In the 2000, with the beginning of a new millennium, the thinkers and the poets of the world were hoping that human beings will evolve to
usher in a new era of a new kind of humanity on earth, which will bring an end to all wars, and conflicts between nations, religions,
races and genders. Around that time, a Millennium World Peace Summit was organised in New York. Nobel Peace laureate from Northern Ireland Betty Williams, Mahatma Gandhi’s grand-daughter Ela Gandhi, eminent primatologist Jane Goodall and Vashti Mckenzie from the African
Methodist Episcopal Church attended a special session which waspresided over by Mrs Indu Jain of the Times of India group.

During the summit, Betty Williams is reported to have pointed out that war was essentially man’s work. She said to men: “Now move over. Women will ensure peace.”

Stressing that practising non-violence is not for the faint-hearted, she said it required exemplary courage. It is really true that most of
the wars, almost all the wars, have been fought by men. The world is always busy in wars because we have been appreciating male qualities
and condemning feminine qualities in people. Anyone who is disinterested in fighting is labelled as effeminate. And if a boy
starts weeping we ask him: Why are you crying like a girl? Be a man!

This philosophy of condemning feminine qualities has been the root cause of all wars in the world and it provokes aggressiveness and
barbarianism in men. Our history books are full of appreciation of the “heroic” deeds of Alexander the Great and Napoleon Bonaparte and other
such men who unleashed large scale violence in the world. We want ourcmale children to become brave heroes like them or at least imbibe some of their qualities.

This appreciation of aggressive male qualities has been more dominant in the West. German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche condemned Gautama  the Buddha because of his feminine grace and beauty. His idea of a real man was to be strong and to be made of steel. Buddha was the most compassionate and cultured of men, the most graceful man this world has ever known. But his compassion, grace and beauty are essentially feminine qualities that have been adored and worshipped in the East. Nietzsche condemned Buddha’s teachings also. He said that he could not appreciate his teachings as they were harmful to the humanity. He warned that if people believed in Buddha’s teachings, the whole world would turn feminine. Nietzsche appreciated the warrior, the military man, who is always ready to kill or to be killed. The sound and the rhythm of an army marching to the war zone was real music to his ears. It is this philosophy that gave birth to monsters like Hitler.

Nietzsche was certainly a genius who was born in the West and his psyche was corrupted by the Western philosophy of conquering and
ruling the world. So if we follow his philosophy we will have more world wars and no peace. If we want peace in the world, we will have
to nurture feminine qualities to bring about a balance in the world. It is about time that we avoid insane thinkers like Nietzsche and embrace enlightened mystics like Gautama the Buddha. This indeed will indeed bring a new era of peace. And prosperity also if we try to understand Zorba dimension of life envisioned by Osho, an enlightened mystic of modern time.

Osho says: It is true that all great qualities are feminine – love, compassion, sympathy, kindness. All these qualities have a flavour of
the feminine. We have been giving too much emphasis to the head and ignoring the heart. We are living an utterly miserable life because we
have got hung up in our heads and have bypassed our hearts. The head has dried our poetry of emotions, the sentiments, the smiles, the
tears, the laughter, and made our life so boring. Friendship has disappeared from the world because our head calculates too much. The
head is miserly and calculative. This is the head that has created such monstrous concrete jungles that man has no time to look at the
sky and dance with the clouds and rejoice in the rains. The heart wants to sing, but the head thinks about society and worries about what others will say about us. The head has made us much too serious in the name of sanity.

Mrs Indu Jain rightly stated at the World Peace Summit that she would like to invoke the all-pervading feminine power – the very embodiment
of non-violence – to be here with us. Give women a chance, and non-violence will effortlessly be the religion of the new millennium.
The new millennium should have a totally new vision and values of life, in which women give a significant contribution of their feminine
qualities to men, and use their feminine power for peace. Let the head and heart unite in meditation and create a new BEING in the world.

Professor Stephen William Hawking was born on 8th January 1942 (exactly 300 years after the death of Galileo) in Oxford, England. And he left his body on 14th March, the birthday of Einstein. It is indeed a mystical happening that makes him as important a scientist as Galileo and Einstein. I would like to add one more dimension to it, which is spiritual: He was the Ashtavakra of the world of Cosmic Science who transcended his deformed body and its limitations.

Since 1963, when he was diagnosed with ALS, a form of Motor Neuron Disease, shortly after his 21st birthday. In spite of being wheelchair-bound and dependent on a computerized voice system for communication he continues to combine family life (he had three children and three grandchildren) with his research into theoretical physics, in addition to an extensive program of travel and public lectures. His deformed body with all its unbearable hardships could not force him to feel depressed, or renounce everything or commit suicide. He changed his gestalt towards life and started dwelling in the world of spirit and consciousness, beyond the boundaries of body and mind. Through some unknown cosmic transmission, he must have got access to the words of sage Ashtavakra: You are really unbound and action-less, self-illuminating and spotless already. The cause of your bondage is that you are still resorting to stilling the mind. You are unconditioned and changeless, formless and immovable, unfathomable awareness, imperturbable-such consciousness is un-clinging. You are not bound by anything. What does a pure person like you need to renounce? Putting the complex organism to rest, you can go to your rest.

Prof. Hawking came to India in 2001 for a public talk at TIFR. Shri Sandip Trivedi, the director of TIFR remembers: A massive crowd had gathered, and he started by telling the audience ‘You must be wondering how I think about myself’, and then proceeded to say that he thought of himself as a scientist with some qualities or traits that are peculiar to them, to any other scientist’. This was his way of conveying that he had indeed overcome all the odds, even in his mind. There was immediate response from the crowd in the form of a thunderous applause.”

“He had this amazing ability to connect to people. He was a great communicator. And of course, the subjects he used to deal with, black holes, outer universe, are very fascinating topics. People loved listening to him.”

Prof. Hawking did not believe in God, but there was something divine in him as it is said about Gautama the Buddha.  Remember H. G Wells saying that Gautam Buddha is the most godless and the most godlike man of human history. He is so positively one with godliness. Prof. Hawking heralds a new ways of scientific thinking—something beyond thought. New ground breaking insights. It is being acknowledged now that Science Fiction also owes a great deal to his theories in astrophysics and cosmology and of everything from black holes to relativity. And when he passed away, players in the EVE Online community decided to recognize his contributions to science in their own way by covering the night sky in beacons.

It is reported that these cynosural beacons, these modules emit a bright, radiant light and are used to open jump bridges that ships can use as a warp destination. On a normal day, seeing a cynosural beacon flare up is reason to panic—it often signals the cavalry has arrived to obliterate you. But on March 14 and 15, the beacons were appearing all across space as tribute to Hawking and his achievements.

Prof. Hawking had a prophetic intelligence, almost spiritual, and has warned against the dangers of science and technology. He said that technology needs to be controlled in order to prevent it from destroying the human race. He has also spoken out about the dangers of artificial intelligence. In a Reddit AMA back in 2015, he said that Artificial Intelligence would grow so powerful it would be capable of killing us entirely unintentionally. In one of his interviews to the Independent UK newspaper, he had suggested that we need to establish away of identifying threats quickly, before they have a chance to escalate. Before that happens, we need to have some form of world government. “All this may sound a bit doom-laden but I am an optimist. I think the human race will rise to meet these challenges.”

Talking on the relationship between mind and the computer, the modern sage Osho suggests to accept these challenges: The computer is also part of man’s creativity. There is no need to become a competitor; you are the master. And for the first time the computer and you are separate. That’s what all the teachings of the mystics have been telling you, that your mind and you are separate. But it is difficult because the mind is inside your head and your consciousness is so close to it, so thousands of mystics have been teaching, but nobody listens. The distance is not very much. But with computers, the distance will be very clear; there will be no need for any mystic to tell you.

Osho adds: For example, the computer can change all the stupidity that man has shown through the whole of history. I don’t think that computers will like to create war, or computers will exploit people, or computers will discriminate between black and white, between man and woman.

Moreover, you are always the master, not the computer. You can always change the program of the computer. The computer is simply a tremendous instrument, which gives you immense possibilities that are not available to you biologically. You can do things which man has never dreamt of. The computer can be a thousand times more superior than Albert Einstein. Naturally the computer can produce a science far more fundamental, far more real, not changing every day because new discoveries go on happening and the old discovery becomes out of date. The computer can reach the very center of reality.

In modern world, having an ambition and competing with others is thought to be the only way of progressing in life. But if you observe the world as it is today, you will see that most people have become mental on this path and have lost touch with their own heart. A man who is always competing with others may have an illusion of increasing his IQ–the Intelligence Quotient–to succeed in business or politics, but it results in drying up his EQ–the Emotional Quotient. And any way, this kind of intelligence with a shrunken heart cannot be called the authentic intelligence. This kind of success or progress is also not holistic, it is lopsided. It is sickness. The frenzy of competition does not make us healthy. This is toxic for our whole being. It creates a certain cancer for our consciousness.

Then what is the right path? How to progress in life–the happy and healthy way? If you ask me, it is quite simple. Just be in tune with your own being and do not be in any conflict with your being, you will have revelation of your true potential. Make total effort to let it blossom.  Accept yourself fully as you are and realize your potential that was born with you as your blueprint.

There’s a joke. A father was reprimanding his son for being a lazy good-for-nothing. “When I was your age,” he said, “I worked sixteen hours a day to learn the business.”

“I am very proud of you, Dad,” replied the son. “If it had not been for your ambition and perseverance, I might have had to the same.”

Every child in this world enters as an innocent being, a tabula rasa, but very soon he is corrupted by the elders to become ambitious, as this is the way our world functions. As the child grows, he starts taking the ruinous path of competing and fighting with others. The child does not do this himself, he is actually pestered by the parents, teachers and preachers. Gradually, his mind becomes poisoned by the education that he receives.

The root cause of all violence in the world is the education of ambition that every child receives from the previous generation. Our education is not based on meditation or love, but it is based on ambition and competition. This poisonous system of education needs a metamorphosis, a total transformation.

Nobody is superior, nobody is inferior, but nobody is equal either. People are simply unique, incomparable. You are you, I am I. I have to contribute my potential to life, you have to contribute your potential to life. I have to discover my own being, you have to discover your own being.

When inferiority disappears, all feeling of superiority also disappears. They live together, they cannot be separated. The man who feels superior is still feeling inferior somewhere. The man who feels inferior wants to feel superior somewhere. They come in a pair; they are always there together; they cannot be separated.

Osho tells a parable in a Darshan Diary The Sun Rises in the Evening : A very proud man, a warrior, a samurai, came to see a Zen master. The samurai was very famous, well known all over the country, But looking at the master, looking at the beauty of the master and the grace of the moment, he suddenly felt inferior. Maybe he had come with an unconscious desire to prove his superiority. He said to the master “Why am I feeling inferior? Just a moment ago, everything was okay. As I entered into your court suddenly I felt inferior. I have never felt like that. My hands are shaking. I am a warrior, I have faced death many times, and I have never felt any fear–why am I feeling frightened?”

The master said, “You wait. When everybody has gone, I will answer.” People continued coming to visit the master, and the man was getting tired, more and more tired. By the evening the room was empty, there was nobody, and the samurai said, “Now, can you answer it?” And the master said, “Now, come outside.”

A full moon night – the moon was just rising on the horizon… And he said, ‘Look at these trees, this tree high in the sky and this small tree. They both have existed by the side of my window for years and there has never been any problem, the smaller tree has never said “Why do I feel inferior before you?” to the big tree. How is it possible? This tree is small and that tree is big and I have never heard any whisper.

The samurai said, “Because they can’t compare.” The master said, “Then you need not ask me; you know the answer.”

Osho concludes: Comparison brings inferiority, superiority. When you don’t compare, all inferiority, all superiority, disappear. Then you are, you are simply there. A small bush or a big high tree–it doesn’t matter; you are yourself. You are needed. A grass leaf is needed as much as the biggest star. Without the grass leaf God will be less than he is. The sound of the cuckoo is needed as much as any Buddha; the world will be less, will be less rich if the cuckoo disappears.”

A man who lives like a robot, howsoever efficient and successful, cannot be called a living person, as life and wakefulness are synonymous.

There is so much talk about digital revolution these days. And this has a tremendous appeal. Even small children are getting attracted to all digital things. Also, there is so much talk about artificial intelligence that is going to replace natural intelligence. They say it will prove million times more powerful than natural intelligence. But with all this revolution that is robotic, we cannot be sure whether we are going towards heaven or hell on earth. This could be very unhealthy, specially if it is controlled by pathological people. It is going to be a real menace.

Once Osho talked about sociologist Lewis Yablonsky, who had then coined an interesting word — “robopathology”. Any one who suffers from it is a “robopath”. “Robo” means a machine, an automaton; one who lives a mechanical kind of life, a repetitive kind of life; one who has no adventure; one who simply goes on dragging himself. He fulfils the day-to-day demands but he never fulfils the eternal demand, the eternal challenge. He will go to the office, to the factory, he will come home, he will look after the children and the wife, and he will do a thousand and one things — and do them very efficiently — but he will never be alive. He will live as if he is already dead.

A man who lives like a robot, howsoever efficient and successful, cannot be called a living person, as life and wakefulness are synonymous. Sleep is also a mini death, though a man can dream in the sleep that he is alive. But this aliveness is useless without awareness. A robot will not have such an aliveness that comes with the throbbing of the heart and a joy of awakening. Being fully awake is the real thing.

There is a Sufi parable. There was a tradesman in a small village, who sat on his knees in his little shop, and with his left hand he pulled a strand of wool from the bale which was above his head. He twirled the wool into a thicker strand and passed it to his right hand as it came before his body. The right hand wound the wool around a large spindle. This was a continuous motion on the part of the old man who, each time his right hand spindled the wool, inaudibly said, “La illaha illa’llah.” There could be no uneven movement or the wool would break and he would have to tie a knot and begin again. The old man had to be present every moment or he would break the wool.

This is the real awakening, what Sufis call Zikr — an awareness on a higher plane than that on which we normally live. It is a silsila — a tradition of masters and disciples. Out of such a small phenomenon the tradesman created so much awareness.

The modern man, who has to adjust with city-life, with all its maddening speed, traffic and noise, has become unnatural.

Off late, the people in the Western world are increasingly adopting mindfulness and meditation as part of their daily routine to acquire peace of mind.

But most of the people who meditate regularly wonder why they start falling sleep during such a process of self-exploration. As soon as their body and mind relax, some sort of sleepiness begins to possess their being. This is quite natural.

The modern man, who has to adjust with city-life, with all its maddening speed, traffic and noise, has become unnatural. So the first thing that the meditation does, in the moments of relaxation, is to give him some good sleep that his body needs urgently. The environment we live in is not so conducive to meditation — not enough oxygen and prana-energy to keep us fully awake while we meditate. And to meditate in air-conditioned rooms, may be suitable to most people, is not equal to meditating in a forest or gardens.

So the first requirement for meditation is to let our body regain its naturalness with letting it fall into sleep. The body will keep asserting and asking for more sleep. Be kind to your body. For a few days, you cooperate with it and it will cooperate with you. In the beginning, the body may be fidgety also. Don’t worry, continue with meditation. ultimately, it would be a rewarding experience. Recently, ABC news anchor Dan Harris has written a book, named Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics, in which he shared his own experience to highlight the benefits of meditation, which has become popular as Mindfulness.

Another neuroscientist Davidson suggests that one needs to part from his/her favourite gadgets and technology in order to achieve the benefits of meditation. Also, as one starts practising meditation, he would be easily able to manage things in spite of being busy. Today, meditation is being fully supported by the scientific researches highlighting the benefits of practising mindfulness to maintain a healthy body and mind.

Says Osho on this subject: “The world can come to a harmony if meditation is spread far and wide, and people are brought to one consciousness within themselves… My effort is to make meditation almost a science, so it is not something to do with religion, so anybody can practice it — whether he is a Hindu or a Christian or a Jew or a Mohammedan, it doesn’t matter. What his religion is, is irrelevant: he can still meditate. He may not even believe in any religion. He may be an atheist; still he can meditate. Meditation has to become almost like a wildfire. Then there is some hope….. It should be ecstatic. It should be enjoyable. It should bring a dance to people’s hearts.”