I argued with the vice-chancellor, “These students should not fail. I want to look at their copies.” And I showed the vice-chancellor that their answers were absolutely right, although they were against the books.

“But books don’t have a monopoly. And the books were written fifty years ago, and in fifty years do you think everything has stopped, gone dead? that a full stop came when this book was written? In fifty years so much has happened in the world of philosophy, more than had ever happened in almost five thousand years previously. If you weigh five thousand years of philosophical thinking, and the last fifty years of contribution, these fifty years will still be weightier.”

He agreed with me, but he said, “What can I do about it? The examiners have failed them. And it is not a question of one student, it is a question of many students.”

So I said, “Then the only way is that I should leave the university, that I should start teaching what to me is true.”

And this is the situation of the sannyasin. It is better he leaves the university. It will become a bigger and bigger burden. The more he understands, the more difficult it will be.

For example, I never could say to my students that psychology is a science. It is not. To become a science there is no possibility of having so many schools. Then there will be a single truth about any problem; not that Freud has one answer and Adler has another and Jung has another and Assagioli has another. What kind of science is this? But every book of psychology pretends that psychology is a science, because science has prestige: to declare it scientific is to declare it true.

So the best way for the sannyasin is to get out of the university. His university is now the whole universe. And he should not teach anything that goes against his conscience, because the conscience is so valuable that it cannot be sold for anything. A job, a good salary, a respectable position, does not matter. And he should make it clear why he is resigning – because the subject is not a science and it is pretending to be a science, and he doesn’t want to pretend anything.

The subject is basically wrong; it starts with society – which does not exist – and it avoids the individual, who really exists. It avoids the individual because to accept the individual as the source of study, sooner or later one will have to encounter people like Gautam Buddha, Bodhidharma…. And that will be a totally different world. Whatever the sociologist has found amongst the sleepy people will be contradicted absolutely by looking at a buddha.

So either sociology should be divided into two parts, or sociology should become two subjects: sociology of the awakened man, and sociology of the sleeping man. “And if it is not going to happen then I am not going to commit a crime against my own understanding and self.” The sannyasin should make it clear to the university and to the news media.