Ishavashya Upanishad #13

Om. Shantih, shantih, shantih.
Om. That is the Whole, and this too is the Whole; for from the Whole the Whole alone is born. And taking the Whole from the Whole, the Whole alone remains.
Om. Peace, peace, peace.

The eternal law of life is: where the beginning is, there is the culmination. What is alpha is also omega. Under this same eternal law, Ishavasya ends upon the very seed with which it begins. There is no other way. All journeys move in a circle. The first step is the last also. The first step is also the last.

Those who understand that the first step is also the last are spared all futile running around. Those who know that what is the beginning is also the end are freed of useless anxiety. We arrive exactly where we set out from. The first halt of the journey is the final destination of the journey. Hence, in the middle, we can walk utterly at ease. For there is no other possibility. We shall not reach where we never were. Strive as we may, we shall not arrive where we were not. We reach where we already are.

Understand it thus: we can only become what we already are. There is no other possibility. What is hidden within us, that alone will be revealed. And what appears, that too will sink back again. The seed becomes the tree, the tree becomes seed again. Such is the eternal law of life. Those who understand this law find their anxiety growing thin. Their threefold fevers fall into peace. There remains no cause any longer — neither for sorrow nor for happiness. There is no reason to be unhappy, for we carry our goal with us. There is no reason to be happy, for nothing is obtained that was not ours from the very beginning.

Therefore, to intimate this great law the Upanishad begins with the mantra with which Ishavasya ends as well. The path we trod in between — those too were only different doors leading back to the same mantra. Each mantra was a reminder, again and again, to awaken the memory of that one ocean. Every ghat and every tirth was a call, an invitation, an invocation to leave the boat in that ocean. If you have kept this thread in heart, you will see that it ran through the very breath of every sutra. Hence first came the proclamation, and now, at the end, the fulfillment of that proclamation. On the first day I told you the meaning of the sutra; today I shall speak its purport.

You will ask: what is the difference between meaning and purport?
Meaning is very evident; purport is utterly hidden. Meaning is body; purport is soul. Meaning can be understood by the intellect; purport only by the heart. Naturally, in the beginning only the meaning can be said, not the purport. But now we have peeped through many doors into that temple to which this sutra points. We have not only understood; we have also tried to descend into it in meditation.

In one sense this event is unique. Many commentaries have been written on the Upanishads. But that a commentary has been done together with meditation — this is perhaps the first time on earth. The words of the Upanishad have been interpreted, yes; but that there has also been a living effort to leap into the purport — this is the first occasion. Attempts have been made to infer purports from meanings; but that meaning and purport were sought doubly and together — this is the first occasion.

In my vision, whatever I was speaking was only to create a springboard for your leap. The purpose was the leap. That is why, after every sutra, we kept plunging into meditation — to try to know, by leaping, through experience, that which the word merely points toward. Now I can speak the purport — because you have not only heard the words but have not considered them sufficient, and have done something more after the word — to reach the wordless. Meaning can be known by those who know the word. But purport is known only by those who have tasted the wordless. If even a slight glimpse of the wordless has been given to you, then what I say now as purport will be understood.

What is the purport of this sutra? Firstly, let me say to you: this sutra declares that life is beyond reason, illogical. Nowhere does the sutra say in so many words that life is beyond logic — it only hints. I have told you what is said; now I tell you the unsaid that is implied — the mere pointing.

Wittgenstein, in perhaps the most precious book written in this century — in a hundred years in which millions of books have been written — wrote the Tractatus. In that Tractatus he says two things. First: that which cannot be said, must not be said — it should be left unsaid. And second: that which cannot be said can be shown. What cannot be said can still be indicated.

Understand it this way: what cannot be said can still be pointed toward. What could be said, I said to you earlier as meaning. What cannot be said, and for which there is no way of saying, that is the purport of this sutra. That I now indicate.

The first indication: life is beyond logic. Therefore those who seek life through reasoning will only wander around death; they will never know life. Why do we find an indication toward the irrational here?

Because the sutra says: from the Whole, the Whole issues forth.

First, how can the Whole give birth to the Whole? Where is there a place outside the Whole from which the Whole could come out? Whole means the Absolute, beyond which nothing remains. If anything were beyond, then this much would be less than whole. Outside the Whole, nothing is — no space, no sky. From where will the Whole emerge? If it emerges, where will it go? There is no facility of going out.

And yet the sutra says: take the Whole from the Whole — and the Whole remains behind. Not only this, it adds yet another statement, more illogical still.

First, the Whole cannot come out of the Whole — there is nowhere to come to. And even if it did, if the Whole came out, how would the Whole remain behind? Should not nothing be left?

By logic this is nonsense; by mathematics, utterly wrong. No one in their senses could have written it — perhaps someone intoxicated. So it appears to the logician and mathematician.

But to think thus is the same mistake that once happened in a garden. A gardener invited his friend to see the roses — they were in splendid bloom. But the friend was a goldsmith; he brought along his touchstone. Seeing the roses he said, I will not believe so easily. You cannot deceive me. I am no child. I assay even gold; how could I not assay this flower? The gardener said, How will you assay a flower? He replied, I have brought the touchstone by which I test gold. The gardener regretted the invitation; but before he could stop him, the man had plucked the rose and rubbed it upon the stone. Then he tossed the crushed flower aside and declared, All lies. There is no truth in the flower. The touchstone says so.

As the gardener must have felt, so will the rishi of this sutra feel if someone comes with logic and mathematics. Flowers are not tested on the jeweler’s stone. If one tries, it is not the flower’s fault; it is the tester’s foolishness.

This sutra — and especially this sutra of Ishavasya — is a flower blossomed in self-experience. It cannot be measured by logic’s touchstone. And within it lies the full warning: do not put it upon the stone of logic, for it is pointing beyond logic. It says: we are about to say something that is illogical. Something that cannot be, but is. Something that should not happen, but happens. For which you will find no ground, no method; and still — it is.

What does it mean to call life beyond logic? It means: those who think of life in terms of rule, mathematics, logic, law, system — will miss the mystery. A scientist who took a flower into his laboratory to find its beauty would cut it, separate its elements, put each chemical in a bottle, and then ask, Where is beauty? There is sap, there are minerals, there are chemicals; beauty is nowhere to be found. The fault is not the flower’s, nor even the scientist’s — his instruments are not made to weigh beauty. Beauty demands another dimension.

Those who think of life as if it were mathematics will never measure it. For life is fundamentally a mystery. However much we know, all our knowing stands upon a fathomless unknowing. However much we come to know, that very knowledge only points toward the more that remains. The more we know, the more we discover how deep man’s ignorance is.

Life does not yield to our opening; when we try to open it, it tangles further. All our efforts to open life are like Aesop’s fable: A centipede was walking along a path. A rabbit saw him and was bewildered. He must have studied in a school of logic. He wondered: with a hundred legs, which does the centipede lift first, then which, then which? How does he keep count? Surely he must stumble! He stopped the centipede and asked, Wait, answer me. I am a student of logic. How do you manage it? The centipede said, Until now I have walked well enough; I never needed to count. I never even thought which leg goes first, which next. But since you ask, I will think and tell you. He tried to lift a leg and fell in a heap. He pleaded, Friend, your logic has put me in trouble. Keep your logic to yourself — and do not ask this question of any centipede you may meet. We were living so happily. Legs had never given any problem. We never asked, and they never argued.

This is man’s greatest problem: he is in the centipede’s plight — but there is no rabbit to ask; man asks himself. He entangles himself by his own questions. He frames the questions and fabricates the answers. The questions are wrong to begin with; the answers are worse. Each answer breeds new questions. A crowd of questions, a crowd of answers — and man is lost. He comes to a point where nothing is known, what is what. We are all in that state.

Someone asked Saint Augustine: One question torments me. Tell me and I will be at ease. It is heard that you are a knower. Augustine said, You may have heard so; ever since I heard it, I am in trouble — I look within for the knowledge and find none. Once I, too, believed by mistake; now it is hard to believe. Still, ask. If you have come so far, ask. Whether I answer or not, the relief of having asked will be something. After all, do answers ever truly answer? So ask. The man asked, What is time? Augustine said, You have asked the very question I feared. There are questions about which, until one is asked, we are sure we know what they mean. Ask them, and we are in difficulty. I know time perfectly well — until you ask.

If someone asks you what time is — you know it well enough. You catch the train, you reach the office. Calendars hang on your wall. Yet if asked, What is time? no answer has yet been found. All offered answers are groping in the dark.

Ask, What is the Atman? You have carried it since birth — those who know say, from before birth. So many days have passed; yet you do not know what it is. If no one asks, all is fine. If someone asks, there is a hitch.

Ask, What is love? Everyone says they love. And even those who do not, pretend. Countless stories of love — all stories are of love. Precisely because man has not yet loved, he writes of love to console himself. All poems are about love. The man whose life lacks love begins to write love poetry. Poetry is easy; love is difficult. Poetry is made by tying rhymes; love is born by breaking all rhythms. Poetry has meters and rules; love is utterly unmetered — without prosody. Where it begins and ends, none can say. No measures, no fixed place. Poetry can be learned and made. Love has no way to be made or learned. Yet we talk all day of love — and if someone asks, What is love?

G. E. Moore — the most influential logician of the last fifty years — wrote Principia Ethica, a great book, painstakingly crafted around a single question: What is good? After such labour, this Oxford philosopher concludes: good is indefinable. He says, good is like when one asks me, What is yellow? What can I say? Yellow is yellow. If you ask, What is yellowness? — at best, one can point: This. A yellow flower, a yellow wall, a yellow cloth. But those are a flower, a wall, a cloth. Where is yellowness itself? Indefinable. If even yellow cannot be defined, will you define God for me?

Even the smallest facts of life are indefinable. When I say life is beyond logic, I say life is indefinable. You cannot explain it. You can live it — but you cannot say what it is. And if you try to say, the mistake will be like the rishi of this sutra, who is forced into seeming contradiction: from the Whole the Whole emerges, and the Whole remains. It sounds like a riddle.

A Zen master, Rinzai, loved to pose riddles — because they can only point. Whenever a seeker came, Rinzai would say, Seek truth later; first solve a problem of mine. The seeker, forgetting his own quest, would ask, What is your problem? Rinzai’s problem was one insoluble in the usual way, as all existential problems are. He would say: I placed a goose’s egg in a bottle. It hatched. I kept feeding it from the mouth of the bottle. Now the goose has grown big. The neck of the bottle is narrow. The goose must be brought out — and the bottle must not be broken. Tell me the way. If you suggest, Pull it through the neck, I tell you — impossible. We have tried. Do not say, Break the bottle — the bottle is precious. And if the goose stays longer, it will die — you will be responsible. Is there an answer? If someone said, I will try, Rinzai sent him to meditate in the next room: Hurry, the goose’s life is at stake. He had left another door there, and after a while the seeker would have fled. Rinzai would return and say to the others, The goose is out.

Only once did someone answer. He had not come to ask; he came and sat. Rinzai asked, Have you something to ask? He said, I have something to tell. Rinzai, a little afraid, told his riddle. The man seized Rinzai by the neck and said, The goose is out — say it! Rinzai said, It is.

Life is not a puzzle. Those who make it a puzzle get into trouble. Life is not a question. Those who make it a question must seek answers — and every answer entangles further.

Life is an open secret. Remember the double phrase — open secret. Life is utterly open — before the eyes, all around. Nowhere hidden, no veil. Yet it is a secret.

There is a difference between a puzzle and a mystery. A puzzle can be solved. A mystery is that which is wholly open, and yet — still not open. A mystery is that which stands revealed, and yet so deep that you may travel endlessly and find that the remainder is still infinite. From the Whole the Whole may come forth, yet the Whole remains. The Whole may be absorbed into the Whole, and still — still the Whole is just as it was.

This sutra intimates this mysteriousness. It is an indication that whoever consents to this sutra can enter life. Whoever says, No, it cannot be so, will remain outside the door — he cannot enter within.

Life is a mystery — which means it is trans-logical. The laws of logic are man-made. Nature supplies no axioms of logic. They are our arrangements — useful, but we forget they are only provisional.

Our rules are like the rules of a game. Chess: a knight, a rook, pawns, a king — with fixed moves. Players become heavily serious. In truth, I have seldom seen people so serious as chess-players. Wooden horses, wooden elephants, wooden pawns — and they forget it is child’s play, all assumed. Just so are our logical rules — assumptions. Nature has given us none; we have imposed them. Like traffic rules: keep left or keep right. In India we keep left, in America they keep right. Keep left there and you will be arrested, keep right here and you will be arrested. But some rule must be, because the road is crowded. Gradually, we begin to feel that our rule holds some ultimate sanctity — as if there were a deep cosmic order in keeping left. There is none. It is a human arrangement.

Understand a couple of basic rules of logic and the sutra will be easier. One axiom says: A is A and cannot be B. As a convention, fine. But in life there is nothing that does not turn into its other. Night becomes day, day becomes night. Childhood becomes youth, youth becomes old age. Life becomes death. Poisons become medicine; all medicines are poisons, and to the sick they become nectar. Life is liquid, logic is rigid. The rules are dead; life is a living stream. If you spread the net of logic upon life to catch it, only dead things come to your hand.

A story. A logician went to the barber’s shop at dawn. Haircut done; barber said, Bring the fee tomorrow. The logician worried: Tomorrow? What if he changes? What proof will I have? If he gives up barbering and opens a sweet shop, and I tell people I owe him, they will laugh. I must arrange so he cannot change. He looked around and found a buffalo sitting in front of the shop. Good, he thought — a buffalo is steady, like the rules of logic. He marked the buffalo, went home. Next day he returned; the buffalo was sitting in front of a sweet shop opposite. He caught the sweet-seller by the neck and cried, I suspected this, so I fixed my proof. For eight annas you have even changed caste!

The buffalo knows nothing of logic. The dead are fixed; the living flow. While you define, something else has already happened. You say, This man is angry — by the time you have said it, the anger may already be ebbing. What abides here? Definitions are always of the past; life is always the present. Definitions freeze; life moves.

This sutra says: there is no definition of life, no logic of life. Life is a mystery.

Tertullian was asked, Why do you believe in God? What is your reason? He said, Reason? When I saw there is no reason for anything in life, I understood there is no harm in believing in God without reason. Since the whole of life is without cause, God too can be held without cause. If you insist: I believe precisely because God is absurd. I examined all rules and found them false; all logical sums came to naught; every explanation failed. I dropped the intellect. Now I believe in no-mind.

This sutra is a sutra of Shraddha — of faith. Shraddha means a leap into the unknown; leaving all rules, explanations, definitions and calculations, and jumping into the immeasurable, the infinite — leaving the intellect and entering no-mind.

Those who sought truth by intellect are philosophers; they have found nothing. Thousands of books — mere nets of words. They cast them skillfully; their nets are so vast you cannot escape. But they know nothing.

Those who have known are of another kind — saints, rishis. They said, We shall not descend into words; we shall descend into existence itself. Why study what the Ganga is when the Ganga flows? Let us dive and know in the Ganga, not in the library. There are two ways of knowing. If I wish to know about love, I can go to the library and read — or I can enter love. The first is easy, hence the weak cling to books. Children can read about love. But to know love is to go through fire — a great austerity, a great trial by flame. To know love is one thing; to know about love is utterly other. To know truth is one thing; to know about truth is entirely different. What is known about truth is borrowed, stale. Those who wish to know truth must leap beyond the intellect.

A friend came two days ago. He said, Whatever I hear, I doubt. What you say, I doubt — and what you will say, I will doubt. Yet I have brought some questions; please answer. I said, Then what will you do with answers? You say you will doubt them. Why trouble me? Live with your doubt. Why ask? Life is spread all around — flowers bloom, birds dance, clouds drift, the sun has risen, breath throbs within you — the expanse is infinite. Jump and know there. Why come to me? And if after asking you will still doubt, asking is futile. Better still, when will you doubt your doubt? When will the question arise: will doubt take me anywhere? If you must doubt, then doubt totally — doubt the doubt itself. After so much doubt, has anything been gained? If not, let doubt doubt itself — and you will be emptied of it. In either way — either by not doubting at all, which is rare, or by doubting so deeply that doubt devours itself — in either case, the day one goes beyond doubt, one goes beyond intellect. The intellect is not something that doubts — the intellect is doubt.

The simple will understand this sutra and not doubt. The complex will understand it and doubt totally. In both cases, Shraddha is born — the leap happens.

This sutra is of Shraddha. Those who approach with logic will not understand, because logic finds no seat here. From the Whole the Whole emerges, and the Whole remains — logic will not accept this. Shraddha will.

Shraddha is simplicity. Shraddha is trust — a friendly trust in existence. The existence that gave me birth, that raised me, that gave me strength, thought, love, heart — to that existence can I not offer trust? If not, we have crossed the boundary of ungratefulness.

Reading this sutra, whoever does not feel that it calls for Shraddha — that only by Shraddha will the infinite gate of life open, only by Shraddha can the summit be reached — has missed its purport. This is its final purport.

Why speak of the Whole at all? At the beginning and end — why this talk of the Whole? In life, everything appears incomplete. It would seem realistic to talk of the incomplete. No person appears complete, no love appears complete, no power, no form appears complete. Everything seems partial. Why did the rishi of Ishavasya begin and end with the Whole? The so-called realists will say: unrealistic — a flight into ideals, into the sky. Where is the Whole?

It is an indication: wherever you see incompleteness, it belongs to your vision; incompleteness is nowhere in existence. It is in the window through which you look. If one looks at the sky through a window, the sky appears cut into the frame of the window. The frame seems to be the sky’s boundary. If one has never stepped outside that frame, he may insist that the sky is rectangular. The frame is not on the sky; it is on your window. The sky is formless.

Even outside the house the sky does not appear formless — the frame becomes larger, the whole earth its boundary. The sky looks like a dome encircling the earth. Hence the domes of temples. Go around the earth; nowhere does sky touch earth. The horizon is an illusion like your window’s frame. Even from a spacecraft, what you see is still from a locus — that place becomes the limit. Where then to stand to see the formless, the Whole?

The rishis of the Upanishad say: only one place — within. There is no window there. Drop the senses — for wherever the senses are, there the frame is. The senses are windows. However much you enlarge the lens, the window remains. But close the eyes, go in. Be without eyes, without ears, without body — go within, and there the formless, the Whole, is experienced.

Only by knowing the inner Whole does one know that the statement is true. And once one has seen the open sky once, then even standing behind the smallest window he knows: the frame belongs to my window, not to the sky. Once one has seen the inner Whole, he begins to see the Whole everywhere — however many frames and prisons cover it from without, he knows: they sit above, within the formless abides.

Therefore the rishi begins with the Whole and ends with the Whole. But we begin in the partial and end in the partial — how then will our rhythm meet this sutra? We stand with our backs to the rishi — like two numbers that cannot meet. We memorize his words, recite them at dawn; but our back remains turned, and the meanings we derive are rendered meaningless.

My last word to you: this talk of the Whole is rightly said. This is the fact, this is the truth. All is Whole. How could the incomplete be? Who would make it incomplete? Only the One is — there is no other to limit Him. Boundaries are always made by the other. You think your house’s boundary is made by your house; no — it is made by your neighbour’s. Since Paramatma is alone, existence one, the current of life one, no other at all — who will draw a line? Who will make it partial? Existence is infinite, Whole — absolute, unconditioned. But we will know it only when the glimpse of this Whole arises within. Then its glimmer is seen everywhere. He who has known a single drop of this inner fullness comes to know the secret of its endless oceans.

From the Whole the Whole emerges; in the Whole it is dissolved. In between, the incomplete appears — fabricated by the frames of our intellect and senses. Drop those frames, step a little beyond. Recede, go behind, transcend — and one is established in the Whole. And only he, established in the Whole, understands the meaning of Ishavasya: all is the Lord, all belongs to the Lord. I am not — Thou alone art.

Enough for today.

Now, at the end, we shall set out on the inner journey. Wait two minutes. Two or three things — because it is the last day — I must tell you for the meditation. The last day; a few pointers.

First, these six days of experiment have brought you to the point where today I wish to add a small thing to the experiment. With it, there will be a great explosion — be ready. The small thing is: today, when you look toward me, look without blinking — unblinking — and at the same time dance, and also sound the cry Hoo, Hoo, Hoo.

This cry strikes deeply upon the sleeping Kundalini within you. The Sufis have worked deeply with Allahu. They begin with Allahu; slowly Allah drops away and Hoo, Hoo, Hoo remains.

Say Hoo with such force — feel it — that as you say Hoo, your navel contracts, and a sharp blow falls below the navel. Hoo — the whole navel contracts and strikes. There is the abode of Kundalini. A strong push will fall there.

Now we are in such a state — nearly ninety percent of friends — that as soon as this blow is made, energy will surge upward like a flame of light. When the flame rises upward, I will signal with my hand. With my signal, become utterly mad. When I move my hand from below upward, feel within that the energy rises, the fire is moving upward — the whole life-force is going up. Cry Hoo, dance, leap, put in your total energy.

And when I feel that many friends have reached the point from which shaktipat can happen, that the power of the Divine can also descend upon you, I will lift my hand and bring it down. When I lift my hand and bring it down, then hold nothing back — do not spare even a mustard seed; spend yourself totally.

And those friends who sit idly above — they must not sit. Their sitting hinders us, for seeing them sit, others become lax.