Socrates was given the option that if he stops talking to people about his philosophy of truth, then he can be released from the court and he can save his life. He laughed and he simply rejected the very idea. What he said is something worth remembering. He said: “To say the truth, to live the truth, is my life. If I cannot say the truth, if I cannot live the truth, then for what I am supposed to live?”
A life is life only when there is something higher in it – higher than life itself. Remember, only that which is higher than life brings significance to life, brings meaning to life. If life has nothing higher than itself then it is empty, utterly futile; then it is absurd.
I am giving you something to live and something to die for – and the greatest joy in life is to have something to die for. Only when you have something to die for do you have something to live for.
This kind of threat is going to happen all over the world, but should be accepted – not only accepted, welcomed. It is good news! It is immensely satisfying that my sannyasins are making themselves felt.
It is true that I would like the society that has existed up to now to disappear. It is a very primitive society. It is almost animal, it is not human yet. Humanity has to happen – it has not happened yet; it is something in the future. It is only a potential, it has not become an actuality – and what more joy can there be than making this potential actual? What more adventure can you hope for in life? What can be more ecstatic than making a tremendous effort to introduce humanity on this condemned earth?
Unless societies disappear – German, Italian, Indian, Japanese – there cannot be a humanity. Unless these small divisions, which are absolutely pointless, are destroyed totally, erased totally, the one civilization, the one culture, the one religiousness cannot be born. I am against the societies, against the nations, against the states, because they have done enough harm to us. You can look at the whole history. It is monstrous, murderous, it is full of blood. In three thousand years history there have been five thousand wars. What kind of civilization, what kind of culture has there been? – as if we are here only to kill each other!
But the politician thrives on these divisions. The moment a global civilization comes into existence, these politicians are bound to disappear. How can there be a German Chancellor then, or an American President, or an Iranian Prime Minister?
The politicians and the priests have been in a very subtle conspiracy against humanity. They know one thing for certain: that they can exist only in a divided world. The religions – I mean the organized religions, the dogmatic religions, the creeds, the cults, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Mohammedanism – they keep humanity divided. That’s how the pope, the ayatollah, the shankaracharya, the imam, and all these hocus-pocus people can exist. If humanity is one then these people will disappear. They will become things of the past, of an ugly past, of a nightmarish past.