true imitation
There was a man who was reading a love poem, a beautiful poem, which described the love of Laila and Majnun. He admired the hero of the poem, Majnun, so much that he attempted to become Majnun. In order to become Majnun, he took a picture which somebody told him was the picture of the heroine of the poem he had been reading. He took up that picture, hugged it, shed tears over it, placed it on his heart, and never parted with it. But you know, artificial love cannot exist long. Here is artificial love. Natural love cannot be imitated and he was trying to imitate love.
There came up to him a man, and told him:
"Brother, what are you doing? That is not the way to become Majnun. If you want to become Majnun, you need not take up his lady love; You ought to have the real internal love of Majnun. You do not want the same object of love; You require the same intensity of love. You may have your own object of love, you may choose your own heroine, you may choose your own lady love, but you ought to have the same intensity of feeling and loving which Majnun had. That is the way to become a genuine Majnun."
Similarly, if you want to become a Christ, a Buddha, a Mohammed, or a Krishna, you need not imitate the things that they did, you need not imitate the acts of their lives, you need not become a slave of the way themselves behaved. You need not sell your liberty to their deeds and their statements, you will have to realize their character, you will have to realize the intensity of their feelings, you will have to realize the depth of their realization, you will have to realize the deep spirit, the genuine power that they had.