The moral of the story is that the person who was valedictorian of the class was a mentally-retarded eel who did everything in a half-way fashion. But the educators were all happy because everybody was taking all of the subjects, and it was called a “broad-based education.”
We laugh at this, but that’s what it is: it is what you did. We really are trying to make everybody the same as everybody else, and hence destroying everybody’s potential for being oneself.
Intelligence dies in imitating others. If you want to remain intelligent you will have to drop imitating. Intelligence commits suicide in copying, in becoming a carbon copy. The moment you start thinking, “How to be like that person?” you are falling from your intelligence, you are becoming stupid. The moment you compare yourself with somebody else you are losing your natural potential. Now you will never be happy, and you will never be clean, clear, transparent. You will lose your clarity, you will lose your vision, you will have borrowed eyes. But how can you see through somebody else’s eyes? You need your own eyes, you need your own legs to walk, your own heart to beat. People are living a borrowed life, hence their life is paralyzed. This paralysis makes them look very stupid.
A totally new kind of education is needed in the world. The person who is born to be a poet is proving himself stupid in mathematics and the person who could have been a great mathematician is just cramming history and feeling lost. Everything is topsy-turvy because education is not according to your nature: it does not pay any respect to the individual. It forces everybody into a certain pattern. Maybe by accident the pattern fits a few people but the majority is lost and the majority lives in misery.
The greatest misery in life is to feel oneself stupid, unworthy, unintelligent. And nobody is born unintelligent, nobody can be born unintelligent because we come from God, God is pure intelligence. We bring some flavor, some fragrance from God when we come into the world. But immediately the society jumps upon you, starts manipulating, teaching, changing, cutting, adding, and soon you have lost all shape, all form. The society wants you to be obedient, conformist, orthodox. This is how your intelligence is destroyed.
My whole approach is to take you out of this imposed pattern. This is a prison cell in which you are living. You can drop it. It will be difficult to drop because you have become so accustomed to it. It will be difficult to drop because it is not just like clothing. It has become almost your skin, you have lived with it so long. It will be difficult to drop because this is your whole identity – but it has to be dropped if you really want to claim your real being.