Snowflake

Learning

The word learning is dangerous. Learning is accumulating information. The more you accumulate information the deeper your reality goes into the unconscious. You become burdened, you become too top-heavy. Your head starts clamoring with knowledge, becomes very noisy, and then you cannot hear the still small voice of your heart. That silence is lost in the noise of knowledge.

That’s why even sinners achieve but scholars miss – because the sinner can be humble, but the scholar cannot be humble. The sinner can cry and weep, but the scholar knows. He is adamant in his knowledge, he is egoistic in his knowledge. He is hard, he cannot melt. He is not open, he is closed. All his windows and doors are blocked by his knowledge, his scriptures that he has accumulated.

To come to truth means unlearning rather than learning. You have to unlearn that which you have known. It is not a becoming but an unbecoming, it is not a learning but an unlearning. To unlearn is the way. If you can unbecome then you will be capable of becoming. If you are capable of unlearning, if you can drop all knowledge utterly, unconditionally, without any clinging, you will become innocent – and that innocence brings you home.

Near a sage you go to unlearn. When you are fed up with your learning, when you have learned much and gained nothing, when you know much and you are lost in your own knowledge, when you know much but you have completely forgotten who you are, when you know much about unnecessary things, nonessential things and the essential knowledge about your own being is lost – then you come to a sage to unlearn.

And that is the greatest surrender. It is easy to surrender your wealth because it is outside you. Robbers can take it, it can be stolen; it is nothing that is part of you, it is outside! You can drop it easily. But knowledge becomes an inner phenomenon, it gets inside you, it runs in your blood, it becomes part of your bones, it becomes your very marrow. It is difficult to surrender it.

It is easy to learn something, it is very, very difficult to unlearn it. How to unlearn when you know a certain thing? It becomes very, very difficult not to know it. How to drop it? It is so deep in you. Unless you move beyond your mind – for you are identified with the mind – you cannot drop it because you think “It is me.” You think your knowledge is your being.

Move! All meditations are techniques to move from the mind, to gain a little distance from the mind, to become a little aloof and unidentified; to transcend the mind, to become a watcher on the hills so you can see what is happening in the mind. When you are separate from the mind, only then is there a possibility to drop something, to drop knowledge, to unlearn.

…the student of Tao aims at losing day by day. That is his gain. He gains by: …losing day by day. That is his learning, he learns by unlearning day by day. A moment comes when he is again a child, not knowing anything. A moment comes when he enters paradise again. He tasted the bitter fruit of knowledge, but he found out it was stupid. Knowledge is deep stupidity. He found it out, now he comes into paradise again. Now no serpent can seduce him. He comes mature – a child but mature. A child, innocent – but alert, aware, conscious.

Now he attains a greater purity because a purity that has no awareness is bound to be lost. Somebody is going to seduce, somebody is going to corrupt, and if there is nobody, you will corrupt yourself, because you are not alert.

Adam had to be thrown out of the Garden of Paradise. He was simply innocent. He was Buddha-like in one part, he was innocent, he was like Jesus in one part, he was innocent – but the other part was lacking, he was not aware.

Adam is the beginning, Jesus is the end. Adam is half, Jesus is complete – the other half has become aware. Now Jesus is incorruptible. He is not only pure, he is also incorruptible; his innocence is now absolute.