If you want to sell a car, you have to advertise the car with a beautiful woman standing just by the side of the bonnet, looking at the car, enchanted. She is enchanted by the car, you become enchanted by her. Strange game! And then you purchase the car – as if that woman is going to come as part and parcel of the car. Later on you understand and feel silly, but then it is too late. That woman has nothing to do with the car.

In fact, such kinds of advertisements will show people of the future, what kind of people have existed on the earth before. After two thousand years people will think, “It seems it was just a madhouse! These advertisements show something about the people who were advertising, who were looking at the advertisements; these advertisements must have worked.” They are working.

You purchase a thing not because you need it but because it is advertised so much, hammered so much in your mind, from all sides. Wherever you go the billboards are there; in the movie it is there: Coca-Cola, Coca-Cola, Coca-Cola…wherever you go. It is difficult to get rid of Coca-Cola – and then naturally you decide it is better to taste it, because if the whole world is talking about Coca-Cola there must be something in it.

The question you have asked is your question – you are not interested in truth. But you don’t have the courage even to say that. Why be afraid? If you are not interested, it is perfectly okay. Then the truth is not interested in you either. The truth is not going to follow you, it is not going to nag you, “Be interested in me! Why are you not interested in me?” It is not your wife.

Asking what truth is would have been enough. If you had stopped there…. The same question was asked by Pontius Pilate – his last question to Jesus Christ. He had asked many other things and Jesus had answered them. His last question was, “What is truth?” – and this is the only question that Jesus did not answer.

Now, Jesus not answering the question can have many interpretations. Perhaps he knew nothing about truth. Perhaps he knew, but he also knew that the questioner was not going to understand it; it was futile, because the questioner was asking from a space which was absolutely wrong. Pontius Pilate was the governor-general; he was going to decide the fate of this young outrageous person who was just a hobo, a nobody. Perhaps he was the first hippie in the world.

To ask about truth you have to be in a certain space.

You cannot be in power and ask the person who is standing before you as a criminal, whose life is in your hands – you are going to decide whether he is going to be crucified tomorrow or not. This is not the way to ask such a vital, ultimately meaningful question. You have to come down. You have to sit as a disciple by the side of the man you want to question about truth. Only a disciple has the qualification to ask such a question. Perhaps Jesus did not answer because there was no disciple; there was a governor-general.

Or, it is possible Jesus wanted to answer but language was a barrier. Truth cannot be expressed through language; the moment you put it into words something goes wrong.