Now what is happening? East and West are meeting in Arica, est, tm and other so-called spiritual movements – and just the opposite to what was expected is happening. It is not Eastern religion meeting Western science, it is Eastern science meeting Western religion. It is an ugly affair.

You must have heard:

A French actress told George Bernard Shaw that she would like to get married to him.

Bernard Shaw inquired why.

She said, “The logic is simple. I have a tremendously beautiful body. Look at my face, look at my eyes, my form – it is perfect. And you have a beautiful intellect, the greatest intelligence ever. Our child will be a beauty: your brain and my body.”

George Bernard Shaw said, “I am afraid things can go wrong. Our child may have my body and your intellect.”

This is what is happening!

He declined the offer to marry. He said, “It is dangerous. There is no certainty about it.”

Of course, George Bernard Shaw had a very ugly body – and actresses have never been known to have any intellect. Intelligence is a strange phenomenon to actresses, otherwise why would they be actresses in the first place?

Arica, est, and tm are just by-products of the marriage between George Bernard Shaw and the actress. Things have gone wrong. This is not a synthesis, this is a compromise, a hotchpotch. And it is very dangerous.

A great synthesis is needed. That synthesis will not come through movements, it will come only through a few people who attain to that synthesis in their souls. It is not a question of reading the Bible and reading the Bhagavad Gita and finding out the similarities and making a synthesis out of it – that would be a mechanical unity. Many people have done that.

Dr. Bhagwandas has written a very scholarly book: The Essential Unity of all Religions. The whole thing is silly. Read the Koran, read the Veda, read the Bible, read the Dhammapada, find the similarities – it is very easy to find similarities – but in fact the Koran is beautiful only because of those things which are not in the Gita. The beauty is in its uniqueness. When you find something…as Mahatma Gandhi has done, he read the Koran and found things which were similar to the Gita. He was looking for the Gita in the Koran. It was unjust to the Koran; it was not good manners either because he was imposing some alien element on the Koran. And whatsoever was not similar to the Gita, in tune with the Gita, he would forget about. He would forget that it existed in the Koran. And that which was dropped is the uniqueness of the Koran.