Secondly, it has always been a difficult process for an enlightened man to bring his experience into language. Everybody falters. It is not the person’s fault; the very process is one of trying to do the impossible. The experience of the universal consciousness is so far away from language that when you drag it down to language, it becomes something else. Then it can have many interpretations.

Your experience was one, absolutely singular, absolutely clear. There was no question of any alternative meaning or any interference. But when you bring it down to the level of language, then thousands of problems arise.

You have to remember the difficulty of the enlightened man, and you have to be compassionate, because our language is so poor that it cannot contain things of the beyond.

For example, Krishna’s Shrimad Bhagavadgita has one thousand interpretations. Now, either Krishna was so mad that he would speak words with one thousand meanings…A word with one thousand meanings means nothing! And those meanings are contradictory to each other. But in bringing them to language, they become vulnerable. There are one thousand great commentaries on Krishna’s Gita, and they all condemn each other. They all project their own mind – and they are free, because Krishna is not there to interrupt, to say, “This is not my meaning.”

A word can have many meanings. Particularly older languages – Sanskrit, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic – have a beauty but also a difficulty. Their beauty is that they are very poetic. Poetry needs as much freedom to use words as possible. Even to use the same word in different meanings gives the poet a great freedom.

But you cannot write science in the same way as you write poetry. It has to represent exactly the one thing that you are trying to pinpoint. You cannot write a treatise on science in Sanskrit; it is impossible, because immediately there will be commentators and there will be differences, and it will simply create confusion.

Science is very much prose. But the inner world of man is just the opposite; it is very much poetry.

So it was very good that these ancient languages were capable of having one word with many meanings, and many words with one meaning. They could manage to convey something which is not possible to convey in prose.

Many times I will have to remind you where the translator has misunderstood Manzan.

Manzan is an enlightened master. What he is saying is absolutely true, but the way he has been translated…and I cannot blame the translator either. Manzan is speaking from high on top of the mountains, snow-peaked, and the translator is translating in the dark valleys of the unconscious mind. It is almost like a conversation between a sleeping man and a waking man. The waking man says something and the sleeping man, if he hears at all, hears something else. Most probably he does not hear; he goes on weaving his own dreams.