Down the ages you will find thousands of geniuses with very bad memory and thousands of people who had tremendous memory with no intelligence at all, because memory and intelligence come from different sources. Memory is part of the mind, intelligence is part of NO-mind. Intelligence is part of your consciousness and memory is part of your brain. The brain can be trained – that’s what universities go on doing. All your examinations are tests for your memory, not for your intelligence. But universities give you the wrong impression – as if memory is intelligence. It is not.
This whole educational system exists to destroy intelligence or to divert you from intelligence towards memory. Memory is useful, utilitarian. Intelligence is dangerous; it has no utility for the status quo, it has no utility for the vested interest. Intelligent people have always proved to be difficult people just because of their intelligence; they cannot bow down to any stupid thing. And our society is full of superstitions, stupidities; all kinds of nonsense prevails in the name of religion, in the name of politics, in the name of literature, art.
Each child is distracted, is diverted. Hence so much stupidity. It is really a miracle how few people have escaped from this prison – a Buddha, a Zarathustra, a Lao Tzu, a Jesus, a Pythagoras – very few people. It is almost impossible to escape from this prison because the prison is all around and it begins from the very beginning; from your very childhood you are conditioned to be a prisoner: a Christian, a Hindu, a Mohammedan – these are all prisons. And when you are prisoners of churches, nations, races, then naturally there is going to be violence.
No animal is as violent as man. Animals kill but they kill only when they are hungry, otherwise not. Man is the only animal who enjoys killing for no reason at all, as if killing in itself is a blissful activity.
One day in a restaurant a lion and a hare entered. The manager was shocked; they could not believe their eyes. A great silence fell over the restaurant. Many people were there eating, talking, gossiping; all became absolutely silent. What is happening? The manager rushed to the new customers. Somehow he managed to stammer to the hare, “What would you like, sir?”
The hare asked for coffee. The manager asked, “And what your friend would like to have?”
The hare laughed and he said, “Do you think if he was hungry I will be here? He is not hungry; otherwise he would have taken his breakfast – I would be gone! We can be together only when he is not hungry.”
In a zoo in Moscow they have kept a lion and a sheep in one cage to show the philosophy of peaceful coexistence. Everybody goes to see the cage. It is a miracle! The sheep and the lion sitting side by side – sometimes the sheep fast asleep – just so close to the lion, her head resting on lion’s belly. This is something!
A very curious young boy asked the zoo-keeper that, “How do you manage? How you have trained them?”