Saner society

freedom, a life which has its source within. He does not care about respectability, honour, money and power. All these things become trivia, because the meditator knows real, valuable things: he knows silence, peace, love; he knows a dancing heart, he knows the music that is within his own being and also outside of him. He becomes aware of all these treasures. Now money is like children’s play; power is violent, brutal, barbarous. Anything that needs to be competitive, he will not participate in, because every competition means enmity, every competition means putting somebody down. Your victory is going to be somebody’s defeat, and he cannot conceive that he can be the cause of anybody’s defeat, sadness and suffering. He becomes a dropout from the competitive, egoistic, money-minded, power-oriented society.

Mind games

Hence every society has been afraid of meditation. It teaches you things which, taken to the extreme, are bound to create insanity in you. And once you are a participant in the game, there is no way not to go to the extreme. One thing leads to another, one step to another step.

You want to reach the peak, you forget completely that what you are doing is being very destructive to your own being — and you cannot be destructive to others without being destructive to yourself. Your jealousies, anger, your greed, all accumulate like wounds inside you. Sooner or later… there is a limit that you can tolerate; once that limit is crossed, the same society which has created the insanity in you puts you in an insane asylum.

And have you ever heard that anybody comes out cured from your insane asylums? Have you ever heard of anybody who is cured by years of psychoanalysis? I know people who have been, for 15 years or even 20 years, into psychoanalysis, wasting treasures. Now they have become addicts; their basic problem is still there but a new problem has arisen: they cannot live without psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis has become a drug. Twice a week or three times a week they need psychoanalysis.

But nobody is cured, because the function of psychoanalysis or psychiatry — or any other therapies used in insane asylums — is not to cure you. It is just to make you normally insane so that you can go back to work, so that you can be again useful to society, so that society can again exploit you. They are simply pushing you back within the limit so you can function efficiently.

This is not cure; any small incident and you may cross the line again. Your wife dies, your child dies, your business goes bankrupt and again you are back beyond the sanity line.

In fact, society is not sane, and its whole education and culture is not for the sane.

A strong foundation

The rebellious society of my vision will first discipline every child more in meditation than in anything else, because the child is the most capable of being meditative. The child is innocent, unburdened, unworried; he has no thoughts, no memories, no wounds, he is still unscratched.

The first thing that should be as a foundation for his whole life is the art of meditation; anything else should come later on. First, make sure that he knows how to get out of the mind, to get out of the jungle of thoughts any moment he wants. Then there will be no need of any madhouses and unnecessary psychoanalysis… society would be responsible.