Question: Which is the wiser course to take - to protect and shelter the ignorant by advice and guidance, or to let them find out through their own experience and suffering, even though it may take them a whole lifetime to extricate themselves from the effects of such experience and suffering?

Krishnamurti: I would say neither; I would say help them to be intelligent, which is quite a different thing. When you want to guide and protect the ignorant, you are really giving them a shelter which you have created for yourself. And to take the opposite point of view, that is, to let them drift through experiences, is equally foolish. But we can help another by true education - not this modern disease we call education, this passing through examinations and universities. I don't call that education at all. It is merely stultifying the mind. But that is a different question.

If we can help another to become intelligent, that is all we need do. But that is the most difficult thing in the world, for intelligence does not offer shelter from the struggles and turmoils of life, nor does it give comfort; it only creates understanding. Intelligence is free, untrammelled, without fear or superficiality. We can help another to free himself from acquisitiveness, from the many illusions and hindrances which bind him, only when we begin to free ourselves. But we have this extraordinary attitude of wanting to improve the masses while we ourselves are still ignorant, still caught up in superstition, in acquisitiveness. When we begin to free ourselves, then we shall help another naturally and truly.