We hear stories about faqirs sticking knives into their cheeks and hairpins through their tongues, piercing their muscles, jumping into the fire, swallowing flames, eating thorns, but all this is juggling compared with the power of the mystic. People are often apt to compare a mystic with a juggler, but they are two different beings altogether. This does not mean that these jugglers have no power; they are powerful too; but their world is different, their object in life is different, and they have another sphere, another destiny, another destination. A mystic may not do any of the things that jugglers do, and yet the mystic may accomplish far greater things than the jugglers. A so-called man of common sense, who considers himself to be practical, cannot imagine the power that is at the command of the mystic. Only the non-mystic boasts of his power and shows it off to people, whereas the mystic neither speaks about it nor does he exhibit his powers before others.

Once I met a great scientist in New York, who said to me, touching his pen lying on the table, "If there is really a spiritual power, a mystic power, I would like to know if it is possible to lift this pen by this power." I said, "Do you really think that a mystic will waste his energy in making this experiment, raising a pen in space? And if he did it, what would he have gained? Would he not sooner raise a soul higher, bringing him to another sphere, raising his ideals, his aspirations, instead of trying to raise this little pen lying on the table? What will he get for it? Praise? He does not want it. That people will believe in him? He does not care. Praise is not his object nor does he care if people believe in him. Why should he trouble about these things?'

Then I told him a story of a juggler I myself had seen in the streets of India, in Baroda. A man used to sit in a corner with his mantle spread on the ground, and he had little horses and elephants and camels and dogs and cats cut out of paper and painted. They were lying on his mantle, and the man had a tambourine in his hand; people crowded round him to see the phenomena he was going to show. He would begin to sing, and after his song of introduction was ended it would seem that some life was coming into those animals. Then he would sing, "Horses, run," and as long as he repeated this the horses ran; and then he would say, "Camels, walk," and the camels would begin to walk; and when he said, "Elephants, move," the elephants would move.

Those who eat thorns or swallow different-colored balls and then take them out again to show them, what has this got to do with mysticism? It has no connection. Some of these jugglers are most powerful, but their kind of power does not belong to the higher spheres; it belongs only to their world.