Scholars
You can understand only that much which you have experienced; understanding never goes beyond your experience. Words you can accumulate, you can become scholars, great scholars. And again you will be in a new kind of illusion: the illusion that information creates. The more information you have, the more you start feeling you know.
Information is thought to be synonymous with knowing -- it is not. Knowing is a totally different affair. Knowing is experiencing; information only accumulates in the memory system. A computer can do it, there is nothing special about it; there is nothing specially human about it.
Two large rats walked into a movie house one day and went straight to the projection room. Once inside they ate the entire reel of film. After eating, one rat looked at the other and asked, "Did you like the movie?"
To which the other replied, "No, I liked the book better."
These are the scholars - the rats! They go on eating words, they go on accumulating words. They can have mountains of words and they become very articulate about words. They can deceive others; that is not so bad because they can deceive only people who are already deceived; you cannot do much more harm to them. But by deceiving others, slowly slowly they become deceived themselves, and that is the greatest problem.
Ninety-nine percent so-called religious people - saints, mahatmas - are just scholars. As far as words are concerned they are very clever, but if you look deep into their eyes you will find just the same stupid human beings. Nothing has changed.
-Osho, "Zen: The Special Transmission, #3"