"Nothing is written in it – not even a single word. That is their attitude about books – that although many things will be there, for you it will remain empty, because you can read only that which you know.

"Just the other day I heard somebody ask Mulla Nasruddin, 'Why did Jesus say 'Blessed are the poor in spirit?''

"Mulla thought for a while and then said, 'Blessed are the poor in spirit for they have no money to buy booze.'

"Another time somebody asked Mulla Nasruddin, 'And what is the eleventh commandment?'

"He said, 'Thou shalt not get caught.'

"Your mind will become your master when you are reading a book, and the mind is the problem. This mind can continue perfectly well with a book. The book is dead. The mind has to interpret, comment, decide what the meaning is. So when you are reading a book, you are reading your own mind in an indirect way. The book goes on throwing you back to yourself.

"You may become very learned but you will never become a man who really knows. You will know many things about God but you will never know God. And you will know many things about truth but you will never know truth. And to know about is just meaningless. To know is the thing, not to know about. To know about means you have missed. But the books can give you a very, very strong feeling that you know; without knowing at all you can have the feeling that you know – and that will become your greatest barrier to knowing. That will become a China Wall around you; your bridges will be broken. How to bridge? How to connect? How to attain to this connection with the divine?

"The divine seems so far away; the divine seems almost impossible. The God is not obvious; the God is not close by. You look all around and the existence seems to be almost empty of God. That's what Martin Heidegger says – 'I have not found a single thing in the world which I can call sacred.'

"From the ordinary standpoint he is right. Where can you find the sacred? The sacred is missing – not because the sacred is not there, but because you don't know how to feel the sacred."