"But if you cling too much to Christianity, you will not be able to understand Christ. Christ is beyond all churches.

"Christ is the very principle of religion. In Christ all the aspirations of humanity are fulfilled. He is a rare synthesis. Ordinarily a human being lives in agony, anguish, anxiety, pain and misery. If you look at Krishna, he has moved to the other polarity: he lives in ecstasy. There is no agony left; the anguish has disappeared. You can love him, you can dance with him for a while, but the bridge will be missing. You are in agony, he is in ecstasy – where is the bridge?

"A Buddha has gone even farther away. He is neither in agony, nor in ecstasy. He is absolutely quiet and calm. He is so far away that you can look at him, but you cannot believe that he is – it looks like a myth, maybe a wish fulfillment of humanity. How can such a man walk on this earth so transcendental of all agony and ecstasy? He goes too far away.

"Jesus is the culmination of all aspiration. He is in agony as you are, as every human being is born – in agony on the cross. He is in the ecstasy that sometimes a Krishna achieves: he celebrates; he is a song, a dance. And he is also transcendence. There are moments, when you come closer and closer to him, when you will see that his innermost being is neither the cross nor his celebration, but transcendence. That's the beauty of Christ: there exists a bridge. You can move toward him by and by, and he can lead you toward the unknown – and so slowly that you will not even be aware when you cross the boundary, when you enter the unknown from the known, when the world disappears and God appears. You can trust him, because he is so like you and yet so unlike. You can believe in him, because he is part of your agony; you can understand his language.

"That's why Jesus became a great milestone in the history of consciousness. It is not just coincidental that Jesus' birth has become the most important date in history."