Children are very observant. They go on looking at what is happening. The father goes out almost like a lion, and when he comes home he is just a mouse. Every husband is henpecked. There is no other category of husbands. But why? Why has this ugly situation arisen? There is a male form of politics, there is a female form of politics – but both are trying to be on top of each other.

In every other area, for example in university…the lecturer wants to be the reader, the reader wants to be the professor, the professor wants to be the dean, the dean wants to be the vice-chancellor – a constant struggle for power. At least one would think it should not be so in education. But nobody is interested in education, everybody is interested in power.

In religion it is the same: the bishop wants to be the cardinal, the cardinal wants to be the pope. Everybody is on a ladder trying to climb higher, and others are pulling his legs downwards. Those who are higher are trying to push him so that he cannot rise up to their level. And the same is being done to those who are on a lower rung of the ladder: some are pulling their legs; others are kicking and hitting them to keep them down, as low as possible. The whole ladder, if you see it just as an observer, is a circus. And this is happening all around, everywhere.

So to me politics means an effort to prove yourself superior. But why? – because you feel, deep down, inferior. And the man of instinct is bound to feel inferior – he is inferior. It is not an inferiority complex; it is a fact, a reality – he is inferior. To live the life of instinct is to live at the lowest possible level of life.

If you understand the struggle, the fight for being superior, and you drop out of the fight – you simply say, “I am myself, neither superior nor inferior….” If you just stand by the side and watch the whole show, you have entered into the second world – the world of intelligence and consciousness.

It is only a question of understanding the whole rotten situation in which everybody is caught. You have just to give a little patient observation to the whole situation: “What is happening?…And even if I reach to the highest rung of the ladder, what is the point?” You are just hung up in the sky looking like a fool. There is nowhere else to go.

Of course, you cannot come down because people will start joking about you: “Where are you going? “What happened? Are you defeated?” You cannot come down and you cannot go anywhere else because there is no step higher, so you are hung up in the sky pretending – smiling a Jimmy Carter smile – that you have arrived, that you have found the goal of life. And you know that you have not found anything. You have been simply a fool and your whole life is wasted. Now there is no way to go up; and if you go down then everybody is going to laugh.

So anybody who becomes a president of a country or a prime minister of a country – his only prayer is that he should die at his post…. Because lower you cannot go – that is very insulting, humiliating; higher, there is no way. You are stuck; only death can release you from the dilemma.