But gibberish has been thought to be one of the methods used by enlightened people. You will be surprised to know that the word, the English word, gibberish, is not English, it is Arabic; and it comes from an enlightened man, Jabbar. Jabbar was certainly an enlightened man, but he spoke so fast that his words would run over each other. It was impossible to make any sense out of what he said because there were no full stops, no commas, no indication of where the sentence began and where it ended. Jabbar simply did not believe in all these mannerisms.

It is because of Jabbar that people started calling his language gibberish, but by and by the word gibberish became completely disassociated from Jabbar. Nobody would think that the English word gibberish is from a Sufi word and has come from a man who was enlightened. Gibberish, in the East, is thought to be a way of enlightened people. They are saying to you: Nothing can be said through words. You will have to understand something besides the words.

But mad people also do the same. And this man Tuntun Pal Baba was simply paralyzed, retarded; you could see it from his face. As I went again and again to him and he became more and more familiar to me, and I became familiar to him, we started some kind of communication. I started using his bell, and I made a few code signals with the bell.

I tried writing, asking him, “What is your name?” and I would ring the bell two times. I knew that he could read because he looked at the slate on which I had written, “What is your name?” and his eyes had the flash showing that he could read. I made the signal three times and wrote on the slate: “I understand that you can read.” He looked at it and smiled with half his face. I put the pen in his hand and made the sign of ringing the bell two times, and he wrote his name, Tuntun Pal Baba.

I said, “This is not right – you can’t deceive me that you are enlightened. You have deceived thousands of people for sixty years, but this is not good; you have not gained anything out of it. Those poor people from the villages have lived with the belief that they are under the guidance, under the blessings, of an enlightened man. This is criminal. And on the other hand you could have been cured, because there is not much of a problem; paralysis can be cured.”

I could see the flash in his eyes that he understood that he had made a mistake. If paralysis could be cured…. It was because of paralysis that perhaps half of his brain also had gone numb and created the madness. He wrote on the slate: “Is it possible that I can be cured?”

I said, “Perhaps now it is too late. For sixty years you have been paralyzed, your brain has been numb for sixty years; I don’t think that after sixty years of paralysis the brain cells can be alive, can function again. And now, what is the point? You must be nearabout ninety, ninety-five, or a hundred: what is the point now? Now it is better you remain enlightened – at least people are happy. And you are not feeling in an inferior state – that you are paralyzed, that you cannot speak, that half your brain is not functioning.”