The priests have been praying in their hearts that man should never get out of his sickness, unhealthiness, insanity, because they are the people who come to the temple, to the mosque, to the synagogue, to the church. You will rarely find young people in the churches, but you will always find old men, old women, because now death is approaching and only the priest knows how to help them. And the priests go on pretending that they know.

I was visiting a very beautiful place in Agra. Agra is famous all over the world because of the Taj Mahal. But in Agra and the surrounding area there is a small sect of Hindus called Radhaswami. For almost one hundred years, their priests had been making something which should be better than the Taj Mahal. It is difficult, but they have made the ground floor; and the ground floor shows that, if they go on exploiting people, perhaps they will defeat the Taj Mahal one day. It is only half-built, but you can see even the half-built has more art, more beauty than the Taj Mahal.

They invited me to their temple, which is going to be the samadhi of the guru who founded their religion, and they showed me, in beautiful marble, a map of stages of spiritual evolution. They said, “There are fifteen stages of evolution.” Mohammed and Moses were just in the fourth stage; Jesus, a little better, in the fifth stage. Mahavira, a little better – sixth stage. Kabir and Nanak, a little better still, were in the seventh stage, and Gautam Buddha was also in the seventh stage. And then there was a gap. In the fifteenth stage – the last – was their own guru.

They said, “What do you think about it?”

I said, “It is absolutely right. Just one thing is missing in it – but it is bound to be missing.”

They said, “What is missing in it?”

I said, “There are sixteen stages, not fifteen.”

They said, “Sixteen? But in our scripture there are written only fifteen stages!”

I said, “It is written, because your guru has reached only fifteen stages. I am living in the sixteenth! Your guru tries to enter, but I don’t allow him – he goes on trying to climb to the sixteenth and I go on pushing him back to the fifteenth.”

They were very shocked. And when I went there the next time they had made sixteen stages, and their guru was in the sixteenth.

I said, “It won’t work. Your guru could enter in the sixteenth because I have moved to the seventeenth! You cannot keep pace with me; your guru has to be one stage behind.”