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of doubting, he is afraid of doubt. Through his belief he represses his doubt, but the doubt is there; and the more you repress it, the deeper it goes into you. You may completely forget about it but it will remain part of your unconscious. And any moment it can again surface, any situation can bring it up.
To me, knowing, not believing, is the only way to be religious. In the past it has been said that believing is knowing; I say to you knowing is believing. Without knowing there is no point in believing.
So Astiko means one who knows god. And in fact we all know, it is just that we have forgotten that we know it. We are born knowing; each child is born knowing but he is not aware that he knows. So we have not to know god really, just we have to become aware of our knowing. But we are so occupied with the outside world that the whole energy is spent in the non-essential and nothing is left for the essential.
The religious person is one who starts discriminating between the essential and the non-essential and goes on dropping the non-essential so more and more energy is available for the essential. The moment enough energy is available for the essential you suddenly go through an explosion and that explosion makes you aware of who you are. Suddenly it is there, the experience that we are part of god. And also in that moment one knows that we always know it in a very subtle way, in an underground way -- something like an undercurrent -- but we were so occupied, preoccupied with other things that it receded. We had been ignoring it, that's all.
The English word 'ignorance' is beautiful. It means ignoring; it does not mean not-knowing. We have been ignoring god, that's all; our ignorance consists of ignoring. If we drop ignoring, if we pay attention, if we just become a little bit concerned about our own being, immediately the discovery....
Neti-neti. They contain the whole of religion -- those two words, neti-neti. They mean neither this nor that.
This is a method of inner discovery. One has to become aware that one is not the body -- that is the first neti -- and then one has to become aware that one is not the mind -- that
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