One friend came today. He said he wanted to take sannyas, but he needed some time to consider the matter. I asked him how many other matters in his life he had thought about first before acting. Had he given prior thought to other matters sannyas would have happened long ago, because sannyas is nothing but the end result of thinking. All indulgence in life is going to become meaningless to anybody who thinks and deliberates.

So I asked him what else in life he had thought about beforehand. How many other things had he done after thinking about it? Or was it only about taking sannyas he wanted to think and deliberate? How long do you intend to depend on these deliberations? And it is you, after all, who is deliberating – do you think you are going to be more intelligent tomorrow? Just look back: your intelligence may have even become less sharp, it certainly does not seem to be growing.

Scientists say that ordinarily between fourteen and eighteen years of age people’s intelligence stops growing. And only in the case of special individuals does intelligence grow up to the age of eighteen, otherwise it stops growing much earlier.

During the last world war, recruits for the army were tested for their intelligence and the average age of intelligence was found to be thirteen and a half years. After thirteen and a half years intelligence does not continue to develop in the average person.

You may say that that does not seem to be right because you feel that you have definitely become more intelligent than when you were younger. Even if you do not feel that way, you definitely go on making your children feel that you are more intelligent. You are an old man, experienced…certainly you are more intelligent.

You may have more experience, but you do not have more intelligence because of your age. Experience is only an accumulation of information. Intelligence is use of that accumulation, and that is entirely different.

A child has less of an accumulation of experience, you have more. But how you use that accumulation is intelligence. Intelligence is not experience. So it can be that a child has more intelligence than an old man, but it can never happen that a child has more experience than the old man. The child is bound to have less experience, but he can have more intelligence. The old man has more experience.