Can an uneducated person achieve enlightenment?

Question: BELOVED MASTER, I AM AN UNEDUCATED MAN. CAN I STILL BECOME ENLIGHTENED? John, there is more possibility for you than for an educated man. The education that exists in the world is not true education. True education will be a help towards enlightenment because it will make you more meditative, more silent, more aware, more inward-looking. The education that exists in the world makes you more ambitious, outward-looking, more egoistic, more superficial. It gives you all kinds of wrong values. It is a kind of poisoning. It does not help you, in any way, to be yourself. It is destructive. It helps you to be somebody else, and that's its very destructive foundation. It is a poisoning, but so slow that you never become aware. It begins the day you are born and it goes on slowly slowly destroying you, distracting you from your nature.

What is more important, the practise of life or the theory? Is it possible for someone as ignorant as I am, who used to be a really devoted roman catholic, fifty years old, to attain to enlightenment without taking much time to study all which is between heaven and earth?

"Is it possible for someone as ignorant as I am to attain to enlightenment?" It is possible only for those who recognize their ignorance -- because those are the innocent people, who recognize their ignorance. The recognition of ignorance is the very door to enlightenment. If you think you know, then you will be debarred. Pundits have never become enlightened -- they cannot. They have too much knowledge, they are burdened too much with knowledge. They are like donkeys carrying scriptures -- that's what Jalaluddin Rumi has said. And a donkey remains a donkey -- whether he carries a KORAN on his back or not does not matter. You can carry scriptures in your memory, but memory is not knowledge. To memorize a thing is not to know it. To memorize a thing is a way to avoid knowing it. It is very cheap. A computer can do it; there…

Beloved Osho, is it possible to become enlightened in a really easy and relaxed way, with not too much effort and lots of naps?

Gayano, you are asking me, a man who has never done anything. Just through relaxation ... without any effort and lots of naps! Mostly I am asleep. I just get up to talk to you in the morning, then I go back to sleep; then I get up again in the evening to talk to you and go back to sleep. My total hours of sleep must be eighteen. Six hours I am awake, two hours with you, one hour for my bath, for my food and the remainder I am in absolute samadhi. And I don't even dream -- so lazy! And you are asking me the question. This is my whole philosophy, that you should not make any effort, that you should relax and enlightenment comes. It comes when it finds you are really relaxed, no tension, no effort and immediately it showers on you like thousands of…

Beloved Osho, can the intellect be a door to enlightenment, or is enlightenment only achieved through surrender?

And then there are great insights. A man who wants to be really awake, wants to be really a Buddha, has to live each moment in such intensity -- as you live only rarely, rarely, in some danger. The first meaning is opposite to sleep. And naturally, you can see reality only when you are not asleep. You can face it, you can look into the eyes of truth -- or call it God -- only when you are awake. Do you understand the point of intensity, the point of being on fire? Utterly awake, there is insight. That insight brings freedom, that insight brings truth. The second meaning of budh is to recognize -- as to become aware of, acquainted with, to notice, give heed to. And so a Buddha is one who has recognized the false as the false, and has his eyes opened to the true as…

What is enlightenment?

He had read all the Buddhist scriptures -- there are thousands of them. It is said about this Chikanzenji that he had all these scriptures in his room and he was constantly reading day and night. And his memory was so perfect he could recite whole scriptures -- but still nothing happened. Then one day he burned his whole library. Seeing those scriptures in the fire he laughed. He left the monastery, he left his guru, and he went to live in a ruined temple. He forgot all about meditation, he forgot all about yoga, he forgot all about practising this and that, he forgot all about virtue, SHEELA, he forgot all about discipline and he never went inside the temple to worship the Buddha. But he was living in that ruined temple when it happened. He was mowing down the weeds around the temple -- not a very religious…