But the commune which was flourishing…the whole of America was shaken by the commune. Most shaken were the Christians, who think they are civilized. It was the fundamentalist Christian President Ronald Reagan, acting under the influence and pressure of the church to destroy this commune: “It is dangerous, because it is taking young people from the Christian fold.”

You go on taking people from the Hindu fold, from the Mohammedan fold, from the Buddhist fold, and that is absolutely all right. And if I had been…. I was not converting anybody into any religion. Only the very intelligent people had come, on their own accord, and they were free to leave any moment.

This is not a religion, it is a caravan of seekers of truth. Nobody is converted, everybody has joined the caravan, the commune, on his own accord. His freedom is intact, his individuality is respected.

It has been asked of me, “Before you there have been Hindu monks, Jaina monks, Buddhist monks, but nobody was so much condemned. Why was your commune destroyed by America by force?”

The reason is clear.

Vivekananda was the first to enter America from India, but he behaved like a politician: he praised Christianity, and he said, “All religions are one” – and he did not take anybody out of the Christian fold. He never criticized a single Christian dogma, so naturally there was no question. He had no commune, he was just a visitor, praising. People loved him, because their religion was being praised by an outsider.

The same was done by Ramateertha, and the same has been done by Maharishi Yogi and other sannyasins of Hinduism. They all praise Christianity, so Christians are happy.

I am not going to praise any lies, any poisons, any untruths. I am going to say straightforwardly what is what. That was the problem for them. They could not understand how to argue with me.

I was in America for five years, fighting in all the courts. In the end my visa had expired long before, I had no visa, no entry permit – but they had not the guts even to come into the commune. They surrounded the whole commune – the commune had one hundred and twenty-six square miles – they surrounded the whole commune with the National Guard with machine guns, but they did not dare to enter into the commune.

And we had nothing – just thirty semi-automatic guns, which are available in America to any citizen. These belonged to the police force of the commune, which was paid by the American government because the police force was part of the American police force, even though all the people were sannyasins who had taken the police training. So they were afraid that “Although the police force is ours, it is going to fight for the commune, not for us.”

The greatest power in the world was afraid of thirty semiautomatic guns. They were planning for years and years how to arrest me – and I don’t have even a paperknife!