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| | | Book Name: The Dhammapada - The Way of the Buddha, Vol 9 | Previous Next | |
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his eyes were.
"Did you follow my advice?" he asked.
"I tried to -- but I can't raise the glass higher than my mouth!"
The fool is not only the person who is ignorant. The fool can be very knowledgeable; often he is. He can be a pundit, he can be a priest, he can be a professor. And then he is more dangerous because he appears to talk sense, and deep down he is as ignorant as anybody else, as foolish as anybody else.
A famous professor walked into a travel agency to buy a steamship ticket.
"To where?" the agent asked.
"Have you got a globe of the world?"
The travel agent handed him a globe. The professor turned the globe around and around looking at all the countries and continents. After thirty minutes he said, "Pardon me, haven't you got anything else?"
Your professors, your pundits, your scholars, are not very much different.
And remember, the foolish person may have a certain character. It is easy for the fool to create a certain character because he is stubborn. Stupidity is always stubborn. If some idea gets into his head he may be able to practice it more consistently than the intelligent person because he is stubborn, he cannot be flexible. He is not dynamic, he is stagnant.
That helps many foolish people to become respectable -- because they can do stupid things nobody else will be able to do, but they do them with such perseverance, with such patience, with such strength, that they succeed in doing them. They can create great characters, they can be great moralists, they can be very pious, and they can impress you.
Remember, character is not of much value. What is valuable is consciousness -- not conscience but consciousness. Conscience is created by the society. The more foolish you are, the more the society is able to create a conscience in you. It gives you an idea how to live your life. It manipulates you in a very subtle way. It hypnotizes you and conditions you. And the conditioning is so long that you forget completely that these are not your ideas.
For example, if you are born in a vegetarian family you will be a vegetarian, thinking that you have renounced all
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