..., they will pull it out. They will not wear shoes, they will walk barefoot, because shoes are a luxury. Naked, without any possessions, they impress people very much. Extremists are always very impressive. You are greedy, you are after money, after power, prestige; they have renounced all. Certainly, a great respect arises in your heart for them because you know you cannot do this; it is too cold to be...

... naked. And to live without money.... The Jaina monk cannot touch money; he is not allowed to touch it, he is not even allowed to SEE money. How can you live without money? A great respect arises in you. You live on one extreme and you respect the other extreme. Sooner or later, when you will become fed up with your extreme, you will start moving to the other extreme. But no basic change happens. The...

... man who is afraid of touching money is still in a state of ignorance, unawareness. Buddha says: Stop in the middle. There is no need to be indulgent, there is no need to renounce either. Just be in the middle, exactly in the middle. He has a great point there: if you remain exactly in the middle, that is the point from where transcendence happens. It is like the pendulum of a clock. It goes from the...

... to the insurance company and said, "Can I get the money for which my husband has been insured?" The man in the office said, "But he is still alive. He is not dead. You will get the money only when he is dead." She said, "I know that he is not dead, but no life is left in him either." That's the situation: people are not dead and yet not alive either. They are somehow...

... wants to have money, it wants to have God too. It wants to have power; it wants to have liberation, moksha, truth, nirvana. It wants to have everything. Buddha saw it and in that seeing he dropped that mad effort and he dropped the very source of ambition. It was a full-moon night. He laughed at himself, at the whole stupidity of six years. He relaxed, he sat under a tree. For the first time after six...

... can allow me to live here but no foreigners should be allowed to live around me, and no commune should be allowed to be made. You think you are independent. You think that you are free but in this world where you have to beg and you already have loaned so much money from the world and every day you need more and more loans, you cannot deny America a small favor which costs you nothing. Even America...

... type of professional within the commune, why we should bother to go out? And these people certainly looked after the commune with more love, because money was no more the question. In the commune we has dissolved the money completely and this point you have to remember. Just by stopping that you cannot use money in the commune we destroyed the division between the poor and the rich, there was no need...

... for a dictatorship of the proletariat. In seventy years in Russia they have not been able to bring a classless society. We brought it in four years and without harassing anybody, without taking anybody's money -- just stopping that in the commune money is a dirty word and we will not be using money. If you need anything you can get from the commune. You may have millions of dollars, I may not have a...

... perspective. Just somebody becomes a prime minister and he starts thinking that he has all the wisdom of the world. This is sheer nonsense. But I have the vision, I have the people to materialize it and we will make the last effort to create a society to show to the whole world. That without a government a commune can exist, that without money people can exist and not in poverty but with great inner...

... whole approach was purely economic. But man is not just money. Man is much more. Man is not just what he possesses, he is much more. But what he possesses has a certain value as far as his individuality is concerned. According to me, the right communism should be that accumulation of private property in a few hands should be stopped, so that everybody can have private property. Nobody is super-rich...

... families. This disparity is inhuman, because the producer is hungry and the parasite goes on collecting money which is useless to him. It is useful for those who are dying of hunger - and they are the producers. These fifteen rich families don't work, don't produce; they are simply clever about how to suck blood. They have spread like an octopus around millions of people, and they are sucking their blood...

.... In a thousand and one ways all the money goes silently, without any noise, into their treasuries. You will be surprised to know that just the city of Bombay has half the money of the whole country. Strange... the whole country works - people are working in the fields, in the gardens, in the factories - but somehow there are strategies so that the money goes on moving towards Bombay. Half of the...

... country's money in one city! This is intolerable. But one should not be angry about it. It is intolerable because it is inhuman and it destroys people's love, people's compassion, people's kindness. It creates all kinds of crime. Poverty is the mother of all crimes. It is a very strange world. First, you make people poor and force them to become criminals, and then you have courts and the police and the...

... capitalist party or to another capitalist family. They go on promising the poor a better future, and they know perfectly well that a better future is not going to come because first they have to repay the money that has been given to them. They are themselves slaves. This situation is ugly. The structure should certainly be changed. But it should be changed because you have a compassion, a love for all...

... suffering human beings - not an anger, an envy, a jealousy against those few who have all the money, who have all the luxuries. It is a question of focus: are you fighting for the poor or are you fighting because of your jealousy that you are not one of the fifteen families? Is it your jealousy, envy, anger, violence, that is prompting you to rebel against this structure? If that is the case then, when...

... boxes and dies. Sure enough, on the day of the funeral, they all show up and each places a box in the grave. Later on they decide to go to a nearby pub for a drink, where, after a long silence, the priest at last speaks. "Friends," says the priest, "I am afraid I have a confession to make. I did not put all the money in the grave. What with contributions falling off lately and the...

... church in need of repair, it seemed such a sin not to put some of the money where it will do some good." Then the minister says, "Father, I am glad you spoke up. As you know, I am the head of several charities. And, likewise, it seemed to me such a sin to just bury all that money. So I too kept some of it, of course a small portion, to help these very worthwhile and needy charities of mine...

... reincarnation. That has made the whole difference. If there is only one life you have to be in a hurry. You have to do everything quick and you have to do everything skillfully so you need not do it again, because time is short. In the West, time is money. Because time is so short - seventy, eighty years... half of it will be simply wasted in sleep; most of it will be wasted in earning bread and butter, the...

...: many many lives, millions of lives. There is more time than you need; it is not money at all. Then there is no question of hurry, no question of speed, no question of being skillful. You can do the same thing again and again. You can sleep and let the time pass. If this life goes down the drain there is nothing to worry about: there will be another life and another, and so on, so forth. These two...

.... Don't waste it in accumulating money, gadgets; don't waste it in superficial things. Think of the essential, not of the accidental. That was the message behind it. But what happened? People turned it completely upside down. They became much more interested in the nonessential, because there is not much time, so "Eat, drink and be merry! You are not going to be born again, so have as much as you...

... number twenty-four, and it won." "Why, you fool, three times seven is twenty-one, not twenty-four." "You've got the education," said Killoran, "I've got the lottery money." And, Meeshael, that's what I would like to say to you: you may know mathematics - you have got the education, I have got the lottery money! The last question: Question 5: BELOVED MASTER, I HAVE...

.... Nobody is concerned with the real problems of the country. Democracy is not really a problem for the poor. They are ready to sell their votes for just two rupees, five rupees. Now in a country where people are ready to sell their votes for just five rupees, how do you think a democracy can function? Whosoever has the money will purchase the votes. So it is good for the people who have money, it is good...

... to do with the government, it has nothing to do with anything else: it is a question of your own past life. So if you are poor, you are poor because of your past life; you have committed certain sins and you are suffering. If somebody is rich, he is rich because of his past life; he had attained great virtue. You have heard it said you cannot purchase virtue with money - but you can purchase money...

... with virtue. In India that is an accepted rule: you can have more money by being virtuous - not in this life, remember. If in this life you are virtuous you won't have any money! If in the past life you were virtuous, in this life you have to be as cunning as possible, then you will have money and you will have power. Nobody is concerned with the whole nation as such. My concern is with the whole...

... don't need. If I need money sometime... you can just leave your address with me." As I refused - the man was almost seventy-five or eighty years old - tears, big tears started coming out of his eyes. I said, "Have I hurt you?" He said, "You don't understand my misery and my poverty. I am one of the richest men in the country, but I have got only money and nothing else. So when...

... somebody refuses my money, he has refused me. I don't have anything else to give to you. You can just accept it and burn it in front of me - that is your business. Once you have accepted, what you do with the money is not my concern, but you cannot reject it. I am a very poor man, because I don't have anything else than money." It was so difficult; I accepted the money and gave it to the...

... organization which had arranged the lectures for me, but the old man became a great friend to me. The difference in my age and his age was great at that time. He said, "If you have really accepted the money, whenever you come to Calcutta you have to stay at my house." I said, "There is no problem, I will be staying at your house." He was really a great soul. The whole house was centrally...

... miserliness... Just a little bit longer nose and I would have been a beautiful person. And he has given me a nose which looks as if he has punched it. Is it a nose or a joke? - punch line!" And you are always looking all around - thousands of people. There are people who have beautiful bodies, there are people who have great intelligence, and there are people who have money - and they all keep you in...

... send him every week exactly seven days' money for food, for clothes, for absolute necessities. And Van Gogh was fasting for four days and saving the money to purchase paints and canvases and brushes. So one day he would eat, one day he would fast. Perhaps no man has fasted so spiritually. THIS I call a spiritual fast, because it is in the service of creativity. It is not out of greed - you fast...

... immediately threw the money out on the street and pushed the man out and told him, "Tell my brother never to send any other man to purchase my paintings. You are not the man... you don't even have an eye for the beauty, for creativity. You don't even want to see... Certainly I can say this money has been given by my brother to you, just to give me a little satisfaction that at least one painting has...

... time, where the medical and the psychiatric doctors were sympathetic to him, to his whole misery. He had done no harm. And they allowed him, from the institution's money, to have paints and everything that he wanted. For the first time he had everything he needed to paint without being hungry. His best paintings are those which he painted in a madhouse. But still he was thought mad, because the...

.... The commune has hospitals, schools, colleges. The commune takes care of the children; parents can visit them. It is simply insignificant whether the parents are living together or they have separated. For the child, they both are available; he can visit them, they can visit him. All the communes should be interdependent, but they will not exchange money. Money should be dissolved. It has done...

... tremendous harm to humanity. Now it is time to say goodbye to it! These communes should exchange things. You have more milk products; you can give them to another commune, because you need more clothes, and that commune can provide you with more clothes -- a simple barter system, so no commune becomes rich. Money is a very strange thing. You can accumulate it; that is the strangest secret of money. You...

... cannot accumulate milk products, you cannot accumulate vegetables. If you have more vegetables you have to share with some commune which has not enough vegetables. But money can be accumulated. And if one commune becomes richer than the other commune, then comes from the back door, the poverty and the richness and the whole nightmare of capitalism, and the classes of the poor and the rich, and the...

... desire to dominate, because you are rich. You can enslave other communes. Money is one of the enemies of man. Communes will be exchanging. They will be broadcasting on their radio stations, that such and such a product is available from them. Anybody who has certain other products that they need can contact them, and things can be exchanged in a friendly way; there is no haggling, there is no...

... existence. Our situation is that of a small child in the forest who has lost his mother and is searching in the forest, not knowing where to go. This situation allows many exploiters... this helplessness is used by those who are in power, by those who have money. The helplessness is used to convert you into a slave, into dependence. Hence, all the religions have developed particular programs. They begin...

... tree cannot give anything more - she cannot give money, she cannot give gold - but she can give beautiful flowers, as big as possible, to a loving heart. She can give juicier fruits. Love has never been thought of as food, but it is a very subtle kind of food. And now psychologists have concluded that if a child gets everything necessary - all chemicals, all hormones, food, exercise, fresh air, rest...

... safe principles we do not apply them to human beings - this has been the idea prevalent in the masses. Even the medical professionals - doctors, physicians - also believe in it. But the truth is something very different. Just a few days ago.... For almost two years, a group of senators in America were investigating about a certain amount of money... not a small amount of money; two hundred million...

... dollars is there in the books, but where has it been spent, where has it gone? The cabinet went on denying any knowledge of it, the president went on denying. The suspicion was that the government of America today is the greatest terrorist. And the money is going to the terrorists in a small country in the middle portion of the Americas, between South America and North America. Just like Cuba, another...

... American country because it had gone into the hands of the communists. And after two years of continuous struggle, only now has the president accepted that, "Yes, that money has gone to the terrorists." And the whole world is silent, nobody has criticized it! Governments are to save people from terrorism, and here governments are supplying money and arms and food to terrorists. And then they go...

... reflection, you are already in love with it. It is just like a photograph.... Once in a while it happens. I have received a few letters saying that somebody has seen my picture and has fallen in love. He had no money to come; it took ten years to reach here, but for ten years he has been a sannyasin. For ten years he has meditated and now he has come - a mature person. Even the photograph has helped...

...; something in the photograph turned him on. And it must have made a great impression because for ten years he was earning money just to come here. The way, the path, is very simple and can be made even more simple. But simplicity is against the priests, they want it to be complex - so complex that they are needed to interpret it; so complex that without a mediator it is impossible to grow in your...

... teach me morality? What relationship has morality with geography?" I remember the poor man who was my geography teacher. He was in trouble because I had taken something from the pocket of the student who was sitting by my side. I had taken his money from his pocket and this teacher was telling me, "Don't do that." I said, "That's not your business. You are a geography teacher and...

... this is a question of morality. If you want, I am ready to go to the principal; you come with me. Nowhere in the geography syllabus... I have read it and nowhere is it said that you cannot take somebody else's money. And money is simply money; whoever has it, it is his. Right now it is mine. A few moments before it may have been his, but he has lost it. He should be more alert. If you want to give...

... advice, give advice to him. "In the first place, what is the need to bring so much money to the geography class? There is nothing to buy, nothing to purchase; there is not going to be any shopping. Why did he bring his money here? Then if he has brought the money, he should be alert. It is not my fault, it is his fault, and I have simply taken advantage of it, which is my right. To take advantage...

... pockets? Are you mad or something? Why do you go on bringing all these stones? And we have to throw them out every day." I said, "You don't understand. You can throw them, but if you have any understanding of a simple thing - I feel so ecstatic, so joyous when I see these stones. I am not interested in your money and I am not interested in anything else - I simply collect the stones." But...

... am finished with that. And Kaka is willing, I have asked him. He said he is willing:'Whenever there is no customer you can come and I will shave your head completely, and no question of money.' So you need not be worried. I am his free customer because nobody listens to him; I am the only person who listens." My father said, "But you know perfectly well that now this will create more...