Question 4:

Osho,

Can you please speak on your vision of an intelligent person?

 

 

EVERY CHILD is born intelligent, and every grown-up person behaves like an unintelligent person.

 

This is one of the strangest things, because intelligence is a God-given gift and he is not a miser. He gives to everybody out of his abundance, out of his overflowing intelligence, bliss, love. Everybody comes so rich and everybody becomes so poor! What goes wrong?

 

The society does not want you to be intelligent. The wants you to be mediocre because it is easy for the society to enslave the mediocre person. It is easy for the manipulators, and they' are many - the priest, the politician, the pedagogue, the pundit, they are all manipulators - it is easy for them to manipulate you if you don't have intelligence, because you are bound to depend on them, you have to depend on them. You have to look up to them always for guidance. You will need leaders if you are unintelligent. You will need religious mediators between you and God if you are unintelligent.

 

And you will always be afraid of powerful people because they know more. You will be continuously in fear.

 

The society functions in such a way: the whole educational system is created not to serve you but to serve the vested interests. From the kindergarten to the university they are serving the vested interests; they are making you more and more stupid.

 

It is said that when Henry Thoreau came out of the university, Emerson gave a great party to celebrate the occasion. And he told the participants, "I am giving this party not because Thoreau has attained great knowledge in the university but because he has been able to come back from the university and he is still intelligent. The university has not been able to change his intelligence. The university has failed, that's why I am giving this party! I respect this young man for the simple reason that he has escaped from the whole cunning strategy that our education is."

 

Intelligence simply means ability to respond, because life is a flux. You have to be aware and to see what is demanded of you, what is the challenge of the situation. The intelligent person behaves according to the situation and the stupid behaves according to the ready-made answers. Whether they come from Buddha, Christ or Krishna, it does not matter. He always carries scriptures around himself; he is afraid to depend on himself. The intelligent person depends on his own insight; he trusts his own being. He loves and respects himself. The unintelligent person respects others.

 

And you can see the point. Why are the vested interests interested in creating stupidity? - because that is the way they will be getting respect. No parents really want their children to be intelligent, because if the children are intelligent they are rebellious too, they are disobedient too. Obedience has been imposed on you as a great value; it is not a great value. It is one of the basic causes of the destruction of your intelligence.

 

I am not saying be disobedient. I am simply saying when you feel like being obedient, be obedient; when you feel like being disobedient, be true to yourself. Your only responsibility is towards yourself and nobody else.

 

An intelligent person risks. He will be ready to die rather than to compromise. Of course, he will not fight, as the Desiderata says, with unnecessary things, with non-essentials, but as far as essentials are concerned he is not going to be obedient.

 

And you have obeyed even about the essentials. What is your belief in God? You have simply obeyed. What do you know about God? You have simply obeyed; you have followed your parents, they followed their parents. And parents are happy with unintelligent children because they are obedient they have to be obedient. They know one thing, that whatsoever they do is bound to be wrong, so it is better to listen to the parents' advice.

 

For thousands of years every society has been telling children, "Respect your parents," because they are afraid of children - they may not respect their parents. And I am not saying disrespect your parents. I am simply saying: the first respect has to be towards yourself. Out of that respect you can respect your parents, your teachers - you can respect everybody. But if you don't respect yourself your respect for anybody else is going to be pseudo; deep down there will be hatred. Each child hates... deep down he knows that "The parents are my enemies." He can see how his intelligence is being cut.

 

Just the other day Laxmi was telling me that a few of our sannyasins had made a small drama, and Veereshwar, who is a Ph.D., was quoting me - he was the chief actor. And Subhuti was there and he reported to Laxmi, "Of course he was quoting Osho, but when Osho says the same things they have a totally different flavor, and when Veereshwar was quoting, the words were the same, but the context was missing, and he made everything ugly." Subhuti felt almost sick; he felt like vomiting. What happened? Veereshwar was just quoting words, borrowed; of those words he has no experience.

 

Remember always: never be repetitive. Don't repeat anybody. Let your experience blossom.

 

And just the other night Vivek told me that the kids, the ashram kids, small sannyasins, did the same kind of drama and it was tremendously beautiful. Little Siddhartha was acting like Shiva, a samurai, and he did perfectly well. And they were absolutely unselfconscious; they were not worried about the audience. The place was packed, and the kids were enjoying themselves immensely.

 

A very proper English girl comes into the ashram - because the ashram was being enacted - and Siddhartha is standing outside like a samurai, and he stops her and says, "This is darshan time and you cannot go in! And first you have to leave your mind where the shoes are left!" And he was not worried about the audience, what was happening. He was enjoying himself. And the whole thing was far more intelligent.

 

And a reporter comes into the drama, a small kid with a camera, and he wants to take photographs of the Encounter Group and Leela and Tantra. And he says, "I am from the Times of India and I am going to write a beautiful article." And the samurais throw him out, and they enjoy the whole thing!

 

This was totally different. This has beauty.

 

A young mother says that after putting her two children to bed one night she changed into a floppy blouse and an old pair of slacks and proceeded to wash her hair. All during the shampoo she could hear the children growing wilder and noisier. Finishing as hurriedly as possible she wrapped a large towel around her head, stormed into their room and put them back to bed with a stern warning to stay there.

 

As she left she heard the two-year-old say to his sister in a trembling voice, "Who was that?"

 

This is intelligence!

 

But the society is not interested in intelligent people. It is not interested in sannyasins, it is interested in soldiers. It wants to create soldiers. Soldiers are the most stupid people; unless you are stupid you cannot be a good soldier. The greater you are in your stupidity the better, as far as being a soldier is concerned.

 

As the last soldier was about to jump from the airplane, he panicked, grabbed hold of his sergeant and said, "What happens if my second parachute doesn't open either?"

 

"Don't worry," said the sergeant with a smile. "Just come back and I will give you a new one!"

 

Intelligence can be rediscovered. The only method to rediscover it is meditation. Meditation only does one thing: it destroys all the barriers that the society has created to prevent you from being intelligent. It simply removes the blocks. Its function is negative: it removes the rocks that are preventing your waters from flowing, your springs from becoming alive. Everybody is carrying the great potential, but society has put great rocks to prevent it. It has created China Walls around you; it has imprisoned you.

 

If you are a Christian you are imprisoned by the Christian priests. If you are a Hindu you are imprisoned by Hindu priests. Your prisons are different; maybe their architecture is different, the rooms are made differently, with different material. And maybe a few prisons are more comfortable than others, more sophisticated than others. Of course the American prison is better than the Indian prison, far better, more comfortable: the radio is available, the TV is available to the prisoner. The Indian prison is bound to be Indian. Indians are living in such an uncomfortable way, how can they provide television and radio and comfort to the prisoners? Impossible. They are there to be punished; they cannot be allowed to enjoy.

 

Christianity may be a little better prison than Mohammedanism, but a prison is a prison. And in fact a better prison is far more dangerous because you may start clinging to it, you may not like to get out of it; you may start loving it as if it is your home. But these are all prisons.

 

And sometimes people get fed up with one prison and they change their prisons. The Hindu becomes the Christian, the Christian becomes the Hindu. Now there are many foolish Christians who have become Hare Krishna people - the same stupidity but masquerading in a new form. There are many Hindus who have become Christians, but the same superstitiousness persists; there is no difference at all. I have seen those Hindus who have become Christians - no change. I have seen those Christians who have become Hindus - no change. They have just changed the prison.

 

To come out of all prisons is intelligence - and never to get into another again. Intelligence can be discovered through meditation because all those prisons exist in your mind; they cannot reach your being, fortunately. They cannot pollute your being, they can only pollute your mind - they can only cover your mind. If you can get out of the mind you will get out of Christianity, Hinduism. Jainism, Buddhism, and all kinds of rubbish will be just finished. You can come to a full stop.

 

And when you are out of the mind, watching it, being aware of it, just being a witness, you are intelligent. Your intelligence is discovered. You have undone what the society has done to you. YOU have destroyed the mischief; you have destroyed the conspiracy of the priests and the politicians.

 

YOU have come out of it, you are a free man. In fact you are for the first time a real man, an authentic man. Now the whole sky is yours.

 

Intelligence brings freedom, intelligence brings spontaneity.

 

A little colored soldier tried to break out of camp and was stopped by the guard. Our hero challenged the guard with: "I've got a mother in Heaven, a father in Hell, and a girl in Harlem, and I'm gonna see one of them tonight!"

 

Must have been an intelligent person - as if the whole army training has failed! YOU see his response.

 

Annalisa and Roberta, two Rome hotel chambermaids, were talking when the bell rang and Annalisa had to go up to the room of an American tourist. He pushed her down on the bed, took his will, and in less than five minutes she was back downstairs.

 

"What did he want?" asked Roberta.

 

"I dunno. I think he must-a forgot-a himself!"

 

People go on living in such an unconscious way. They become accustomed to things, when they don't see. They become accustomed to certain rituals; their whole lives are ritualistic. They go on making empty gestures; they don't mean anything. A stupid person behaves mechanically: an intelligent person behaves consciously.

 

It is only through meditation that it will be possible for you to get back, to claim back your intelligence.

 

The society has repressed your greatest treasure; it has hidden your greatest energy from you. It has deprived you of your true being; it has perverted you. And it goes on saying that it is done for your sake. Man has been exploited, oppressed in every possible way.

 

The time is ripe now for a great rebellion to destroy all these walls, all these rocks, to destroy all this repressed structure, because whenever anything is repressed... If intelligence is repressed it becomes stupidity. If sex is repressed then it starts moving into directions of perversion: it may become homosexuality, it may take some other forms, it may become greed.

 

Greed means now you feel excited only, sexually excited, with money - money is your object of love. It may become politics; then power is your object of love. Then you are simply living an unnatural life, because power cannot fulfill your love, neither can money fulfill your love. But you have completely forgotten what has happened, why you have become so much interested in money.

 

Why do people cling to money so deeply? Use the money, but don't cling to it. Why do people become so ambitious? And why is there so much sexual perversion in the world? It is because of repression. Every repression destroys something in you.

 

Gino went to an optometrist and asked for a new pair of glasses.

 

"But you just got a new pair last week."

 

"I know," said Gino, "but I got them-a broken in an accident."

 

"How?" asked the optometrist.

 

"I was kissing my girl," said the Italian.

 

"How the hell could you break your glasses kissing a girl?"

 

"She crossed her legs!"

 

Fitzgerald went to a bar for five consecutive nights and watched Manzini sitting over in a corner booth. It was an incredible sight. Good-looking, wildly-shaped girls, alone or in groups of two or three, would wander in and soon make their way to the weird-looking Manzini.

 

"I don't understand it," grumbled Fitzgerald to the bartender. "I don't see how the Eye-talian does it."

 

"Me either," says the barkeep. "I been watching him for weeks. He certainly ain't handsome, he is a lousy dresser, and he hardly never says a word. The guy just sits there, licking his eyebrows!"

 

Meditation can bring you to your nature. It can help you to drop all the perversions. It can make you intelligent, it can make you loving, it can make you spontaneous, it can make you responsible. It can make you a benediction to yourself and to existence. Except meditation there is no other method which can help. This is the key, the master key.

 

Let me repeat: intelligence is your nature. All that is needed is to discover it, because it has been hidden from you for certain reasons by people who are powerful and who want to remain in power.

 

Of course they will not like it.

 

That's why they are against me. They CANNOT like it - I am creating trouble for them. The more people become meditators, the more people become sannyasins, the less is the possibility of oppressing them, of exploiting them. And the orange people are spreading all over the world. It is an atomic explosion! Within six years thousands of people around the world have been transformed to a new vision, to a new lifestyle. They have been given back their individuality, their authenticity, their intelligence. Now nobody can exploit them.

 

Hence it is certainly a rare phenomenon that I am condemned by Christians, Hindus, Mohammedans, Jainas, Sikhs, Parsis, Jews, everybody - I am condemned by the religious, the so-called religious - AND by the politicians, by the journalists, by the so-called intelligentsia, the writers, the critics, because they are all part of a conspiracy against man.

 

And I want to destroy that conspiracy totally. Only then can a new man be introduced on the earth.

 

And the earth is waiting for the new man. The new man will be the salt of the earth. He will bring with him joy, dance, celebration.

 

- Osho, "Guida Spirituale, #12"