WHAT DOES YOUR MOVEMENT SIGNIFY ABOUT THE CONDITION OF SOCIETY? IS IT AN ESCAPIST AND SELF-REGARDING CULT? OR DO YOU PROPOSE THROUGH CHANGING HUMAN NATURE TO CHANGE SOCIETY AND THE WORLD?

Peter Jenkins,

WHAT IS HAPPENING HERE IS NOT A movement: it is a mutation. It has no concern with the society: its whole concern is with the individual. It is a revolution in the true sense of the word.

There is no idea of changing the society or the world, because there is no society at all. Only individuals exist -- society is an illusion. And because we believe in society, all the revolutions have failed. The belief that the society exists has sabotaged all efforts to change man -- because the belief is rooted in illusion.

Ask the scientist: he says there is no matter but only electrons. Matter is an illusion. In exactly the same way, those who understand human consciousness will say that society is an illusion like matter. Electrons are true, so are individuals.

The individual needs a mutation. And what we are doing here is utterly individualistic; it is not socialistic at all. It may look as if it is an escape -- but the word 'escape' in itself has nothing wrong in it. If the house is on fire and you escape from it, nobody calls you an escapist. You are simply intelligent, that's all.

We are not escaping, we are simply trying to understand what the case is. We are not avoiding problems -- in fact, just the contrary. We are facing all the problems that the society has avoided. We are trying to encounter all the problems that the so-called society has been teaching you to repress.

Man need not have ANY unconscious. It is because of repression that man has become divided between conscious and unconscious. It is the great work of your so-called society. It is a conspiracy against man. Once man is divided he starts becoming a weakling, because he starts fighting within himself. He is split, he becomes schizophrenic. And the man who is split can never be a master of himself.

And that's what your so-called society wants everybody to be: never to be a master but always to be a slave. The society needs slaves. And by 'the society' I mean the conspiracy of the priests, the politicians, the power-hungry people. Society is a conspiracy of the power-obsessed people, and their basic strategy is to divide man from the very beginning.

And how have they divided man? They have told you not to accept yourself in your totality. They have told you that much is wrong in you -- in fact the major part of your being, of your wholeness, is wrong. That wrong part has to be denied expression, that wrong part has to be repressed. And once you start repressing anything in yourself, a rift is created. Then you go on repressing all the problems and you go on sitting on the volcano -- thinking everything is okay, believing everything is okay, and knowing all the time that nothing is okay. Deep down, there is fire and it is going to erupt any moment.

Then people become neurotic, psychotic. Then people suffer millions of diseases -- unnecessarily. But it serves the vested interests. It serves the capitalist society, it serves the communist society; it serves the Catholic church, it serves the Hindu, the Mohammedan priesthood. It serves all those who are in power.

Man remains shaky, trembling, weak, divided. And man cannot assert himself, cannot stand on his own. He needs somebody to depend upon. He seeks and searches for tyrants -- without tyrants he cannot live. He cannot live without governments and he cannot live without the leaders.

And look what your leaders and your governments, your churches and your priests have done. Just look at history and you will see that the whole history of man up to now has been utterly ugly. It has not been human at all.

My effort here is not to change the society but to transform the individual -- to help the individual to become whole, to help the individual to drop this rift between the conscious and the unconscious; to help the individual not to repress any more but to accept himself, not to condemn but to love himself.
You can call it a 'self-regarding cult' -- because I teach self-love. And you have been told that there is something wrong with self-love. You have been told, "Love others, but never love yourself." But how can you love others if you cannot even love yourself?

Meditate on the great statement of Jesus: "Love thy neighbour as thou lovest thyself." But the fundamental is loving thyself.

You cannot love anybody else -- because love has to well up within you first. And you are the closest to yourself: if you hate yourself, you will hate your neighbour. Whatsoever the priests and the leaders go on saying, it will not make any difference. You will hate your neighbour, you will hate humanity, you will hate the earth -- because you will hate yourself.

Love yourself, and out of that love grows love for others.

I teach you to be selfish, because only out of true selfishness is altruism born. A really selfish person cannot be against anybody, a really selfish person cannot hurt anybody -- because hurting somebody you have to hurt yourself first. You cannot create suffering for others without creating suffering for yourself. Before you are angry with someone, you have to be angry within yourself. Before you are violent with somebody, you have to go through many nightmares.

The person who really loves himself, who is in tremendous love with himself, cannot do any harm to anybody -- because he cannot do any harm to himself.

So in a way we are escapists, because whatsoever you call real life is not real -- it is a distortion of life; it is something else in the name of life. And we are certainly self-regarding, because out of that regard, regard for the other is born.

If the individual can be helped, if the individual can be enlightened, if the individual can be persuaded to celebrate life, to enjoy life, only then will we be able to change the climate around the earth. But that is not our purpose, that is not our goal -- that is going to be just a consequence.

You ask me: WHAT DOES YOUR MOVEMENT SIGNIFY ABOUT THE CONDITION OF SOCIETY?

It simply signifies that the society is rotten, that the society is ill, that there is no possibility of reforming the society. Because if this society is reformed it will be simply a modified form of the same rottenness -- maybe a little bit better decorated, better painted, but it will be the same disease. In five thousand years' history, many times society has been reformed. And nothing basically ever changes; it remains the same in every form. It is the same illness, the same ugliness, the same sickness that continues.

Enough is enough!

Those who are intelligent have become aware that all revolutions have failed -- all social revolutions have failed. And we have not listened yet to Buddhas who have been telling of a totally different revolution: the revolution in the heart of the individual -- because the individual is substantial, real. Society is only a relationship.

For example, we are sitting here, two thousand people. You can think of it as a society, as a community. But what is society? What is community? There are two thousand individuals sitting here. You will never come across society anywhere; you will never meet the community. Whenever you come across anything, you will come across the real individual.

Society is only a word -- and a very dangerous word. And man is very very efficient at inventing dangerous words. For example, 'humanity'. Now, I have never seen humanity; I have only seen human beings. Humanity is just an abstraction. But there are people who love humanity. You cannot hug humanity, you cannot kiss humanity. But that becomes a very very subtle camouflage. In the name of humanity you can go on hating human beings -- because you love humanity; there is no need to love human beings because you love humanity.

And if the need arises, you can sacrifice all human beings for your love of humanity. That has been done again and again: people love nations, and people kill people in the name of 'the nation'. In the name of 'motherland', 'fatherland' -- stupid words -- but in the name of 'motherland' thousands of people can be killed very easily.

The real is sacrificed on the altar of the abstract. This is your whole history. In the name of God, in the name of religion, in the name of love, in the name of peace, in the name of democracy, in the name of communism -- ALL abstractions -- we go on butchering real human beings.

These words are dangerous words. Drop these words; love human beings. If you have to sacrifice the motherland, sacrifice it -- it is nothing. If you have to sacrifice religion, sacrifice it -- it is nothing. If you have to sacrifice humanity, kill it without a single thought -- because there is no humanity and you will not be killing anything. But love the real: avoid the abstract. It is the abstract that has been the greatest calamity.

I assert the real against the abstract. And this has been the way of all the Buddhas, but they have never been tried. Politicians have been tried and all the political experiments have failed, but Buddhas have never been tried. We have listened to them, we have worshipped them, but we have never tried them. We have never given a chance to them.

Now the time has come that if Buddhas are not tried, then there is no future. Man is doomed -- because man has invented, slowly slowly, so many violent forces, man has discovered such dangerous weapons, the next war will not be the third, it will be the last. The next war will be the total war. It will destroy all life -- not only human life but all life, life as such.

Before it happens, please give one opportunity to those who have been saying again and again -- Krishna, Christ, Buddha, Lao Tzu, Zarathustra -- that the individual has to be transformed. And once the individual is transformed, society automatically changes; that is a consequence.
So we are not proposing here any social revolution. I am not at all concerned with the society: my whole concern is the real individual.

You ask me, Peter Jenkins: IS IT AN ESCAPIST AND SELF-REGARDING CULT?

IN A SENSE IT IS ESCAPIST because we are escaping from all illusions. In a sense it is not escapist, because we are escaping into reality. Escaping from illusions and escaping into reality: hence it is not escapist.

And it is not self-regarding in the sense that we are against others, that we don't teach any altruism, that we don't care for morality, that we don't care at all for others. No. We know how to care for others. But to care for others, the basic fundamental, the basic requirement is to care for yourself.

A Christian mother was telling her child, "Serve others: service is religion. God has made you to serve others."

The little boy asked the mother, "I can understand it, that God created me to serve others, but a question arises: why did God create others? To serve me?"

That looks very unscientific: "I am here to serve others and others are here to serve me. Why can't I serve myself and you serve yourself? Because I will be able to take care of myself in a better way than anybody else can take care of me, and you will be able to take care of yourself better than I can ever take care of you."

I teach self-service. And then, as a consequence, a totally different vision arises. The person who serves himself, enjoys himself, loves himself, respects himself, is BOUND to respect others. Because, slowly slowly, he becomes aware that the same life exists in others -- the same life. The more you love yourself, the more you become aware that you are not separate.

Only in love is union felt. The more you love yourself~ the more you merge and melt into your own being, the more you become orgasmic in your inner world, the more you see that all definitions are false, all demarcations are arbitrary, that you are not separate, that the universe is one.

That's why we call it 'universe' -- 'uni' means one. We don't call it 'multiverse'. It is one, it is one whole. We are part of each other -- no man is an island. We belong to an invisible but infinite continent. Boundless is our existence.

But those experiences happen only to people who are self-actualizing, who are in such tremendous love with themselves that they can close their eyes and be alone and be utterly blissful. That's what meditation is all about.

Meditation means being ecstatic in your aloneness. But when you become ecstatic in your aloneness, soon the ecstasy is so much that you cannot contain it. It starts overflowing you. And when it starts overflowing you it becomes love. Meditation allows love to happen. And the people who have not known meditation will never know love. They may pretend that they love but they cannot. They will only pretend -- because they don't have anything to give, they are not overflowing.

Love is a sharing. But before you can share, you have to have it! Meditation should be the first thing. Meditation is the center, love is the circumference of it. Meditation is the flame, love is the radiation of it. Meditation is the flower, love is the fragrance of it.

I teach meditation, because that is the only way to allow love to happen in your being. And when you start overflowing, you start relating with others, caring for others -- service comes in your life as a shadow of meditation. It is not to be imposed upon you, it has not to be a duty.

'Duty' is a four-letter, dirty word. Whenever you do something AS a duty, it is imposed, cultivated, phony. It is pseudo, it makes you a hypocrite.

A totally different quality arises in your being when you are overflowing and you cannot contain yourself. You HAVE to love, you have to share. And the beauty of sharing is that the more you give, the more you get. The more you empty yourself into love, the more you feel full.

You ask me: DO YOU PROPOSE THROUGH CHANGING HUMAN NATURE TO CHANGE SOCIETY AND THE WORLD?

I don't propose it. That's how it can happen -- the ONLY way it can happen. But that is not our goal.
When you kindle a light, darkness disappears of its own accord. You need not look for darkness with the light -- to find out where it is and to force it to go out of the room -- you need not do anything like that. If the light is there, darkness is not there.

If man is transformed, he becomes a light -- unto himself first, and then for others too. That's a natural consequence.

We live in the present, we live in meditation, we allow ourselves to be full of love so that it starts overflowing. But this whole thing is non-utopian. We are not searching for a utopia, we are not searching for a golden age to come in the world. Although the golden age can come only this way -- there is no other way. All other ways have failed.

Either meditation or suicide: these are the only alternatives left for human beings. Within these next twenty-five years, the last part of this century, either man has to become meditative, and out of meditation loving, or man has to commit universal suicide.