Question – Is all Mind made out of the same material – Stupidity?
Osho – Yes. Mind is stupid. There is no mind which is intelligent. Mind cannot be intelligent; mind is stupidity. To say “stupid mind” is not right; it is repetitive because “stupidity” and “mind” both mean the same thing.
Why is mind stupidity? Because mind is nothing but the past. the collected dust that you have gathered on the way — layers and layers of dust. That hinders your intelligence. It is just like a mirror covered with dust: mind is dust; mirror is consciousness. When all dust is washed away, intelligence arises: when there is no mind you are intelligent; when there is mind you are stupid.
Of course, there are two types of “stupid” — ignorant stupids, knowledgeable stupids: people who don’t know anything that are stupid and people who know too much and are stupid. And remember, the second type is more dangerous than the first because the second type has more dust on the mirror than the first. An ignorant man can evolve more easily than a pundit, the man who thinks he knows. The very thinking that he knows becomes the hindrance. Mind is not intelligence; intelligence is of the no-mind. Mind is a block.
Try to understand this. Mind is all that you have experienced, all that you have gone through, all that is already dead — mind is the dead part of your being. Then you go on carrying it. It does not allow you to be here; it does not allow you to be present. It does not allow you to be intelligent. Before you respond, it starts reacting.
For example, if I ask a person, “Is there God? Does God exist?” — if he answers from the mind he will be stupid. If he says, “Yes, God exists,” because he has been brought up in such a way — taught, cultivated, conditioned, that God exists — he says, “Yes, God exists”; but this is not an intelligent response. He does not know; somebody else, others, have told him. They also didn’t know; somebody else, others, had told them. He has heard a rumor, and he believes in the rumor. No, he is not intelligent. He is not even intelligent enough to understand what he is saying. Or the man can say, “No, God doesn’t exist,” because he was brought up in a communist family or in Russia or China. That too is the same stupid mind — conditioning changed, but the stupidity is the same: he knows that God doesn’t exist, without knowing. He has not searched; he has not investigated. He has not gone into the matter at all.
But if an intelligent person is asked…. Intelligent person: I mean a man who does not look through the mind, puts aside the mind. You ask him, “Does God exist?” — there will be no answer. At the most an intelligent man can say, “I don’t know.” When you say, “I don’t know,” you show a certain intelligence, the possibility. It is very small, but it can grow and can become a big phenomenon. Or the person will say, “I have not investigated. I have heard people saying this and that, but I don’t know. As far as I am concerned I am not aware either this way or that, yes or no. Both are impossible; I cannot say.”
This is intelligence, and this man can know someday because with this intelligence discovery is possible. If you are clogged with theories, burdened with scriptures, you will never be intelligent; you will always remain stupid.
Mind is the past — the dead hovering over the living. It is like a cloud surounding you: through it you cannot see, the vision is not clear, everything is distorted. Let this cloud disappear. Remain with no answers, no conclusions, no philosophies, no religions. Remain open, just open; remain vulnerable, and the truth can happen to you. To be vulnerable is to be intelligent. To know that you don’t know is to be intelligent. To know that through mind you miss is to be intelligent. To know that through no-mind the door opens is to be intelligent. Otherwise, mind is the stupidity.
Source – Osho Book “Osho Book “Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, Vol5”