listendontfollow

Listen, but don’t follow. Listen well, but follow your own insight, don’t follow others’ advice. Listen certainly—very meditatively, try to understand what they are wanting to convey to you. They may really be well wishers, but if you start following blindly you will never attain to your own intelligence. You will remain dependent on crutches, you will always look up to others to tell you what to do, what not to do. You will always need leaders—which is a very unhealthy state, to need leaders.
 Listen, because people have great experiences, and if they are sharing, willing to share, it will be foolish on your part not to listen. Sharing their experience may give you great insight—it will help you to become more aware—but don‘t follow.


 People follow literally and then they become just blind. When others are giving you all that you need, what is the need to have your own eyes? And when others are chewing for you, what is the need to chew on your own? Slowly, slowly you become more and more weak, more and more impoverished, more and more starved...
 The real friend is one who does not advise you but helps you to become more alert, more aware, more conscious of life—its problems, its challenges, its mysteries. And helps you to go on your own voyage, gives you courage to experiment, gives you courage to seek and search, gives you courage to commit many mistakes... because one who is not ready to commit mistakes will never learn anything at all.
 Commit as many mistakes as you can, but don’t commit the same mistake twice because that makes you stupid. Commit new mistakes, invent new mistakes, and you will be learning all the time, and your intelligence will be growing all the time.
 Your intelligence needs sharpening. The real friends help you to sharpen your intelligence. They don‘t give you fixed advice, because fixed advice is of no use. What is true today may not be true tomorrow, and what is right in one situation may be wrong in another. And situations are changing all the time, so what you need is not a fixed pattern of living but a way of seeing, so wherever you are, in whatsoever situation you find yourself, you know how to behave spontaneously, how to depend on your own being.

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