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knowledge remains the same. and you act out of this knowledge. That means you face today with your yesterday's knowledge. You will never be able to be alive. The more you function through knowledge, the more immature you become.
Now let me tell you a paradox: every child who is innocent is mature.
Maturity has nothing to do with age because it has nothing to do with experience; maturity has something to do with responsiveness, freshness, virginity, innocence. So when I use the word 'mature' I don't mean that when you become more experienced you will be more mature. That's what people usually mean when they use the word -- I don't mean that. The more you gather knowledge, the more your mind will become immature; and by the time you are seventy or eighty, you will be completely immature because you will have a stale past to function through. Watch a small child...knowing nothing, having no experience, he functions here and now.
That's why children can learn more than aged people. Psychologists say that if a child is not forced to learn, not forced to discipline himself, he can learn any foreign language in three months. Just left to himself with people who know the language he will catch it in three months. But if you force him to learn, it will take almost three years, because the more you force, the more he starts functioning through whatsoever he learns, through yesterday's knowledge. If he is left to himself he moves freely, spontaneously; learning comes easy, by itself, on its own accord.
By the time the child reaches the year eight he has learned almost seventy per cent of whatsoever he is going to learn in his whole life. He may live eighty years, but by the time he is eight he has learned seventy per cent -- he will learn only thirty per cent more, and every day his capacity to learn will be less and less and less. The more he knows, the less he learns. When people use the word 'maturity' they mean more knowledge; when I use the word 'maturity' I mean the capacity to learn. Not to know but to learn -- and they are different, totally different, diametrically opposite things. Knowledge is a dead thing; the capacity to learn is
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