And the woman who said it is a dogmatic Christian. In fact, she thinks – maybe not very consciously, but unconsciously – that Jesus is the only divine being there has ever been. But you must know that Jesus was crucified, and the people who crucified him were not crucifying a divine being – they were crucifying a vagabond, they were crucifying a criminal; they were crucifying a man who was creating mischief.

The people who crucified Jesus were not able to see his divineness at all; they could only see the mischief in him. So whether Jesus was a divine being or not is not the question. Whether you can see or not is the question. And you can see only that which you are; you cannot see beyond yourself.

The moment you start seeing the divine in me, something of the divine has been born in you. And then it is not going to remain confined to me. The moment you start seeing divineness in me, by and by you will see the divine in Jesus, in Buddha, in Krishna. And, by and by, you will see the divine in other people. By and by, you will be able to see the divine in birds, in trees, in rocks – and one day you will see that only divineness exists and nothing else. In fact, only the divine exists and nothing else.

The more you hear me, the more you will feel something has been left unheard. The more you see me, the more you will feel something is missing, you have not seen me totally. The more you are close to me, the more intense your thirst will become. The more you love me, the more you will become passionate in your love: a burning desire will arise in you to become divine yourself.

Now there is a problem with Christians, Mohammedans, Jews, who think of the divine as a person – there is a problem. They think the divine is the one who created the world. In the East we have a deeper understanding of the divine than that. Creation is not something separate from the divine: it is its play, it itself hiding in many forms. Here it has become a rock, there it has become a flower. Here it is a sinner and there it is a saint. The whole play is the divine’s. And it is the only actor and it goes on dividing its roles. It is in Jesus and it is in Judas.

In the East, the divine is not a person; the divine is the very stuff the universe is made of. The divine is not a creator – the divine is creativity. And the creator and the creation are just two aspects of the same creative energy.

In the West, the idea is something like a painter making a picture, a painting. By the time the painting is complete, the painting is separate from the painter. Then the painter can die, but the painting will remain. In the East, we don’t think of the divine and the world as a painter and a painting – we think of the divine as a dancer, nataraj. You cannot separate the dancer from the dance: if the dancer goes, the dance goes. If the dance stops, then the person is no longer a dancer. Dancer and dancing exist together; they cannot exist separately; you cannot separate them.