It is just like in the ancient days in China they used to put small shoes, iron shoes, on women’s feet because that was the sign – a smaller foot was the sign that the woman comes from a royal family. If the woman cannot walk rightly, she is royal! So no rich women were able to walk; they had small feet. And if you encase the feet in iron shoes, what are you doing? Great pain was suffered just to have small feet. Those feet cannot be beautiful. Those feet are ugly because the growth has not happened. How can something retarded be beautiful? But that was thought of for thousands of years as beautiful, and women suffered it – and they enjoyed it, that they had small feet.

Now that has disappeared. Now, if a royal woman, a rich woman in ancient China was to learn running, jogging, it would have been very difficult. Much effort would have been needed because she did not have the feet for it. Not that God is testing her – just because the society is foolish and the society has conditioned her feet in such a way that she cannot run.

And the same is true about a thousand and one things. Your society conditions you in a certain way; then you cannot do certain things. When you want to do them, much effort is needed to undo what the society has done.

The society has taught you to think, and to think continuously, and to think skillfully and cleverly. It has not allowed you to know that there are spaces of no-thought, because the society is afraid. Those spaces of no-thought are very dangerous. Those spaces of no-thought are very crazy. Those spaces of no-thought will give you great joy, but will make you so rebellious. Those great spaces will make you very, very happy, but a happy person becomes free. He cannot be easily forced to do foolish things.

You cannot send him to the army. He will say, “Nonsense. I am so happy, why should I go and kill others and be killed?” You cannot send him to the military; he will simply say no. You cannot force him to do foolish things for his whole life like a machine, He will say, “Why? I will do things that I like and that I love.” An ecstatic person is a rebellion in the world. You cannot tell him to just be a clerk in an office and go on filing things, putting files upon files his whole life. He will say, “I will go and become a farmer because I love trees. If I am not going to be rich, it is okay. My richness will be of the inner.” “I am going to become a fisherman. I will be on the open sea. I don’t want to become a clerk.”

But then things will be difficult for the society. Society needs clerks, society needs soldiers. Society needs very repressed people whose energies are boiling inside and have no way to go anywhere – so that they can be put into any work. Society arranges things in such a way that you can become slaves.

The society is not here to make you free people, because with freedom politics will disappear, states will disappear. In a free world there will be no nation and there will be no need for nations and there will be no need for armies. Millions of people just wasting their life – doing parade. Left turn! Right turn! Turn about! Millions of people – doing it very happily and thinking they are doing great things, great service to humanity.