INTERVIEW WITH THE WORLD PRESS
The Last Testament Vol 2 22
TwentySecond Discourse from the series of 30 discourses - The Last Testament Vol 2 by Osho.
You can listen, download or read all of these discourses on oshoworld.com.
Bunte,
Offenburg, West Germany
Boy, would my one-year-old daughter love you! It's quite an entrance, a lot of fun.
This is my very first interview. I'm glad that it could be with you. I'm usually hiding behind a camera.
The first few questions I have were given to me by Bunte editors directly and they were sent here, and then I have a few questions of my own.
Okay.
Osho,
Since when have you been aware of the dangers of AIDS?
It was going to happen some day. It is something to do with how life functions. Life functions through polarities. The opposite poles create the tension for life. Life is a tension, death is a relaxation.
It is just like positive electricity and negative electricity: if both are not functioning together there will not be any electricity. So in existence, opposites are really not opposites but complementaries. The same is the case with bioenergy: man and woman are positive and negative poles. Their meeting is the meeting of positive and negative energy. It is creative of life.
So even before AIDS became known, I was aware that homosexuality is spreading fast. Sooner or later something very dangerous is going to happen, because homosexuality means there is no tension; man and man are the same poles. They can only create death, not life.
I have always been telling people to move in their natural, biological sex relationships – man to woman. But about AIDS I became aware just last year, that that of which I was always afraid has come. It was bound to come sooner or later. It is a by-product of homosexuality. And homosexuality is a religious disease: if anybody is responsible for it, it is the founders of all the religions. They have committed this crime, perhaps unknowingly, because first they told people that celibacy is something spiritual, which is sheer nonsense.
Celibacy is impossible. Nobody has ever been a celibate, unless he was impotent. But the most surprising thing is that the impotent people have not contributed anything to human progress, evolution. They have never been creative; they are just hollow, they have no potency to create.
The religious people were teaching a forced impotency which is against biology. And whatever your ideology may be, there is no way to convey the ideology to your physiology, biology, your chemistry – there is no way. Once you have eaten the food, you cannot tell your stomach what to do with it. And it is good that it is beyond your control. Once you have swallowed it, it is beyond your control. Your body knows perfectly well what to do with it.
You may take the vow of celibacy, but your biology is not even aware that you are a Christian monk or a Hindu monk or a Buddhist monk. Your biology goes on functioning the same way as before. It goes on creating male sperms in you, in millions, because nature depends on your not being a celibate. It is good that Buddha’s father was not celibate; it is good that Mohammed’s father was not celibate. If these people had been celibate, the world would have missed two very colorful people.
Nature wants you to be alive, hence it has kept in its own control the basic elements in your life – for example, breathing. It is not up to you to breathe or not to breathe; otherwise sometimes you may forget. In sleep you are bound to forget, and then in the morning there will be nobody to breathe. So about breathing, no one can say, “I am doing it.” It is existence that breathes in and out, and you are not in control of it, because breathing is so essential for your life – it cannot be left in your unconscious hands.
What breathing is to a single individual, reproduction is to the race. Individuals come and go, but humanity has to continue. Life has to continue. It cannot depend on individuals’ decisions, because they are only temporary. They will be here only for the time being; their decisions cannot be of any value.
So celibacy, sexual energy, the power to reproduce, has been kept in the hands of life itself. You cannot do anything about it.
You said before that this was something that had to happen sooner or later.
Yes.
And a question I have here, I ask why now? Why not in the fifties, why not in the sixties or seventies? Why right now?
There are reasons. First, everything has to reach a particular climax. You don’t ask why water evaporates at a hundred degrees – why not at ninety-eight and why not at ninety, and why not at a hundred and one? It is simply something that is not in our hands. Everything happens at a certain point, at a certain climax, and there is no question of a reason why, because there is nobody to answer it.
No scientist can answer it, why water evaporates at a hundred degrees – there is no reason! It could have been ninety-nine. And there is nobody to ask about it. We have to accept it as a fundamental law of existence.
Asking about homosexuality…why it did not happen in the sixties, in the fifties, is pointless, because if it had happened in the sixties you would have asked the same question then too: Why did it not happen in the forties? It is irrelevant. Whenever it has happened, that means that now it has touched the evaporating point.
And do you feel that homosexuals were the first to suffer because their unnatural way would leave them most susceptible? Is that something that might naturally or logically follow?
It will follow logically, because what they are doing is absolutely perverted. And the consequence is going to be something that is not a disease – because I don’t call AIDS a disease – it is just a slow death. A disease is curable. Death is the only phenomenon which is incurable.
And now the scientists all over the world have accepted the fact that there is no cure for AIDS. So AIDS is no longer a disease; it is death, just slow death.
Let me ask a question that I have regarding that, that's a statement you made the other day in discourse. I think it would be fitting if I were to ask that now. You said in discourse a few days ago that AIDS is not a disease, it is death; that the scientists say there will never be a cure. Don't you feel this is quite a negative statement or assessment, just as I'm sure a hundred years ago people said that man would never fly, let alone set foot on the moon?
No, it is not so. That was simply ignorance, and the people who said it simply said it because it had not happened before.
But couldn't you say the same thing about a cure for AIDS?
No, because if you understand the situation of AIDS…the situation is that it is not a disease that needs any medicine, any operation; it is really the death of the will to live. Deep down the person has lost his will to live, and there is no medicine which can create the will to live.
I had heard that you had said, mostly as it pertained to homosexuals, that there was a loss of polarity in their lives. But how about those who are unwittingly infected, from homosexuals – normal, heterosexual people?
I certainly would have the will to survive. I would hate to be infected from some kind of contact with a homosexual, but I would have that will to survive. Could I overcome that if there was even some, some sort of medicine that might help or prolong or who knows what – whether it was Interferon or who knows what that they've had some success with. Would my will to survive help me?
I don’t think so, because the will to die is far more powerful than the will to survive. Ordinarily just the opposite is the case: your will to die remains dormant and your will to survive and live remains active. If you become infected from somebody whose will to live has died, and the will to die has become the dominant factor, he will provoke your will to die, which is very powerful because it has been dormant and never active.
Your will to live is exhausted, tired; you may like to live, but you have been using that will, that energy, that power. You have never used your will to die. That has remained dormant there, underneath. In fact, Sigmund Freud was the first man to discover that man has a wish for death. Before him it was not even a known fact that there is something like the will to die.
You can become infected only because your will to die is so powerfully there, ready to explode, that just a small infection is needed to make it creative. It will spread fast, and your will to life is exhausted, tired, old, spent. It is almost hoping against hope that there will be some way to survive once you are positive, an AIDS patient.
What it actually does when the will to live disappears: you become vulnerable to every kind of disease. Ordinarily, whenever a disease attacks you, your body, your will to live, creates antibodies to fight with it. But when the will to live is almost dead or dying, or is fighting for its own survival – and instead of the will to live, on the throne is the will to die – then any infection is welcome. No antibodies will be created in you.
This is the problem: your body is no longer fighting against any infection.
So then this community, it seems, is the only one in the world that's going out of its way to avoid it.
Certainly. It is the only…a unique community.
So does the world want to die – is that what you're saying?
And we are trying the same methods in our other communes around the world. Our communities will be the shelters for anybody who really wants to save himself.
So you suggest…are you suggesting that the will of the world is in a sense looking to die?
The whole world… In fact it is not only through AIDS – that is only one side of the story. The other side is that the world itself is preparing for a global death. So the attack is double-sided: from the individual…every individual is preparing for death; and the nations and the countries and the politicians, they are preparing with nuclear weapons. We are in a very unique time, pushed from every side towards self-destruction.
Unless something helps people to rejoice in life, to dance and sing and love – which religions have crippled; that’s why I say they are the criminals… They have all been against life in some way or other, more or less. They want to renounce this life in favor of a future life after death. They don’t want you to enjoy, they don’t want you to laugh, they don’t want you to dance, they don’t want you to eat tastefully, they don’t want you to drink – they don’t want you to do anything that gives you joy. They want you to do things which are boring, utterly futile – stupid yoga exercises in which you are just torturing your body unnecessarily. There is no need; nothing is going to be gained by it. Fasting is religious, feasting is not, and if you can fast long you become a great saint – and all that you have done is repress your natural hunger.
Everything that makes life worth living has been condemned. Poverty has been praised, comfort has been condemned. For thousands of years these people have been preparing you against life. My effort in the communes is to revive your will to live and to rejoice in it without any guilt.
In Indian religions there are five basic principles. The first is aswad; it means tastelessness – you should eat but you should not enjoy the taste. If you enjoy the taste you are committing a sin. Now this type of teaching is going to destroy people in both ways: if they enjoy the taste they feel guilty and that becomes a wound; if they don’t enjoy the taste of food, much of the joy of their life is lost.
The second is celibacy. Food and sex are very deeply connected, because food keeps you alive and sex keeps the race alive. So the second is sex – remain celibate. Now a person who cannot remain celibate – and nobody can – is bound to become frustrated, perverted, guilty, to feel himself a sinner. Life becomes a sin.
Christians say you are born in sin. You need not do anything; you are already born in sin, because Adam and Eve committed the original sin, and you are their descendants and you are still carrying the same sin. Very strange! We don’t know when Adam and Eve existed, whether they ever were or not, or whether it is just a myth or a reality. And in fact, I cannot see there was any sin in what they did. To try to know, to become wise, is a sin! – then what is virtue? Those poor fellows just ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge – that is a sin – and they were going to eat the fruit of eternal life, but were prevented and thrown out of heaven. What sin is there in being eternally alive? The biblical story is significant: religions don’t want people to be wise, they don’t want people to live. There is somewhere, deep down, support from God himself, from the biblical story, for your will for death.
If life is sin…and this has been told you continuously for thousands of years, and slowly, slowly it has penetrated your unconscious – one thing. The second thing: all the religions have forced people that if you cannot be a celibate, then get married. And monogamy has been the rule. It is something unnatural. One gets fed up with everything. If every day you have to eat the same food, three times every day the same food, how long can you remain unbored? Soon you will be bored. If you are bored with the woman you are tied to, you cannot say it but in every action, in every word, in every reaction it will be there. And so is the case with the woman: she is bored with you. But she is dependent, financially dependent; she had been prevented from education, she has children to look after… So you are tied to each other. Naturally, this is not…marriage is not a natural institution, it is a forced institution.
Man would love to change women, women would love to change men. And then they will be more rejoicing, more loving, and more wanting to live as long as possible. Marriage has killed their sexual joy; celibacy has made them perverted, homosexuals. Marriage has also played some part in making people homosexuals, because the woman will not tolerate the man even looking at another woman – but as far as boys are concerned, they can go together, there is no problem. The woman is not aware that they will be doing the same nasty things!
Religion created marriage, religion created celibacy, and both created perverted sexuality. In my commune marriage is just a legal game, because idiots are holding the power, so okay – just play according to their rules. But remember that it is unnatural.
I was under the impression that you're encouraging marriage amongst people too.
No.
Especially in the light of the problem with AIDS and so forth, so that people become closer, and with one person? No?
I don’t encourage marriage because marriage means boredom.
So it's a legal game?
So just legally they can be married, but spiritually they should be free, and they should be moving. And the basic religious teaching should be: drop jealousy and allow freedom – to anybody you love. It is your duty to make him happy and joyous. If he is becoming bored, it is good for both of you to be free. Remain legally married – no harm. If fools are making rules and they are in power, nothing can be done about it. But we can find a way – any intelligent person can find a way.
In my commune marriage is just a game; otherwise whosoever wants whomsoever, they are free…and no prevention. That’s why they are so joyous – because they are not bored. Every day a new dish!
A new…?
A new dish! If they learn Chinese, Japanese…
Okay.
Every day a new restaurant! And in fact, it is human. If the husband is happy, if the wife is happy, perhaps once in a week they can be again in deep love without being bored. It is better to have authentic love one time, once a week, than to have seven days of just boredom and no love at all. And you are bound to hate the person who is keeping you bored, and you are bound to hate yourself also, that you are such a coward that you cannot get out of this imprisonment.
So marriage has helped homosexuality, because the women won’t suspect it. Celibacy has created homosexuality in the monasteries – in Buddhists in Christians, in Jainas, in Hindus – everywhere. And all this has come to a point because anything that is unnatural can never give you contentment. That can be taken as a fundamental law: anything unnatural cannot give you contentment; it will only give you frustration.
So man moved into homosexuality, and naturally women followed, because they are now for equality, into lesbianism. Both are frustrated, but women are less frustrated for the simple reason that this freedom of lesbianism is a very new thing. Only very few women in the past had been lesbians – only nuns – but now it is widespread. Every intelligent woman once in a while tries it, and I don’t think that there is any harm once in a while in trying something new. It simply shows you are an intelligent being. Only retarded people can remain contented with the same thing their whole life.
The more intelligent you are the more freedom you need; otherwise you will become frustrated. But anything that is unnatural is going to create frustration also. Natural courses have been condemned and poisoned by religions; unnatural perversions lead nowhere. You lose the desire to live. That’s the reason why in Europe a school of philosophy – existentialism – arose.
Existentialism is a philosophical analysis of this whole human situation: that there is no meaning in life, that there is only anxiety, boredom, anguish, despair, and suicide is the only way out. According to existentialism, suicide becomes the only way out of this nightmare that you call life. That was a philosophical expression; AIDS is a biological expression of the same thing.
In my commune I am trying in every possible way to introduce my people again to the natural flow of life, with no condemnation, no idea of sin, no punishment in hell, no reward in heaven, no God in existence, and they have to decide their life. There are no ultimate laws about marriage or about anything. They are all just convenient ways. If you find it convenient, good; if you don’t find it convenient, don’t stay a single moment in the bondage. And we are teaching them something which the whole of humanity needs: meditation.
Meditation leads you to the innermost core of your life. You are alive; you may have lost even the will to live, but still you are alive, and there is a small flame of life still in you. If you can reach that small flame, it can flare up again. If you can become consciously aware of that flame, things can change, totally change.
Let me ask you this question. My feeling is that sannyasins don't fear death, so why fear AIDS, and are you not…?
We do not fear AIDS; there is no question of any fear. When you are going on the road and you find a rock and you bypass it, does it mean you fear the rock? Do you have to stumble on it to prove that you don’t fear it? We do not fear AIDS; we just see it on the way. People are stumbling on it, and we are making our people not stumble. There is nothing to be afraid of in it. There is no reason for my people to be afraid of it.
But how, how has it affected the quality of life here? – this avoidance of stumbling on the rock?
Nothing has…
…because you say AIDS is death: I suppose you don't want to stumble on death if you don't have to. …If that's what you're saying.
But you have…
I have a feeling the quality of life is not quite the same, now that there is this avoidance of death.
No. The quality is better. It is not the same – that’s true. The quality is better because people are more responsible, and people are not only responsible towards their own life; they are also responsible for not affecting anybody else’s life. Their life-quality is enhanced. And when the whole world is in the ditch of death and they are still dancing and laughing, they will see that if they had not been able to take all those precautions, this laughter would not have been possible.
You cannot find people anywhere who are more joyous and more laughing and dancing and happy, and more hardworking at the same time. Even God got tired by the sixth day. My people work seven days a week!
I thought God didn't exist?
He does not exist, but as far as the story goes, he got tired.
Alright.
So whenever I want to make a joke of him, I accept the story. I don’t accept God.
I had a question from somebody else about God and I put it aside because I was under the impression that you don't acknowledge the existence of God, but as far as the story goes it's…
As far as the story goes…
It's a good one?
I can make use of any story without any difficulty.
Okay. You've also said in discourse that no children have been born here in four years. And that the world is now not a good place to bring a child into. Isn't the child an opportunity to reeducate, renew and replace the old ways, or to use your own words, “Why wait to heal old broken bones? – replace them.” It seems to me that in a commune such as this, where you are going to great lengths to filter out the sick through awareness, the greatest opportunity exists to bring in new generations of physically healthy and spiritually pure individuals.
We will do that, but the time is not right yet. I have to prepare my people. Once my people are ready – they have all the comforts, they have all the educational systems, they have everything that the children will need… In my commune, these children will be of the commune; there is no family fixation. The father and mother can be loving to their child, but the child will be part of the commune, not in a separate family from others.
So all males will be his uncles and all females will be his aunts, and he will be welcome in every place and in every home. He can move wherever he wants, he can live wherever he wants to live, he can live with whomsoever he wants to live. I have to prepare my people first, and once my people are ready, you are right: I am not going to repair rotten bones; I will create my own people.
I am heading towards that, but my ways of creating the people are going to be different. They are not going to be the old ways. The old way has failed. It was accidental. My people are going to be more scientific about it.
Can you give me some idea?
For example, no couple is free to bring an accidental child into the commune. They will have to get the permission of the medical board, and if…when the medical board suggests that their child will not be something unique – will be just ordinary, a mediocre mortal such as the whole world is full of – then the best way will be that the woman gets artificial insemination. So they can find the best male sperm in the commune and introduce it. And in fact it is easier; the natural way is really a strange way.
I have been a competitor in only one race and that was when I met my mother’s egg!
In a race?
When I met my mother’s egg…
Okay.
That was the only race in which I was a participant – but the race was tremendous! One million participants! And if you compare with my size…the small passage that they had to move along was two miles. They are so small – male sperms – and one million male sperms rushing towards the female egg…! And I am a lazy person! I decided once and for all that “Put your whole energy into it and reach the egg somehow, because then your whole life you can rest and relax!”
So I have done every competition, every race – even before my birth I was finished with competition and race. To find out of one million sperms, who is going to be who, is very difficult. But now methods are possible to decide: in these one million people there may be a few Albert Einsteins, a few Rabindranath Tagores, a few Mozarts, a few Hegels, Kants. One million is a big quantity.
What about the possibility of using your sperm?
I will not allow it…simply because even if you become enlightened, your sperms don’t become enlightened! And I am not going to give birth to an unenlightened child!
Well, would there be the possibility, a higher likelihood, that your offspring…?
No. The biology remains completely unaffected by your enlightenment.
Well, what about just your intelligence then? I mean, you have an intelligence level that – I'm sure most people would agree – is quite high…
No.
…It's another thing to be an enlightened master, but you spoke before of having a new generation here, that you're planning for that, you speak of other great men…
I am planning for that, and I have intelligence enough to find more intelligent people than me. But I am an ordinary man with no special talent. If we need a physicist, then Albert Einstein will be better or Sakharov will be better. If we need a painter then Picasso will be better or van Gogh will be better. So include me out!
Do you think people will be disappointed?
No, they will not be disappointed. They will be disappointed if I give birth to a child and he proves an idiot! They will be happy that I don’t leave any trace which is below me. And there is no way to make the sperms enlightened before their birth, so it is better not to take the risk.
Alright. It seems like…I won't push the issue. I still have a few questions that I must ask here.
Okay. Finish.
What kind of protective measures has the community instituted to curb the AIDS threat? And should the problem become larger, what future measures may be taken?
Very simple. The first is that the commune members should be respectful, loving, compassionate, to anybody who is found to be suffering from AIDS. That has to be their basic attitude, because that is what the problem will be in the outside world: once a person is known to have AIDS he will be a condemned person – by his own family, children, parents, wife, friends – everywhere he will be an outcast.
So people are keeping the information repressed. Many more people are suffering from AIDS than are known. But it is human, because the moment people come to know you are condemned in everybody’s eyes. So this is the first thing that I am teaching to my people: that he is simply a victim – the victim of neurotic religious ideologies, the victim of unnatural social institutions like marriage, prostitution. So he is a sufferer and close to death; now don’t make him suffer more.
Help him, respect him; don’t let him die in indignity – and teach him meditation. And I am telling my people that he is fortunate in a way: if he is going to live for two years, now for two years he is going to be one of the richest people in the world. Even the richest man cannot afford so much time for meditation. And we will arrange his food, his clothes, the best we can, and he should meditate, listen to the best music, see films, read novels – whatever he always wanted to do, let him do it. And let him feel that he is loved and respected and there is no discrimination.
There are two persons from the commune, and four more have arrived from outside, because in the outside there is no place for them. Even hospitals avoid them, even doctors are afraid; families don’t want them anymore, their jobs are finished. But we have accepted them – that’s perfectly good. We can take care of them, there is no problem. They can help in their own way. They can edit, they can paint, they can sculpt, or do whatsoever they are capable of. We have arranged the most scenic place for them to live.
And as far as sex is concerned, those who have AIDS can have sex amongst themselves. It is their responsibility towards the commune, which is taking care of them, giving them all respect and love, that they should not in any way affect anybody’s life in the commune. And certainly, with such respect and love it is impossible for them to interfere in anybody’s life here. They come to the discourses; they are allowed to move in the commune. They have been told just not to have any physical contact. And the commune has to take every care, because accidentally anything may provoke the thing. Tears can infect you, saliva can infect you; perhaps any liquid coming out of the body of an AIDS victim carries the virus – so just keep clean, make everything sterile.
So even in small things – in the restaurant, everybody who comes to eat there first has to clean his hands with alcohol, and anything that has been used for eating is sterilized after eating. Even a person making a phone call, by chance his saliva may fall on the phone – so after every phone call the phone is sprayed with alcohol. In this way we are taking every precaution that no infection spreads.
Did you help make these decisions, to implement these measures? Or the medical people here only…?
No, no.
And did they consult with…?…Because certainly these affect the quality of life here – these new measures – and I should think that's something that you would ultimately have a say over.
No. This is the decision of the medical people in the commune. And we have the best medical experts, surgeons, who are capable – they take the decisions. Only in the beginning will it look a little odd that your hands have to be sprayed with alcohol, but finally you will find it more hygienic in every way. Even if AIDS disappears, these arrangements are not going to disappear, because they will prevent other infections too.
So when they are new these measurements will seem to affect life, but the effect will be for the better. And not a single sannyasin has complained that he is not feeling good with these things. In fact, every sannyasin is excited that his commune is taking every care. Outside there is nobody to take care of you. This simply shows the carefulness, lovingness.
And the commune is an organic unity.
So in every possible way – people making love should use gloves, should use condoms. In the beginning it looks as if this is an unnecessary complication. When you are making love to a woman, in that moment to think of condoms and gloves – it destroys the whole joy, it seems. But it is not true. In fact it is better: the slower you are, the better is the possibility of having an orgasm. It is good that the man is slower – he has to put the condom, he has to put the gloves. It is good. And it will increase people’s sensitivity.
When you touch a woman with gloves on, naturally there is a barrier in the beginning – the plastic, the rubber, or anything the glove is made of, comes in between. But soon you become accustomed to it and because you love the woman your sensitivity spreads out of the glove.
Now it is a fact well established by a Russian scientist, Kirlian, who was working with photography and human energy, that each person has a two-inch aura of energy around his body. So if you are using a glove, don’t be worried – beyond the glove there is a two inch aura of your energy. It can be photographed. And it will be a good chance to feel that aura; otherwise, who cares? It is just a simple question…
If you come to an aboriginal tribe in India and see naked people, they cannot believe why you are wearing a coat and suit and all these things, and missing life – the wind, the sun and the contact, the direct contact. But you have never thought about it, that you are missing the direct contact with existence because of your coat, because of your shoes. Your contact with existence has taken new dimensions.
For example, your contact with existence is eighty to ninety percent from your eyes; the remainder is from your hands. In fact the whole body sensitivity has become concentrated into certain places: your eyes, your hands, your face. It has not been in any way a loss to humanity, because the hands have become immensely powerful. The eyes have become immensely capable of seeing beauty. Your tongue has become capable of tasting. Otherwise, buffaloes only eat one kind of grass and they go on chewing the same grass their whole life – no question of change. Even if you give them another kind of grass they will not eat it. They are not bored; their tongues don’t have the taste buds. Your tongue has taste buds, and because the whole body is covered, the uncovered part – your face, your hands, your ears, your eyes, your nose, your mouth – they have all become concentratedly sensitive. So you can see more beauty than a naked man; you can hear music, its subtle nuances, better than a naked man. You can taste better, more refined qualities of taste, than a naked man. He simply swallows things – there is no question of taste. But in the beginning it would have been difficult.
So that’s simply the beginning. Once they become accustomed to it they will be able to have sensitivity even through the gloves. In fact you already have leather gloves of your own. And who is there? – you are in the head; the part, the center that feels it is in the head, and then there are bones and nerves, and it is a complicated system. In that complicated system, I don’t think just a little bit more plastic is going to create any trouble. If your mind can manage to feel the woman’s body through all this complicated system, it will be able to feel through a plastic glove.
Soon you will find that it is more hygienic, because your hand will not be touching the woman’s perspiration, which can be dangerous. I have suggested to my people: stop kissing and start rubbing noses. And don’t feel that you are losing something – it is only a question of thinking. You are gaining new ground. You have never understood that noses are one of the most erotic points. Eskimos have been doing that for centuries; they never kiss, because they have always thought that kissing is unhygienic, ugly. If they see a Frenchman kissing they will start vomiting – what is this man doing?
Should I think that I am doing well because I have a big nose?
A big nose will be better, certainly. A Jew is better in every way!
Does it show?
I am a Jew – just born in a wrong country!
I have another question here…a few more.
I've heard rumors that you're possibly planning a program similar to the Share-A-Home Program, but with AIDS victims, and I'm wondering if there's any truth to that, and at the same time, in a certain sense, I personally feel there's almost a contradiction or almost an absurdity to that. I just wonder if there's any truth to those rumors.
No. It is just a rumor.
Just a rumor?
My people are very creative in making rumors go around – and we enjoy! Nothing to be worried about.
Okay. Now I have another direct question from the magazine. They're under the impression that the Dutch sannyasin population is one of the largest, percentage-wise, in relation to the total population of the Netherlands. If that's so, what is the explanation for that or what do you think could be an explanation for that?
It is true. Holland is almost mine, the same way Germany is mine. The reason for both countries becoming interested in me is the same: both are people with guts, and cowards cannot be interested in me. Germans and Dutch both have guts and know how to take risks and go for adventure.
French people are just intellectuals. I don’t have any impact on France, for the simple reason that intellectuals are interested only in talking and thinking but never in doing anything.
The English are grumpy, long faces, so depressed and depressing to others that they cannot believe it is possible to laugh and rejoice and dance. They have lost all hope – with their empire gone, they are almost a graveyard. England is no longer a living country, and those who are alive have come to me.
The Italians are here in large numbers. Many Italians have been to me, but they are as slippery as their spaghetti. You cannot rely on them. Just a national characteristic: they are not reliable. What they can do? They are not doing it knowingly. So many have come, many have gone, many go on coming and going, but they are slippery people.
Germans and Dutch – any people who have come to me from these two countries have remained with me. They know the joy of trusting with every phase, and they also know a certain decisiveness which Italians lack. Italians are not decisive; they are always “To be or not to be” – either, or. The German or Dutch either will not become part of my world movement – that is clear, it is not indecisiveness; he has taken a decision – or he will become part, and it is not wishy washy. Now he is going to stay with his commitment.
Every country has developed a certain character. Down the centuries, different geography, different history, different religious ideologies, different
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is one of the cleanest cities in the world, but when they come to the commune they understand that they can be defeated. And our vision is absolutely clear. It is not foggy, it is not based on beliefs; it is absolutely rational, scientific. We are all for peace and we want that there should be no world war – no war ever. The last war has happened. They are coming more and more, in greater numbers.
It is a little bit difficult to characterize people, but people do have different characters. For example, Indians are so much in misery, suffering, poverty, but still they go on holding to the idea that they are the holiest people in the world – now what is the need for them to become sannyasins? They are the holiest people already! Just to be born in India is to be holy, so why they should bother about…? And they are afraid of me because I don’t accept their holiness, I don’t accept their religion, I don’t accept their tradition.
I am against every tradition, every religion, every ideology. I want man to be deprogrammed, completely deprogrammed, so he is clean and clear, unburdened of the past and free to fly into the future. But that is most difficult for an Indian. He is so burdened with a long tradition of ten thousand years, and for ten thousand years he has been believing that his is the only religious community in the world, and the highest. It is difficult for them. They have lost all sense of humor, because holy persons don’t laugh. They have lost all sense of respect because they have become accustomed to being respected; they have forgotten that they have to respect also in response.
There was a world Hindu conference. The secretary was interested in me and somehow managed an invitation for me. The president was the shankaracharya, the head of the Hindus. We have been quarreling and fighting for almost two decades. If he had known that an invitation had gone to me, it would have been immediately prevented, but without his knowledge the invitation came to me, and my friend’s letter saying that, “The shankaracharya does not know about it, but you have to come because your presence will make a difference; otherwise, all those Hindu leaders will talk the same nonsense.”
I was to inaugurate the conference and the shankaracharya was to preside over it, but the moment he saw me he lost all gentlemanliness, had completely a nervous breakdown. He jumped over and took the mike and inaugurated the conference. Seeing that I had been invited to inaugurate it, the people were shocked and could not believe that this could be done. Even though a shankaracharya is doing it, this is wrong, because on the cards they had received, my name was down to inaugurate the conference and the shankaracharya was just to preside.
While inaugurating the conference he told the audience that he cannot sit on the same platform as me, and he is not going to allow me to speak. I went close to him and I said, “I will not take more than two minutes – I have just one question to ask the people.” And not bothering about him, I took the mike and asked the people, “What do you want? Do you want me to speak or not? If you want me to speak raise both your hands.” There were at least one hundred thousand people, and two hundred thousand hands. And I said to the shankaracharya, “Look at these hands! You are no longer president here; you are canceled by the audience itself. Now go home and rest!”
I spoke and argued against everything that he had said. He was becoming red and trembling with anger…and these are the people who think themselves holy! Since that conference it was made a point that I should not be invited in any Hindu conference. Since that conference I have not been to speak in any Hindu conference. And the fear is that what they are saying is absolutely wrong, and they are keeping the people still befooled. And those one hundred thousand people were absolutely in my favor, because on each point I completely demolished him. They clapped and they appreciated it, and the more they appreciated it, the more he was out of his mind completely. In fact, while getting down he fell from the stage. He was in such a state…
Hindus have an idiotic idea of being the holiest people. Naturally they can’t come to me, because I will take their holiness away and make them simple human beings. My whole effort is to make simple human beings, natural human beings.
What about the Americans?
Americans are phony!
Phony?
Plastic – nothing much.
How is that manifest most obviously?
They used to come to me in India – while I was there many Americans used to come every year to visit me and they would remain there for two or three hours…months, do the meditations and everything, and then they would disappear, come back to America.
Since I have been in America I have not seen those people at all, because now it needs guts to be here. I am fighting the Oregon government, fighting the federal government, and those people have simply chickened out.
Do you think, in a sense maybe, that's a problem for you in that, as you say, the Americans are chicken, and that you're not robbing America of its sons and daughters, which is always what people are assuming?
Not at all. For all the money that…
Which would create more controversy, if more people were saying, “I'm losing my son and daughter to this commune,” since that's usually the way the media reports it – and that's the hysteria that's reported in many newspapers.
That is a possibility. But one thing you should remember: I have not used American dollars in creating this commune at all. All the money has come from different countries. American dollars I have not used yet. I will use it…I cannot leave them just like that. Even they – they are chickens! I will…I have a chicken house here!
Do you think maybe it's because Americans have a superior attitude? Is it possible that this isn't so attractive to Americans possibly because they have such a superior…?
No. They have been coming – and not only they, but their leaders were coming. Erhard, the founder of EST came to me. Dick Price, the founder of Esalen Institute, came to me. I know where the problem is here: the problem is the people who had been coming to India and becoming sannyasins there were simply dishonest. They would wear red clothes there and the moment they left India they put their red clothes in the suitcase and became Americans. So here there was no problem for them.
Now to come here means to get into trouble with the society, with the parents, with the wife, with the husband, and those who have come, they had to face all that trouble. In India they were coming; they were not afraid that their dollar is at any risk there. Here, it is. Here we have poured almost two hundred million dollars into this desert, and if we want to make this whole desert a lush, green place, it will need a billion or two billion dollars more. And certainly we are going to get them from the Americans. How far they can escape? They cannot escape, but they will try. That’s why I am saying they have chickened out.
Seeing the enormousness of the commune, seeing that there is going to be a fight with the government – and we are fighting in so many courts and we are winning in every court… And I have made it a point that all the American politicians are doing things which are against the American constitution. Among our sannyasins there are four hundred legal experts. We have the biggest legal firm in the whole world, and they are working day and night to fight the government on their own grounds. And we are winning!
Do you have fun with that?
I am going to have immense fun. I am really excited. I was sick…I became healthy! I have not become healthy by any medicine, but just the excitement has proved of tremendous help.
I have another direct question here. In the recent Der Spiegel interview you called Hitler a true and great leader. Do you stand by this comment, that Hitler was a true and great leader, or perhaps was it quoted out of context?
He was certainly a great leader, but he was a crackpot! There is no contradiction in it. In fact, only crackpots can be leaders; otherwise who bothers to be a leader?
I agree!
Yes.
Absolutely.
Okay…or do you have some more questions?
Yes, I think I have one last one.
Yes, just one – the last.
No, I'll let it go. That's okay. We can finish.
You are certain?
I'm sure.
No. There is one question.
Such an appropriate question! I've been at the Ranch now seven times. The news peg or reason or headline for each of my visits would be something like this: the first visit – India's sex guru comes to America; my second visit was India's sex guru swallows small town; my third visit, I came here for the first festival – welcoming sannyasins to the new Ranch and the small, swallowed town; the fourth visit I made was for the second festival and photographing the progress of the new city; the fifth time was for guns, gambling and because a very wealthy German blue blood showed up here; the sixth time was for welcoming the homeless; and now I'm here doing a story on AIDS. What do you think might be the reason for my next visit?
Just that the red people swallowed America!
Offenburg, West Germany
Boy, would my one-year-old daughter love you! It's quite an entrance, a lot of fun.
This is my very first interview. I'm glad that it could be with you. I'm usually hiding behind a camera.
The first few questions I have were given to me by Bunte editors directly and they were sent here, and then I have a few questions of my own.
Okay.
Osho,
Since when have you been aware of the dangers of AIDS?
It was going to happen some day. It is something to do with how life functions. Life functions through polarities. The opposite poles create the tension for life. Life is a tension, death is a relaxation.
It is just like positive electricity and negative electricity: if both are not functioning together there will not be any electricity. So in existence, opposites are really not opposites but complementaries. The same is the case with bioenergy: man and woman are positive and negative poles. Their meeting is the meeting of positive and negative energy. It is creative of life.
So even before AIDS became known, I was aware that homosexuality is spreading fast. Sooner or later something very dangerous is going to happen, because homosexuality means there is no tension; man and man are the same poles. They can only create death, not life.
I have always been telling people to move in their natural, biological sex relationships – man to woman. But about AIDS I became aware just last year, that that of which I was always afraid has come. It was bound to come sooner or later. It is a by-product of homosexuality. And homosexuality is a religious disease: if anybody is responsible for it, it is the founders of all the religions. They have committed this crime, perhaps unknowingly, because first they told people that celibacy is something spiritual, which is sheer nonsense.
Celibacy is impossible. Nobody has ever been a celibate, unless he was impotent. But the most surprising thing is that the impotent people have not contributed anything to human progress, evolution. They have never been creative; they are just hollow, they have no potency to create.
The religious people were teaching a forced impotency which is against biology. And whatever your ideology may be, there is no way to convey the ideology to your physiology, biology, your chemistry – there is no way. Once you have eaten the food, you cannot tell your stomach what to do with it. And it is good that it is beyond your control. Once you have swallowed it, it is beyond your control. Your body knows perfectly well what to do with it.
You may take the vow of celibacy, but your biology is not even aware that you are a Christian monk or a Hindu monk or a Buddhist monk. Your biology goes on functioning the same way as before. It goes on creating male sperms in you, in millions, because nature depends on your not being a celibate. It is good that Buddha’s father was not celibate; it is good that Mohammed’s father was not celibate. If these people had been celibate, the world would have missed two very colorful people.
Nature wants you to be alive, hence it has kept in its own control the basic elements in your life – for example, breathing. It is not up to you to breathe or not to breathe; otherwise sometimes you may forget. In sleep you are bound to forget, and then in the morning there will be nobody to breathe. So about breathing, no one can say, “I am doing it.” It is existence that breathes in and out, and you are not in control of it, because breathing is so essential for your life – it cannot be left in your unconscious hands.
What breathing is to a single individual, reproduction is to the race. Individuals come and go, but humanity has to continue. Life has to continue. It cannot depend on individuals’ decisions, because they are only temporary. They will be here only for the time being; their decisions cannot be of any value.
So celibacy, sexual energy, the power to reproduce, has been kept in the hands of life itself. You cannot do anything about it.
You said before that this was something that had to happen sooner or later.
Yes.
And a question I have here, I ask why now? Why not in the fifties, why not in the sixties or seventies? Why right now?
There are reasons. First, everything has to reach a particular climax. You don’t ask why water evaporates at a hundred degrees – why not at ninety-eight and why not at ninety, and why not at a hundred and one? It is simply something that is not in our hands. Everything happens at a certain point, at a certain climax, and there is no question of a reason why, because there is nobody to answer it.
No scientist can answer it, why water evaporates at a hundred degrees – there is no reason! It could have been ninety-nine. And there is nobody to ask about it. We have to accept it as a fundamental law of existence.
Asking about homosexuality…why it did not happen in the sixties, in the fifties, is pointless, because if it had happened in the sixties you would have asked the same question then too: Why did it not happen in the forties? It is irrelevant. Whenever it has happened, that means that now it has touched the evaporating point.
And do you feel that homosexuals were the first to suffer because their unnatural way would leave them most susceptible? Is that something that might naturally or logically follow?
It will follow logically, because what they are doing is absolutely perverted. And the consequence is going to be something that is not a disease – because I don’t call AIDS a disease – it is just a slow death. A disease is curable. Death is the only phenomenon which is incurable.
And now the scientists all over the world have accepted the fact that there is no cure for AIDS. So AIDS is no longer a disease; it is death, just slow death.
Let me ask a question that I have regarding that, that's a statement you made the other day in discourse. I think it would be fitting if I were to ask that now. You said in discourse a few days ago that AIDS is not a disease, it is death; that the scientists say there will never be a cure. Don't you feel this is quite a negative statement or assessment, just as I'm sure a hundred years ago people said that man would never fly, let alone set foot on the moon?
No, it is not so. That was simply ignorance, and the people who said it simply said it because it had not happened before.
But couldn't you say the same thing about a cure for AIDS?
No, because if you understand the situation of AIDS…the situation is that it is not a disease that needs any medicine, any operation; it is really the death of the will to live. Deep down the person has lost his will to live, and there is no medicine which can create the will to live.
I had heard that you had said, mostly as it pertained to homosexuals, that there was a loss of polarity in their lives. But how about those who are unwittingly infected, from homosexuals – normal, heterosexual people?
I certainly would have the will to survive. I would hate to be infected from some kind of contact with a homosexual, but I would have that will to survive. Could I overcome that if there was even some, some sort of medicine that might help or prolong or who knows what – whether it was Interferon or who knows what that they've had some success with. Would my will to survive help me?
I don’t think so, because the will to die is far more powerful than the will to survive. Ordinarily just the opposite is the case: your will to die remains dormant and your will to survive and live remains active. If you become infected from somebody whose will to live has died, and the will to die has become the dominant factor, he will provoke your will to die, which is very powerful because it has been dormant and never active.
Your will to live is exhausted, tired; you may like to live, but you have been using that will, that energy, that power. You have never used your will to die. That has remained dormant there, underneath. In fact, Sigmund Freud was the first man to discover that man has a wish for death. Before him it was not even a known fact that there is something like the will to die.
You can become infected only because your will to die is so powerfully there, ready to explode, that just a small infection is needed to make it creative. It will spread fast, and your will to life is exhausted, tired, old, spent. It is almost hoping against hope that there will be some way to survive once you are positive, an AIDS patient.
What it actually does when the will to live disappears: you become vulnerable to every kind of disease. Ordinarily, whenever a disease attacks you, your body, your will to live, creates antibodies to fight with it. But when the will to live is almost dead or dying, or is fighting for its own survival – and instead of the will to live, on the throne is the will to die – then any infection is welcome. No antibodies will be created in you.
This is the problem: your body is no longer fighting against any infection.
So then this community, it seems, is the only one in the world that's going out of its way to avoid it.
Certainly. It is the only…a unique community.
So does the world want to die – is that what you're saying?
And we are trying the same methods in our other communes around the world. Our communities will be the shelters for anybody who really wants to save himself.
So you suggest…are you suggesting that the will of the world is in a sense looking to die?
The whole world… In fact it is not only through AIDS – that is only one side of the story. The other side is that the world itself is preparing for a global death. So the attack is double-sided: from the individual…every individual is preparing for death; and the nations and the countries and the politicians, they are preparing with nuclear weapons. We are in a very unique time, pushed from every side towards self-destruction.
Unless something helps people to rejoice in life, to dance and sing and love – which religions have crippled; that’s why I say they are the criminals… They have all been against life in some way or other, more or less. They want to renounce this life in favor of a future life after death. They don’t want you to enjoy, they don’t want you to laugh, they don’t want you to dance, they don’t want you to eat tastefully, they don’t want you to drink – they don’t want you to do anything that gives you joy. They want you to do things which are boring, utterly futile – stupid yoga exercises in which you are just torturing your body unnecessarily. There is no need; nothing is going to be gained by it. Fasting is religious, feasting is not, and if you can fast long you become a great saint – and all that you have done is repress your natural hunger.
Everything that makes life worth living has been condemned. Poverty has been praised, comfort has been condemned. For thousands of years these people have been preparing you against life. My effort in the communes is to revive your will to live and to rejoice in it without any guilt.
In Indian religions there are five basic principles. The first is aswad; it means tastelessness – you should eat but you should not enjoy the taste. If you enjoy the taste you are committing a sin. Now this type of teaching is going to destroy people in both ways: if they enjoy the taste they feel guilty and that becomes a wound; if they don’t enjoy the taste of food, much of the joy of their life is lost.
The second is celibacy. Food and sex are very deeply connected, because food keeps you alive and sex keeps the race alive. So the second is sex – remain celibate. Now a person who cannot remain celibate – and nobody can – is bound to become frustrated, perverted, guilty, to feel himself a sinner. Life becomes a sin.
Christians say you are born in sin. You need not do anything; you are already born in sin, because Adam and Eve committed the original sin, and you are their descendants and you are still carrying the same sin. Very strange! We don’t know when Adam and Eve existed, whether they ever were or not, or whether it is just a myth or a reality. And in fact, I cannot see there was any sin in what they did. To try to know, to become wise, is a sin! – then what is virtue? Those poor fellows just ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge – that is a sin – and they were going to eat the fruit of eternal life, but were prevented and thrown out of heaven. What sin is there in being eternally alive? The biblical story is significant: religions don’t want people to be wise, they don’t want people to live. There is somewhere, deep down, support from God himself, from the biblical story, for your will for death.
If life is sin…and this has been told you continuously for thousands of years, and slowly, slowly it has penetrated your unconscious – one thing. The second thing: all the religions have forced people that if you cannot be a celibate, then get married. And monogamy has been the rule. It is something unnatural. One gets fed up with everything. If every day you have to eat the same food, three times every day the same food, how long can you remain unbored? Soon you will be bored. If you are bored with the woman you are tied to, you cannot say it but in every action, in every word, in every reaction it will be there. And so is the case with the woman: she is bored with you. But she is dependent, financially dependent; she had been prevented from education, she has children to look after… So you are tied to each other. Naturally, this is not…marriage is not a natural institution, it is a forced institution.
Man would love to change women, women would love to change men. And then they will be more rejoicing, more loving, and more wanting to live as long as possible. Marriage has killed their sexual joy; celibacy has made them perverted, homosexuals. Marriage has also played some part in making people homosexuals, because the woman will not tolerate the man even looking at another woman – but as far as boys are concerned, they can go together, there is no problem. The woman is not aware that they will be doing the same nasty things!
Religion created marriage, religion created celibacy, and both created perverted sexuality. In my commune marriage is just a legal game, because idiots are holding the power, so okay – just play according to their rules. But remember that it is unnatural.
I was under the impression that you're encouraging marriage amongst people too.
No.
Especially in the light of the problem with AIDS and so forth, so that people become closer, and with one person? No?
I don’t encourage marriage because marriage means boredom.
So it's a legal game?
So just legally they can be married, but spiritually they should be free, and they should be moving. And the basic religious teaching should be: drop jealousy and allow freedom – to anybody you love. It is your duty to make him happy and joyous. If he is becoming bored, it is good for both of you to be free. Remain legally married – no harm. If fools are making rules and they are in power, nothing can be done about it. But we can find a way – any intelligent person can find a way.
In my commune marriage is just a game; otherwise whosoever wants whomsoever, they are free…and no prevention. That’s why they are so joyous – because they are not bored. Every day a new dish!
A new…?
A new dish! If they learn Chinese, Japanese…
Okay.
Every day a new restaurant! And in fact, it is human. If the husband is happy, if the wife is happy, perhaps once in a week they can be again in deep love without being bored. It is better to have authentic love one time, once a week, than to have seven days of just boredom and no love at all. And you are bound to hate the person who is keeping you bored, and you are bound to hate yourself also, that you are such a coward that you cannot get out of this imprisonment.
So marriage has helped homosexuality, because the women won’t suspect it. Celibacy has created homosexuality in the monasteries – in Buddhists in Christians, in Jainas, in Hindus – everywhere. And all this has come to a point because anything that is unnatural can never give you contentment. That can be taken as a fundamental law: anything unnatural cannot give you contentment; it will only give you frustration.
So man moved into homosexuality, and naturally women followed, because they are now for equality, into lesbianism. Both are frustrated, but women are less frustrated for the simple reason that this freedom of lesbianism is a very new thing. Only very few women in the past had been lesbians – only nuns – but now it is widespread. Every intelligent woman once in a while tries it, and I don’t think that there is any harm once in a while in trying something new. It simply shows you are an intelligent being. Only retarded people can remain contented with the same thing their whole life.
The more intelligent you are the more freedom you need; otherwise you will become frustrated. But anything that is unnatural is going to create frustration also. Natural courses have been condemned and poisoned by religions; unnatural perversions lead nowhere. You lose the desire to live. That’s the reason why in Europe a school of philosophy – existentialism – arose.
Existentialism is a philosophical analysis of this whole human situation: that there is no meaning in life, that there is only anxiety, boredom, anguish, despair, and suicide is the only way out. According to existentialism, suicide becomes the only way out of this nightmare that you call life. That was a philosophical expression; AIDS is a biological expression of the same thing.
In my commune I am trying in every possible way to introduce my people again to the natural flow of life, with no condemnation, no idea of sin, no punishment in hell, no reward in heaven, no God in existence, and they have to decide their life. There are no ultimate laws about marriage or about anything. They are all just convenient ways. If you find it convenient, good; if you don’t find it convenient, don’t stay a single moment in the bondage. And we are teaching them something which the whole of humanity needs: meditation.
Meditation leads you to the innermost core of your life. You are alive; you may have lost even the will to live, but still you are alive, and there is a small flame of life still in you. If you can reach that small flame, it can flare up again. If you can become consciously aware of that flame, things can change, totally change.
Let me ask you this question. My feeling is that sannyasins don't fear death, so why fear AIDS, and are you not…?
We do not fear AIDS; there is no question of any fear. When you are going on the road and you find a rock and you bypass it, does it mean you fear the rock? Do you have to stumble on it to prove that you don’t fear it? We do not fear AIDS; we just see it on the way. People are stumbling on it, and we are making our people not stumble. There is nothing to be afraid of in it. There is no reason for my people to be afraid of it.
But how, how has it affected the quality of life here? – this avoidance of stumbling on the rock?
Nothing has…
…because you say AIDS is death: I suppose you don't want to stumble on death if you don't have to. …If that's what you're saying.
But you have…
I have a feeling the quality of life is not quite the same, now that there is this avoidance of death.
No. The quality is better. It is not the same – that’s true. The quality is better because people are more responsible, and people are not only responsible towards their own life; they are also responsible for not affecting anybody else’s life. Their life-quality is enhanced. And when the whole world is in the ditch of death and they are still dancing and laughing, they will see that if they had not been able to take all those precautions, this laughter would not have been possible.
You cannot find people anywhere who are more joyous and more laughing and dancing and happy, and more hardworking at the same time. Even God got tired by the sixth day. My people work seven days a week!
I thought God didn't exist?
He does not exist, but as far as the story goes, he got tired.
Alright.
So whenever I want to make a joke of him, I accept the story. I don’t accept God.
I had a question from somebody else about God and I put it aside because I was under the impression that you don't acknowledge the existence of God, but as far as the story goes it's…
As far as the story goes…
It's a good one?
I can make use of any story without any difficulty.
Okay. You've also said in discourse that no children have been born here in four years. And that the world is now not a good place to bring a child into. Isn't the child an opportunity to reeducate, renew and replace the old ways, or to use your own words, “Why wait to heal old broken bones? – replace them.” It seems to me that in a commune such as this, where you are going to great lengths to filter out the sick through awareness, the greatest opportunity exists to bring in new generations of physically healthy and spiritually pure individuals.
We will do that, but the time is not right yet. I have to prepare my people. Once my people are ready – they have all the comforts, they have all the educational systems, they have everything that the children will need… In my commune, these children will be of the commune; there is no family fixation. The father and mother can be loving to their child, but the child will be part of the commune, not in a separate family from others.
So all males will be his uncles and all females will be his aunts, and he will be welcome in every place and in every home. He can move wherever he wants, he can live wherever he wants to live, he can live with whomsoever he wants to live. I have to prepare my people first, and once my people are ready, you are right: I am not going to repair rotten bones; I will create my own people.
I am heading towards that, but my ways of creating the people are going to be different. They are not going to be the old ways. The old way has failed. It was accidental. My people are going to be more scientific about it.
Can you give me some idea?
For example, no couple is free to bring an accidental child into the commune. They will have to get the permission of the medical board, and if…when the medical board suggests that their child will not be something unique – will be just ordinary, a mediocre mortal such as the whole world is full of – then the best way will be that the woman gets artificial insemination. So they can find the best male sperm in the commune and introduce it. And in fact it is easier; the natural way is really a strange way.
I have been a competitor in only one race and that was when I met my mother’s egg!
In a race?
When I met my mother’s egg…
Okay.
That was the only race in which I was a participant – but the race was tremendous! One million participants! And if you compare with my size…the small passage that they had to move along was two miles. They are so small – male sperms – and one million male sperms rushing towards the female egg…! And I am a lazy person! I decided once and for all that “Put your whole energy into it and reach the egg somehow, because then your whole life you can rest and relax!”
So I have done every competition, every race – even before my birth I was finished with competition and race. To find out of one million sperms, who is going to be who, is very difficult. But now methods are possible to decide: in these one million people there may be a few Albert Einsteins, a few Rabindranath Tagores, a few Mozarts, a few Hegels, Kants. One million is a big quantity.
What about the possibility of using your sperm?
I will not allow it…simply because even if you become enlightened, your sperms don’t become enlightened! And I am not going to give birth to an unenlightened child!
Well, would there be the possibility, a higher likelihood, that your offspring…?
No. The biology remains completely unaffected by your enlightenment.
Well, what about just your intelligence then? I mean, you have an intelligence level that – I'm sure most people would agree – is quite high…
No.
…It's another thing to be an enlightened master, but you spoke before of having a new generation here, that you're planning for that, you speak of other great men…
I am planning for that, and I have intelligence enough to find more intelligent people than me. But I am an ordinary man with no special talent. If we need a physicist, then Albert Einstein will be better or Sakharov will be better. If we need a painter then Picasso will be better or van Gogh will be better. So include me out!
Do you think people will be disappointed?
No, they will not be disappointed. They will be disappointed if I give birth to a child and he proves an idiot! They will be happy that I don’t leave any trace which is below me. And there is no way to make the sperms enlightened before their birth, so it is better not to take the risk.
Alright. It seems like…I won't push the issue. I still have a few questions that I must ask here.
Okay. Finish.
What kind of protective measures has the community instituted to curb the AIDS threat? And should the problem become larger, what future measures may be taken?
Very simple. The first is that the commune members should be respectful, loving, compassionate, to anybody who is found to be suffering from AIDS. That has to be their basic attitude, because that is what the problem will be in the outside world: once a person is known to have AIDS he will be a condemned person – by his own family, children, parents, wife, friends – everywhere he will be an outcast.
So people are keeping the information repressed. Many more people are suffering from AIDS than are known. But it is human, because the moment people come to know you are condemned in everybody’s eyes. So this is the first thing that I am teaching to my people: that he is simply a victim – the victim of neurotic religious ideologies, the victim of unnatural social institutions like marriage, prostitution. So he is a sufferer and close to death; now don’t make him suffer more.
Help him, respect him; don’t let him die in indignity – and teach him meditation. And I am telling my people that he is fortunate in a way: if he is going to live for two years, now for two years he is going to be one of the richest people in the world. Even the richest man cannot afford so much time for meditation. And we will arrange his food, his clothes, the best we can, and he should meditate, listen to the best music, see films, read novels – whatever he always wanted to do, let him do it. And let him feel that he is loved and respected and there is no discrimination.
There are two persons from the commune, and four more have arrived from outside, because in the outside there is no place for them. Even hospitals avoid them, even doctors are afraid; families don’t want them anymore, their jobs are finished. But we have accepted them – that’s perfectly good. We can take care of them, there is no problem. They can help in their own way. They can edit, they can paint, they can sculpt, or do whatsoever they are capable of. We have arranged the most scenic place for them to live.
And as far as sex is concerned, those who have AIDS can have sex amongst themselves. It is their responsibility towards the commune, which is taking care of them, giving them all respect and love, that they should not in any way affect anybody’s life in the commune. And certainly, with such respect and love it is impossible for them to interfere in anybody’s life here. They come to the discourses; they are allowed to move in the commune. They have been told just not to have any physical contact. And the commune has to take every care, because accidentally anything may provoke the thing. Tears can infect you, saliva can infect you; perhaps any liquid coming out of the body of an AIDS victim carries the virus – so just keep clean, make everything sterile.
So even in small things – in the restaurant, everybody who comes to eat there first has to clean his hands with alcohol, and anything that has been used for eating is sterilized after eating. Even a person making a phone call, by chance his saliva may fall on the phone – so after every phone call the phone is sprayed with alcohol. In this way we are taking every precaution that no infection spreads.
Did you help make these decisions, to implement these measures? Or the medical people here only…?
No, no.
And did they consult with…?…Because certainly these affect the quality of life here – these new measures – and I should think that's something that you would ultimately have a say over.
No. This is the decision of the medical people in the commune. And we have the best medical experts, surgeons, who are capable – they take the decisions. Only in the beginning will it look a little odd that your hands have to be sprayed with alcohol, but finally you will find it more hygienic in every way. Even if AIDS disappears, these arrangements are not going to disappear, because they will prevent other infections too.
So when they are new these measurements will seem to affect life, but the effect will be for the better. And not a single sannyasin has complained that he is not feeling good with these things. In fact, every sannyasin is excited that his commune is taking every care. Outside there is nobody to take care of you. This simply shows the carefulness, lovingness.
And the commune is an organic unity.
So in every possible way – people making love should use gloves, should use condoms. In the beginning it looks as if this is an unnecessary complication. When you are making love to a woman, in that moment to think of condoms and gloves – it destroys the whole joy, it seems. But it is not true. In fact it is better: the slower you are, the better is the possibility of having an orgasm. It is good that the man is slower – he has to put the condom, he has to put the gloves. It is good. And it will increase people’s sensitivity.
When you touch a woman with gloves on, naturally there is a barrier in the beginning – the plastic, the rubber, or anything the glove is made of, comes in between. But soon you become accustomed to it and because you love the woman your sensitivity spreads out of the glove.
Now it is a fact well established by a Russian scientist, Kirlian, who was working with photography and human energy, that each person has a two-inch aura of energy around his body. So if you are using a glove, don’t be worried – beyond the glove there is a two inch aura of your energy. It can be photographed. And it will be a good chance to feel that aura; otherwise, who cares? It is just a simple question…
If you come to an aboriginal tribe in India and see naked people, they cannot believe why you are wearing a coat and suit and all these things, and missing life – the wind, the sun and the contact, the direct contact. But you have never thought about it, that you are missing the direct contact with existence because of your coat, because of your shoes. Your contact with existence has taken new dimensions.
For example, your contact with existence is eighty to ninety percent from your eyes; the remainder is from your hands. In fact the whole body sensitivity has become concentrated into certain places: your eyes, your hands, your face. It has not been in any way a loss to humanity, because the hands have become immensely powerful. The eyes have become immensely capable of seeing beauty. Your tongue has become capable of tasting. Otherwise, buffaloes only eat one kind of grass and they go on chewing the same grass their whole life – no question of change. Even if you give them another kind of grass they will not eat it. They are not bored; their tongues don’t have the taste buds. Your tongue has taste buds, and because the whole body is covered, the uncovered part – your face, your hands, your ears, your eyes, your nose, your mouth – they have all become concentratedly sensitive. So you can see more beauty than a naked man; you can hear music, its subtle nuances, better than a naked man. You can taste better, more refined qualities of taste, than a naked man. He simply swallows things – there is no question of taste. But in the beginning it would have been difficult.
So that’s simply the beginning. Once they become accustomed to it they will be able to have sensitivity even through the gloves. In fact you already have leather gloves of your own. And who is there? – you are in the head; the part, the center that feels it is in the head, and then there are bones and nerves, and it is a complicated system. In that complicated system, I don’t think just a little bit more plastic is going to create any trouble. If your mind can manage to feel the woman’s body through all this complicated system, it will be able to feel through a plastic glove.
Soon you will find that it is more hygienic, because your hand will not be touching the woman’s perspiration, which can be dangerous. I have suggested to my people: stop kissing and start rubbing noses. And don’t feel that you are losing something – it is only a question of thinking. You are gaining new ground. You have never understood that noses are one of the most erotic points. Eskimos have been doing that for centuries; they never kiss, because they have always thought that kissing is unhygienic, ugly. If they see a Frenchman kissing they will start vomiting – what is this man doing?
Should I think that I am doing well because I have a big nose?
A big nose will be better, certainly. A Jew is better in every way!
Does it show?
I am a Jew – just born in a wrong country!
I have another question here…a few more.
I've heard rumors that you're possibly planning a program similar to the Share-A-Home Program, but with AIDS victims, and I'm wondering if there's any truth to that, and at the same time, in a certain sense, I personally feel there's almost a contradiction or almost an absurdity to that. I just wonder if there's any truth to those rumors.
No. It is just a rumor.
Just a rumor?
My people are very creative in making rumors go around – and we enjoy! Nothing to be worried about.
Okay. Now I have another direct question from the magazine. They're under the impression that the Dutch sannyasin population is one of the largest, percentage-wise, in relation to the total population of the Netherlands. If that's so, what is the explanation for that or what do you think could be an explanation for that?
It is true. Holland is almost mine, the same way Germany is mine. The reason for both countries becoming interested in me is the same: both are people with guts, and cowards cannot be interested in me. Germans and Dutch both have guts and know how to take risks and go for adventure.
French people are just intellectuals. I don’t have any impact on France, for the simple reason that intellectuals are interested only in talking and thinking but never in doing anything.
The English are grumpy, long faces, so depressed and depressing to others that they cannot believe it is possible to laugh and rejoice and dance. They have lost all hope – with their empire gone, they are almost a graveyard. England is no longer a living country, and those who are alive have come to me.
The Italians are here in large numbers. Many Italians have been to me, but they are as slippery as their spaghetti. You cannot rely on them. Just a national characteristic: they are not reliable. What they can do? They are not doing it knowingly. So many have come, many have gone, many go on coming and going, but they are slippery people.
Germans and Dutch – any people who have come to me from these two countries have remained with me. They know the joy of trusting with every phase, and they also know a certain decisiveness which Italians lack. Italians are not decisive; they are always “To be or not to be” – either, or. The German or Dutch either will not become part of my world movement – that is clear, it is not indecisiveness; he has taken a decision – or he will become part, and it is not wishy washy. Now he is going to stay with his commitment.
Every country has developed a certain character. Down the centuries, different geography, different history, different religious ideologies, different
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is one of the cleanest cities in the world, but when they come to the commune they understand that they can be defeated. And our vision is absolutely clear. It is not foggy, it is not based on beliefs; it is absolutely rational, scientific. We are all for peace and we want that there should be no world war – no war ever. The last war has happened. They are coming more and more, in greater numbers.
It is a little bit difficult to characterize people, but people do have different characters. For example, Indians are so much in misery, suffering, poverty, but still they go on holding to the idea that they are the holiest people in the world – now what is the need for them to become sannyasins? They are the holiest people already! Just to be born in India is to be holy, so why they should bother about…? And they are afraid of me because I don’t accept their holiness, I don’t accept their religion, I don’t accept their tradition.
I am against every tradition, every religion, every ideology. I want man to be deprogrammed, completely deprogrammed, so he is clean and clear, unburdened of the past and free to fly into the future. But that is most difficult for an Indian. He is so burdened with a long tradition of ten thousand years, and for ten thousand years he has been believing that his is the only religious community in the world, and the highest. It is difficult for them. They have lost all sense of humor, because holy persons don’t laugh. They have lost all sense of respect because they have become accustomed to being respected; they have forgotten that they have to respect also in response.
There was a world Hindu conference. The secretary was interested in me and somehow managed an invitation for me. The president was the shankaracharya, the head of the Hindus. We have been quarreling and fighting for almost two decades. If he had known that an invitation had gone to me, it would have been immediately prevented, but without his knowledge the invitation came to me, and my friend’s letter saying that, “The shankaracharya does not know about it, but you have to come because your presence will make a difference; otherwise, all those Hindu leaders will talk the same nonsense.”
I was to inaugurate the conference and the shankaracharya was to preside over it, but the moment he saw me he lost all gentlemanliness, had completely a nervous breakdown. He jumped over and took the mike and inaugurated the conference. Seeing that I had been invited to inaugurate it, the people were shocked and could not believe that this could be done. Even though a shankaracharya is doing it, this is wrong, because on the cards they had received, my name was down to inaugurate the conference and the shankaracharya was just to preside.
While inaugurating the conference he told the audience that he cannot sit on the same platform as me, and he is not going to allow me to speak. I went close to him and I said, “I will not take more than two minutes – I have just one question to ask the people.” And not bothering about him, I took the mike and asked the people, “What do you want? Do you want me to speak or not? If you want me to speak raise both your hands.” There were at least one hundred thousand people, and two hundred thousand hands. And I said to the shankaracharya, “Look at these hands! You are no longer president here; you are canceled by the audience itself. Now go home and rest!”
I spoke and argued against everything that he had said. He was becoming red and trembling with anger…and these are the people who think themselves holy! Since that conference it was made a point that I should not be invited in any Hindu conference. Since that conference I have not been to speak in any Hindu conference. And the fear is that what they are saying is absolutely wrong, and they are keeping the people still befooled. And those one hundred thousand people were absolutely in my favor, because on each point I completely demolished him. They clapped and they appreciated it, and the more they appreciated it, the more he was out of his mind completely. In fact, while getting down he fell from the stage. He was in such a state…
Hindus have an idiotic idea of being the holiest people. Naturally they can’t come to me, because I will take their holiness away and make them simple human beings. My whole effort is to make simple human beings, natural human beings.
What about the Americans?
Americans are phony!
Phony?
Plastic – nothing much.
How is that manifest most obviously?
They used to come to me in India – while I was there many Americans used to come every year to visit me and they would remain there for two or three hours…months, do the meditations and everything, and then they would disappear, come back to America.
Since I have been in America I have not seen those people at all, because now it needs guts to be here. I am fighting the Oregon government, fighting the federal government, and those people have simply chickened out.
Do you think, in a sense maybe, that's a problem for you in that, as you say, the Americans are chicken, and that you're not robbing America of its sons and daughters, which is always what people are assuming?
Not at all. For all the money that…
Which would create more controversy, if more people were saying, “I'm losing my son and daughter to this commune,” since that's usually the way the media reports it – and that's the hysteria that's reported in many newspapers.
That is a possibility. But one thing you should remember: I have not used American dollars in creating this commune at all. All the money has come from different countries. American dollars I have not used yet. I will use it…I cannot leave them just like that. Even they – they are chickens! I will…I have a chicken house here!
Do you think maybe it's because Americans have a superior attitude? Is it possible that this isn't so attractive to Americans possibly because they have such a superior…?
No. They have been coming – and not only they, but their leaders were coming. Erhard, the founder of EST came to me. Dick Price, the founder of Esalen Institute, came to me. I know where the problem is here: the problem is the people who had been coming to India and becoming sannyasins there were simply dishonest. They would wear red clothes there and the moment they left India they put their red clothes in the suitcase and became Americans. So here there was no problem for them.
Now to come here means to get into trouble with the society, with the parents, with the wife, with the husband, and those who have come, they had to face all that trouble. In India they were coming; they were not afraid that their dollar is at any risk there. Here, it is. Here we have poured almost two hundred million dollars into this desert, and if we want to make this whole desert a lush, green place, it will need a billion or two billion dollars more. And certainly we are going to get them from the Americans. How far they can escape? They cannot escape, but they will try. That’s why I am saying they have chickened out.
Seeing the enormousness of the commune, seeing that there is going to be a fight with the government – and we are fighting in so many courts and we are winning in every court… And I have made it a point that all the American politicians are doing things which are against the American constitution. Among our sannyasins there are four hundred legal experts. We have the biggest legal firm in the whole world, and they are working day and night to fight the government on their own grounds. And we are winning!
Do you have fun with that?
I am going to have immense fun. I am really excited. I was sick…I became healthy! I have not become healthy by any medicine, but just the excitement has proved of tremendous help.
I have another direct question here. In the recent Der Spiegel interview you called Hitler a true and great leader. Do you stand by this comment, that Hitler was a true and great leader, or perhaps was it quoted out of context?
He was certainly a great leader, but he was a crackpot! There is no contradiction in it. In fact, only crackpots can be leaders; otherwise who bothers to be a leader?
I agree!
Yes.
Absolutely.
Okay…or do you have some more questions?
Yes, I think I have one last one.
Yes, just one – the last.
No, I'll let it go. That's okay. We can finish.
You are certain?
I'm sure.
No. There is one question.
Such an appropriate question! I've been at the Ranch now seven times. The news peg or reason or headline for each of my visits would be something like this: the first visit – India's sex guru comes to America; my second visit was India's sex guru swallows small town; my third visit, I came here for the first festival – welcoming sannyasins to the new Ranch and the small, swallowed town; the fourth visit I made was for the second festival and photographing the progress of the new city; the fifth time was for guns, gambling and because a very wealthy German blue blood showed up here; the sixth time was for welcoming the homeless; and now I'm here doing a story on AIDS. What do you think might be the reason for my next visit?
Just that the red people swallowed America!