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Once I was asked, “What is philosophy?” I said, “Philosophy is the art of asking the wrong questions.” Philosophy is the blind man asking “What is light?” It is the deaf man asking “What is music? What is sound?”

If the blind man asks, “How can I get my eyes back?” it is no longer philosophy, it is religion. If the deaf man goes to a physician to be treated so that he can hear, then he is moving in the direction of religion and not in the direction of philosophy.

Philosophy is guesswork, it is speculation; knowing nothing, trying to invent the truth. The truth cannot be invented, and anything invented cannot be true. The truth has to be discovered.

It is already there, all that we need is open eyes to see it, a heart to feel it, a being to be present to it. The truth is always present but we are absent, and because we are absent we cannot see the truth. We go on asking about the truth, and we don’t ask the right question: How to be present? How to become a presence?

We ask about the truth and that asking is also going away from it, because the asking implies that an answer is possible from somebody else. Asking implies that somebody else can tell you what the truth is. Nobody can tell you it, it cannot be told.

Lao Tzu says: “The truth that can be said is no longer truth. Once said, it becomes a lie.” Why? – because the person who knows, knows it not as information; otherwise, it would have been very easy to transfer the information to anybody who was ready to receive it.

The truth is known as an inner experience. It is like a taste on the tongue. If a man has never tasted what sweetness is, you cannot explain it to him, it is impossible. If a man has not seen color, you cannot explain to him what it is.

There are things which can only be experienced, and through experience understood. God is that ultimate experience, which is utterly inexpressible, untransferable. It cannot be conveyed. At the most, a few hints can be given; but those hints are also to be received with a very sympathetic heart, otherwise you will miss them.

If you interpret them with your mind you are going to miss them, because what can your mind do as far as interpretation is concerned? It can bring only its own past; it can bring only its own chaos. It can bring its conflicts, doubts, confusions. All those it will impose on the truth, on the hints given to you, and immediately everything is distorted. Your mind is not in a state to see, to feel.

Religion simply means creating a space in your mind which is capable of seeing, which is capable of non-conflict, which is capable of being one without any split, which is capable of integrity, clarity, perceptiveness.

A mind which is full of thoughts cannot perceive; those thoughts go on interfering. Those thoughts are there, layer upon layer. By the time something reaches your innermost core, if it ever reaches, it is no longer the same as it was delivered by someone who had known. It is a totally different phenomenon.

Buddha used to repeat each hint thrice. Somebody asked him, “Why do you repeat one thing thrice?” He said, “Even thrice is not enough.

When I say it for the first time, you hear only the words. Those words are empty, just empty hollow shells, with no content. You cannot hear the content the first time. The second time, you hear the content with the words, a fragrance comes, but you are so dazed, you are so mystified by its presence, that you are not in a state to understand. You hear, but you don’t understand. That’s why I have to repeat it thrice.”

I go on repeating again and again for the simple reason that you are so asleep it has to be repeated, hammered. Maybe in some moment, some auspicious moment, you will not be so deep in sleep; you may be close, very close to awakening, and something may enter into you. You may be able to hear. Yes, there are moments when you are very close to awakening – not awake, not asleep, just in the middle, somewhere in between.

You know that each morning there are a few moments when sleep is no longer there but you are not yet awake, you cannot say you are awake. You can hear, in a very vague way, the sounds of the birds, and the milkman, and the wife talking to the neighbor and the children getting ready to go to school, and the traffic noise, and a train passing by, but in a very vague way, not totally, partially. And then you doze off again into sleep. One moment you hear the noise of the train passing by, and in the next moment you are deeper into sleep.

Now sleep researchers say that it happens continuously in your sleep: if you sleep for eight hours, you are not continuously on the same level; your level goes on changing, peaks and valleys. The whole night you are going up and down.

Sometimes you are very deep in sleep where even dreams disappear – Patanjali has called it sushupti, dreamless sleep – and sometimes you are full of dreams, and sometimes you are just on the verge of awakening. If something shattering, shocking happens, you will be awake, suddenly awake.

That’s the effort of all the buddhas: waiting for that right moment when you are very close to awakening. Then a little push and your eyes open and you can see.

God cannot be explained but can be seen; can be experienced, but can not be explained. Any explanation about God is nothing but explaining him away; hence, the more priests, theologians, professors there are, the less religion there is in the world. The more popes and shankaracharyas, the less religion there is in the world because those people go on explaining and God cannot be explained.

They have stuffed your minds with so many explanations that those explanations are in conflict. Now it is almost impossible to figure out what is what, which is which. You are in utter confusion. Man has never been in such confusion before, because humanity has never been so close before. The earth has really become a village, a global village.

In the ancient days the Buddhist knew only what Buddha had said, and the Mohammedan knew only about what Mohammed had said, and the Christian knew only about Jesus. Now we have become inheritors of the whole heritage of humanity. Now you know Jesus, you know Zarathustra, you know Patanjali, you know Buddha, you know Mahavira, you know Lao Tzu and hundreds of other explanations, other hints – and they are all jumbled up in you.

Now it is very difficult to pull you out of this confusion. The only possible way is to drop this whole noise, not in parts but in toto. That’s what my message is.

By dropping it, you will not be dropping Jesus or Mohammed or Buddha; by dropping it you will come closer to them. By dropping it, you will simply be dropping the priests and the traditions and the conventions and the exploitation that goes on in the name of tradition and convention.

By being clear of all this, forgetting the Bible and the Vedas and the Gita, you will attain to a clarity, a cleanliness. Yes, you need a spring cleaning; you need a total unburdening of the heart.

Only then, in that silence, will you be able to understand.