Albert Einstein laughed; he said, “It is not strange. I can say about the fourth that it will never happen. But about the third, it is impossible to say. The calamity will be so big that man will have never seen such calamity. Within ten to fifteen minutes the whole world, all life, every living thing on the earth, will be dead.”

Just America alone has enough nuclear weapons to destroy life on this earth seven times, although there is no need. Only one man, Jesus, is supposed to have been resurrected, and I don’t think even he will be able to resurrect seven times. One time he managed to escape from a cave and befool the whole world, but seven times? It will be impossible. He never went back to Jerusalem, because once he managed to befool people; now it is impossible. If he is caught again he will be crucified.

What is the purpose of accumulating so many nuclear weapons? And seeing the situation, the Soviet Union has stopped creating more nuclear weapons. There are enough in the Soviet Union also to destroy the whole of humanity, all living beings. Now there is no point. They seem to be more intelligent, understanding that if you have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the whole world, why go on wasting money piling up nuclear weapons?

The totality of the war is a new phenomenon to be encountered. All the wars in the past were small, local. Even our second world war was nothing compared to the possibility of the third world war. I call it a total war, because it will be a total destruction of the planet Earth. This creates a certain situation which has never been there before.

The time is short, perhaps not more than ten or eleven years. By the year 2000, most probably we will have either committed suicide or we will have changed the whole structure of the human mind and raised the consciousness and created millions of meditators and thousands of buddhas. That is the only alternative:

War or meditation.

War or spiritual revolution.

And the war has to be understood as the culmination of our whole human history. It is not coming from the sky – it is coming from our past, accumulating more and more anger, more and more violence, more and more weapons. The first world war was smaller, the second became bigger. The third is going to be total.

Because it is a total war, every person has to understand his responsibility. In smaller wars it was nothing to be worried about. If it was going on in Vietnam…who cares about Vietnam? Many people have not even heard the name Vietnam. If it is happening in Afghanistan, who cares? – small pieces of humanity are involved. But this time it is the whole existence of life and all living beings with us: trees, and roses, and lotuses….

And we are coming closer to the point where man can become a superman. Now we cannot afford a war. We cannot afford a global suicide. We have to understand how to transcend the mind that the past has created and programmed for wars and destruction and violence.