THIS ACADEMY CANNOT be only of science because science is only a part of human reality. The academy has to be comprehensive; it has to be for creativity, for art, for consciousness. Science is for the outer world, consciousness is for the inner world – and art is the bridge between them.

 

Hence it will have three divisions, major divisions, not separated, but just for arbitrary purposes to be denominated as separate.

 

The most fundamental thing will be creating methods, techniques, ways of raising human consciousness. And certainly, this consciousness cannot be against the body; this consciousness is residing in the body. They cannot be accepted as inimical to each other. In every way, they are supportive. I say something to you and my hand makes a gesture without my telling the hand. There is a deep synchronicity between me and my hand.

 

You walk, you eat, you drink, and all these things indicate that you are body and consciousness as an organic whole.

 

 

The body has to be loved, you have to be a great friend to it. It is your home. You have to clean it of all junk and you have to remember that it is in your service continuously, day in, day out: digesting, changing your food into blood, taking out the dead cells of the body, bringing new oxygen, fresh oxygen into the body – and you are fast asleep.

 

It is doing everything for your survival, for your life – although you are so ungrateful that you have never even thanked your body. On the contrary, your religions have been teaching you to torture it – that the body is your enemy and you have to get free from the body, its attachments. I also know that you are more than the body and there is no need to have any attachment. But love is not an attachment, compassion is not an attachment. Love and compassion are absolutely needed for your body and its nourishment. And the better body you have, the more possibility there is for consciousness to grow. It is an organic unity.

 

A totally new kind of education is needed in the world where fundamentally everybody is introduced into silences of the heart – in other words into meditations; where everybody has to be prepared to be compassionate to one's own body, because unless you are compassionate to your own body, you cannot be compassionate to any other body.

 

 

This mystery needs to be loved, to be intimately inquired into – its mysteries, its functionings.

 

But the religions have unfortunately been absolutely against the body. It gives a clue, a definite indication that if a man learns the wisdom of the body and the mystery of the body, he will never bother about the priest or about the God; he will have found the most mysterious within himself. And within the mystery of the body is the very shrine of your consciousness.

 

And once you have become aware of your consciousness, of your being, there is no God above you. Only such a person can be respectful of other human beings, other living beings, because they all are as mysterious as he himself is – different expressions, varieties which make life much richer.

 

 

Any education that does not teach you to love your body, does not teach you to be compassionate to your body, does not teach you how to enter into its mysteries, will not be able to teach you how to enter into your own consciousness.

 

The body is the door, the body is the stepping-stone. And any education that does not touch the subject of your body and consciousness is absolutely not only incomplete, it is utterly harmful, because it will go on being destructive. It is only the flowering of consciousness within you that prevents you from destruction, and that gives you a tremendous urge to create – to create more beauty in the world, to create more comfort in the world.

 

That is why I include art as the second part of the academy. Art is a conscious effort to create beauty, to discover beauty, to make your life more joyful; to teach you to dance, to celebrate.

 

And the third part is a creative science.

 

 

These three together can make any system of education complete. All else is secondary – maybe useful for mundane purposes but is not useful for spiritual growth, is not useful to bring you to the sources of joy, love, peace, silence. And a man who has not experienced the inner ecstasy has lived in vain, unnecessarily. He vegetated, he dragged himself from the womb to the grave, but he could not dance and he could not sing and he could not contribute anything to the world.

 

According to me, a religious person is one who contributes to the world some beauty, some joy, some happiness, some celebration which was not there – something new, something fresh, some more flowers. But religion has never been defined the way I'm defining it. And all the ways religion has been defined have proved absolutely ugly and wrong. They have not helped humanity to rise to the heights of joy and beauty and love; they have drowned the whole humanity in misery and suffering. They have not taught you freedom; on the contrary, they have enforced on you all kinds of slavery in the name of obedience. Obedience to whom? Obedience to the priests, obedience to those who have money, obedience to those who have power: in short, obedience to all the vested interests.

 

 

Only a right education can transform this ugly and sick situation.

 

My idea of a World Academy of Creative Science, Arts and Consciousness is really, in other words, my vision of a real religion. Man needs a better body, a healthier body; man needs a more conscious, alert being. And man needs all kinds of comforts and luxuries that existence is ready to deliver.

Existence is ready to give you the paradise here now. But you go on postponing it; it is always after death. My approach is to teach you that this is the paradise, there is no paradise anywhere else. And no preparation is needed to be happy. No discipline is needed to be loving. Just a little alertness, just a little wakefulness, just a little understanding.