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Chapter 19: Organism, Not Organization

I am giving an alternative for everything. Organization has to be replaced by organism. The commune has to be an organism. I am working on that way, and is happening. It will take a little time for people to start feeling themselves that something strange is happening: they are functioning in tune, they are feeling responsible. Nobody is holding them responsible, nobody will condemn them for not being responsible, but suddenly they feel that’s how life is more joyful, that’s how life is more loving, that’s how all misery, sadness, darkness, disappears.

And that’s how you become respectable, not in others’ eyes, but even in your own eyes. A tremendous self-respect arises - and you are not higher and nobody is lower than you. Your self-respect makes it possible for you to respect everyone as he is.

I have told the journalists that whatever I have said is as much applicable to my own people as to anybody else, because what I say is simply a universal law. So you can see here that it is still an organization. An organization will need violence or will be afraid of violence from outside. But I am still here and I would like the organization to completely disappear, not only from this place, but from everywhere in the world. Organization is not needed, just small communes which can function as an organic whole. And if people are joyous, if they feel life as a blessing, they will not commit violence because that is simply a disturbance of their own joy and of the joy of the other person.

But if only your commune becomes an organism and you are surrounded by organizations around you, then certainly you will need weapons, not for violence, but simply for self-defense.

Organizations are always trying to invade, trying to conquer - conquer each and every thing. Even a man as intelligent as Bertrand Russell wrote a book, Conquest Of Nature. Now, that is ugly. We are part of nature, how can we conquer nature? That is creating a split. It is like one of my hands becomes the conqueror of my whole being. That is simply not possible, but because nature is silent and non-argumentative, you can go on saying anything. What have you conquered in nature?

All that you have done is you have learned the laws of nature, and you are following the laws of nature. Hence you have become more productive, more creative, more powerful. But this is not conquest of nature; this is simply an inquiry - and nature is compassionate enough that it goes on opening its secrets to you. And you are such ungrateful creatures that on the one hand nature is opening its secrets to you, and on the other hand you are declaring that you have conquered nature. But that is the language of the organizational man: violence, conquest, victory.

But if a commune is there, an organism surrounded by organizations, there is every possibility those organizations will try to invade you, conquer you, destroy you, be violent with you.

To me, to be violent is something ugly; but to allow violence to be done to you is also ugly. In both cases you are partners. Violence can be done only with two partners. Either you can be the doer or you can be the receiver.

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