Siddhartha

What I got from this passage is that the world doesn't come in black and white. Siddhartha goes on to say that there is no purely evil or purely saintly person in this world. In the book Sophies World by Josaline Gardner it is said: "It is impossible to think about death without realizing how wonderful it is to be alive." In a sense, the opposite of everything is what makes that thing hold true. If there were no evil there would be no such thing as good.
I think Siddhartha is referring to the way that we percieve time. In the western world we see time in a linear sense, but Siddhartha is saying that time is not linear. Time is an illusion that is not there at all. When a baby is born it is already determined that he will grow old so really he is not only a baby. We know as surely as if the baby were already an old man that one day he will be one. When somebody does something wrong, because it will be forgivven it is already so. We know the sun will rise-so it already has. This is a completely different way of thinking about time. It is hard for westerners to view life like this because we rely so much on our 24 hours in a day schedule. We manage our lives around time and in some ways measure our lives worth with it. To the western world, there is only such thing as black and white, good and bad, the future and the past.