"And as your awareness grows, things that looked sinful to you will look only pathological. People are sick. And they are sick as victims of thousands of years of teaching them what is good and what is not good.

"With awareness there is no decision about any act. Awareness simply sees it whether it is good or not; it has no criterion. But the first thing is to attain to awareness. And then the same things may not look the same.

"For example, the rape of a woman is certainly ugly. But who is responsible for it? The society, the culture, the religion – they have been trying to keep men and women apart. Your biology knows nothing of it, and when you see a beautiful woman on a dark night, alone, your biology takes over your so-called morality and religion.

"But then too, it is not certain that raping the woman is certainly bad. Perhaps she was also waiting for it. Perhaps she was getting frustrated that nobody is raping her. There is a deep desire in every woman to be longed for, and the more drastically you long for her the more satisfied she feels. And rape is the ultimate in longing for a woman. You are ready to commit a crime just to have her. You may be imprisoned for years in a jail, you don't care.

"In most of the cases you and the woman are both brought up by the same idiotic society. They have told the woman to remain away from men, they have given her a certain psychology to avoid men. Even if somebody is attractive to her, she has to say no.

"In all the languages the poets have been saying for centuries that when a woman says no she means yes. But this is not true in Rajneeshpuram. Here when a woman says no she means no, and when she says yes she means yes. You are fortunate if she says no! But there is no confusion about the meanings of the words.

"No woman has been raped in four years' time in the commune here – but a few swamis have been raped! This is something new that is happening."