The Robe

Your Own Centre

VERY FEW RARE SOULS ARE ATTRACTED TOWARDS A MASTER BECAUSE, IN FACT, WITH A MASTER YOU WILL HAVE TO UNLEARN.

Come to your centre

A wise man lives in the depths. A man of knowledge lives on the circumference; a wise man lives at the centre. There is only one way to reach a wise man – you will have to come to your own centre. Centre to centre there is communion with a wise man. Head to head, mind to mind, there is communion with a teacher, the man of knowledge.

The wise man has by and by disappeared from the world. In the West you don’t find philosophers, you find only professors of philosophy. This is something absurd. A professor of philosophy is not a philosopher; a professor of philosophy is just a teacher – a man of knowledge but not a wise man – not like Socrates, not like Lao Tzu, not like Buddha. They are not professors. They are not professing anything, they are not teaching anything to anybody. They are just there – like the sun is there, you open your eyes and the darkness disappears; like the flower by the side of the path, you just be with it for a few seconds and the fragrance fills you to your very depth; like a river flowing, you come to it thirsty and your thirst is quenched. They are not professors, they are alive people. They are more alive than anybody else, and then they become more and more mysterious.

A PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IS NOT A PHILOSOPHER; A PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IS JUST A TEACHER – A MAN OF KNOWLEDGE BUT NOT A WISE MAN.

Knowledge grows, changes, moves – wisdom is eternal, it is always the same. Whenever you attain it, it is always the same. It is like the sky which remains eternally the same. Seasons come and go: now it is winter, now it is summer, now it is raining, now the rains have disappeared. Trees come and die, generations come and go and the drama of life goes on moving, but the sky remains as it is, eternally the same, eternally new, ever fresh and always old. Wisdom is like the sky.

Wisdom grows with time

Of course knowledge can be taught in the universities, colleges, schools. Wisdom can never be taught. Nowhere can it be taught. Wisdom has to be imbibed through life, there is no other way. So only an old man can be a wise man. In wisdom the young man can never defeat the old man, but in knowledge he can always defeat him. How can you defeat the old man in wisdom? Wisdom comes through experience; knowledge comes not through experience but through learning. You can cram it in, and if you are a little intelligent, more intelligent than the average, you can know more than your teacher. You can know more than your father, there is no problem about it. Just a little effort on your part is needed. But wisdom – there is no way. It comes by and by through life. If you live and if you live totally, if you live and you live with awareness, only then, drop by drop, does wisdom come into being. It is such a subtle phenomenon! There is no direct way to reach it. Only old people can be wise. That’s why whenever there is somebody who is wise and young, in the East we know that he is old, he is ancient.

There is a beautiful story about Lao Tzu that he was born, old; when he was born he was 84 years of age – he had remained in his mother’s womb for 84 years. Absurd, unbelievable, but a beautiful story – says something, says something very significant. It says that from his very childhood he was like an old man, so wise he could not be a child. It says something. It is symbolic. It says that when he was a child he had as much wisdom as ordinarily a man of 84 would have. He must have been tremendously alert.

If you are very alert then a single experience can give you much. If you are not alert you will go on repeating the same experience and nothing will be gained.