But a calamity happened instead. The person who tries to become Gautam Buddha or Jesus Christ, cannot become Jesus Christ and cannot become Gautam Buddha. The natural law does not allow any carbon copies. It believes in the original.

So they could not become Buddhas and Christs, but by trying to become Buddha and Christ they also missed what they could have become. And this is the frustration of the whole humanity.

You never ask, Who was Jesus trying to become? Who was Gautam Buddha trying to become? If you are really understanding, one thing is clear: Gautam Buddha, Mahavira, Jesus Christ, or Moses, or Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu – they were not trying to become anybody else. That is the basic reason why they could become what was their own potential.

If you have to learn something from their lives, this is the most fundamental thing: never try to become somebody else. But from your very childhood you are being conditioned that you are unworthy as you are; prove yourself by becoming somebody else.

In my childhood I was never an obedient child, and I have remained the same. Just now nobody is giving me orders, so my disobedience has no way to express itself.

Once in a while my mother comes while I am taking my lunch, and she forgets, and she starts saying, “Mix this with that. With this vegetable, curd would have been good.”

And I say, “You have known me for my whole life. If you say so, I am not going to do it. Still you go on doing the same thing.”

She even tries to corrupt the minds of my kitchen people. I have told them, “Listen to her respectfully, but don’t follow what she says.”

I want to eat my food my way. Nobody is going to instruct me. Tastes differ, likes differ, individualities differ.

In my childhood there was a boy living just by the side of my house, my neighbor’s son, and my father used to say, “Look at that boy.” He was not my class fellow, he was two years ahead of me. “He always comes first. Why don’t you try?”

I said, “Until you stop telling me, I am not going to try. In a way, I am also first – from backwards. If there are thirty boys, I am the thirtieth. It is only a question from where you start counting. I can be first also, but I am not going to follow that idiot.”

My father said, “He always comes first, and you call him an idiot.”

I said, “Yes, I call him an idiot. He comes first because all the people in his class are just third-rate. Once in a while I have talked with him. He is just stupid. He can’t answer a single question; he can’t argue. The moment he sees me he tries to escape, afraid that I will catch hold of him and put him in a confusion.”

Finally my father stopped saying these things. The year he stopped, I came first in the class.