Tao: The Three Treasures, Vol 3 Talks on Fragments from Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching Talks given from 11/08/75 am to 20/08/75 am English Discourse series 10 Chapters Year published: Originally the "Three Treasures" series was published as two volumes, later republished as four volumes. Tao: The Three Treasures, Vol 3 Chapter #1 Chapter title: Pursuit of Knowledge 11 August 1975 am in Buddha Hall Archive code: 7508110 ShortTitle: TREAS301 Audio: Yes Video: No Length: 79 mins LAO TZU SAYS: WITHOUT STEPPING OUTSIDE ONE'S DOORS ONE CAN KNOW WHAT IS HAPPENING IN THE WORLD. WITHOUT LOOKING OUT OF ONE'S WINDOWS ONE CAN SEE THE TAO OF HEAVEN. THE FURTHER ONE PURSUES KNOWLEDGE THE LESS ONE KNOWS. THEREFORE THE SAGE KNOWS WITHOUT RUNNING ABOUT UNDERSTANDS WITHOUT SEEING, ACCOMPLISHES WITHOUT DOING. Religion is not knowledge, it is knowing. Knowledge is of the mind, knowing is of the being, and the difference and the distance, is tremendously vast. The difference is not only quantitative, it is also qualitative. Knowledge and knowing -- they are as different as heaven and hell, earth and the sky, so the first thing to understand is the difference between knowledge and knowing. Knowledge is never of the present, it is always of the past. The moment you say you know it is already a dead thing, it has already left its marks on the memory, it is like dust clinging to you. You have already moved away from that. Knowing is always immediate, knowing is here and now. You cannot say anything about it, you can only be it. The moment you speak of it, even knowing becomes knowledge; that's why all those who have known, they say it cannot be said. The moment you speak of it the very nature of it changes; it has become knowledge. It is no more the beautiful alive phenomenon of knowing. Knowing has no past, it has no future, it has only the present. And remember, present is not part of time. People ordinarily think that time is divided between past, future and present. They are absolutely wrong. Time is divided between past and future, present is not a part of time at all. You cannot catch hold of it in time. Pursue it and you will miss. Try to grasp it and it will always be out of your reach, because it is part of eternity not part of time. Present is eternity crossing time. It is a meeting point where eternity and the temporal meet. In the present is knowing, in the past is knowledge, Whenever you know, you start planning. The more you know, the more you plan. Knowing means the past, planning means the future -- then you don't allow the future freedom, you try to fix it into the pigeon holes of the past. You would like it to be just a repetition of the past, howsoever modified, decorated, but just a repetition of the past. A man of knowledge is a man of planning, and life is an unplanned flow. Life is freedom, you cannot pigeon hole it, you cannot categorize it, that's why a man of knowledge misses life. He knows much, and he knows nothing. He knows too much and he is just empty and hollow. You cannot find more shallow a person than a man of knowledge. He is just surface and surface, he has no depth, because depth comes through eternity. Time is horizontal, it moves in a line on the horizon. Eternity is vertical, it moves into depth and height. That is the meaning of Jesus' cross: time crossing eternity, or eternity crossing time. Jesus' hands are time, they move into past and future, crucified in time, resurrected into eternity. His being is vertical -- everybody's being is vertical, only the body, the hands, the material part of you, is horizontal. Knowledge creates future, future creates worry. The more you know, the more worried, the more uneasy you are, never at ease, at home, a deep trembling inside. It is a pathology. A man of knowing is totally different -- he lives here. This moment is all, as if tomorrow exists not -- and really it exists not, it has never existed, it is part of the game of the mind. It is a dream of the man of knowledge. This moment is all, and the total. Knowing moves into this moment vertically, goes deeper and deeper and deeper. A man of knowing has depth, even his surface is nothing but part of depth. He has no superficial surface, his surface is also part of depth. And a man of knowledge? He has no depth, his depth is also part of his surface. And this is the paradox: that a man of knowing knows and a man of knowledge does not know, cannot know, because knowledge cannot meet life -- that is the barrier, on the contrary, the only barrier, the hindrance. It is just like this: a mother knows that the child is hers, the father has knowledge that the child is his. The father has only a belief. Deep down he does not know. Only a mother knows! It happened, Mulla Nasrudin was working as a vizier to a small kingdom. The king was very generous; not very rich (the kingdom was small) but still very generous. Every year Nasrudin would come and tell him that his wife had given birth to a child, and the king would give valuable presents to him, to the child, to the mother, but then it became too much because it was every year. When the twelfth child was born and Nasrudin came, the king said, Now Mulla, it is too much, and the world is suffering too much from over population, what are you doing? If you go at this speed you will create a small nation. You go on, every year -- stop it! Let this child be the last! And if you cannot stop, if you are unable to stop, then it is better to commit suicide rather than to overburden the earth. Nasrudin was very depressed. Then the thirteenth child was born -- what to do? So he thought, it is better now not to go to the king -- go to the forest and commit suicide, as the king has said. So he went to the forest, he prepared everything to hang himself, just a split second and he would have been hanging under the tree dead -- suddenly he said, Nasrudin! Beware! You may be hanging the wrong man! A father simply believes, a mother knows. Knowing is like a mother, knowledge is like a father. All knowledge is belief. Knowing is not belief, it is KNOWING. It is your perception it is your vision it is your growth. It is just like the mother -- the child grows in her womb, she knows, the child is HER PART, her own extension, her own being, blood and bone. A father is extrinsic, he is not intrinsic. He simply believes that the child is his. A man of knowledge believes that he knows. A man of knowing knows. Knowing is a transformation in your being, it is like a pregnancy, you have to carry it, you have to give birth to yourself, a resurrection into eternity, a turning away from time and a moving in no time, a conversion from mind to no mind, but something so tremendous that you know it is happening in you. A man of knowledge goes on collecting dust from Buddhas. Those who have known, he believes in them. Whatsoever he believes in is dead. He has not given birth to himself. He has collected knowledge from others, everything is borrowed, and how can knowledge be borrowed? How can being be borrowed? If knowledge is going to be true it is going to be of the nature of being. George Gurdjieff used to ask people -- seekers who would come to him -- the first thing he used to ask is: Are you interested in knowledge or being? Because here we give being and we are not concerned about knowledge, so you decide well. If you are concerned with knowledge, go somewhere else. If you are concerned with being, remain here. But make a very very clear decision. What is the difference between being and knowledge? The same as the difference between knowledge and knowing. Knowing IS being. It is not something that is being added to you, it is something you grow into. Knowledge is something which is added to you. You don't grow through it, rather, you carry it as a burden. So you will always find a man of knowledge burdened, heavily burdened, mountains of knowledge he is carrying on his shoulders. You will see his face very serious, deadly serious, and his heart completely crushed under the burden. A man of knowing is weightless. He has nothing to carry. He can fly into the sky. The gravitation of the earth does not affect him. He is not pulled towards the earth because the earth can pull only that which is heavy. He remains on the earth but he is not of the earth. That is the meaning of Jesus' saying -- he says again and again: My kingdom is not of this world.... It is of some other world, the world of being, of eternity. If you understand the distinction well, then remember never to move on the path of knowledge. Move on the path of knowing, being, because only then you gain something: not that you have more information, but you become more, and that is the crucial point to be understood -- you have to become more.