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Zen says that one has to get out of this trap of the past and the future -- because the door opens in the present; the door opens at this moment, either now or never. And the door is open, but our eyes are wavering. We look into the past, we look into the future -- and the present is very, very small between these two, and we go on missing it.

Zen says that unless you drop the mind you can never be in tune with existence, you cannot pulsate with the pulse of the universe. If you don't drop the mind you go on living in a private world of your own creation; you don't live in the real world, you remain idiotic.

That is the meaning of the word idiot. Idiot means living in a private world. The idiot lives in a private world; he has a private idiom. He has his own way. He confines himself in his own way. He never follows the universal, the existential. He goes on projecting his own ideas. The mind is the idiot... howsoever clever, remember. The idiot can be very clever, can be a great expert, can accumulate much knowledge, can have many many degrees, Ph.D.s, and so on -- but the idiot remains the idiot. The idiot only becomes more dangerous.

Intelligence never arises out of the mind. Intelligence arises only when the mind has been discarded. When the mind has been put aside, intelligence arises. Mind is blocking the fountain of intelligence like a rock. Mind is always mediocre; mind is always stupid, unintelligent. To be in the mind is to be unintelligent. To be beyond the mind is to be intelligent. Intelligence is not the quality of the mind at all.

All meditation is the search for this intelligence -- how to drop learning, how to drop knowledge, how to drop all your accumulated past. Once it is accumulated it becomes more and more difficult to drop it, and every day it becomes bigger. The load goes on growing. The weight on your back goes on growing every single moment. It is not age that kills you, it is the weight.

A man who lives in no-mind lives without death -- because he dies every moment. He never collects, he never looks back, he never looks ahead; he is just here. He is just here with this cry of the cuckoo; he is just here. His being is in this moment. He flows with the moment. He is not rigid, not confined by the past. In fact, he has no biography and he has no dreams for the future. He lives as it comes.

And Zen says that mind may be useful in the world but is not useful as far as the ultimate is concerned. The mind may be useful with the trivial but is useless with the ultimate. The ultimate cannot be thought, because it is below and beyond thought. You are that ultimate, how can you think it? Before thought comes, you already are that. Thought is a later addition to it.

The child is born -- he is the ultimate. Thought will come by and by; he will accumulate knowledge, he will write many things on his slate of being. And he will become a knower -- this and that -- and he will get identified with being a doctor or an engineer or a professor. But the moment he was born he was just pure awareness; just a freshness, a clean slate, nothing written on it, not even his own signature. He had no name and he had no idea who he was.

That is primal innocence, and that is our ultimate. Our ultimate being is before thought and after thought. Not that it disappears when thought is there, but it becomes clouded -- just like the sun surrounded by too many clouds. When there are dark clouds, it appears as if the sun has disappeared.

We never lose our ultimacy, we cannot. That's what ultimacy is -- it cannot be lost. It is our innermost nature -- there is no way to lose it. But it can become clouded. The flame can become too clouded with smoke, can almost be thought of as lost. The sun can be so clouded that it appears as though dark night has come -- that's the situation. We are before thought, we are while thought is there, we will be when thought has disappeared -- we are always here. But when thought is there, it is very difficult to know who we are, what exactly this consciousness is.

Thought is a distraction. Thought is a disturbance. It is only when thought is again not there that we come into contact with the ultimate. If one thinks about it one can think and think and think, but it eludes thought; it goes on slipping out of it. And then, seeing that thinking is not leading anywhere, it stops on its own accord. If one really goes on thinking to the very end, a state of non-thinking happens automatically. This end of thinking comes finally and naturally -- that's what Zen proposes.

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