The ego suffers. That’s why you feel pain. “I don’t know where I’m going or what I want or even what I like.” Beautiful! That means there is nowhere to go. You can only be here and now. The goal has disappeared, now you don’t feel certain where you are going. Perfectly beautiful. When the goal disappears you cannot go anywhere, you can only be here – and here now is the goal.

You feel this state as very painful because the ego has to die. The ego would like to be a knowledgeable person, not ignorant; the ego would like to cling to mere words without any content in them, because still they give you a feeling that you know something and you know where are you going. You will feel pained if you are persuaded by the ego. If you are not persuaded by the ego you will feel happy and you will celebrate. You will be happy that you have attained something worthwhile.

Don’t create suffering for yourself. Try to look at this ignorance with a totally different vision. That is what I am trying to impart to you – the vision to look at things in a totally different way. Ignorance is clean, cleaner than any knowledge; ignorance is silent, more silent than any knowledge. Knowledge is always noisy, knowledge is a marketplace; ignorance is a cave somewhere deep in the Himalayas.

Knowledge is ill, ignorance is healthy. Knowledge is ill because of the ego – the ego is the greatest disease. You cannot feed the ego if you don’t cling to knowledge. If you cling, you can feel that you are somebody – that you know something, that you are not an ignorant person; you can compare yourself to others – that you know more, that everybody else is ignorant, stupid, but you are very intelligent, you have degrees from universities. And you exhibit them in your sitting room, you frame them, you bring it to everybody’s notice that you are no ordinary person; you are very cultured and cultivated, knowledgeable. You go on showing your knowledge everywhere. Wherever you can get a chance, even a slight chance, you jump in and you start showing your knowledge, your software. You start arguing; you start proving yourself right. The whole effort is egoistic.

Ignorance is healthy; ignorance is innocent, innocent like a child, a newly-born babe. Ignorance is never cunning, knowledge is always cunning. When you have knowledge you call it cleverness; when somebody else has it you call it cunningness – but cleverness and cunningness are the same.

Knowledge can deceive others. It is a criminal. Ignorance cannot deceive anybody – at the most it can be deceived by everybody else. Ignorance is never a crime. Knowledge is active, aggressive, male; ignorance is inactive, passive, female. Ignorance is receptive, a womb; knowledge is never receptive, it is always rejecting. Have you seen people who are knowledgeable? It is very difficult for them to bring out a yes, it is very easy to bring a no. No is always ready on their lips. No gives them power, the feeling of power ( that they can argue and they can destroy.