... absolutely stuck and paralyzed. So people go on without deciding; people live just accidentally. Their decisions are dependent on the moment: whatsoever happens in the moment they allow it to happen. They are like driftwood, just at the mercy of the waves and the wind, with no sense of direction. And the war inside is constant: day in, day out, there is a civil war. The whole thing will continue if we...

... certain way you are very free: you cannot be condemned for your act. After the second world war, in the Nuremberg trials, so many of Adolf Hitler's top men simply said that they were not responsible, and they don't feel guilty. They were simply being obedient -- whatever was told they did it, and they did it with as much efficiency as they were capable of. In fact to make them responsible and condemn...

... them, punish them, send them to the gallows, according to me was not fair. It was not justice, it was revenge. If Adolf Hitler had won the war, then Churchill's people, Roosevelt's people, Stalin's people or they themselves would have been in the same situation, and they would have said exactly the same -- that they are not responsible. If Stalin had been on the stand in the court, he would have said...

... only one thing is taught through years of training, and that is obedience. In Germany, in the second world war, there were good people, but they were heads of concentration camps. They were good fathers, good husbands, good friends. Nobody could have conceived -- watching them in their families, with their friends, in the club -- that these people are burning thousands of Jews every day. And they...

.... With a genius president in America, and a genius president in the Soviet Union, a third world war becomes impossible. In fact, with geniuses ruling all over the world, the day will not be far off when they will decide that it is better to make one world rather than divide it into nations, because that solves problems more easily. There are thirty million Americans who are dieting because of too much...

... to Soviet Russia, the wheat can move to the poor country. And if there is one world, then there is no need for seventy-five percent of every nation's wealth to be wasted on nuclear weapons, on armies, on other kinds of war materials. Seventy-five percent! Humanity is living only on twenty-five percent. If there are no longer any nations, the question of war does not arise. A hundred percent of all...

...; otherwise, just get back to your own countries." And if Red Indians are in the government, the possibility of a third world war simply disappears, because Red Indians will not be at all interested, or even ready for a third world war. They will not pile up nuclear weapons - they cannot create them. And all the foreigners who call themselves Americans have taken it for granted that this is their...

... - synchronicity. There is no difference between the two. Question 5: BELOVED MASTER, CAN YOU SORT OUT THE BIG PEAS, THE SMALL PEAS, AND THE MIDDLE PEAS? It is a difficult problem. First I have to tell you the story from which the question has arisen. In the second world war, one of the German professors of philosophy was recruited into the army. He was not willing, but you know, Germany is Germany: willing or...

... goes on and after all this fight - as happens in every war - some kind of peace, some kind of treaty and the husband goes out to buy ice cream. And people are living together in this misery without any analysis of where it is coming from. It is coming from private property and the desire to keep the property in the hands of our own children. Karl Marx used to think that when communism comes, marriage...

... beginning of a war. One tribe would invade the other tribe, steal as many young girls as possible.... And even today a sword hangs symbolically by the side of the man who is sitting on the horse going to the girl's house to get married. And the crowd that follows is a reminder that marriage was once an attack by a crowd on another tribe. No idiot even asks why the sword, and what is its purpose? There is...

... not going to be any fight; the marriages are prearranged... But remnants go on for centuries, and if you go into a deep research you will be surprised. The horse, the sword, the crowd, the marriage party... it used to be the army. And the band was a declaration: "We are coming. Be ready." It is a war symbol. And those women stolen forcibly, violently, naturally became slaves. Times changed...

... that is the only community in the whole of history which has never fought a war. It does not know that wars exist. Perhaps wars have something to do with your repressions. After each ten, twenty years the whole humanity is so full of repressions that a great explosion into a war is an absolute necessity; otherwise you all will go mad. War is a civilized way to go mad and yet retain the idea that you...

.... And I cannot be silent because I don't know what silence is. I have never known it; silence has never happened to me. I know a sort of silence: the silence that comes between two thoughts, as a gap; the silence that exists between two words, just as a gap. Our silence is just like the peace which happens between two wars. It is not really peace; it is just preparation for another war. How can that...

... be peace which bridges two wars? The war simply goes underground, that's all. It is a cold war. It is never peace. Our silence is like that. So tell the master: I cannot be silent and I cannot talk - so tell me what to do. Don't start anything on your own, because whatsoever you start will be wrong. Talk or silence - whatsoever you start will be wrong. Just leave everything to the master, and ask...

... willing, if they are not intelligent enough to change, then change them forcibly. Russia was getting settled after the second world war. It had had so many shocks, so much disturbance in the second world war that it was not interested in a world revolution right then. But Mao, in China, was very excited about transforming the whole of Asia into communism. That became a rift between Mao and Stalin...

..., because Stalin wanted to settle down first; the second world war had disturbed Russia so much that if Stalin started thinking of world revolution, Russia itself might get lost in it. So he was more concerned about Russia. But Mao was ideologically right. He said, "Then you are becoming a nationalist, and communism is an international philosophy; we are not to be worried about nations, we have to...

... was thought that it would be dangerous to give the printing press - a very innocent invention - to the masses, because then there would be so many books available that the mediocre mind wouldn't be able to cope with it; it would go berserk. To avoid that, printing presses remained suppressed. Gunpowder was discovered two thousand years ago. But it was never used in war for the simple reason that the...

... soldier is the most retarded person in society. He needs to be retarded; it is society's demand that he should be retarded. His training is for remaining mediocre so that he never doubts anything, he never questions anything, he never says NO to anything. He has no mind of his own. Orders come from above, and he simply follows. He was accustomed to the old strategy of war; he was trained for archery and...

... other things. Now gunpowder will be so new to him that he may not be able to use it, or he will use it wrongly. It is better to leave him alone; he is doing perfectly well with his archery.... In India it was discovered almost five thousand years ago that the elephant, in comparison to the horse, is not the right vehicle as far as war is concerned, because the horse has more mobility, quickness. The...

... you that the times are no longer ordinary. And there have never been, in the whole history of man, such dangerous moments as those through which we are passing. It is no time for quarreling, arguing about theological matters; it is not intelligent to console yourself that some miracle will happen and the world war will be postponed. It is not only the world war -- the attack is multidimensional. The...

... ecology of the earth is breaking down. There are thousands of submarines moving around the earth in the ocean -- and each submarine is carrying nuclear weapons so powerful that even the whole energy that was used in the second world war is nothing compared to the energy of one submarine carrying nuclear missiles. The Soviet Union has its own submarines; America has its own submarines. Just by accident...