He said, “You don’t understand. In Jainism, the moon is a god, not a planet. You cannot walk on a god. And they have not only walked on a god, they have brought stones and other things from the moon to be studied on the earth. It has to be proved that they are deceiving the whole world, that all these things they had taken from the earth, and they have brought them back. Nobody has been to the moon; nobody can have been, otherwise the whole system of Jainism will collapse.”

I said, “Just for a single thing, that the moon proves to be a planet not a god…?”

He said, “If one thing is wrong, then everything becomes suspicious. We cannot afford anything to be wrong.”

I said, “You are too late! Many things have already been proved wrong. You are not very knowledgeable. You have simply been reading the newspapers, and because it is a recent event, man landing on the moon…otherwise in three hundred years science has destroyed much that all the religions have believed in for centuries.”

That man was really in tremendous anguish. I said, “For you, being a monk, it does not matter whether anything is wrong or right – your search is for the truth, for peace and silence. And you are getting so much upset. Your very anguish shows that your own mind is shattered. It is not a question of Jaina scriptures, or the Jaina tradition, it is a question of your mind.

“You are collecting all this money, not for Jaina scriptures but to save your sanity; otherwise you would go insane. You have sacrificed your whole life, and now you find that the gods you have been worshipping are not gods but just planets, as ordinary as the earth, and very poor – no water, no plants, no life. It is your mind that is going to be shattered. How will you account for your whole life…?”

This is the situation of many people of intelligence. Either they are going insane…you can see it, psychotherapy and other schools of therapies are growing fast, and they are the most highly paid people. People are going through psychoanalysis for years at a time. In fact people have started boasting. In women’s clubs you can go and hear it, that one woman will be saying, “How many years have you been in psychoanalysis? – just seven years? I have been in psychoanalysis for fifteen years.” It has become something of pride. But to be in psychoanalysis simply means you are insane; otherwise why are you taking the treatment? And it is spreading.

But the most intelligent people are rushing towards the East to find some way, some method, some meditation – Yoga, Zen, Sufism, Hasidism. Somewhere somebody must know how to get over this critical stage, how to go beyond the traditional mind and still remain centered, sane, and intelligent. Thousands of people are moving towards the East.

It is very hilarious because thousands of people are coming from the East to the West to study science, medicine, engineering, electronics, and the people who know all these are going to the East, just to learn how to sit silently and do nothing.