A revolution is part of the political world. A revolutionary’s approach is through politics. His understanding is that the structure of society is enough to change the human being.

A rebel, as I use the term, is a spiritual phenomenon. His approach is absolutely individual. His vision is if you want to change society you have to change the individual. Society in itself does not exist. It is only a word, like “crowd”.  Society is a collective name; just a name with no reality, no substance.

The individual has a soul, has the possibility of evolution, of change. The rebel is the very essence of religion. He brings into the world a change of consciousness. And if the consciousness changes then the structure of society is bound to follow. It does not work the other way around because that is a revolution, and each and every revolution has failed.

No revolution has yet succeeded in changing human beings; but it seems as if we are not aware of the fact. We still go on thinking in terms of revolution, of changing society, of changing the government, of changing the bureaucracy. Feudalism, capitalism, communism, socialism, fascism—they were all in their own way revolutionary. And they have all failed because man has remained the same. A Gautama Buddha, a Socrates, a Jesus—these people are rebels. Their trust is in the individual. They have not succeeded either, but their failure is different than that of a revolutionary. Revolutionaries have tried their methods in many countries, in many ways and have failed. But the approach of the Buddha has not succeeded because it has not been tested yet. A Jesus has not succeeded because the Jews crucified him. He has not been given a true chance. And he was strongly misinterpreted.

We have to be rebels, not revolutionaries. The revolutionary cannot stand alone; he needs crowds, a political party, a government. He needs power—and power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Yet each and every revolutionary who have succeeded in capturing power have been corrupted by the power. They could not change the nature of power and its institutions; the power changed them and their minds, and corrupted them. Only the names are different, but the society continued to be the same.

Human consciousness has not grown for centuries. Only once in a while someone blossoms—but in millions of people, the blossoming of one person is not a rule, it is the exception. And because that person is alone, the crowd cannot tolerate him. His existence becomes a kind of humiliation to everyone else; his very presence feels insulting because he opens your eyes, makes you aware of your potential and your future. And it hurts your ego that you have done nothing to grow, to be more conscious, to be more loving. You have not contributed to the world; your existence has not been a blessing but a curse. You introduce into the world your anger, your violence, your jealousy, your competitiveness. You make the world a battlefield; you are bloodthirsty, and you make others bloodthirsty. You deprive humanity of its humanness.

The world has known very few rebels. But now is the time: if humanity proves incapable of producing a large number of rebels, a rebellious spirit, then our days on earth are numbered, then the coming decades may become our graveyard. We are coming very close to that point.

We have to change our consciousness, create more meditative energy in the world, create more lovingness! We have to destroy the old—its ugliness, its rotten ideologies, its stupid discrimination, idiotic superstitions—and create a new human being with fresh eyes, with new values. A discontinuity of the past, that is the meaning of rebelliousness.

Unless we create such rebellious people around the earth, humanity has no future. The old man has brought us to our ultimate death. It is the old mind, the old ideologies, the old religions—they have combined together to bring about this situation of global suicide. Only a new human being can save humanity and this planet, and the beautiful life of this planet.

THE DAYS OF REVOLUTION ARE OVER. The French revolution failed, the Russian revolution failed, the Chinese revolution failed. In India, even the Gandhi revolution failed.

It is strange how revolutions have failed, failed at the hands of the revolutionaries themselves. Because once the power comes into their hands they start thinking in different ways. Then they become too attached to their power. Then their whole effort is how to keep the power in their hands, and how to keep the people under control.

The future needs no more revolutions. The future needs a new experiment, which has not been tried yet. Although for thousands of years there have been rebels, they remain alone—individuals. Perhaps the time was not right for them. But now the time is not only right…if you don’t hurry, the time has come to an end. In the coming decades, either mankind will disappear or a new human being with a new vision will appear on the earth. That new human being will be a rebel.

I propose a new religiousness. It will not be Christian and it will not be Hinduism and it will not be Buddhism. It is purely the quality of being whole.