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love. But what about AIDS? Now it is not friendship to eat from the same plate. Nothing can be more inimical.
What is good and what is bad?
In ignorant children you can enforce any idea that "This is good." For example, in Jainism, the Jaina monk cannot use a simple thing like a razor blade, because that is using technology -- high technology. He has to pull out his hair. And every year thousands of people come to see the monk pull out his hair. It is painful, stupid, but those people... you should see the crowd; they are crying with respect: "Now this man is doing something great. This is what a saint should be." They have conditioned their children that this is what it means to be a saint.
Unfortunately, I was born in this religion -- Jainism. But it was going to be "unfortunately" anywhere I was to be born, because to be a Christian or a Jew or a Hindu or a Mohammedan does not matter.
In this matter, a child cannot yet find parents who will not condition him. A child cannot say, "I am born, fortunately, to parents who have not conditioned me, who have given me freedom, who have given me as sharp an intellect as possible, who have taught me how to doubt, how to be skeptical, how to be an agnostic, how to inquire and never believe unless I come to know myself."
In my childhood I have seen many Jaina monks pulling out their hair, and I used to say to my father, "I don't see anything good in it. It is not doing any good to humanity, it is not something creative. It is not making life more beautiful. In fact, that man is a masochist."
And my father would say, "You keep quiet. If you cannot keep quiet, go home, but don't say such things. A masochist?"
I said, "I cannot be quiet, and I cannot go away from here. I have to see the whole show of this masochism."
It is a known fact that mad people in madhouses pluck their hair. And you may know women -- because they cannot do any other harm to the man they love, they start pulling out their own hair.
So this Jaina monk is doing something feminine too; he is not really a male. Pulling out your hair... I don't see any beauty, any grace in it. Look at his face:
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