Question 2

I WISH I COULD KNOW MORE ABOUT GOD. CAN YOU HELP ME, BELOVED MASTER?

There is no way to know more about God. You can know God, but you cannot know more about God. Knowing more about God is not knowing God. Knowing more is knowledge; knowing God is a totally different dimension. Knowing about is knowledge -- you can go on, about and about and about, but you will never reach to God. To know God is totally different than knowing about God.

You can know much about love without knowing love at all. You can go to the libraries and you can consult the encyclopedias and you can collect all knowledge possible about love -- but if love has not happened to you, if that fire has not happened to you, you will not know what love is. You can collect all the stories about love -- Laila and Majnu, Shiri and Farhad -- you can collect stories about all the lovers of the world; that too won't help. Love has to happen to you; you have to fall into love. You have to take the risk, you have to gamble -- only then will you know.

You say, "I wish I could know more about God." So, first thing: knowing more will not be of much help. That's how a person becomes a pundit, a scholar-knowledge. I am not here to help you become more knowledgeable; you already have too much knowledge. I am here to destroy your knowledge, to take it away from you. You have to learn how to unlearn.

And then you say, "I wish." Wish is a very very weak thing. Just by wishing, nobody can move towards God. More urgency, more deep desire is needed... desire which becomes a flame in you. Hunger is needed; wishing won't help. Thirst is needed... as if you are lost in the Sahara desert, and for miles all around just sand and sand and the burning sun, and not a drop of water with you and you cannot see any greenery anywhere, and you are thirsty, and your whole being is at stake -- any moment you can die -- and the thirst goes on and on and you become a flame... in that thirst, God is possible.

Become thirsty. Wishing is not enough; wishing is too weak. I have heard...

A hungry-looking tramp stopped at a farmhouse and asked for some food. The housewife brought him some and he sat on the back step enjoying all she had set before him.

As he sat there, a little red hen dashed by, being chased by a rooster. The tramp threw the rooster a piece of his bread. It stopped dead in its tracks and greedily swallowed the bread whole.

"Gee!" said the tramp. "I hope I'll never be that hungry."

You have to be tremendously hungry. It is not just a curiosity. God cannot be an object of your wish. God is not a wish-fulfillment, God is not your dream. God has to go like a flame into your guts. When you start feeling that nothing else matters, when God is the first priority and you are ready to sacrifice everything. When God becomes such an absorbing, urgent desire that even life is not meaningful any more without God-only then. And then there is no need for anybody to help you, your desire will do the work.

In that urgent thirst, in that intensity, all that is darkness in you disappears. In that flame, all that is useless burns down. You come out as pure gold.

God is your reality as much as it is my reality. God is as much your reality as it was Jesus Christ's or Gautam Buddha's. The difference is, you have not yet been able to sort out the chaff from the wheat; the wheat is in you, but too much chaff is there. In a tremendous desire to know, to be, the chaff burns down -- and there is no other way.

When you go to a master, he in fact does not help you to reach to God, he helps you to become more and more thirsty. He helps you to become more and more intensely hungry. He gives you thirst and hunger; he gives you a mad passion for the impossible.

One man came to Buddha and asked, "If I come and follow you, will I be able to know truth?" Buddha said: That is not certain. I cannot guarantee. I can guarantee only one thing, that I will make you more and more thirsty. Then everything depends on you. I can transfer my thirst to you and if you are ready to allow that much thirst... because it is painful. The journey is painful; all growth is painful. If you allow me to create that much pain in you, that very pain will purify. Pain is a purifying process.

So never ask about God as if it is your wish, and never ask that you would like to know more. God either is known or not known -- more or less is not the question. You cannot divide God -- "I know a little bit and somebody else knows a little more, and somebody almost half, and somebody a hundred percent." God cannot be divided; either you know, or you don't know. And the knowledge of God is not like any other knowledge. It is not like scientific knowledge, that you can go on knowing more and more and more, never ending, the procession continues. It is not a knowledge from the outside. The knowledge of God is not like knowledge, it is more like love. You disappear in your beloved -- that is the only way to know. And the more you disappear in your beloved, the more you know that "I don't know."

The greatest knowers of God always say they don't know. They are like drops in the ocean -- they have fallen into the ocean and disappeared, and the ocean has fallen into them and disappeared. Now, who is the knower and how is the known?

Kabir has said: I was searching and searching and searching, and then I got lost, and then happened the miracle of miracles. When I was not there you were standing before me. And when I was there and searching and searching, you were so far away -- not even a glimpse. And now, look... I have disappeared. Searching, searching, I got lost, completely lost; my whole search absorbed me, destroyed me completely. Now I am no more... and my Lord, you are standing before me.

Kabir has said that the seeker never reaches to the sought. Man never confronts God -- because unless you disappear he cannot appear, so there is no meeting-point. When you are, he is not; when he is, you are not -- so how can you claim that "I know?" You are not -- only then, he is. When the knower disappears, the knowledge appears; it cannot be just a wish-fulfillment.