When a man can produce a thousand times more with a small machine, why should he bother with a spinning wheel? It takes eight hours per day to spin if you want enough clothes for the year for one person. So everybody is spinning and everybody will go bananas because you cannot eat, you cannot do anything else – there is no time! You have to sleep too, but just your clothes will take your whole time! But even clothes are not natural. Nobody pointed out to Mahatma Gandhi that even clothes are unnatural, because no animal uses clothes except for a few dogs in England – and they too against their will. It is absolutely unnatural to force them to wear clothes. Ladies take them for walks, and you know dogs – every tree creates a tremendous urge in them, which is natural…nobody has planted it in their minds…. Perhaps they are watering the tree just to help it grow faster. But the lady is embarrassed.
So the first part of your question has to be understood: every new thing is opposed. For example, in India birth control is opposed by all the religious leaders for the simple reason that it is not natural.
I was very friendly with a shankaracharya – who is almost similar to the pope in Hinduism – and he was very much against progress, science, technology. I heard that he had a heart attack so I went to see him in the hospital. And I asked him, “What about your philosophy?”
He said, “This is not the time.”
I said, “This is the time! What is this cardiogram? – something produced by nature…grown by the trees? What are all these instruments that the doctors are using and the medicines that are being given to you? This is the time for it to be decided whether you are a man of your word or just enjoy talking. When it comes to yourself then you forget all about it.” What is wrong with birth control? The Indian religious leaders have many arguments.
One very famous Hindu leader, Karpatri…
Just by chance we were traveling in the same compartment and we started discussing birth control. He said, “Don’t mention that name, it is absolutely against nature. Just look, Rabindranath was the thirteenth child of his parents. If they had used birth control there would not have been any Rabindranath.”
I said, “Agreed, that means every father and mother should produce at least thirteen children in search of a Rabindranath?”
In India there are people who have twelve children, thirteen children, fourteen children…but the Rabindranath does not appear.
…”So can you give me a guarantee?”
He said, “Why should I give any guarantee for anything in which I’m not involved? It is unnatural to prevent children whom God is sending…”
I said, “Who told you that God is sending them? God has been practicing birth control from eternity. He has given birth to only one child, Jesus Christ. If you have learned something from God, learn birth control. He could have produced millions of children – but he is a wise man, it seems. And that too he managed without getting married, via an agent, the Holy Ghost. So the blame goes to the Holy Ghost; God is completely out of it. But the Holy Ghost seems to have learned birth control, because in two thousand years since Jesus Christ he has not tried again.”
He said, “You always bring strange arguments. I am not a Christian and I don’t know The Bible or the Christian God.”