it is just the opposite. The doctor – I have heard the story – came to Mulla Nasruddin and said, ”You have not paid and I have been again and again coming and reminding you that I cured your child of smallpox, and you don’t listen.” Mulla said, ”You had better listen; otherwise I am going to sue you in the court.”

The doctor said, ”This is strange... I treated your child.”

He said, ”Yes, that I know – but who spread the epidemic in the whole town? Your child – and all the money that you have earned you have to divide with me.”

He was right. His child had done a great job, and since that day the doctor never came back again to ask for the money for the treatment that he had given to the child. It was right, Mulla’s argument was correct. The doctor had earned enough out of the epidemic.

But this is a very wrong system. The commune should pay the doctor to keep the commune healthy, and if anybody gets sick in the commune the doctor’s salary is cut. So health is the business of the doctor, not sickness. And you can see the difference: in the West the doctor’s business is called medicine, which relates to sickness. In the East it is called ayurveda, which means the science of life – not of sickness.

The basic business of the doctor should be that people should live long, should live healthy, whole, and he should be paid for it. So each commune can afford very easily to keep the doctor, the plumber, the engineer – whatever is needed. That is the commune’s responsibility to take care of – and the people who serve the commune should be rotating so there is no power arising again. The committee of the commune should be in rotation; every year new people are coming in and old people are going out, so nobody becomes addicted to power.

Power is the worst drug that people can become addicted to; it should be given, but in very small doses and not for a long time. Let the individual grow and let the commune grow – and forget all about society; don’t fight with it. Don’t even say, ”We are creating an alternative society...” We have nothing to do with society; let society go on as it is. If it wants to live it will have to change its mode, its form, its structure, and it will have to become a commune. If it wants to die, let it die.

There is no harm. The world is overpopulated; it needs only one-fourth of its population. So the old rotten heads who cannot conceive of anything new, who are absolutely blind and cannot see that what they are doing is harmful and poisonous... if they have decided to die, then let them die silently. Don’t disturb them.

I don’t teach you to be rebellious and to be revolutionaries. I want you to be very silent, almost underground transformers. Because all the revolutions have failed... now the only possible way is that we should do it so silently and so peacefully that it can happen. There are things which happen only in silence. For example, if you love trees, you should not take up the rosebush every day to look at its roots; otherwise you will kill it. Those roots have to remain hidden. Silently they go on doing their work. My people have to be just like roots: silently go on doing the work, changing yourself, changing anybody who is interested; spreading the methods that can change; creating small pools, small groups, small communes and wherever possible bigger communes. But let this whole thing happen very silently, without creating any upheaval.

The individual can exist only if society dies; they cannot coexist. It is time for the society to be dead, and we will find new ways of togetherness which will not be formal, which will be more of the heart. The family prevents it, the family draws a boundary around every child. It says, ”I am your father, so love me. I am your mother, so love me. This is your family. If there is need, sacrifice yourself for the family.”

The same idea is projected on a bigger scale as nation: ”This is your nation. If it needs you, sacrifice yourself.” It is society, family, nation... it is the same idea becoming bigger and bigger. So my basic attack is on the family. The family is the root cause of all our problems. Our poverty, our sickness, our madness, our emptiness, our lovelessness – the family is the cause. And the family is the cause of all our conditionings, from the very beginning. It starts conditioning your mind: you are a Jew, you are a Christian, you are a Hindu, you are this and you are that – and the poor child does not know what nonsense you are talking about.

I have heard about a rabbi and a bishop... They lived opposite each other, and naturally they were continually competing about everything. It was a question of the prestige of their religion. One morning the rabbi saw the bishop had got a new car. He asked, ”What are you doing?” The bishop was pouring water over the car. He said, ”I am baptizing it. I got a new car – a Cadillac.” The rabbi was heartbroken. Seeing with his own eyes, outside his own front door the car is being made Christian!

Next day when the bishop came out, he was surprised. He asked the rabbi, ”What are you doing?” A beautiful Rolls Royce was standing there and the rabbi was cutting the exhaust pipe. He said, ”I am circumcising my Rolls Royce. Now it is a Jew!” This is what they are doing with every child. And every child is as innocent as the Cadillac and the Rolls Royce; he does not know what is being done to him. The family is the ground of all conditionings; it gives you as inheritance the whole past and the load, the burden of all those things which have been proved wrong for hundreds of years. You are loaded with all those wrong things, and your mind is closed and clogged and it cannot receive anything new that goes against it. Your mind is simply full of wrong things. If the children are in the hands of the commune... I have experimented and found it immensely successful. The children are far happier because they are far freer. No conditioning is stamped on them; they mature earlier, and because nobody is trying to make them dependent so they become independent. Nobody is going out of their way to help them, so they have to learn how to help themselves. This brings maturity, clarity, a certain strength. And they are all meditating: meditation is not a conditioning; it is simply sitting silently, doing nothing, just enjoying the silence – the silence of the night, the silence of the early morning... and slowly, slowly you become acquainted with the silence that pervades your inner being. Then the moment you close your eyes you fall into the pool of a silent lake, which is fathomless. And out of that silence you are rejuvenated every moment. Out of that silence comes your love, comes your beauty, comes a special depth to your eyes; a special aura to your being, a strength to your individuality, and a self-respect.

Question 2

INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM AND AUTHORITY ON ONE SIDE, AND AUTHORITARIANISM AND DICTATORSHIP ON THE OTHER SIDE, MOVE MAN’S LIFE AND HIS ASPIRATIONS. PLEASE COMMENT ON THIS.

It is the same problem, the same question, phrased differently. Society is authoritarian; the church is authoritarian; the educational system is authoritarian. They all say, ”Whatever we say is right and you need not question it. You have simply to follow.” And there are problems, for example in the educational system... I have been a student, I have been a professor, and I know that for the best part of life a person is being ruined by authoritarian people in the schools, in the colleges, in the universities. I was expelled from many colleges for the simple reason that I could not accept any authoritarianism. I said, ”You prove it and I am ready to accept it.

But without proving it, without giving right arguments for it, without making it a rational statement, I am not going to accept it.” And I was fighting in every subject, because in every subject the teachers were simply lecturing. Students were taking notes, because all that was needed was to repeat in the examination papers what the teachers had been telling them. And the better you repeat, exactly like a parrot, the more credit you get. Small things they were in difficulty to prove, and it became embarrassing to them. Every day it was a question... Anything they would say, I would stand up immediately – and I was asking relevant questions – ”On what grounds...?”

For example, one of the professors who was teaching me religions made the statement that the VEDAS – the Hindu holy scriptures – were written by God. I had to stand up. I said, ”I object. In the first place you have not been able to prove the existence of God. In the second place, now you are saying that these books, which are full of rubbish, are written by God. Have you ever looked into the VEDAS?” I asked him, ”Have you ever read from the first page to the last page?” There are four VEDAS, big volumes. ”I have brought all the four with me, and at random I can open and read, and let the whole class decide whether this is a statement which God could have written.”

The VEDAS are full of prayers. Now, God cannot pray; to whom will he be praying? And prayers for such stupid things that it is simply ridiculous to say that they are written by God. One brahmin is praying, ”I have been continuously doing all the rituals, living according to the scriptures and you have still not given me a child. Give me a child; that will be a proof that my prayers have been heard.” I asked him, ”How could God have written this passage? It is written by someone and addressed to God, but it cannot be written by God himself. And if this is the situation of God, then that poor fellow should not be bothered about it. God is asking about a child from somebody else, so why should we not ask from the same source? Why should we bother this poor fellow?”

Their only answer finally was that every college would reject me. The principal would say, ”We are sorry. We know you are right, but we have to run the college. You will destroy the whole institution. Professors are threatening to resign, students are saying that you don’t allow the professors to teach, because on a single point every day the whole period is lost. Eight months have passed and the course will not be finished in the coming two months if the same thing continues.

”They have come here to pass examinations; they are not interested in truth, they are not interested in the validity of any statement. Their only reason to be here is to get a certificate. And you are a strange fellow – you don’t seem to be interested in certificates.” I said, ”I am not interested at all in certificates. What will I do with the certificates of these people who don’t know anything? I cannot think of these people as my examiners. The day you give me the certificate, I will tear it up immediately before you – because these people can’t answer.”

But the whole system is geared in that way. When I became a professor myself, I had to make a new arrangement. The arrangement was that in each forty-minute period, twenty minutes I would teach the syllabus as it is written in the books, and twenty minutes I would criticize it. My students said, ”We will go mad.”

I said, ”That is your problem – but I cannot leave these statements without criticism. You can choose; when your examination comes you can choose to write whichever you want. If you want to fail, choose my part. If you want to pass, choose the first part. I am making it clear; I am not deceiving anybody – but I cannot go on deceiving you by teaching you something which I think is absolutely wrong.”

The vice-chancellor finally had to call me, and he said to me, ”This is a strange type of teaching. I have been receiving every day reports that half the time you teach the syllabus and half the time you have your arguments, which destroy the whole thing that you have taught them. So they come as empty as they had gone in... in fact in more of a mess!” I said, ”I’m not worried about anybody. What have they done with me all these years when I was a student? I was expelled from one college and then another. And you can come one day and listen to whether I am doing any injustice to the prescribed course. When I teach the prescribed course, I do it as totally as possible, to make it clear.” He came one day and he listened, and after twenty minutes he said, ”That is really great. I had been also a student of philosophy, but nobody has ever told me this way.”

I said, ”This is only half the talk. You just wait, because now I am going to destroy it completely, step by step.”

And when I destroyed it completely he said, ”My God! Now I can understand what the poor students are reporting to me. You are not supposed to be a professor in this structure of education. I can understand that what you are doing is absolutely honest, but this system does not create people of intelligence; this system only creates people of good memory – and that’s what is needed. We need clerks, we need stationmasters, we need postmasters – and these people don’t need intelligence, they need a good memory.” I said, ”In other words you need computers, not men. If this is your educational system, then sooner or later you are going to replace men with computers” – and that’s what they are doing. Everywhere they are replacing important positions with computers, because computers are more reliable; they are just memory, no intelligence.

Man, however repressed, has a certain intelligence.

The man who dropped atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – if it was a computer, there was no question: at the exact time, at the exact mileage, it would have dropped the bomb, returned. It would have been simply mechanical. But the man who was dropping the bomb, howsoever you may have destroyed his intelligence, had to think twice what he was doing: killing one hundred thousand people who were absolutely innocent, who were civilians, who were not army people, who had not done any harm to anybody – is it right?

Now everywhere, all nuclear weapons are in the hands of computers, not in the hands of man. Computers will fight the third world war. Man will be killed – that is another matter. Computers don’t care whether humanity survives or disappears; it does not matter to them, but they will do exact and efficient work which man cannot do. Man may hesitate in destroying the whole of humanity; something of intelligence, just a little bit of intelligence is enough to create the question, ”What am I doing?”

All our institutions, our religions are authoritarian. They don’t tell you why: ”Just do it because it is written in the book, because Jesus says so.” Jesus has not given a single argument why it should be done; he has not given a single rational ground for any of his doctrines. Neither has Moses done that, nor has Krishna.

Krishna simply says to Arjuna, ”This is from God: You have to fight.” This is authoritarianism. And God is used, manipulated in every situation, to make whatever you are saying absolutely unquestionable. We have to destroy all authoritarianism in the world.

Authority is totally different. Authoritarianism is connected with the society, with the church; authority is something which is concerned with the individual realization. If I say something to you, I say it with authority. This simply means I am saying it because this is my experience – but it does not mean that you have to believe it. It is enough that you listened to it; now you can think over it, you can decide for or against. To me what is important is not that you decide for; what is important to me is that you decide on your own. It may be against it, it does not matter – but the decision should come from your own being. If it doesn’t come from your own being, then you are making me authoritarian.

I am speaking from my authority. Please don’t make me into an authoritarian, because I am simply stating the fact with as much force and fire as I am capable of – so that it is absolutely clear to you, and now you are free to decide. I am not deciding for you, and I am not asking you to have faith in me or believe in me.

I am simply asking, ”Give me a little chance. Think about what I am saying to you” – and I will be grateful that you thought about it. That’s enough. Your thinking will give you a sharper intelligence... and I trust in intelligence. If you think, and your intelligence becomes sharper, I know whatever you conclude will be right. And even if you conclude wrong one time, it does not matter. One has to fall many times and rise up again. That’s how life is. One has to commit mistakes and learn from them, and change every blocking rock into a stepping-stone.

But around me there is no question of any belief or faith. With individual freedom, authoritarianism dies and a new thing arises: authority. Each individual is capable of having experiences of his own; then he has authority, then he can say, ”I have seen it. I have tasted it. I have enjoyed it. I have danced it. And it is not a question that I am quoting from some scripture, I am simply opening my heart to you.” Authority belongs to experience.

Authoritarianism belongs to somebody else, not to you; hence it creates slavery, not freedom. And to me freedom is the ultimate value, because only in freedom can you blossom, and can you blossom to your fullest possibility.

IS SOCIETY A REAL FACT DETERMINED BY THE EXISTENCE OF MAN, OR IS IT A FALSE CONCEPT, A CONDITIONING WHICH EXISTS ONLY BECAUSE MAN IS ASLEEP?

Society is not an existential reality. It is created by man because man is asleep, because man is in a chaos, because man is not capable of having freedom without turning it into licentiousness. Man is not capable of having freedom and not taking advantage of it. So it is an artificial – but necessary – creation of man.

Because society is artificial, it can be dissolved. Because it was necessary once, it does not mean it has to be necessary forever. Man just has to change those conditions which made it necessary. And it is good that it is not existential, otherwise there would be no way to get rid of it.

It is our own manufactured thing. We can destroy it any day we want.

Question 4

HOW TO EVOLVE OUT OF THE COLLECTIVITY, THE NATIONS, WITHOUT FALLING INTO THE BARBARITY OF SINGLE EGOS FIGHTING AGAINST EACH OTHER?

All your questions are centered on one thing. I would like to give you one answer.

I am reminded of a parable....

A great master was sitting on the seashore, on the beach, and a man who was seeking for truth came to him, touched his feet and asked, ”If I am not disturbing you, I would like to do anything that you suggest which can help me to find the truth.” The master simply closed his eyes and remained silent. The man shook his head. He said in his own mind, ”This man seems to be crazy. I am asking him a question and he is closing his eyes.” He shook the man and said, ”What about my question?”

The master said, ”I answered it. Just sit silently... don’t do anything, and the grass grows by itself. You need not bother about it – everything will happen. You just sit silently, enjoy silence.” The man said, ”Can you give it a name – because people will be asking me, ‘What are you doing?’”

So he wrote on the sand with his finger: meditation.

The man said, ”This is too short an answer. Be a little more elaborate.” The master wrote in big letters: MEDITATION.

The man said, ”But these are simply big letters. You are writing the same thing.”

The old master said, ”If I say more than that, then it will be wrong. If you can understand, then just do what I have told you, and you will know.” And that’s my answer too. Each individual has to become a meditator, a silent watcher, so that he can discover himself. And this discovery is going to change everything around him. And if we can change many people through meditation, we can create a new world. Many people have been hoping for centuries for a new world, but they had no idea how to create it. I am giving you the exact science how to create it.

Meditation is the name of that science.