It happened in Soviet Russia, when the revolution came and the communists changed the whole social structure; the czar was killed, and a strange phenomenon came into existence. The people who had killed the czar turned out to be greater czars than the czars themselves. Josef Stalin proved to be far more terrible than Ivan the Terrible. Ivan is nothing compared to Josef Stalin.

And it is a natural phenomenon. I am not blaming Josef Stalin at all, I can understand what really happened. If you fight with the czar you have to learn his ways, and by the time you are the winner you have learned the ways so skillfully, so efficiently, they have become your ways. You start practicing the same on your enemies. That’s why every revolution has failed. Persons change but the structures remain the same, because the idea of freedom from is basically wrong.

The second idea is freedom for; it is future-oriented. The first is political, the second is more poetic, visionary, utopian. Many people have tried that too, but that too is not possible, because future-oriented you can’t live in the present – and you have to live in the present. You don’t live in the past, you don’t live in the future, you have to live in the present.

Visionaries only imagine. Beautiful utopias they have imagined, but those utopias never become reality, cannot become reality.

If you react to the past, you are determined by the past. If you forget the past and look at the future, you are still driven by the past, you are just not aware of it. Looking at the future you dream beautiful dreams, but they can’t change reality. The reality remains the same; dreams are very ineffective, impotent.

The first, freedom from, is a reaction. The second, freedom for, is revolution. The third, just freedom, is rebellion. It is present-oriented. The first is political, the second is poetic, the third is mystic, religious.

What do I mean when I say just freedom? Neither for nor against, no past, no future, just being herenow, just living moment to moment with no ideology, with no utopia.

The real sannyasin, the real mystic, is not against the past, is not for the future. He is so utterly absorbed by the present that he has no time, no energy, for the past and the future. This is how the rebel is born.

The rebel is the most beautiful phenomenon in the world. Buddha is a rebel, so is Jesus; Atisha is a rebel, so is Kabir. These are rebels. You will misunderstand them if you think of them as if they were revolutionaries; they were not. Neither were they reactionaries. Their orientation is totally different, their orientation is now, here. They don’t live for any ideal, and they don’t live against any ideal. They don’t have any ideas; no ideology exists in their consciousness.

The sheer purity of this moment – they live it, they enjoy it, they sing it, they dance it. And when the next moment comes, they live the next moment with the same joy, with the same cheerfulness. They move moment to moment, they don’t plan ahead.