If you are influenced by the speaker, you are creating authority. Any form of authority prevents you from understanding what is real, what is true. If you are influenced by the speaker, you have not understood what the speaker has been saying for the last hour or for the last thirty years. He has been saying: free yourself from influence, look, find out. That demands intelligence. Intelligence is the understanding of every influence and not being caught in any influence. That requires alertness, watchfulness, an awareness of everything inwardly that is going on, every response – not to let a thought go by without knowing the content of that thought, its background and the motive.