All the quotes used for this website

"The human intellect that we have developed through education, through all kinds of techniques is no match for nature. They [creative activities] assume importance because they have been recognized as expressions of spiritual, artistic and intellectual values. The drive for self-expression is born out of neurosis. This applies to the spiritual teachers of mankind too. There is no such thing as a direct sense-experience. All forms of art are nothing but an expression of sensuality."

"Sing not any songs but songs of money."

"Artists find it comforting to think that they are creative: 'creative art', 'creative ideas', 'creative politics'. It's nonsense. There is nothing really creative in them in the sense of doing anything original, new or free. The artists pick something here and something there, put them together, and think they have created something marvelous. They are using something that is already there; their work is an imitation. Only, they are not decorous enough to admit that. They are all imitating something that is already there. Imitation and style are the only 'creativity' we have."

"The easy way of making money is the only art to be practiced."

"If you try to destroy the authority of others, you in your own way become the authority for others. How to avoid that is really a problem for me. But in some sense it's not really a problem."

"If you have the courage to touch life for the first time, you will never know what hit you. Everything man has taught, felt and experienced is gone, and nothing is put in its place. Such a person becomes the living authority by virtue of his freedom from the past, culture, and he will remain so until someone else who has discovered this for himself blasts it. Until you have the courage to blast me, all that I am saying, and all the gurus, you will remain a cultist with photographs, rituals, birthday celebrations, and the like."

"You will never blast me; the attachment you have to religious authority prohibits you from questioning anything, much less a man like me. I am certain you will never challenge me. For that reason what I am saying will inevitably create an unstable, neurotic situation for you. You cannot accept what I am saying, and neither are you in any position to reject it. If it wasn't for your very thick skin, you would certainly end up in the loony bin. You simply cannot and will not question what I am saying; it is too much of a threat."

"You needn't bother with these religious people anymore; they are obsolete. But they don't want to lose their hold over people. It is their business; their livelihood is at stake. There is no difference between the policeman and the religious man. It is a little more difficult with the policeman, for, unlike the inner authority sponsored by the holy men, he lies outside you and must be bribed."

"I don’t believe in astrology. But it will be useful as a good example to those who are knowledgeable in it, if they can examine how, from the beginning, my horoscope has been governed by the influence of the movements of the planets."

"I don't know if there is anything to astrology, but they say, 'You will become the idol of the masses'."

"Assuming for a moment that there is an enlightened one, that man cannot die unless everybody in this world comes to know that there is such a man. They may not even know what he is saying. That is the great tradition. It is in that sense that this fellow has a message to give. Not like Rajneesh scandals and all that. The astrologer said, 'Until that happens you are not going to die. Another twenty-one years you will constantly move, running away from the people in order to avoid them from following you'. I don't know. The age is going to catch up. I don't care what the astrologers say."

"Planets have no influence on my actions and there never will be any."

"The only way you can separate yourself from whatever you call yourself – the 'I', the 'self' or the 'Atman' – is only when you use knowledge. Otherwise, you have no way of separating yourself from what you call 'you', 'I'. I do use 'I', I do use 'my' sometimes; 'my' daughter when I introduce her, or 'my' sister. My wife has been dead for 35 years, so there is no need for me to say that that is 'my' wife. [laughs] But actually, I have no relationship whatsoever with my daughter or the person I am introducing as my friend. The only way I can separate myself and look at myself is when I use the knowledge about the 'self', the 'I', or the 'Atman' or whatever it is. So that knowledge is put in here, in the computer, in the data bank or memory bank by culture or the society. Other than that, I don't think I have any idea as to who the hell am I, if I may use that word."

"The Atman is created by that junk Mandukya Upanishad. You don't have to get drunk to understand sobriety."

"There is no self here. There is no Atman here. There is no soul here at all. You may not accept it, but that unfortunately happens to be a fact. The totality of thoughts and feelings is not here."

"There is no moksha, no jivanmukti, and no atman. And there is no such thing as self realization. Those are all lies. There is only the natural state. I don't like to use your terms such as enlightenment, jivanmukti, nirvana, or moksha to refer to this state. Those terms suggest some other meanings. They sound weird to me. When I talk about the natural state, it is not the state of someone who has attained self-realization or God-realization. It is not something created through self effort. This natural state is always living and spontaneous. This happens to one in a billion, accidentally. It does not result from your effort. It is acausal. And why this natural state happens to that one and not anyone else, I don't know."

"What you are is a belief; if you let one belief go, you must replace it with another; otherwise, you will drop dead. I am telling you, a clinical death will occur. It is not the near death experience of those 'near death' scoundrels."

"You replace one belief with another. You can't be without a belief. What you call 'you' is only a belief. If the belief goes, you go with it. That is the reason why if you are not satisfied with the belief-structure you are brought up in, you replace it with something else."

"What is responsible for the human tragedy or the malady that we are confronted with today is that we are interested in maintaining the identities that are created by our culture. We have tremendous faith in the value system that is created by our culture or society or whatever you want to call it. We never question that. We are only interested in fitting ourselves into that value system. It is that demand from the society or culture to fit us all into that value system that is the cause of man's tragedy."

"It is not a question of replacing our ideas with new ideas, our thoughts with new thoughts, our beliefs with new beliefs, for the whole belief structure is very important to us. We do not want to free ourselves from this illusion. If we free ourselves from one illusion, we always replace it with another. If we brush aside or drop one belief, we will always replace that belief with another belief."

"When we are made to believe that we are handicapped, you become dependent on the crutches. The modern gurus supply you with mechanized crutches."

"Total anarchy is a state of being rather than a state of doing. There is no action in total anarchy; it is a state of being. So why are we frightened of anarchy? The anarchy which you are talking about is the destruction of the institutions which we have built with tremendous care, and of our belief that those institutions should continue forever. So it is that we are fighting for - to preserve them in their pristine purity."

"When I talk of a total anarchy, it is a state of being and not a state of doing. There is no action there. Maybe out of that something new will emerge. Now they are talking about new forms of life near a volcano on the west coast of the United States. Maybe something new will spring up. Not that I am concerned about the future of mankind."

"An artist is a craftsman like any other craftsmen. He uses that tool to express himself. All art is a pleasure movement."

"Why do you want to place art on a higher level than craft? If there is no market for an artist's creation, he will be out of business. It is the market that is responsible for all these so-called artistic beliefs. An artist is a craftsman like any other craftsman. He uses that tool to express himself. All human creation is born out of sensuality. I have nothing against sensuality."

"You cannot be aware; you and awareness cannot co-exist. If you could be in a state of awareness for one second by the clock, once in your life, the continuity would be snapped, the illusion of the experiencing structure, the 'you’, would collapse, and everything would fall into the natural rhythm. In this state you do not know what you are looking at. That is awareness. If you recognize what you are looking at, you are there, again experiencing the old, what you know."

"The thought can never penetrate here. It is that state where the action takes place. But I have no way of knowing what is happening at that time. But there seems to be some kind of awareness: that is the difference between sleep and this state. Something is aware of something else. The Hindu religious thinkers say the immensity is aware of its own immensity, or that is aware of that. I would simply say life is aware of itself."

"Awareness is simply the action of the brain. The idea that you can use awareness to bring about some happier state of affairs, some sort of transformation, or God knows what, is, for me, absurd. Awareness cannot be used to bring about a change in yourself or the world around you."

"Choiceless awareness is poppycock. Who is the one being choicelessly aware? You must test this for yourself. That Victorian gentleman has gathered about him the spiritual dead wood of a twenty-, thirty- and forty-year club. What good is that? I lived with him for years, and I can tell you he is a great actor. 'Gentlemen, we are taking a journey together' [Laughter] - but you can never go on that journey with him. Whatever you do, it is always the same. What you experience with him is the clarification of thought. You are that thought. He is a do-gooder who should have given up long ago."

"The body is not interested in anything you are interested in. And that is the battle that is going on all the time."

"The human organism is not interested in your wonderful religious ideas--peace, bliss, beatitude or any such thing. Its only interest is survival. What society has placed before us as the goal to reach and attain is the enemy of this living organism."

"This body doesn't want to learn anything. Left to itself it has tremendous intelligence."

"As a human body it is an extraordinary piece of creation. But as a human being he is rotten because of the culture."

"The body has no independent existence. You are a squatter there."

"The body does not exist except as a thought. There is one thought. Everything exists in relationship to that one thought. That thought is 'me'. Anything you experience based on thought is illusion."

"The body is a fortuitous concourse of atoms. There is no death for the body, only an exchange of atoms. Their changing places and taking different forms is what we call 'death.' It's a process which restores the energy level in nature that has gone down. In reality, nothing is born and nothing is dead."

"The body does not exist except as a thought. There is one thought. Everything exists in relationship to that one thought. That thought is 'me'. Anything you experience based on thought is illusion."

"When once it throws out everything that has been put in there by your filthy culture, this body will function in an extraordinarily intelligent way. It can take care of everything."

"If at any time I accept anything, it is not what the religious people have told me about the way the body functions, but what the medical doctors have found. Yet, what they do not know is immense; and they will never know how this body functions."

"My brain and your brain are not different. The brain of a genius is no different from yours. They have found out that the brain of Einstein is no different from that of a low grade moron. [Laughter] It seems that they examined it after his death. They stored it. You will be surprised, it is no different from a walnut. [Laughter] You eat your macrobiotic food and enjoy, Sir. Don't bother about all this."

"Half of me is woman. This is an abnormal thing. This is an abnormal condition of the body which you have turned into something mysterious and mystifying and then call it an enlightened being. When once this kind of a thing happens, the whole hormonal balance changes. So, who is normal and who is abnormal? From your point of view this [referring to himself] is an abnormal individual. But I don't call you an abnormal man."

"Boredom is a bottomless pit. As long as you think that there is something more interesting, more purposeful, more meaningful to do than what you are actually doing, you have no way of freeing yourself from boredom."

"I have been everywhere in the world, meeting and talking with people. People are exactly the same the world over. The questions never vary. But I am never bored with it. How can I be bored? If I were some sort of fool getting some sort of kick out of this, looking for new, better and different questions, then there would be a possibility of getting bored. But I am not looking for anything So boredom is impossible. Are you bored? You have no way of finding out for yourself."

"The boredom and restlessness you feel inside you is there only because you think you must be doing something more interesting, more meaningful, and more valuable than what you are already doing. You think that the way you are carrying on is terrible boring, and that there must be something more valuable, powerful, and exciting to do. So all this becomes part of the complex knowledge you have about yourself. The more you know about yourself the more impossible it becomes to be humble and sensitive. How can there be humility as long as you know something?"

"Your naturalness is destroyed by that demand which is put in there by the culture. So, then, your life looks meaningless to you if that is all that you can do. You have tried to fill in that boredom with everything possible... Now you have all these new gimmicks - yoga, meditation, and all the psychology."

"Reading books, religious books - this is something new added on to the already existing [list of] things there, but you have not succeeded in freeing yourself from the boredom. That is the demand. You are bored with your life, with your existence, because it's very repetitive. First of all, your physical needs are very well taken care of, you see, here in this part of the world, at least. So, there is no need for you to spend any more energy to survive. That part is taken care of. When that is taken care of, the natural question that arises is a very simple question: is that all that is there? Going to the office every morning, or just being a housewife doing all the chores of the house, or sleeping, having sex - everything, you see - is that all? It is that demand on your part that is being exploited by these holy men. Is that all? So, those are some of the gimmicks that you are trying to fill the boredom with there."

"The attractiveness of those things [which you use] to free yourself from the non-existing boredom has really created the boredom. And those things really cannot fill this boredom. So it goes on and on and on and on - the newer and still newer techniques and methods. Every year we have a new guru coming from India with a new gimmick, with a new technique or some new therapy, you know. All kinds of things."

"You are looking for something to free you from what is not there. That's all that I have been emphasizing all the time. The problem is not really the boredom. You are not conscious of the existence of boredom either on the conscious level of your thinking or on the conscious level of your existence."

"Man imagines that there is something more interesting, more meaningful, more purposeful to do than what he is actually doing. Anything you want above the basic needs creates this boredom for the human being. But you get the feeling, 'Is that all?'"

"I don't give a hoot for a sixth-century B.C. Buddha, let alone all the other claimants we have in our midst. They are a bunch of exploiters, thriving on the gullibility of the people."

"They created these metaphysics, the intellectuals. And what you find in Upanishads is not the people whom they are talking about, but the aspirations of those people who 'want’ to be that state. That’s why Buddha had too much intellectual nonsense. That fellow didn’t have the guts, sir, to go to the end. And when he had this experience he said, as long as there is a single soul imprisoned in the veil of illusion I refuse to enter the gates of Nirvana. He never entered the gates of Nirvana – he refused for the sake of mankind; like the politicians talking of mankind, humanity, you know? And then for the first time in the history of mankind he introduced the element of conversion, proselytization. He created a sangha- he moved from place to place, followed by all these people, and he wouldn’t allow women to join his order for a long time. There were a lot of protestations. Finally he relented and admitted them also. Then came along – this is my reading of history, take it or leave it – an Ashoka, the King, and he used that as an instrument of power, very forcibly in this country. But then Jainism spread in the South, not Buddhism. That’s why you have so many Jain temples. The place where I grew up is called “the place of temples”. Not Buddhist temples, but Jain monasteries. A lot of prostitutes lived there, along with of course… they go together: prostitutes and spiritual teachers. It is not a religion."

"He [Buddha] didn’t have the guts. He stopped with some pretty little mystical experience, like anybody else. Like all these gurus you have in the market place. Even Ramana Maharishi stopped there. All of them. That prevents the possibility of these people coming out with something original. So they have to rely upon the authority of the scriptures, and then they interpret. How can a fellow that has written four volumes talk of enlightenment? Tell me. And claim that he is an enlightened man? He cannot do that. It’s a sales speech. They sell that stuff to the poor people. There is authority for them. The filthy word using – enlightenment. Sorry, sir."

"They are all false as far as I am concerned. This certainty that I have is something that I cannot transmit to you. It does not mean that I will go and burn all the churches, temples, or bury all the Vedas etc. — that's all too silly -, or that I will become a terrorist and mindlessly kill everyone."

"There can't be another Buddha within the framework of Buddhism. There can't be another Ramanujacharya within the framework of that school of thought."

"I do watch television. I turn off the sound and watch the movement only. I like to watch the commercials because most of the commercials are more interesting than the programs. If people can fall for the commercials, they can fall for anything that these religious people are selling today in the market. How can you fall for those commercials? But they are very interesting. It is not the commercials nor what they are selling that interest me, but the techniques of salesmanship. They are amazing and more interesting — I am fascinated by those techniques. I am not influenced by what they are selling. If they had customers like me they would be soon out of business. I don't buy anything they are selling."

"In a business deal, if your partner refuses or fails to deliver the goods, that is the end of the business relationship. But here in the area of religion they can get away with just promising something. They don't deliver the goods at all. How we can fall for that kind of a thing is beyond me. The whole con game has gone on for centuries. But why do we allow ourselves to be conned by those con men? There is not a single exception. All these spiritual teachers of mankind from the very beginning have conned themselves into the belief that they have the answers, the solutions for mankind."

"I reached the top of whatever line I chose. When I was twenty-one I was the leader of the Theosophical Society. I made a million dollars out of a hundred dollars. I chose this life not because I was a total failure or misfit. I chose this life because I wanted to find the source."

"There are so many people who are selling in the marketplace. They are interested in selling comforters. That is where these people [seekers] should go, and not hang around me."

"The thicker the wallet, the grander the life."

"I cannot set up any holy business and make money. It is just impossible for me. I am not interested in freeing anyone or taking anybody away from anyone else. What they are interested in they can get from their gurus. You can go to the temples and pray there. You certainly get some comfort. You need to be comforted: that is what you want. And they provide you with that. This is the wrong place to come. Go anywhere you want. I have no interest in freeing you at all. I don't even believe in altering you in any way, or saving or reforming society, or doing anything for mankind."

"Maximize the art of money making."

"This shock, this lightning, hitting me with the greatest force, shattered everything, blasted every cell and gland in my body - the whole chemistry seems to have changed. There's no scientific evidence or medical man to certify that, but I'm not interested in satisfying anyone's curiosity, because I am not selling this, I am not collecting followers and teaching them how to bring about this change."

"The whole chemistry of the body changes, so it begins to function in its own natural way. That means everything that is poisoned (I deliberately use that word) and contaminated by the culture is thrown out of the system. It is thrown out of your system, and then that consciousness or life (or whatever you want to call it) expresses itself and functions in a very natural way."

"This process lasted for forty-nine minutes - this process of dying. It was like a physical death, you see. Even now it happens to me: the hands and feet become so cold, the body becomes stiff, the heartbeat slows down, the breathing slows down, and then there is a gasping for breath. Up to a point you are there, you breathe your last breath, as it were, and then you are finished. What happens after that, nobody knows. When I came out of that, somebody said there was a telephone call for me. I came out and went downstairs to answer it. I was in a daze. I didn't know what had happened. It was a physical death. What brought me back to life, I don't know. How long it lasted, I don't know. I can't say anything about that, because the experiencer was finished: there was nobody to experience that death at all... So, that was the end of it. I got up."

"The movement that has been created by the heritage of man, which is trying to make you into something different from what you are, comes to an end, and so what you are begins to express itself, that's all, in its own way, unhindered, unhandicapped, unburdened by the past of man, mankind as a whole. So such a man is of no use to the society; on the other hand he becomes a threat."

"You see, people usually imagine that so-called enlightenment, self-realization, God-realization or what you will (I don't like to use these words) is something ecstatic, that you will be permanently happy, in a blissful state all the time - these are the images they have of those people. But when this kind of a thing happens to the individual, he realizes that really there is no basis for that kind of thing. So, from the point of view of the man who imagines that that is permanent happiness, permanent bliss, permanent this and permanent that, it is a calamity because he is expecting something whereas what happens is altogether unrelated to that. There's no relationship at all between the image you have of that, and what actually is the situation."

"Such an individual cannot retire into a cave or hide himself; he has to live in the midst of this world; he has no place to go to."

"Everything was thrown out of my system. I don’t know how I was thrown off the merry go round. I went round and round and round. I was lucky - luck, not in the sense that when you go to a gambling place and win if you’re lucky. They put me on a merry go round; I went on and on and on. I didn’t have the guts to jump off. I was just thrown off like an animal thrown from the top of a tree. The animal just gets up and runs off."

"The whole life energy was moving to some focal point - where it was, I don't know. Then a point arrived where the whole thing looked as if the aperture of a camera was trying to close itself. (It is the only simile that I can think of. The way I am describing this is quite different from the way things happened at that time, because there was nobody there thinking in such terms. All this was part of my experience, otherwise I wouldn't be able to talk about it). So, the aperture was trying to close itself, and something was there trying to keep it open. Then after a while there was no will to do anything, not even to prevent the aperture closing itself. Suddenly, as it were, it closed. I don't know what happened after that."

"What happens is that the servant has taken possession of the running of the house in trying to influence everything there. Somehow, through some miracle he is forced to leave. When the servant leaves, he wants to adopt a scorched-earth policy. He wants to burn everything there. You want him to go but he won't go. He has become the master. So this [your thought] is moving at a particular rhythm, at a particular tempo and speed. Suddenly when it stops, through no volition of yours, through no effort of yours, it blows up the whole thing here. That's all that has happened to me. From then on it [the organism] falls into a quite natural rhythm and functions in its own way. That is why all those changes take place in the body."

"When, through some miracle or chance you are freed from the hold of thought and culture, you are left with the body's natural functions, and nothing else. It then functions without the interference of thought. Unfortunately, the servant, which is the thought structure that is there, has taken possession of the house. But he can no longer control and run the household. So he must be dislodged. It is in this sense that I use the term 'natural state', without any connotation of spirituality or enlightenment."

"It is thought that has invented the ideas of cause and effect. There may not be any such thing as a cause at all. Every event is an individual and independent event. We link up all these events and try to create a story of our lives. But actually every event is an independent event. If we accept the fact that every event is an independent event in our lives, it creates a tremendous problem of maintaining what we call identity. And identity is the most important factor in our lives. We are able to maintain this identity through the constant use of memory, which is also thought. This constant use of memory or identity, or whatever you call it, is consuming a tremendous amount of energy, and it leaves us with no energy to deal with the problems of our living. Is there any way that we can free ourselves from the identity? As I said, thought can only create problems; it cannot help us to solve them. Through dialectical thinking about thinking itself we are only sharpening that instrument. All philosophies help us only to sharpen this instrument."

"If a body is lucky enough to stumble into its natural way of functioning, it happens not through your effort, not through your volition; it just happens, but not by what you do or do not do. It is not even a happening within the field of cause and effect. 'Acausal’ is the most appropriate word for it, because a happening can never be outside the field of cause and effect. If it stumbles into this of and by itself, such a body will be so unique that it will be unparalleled in this world and will function in an extraordinary way. Such a body has never existed before on this planet."

"Even the demand to know, 'How did you stumble into this?' is the same. You want to know the cause. You want to know what I did or what I did not do. You see, you are trying to establish a cause-and-effect relationship between the two. You do this for the simple reason that you want 'that' to happen to you."

"I don't see any way of comparing what I did with what I stumbled into. I have no way of saying 'This is it', and then 'I was like that'. There is no point [of reference] here. Since there is no point here, there is no way I can look back and say that was the point. You may very well ask me the question, 'How come you are saying that despite all you did you have stumbled into whatever you have stumbled into?' But I have to put it that way — 'despite', 'in spite of' — or whatever words you want to use."

"To me every event is an independent unit. A friend of mine, Mr. Mahesh Bhatt, one of the film directors, signed a contract with Penguin Books to write a biography of his friend U.G. Krishnamurti. I told him that there is no story to tell. I am saying that whatever has happened to me is acausal. Whatever has happened has happened despite everything I did. All those events before it were unconnected with it. We would like to link all of them up and create a story or philosophical structure out of them, and say that every event in one's life is not an accident but that some destiny may be shaping the events, shaping one's life. I don't think that is the way we are functioning."

"This very demand to know either the cause of our own origins or the cause of the origin of the world is an idle demand, the answers for which, however interesting they may be, are of no importance in dealing with the problems of living."

"Saints are not honest enough to admit it. Whenever a saint comes to me, or one who practices celibacy, I am very ruthless with him, I ask him 'Do you really mean to say that you never have wet dreams?' I tell him to practice celibacy in the name of your spiritual pursuit is crime against nature."

"I denied myself sex for twenty-five years pursuing spiritual goals. Then I suddenly realized, 'Look, this is ridiculous. Celibacy has nothing to do with it. I have wet dreams. Sex is burning inside of me. Why the hell am I denying myself sex? Why the hell am I torturing myself?' I asked my teacher, 'Are you sure you don't have wet dreams any time?' He blushed. He did not have the courage to give me an answer."

"In the pursuit of your spiritual matters it doesn't really make any difference whether you practice celibacy or indulge in sex and call it Tantric sex. It is comforting to believe that you are having Tantric sex and not sex with a call girl or a prostitute. To say that there is more 'feeling' or more closeness when you have sex for spiritual reasons is absolute gibberish."

"Don't talk of 'higher centres' and 'Chakras'. It is not these but glands that control the human body. It is the glands that give the instructions for the functioning of this organism."

"All these claims of the spiritual teachers that it will move from muladhara to sahasrara are rubbish. Do not believe all that nonsense. If the semen is not used, it goes out through urine whether you are a saint or godman or sinner..."

"Because of the constant use of memory, which is thought, to maintain identity, many of these glands [chakras] which are very essential for the functioning of the living organism have remained dormant, inert, and inactive. Some people who are interested in religious things try to activate them, and feel that they are getting somewhere. But if you try to activate any of those through some techniques that you are importing from countries like India or elsewhere, it might be dangerous. They might shatter the whole nervous system. Instead of helping people, they might give you a 'high'. One danger in playing with these glands is that we might create more problems for this body rather than to help it function normally, sanely, and intelligently. That danger is there."

"There has been no qualitative change in man's thinking; we feel about our neighbours just as the frightened caveman felt towards his. The only thing that has changed is our ability to destroy our neighbor and his property."

"When the movement in the direction of becoming something other than what you are isn't there any more, you are not in conflict with yourself."

"I do not want to be an exhibitionist, but you are doctors. There is something to the symbolism they have in India — the cobra. Do you see the swellings here? — they take the shape of a cobra. Yesterday was the new moon. The body is affected by everything that is happening around you; it is not separate from what is happening around you. Whatever is happening there, is also happening here — there is only the physical response. This is affection. Your body is affected by everything that is happening around you; and you can't prevent this, for the simple reason that the armour that you have built around yourself is destroyed, so it is very vulnerable to everything that is happening there. With the phases of the moon — full moon, half moon, quarter moon — these swellings here take the shape of a cobra. Maybe that is the reason why some people have created all these images — Siva and all those kinds of things. But why should it take the shape of a cobra? I have asked many doctors why this swelling is here, but nobody could give me a satisfactory answer. I don't know if there are any glands or anything here."

"My point is that there is nothing there to be changed. What these gurus in the market place are doing is to sell you some ice packs and provide you with some comforters. But when you come to me, you find it very difficult for the simple reason that I do not offer you any solutions to your problems. My interest is to point out that there are actually no problems, and what we are saddled with are only solutions. Also, we are not ready to accept the fact that the solutions that these people have been offering us for centuries are not really the solutions."

"You are not going to have all these transformations, radical or otherwise. Not because I know your future, but because there is nothing there to be transformed, really nothing. If you think there is, and think that plum will fall into your stretched palm, good luck to you."

"What I am emphasizing is that the demand to bring about a change in ourselves is the cause of our suffering. I may say that there is nothing to be changed. But the revolutionary teachers come and tell us that there is something there in which you have to bring about a radical revolution. Then we assume there is such a thing as soul, spirit, or the 'I'. What I assert all the time is that I haven't found anything like the self or soul there."

"You don't realize that all your attempts to bring about change are total failures. What an amount of energy you put into it!"

"I don't see anything wrong with this world, because the world can't be any different. I am not interested in making a living out of telling people that the world needs some change, radical or otherwise. If you are a politician or a president for a nation, then it is a different story. Otherwise it is what it is. We being what we are, the world cannot be any different. What I say is not an abstraction. You and I living together is the world."

"You are the guys who want to change the whole thing — 'a better world and a happier world'. I don't see any of this possibility, you see, to create that kind of world. So we must ask questions which have never been asked before, because all the questions which we have been asking are born out of the answers we already have."

"When once this demand to change yourself into something better, something other than what you actually are, is not there, the demand to change the world also comes to an end. I don't see anything wrong with the world."

"Charity is the filthiest invention of the human mind: first you steal what belongs to everyone; then you use the law and various other means to protect it."

"You give charity to prevent the have-nots from rebelling against you. It also makes you feel less guilty. All do-gooders feel 'high' when they do good."

"The practice of charity, started by the religious man, is what refuses to deal with the problems squarely. I may give something to a poor man because he is suffering. But unless I have something more than he has, there is no way I can help. What do I do if I don't have the means to help him? What do I do in a situation where I am totally helpless? That helplessness only makes me sit with him and cry."

"You know, if you give charity to a beggar, it's the most vulgar thing. If you do something of that sort, it is only for your self-fulfillment. It is a 'do-gooder's' high that you feel. You are not accepting the fact that you are a self-centered man."

"The poor man has a right to this wealth. That is why I call charity vulgar, vicious. You take everything that belongs to everybody here and then give him charity. What for? He has a right. You may very well ask me the question, 'What are you doing?' It is easy for you to throw that question at me. I am not here working for this country. If I were in power, I would give everything to everyone. Whatever anyone wants. But you will never put me in the seat of power."

"Leaveth not a penny for others."

"You know, this dialogue is only helpful when we come, both of us, to a point and realize that no dialogue is possible, that no dialogue is necessary. When I say 'understanding', 'seeing', they mean something different to me. Understanding is a state of being where the question isn't there any more; there is nothing there that says 'now I understand!' - that's the basic difficulty between us. By understanding what I am saying, you are not going to get anywhere."

"The whole purpose of a conversation or dialogue is only to convert the other man to your point of view. If you have no point of view, there is no way he can convince or convert you to his point of view."

"Whatever comes out of me it depends upon what you draw out of me, so I have actually and factually nothing to to communicate, because there is no communication possible on any level. You see, the only instrument we have is the intellect and we know in a way that this instrument has not helped us to understand anything. So when once it dawns on you that that is not the instrument and there is no instrument, no other instrument to understand anything, so you are left with this puzzling situation that there is nothing to understand."

"Am I speaking? You know, it may sound very funny to you. I have nothing to say, and what I am saying is not born out of my thinking. You may not accept this. But it is not a logically ascertained premise that I am putting across. It may sound very funny to you, and you have put me in a very precarious position by asking me why I am talking. Am I talking? Really I am not, you see. There is nobody who is talking here. I use this simile of a ventriloquist. He is actually carrying on both sides of the dialogue, but we attribute one side of it to the dummy in front of him. In exactly the same way, all your questions are born out of the answers you already have. Any answer anybody gives should put an end to your questions. But it does not. And we are not ready to accept the fact that all the questions are born out of the answers. If the questions go, the answers we take for granted also go with them."

"It is through you that I can express myself. You are the medium of my expression."

"Nature has done a tremendous job in creating this extraordinary piece — the body. The body does not want to learn anything from culture. It doesn't want to know anything from us. We are always interested in telling this body how to function. All our experiences, spiritual or otherwise, are the basic cause of our suffering. The body is not interested in your bliss or your ecstasies. It is not interested in your pleasure. It is not in interested in anything that you are interested in. And that is the battle that is going on all the time. But there seems to be no way out."

"What is wrong with this world? The world can't be anything different from what we are. If there is a war going on within us, we cannot expect a peaceful world around us. We will certainly create war. You may say that it all depends upon who is responsible for the war. It is simply a point of view as to who is calling another a warmonger and oneself the 'peace-monger'. The peace-mongers and the warmongers sail in the same boat. It is something like the pot calling the kettle black, or the other way around: the kettle calling the pot black."

"My teaching, if that is the word you want to use, has no copyright. You are free to reproduce, distribute, interpret, misinterpret, distort, garble, do what you like, even claim authorship, without my consent or the permission of anybody."

"I have no teaching. There is nothing to preserve. Teaching implies something that can be used to bring about change. Sorry, there is no teaching here, just disjointed, disconnected sentences. What is there is only your interpretation, nothing else. For this reason there is not now nor will there ever be any kind of copyright for whatever I am saying. I have no claims."

"UG: No. It's up to you. This is your property, not mine. I have nothing to do with what I have said. It is you who have brought this out from me. What you do with it is your affair. You have the copyright over whatever has come out. I am not saying this for the sake of saying it. It is yours. I don't sit here and think about these things at all. At no time do I do that."

"Consciousness is so pure that whatever you are doing in the direction of purifying that consciousness is adding impurity to it."

"There is no consciousness at all, there are no thoughts, just memory: to recognise that as a watch is memory, to recognise you as a woman is memory."

"Mind or thought is not yours or mine. It is our common inheritance. There is no such thing as your mind and my mind (it is in that sense mind is a myth). There is only mind, the totality of all that has been known, felt and experienced by man, handed down from generation to generation. We are all thinking and functioning in that thought sphere just as we all share the same atmosphere for breathing."

"It is the self-consciousness that occurred in the human species somewhere during the course of evolution (I even question evolution; and I don't know if there exists such a thing as evolution at all) that has separated the human species from the totality of nature. It is responsible for the feeling that the human species is created for some grander purpose than all the other species on this planet. It caused the feeling that the whole creation is for the benefit of man. That's how we have created all these ecological problems and problems of every kind."

"I am questioning the very idea of consciousness. There is no such thing as consciousness at all. Consciousness is nothing but knowledge. Don't ask me how knowledge originated. Somewhere along the line knowledge started with you, and then you wanted to know about the things around. That is what I mean by 'self-consciousness'. You have become conscious of what is going on around you, and so naturally you want to know. What I am suggesting is that the very demand to understand the mystery of existence is destructive. Just leave the mystery alone."

"Thinking is born out of this self-consciousness. When I use the word self consciousness I don't mean all that stuff we find in religious thinking. What I mean is very simple: I mean the feeling that you are different from the tape recorder there, that you are different from that blue door. This is what I mean by separation. That feeling doesn't exist in animals at all. We are made to believe that there is something that you can do, to bring about a change in and around you. The demand for change springs from this self-consciousness, the separation from the singleness of the whole nature around us."

"I even question the idea of consciousness. There may not be any such thing as consciousness at all, let alone the subconscious, the unconscious, and all the other levels of consciousness. How do you become conscious of a thing? You become conscious of a thing only through your memory. First, you recognize it. And the recognition and naming are all that are there. You can trick yourself into the belief that recognition and naming are two different things. But actually they are not. The very fact that you recognize something as an object even without naming it means that you already know about it. The memory that has captured it says that it is an object. The talk about recognition without naming is a very clever way of playing a game. It is only sharpening your intellect. Actually you are not trying to understand what the problem is or how to deal with it."

"I now call my book 'The Mistake of Enlightenment' instead of its real title, 'The Mystique of Enlightenment'. It is a mistake I made. I don't have any message to give to the world. Frankly speaking, I really don't know what is there in that or in the second book. What I am saying is valid and true for just this moment. That's why people tell me, 'You are contradicting yourself all the time'. No, not at all. You see, this statement [I am making now] is contradicted by my next statement, a third statement contradicts the first two statements, a fourth statement contradicts — rather negates than contradicts — the first four, and the fifth one negates the sixth even before it is made! This is done not with the idea of arriving at a positive position; the negation is made for the sake of negation because nothing can be expressed, and you can't say this is the truth. There is no such thing as truth."

"The valor I am talking about is the courage that is naturally there when all this authority and fear is thrown out of the system. Courage is not an instrument or quality you can use to get somewhere. The stopping of doing is courage. The ending of tradition in you is courage."

"You can have the courage to climb the mountain, swim the lakes, go on a raft to the other side of the Atlantic or Pacific. That any fool can do, but the courage to be on your own, to stand on your two solid feet, is something which cannot be given by somebody."

"You have to rule out all such things as mutation, and radical transformation. I ruled those out because I didn't find anything there to be transformed. There was no question of mutation of mind, radical or otherwise. It is all hogwash. But it is difficult for you to throw all this stuff out of your system. You can also deny it and brush it aside, but this, 'May be there is something to it' lasts for a long time. When once you stumble into a situation that you can call 'courage' you can throw the entire past out of yourself. I don't know how this has happened. What has happened is something which cannot but be called an act of courage, because everything, not only this or that particular teacher you had been involved with, but everything that every man, every person, thought, felt, and experienced before you, is completely flushed out of your system. What you are left with is the simple thing — the body with its extraordinary intelligence of its own."

"My interest is to point out to you that you can walk, and please throw away all those crutches. If you are really handicapped, I wouldn't advise you to do any such thing. But you are made to feel by other people that you are handicapped so that they could sell you those crutches. Throw them away and you can walk. That’s all that I can say. 'If I fall...' - that is your fear. Put the crutches away, and you are not going to fall."

"Culture is a way of life and the way of thinking of a people. To me, this is culture: how we entertain ourselves, how we speculate about reality, what kind of things we are interested in, what kind of art we have, and so on. Whether the culture is Oriental or Occidental, it is basically the same. I don't see any difference between the two except one of accent, just as we all speak English with different accents. All human beings are exactly the same, whether they are Russian, American or Indian. What is going on in the head of that man walking in the street is no different from what is going on inside the head of a person walking in a street in New York. Basically it is the same."

"If it had not been for the culture, Nature would have thrown up many more flowers - so this has become a stumbling block to man's freeing himself in his own way. What is responsible for his difficulty is this thing, you see, the culture."

"They don't want you to question. They force on us everything they believed in, even the things they themselves did not believe, the things that did not operate in their lives. There is no use blaming them now. We are adults. So we don't have to blame them."

"We are the products of the great heritage of India. But if this is what we have done, and if we are what we are today, what is there to be proud of in the great heritage of India? Why do you want us to go back? This great heritage is something which has failed us. What do we do in such a situation? What is the answer? Maybe you have an answer, he has an answer, or she has an answer. I am asking them, since they are the ones that are trying to bring about a change. There is nothing there to be changed. As long as you are interested in bringing about a change in yourself, you talk in terms of bringing about a change in the world. When once you are freed from the demand to bring about any change in yourself, the demand to bring about a change in the world also comes to an end."

"One of the tragic things that human culture has done to us is that it has placed before us the model of a perfect being. That perfect being is modeled after the great spiritual teachers."

"The whole value system is born out of the demand to fit ourselves into this model we have before ourselves. We want to develop ourselves into perfect beings. This constant battle within ourselves is created by the value system. We never question that. The value system is false, and it is falsifying us."

"Because of this input of culture, it has become impossible for this organism to show uniqueness. We have destroyed the possibility of what nature can do. You only use this paradise that nature has created, including not only mankind but all the species that exist on this planet. We are solely and fully responsible for the chaos that mankind has created, and there seems to be no way out of it."

"All your heritage is a contamination here [points to himself]. It has been thrown out of my system. All the teachers' teachings are a contamination. But you consider them to be very sacred and keep repeating them, empty words and empty phrases, day after day. The teachings don't operate in your life."

"What I am saying is that this is something that you cannot totally reject through any volition or effort of yours. Somehow it happened to me. It is just a happening. It is acausal. The whole thing drained out of my system — the parameters that mankind has evolved, the thoughts, feelings and experiences throughout the ages. All this was thrown out of my system."

"Your feeling it does not mean anything. The individual you are talking about is created by your culture. You are creating that non-existing individual there."

"You are trying to model your life after these great teachers. You want your behavior patterns to be like theirs. But it's just not possible. A 'perfect being' does not exist at all. A perfect being is the end product of human culture, that is, the being we think as the perfect being. And you want everybody to be perfect that way. So going back to my point, nature's interest is only to create perfect species. It does not use any model. Every human being is something extraordinary and unique. If a being does not fit into the scheme of things, nature discards it and starts all over again."

"Culture is not anything mysterious. It is your way of life and your way of thinking. All the other cultural activities we consider to be very creative are part and parcel of your way of living and thinking. And your way of thinking is the thing that has created all these problems for you. There is no way you can free yourself from the problems created by thinking except by setting in motion another kind of thinking. But that cannot be of help."

"Our pushing people into a value system is a very undesirable thing, you know. You want to push everybody into a value system. We never question that this value system which we have cherished for centuries may be the very thing that is responsible for our misery."

"Your culture is nothing but to teach man how to kill and how to be killed, whether it is in the name of religion or in the name of political ideology, or in the name of patriotism, or anything you want. It can't be anything different. That is why I said that the whole thing is moving in the direction of the total annihilation of man. Such things have set in motion forces of destruction which no power can stop. "

"There is no such thing as creativity at all. All that people do is imitate something or the other that already exists. Only when you do not use anything as a model, what emerges can be called creativity and that cannot be used again as a model for future acts of yours. And there it ends. If you look at human faces or even those leaves: no two faces are the same, no two leaves are the same."

"[The brain] it is singularly incapable of creating anything. We have taken for granted that there it is something extraordinary, creating all kinds of things that we are so proud of. It is just a reactor and a container. It plays a very minor role in this living organism."

"You are not creating. The brain is only a computer. Through trial and error you create something. But there are no thoughts there. There is no thinker there. Where are the thoughts?"

"All creative things are painful. The birth of a child is a very natural thing. But to call it a traumatic experience and build up a tremendous structure of theories around it is something I am not concerned with. It cannot be a traumatic experience."

"All creations in nature are like that. I don't call it pain or violence. Volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, storms, and overflowing rivers are all part of nature. You cannot say that there is only chaos or that there is only order. Chaos and order happen almost at the same time. Birth and death are simultaneous processes."

"In nature there is no death or destruction at all. What occurs is the reshuffling of atoms. If there is a need or necessity to maintain the balance of 'energy' in this universe, death occurs."

"You are more useful to the nature dead than alive."

"Waiting for death is like waiting for the sun to rise. One cannot hit the fast forward button and make things more faster or slow time. Death will happen when it happens."

"If you don't know what you are looking at, the 'you' as you know yourself, the 'you' as you experience yourself, is going to come to an end. That is death. That is the only death, and there is no other death."

"We don't want to come to terms with the fact that we can only live seventy or eighty years of life. With death, all that we have achieved during that span has to come to an end. Not wanting to accept the fact that that is the end, we project the beyond and create all kinds of fantasies."

"As far as the body is concerned there is neither birth nor death. What we call death is nothing but a reshuffling of atoms, and the reshuffling of atoms takes place for the simple reason that the level of energy in this universe has to be maintained."

"Birth and death are simultaneous processes. When once the continuity of thought or the demand to experience the same thing over and over again to maintain what we call identity is not there, all these questions which we repeatedly ask are finished."

"UG: There is nothing to die here [in U.G.]. The body cannot be afraid of death. The movement that is created by society or culture is what does not want to come to an end. How it came to an end [in U.G.] I really don't know. What you are afraid of is not death. In fact, you don't want to be free from fear."

"Your own death, or the death of your near and dear ones, is not something you can experience. What you actually experience is the void created by the disappearance of another individual, and the unsatisfied demand to maintain the continuity of your relationship with that person for a non-existent eternity. The arena for the continuation of all these 'permanent' relationships is the tomorrow — heaven, next life, and so on. These things are the inventions of a mind interested only in its undisturbed, permanent continuity in a 'self'-generated, fictitious future."

"Food, clothing and shelter- these are the basic needs. Beyond that, if you want anything, it is the beginning of self-deception."

"You mistakenly believe that by pursuing the spiritual goal you will somehow miraculously make your material goals simple and manageable."

"Every time you experience greed and condemn it you are adding to its momentum. You are not dealing with the actual greed, anger or desire. You are only interested in using them. Take, for example, desirelessness. You want to be free from desire. But you are not dealing with desire but only with the idea of 'how to be free from desire'. You are not dealing with something that is living there. Whatever is there or happening there cannot be false. You may not like it and may condemn it because it doesn't fit into your social framework. The actions born out of the desire may not fall into the society's framework which accepts certain actions as socially acceptable and certain others as anti-social. But you are concerned only about values. You are concerned about grappling with or fighting that which you condemn. Such a concern is born out of culture, society, norms, or whatever. The norms are false and they are falsifying you."

"You have been told that you should practice desirelessness. You have practiced desirelessness for thirty or forty years, but still desires are there. So something must be wrong somewhere. Nothing can be wrong with desire; something must be wrong with the one who has told you to practice desirelessness. This (desire) is a reality; that (desirelessness) is false – it is falsifying you. Desire is there. Desire as such can’t be wrong, can’t be false, because it is there."

"It is all chemical. If, as they say, desires are hormones, then the whole ethical code and culture that we have created through centuries to control the behavior of human beings are false. So, desire cannot be false. Anything that is happening within the organism cannot be false."

"I told Bertrand Russell, “The H-bomb is an extension of your policeman; are you willing to do away with the policeman?” “You have to draw the line somewhere!” he said. I just said goodbye and walked out."

"The most important thing for us to realize is that thought is a very destructive weapon, and that thought is our enemy. However, we are not ready to accept the fact that thought can only create problems, but cannot help us to solve them."

"We use thought not only for our self-aggrandizement but we also use it to destroy, for no reason, other species of life around us. Physical fear is totally different from the fear of losing what you have, the fear of not getting what you want. You call this psychological fear."

"We use thinking as an instrument of destruction. We want to believe that God is on our side. During the last world war, the Germans claimed that God was their copilot, and the British also claimed that God was their copilot. Both of them destroyed life and property. So we would like God to be on our side all the time and use Him. But what has come out of that is only violence. Belief in God, or belief in anything, separates us from others."

"Every time a god man appears on the stage he is adding momentum to all the chaos that already exists, and we are slowly moving in the direction of destroying ourselves."

"If humanity goes, you and I will also go with it. Who has given me or you the mandate to save mankind? I am part of this world. As far as I am concerned I am in perfect harmony with the world. I like it exactly the way it is. I am not in conflict with it. It cannot be any different."

"Nature uses the human species to destroy everything that it has created. Everything that is born out of thought, every discovery you have made so far is used for destructive purposes. Every invention of ours, every discovery of ours is pushing us in that direction of total annihilation of the human species."

"Nothing is ever born, and nothing ever dies. What has created the space between creation and destruction, or the time between the two, is thought. In nature there is no death or destruction at all. What occurs is the reshuffling of atoms. If there is a need or necessity to maintain the balance of energy in this universe, death occurs."

"Even if we discover the laws of nature, for whatever reason we are interested in doing so, ultimately they are used to destroy everything that nature has created. This propaganda that the planet is in danger is a media hype. Everybody has in fact forgotten about it. Actually it is not the planet that is in danger, but we are in danger. We are not ready to face this situation squarely. We must not look for answers in the past or in the great heritage of this or that nation. And we must not look to the religious thinkers. They don't have any answers."

"Any school boy knows how they make an atom bomb. And on a worldwide basis, huge amounts of fissionable materials are already missing. They will end up in God-knows-whose hands. The know-how is available to everyone. One day someone is going to use it. Then we will be in trouble."

"When you are no longer caught up in the dichotomy of right and wrong or good and bad, you can never do anything wrong. As long as you are caught up in this duality, the danger is that you will always do wrong."

"Once you are, I don't like to use the word, freed from, or are not trapped in, this duality of right and wrong, good and bad, you can never do anything bad. As long as you are caught up in wanting to do only good, you will always do bad."

"You see, both good and bad, right and wrong, are not the reverse of a coin but are the same coin. They are like the two ends of the spectrum. One cannot exist independent of the other. When once you are finished with this duality, (I am using the word with much caution, although I don't like to use it,) when you are no longer caught up in the dichotomy of right and wrong or good and bad, you can never do anything wrong. As long as you are caught up in it, the danger is that you will always do wrong; and if you don't do wrong, it is because you are a frightened 'chicken'. It is out of this cowardice that the whole religious thinking is born."

"It is not a question of calling it right or wrong. There is no way out. Anything you do to get out of this trap which you yourself have created is strengthening and fortifying it."

"We are using the neurons, our memory, constantly to maintain our identity. Whether you are awake or asleep or dreaming, this process is carried on. But it is wearing you out. That is why I say that the tragedy that is facing mankind is not Aids or cancer but Alzheimer's disease."

"We don't have to use all those phrases such as, 'I am aware of this, that, and the other'. If you put into practice what they call 'awareness', you will go the way of Alzheimer's disease which is hitting everybody. I read it in some magazine that it is hitting everybody. It has hit already the famous musician, what is his name, Frank Sinatra. It is there in one of your papers. He is very young. They mention him as an example of how a person suffering from Alzheimer's disease functions. You have the 'key' there in your hand. But you don't know how to use the key and open the door."

"I have never taken any medicine nor have I ever seen a doctor. All the doctors who have advised me not to live the kind of life I had been living are now dead and gone. There is one exception – once, I had typhoid fever when I lived in Madras. My wife’s brother was a top doctor in the General Hospital in Madras. The British had a wing in the hospital for themselves and nobody else was allowed to stay in the rooms in that wing. That year, however, they opened the wing to the general public. So my brother-in-law got me one room in it and another for my family members. In that room my wife and grandmother stayed. Three nurses took care of me taking turns every eight hours for a whole month, after which I walked out."

"Although I assert that all doctors should be shot, I don’t advise others not to see a doctor. I don’t know what I will do if I am in a situation where I want to prolong my life a little longer. So I would never tell others not to see a doctor."

"The cells are wearing out. That's why I say that the tragedy that is facing mankind is not AIDS or cancer, but Alzheimer's disease. We are using the neurons, our memory, constantly to maintain our identity. Whether you are awake or asleep or dreaming, this process is carried on. But it is wearing you out."

"You must have read the statistics recently in an American magazine. One in three in the sixty-year age group is affected by this Alzheimer's disease. The nature of the disease is such that it brings about total and complete destruction of the mind and identity. In England one in two in the eighty-year group, altogether six hundred thousand people, are affected, and out of that there are two Nobel Prize winners. Hundreds and thousands of people around the globe are affected. We don't have any record of exactly how many are affected. That may be nature's way of turning us all into vegetables to recreate something better. I am hazarding an opinion which is as bad or as good as anyone else's. I have said my piece."

"That is the fate of mankind, I am telling you. It is the Alzheimer's disease. If you don't behave, if you continue to maintain your identity, you are in trouble. Nature will destroy the minds and identities of people, and we will all become vegetables. Nature then will reshuffle these human bodies and will create a new species. The human species is expendable. We are not created for any purpose grander than that for which the mosquito that is sucking your blood is created."

"I think what we are actually doing is trying to treat the symptoms of what we call a disease. But my question is, and I always throw this question at the people who are competent enough — the doctors, what is health? What is disease? Is there any such thing as disease for this body? The body does not know that it is healthy or unhealthy. You know, we translate the 'malfunctioning' [of the body] to mean that there is some imbalance in the natural rhythm of the body. Not that we know what actually is the rhythm of the body. But we are so frightened that we run to a doctor or to somebody who we think is in the know of things and can help us. We do not give a chance for the body to work out the problems created by the situation we find ourselves in. We do not give enough time for the body. But what actually is health? You are a doctor, and my question to you is, what actually is health? Does the body know, or does it have any way of knowing, that it is healthy or unhealthy?"

"It is not that I am saying that you should not go to a doctor or take the help of medicine. I am not one of those who believe that your prayers will help the body to recover from whatever disease it has, or that God is going to be the healer. Nothing like that. Pain is part of the biological functioning of the body, and that is all there is to it. And we have to rely or depend upon the chemistry of this body, and the body always gives us a warning. In the early stages we do not pay any attention, but when it becomes too much for the body to handle, there is panic and fear. Maybe it is necessary for us to go to a person who is in the know of affairs and get a helping hand from him. That's all we can do. The patient can be given a helping hand. All treatment, whether traditional or alternative, is based upon the account of the symptoms narrated by the patient."

"My advice to the doctors is that they should heal themselves first. It's so surprising that many of the heart specialists have died of heart failure."

"The invention of God, along with all those other beliefs, may have served mankind's instinct to survive for some time in the past, but not now. It's the extension of the same survival mechanism that now operates through the fear of extinction. The biological instinct is very powerful, and the fear of extinction, not love and compassion, will probably be the savior of mankind."

"There is no power outside of man. Man has created God out of fear. So the problem is fear and not God."

"It is money, not divinity, that counts in life."

"In the name of God we have killed more people than in the two world wars put together. In Japan millions of people died in the name of the sacred Buddha. Here in India, five thousand Jains were massacred in a single day. This is not a peaceful nation! You don't want to read your own history: it's full of violence from the beginning to the end."

"You divorce one woman and then the new wife comes. You put the old wife's picture and your children's pictures all in the attic and replace them with the pictures of the new wife's parents, grandparents and children. [Laughter]"

"It is these institutions which are responsible for the misery of mankind. There is no way you can change or modify these institutions. It is a lot easier for people in India now to go for a divorce than it was in earlier times. There was no question of me divorcing my wife or my wife divorcing me at that time. Now it is a lot easier. The changing conditions are responsible for a change in our idea. But that does not mean that the problem has an easy and simple solution."

"Atmospheric pollution is most harmless when compared to the spiritual and religious pollution that have plagued the world."

"We are made to believe that there is a purpose, and that belief is what is responsible for the tragedy of mankind today. We have also been made to believe that we are created for a grander purpose, for a nobler purpose, than all the species on this planet. This is not all. We are also told that the whole creation was created for the benefit of man: that's why we have created all these problems — ecological problems and problems of pollution."

"These environmental problems have been allowed to escalate into huge crises, so huge that in fact they are beyond what any individual or even ecologists can tackle any more. Look out the window. Observe the sickening fumes, the poisonous air. The factories are pumping out millions of tons of deadly wastes. There is more pollution here than in Western countries. To clean up the exhaust fumes from all the contaminating chemicals takes huge amounts of money. These companies are not going to voluntarily clean up the mess. Do you think General Motors and the others give a damn? If I had any shares in a company, and I don't actually, I would want dividends, not a bill for clean-up costs. Any management team that advocated corporate responsibility would be run out of office at once. As a shareholder I would want income, period. I wouldn't give a damn for all the people, animals, and plants that are there. "

"Now it has become fashionable to become an ecologist. Prince Philip's talk of saving the whales is a joke to me. The fellow has nothing else to do. And Queen Anne talks of saving the seals! Why are they concerned about whales and seals? If what I read is true, only fifteen percent of all the animal species that ever lived are alive today. All the other species have become extinct. Only five percent of all the plant species that ever existed exist now. So, extinction of species is the regular order of things in nature. Perhaps man should have become extinct long ago, I don't know. It's too late now. This one species alone is increasing the rate of extinction of all other species beyond what could have been thought possible."

"The self-consciousness in the human species, the idea that the world was created for man alone, is the real problem. The useless ecologists, they should all be shot on sight! They form groups, attend meetings, collect funds, start foundations, build organizations worth millions with presidents and vice-presidents, and they all make money. It may sound very cynical to you, but the fact of the matter is that they have no real power. The solutions do not lie with them. The problem is out of their hands. Governments have the power to do something, but they are not interested."

"We invent what is called a thoughtless state or an effortless state, I don't know for what reason. Why one should be in an effortless state is beyond me. But to be in an effortless state or to act effortlessly we use effort. That's absurd. We don't seem to have any way of putting ourselves into a thoughtless state except through thought."

"You can't do a thing; yet you don't stop there. All those who say that you can do something are telling you that there is a way out."

"You had to struggle, and put in a lot of effort to acquire the necessary legal knowledge to get the job. That's understood. So, that is the only way. There is no other way. You are applying that same technique to achieve your so-called spiritual goals. This is the difference that I am pointing out."

"'Be selfish and stay selfish' is my message. Wanting enlightenment is selfishness. Charity is selfishness."

"Your effort to control life has created a secondary movement of thought within you, which you call the 'I'."

"The body has no independent existence. You are a squatter there."

"What you do is really an expression of your urge for self-fulfillment. You may not agree. What is it that you are trying to do there? You say your actions are very noble, meant to help the suffering world. Not a chance."

"Man is always selfish, and he will remain selfish as long as he practices selflessness as a virtue. I have nothing against selfish people. I don't want to talk about selflessness - it has no basis at all. You say 'I will be a selfless man tomorrow. Tomorrow I will be a marvelous man' - but until tomorrow arrives (or the day after tomorrow, or the next life) you will remain selfish. What do you mean by 'selflessness'? You tell everybody to be selfless. What is the point? I have never said to anybody 'Don't be selfish'. Be selfish, stay selfish! - that is my message. Wanting enlightenment is selfishness. The rich man's distributing charity is also selfishness: he will be remembered as a generous man; you will put up a statue of him there."

"Whenever such a thing happened, it happened to those people who had given up completely and totally all their search. That is an absolute requisite for that kind of a thing."

"This has understood that it is not possible to experience anything any more. I don't know if I quite make myself clear. The individuality, the isolation, the separation (or whatever you want to call it) is not there any more. What separates you, what isolates you, is your thought - it creates the frontiers, it creates the boundaries. And once the boundaries are not there, it is boundless, limitless. Not that you can experience that boundlessness and limitlessness of your consciousness; the content of your consciousness is so immense that you can't say anything about it."

"Assuming for a moment that there is an enlightened being, he has no way of telling himself that he is an enlightened man and there is no question of his trying to enlighten others."

"I have searched everywhere to find an answer to my question, 'Is there enlightenment?' but have never questioned the search itself. Because I have assumed that goal of enlightenment exists, I have had to search. It is the search itself which has been choking me and keeping me out of my natural state. There is no such thing as spiritual or psychological enlightenment because there is no such thing as spirit or psyche at all. I have been a damn fool all my life, searching for something which does not exist. My search is at an end."

"Only if you reject all the other paths can you discover your own path."

"There are no spiritual goals at all; they are simply an extension of material goals into what you imagine to be a higher, loftier plane. You mistakenly believe that by pursuing the spiritual goal you will somehow miraculously make your material goals simple and manageable. This is in actuality not possible. You may think that only inferior persons pursue material goals, that material achievements are boring, but in fact the so-called spiritual goals you have put before yourself are exactly the same."

"As long as your goal is there, these persons, their promises and their techniques will look very, very attractive to you. They go together. There is not anything you must do."

"You cannot separate experience from knowledge. Similarly enlightenment has no independent existence of its own apart from the knowledge we have about it. There is no enlightenment at all. The idea of enlightenment is tied with the desire to change. But there is nothing to change."

"The mystique of enlightenment is based upon the idea of transforming yourself. I maintain that there is nothing to change or transform."

"You all fool yourselves thinking that you are going to get something by hanging around me… ho ho ho! You’re not going to get a thing because there is no need to get anything from anybody."

"There is no such thing as enlightenment. So whether Rajneesh is enlightened or some other joker is enlightened is irrelevant. It is you who assumes that somebody is, whoever he is. Good luck to you! Somebody coming and telling me, 'That I am' is a big joke. There is nothing to this whole nonsense. I have heard that there is a course in the United States: if you want enlightenment in twenty-four hours they charge you one thousand dollars and if you want it within a week, five hundred dollars, and so on."

"Darwin's theory is not to be considered at all - his basic statement that acquired characteristics are not transmitted from generation to generation has proved to be wrong. Maybe there is something to evolution - maybe - but what exactly do we mean by 'evolution?' You see, the simple things become complex, hm? Man has become such a complex individual today that he has to move in the opposite direction. I don't mean, by saying 'in the opposite direction,' that we have to advocate involution. You see, there is no question of going back and starting with the year number one; man has to start where he stands today."

"I don't see any plan or scheme there at all! There is a process, I wouldn't necessarily call it evolution, but when it slows down then a revolution takes place. Nature tries to put something together and start all over again, just for the sake of creating. This is the only true creativity. Nature uses no models or precedents and so has nothing to do with art per se."

"We don't even know if there is any such thing as evolution. We rule out spiritual evolution. Those who assumed that there is such a thing as spirit or soul or center, or whatever you want to call it, say that it also goes through the evolutionary process and perfects itself. And for that you have to take one birth after another. I don't know how many births there may be, 84 million, or god knows what the figure is."

"We have for centuries been made to believe that the end product of human evolution, if there is one, is the creation of perfect beings modeled after the great spiritual teachers of mankind and their behavior patterns."

"Even today some universities don't allow their students to study Darwin's Origin of Species. His statements have been proved to be wrong to some extent because he said that acquired characteristics cannot be transmitted to the succeeding generations. But every time they [the scientists] discover something new they change their theories."

"I don't think that we deliberately took the wrong path. Something happened long ago to the human race. We are now a menace to the planet. Perhaps it is nature's way to clear away and start afresh in the fastest way. I don't see any scheme in nature, do you? We project our own ideations and mentations onto nature and imagine it to be sweetly ordered. We imagine that there is a scheme or plan, and such a thing as evolution. I don't see any such thing."

"All experiences, spiritual or otherwise, are the basic cause of our suffering."

"Whatever we experience is thought-induced."

"Whatever you experience - peace, bliss, silence, beatitude, ecstasy, joy, God knows what - will be old, second-hand. You already have knowledge about all of these things. The fact that you are in a blissful state or in a state of tremendous silence means that you know about it. You must know a thing in order to experience it. That knowledge is nothing marvelous or metaphysical; 'bench', 'bag', 'red bag', is the knowledge. Knowledge is something which is put into you by somebody else, and he got that from somebody else; it is not yours. Can you experience a simple thing like that bench that is sitting across from you? No, you only experience the knowledge you have about it. And the knowledge has come from some outside agency, always. You think the thoughts of your society, feel the feelings of your society and experience the experiences of your society; there is no new experience."

"There is no such thing as my experience and your experience. When you experience something you think it is something extraordinary and naturally the need arises to share that experience with somebody else. When you and I go out for a walk you naturally look at something that you have not looked at before and it is something extraordinary for you. And when you say to yourself this is something extraordinary that you have not seen before there is a need for you - which is a part of your self fulfillment - to share that pleasure with somebody else. Whatever you experience has already been experienced by someone else. Your telling yourself, 'Ah! I am in a blissful state,' means that someone else before you has experienced that and has passed it on to you. Whatever may be the nature of the medium through which you experience, it is a second hand, third-hand, and last-hand experience. It is not yours. There is no such thing as your own experience. Such experiences, however extraordinary, aren't worth anything."

"Your experiencing structure cannot conceive of any event that it will not experience. It even expects to preside over its own dissolution, and so it wonders what death will feel like, it tries to project the feeling of what it will be like not to feel. But in order to anticipate a future experience, your structure needs knowledge, a similar past experience it can call upon for reference. You cannot remember what it felt like not to exist before you were born, and you cannot remember your own birth, so you have no basis for projecting your future non-existence."

"Every time you experience, through the help of this experience the knowledge is strengthened and fortified. This is a vicious circle. It goes on and on and on. The knowledge gives you experiences and the experiences fortify the knowledge you have."

"Anything we experience, although we call it 'rebirthing', or trying to experience how it was like when you were a newborn baby or an infant is naturally colored by where we stand today. Anything we experience has no relevance, no meaning, to what I'm trying to say."

"You know, in Japan they have some techniques: by manipulating certain nerves at the base of your head they will make you go through the experience of your own birth... I have always maintained that the experiencing structure at the time of your birth was totally absent."

"Your own experiences don't always help you. You tell yourself, for example, 'If I had this experience ten years ago, my life would have been different'. But ten years hence you will be telling yourself exactly the same thing, 'If I had this experience ten years ago'. But we are now at this point and your past experiences cannot help you to resolve your problems."

"Unfortunately, what has created this interest in the Western nations is the so-called Hippy generation. When they tried drugs, the drugs produced a change in what they called their 'levels of consciousness'. For the first time they experienced something outside the area of their normal experiencing structure. When once we experience something extraordinary, which actually it is not, we look around for varieties of experiences..."

"What you don't know you can't experience. To experience a thing you have to 'know'."

"Fear is the very thing that you do not want to be free from. If the fear comes to an end, you will drop dead physically. Clinical death will take place."

"You love fear. The ending of fear is death, and you don't want that to happen. I am not talking of wiping out the phobias of the body. They are necessary for survival. The death of fear is the only death."

"It is fear that makes you believe that you are living and that you will be dead. What we do not want is the fear to come to an end. That is why we have invented all these new minds, new sciences, new talks, therapies, choiceless awareness and various other gimmicks."

"What is necessary to understand is that the fear that has created all these beliefs is the fear that has created god. That’s the most important thing to realize."

"Fear makes your body stiff and then you will certainly break your limbs. My body is never stiff."

"I am telling you to stand on your own - you can walk, you can swim, you are not going to sink. That's all that I can say. As long as there is fear, the danger of your sinking is almost certain. Otherwise, there is a buoyancy there in the water that keeps you afloat. The fear of sinking is the very thing that makes it impossible for you to let the movement happen in its own way. You see, it has no direction: it is just a movement with no direction. You are trying to manipulate and channel that movement along a particular direction so that you can have some benefits. You are just a movement without a direction."

"There is no such thing as the fear of the unknown. You can't be afraid of the unknown, because the unknown, as you say, is the unknown. The fear that you are talking about is the fear of the known coming to an end."

"It is the fear that makes you believe that you are living and that you will be dead. What we do not want is the fear to come to an end. That is why we have invented all these new minds, new science, new talk, therapies, choiceless awareness and various other gimmicks. Fear is the very thing that you do not want to be free from. What you call 'yourself' is fear. The 'you' is born out of fear; it lives in fear, functions in fear and dies in fear."

"People ask me, 'How come you take walks with the cobras?' I have never done it with a tiger or any other wild animal. But I don't think I would be frightened of them either. If there is no fear in you, then you can take walks with them. The fear emits certain odors which the cobra senses. The cobra senses that you are a dangerous thing. Naturally, the cobra has to take the first step. Otherwise, it is one of the most beautiful creatures that nature has created. They are the most lovable creatures. You can take a walk with them and you can talk to them."

"It is your fear that is responsible for the situation you find yourself in. It is your fear that creates a problem for the cobra; then it has to take the first step. If the cobra kills you, you are only one person. Whereas we kill hundreds and thousands of cobras for no reason. If you destroy these cobras, then the field mice will have a field day, and you will find that they destroy the crops. There is a tremendous balance in nature. Our indiscretions are responsible for the imbalance in nature."

"The ending of fear is the ending of you as you know yourself. I am not talking of the psychological, romantic death of 'dying to your yesterdays'. That body of yours, I assure you, drops dead on the spot the moment the continuity of knowledge is broken."

"All feelings are thoughts. There is no way you can feel anything without giving a name to it."

"Your emotions are more complex, but it is the same process. Why do you have to tell yourself that you are angry, that you are envious of someone else, or that sex is bothering you? I am not saying anything about fulfilling or not fulfilling. There is a sensation in you, and you say that you are depressed or unhappy or blissful, jealous, greedy, envious. This labelling brings into existence the one who is translating this sensation. What you call 'I' is nothing but this word 'red bag', 'bench', 'steps', 'banister', 'light bulb', 'angry', 'blissful', 'jealous', or whatever. You are putting your brain cells to unnecessary activity making the memory cells operate all the time, destroying the energy that is there. This is only wearing you out."

"Children can express all emotions. If they can't use words, they are able to express their emotions so beautifully, in simple ways. Their whole bodies express their joy, each in a different way. But we are proud of the words we use because for us they are instruments of power."

"Anger is like an outburst of energy. It is like the high tide and the low tide in the sea. The problem is, 'What to do with anger?' The question, 'What to do with anger?' is something put in there by culture, because society considers an angry man a threat to its status quo, to its continuity."

"'The heart is more important than the head' and all such nonsense are absolute poppycock. When once this [U.G.'s] kind of disturbance takes place in the hormonal balance of the human body through this catastrophe, through this calamity, through whatever you want to call it, not only is the thymus activated but also all other glands such as the pineal and the pituitary are activated. People ask me, 'Why don't you submit yourself to medical testing to validate all these claims?' I tell them that I am not selling these claims."

"We were about to make love, and my two-year-old girl cried. We had to break up, and you can't imagine what violent feelings I had at that time. I just wanted to strangle that child! Of course, I did not act on those feelings. I could have. That was the frame of my mind. I said to myself, 'That is the blood of my own blood, to use an idiotic phrase, bone of my bone — my own child. How can I have such thoughts? There is something wrong here' [Pointing to himself]. I told myself, 'You are not a spiritual man, you are not what you think you are and what people think you are'. I was lecturing on the Theosophical platforms everywhere. I said to myself, 'You are 'this', and 'this' is you. This is what you are — all this violence'."

"One of the leaders of the feminist movement visited me and asked, 'What do you have to say of our movement?' I said, 'I am on your side, but you have to realize one very fundamental thing. As long as you depend on man for your sexual needs, so long you are not a free person. If you use a vibrator for your sexual satisfaction, that is a different matter'. 'You are very crude', she said. I am not crude. What I am saying is a fact. As long as you depend upon something or somebody there is scope for exploitation. I am not against the feminist movement. They ought to have every right. Even today, in the same job a woman is paid less in the United States than a man. Why?"

"Man has no freedom of action. I don't mean the fatalism that the Indians have practiced and still are practicing: when I say that man has no freedom of action it is in relation to changing himself, to freeing himself from the burden of the past."

"One thing that I always emphasize is that it is culture that has created us all for the sole purpose of maintaining its status quo and its continuity. So, in that sense, I do not see that there are any individuals at all. At the same time, the same culture has given us the hope that there is something that you can do to become an individual and that there is such a thing as free will. Actually there is no free will at all."

"You don't have any freedom of action. This is not what we have been taught in India — the fatalistic philosophy. When you say that there is no freedom of action, it means that you have no way of acting except through the help of the knowledge that is passed on to you. It is in that sense, I said, no action is possible without thought. Any action that is born out of thought which belongs to the totality of knowledge is a protective mechanism. It is protecting itself. It is a self perpetuating mechanism. You are using it all the time. Every time you experience anything through the help of that knowledge, the knowledge is further strengthened and fortified."

"You are not the one that is operating the camera. The thoughts which we are talking about don't originate there. No action of yours is self-generated. The problem is really with the language. We can manage with three hundred basic words."

"Anything you want to be free from for whatever reason is the very thing that can free you."

"I tell all those who want to discuss with me the question of how to decondition yourself, how to live with an unconditioned mind, that the very thing that they are doing is conditioning them, conditioning them in a different way. You are just picking up a new lingo instead of using the usual one. You begin to use the new lingo and feel good. That's all. But this is conditioning you in exactly the same way; that's all it can do."

"Do you really think that there is freedom in the United States? What does that mean to a starving man - freedom of speech, freedom of worship, and freedom of the press? He does not know how to read the newspapers and is not interested in them. At least in the Communist systems they fed, clothed, and sheltered people, though that is now being denied to them in those nations. There is more unemployment than ever before in the Western countries. I don't think this is the model for the whole of mankind."

"Actually when the experiencing structure in babies come into operation is very difficult to see, and I'm one of those who believe that the influence of environment is very limited on us, and I maintain - I'm are not an authority to assert such things - but the experiencing structure is genetic in its origin and in its expression. You see, everything is genetically controlled and if we really want to change individuals, the only way we can do it is not to change the environment, not through the cultural input but trying to understand what really is the part that the genes play in us, and maybe through some genetic engineering we can create perfect human beings."

"I'm at the same time conscious of the fact that it is a very dangerous thing that we are indulging in. When once we perfectly the engineering techniques we hand it over to the state and it will be a lot easier for the state to manipulate the individuals and turn them into just a robot - I'm not against robots: we actually are robots whether we like it or not - and make them things make them do things which they are unwilling to do. Because it takes a lot of time lot of brainwashing to teach something to the people, to make people believe in God, for example, to make people believe in a particular political ideology but to free them from that kind of a thing we have to brainwash them all over again. It's a very elaborate long process and so this is a lot easier for us to use these techniques and change individuals faster than it is possible otherwise."

"I can make no definitive statements about the part genes play in the evolutionary process, but at the moment it appears that Darwin was at least partially wrong in insisting that acquired characteristics could not be genetically transmitted. I think that they are transmitted in some fashion. I am not competent enough to say whether the genes play any part in the transmission."

"I may be wrong, but I feel, Sir, that man's problems, even his psychological problems, can only be solved through the help of your genes. If they can show that the tendency, say, to steal, is genetically determined, where will that leave us? It implies that man has no freedom of action in any area. Even the capacity to learn a language is also genetically determined. The whole thing, every tendency, capacity, and kind of behavior, is controlled by the genes. Man has no freedom of action. His wanting and demanding freedom of action seems to be the cause of his suffering."

"That messy thing called 'mind' has created many destructive things. By far the most destructive of them all is God."

"God is the figment of man's fertile imagination."

"God or enlightenment is the ultimate pleasure, uninterrupted happiness. No such thing exists. Your wanting something that does not exist is the root of your problem. Transformation, moksha, and all that stuff are just variations of the same theme: permanent happiness. The body can't take uninterrupted pleasure for long; it would be destroyed. Wanting a fictitious permanent state of happiness is actually a serious neurological problem."

"To me the question of whether God exists or not is irrelevant and immaterial. We have no use for God. We have used God to justify the killing of millions and millions of people. We exploit God."

"What is it that money cannot buy? Even God."

"I don't care what Ramakrishna said, or what Sankara said, or what Buddha said."

"A sage cannot have a disciple, a sage cannot have a follower, because it is not an experience that can be shared."

"All gurus are welfare organizations providing petty experiences to their followers. The guru game is a profitable industry; try and make two million dollars a year any other way."

"You have to be saved from the very idea that you have to be saved. You must be saved from the saviors, redeemed from the redeemers."

"Until you have the courage to blast me, all that I am saying, and all gurus, you will remain a cultist with photographs, rituals, birthday celebrations and the like."

"If you brushed aside your hope, fear, and naiveté‚ and treated these fellows like businessmen, you would see that they do not deliver the goods, and never will. But you go on and on buying these bogus wares offered up by the experts."

"A guru is one who tells you to throw away all the crutches that we have been made to believe are essential for our survival. The true guru tells you, 'Throw them away, and don't replace them with the fancy crutches or even computerized crutches. You can walk; and if you fall, you will rise and walk again'. Such is the man whom we consider, or even tradition considers, to be the real guru, and not those who are selling those shoddy pieces of goods in the market place today. It is a business; it has become a holy business to people."

"As you depend upon somebody for solving your problems, so long you remain helpless. And this helplessness is exploited by the people who actually do not have the answers to your problems, but they give you some sort of a comforter. People are satisfied with these comforters and fall for this kind of thing, instead of dealing with the problems by themselves and for themselves."

"All those filthy religious people are fooling themselves and fooling everybody, living on the gullibility and credulity of people, making an easy living, selling shoddy pieces of goods and promising you some goodies that they can never deliver. But you want to believe all that nonsense. It’s a reflection on your intelligence that you fall for all that crap to which you are exposed."

"You can go back to your gurus. Do what you like. The thing I am talking about happens to the lucky; if you are lucky, you are lucky. That is all. I have nothing to do with it. It is in no one's hands."

"What I am trying to say is that you are satisfied with the crumbs they throw at you. And they promise that one day they are going to deliver to you a full loaf of bread. That is just a promise. They cannot deliver the goods at all. They just don't have it."

"This certainty that they were all false, and that their teachings falsified me, is something which I cannot transmit to anyone. It is your problem. As I said this morning, I had this hunger, I had this thirst. Nothing satisfied my hunger and nothing satisfied my quest."

"The feeling, 'That man in whom I have placed my confidence and belief cannot con himself and con everyone else', comes in the way of throwing the whole thing out of the window, down the drain. The solutions are still a problem. Actually there is no problem there. The only problem is to find out the inadequacy or uselessness of all the solutions that have been offered to us."

"They can't confuse us. We want to be confused. Otherwise how can they confuse us? We are willing victims in this matter."

"You cannot fit me into a value system at all. A value system has no use for me, and there is no question of my setting up a holy business. I have no way of telling myself that I am different from you. As I said, you have to take my word for it. If you still say, 'No, we don't accept it,' it is just fine with me."

"The other day I was talking to someone who asked me, 'Why is it you are not concerned?' I am not interested in saving anyone. As a matter of fact, I have been pleading that the world has to be saved from all the saviors of mankind."

"I did not condemn people as hypocrites. I said, 'Maybe the source is wrong. The man who is responsible for the teaching is wrong. Maybe he conned himself and conned everyone else'. So I wanted to find out. Now, I know that they all conned themselves and conned the whole of mankind. I conned myself too. I believed in them. I placed my confidence in them but they led me nowhere. Having known this, I cannot do to others what they did to the whole of mankind. I can just point out, 'Look here! They have put us all on the wrong track. If you want to find out for yourself and by yourself, go ahead and do it'."

"They cannot deliver the goods. They only give us hope. As I said at the beginning, we live in hope and die in hope."

"You are unique in your own way. There is no way you can copy those men. That is where we have created the tremendous problem for the whole of mankind."

"We need to be saved from the self-appointed saviors of mankind. No, they are the ones who are responsible for the terrible situation we find ourselves in today. We don't realize that it is they who have created this mess for us. They had their day, and have utterly, totally failed. Still they refuse to take a back seat."

"Happiness is something which cannot be achieved through anything. Any thinking that is open to us we have projected and created what is called enlightenment, God, self realization, call it by whatever name you like. So that is the ultimate pleasure."

"All I can guarantee you is that as long as you are searching for happiness, you will remain unhappy."

"The more moola you have, the merrier life will be."

"As long as you are pursuing those ideals that society or culture has placed before you, you will remain the opposite of it. And you hope that one day, through some miracle or through the help of somebody, some guru, you will be able to resolve the problem... not a chance!"

"It's the hope that keeps you going - 'If I follow this for another ten years, fifteen years, maybe one of these days I will...' because hope is the structure."

"See, you are thrown into a situation from where you have no escape. You are trapped in it. The very attempt on your part to 'untrap' (is there any such word?) or free yourself, or get out of that trap, is making you sink further into it. What we are left with is the total helplessness to do anything. But yet, unfortunately, we have a hope that there is something we can do. We don't stop at that total helplessness; we go on and on until the dead end. The living teachers and the yet unborn ones are hammering into our heads that they have answers for our problems and that they have the means to save the whole situation."

"We live in the hope and die in the hope that somehow the very same thing that has failed us will one day rescue us. You cannot conceive of the impossibility of creating a harmony between humans and the life around through thought."

"The way the world is moving, there seems to no hope. If the world or mankind has to free itself from the chaos of its own making, then man should come up with other ways. As I see it, the whole thing is heading in a direction where there is no way that we can stop or reverse it."

"I can never sit on a platform and talk. It is too artificial. It is a waste of time to sit and discuss things in hypothetical or abstract terms. An angry man does not sit and talk and converse pleasantly about anger; he is too angry. So don’t tell me that you are in crisis, that you are angry. Why talk of anger? You live and die in the hope that someday, somehow, you will no longer be angry. You are burdened with hope, and if this life seems hopeless, you invent the next life. There are no lives to come."

"To hope that the future is going to be a marvelous thing and tremendously different from what it has been all these years. But we are not doing anything to create something new."

"Some friends who have been with me for years say that they still have the hope that they are going to get something from me. This, in short, is the story of my life."

"Whatever has happened to me has happened despite everything I did. And whatever I did and whatever events people believe that led me into this are totally irrelevant, because it is very difficult for me to fix a point now and tell myself that this is me and look back and try to find out because of whatever has happened to me. Because this is not in the the field or the area of cause-and-effect relationship that is why I am emphasizing, over emphasizing all the time whenever I have a chance to meet people and talk about it and say that it is acausal."

"It is very difficult to to tell people how it happened because they are only interested in finding out how it happened to me and their only interest is to find out the cause and what led me into this. But when I tell that this is acausal it is very difficult for them to understand and accept it. Their interest is to find out the cause and make it happen to them."

"The functioning of the heart is a natural thing; the functioning of all the organs in your body is very natural. They are not for one moment asking themselves the question 'How am I functioning?' The whole living organism has this tremendous intelligence which makes it function in a very natural way. You have separated what you call life from [that]. What you call life is living, which is in no way related to the functioning of this living organism."

"So, naturally, you are asking the question, 'How to live?' You see, it is the 'How to live' that has really destroyed the natural way the whole thing is going on. That is where the culture steps in and tells you, 'This is the way you should act and live. This is the one and the only thing that is good for you and good for the society'. You want to change that [state of affairs], you see. What is it that you want to change? That is all that I am asking."

"'How' means you want to know."

"I'm not the person to put all that shit in you, go somewhere else. All that they have done and put there in you is that shit: how, how, how, how! The how has to go."

"You want me to tell you 'How I can be free from frustration?', that is the one that keeps the frustration there. The how is related to the frustration, so you don't want to be free from frustration. You want to live with it, romanticize it and make movies and make money, sit on a platform and talk about it: 'don't condemn it', 'don't justify it', 'don't identify you yourself with frustration', 'be choicelessly aware of that'. One who is choicelessly aware of that frustration is the frustration. There is no frustration other than that bastard's statement: 'choicelessly aware of frustration', that is the frustration. Because you will never be free from that, that's the joke: 'be choicelessly aware of frustration', 'just to look at it' that doesn't exist! The only thing that exists is empty words that you have picked up somewhere else. That's all. So you don't want to be free from that. If you are really interested in freeing yourself from that which you are not, that shit must go."

"The basic method of maintaining the continuity is the incessant repetition of the question, 'How? How? How?' 'How am I to live? How can I be happy? How can I be sure I will be happy tomorrow?'. This has made life an insoluble dilemma for us. We want to know, and through that knowledge we hope to continue on with our miserable existences forever."

"You are living. As soon as you introduce the question 'how to live?', you have made of life a problem. 'How' to live has made life meaningless. The moment you ask 'how', you turn to someone for answers, becoming dependent."

"Humility is an art that one practises. There is no such thing as humility. As long as you know, there is no humility. The known and humility cannot co-exist."

"Humility means not a trace of knowledge or experience. It is complete absence of all ideations and mentations."

"What we call identity, the 'I', the 'me', the 'you', the 'center', the 'psyche', is artificially created. It does not exist at all."

"What I am trying to say is that there is no individual there at all. There is only a certain gathering of knowledge - which is thought - but no individuality there. Anything I do to help would only add to your misery - that is all. By continuing to listen to me you merely heap one more misery upon those you already have."

"The maintenance of our identity is possible only through the constant use of memory. It is wearing out the human organism, leaving little energy for tackling the problems of the world."

"Every time a thought is born you are born. It is not this particular entity, which is non-existing even while you are living, takes a series of births."

"'I' is nothing but the movement of knowledge."

"To me, the 'I' is a first person, singular pronoun. I discovered this when I was very young. Other than that, I do not think there is any such thing as 'I', or 'self', or all the words we use for this. There is no way you can separate yourself from this living organism, other than through the concepts or ideas that have been put into you."

"You are just a computer. There is no individual there. It is all one movement in the cosmos. The movement of even a leaf affects you."

"You will be shocked if I tell you that you are just a 'solidified imagination'."

"What I am trying to say is that I have no image of myself. I have no way I can create the image. The only instruments I have are my sensory perceptions. My sensory perceptions function independently of each other. There is no coordinator who is coordinating all the sensory perceptions and creating an image. Since I have no way I can create an image here within me, I have no way of creating an image of you and put you up there. But it does not mean that I am this microphone, or you, or that table. It is not that I am the table, or the microphone, or this glass of water, or this visitors' card; not at all."

"I am not saying that thought is useless or any such thing. Its interest is to maintain its continuity. When the identity is not there, you have no way of identifying yourself with anything except through the help of knowledge. So, I do accept, like anyone else, the reality of the world as it is imposed on me. Otherwise I would end up in the loony-bin, singing loony tunes and merry melodies. But at the same time, I know that thought is merely functional in its nature and it cannot help me become something which I am not."

"We maintain the separation and keep up a non-existing identity. That is the reason why you have to constantly use your memory, which is nothing but the neurons, to maintain your identity."

"When once the 'I' is gone, there is no way of experiencing your own body anymore. You have no way of knowing whether you are alive or dead. You will never be able to tell yourself, 'This is my body'. If you ask me, 'Is that your body or my body?' I may say, 'This is my body,' just to communicate to you, differentiate and say that it is not your body but my body. But the fact that this is my body is something which cannot be experienced at all."

"You can't lose your identity. It's too dangerous. If you don't know what you are looking at, you are going to be in trouble. You may tell yourself that you don't know what you are looking at, but if you are looking at your girl and tell yourself that you do not know [her], that is the end of the whole story. It's too dangerous. Don't play with that kind of thing. You can sit there and look at the camera and say, 'I don't know what I am looking at'. But that's a trick. You create a state of mind and believe that you don't know what you are looking at. But actually, in a given situation, if you don't know what you are looking at, there is trouble. So you dare not put yourself in that situation. You can only play games with it."

"You see, the identity is nothing but the input of the culture there."

"The identity that we have created, that culture has created in us, is the most important factor which we have to consider. If we continue to give importance to this identity, which is the product of culture, we are going to end up with Alzheimer's disease. We are putting memory and the brain to a use for which they are not intended. Computers can do the same job in a much more efficient way."

"Our trying to take advantage of everything in nature is the source of problems. And, it was at that time what we call 'identity' took its birth. We for some reason seem compelled to maintain that identity."

"You are not an individual. You are doing exactly the same thing that everybody is doing."

"The recognition of yourself as an entity is possible only through the help of the knowledge. We start this process with children. You tell a child: 'Show me your teeth, show me your nose, show me your ears, or tell me your name'. That is where identity starts. The constant use of memory to maintain that identity is the situation we find ourselves in. We do not want that identity to come to an end. We do everything possible to maintain it. But the effort to maintain your identity is wearing you out."

"By associating themselves with us, even cats and rats have become like human beings. You also give identity to the cats and names to the dogs. Human culture has spoiled those animals. Unfortunately, we spoil the animals by making them our pets."

"It is the body that is immortal. It is living from moment to moment."

"There is no such thing as death at all. What do you think will die? What? This body disintegrates into its constituent elements, so nothing is lost. If you burn it, the ashes enrich the soil and aid germination. If you bury it, the worms live on it. If you throw it into the river, it becomes food for the fishes. One form of life lives on another form of life, and so gives continuity to life. So life is immortal."

"It is the body which is immortal. It only changes its form after clinical death, remaining within the flow of life in new shapes. The body is not concerned with 'the afterlife' or any kind of permanency. It struggles to survive and multiply NOW. The fictitious 'beyond', created by thought out of fear, is really the demand for more of the same, in modified form. This demand for repetition of the same thing over and over again is the demand for permanence. Such permanence is foreign to the body. Thought's demand for permanence is choking the body and distorting perception. Thought sees itself as not just the protector of its own continuity, but also of the body's continuity. Both are utterly false."

"What they are calling mental activity, spiritual activity, emotional activity, and feelings are really all one unitary process. This body is highly intelligent and does not need these scientific or theological teachings to survive and procreate. Take away all your fancies about life, death, and freedom, and the body remains unscathed, functioning harmoniously. It does not need your or my help. You don't have to do a thing. You will never again ask stupid, idiotic questions about immortality, afterlives, or death. The body is immortal."

"It is a very superficial division that we make between thought and instinct. Actually there are no instincts in the human being at all. There is no such thing as instinct. That's all invented by your fanciful thinking."

"The extraordinary intelligence of the biological organism is all that is necessary for good living, but we are all the time interfering with its natural operation through the medium of thought."

"The native intelligence of the human body is amazing. That is all it needs to survive in any dangerous situation in life."

"The native intelligence is what you are born with; the intellect is acquired from what they teach you. So, you don’t have any words or phrases, or even experiences, which you can call your own. You have to use that knowledge that has been put in there in order to experience anything."

"The body is not interested in your perceptions. It is not interested in learning anything from you or knowing anything from you. All the intelligence that is necessary for this living organism is already there. Our attempts to teach this body, or make it function differently from the way it is programmed by nature, are what are responsible for the battle that is going on. There is a battle between what is put in by culture and what is inherent there in the body."

"The body knows what is good for itself. It can survive and it has survived for millions of years. It is not concerned about your pollution or your ecology, or about the way you are treating it."

"The conditioning of the body is its intelligence. That is the native intelligence of the body. I am not talking about the instinct. The intelligence of the body is necessary for its survival. That intelligence is quite different from the intellect which we have developed. Our intellect is no match for that intelligence. If you don't think, the body can take care of itself in a situation where it finds itself in danger. Whenever the body is faced with danger, it relies upon itself and not your thinking or your intellect. If, on the other hand, you just think, then you are frightened. The fear makes it difficult for you to act."

"This body of ours, which is the product of thousands and thousands years of evolution, has enough intelligence to help itself survive under any circumstances."

"The man who spoke of 'love thy neighbor as thyself' is responsible for this horror in the world today. Don't exonerate those teachers."

"Jesus did not materialize loaves and loaves of bread, but he just got whatever bread was there and divided it into small bits and distributed it to everybody there. Naturally, you want to attribute it to some miracle."

"He made statements out of which the whole dogmatic teaching of Christianity originated. Certainly. That applies to every teacher. I am not condemning only Jesus. All teachers - Buddha, Mohammed - all the teachers whom we consider to be the great religious teachers of mankind, let alone those people who are doing holy business in the market place today. We are not concerned about this. There is no use blaming them anyway."

"By using the models of Jesus, Buddha, or Krishna we have destroyed the possibility of nature throwing up unique individuals."

"You always want to be somebody else; you want to imitate the life of somebody else — you want to imitate the life of Jesus, you want to imitate the life of Buddha, you want to imitate the life of Shankara. You can’t do it, because you don’t know what is there behind. You will end up changing your robes, from rose to saffron, saffron to yellow, or from yellow to rose, depending upon your particular fancy. How can you ask for a thing which you do not know? How can you search for a thing which you do not know? That is my question"

"I arrived at a point when I was twenty-one where I felt very strongly that all teachers — Buddha, Jesus, Sri Ramakrishna, everybody — kidded themselves, deluded themselves and deluded everybody. This, you see, could not be the thing at all — “Where is the state that these people talk about and describe? That description seems to have no relation to me, to the way I am functioning. Everybody says 'Don’t get angry’ — I am angry all the time. I’m full of brutal activities inside, so that is false. What these people are telling me I should be is something false, and because it is false it will falsify me."

"You necessarily have to fit me into that framework [of the Buddha, Jesus, and others], and if you don't succeed, you will say, 'How can he be outside of it?' The way out for you is either to reject me totally, or to call me a fraud or a fake. You see, the feeling, 'How can all of them be wrong?' prevents you from listening to me. Or else you put it another way and say that the content of whatever has happened to U.G. and to them is the same, but his expression is different."

"I wanted moksha, what the Buddha had. Just the way you think about what I have or what Jesus Christ had."

"You see, U.G. is created by the Buddha, Frank is created by Jesus. You don't understand that, do you? You don't want this [U.G.] to go [out of your system], and that is the reason why you keep that [the Buddha, Christ, etc.] and perpetuate it. Both are the same. Culture has created the individual for the sole purpose of maintaining its continuity."

"Don't you think that they [the religious people] have all created a mess for us. They laid the foundation for the destruction."

"in India they accept Jesus also as one of the great teachers of mankind. They tell themselves and others that Jesus is there to enable you to become a Christ and not a Christian. But that is not acceptable for the Christians, because it destroys the whole foundation of the church; it destroys the whole foundation of Christianity. If there was a Christ, you have to accept his word when he says: 'I am the way, I am the truth, and I am the life. Through me you will reach the eternal Father'. That statement, whether he made it or someone else put it in his mouth, has created the foundation for the whole church. You cannot exonerate the leaders of the church and only blame the followers for the sorry mess of things they have created for us."

"We found ourselves in a situation where only spirituality mattered. And now there are movie stars instead of Jesus. So many people have movie stars, tennis players, or wrestlers as their models, depending upon what their particular fancy is."

"I wanted to find out whether there was anything to him. He was saying something on the platform. Toward the end I asked him a question, 'What do you have behind all the abstractions you are throwing at me and others? Is there anything?' (That was my way of dealing with problems.) I listened to him every time he came to Madras. But I didn't swallow any of his words. Then the encounter came about in a very strange way. We thrashed it out. I told him, 'Look here, as far as thought is concerned, it has reached its acme in India. You can't even hold a candle before those mighty thinkers that India has produced. What is it that you have? I want an answer'. But then we didn't get along. I said to myself, 'You are nowhere. What the hell are you doing here?' I didn't want to waste my time. So I told the old man, 'You can give your time to anyone who you think will be helped by you'. And that finished the whole thing. That was in 1953. I never saw him afterwards."

"You see the one thing that occurred to me when I was listening to him suddenly dawned on me: 'Why the hell have you been listening to this man? from the description you feel that you are in the same state as that man'. So I said to myself 'I'm in the same state as that man - assuming for a moment that he was in the state that he was describing - and in the same state that the great spiritual teachers were, what the hell have I been doing all my life? Why the hell am I here sitting and listening to him?'. And then I walked out with this one single thought in me who whirling as it were like a whirlpool: 'How do you know that you are in the same state?' That means: the descriptions of their states that I was very familiar with and I tried to simulate them in me and try to experience them is still there. So this question went on and on and on and on, and suddenly the question disappeared and I said to myself: 'There is no reason for me to feel grateful to anybody to express any thankful to anybody, and whatever has happened to me has happened despite listening to this teacher or the teacher, or doing this that or the other'. This is something which is not very interesting to the people. They want to know and I tell them: 'I myself do not know', and I cannot look at myself and tell myself that I'm an enlightened man, that I am a free man, that tremendous changes have taken place in me."

"The old man Mr. J. Krishnamurti was part of my background. I did not go to him. In every room of our house we had photos of J. Krishnamurti, beginning from his ninth or tenth year till he was, I don't know how old. I disliked the photos of all the gods and goddesses."

"You know, the old man and I thrashed out everything for thirty days, whenever he could find time. We used to go for walks. I met him toward the end of my association with the Theosophical Society."

"The subject of my children and their education arose one day. Krishnamurti asked me, 'What school are your daughters attending?' 'Naturally, Besant Theosophical School', I answered, 'You know, it's almost next door to us'. 'They teach religion, Sir', he said. I retorted, 'What do they teach in Rishi Valley School? Instead of having them attend a prayer meeting, you drag those poor unwilling students to watch sunsets from the hilltop. How is that different? You like sunsets. So the children have to watch them too. You know, I spent three-and-a-half days in that Guindy National School. You will recall that you gave talks to us during that time. There is nothing marvelous about those schools. As for myself, I attended a street-side school. And what's wrong with me!'."

"I wanted to find out whether there was anything to him. He was saying something on the platform. Toward the end I asked him a question, 'What do you have behind all the abstractions you are throwing at me and others? Is there anything?' (That was my way of dealing with problems.) I listened to him every time he came to Madras. But I didn't swallow any of his words. Then the encounter came about in a very strange way. We thrashed it out. I told him, 'Look here, as far as thought is concerned, it has reached its acme in India. You can't even hold a candle before those mighty thinkers that India has produced. What is it that you have? I want an answer'."

"I told J. Krishnamurti that he was a stupendous hoax of the twentieth century along with Freud. I told him, 'You see, you have not freed yourself from this whole idea of messiahs and Theosophy'. He could not come out clean from the whole thing. If you think that he is the greatest teacher of the Twentieth Century, all right, go ahead, good luck to you."

"What does it matter, whether I discuss the prime minister of India or J. Krishnamurti? You know, I express what I think of that man."

"I don't want to indulge in this frivolity that 'the word is not the thing'. If the word is not the thing what the hell is it? Without the word you have no way of experiencing anything at all. Without the word you are not separate from whatever you are looking at or what is going on inside of you. The word is the knowledge. Without that knowledge you don't even know whether it is pain or pleasure that you experience, whether it is happiness or unhappiness, whether it is boredom or its opposite."

"The talk of intuition and insight is another illusion. Every insight you have is born out of your thinking. The insights strengthen and fortify the very thing you are trying to be free from. All insights, however extraordinary they may be, are worthless. You can create a tremendous structure of thought from your own discovery, which you call insight. But that insight is nothing but the result of your own thinking, the permutations and combinations of thought. Actually there is no way you can come up with anything original there. There is no thought which you can call your own. I don't have any thoughts which I can call my own — not one thought, not one word, not one experience."

"I don't see how what I am saying is even close to his line of thinking. He talks of 'passive awareness', journeys of discovery, psychological transformations, opens schools and launches foundations. These activities do not free you, but perpetuate the movement of thought and tradition."

"I am using 80% of his words and phrases, the very phrases he has used over the years to condemn gurus, saints, and saviors like himself. He has it coming. One thing I have never said: he is not a man of character. He has great character, but I am not in the least interested in men of character. If he sees the mess he has created in his false role as world Messiah and dissolves the whole thing, I will be the first to salute him. But he is too old and senile to do it. His followers are appalled that I am giving him a dose of his own medicine."

"Your actions are such that one action limits the next action. Your action at this moment is limiting the next action. This action is a reaction. the question of freedom of action does not even arise. Therefore no fatalistic philosophy is needed. The word 'karma' means an action without a reaction. Any action of yours limits the action that is to take place next."

"I am not opposed to the theory of karma or reincarnation. But I am questioning the very foundation of that belief."

"Man has to be saved from God - that is very essential because... I don't mean God in the sense in which you use the word 'God'; I mean all that 'God' stands for, not only God, but all that is associated with that concept of God - even karma, reincarnation, rebirth, life after death, the whole thing, the whole business of what you call the 'great heritage of India' - all that, you see. Man has to be saved from the heritage of India. Not only the people; the country has to be saved from that heritage. (Not by revolution, not the way they have done it in the communist countries - that's not the way. I don't know why; you see, this is a very tricky subject). Otherwise there is no hope for the individual."

"Knowledge creates experience and experience strengthens the knowledge. This is a vicious circle."

"There is no such thing as 'knowledge' for the sake of knowledge. Knowledge is power. 'I know. You don't know'."

"Anything you experience based on knowledge is an illusion."

"The knowledge about enlightenment passed on to us from generations tells you that you are an enlightened man, you see, so then naturally you want to enlighten others, so it is a petty little experience which has become possible for me, through the help of this thought, so what I experienced and call and enlightenment is a thought induced experience and not really an enlightenment at all."

"The knowledge creates experience, and the experience strengthens knowledge. This is a vicious circle."

"There is no way you can look at anything without the use of the knowledge that you have of what you are looking at."

"When you know nothing, you say a lot. When you know something, there is nothing to say."

"The only way the self can add more and more knowledge and experience is to endlessly ask itself the meaningless question 'How? How am I to live?' If someone tells you that the continuity of knowledge and experience must come to an end, you ask, 'How?', and are right back in the same trap. You are merely asking for the same kind of knowledge."

"Knowledge must come to an end. How can you understand this simple thing? Your wanting to know only adds momentum to your knowledge. It is not possible to know what this is, because knowledge is still there and is gathering momentum. The continuity of knowledge is all you are interested in."

"Accumulated knowledge, accumulated experiences are there. You are using them to communicate to yourself and to communicate to others."

"There is no inside and outside. The only way I can separate myself from you is through the knowledge I have about you. I never tell myself that you are wearing blue jeans. I know they are blue jeans. The moment I say that, 'they are blue jeans', the knowledge I have about blue jeans is no longer there. So, I cannot say that I don't know anything. When I say that 'I know that that is blue, and the sky is bright', then I am back again in the same situation, which is that I really don't know what I am looking at. I never tell myself that 'It is bright outside'. Never. And if you asked me, I would say, 'It is bright and sunny and it is very warm'. All the information that is there, inside is brought out by your question. I never tell myself that 'It is bright', or I never tell myself that 'It is dark', but I don't say for one moment 'I do not know'. I know."

"For us knowledge is power. 'I know, and you don't know'. That gives you power. There is no such thing as knowledge for knowledge's sake. It is good to write an essay on knowledge for knowledge's sake or art for the sake of art. Is there beauty? What is beauty? Only when it is framed, you call it beauty. It is thought that frames something, the nature of which we really don't know."

"What I went through is not part of that knowing mechanism. 'Why do you say that it is a state of not-knowing?' you may ask. 'How can you talk of that state of not-knowing in terms of the known?' you may ask. You are only pushing me to give an answer. To answer your question, your demand, your persistence to know what that state is, I say that it is a state of not-knowing; not that there is something which cannot be known. I am not talking of the unknowable, the inexpressible, the inexperienceable. I am not talking of any of those things. That still keeps the movement going. What there is is only the known."

"We project the knowledge we have of whatever we are looking at. Even if you say that it is an object without giving a name, like, for example, 'camera', knowledge has already come in. It is good for a philosophy student to talk about this everlastingly, separating the object from the word, or separating the word from the thing. But actually, if you say that it is an object, you have already separated yourself from it. Even if you don't give a name to it, or recognize it as something, or call it a camera, a video camera, you have already separated yourself from it."

"If the information is not already there, there is no way you can see."

"You experience what you know. Without the knowledge you have no way of experiencing anything. There is no such thing as a new experience at all. When you tell yourself that it is a new experience, it is the old that tells you that it is a new experience. Otherwise, you have no way of saying that it is something new. It is the old that tells you that it is new. And through that it is making it part of the old."

"By calling something 'beautiful', you have already destroyed it. You have put the whole thing in a frame by calling it beautiful. If you don't say it is beautiful, it is having an effect on this body. The body is responding to the stimulus there. You take a deep breath. That's all."

"Don't you think that wanting to know is really the problem? 'Wanting to know' is what has created this identity of ours."

"Wanting to know more and more is only strengthening and fortifying the very thing which has not helped us to solve the problem individually or collectively."

"It is the knowledge that creates the experience, and it is the experience that strengthens the knowledge. At every moment of our existence, we have to know what is happening outside of us and what is happening inside of us. That is the only way you can maintain this continuity."

"Everything comes from outside. If I have to experience anything, I have to depend upon the knowledge that is put in here. Otherwise there is no way you can experience anything. What you do not know, you cannot experience. There is no such thing as a new experience at all."

"What makes you think that you are thinking is that you are using this, what you call thought, thoughts are words, noise, you know. You say “grass”, you recognise that “watch” it is sound. We are taught how to space these notes and create a language."

"Language is nothing but the spacing of notes: you know, two notes. You widen this space and produce certain sounds that it sounds like Italian. For music the same, otherwise is nonsense: you can’t listen to the music the way the listening mechanism listens to the music: it is too absurd… You see, it even listens to the space: your linking up to the space is music, between two notes."

"There is more melody, more life, more vitality in the barking of the dogs than what you are saying, because you say cultivated things."

"All that is coming out of me is the barking of a dog, nothing else. You are the one that is making this barking, turning this barking into a language, English language: your thought out of space this barking that is come out of this individual. This individual does not even know that he's saying things in English, he doesn't know! Then you want to know! I cannot be of any help there. Try somebody else, good luck to you! Go anywhere, do anything you like!"

"For purposes of communication we have to rely upon words. But when I say, 'He is a nasty fellow', it is not a value judgment but a descriptive sentence. That is the way you describe or fit the actions of that individual into the framework of nastiness. I have to use that word, but it is not a value judgment in my case. Not that I am placing myself on a higher or superior level. 'What is the good man good for?' — I don't know. Maybe for society a good man is a useful citizen, and for a bad man a good man is good because he can exploit him. But as far as I am concerned what a good man is good for I wouldn't know. The problem with language is, no matter how we try to express ourselves, we are caught up in the structure of words. There is no point in creating a new language, new lingo to express anything. There is nothing there to be expressed except to free yourself from the stranglehold of thought. And there is nothing that you can do to free yourself either through any volition of yours or through any effort of yours."

"You know it is said that Shakespeare, that great playwright and poet, had a vocabulary of only four thousand words. I don't know if that is true. But now we have many thousands of words. We come up with every kind of phrase to cover up this impossibility of trying to use words to understand the reality of things. That is where the real problem is. Thought has not succeeded so far in understanding reality, but that [thought] is all that we are left with. We cannot question thought. We cannot brush it aside. We know in a way that it cannot help us, but can only create problems. We are not ready to throw it out and find out if there is any other way, if there is any answer."

"What is language after all? Language is nothing but the space between two notes and the tune. If you learn that, you know how to speak Konkani, French or German. In that sense all languages are the same. They are just noise."

"Our language structure is such that there is no way you can be free from a dualistic approach to problems. I don't want to use the word 'dualistic' because it again has religious connotations."

"I will never break the laws, no matter how ridiculous the laws are."

"Nature's laws know no reward, only punishment. The reward is only that you are in harmony with nature. The whole problem started when man decided that the whole universe was created for his exclusive enjoyment. We have superimposed the notion of evolution and progress over nature. Our mind — and there are no individual minds, only mind — which is the accumulation of the totality of man's knowledge and experience, has created the notion of the psyche and evolution."

"Anything that we discover, the laws of nature or whatever you call it, are used by us only for destructive purposes. And it is true that we have discovered quite a few of nature's laws, and the theories are constantly changing..."

"I am not against stealing, but I tell people, 'Steal but don't get caught'. [Laughter] It is stupid to get caught. All the politicians, the whole government machinery thrives on stealing, promising something which they cannot deliver."

"What is the international law which these people are talking about? I want to know. You as a lawyer know. What happened when America attacked and occupied Granada, a small nation? Nobody ever objected to it; nobody ever created a blockade there. I am not impressed by the international law and its legal structure. As long as it is advantageous to you, you talk of law. When the law fails you use force. Don't you?"

"Our very demand to understand nature's laws is to use them for the purpose of maintaining the continuity of thought. All the talk that thought is altruistic and that we are curious to know the laws of nature just for the sake of knowing them is bluff. The very motivation, the drive behind our demand to understand the laws of nature is to use them for the purpose of continuing the human species at the expense of every other form of life on this planet."

"It would be more interesting to learn from children, than try to teach them how to behave, how to live and how to function."

"The body has no need to understand anything. The body does not have to learn anything, because anything you learn, anything you do is attempting to change, alter, shape or mold yourself into something better. This [body] is a perfect piece that has been created by nature. In this assemblage of the species of human beings on this planet one being is endowed with the intelligence of an Einstein, another is endowed with the brawn of a Tyson, and someone else is endowed with the beauty of a Marilyn Monroe. But two or three or all [of these characteristics] in one will be a great tragedy. I can't conceive any possibility of all the three blooming in one individual — brain, brawn, and beauty."

"The intellect is created by culture and is acquired. The intelligence that is necessary for survival is already there in the physical organism. You don't have to learn a thing. You need to be taught, you need to learn things only to survive in this world which we have created, the world of ideas. You need to know in order to survive. You have to fight for your share in the cake. Some joker comes along and says that you should fight without expecting any results. What the hell are you talking about? How can you act without expecting any results? As long as you live in this world you have to fight for your share. That is why they teach you, send you to a school, and give you some tools. That is what society has done to you."

"I don't believe in education. You can teach a technique - mathematics, auto mechanics, but not integrity. How can you teach them about non-greed and nonambition in an insanely greedy and ambitious society? You will only succeed in making them more neurotic."

"The knowledge - that is all that is there. The 'me', 'psyche', 'mind', 'I', or whatever you want to call it is nothing else than the totality of the inherited knowledge passed on to us from generation to generation, mostly through education. You teach the child to distinguish between colors, to read, to imitate manners. It is relative to each culture: Americans learn American manners, Indians learn Indian manners, etc. Gestures of the body, of hands or of face constituted the first language. Later words were added on. We still use gestures to supplement our spoken words because we feel that words alone are inadequate to fully express what we want to convey."

"You are not one thing and the life another. It is one unitary movement. Anything I say about it is misleading and confusing."

"Why should life have any meaning? Why should there be any purpose to living? Living itself is all that is there. Your search for spiritual meaning has made a problem out of living."

"Life has to be described in pure and simple physical and physiological terms. It must be demystified and depsychologized."

"Anything that happens in space and time is limiting the energy of life. What life is I don't know; nor will I ever."

"You have to touch life at a point where nobody has touched it before. Nobody can teach you that."

"Thought can never capture the movement of life, it is much too slow. It is like lightning and thunder. They occur simultaneously but sound, traveling slower than light, reaches you later, creating the illusion of two separate events. It is only the natural physiological sensations and perceptions that can move with the flow of life. There is no question of capturing or containing that movement. We like to use the word consciousness glibly, as if we are intimately familiar with it. Actually, consciousness is something we will never know."

"Nobody has given me the mandate to save you people or save the world. The human species should be wiped out for what it has done to every other species on this planet! It has no place on this planet. If I am sure of one thing, it is that. If it were not for your destructive weapons, you would have been wiped out a long time ago. And you are going to be wiped out, because now others have the means to wipe you out. But you are not going to go gracefully without taking every form of life on this planet with you."

"I have nothing to lose if the whole thing is wiped out. I have nothing to gain if it remains the same."

"The demand to fit ourselves into that value system is using a tremendous amount of energy, and there is nothing we can do to deal with the living problems here. All the energy is being consumed by the demands of the culture or society, or whatever you want to call it, to fit you into the framework of that value system. In the process, we are not left with any energy to deal with the other problems. But these problems, that is, the living problems, are very simple."

"You don't want to be a normal person, you don't want to be an ordinary person. That is really the problem. It is the most difficult thing to be an ordinary person. Culture demands you must be something other than what you are. That has created a certain momentum - a tremendous, powerful movement of thought which demands that you should be something other than what you are. That's all that it is. You can use it to achieve something; otherwise it has no use."

"We don't seem to realize that it is thought that is separating us from the totality of things. The belief that this is the one that can help us to keep in tune with the totality is not going to materialize. So, it has come up with all kinds of ingenuous, if I may use that word, ideas of insight and intuition."

"Nobody knows anything about life. We have only concepts, ideations, and mentations about life. Even the scientists who are trying to understand life and its origin come up only with theories and definitions of life. You may not agree with me, but all thought, all thinking is dead. Thinking is born out of dead ideas. Thought or the thinking mechanism trying to touch life, experience it, capture, and give expression to it are impossible tasks."

"Are you sure that you are born? We have been told that."

"The actions of life are outside the field of thought. Life is simply a process of stimulus and response; and stimulus and response are one unitary movement. But it is thought that separates them and says that this is the response and that is the stimulus."

"Money is the be all and end all of our existence."

"I am part of the mainstream of life everywhere. At the same time I have no roots anywhere. If I may put it that way, I am a rootless man of sorts. I have lived everywhere in the world, and I don't feel at home anywhere. It's very strange. I am one of the most traveled persons in this world. I have been traveling ever since I was fourteen, and since then I have never lived in any place for more than six months at a time. My traveling is not born out of my compulsive need to travel. When people ask me, 'Why do you travel?' I answer them, 'Why do some birds travel from Siberia to a small bird sanctuary in Mysore State and then go back all the way?' I am like those migratory birds. It's very strange."

"Life is something which you cannot capture, contain, and give expression to. Energy is an expression of life. What is death? It is simply a condition of the human body. There is no such thing as death. What you have are ideas about death, ideas which arise when you sense the absence of another person."

"Money is the only thing that will not make life a puzzle."

"Out with love. In with money."

"There is nothing to your love: if you don’t get what you want, what happens to your, 'I love you darling, dearie, honey bunch, shnookie putsie, sugar britches, petite shu-shu, sugar booger?’ If you don’t get what you want out of all that, what happens to your lovey-dovey?"

"The relationship between a man and a woman is based on the images that the two create for themselves of each other. So, the actual relationship between the two individuals is a relationship between the two images. But your image keeps changing, and so does the other person's. To keep the image constant is just not possible. So, when everything else fails, we use this final, last card in the pack, 'love', with all the marvelous and romantic ideations around it."

"Love and hate are not opposite ends of the same spectrum; they are one and the same thing. They are much closer than kissing cousins."

"If there is a God, let people see what God can make of you. You don't have to talk of God as full of love, mercy, and all that. People will see it in you. So, what good is the culture you are talking about? I want to know. When people throw all these phrases at me, this is what I tell them."

"No money, no honey."

"It's neither 'Love thy neighbor as thyself', nor the spiritual values, nor the human value system that can protect us from now on, but the terror that your very existence is at stake. You cannot survive unless the one that is next to you also survives. It's not cooperation on the basis of love and brotherhood, but it's the way this human body is functioning, the way that animals are functioning that can protect you. Animals do not kill their fellow beings (they are also beings, you see) for an ideology or for God."

"Love is fascist in its nature, in its birth, in its expression and in its action. It cannot do us any good. We may talk of love but it doesn't mean anything. The whole music of our age is all around that song, 'Love, Love, Love...'."

"To me, love implies two. Wherever there is a division, whether it is within you or without you, there is conflict. That relationship cannot last long. As far as I am concerned, relationships are formed and then they are dissolved immediately. Both these things happen in the same frame, if I may use that word. That is really the problem. You may think that I am a very crude man, but if anybody talks to me about love, to me it is a 'four-letter word'."

"I still maintain that it is not love, compassion, humanism, or brotherly sentiments that will save mankind. No, not at all. It is the sheer terror of extinction that can save us, if anything can."

"Love money more than thyself."

"It is a chain reaction; one after the other, every cell is involved. It is not so easy - not through logic or power or somebody's teaching or repeating some mantras. You cannot make it happen. But the possibility of that kind of thing happening is there in everybody because that is its nature. That is the reason why it happens to one in a billion."

"What is there to meditate upon? I discovered all those things before - the mantras, the meditations, what meditation does. I didn't practice, of course, Transcendental Meditation or any such thing; but some meditations. So, this I discovered for myself: meditation is a self-centered activity. It is strengthening the very self you want to be free from. What are you meditating for? You want to be free from something. What are you to meditate on? All right, thought is a noise, sound. What is sound? You look at this and you say 'This is a tape-recorder', so thought is sound. There is a continuous flow of thoughts, and you are linking up all these thoughts all the time, and this is the noise you can't stand. Why can't you stand that noise? So, by repeating mantras, you create a louder noise, and you submerge the noise of thought, and then you are at peace with yourself. You think that something marvelous is happening to you. But all meditation is a self-centered activity."

"The world you experience around you is also from that point of view. There must be a point and it is this point that creates the space. If this point is not there, there is no space. So, anything you experience from this point is an illusion. Not that the world is an illusion. All the Vedanta philosophers in India, particularly the students of Shankara, indulge in such frivolous, absolute nonsense. The world is not an illusion, but anything you experience in relationship to this point, which itself is illusory, is bound to be an illusion, that's all. The Sanskrit word 'maya' does not mean illusion in the same sense in which the English word is used. 'Maya' means to measure. You cannot measure anything unless you have a point. So, if the center is absent, there is no circumference at all. That is pure and simple basic arithmetic."

"You see, in India, they call the word illusion, maya. 'Maya' means 'to measure'. But there is no way you can measure anything unless there is a space, and there is a point [of reference] here. The moment thought takes its birth there, that is the point, and you create another point and try to measure. So thought creates a space. And anything you experience from that point is an illusion. If you say that somebody coming with a gun to shoot you is an illusion, you are a damn fool. You have to protect yourself. It doesn't mean that the whole world is an illusion. Not at all. Whatever you experience of the world, or of yourself as an entity, is an illusion because that experience is born out of the knowledge that is put in there. Otherwise, you have no way of experiencing the reality of anything."

"We all take it for granted that there is such a thing as a horizon there. So, if you look at that and you say that it is a horizon, it sounds very simple to you. But you forget that the physical limitation, the limitation of your physical eye fixes that point there and it calls it 'horizon'. If you move in the direction of the horizon, the faster you move in the direction, even in a supersonic plane, the farther it moves away. What you are stuck with is only the limitation. I also give the example of trying to overtake your shadow. As children we played this game of trying to overtake our shadows - all the other boys running with you, everybody trying to overtake his own shadow. It never occurred to us then that it is this body that is casting this shadow there, and that your wanting to overtake that shadow is an absurd game that you are playing. You can run for miles and miles and miles. You know the story of Alice In Wonderland. The red queen has to run faster and faster and faster in order to keep still where she is. You see that's exactly what you are all doing. Running faster and faster and faster. But you are not moving anywhere."

"The center is created here; the space is created by thought. Measurement starts from a reference point. All measurements are illusory. 'Maya' means 'measure' and not 'illusion'. If the reference point goes by any chance, there is no way of knowing anything. Then there is no outside or inside."

"What I am saying is that the way you are experiencing things through the help of the knowledge that is put in you is not the way. And you have no way of finding out anything other than that."

"Meditation itself is evil. That is why you get evil thoughts when you start meditating."

"Better masturbate than meditate."

"If you practice any system of mind control, automatically the 'you' is there, and through this it is continuing. Have you ever meditated, really seriously meditated? Or do you know anyone who has? Nobody does. If you seriously meditate, you'll wind up in the loony bin. Nor can you practice mindfulness trying to be aware every moment of your life."

"The body cannot tolerate all these meditation techniques that we impose on it. It [meditation] brings about an imbalance in the chemistry of this living organism. All this is the cultural input there [in us] which is destroying the sensitivity of the whole system."

"I don't talk of a meditative state. That is Krishnamurti's business - he talks about a meditative state: 'It is not this; it is not that'. All right, if this is a meditative state, what am I meditating upon? I am meditating upon that (indicates some object) at this moment - looking at that. The reflecting of that is here. Something is moving - movement - life is movement. All the time something or the other is happening there - all the time - and the movement there is the movement here. There is no moment when something or the other is not happening."

"The other day I was talking to a neurosurgeon, a very young and bright fellow. He said that memory, or rather the neurons containing memory, are not in one area. The eye, the ear, the nose, all the five sensory organs in your body have a different sort of memory. But they don't yet know for sure. So we have to get more answers. As I see it, everything is genetically controlled. That means you don't have any freedom of action."

"There is always a space between perception and memory. Memory is like sound. Sound is very slow, whereas light travels faster. All these sensory activities or perceptions are like light. They are very fast. But for some reason we have lost the capacity to kick that [memory] into the background and allow these things to move as fast as they occur in nature. Thought comes, captures it [the sensory perception], and says that it is this or that. That is what you call recognition, or naming, or whatever you want to call it."

"We think that our memory is very fast. But actually it is slower than the activity of the sensory perceptions. There is an illusion that memory is operating all the time, trying to capture everything within its framework. But the illusion is created by the mind in order to maintain the continuity of our identity. We can't afford to let go of our identity whether we are asleep, awake or dreaming. This identity is there all the time, and we do not want to let go of it."

"What is going on there, or that reaction you are referring to, is something that I have no way of transmitting or experiencing. I may tell you that I have had sex. Sometimes the memory comes. The moment that memory takes birth there inside of me it is like any other memory. It cannot take roots here because every thing here [pointing to his head] tightens and makes it impossible for that [the memory] to drag on or continue any longer. The next moment I will be seeing the black dog there and the frame of the previous thing is finished — the whole thing. I may be now looking at the most beautiful and gorgeous woman, and the next moment it may be a black dog there. These are different frames. That is why I ask, 'Who is abnormal here, you or me? Who falls on which side?'"

"Actually there are no thoughts there [within you]. Thoughts are not self-generated. They are not spontaneous. We never look at a thought. What is there is about thought but not thought itself. We are not ready to question that and face the fact that thoughts are not spontaneous. They come from outside — outside in the sense that when there is a sensory response to a stimulus, we translate that sensation within the framework of our knowledge, and tell ourselves that that [the translation] is the sensation. You recognize the sensation and give a name to it. That is what memory is all about. What is there is only memory. Where is that memory? Really, nobody knows where memory is."

"The constant use of memory to maintain our identity will put us all ultimately in a state where we are forced to give up. When someone gives up the attempt to fit himself or herself into the value system, you call that man crazy. He (or she, as the case may be) has given up. Some people don't want to fit into that framework. We push them to be functional. The more we push them to be functional, the more crazy they become. Actually, we are pushing them to suicide."

"I don't really know what memory is. We were told that 'To recall a specific thing at a specific time' is memory. We repeated this definition as students of psychology. But it is much more than that. They say that memory is in the neurons. If it is all in the neurons, where is it located in them? The brain does not seem to be the center of memory. Cells seem to have their own memory. So, where is that memory? Is it transmitted through genes? I really don't know. Some of these questions have no answers so far. Probably one of these days they will find out."

"We really do not know what memory is, but we are constantly using it to maintain that non-existent identity of ours."

"A certain amount of the use of memory is absolutely essential; but to use it to live forever, to be fit and to be healthier, will create complications."

"I have a word-finder which is very helpful. There was a time when we were made to memorize dictionaries, the thesaurus of Sanskrit, and all that. But now there is no need. You just press a button, the machine says, 'Searching,' and a little later it tells you the meaning of the word, as well as its root meaning and spelling. It is a lot easier to use such machines than to memorize all that information. Our reliance on memory will very soon be unnecessary."

"We are made to believe that there is such a thing as mind. But there is no such thing as your mind or my mind. Society or culture, or whatever you want to call it, has created us solely and wholly for the purpose of maintaining its own continuity and status quo. At the same time, it has also created the idea that there is such a thing as the individual. But actually, there is a conflict between the two: the idea of the individual and the impossibility of functioning as an individual separate and distinct from the totality of man's thoughts and experiences."

"I don't accept that there is such a thing as the mind, let alone the open mind or the unconditioned mind. There is no totality of these thoughts and experiences. They are all disconnected, disjointed things. You'll never be free from thought. If there is any such thing as a thoughtless state it can never be experienced by you or by anybody. Whatever you experience there is created by this thought."

"There is no such thing as your mind or my mind. May be there is such a thing as the 'world mind' where all the cumulative knowledge and the experiences thereof are accumulated and passed on from generation to generation."

"There is no such thing as your mind and my mind. There is only mind: the totality of all that has been known, felt, and experienced by man, handed down from generation to generation. We are all thinking and functioning in that 'thought sphere', just as we all share the same atmosphere for breathing. The thoughts are there to function and communicate in this world sanely and intelligently."

"Mind is nothing other than what you are doing to free yourself from the mind."

"There was a well-known professor of psychology at the University of Madras, Dr. Bose. Just a month before my final examinations, I went to him and asked him the question, 'We have studied all these six schools of psychology, this, that, and the other, exhaustively, but I don't see in all this a place for the 'mind' at all'. (At that time I used to say that 'Freud is the stupendous fraud of the Twentieth Century'. The fact that he has lasted for a hundred years does not mean anything.) So my problem was that I did not see any mind. So I asked my professor, 'Is there a mind?' The only honest fellow that I have met in my life was not any of those holy men but that professor. He said that if I wanted my Master's degree I should not ask such uncomfortable questions. He said, 'You would be in trouble. If you want your postgraduate degree, repeat what you have memorized and you will get a degree. If you don't want it, you explore the subject on your own'. So I said, 'Goodbye'. I did not take my examination."

"The mind is (not that I am giving a new definition) the totality of man's experiences, thoughts, and feelings. There is no such thing as your mind or my mind. I have no objection if you want to call that totality of man's thoughts, feelings, and experiences by the name 'mind'. But how they are transmitted to us from generation to generation is the question. Is it through the medium of knowledge or is there any other way by which they are transmitted from generation to generation, say for example, through the genes? We don't have the answers yet. Then we come to the idea of memory. What is man? Man is memory."

"What is mind? You can give a hundred definitions. It is just a simple mechanical functioning. The body is responding to stimuli. It is only a stimulus-responding mechanism. It does not know of any other action. But through the translation of stimulus in terms of human values, we have destroyed the sensitivity of the living organism. You may talk of the sensitivity of the mind and the sensitivity of your feeling towards your fellow beings. But it doesn't mean a thing."

"Unless you are free from the desire of all desires, Moksha, liberation, or self-realization, you will be miserable."

"Just let me warn you that if what you are aiming at - Moksha - really happens, you will die. There will be a physical death, because there has to be a physical death to be in that state."

"Whether you are interested in Moksha, Liberation, Freedom, Transformation, you name it, or you are interested in happiness without one moment of unhappiness, pleasure without pain, it is the same thing."

"You necessarily have to fit me into that framework [of the Buddha, Jesus, and others], and if you don't succeed, you will say, 'How can he be outside of it?' The way out for you is either to reject me totally, or to call me a fraud or a fake. You see, the feeling, 'How can all of them be wrong?' prevents you from listening to me. Or else you put it another way and say that the content of whatever has happened to U.G. and to them is the same, but his expression is different."

"I wanted moksha, what the Buddha had. Just the way you think about what I have or what Jesus Christ had."

"The only test for me is money. How free you are with your money? I don’t mean, “How wasteful you are with your money?”"

"Don’t be a damned fool! Go and make money. That’s the only thing that impresses me – cash on the barrel! I told my grandparents this even as a little boy."

"Money is the most important factor in our lives. They say that money is the root cause of all evil. But actually it is not the root cause of evil; it is the root cause of our existence, of our survival. I sometimes say that if you worship that god, the money god, you will be amply rewarded. If you worship the other God — whether He exists or not is anybody's guess — you will be stripped of everything you have, and He will leave you naked in the streets. It is better to worship the money god."

"Speaketh not anything but money. Thinketh not anything but money. Willeth not anything but money."

"Tell me one person who is not thinking of money. Not one person on this planet. Even the holy ones who talk about their indifference to money are concerned about it. How do you think they will get ninety-two Rolls Royces? You try and buy one Rolls Royce car; you will know how difficult it is. For the religious people it is easy because other people deny themselves and give their money to them. So you can be rich at another man's expense. How much money you need is a different matter. Each one has to draw his own line. But when once your goals and needs are the same, then the problem is very simple."

"Cursed indeed are those who maketh not money."

"Better make loads of money than have a content style of living."

"I don't live in any particular place. I am here today, and tomorrow I will be in America, or God knows where. I have no fixed abode. I have no tangible means of livelihood. That is the definition of a vagabond. Mine is a sort of gypsy life. I have just enough money to travel and take care of my physical needs. So, I don't depend upon anyone. The world does not owe a living to me. Why should the world feed me? I am not contributing anything to the world. Why should the world feed me and take care of me?"

"Punish not robbers, thieves or stealers of money."

"Look at Mother Teresa. What is going on there? As an individual, she did a tremendous amount of service. But now she is only interested in the money — meeting the heads of governments and collecting money everywhere. I am glad they are stealing the money from the envelopes that pour in. The money ends up in a Hong Kong bank: have you heard the news?"

"Denying yourself money is the root of all misery."

"Shut your mouth, open your wallet."

"Be not shy about money-making."

"Make money by hook or by crook."

"What is morality? It is not the following of enjoined rules of conduct. It is not a question of standing above temptations, or of conquering hate, anger, greed, lust and violence. Questioning your actions before and after creates the moral problem. What is responsible for this situation is the faculty of distinguishing between right and wrong and influencing your actions accordingly."

"Life is action. Unquestioned action is morality. Questioning your actions is destroying the expression of life. A person who lets life act in its own way without the protective movement of thought has no self to defend. What need will he have to lie or cheat or pretend or to commit any other act which his society considers immoral?"

"A 'moral man' is a frightened man- chicken hearted man; that is why he practices morality and sits in judgement over others."

"Whatever has happened to me can happen to a con man, to a rapist, to a murderer, or to a thief. All of them have as much a chance as, if not a better one than, all these spiritual people put together. Don't ask me the question, 'Was the Buddha a rapist, or Jesus something else?' That's not an intelligent question."

"The whole ethical culture and everything that we have created to rule ourselves with are born out of the thinking of man. We are not ready to accept the fact that nature probably is interested in creating only perfect species and not perfect individuals. Nature does not use any model. It creates something; then it destroys it, and creates something else. The comparative process characteristic of thinking seems to be absent."

"The ethical considerations are what are standing in the way of your doing something. You don't have the energy to deal with this problem because you are throwing away what energy you do have by indulging in all these pointless ethical considerations. Otherwise you would find some way of neutralizing the whole thing."

"As long as you practice virtues, so long you will remain a man of vice. They go together. If you are lucky enough to be free from this pursuit of virtue, as a goal, along with it the vice also goes out of your system. You will not remain a man of vice. You will remain a man of violence as long as you follow some idea of becoming a non-violent, kind, soft, gentle person. A kind man, a man who is practicing kindness, a man who is practicing virtues is really a menace. Not the [socalled] violent man."

"When I use the term 'natural state' it is not a synonym for 'enlightenment', 'freedom', or 'God-realization', and so forth. Not at all. When the totality of mankind's knowledge and experience loses its stranglehold on the body — the physical organism — then the body is allowed to function in its own harmonious way. Your natural state is a biological, neurological, and physical state."

"To be yourself requires extraordinary intelligence. You are blessed with that intelligence; nobody need give it to you; nobody can take it away from you. He who lets that express itself in its own way is a 'Natural Man'."

"It is an act of futility to relate my description to the way you are functioning. When you stop all this comparison, what is there is your Natural State. Then you will not listen to anybody."

"The 'Natural State' is acausal; it just happens."

"A normal person lives in his illusions. A mad cap lives in his hallucinations. A man in the 'natural state' has neither of them."

"You can't come into your own uniqueness unless the whole of human experience is thrown out of your system. It cannot be done through any volition or the help of anything."

"A murderer, a con man, or a rapist has as much chance if not a better chance than all the holymen and spiritual aspirants put together."

"If there is one [a person in the natural state], he won't be hiding somewhere. He will be there shining like the star. You can't keep such people under bushel."

"To be yourself is very easy, you don't have to do a thing. No effort is necessary. You don't have to exercise your will, you don't have to do anything to be yourself. But to be something other than what you are, you have to do a lot of things."

"So, all that any man has ever thought or felt must go out of your system. And you are the product of all that knowledge, that’s all you are."

"What makes one person come into his natural state, and not another person, I don’t know. Perhaps it’s written in the cells. It is acausal. It is not an act of volition on your part; you can’t bring it about. There is absolutely nothing you can do. You can distrust any man who tells you how he got into this state."

"Get this straight, this is your state I am describing, your natural state, not my state or the state of a God-realized man or a mutant or any such thing. This is your natural state, but what prevents what is there from expressing itself in its own way is your reaching out for something, trying to be something other than what you are."

"This state is not in your interest. You are only interested in continuity. You want to continue, probably on a different level, and to function in a different dimension, but you want to continue somehow. You wouldn't touch this with a barge pole. This is going to liquidate what you call 'you,' all of you - higher self, lower self, soul, atman, conscious, subconscious - all of that."

"The natural state is not the state of a self-realized God-realized man, it is not a thing to be achieved or attained, it is not a thing to be willed into existence; it is there - it is the living state. This state is just the functional activity of life. By 'life' I do not mean something abstract; it is the life of the senses, functioning naturally without the interference of thought. Thought is an interloper, which thrusts itself into the affairs of the senses. It has a profit motive: thought directs the activity of the senses to get something out of them, and uses them to give continuity to itself."

"The Natural State is a state of great sensitivity - but this is a physical sensitivity of the senses, not some kind of emotional compassion or tenderness for others. There is compassion only in the sense that there are no 'others' for me, and so there is no separation."

"The body is in a state of quiet, of relaxation, which you can call bliss, truth, love, god or reality or anything you like, but it is not that, because there is nobody looking at it. I look at that (microphone) and I can bring out the word and say it is a microphone. But here, for this state of being, there is no word you can find to describe it. So the words bliss, love, god, truth, are all inadequate to express this state of being. Here there is no difference between life and death. The continuity (of the self) is gone once and for all."

"The natural state is the functioning of this living organism. It is not a synonymous term for enlightenment or God-realization or self realization. What is left here is this pulsating living organism. And the way it is functioning is no different from the mosquito that is sucking your blood."

"It [the natural state] is not something that can be captured, contained and given expression to through your experiencing structure. It is outside the field of experience. So it cannot be shared with anyone. That's the reason why I am saying that he, you, or it, is the medium through which whatever I am saying is expressing itself. But you are distorting, correlating and garbling it. Thought cannot help doing that."

"You and I are functioning in exactly the same way; and I am not anything that you are not. You think that I am different from you. You have to take my word: at no time does the thought that I am different from you ever enters my mind. I know for certain that you are functioning in exactly the same way that I am functioning. But you are trying to channel the activity or movement of life both to get something and to maintain that continuity of what is put in there [in you] by culture. That is not the case here [in U.G.]."

"Every human body, however, is unique. Nature is not interested in creating a perfect being. Its interest is to create only a perfect species."

"That seems to be the purpose - if at all there is any purpose in Nature, I don't know. You see, there are so many flowers there - look at them! Each flower is unique in its own way. Nature's purpose seems to be (I cannot make any definitive statement) to create flowers like that, human flowers like that."

"Nature is interested in only two things - to survive and to reproduce one like itself. Anything you superimpose on that, all the cultural input, is responsible for the boredom of man."

"The human kind appeared on this planet and it thinks all this has been created for its use. You think you were created for a grander and nobler purpose. The human being is a more despicable thing than all the other forms of life on this planet."

"What prevents the uniqueness, which is the end product of millions and millions of years, to express itself? It [the mind] is just two thousand years old. It is too silly to think that it is going to succeed. It is not going to succeed. You don't go about calling yourself unique. I don't go around the world telling everyone that I am a unique man. No, not in that sense. But you are unique. The two uniques don't even bother to compare how unique they are. I have to use that word uniqueness because it is really unique. Even two human bodies are not the same."

"I studied botany in the university. When you study the leaves under a microscope, you can see that no two leaves are the same. Our whole attempt, for idiotic reasons, to fit every individual into a common mold is not going to succeed. If we push it too hard, we will probably blow ourselves all up. That is inevitable because we have in our possession tremendous instruments of destruction, far surpassing the capacity of the so-called mind to deal with them."

"[Everything is programmed] not only by culture, but by nature itself, probably for its own survival. We don't know, it [each species] is programmed. That is why I say that there is no freedom of action at all. The demand for freedom of action is meaningless."

"The problems are not created by nature. It is we who have created the problems. There is plenty, there is bounty in nature; but we take away what rightfully belongs to everybody and then say that you should give charity. That's too absurd!"

"I don't think I have any special insights into the laws of nature. But if there is any such thing as an end product of human evolution (I don't know if there is such a thing as evolution, but we take it for granted that there is), what nature is trying to produce is not a perfect being."

"Nature does not use anything as a model. It is only interested in perfecting the species. It is trying to create perfect species and not perfect beings. We are not ready to accept that. What nature has created in the form of human species is something extraordinary. It is an unparalleled creation. But culture is interested in fitting the actions of all human beings into a common mold. That is because it is interested in maintaining the status quo, its value system. That is where the real conflict is. This [referring to himself] is something which cannot be fitted into that value system."

"Isolated functioning is not part of nature. But this isolation has created a demand for finding out ways and means of becoming a part of nature. But thought in its very nature can only create problems and cannot help us solve them."

"The planet is not in danger, but we are in danger. You can pollute this planet and do all kinds of things; the planet can absorb everything — even these human bodies. If we are wiped out, nature knows what to do with the human bodies. It recycles them to maintain the energy level in the universe. That's all it is interested in. So, we are no more purposeful or meaningful than any other thing on this planet. We are not created for any grander purpose than the ants that are there or the flies that are hovering around you or the mosquitoes that are sucking your blood."

"Unfortunately, the religious thinking of man for centuries has placed before us the model of a perfect being. Nature is not interested in a perfect being. Nature is not interested in the cultural input there [in us]. That's the battle that is going on in the form of the demand of the society or culture to fit everybody into its value system. That is really the cause of man's tragedy. It is not a question of destroying the value system or revolting against it. It is the impossibility of fitting yourself into that framework created by your culture that is really the problem. Thought is the real enemy. Thought can only create problems; it cannot solve them."

"Nature is interested in only two things — to survive and to reproduce one like itself. Anything you superimpose on that, all the cultural input, is responsible for the boredom of man. So we have varieties of religious experience. You are not satisfied with your own religious teachings or games; so you bring in others from India, Asia or China. They become interesting because they are something new. You pick up a new language and try to speak it and use it to feel more important. But basically, it is the same thing."

"Culture or society has placed before us the model of a perfect being. Nature does not imitate anything. It does not use anything as a model."

"I am quite satisfied with the world! [Laughter] Quite satisfied. The world cannot be any different. Traveling destroys many illusions and creates new illusions for us. I have discovered, to my dismay, if I may put it that way, that human nature is exactly the same whether a person is a Russian, or an American or someone from somewhere else. It is as though we all speak the same language, but the accent is different. I will probably speak [English] with an Andhra accent, you with a Kannada accent, and someone else with a French accent. But basically human beings are exactly the same. There is absolutely no difference. I don't see any difference at all. Culture is probably responsible for the differences. We being what we are, the world cannot be any different. As long as there is a demand in you to bring about a change in yourself, you want to bring about a change in the world. Because you can't fit into the framework of culture and its value system, you want to change the world so that you can have a comfortable place in the world."

"Nature has provided us with tremendous wealth on this planet. If what they say is correct, twelve billion people can be fed with the resources that we already have on this planet. If eighty percent of the people are underfed, then there is something wrong — something is wrong because we have cornered at one place all the resources of this world. I don't know, I am not competent enough to say, but they say that eighty percent of this world's resources are consumed by the Americans alone. What is it that is responsible for that?"

"People are looking for enlightenment. You say you are not, but it is the same. Whether you want a new car or simple peace of mind, it is still a painful search. The secular leaders tell you one way, the holy men another way. It makes no difference: as long as you are searching for peace of mind, you will have a tormented mind. If you try not to search, or if you continue to search, you will remain the same. You have to stop. You don't stop searching because such an act would be the end of you."

"As long as there is that hope that you can somehow or the other get out of the jungle, so long will you continue what you are doing - searching - and so long you feel lost. You are lost only because you are searching. You have no way of finding your way out of the jungle."

"Vegetarians are more aggressive than the meat eaters. You will be surprised. Read the history of India - [it is full of] bloodshed, massacres, and assassinations - [all] in the name of religion."

"If there is no craving, what's the difference whether you eat meat or vegetables? One form of life lives on another form of life. How many millions of bacteria are crawling all over your body — the flora and the fauna? You will be surprised, if they are magnified. They are as big as cockroaches. [Laughter] They live on you. When it becomes a corpse, they will have a field day on this body."

"I am ready to discuss any subject you want. I have opinions on everything from disease to divinity. So I can discuss any subject. In America I always start with health food. That is the obsession there. When you don't have faith in anything, food becomes your obsession in life. So what do we do?"

"Why do you have to feel so good because you have given up meat-eating?"

"You need to drink water. Otherwise, after seventy two hours you are gone. Dehydration takes place. Because eighty percent of the body is water. Not only there, in every plant and in every form of life. Even on this planet as a whole eighty percent is water."

"I am surviving without eating vitamins. I don't eat vegetables. I don't eat fruit. I don't eat brown rice. I have survived seventy three years. What's wrong with me?"

"I don't eat ideas, I don't wear names."

"You can believe whatever you want to believe. Someone else believes something else. It is the belief that matters to people. You replace one belief with another. You are brought up on meat. Then why should you eat macrobiotic diet today? You have changed from one belief to another belief and you feel good. Feel good and enjoy. Enjoy your brown rice."

"The moment you ask, 'How to live' and 'What to eat?' you have created a problem."

"Once a friend of mine invited me and fed me macrobiotic food. I have not yet recovered from that. It was fifty three years ago."

"The problem is you eat more than what the body needs. It's the overeating that is the problem."

"Brown rice! The look of it will make me sick! I raised my son on milled rice, double polished and triple polished rice. [Laughs] He is working in a nuclear submarine somewhere in United States. He is an electronics technician. He is healthier than most health food freaks. Now, of course, he eats meat. He eats even human flesh — anything he can get."

"I don't eat any health foods. On the contrary, I say all such things are muck."

"As we grow older and older we have to reduce the quantity of the intake of food. We don't do that because our eating habits are based on nothing but pleasure. We eat for pleasure. Eating is a pleasure-seeking movement for us."

"We eat more than what is necessary for the body. That is one of the basic things that we have to come to terms with. We don't need to eat so much food. I eat very little. I had many friends, top nutritionists, living with me as my neighbors in Chicago. For some reason, I have always been taking large quantities of cream — double cream, triple cream, clotted cream, name it. That's my basic food. They always warned me, 'Look here, my good friend, we are very much interested that you should live long, but with this you are going to have cholesterol problems. You will die of this, that, and the other'. But I am still here, and they are all gone. I maintain that fat eats fat. [Laughter] Be that as it may, I am not recommending this to anyone."

"It may sound very frivolous and ridiculous to say that, but when those people who had lived for years and years in concentration camps moved over to countries like the United States and Western Europe and ate this kind of food, they started having nothing but health problems. I am not making any generalizations from that."

"You know there are no hard and fast rules applicable to everyone. My suggestion to all these nutritionists and doctors is that they should rethink the matter and try to look at the functioning of this human body in a different way. But that will take a lot of jettisoning of our ideas which we have taken for granted."

"It's not a question of offering opinions - of course I do have my opinions from disease to divinity, but they're as worthless as anybody else's."

"I have views on every damned thing from disease to divinity because I have acquired knowledge through studies, travel, experience and the like. But my views are of no more importance than those of the maid cleaning and cooking there. Why should any importance be given to my views and opinions?"

"I am an illiterate. I don't read much. I haven't read anything for ages now."

"Anything I say, you want to abstract something from it and project something on it. I may have my own likes, but all those likes are conditioned by my upbringing. There is no way you can free yourself from your conditioning. The talk of an unconditioned mind is utterly foolish. But my conditioning does not interfere with my actions."

"What I am saying has no social content. I have opinions on everything in this world. You have your opinions, and I can also express opinions and judgments on everything. But my opinions and judgments are no more important than the opinions and judgments of your mother or that taxi driver there."

"Someone asked me: 'What do you have to say about him after his death?' I said that the world has never seen such a pimp nor will it ever see one in the future."

"He made a big business out of it. He took money from the boys, he took money from the girls, and kept it for himself. He is dead and so we don't say anything. Nil nisi bonum."

"One day many Rajneesh disciples visited me in Bombay. My host happened to be one of the top movie directors. He was very close to Rajneesh. He spent years and years practicing all the techniques taught by Rajneesh. But after he met me he walked out on him. And in his living room, there used to be a massive picture of Rajneesh. After his encounter with me he removed it and put it in the almirah and then put my picture there. Look what he has done!"

"Pain indicates a healing process in the body. That is what I have discovered. We don't give the body a chance to recover but rush to the doctor."

"Even in extreme grief you get the feeling that you are not there. What happens if the body goes through unbearable pain? You become unconscious. It is then that the body has a chance of taking care of that pain. If it cannot, then you go."

"The basic problem is that we have unfortunately divided pain into physical and psychological pain. As I see it, there is no such thing as psychological pain at all. There is only physical pain."

"The pain seems more acute than what it actually is because we are linking up all these sensations of pain and giving them continuity. Otherwise the pain is not so acute as we imagine it to be. Another problem is that we don't give a chance to the body to recuperate. We just run to the corner drugstore or to a doctor and buy medicines. That's probably one of the things that is making it difficult for the body to handle its problems in its own way."

"It is terror, not love, not brotherhood that will help us to live together. Until this message percolates to the level of human consciousness, I don't think there is any hope."

"All I am saying is that the peace you are seeking is already inside you, in the harmonious functioning of the body."

"This state is already a peaceful state. Since you are moving away from this peaceful state in search of an idea of peace, you have no peace."

"How can you create peace through war? What is the source of war? This peace is war. You are promising me peace through war. You are promising me peace of mind through meditation which is war. I discovered these things when I was very young. Can you establish peace through war? The peace that is there between world wars is false. You are war-weary and getting ready for another war. I am not saying anything against war. I am not a peace-monger, much less a warmonger."

"By introducing this idea of a peaceful mind, we set in motion a sort of battle, and the battle goes on and on. But what you feel, what you experience as the peaceful state of mind, is a war-weary state of mind created by your thought. Once you experience some peaceful state of mind, you want more and more of the same. This creates problems for the body."

"The senses function unnaturally in you because you want to use them to get something. Why should you get anything? Because you want what you call the 'you’ to continue. You are protecting that continuity. Thought is a protective mechanism: it protects the 'you’ at the expense of something or somebody else."

"You see, if I use the word 'matter,' it is not in the sense in which the scientists use the word (Touches the carpet). There is a contact. A clever man asks 'How do you know there is a contact?' That contact is awareness, you can say. But the moment you say that it is hard, you have given solidity to it; otherwise, is it hard or is it soft? Can you experience directly? I don't know, language is the most misleading thing."

"Philosophers have talked about pure perception. There cannot be any perception, let alone pure perception, without the perceiver. These are all the games that we play with ourselves and with others. There cannot be any perception without the perceiver. And why talk of pure perception, I don't understand? So, this is also the way the Indians have dealt with this problem. One disciple tells others that, 'My guru is in the turiya state, the highest state'. And according to me, the turiya state is Alzheimer's disease. You see, they don't have any problems, they don't recognise anything, they don't experience anything. Valentine had that, she was touching everything to establish a relationship with the things around her. The sense of touch is the most important sensory activity. Children begin with that, and then all the other four senses follow."

"(On the first day) I noticed that my skin was soft like silk and had a peculiar kind of glow, a golden color. I was shaving, and each time I tried to shave, the razor slipped. I changed blades, but it was no use. I touched my face. My sense of touch was different, you see, also the way I held the razor. Especially my skin - my skin was soft as silk and had this golden glow. I didn't relate this to anything at all; I just observed it."

"(On the fourth day) something happened to the eyes. We were sitting in the 'Rialto' restaurant, and I became aware of a tremendous sort of 'vistavision', like a concave mirror. Things coming towards me, moved into me, as it were; and things going away from me, seemed to move from inside me. It was such a puzzle to me - it was as if my eyes were a gigantic camera, changing focus without my doing anything. Now I am used to the puzzle. Nowadays that is how I see. When you drive me around in your Mini, I am like a cameraman dollying along, and the cars in the other direction go into me, and the cars that pass us come out of me, and when my eyes fix on something they fix on it with total attention, like a camera. Another thing about my eyes: when we came back from the restaurant I came home and looked in the mirror to see what was odd about my eyes, to see how they were 'fixed'. I looked in the mirror for a long time, and then I observed that my eyelids were not blinking. For half an hour or forty-five minutes I looked into the mirror - still no blinking of the eyes. Instinctive blinking was over for me, and it still is."

"On the seventh day I was again lying on the same sofa, relaxing, enjoying the 'declutched state'. Valentine would come in, I would recognize her as Valentine; she would go out of the room - finish, blank, no Valentine - 'What is this? I can't even imagine what Valentine looks like'. I would listen to the sounds coming from inside me?' I could not relate. I had discovered that all my senses were without any coordinating thing inside: the coordinator was missing."

"As long as I am looking at something, there is space, but space of and by itself, because I have what you call Vistavision, I see much more. The eyes take in completely the hundred peer cent of what is there. They say the eye cuts off ninety-eight per cent and takes in only two per cent, but here, since there is no choice of any kind, the eyes take in the whole thing."

"the space that thought creates is different. The moment you say the Palace Hotel (in Gstaad), there is a space. When I close my eyes there is no space at all. Light is the part of the whole space, and the light inside has no frontiers. But to say that I am the space is not correct (laughs)."

"Do you think you are really in contact withy anything? Do you think you are looking at that man? Do you think you have ever looked at your wife even once? If you once looked at your wife, that would be the end of the whole relationship. You look at everything through the knowledge you have. It’s the knowledge about the things around that creates the world for you. You can not experience anything that you do not know. In that sense I say and maintain that there is no such thing as new experience at all. How can you have contact with the world?"

"What I am talking about is the sensitivity of sensory perceptions. But what you are concerned with is sensuality. They are different things. The sensory activity of the living organism is all that exists. Culture has superimposed on it something else which is always in the field of sensuality. Whether it is a spiritual experience or any other experience, it is in the field of pleasure."

"I am describing the functioning of sensory perception. Physiologists talk about this as a response to a stimulus. But the fact that this particular response is for that particular stimulus is something which cannot be experienced by you. It is one unitary movement. Response cannot be separated from the stimulus. It is because they are inseparable that we can do nothing to prevent the possibility of the knowledge about past experiences coming into operation before the sensory perceptions move from one thing to another."

"You can't even assert that it just happens. There are no two things there. As far as the eye is concerned it does not even know that it is looking."

"Is there a looking without a looker? Is there any seeing without a seer? I don't use those words in a metaphysical sense. Is there a seeing without a seer? There is no seeing even. 'What is going on?' — the very question is absurd. We want to know everything, and that's our problem."

"You never see anything. The physical eye does not say anything. There is no way you can separate yourself from what you are looking at. We have only the sensory perceptions. They do not tell anything about that thing — for example, that it is a camera. The moment you recognize that it is a camera, and a Sony camera at that, you have separated yourself from it. So what you are actually doing is translating the sensory perceptions within the framework of the knowledge you have of it."

"We never look at anything. It is too dangerous to look because that 'looking' destroys the continuity of thinking."

"I always give the example of a film. If you take a movie of a moving hand, from here to there, there are so many frames. What you see on the screen is an artificial thing. You need a projector to produce that action or movement on the screen. But it is not actually the movement of the hand from here to there. You have to synchronize the discrete movements of the hand to produce a combined effect of the hand moving. That is the way the human organism is operating. When you are listening to the tape-recorded music, you don't hear the gap between the two notes. But the senses register and listen to the gap. This is so even when you speak a language."

"Whether I hold the hand of a woman or hold the arm of a chair, the physical response is exactly the same. Exactly the same. The response doesn't say that this is the hand of a delicate darling or this is a teak-armed chair. Please don't get me wrong. It is not that I phrase these things in a certain way or that I put them all on the same level. You have to understand what I am trying to say."

"It is your thinking that is creating the observer. So this whole talk of the observer and the observed is balderdash. There is neither the 'observer' nor the 'observed'. [The talk of] the 'perceiver' and the 'perceived', the 'seer' and the 'seen' is all bosh and nonsense. These themes are good for endless metaphysical discussions. There is no end to such discussions. And to believe that there is an observation without the observer is a lot of baloney."

"There is no such thing as permanence at all. Everything is constantly changing. Everything is in a flux. Because you cannot face the impermanence of all relationships, you invent sentiments, romance, and dramatic emotions to give them certainty. Therefore you are always in conflict."

"The demand for permanence - permanent relationships, permanent happiness, and permanent bliss - in any field and in any area of human existence is the cause of human misery. There is nothing to permanence."

"This is the basic demand — permanence. So it is this demand that has created the whole religious thinking — God, Truth or Reality. Since things in life are not permanent, we demand that there must be something permanent. That is why these religious teachers are peddling their wares in the streets. They offer you these comforters: 'permanent happiness' or 'permanent bliss'. Are they ready to accept the fact that bliss, beatitude, immensity, love, and compassion are also sensual?"

"What is tradition after all? It is the unwillingness to change with the changing times. We change a little when we are forced to by conditions. But the fact is that change is not in the interests of the mechanism of our thinking."

"The demand for permanence is really the problem. The moment a sensation is translated as a pleasurable one there is already a problem. The translation is possible only through the help of knowledge. But the body rejects both pain and pleasure for the simple reason that any sensation that lasts longer than its natural duration is destroying the sensitivity of the nervous system. But we are interested only in the sensual aspect of the sensory activity."

"This body is interested in maintaining its sensitivity of the sensory perceptions and also the sensitivity of the nervous system. That is very essential for the survival of this body. If we use that instrument of thought for trying to achieve the impossible goal of permanent happiness, the sensitivity of this body is destroyed. Therefore, the body is rejecting all that we are interested in: permanent happiness and permanent pleasure. So, we are not going to succeed in that attempt to be in a permanent state of happiness."

"[The brain] is not interested in sensual activity. It is not interested in any experiences that the mind is interested in and is demanding. It is not even interested in the so-called spiritual experiences, the religious experiences like bliss, beatitude, immensity, and happiness. Happiness is something which the body is not interested in. It cannot take it for long. Pleasure is one of the things that it is always rejecting. The body does not know, and does not even want to know, anything about happiness."

"All the politicians, the whole government machinery thrives on stealing, promising something which they cannot deliver. It is amazing that we have tremendous faith in all these religious people who cannot deliver the goods."

"When we find that we cannot force our beliefs on others we resort to violence. We would like everybody to believe the same thing. When we fail in that attempt of ours to make everybody believe in God, or no God, or even our political systems — the right or the left —, what is left is only violence."

"Individually there seems to be nothing that you can do to change, alter or reverse anything. And 'collectively' it means war. We have unfortunately placed the politicians in the seats of power. Political consciousness is all that we are left with. But the religious people are still trying to talk in terms of the divine, humanity, ancient culture, Ramarajya, this, that, and the other. Politicians also use these things for purposes of elections, and thus try to win people over to their side. But if we think in terms of something that is already dead, we don't have any future to think of."

"Gorbachev is a traitor to the cause of communism. Millions and millions of people have died for the cause of communism, and if he is looking to the West for the solutions to his problems, there is something wrong. The answers have to be found within the framework of the U.S.S.R. The West is not in a condition to offer him anything except McDonald's or organically grown potatoes or Pepsi Cola. Actually it is not our ideas of freedom or of humanity that have brought about a change there but it is Pepsi Cola. It has conquered Russia. And it is Coca Cola that has made a tremendous impact on China."

"You talk of the sacredness of life and condemn abortion. This is the same old idiotic Christian idea persisting, which turned every woman into a criminal. And then you go and kill hundreds and thousands of people in the name of your flag, in the name of patriotism. That is the way things are. Not that it is in your interest to change it, but change is something which this structure is not interested in. It only talks of change. But you know things are changing constantly."

"My wife was against birth control and such other measures. She tried to sort these things out. She was telling me that by nursing a child for a longer time, pregnancy could be delayed. All kinds of strange ideas! She was not ready to go to a doctor and finish it with an abortion. But somewhere along the line she did have to have an abortion, as we did not want to have more children."

"Every time somebody comes and knocks on the door of my house, I tell him, 'Go to your prime minister. He is there. You elected him. You put him there to feed you, clothe you, and shelter you'."

"After forty-three years of freedom you still can't go on blaming the British for the situation here [in India]. Don't go on exalting your culture and heritage. In one blast the whole thing should be thrown out. They don't even have the energy to blow up the whole thing. You have been fed with all kinds of bluff and nonsense."

"Whatever is the great heritage of India, it is good for politicians to use it and raise hopes in people's hearts. But we are all the products of that great heritage, and there is nothing to be proud about the people of this country today. We talked of the oneness or unity of life for centuries. Then why is there this poverty? Why is there this misery? Why haven't we done anything to resolve these problems to the satisfaction of everybody?"

"You may very well ask me, 'Why don't you do something?', but I am not working for this country, and I have no business to tell the leaders of this country how to run it. We are in a situation where we have to deal only with the political consciousness. Religion is dead, but the religious people are not ready to take back seats and admit to themselves that they have done an enormous mischief and now should leave everything to us. I maintain that all the political systems we have today, including communism, are nothing but the warty outgrowth of the religious thinking of man."

"I will not join a separatist movement and break up this country. I am not interested, because I am not interested in becoming the Chief Minister of Telugu Desham or Kannada Desham or Tamil Nadu. Your system is so corrupt that anyone, however 'Mr. Clean' he may be, will also be corrupted. The system is corrupt. You are corrupt. You are corrupted by the religious thinking."

"It is thought that has created the world; and you draw lines on this planet— 'This is my country, that is your country'. So, how can there be unity between two countries? The very thing that is creating the frontiers and differences cannot be the means to bridge the different viewpoints. It is an exercise in futility."

"Once upon a time, the scepter and the crown, the church, and the pontiffs, were all worshiped. Later the kings revolted against that, and then the royal family came to be admired and worshiped. Where are they now? Others have eliminated royalty and have created the office of the president. We are told that you should not insult the head of the state. Until yesterday, he was your neighbor, and now he becomes the president of your republic. Why do you have to worship a king or a president? The whole hierarchical structure, whether of the past or of the present, is exactly the same."

"During the Second World War we were all made to believe that it was a war to end all wars. What nonsense they talked! Has it ended wars? Wars have been going on and on. We were made to believe that the first world war was waged to make the world safe for democracy. [Laughs] Oh boy! We are all made to believe all kinds of stuff. If you believe your leader, or if you believe what the newspaper man is telling you, you will believe anybody and anything."

"I personally feel that there is no power outside of man, you see - no power outside of man - whatever power is out there is inside man. So, if that is the case - and that is a fact to me - there is no point in externalizing that power and creating some symbol and worshipping it, you know? So that's why I say that God, the question of God, is irrelevant to man today."

"I am not interested in winning you over to my point of view, because I have no point of view. And there is no way you can win me over to your point of view. It is not that I am dogmatic or any such thing. It is impossible for you to win me over to your point of view. During a conversation like this, somebody throws at me words at me like, 'Oh, you are very this and very that'. All right', I say, 'This is my point of view. What the hell is yours?'. It is also a point of view. So how do you think these two points of view can be reconciled, and for what purpose do you want to reconcile them? You feel good because you have won him to your point of view. You use your logic and your rationality because you are more intelligent than I am. All this is nothing but a power play."

"If someone wants to be on the top, if it is part of his power game, then he talks of changing the world; he talks of creating heaven or paradise on earth. But I want to know when."

"All you are interested in as a scientist is self-fulfillment, the ultimate goal of a Nobel prize, and power. I am very sorry. Personally, you may not be interested in that kind of thing. That's all. I encourage that kind of pursuit. Of course, you scientists have made all this comfort-bearing technology possible, and in that sense, I, like all those who enjoy the benefits of modern technology, am indeed indebted. I don't want to go back to the days of the spinning wheel and the bullock cart. That would be too silly, too absurd."

"Going to the pub or the temple is exactly the same; it is quick fix."

"All your experiences, all your meditations, all your prayer, all that you do, is self-centred. It is strengthening the self, adding momentum, gathering momentum, so it is taking you in the opposite direction. Whatever you do to be free from the self also is a self-centred activity."

"You are in no position to deny or accept what I am saying. You have probably tried some kind of system to control your thoughts and beliefs, and it has failed you. Repeating mantras, doing yoga, and prayer have not helped. For whatever reasons, you have not been able to control your thoughts. That is all."

"You attach special significance to the prayers and temples, for no reason other than that it is your prejudice and that it makes you feel superior to those who frequent pubs and bordellos."

"What is the difference between a man going to a bar for a glass of beer, and a man going to a temple and repeating the name of Rama? I don't see any basic difference."

"Offer not prayers to anybody but to money."

"The demand for material goodies is the only thing that prayers should answer."

"The plain fact is that if you don't have a problem, you create one. If you don't have a problem you don't feel that you are living."

"The problem is the demand to bring about a change."

"The real problem is the solution. If you can't solve the problem, the problem ceases to be a problem. You are interested more in the solution than in the problem. But the solution applies only to tomorrow, not to the present - when are you going to solve the problem? - so it is not the solution. Why are you interested in finding out the solutions? They have not helped you. But you are looking at the solutions, you are interested in the solutions, not the problem. What is the problem? - that is all I am asking. You have no problem there, but you are talking of solutions."

"Because you want to use certain answers to end your problems, those problems continue. The numerous solutions offered by all these holy people, the psychologists, the politicians, are not really solutions at all. That is obvious. They can only exhort you to try harder, practice more meditations, cultivate humility, stand on your head, and more and more of the same."

"If they were really the solutions, the problems would have been solved long ago. If they are not the solutions, and if there are no other solutions, then there are no problems to be solved."

"You create a problem and then try to solve it. That's what we are all doing. You enjoy your problems. Why not?"

"What people are interested in is not some answers to their problems but some comforters. As I said before, they are selling ice packs to numb the pain and make you feel comfortable. Nobody wants to ask the basic question: What is the real problem? What is it that they want? What are they looking for? And this [situation] is taken advantage of by the people from the East. If there is anything to what they claim (that they have the answers and solutions for the problems that we are all facing today), it doesn't seem to be evident in the countries from where they come. The basic question which Westerners should throw at them is: 'Have your answers helped the people of your own countries? Do your solutions operate in your own lives?'. Nobody is asking them these questions."

"We are not ready to accept the fact that what has created the problems cannot itself solve them. What we are using to solve our problems is what we call 'thought'. But thought is a protective mechanism. Thought is only interested in maintaining the status quo. We may talk of change, but when actually the time comes for us to change things, we are not ready for it. We insist that change must always be for the better and not for the worse. We have a tremendous faith in the mechanism that has created the problems for us. After all, that is the only instrument that we have at our disposal, and we don't have any other instrument. But actually it cannot help us at all. It can only create problems, but cannot solve them. We are not ready to accept this fact because accepting it will knock out the whole foundation of human culture. We want to replace one system with another. But the whole structure of culture is pushing us in the direction of completely annihilating all that we have built with tremendous care."

"I believe that the problems of this planet can be solved through the help of the tremendous high-tech and technology at our disposal. But the benefits that we have accrued through these advancements have not yet percolated to the level of all the people living on this planet. Technology has benefited only a microscopic number of people. It seems that even without the help of high-tech and technology it is possible for us to feed twelve billion people. When nature has provided us with such bounty, why is it that three-fourths of the people are underfed? Why are they all starving? They are starving because we are responsible for their problems. That is the problem that is facing us all today."

"It's thought that is creating all our problems, and it is not the instrument to help us solve the problems created by itself."

"Gurus play a social role, so do prostitutes."

"Prostitutes are the only people who deliver the goods. The holy business is the only business where you can get away without delivering any goods."

"Your guru has given you the license and cover, so you don't feel guilty or immoral or impure. Similarly, those aspiring starlets who have sex on what they call in Hollywood the casting couch with the producer-director to get a part in his film, also feel superior to professional whores. They get away with that because they belong to a glamorous profession. I have no moral position."

"All this rubbish about the conscious and the unconscious, awareness, and the self, is all a product of modern psychology. The idea that you can use awareness to get somewhere psychologically is very damaging. After more than a hundred years we seem unable to free ourselves from the psychological rubbish - Freud and the whole gang."

"I always questioned the psychologists, especially Freud when he made a statement that the birth is a neurotic, a traumatic experience. I don't think it is a traumatic experience at all because there was no experiencing structure there at all."

"They [psychologists] tell you how to fit into the value system that is created by our culture or society. That is really the human problem. The one very basic question which every intelligent man and woman should ask for himself or herself is, 'What kind of a human being do I want on this planet?'"

"This is a silly idea, the Freudian idea that for everything that is happening your mother is responsible, or your father is responsible. We are all grown-up people. There is no point in blaming our mothers and fathers. Actually, it is not a one-way street. Even children want to be accepted by us. We force them to fit into this framework, and they want to be accepted by us. This is a two-way traffic."

"All those people, the scientists and psychologists who come to see me, I tell them that they have all come to the end of their tether. If they are looking for answers, they should not look to Vedanta, or Zen Buddhism. Those sects don't have any answers for their problems. The scientists and psychologists have to find their answers, if there are any answers within their own framework. Only then will they be able to help mankind to look at things differently. But there is no way you can go back and revive anything."

"We are not created for any grander purpose than the ants that are there or the flies that are hovering around us or the mosquitoes that are sucking our blood."

"We are not satisfied with the daily grind of our lives, doing the same thing over and over again. We are bored. So boredom is responsible for asking the question, 'What is the purpose?' Man feels that if this is all that is there, what more is there for him to do?"

"I don't see any plan or scheme there at all! There is a process — I wouldn't necessarily call it evolution — but when it slows down then a revolution takes place. Nature tries to put together something and start all over again, just for the sake of creating. This is the only true creativity. Nature uses no models or precedents, and so has nothing to do with art per se. "

"I am not anti-rational, just unrational. You may infer a rational meaning in what I say or do, but it is your doing, not mine."

"What is the meaning of life? What is the purpose of life? It may have its own meaning, it may have its own purpose. By understanding the meaning of life and the purpose of life we are not going to improve, change, modify, or alter our behavior patterns in any way. But there is a hope that by understanding the meaning of life, we can bring about a change. There may not be any meaning of life. If it has a meaning, it is already in operation there. Wanting to understand the meaning of life seems to be a futile attempt on our part. We go on asking these questions."

"All the questions are born out of the answers. But nobody wants the answers. The end of the question is the end of the answer. The end of the solution is the end of the problem. We are only dealing with solutions and not with the problems. Actually there are no problems, there are only solutions. But we don't even have the guts to say that they don't work. Even if you have discovered that they don't work, sentimentality comes into the picture."

"You see, the individual has to find out his answers for the questions. That is why every individual is the savior of mankind - not collectively. If he can find out an answer for his question, or a solution for his problems, maybe there is some kind of a hope for mankind as a whole - because we all are brought together: whatever is happening in America is affecting us; whatever is happening here is affecting the other nations too."

"All the questions you come out with must be your own questions - then there is meaning in carrying on a dialogue. It has to be your question. So, do you have a question to call your own, a question which nobody else has asked before?"

"The questioner has to come to an end. It is the questioner that creates the answer; and the questioner comes into being from the answer, otherwise there is no questioner. I am not trying to play with words. You know the answer, and you want a confirmation from me, or you want some kind of light to be thrown on your problem, or you're curious - if for any of these reasons you want to carry on a dialogue with me, you are just wasting your time; you'll have to go to a scholar, a pundit, a learned man - they can throw a lot of light on such questions. That's all that I am interested in in this kind of a dialogue: to help you to formulate your own question. Try and formulate a question which you can call your own."

"I have no questions here at all. I come and sit here, and it's empty, but not in the sense in which you use the word 'emptiness'. Emptiness and fullness are not two different things; you cannot draw a line of demarcation between the void and the fullness. But there is nothing here - nothing - so I don't know what I'll say. I don't come prepared to say something. What you bring out of me is your own affair - this is yours, not mine - there is nothing here which I can call my own. This is your property because you have brought out the answer from me - it's not mine - I have nothing to do with the answer at all. This is not the answer. I am not giving you any answers at all."

"Whatever comes out of me is not manufactured by thought - but something is coming out. You are throwing a ball and the ball is bouncing and you are calling that the 'answer'. Actually, what I am doing is only restructuring the question and throwing it back at you."

"All questions are the same - they are mechanical repetitions of memorized questions. Whether you ask 'Who am I?' 'What is the meaning of life?' 'Does God exist?' or 'Is there an afterlife?' all these questions spring only from memory. That is why I ask whether you have a question of your own."

"The questioner is nothing but the answers. That is really the problem. We are not ready to accept this answer because it will put an end to the answers which we have accepted for ages as the real answers."

"My interest is only to make you frame the 'right' question. The right question has the answer in itself. But you seem to know the answer and that is why you put the question. If I give you an answer, you'll either agree or disagree, but this is not a matter of agreeing or disagreeing at all."

"I merely rephrase, restructure and throw the same question back at you. It's not game playing, because I'm not interested in winning you over to my point of view."

"Actually we do not want answers for our questions. The assumption that the questions are different from the questioner is also false. If the answer goes, the questioner also goes. The questioner is nothing but the answers. That is really the problem. We are not ready to accept this answer because it will put an end to the answers which we have accepted for ages as the real answers."

"You have no questions, and I have no questions. I have no questions at all other than the basic questions we need to ask. I am here and I want to get the bearings of this place. So I want to go and find out. I ask 'Where is this station?' If I want to go to London, I ask, 'Where is the British Airways office?' These are the basic questions we need to ask to function sanely and intelligently in this world. We do have to accept the reality of the world as it is imposed on us. Otherwise we will go crazy. If you question the reality of anything that is imposed on you, you are in trouble, because there is no such thing as reality, let alone the ultimate reality. You have no way of experiencing the reality of anything."

"We can only ask questions and find out if there are any answers individually. Collectively means, you see, I have one idea, you have another idea, and there is going to be a battle between us."

"The moment we ask the question, 'Is there something more to our life than what we are doing?', it sets the whole questioning mechanism going."

"The only kind of questions I have are ones like, 'How does this microphone work?' I ask that because I don't know its workings. I have questions only as to how these mechanical things are operating. For living situations we have no answers at all. You cannot apply this mechanical, technical know-how, which we have acquired through repeated study, to solve problems of living."

"You come here and throw all these things at me. I am not actually giving you any answers. I am only trying to focus or spotlight the whole thing and say, 'This is the way you look at these things; but look at them this [other] way. Then you will be able to find out the solutions for yourself without anyone's help'. That is all. My interest is to point out to you that you can walk, and please throw away all those crutches."

"That man was sitting there. From his very presence I felt 'What! This man - how can he help me? This fellow who is reading comic strips, cutting vegetables, playing with this, that or the other - how can this man help me? He can't help me'. Anyway, I sat there. Nothing happened; I looked at him, and he looked at me. 'In his presence you feel silent, your questions disappear, his look changes you' - all that remained a story, fancy stuff to me. I sat there. There were a lot of questions inside, silly questions - so, The questions have not disappeared. I have been sitting here for two hours, and the questions are still there. All right, let me ask him some questions - because at that time I very much wanted moksha. This part of my background, moksha, I wanted. 'You are supposed to be a liberated man' - I didn't say that."

"'Can you give me what you have?' - I asked him this question, but that man didn't answer, so after some lapse of time I repeated that question - 'I am asking 'Whatever you have, can you give it to me?''. He said, 'I can give you, but can you take it?' Boy! For the first time this fellow says that he has something and that I can't take it. Nobody before had said I can give you, but this man said I can give you, but can you take it? Then I said to myself If there is any individual in this world who can take it, it is me, because I have done so much sadhana seven years of sadhana. He can think that I can't take it, but I can take it. If I can't take it, who can take it? - that was my frame of mind at the time - you know, [Laughs] I was so confident of myself."

"I didn't stay with him, I didn't read any of his books, so I asked him a few more questions: 'Can one be free sometimes and not free sometimes?' He said 'Either you are free, or you are not free at all'. There was another question which I don't remember. He answered in a very strange way: 'There are no steps leading you to that'. But I ignored all these things. These questions didn't matter to me - the answers didn't interest me at all."

"But this question 'Can you take it?'... 'How arrogant he is!' - that was my feeling. Why can't I take it, whatever it is? What is it that he has? - that was my question, a natural question. So, the question formulated itself: 'What is that state that all those people - Buddha, Jesus and the whole gang - were in? Ramana is in that state - supposed to be, I don't know - but that chap is like me, a human being. How is he different from me? What others say or what he is saying is of no importance to me; anybody can do what he is doing. What is there? He can't be very much different from me. He was also born from parents. He has his own particular ideas about the whole business. Some people say something happened to him, but how is he different from me? What is there: What is that state?' - that was my fundamental question, the basic question - that went on and on and on. I must find out what that state is. Nobody can give that state; I am on my own. I have to go on this uncharted sea without a compass, without a boat, with not even a raft to take me. I am going to find out for myself what the state is in which that man is. I wanted that very much, otherwise I wouldn't have given my life."

"Even if the scientists are trying to assert that they know Reality better than all the spiritual teachers and metaphysicists put together. There is no way you can experience the Reality of anything. And I maintain and assert with all the emphasis at my command, that which you do not know, you cannot experience. What you do not know is a concept, you see."

"Here there is no such thing as reality any more, let alone the ultimate reality. I function in the world as if I accept the reality of everything the way you accept it. For example (I always ask this), is it possible for you to experience the three-dimensional space in which you are functioning? No. You must have knowledge - length so many feet, width, height so many feet. How can you experience the three-dimensional space except through knowledge? So even this cannot be experienced - let alone the fourth dimension - we really don't know about it. So I can say that the walls don't exist for me, in the sense that there is no direct experience of the wall over there."

"The reality of that person sitting there, for instance, or even [the reality of] your own physical body. You have no way of experiencing that at all except through the help of the knowledge that has been put in you. So, there may not be any such thing as reality at all, let alone the ultimate reality. I do have to accept the fact that you are a man, that she is a woman. That is all. There it stops. But what is the reality you are talking about?"

"There is nothing there, only your relative, experiential data, your truth. There is no such thing as objective truth at all. There is nothing which exists outside or independent of our minds."

"You cannot describe that 'what is' in any manner. And you cannot leave 'what is' as it is. You cannot even complete the sentence and say ''What is' is'. But we don't stop there. We build a tremendous structure, the fantasy structure, romantic structure, on 'what is' and talk about love, bliss, beatitude, or immensity."

"You cannot remember what it felt like not to exist before you were born, and you cannot remember your own birth, so you have no basis for projecting your future non-existence. As long as you have known life, you have known yourself, you have been there, so, to you, you have a feeling of eternity. To justify this feeling of eternity, your structure begins to convince itself that there will be a life after death for you - heaven, reincarnation, transmigration of souls, or whatever. What is it that you think reincarnates? Where is that soul of yours? Can you taste it, touch it, show it to me? What is there inside of you that goes to heaven? What is there? There is nothing inside of you but fear."

"For generations you have been under the influence of the belief that there is reincarnation. You believe you did something terrible in your past life, and so you enjoy your misery, your degradation, your poverty in this life and hope for the best in your next life. So what is the point in feeling sorry about all this? For centuries people have been brainwashed to believe in all kind of things. Besides, you have no way of testing the validity or truth of the statements of those god men."

"Someone says he was Shirdi Sai Baba in his previous life and Satya Sai Baba in this life, and in his next life he is going to be God knows what. We have no way of testing these claims. You are not going to be there to test that."

"To those people who ask this question about reincarnation, I tell them that there is reincarnation for those who believe in it, and there is no reincarnation for those who don't believe in it. But if you ask me, 'Is there reincarnation [objectively] like the law of gravity in nature?' my answer is, 'No'. Some people have this compulsion to believe. There is not much that we can do about it. Probably believing [in reincarnation] is consoling and comforting to them."

"If you are lucky enough to be freed from the totality of knowledge, the knowledge of the self, reincarnation, and all kinds of things, then is it possible for you to experience any center, any 'I', any self, any soul? So, to me the 'I' is nothing but a first person singular pronoun, and I do not see any center or self there. So the whole idea of reincarnation is built only on the foundation of our beliefs."

"The only relationship you have with anybody in this world is “What do I get out of it?” That’s all you care about. Other than that, there is nothing to it!"

"The relationship between a man and a woman is based on the images that the two create for themselves of each other. So, the actual relationship between the two individuals is a relationship between the two images. But your image keeps changing, and so does the other person's. To keep the image constant is just not possible. So, when everything else fails, we use this final, last card in the pack, 'love', with all the marvelous and romantic ideations around it."

"You do create me. I don't create you for the simple reason that I don't have any image of myself. You have an image of yourself and in relationship to that image you create the images of others around you. That is the relationship that you have with the other people. But the people are constantly changing — you are changing and so is the other person. But you want the image always to remain the same. That's just not possible."

"My actions are not the actions of an abnormal man. I am not a misogynist. I don't hate women. I like them. I have always had women with me. But the relationship with everything around me is formed and broken every minute of my existence. I don't want you to put me in any particular cage; you will not succeed at all."

"What, after all, is the world? The world is the relationship between two individuals. But that relationship is based on the foundation of 'What do I get out of a relationship?'. Mutual gratification is the basis of all relationships. If you don't get what you want out of a relationship, it goes sour. What there is in the place of what you call a 'loving relationship' is hate. When everything fails, we play the last card in the pack, and that is 'love'."

"The whole culture has created, for its own reasons, this situation for us through its value system. The value system demands that relationships be based on love. But the most important element is security and then possessiveness. You want to possess the other individual. When your hold on the other becomes weaker for various reasons, your relationship wears out. You cannot maintain this 'lovey-dovey' relationship all the time."

"Religions have promised roses but you end up with only thorns."

"Your natural state has no relationship whatsoever with the religious states of bliss, beatitude and ecstasy; they lie within the field of experience. Those who have led man on his search for religiousness throughout the centuries have perhaps experienced those religious states. So can you. They are thought-induced states of being, and as they come, so do they go. Krishna Consciousness, Buddha Consciousness, Christ Consciousness, or what have you, are all trips in the wrong direction: they are all within the field of time. The timeless can never be experienced, can never be grasped, contained, much less given expression to, by any man. That beaten track will lead you nowhere. There is no oasis situated yonder; you are stuck with the mirage."

"This assumption that to have a 'heart' is better than to use your head. The whole religious thinking is built on the foundation of having a good heart and giving supremacy and importance to it, and not to what your 'head' is doing. The heart is there only to pump blood. The heart does not for a moment know that it is pumping blood. It is not asking the question, 'Am I doing it right?' It is just functioning. It does not ask the question, 'Is there any purpose?' That question has no meaning. The questions, 'Is there any meaning?' 'Is there any purpose?' take away the living quality of life. You are living in a world of ideas. It is not interested in your kindly deeds. If you indulge in kindly deeds, doing good unto others, having a good 'heart', you will only create problems for the heart. It is the beginning of your cardiac problems! That's going to be a real problem. It is your kindly deeds that are responsible for the cardiac arrests and heart failures, and not any [mal]functioning of the heart. The tremendous importance that we have given to the 'heart' is totally irrelevant."

"You can’t fit me into any religious frame. I don’t need to fool people and thrive on their gullibility and credulity. Why should I? I’m telling you, you will lose everything! You are not going to get anything from anybody. There is no need for me to say you’re not going to get what you want from anyone else either. That you will find out by yourself. But that you can’t do either by your own effort or by your volition or by anything you do or do not do. That is not something that happens in the field of cause and effect."

"You have created gods and goddesses from your own imagination. You have one wife, your gods have 16,000 wives. You have two arms and one head, your god has three heads. Remove Rama and Krishna from the scene, and everything is finished for this country. What I say is out of the way, not of the run of the mill type. If help is what you are interested in, you are not going to get it. What I say destroys the very foundations and architecture of culture."

"I am not for a moment expounding Hinduism here or in India. In fact, they think that I am not a Hindu. Yet the Hindus are ready to accept [to some degree] what I am saying. They say, 'What you are saying seems to be true, but the way you are putting things is not acceptable'. They brush me aside. But at the same time they cannot totally brush me aside. They always try to fit me into their framework or reference point. If they cannot do that, the whole tradition in which they have a tremendous investment is at stake."

"Religion has created schisms. It has been responsible for tremendous destruction of life and property. It is very unfortunate. But, nevertheless, the fact does remain that religion has failed in its purpose."

"When a void is created, when all the systems have failed, there is the danger of a demand for the religious stuff stepping into it and trying to tell us, 'We have the answers for your problems'. But the revolutions have failed. I am not against any value system, but the demand to fit ourselves into it [a value system] is the cause of man's suffering."

"I maintain that all the political institutions and ideologies we have today are the outgrowth of the same religious thinking of man. The spiritual teachers are in a way responsible for the tragedy of mankind. We have come to a point where we have to ask a different kind of question and find out if there is anything that we can do."

"What matters most is not monism but moneyism."

"All these utopias, all these ideas of creating a heaven on this earth are born out of the assumption that there is a heaven somewhere there and that we have to create that heaven on this planet. And that's the reason why we have turned this into a hell. You see, I don't call this a hell. I'd like to say it cannot be any different."

"Man has created religion because it gives him a cover. This demand to fulfill himself, to seek something out there was made imperative because of this self consciousness in you which occurred somewhere along the line of the evolutionary process. Man separated himself from the totality of nature. The religious thinking of man originated from the idols, gods, and spiritual teachers that we have created."

"There is a tremendous danger facing mankind today. The void created by the failure of all these ideologies will be taken advantage of by the church. They will preach and shout that we all have to go back to Jesus, or go back to the great traditions of our own countries. But what has failed for them is not going to help us to solve our problems."

"All revolutions are nothing but revaluations of our value systems. You only replace one system with another system. But basically, any system is not going to be much different from the system that has been replaced."

"Even the talk of continuous revolution of Mao Tse-Tung has failed. In the very nature of things, a revolution has to settle down."

"The whole field of psychology has misled the whole thinking of man for a hundred years and more. Freud is the stupendous fraud of the 20th century. J Krishnamurti talks of a revolution in the psyche. There is no psyche there. Where is this mind which is to be magically transformed? J.K.'s disciples have come to the point where all they can do is to repeat meaningless phrases. They are shallow, empty people. The fact that J.K. can draw large crowds means nothing; snake charmers also draw big crowds. Anybody can draw crowds."

"Since there is no demand to bring about a change in me, there is no corresponding demand to change society. I am not a reformer. I am not a revolutionary either. In fact, there is no such thing as revolution. All that is bogus. It is another commodity to be sold in the marketplace, to hoodwink gullible people."

"A certain person breaks it, and you make it a part of that accumulated wisdom - that is why it becomes more difficult. Even the revolutionary statement of that particular individual who has achieved this break-through has already become part of your tradition: your very listening has destroyed the revolutionary nature of this break-through and has made this a part of knowledge, tradition, because you are the tradition."

"There is no sadhana necessary, no purification methods necessary for this kind of a thing to happen - no preparation of any kind."

"What I am trying to point out is simply that your spiritual and religious activities are basically selfish."

"Unfortunately you are doing something, and that doing has got to come to an end. In order to bring that doing to an end, you are doing something else. That is really the crux of the problem. That's the situation in which you find yourself."

"It is the knowledge that is there that has thrown out this question, 'Who am I?' So you want to know, and through that knowing the knowledge you have gathers momentum. You are adding more and more and more [to the knowledge]. If there is anything to be known there, all you know should comes to an end. So, by this pursuit or the demand to get an answer for that question you are adding more and more to the knowledge."

"What I am saying unburdens you. You don't get any directives about what one should do. There are no miracles, no room for any spiritual healing. If anyone can perform miracles, it's you, because you are as much an expression of life as all those claimants in the market place. No special mandate is given to anybody. No one is sent by anybody to change anything in this world. You mean to say that if there is such a thing called the supramental power, it needs you and me to channel itself? What are you talking? If it is possible for any one person to perform any miracles it is possible for anybody."

"You give me a list of all the saints, sages, and saviors of mankind. Then, look at their lives and look at what they did. I did everything they did. Nothing happened. I knew what it was all about. I was interested in finding out whether there was anything to all those teachers, from the very beginning of our times. I found out that they conned themselves and conned every one of us. Was there anything to their experience which they wanted to share with the world?"

"Your doing something to go back to your original state is what is taking you away from it. The original state is already there and is expressing itself in an extraordinarily intelligent way. The acquired intellect is no match to the intelligence that is there."

"When I was your age, very young, I was stupid. I did all that was expected of those who practice spiritual sadhana, to quote and unquote. But I got nowhere, and I rejected them all."

"What I am emphasizing is that whatever has happened to me has happened despite everything I did. In fact, everything I did only blocked it. It prevented the possibility of whatever was there to express itself. Not that I have gained anything. Only what is there is able to express itself without any hindrance, without any constraints or restraints imposed on it by society for its own reasons, for its own continuity and stability."

"When there is no path, where is the question of right or wrong?"

"We have no way of knowing anything. Even the scientists — they can say what they like. How does it interest us? It does not really matter as to how this whole universe was created — whether God created it, or the whole thing came out of some dust and pebbles, or hydrogen atoms somewhere. It is for the scientists to talk about all this, and every now and then come up with new theories. They will be amply rewarded and given Nobel prizes. But the theories don't help us to understand anything. So I really don't know if there is any purpose. I don't think that there is any. I do not see any meaning or purpose in life. A living thing, a living organism is not interested in asking the question, 'What is the purpose of life? What is the meaning of life?'"

"Why are we so tremendously impressed by our scientific research? We can give them Nobel Prizes. We can give them prestigious awards. But how is it [this research] going to affect the common man?"

"We are creating the universe ourselves. We have no way of looking at the universe at all. The model that we see is created by our thought. Even the scientists who say that they are observing certain things have actually no way of observing anything except through the mirror of their own thinking. The scientist is influencing what you are looking at. Whatever theories he comes up with are only theories; they are not facts to him. Even if you are looking at an object physically, without the interference of thought and without translating what you are looking at, the physical looking is affecting the object that you are looking at. Actually there is no way you can capture, contain and give expression to what you are looking at."

"You dare not look at anything. Scientists can come up with all kinds of theories, hundreds and hundreds of them. You can only reward them with Nobel prizes or give them some prestigious awards, and that is all that they are interested in. But, are we ready to accept the fact that there is no way that you can look at anything? You are not looking at anything at all. Even the physical looking is influenced by your thoughts. There is no way you can look at anything without the use of the knowledge that you have of what you are looking at. In fact, it is that [the knowledge] that is creating the object."

"The scientists, by looking or asking for help from all these religious people, are committing the biggest of all blunders. They have come to the end of their tether. If they have problems in their systems they have to solve them by and for themselves. These religious people have no answers for the problems created by the scientific thinking of man. I do not know if by coming together and exchanging their views or giving speeches they are going to achieve anything. I may sound very cynical when I say that nothing is going to come out of it except that they will make speeches and feel comfortable that they are trying to understand each other's point of view."

"Pure science is nothing but speculation. The scientists discuss formulas endlessly and provide us with some equations. But I am not at all taken in by the 'march of progress' and all that rot."

"Einstein encouraged Roosevelt to drop the atom bomb. 'If you don't do it, they will', he said. Out of his contempt for Germany and gratitude to the United States, which helped him flourish in his work and produce tremendous results, he gave that advice. He came to regret that advice later on. That doesn't matter."

"You scientists are the ones who control the fate of the world, not these gurus, not these religious people. The fate of the world is in your hands and not in the hands of the government. But your research funds have to come from them. They hold the strings. So, what do we do? The situation is so horrible. What do we do? I want to know. But still we play with each other: 'Who has an edge over whom in the world?'."

"Sai Baba is a magician. He used to produce Swiss watches. But after the Indian government placed an import tax on Swiss watches, he soon began producing Indian-made watches. I saw a man on television the other day, who could make a jet aircraft disappear before your very eyes! Sai Baba conjures up a watch. He gives it to an honored disciple, but he, Sai Baba, receives all the acclaim and applause. It all looks legitimate, but is only a gimmick. I make fun of such things. How can you take them seriously?"

"I don't know anything about Sai Baba. I am not interested in miracles, you see. He is the number one holy man in this country because he draws huge audiences, uh? So, in that respect [Laughs] he is number one, and there are number two, three, four, you see - we have classifications according to the number of people they draw."

"What is he doing, Sir? What is he doing? And if he's an avatar as he claims he is, and if he can't do, who else can? - tell me. So something is wrong somewhere."

"What you are looking for does not exist. You would rather tread an enchanted ground with beatific visions of a radical transformation of that non-existent self of yours into a state of being which is conjured up by some bewitching phrases. That takes you away from your natural state - it is a movement away from yourself."

"All I can guarantee you is that as long as you are searching for happiness, you will remain unhappy."

"You have no recourse but to use thought to get what you want in this world. But when you seek to get what does not exist - God, bliss, love, etc. - through thought, you only succeed in pitting one thought against another, creating misery for yourself and the world."

"So, don't you see the absurdity of the question, 'Who am I?' It doesn't matter who suggested that, who threw that question at you, who recommended that question. There is nothing there to know. What is there is all of what you know. When that is not there (knowledge - from that questions arise ), there is no need for you to know anything, and there is no way of knowing anything about what is there."

"'Who am I?' Why do you ask that question? That means there is some other I there you want to know. That question to me has no meaning at all. The very fact that you ask that question implies that there are two things. The 'I' you know, and there is another 'I' the nature of which you do not know. The question 'Who am I' implies that there is some other I, the nature of which you really do not know and you want to know"

"The search for the unknown is an absurd thing. A thing that I do not know – how can I search for it? How can I seek it? How can I want it? Whatever I want, whatever I seek, whatever I pursue is a thing which I have already known, experienced or accepted the experience of somebody or have created an image of that."

"The idea or search for ultimate reality prevents you from facing the reality that is there now. So when such a goal drops away you are stuck with yourself. This suffering is the reality. No matter what you do you cannot escape it. When you see that there is nothing you can do about it, you stop."

"First you’ll have to see that your search is not different from other things or what others are doing, and see that it is an escape from what is there. If you at least see the illusion of it all then it loses the grip over you."

"I am only interested in describing this state, in clearing away the occultation and mystification in which those people in the 'holy business' have shrouded the whole thing. Maybe I can convince you not to waste a lot of time and energy looking for a state that does not exist except in your imagination... The natural state is acausal: it just happens."

"The very thing that I searched all my life was shattered to pieces and I said to myself: 'The self realization, God realization, transformation, radical or otherwise, or even enlightenment, there is nothing there to be realized, nothing there to be found there'. The very demand to be free from anything, even from the physical needs of the body just disappeared and I was left with nothing."

"Don't you see the absurdity of what you are doing? All this search is like trying to chase something that does not exist at all."

"I found that whatever I wanted was what they [the religious people] wanted me to want. Whatever I thought was whatever they wanted me to think. So there was no way out of this. Somewhere along the line something hit me: 'There is nothing there to be transformed, nothing there to be changed. There is no mind there, nor is there any self to realize. What the hell am I doing?' That spark hit me like a shaft of lightning, like an earthquake. It shattered the whole structure of my thought and destroyed everything that was there, all the cultural input. It hit me in a very strange way. Everything that every man had ever thought, felt, and experienced before was drained out of my system. In a way, it totally destroyed my mind, which is nothing but the totality of man's experiences and thoughts. It destroyed even my identity."

"What I am trying to say is that you must discover something for yourself. But do not be misled into thinking that what you find will be of use to society, that it can be used to change the world. You are finished with society, that is all."

"The search is inevitable and is an integral part of it. That is why it has turned us all into neurotics and has created this duality for us. You see, ambition is a reality, competition is a reality. But you have superimposed on that reality the idea that you should not be ambitious. It has turned us all into neurotic individuals. We want two things at the same time."

"There is no other way I can point out the danger that is involved in your seeking whatever you are seeking. You see, there is this pleasure movement. I am not against the pleasure movement. I am neither preaching hedonism nor advocating any '-ism' or anything. What I am saying is a threat to 'you' as you know yourself and experience yourself."

"What I am saying is that you have to answer this question for yourself — 'What do we want?' This was my problem. I asked myself, 'Is there is anything I want other than what they wanted me to want? Is there anything I want to think other than what they wanted me to think?'. Nobody could help me in this area, and that was my problem. I had no way of finding out an answer. Wanting not to want what the others wanted me to want was also a want. It never occurred to me that this was no different from all the other wants. Somewhere along the line the question somehow disappeared; I don't know how. What I am left with is something which I have no way of experiencing, and no way of communicating or transmitting to anybody."

"I am trying to avoid all the seekers. Here they have invented the term 'finders'. 'Finders' means those who have found the truth. I don't want seekers. And if there are any finders, they don't need my help."

"I don't want to see Krishnamurti's 'widows'. Most of those who come to see me are the followers of J. Krishnamurti. I mean J. Krishnamurti freaks, and also the 'widows' of Rajneesh, and all kinds of religious buffs — of all shapes, sizes, and colors. Unless they have some sort of background in all this, they can't be interested in this kind of thing. They only come to receive some confirmation from me about what they are interested in. But they find that they are not getting anything from me. Still they continue to come. You have no idea of how many thousands and thousands of people have passed through the precincts of my homes in India, America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand."

"To me, the 'I' is a first person, singular pronoun. I discovered this when I was very young. Other than that, I do not think there is any such thing as 'I', or 'self', or all the words we use for this. There is no way you can separate yourself from this living organism, other than through the concepts or ideas that have been put into you. The only way you can separate yourself from whatever you call yourself – the 'I', the 'self' or the 'Atman' – is only when you use knowledge. Otherwise, you have no way of separating yourself from what you call 'you', 'I'. I do use 'I', I do use 'my' sometimes; 'my' daughter when I introduce her, or 'my' sister."

"Because we are using the word 'we', you are asking me the questions, 'Who is the 'we'?' 'What is the entity that is using it?' etc. This is only a self perpetuating mechanism, and it is maintaining its continuity. When I say 'self', I don't mean the 'self' in the sense in which we normally use the word. It is more like a self-starter in a car. It is perpetuating itself through this repetitive process."

"Somewhere along the line in human consciousness, there occurred self consciousness. (When I use the word 'self', I don't mean that there is a self or a center there). That consciousness separated man from the totality of things. Man, in the beginning, was a frightened being. He turned everything that was uncontrollable into something divine or cosmic and worshiped it. It was in that frame of mind that he created, quote and unquote, 'God'. So, culture is responsible for whatever you are."

"The so called self-realization is the discovery for yourself and by yourself that there is no self to discover. That will be a very shocking thing because it's going to blast every nerve, every cell, even the cells in the marrow of your bones."

"When I use this phrase — 'the state of unknowing' — it is not a synonymous term for transformation, moksha, liberation, God-realization, self-realization, and what have you."

"Why can't you leave the sensations alone? Why do you translate? You do this because if you do not communicate to yourself, you are not there. The prospect of that is frightening to the 'you'."

"There is no sensitivity other than the sensitive nervous system responding to stimuli. So, if you are concerned or preoccupied with the sensitivity of anything else, you are blurring the sensory activity. The eyes cannot see, but the moment you see, the translation of sensory perceptions comes into operation. There is always a space between perception and memory."

"There is an extraordinarily alert, and alacritous quality to it [the organism]. The body is rejecting all sensations. Sensations have a limited life; beyond a particular duration the body cannot take them. It is either throwing them out or absorbing them. Otherwise they destroy the body. The eyes are interested in seeing things but not as beauty; the ears hear things but not as music. The body does not reject a noise because it is the barking of a dog or braying of an ass. It just responds to the sound."

"Anything that is harsh, anything that would destroy the sensitivity of the nervous system, the body cuts out. It is like a thermostat. To some extent the body has a way of saving itself from heat, cold, or anything that is inimical to it. It takes care of itself for a short period, and then thought helps you to take the next step to cover yourself, or to move yourself away from the dangerous situation you find yourself in. You will naturally move away from the cement mixer that is making a loud noise and is destroying the sensitivity of your nervous system. The fear that you would be destroyed because the sound is bad, or that you will become a nervous wreck, and so on and so forth, is part of your paranoia."

"You are not decent and decorous enough to admit that all your spiritual experiences — bliss, beatitude or love — are also sensual activities. Any activity of thought, whether it is called spiritual or sensual, is also a sensual activity. That's all that you are interested in. Your being in a blissful mood is a high, the do-gooder's high. You become a boy scout and take the lady across the road so that you can get some brownies. This is the do-gooder's high that they talk about. Jogging also gives you a high. Let's admit it."

"Your thinking has turned that particular demand to make this pleasurable sensation last longer than its natural duration into a problem. It has turned that into a problem for the functioning of this body, and by so doing, it has created a neurological problem. It [the body] is doing everything possible to absorb that, whereas your thinking makes it impossible for this body to handle that in its own way, for the simple reason that you are trying to solve those problems within the field of your religious or psychological approaches."

"Sometimes the sensual memory of making love to my wife comes suddenly from nowhere. But when these thoughts try to take root there, everything in you tightens - you don't have to do a thing. The thoughts cannot stay there - there is no continuity, no build-up - one knows what it is, and there it ends - something else comes up. But it doesn't end there for you; you say 'How can I have these sensual thoughts?' You think you are not free if you have sensual thoughts; but if you don't have them, you can be certain that you are not a living human being. Saint or sinner, he must respond to every stimulus. There is no sublimation - all that is absolute nonsense."

"The saints are telling lies - it is poppycock, rubbish - don't believe all that. What is the point in condemning yourself, telling yourself that you are a sinner? What nonsense you are talking! You must respond - if there is a woman, there must be a physical response to that - otherwise you are a corpse."

"The only way for any one who is interested in finding out what this is all about is to watch how this separation is occurring, how you are separating yourself from the things that are happening around you and inside you."

"I never tell myself and tell you that I am the table. That is too absurd. So what I am saying is that there is no way you can separate yourself on your own free will and volition except when there is a demand from outside. You ask the question, 'What is that?' You and I have the same information in our memories. Whether you use a French word, an English word, a German word, or a Latin word, it doesn't matter. The reference point is the table you are asking me about. So, I say it is a table, and that it is a white table. You and I have the same information. When that question is not there, I would at no time look at it and tell myself that it is a table. It does not mean that I am 'choicelessly aware' of that. What is there is only the reflection of this object on the retina. Even this statement cannot be experienced by me, because the stimulus and response are one unitary movement. The moment you say there is awareness, there is already a division."

"The day man experienced the consciousness that made him feel separate and superior to the other forms of life, at that moment he began sowing the seeds of his own destruction."

"Basically there is no difference between what is here (pointing towards himself) and what is out there in the world. There is no way you can draw a line of demarcation."

"The fundamental mistake that humanity made somewhere along the line, is, or was, or whatever is the correct verb, to experience this separateness from the totality of life. At that time there occurred in man, which includes woman also, this self consciousness which separated him from the life around. He was so isolated that it frightened him. The demand to be part of the totality of life around him created this tremendous demand for the ultimate. He thought that the spiritual goals of God, truth, or reality, would help him to become part of the 'whole' again. But the very attempt on his part to become one with or become integrated with the totality of life has kept him only more separate."

"There is no way I can separate myself except when I use the knowledge which is common to us both. So there is no way I can create this individual here [pointing to himself] and experience that there is such a thing as a human body here, that there is something that is talking here. There is nobody who is talking. It is just a computer. And, you are interested in operating the computer. Whatever is coming out of me that you think is the answer is a printout."

"All you know is separateness and duration, space and time, which is the 'frame' superimposed by the mind over the flow of life. But anything that happens in space and time is limiting the energy of life. What life is I don't know; nor will I ever. You can say that life is this, that, or the other, and give hundreds of definitions. But the definitions do not capture life. It's like a flowing river."

"Thought processes then and even now are outside of you. Self-consciousness or separation [of ourselves] from the world around us occurs, they say, — I am not competent enough to say anything — around the eighteenth month of the child. Until then the child cannot separate itself from whatever is happening there inside and outside of itself. But actually there is no inside and outside at all. What creates the inside and the outside, or what creates the division between the inside and the outside is the movement of thought. Anything that is born out of thought is a self-protecting mechanism."

"We function in a thought-sphere, and not in our biology. The separative thought structure, which is the totality of man's thoughts, feelings, experiences, and so on — what we call psyche or soul or self — is creating the disturbance. That is what is responsible for our misery; that's what continues the battle that is going on there [in the human being] all the time. This interloper, the thought sphere, has created your entire value system. The body is not in the least interested in values, much less a value system. It is only concerned with intelligent moment-to-moment survival, and nothing else."

"You can have sex today and this kind of a thing can happen to you tomorrow, and this can happen even through sex."

"An enlightened man can never have sex because he cannot reproduce another one like him. Once an interviewer on television asked me, “Can’t we take your sperm and make a woman pregnant?” I answered, “There is no sperm anymore.” Anandamayi stopped having her periods when she was twenty-one, after whatever had happened to her. She was a nice lady. She was a genuine article."

"Your birth is not in your hands. You’re here because your parents had sex. But I can say now that that your death is in your hands."

"The Bhagavatam is nothing but pornography written by sex-starved people. If that goes from you, the whole knowledge goes, no new knowledge accumulates, and then thought comes only for the purpose of helping you to function intelligently and sanely in this society. Of course, I have a memory. If I had no memory, they would put me in a loony bin."

"Why the religious thinking of man has emphasized denial of sex as a means to his spiritual attainment is something that I cannot understand. Maybe because that is the way you can control people. Sex is the most powerful drive."

"God and sex go together. If God goes sex goes, too."

"Sex is very natural thing. You see, if you don't have sex, the semen probably goes out through urine or in some other way. After all, the sex glands have to function."

"There is no sex at all without thought. Thought is memory."

"I did have a one-night stand. It was not with a cheap call girl or a prostitute. It was with one of the richest women around. And that finished the whole thing. There was no more sex after that. You will be surprised at that."

"Once a holy man came to see me. He was in his forties. He was claiming that denial of sex is so essential for the spiritual future of man. I said, 'It's a crime against nature'. Nature has not intended you to deny sex. Then he got up and left. So how can this abnormal situation be made a model for all spiritual aspirants? And why torture them? Why has denial of sex been made the foundation stone of all the spiritual enlightenment in this country and in the West as well? As a reaction or a revolt against that [denial], what you call the Tantric system appeared in this country. When it went out of control, they introduced this mystical element, the 'left' and the 'right' Tantra. That is why now some jokers are saying that Tantric sex is only one of the means to attain spiritual bliss, enlightenment, and what not."

"It is just not possible for that individual [for U.G.] physically to have sex any more. The whole chemistry of the body has undergone abnormal changes. I call it abnormal because this is not possibly what nature has intended it to be. There are two things that this living organism is interested in — its survival and the reproduction of one like itself. Even nature has discarded this body because it has no use for it any more. But you have turned that into something spiritual. That is why they say that sex control is something very essential for the spiritual achievement of human beings. What I am trying to say is that neither the denial nor the indulgence in sex has anything to do with what they call enlightenment."

"It is just not possible to have a sex 'build-up' without thought. It is the continuous thinking that gives the illusion of a coordinator. But here [referring to himself] there is nobody who is coordinating the sensory activity. Sensations occur so fast that there is no way memory can capture that in its framework and say, 'This is it'."

"To be attracted to something is natural. If you are not attracted, you are a stone. The body with its senses is not a stone. It has to respond to what is happening around it. What touches this body is not your piety or your silence but your anger, your lust, and everything that is happening there. That is the response I am talking about. Well, I don't translate. I don't even know what is going on here — whether it is a sex drive or affection or anger or greed. None of those things are translated by thought as such and such. There is no time here."

"Sex is violence. But it is a necessary violence for this body. It's a pain."

"Unfortunately, we have blown this business of sex out of proportion. It is just a simple biological need of the living organism. The body is interested in only two things — to survive, and to reproduce one like itself. It is not interested in anything else. But sex has become a tremendous problem for us, because we have turned the basic biological functioning of the body into a pleasure movement. You see, if there is no thought, there is no sex at all."

"Sex has to be put in its proper place as one of the natural functionings of the body. It is solely, mainly and wholly for the purpose of reproducing or procreating something like this [the body]. It has no other place in the functioning of the body."

"Until this happened to me, the powerful drive [sex] was still there. But I knew that the semen would go through the urine or some other way. That didn't bother me because I was determined to figure out and solve this problem for myself and by myself. I did not go to a therapist. I never believed in any therapy. So it resolved on its own and by itself. Sex has a place in the organism in that it is a very simple functioning of the body. Its interest is only to create. I discovered these things by myself."

"It is not just the sex act that is important, but the build up that is there, the romantic structure that we have built around the love play. If you look at a beautiful woman, for example, the moment you say that it is a woman, you have already created a problem — 'A beautiful woman!' Then it is more pleasurable to hold her hands than just to look at her. It is more pleasurable to embrace her, even more pleasurable to kiss her, and so on. It is the build-up that is really the problem. The moment you say that she is a beautiful woman, culture comes into the picture. Here [pointing to himself] the build-up is totally absent because there is no way that these [pointing to his eyes] can be focused on any particular object continuously. For all you know, when that beautiful woman opens her mouth, she might have the ugliest teeth that a woman could have. So, you see, that [the eyes] has moved from there to here and again from here to something else, as perhaps, to her movements. It is [the eyes are] constantly changing its focus and there is no way that you can maintain this build-up. What is there is only the physical attraction. That you can never be free from, never. All those people — these saints — are tortured with the idea controlling that natural attraction. But that natural attraction is something which should not be condemned. You don't tell yourself that you are a god man, a realized man, an enlightened man or a saint, and that you should not think these thoughts."

"Thought always interferes with sex. It has become a pleasure movement. I am not saying anything against it. I go to the extent of telling people that if it is possible for you to have sex with your mother without any problem, psychological or spiritual, then that will put an end to your sex. You see, the whole thing is built on your ideas. I am not advocating incest as a way of life. For this [the body] there is no such thing as incest at all. It is the guilt problem, the psychological problem, the religious problem, which says that it has to be this way and not that way. If it is possible for a human being to have sex without a second thought, without any regret, with his sister, daughter, or mother, then this [sex] is finished once and for all. It falls into its proper place. I am not suggesting it as a therapy. Please don't get me wrong."

"Anything we touch we turn into a problem; and sex even more so, because this is the most powerful drive there is. If you translate it [into pleasure] and push it into an area where it does not really belong, namely, the pleasure movement, we will, then, create problems. When once you create a problem, the demand to deal with that problem within that framework is bound to arise. So, that is where you come in [with sex therapy etc.]. I have nothing against sex therapists, but that problem has to be solved by people. Otherwise they become neurotic. They don't know what to do with themselves. Not only that, but everything, God, truth, reality, liberation, moksha, is ultimate pleasure. We are not ready to accept that."

"We have to revise all our ideas about this whole business of sex. We give a tremendous importance to sex, and so the denial of it becomes such an obsession with people. In India they even moved away from that denial and created what is called Tantric sex. It was the highest pleasure that human beings could have. Sex through Tantra was considered the highest. That was the reason why they created in Brazil, and probably in some other countries too, the coupling of the male and the female organs. We have in India all that nonsense — the temples, and then a temple for the bull, a symbol of virility. All these were admired and worshiped. This is the other extreme: indulgence in sex became a spiritual pursuit."

"Real silence is explosive; it is not the dead state of mind that spiritual seekers think. This is volcanic in its nature; it's bubbling all the time - the energy, the life - that is its quality."

"The peace there is not this inane dead silence you experience. It's like a volcano erupting all the time. That is the silence, that is peace. The blood is flowing through your veins like a river. If you tried to magnify the sound of the flow of your blood you will be surprised - it's like the roar of the ocean. If you put yourself in a sound proof room you will not survive even for five minutes. You will go crazy, because you can't bear the noises that are there in you. The sound of the beat of your heart is something which you cannot take. You love to surround yourself with all these sounds and then you create some funny experience called the 'experience of the silent mind,' which is ridiculous. Absurd. That is the silence that is there - the roar - the roar of an ocean. Like the roaring of the flow of blood."

"That is all that it [the body] is interested in, not your state of mind nor the experience of the silent mind. It's not interested in your practice of virtues nor in the practice of your silences. The body has no interest in your moral dilemma or whatever you want to call it."

"Society is, after all, two individuals or a thousand of them put together. Because I am a direct threat to you individually — as you know and experience yourself — I am also a threat to society. How can society possibly be interested in this sort of thing? Not a chance."

"I am not in conflict with the society. I am not interested in changing it. The demand to bring about a change in myself isn't there anymore. So, the demand to change the world at large is not there. I suffer with the suffering man and am happy with the happy man..."

"I have to accept the reality of present-day capitalist society however exploitative or inhumane it may seem to be. Not because it is the best system that can ever be, or because its exploitation and inhumanity are unreal, but for pure and simple reasons of survival. The acceptance has only a functional value. Nothing more and nothing less. If I do not accept social reality as it is imposed on me, I will end up in the loony-bin singing merry melodies and loony tunes."

"Anything that is born out of this division in your consciousness is destructive, is violence. It is so because it is trying to protect not this living organism, not life, but the continuity of thought. And through that it can maintain the status quo of your culture, or whatever you want to call it, the society. The problems are neurological. If you give a chance to the body it will handle all those problems. But if you try to solve them on a psychological level or on an ethical level, you are not going to succeed."

"The society is interested in the status quo; it doesn't want to change. The only way it can maintain the status quo or continuity is through this demand, the demand that everybody should fit into this structure. Whereas every individual is a unique individual, physically speaking it's a unique individual. Nature is creating something unique all the time. It is not interested in a perfect man; it is not interested in a religious man."

"Society or culture or whatever you might want to call it, has created us all solely and wholly for the purpose of maintaining its continuity and status quo."

"It is the ones who believe in God, who preach peace and talk of love, who have created the human jungle. Compared to man's jungle, nature's jungle is simple and sensible! In nature animals don't kill their own kind. That is part of the beauty of nature. In this regard man is worse than the other animals. The so-called 'civilized' man kills for ideals and beliefs, while the animals kill only for survival."

"Society is trying to create the human beings. That is what society has done. You and I have been created by the society, solely and wholly to maintain its continuity, its status quo. You have no way of establishing your own individuality. You have to use that [society and all its heritage] to experience yourself as an entity and to function in this world. If you don't accept the reality of the world as it is imposed on us, you will end up in the loony bin. But we have to accept that. The moment we question the reality of what has been imposed on us we are in trouble."

"I am in perfect harmony with this world, exactly the way it is."

"There is no need to change this world at all; and there is no need to change yourself either."

"I am not a sociable man; yet I am not anti-social."

"We have not moved away from the tribal level. Have we really? The cave man didn't have the means to blow up the whole world, but we do. And animals don't kill anybody for an idea or belief. Only we do it."

"There is nothing that prevents me from fitting into the framework of society. I am not in conflict with the society."

"We have probably arrived at a place where there is no going back. What is the fate of mankind and what is one to do? Anything that is born out of thought is destructive in its nature. That is why I very often say in my conversations and interviews that thought, in its birth, in its nature, in its expression, and in its action, is fascist. Thought is interested in protecting itself, and is always creating frontiers around itself. And it wants to protect the frontiers. That is why we create frontiers around us: our families, our nations, and then this planet."

"Man cannot be anything other than what he is. Whatever he is, he will create a society that mirrors him."

"Society is the sum of relationships, and despite what you may find agreeable to believe, all these relationships are sordid and horrible. This is the unsavory fact; take it or leave it."

"What is happening, whether it is in India or in America or anywhere in the world, is all the same. The players are different but the play is the same. The actors are different but the act is the same. If you pick up a paper published forty years ago in this country, I believe you will be surprised that everything they have said is again being repeated by these people now. Exactly the same thing. You don't have to print a new newspaper. You can just pick up that old stuff, and put new names and dates on it and reissue it. What is it that you are doing now? You are doing exactly the same thing."

"To sidestep the complexities of this society is one of the biggest mistakes that we are making. But there is nothing out there, you see. All these god men, gurus, and the flunkies (the most wicked word to use) are offering us a new oasis. You will find out that it is no different from other mirages. We are leaving everything for some mythical certainty offered to us. But this is the only reality and there is no other reality."

"Who is normal? The normal person is a statistical concept. But how can this be a model? This [whatever has happened to U.G.] has no value in the sense that whatever I am cannot be fitted into any value system. It is of no use for the world. It has no value for me and it has no value for the world. You may very well ask me the question, 'Why the hell are we talking about all this?' Because you had some questions to throw at me, and what I am doing is to put them in a proper perspective. I only say, 'Look at it this way'."

"You want to make something of what I am saying, to use it somehow to further your own aims. You may say that it is for humanity's sake, but really you don't give a damn about society at all. What I am saying cannot possibly be of any use to you or your society. It can only put an end to you as you know yourself now."

"There is no self, there is no I, there is no spirit, there is no soul, and there is no mind. That knocks off the whole list, and you have no way of finding out what you are left with."

"Actually there is no permanent entity in you, no totality of all your thoughts and experiences. You think that there is 'somebody' who is thinking your thoughts, 'somebody' who is feeling your feelings - that's the illusion. I can say it is an illusion; but it is not an illusion to you."

"Spirituality is the invention of the mind, and the mind is a myth."

"What I am trying to emphasize over and over again is that what has happened to me has nothing to do with the spiritual nonsense they preach; it doesn’t have even a teeny weenie bit of spiritual content. It is a physical phenomenon pure and simple. Once this body is freed from the stranglehold of whatever is put in there either by spiritual teachers or secular teachers, or by those scientists and medical technology, it functions in a very efficient way."

"At the time I was born, when my mother introduced herself to me as “I am your mommy” and hugged me and kissed me, I apparently kicked her; and she died in seven days after I was born. When they put me into the frame of an enlightened man, they said that the mother of such a child can never have any more children or sex, and that she would die. Actually she died of puerperal fever, but not because she gave birth to an enlightened man. They have to put such people into that frame of giving birth to an enlightened man."

"And such a man [a man in the natural state] will be more spiritual than all the other claimants, but not in the ordinary sense of 'spiritual’ - that nonsense must never be used. Spirit is only the breath as in “he breathed his last”; the word has nothing to do with the spiritual crap."

"You are assuming that you are hungering for spiritual attainments and you are reaching out for your goals. Naturally, there are so many people in the market place - all these saints, selling all kinds of shoddy goods. For whatever reason they are doing it, it's not our concern, but they are doing it. They say it is for the welfare of mankind and that they do it out of compassion for mankind and all that kind of thing. All that is bullshit anyway."

"Whether it is materialistic goals or spiritual goals, the instrument we are using is matter. Therefore, the so-called spiritual goals are also materialistic in their value and in their results. I don't see any difference between the two. I haven't found any spirit there. The whole structure which we have built on the foundation of the assumed 'self' or 'spirit', therefore, collapses."

"I was surrounded by all kinds of religious people. I felt that there was something funny in their behavior. There was a wide gap between what they believed and how they lived. This always bothered me. But I could not call all of them hypocrites. I said to myself, 'There is something wrong with what they believe. Maybe their source is wrong. All the teachers of mankind, particularly the spiritual teachers, conned themselves and conned the whole of mankind. So, I have to find out for myself, and I have no way of finding out anything for myself as long as I depend upon anyone'."

"You may talk of your spirituality, and go and exploit the people in the United States. But what kind of a model can India give? What kind of effective role can India play in the world? You are doing exactly what they [the Americans] are doing. What is that 'great' culture that you are talking about? How can there be poverty in this country after so many years? I want to know. You talk of the 'oneness of life' or the 'unity of life'. Where is that unity of life? Where is the oneness of life? I want to know. For centuries we have been brainwashed to believe that this is a 'punya bhumi'. I would never accept that designation. Where is that 'punya bhumi?'"

"Pain is a healing process. But we are paranoid. We are overanxious to see that we don't suffer. I am not saying that you should not get any help that is available to you. There is no point in suffering, like the Christian saints who suffer and don't go to a doctor. That is not what I am saying. In fact, anything we say now is of no use. What we would do in any given situation is anybody's guess."

"All our experiences, spiritual or otherwise, are the basic cause of our suffering.... The body is not interested in anything that you are interested in. That is the battle that is going on all the time... There seems to be no way out...."

"There is no meaning in and no purpose to suffering."

"You don’t have to take my word for it. Be miserable and die in your misery."

"The whole structure of religious thought is built on the foundation of discipline. Discipline to me means a sort of masochism. We are all masochists. We torture ourselves because we think that suffering is a means to achieve our spiritual goals. That's unfortunate."

"Those who impose that kind of discipline on us are sadists. But unfortunately we are all being masochists in accepting that. We torture ourselves in the hope of achieving something... We are slaves to our ideas and beliefs. We are not ready to throw them out. If we succeed in throwing them out, we replace them with another set of beliefs, another body of discipline. Those who are marching into the battlefield and are ready to be killed today in the name of democracy, in the name of freedom, in the name of communism, are no different from those who threw themselves to the lions in the arenas. The Romans watched that fun with great joy. How are we different from them? Not a bit. We love it. To kill and to be killed is the foundation of our culture."

"If you commit suicide, it does not help the situation in any way. The moment after suicide the body begins to decay, returning back to other, differently organized forms of life, putting an end to nothing. Life has no beginning and no end. A dead and dying body feeds the hungry ants there in the grave, and rotting corpses give off soil-enriching chemicals, which in turn nourish other life forms. You cannot put an end to your life, it is impossible. The body is immortal and never asks silly questions like, 'Is there immortality?' It knows that it will come to an end in that particular form, only to continue on in others. Questions about life after death are always asked out of fear."

"Since I have not come into the world of my own choice, I don't think I will opt for suicide. It is not a clever statement that I am making, but these labels that I am a pessimist and others are optimists do not really mean anything. They have put me into the framework of a pessimist, a nihilist, an atheist, and many others. How can you, for instance, call me a god man when I sometimes go to the extent of saying that God is irrelevant?"

"There is no other way that we can function in this society except to live in hope and die in hope. There are some people who have given up. But we force them to become functional in this value system which we have created. We even push them to commit suicide lest they become manic-depressive individuals. We are solely responsible for driving all these people into a situation where they have to put an end to themselves. They don't want to be functional here. They have given up. That is the reason why I say that the psychiatrist is the enemy of this culture, because he is forcing all those people who have given up to fit into this value system."

"You are not ready to accept the fact that you have to give up. A complete and total surrender. It is a state of hopelessness which says that there is no way out... Any movement in any direction, on any dimension, at any level, is taking you away from yourself..."

"I don't want to use that word 'surrender', because it has certain mystical overtones. It is a state of hopelessness which says that there is no way out of this situation. Any movement, in any direction, on any level, is taking you away from that. Maybe something can happen there, we don't know. But even that hope that something will happen is still a hope."

"You see, giving up something in the hope of getting something else in its place is not really giving up. There is nothing to give up there. The very idea of giving up, the very idea of denying certain things to yourself, is in the hope of getting something else."

"All that is necessary for the survival of this living organism is already there. The tremendous intelligence of the body is no match for all that we have gathered and acquired through our intellect."

"It is terror, not love, not brotherhood that will help us to live together. Until this message percolates to the level of human consciousness, I don't think there is any hope."

"The body knows what it needs to do to survive. If it does not have the means to survive, it goes gracefully. The only reason for this organism to exist is to give continuity to the human species. Sex is only for reproduction, but you have turned that into a pleasure movement. What else is sex for than reproduction?"

"You don't have to teach dogs, cats, pigs, and other wild animals, how to search for food, eat and survive. All our activity is nothing but an extension of the same survival mechanism. But in this process we have succeeded in sharpening that instrument. With the help of that instrument we are able to create everything that we are so proud of — progress, this, that, and the other."

"The cooperation there springs from the total selfishness of mutual survival. It's like the cell in your body which also can survive only when it cooperates with the cell next to it. Otherwise it has no chance of survival. That's the only way we can live together. But that has to percolate to the level of, if you want to use that word, your 'consciousness'. Only then you will live in this world peacefully."

"Animals kill only for their survival and leave the rest of their game. You can call it garbage or whatever you want. Every other thing survives on that. If I take only whatever I need for myself, the rest is there for everybody. There won't be any shortage."

"The body does not want to learn anything or know anything, because it has that intelligence — native, innate intelligence — that helps it to survive. If this body is in a jungle, it will survive; if it doesn't, it's gone. But it will fight to the last. That's just the way the human body is functioning. If there is some danger to it, the body throws in everything that is available and tries to protect itself. If it cannot, it gives in. But in a way the body has no death. The atoms in it are put together and what happens at death is a reshuffling of the atoms. They will be used somewhere else. So the body has no birth or death, because it has no way of experiencing that it is alive or that it will be dead tomorrow."

"What it [the body] is concerned with is in its own survival. And it will survive. There is no doubt about it. When the time comes, it will probably flush the whole thing [the cultural input] out of its system. That would be the luckiest day for mankind. That is something that cannot be achieved through any volition or effort, or through the help of any teacher who says that there are ways and means of freeing you from the stranglehold of your thoughts."

"You are trying to enforce peace through violence. Yoga, meditation, prayers, mantras, are all violent techniques. The living organism is very peaceful; you don't have to do a thing. The peacefully functioning body doesn't care one hoot for your ecstasies, beatitudes, or blissful states."

"Anything you do with this will cause you pain, that is why I say the search for moksha is the dukkha of all dukkhas (laughter). There is no end to that, you will keep searching for this eternally, you are not going to get it. Even if you get what you want, and experience bliss, beatitude, God knows what, there is always more and more of it. Silence you experience, but you want permanent silence, you want always to be in silence. But in the very nature of things, there is no permanence at all. You have never lived with these (liberated) people, I do not know if there are any."

"It is very difficult to be like the other fellow, to be ordinary. Mediocrity takes a great deal of energy. But to be ourselves is very easy. You don't have to do a thing. No effort is necessary. You don't have to exercise your will. You need not do a thing to be yourself. But to be something other than what you are, you have to do a lot of things."

"The techniques of meditation are self centered activities. They are all self-perpetuating mechanisms which you use. So the object of your search for ultimate reality is defeated by all these techniques because these techniques are self-perpetuating instruments. You will suddenly realize, or it will dawn on you, that the very search for ultimate reality is also a self-perpetuating mechanism. There is nothing to reach, nothing to gain, nothing to attain."

"All that you are doing — all the therapies and techniques that you are using to free yourself from fear, for whatever reason you want to be free from fear — is the thing that is maintaining the fear and giving continuity to it. So you do not want the fear to come to an end. If the fear comes to an end, the fear of what you know comes to an end. You will physically drop dead. A clinical death will take place."

"The hundred different techniques that they offer to you have not been subjected to test. You don't have any statistical evidence to prove that there is something to what they claim. They exploit the gullibility and credulity of the people. When once you have everything that you need, the material goodies, you look around and ask the question, 'Is that all there is to it?' And that situation is exploited by those people. They don't have any answers for the problems facing us today."

"All these therapies, all these techniques, religious or otherwise, are only perpetuating the agony of man. It is very comforting for people to believe that somehow, through some miracle, they are going to be freed from the problems that they are confronted with today. There is no way out of this because we are all wholly and solely responsible for the problems that we have created for ourselves and for others."

"There is no teaching of mine, and never shall be one. 'Teaching' is not the word for it. A teaching implies a method or a system, a technique or a new way of thinking to be applied in order to bring about a transformation in your way of life. What I am saying is outside the field of teachability; it is simply a description of the way I am functioning. It is just a description of the natural state of man - this is the way you, stripped of the machinations of thought, are also functioning."

"My interest is not to knock off what others have said [that is too easy], but to knock off what I am saying. More precisely, I am trying to stop what you are making out of what I am saying."

"My mission, if there is any, should be, from now on, to debunk every statement I have made. If you take seriously and try to use or apply what I have said, you will be in danger."

"My teaching, if it can be so called, stands or falls by itself. It is a threat to society. So the best thing would have been to burn all the memories that you have of me along with my body. But that's impossible."

"My teaching, if that is the word you want to use, has no copyright. You are free to reproduce, distribute, interpret, misinterpret, distort, garble, do what you like, even claim authorship, without my consent or the permission of anybody."

"I am like a puppet sitting here. It's not just I; all of us are puppets. Nature is pulling the strings, but we believe that we are acting. If you function that way [as puppets], then the problems are simple. But we have superimposed on that [the idea of] a 'person' who is pulling those strings."

"What I am saying is not born out of my keen observation of things around me. It is not born out of logical thinking. It is not a logically ascertained premise."

"Thought is in its birth, in its origin, in its expression and in its actions very fascist. When I use the word 'fascist' I do not use it in the political sense but to mean that it controls and shapes our thinking and our actions."

"Thought is something dead and can never touch anything living. It cannot capture life, contain it, and give expression to it. The moment it tries to touch life it is destroyed by the quality of life."

"Stop thinking and start living."

"The human thinking is born out of some sort of neurological defect in the human body. Therefore anything that is born out of human thinking is destructive."

"Thought is very essential for us to survive in this world. But it cannot help us in achieving the goals that we have placed before ourselves. The goals are unachievable through the help of thought. The quest for happiness, as you mentioned, is impossible because there is no such thing as permanent happiness. There are moments of happiness, and there are moments of unhappiness. But the demand to be in a permanent state of happiness is the enemy of this body."

"Your highly praised inventiveness springs from your thinking, which is essentially a protective mechanism. The mind has invented both religion and dynamite to protect what it regards as its best interests."

"When thought is not there all the time, what is there is living from moment to moment. It's all in frames, millions and millions and millions of frames, to put it in the language of film."

"Every time a thought is born, you are born. When the thought is gone, you are gone. But the 'you' does not let the thought go, and what gives continuity to this 'you' is the thinking."

"This labelling is necessary when you must communicate with someone else or with yourself. But you communicate with yourself all the time. Why do you do this? The only difference between you and the person who talks aloud to himself is that you don't talk aloud. The moment you do begin to talk aloud, along comes the psychiatrist. That chap, of course, is doing the same thing that you are doing, communicating to himself all the time - 'bag', 'red bag', 'obsessive', 'compulsive', 'Oedipus complex,' 'greedy', 'bench', 'banister', 'martini'. Then he says something is wrong with you and puts you on the couch and wants to change you, to help you."

"Put it simply. I can't follow a very complex structure - I have that difficulty, you see. Probably I'm a low-grade moron or something, I don't know - I can't follow conceptual thinking. You can put it in very simple words. What exactly is the question? Because the answer is there; I don't have to give the answer. What I usually do is restructure the question, rephrase it in such a way that the question appears senseless to you."

"The use of words to achieve, to accomplish a certain thing is what is called thinking, otherwise there are no words."

"The human thinking is born out of some sort of neurological defect in the human body. Therefore anything that is born out of human thinking is destructive."

"I don't have any thoughts which I can call my own - not one thought, not one word, not one experience."

"We think that thoughts are there inside of us. We think that they are self-generated and spontaneous. What is actually there is what I call a thought sphere. The thought-sphere is the totality of man's experiences, thoughts, and feelings passed on to us from generation to generation."

"Everything that is born out of thought, every discovery you have made so far is used for destructive purposes. Every invention of ours, every discovery of ours is pushing us in the direction of total annihilation of the human species."

"You forget that everything you have around you is the creation of thought. You are yourself born out of thought, otherwise you would not be here at all. In that sense thought has a tremendous value, yet it is the very thing that will destroy you."

"What I am saying is not the absence of thought. The thought will be there. But it has become a part of the movement of life. Thought is never separate or have an independent existence. In you the thought has a parallel movement with the movement of life."

"The other animals use thought - the dog, for example, can recognize its owner - in a simple manner. They recognize without using language. Humans have added to the structure of thought, making it much more complex. Thought is not yours or mine; it is our common inheritance."

"I brushed aside everything born out of human thought. Everything they told me falsified me. And what you are trying to get you can never get, because there is nothing to get."

"You have, through combinations and permutations of ideation and mentation about thoughts, created your own thoughts which you call your own. Just as when you mix different colors, you can create thousands of pastel colors, but basically all of them can be reduced to only seven colors that you find in nature. What you think is yours is the combination and permutation of all those thoughts, just the way you have created hundreds and hundreds of pastel colors. You have created your own ideas. That is what you call thinking."

"You have no way of finding out the fact that you were born on a particular day. What you are not ready to accept is that you are a thing exactly like a computer. You are so mechanical. Everything is put in there. There is nothing which you can call your own. I don't have any thought which I can call my own. What I want to emphasize to those who come to see me is that thoughts are not really spontaneous. They are not self-generated. They always come from outside. Another important thing for us to realize and understand is that the brain is not a creator."

"Have you ever tried to find out? What there is is only about thought but not thought. You cannot separate yourself from a thought and look at it. What you have there is only a thought about that thought, but you do not see the thought itself. You are using those thoughts to achieve certain results, to attain certain things, to become something, to be somebody other than what you actually are."

"I always give the example of a word-finder. You want to know the meaning of a word and press a button. The word-finder says, 'Searching'. It is thinking about it. If there is any information put in there, it comes out with it. That is exactly the way you are thinking. You ask questions and if there are any answers there, they come out. If the answers are not there, the brain says 'Sorry'. It is no different from a computer."

"That energy is something which cannot be defined and which cannot be understood. Not that I am mystifying it. The moment the dead thought tries to capture that energy, it [thought] is destroyed. Thought is matter. The moment it is created, it has to be destroyed. But that is the very thing that we resist, you see. Thought is born and is destroyed, and again it is born and again it is destroyed. The only way you can give continuity to thought is through this constant demand to experience everything. This is the only way you try to maintain the continuity of the 'experiencing structure'."

"When I talk of 'feeling', I do not mean the same thing that you do. Actually, feeling is a physical response, a thud in the thymus. The thymus, one of the endocrine glands, is located under the breast bone. The doctors tell us that it is active through childhood until puberty and then becomes dormant. When you come into your natural state, this gland is re-activated. Sensations are felt there; you don't translate them as 'good' or 'bad'; they are just a thud. If there is a movement outside of you - a clock pendulum swinging, or a bird flying across your field of vision - that movement is also felt in the thymus. The whole of your being is that movement or vibrates with that sound; there is no separation. This does not mean that you identify yourself with that bird or whatever - 'I am that flying bird'. There is no 'you' there, nor is there any object. What causes that sensation, you don't know. You do not even know that it is a sensation."

"There are certain glands... This I have discussed so many times with doctors who are doing research into the ductless glands. Those glands are what the Hindus call chakras. These ductless glands are located in exactly the same spots where the Hindus speculated the chakras are. There is one gland here which is called the 'thymus gland'. That is very active when you are a child — very active — they have feelings, extraordinary feelings. When you reach the age of puberty it becomes dormant — that's what they say. When again this kind of a thing happens, when you are reborn again, that gland is automatically activated, so all the feelings are there. Feelings are not thoughts, not emotions; you feel for somebody. If somebody hurts himself there, that hurt is felt here — not as a pain, but there is a feeling, you see — you automatically say 'Ah!'"

"These experts make fun of me when I say that the most important of all glands is the thymus gland. When I discussed this subject with some physiologists and doctors they made fun of me. Naturally so, because according to them, the gland is inactive. If it is activated through any external means, it would be an abnormal situation. But, you know, the thymus is the most important gland, and feelings operate there without the element of thought."

"If you don't accept what I am saying, it is just fine with me. If some top physician wants to reject what I say, that fellow will say that I am talking rubbish. But now volumes have been written in America on the subject of the thymus gland. I am not claiming any special knowledge of these things. What I am trying to say is that the feelings felt at the thymus are quite different from the feelings induced by thoughts."

"Whatever you want to happen is in terms of time. Whatever the state you want to be in, you are not in that state, because the goal is there, which is tomorrow, not today. So if this (goal) is not there, the thought which is thinking in terms of something happening in time is not there."

"Time means the future."

"It took three years for this body to fall into a new rhythm of its own"

"Thought cannot conceive of the possibility of anything happening outside the field of time. I don't want to discuss time in a metaphysical sense. I mean by time yesterday, tomorrow, and the day after. The instrument which has produced tremendous results in this area [of time] is unable to solve problems in the area of living. We use this instrument to achieve material results. We also apply the same thing to achieve our so-called spiritual goals. It works here but it doesn't work there."

"Thought can never conceive the possibility of achieving anything except in time. It does not want to let go of this image which is created by what you would like to be, what you think you ought to be or should be. That's really the problem."

"In this particular time frame, all events are independent, and there is no continuity among them. Each event is an independent frame, but you are linking up all these [frames] and trying to channel the movement of life in a particular direction for your ulterior motives. But actually you have no way of controlling the events. They are outside of you. All you can do is establish a relationship with particular events, or put them all together and create a tremendous structure of thought and philosophy."

"There is no such thing as truth. The only thing that is actually there is your 'logically' ascertained premise, which you call truth."

"You can never understand this; you can only experience this in terms of your past experience. This is outside the realm of experience. The natural state is acausal: it just happens. No communication is possible, and none necessary. The only thing that is real to you is the way you are functioning; it is an act of futility to relate my description to the way you are functioning. When you stop all this comparison, what is there is your natural state. Then you will not listen to anybody."

"When the 'you' is not there, when the question is not there, what is is understanding. You are finished. You'll walk out. You will never listen to anybody describing his state or ask any questions about understanding at all."

"I am always emphasizing that somehow the truth has to dawn upon you that there is nothing to understand."

"The demand to understand and bring about a change in you is the one that is responsible for the demand to understand the world and then bring about a change in the world. They are one and the same. That is why you are interested in listening to others. Through that listening you think you will be able to bring about a change in you and then also a change in the world around you."

"What is there to understand? To understand anything we have to use the same instrument that is used to understand this mechanical computer that is there before me. Its workings can be understood through repeatedly trying to learn or operate it. You try again and again. If it doesn't work, there is someone who can tell you how to operate it, take it apart and put it together. You yourself will learn through a repetitive process — how to change this, improve this, modify this, and so on and so forth. This instrument which we have been using to understand has not helped us to understand anything except that every time you are using it you are sharpening it."

"The understanding that there is nothing to understand, nothing to get, somehow dawned on me. I was seriously wanting to understand. Otherwise I would not waste forty-nine years of my life. But when once this understanding that there is nothing to understand somehow dawned on me, the very demand to be free from anything, even from the physical demands, was not there any more. But how this happened to me I really wouldn't know. So there is no way I can share this with you, because it is not in the area of experiencing things."

"I didn't understand a thing. I am telling you. There is no process to go through to reach anywhere. It looks like I went through some process. No. I did not. I wasted so many years of my life in pursuit of the goals that I had set for myself. If it had dawned on me during the early stages of my life that there is nothing to understand, I wouldn't have wasted forty-nine years of my life and denied myself everything. I was born with a silver spoon, sleeping on a luxurious bed. Do you think if I had known all this I would go there and lie down in a cave repeating things which I did not know?"

"We have developed and sharpened the intellect through years. So it [the intellect, in U.G.] understood in its own way that it is not the instrument, that there is no other instrument, and that there is nothing to understand. My problem was how to use this intellect to understand whatever I was looking for. But it didn't help me to understand a thing. So I was searching for some other instrument to understand, that is, intuition, this, that, and the other. But I realized that this is the only instrument I have; and the hope that I would understand something through some other instrument, on some other level, and some other way, disappeared. It dawned on me, 'There is nothing to understand'. When this happened, it hit me like a shaft of lightning. From then on, the very demand to understand anything was finished. That understanding is the one that is expressing itself now. And it cannot be used as an instrument to understand anything. It cannot be used as an instrument to guide, direct or help me, you or anybody."

"Any attempt on my part to understand anything at any given moment is exploded because that [thought] is the only instrument I have, and there is no other instrument. This instrument cannot invent a thing called hope again anymore. There is no hope of understanding. The moment it [thought] is forming something there, it is exploded, not through any volition, not through any effort, but that's exactly the way it happens. It is continuously happening all the time. That is the way life is moving along. It has no direction."

"If there was anything to the teachings of the Upanishads, there wouldn't have been any need for Buddha to come. Why did he? They created the opportunity, the need for a man like Buddha - he came after the Upanishads. You see, the Vedic stuff deteriorated, then the Upanishadic seers arrived on the scene; and they messed up the whole thing, so Buddha came; and afterwards, so many people. Buddhism deteriorated in this country, so Sankara had to come; and Sankara's followers did exactly the same thing, so there arose the need for Ramanujacharya to come - it's the same thing, you see - and, after him, Madhavacharya. Where is the room for all these teachers?"

"Beauty is not in the object. Nor is it in the eye of the beholder. To say, like the Upanishads do, that the total absence of the self is beauty is a lot of hogwash! The act of capturing and framing, which thought creates for us, is what we call beauty."

"You are talking of the Turiya state where there is no division. Do you know what you are talking about? All your sadhana is the very thing that is creating the division there. Through knowing you think, you will become. Maybe that fellow who talked about it was in a state of bliss. What good is that? If you experience that, it is false. If you touch the man, it is false."

"When I went to school I studied everything, including Advaita Vedanta. Vedanta was my special subject for my Masters in philosophy. Very early during my studies I arrived at the conclusion that there is no such a thing as mind at all."

"You may talk of the unity of life or the oneness of life, and all that kind of stuff and nonsense. But there is no way you can create that unitary movement through any effort of yours. The only way for anyone who is interested in finding out what this is all about is to watch how this separation is occurring, how you are separating yourself from the things that are happening around you and inside of you. Actually there is no difference between the outside and the inside."

"Such actions of yours like breath-control and yoga blur the sensitivity of the sensory perceptions. All this is really an enemy to the living organism."

"Many people want to fit me into traditional descriptions of things like yoga, this, and that."

"You know, the whole Buddhist philosophy is built on the foundation of that 'no mind'. Yet they have created tremendous techniques of freeing themselves from the mind. All the Zen techniques of meditation try to free you from the mind. The very instrument that we are using to free ourselves from the thing called mind is the mind."

"Those Zen bastards! They institutionalized meditation. Jokers! I was never attracted to Zen masters. Never! Because they were all the followers of Buddha and what Buddhism tried to preach to the world. So reject it. You all are them! They institutionalized the whole thing. They invented the techniques of meditation."