“No, all exactly like this one.”

“Well,” said the artisan dubiously, “if they must all be exactly alike, I will have to charge you more for each chair.”

“More!” exclaimed the American, who had hoped for a better price on a quantity order. “Why more?”

“I would become bored making them all alike,” replied the artisan. “I would be happier making each one different.”

God would have really become bored if he was to go on producing the same type of people again and again. God is not an assembly line. The production is not mass; it is always unique, whatsoever is created. You cannot find two pebbles alike on the whole of the earth, not even two leaves alike. What to say about two human beings?

But the stuff is the same: it is the same universal consciousness out of which we are all made, sculptured, painted. It is the same, but still each one is given a different form. And the world is beautiful because each individual has a uniqueness – his own face, his own authenticity. Yet go deeper in him, and you will find the individual disappearing. And when you have reached to his very core, there is no individual left, but only the universal.

So let me say it in this way: on the circumference we are different, at the center we are the same. The center is one, the circumference is millions. And each circumference has its own way of expression, of being.

God is a creator, not a producer. And his creativity is infinite. He never duplicates, he never imitates, he never creates carbon copies. He creates one individual only once – and that is your grandeur, your dignity, your glory.

You ask me, “If the self is the same in all men, does this mean that all men are identical?”

They are not identical. On the circumference they are absolutely unique. At the center there is no question of identity: it is one. There are not two, so how can they be identical? At the center there is only one universal existence; there is no question of being identical with anything else – there is nothing else. On the periphery, on the circumference, there is no question of being identical: all waves are different, no two waves are similar.

And you ask, “If so, how can any one man be an essential part of creation?”

Each single wave is an essential part of the ocean; it is not accidental. By essential I mean it is needed by the ocean, otherwise it would not have been there in the first place. Existence needs you the way you are, he needs you exactly the way you are. So please don’t try to become somebody else.