But if you listen to the clear…and what is clear? The path that is clear is borrowed: because everybody is saying it, so it is clear; because everybody is supporting it, so it is clear. And you are using the word intelligent wrongly; it is not intelligent. The feeling that something is clear is rational but not intelligent. And these are two different things. It is logical but not intelligent.
Intelligence is always a search of the unknown, and the search of the unknown is always vague, it is never clear. The seeker is always moving in a chaos. But those who have known have agreed on the point that it is only out of chaos that stars are born. The unclear, the vague, something that seems to be there and yet not clear enough, hidden in a kind of morning mist, is an indication of a dawn approaching. Don’t go against it. It is an indication of a sun that is going to rise soon. It is also an indication of the mysterious; the mysterious can never be clear. And life is nothing if it is not mysterious.
The intelligent person is one who listens to the real, who listens to the unclear, who listens to the vague, who listens to the mysterious and who is courageous enough to go deep into the mystery of existence. Those who follow the clear, the rational, the mathematical, remain mundane. They remain with the crowd, they remain ordinary, and they always remain retarded because they have never given their intelligence a chance of adventure. They have never risked, and without risk intelligence goes to sleep. It is only in risk that intelligence awakens.
When your house is on fire, suddenly you find a great release of energy and intelligence in you. You may have been tired just a moment before, so utterly tired that you wanted to go to sleep and not to do a single thing. But if the house is on fire, immediately all tiredness disappears; immediately you find yourself more full of energy than you have ever found yourself before. Suddenly you are no longer old, you have become young.
Sometimes instances have happened…of one I have been an eyewitness. A woman had been for almost ten years paralyzed. She could not move from her bed, she was a burden to everybody. But one day the house caught on fire. Everybody ran out of the house, and everybody forgot about the woman – obviously, when it is a question of survival you first think of yourself. But when everybody was out, then they suddenly started thinking, what will happen to the poor woman? She was somebody’s wife, she was somebody’s mother, and she was somebody’s someone…they were all related. But nobody was ready to go in.
The whole crowd, the whole neighborhood was there and they were all in for a great surprise, because they saw the woman coming running out of the house. Nobody could believe it: she had not moved from the bed for ten years, and doctors had declared that she will remain paralyzed her whole life, she is not going to be cured. But everybody saw that she was running, and as she came out and people said, “What are you doing? You have been paralyzed for ten years,” she said, “My God, I simply forgot!” And she fell down, again paralyzed.