Osho – We go on polishing the mind in schools, colleges, universities, with the hope that we will be able to create an intelligent humanity. Our stupidity is such that for five thousand years we have been doing this and yet we have not realised the fact that humanity has not become intelligent at all. On the contrary, human beings have become more unintelligent.
In fact the uneducated person seems to be more sharp, more intelligent, than the so-called professor, the scholar, the pundit. or course the professor knows many words and he can quote scriptures, and the uneducated person knows no information, but put them in any real situation and you will immediately see that the uneducated behaves more intelligently than the educated.
It is said of Edison that he had two cats and sometimes he had to wait for the cats to come in at night. Somebody suggested “Why don’t you make a hole in the door so you can go to sleep — whenever the cats want to they can come in and they can also go to sleep. There is no need to wait for them.” He liked the idea.
The man who had suggested it was his own servant, absolutely uneducated. Two poles: Edison, the man who invented one thousand scientific gadgets — the gramophone, the radio, the electric bulb… In fact without Edison you would be in difficulty living because all gadgets are his. And the servant was utterly uneducated.
The next day, when the servant came, he was puzzled. He asked Edison “What have you done? Why have you made two holes?” He said “But I have got two cats and how can two cats pass through one hole?” The servant could not believe him: what nonsense was this?
In any real situation you will be able to see who is intelligent. The challenge has to be new otherwise the scholar will win the race. If it is something old that he knows about then he will seem to be very intelligent, but if it is something absolutely new about which he has no information he will prove less intelligent than the uninformed person.
The uninformed person has to depend on his own consciousness and the informed person depends on his memory — that’s where the difference lies. The uninformed person has not much of a mind but he has some natural quality of meditativeness.
Each child is born with it, it is our natural ingredient. It is not something that has to be learned, meditation has only to be discovered. It is hidden behind layers of mind. And the whole process of meditation is to cut through all these layers so that you can rediscover your natural intelligence. And to be naturally intelligent is to be blissful, to be naturally intelligent is to know what life is all about. In being naturally intelligent one is bound to experience godliness all around.
Mind is mediocre, all minds are mediocre — the great minds and the small minds. They differ only in degree , degrees of mediocrity. But intelligence means a glimpse of no-mind, and all original insights have arisen out of that state of no-mind.
I call that state meditation. Meditation is the art of slipping out of the grip of the mind so that you can see existence as it is without any prejudices. Then there is great light, clarity, understanding, and to live out of that clarity, understanding, out of that light, is to live a life of celebration. That is the goal of sannyas.
Source – Osho Book “The Miracle”