A frog sitting by the side was very puzzled – he must have been a philosopher. He asked, “Uncle, wait! You are doing a miracle. A hundred legs! How do you manage? Which leg comes first, which comes second, third – and so on and so forth, up to a hundred. You don’t get puzzled? How do you manage? It looks impossible to me.”

The centipede said, “I have never thought about it. Let me brood.” And standing there, he started trembling and he fell down on the ground. He himself became so puzzled – a hundred legs! How is one going to manage?

Philosophy paralyzes people. You are paralyzed by your philosophies. Life needs no philosophy, life is enough unto itself. It needs no crutches; it needs no support, no props. It is enough unto itself.

This is the first thing I would like to convey to you; this is my understanding, not my theory; this is how I feel life to be. It is not a mind thing, it is my existential experience. Trust life. And if you trust in life, I call you religious. Trust in life is trust in existence. God becomes a theory; when you dissolve that theory only life is left in its tremendous mystery, shimmering, just surrounding you within and without.

And you are part of it, part of its ecstasy.

“What is more important,” the questioner has asked, “the practice of life or the theory?”

Practice is needed only for a theory. Life needs no practice. You have simply to live it without brooding, without bringing the mind in. Once you bring the mind in you have started distorting life.

“Is it possible for someone as ignorant as I am to attain to enlightenment?”

It is possible only for those who recognize their ignorance – because those are the innocent people, who recognize their ignorance. The recognition of ignorance is the very door to enlightenment. If you think you know, then you will be debarred.

Pundits have never become enlightened – they cannot. They have too much knowledge, they are burdened too much with knowledge. They are like donkeys carrying scriptures – that’s what Jalaluddin Rumi has said. And a donkey remains a donkey – whether he carries a Koran on his back or not does not matter. You can carry scriptures in your memory, but memory is not knowledge. To memorize a thing is not to know it. To memorize a thing is a way to avoid knowing it. It is very cheap. A computer can do it; there is nothing human about it, nothing special. The computer can do better. All that your mind can do the computer can do better. So there is nothing special about it, nothing human, nothing divine. It is a mechanical thing.