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dropped -- in fact he should not have been dropped if Gandhi had really been a man of truth. The fourth monkey is the logical conclusion: "Hide the origin of all evil."
But this is not my interpretation. Knowing the people, and knowing that Charles Darwin has this great idea that man has come from monkeys -- and there is every possibility, because your mind still functions like a monkey. My interpretation, when I went to see Mahatma Gandhi's ashram ... He was dead, but his son Ramdas was my friend, so he invited me and he showed me around. It is an ugly place -- Mahatma Gandhi was a great self-torturer and he forced torture on other people.
I said, "These three monkeys ... where is the fourth? -- because I know the whole set."
He said, "I have never heard about the fourth." And he told me Mahatma Gandhi's interpretation.
I said, "That is not right. Looking at humanity, looking into humanity's psychology ... The first monkey says, `Don't listen to the truth because it will disturb all your consoling lies.'
"The second monkey says, `Don't look at the truth; otherwise your God will be dead and your heaven and hell will disappear.'
"The third monkey says, `Don't speak the truth, otherwise you will be condemned, crucified, poisoned, tortured by the whole crowd, the unconscious people. You will be condemned -- don't speak the truth!'
"And the missing fourth monkey says, `Hide your pleasures. Hide your enjoyment, don't show it to anybody.'"
People can respect you if you are miserable, but if you are happy everybody is jealous of you.
People have been asking me why my commune failed in America. It never failed. The reason it was destroyed by the violence of the American government was that it was such a successful experiment. Never has there been a commune in the whole history of man so successful.
That was the trouble. If we had failed, nobody would have bothered about us, but we succeeded. In five years we fought against the greatest power in the world -- and we had no power. We were not a nation, we had no army ... but we had truth on our side.
The commune was destroyed because it was successful.
The
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