AIDS is not just a disease, it is something more, something beyond the limitation of the medical profession.  It is not a disease in the same category as other diseases; hence the danger of it. Perhaps it will kill at least two-thirds of humanity. It is, basically, the incapability to resist diseases. One slowly, slowly finds oneself vulnerable to all kinds of infections, and one has no inner resistance to fight those infections.

Humanity is losing the will to live. Whenever a person loses the will to live his resistance falls immediately, because the body follows the mind. The body is a very conservative servant of the mind; it serves the mind in a religious way. If the mind loses the will to live it will be reflected in the body by the dropping of resistance against sickness, against death. Of course the physician will never bother about the will to live.

It is going to become such an enormous problem all over the world that any insight from any dimension can be of immense help.  Just in the beginning it was thought to be a homosexual disease. From all around the world researchers supported the idea that it was something homosexual — it was found that it happens more in men than in women.

The report  says that AIDS is not a homosexual disease, that it is a heterosexual disease, and it happens if people go on changing partners —mixing with many women, with many men, continually changing partners. This continuous changing is the cause of the disease. Homosexuality has nothing to do with it, according to their research.

It has nothing to do with either heterosexuality or with homosexuality. It has certainly something to do with sex, because the will to live is rooted in sex. If the will to live disappears, then sex will be the most vulnerable area of life to invite death.

Naturally, when people have everything that you can hope for, everything that you can desire — and that’s where the problem of the will to live arises.  When you are hungry you think of getting work, food; you don’t have time to think about life and death. You don’t have time to think about what the meaning of existence is. It is impossible: a hungry man cannot think of beauty, of art, music. Take the hungry man, starving, into a museum filled with beautiful pieces of art: Do you think he will be able to see any beauty there? His hunger will prevent him. These are luxuries. Only when all his basic needs are fulfilled does man come to face the real problems of life. Poor countries don’t know the real problems.

Hence the richest man is the poorest, the richest man comes to know the unsolvable problems of life, and he is stuck; there is nowhere to go. The poor man has so much to do, so much to achieve, so much to become. Who cares about philosophy, theology, art? They are too big for him; he is interested in very mundane things, very small things. And it is impossible for him to turn his consciousness upon himself and start thinking and brooding about existence, being — just impossible.

You have everything and done everything; now what else is there to do?

That’s the point where perversion begins.  You have known many women and you have come to understand that it is all the same.  Once you put the light off, every woman is just the same. When the light is off, if the woman goes into the other room and your wife comes in — and you are not aware — you may even make love to your wife, giving her beautiful dialogues, not knowing that she is your wife.

Perversion requires the basic condition that you are fed up with changing women, you want something new. Then men start trying men — that seems to be different; women start trying women — that feels a little different. But for how long? Soon that too is the same. Again, the question arises. This is the point where you try all kinds of things, and slowly, slowly one thing becomes settled: that it is all useless. Curiosity disappears. Then, what is the point of living for tomorrow? It was curiosity: tomorrow something new may happen. Now you know that the new never happens. Everything is old under the sky. The new is just a hope, it never happens. You try all kinds of designs in furniture, houses, architecture, clothes — and everything fails finally.

When everything fails and there is no hope for tomorrow, then the will to live cannot go on with the same fervour, force, persistence. It starts dragging. Life seems to lose juice. You are alive because what else to do? You start thinking of committing suicide.

Life has so many things to give, and they see that everybody is enjoying all kinds of things and they have not lived yet. There is a great urge, force, to live. Much has to be done, much has to be achieved. There is the whole sky of ambition open, and they have not even begun to scratch the ground. No beggar ever thinks of committing suicide.

Logically it should be just the other way: every beggar should think of committing suicide, but no beggar ever thinks of it — even a beggar who has no eyes, is blind, is paralyzed, crippled.  In poor countries nobody thinks of suicide, in poor countries the question of meaning has not been raised. It is a Western question. What is the meaning of life? In the East nobody asks that. The West has come to a saturation point where everything you could live for you have already lived. Now what? If you are courageous enough, you commit suicide — or murder….

Once this disease, AIDS, spreads — and it is spreading, it is already epidemic.  The politicians are keeping quiet, the priests are keeping quiet, because the problem is too big, and nobody seems to have any suggestion as to how to solve it, so it is better to keep silent.

But how long can you keep silent? The problem is spreading, and once it spreads and becomes wider, you will be surprised: the profession that will be the topmost in this business of AIDS will be the priests, the nuns, the monks. They will be on the topmost, the most affected by it, because they have been practicing perverted sex longer than anybody else.

As it appears to me, the disease is spiritual. Man has come to a point where he finds the way ends. Going back is meaningless because all that he has seen, lived, shows him there was nothing in it; it has all proved meaningless. Going back has no meaning; going ahead there is no road: facing him is the abyss. In this situation if he loses the desire, the will to live, it is not unexpected.

It has been experimentally proved that if a child is not brought up by loving people — the mother, the father, the other small children in the family — if the child is not brought up by loving people, you can give him every nourishment but somehow his body goes on shrinking. You are giving everything necessary — medical needs are fulfilled, much care is being taken — but the child goes on shrinking. Is it a disease? Yes, to the medical mind everything is a disease; something must be wrong. They will go on researching the facts, why it is happening. But it is not a disease.

The child’s will to live has not even arisen. It needs loving warmth, joyful faces, dancing children, the warmth of the mother’s body — a certain milieu which makes him feel that life has tremendous treasures to be explored, that there is so much joy, dance, play; that life is not just a desert, that there are immense possibilities. He should be able to see those possibilities in the eyes around him, in the bodies around him. Only then will the will to live spring up — it is almost like a spring. Otherwise, he will shrink and die — not with any physical disease, he will simply shrink and die.

AIDS is the same phenomenon at the other end. The orphan child shrinks and dies because his will to live never sprouts, never springs up, never becomes a flowing current.  AIDS is at the other end: You suddenly feel you are an existential orphan. This existential feeling of being an orphan causes your will to live to disappear. And when the will to live disappears, sex will be the first thing to be affected because your life starts with sex; it is a by-product of sex.

So while you are living, throbbing, hoping, ambitious, and the tomorrow remains the utopia — so that you can forget all the yesterdays which were meaningless, you can forget today which is also meaningless…but tomorrow when the sun rises and everything will be different…. All the religions have been giving you that hope.

The day he matures and realizes this, the desire to live falls apart. And the first thing wounded by it will be your sexuality. To me that is AIDS.  When your sexuality starts shrinking you are really hoping that something will happen and you will go into eternal silence, into eternal disappearance. Your resistance is not there. AIDS has no other symptoms except that your resistance goes on dropping At the most you can live two years if you are fortunate and don’t get accidentally infected. Each infection will be incurable, and each infection will be weakening you more and more. Two years is the longest the AIDS patient can live; and he may disappear sometime before that.  And no treatment is going to help, because no treatment can bring back your will to live. Then multidimensional approach is required which is a hope is the future and also hope herenow, make this very moment fulfillment, a contentment so deep that there is no need for the will to live. The will to live is needed because you are not alive. The will keeps picking you up: you go on slipping down, the will keeps picking you up. you should learn to live without any will, to live joyously. It is the tomorrow that goes on poisoning you. Forget yesterdays, forget tomorrows. This is our day — let us celebrate it and live it. And just by living it you will be strong enough so that without the will to live you will be able to resist all kinds of diseases, all suicidal attitudes.

Just being fully alive is such a power that not only can you live, you can make others aflame, afire.  Only meditation can release your energy herenow. And then there is no need for any hope, for any utopia, for any paradise anywhere. Each moment is a paradise unto itself.