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Sadness is caused by intelligence, the more you understand certain things, the more you wish you didn’t understand them.
-Charles Bukowski
It is a widely acknowledged fact that intelligence and sadness share a direct relationship. The more intelligent a person is, the keener their observation becomes. The heightened observation causes profound self-awareness. The more self-aware, the more self-destructive the person becomes. This all worsens when the person carries the bane of remembering every detail of the past, the burden of an excellent memory. For individuals empathetic by nature, this burden intensifies the pain.
You see the dimensions of changes happen within yourself due to that ‘one’ instance, that one experience. Instances of such a type aid you in your destruction by making you self-aware to the point where you feel you are just a version of others. You start feeling that you are not special anymore, that everyone else is essentially plagued by the life they’re living. The more intelligent you are, the more profoundly you fathom that everyone else is trying as hard as they can to make sense of the existence they’ve been forced to experience and entertain. This realisation breeds empathy, recognising the shared humanity in the struggles of others since they all are parts of you made of the same atoms, the same elements, the same dust.
Thereon, you cannot continue the petty enmities or enviousness you felt before. You try as hard as you can just to stay afloat, just to stay alive, donning that excellent mask of yours. You don’t feel superior to anyone, instead, you feel like you are a minuscule insignificant being bestowed with a tragically coincidental existence.
One might contend that even though we’re non-existent beings on the face of earth, yet those stars, those planets, those comets, they are also as small and as insignificant as we are to them. Nevertheless, you are constantly stuck in this rut, in this dilemma where you can’t help but question every minute of your existence. You try to find people who share a similar plight as you in the hope of seeking solace in their companionship, only to find it draining, so you start humourising your hopeless situation, it’s all in the mind after all. You don’t fear death, you don’t fear life, you fear the daily mundaneness that comes along with life, you fear the uncertainty that looms around every minute of yours. You fear Time. I fear Time.
This heightened awareness, a double-edged sword, compensates for the obliviousness of others, yet robs one of peace, plunging them into restless hunger and an eternal search for oneself. Aristotle’s aphorism, ‘The more you know, the more you know you don't know,’ reverberates with painful resonance. You start wishing for the time when you did not understand things so profoundly, when you were not this vulnerable, when your life was not this convoluted, when you were “you.”
However, the inevitability is what one knows somewhere but cannot ever be completely aware of. You understand the world a tad better, the universe little better but at the cost of your own feelings of self-worth, at the cost of your own blissful ignorance. No wonder Thomas Gray in Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College wrote,
“No more; where ignorance is bliss,
'Tis folly to be wise.”
It is like a contagion effect, one bad thing leads to another worse thing. First off, one gets the feeling that one exclusively gets to experience transcendental things while others are simply squandering their time undertaking futile tasks. At a later stage, one thinks that it’s better to stay alone since one is above others in terms of emotional and contextual intelligence. Lastly, as Carl Gustav Jung put it, “If a man knows more than others, he becomes lonely”, one succumbs to a bleak acceptance of perpetual doom and loneliness.
The solution as Osho proposes lies in accepting and embracing a balance of folly and wisdom,
"A little foolishness, enough to enjoy life, and a little wisdom to avoid the errors, that will do."
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