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you have experienced -- not your beliefs but your experience. And if you have no experience, be honest, be truthful. Say, "I don't have any experience. I have only a bunch of beliefs others have given me, which are not my experience. I am carrying borrowed knowledge, I don't know anything on my own, hence I cannot recommend anything to you."
What am I doing here? I am not trying to convert you to any religion, or to any cult, or to any creed. I don't have any belief system, I don't have any theology, I don't have any philosophy, I don't have any religion. What I am trying to convey is my experience of truth. If it can be of any use to you, you can use it. If you see it is not of any use to you, that's perfectly all right. It is your freedom, I will not interfere in your freedom. I will not trespass your individuality. I respect you, I love you. How can I convert you?
So no man of truth, no man of compassion, no man of authentic experience is ever a converter. It is all those believers, who are afraid of their own doubt, who want to keep the insiders in, and go on bringing new people from outside. It helps the believers to have thicker beliefs, and thicker beliefs make your intelligence also retarded. The thicker the belief, the more retarded the intelligence. No belief helps your intelligence to grow, even though there is space enough to grow. When you go on pushing beliefs and hiding your doubt in your unconscious corners of darkness, you are crippling yourself. You are destroying your own buddhahood, you are destroying your own potential.
You could have been one of the enlightened ones, but you will remain just a Catholic, or a Hindu, or a Mohammedan. And these are all fictions, beautiful fictions. You can enjoy them as stories, as novels, but don't call them "holy" scriptures.
Four hundred and eighty-eight pages in the Holy Bible are pure pornography. I sometimes wonder why people go on missing those four hundred and eighty-eight pages -- not one page, or two pages. I told one of my friends to pick out all those pages, and he has published a book of four hundred and eighty-eight pages taken out of the Old Testament. Every passage is
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