These people have sprung up all over the world. India has suffered from these people for many centuries, but this century is seeing a new phenomenon. The Indian frauds have created similar kinds of people all over the world – pretenders, who know nothing except some strategy that influences people to believe in them; and particularly at this time, when everybody is going down into a deep psychological crisis. Everything seems to be silent on the surface. You may not even be thinking about the third world war, the ecological crisis; you may not be thinking about AIDS. At least consciously you may not be concerned at all what is going to happen to humanity tomorrow, but deep down you cannot avoid it.
Your consciousness is a separate personality, but your unconscious, as you go deeper, becomes more and more part of the whole ocean. So whatever is happening in the soul of the cosmos has ripples in everybody’s unconscious. If you can read your own unconscious, you can read the whole future that is going to happen. But you may know or you may not know about your unconscious situation.
These frauds – the Indians and their by-products, mostly American – are doing a good business. It is said that psychologists build castles in the air, psychoanalysts live in them, and psychiatrists collect the rent. But I wonder who pays the rent? You! I say again, you! You pay the rent, and there are many others who are paying the rent. Those castles do not exist, nobody lives in those castles….
But in a psychological crisis of this intensity – in which we are – everybody is shattered inside, is somehow holding himself together, and anybody who pretends to teach you the way towards the beyond immediately attracts you. You don’t have any way, any criterion, any measurement to figure out whether the man is true or not, whether the man is authentic or not. In the East, because the tradition is more than ten thousand years old, slowly, slowly we have figured out a few indications of an enlightened master. Those indications may be helpful to you.
The authentic master is not at all interested in disciples, in the crowd, in the many numbers around him. He does not brag about it. He attracts only the very intelligent, because what he teaches and whatever he is, is understandable only by very highly intelligent people. Have you ever checked what intelligence quotient you have? Before figuring out whether a master is true or not, you should have a psychological test to find out what is your mental age.
The average mental age of humanity is fourteen years. Now, people with a mental age of fourteen years are not the people to understand something of the transcendental, something of the spiritual, something of the inner. It is time for them to play football, watch boxing matches, sit before their TV, glued to it for seven and a half hours every day. But I have always been wondering…. Nobody ever thinks about how much intelligence you have. Is it enough to be a disciple? Is it enough to be accepted by a master?
A master is not in any way interested in converting you to a certain system of beliefs. If any master is doing that, he is only a teacher. And a teacher carries only borrowed knowledge. He can say beautiful things, but they are all parrot-like. Sometimes he can talk even better than the masters because masters are spontaneous and the teacher has gone through many rehearsals. He is well prepared, he has done his homework, and he goes on teaching the same thing again and again to different people.