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ask, "Have you seen God with your own eyes?"
He would look all around....
I would say, "Are you looking for witnesses? Put your hand on your heart, and in the name of God be truthful: Have you seen God?"
And in a temple these poor believers cannot lie! He would say, "No, I have not seen him... I believe in God."
I said, "Belief means nothing. One can believe in anything. You have some nerve to talk about God without having seen him. Have you heard that he is sick?"
He would say, "I have never heard such a thing. God... and sick?"
I said, "Why not? I was just preparing you for the bad news."
He said, "What do you mean?"
I said, "Friedrich Nietzsche says God is dead. Can your belief protect God from dying? All this lecturing about God, not even knowing the ABC of experience.... You are fooling and cheating people."
Then everybody would fall silent and my grandfather would say, "The work is done. He will never come to this town again."
And it used to happen that those people never came again, knowing perfectly well that I would be there.
When I left the town and went to the university, I used to come back on holidays. My grandfather would say, "I miss you very much because those old idiots, knowing that you are not here, have started coming back. And I am too old to create a disturbance. You were a great help to me because I want to destroy all these nonsense beliefs."
One should either know, or should know that one does not know.
The original man is simply a natural man who has survived the conditioning of the society, the manners of the society; who has asked everything before accepting anything; who has inquired into the truth of anything before accepting it. He is never a hypocrite.
The Zen man certainly is the original man. It is the search for the original man, your very nature, where you are not a man, not a woman, not a Hindu, not a Christian; where you simply are -- unfettered freedom, unscratched sky. The beauty of it and the benediction of it is infinite.
Now it is time for a really original man....
Sardar Gurudayal Singh got the point! He always
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