This is a very strange story, and there is every possibility that you will misunderstand it, because the most difficult thing to understand in life is the behavior of an enlightened person.

You have your own values, and you always look through those values. An enlightened person is in a totally different dimension, where he lives without values, where he lives without any criteria, where he lives without any morality, where he simply lives without the ego, because all values belong to the ego. An enlightened person simply lives. He is not manipulating his life, he is a white cloud floating. He has nowhere to go, nothing to achieve. Nothing is good for him and nothing is bad. He does not know any God, he does not know any Devil. He knows only life, and life in its totality is beautiful.

God is also ugly because it is a part, not the whole. The Devil is also ugly because that too is again a part and not the whole. God is not alive, the Devil is also dead, because life exists as a rhythm between the two -- the good and the bad, God and the Devil. Life exists between these two poles. Life cannot exist with one polarity. These are the two banks between which the river of life flows.

An enlightened person has come to know this. He is neither against anything nor for anything. He responds moment to moment, without any judgment on his part. That's why it is very difficult. An enlightened person always appears more or less like a madman. So the first thing to be understood is: don't evaluate an enlightened person through your values -- very difficult, because what else can you do?

I have heard that once a very great painter asked a doctor friend to come and look at one of the paintings he had just finished. The painter was thinking that this was the greatest creation he had ever attempted, this was the peak of his whole art. So, naturally, he wanted his doctor friend to come and look at it.
The doctor observed very minutely, looked from this side and that. Ten minutes passed. The artist became a little apprehensive, then he asked the doctor, "What is the matter? What do you think about this painting?"
The doctor said, "It appears to me double pneumonia!"

This is happening to everybody, because a doctor has his own attitudes, ways of looking at things. He looked at the painting -- he cannot look at anything except in his own fixed ways; without them he cannot look -- he diagnosed. The painting doesn't need any diagnosis; he missed. The beautiful thing turned into pneumonia.
This is how mind functions. When you look at a thing, you bring in your mind to color it. Don't do that with an enlightened person, because that is not going to make any difference to the enlightened person, but you will miss the opportunity to see the beauty of it.

Second thing: an enlightened person behaves from a center, never from the periphery. You always behave from the periphery, you live on the periphery, the circumference. To you, the circumference is the most important thing. You have killed your soul and saved your body. The enlightened person can sacrifice his body, but cannot allow his soul to be lost. He is ready to die -- any moment he is ready to die, that's not a problem -- but he is not ready to lose his center, the very core of his being.

To an enlightened person the body is just a means. So if it is needed, then even an enlightened person will tell you to, "Leave the body, but don't leave your inner being." This is how all tapascharya, all austerity, is born. The circumference is to be sacrificed for the center. Even if the head needs to be cut -- if that is going to help you, if with your head your ego can fall -- an enlightened person will tell you to drop the head, to cut it off: "Don't carry this head if it helps the ego, because for nothing you are losing all."

This has to be remembered: when you live from the center, the outlook is totally different. Then nobody dies, nobody can die -- death is impossible. If you live from the periphery then everybody dies, death is the final end of everybody; eternal life exists nowhere.

… and read further in No Water No Moon chapter 5