In fact, I am telling these sannyasins, “Take it as an opportunity: perhaps in your whole life you may not have had an opportunity to remain in silence for two years. And death comes unknown to others; to you it is coming with a notice. It is perfectly useful, because you can prepare. Nobody else is ready for death, everybody is caught unprepared; you can prepare. And the preparation is to go deeper into meditation. Reach the point where death can never reach, and then let death come. You don’t die, you simply go on moving into new forms.”

So only in an intelligent, loving, understanding commune – every sannyasin has gone through the tests. In the cities people are resisting; even if they have symptoms they don’t want to be tested. The fear of condemnation will kill them. Two years of living in such a condemnation, there will be only one way: to commit suicide rather than be condemned by your own family, by your own people, friends, and live like a ghost, welcome nowhere. These people can only commit suicide. That will be the only respectable thing left for them.

But in a commune it is a totally different situation. All over the world we have communes, and we are making the commune the model for everything. Any city can follow the same ground rules. The basic thing is that the AIDS patient should not be condemned, that there should be special shelters, nursing homes – better than any other – for these people who are living under the shadow of death. And the best music, the best paintings, the best films, the best literature, anything that they want should be provided.

And the whole responsibility should be thrown onto the religious people. They should be charged for all the expenses, because it is they who have done it. And they are still doing crimes, and nobody is preventing them. They still go on telling people – in South Africa the pope is talking to people against birth control, against abortion, against the pill, because, “These are all against God’s will.” As if he knows God. As if he knows God’s will. And he is saying it to people whose birthrate is the highest in the world, who are already over-populated, starving, in utter degradation, in slavery – he is teaching them this nonsense. He should be immediately shot.

And the same is being done by all the other religions. Mohammedans still insist to marry four wives. That means they can create a four-times greater population than anybody else. And they say it is a religious question, and you cannot interfere in anybody’s religion.

The population is growing, starvation is growing, sicknesses like AIDS are spreading, nuclear weapons are piling up – it is enough for any man of intelligence to understand that we are very close to a global death. Some way or other this beautiful earth is going to be destroyed, unless something very drastic is done.

Do you see any possibility that that drastic change will come?

I don’t see any possibility, but I will make every effort. It is hoping against hope, but I still hope. I don’t see that anything can be done because all these people are divided into religious groups; their minds are so conditioned that they can’t see the reality.