“If you ask all the great minds they will say that whatsoever they have attained has come from beyond the mind, not from the mind.”
Lao Tzu says, “All the world says: My teaching greatly resembles folly, because it is great, therefore it resembles folly.”
All greatness is so beyond the mediocre mind! And mind is mediocre! Remember it; mind itself is mediocre. The mind can never be great; there have never been great minds. If you have heard about great minds you have heard wrongly. If you ask all the great minds they will say that whatsoever they have attained has come from beyond the mind, not from the mind; something that filters through the mind but is not part of the mind.
Ask Madame Curie how she solved her problem and became a Nobel laureate. She tried for years, for three years almost, to solve a single mathematical problem upon which her whole research depended; she failed and failed and failed. Frustrated one night, she dropped the whole project, went to sleep; and in the night, in a dream, the problem was solved. She got up, wrote it down at the desk, went back to sleep; in the morning she completely forgot about it.
When she came to work at the desk she was surprised – there was the answer, miraculously there! For three years she had been working at it – where had it come from? And there was nobody else, she was alone in the room, and nobody else could have solved it even if there had been somebody there. Nobody, no servant, could have done that trick, she herself had been working on it for three years. Then she remembered a dream. In the dream she had seen the whole answer written. Then she remembered that she had got up in the night; and then she looked at the handwriting – it was her own.
Now, the Nobel Prize should not go to the mind – but it has gone to the mind. Now Madame Curie is a great mind – and the answer has come from beyond the mind.
Always it has been so. Always it will be so. Mind is mediocre. It is good at small things, petty things of the market – you can run a small business, you can earn a little money, you can have a bank balance, there it is okay. But not beyond that.
Osho, Tao: The Three Treasures, Vol 4, Ch 1
Series compiled by Shanti
All excerpts of this series can be found in: 1001 Tales
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