In place of Zorba I would like to give you a name, Irene Pappas. She will be here next weekend, so I will introduce you. Zorba is just a fiction, but she is not. She is a reality, but she has all the qualities of Zorba. In the film Zorba the Greek she played the role of the widow who was stoned by people because she was not behaving according to the traditional orthodox ways. She was still loving.

Tradition thinks that the moment your husband is dead you are also dead. It was better in India – at least they used to burn the woman with the husband. Ugly, inhuman, utterly primitive, but looked at from a different angle, very compassionate; otherwise, she was going to suffer perhaps fifty years or sixty years, a living death.

And that was the situation of the widow in Zorba the Greek. She was a rebellious woman; Pappas played the part of the widow and she continued to have love affairs. Life means love. If you cannot love, you are not allowed to breath.

Love is to your inner being, exactly what breathing is to your body.

Irene Pappas has never met me, but she feels a deep communion with me, and she is going to be here amongst you. She is not yet a buddha, but I hope that she will be a buddha before she dies.

What do you think of women going on a sex strike to prevent all the stupid nonsense men are creating?

A great idea; but the problem is that sex is not only the need of man, it is the need of the woman too. The strike will not be only against man, it will be against women also. Now why go on a sex strike when the pill is available? Instead of making sex a struggle, a strike, why not make it a playfulness, a fun?

We have all the methods, medicines, so that the woman need not get pregnant. That was creating the whole problem. It is really a strange arrangement of existence that only the woman gets pregnant. If I was to decide, it should be rotation – one time the man gets pregnant, one time the woman gets pregnant and the world becomes a rotary club!

But the pill has made almost what was missing in nature. Now no woman can be made pregnant against her own will, and if there is no pregnancy, sex is only fun, and you don’t go on strike against fun.

Take it nonseriously, take it playfully. Sex can become a beautiful phenomenon if pregnancy is not involved in it, and that can be avoided.

So I don’t think there is any need for going on strike; that will make the whole world very sad. All men will become British, all women will become German, and existence will be in a very troubled situation. And a thirty-year strike cannot be broken easily, it will become your second nature; thirty years is almost half of your life – it will become your habit.