"What you know through the mind makes no difference – your consciousness remains the same. In fact it becomes worse, because accumulated knowledge is just like dust around your mirroring consciousness; the consciousness reflects less and less and less.

"The more you know, the less aware you become. When you are completely filled with scholarship, borrowed knowledge, you are already dead. Then nothing comes to you as your own. Everything is borrowed and parrotlike.

"Mind is a parrot. I have heard – it happened in the days of Joseph Stalin – that a man, a very prominent communist, came to the Moscow police station and reported that his parrot was missing. Because this man was a very prominent communist, the chief at the police station inquired about the parrot, for it was significant and had to be searched for. In his inquiries he asked, 'Does the parrot talk?'

"The communist, the comrade, felt a slight fear, and then he said, 'Yes, he talks. But note it down: whatsoever political opinions he has, they are completely his own.'

"But how can a parrot have opinions of its own? A parrot cannot have opinions of its own – and neither can mind, because mind is a mechanism. A parrot is more alive than a mind. Even a parrot may have some opinions of its own, but the mind cannot. Mind is a computer, a biocomputer. It accumulates. It is never original, it cannot be. Whatsoever it has is borrowed, taken from others.

"You become original only when you transcend mind. When the mind is dropped, and the consciousness faces existence directly, immediately, moment to moment in contact with existence, you become original. Then for the first time you are authentically your own. Otherwise all ideas are borrowed. You may quote scriptures, you may know by heart all the Vedas, the Koran, the Gita, The Bible, but that makes no difference – they are not your own. And knowledge that is not your own is dangerous, more dangerous than ignorance, because it is a hidden ignorance, and you will not be able to see that you are deceiving yourself. You are carrying false coins and thinking that you are a rich man, carrying false stones and thinking that they are Kohinoors."