Question: Beloved Master, What is wrong with knowing more and more about God? Can it not help the seeker?
Osho – Kamalesh, knowing and knowledge are different. I am all for knowing and I am all against knowledge. Knowing is your insight, it is your capacity to see, it is philosia. Knowledge is philosophy. It is not your capacity to see, it is just your capacity to memorize what others have said. How is it going to help, knowing about God? A blind man can know about light; how is it going to help? A deaf man can know about music, he can read about music, he can even read music, but how it is going to help? It is not going to help at all. The danger is that the blind man may start thinking that he knows so much about light that he must be knowing light itself. And that’s what happens to the knowledgeable people.
Knowing about God, they start thinking that they know God. To know love is one thing; to know about love is totally another. To know God is a transformation of your being; to know about God needs no transformation. You can just go to the library and collect information. You can go to the pundits and the scholars and accumulate information.
You ask me, “Can it not help the seeker?”
No, not at all. It will hinder. The seeker has to be empty, unprejudiced. The seeker has to be without any idea of what God is, or truth is. If he has some idea, the danger is he will project his idea on the existence and he will think that he has come to know the truth. Truth can be known only when you are utterly empty, when there is nothing to distort or project inside you; when you are so silent that you are only receptive, not projective. In total receptivity truth is known.
Meditation is nothing but an effort to cleanse your mind of knowledge. Knowledge is dust that has gathered on the mirror of your being; it has to be cleaned.
A naked girl is standing, speaking endlessly to a naked man kneeling and embracing her belly, later lying supine at her feet. She says, “My life is empty… it is a mockery… I am nothing — just a facade — a shell… a dead and useless thing! I am twenty-six years old… and I have never had a meaningful relationship… never had a truly meaningful relationship…. I should not even admit that, I suppose. It is very humiliating! I have passed from one shallow sexual episode to another. That’s the story of my entire life… one tawdry, shallow, clutching incident after another. My relationships have no deep, lasting significance — if I could just ONCE lie down and have something meaningful happen!”
The man replies, from the floor, “Have you ever tried talking less… and lying down SOONER?”
People go on talking and talking about God. Better to be silent, better not to say anything but to sit. You don’t know; it is better not to hide your ignorance in big words, in spiritual jargon. To know that “I don’t know” is a great step towards real knowing. To know that “I know” without knowing is going astray, is going farther and farther away. Truth asks only one thing: Be silent, so that you can listen, so that you can hear the still, small voice within.
Source: Osho Book “The Dhammapada, Vol 8”