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Main Index
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cannot be returned. You have eaten it; it has become your blood and bones. There is no way of throwing it; there is no way to return it and go to God the Father and say, "I return this -- this forbidden fruit of Knowledge. Forgive me." There is no way! There is no way to go back!
Now it is your blood. We cannot go back; we can only go forward. There is no going back. We cannot go below knowledge. We can only go beyond knowledge. Only a different innocence is possible -- the innocence of total awareness.
There are two types of innocence. One is below knowledge -- the childlike, the pre-Adam-like, the animal-like. Below knowledge you are not, the ego is not, the troublemaker is not; you exist as part of the Cosmic Whole. You do not know that you are part, you do not know that there is a Cosmic Whole: you know nothing. You exist without knowing. Of course, there is no suffering because suffering is impossible without knowledge. One has to be aware of suffering to suffer it. How can you suffer if you are not aware?
You are being operated upon: a surgeon is operating on you. If you are conscious, you suffer. If you are unconscious, there is no suffering. The leg is cut completely, thrown, and there is no suffering because suffering is nowhere recorded, nowhere known -- you are unconscious. You cannot suffer in unconsciousness. You can suffer only when you are conscious. The more conscious, the more you suffer. That is why the more man grows in knowledge, the more he suffers.
Primitive people cannot suffer so much as you can suffer -- not because they are better, but because they are ignorant. Even today, villagers are not yet part of the modern world and they live in a more innocent way. They do not suffer so much. Because of this, many fallacies have come to the thinkers, to the philosophers. For example, Rousseau or Tolstoy or Gandhi: they think that because villagers are more blissful it would be good if the whole world became primitive again, went back to the jungle, back to the forest, back to nature. But they are wrong because the man who has lived in a civilized city will suffer in a village. No villagers have suffered that way.
Rousseau
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