Unless one falls in love, the process of understanding cannot be triggered. You can be here, you can listen to me – only words will reach you. Those words will become part of your memory; they will make you more knowledgeable. But to be knowledgeable is utterly futile; it doesn’t help. To know about God is not to know God, because the word God is not God. To know about love is not to know love, because the word love is not love.

You will have to move into an experiential space. For that, waiting is needed, a relaxed, non-goal-oriented attitude is needed – otherwise you will not understand a thing. You will only misunderstand. The head only knows how to misunderstand. It is only the heart which knows how to understand. Love is the only way to know. Logic is a pretend: it only pretends that it knows. It befools you, it deceives you. It is only love that opens the eyes of knowing.

But see: the head goes on condemning love. The head says, “Love is blind.” Only love has eyes. Without love, everything is blind. But the head condemns the heart, and the head is really very skillful in creating counterfeit phenomena. Instead of understanding, it spins and weaves knowledgeability. And knowledgeability is a false coin – it is not understanding. Understanding means you have tasted, lived, loved, been, in a totally different space; you have visited the innermost core of your being.

Knowledge simply means you have heard somebody talk about it. Knowledge only goes on adding to your memory but not to your being. Understanding helps your being to grow, to mature.

If you are here to understand, then forget about going so quickly. Just see: so many people here had come only for a few days…then a few years have passed. And I am happy about my people – they don’t even count, and they don’t go on asking me “How long is it going to take?” Now they know that it is not a question of “how long?” It can happen any moment. It is only a question of your own openness, your own intensity, your own passionate desire to know, your own love.

It is unpredictable. It is not a commodity. Had it been a thing I would have given it to you very joyously. I am helpless – I cannot give it to you. I am creating the space in which it can happen, but it happens indirectly. Understanding is not direct; it is very indirect. If you approach understanding directly, it is very shy, it escapes, it is very elusive.

You have to be very very alert, watchful, when you start moving towards understanding – in indirect ways. All that is great in life happens only indirectly. It may be understanding, or happiness, poetry, painting, sculpture; it may be art, it may even be a discovery of science – all that is great happens indirectly.

Now it is a well-known fact that scientists go on struggling to understand something, and they fail again and again and again, and one day suddenly, when they are not struggling at all – maybe smoking a cigar, or just resting in their bathtub, or digging in the garden – suddenly it pops up. And they have been struggling so long and it was not coming.

There is a certain secret in it.