Knowledge borrowed from others is untrue, knowledge gathered from the outside is untrue. It hides your ignorance but it does not make you wise. It covers up your wounds but it does not heal. In a way it is very dangerous because one tends to forget one’s wounds, and the wounds go on growing inside; they can become canceric.

 

It is better to know them. It is better to open them to the winds, to the rains, to the sun. Hiding them is protecting them, and they are your enemies. It is better to let them be exposed — nature heals. Hence the first step of true knowledge is to know “I know nothing”; that is exposing your ignorance. And from that moment a turning happens, a great change happens: one starts looking inwards.

 

True knowledge has to happen within you. It can’t come through thoughts, it has to come through a thoughtless space within you. It cannot come through studying, it comes through meditation. It comes only when the mind becomes absolutely contentless, so utterly empty and pure, uncontaminated, unpolluted, that your own inner sources start flowing because all the hindrances have been removed.

 

The source from where the spring can flow is there, but there are many rocks in the way, and those rocks are thought to be knowledge. They are not knowledge but enemies of knowledge. Drop all that you have learned from the without so that the within can speak to you, and then you will know the flavor of true knowledge, knowing. True knowing liberates.

 

- Osho, “Scriptures in Silence and Sermons in Stones, #20”