Osho Quotes on Intellectuality – Intellectuality is not intelligence

Osho Quotes on Intellectuality

1. Intellectuality is not intelligence. To be intellectual is to be phony; it is a pretending intelligence. It is not real because it is not yours; it is borrowed. Intelligence is the growth of inner consciousness. It has nothing to do with knowledge, it has something to do with meditativeness. An intelligent person does not function out of his past experience; he functions in the present. He does not react, he responds. Hence he is always unpredictable; one can never be certain what he is going to do.
2. The philosopher remains immature. Maturity is of consciousness, not of intellectuality. It is not of knowledge, it is of innocence.
3. Intelligence is a clarity, intellectuality is a borrowed knowledge.
4. God is available only when you are at the peak of your intelligence, when you are as sharp as you can be. God is not for the stupid: God is only for the intelligent, because life becomes available only through intelligence. And remember, by ‘intelligence’ I don’t mean intellectuality. Intellectuality is a camouflaged stupidity; intellectuality is just a deception of intelligence, it is phony. Your so-called intelligentsia has nothing to do with intelligence. Maybe they are people who are very clever, but not intelligent; cunning, but not intelligent. Intelligence means awareness, alertness. When you have cleaned all the dust from your mind, the dust of knowledge and belief, and your mind is just a pure mirror, that is intelligence. Meditation is intelligence.
5. Meditation is a device to release your intelligence. The more meditative you become, the more intelligent you become. But remember, by intelligence I don’t mean intellectuality.
6. All philosophers are playing with words. Sometimes there is immense beauty even in words, great poetry, logic, that you cannot deny. Nietzsche, Hegel, Kant, Bertrand Russell, Jean Paul Sartre, Jaspers or Martin Heidegger are pinnacles of intellectuality. You are bound to be impressed — but you are not going to be transformed. And to be impressed is to be enslaved. Unless a transformation happens, your slavery goes on deeper and deeper.
7. The intellectual is most prone not to understand. His intellectuality prevents him because it gives him a sense as if he knows. But `as if’ is not the point. You have to experience, not as if, but this!
8. Meditation means the purest intelligence, uncontaminated intelligence, pure intelligence — not intellectuality. Intellectuality is a totally different matter. You can become an intellectual by going to university, visiting the British Museum and going to the libraries and studying scriptures. You can become an intellectual; meditation is not needed for intellect. And the intellectual goes on collecting rubbish. He becomes a great rubbish-collector; his mind is just a junkyard, and everything is borrowed. Intelligence has nothing to do with the outside, with borrowing from the Vedas or the Bible or the Koran — no. It is discovering one’s own inner sources. It is discovering one’s own centre. That’s what meditation is all about: a discovery of one’s own centre. And the moment you know who you are, there is a great explosion of intelligence.
9. I am not against intellect, I am not against intelligence; I am against intellectuality. Don’t get identified with your mind. Always remain a watcher on the hills; a witness to the body, to the mind, a witness to the outer and to the inner, so that you can transcend both the outer and the inner and you can know that you are neither — you are beyond both. That beyond is God.
10. Intelligence has nothing to do with the mind; intelligence has something to do with the heart. It is the quality of the heart. Intellectuality is the quality of the head. The intellectual is not necessarily an intelligent person and the intelligent person is not necessarily an intellectual.
11. I am talking heart to the heart, being to the being. Don’t lose your path in the forest of intellectuality, otherwise you will listen to something but that will not be what I am saying. If you want to listen to me, listen from the heart — in fact from the navel, from the belly. Forget the head, so that the being can commune with the being. Only then the meaning will be mine. If you listen through the intellect the meaning will be given by you. You will have heard it, but I will not have said it.
12. Knowledge not only deceives others, it deceives you too. When you know answers parrotlike, you start thinking that you really know. Because you can read and you can write, you start to think that you know; because you can understand words you start thinking that you know; because your intelligence is covered with intellectuality, you start thinking that you are intelligent — but you are not intelligent, only intellectual. Intelligence is part of wisdom, intellectuality is part of knowledge.
13. I have been saying nothing against intelligence, intellect, but against intellectuality — and that’s a totally different phenomenon. When somebody becomes identified with his intellect, intellectuality is born; when somebody remains the master, unidentified with his intellect, intelligence is born. Intellect is the same. The whole thing depends whether you get identified with it or you remain transcendental to it. If you become identified, it is intellectuality; if you remain unidentified, it is intelligence. Intelligence is of tremendous importance; intellectuality is a barrier. Intellectuality is a barrier even in the world of science. Intellectuality can, at the most, give you scholars, wordy people who go on and on spinning, weaving systems of thought with no substance at all.In the scientific endeavor, intelligence has to be focused on the objective world; in the religious exploration, intelligence has to move inwards. It is the same intelligence, only the direction changes. In science, the object, the outer object, is the goal of inquiry; in religion, your subjectivity, your interiority, is your adventure. The intelligence is the same. If you become an intellectual then you will not be a scientist; you will only write histories of science or philosophies of science, but you will not be a scientist, an explorer, an inventor, a discoverer, on your own. You will be simply accumulating information. Yes, that too has a certain use; as far as the outside world is concerned, even information has a certain limited utility, but in the inner world it has no utility at all. It is a barrier; it has a negative effect on the inner experience.
14. Put your intellect aside. And remember, I am not telling you to put your intelligence aside. On the contrary, if you can put the intellect aside you will be far more intelligent because intelligence and intellectuality are not synonymous, they are antagonistic. Intelligence is a clarity; intellectuality is nothing but a clouded state. Intellectuality means you are too knowledgeable; your knowledge goes on interfering. Your mind is continuously interpreting, your mind is judging. Listen to me without any judgment. I am not saying agree with me — there is no question of agreement or disagreement — just listen.
15. All kinds of cunning people are thought to be intelligent people. And you have to watch your own cunningnesses. To be cunning is not to be intelligent; to be intellectual even is not to be intelligent. Intelligence has a totally different flavor from intellectuality. Intelligence is the fragrance of meditation — only a master is intelligent.
16. Intelligence is not intellect; intellect is part of mind, intelligence is part of the heart. Intelligence is always part of the heart, it is not intellectuality. I don’t mean by ‘intelligence’ your so-called intelligentsia — it has nothing to do with intelligence. Your intelligentsia is knowledgeable. They may have big university degrees, much knowledge, but they know nothing. All their knowledge is borrowed, all their knowledge is parrotlike, it is mechanical. They go on talking about it, but it does not affect their life. It has no relationship with their own source of being; it does not well up within their own heart. When I talk about intelligence I always mean the heart — something happening in you, not coming from the outside. If it comes from the outside, it creates intellect; if it comes from within, it is intelligence. Help your intelligence to grow.
17. Stupid people can become very knowledgeable. They can become great scholars, popes, shankaracharyas, Ayatollah Khomeiniacs, great rabbis full of knowledge, but no knowing of their own. All knowledge is borrowed. In themselves they are just empty; they are covering that emptiness with borrowed knowledge. It is not their own intelligence that has become sharpened, it is only their intellectuality that has become too full of information.
18. Become more and more alert, more and more aware, less and less knowledgeable and more and more intelligent. And remember the distinction between intellectuality and intelligence: intellectuality is the cause of fall; intelligence will be the cause of rising back to the real, original status. Awareness brings intelligence: knowledge brings intellectuality. And to live intelligently is to live religiously. One need not be a Christian or a Hindu or a Mohammedan; all that is needed is intelligence. Not to live superstitiously is to be religious, not to live through beliefs, to live out of one’s own understanding is to be religious. It needs guts, it is the very spirit of rebellion, but only those who are rebels know the real taste of life and love and light, and only the rebellious people dare to enter into god.
19. When I say intelligence, always remember that I never mean intellectuality. Intellectuality is a substitute for intelligence. People who pretend to be intelligent are intellectuals. A real man of intelligence is not an intellectual at all, he is existential. He knows perfectly well that intellect is uncreative, that it cannot create anything. At the most it is a good survival device, but it is uncreative. All that is created is created by something else. That is intelligence. You can call it intuitiveness — but it is something else. It has nothing to do with your intellect.
20. Mind is not your intelligence. It may sound strange but this is a truth, that mind is not your intelligence. Mind can be intellectual, which is a very poor substitute for intelligence. Intellectuality is mechanical. You can become a great scholar, a great professor, a great philosopher — just playing with words which are all borrowed, arranging and rearranging thoughts, none of which are your own. The intellect is absolutely bankrupt. It has nothing of its own, all is borrowed. And that’s the difference between intelligence and intellect. Intelligence has an eyesight of its own, a capacity to see into things, into problems. Intelligence is your born quality.
21. Intellectuality is just the opposite of intelligence. The intellectual person is constantly carrying prejudices, information, a prioris, beliefs, knowledge. He cannot listen; before you have said anything, he has already concluded. Whatsoever you say has to pass through so many thoughts in his mind that by the time it reaches him it is something totally different. Great distortion happens in him, and he is very closed, almost blind and deaf.
22. Intelligence is brilliance. brilliance is noble. But remember: intelligence is not intellectuality. Intellectuality is pseudo-intelligence. It pretends to be intelligence; it is not. Intellectuality is borrowed; it comes through education, culture, it comes through others. If one is capable of having a good memory one can become a good intellectual. That’s what the scholars in the universities are. They have good memories, but memory is not intelligence, memory is a mere mechanism. Any computer can have it. Intelligence is a totally different thing — the spark of genius, the capacity to have new insights, the capacity to be creative. Intellectuality always remains repetitive. It can repeat beautifully, skilfully, accurately, but it can only repeat; It is a parrot.