It is reported that Saint Augustine said, “I know what time is, but when people ask me, everything is lost, I cannot answer. I know what love is, but you ask me: What is love? – and I am at a loss, I cannot answer. I know what God is, but you ask, and I am at a loss.” And Augustine is right, because profundities cannot be asked, cannot be questioned. You cannot put a question mark on a mystery. If you put a question mark, the question mark becomes more important; then the question covers the whole mystery. And if you think that when you have solved the question, then you will live the mystery, you will never live it.

Questioning is irrelevant in religion. Trust is relevant. Trust means moving into the experience, into the unknown, without asking much – going through it to know it.

I tell you about a beautiful morning outside, and you start questioning me about it here, walled in a room, enclosed, and you would like your every question to be answered before you take a step outside. How can I tell you if you have never known what morning is? How can I tell you? Only that can be told through words which you already know. How can I tell you that there is light, beautiful light falling through the trees, and the whole sky is filled with light, the sun has risen, if you have always lived in darkness? If your eyes are accustomed only to the dark, how can I explain to you that the sun has risen?

You will ask: What do you mean? Are you trying to deceive us? We have lived all our lives and we have never known anything like light. First answer our questions, and then, if we are convinced, we can come out with you; otherwise it seems you are leading us astray, astray from our sheltered life.

But how can the light be told of if you don’t know about it? But that’s what you are asking: Convince us about God, then we will meditate, then we will pray, then we will search. How can we search before the conviction is there? How can we go on a search when we don’t know where we are going?

This is distrust – and because of this distrust you cannot move into the unknown. The known clings to you, and you cling to the known – and the known is the dead past. It may feel cozy because you have lived in it, but it is dead, it is not alive. The alive is always the unknown, knocking at your door. Move with it. But how can you move without trust? And even doubting persons think that they have trust.

Once it happened:

Mulla Nasruddin told me that he was thinking of divorcing his wife. I asked, “Why? Why so suddenly?”

Nasruddin said, “I doubt her fidelity towards me.”

So I told him, “Wait, I will ask your wife.”

So I told his wife, “Nasruddin is talking around town and creating a rumor that you are not faithful, and he is thinking of divorce, so what is the matter?”

His wife said, “This is too much. Nobody has ever insulted me like that – and I tell you, I have been faithful to him dozens of times!”