And always remember, a person who lives through rules is bound to be unintelligent. In fact, to live according to rule is just a way to avoid intelligence. Then you can afford to be stupid. There is no problem; the rule takes care. You don’t feel responsible, you are simply following a certain dead rule, you are following it perfectly. Then you need not be intelligent. What is the point of being intelligent?
When you go to the church every Sunday, you don’t go out of your own inspiration, you simply go as a rule. You say a certain prayer that has been given by tradition down the ages – you simply repeat it. You are a gramophone record. It is not in any way connected with you and your heart, it is not your pulsation, it is not your vibe. It is not you, it is tradition speaking through you. It is other people’s voices ringing through you, resounding through you. You are just an echo – how can the echo be intelligent?
People who don’t want to be intelligent become followers – followers of tradition, followers of scriptures, followers of rules and regulations, rituals.
An intelligent person has no rules, no rituals – and I don’t mean that he is insane and I don’t mean that he is irresponsible and I don’t mean that he will hurt others, no, not at all. In fact, just the contrary is the case. Because he lives intelligently he cannot hurt anybody. The people who follow the rules are always violent people. Violence comes out of stupidity; nonviolence is a flowering of intelligence. Intelligence and love always go together. The more intelligent you are, the more loving you are; the more loving you are, the more intelligent you are. They are two aspects of the same coin.
By intelligent I don’t mean intellectual, remember. The intellectual is not the intelligent person, the intellectual is again living in the past. He can recite the Vedas, but he cannot create a single richa, a single poetry of the quality of the Vedas. He can recite the Gita or the Koran or the Bible, but he cannot sing a single song of the quality of the Gita. He cannot express himself in any creative way – the way Mohammed did. His utterances are borrowed, his utterances have no life in them; his utterances have no heart to beat, they don’t breathe. They don’t have that aliveness that Jesus’ utterances have. He will be intellectual, he will be a pundit, a scholar.
And through being intellectual you can deceive yourself and others that you are intelligent. Intelligence has nothing to do with intellect. Intellect is part of memory, intelligence is part of your heart. They are totally different phenomena.
Sometimes you can find a farmer, a woodcutter, a fisherman, who is very intelligent – but not intellectual, certainly not intellectual. He may not know anything about the scriptures and the theories and the philosophies.
All Jesus’ apostles were nonintellectual people, but they were immensely intelligent. To be with Jesus one needs intelligence, not intellect. Those people were simple people, but they had clarity, they could see the radiance of Jesus, what had happened. The professors could not see it; the fisherman, the woodcutter, the gardener could.