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Melissa, I am just a storyteller. From my very childhood I have loved to tell stories, real, unreal. I was not at all aware that this telling of stories would give me an articulateness, and that it would be of tremendous help after enlightenment.
Many people become enlightened, but not all of them become masters -- for the simple reason that they are not articulate, they cannot convey what they feel, they cannot communicate what they have experienced. Now it was just accidental with me, and I think it must have been accidental with those few people who became masters, because there is no training course for it. And I can say it with certainty only about myself.
When enlightenment came, I could not speak for seven days; the silence was so profound that even the idea of saying anything about it did not arise. But after seven days, slowly, as I became accustomed to the silence, to the beautitude, to the bliss, the desire to share it -- a great longing to share it with those whom I loved was very natural.
I started talking with the people with whom I was in some way concerned, friends. I had been talking to these people for years, talking about all kinds of things. I had enjoyed only one exercise, and that was talking, so it was not very difficult to start talking about the enlightenment -- although it took years to refine and bring into words something of my silence, something of my joy.
You are asking what the relationship is between enlightenment and language. No relationship at all, because enlightenment happens in silence; there is no language, no chattering of the mind, not even a single word. And most of the enlightened people have remained silent their whole life.
Just here in this city a few years ago was a man, Meher Baba. He lived more than thirty years in silence. He was announcing every year that he would be speaking. The date would come, his disciples would gather, they would come from faraway lands -- and again he would not speak. He could not manage a connection between silence and language.
If you have not been a poet before you become enlightened, after enlightenment you cannot express yourself in poetry. But
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