The children are very curious about each and every thing. They are continuously asking, their enquiry is constant. You try to shut them up – not because their questions are irrelevant, but because you don’t have answers. And you know perfectly well that by the time they reach your age, they will understand the situation – and they will do the same with their own children. This goes on and on, generation to generation; hence very rarely have there been enlightened people.

Of the people who are known as enlightened, at least eighty percent are just bogus. How can they criticize God, Jesus, heaven and hell? In fact, they are accepted as enlightened because they accept Jesus as the son of God. They are accepted as enlightened because they go on telling people they have seen God, met God, talked with him; he has sent messages through them to you. How can they criticize God? That is their foundation. How can they criticize heaven and hell? Their whole enlightenment, saintliness, wisdom, depends on these fictions. Destroying them, they will destroy themselves.

Hence, eighty percent of your so-called enlightened people are more unenlightened than you are. But it is a strange world. The blind go on leading other blind. Of course, finally they all fall in a ditch someway or other. But the other blind far away in the line don’t know that the leader and the close followers have fallen in a ditch and disappeared.

I cannot accept anything that is not my own experience. I have enquired without any investment. I do not want to be worshipped; hence, I am not dependent on you. I do not want to become a God to you; hence I am absolutely free to say what is the truth.

Eighty percent of enlightened people have been either Christians or Hindus or Mohammedans or Buddhists. To me this is something of a fundamental contradiction. A man is enlightened and is still a Mohammedan? Then what is the difference between blind people and enlightened people? At least he should renounce Mohammedanism, Hinduism, Christianity. He should simply say, “I am myself. I am not a sheep, and I don’t need any shepherd. I am a man of my own consciousness, and I have a light of my own. I don’t need the Bible to guide me, or the Vedas to be my vision. I have my own vision.”

An enlightened person cannot belong to any religion. He belongs to existence. So you can cut off eighty percent of your enlightened people without any difficulty.

Ten percent of enlightened people remain silent. You never come to know about them, for the simple reason that you cannot understand silence. And to be enlightened is one thing; to give it an expression is totally different. And unless the enlightened person starts expressing his vision, his experience, his realization, how are you going to know about him?

Why do ten percent choose to remain silent? It is because to be articulate is a different quality, it does not come in the same parcel as enlightenment. You don’t expect an enlightened man to be a painter necessarily. You don’t expect him to be a poet necessarily. Why should you expect that he will be able to be articulate with words? And it is a very difficult job. Perhaps the hardest job in the world is to tell you about something you know nothing about.