They had all pretended to be higher than you, holier than you, more special than you. They fulfilled a great need in you: you wanted to follow somebody who was the only begotten son of God. By following the son of God you were also participating in something divine. I have dissolved the very idea of following. You are my fellow travelers.

I want it to be declared throughout the earth, to all the corners of the earth, that someone has transcended, for the first time, even the experience of enlightenment – because that too is a way of creating distance, great distance: I am enlightened, you are not enlightened; I am always right, you are always wrong.

You are right as much as I am right. Accept the responsibility of your actions, of your thoughts, of your being, and fight every kind of trespass. You have to be yourself. If you cannot accept me being as human as you are just because I am enlightened, then I throw that enlightenment away. But I cannot allow you to be humiliated in a subtle way; I cannot allow you to go on becoming bigger egos. To hell with enlightenment!

And I will do everything that will destroy it. No Buddha has laughed. What kind of miserable creatures…? No Buddha has danced. No Buddha has sung.

You just wait! You will be the first ones to see a buddha dancing. As your laughter and your love are making me stronger, soon I am going to dance. You should not be surprised when someday I appear in your disco or your playing cards room! I want to erase all kinds of stupidities that have arisen in the past, and have become bigger and bigger as time has passed.

My sannyasins and I are not different. Your faults are my faults, your errors are my errors. I accept you as you are; remember it, because if I come to your disco perhaps you will not be ready to accept me. I am preparing you for that, I don’t want you freaking out. It has been a long and hard struggle for me to find my people, I am not going in any way to freak them out.

Slowly, slowly you will get accustomed to the idea that an enlightened man can come to a disco, dance with you, play cards with you, drink a little champagne with you. You should be immensely happy that you are with a man who claims no holier-than-thou attitude. It is ugly. There is nobody above human beings.

I have always loved one statement of Chandidas. He was thought to be mad, because he declared: sabar uppe manu sut, tahar uppe nain – “Above all is the truth of man, and there is nothing above it.”

Although he was in the past, I can recognize him as belonging to us, he is a contemporary. And he is courageous enough to enter the twenty-first century with us. What a great statement! sabar uppe manu sut…”Above all is the truth of man, and there is nothing above it.” He dissolved all gods, all angles. He recognized that man’s consciousness is the highest.

You don’t see it because you are asleep, but there is not much difference between the man who is asleep and the man who is awake. The man who is awake was asleep just few moments ago, the man who is asleep may be awakened just in a few moments, but there is no basic difference.