The society is not afraid of these people; the society is afraid only of people who can become so centered, so conscious that laws become useless for them. They always do right. They are beyond the grip of the so-called powerful interests.

If individuals grow, society will diminish. The way they have known society – with the government, with the army, with the courts, with the policemen, with the jails – this society will diminish.

Certainly, because there are so many human beings, new forms of collectivities will come into being. I would not like to call them society, just to avoid the confusion between the words. I call the new collectivity a commune. The word is significant: it means a place where people are not only living together, but where people are in deep communion.

To live together is one thing; we are doing it: in every city, every town, thousands of people are living together – but what togetherness is there? People don’t even know their neighbors. They live in the same skyscraper, thousands of people, and they never come to know that they are living in the same house.

It is not togetherness, because there is no communion. It is simply a crowd, not a community. So I would like to replace the word society with the word commune.

Society has existed on certain basic principles. You will have to remove them, otherwise the society will not disappear. The first and the most important unit of society has been the family: if the family remains the way it is, then the society cannot disappear, then the church cannot disappear, then religions cannot disappear. Then we cannot create one world, one humanity.

The family is psychologically out of date. It is not that it was always there; there was a time when there was no family, people lived in tribes. The family came into existence because of private property. There were powerful people who managed to have more private property than anybody else, and they wanted it to be given to their children. Up to now there was no question…Men and women were meeting out of love; there was no marriage and no family – but once property came into existence, the man became very possessive of the woman. He turned the woman also into part of the property.

In Indian languages the woman is called property. In China the woman has become so much a property that even if a husband killed his wife…there was no law against it, no crime was committed. You are absolutely free to destroy your property: you can burn your furniture, you can burn your house. It is not a crime, it is your house. You can kill your wife…

With private property the woman also became private property, and every strategy was used so that the man can be absolutely certain that the child that is born from his wife is really his own. Now, this is a difficult problem: the father can never be absolutely certain; only the mother knows. But the father created every kind of barrier for the movement of the woman so that she could not come into contact with other men. All possibilities and all doors are closed.