If you give rise to a thought of love in your mind, you will be drowned by water. If you give rise to a thought of anger in your mind, you will be burned by fire. If you give rise to a thought of doubt in your mind, you will be obstructed by earth.

Just metaphors. All that he is saying is: any rise of thought in you, and you have missed the point. A single thought is an obstruction to your inner space. It takes you away. Whether it is a thought of love or mind or anger or greed – it does not matter what the quality of the thought is. It may be a good thought or a bad thought, a very saintly thought or a very unsaintly one – it does not matter. Thought as such takes you away from your settled peace with the universe.

If you give rise to a thought of joy, you will be whirled away by wind.
If you can discern all this you will not be affected by objective things which you can turn to your own advantage. Then you can walk on water as if on the ground, and walk on the ground as if on water.

Don’t take this statement in a factual way, as Christians have done. What he is saying is simply that to the innermost being the outer world is just a dream. In the dream you have walked on water, in the dream you have flown in the sky, in the dream everything is possible. But when you wake up you find the dream water, the dream fire, the dream sky were all imagination and nothing else.

But these statements, made with absolutely good intentions, create trouble later on, because people start thinking that unless you can walk on water you are not a self-realized one.

The miracles of Jesus walking on water or raising dead Lazarus back to life…A great search by Christian experts shows that these things never happened, that they were added later on, almost three hundred years later, to make Jesus look special – not an ordinary human being, but really a son of God. For two thousand years Christians have been insisting that these are facts. Now, in the light of science and more intelligence, even Christian scholars are saying that these are only metaphors, added by the disciples to raise their master to a superior and higher position in such a way that nobody can compete with him.

I have heard that two Christian bishops, visiting Jerusalem, had a very great friend, a rabbi. They asked him to show them all the holy places. The rabbi took them to many places which were concerned with Jesus – where he raised Lazarus, where he made water turn into wine. And then at the Sea of Galilee he took them to the place where it is thought he walked on water.

The rabbi said, “Would you like to have a demonstration?”