The very recognition is a great beginning. The moment you recognize that you do not know, you are already moving toward the path that leads to knowing. In the scriptures are only dead words; a true seeker cannot be satisfied with them. He would like to come in contact while the word is still alive; blood and flesh.
Scriptures are needed by those who cannot encounter a man like Jesus, because he is going to hit them hard to make them aware: “All that you have learned has been learned in sleep, and all that you have been repeating is mechanical. It is not your own experience.”
Truth can only be experienced. Only lies can be learned. Millions of libraries are full of lies – beautiful lies. Not that they were always lies: once they were also alive, once they were also uttered by someone who had found them. In that moment, the word has wings. In that moment, the word is full of silence, love, beauty, truth.
But all that fragrance of the living word will soon disappear – the flower will die, the petals will disappear into the earth. Not even a trace will be left behind. But faraway echoes will go on and on, in scriptures collected by scholars, commented on by researchers. But whatever they are doing is dissecting a corpse, and by dissecting a corpse you cannot find the soul.
What medical science goes on doing, idiots have been doing since the very beginning. In every medical college, they are dissecting corpses to find what it is that we call life. Can you think of people more blind? And they are very learned. And because they cannot find the living principle of life in a corpse, they deny it.
It is very easy to deny, it is very easy to say no. You can do it sitting in your chair, no pilgrimage is needed. But to find, to seek and search, you will have to move into the unknown without any prejudice. And all knowledge that is borrowed creates only prejudice and nothing else.
An intelligent man puts all his knowledge aside and becomes an innocent child – who knows nothing, but who is open, available, receptive; whose eyes are full of wonder, who is mystified by small things. A seashell on the beach, a wildflower, which attracts nobody, mystifies him. He is living in a wonderland. It is not only Alice who entered wonderland; every child lives in wonderland.
And that’s what Jesus said to Nicodemus. “Unless you are born again in this very life, unless you become a child again, there is no hope for you.”
When Almustafa saw the people coming… They were all innocent people – not rabbis, not popes, not professors; no shankaracharyas, no ayatollahs, but simple people, who knew that they knew not. But that is the beginning of an eternal journey in which one goes on disappearing. One day one finds the truth, but one does not find oneself. The seeker is lost and the sought is found. The knower is no more, but knowledge, knowing has blossomed. And others came also… Who are these others?
And others came also and entreated him, but he answered them not.