"You could not have seen their faces, you could have only heard their voice. 'Sona' means sound. 'Persona' means you can have a contact only with their sounds, not with their faces. They are hiding somewhere. From that comes the word 'personality.'

"In that sense Buddha, Jesus, Zarathustra, Lao Tzu, have no personalities. They are just there in front of you, not hiding anything. They are naked, confronting you in their absolute purity. There is nothing to hide. You can see them through and through, they are transparent beings.

"So you cannot say rightly that they have personalities or that they are persons. They are individuals, but remember the meaning of the word – they cannot be divided. They don't have fragments. They are not a crowd. They are not polypsychic. They don't have many minds. Their manyness has disappeared and they have become one, and their oneness is such that there is no way to divide it. No sword can cut them in two. Their indivisibility is ultimate.

"In that sense you can call them individuals. But it is dangerous. Because this oneness comes only when the many is lost. When the many is lost how can you say even that one is one? Because one can be called meaningfully one only when the possibility for many exists. But the very possibility has disappeared.

"Buddha is not many, but how can you call him one? That's why in India we call 'God' advait, non-dual. We could have called him one, but we have resisted that temptation. We have never called him one, because the moment that you call something one, the two has entered – because one cannot exist without the two, the three, the four. One is meaningful only in a series. One is meaningful only in a hierarchy.

"If really one has become one, how can you call him one? The word loses meaning. You can call him only not-many; you can call him non-dual, advait, not two. But you cannot call him one. Not-two is beautiful. It simply says that the twoness, the manyness, has disappeared. It does not say what has appeared, it simply says what has disappeared. It is a negative term."