Amateurs and Experts

All great discoveries are made by amateurs.

It always happens that when you start new work, you are very
creative, you are deeply involved, your whole being is in it.
Then by and by, as you become acquainted with the territory,
rather than being inventive and creative you start being
repetitive. This is natural, because the more skilled you
become in any work, the more repetitive you become. Skill is
repetitive.

So all great discoveries are made by amateurs, because a skilled

person has too much at stake. If something new happens, what
will happen to the old skill? The person has learned for years

and now has become an expert. So experts never discover anything
;
they never go beyond the limit of their expertise. On the one
hand, they become more and more skillful, and on the other hand
they become more and more dull and the work seems to be a drag.
Now there is nothing new that can be a thrill to them—they
already know what is going to happen, they know what they are
going to do; there is no surprise in it.

So here is the lesson: It is good to attain to skill, but it is
not good to settle with it forever. Whenever the feeling arises
in you that now the thing is looking stale, change it. Invent
something, add something new, delete something old. Again be
free from the pattern—that means be free from the skill—again
become an amateur. It needs courage and guts, to become an
amateur again, but that’s how life becomes beautiful.

3. Choose Nature

Wherever you find that society is in conflict with nature,
choose nature—whatever the cost. You will never be a loser.


The thinking up to now has been that the individual exists for
the society, that the individual has to follow what the society
dictates. The individual has to fit with the society. That has
become the definition of the normal human being—one who fits
with the society. Even if the society is insane, you have to
fit with it; then you are normal.

Now the problem for the individual is that nature demands one
thing, and society demands something contrary. If the society
were demanding the same as nature demands, there would be no
conflict. We would have remained in the Garden of Eden. The
problem arises because society has its own interests, which are
not necessarily in tune with the interests of the individual.
Society has its own investments, and the individual has to be
sacrificed. This is a very topsy-turvy world. It should be just
the other way round. The individual does not exist for the
society, the society exists for the individual. Because society
is just an institution, it has no soul. The individual has the
soul, is the conscious center.

4. An Echoing Place

The world is an echoing place. If we throw anger, anger comes
back; if we give love, love comes back.

Love should not be demanding; otherwise it loses wings, it
cannot fly. It becomes rooted in the earth becomes very earthly;
then it is lust and it brings great misery and great suffering.
Love should not be conditional, one should not expect anything
out of it. It should be for its own sake—not for any reward, not
for any result. If there is some motive in it, again, your love

cannot become the sky. It is confined to the motive; the motive
becomes its definition, its boundary. Unmotivated love has no
boundary: It is pure elation, exuberance, it is the fragrance of
the heart.

And just because there is no desire for any result, it does not
mean that results do not happen; they do, they happen a
thousandfold, because whatever we give to the world comes back,
it rebounds. The world is an echoing place. If we throw anger,
anger comes back; if we give love, love comes back. But that
is a natural phenomenon; one need not think about it. One can
trust: It happens on its own. This is the law of karma: Whatever
you sow, you reap; whatever you give, you receive. So there is
no need to think about it, it is automatic. Hate, and you will
be hated. Love, and you will be loved.

5. Retrospective Wisdom

The other is never responsible. Just watch. If you become wise
in the moment, there will be no problem. But everybody becomes
wise when the moment is gone. Retrospective wisdom is worthless.


When you have done everything, you have fought and nagged and
bitched and then you become wise and see that there was no
point in it, it is too late. It is meaningless—you have already
done the harm. This wisdom is just pseudo-wisdom. It gives you
a feeling "as if" you have understood. That is a trick of the
ego. This wisdom is not going to help. When you are doing the
thing, at that very moment, simultaneously, the awareness should
arise, and you should see that what you are doing is useless.


If you can see it when it is there, then you cannot do it. One
can never go against one’s awareness, and if one goes against
it, that awareness is not awareness. Something else is being
mistaken for it.

So remember, the other is never responsible for anything. The
problem is something boiling within you. And of course the one
you love is closest. You cannot throw it on some stranger
passing on the road, so the closest person becomes the place
where you go on throwing and pouring your nonsense. But that
has to be avoided, because love is very fragile. If you do it
too much, if you overdo it, love can disappear.

The other is never responsible. Try to make this such a
permanent state of awareness in you that whenever you start
finding something wrong with the other, remember it. Catch
yourself red-handed, and drop it then and there. And ask to be
s forgiven.



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