But everybody can be a Zarathustra, because the spiritual realization is everybody’s birthright. It is not a talent like painting, or music, or poetry, or dancing; it is not a genius either. A genius has tremendous intelligence, but it is still of the mind.

Enlightenment is not of the mind, it is not intellect; it is intelligence of a totally different order. So, the first thing to remember is that it is not only people, like Friedrich Nietzsche who have missed the journey towards their own selves; they were great intellectuals, geniuses unparalleled – but all that belongs to the mind. And to be a Gautam Buddha, a Lao Tzu, or a Zarathustra is to get out of the mind, to be in a state of mindlessness. It does not matter whether you had a big mind or a small mind, a mediocre mind, or a genius; the point is that you should be out of the mind. The moment you are out of the mind, you are in yourself.

So the strange thing is that the more a person is intellectual, the farther he goes away from himself. His intellect takes him to faraway stars. He is a genius, he may create great poetry, he may create great sculpture. But as far as you are concerned, you are not to be created, you are already there.

The genius creates, the meditator discovers.

So, don’t make a category of Nietzsche and Stein and Schweitzer separate from others. In the world of mind, they are far richer than you, but in the world of no-mind, they are as poor as you are. And that is the space which matters.

Secondly, you ask, “What sort of consciousness do they carry into the next life?” They don’t have any consciousness to carry into another life. They have a certain genius, a certain talent, a certain intelligence; they will carry that intelligence into another life, but they don’t have consciousness.

Consciousness is an altogether different matter. It has nothing to do with creativity, it has nothing to do with inventiveness, it has nothing to do with science or art; it has something to do with tremendous silence, peace, a centering – they don’t have it. So the question of carrying a certain consciousness into the next life does not arise; they don’t have it in the first place. What they have, they will carry into the next life. They will become greater geniuses, they will become better singers, they will become more talented in their field, but it has nothing to do with meditation or consciousness. They will remain as unconscious as you are, as anybody else is.

It is as if you all fall asleep here; you will be dreaming. Somebody may have a very beautiful dream, very nice, very juicy, and somebody may have a nightmare. But both are dreams. And when they wake up, they will know that the beautiful dream and the nightmare are not different – they are both dreams. They are non-existential, mind projections.