Do you know? – when men walked on the moon, what their greatest experience was? It was not of the moon. Their greatest experience was of the Earth! From that space, from that distance, they could see Earth as one. Boundaries disappeared, nations disappeared. There was no India and there was no Germany and no England and no America; it was all one Earth. That was their greatest experience, not that they were standing on the moon. For the first time ordinary human beings could feel that the Earth is one.
Exactly the same happens when you reach the inner peak of consciousness. From there, the vision is even more clear than it is from the moon, because that is the greatest peak. From that perspective you see life as whole. I call that man enlightened who sees life as whole. They have been blooming, flowering, everywhere. Flowers bloom in the valleys of the Himalayas too, where nobody goes and sees them. Don’t think that they bloom only in your garden. They bloom in primitive societies too. Of course, they don’t have the word enlightenment or buddha. They have their words.
If you look into the Old Testament you will not find the word enlightenment, you will not find the word buddha; that is not there. That is a different kind of language. But who are these prophets? In a very primitive society the enlightened person may be called “the magician,” and it looks very absurd to call Buddha a magician. But that is their language and that has its own beauty – because this is the greatest magic there is, and the man has performed the greatest miracle: he has transformed himself.
The word magician comes from a very, very enlightened person, Magus. The people around him must have felt the same way as they felt around Buddha. The vibe of the person was miraculous. To be around him was enough to trigger something inside you that took you far away, far, far away from your ordinary places, which brought you to a new place inside your being, which gave you an experience of a new space. People must have wondered what he had done.
Primitive societies call their enlightened people “the magicians.” Languages differ. Those who understand should not bother too much about languages. They should break all the barriers of languages, concepts, and they should look directly. Then you will be surprised: flowers have been blooming all over the earth, the divine has been coming all over the earth. The divine has been descending everywhere, in every time, in every kind of place. It is not partial, but every race would like to declare that existence is partial.
Jews say they are the chosen people: all that is beautiful and all that is great has been happening to them, all the prophets belong to them. Mm? Just listen to the Jews: they will say “Who else has so many prophets?” Of course in India they are not called prophets, in China they are not called prophets – “Who else has so many prophets?” And the Jew is right, because they have a long, long line of prophets.
If you ask the Christians, of course they are the chosen people. They follow “the only begotten Son of God.” Christ has come to them. Who else has such a phenomenon as Christ? It is their property, their possession: Christ belongs to them.