The primitive people cannot become enlightened. They are beautiful, spontaneous, natural, but utterly unaware of what they are; they don't have any awareness. They live joyously but their joy is unconscious.
First they have to lose it. They have to become civilized, educated, knowledgeable; they have to become a culture, a civilization, a religion. They have to lose all their spontaneity, they have to forget all about their essence, and then suddenly one day they start missing it. It is bound to happen.
That is happening all over the world, and it is happening in such great measure because this is the first time that humanity has really become civilized.
The more civilized a country is, the more is the feeling of meaninglessness. The backward countries still don't have that feeling, they can't have. To have that feeling of inner emptiness, meaninglessness, absurdity, one has to become very civilized.
Hence I am all in favor of science, because it helps the fish to be thrown on the shore. And once on the hot shore, in the hot sand, the fish starts feeling thirsty. It had never felt thirsty before. For the first time it misses the ocean around, the coolness, the life-giving waters. It is dying.
That is the situation of the civilized man, the educated man: he is dying. Great inquiry is born. One wants to know what should be done, how one can enter into the ocean of life again.
OSHO