Osho,
Would you say something to us about wisdom?
Wisdom is one of the most misunderstood words in any of the languages of the world. Mostly, the misunderstanding has arisen because of the word knowledge. People think both are identical, synonymous. In reality, they are just the opposite of each other.
The knowledgeable man is not the wise man; the knowledgeable man is simply covering up his ignorance by collecting all kinds of information from the outside. His scholarship is great, his information is vast, his memory may be very rich, but he is still not wise – because wisdom has nothing to do with scholarship, nothing to do with scriptures, nothing to do with memory either. Wisdom is the name of pure intelligence. It is the spontaneous flowering of your being.
Knowledge comes from outside.
Wisdom comes from your innermost core.
Knowledge is always borrowed; wisdom is never borrowed. Neither can you take it from anybody, nor can you give it to anybody.
The English word education will help you to understand the distinction. It comes from a root which means drawing out, just the way you draw water out of a well. Education is only an opportunity, a supportive background, where whatever is your potential can be drawn out; whatever is in the form of a seed in you starts growing and comes to blossom.
Wisdom is the spring of your innermost being; it is transformation, not information. But in the name of education, whatever has been happening in the world for centuries is just the opposite. Your intelligence is not drawn out the way water is drawn out from a well, but information is poured in from the outside, just the way it is poured into a computer. The whole education makes you knowledgeable. And the more knowledge gathers, layer upon layer, the less is the possibility for your own being to find a way to grow. The whole space is taken by borrowed junk; wisdom gets suffocated and dies a very early death.
It is strange that even in the twentieth century when we think we have become very cultured, cultivated, educated, evolved, education is still the same as it was in the most primitive times; it is still doing the same act of turning everybody into a robot, into a mechanical memory system. It does not sharpen your intelligence, it makes you only clever enough to remember things.
But remembering is not knowing. Knowing is possible only through meditation.
Meditation is just emptying out all that is rubbish in you, all that is borrowed, all that has been fed into you, and making you again an innocent child who knows nothing. If one can come to this state of not knowing, in this spaciousness of not knowing, something spontaneously starts growing within. It does not come from outside, it comes from the innermost life sources, from your very roots. It brings beautiful flowers. That’s why it is possible for a Jesus or a Kabir or a Raidas – people who are uneducated, uncultured. Jesus is the son of a carpenter, Kabir is an orphan – nobody knows whether he is a Hindu or a Mohammedan; he remained his whole life a poor weaver. Raidas is a shoemaker. All three came from the world’s most exploited people, the most humiliated, almost reduced into a subhuman species. But they have wisdom. They know nothing of scriptures, but each of their words is pure twenty-four karat gold. Each of their breaths brings the divine into the world. Each of their heartbeats is the heartbeat of the universe itself. They know without knowledge; they understand directly without any mediators.
It happened….

One great Christian missionary who was trying to convert the Japanese people to Christianity went to a great Zen master. He collected information about the man – he was well known far and wide; even the emperor of Japan used to come to touch his feet.
The missionary was puzzled because the Zen master was uneducated, a villager. He thought, “It is a great opportunity to convert this Zen master into a Christian. It won’t be difficult; he cannot argue, he knows nothing of logic, he knows nothing of theology, he has not heard anything about philosophy – he cannot resist, he cannot oppose me. I just have to go to him and read a few words of Jesus.”
He had chosen the most beautiful part, the Sermon on the Mount. He started asking the permission of the Zen master, “I also have a master and I would like you to listen to a few of his words; I want to know your opinion about it.”
He had read only two or three lines and the Zen master said, “Stop! Whoever has said these lines will become enlightened in the next life. Don’t waste my time and don’t waste your time.” The missionary was simply shocked; he had never thought that this would be the response.
The Zen master said, “Don’t look shocked, I am being very compassionate. It is not absolutely certain that in the next life he will become enlightened. I am simply consoling you. Most probably he will become…he is a bodhisattva, but it is a question of time; no one can predict when a bodhisattva will become a buddha.”
The difference is that a bodhisattva means in essence, a buddha, in potentiality a buddha, but not in actuality; just the seed is there. So the possibility is there any day – the seed finds the right soil and the spring comes, and the sprouts start growing out of the seed – but nobody can predict when.
As the missionary was returning, very angry, barely repressing his violent mood – the Zen master said, “Listen, a bodhisattva is nothing special; everybody is a bodhisattva. Everybody is, in essence, a buddha; it is only a question of time. When you realize your essence, you become a buddha. You are also a bodhisattva. The essence of wisdom is lying dormant in every being; you bring it with yourself, it is your self-nature.”

Knowledge is nurture, not nature, but millions of people around the world live their whole life under the misunderstanding that knowledge is wisdom. If knowledge was wisdom, then great scholars, professors, PhDs, DLitts – all would have become enlightened. But it is very strange that the people who have become enlightened come not from the professional scholars but from very innocent groups. Carpenters are not scholars; nor are weavers, nor are shoemakers, nor are potters, but they all have given enlightened people to the world. Their wisdom was, and even is today, as fresh as the morning dewdrops.
Wisdom never grows old.
Knowledge is always old, it is never fresh. It is being passed from one generation to another generation; it has been going on from one hand into another hand. Wisdom, everybody has to find for himself.
Wisdom is an individual search and its fulfillment. Its beginning is to ask the question, “Who am I?” and its end is to find who is residing in you as your life, as your consciousness. And the moment you have known your being, you have become aware of your immortality.
The Upanishads say, amritasya putrah: you are all sons and daughters of immortality. To know it firsthand, not by repeating the Upanishads but to know it by your own experience, is wisdom.
A Gautam Buddha, a Mahavira, are people of wisdom because they have come face to face with their own reality. What they are saying is not within quotation marks, it is not a repetition of any scripture. What they are saying is on their own authority. Wisdom is its own authority; it is self-evident, it needs no support from the past.
Knowledge never transforms anybody, it simply burdens you. It may give you respectability, honor, prestige, but it will not make you aware of yourself; you will not know who you are. You may remain a Christian, you may remain a Hindu, you may remain a Buddhist, you may remain a Mohammedan, just because the older generation – your parents, your teachers, your priests – have burdened you, conditioned you, fed you with all kinds of traditional knowledge.
But wisdom, nobody can impart to anybody else. That’s its beauty and that’s its grandeur. You can find it yourself, but it will be always firsthand – young and fresh and alive. Knowledge is always dead; it stinks of death. Wisdom is fragrant of love, of life, of rejoicings.

James, the eldest son of a respected Hollywood family, walked into his father’s study and made a shocking announcement that he now intended to live openly with his gay boyfriend.
“Damn it, James,” shouted his father, “our family came over with Columbus and the Mayflower; we have never had a scandal like this!”
“But I can’t help it, father,” said James, “I am so in love with him.”
“But for God’s sake, son”, shouted his father, “he is Catholic!”

This is knowledge. He is not worried about homosexuality, he is worried that “he is Catholic and you are not Catholic.”
The knowledgeable person can be found always acting foolishly, because all the knowledge is just superficial. Deep down he is just the old idiot. A donkey loaded with holy scriptures does not become a holy donkey; he remains a poor donkey. Whether he is loaded with holy scriptures or loaded with unholy bricks, it doesn’t matter – he is simply loaded, he is carrying a burden. He will always act according to his understanding.
The man of knowledge is not the man of understanding. His behavior, his actions, will show his foolishness. Yes, he can give a good lecture, he can write a great treatise, he can be a great theoretician, but in actual life, in existential situations, his responses will be of a dead and ignorant man, because his ignorance has not gone anywhere – it is simply repressed under knowledge. And whenever there is a new situation for which he has not collected information ahead, for which he has not done his homework, he is bound to respond from his ignorance. There is no other way, no alternative possible for him.
The wise man is in a totally different situation: he is not knowledgeable, he is utterly innocent and silent, but he has a clarity of vision. His eyes are without the dust of knowledge; he can see clearly and directly and immediately and spontaneously. He is always here and now with his total presence, with his full, flowering consciousness. He will act out of this consciousness, his action will show his wisdom.

It happened once: Gautam Buddha is passing on the road by the side of a village. The village consists of brahmins, scholars, pundits; they are absolutely against Buddha. The knowledgeable people will always be against the wise man because he is a danger to their whole investment. They surround Gautam Buddha and start abusing him, “You are corrupting people’s minds, you are corrupting the youth, you are destroying people’s morality.” The same accusations….
The knowledgeable people have not been knowledgeable enough even to find some new accusations – just the old accusations against Socrates, against Gautam Buddha, against Mahavira, against Jesus, against Baal Shem, against anybody who seems to be dangerous to their knowledge. Because he has something really valuable and alive, in comparison to him, the knowledgeable look so poor. It hurts the ego of the knowledgeable.
Buddha stood there silently, listening very attentively, as if they were saying something very significant. They were abusing him as badly as possible. They were misbehaving, mistreating an innocent man who had not done any harm to them. Even Buddha’s followers who were with him started losing patience, but before Buddha they could not do anything; otherwise they would have put these people right. They were all warriors, because Buddha came from the warrior race; he was the son of a king, and most of his followers in the beginning came from the warrior race, the kshatriyas.
Just one disciple of Gautam Buddha would have been enough to finish all those brahmins who were shouting, abusing, using four-letter dirty words against Gautam Buddha.
Listening to them for a time, Gautam Buddha said, “I have a question to ask you. Before I ask the question, I have to ask your permission…because I will not be able to give more time to you today. I have to reach to the other village; people must be waiting for me. But if you have something more to say, something more to convey, I will make a point of it that when I return, I will return on the same route and I will inform you ahead so you can be prepared. And then I can stay as long as you want.”
One of the men from the crowd said, “It seems strange, we are not conveying any message to you, we are simply abusing you – and it seems you are not affected at all.”
Gautam Buddha smiled and said, “If you want me to be affected, then you have come too late; if you had come to me ten years before, all of you would have been dead by now. But now it is too late – now it does not matter to me, and that’s what I was going to tell you.
“In the village that I passed before coming to your village, people had come with sweets, flowers, to welcome me. But I said to them, ‘We have taken our one meal – because only one meal is allowed to us by our discipline, and we are not allowed to carry food with us. So we are sorry – we are immensely grateful, thankful; we can see your love and your honor, but we are sorry – you will have to take your sweets, your flowers back.’ I want to ask you,” he said to the crowd, “what should they have done with the sweets and the flowers?”
One of the men said, “Is that a great question? They should have distributed the sweets in the village; they would have enjoyed eating them.”
Buddha said, “You are right. Now, what will you do? You have brought all kinds of ugly words. I don’t take them, and without my taking them, you cannot give them to me. You will have to take them back; just the way the other village people had to take their sweets back, you will have to take your presents back that you had brought to me. We don’t take presents – you will have to take them. What will you do?”
They looked at each other. Buddha said, “Simply do the same thing: distribute them to each other and enjoy.”
Wisdom acts in a fresh way.
Buddha turned to his disciples and said, “Remember, unless you take somebody’s insult, you are not insulted. You are insulted only when you take it, you are humiliated only when you accept it. If you don’t accept it, the person has to take it back; there is no way for him to give it to you. But I am not at all concerned with the people, I am concerned with you, because although you are standing silently behind me, I can feel the vibe of your anger.
“I can forgive those people because they are knowledgeable but ignorant. I cannot forgive you because you are meditators, and anger is not expected from you. Whatever the situation may be, you have to remain centered and silent, and radiate your meditation. Use the opportunity to radiate your fragrance.
“You have failed in a beautiful situation. These people had created such a beautiful situation – you should be thankful to them. They gave you a chance to test your meditation, how wise you have become. But you started getting angry and hot. Even I started feeling your heat and your vibration all around, although you were keeping hold of yourselves. But subtle vibrations I have always felt – your peace and your silence and your love and your gratitude – and I could see the whole climate changing. I could feel as if suddenly the coolness had disappeared and there was a certain heat, which does not show your depth in wisdom.
“Remember next time, perhaps in the same village when we return…if these people invite us, we will have another chance. Next time remember, wisdom cannot be disturbed. Knowledge has no depth – it can be disturbed very easily.”

Your question is, “Would you say something to us about wisdom?” Everything that I am saying to you is about wisdom. The question may be about anything, it doesn’t matter; whatever I am saying, I am saying about wisdom.
Your questions go on differing, but my answer, if you listen correctly, is always the same. The reference changes, the context changes, my words change with your question, but whatever I am saying is nothing but expressing different aspects of wisdom.

Osho,
What is needed for me to make the next jump? Listening to your words for the last nine years does not appear to bridge the gap, and my experience of silence hasn't either. Where and how can I meet you and dissolve into all that is?
The question that you are asking is very simple and yet very complex at the same time. Simple, because although you have been hearing me for nine years, you have not heard a single word.
There is a hearing and there is a listening.
Hearing is simply possible for everybody, because you have ears. Listening is a totally different discipline. When you are hearing your mind is doing a thousand and one things. In that marketplace of the mind, where so much is going on, whatever you hear is lost or mixed with other thoughts, or is interpreted according to your old prejudices. But one thing is certain, you don’t hear that which has been said. To be able to hear that, you need a silent mind.
I don’t mean that you have to agree with me; there is no question of agreeing or disagreeing – I am simply trying to make the difference clear. You have first to listen, then it is up to you to agree or not agree. But first listen clearly to what is being said, and that is possible only if your mind is in silence.
If your mind is going with thousands of thoughts – relevant, irrelevant – you may hear and yet you will not listen. That’s why I say your question is simple in a way and yet complex in another, because it raises the whole question of meditation, how to be in a state of meditation – because only a meditator can listen. Mind is incapable of listening.
Researches in depth psychology have come to very strange conclusions. One of the strangest conclusions is that although it has always been thought that the mind is the medium to connect you with the world – it is a bridge, a mediator, a window – the researchers have found that this is not the case. Mind is a barrier, not a bridge; it is a window, but a closed window not an open window. It is a censor for whatever passes in front of you. And the most surprising fact for the researchers has been that ninety-eight percent of what you hear is not allowed in; only two percent reaches to you – that too, in a distorted form.
If there are five hundred people here, that means there are five hundred versions of what I am saying. If you are asked afterward to give a report in short of what I have said, you will find five hundred different reports contradicting each other. They were all eyewitnesses; they were all present here!
It happened:

One English historian, Edmund Burke, was writing a world history and he was very ambitious. He wanted to make a complete history of the world – from the very beginning, when life started as a fish in the ocean – up to now; the whole world, whatever has happened…And he had devoted almost his whole life to collecting all kinds of facts and figures.
One afternoon he heard a shot behind his house. He ran – there was a crowd – a man was lying…he had been shot. He was not yet dead, but he would die at any moment, so much blood had gone out of his body. And there was a crowd – they were all eyewitnesses. In front of them, the man had been shot and the murderer had escaped.
Edmund Burke inquired from different people and he found different versions of what had happened. They were all eyewitnesses, and their descriptions of the happening were so different. Many were so contradictory that he could not believe it was possible. And then a great question arose in his mind, “What am I doing? I am writing the history of the world from the times when life arose in the ocean as fish, and then all the transformations of life up to the man of today, and I cannot figure it out – just behind my house I have heard a shot, eyewitnesses are present, and yet I cannot figure out what has happened. Of what value is my history?”
He dropped the whole project. He never looked again at all the collected material for which he had wasted almost his whole life. Many of his friends said, “This is not right – just because of a small incident.”
He said, “It is not a small incident. It shows that all that I am writing is only my prejudice, my opinion about something for which I don’t have any eyewitnesses. And even if I had eyewitnesses, it would be of no use. Something happens behind my home; I hear the sound of a shot, I run there in time – the man is dying, the crowd is standing…and everybody has a different story to tell! Now, what can I say about Confucius? What can I say about Moses? What can I say about Krishna? – whether these people ever existed or not?”

No, history is simply not possible. And it is true, you can see it. For three hundred years this country was under the slavery of Britain. British historians have written about the last three hundred years’ history, and Indian historians have also written…and they don’t agree on any point. The rulers have their own opinion, their own prejudice; the ruled have their own opinion, their own prejudice. How can they agree? Who is going to decide who is right? There is no third party which is neutral.
You have been here, Arpana, for nine years, but you have not been able to hear. And you are asking, “What is needed for me to make the next jump?”
What next jump? Where is the first jump? You have not taken even the first step. You are exactly where you were nine years before. You may be going round and round in the same place with the same mind, with the same prejudice….
Ask for the first step. And the first step will be: learn to listen. You have already accepted the idea: “Listening to your words for the last nine years…” you have taken it for granted that you are capable of listening. Nobody is capable of listening without going through a certain discipline. Yes, you can hear, but don’t make them synonymous.
I have heard….

A Baptist, a Presbyterian, a Methodist and a Catholic sat down to dinner. As soon as grace was said, a very large fish was served up. The Catholic immediately rose and helped himself to a good third of the fish, head included. Looking at the others, he pompously announced, “The pope is the head of the church.” Naturally, being a Catholic, he is entitled to take the head of the fish; that’s what his understanding of religion is.
The Methodist wasted no time and reached across the table, helping himself to another third of the fish, including the tail. Chin high in the air, he said, “The end crowns the work.”
The Presbyterian quickly removed the last of the fish, saying, “Truth lies between the two extremes.”
The Baptist looked down at the empty plate and, faced with the prospect of a meager dinner, grabbed the glass of water and threw it in the faces of all the three and shouted, “I baptize you in the name of the Lord!”

Everybody is doing his own religion. The Baptist is baptizing. The Presbyterian who believes in the golden mean – the middle way, always remaining in the middle, avoiding the extremes – takes the middle part of the fish. The Catholic takes the head, because the pope is the head of the church, and the Methodist takes the tail and announces that the end crowns the work.
This is almost the situation of everybody. Your religion is your interpretation, your convenience, your comfort. What you hear, you hear only selectively – whatever suits your purpose. If you are sitting here with a predetermined mind, that you know already what is right and what is wrong, you cannot listen.
So the first step for you will be, Arpana, to drop this idea, which you have taken for granted, that you have been listening. If you had been listening for nine years, you would have gone through such a great transformation that you would not have been able to recognize yourself, how much you have changed. But you have not changed at all. That is absolute evidence that you have not listened at all.
So the first step is, start meditating and create the space of silence, so that when you sit here you can really be available to me – not holding anything back – so that I can reach to your heart. But if you remain closed, there is no way.
I cannot interfere in your being unless you invite me. Without your invitation and your openness and receptivity, interfering with your life is against the very fundamental rights of every human being. Everybody should be left alone in his individuality. Unless you invite me, I will stand at the door and wait for you; I will not even knock at your door, because even if I knock you may open the door unwillingly. It will be pointless – you will still be resistant.
If you are waiting for me with open doors and your eyes are looking far away in the distance, waiting for me…and as I come closer to you – as you start hearing my footsteps – you rejoice, then there is a possibility of communion. Then I can say something. Or it may not even need to be said…just being in my presence may be enough – something may start changing within you, without anything being said.
This is one of the paradoxes of existence: you sit here for nine years, hearing, and you don’t hear a word. And I am saying to you, “Sit here silently, there is no need even for me to say anything and you will hear it. You will hear the message, because the message is of silence, it does not consist of words.”
Forget all those nine years, they have gone down the drain. Begin afresh. This is your first day; count from today. Never mention again those nine years, but make a change. And I am not asking much, I am simply asking, “Be silent.” But you cannot be silent unless you are going through meditations.
It is a whole strategy – you are doing meditations of different kinds because one never knows which one is going to suit you. People are different, that’s why there are different kinds of meditations. And I have chosen the most fundamental types, so one is bound to suit you. That which suits you, that which brings joy to your heart, a dance to your feet, go deeper into it. If you feel that there are some psychological problems which are hindering you in entering meditation, there are groups in which, under expert guidance, you can drop your psychological problems.
After you have done all this then sitting with me in silence will become possible, and that is an absolute requirement.

Hymie Goldberg was in the middle of a lengthy religious discussion with his psychiatrist.
“Now, do I understand correctly,” said the shrink, “that it was your wife who introduced you to religion?”
“Yes, that’s correct,” said Hymie. “I did not really believe there was a hell until I married her.”

That’s how we listen.

“Did you hear that Dennis Thatcher died?”
“No, what were his last words?”
“He did not have any, his wife was with him to the end.”

Jesus and Moses are playing golf. Jesus hits the ball, which almost falls into the hole, when a rabbit jumps past and swallows the ball. As the rabbit runs off, an eagle appears, catches the rabbit and flies away with it into the sky. A hunter arrives and shoots the eagle, the rabbit falls out of the eagle’s claws and as the rabbit hits the ground, the ball shoots out of his mouth and into the hole.”
“So, Moses,” says Jesus, “now, what do you say?”
“Well, Jesus,” says Moses grumpily, “I have actually wanted to ask you all day, do you really want to play golf or do you just want to muck around?”

That’s what, Arpana, I want to ask you. Do you really want to listen to me or just to muck around? Nine years is enough. Now, don’t waste time. It is not only you, there are people with you in the same boat.
For example, here is a question from Deva Vimal: “Somehow I feel it is not enough now, just to bask in your presence. It is as if you have prepared the soil and it is time for me to do some gardening. But what have I done with this responsibility? I head-trip through my most valuable job, I hurt myself and two beautiful women in a messy triangular something, and I procrastinate about any effort at meditation. Then the other night I heard you say, ‘Anything you do out of unawareness will be wrong.’ My God, catch twenty-two. Osho, please help me find my courage and method to cut the crap and go within.”
On the one hand, you say, “I procrastinate, I make every effort not to meditate,” and yet you want to get out of the problems that your mind is creating. And because you are not meditating, the evidence is immediately available.
You say, “Then the other night I heard you say…” You say, “Then…” as if I have said it for the first time, just the other night! My whole life I have been saying only one thing, and that is that anything you do out of unawareness will be wrong and everything that you do out of awareness is right, because awareness is right and unawareness is wrong.
This has been my essential teaching and you have heard it only the other night. And at the same time you don’t want to meditate. You yourself are declaring that you avoid making any effort to meditate.
So what do you want? How can you get out of this crap? Your whole life will become more and more a puzzle in which you will get entangled; you will forget all ways of coming back home. Now, what are you doing by creating a “triangular something” with two beautiful women? One woman is enough to make you enlightened – two women are enough to drag you back from enlightenment!
Are you writing a film story or a novel? Because no film story, no novel is possible without a triangular mess. Don’t make your life a film, don’t make your life a novel. Have you ever heard of any film, any novel, any story, profane or sacred, without there being a triangular mess? Either two men and one woman or two women and one man – that is an absolute necessity for creating the story.
But don’t make a story of your life, life is too valuable. Making it a story is destructive. Make it a beautiful growth, a flowering, a celebration, a light unto yourself and for anybody else who is ready to share the light. The night is very dark and the night is very long. Even a single man with a light may be of immense help to millions of people, to bring the dawn closer.
Up to a point every stupidity is allowed, but only up to a point. If you go on doing the same thing again and again, then stupidity becomes your second nature; then to get out of it is almost impossible. It is good that you commit mistakes once – once you become a buffoon, you fool around – then you learn the lesson. And nobody can prevent you from coming out of any triangle in the world. The triangle is not holding you in, you are holding the triangle. And it is so deeply humiliating that people in their old age also continue to play games which they should have left when they were teenagers.

I have heard about three old men, all retired. One was seventy, the other was eighty and the third was ninety, and they used to meet daily, as a routine, in the park every morning. They would sit there in the beautiful garden, in the cool breeze, in the early morning sun, and they would talk about their past golden times, beautiful days, and their present miseries.
One day all three were sitting very silently and very sad. Finally, one man said, “Now it is becoming intolerable, this silence is too heavy. I know we are all in trouble, but sharing with each other the problems, the difficulties, the troubles, the mind will feel a little lighter. I should begin, I should take the initiative and say what my problem is.”
So they both said, “Okay.”
The man of seventy said, “I feel very embarrassed to say it, but I have to say it; otherwise it will remain on my head and I may not be able even to sleep. A beautiful lady was taking a shower in the bathroom and I was looking through the keyhole and my mother caught me red-handed. I am dying with shame.”
The two laughed and consoled him saying, “Don’t be foolish, everybody does such things in childhood; there is not much of a problem. We have all done the same things, we have all been caught red-handed. But in childhood…you are a strange fellow, why are you making a fuss about it now?”
The old man of seventy said, “You don’t understand at all. It is not an incident from my childhood, it happened just today, this morning!”
They both said, “That is certainly serious. But whatever has happened, has happened, you cannot undo it.”
“But your trouble is nothing,” said the man of eighty. “You don’t know others’ troubles, so you start bragging about your trouble. What is great in that? It is natural. A beautiful lady is taking a shower and you are becoming a peeping Tom…that’s perfectly okay. What’s wrong in it? You are not harming anybody. And your own mother has caught you red-handed; before your mother you are always a child, forget all about it. For the mother you are never a grown-up, so don’t make much fuss about it. You don’t know what great trouble I am passing through. For almost a week I have not been able to make love to my wife.”
The first man said, “That is really a bigger trouble. For a whole week you have not been able to make love to your wife? What is the problem?”
The ninety-year-old man started giggling. He said, “You are an idiot, and you have been your whole life an idiot. Although you are seventy years old, that makes no difference; you are just a seventy-year-old idiot. First ask what he means by making love to his wife.”
He said, “What can he mean? It is a well-known fact.”
But the old guy insisted, “First ask.”
So he asked, “Please tell me, what do you mean by making love?”
He said, “What can I mean? At this age I have found a way of making love to my wife. I take her hand in my hand, I press it three times; then she turns to the other side, I turn to the other side and we fall asleep peacefully. But for seven days continuously, the moment I start trying to find her hand she has said, ‘Not today, I have a headache.’ These seven days have appeared almost like hundreds of years, and I have not made love to her. And she is so stubborn, she goes on talking about her headache every night. And you think you are having trouble?”
The ninety-year-old man was still giggling and he said, “Listen, now you know what he means by making love. You are both idiots. I knew it from the very beginning what kind of love he makes. But you don’t know my trouble, and I am ninety years old – you are just children in comparison to me. I am passing through such bad times, you cannot believe.”
They said, “Please tell us.”
He said, “What to tell you? Just this morning when I started preparing to make love to my wife, she started shouting and screaming, ‘What are you doing, you idiot?’ And I said, ‘I am not doing anything, I am just trying to make love.’
“She said, ‘The whole night! This is the fourth time. Neither you sleep nor do you allow me to sleep – love, love, love….’
“So I said, ‘My God, it seems I am losing my memory,’ because I was thinking it was the first time. And you think you are having troubles! Now I am worried that whenever I start making love to her, I will be trembling inside…who knows how many times I have already made love? And even if she is lying, I cannot do anything. This is real trouble,” he said, “and at the age of ninety – life is ending like a tragedy.”

But this is the situation of many people in the world. In different ways you go on making the same mistakes all your life. If you are given another chance to live again, you will make the same mistakes – I can give a guarantee for it – because you don’t learn.
This place is a place of learning.
The very meaning of the word disciple is, one who is ready to learn. It is derived from the root which means learning.
This is not a place for everybody, it is not a public place. It is a gathering of disciples, of people who are ready to learn and who are ready to transcend their mistakes; who are ready to transcend their egos; who are ready to transcend their minds and who are ready to explode into a light which is eternal, which is divine, which is another name of God.

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