And Russia has more potential, because for sixty, seventy years the Russian people have been deprived of any inner journey. It is just like a land which has remained unused for seventy years. No crops have been grown. The land is ready to burst forth – just the seeds are needed. That’s why I say Russia is one of the most potential countries. And meditation is the seed.

Meditation can become a wildfire in Russia, because everything else is difficult. The government is continuously after you; even walls have ears. Everybody is a detective – but nobody can detect your meditation. Spread it! Many people need it.

The second thing: tell the Russian sannyasins not to feel in any way sad that in other countries sannyasins are free. It is not true. Our experience in America proves it – that all democracy is simply talk. The American Constitution is beautiful, but the politicians are just as ugly as anywhere else. The Constitution is a dead book. The power is in the hands of the politicians, and they are doing everything that they can do to destroy sannyasins. That is the reason that I am telling my sannyasins to go underground. And it is so easy for my sannyasins to go underground: no red clothes, no mala – you are underground.

I am not a sadist. I don’t want you to be unnecessarily persecuted, tortured, harassed. There is no need when you can go underground so easily. The politicians will prove absolutely impotent; they cannot do anything to you.

In Mohammedan countries we have sannyasins. They were also feeling bad that they cannot be like every other sannyasin, and the movement cannot grow. Now it can grow everywhere; now there are no barriers.

It is the same thing – the politicians may talk of democracy, they may talk of dictatorship, it doesn’t matter. Politicians are simply politicians. Their minds function in the same way, their cunningness is the same. Yes, their masks may be different. In these four years we have seen that the American politician has only the mask of a democrat. Behind democracy is hypocrisy and nothing else.

This whole world is tortured by politicians in different names, exploited in different names. The only way to get out of this exploitation is to spread meditation to as many people as possible – because the meditator is no longer gullible. He has a maturity and an intelligence; words cannot deceive him.

And if the major part of the world becomes meditative, it will release such a great energy of peace, love, compassion…. That, to me, is the only possibility of preventing the third world war, because meditators will refuse to fight, meditators will refuse to be violent. It does not matter whether they are American or Russian or Indian, the quality of meditation is the same. It makes you so sensitive that you cannot be destructive.

And if the whole world simply refuses to fight, then if these politicians are so interested in fighting they can have wrestling matches, boxing matches, and meditators will enjoy it tremendously. But the world is not going to be destroyed by these idiots.