"You have entered into a new phase, you have become a new person. But it is going to be irrational, abnormal, unpredictable. All over the world this is ordinarily called madness, insanity.

"Only in the East have we found that there is another kind of madness, too, that comes by deep meditation: going beyond the mind. Both are outside the mind; hence there is some similarity. So sometimes you will find that the madman once in a while behaves almost as a wise man. He has insights – he has no control over them, they are just flashes, but sometimes he can see things which you cannot see.

"In the East, where the mind has been the sole center of all research down the centuries, we have discovered that you can go above the mind. Sufism accepts that state and calls it the state of a masta – a divine madman. He is mad, but he is superhumanly mad. His behavior is irrational as far as our logic is concerned. But perhaps there is a higher logic, according to which his behavior is not irrational.

"In India such a man is called paramahansa. Ramakrishna, in the nineteenth century, was one of the men who was called paramahansa. The behavior of a paramahansa is utterly mad, but intensely beautiful, and has a depth which even the greatest genius of the mind does not have.

"It happened, that in Ramakrishna's time:

"He lived just outside Calcutta, on the bank of the Ganges in a small temple. Now many temples have arisen, and in Calcutta. At that time Calcutta was the capital of India, not New Delhi, so the cream of intellectuals, creative people, was in Calcutta. And anyway, Bengalis are the most intelligent people in India, mostly intellectual.

"Keshav Chandra Sen was a great genius as far as intellect is concerned, and he was a co-founder of a religion, Brahmasamaj – 'the society of the divine.' He was known all over India. Ramakrishna was not known, except to a few people in Calcutta on the riverbank where he lived. He was uneducated, and people – the people of the mind – thought he was mad because his behavior was not explainable by mental concepts."