"How is it that you are smoking?'

"The second monk said, 'What did you ask the abbot?'

"The sad man said, 'I asked simply, 'Is it possible to smoke while contemplating God?' And he said, 'No, absolutely no!'

"The second man laughed, and he said, 'That's why! I asked him, 'Can I contemplate God while smoking?' And he said, 'Yes, of course!'

"It is absolutely impossible for a saint to be a rascal – but a rascal can be a saint.

"It is absolutely impossible for a saint because the very definition of the saint does not include any possibility of being a rascal. The saint is thought to be a simple, truthful, sincere and very serious seeker of truth. He is one-dimensional.

"To find the truth he abandons everything, he renounces the world; he renounces his own body, his own feelings, his own emotions. He becomes almost bodiless. He is in the world but he belongs to the world no more. He has turned his back upon the world.

"This has been praised for centuries, but there is something which has been overlooked – that this type of person is flat. He has no colors, he is like a very ancient, antique, faded painting. He is just surviving, not living. He has chosen an anti-life attitude. He rejects life to gain spirituality.

"Necessarily, rejecting life, he rejects everything that is implied in life – all its colors, all its songs, all its beauties, all its joys. It is a tremendous phenomenon. He becomes dry, juiceless – just a skeleton, waiting for death so that he can be released from the body completely.

"Of course, he cannot be a rascal.

"But there have been rascals who became great saints: Chuang Tzu in China, Hotei in Japan, Bodhidharma in India; and in this very century, George Gurdjieff in the West…just to mention the very great and very significant people of tremendous importance as saints. But you cannot include them in the ordinary concept of the saint.

"They are very colorful people, very alive, living intensely. They have not renounced the world; they do not see the need to renounce it. Because God has not renounced the world, why should they renounce the world? And God loves all these colors and these flowers and these birds and these songs and these people."