Grown-Ups

 

 

Every child is intelligent far more intelligent than the so-called grown-ups. The grown-ups are only "so-called"; it is very rare to come across a person who is really a grown-up person. The most fundamental quality in a really grown-up person is that he still keeps the innocence of the child alive, the wondering eyes of the child, the enquiring heart of the child; the purity, the clarity of the child will remain intact in him. He has defeated the society. He has not allowed anybody to destroy his intelligence.

 

People only grow in age; they don't grow up. Growing up is something vertical, growing in age is something horizontal. You remain on the same plane; just time passes by. And of course time helps you to collect many experiences, knowledge, words, information, and you start thinking that you know. And that is the greatest calamity that can happen to any man: not knowing and believing that you know. It means now the doors for knowing are closed forever.

 

Socrates is a grown-up person. He said: "I know only one thing, that I know nothing." His childhood is absolutely unpolluted. The time that has passed by has not been just dust gathering on the mirror. On the contrary, it has helped to sharpen his sword; it has not been like rust on the sword. Knowledge is rust: it destroys your intelligence and gives you poor substitutes -- knowledge is a poor substitute for intelligence.

 

Remember, one can be very intellectual and yet unintelligent. The child is not intellectual. He does not know anything about the great philosophers, the great scriptures; he is not a scholar. He knows nothing! But out of that state of not-knowing he functions. Hence he is always full of wonder and awe; he looks at the world feeling that it is a mystery. The more you know, the more you destroy the mystery.

 

The whole function of our so-called schools, colleges and universities is to de-mystify the universe. Even scientists brag about it, that they are doing a great service to humanity by de-mystifying the universe. In fact, they are creating more and more boredom in the world.

 

No child is ever bored; he is always finding something or other which is immensely interesting for him. He can get absorbed in any small thing -- a butterfly, a flower, a stone, a rock -- anything will do. He immediately becomes aware of something extraordinary in it. That is insight, that is intelligence.

 

If we help children in every possible way to remain as intelligent as when they come into the world, then there will be many grown-up people. Right now you can count the grown-up people in the whole world on your fingers very easily -- because everybody has been manipulated, has been poisoned. It needs a totally different society, a totally different vision of life in which the child is respected.

 

For centuries we have respected the old man: the older the man is, the more we respect him. Why do you respect the old man? just because he has existed for a hundred years? Just existing is not enough for respect; living is a totally different matter. Existing is very ordinary; living has a totally different flavor to it.

 

Living means living out of AGNOSIA, living out of a state of not-knowing, living life as a mystery. That is the only way to live it. Others only exist, others only survive.

 

A grown-up person moves in a deep harmony. His body, his psychology, his spirituality are always attuned; they all move together. This does not happen to the people who only grow in age. Their bodies become older but their minds remain retarded.

 

At the time of the First World War, psychologists became aware for the first time of this fact, because for the first time on a large scale they tried to observe, experiment, to know how many people are really psychologically grown-up. And they were amazed, shocked: the average psychological age of human beings is only twelve years. The body may be eighty years old and the mind is lagging far behind. In fact, there seems to be no connection... the gap of seventy years or eighty years. And the eighty-year-old person pretends to know because he thinks he is eighty years old, and he stopped growing when he was only twelve years of age. Really he should be counted only as twelve years of age, not eighty. And as far as the spirit is concerned he may be still in the womb of the mother; he may. never have come out of the womb.

 

These three together, in deep harmony, create beauty, grace, light, love. When they are all in accord, life is an orchestra -- but they are in discord. The spirit is almost non-existent. Hence George Gurdjieff used to say, "I have come across very few people who have any soul."

 

Ordinarily everybody believes that he HAS a soul because the religions have been telling for centuries that everybody has a soul. Everybody only has a potential for being a soul, but that potential is not actualized, not realized. It is Still a seed; it has not come to be a tree. It has not reached the point where spring comes and flowers open up and one feels fulfilled, contented.

 

A grown-up person is a flowering. His life is not divided; his life is an organic unity. He moves in a kind of absolute unity; nothing is lagging behind, nothing has gone far ahead.

 

And this disunity that we see in the world is multidimensional. The soul is in the womb; the mind, the psychology is somewhere hung up at the age of twelve, and the body is eighty or ninety years old. This is only one kind of discord; there are many kinds of discord.

 

The head goes on becoming bigger and bigger, and the heart goes on shrinking. They lose all synchronicity. And when the head becomes too much, man is a monster.

 

If you watch, if you observe within yourself, you can see it. I am only stating a fact. You will not feel any heart in you. You will see your head is heavy, full of junk, but your heart is only a word. You have read about it in poetry, in novels. It seems to be a fiction, a myth. In fact, physiologists say there is no heart. What you call the heart, from where the love arises, does not exist for the scientist. What exists is only a blood-purifying system. Your heartbeat has nothing to do with the heartbeat the poets have been talking about, the mystics have been praising; it is something else.

 

But scientists are right in a way, because the people they observe DON'T have any hearts. They have not observed a Buddha or a Meera, they have not observed Chuang Tzu or Kabir. They have never come across a man of the heart, so what they know is only about lungs.

 

The mystics are talking about something ELSE which is not grown-up in you. It is something behind your physical heart.which has not started functioning. It starts functioning only when you shower much energy on it, when your energy starts moving it. But your whole energy goes to the head.

 

Our structure of education is such that we bypass the heart. In fact, we try to ensure in every possible way that nobody's energy should enter the heart, because once the heart starts functioning it becomes difficult for the head to take possession of you.

 

And the society needs only heads and hands. That's why the society is divided into two kinds of people: the heads -- the people who work with their heads, the so-called intelligentsia -- and the hands, the people who are laborers. The society does not believe in the heart because the heart has no utilitarian purpose. You cannot produce commodities out of the heart; you cannot make people rich; you cannot create bigger houses, sophisticated machines; you cannot reach the moon. So what is the purpose of it? Its purpose is totally different: it is non-utilitarian. It brings joy, but joy the society is not interested in. The society wants people who are efficient robots. A joyful person is not a robot. The society does not want you to be loving; it wants you to be calculating.

 

-Osho, "Guida Spirituale, #10, Q1“