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And unless the divine is your experience, the belief is futile. It is not going to help you; on the
contrary it may hinder you, because just by believing in it you deceive yourself that somehow you
have known it. The belief becomes the deception. It doesn’t become an opening, it closes you.
It makes you knowl-edgeable without knowing it; it gives you a feeling of knowledge without any
intimate experience of it.
Remember, untruth is not such a great hindrance as the belief in the truth. If you believe you stop
seeking; if you believe you have already taken it for granted. It cannot be so. You will have to pass
through a mutation; really you will have to die and be born again. Unless the seed that you are dies,
the new life cannot sprout out of it. Belief becomes a barrier; it gives you a false assurance that
you have known – but that is all you have got. Belief is just borrowed. A Buddha says something,
a Jesus says something, or a Mohammed, and then we go on following it, believing in it. This can
create such a situation within you that the distant will appear close and the closest will continue to
appear distant – it creates an illusory mind.
I have heard one Sufi story. Once it happened that a fish in the ocean heard somebody talking about
the ocean, and the fish heard for the first time that there exists something like the ocean. She started
to search, she started to ask and inquire, but nobody knew where the ocean was. She asked many
fish, great and small, known and unknown, famous and not so famous, but nobody was capable of
answering where the ocean is. They all said they have heard about it; they all said, ”Sometime in
the past our ancestors knew it – it is written in the scriptures.” And the ocean was all around! They
were in the ocean; they were talking, living in the ocean.