Nobody can tolerate your success. When you are a failure, everybody has the upper hand; he sympathizes with you, he says, “Poor fellow…” But nobody goes to the successful man to congratulate him; it hurts.

I am happy that the richest country in the world became jealous of a small commune of five thousand people. It has proved indubitably that money does not change people, or their mind.

I could have understood it if our commune in India would have been as successful as it was in America…but I am certain in India we would have been destroyed exactly on the same lines. In fact, they are trying, because we are still gathering, things are returning…people are coming again, and the fear in New Delhi is great. It is strange: they have all the power, but still they cannot see people happy, joyous, creative, loving and living their own way, living their own style, living in freedom.

Because the whole world is living in slavery, the free man cannot be tolerated. The whole world is a failure. Even the richest are still beggars because they want more. What is the difference?…A beggar wants more, the emperor wants more – their minds are functioning in the same way.

The commune became the target of the whole of American politics, and particularly the fundamentalist Christians – because they were not so successful in two thousand years in bringing a smile to people’s faces, bringing light to their eyes, bringing silences to their hearts. I had never thought that they will become jealous. I thought they had everything – why should they be jealous of our cars or our airplanes, our roads, our turning the desert into an oasis? They should have been happy and helpful.

But this is not the way insane people function. They became afraid that an authentic communism is happening – a communism which is not imposed from outside, which has no dictatorship. Just out of the joy of creation, people are creating. This became more dangerous to them than Russia. It is absolutely out of all proportion…. But success hurts even your best friends, and failure even brings your enemies to sympathize.

One hopes one day things will be totally different. Success will receive its reward, and failure will receive all the support that can transform it into success. But that is not the thing: sympathy is empty. And destroying success is absolutely necessary, because people start comparing: What has the government been doing? – the richest government, the most powerful government, which could have changed the whole of America into a paradise.