The situation of religion is just the opposite. It knows less and less about more and more. Obviously a religious man becomes more and more unobsessed. The more he becomes religious, the less obsessed he is. His method is to know less and less about more and more. His ultimate conclusion is to know nothing about all. That’s why Bodhidharma says, “I know nothing.” Socrates says, “I know nothing.”

Nothing about what? – about all.

The focus is no longer there. The religious man is just a presence opening into all dimensions simultaneously.

Art is similar to science. Everything except religion is bound to be a kind of an obsession, for the simple reason that you have to go deeper and deeper to find the source of something; but your vision becomes narrower, and everything else starts falling out of your vision. You don’t see, you become more and more blind about everything else except the one thing with which you are obsessed.

The painter, while painting, is not aware of anything; the poet also.

One of the greatest poets of India, Rabindranath Tagore, used to lock himself in his room or in his porch for days together. He was not to be disturbed for food or anything. Nobody knew what he was doing inside his room because he had locked it from the inside. Sometimes three days would pass and the whole family would be in a panic, wondering whether that man was still alive or dead. But there was no way to disturb him. They would all move around outside his room just to figure out if there was some noise inside or not, at least some indication that he was still alive.

When he was asked, “Why do you do it?” he said, “Unless I forget the whole world, and my family…” His family was a big family. His father was one of the richest men in Bengal, his grandfather was even richer. The British government had given them the title of rajah, the king, although they were not kings. But they had so much land and so much property and so much money that they were equivalent to any king; they had their own kingdom.

There were one hundred people in the family. Rabindranath writes in his autobiography: “There were many people that I never came to know who they were. Guests used to come and then never go, and nobody would bother about it. Faraway relatives would appear – nobody had heard about them, they just used to declare that they were faraway cousins. That was perfectly okay, they were allowed in the family. They stayed in the family, they lived in the family, and they were so rich that nobody bothered whether these people should work or anything.

So, Rabindranath says, “In that family it was always a marketplace. It was impossible to be in that space where poetry becomes possible. It comes only when you are alone. It is very shy, it is very feminine; it won’t come in a crowd. It won’t come if you are concerned with something else. It will come only when you are concerned only with it. It is very possessive, just like the feminine. Of course, as graceful as the feminine, and as shy as the feminine, but of course, as possessive too.”