"Truth is always new and mind is always old. That&’s why mind and truth never meet. Mind is always of the past, truth is always of the present. That’s why mind and truth never meet. Mind is that which you have already known; truth is that which is yet to be known. Mind is the known and truth is the unknowable or the unknown. Mind is just a record of all that has happened. Mind is not an adventure; truth is an adventure.

"There is an old proverb which says, ‘There is nothing new under the sun.’ If you think about the mind the proverb is true. But if you think about truth, the proverb is absolutely false. Then there is another proverb – which is true – which says, ‘There is nothing old under the sun.’ Everything is absolutely fresh and new – like a fresh leaf coming out of the tree. Truth is always young, mind is always old. That’s why Jesus says to his disciples, ‘Unless you become like small children, you will not be able to enter into my Kingdom of God.’

"Mind is very cunning and clever, but not intelligent. Intelligence is a quality of awareness and cunningness and cleverness are just substitutes for intelligence. So mind goes on playing tricks of cleverness; and in that cleverness, mind itself is caught. In its own cleverness and cunningness it is lost. Remember this – that you will not become intelligent by being clever, you will become intelligent by being more aware. Cleverness need not be necessarily a sign of intelligence. Even stupid people can be clever. Cleverness comes out of experience: you do things many times, you learn. The mind becomes like a computer – each experience is fed into it and it goes on learning and accumulating knowledge and it goes on using that knowledge.

"Intelligence has a totally different quality: it has nothing to do with experience, it has something to do with awareness. Cunningness comes out of experience; intelligence comes out of awareness. That’s why old people become very cunning… and hippies are right when they say never believe a person who is more than thirty. Because by that time a person becomes cunning, one has learned the tricks and the ways of the world.

"But a child is intelligent because a child is more alert, more radiantly alert. See a child watching something. If a child is watching a snail just watch the child – how alert, how totally in the moment he is. It is as if he has become just the eyes; his whole being is pouring through the eyes. A child is intelligent, an old man becomes cunning and clever. A child has no experience so he cannot use the past. He has to face the present.

"And the whole Zen attitude is that you will have to become a child again; you will have to attain a second childhood in which you drop all experiences. Mind is nothing but a name for the whole accumulated past. Mind is not an entity really, just a piled-up past. If you disperse it, if the dust of the past is cleaned away from the mirror of your being, you will become intelligent. And only intelligence can know what truth is." Osho