If you are habituated in the American way, then one meal will kill you! What will you do the remaining twenty-four hours? The American eats five times, and in between cigarettes are needed, chewing gum is needed; somehow the mouth should continue to chew. They have become so accustomed, that even to take away somebody’s chewing gum you have to hospitalize him because of the withdrawal effects! Chewing gum – such a simple thing. In the first place you were doing something stupid and now you are talking about withdrawal effects! So something else has to be given in place of chewing gum; then something else, less addictive, and it takes a few weeks to get out of the habit.

The problem is, the habit goes into the back side of your brain, and we don’t yet have any direct approach to the back side. The back side is still the unknown continent, and it controls everything. It freaks out if you drop any habit. It forces you to take the habit back.

I was staying in Calcutta with a friend, in the house of one of the richest men of India, Sohanlal Dugar. He is dead now. He must have been at that time seventy or seventy-five years old, and he told me, “I have renounced sex four times.” The stupid man who was with me was very much impressed. When we were left alone the man said, “This is great – four times!”

I said, “You are an idiot. You don’t understand: you can renounce sex only once. How can you renounce it four times?”

Then he said, “Yes, that is right. If you have renounced once, you have renounced.”

I said, “Let Sohanlal come back and I am going to ask what happened the fifth time.”

I asked him when he came back, “You were telling us about your celibacy, that you tried four times, and my friend is very much impressed. So I am asking you, what happened to the fifth time?”

He said, “It is a disaster. The fifth time I did not renounce it, because four times I have already failed and learned the lesson that there is no point in renouncing; it is better to keep silent about it.”

That’s why everybody in the world is silent about sex. Particularly the celibates are absolutely silent because they know the problem, how many times they have renounced and it comes back again. It is not in your control and it is not your personal habit. It comes with your very birth, it is a biological habit.

So, there are many kinds of habits. A few habits you can drop, but a few habits are very deeply rooted. And to remain ignorant and unconscious is a very long, millions of years old, habit. If you allow it just a single moment, it will take you over.

Enlightenment is a very new phenomenon, and there is everything against it: your whole old mind, your unconsciousness, your tendency to forget. The English word sin originally meant forgetfulness, but the priests destroyed the beauty of the word. Forgetfulness is certainly a sin – not against anybody, against yourself. But you have remained forgetful so long – it is not chewing gum, that within four weeks you will drop it. And it is such a consolation to remain in forgetfulness: it is cozy, it does not create an eternal quest, a search for the truth. It does not take you on dangerous paths. It keeps you mundane and ordinary, a part of the crowd, very happy in stupid things.