Questioner: If man’s nature is intelligence, then why is ignorance so prevalent and there are very few intelligent people in the world? There have been very few Saints compared to the overall population of mankind. Why is it so?
Acharya Prashant: It cannot really be explained but what is certain is that if a Saint is able to speak to you, it is because you have a Saint within. So, I do not know to what extent we can accurately count the number of Saints we have had. I would rather like to say that — Every person is a Saint; all that we have is Saints.
There are saints that appear as Saints, and there are saints that are waiting to appear as Saints. All’s said and done there is only Sainthood, nothing else. Of course, you can say that there is the Sainthood and there is the waiting. Yes, there is the waiting and waiting means time. So, there is Sainthood and there is time.
The thing is, waiting is nothing. You are waiting for something to happen. Now, is anything happening in the waiting? Waiting means that the happening is postponed. The real thing is just being postponed, not that the Real thing is being substituted with anything Real. It is just being unduly, unnecessarily postponed.
So, of course, one can give a lot of classical, theoretical answers that there is Maya; anyone cannot explain the origin of Maya; or that it is the very desire of the source and one cannot read into the desires of the source; or that, this question can come as long as the mind is disturbed, when the mind is not disturbed then one does not ask where does disturbance come from. So, I can give all those answers, but I would rather like to give a more useful answer.
