There is not much time left for humanity to realize that we must create a world where the possibility of war does not exist.
Once man is taken to be a only a combination of matter, and no place is given for a spiritual being inside him, t hen to kill becomes just play.
Nations are irrelevant because of nuclear weapons. If the whole world can be destroyed within minutes, the alternative can be that the whole world should be together; now it cannot remain divided. Its division is dangerous, because division can become war any moment. The division cannot be tolerated. Only one war is enough to destroy everything, hence there is not much time left for man to understand that we should create a world where the very possibility of war does not exist.
Terrorism has many undercurrents. One is that because of nuclear weapons, nations are pouring their energies into that field, thinking that old weapons are out of date. They are out of date, but individuals can start using them.
Nuclear weapon has given individual people a certain freedom to use old weapons, which was not possible in old days because governments were also using same weapons. Now governments are concerned on destroying old weapons, selling them to countries which are poor and cannot afford nuclear weapons. And all those terrorists are coming from these poor countries — with weapons that have been sold to their countries. They can throw bombs at you. You have a vast amount of atomic bombs, nuclear bombs in your hands — but sometimes where a needle is useful, a sword may not be of any use. You may have the sword; that does not mean that you are necessarily in a superior position to the man who has a needle, because there are purposes in which only the needle will work — the sword will not be of any use.
Those small weapons from old times were piling up, and big powers had to dispose of them. They could drown them in the ocean, which meant so much money, so much manpower, so much energy would go to waste, that economically it was disastrous. But just to go on piling them up was also economically impossible. How many weapons can you gather? There is a limit. And when you get a new way of killing people more efficiently, then old simply has to be got rid of. It was thought that it would be better to sell them to poor countries. They accepted them, but those weapons cannot be used in a war. In a war those weapons are already useless.
Those weapons can be used individually, and a phenomenon — terrorism — can come out of it.
A terrorist has a strange power, even over the greatest powers. He can throw bombs at the White House without any fear because what you have is too big and you cannot throw it at him. And his weapons are weapons sold by you.
Terrorism became bigger, because the Third World War is almost impossible. And politicians have no other alternative. Terrorism simply means that what was being done on a social scale now has to be done individually.
It can only be prevented if we change the very base of human understanding — which is a Himalayan task; more so because these same people whom you want to change will fight you, they won’t allow you to change them easily. In fact they love bloodshed; they don’t have courage to say so.
If we can clean the basement of human mind’s unconscious, it can be cleaned away; terrorism is not in bombs in your hands; terrorism is in your unconscious.
The new situation is that every human being needs to understand that his unconscious intentions, needs to go through meditation, so he can calm down, become cool, and look towards the world with a new perspective — of silence.
