Everybody's asking questions on what will happen when they arrive.
Very few are really,
Is this curiosity,
That's the word,
Curiosity.
It doesn't matter.
What's important is that you would have grasped what I'm saying.
But we're always asking how would this fit into that system or would this make sense in that context?
Or what will it feel like when we get there?
Get started.
You'll know.
It cannot be described.
We cannot say.
And so it is said so widely in the East.
Those who know do not say.
Those who say do not know.
It cannot be said.
Only the opposite can be said.
The guru cannot give you truth.
As I shall explain to you sooner or later,
Truth cannot be put into words.
You have a formula that isn't the truth,
That isn't the reality.
Reality cannot be put into a formula.
The guru can only point out your errors.
When you drop your errors,
You will know truth.
And then you cannot say.
This is common teaching among the great Catholic mystics,
The great Thomas Aquinas,
Who towards the end of his life,
I thought he kept that famous silence of his for just a couple of months or something.
It went on for years.
He wouldn't write,
He wouldn't talk,
He had seen.
And he realized that he had made a fool of himself,
And he said so explicitly.
It's like if you've never tasted a green mango,
Which are found in abundance in my country,
And you said to me,
What does it taste like?
And I'd say to you,
Uh.
And in giving you a word,
I'd put you off the track.
Try to understand that.
Unless you're very wise,
Which most people are not,
They seize upon the word.
They seize upon the words of scripture,
And they've got it all wrong.
Sour.
And you say vinegar sour?
Oh no,
No,
Not vinegar sour.
You say lemon sour?
You say no,
No,
No,
Not lemon sour.
What sour?
Mango sour.
But I've never tasted one.
Too bad.
Then you go ahead and write a doctoral thesis on it.
You wouldn't have if you had tasted it.
You really wouldn't.
You would have written a doctoral thesis on other things,
But not on this.
And the day you taste a green mango,
You say,
God,
I made a fool of myself.
I shouldn't have written that thesis.
Exactly what Thomas Aquinas did.
He read a whole book written by a great German philosopher and theologian,
Precisely on the silence of Saint Thomas.
He just went silent,
That's all.
He wouldn't talk.
Wouldn't talk.
The great foundation of his Summa Theologica,
Which was the summary of all his theology,
In the prologue he says,
About God,
We cannot say what he is,
But rather what he is not.
And so we cannot speak about how he is,
But rather how he is not.
And then he talks in his famous commentary of Boetius,
De Trinitate,
On the Trinity.
And he says there are three ways of knowing God.
One,
In his creation.
Two,
In his action through creation.
And the highest form of the knowledge of God,
To know that one does not know.
The highest form.
Talking about the Trinity.
To know that one does not know.
Now this is not an oriental Zen master.
This is a canonized saint of the Roman Catholic Church,
The prince of theologians for centuries who's talking.
To know him as unknown.
And in another place he says,
As unknowable.
Reality,
God,
Divinity,
Love,
Is unknowable.
Meaning,
Cannot be comprehended by the thinking mind.
I'll explain that to you.
I'll show you why it is so.
And that will set at rest so many questions that people would have,
Because we're always living under the illusion that we know we don't.
We cannot know.
What then is scripture?
A hint?
A clue?
Not a description,
Silly.
The fanaticism of sincere believers causes more evil than the united effort of 200 rogues.
It really does.
It's terrifying to see what sincere believers will do,
Because they think they know.
You don't.
Wouldn't it be wonderful if we had a world where everybody said we don't know?
Wouldn't that be marvelous?
We don't know.
A man born blind who comes to me and says,
What is this thing called reality?
Or rather,
What's the color green like?
And how does one describe the color green to someone who is born blind?
One uses analogy.
One says,
You know the color green,
It's something like,
Like soft music.
He says,
Oh,
Something like soft music?
Yeah,
Soothing,
Soft.
Oh,
Okay.
Another guy comes to me and says,
What's the color green like?
I say,
You know,
It's something like soft satin.
He says,
Oh,
I say,
The next day I know they're bashing each other over the head with bottles.
One saying it's soft music.
The other one says it's the satin.
And so it goes on.
And neither of them knows a thing of what they're talking about.
It's as bad as that.
And it's even worse.
Because one day you restore sight to this man.
And he's sitting there in the garden and he's looking all around him.
And I say to him,
Well,
Now you know what the color green is.
He says,
That's right,
I heard some of it this morning.
You're surrounded by God and you don't see him.
The final barrier to the vision of God is God,
Is your God concept.
You miss it because you think you know.
That's the terrible thing about religion.
That's what the Gospels are saying.
They knew so they got rid of him.
The highest knowledge of God is to know God as unknowable.
There's far too much God talk.
The world is sick of it.
There's too little awareness,
Too little love,
Too little happiness.
Or let's not use those words either.
There's too little dropping of errors,
Dropping of attachments and cruelty.
Too little awareness.
That's what the world is suffering from.
Not lack of religion,
Lack of awareness,
Lack of waking up.
That's what religion is all about.
That's what it's supposed to be about.
Look what we degenerated into.
Come to my country and see them killing one another.
You find it everywhere.
This is what it ended up in.
So the one who knows does not say.
The one who says does not know.
All revelations,
However divine,
Are never anything more than a finger pointing to the moon.
And as we say in the East,
When the sage points to the moon,
All that the idiot sees is the finger.
Jean Guitton,
A very pious,
Orthodox,
Catholic writer in France,
Adds a terrifying comment.
We frequently use the finger to gouge our eyes out.
Isn't that terrible?
So,
Awareness,
Awareness,
Awareness.
In awareness is healing.
In awareness is truth.
In awareness is salvation.
In awareness is spirituality.
In awareness is growth.
In awareness is love.
In awareness is awakening.
Awareness.
I talked to you so far about awareness of what goes on in the self,
The me.
Why it is that when we look at a tree,
We really don't see it.
We think we do,
But we don't.
When we look at a person,
We don't really see that person.
We think we do.
What we're seeing is something that we fixed in our minds.
We get an impression,
We hold on to that impression,
And we keep looking at that person through that impression.
And we do this with almost everything.
If you understand that,
Then you will understand the loveliness and beauty of being aware also of everything around you.
Because reality is there.
God,
Whatever that is,
Is there.
It's all there.
The little fish in the ocean,
Excuse me,
He says,
I'm looking for the ocean.
Could you tell me where I could find it?
Pathetic,
Isn't it?
So if we would open our eyes and see and realize,
Then we would understand.
