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-- even against the whole propaganda machine of the Soviet Union, which is one of the most efficient, dictatorial, which allows no criticism, no freedom of thinking.
Those Mohammedans have to pretend that they are atheists. But in Mohammedanism, five prayers are prescribed every day -- from morning till you to go bed. It is very difficult in the Soviet Union to do five prayers. They have changed the name of the five prayers; they don't call it prayer, they call it physical exercise. Five times every day... it is good for the body and for the mind. They cannot mention the soul.
Sixty or seventy years of continuous propaganda, conditioning -- but the sacred is just standing by. And thousands of years of conditioning all over the world against the mundane, but the mundane has not disappeared. In India, they even reached to the extreme -- they have been preaching for almost two thousand years that the mundane world does not exist; it is maya, it is illusion, it only appears.
I was staying with a shankaracharya, and he was discussing the illusoriness of the world. I told him, "There is no need to argue. You just pass through the wall. Don't go through the door. And it will be enough; I will be convinced and I will remain your devotee for my whole life."
He said, "Go through the wall? What kind of argument is this?"
I said, "It is not a question of argument. It will simply prove whether the wall is real or illusory."
You can condition the human mind, but the mundane is there. And even the person who preaches continually.... the first shankaracharya, Adi Shankaracharya, who created this theory of illusion and propounded it with great argumentation -- he also needs food, he also needs water, he also needs clothes. And I am wondering why none of his followers ever objected, ever asked, "What is the need of these illusory things? And how can an illusory food become nourishment? And if it becomes nourishment, then to call it illusory is nonsense."
This was one side of the game: the people who wanted to emphasize spirituality had to deny the reality of the world which surrounds you everywhere. And there have been people who have
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