"Have you ever seen any relationship between you and the trees? Have you seen any relationship between you and the rocks? Have you seen any relationship between you and the sea? If you don't see the relationship, then you can never come to know what God is. God, godliness, is nothing but the whole, the total, the one. If you exist as a separate part, you unnecessarily exist as a beggar. You could have been the whole. And even while you think that you are separate, you are not separate – that is just a thought in the mind. The thought is not befooling God, it is only befooling you. The thought is just a barrier for your eyes to open.

"That morning in the River Jordan when John the Baptist initiated Jesus, he killed Jesus utterly. Jesus disappeared. And in that moment of nothingness, a buddha – what Buddha calls shunyata, emptiness. The heavens opened and the spirit of God like a dove descended on Jesus, lighted on him.

"This is just symbolic: Jesus died, God was enthroned. This is what in Zen they call a special transmission, outside the scriptures. No knowledge was given by John the Baptist to Jesus, no scripture was conveyed – not even a single word was uttered. No dependence on words or letters, just a direct pointing to the soul of man: seeing into one's nature – an attainment of buddhahood. This is what happened that day.

"Christians have missed the point: it was not knowledge that was transferred from John the Baptist to Jesus, it was a vision. It was not verbal, it was existential. It was more like knowing than knowledge. Eyes were transferred: a new way of seeing the world and being in the world was transferred, a special transmission outside the scriptures. That's why Jesus immediately felt one with God, but cut off from Jews. Jews are 'the people of the book.' The Bible doesn't mean anything else; it simply means 'the book.' Jews are the people of the book – the people who have believed in the scriptures tremendously, who have loved and relied on the scriptures for centuries.

"Jesus became one with God, but immediately was cut off from his own tradition."