Oliver Grivat, Twenty-Four Heures, Lusanne, Switzerland

Ma Viren, Playman Magazine, Italy

I have about a dozen questions to ask in one hour. My first question: with the Sheela affair and the FBI’s action, is your paradise in real danger? Your movement, is it in decline?

No. The movement is increasing, not declining. The gang that was like a disease to the movement has been surgically removed. Now the movement is far healthier, far more open, available to more people. It is no longer a closed religion, but just a movement of seekers who want to find out the meaning of life, the truth of their being. And this search is individual, it has nothing to do with organization. So we have celebrated the death of the religion; and the death of the religion has saved the individual from dying. Organization is the death of the individual. The more rigid an organization, the less possibility of freedom from the individual. So now the individuals are free. We have taken away everything that outwardly makes them different from humanity. The difference will be only inward, which only they know. That will be their growing silence, awareness, consciousness, serenity, blissfulness, and ultimately the experience of eternal life, that there is no death.

So Sheela’s going has been of immense help. It is in no way detrimental to the movement, it is immensely helpful. The commune is far stronger, because now every individual is responsible. There is nobody to take care, so you can just remain asleep and somebody takes care of you, and naturally exploits you. Now there is nobody to take care and nobody to exploit. Every individual is free, responsible for himself and for the people with whom he is living in love, in joy, in all kinds of ways relating to – in work, in silence, in dancing, in singing. So now this is how a real culture should be: individual-oriented. We are immensely happy. There is no problem for the commune.

So for you it is not a sort of defeat for your movement?