YOU ARE WISE
Through silence you become wise, not through learning, not by becoming more informed but by becoming absolutely silent. YOU ARE WISE... otherwise you will know only words -- hollow words, meaningless words. Yes, you can accumulate much knowledge. You can know the Vedas and the Koran and the Bible and the Gita and you can repeat them, but you will not understand anything. More is the possibility that you will misunderstand. From where will you get the right perspective to understand them? With all your passions and desires and all your confusion and clouded mind, how are you going to understand the Upanishads, the Koran? Impossible. They come from people who had gone beyond the body. Unless YOU go beyond the body you will not understand them. You can understand only that which you have experienced.
But the knowledgeable people not only deceive others, they start deceiving themselves -- maybe not knowingly, not deliberately. If you go on deceiving others your whole life, pretending that you know, slowly slowly you start believing in your own pretensions. You forget that you don't know; you don't want to remember it. Who wants to know that "I am ignorant"? Everybody wants to feel that he knows.
Ask anybody about God and it is very rare to find a person who will say to you, "I don't know." Very rare... almost impossible. Many will say, "Yes, God is, God exists." And they are ready to fight, to argue, to kill you or be killed, for something that they know not, not at all. And there are a few who will say, "No, there is no God." But it is very rare to find a person who will say, "I don't know" -- and that is the real religious person.
The agnostic is the real religious person -- neither the theist nor the atheist. One believes without knowing, one disbelieves without knowing; both are deceiving. But I am not doubting their sincerity. They may be thinking... they may be absolutely convinced that they know. And then you ask other questions about God and then they have to invent answers, because basically they have accepted that they know.
Ask them how many heads God has, and they will tell you three or four, and they will make much out of nonsense. They will say that God has four heads because there are four directions and he has to look in all directions, or three because there are three dimensions and he has to look into all dimensions. How many hands has he? And some say he has one thousand hands because he has to work so much and he is so alone, and he has to create the world and manage the whole show all alone. One thousand hands... two hands are not enough. Do you think one thousand hands will be enough to manage this vast universe? Do you think four heads will be enough to see everywhere?
But people go on inventing answers. You ask the question and they invent -- they have to invent because they cannot accept one thing, that they don't know.
A blonde took her dog to the vet who advised her to buy some Nair to remove the excess hair around the Schnauzer's eyes and ears.
The blonde entered a pharmacy and asked for the hair remover.
"Use it full strength for leg hair," said the druggist, "but dilute it one half for the underarms."
"Ah," said the girl, "but I want to use it on my Schnauzer."
"In that case," said the pharmacist, "you better use one quarter strength and I wouldn't ride a Honda for a couple of weeks."
The knowledgeable person cannot ask, "What is this Schnauzer?" That shows his ignorance and he cannot show that. Sometimes knowledgeable people commit such stupidities that no ignorant person can ever commit, because the ignorant person can always ask what it is -- "I don't know." But the knowledgeable person finds it impossible. He cannot say these three words: "I don't know." If you can say, "I don't know," you have taken one of the greatest steps towards real knowing, towards wisdom.
Buddha says: When mind is empty, silent, you are wise. By wisdom he does not mean knowledgeability; by wisdom he means innocence. Knowledge comes from the outside, wisdom arises within. Knowledge creates noise, wisdom brings more and more silence. The wise person slowly slowly becomes utterly silent. Even if he speaks, his words carry the flavor of silence, the music of silence.
By wisdom he means spontaneity, childlike spontaneity, eyes full of wonder. When your eyes are full of wonder you can see the beauty that surrounds you. When your eyes are full of knowledge you can't see the beauty because you have explanations for everything -- and explanations help you only to explain things away, nothing else.
But knowledgeable people have been doing good business. They have dominated humanity too long; that is their joy.