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You cannot ask it! And if he answers, then he is in the same boat as you -- neither of you knows.
We want answers because we are trying to escape from the suffering entailed in the process of love, in the process that is life, existence, God. We are riding safe vessels: we want to know so that we will not suffer. But suffering is birth; through suffering there is ecstasy. You have to pass through the dark night of the soul to come to the dawn. You cannot ask what dawn is. You have to pass through the dark night to know it.
God is a search, not a question, and a search cannot be answered. It has to be lived; you have to go into it deeply. You will have to be committed to it; you will have to throw yourself into it. That is what the fear is: throwing oneself into the unknown, the uncharted.
You are afraid, so you sit on the bank and ask questions. And, of course, there are always people who get pleasure out of answering you. To answer someone is ego-fulfilling: you know and the other does not, the other is ignorant and you are a knower. Then this mutual nonsense goes on: someone asks and someone will answer. Both are in ignorance because the problem cannot be solved on the bank. One has to go into unknown waters, and you cannot go into the unknown with readymade answers.
Readymade answers are a barrier to the unknown. One has to go into the unknown in total insecurity, not knowing anything. That is what is necessary -- and nothing can be done about it. To jump into the unknown is to come upon the truth, the ecstasy. When you come upon the divine yourself, it is not simply an answer, it is a transformation: you become one with it.
You can never become one with any answer; an answer always remains separate in the memory. You can go on collecting answers and piling them up in the mind; then you know so many answers and yet the question remains the same -- it is still not answered.
The question cannot be answered like that. It can only be answered through a mutation. When you encounter the divine directly, immediately -- when the divine is before you and you are before the divine with no barrier in between -- then you encounter
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