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Only banks can go bankrupt, who else? And this promissory note can be cashed only after death, that is the condition on it. "In God we believe... in God we trust." And the pope promises you that this much will be given to you after death but it is always after death. They have been exploiting people with such simple means of exploitation that anybody who has a little bit of intelligence can see it.
Life is mystery.
Scriptures are mystifying. Scriptures are dead.
And the priesthood lives on these dead scriptures.
A real authentic man lives life, not scriptures.
And by sheer living, intensively, totally, he is surrounded by mystery all over. Each moment is a mystery. You can taste it, but you can not reduce it to objective knowledge.
That's the meaning of mystery: you have a certain way of knowing it, but there is no way to reduce it to knowledge. It never becomes knowledge, it always remains knowing.
You have a sense of knowing, but if somebody insists, "If you know, then give me the answer," and you are a true, honest man, you will say, "I have a sense of knowing but I also have another sense that it cannot be reduced to knowledge."
That's why Lao Tzu refused to write anything his whole life... for the simple reason that the moment you write it, it is something else. But this can be detected only by one who has some acquaintance with mystery.
It is not a question of scholarship: a scholar cannot detect anything wrong in Lao Tzu. Confucius was a great scholar in Lao Tzu's time, his contemporary. The world knows Confucius more than Lao Tzu, naturally: he was a great scholar, a well-known wiseman. Great emperors used to visit him for advice. The emperor of China, who must have been the greatest emperor of those days -- because China has always been a continent unto itself -- appointed Confucius to be his prime minister, so that he was always available to him for advice.
But when Confucius went to see Lao Tzu, do you know what happened? He came back with almost a nervous breakdown. Lao Tzu was known at least to those people who were in search. And when the disciples of Confucius came to know that
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