"Learning comes in steps; unlearning can happen in a single quantum leap. And Zen belongs to the world of unlearning. It is not knowledge; nobody can attain to knowledge suddenly because knowledge is a quantity, it is not a quality. And anything quantitative can only be attained gradually; one graduates in it, slowly, slowly one absorbs and digests it.

"To emphasize this fact, Gurdjieff used to say that knowledge is a quantity, so much so that if few people have more of it then few others will have less of it. It is just a quantity like money. It is not possible to make all people knowledgeable, only few people will be knowledgeable. Don't take it literally. Many of Gurdjieff's followers have taken it literally. He was simply emphasizing the quantitativeness of knowledge, that there is only a certain quantity of knowledge. If few people have acquired it, of course others will not be able to acquire it any more. It is like the land: there is a certain amount of it – if few people have acquired it then others will be missing. But those who understand it literally, whether they are enemies of Gurdjieff or his friends, both are missing the point. The point simply is that knowledge is acquired gradually because it is a quantity. Year by year you graduate slowly. It takes twenty-five years for you to learn all that man has accumulated in thousands of years.

"But unlearning has nothing to do with gradualness; one never graduates in it. One sees the point and drops it immediately. The knowledgeable person, of course, will find it more difficult because whatsoever he has acquired with years of effort, labor, strain, he is bound to cling to it. The ignorant person has nothing to cling, and the knowledgeable person has many layers covering his vision. The ignorant person has nothing to cover his vision; he is far more clear.

"And you will see this quality in farmers, in carpenters, in gardeners – people who work with the land – the woodcutters, the fisherman. You will find a certain clarity in these people, a certain immediacy of understanding. They may not be able to understand complex theories like Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, but they will be able to understand immediately the beauty of a saying of Jesus or Buddha."