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That’s what happened: this nun, Chiyono, studied for years and years and nothing happened. Mind
can study about God, about enlightenment, about the ultimate. It can even pretend that everything
has been understood. But God is not something you have to understand. Even if you know
everything about God, you don’t know him; knowledge is not ’about’. Whenever you say ’about’,
you belong to the outside. You may be moving round and round, but you have not entered the circle.
When someone says, ”I know about God,” he says he doesn’t know anything at all, because how
can you know anything about God? God is the center, not the periphery. You can know about matter
– because matter has no center in it, it is just the periphery. You cannot know about consciousness:
there is no self, there is no one inside. Matter is only the outside; you can know about it. Science
is knowledge. The very word science means knowledge – knowledge of the periphery, knowledge
about something where the center doesn’t exist. Whenever the center is approached through the
periphery, you miss it.
You have to become it; that is the only way to know it. Nothing can be known about God. You have to
be; only being is knowledge there. With the ultimate, ’about and about’ means missing and missing
again. You have to enter and become one.
That’s why Jesus says, ”God is like love” – not loving, but just like love. You cannot know anything
about love, or can you? You can study and study, you can become a great scholar, but you have
not touched, you have not penetrated. Love can be known only when you become a lover. Not only
that: love can be known only when you become love. Even the lover disappears, because that too
belongs to the outside. Two persons in love become absent. They are not there. Only love exists,
the rhythm of love. There may be two poles of the rhythm but they are not there. Something of the
beyond has come into being. They have disappeared.
Love exists when you are empty. Knowledge exists when you are filled. Knowledge belongs to the
ego, and the ego can never penetrate to the center; it is the periphery. The periphery can know
only the periphery. You cannot know something which is of the center through the ego. The ego
can study, the ego can make you a great scholar, maybe a religious scholar, a great pundit. You
may know all the Vedas, all the Upanishads, all the Bibles and Korans, and still you know nothing –
because it is not knowledge from the outside, it is something which happens when you have entered
and you have become one.