Rational understanding is not understanding at all. It is a misnomer. Through reason one never understands anything. One simply comes to feel that one understands. Reason is a lie. It gives you a false feeling, “Yes, you have understood.” Only through experiences does one understand; only through existential experience is understanding possible.

For example, if I talk about love, you can understand it rationally, because you know the language, you know the semantics, you know the meaning of the words, you know the construction of the sentences, and you have been trained, so you can understand what I am saying; but your understanding will be “about” love. It will not be exactly understanding of love. It will be “about” love; it will not be direct. And howsoever you go on collecting facts and information about love, you will never be able to know what love is only through this accumulation. You will have to move into love, you will have to taste it, to dissolve into it, to dare; only then.

Rational understanding is just a very superficial understanding. Become more existential. If you want to know about love, it is better to go into love rather than going into the library and consulting what others have said about love. If you want to meditate, rather than going into the library and consulting what others have said about love. If you want to meditate, rather than going into the books and learning what meditation is all about, go directly into meditation. Feel it, enjoy it, enter into it, allow it to happen around you, allow it to happen within you; then you will know.

How can you know what dancing is without dancing? It is impossible to know from the books, and it is even difficult to know seeing a dancer dance. Then too it is not knowing, because you see the outer form of it, just the movements of the body. You don’t know what is happening inside the dancer, what harmony is arising in him, what consciousness, what awareness is arising in him, what crystallization, what centering. You cannot see it, you cannot infer it. From the outside it is not available, and you cannot enter into the inner world of the dancer. The only way to enter there is to become a dancer.

All that is beautiful, deep, and great has to be lived.

Trust is one of the greatest things in life. Greater than love, because love knows of hate. Trust does not know anything about it. Love is still a duality. The hate part remains hidden; it has not been dropped. You can lute your lover within a second. Anything can cause it, and the hate part comes up and the love part goes down. In love it is only half what you call love; just beneath the surface the hate is always waiting to jump over and posses you. And it possesses you. Lovers go on fighting, continuous conflict.

Somebody has written a book about love. The title is beautiful: THE INTIMATE ENEMY. Lovers are enemies also.

But trust is higher than love; it is nondual. It knows no hate. It knows no polarity, no opposite. It simply is one. It is the purest love – love purified of hate, love which has dropped the hate part completely, love which cannot turn into a sour experience, bitter experience, love which has become almost unearthly, other-wordly.

So only those who love can trust. If you want to avoid love, and trust, your trust will be of a very lower status because it will continue to have the hate part. You have to move your energy first through love so you can become aware of the hate-and-love duality. Then is the frustration that comes out of the hate part, then an understanding through experience, and then you drop the hate part. Then pure love, the very essence, survives. Even the flower is not there, only the fragrance; then you rise into trust. Of course it has nothing to do with rational understanding. In fact the more rational understanding disappears, the more trust will arise. Trust is in a way blind; in a way trust is the only clarity of vision there is. If you think from reason, trust will look blind. Rationalists will always call trust blind. If you look through the experience of trust, you will laugh; you will say, “I have got my eyes for the first time.” Then trust is the only clarity there is. The vision is so clear, without any clouds of anger and hate, so transparent.