And one of the elders of the city said, Speak to us of Good and Evil.
And he answered:
Of the good in you I can speak, but not of the evil.
For what is evil but good tortured by its own hunger and thirst?
Verily when good is hungry it seeks food even in dark caves, and when it thirsts it drinks even of dead waters.

You are good when you are one with yourself.
Yet when you are not one with yourself you are not evil.
For a divided house is not a den of thieves; it is only a divided house.
And a ship without rudder may wander aimlessly among perilous isles yet sink not to the bottom.
You are good when you strive to give of yourself.
Yet you are not evil when you seek gain for yourself.
For when you strive for gain you are but a root that clings to the earth and sucks at her breast.
Surely the fruit cannot say to the root, “Be like me, ripe and full and ever giving of your abundance.”
For to the fruit giving is a need, as receiving is a need to the root.

And one of the elders of the city said, Speak to us of Good and Evil.

Each single word uttered by Kahlil Gibran has to be understood in all its implications. Why did the elders of the city ask? Why not a young man? Why not a child?

The child is so innocent, he does not know the distinction between good and evil; hence the question does not arise. To the child there is nothing good and nothing evil. It is out of ignorance, but it has a similarity with the ultimate state of a man who is awakened – for him, too, there is no good, no evil. The awakened one has come back to his childhood again – with a difference, with a great difference. The child was ignorant; the awakened one is really innocent. And the demarcation between ignorance and innocence is very fine.

Jesus said to Nicodemus, a professor of Judaism in the University of Jerusalem, “Unless you are born again you will not understand what I am saying.” He is not saying that first you have to die and be born through another womb. He is saying, “Unless you are so transformed that your ignorance becomes innocence – that is true rebirth. And only then will you understand what I am saying.”

The child cannot ask the question because he cannot make distinctions, and the awakened one will not ask because he knows that good and evil are two sides of the same coin. If you choose good, you have also chosen evil. And this is one of the great miseries of all the religions and their saints – they have chosen good and repressed evil. Because of this division they themselves have become divided and split. And not only have they become divided and split, they have made the whole humanity schizophrenic.