Acquiring knowledge & not knowing your inner light is being ignorant and becoming carbon copy.

It is one of the most strange coincidences that Gautam Buddha and Mahavira both revolted against the knowledgeable, the learned, the scholarly, the brahmins, the pundits, for a single reason -- that by being knowledgeable, you simply cover up your ignorance. It is not dispelled out of your being.

It is just like on a dark night when you don't have even a lamp in your house. You may have as much information about light as you like, but your information about light is not going to bring light into the house. The house will remain dark. But one thing is possible: your information may create a delusion for you. You may become so engaged in the information about light that you forget about darkness. But darkness is there; whether you forget it or not makes no difference.

In fact it is better to know that the darkness is there, and something has to be done to create light, to destroy darkness. Knowing about light is of no help; real light is needed. The strange coincidence is that both Gautam Buddha and Mahavira were surrounded by brahmin scholars. And all that they have said has been compiled by the same people against whom they were speaking their whole lives.

Mahavira had eleven intimate disciples -- they were all brahmin scholars of great integrity, of great learning, of great knowledge, but their ignorance was just the same as anybody else's. Ignorance can decorate itself with knowledge, but that only hides it; it does not destroy it. One has to discover one's own light, one's own being, one's own self-nature. The moment one discovers one's inner being, all darkness starts disappearing, because at the very center of your being is nothing but pure light. But it has to be discovered.

The people who are interested in knowledge, or interested in scriptures, or interested in learning from other wise men, are not doing anything to reach to their own light, to the very source of enlightenment.

The same happened with Gautam Buddha. His closest disciples were brahmins and hence a great misunderstanding has arisen in their reportings. What they have reported about Gautam Buddha is mixed, polluted, corrupted by their own knowledgeability, by their own learning. Their minds have come in and interfered with the message that was given in silence -- a message that was transmitted heart to heart, being to being, but not from mind to mind.