He used to give sermons, and he would keep fifteen or twenty postcard-sized cards; on each card everything that he was going to say was written in shorthand, so nobody would even know what was written on them. And he always used to speak standing, so the people could not see those cards either. He would speak; when the card was finished he would change the card to number two, to number three.
One day, before he was going to speak, he had arranged his cards and had gone just to get ready in the bathroom. I mixed the numbers – the fifth was first, the first was fifth, the third was tenth, the tenth was the third. I just mixed them and put them back. He came out, took the cards – I also went with him.
He started speaking. Looking at the card he could not understand, “What is happening?” – because the card said something which it was not supposed to say – “Where is the introduction?” He was almost in a nervous breakdown. And in front of a crowd of almost two thousand people, he started looking for the card with the introduction. He could not find it so he tried to start on his own, but he had never started on his own in his whole life.
People were very much puzzled: they had never seen such a third-rate sermon from such a first-rate theologian – and they had all heard him before. He was perspiring – and it was winter. Somehow he finished. Neither did he know what he was saying, nor did the people understand what he was doing, what was going on. It was all irrelevant, inconsistent, unrelated, upside down, the beginning coming in the end. Finally the introduction came: “Brothers and sisters…”
He was very angry. Back in the principal’s home he said, “I feel like killing you!”
I said, “You should feel like that. But I wanted to do it for a specific reason. Do you think Jesus used to have these cards with him? You are more articulate than Jesus. Jesus was uneducated, he did not even know Hebrew, he only knew the local dialect, Aramaic, which only the laborers and poor people spoke. The learned and the cultured and the rich used to speak Hebrew; Aramaic was not for the cultured and the educated. Jesus had no way of carrying these cards because he could not write, but his words have a fire. And your words are the same but there is no fire, there is no warmth. They are not coming from your heart; they are coming from a dead corpse. And you are functioning only like a computer – you are not a theologian, just a machine.”
Each master has to create devices according to his own talents, capacities, genius. For example one of the great Sufi masters, Jalaluddin Rumi, had nothing to say, he was not a man of words – but he knew how to dance. His discourse was that of dancing. He would dance, his disciples would dance, and a certain dancing which is called “whirling,” just standing on one spot and whirling… This dancing had made him enlightened, because he whirled for thirty-six hours, continuously, nonstop, till he fell down. But when he opened his eyes he was a totally different man.