Just meet God outside in the open air, by the sea, by the side of the river, anywhere. Wherever you remember him, he will be there. If he can come to meet the untouchables… You are touchables, he can even touch you.

Because of this I have had to change my standpoint. I used to think that retarded people never grow. They grow – they become more retarded! The Shankaracharya is a living example. Now he has to tell the whole country what the status is of temples and scriptures; and what need there is of worship, yagnas, statues; and what need there is of caste. If sudras are the people of God, then others also are people of God – or do you want to say that only harijans are people of God, and others are not even cousin-brothers to harijans?

This fellow should be put right. He is getting more and more senile, he needs to be hospitalized. And if nobody accepts him, I am ready to accept him here. We will give him a good round of therapies and cleanse him of all this nonsense that he has been carrying. There is no need for him to be arrested and become a martyr, he is simply sick!

But he will not realize it. He will have to be forced to realize that he is suffering from a psychological illness. He should renounce the post of Shankaracharya and just enter a madhouse, where he will find very similar souls, speaking the same language – which nobody understands.

One of my friends, Narendra’s father, had a strange illness. Six months of the year he used to be mad and the remaining six months he was absolutely sane. Whenever he was sane he was ill – always with this problem and that problem and a headache and a stomachache – and he looked very sad. But whenever he became mad he was perfectly healthy, no sign of any sickness.

Once when he was perfectly mad and healthy he escaped from the house. He was caught by the police in Agra, where the Taj Mahal is, because of a very strange linguistic problem. He entered a sweet shop. There is a sweet which is called khaja. But khaja also means, “Eat it.” He asked the shopkeeper what it was, and the shopkeeper said “Khaja,” so he started to eat it.

The man said, “Are you mad?”

He said, “You must be mad, you told me, ‘Khaja.’”

A crowd gathered and the police came and he was brought to the magistrate. The magistrate was also at a loss, because the poor fellow was not wrong – why did they make such names for sweets? He was simply following what the shopkeeper said.

But by asking other questions the magistrate figured out that he was mad. He was sentenced to the madhouse for six months. But they did not know his psychological history: that three months of his madness were over, and after three months he would become sane on his own. There was no problem; it was simply a swing from madness to sanity, from sanity to madness. He had been on this swing his whole life.