Osho,
I have heard you speak for the past month on “beyond enlightenment” – and I don’t understand it.
I have heard you speak for the past twelve years on enlightenment – and I don’t understand it.
All I know is the moment when I sit before you, you feel like blood to my body, your voice more familiar than my own heartbeat.
Osho, have I let you down?

There are things which are beyond understanding.

Enlightenment is beyond understanding, and of course beyond enlightenment is going to be more miraculous, more mysterious. Understanding itself is not the heart of human beings, it is not their very being. It is useful only as far as the outside world is concerned. The moment you start moving inwards, you have to learn new ways of feeling, of loving, of knowing, and finally of being.

Understanding is perfectly right for the mind, for intelligence, for the objective world; but life does not consist only of those things which you can understand. In fact, the things that you can understand don’t make life a celebration, they don’t give life a meaning, a significance; they don’t allow life to become love.

Understanding is the demarcation line between the mundane and the sacred. The mundane can be understood and should be understood. And the sacred cannot be understood and should not be understood. Its sacredness is basically a secret that you experience, just the way you feel the heartbeat, the way you feel your breathing.

The sacred gives color to existence, gives music to that which is mundane. It transforms all prose into poetry and makes everything a mystery unto itself, so that the whole existence becomes a constant challenge to discover. You go on discovering, but the discovery is never finished, hence you can never say you have understood. On the contrary, the deeper you enter into the sacred dimension of life the more you feel you don’t understand, you don’t know.

Socrates had become very old, and before he was given poison, the oracle of the temple of Delphi declared him to be the wisest man in the whole world. A few people who knew Socrates were immensely glad, they rushed to Athens to inform Socrates: “It has never happened before, it is unprecedented that the oracle of Delphi should declare anybody as the wisest man in the world. You are the first.”

Socrates said, “You will have to go back to the temple of Delphi and tell the oracle that although it has always been right, this time it has missed – because I know nothing.”

The people who brought the news were shocked.

They went back and told to the oracle: “Socrates refuses… Not only does he refuse to be the wisest man in the world, he says, ‘I know nothing.’”

And here is the beauty of the incident: The oracle said, “That’s why he is the wisest man in the world, there is no contradiction.”