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The disciple was a little worried about the Master because his ways were strange, unexpected. He could do anything! He was almost thought to be mad. So not to create any trouble for the neighborhood -- because in the night he might start dancing, singing, shouting, sermonizing to nobody and create a disturbance in the neighborhood -- they put him in the basement and locked him up in the basement, so that even if he went and did something nobody would hear him. They closed all the windows, all the doors, and locked them.
In the middle of the night they were suddenly awakened. Somebody was rolling about on the roof with such a loud laughter that a great crowd had gathered all around and they were asking, "What is the matter?"
They rushed up, they found the Master rolling on the roof. They asked, "What is the matter? How did you manage? We locked you in the basement just to avoid such a scene!"
The Master said, "That's why I am laughing. Suddenly I started falling upwards. I cannot believe it myself! It has never happened before, falling upwards!"
It is a beautiful story. Enlightenment is falling upwards just as love is falling downwards. But something is similar in both; the falling -- unreasonable, unexplainable, inexpressible. Only those to whom it has happened know, and even when it has happened you cannot explain it to anybody to whom it has not happened yet.
Christmas Humphreys calls Zen "Zen Buddhism" That is starting in the wrong direction from the very beginning. Zen is not Buddhism -- the essential core of the heart of Buddha, certainly, but it is the essential core of Moses too, the essential core of Zarathustra too, Lao Tzu too. It is the essential core of all those who have become enlightened, of all those who have awakened from their dream, of all those who have seen that the goose is out, that the goose has never been in, that the problem was not a problem at all in the first place, hence no solution is needed.
Christmas Humphreys says: "There is a method of taking the problem in flank, as it were. It will be nonsense to the rational-minded...."
He himself is rational-minded; otherwise, it is not nonsense.
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