Shunya Ke Par #2
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Read in Original Hindi (मूल हिन्दी)
Questions in this Discourse
A friend has asked: You say thought is not original, knowledge is not original. Then the things you are saying—that is, the things I am saying—are they original? Borrowed? Stale? What are they?
When I said that thought is not original, I did not say that nothing is original. I said: thought is not original. Vision can be original. Vision is not thought; seeing is not thought; experience is not thought. This is exactly what I am saying: the experience of truth is original. The idea of truth is not original. When you know truth, that knowing is utterly original. It is not borrowed; it is not stale.
This needs to be understood with a little subtlety.
When you come to know truth, that knowing is original; but when you only know about truth, that is not original. Knowing about truth is knowing thoughts; knowing truth is not knowing thoughts. The realization of truth is always original, but the scriptures about truth are never original.
Yet there are two things here. If I have known truth and come to speak to you, my realization will be original, but my language cannot be original. I will have to use the very language you use. And this is exactly why speaking truth is difficult—because truth is always fresh, and language is always stale. When we pour the fresh into the stale, a great difficulty arises. It becomes very hard to say it; and there is no guarantee that the freshness will reach you. How would it reach? What can reach you are stale words.
Therefore I say: by listening to me—or to anyone—you will not attain truth; you will only receive stale words.
If you want to seek truth, you yourself will have to stand where truth is found.
Then why am I speaking? Why does anyone speak or write?
The point of speaking and writing is not that you will obtain truth from it. The sole use of speaking and writing is that if, through it, even a thirst, a longing arises in you, that is enough. If, through all my trouble—speaking, explaining, through my eyes, my movements, even my silence—if only a thirst is kindled in you that perhaps this man has reached somewhere; perhaps there is such a place—that single hint is enough. And if, stirred by that hint, that thirst, you set out on a search, the work is done.
Thus far, no one has given truth through words; if the thirst for truth arises, that is plenty. And thirst can arise.
What I speak will be language—the same language we have used for thousands of years. It is stale. How can language be fresh? But it is possible that I have gathered that language from books and have no experience of my own—then behind those words there will be no living realization. Then those words will be dead, a corpse.
What is the difference between a corpse and a living person? A corpse is only a corpse—nothing more. In a living person, there is also a body, but there is something else too—there is life within. If I lift words from scriptures and repeat them to you, they will be corpses—dead.
But if I have my own experience, then within those words there will be a life-breath, something alive. Will that living element reach you? Very difficult. It may be that only the words reach you.
It is a great, perpetual difficulty. It will never be solved. And it is God’s great grace that it should not be solved, because if truth could be handed to you through my words, it would be so cheap as to be worthless. No—truth you must find yourself, because in seeking it, in the journey, in immersing yourself, in disappearing into it—everything that happens there—that alone is precious. If it could be taken secondhand, it would become meaningless.
A mother gives birth to her child, and another woman adopts someone else’s child. Have you ever felt the difference? When a mother gives birth, she passes through the pain of labor. To adopt a child is much easier—you avoid the pain. But the adopted child remains borrowed, and the woman never truly becomes a mother; only a show is created. The child calls her mother, and she too thinks of herself as mother.
But the most precious experience of being a mother never happens to her. How could it? Motherhood cannot ripen by taking a child on loan. Motherhood includes the nine months of bearing, the labor, the pain of bringing forth. Without that entire foundation of pain, the state of motherhood never takes birth.
Remember, when the son is born, not only is the son born—the mother is born with him. The mother also has to be born. At the very moment the son is born, the mother is born behind him. The event is simultaneous. We commonly think only the son is born; this is our mistake. Then we imagine: an adopted son will also make one a mother. How will the mother be born? It is at the birth of the child that the mother is born. Therefore an adopted son cannot do. You can be deceived, that’s all.
Truth cannot be borrowed. One must pass through the labor-pain of giving birth to truth.
Realizations are only ever original.
Only realizations are original; thoughts are not. Yet to speak of realization, one must use thought. But then thought is only a vehicle. If you recognize the one seated in the vehicle, you will glimpse the original. If you recognize only the vehicle and not the one within, you will feel: this vehicle I have seen many times; there is nothing special in it. Words we have heard often; scriptures we have read often.
And so you may say: the same thing is being said as before—what is in the Gita, in the Quran, in the Bible. Then you are lost. When I speak, the words and ideas I use cannot be original; they never are. If they were original, you wouldn’t understand them. I can speak a language that is utterly original. But an original language would mean a language only I could understand—no one else. Because if anyone else too understands, it becomes stale—someone else knows it.
Only madmen can speak an original language. Madmen do speak in an original tongue; that is why they are locked up in asylums—only they understand their language; no one else. To speak an original language you must be mad, for only you will understand it. And what is the point of speaking a language only you understand? Even without speaking it would do. Who would understand?
Language will always be stale, because language is our common bridge. We must all understand it; only then does it have meaning; otherwise it is useless. But realization can be original—and must be. Realization alone is original. Yet the same confusion arises between realization and thoughts as between one’s own son and an adopted son.
I was a guest in a house. The woman there had no child of her own. She was extremely wealthy; she had adopted not just a few but seventy orphans. Whoever came, she would adopt. Her entire house had become an orphanage. And yet she had not become a mother; seventy children could not make her a mother!
When I stayed there I asked: When will this stop? Even if you take seven hundred, you will not become a mother. I said: When you took the first child, you did not become a mother; then you took a second, and so on. Now seventy are gathered in the house, but you are still not a mother. Take seven hundred—you still won’t become a mother.
Tears came to her eyes. She said: What you say is exactly what I feel. I have taken so many children, yet I have not tasted the joy of motherhood.
The mother must be born; she is born together with the child. Adopted sons cannot do the work. Borrowed truth cannot do the work either. Thoughts and knowledge are borrowed. Hence I say: the path of knowledge is not the way.
Understand this a little more.
All knowledge is borrowed. Knowing is not borrowed; knowledge is. Make a small distinction between knowledge and knowing. Knowledge means knowledge; knowing means direct knowing. My capacity to know is original. But the store of knowledge I have accumulated is all borrowed. The capacity to know is each person’s own, but the knowledge one has gathered is not one’s own.
And the strange thing is: the more knowledge we accumulate, the weaker our capacity to know becomes. Therefore it becomes almost impossible for a pundit to be a knower. He knows so much; he borrows so much from others; he gathers so much that his own capacity to know gets smothered. He never comes to know, because before he can inquire, he already knows too much. He never needs to know for himself; he always sees through others’ eyes.
If any question arises in his life, he already has the answers; the question comes later. If someone asks him, “Is there a soul?” he does not have to find out. He says, “Yes—because it is written in the Upanishads, because the Gita says so, because Krishna says so, because Mahavira says so.” The answer is not his own. These answers are borrowed and stale. And the irony is that he has never asked the question honestly; otherwise his own answer might have arisen. He has never asked. He inquires, “Is there a soul?” but even before asking, he knows there is—because the Gita says so, because Buddha says so. Would Buddha lie? Would the Gita be false? I don’t say they are wrong. But Buddha speaks for himself. What he says is true for him—not for you or me. It is true for him; he speaks from knowing.
A cowherd once came to Buddha and asked for initiation. Buddha said, “Come, if you wish—but I have heard something about you: you sit on the riverbank and count other people’s cows and buffaloes.” The man said, “Yes, that is my habit. I know the count of the whole village’s cattle.” Buddha asked, “Do you have any cows of your own?” He said, “That never occurred to me! Counting others’, I got so entangled that the question never arose whether I have any of my own. And counting everyone else’s, I began to feel as if they were all mine. What kind of question is this?” Buddha said, “No matter how many of others’ you count, they won’t become yours. In fact, counting others’ you will forget even to ask whether you have any of your own!
“Take initiation if you wish, but remember—don’t start counting others’ truths here. Otherwise you will bring your old habit: ‘What does Buddha say? What does Krishna say? What does Rama say?’ Do not get lost in that tally. What do you say? Have you anything to say in this world? You too were born—do you have anything worth saying?”
If we ask ourselves whether we have anything to say that we have known, we will find ourselves utterly impoverished. We will see we have nothing to say. We have known nothing. To hide this poverty, we keep repeating others’ words. Every morning we read the Gita, memorize verses, chant them. Gradually we forget that we are counting someone else’s cows. What use is counting Krishna’s cows? It did something for Krishna—what can it do for me? At most, it can make me forget that I have my own question and that I need my own answer.
Remember, your question and someone else’s answer will not do. If the question is mine, the answer must be mine. Is there even one question whose answer is truly mine—born of my life, arising from within, sprouted from my own being, my very breath? If I have no answer of my own, then even if I collect all the answers of the world, nothing will happen. I will remain poor—and die poor, a beggar.
And note: to be a beggar in regard to money is not that bad. A beggar at your door fills at most his belly—he gets two loaves of bread. But those who beg in the realm of knowledge stuff their very souls!
When we see a man begging on the street, we say it is bad: “You have strong hands and feet—why do you beg?” But we never think of ourselves: my consciousness is perfectly sound—why am I begging? Why am I standing at the doors of Krishna, Rama, Buddha?
And remember, filling the belly is not so bad, for the belly will be left behind here. Filling the soul is very bad, because it will go on with you. Whether I made blood in my body by begging or by earning, both bodies burn the same at the cremation ground. But the soul I stuffed by begging will remain with me. It seems an easy method.
The path of knowledge appears easy. It seems: accumulate knowledge. Others have known; we don’t need to know. Let us memorize—then assume we also know! Whoever gets buried under knowledge loses the capacity to know.
He who walks with others’ legs—if his own legs forget how to walk, it’s no surprise. He who sees with others’ eyes—if his own eyes stop seeing, there is nothing strange in that. If you want to see with your own eyes, you must use your own eyes. If you wish to keep strength in your legs, you must walk on your own legs. If you wish to take your consciousness on the journey, you must take your own consciousness.
Knowledge has deceived deeply—and the deception is so subtle it is hard to detect. We cannot distinguish between a knower and a scholar. The pundit often passes for a sage—not only deceiving others but himself most of all. He thinks he has known.
So many people come to me—my heart weeps. Whatever they speak, they have learned from somewhere, and they speak as if it were their own. If you shake them and say, “These are not yours,” they become angry. Naturally. If a man believes he is rich and you reveal his pockets are empty, he will be upset.
They go to gurus—to increase their knowledge, to accumulate more, to collect, to learn more. From one guru to another, searching everywhere, gathering whatever they can. Then, after hoarding this junk, they will think they have wealth. Tomorrow they too will become gurus, and people will come to them—and this vicious circle is long.
No—by collecting knowledge one cannot attain knowing.
The intellect can only accumulate; it cannot know. Intellect only creates memory; it cannot know. Intellect is a device, a mechanical instrument. And it is not surprising that now we have computers. Soon you won’t even need to keep an intellect inside—you can keep a computer in your pocket. No need to remember things within; you will feed the computer and it will answer. If the question arises: “Is there a soul?” take out your pocket computer and ask. It will say: “Yes—written in the Gita, in the Upanishads,” and list references. You will happily pocket it and continue your journey.
The intellect is doing the same. It is a computer. It is a device of memory in which you have stored many things. Have you noticed you are not the intellect? You are very different from it. It often happens: you come to see me in the morning and ask, “Do you recognize me?” I think: I have seen this face somewhere. Where? I ask my computer, my intellect, “Where have I seen him?”
I am separate—the one who has fallen into the puzzle: Have I seen him or not? I ask my machine, “Quickly find this man—where have we seen him?” And the man is saying, “You still haven’t recognized me?” Now I am in trouble. I tell my intellect, “Hurry up!” The intellect says, “Yes, somewhere—but I’ll search.” It is a separate instrument that searches. If you press it, it will get confused. Don’t rush a machine or it will jam. If you hurry, everything gets muddled. Give me a little time; sit down; have some tea. I distract you with other talk while my computer works. It must scan through thousands of memory webs, millions of faces and names to find this one. It will work.
So often, if a name doesn’t come, don’t force it—trouble will grow. Do something else for a while. The intellect will work and soon deliver: “Here is the name!” Go to the garden, dig a hole, drink tea, smoke—anything. Leave the intellect to itself so the machine can do its work. It needs time. A machine needs time—how can it answer instantly? Often what we cannot recall all day pops up at night as we fall asleep. In the morning we realize it came.
Madame Curie, who won the Nobel Prize—she solved many problems in her sleep! When she was overanxious to solve them, the machine jammed; excess intensity creates difficulty. You say, “Quick!”—but the machine can only work by its own process.
So, exhausted in the evening, she would sleep; once she discovered the trick, she used it all her life. At bedtime, tired from struggling with problems, she kept paper and pencil by the bed. In sleep she would wake, write the answer, and sleep again!
You will be amazed: your intellect can solve very difficult problems if it has been fed. If it has been given input beforehand, it will fetch answers. Education is like feeding it. We teach a child to count, to add, to multiply—this is feeding the computer. Tomorrow we ask, “What is three hundred times three hundred?”—and the answer comes instantly because the mechanism is ready.
Intellect is a machine—and you are utterly separate from it.
A friend of mine fell from a train and injured his head; he lost his entire memory. The machine broke. He is fine even now—only we no longer consider him “normal.” I went to see him; we studied together as children. When I visited his village, he looked at me as if he had never seen me—the recorder was broken. He asked, “Who are you?” I said, “Don’t you recognize me?” He replied, “I don’t recognize anyone.”
Rahul Sankrityayan was a great scholar, a Mahapandit. Near the end, his mental computer failed. He was in a hospital in Delhi. Great scholars’ computers can fail—too much load, too much work: so many books read and written that the brain gives up; the machine goes beyond its limit. In the end his condition was such that he had to relearn the alphabet—A, B, C; ka, kha, ga; one and one is two; two and two is four. He was relearning as he was dying—because all had been forgotten. The memory gave out; the machine stopped working. But he remained.
Understand well: what you call your knowledge is a mechanical storehouse you use. It is necessary. For worldly life it is very necessary. If I have to return home now, I must know where I am staying, otherwise how will I go back? It is essential. But for reaching God that instrument is irrelevant—because to reach God there is no address, no location, no house. And we come from before the intellect—intellect is a later development. The brain evolved to meet life’s practical needs.
But we have to go back—to the original source from which we came. God is there. We will have to drop everything and return. There the instrument has no use—and cannot work, because we have no memory of God; we have never met him. This instrument can only function where there has been acquaintance before.
If God meets you today and puts his hand on your shoulder and says, “Brother, do you recognize me?” you will answer, “No.” You will ask your computer, “Do we know him?” It will say, “No; this one we have never met. Who is he?” But if Lord Krishna appears, you will recognize him—the computer has his image: we have seen him in temples playing the flute. If he comes just so, you will recognize: “Yes—seems familiar; peacock feather at an angle—everything fits.”
But a follower of Christ will not recognize him. He will say, “Who is this man with a peacock feather? What is this?” If you meet Zarathustra, you won’t recognize him; a Zoroastrian will.
Whoever you “recognize” is not God, because we have no memory of God. Our machine has no record to identify him. If you do recognize and say, “Yes, this is he,” know it is not God—it is a projection, a composite of your memories and knowledge. The one before whom you stand and your computer says, “Totally unfamiliar—never known—who is this?”—and you search within and no answer arises, you cannot recognize—then understand: you have come to some door, to some temple, where the unknown stands. One whom we do not know.
God cannot be recognized, because we do not know him. Hence, if someone comes to you and says, “I have found God,” know he has found those “gods” his memory could identify. That is why I say: the machinery of memory, intellect, knowledge is useless for recognizing God. He is unknown—forever unknown. Therefore he is a mystery.
What does “mystery” mean? That before which we cannot recognize. We stand dumbstruck; our eyes go wide, we cannot blink. The mind says, “I don’t know.” The intellect says, “I don’t know.” The feelings say, “No connection.” Action says, “We have no capacity.” The whole personality declares: “Nothing—we know nothing, recognize nothing. Who is this? What is this?” When all your instruments tire and fall silent, no answer comes; when your ego says, “I have no way”—only then your head bows at those feet. You fall at the feet of the unknown.
Surrender does not happen by your doing. When all your instruments give up, none co-operates, suddenly you find yourself fallen at the feet—of the unknown. The one you thought you were—an aggregate of instruments—disappears. Only that remains which is hidden behind all instruments.
Hence the one who has known God does not say, “I have known.” If he says so, he has not known. If you go ask him, “Tell us—have you known God?” he may perhaps laugh—or look at you silently. But he will not say “Yes I have,” because even the state to say “yes” is not ours. Who will say yes? Who will sanction it? Who will give the certificate, “This is it”? No—none of that.
Before crucifying Jesus, the governor—Pontius Pilate—came to him and said, “I have one question. Answer it before you die.”
Jesus said, “What is the question?”
Pilate asked, “What is truth?”
He thought: this man is dying; it is the last chance; people say he knows—ask him.
Jesus remained silent.
The man said, “Answer me—what is truth?”
Still Jesus remained silent. Perhaps he spoke with his eyes, without words upon his lips, in his very breath. But Pilate understood only human language, the language his computer could recognize.
He said, “He won’t speak; it seems he knows nothing.” And he ordered the crucifixion.
Jesus did not answer. A scholar—a priest of Jesus—would have answered. He would have quoted the Bible: “Truth is this.” Jesus did not answer; his priest would. There is certainly a difference. Jesus knows; the priest does not.
Is it within human capacity to say what truth is? Is it within our capacity to recognize what God is?
There, our entire structure collapses; chaos ensues; all arrangements fall, all words are lost, language disappears. The very person who was seeking vanishes. Only silence and emptiness remain. Who will recognize there? Whom will one recognize? Even if one recognizes, where is the memory to recall it, where the answer, whom to tell? Everything is lost there.
No, the learned do not reach there. The “ignorant” do.
By “ignorant” I mean one who has come to see that knowledge is futile—who wearies even of knowledge, sees there is no essence in it. He says, “Fine—let memory serve; good for getting by, meeting life’s needs—but it leads nowhere. Knowledge is no path.” But one must wander along knowledge for a time—otherwise you won’t even realize it is a cul-de-sac.
Krishnamurti says he is fortunate he never read scriptures. I say I am fortunate that I did—because by reading I became certain there is nothing there. Without reading, you cannot be certain.
It is necessary to read scriptures so that you know there is nothing there. It is necessary to explore knowledge so that you discover there is nothing here—so that this direction is exhausted. For me, the sole use of the path of knowledge is this: walk it thoroughly so that no doubt remains—“perhaps there was something in the scriptures.” No—see it clearly: there is nothing there.
The one use of scripture is that by reading it you are finished with scripture. That “being finished” is a great use, because the entanglement ends. Then you do not remain caught in knowledge; you turn toward knowing. You drop the worry for knowledge. You come to see: it cannot be got from another, no one can give it, it cannot be received secondhand.
This is such a great realization that if it becomes absolutely clear to me that no one else can give, I am thrown back upon myself. Now I must swim or drown—myself. There is no other way; no one else can give! And the day this becomes certain, an immeasurable energy is born within—held back since birth only so long as I leaned on others’ shoulders and hands.
If you are thrown into the ocean—no rescuer, no boat, no support—what will you do? Will you not thrash your arms and legs? That is what swimming is—throwing your limbs. At first disorderly, then gradually with rhythm.
But for swimming, one condition is essential: there must be no support. If there is support, no one can learn to swim. Those who “teach” swimming do nothing; they simply throw you into water and do not support you and stand watching from the shore. No one wants to drown—so he starts flailing. And everyone knows how to swim—the situation simply needs to arise. Once the situation compels, everyone throws their limbs; within four to six days it becomes ordered, and then it makes no difference.
Religion becomes available only to those who, in the ocean of life, drop all supports and are ready to sink, who are thrown in.
I call him a guru who throws you in and goes home—never even looks back to see what happened to you. If a guru holds your hand and leads you, he is your enemy; he will kill you, because you will never learn to swim; you will never be thrown upon yourself.
If knowledge does only this—throws you into the water, and you realize that no scripture, no knowledge will save you—then a revolution will begin in your life.
That is why I say to you: knowledge is not a way; it is a distraction. When it becomes visible as such, you step out of it. And it is not that, having seen knowledge is useless, you need to walk back miles because you had gone miles. Not at all. The day you see that knowledge is futile, you are instantly out. It is not that “I walked a thousand miles on knowledge’s path—now I must unlearn the Gita, the Quran, the Upanishads.” No—no need to forget. It is enough to know: what I have remembered is not knowledge, it is only memory. The matter ends. It is not my knowing; it is someone else’s. It is borrowed, stale—not mine, not my realization, not original. Knowing just this is enough. There is no need to forget the Gita.
A gentleman used to come to me. One day he said, “Your words have touched me so deeply that I tied up my Gita and Upanishads and threw them into the well.”
I said, “What fault had the well committed? Now the well will be in as much trouble as you were. If it starts reading the Gita and Upanishads, it is finished! What will become of the poor well? It has no hands and feet—how will it get rid of them? Why trouble the well?”
He said, “What are you saying! I thought you would be very pleased.”
I said, “It is not a question of my pleasure. If you throw your Gita and Upanishads into a well, that only shows you are not free of them yet. Attachment remains. Earlier you believed that resting your head upon the Gita would bring knowledge; now you believe throwing it into a well will bring knowledge. But either way, you are still tied to the Gita—whether you throw it into a well or put it on your head.”
Do not burn the scriptures. They are very useful. Do not throw them into wells—the wells are not at fault. Man created them; man must carry them. What can wells do? No—neither throw nor burn. Scriptures are valuable; their greatest value is that by reading them you will become free of them. You will know: I found nothing. So read the scriptures, explore knowledge—but keep checking: did anything happen? Did I gain anything? Only words, words, words—no truth at all! And when you are surrounded by a web of words and it becomes clear that you received nothing but words—only words—
One more small story, and I will finish.
There was a very unusual man, Lawrence. He lived long in Arabia—took part in the Arab revolution. Gradually he loved the Arabs so much he became almost Arab. Then he took some Arab friends to Paris to show them the city. There was a big fair; he said, “Come, I’ll show you Paris.” He housed them in a great hotel; showed them the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre—everything grand. But the Arabs took delight in none of it. They were interested in something utterly unexpected. In the Louvre, they would say, “Hurry—let’s go back to the hotel!”
He took them to the exhibition—great marvels. Showed them the Eiffel Tower; they said, “Let’s hurry back,” and as soon as they reached, they darted into the bathrooms. He wondered, “What is this?”
Even in the cinema, midway they would insist on returning and all eight or ten of them would disappear into their bathrooms. He asked, “What is going on?”
It turned out that for them the greatest miracle was the tap—the faucet! They were desert dwellers; for them it was a great miracle: turn the handle and water flows! They kept going in twenty times a day just to open the faucet and watch the water.
On the day of departure, the car was ready, luggage loaded—but the Arabs had vanished. He searched; asked the manager; looked around the hotel—worried they might wander off, as they did not know the language. But they were nowhere outside. Then it occurred to him: perhaps they have gone into the bathrooms—time to leave.
He went and found each in his bathroom trying to remove the faucet! He asked, “What are you doing, you fools?”
They said, “We want to take these taps home. They are wonderful—just open them and water comes!”
He said, “Idiots! Taking the taps will do nothing; behind them is a whole network, a great reservoir. Pipes lead from there to here. The tap alone is nothing.”
But the poor fellows thought, “Such a small thing—take it home to Arabia, and it will be marvelous! Whoever sees it will be amazed: turn the tap—water flows!”
The scriptures are only taps. Behind them is a vast network. Opening the scripture’s tap will not make wisdom flow. Behind the Gita is a vast network—a reservoir named Krishna. You carry the Gita under your arm and repeat their mistake. Nothing happens by clutching scriptures; they are only taps. Nothing can flow from them by themselves. You must reach the reservoir behind—the source—then you too will become scripture. What you speak will become scripture. But you must reach that reservoir—the living spring of God, of truth. Taps alone won’t help.
Taps are being sold—some even free. The Gita Press in Gorakhpur prints taps. Keep them in your homes for two or four pennies. Open the tap and let the stream of wisdom flow—no, nothing will flow from taps. Not knowledge, but the capacity to know.
And if any questions remain, I will speak of them tomorrow morning.
You have listened to me with such quiet—my gratitude. In the end, I bow to the God seated within all. Please accept my pranam.
This needs to be understood with a little subtlety.
When you come to know truth, that knowing is original; but when you only know about truth, that is not original. Knowing about truth is knowing thoughts; knowing truth is not knowing thoughts. The realization of truth is always original, but the scriptures about truth are never original.
Yet there are two things here. If I have known truth and come to speak to you, my realization will be original, but my language cannot be original. I will have to use the very language you use. And this is exactly why speaking truth is difficult—because truth is always fresh, and language is always stale. When we pour the fresh into the stale, a great difficulty arises. It becomes very hard to say it; and there is no guarantee that the freshness will reach you. How would it reach? What can reach you are stale words.
Therefore I say: by listening to me—or to anyone—you will not attain truth; you will only receive stale words.
If you want to seek truth, you yourself will have to stand where truth is found.
Then why am I speaking? Why does anyone speak or write?
The point of speaking and writing is not that you will obtain truth from it. The sole use of speaking and writing is that if, through it, even a thirst, a longing arises in you, that is enough. If, through all my trouble—speaking, explaining, through my eyes, my movements, even my silence—if only a thirst is kindled in you that perhaps this man has reached somewhere; perhaps there is such a place—that single hint is enough. And if, stirred by that hint, that thirst, you set out on a search, the work is done.
Thus far, no one has given truth through words; if the thirst for truth arises, that is plenty. And thirst can arise.
What I speak will be language—the same language we have used for thousands of years. It is stale. How can language be fresh? But it is possible that I have gathered that language from books and have no experience of my own—then behind those words there will be no living realization. Then those words will be dead, a corpse.
What is the difference between a corpse and a living person? A corpse is only a corpse—nothing more. In a living person, there is also a body, but there is something else too—there is life within. If I lift words from scriptures and repeat them to you, they will be corpses—dead.
But if I have my own experience, then within those words there will be a life-breath, something alive. Will that living element reach you? Very difficult. It may be that only the words reach you.
It is a great, perpetual difficulty. It will never be solved. And it is God’s great grace that it should not be solved, because if truth could be handed to you through my words, it would be so cheap as to be worthless. No—truth you must find yourself, because in seeking it, in the journey, in immersing yourself, in disappearing into it—everything that happens there—that alone is precious. If it could be taken secondhand, it would become meaningless.
A mother gives birth to her child, and another woman adopts someone else’s child. Have you ever felt the difference? When a mother gives birth, she passes through the pain of labor. To adopt a child is much easier—you avoid the pain. But the adopted child remains borrowed, and the woman never truly becomes a mother; only a show is created. The child calls her mother, and she too thinks of herself as mother.
But the most precious experience of being a mother never happens to her. How could it? Motherhood cannot ripen by taking a child on loan. Motherhood includes the nine months of bearing, the labor, the pain of bringing forth. Without that entire foundation of pain, the state of motherhood never takes birth.
Remember, when the son is born, not only is the son born—the mother is born with him. The mother also has to be born. At the very moment the son is born, the mother is born behind him. The event is simultaneous. We commonly think only the son is born; this is our mistake. Then we imagine: an adopted son will also make one a mother. How will the mother be born? It is at the birth of the child that the mother is born. Therefore an adopted son cannot do. You can be deceived, that’s all.
Truth cannot be borrowed. One must pass through the labor-pain of giving birth to truth.
Realizations are only ever original.
Only realizations are original; thoughts are not. Yet to speak of realization, one must use thought. But then thought is only a vehicle. If you recognize the one seated in the vehicle, you will glimpse the original. If you recognize only the vehicle and not the one within, you will feel: this vehicle I have seen many times; there is nothing special in it. Words we have heard often; scriptures we have read often.
And so you may say: the same thing is being said as before—what is in the Gita, in the Quran, in the Bible. Then you are lost. When I speak, the words and ideas I use cannot be original; they never are. If they were original, you wouldn’t understand them. I can speak a language that is utterly original. But an original language would mean a language only I could understand—no one else. Because if anyone else too understands, it becomes stale—someone else knows it.
Only madmen can speak an original language. Madmen do speak in an original tongue; that is why they are locked up in asylums—only they understand their language; no one else. To speak an original language you must be mad, for only you will understand it. And what is the point of speaking a language only you understand? Even without speaking it would do. Who would understand?
Language will always be stale, because language is our common bridge. We must all understand it; only then does it have meaning; otherwise it is useless. But realization can be original—and must be. Realization alone is original. Yet the same confusion arises between realization and thoughts as between one’s own son and an adopted son.
I was a guest in a house. The woman there had no child of her own. She was extremely wealthy; she had adopted not just a few but seventy orphans. Whoever came, she would adopt. Her entire house had become an orphanage. And yet she had not become a mother; seventy children could not make her a mother!
When I stayed there I asked: When will this stop? Even if you take seven hundred, you will not become a mother. I said: When you took the first child, you did not become a mother; then you took a second, and so on. Now seventy are gathered in the house, but you are still not a mother. Take seven hundred—you still won’t become a mother.
Tears came to her eyes. She said: What you say is exactly what I feel. I have taken so many children, yet I have not tasted the joy of motherhood.
The mother must be born; she is born together with the child. Adopted sons cannot do the work. Borrowed truth cannot do the work either. Thoughts and knowledge are borrowed. Hence I say: the path of knowledge is not the way.
Understand this a little more.
All knowledge is borrowed. Knowing is not borrowed; knowledge is. Make a small distinction between knowledge and knowing. Knowledge means knowledge; knowing means direct knowing. My capacity to know is original. But the store of knowledge I have accumulated is all borrowed. The capacity to know is each person’s own, but the knowledge one has gathered is not one’s own.
And the strange thing is: the more knowledge we accumulate, the weaker our capacity to know becomes. Therefore it becomes almost impossible for a pundit to be a knower. He knows so much; he borrows so much from others; he gathers so much that his own capacity to know gets smothered. He never comes to know, because before he can inquire, he already knows too much. He never needs to know for himself; he always sees through others’ eyes.
If any question arises in his life, he already has the answers; the question comes later. If someone asks him, “Is there a soul?” he does not have to find out. He says, “Yes—because it is written in the Upanishads, because the Gita says so, because Krishna says so, because Mahavira says so.” The answer is not his own. These answers are borrowed and stale. And the irony is that he has never asked the question honestly; otherwise his own answer might have arisen. He has never asked. He inquires, “Is there a soul?” but even before asking, he knows there is—because the Gita says so, because Buddha says so. Would Buddha lie? Would the Gita be false? I don’t say they are wrong. But Buddha speaks for himself. What he says is true for him—not for you or me. It is true for him; he speaks from knowing.
A cowherd once came to Buddha and asked for initiation. Buddha said, “Come, if you wish—but I have heard something about you: you sit on the riverbank and count other people’s cows and buffaloes.” The man said, “Yes, that is my habit. I know the count of the whole village’s cattle.” Buddha asked, “Do you have any cows of your own?” He said, “That never occurred to me! Counting others’, I got so entangled that the question never arose whether I have any of my own. And counting everyone else’s, I began to feel as if they were all mine. What kind of question is this?” Buddha said, “No matter how many of others’ you count, they won’t become yours. In fact, counting others’ you will forget even to ask whether you have any of your own!
“Take initiation if you wish, but remember—don’t start counting others’ truths here. Otherwise you will bring your old habit: ‘What does Buddha say? What does Krishna say? What does Rama say?’ Do not get lost in that tally. What do you say? Have you anything to say in this world? You too were born—do you have anything worth saying?”
If we ask ourselves whether we have anything to say that we have known, we will find ourselves utterly impoverished. We will see we have nothing to say. We have known nothing. To hide this poverty, we keep repeating others’ words. Every morning we read the Gita, memorize verses, chant them. Gradually we forget that we are counting someone else’s cows. What use is counting Krishna’s cows? It did something for Krishna—what can it do for me? At most, it can make me forget that I have my own question and that I need my own answer.
Remember, your question and someone else’s answer will not do. If the question is mine, the answer must be mine. Is there even one question whose answer is truly mine—born of my life, arising from within, sprouted from my own being, my very breath? If I have no answer of my own, then even if I collect all the answers of the world, nothing will happen. I will remain poor—and die poor, a beggar.
And note: to be a beggar in regard to money is not that bad. A beggar at your door fills at most his belly—he gets two loaves of bread. But those who beg in the realm of knowledge stuff their very souls!
When we see a man begging on the street, we say it is bad: “You have strong hands and feet—why do you beg?” But we never think of ourselves: my consciousness is perfectly sound—why am I begging? Why am I standing at the doors of Krishna, Rama, Buddha?
And remember, filling the belly is not so bad, for the belly will be left behind here. Filling the soul is very bad, because it will go on with you. Whether I made blood in my body by begging or by earning, both bodies burn the same at the cremation ground. But the soul I stuffed by begging will remain with me. It seems an easy method.
The path of knowledge appears easy. It seems: accumulate knowledge. Others have known; we don’t need to know. Let us memorize—then assume we also know! Whoever gets buried under knowledge loses the capacity to know.
He who walks with others’ legs—if his own legs forget how to walk, it’s no surprise. He who sees with others’ eyes—if his own eyes stop seeing, there is nothing strange in that. If you want to see with your own eyes, you must use your own eyes. If you wish to keep strength in your legs, you must walk on your own legs. If you wish to take your consciousness on the journey, you must take your own consciousness.
Knowledge has deceived deeply—and the deception is so subtle it is hard to detect. We cannot distinguish between a knower and a scholar. The pundit often passes for a sage—not only deceiving others but himself most of all. He thinks he has known.
So many people come to me—my heart weeps. Whatever they speak, they have learned from somewhere, and they speak as if it were their own. If you shake them and say, “These are not yours,” they become angry. Naturally. If a man believes he is rich and you reveal his pockets are empty, he will be upset.
They go to gurus—to increase their knowledge, to accumulate more, to collect, to learn more. From one guru to another, searching everywhere, gathering whatever they can. Then, after hoarding this junk, they will think they have wealth. Tomorrow they too will become gurus, and people will come to them—and this vicious circle is long.
No—by collecting knowledge one cannot attain knowing.
The intellect can only accumulate; it cannot know. Intellect only creates memory; it cannot know. Intellect is a device, a mechanical instrument. And it is not surprising that now we have computers. Soon you won’t even need to keep an intellect inside—you can keep a computer in your pocket. No need to remember things within; you will feed the computer and it will answer. If the question arises: “Is there a soul?” take out your pocket computer and ask. It will say: “Yes—written in the Gita, in the Upanishads,” and list references. You will happily pocket it and continue your journey.
The intellect is doing the same. It is a computer. It is a device of memory in which you have stored many things. Have you noticed you are not the intellect? You are very different from it. It often happens: you come to see me in the morning and ask, “Do you recognize me?” I think: I have seen this face somewhere. Where? I ask my computer, my intellect, “Where have I seen him?”
I am separate—the one who has fallen into the puzzle: Have I seen him or not? I ask my machine, “Quickly find this man—where have we seen him?” And the man is saying, “You still haven’t recognized me?” Now I am in trouble. I tell my intellect, “Hurry up!” The intellect says, “Yes, somewhere—but I’ll search.” It is a separate instrument that searches. If you press it, it will get confused. Don’t rush a machine or it will jam. If you hurry, everything gets muddled. Give me a little time; sit down; have some tea. I distract you with other talk while my computer works. It must scan through thousands of memory webs, millions of faces and names to find this one. It will work.
So often, if a name doesn’t come, don’t force it—trouble will grow. Do something else for a while. The intellect will work and soon deliver: “Here is the name!” Go to the garden, dig a hole, drink tea, smoke—anything. Leave the intellect to itself so the machine can do its work. It needs time. A machine needs time—how can it answer instantly? Often what we cannot recall all day pops up at night as we fall asleep. In the morning we realize it came.
Madame Curie, who won the Nobel Prize—she solved many problems in her sleep! When she was overanxious to solve them, the machine jammed; excess intensity creates difficulty. You say, “Quick!”—but the machine can only work by its own process.
So, exhausted in the evening, she would sleep; once she discovered the trick, she used it all her life. At bedtime, tired from struggling with problems, she kept paper and pencil by the bed. In sleep she would wake, write the answer, and sleep again!
You will be amazed: your intellect can solve very difficult problems if it has been fed. If it has been given input beforehand, it will fetch answers. Education is like feeding it. We teach a child to count, to add, to multiply—this is feeding the computer. Tomorrow we ask, “What is three hundred times three hundred?”—and the answer comes instantly because the mechanism is ready.
Intellect is a machine—and you are utterly separate from it.
A friend of mine fell from a train and injured his head; he lost his entire memory. The machine broke. He is fine even now—only we no longer consider him “normal.” I went to see him; we studied together as children. When I visited his village, he looked at me as if he had never seen me—the recorder was broken. He asked, “Who are you?” I said, “Don’t you recognize me?” He replied, “I don’t recognize anyone.”
Rahul Sankrityayan was a great scholar, a Mahapandit. Near the end, his mental computer failed. He was in a hospital in Delhi. Great scholars’ computers can fail—too much load, too much work: so many books read and written that the brain gives up; the machine goes beyond its limit. In the end his condition was such that he had to relearn the alphabet—A, B, C; ka, kha, ga; one and one is two; two and two is four. He was relearning as he was dying—because all had been forgotten. The memory gave out; the machine stopped working. But he remained.
Understand well: what you call your knowledge is a mechanical storehouse you use. It is necessary. For worldly life it is very necessary. If I have to return home now, I must know where I am staying, otherwise how will I go back? It is essential. But for reaching God that instrument is irrelevant—because to reach God there is no address, no location, no house. And we come from before the intellect—intellect is a later development. The brain evolved to meet life’s practical needs.
But we have to go back—to the original source from which we came. God is there. We will have to drop everything and return. There the instrument has no use—and cannot work, because we have no memory of God; we have never met him. This instrument can only function where there has been acquaintance before.
If God meets you today and puts his hand on your shoulder and says, “Brother, do you recognize me?” you will answer, “No.” You will ask your computer, “Do we know him?” It will say, “No; this one we have never met. Who is he?” But if Lord Krishna appears, you will recognize him—the computer has his image: we have seen him in temples playing the flute. If he comes just so, you will recognize: “Yes—seems familiar; peacock feather at an angle—everything fits.”
But a follower of Christ will not recognize him. He will say, “Who is this man with a peacock feather? What is this?” If you meet Zarathustra, you won’t recognize him; a Zoroastrian will.
Whoever you “recognize” is not God, because we have no memory of God. Our machine has no record to identify him. If you do recognize and say, “Yes, this is he,” know it is not God—it is a projection, a composite of your memories and knowledge. The one before whom you stand and your computer says, “Totally unfamiliar—never known—who is this?”—and you search within and no answer arises, you cannot recognize—then understand: you have come to some door, to some temple, where the unknown stands. One whom we do not know.
God cannot be recognized, because we do not know him. Hence, if someone comes to you and says, “I have found God,” know he has found those “gods” his memory could identify. That is why I say: the machinery of memory, intellect, knowledge is useless for recognizing God. He is unknown—forever unknown. Therefore he is a mystery.
What does “mystery” mean? That before which we cannot recognize. We stand dumbstruck; our eyes go wide, we cannot blink. The mind says, “I don’t know.” The intellect says, “I don’t know.” The feelings say, “No connection.” Action says, “We have no capacity.” The whole personality declares: “Nothing—we know nothing, recognize nothing. Who is this? What is this?” When all your instruments tire and fall silent, no answer comes; when your ego says, “I have no way”—only then your head bows at those feet. You fall at the feet of the unknown.
Surrender does not happen by your doing. When all your instruments give up, none co-operates, suddenly you find yourself fallen at the feet—of the unknown. The one you thought you were—an aggregate of instruments—disappears. Only that remains which is hidden behind all instruments.
Hence the one who has known God does not say, “I have known.” If he says so, he has not known. If you go ask him, “Tell us—have you known God?” he may perhaps laugh—or look at you silently. But he will not say “Yes I have,” because even the state to say “yes” is not ours. Who will say yes? Who will sanction it? Who will give the certificate, “This is it”? No—none of that.
Before crucifying Jesus, the governor—Pontius Pilate—came to him and said, “I have one question. Answer it before you die.”
Jesus said, “What is the question?”
Pilate asked, “What is truth?”
He thought: this man is dying; it is the last chance; people say he knows—ask him.
Jesus remained silent.
The man said, “Answer me—what is truth?”
Still Jesus remained silent. Perhaps he spoke with his eyes, without words upon his lips, in his very breath. But Pilate understood only human language, the language his computer could recognize.
He said, “He won’t speak; it seems he knows nothing.” And he ordered the crucifixion.
Jesus did not answer. A scholar—a priest of Jesus—would have answered. He would have quoted the Bible: “Truth is this.” Jesus did not answer; his priest would. There is certainly a difference. Jesus knows; the priest does not.
Is it within human capacity to say what truth is? Is it within our capacity to recognize what God is?
There, our entire structure collapses; chaos ensues; all arrangements fall, all words are lost, language disappears. The very person who was seeking vanishes. Only silence and emptiness remain. Who will recognize there? Whom will one recognize? Even if one recognizes, where is the memory to recall it, where the answer, whom to tell? Everything is lost there.
No, the learned do not reach there. The “ignorant” do.
By “ignorant” I mean one who has come to see that knowledge is futile—who wearies even of knowledge, sees there is no essence in it. He says, “Fine—let memory serve; good for getting by, meeting life’s needs—but it leads nowhere. Knowledge is no path.” But one must wander along knowledge for a time—otherwise you won’t even realize it is a cul-de-sac.
Krishnamurti says he is fortunate he never read scriptures. I say I am fortunate that I did—because by reading I became certain there is nothing there. Without reading, you cannot be certain.
It is necessary to read scriptures so that you know there is nothing there. It is necessary to explore knowledge so that you discover there is nothing here—so that this direction is exhausted. For me, the sole use of the path of knowledge is this: walk it thoroughly so that no doubt remains—“perhaps there was something in the scriptures.” No—see it clearly: there is nothing there.
The one use of scripture is that by reading it you are finished with scripture. That “being finished” is a great use, because the entanglement ends. Then you do not remain caught in knowledge; you turn toward knowing. You drop the worry for knowledge. You come to see: it cannot be got from another, no one can give it, it cannot be received secondhand.
This is such a great realization that if it becomes absolutely clear to me that no one else can give, I am thrown back upon myself. Now I must swim or drown—myself. There is no other way; no one else can give! And the day this becomes certain, an immeasurable energy is born within—held back since birth only so long as I leaned on others’ shoulders and hands.
If you are thrown into the ocean—no rescuer, no boat, no support—what will you do? Will you not thrash your arms and legs? That is what swimming is—throwing your limbs. At first disorderly, then gradually with rhythm.
But for swimming, one condition is essential: there must be no support. If there is support, no one can learn to swim. Those who “teach” swimming do nothing; they simply throw you into water and do not support you and stand watching from the shore. No one wants to drown—so he starts flailing. And everyone knows how to swim—the situation simply needs to arise. Once the situation compels, everyone throws their limbs; within four to six days it becomes ordered, and then it makes no difference.
Religion becomes available only to those who, in the ocean of life, drop all supports and are ready to sink, who are thrown in.
I call him a guru who throws you in and goes home—never even looks back to see what happened to you. If a guru holds your hand and leads you, he is your enemy; he will kill you, because you will never learn to swim; you will never be thrown upon yourself.
If knowledge does only this—throws you into the water, and you realize that no scripture, no knowledge will save you—then a revolution will begin in your life.
That is why I say to you: knowledge is not a way; it is a distraction. When it becomes visible as such, you step out of it. And it is not that, having seen knowledge is useless, you need to walk back miles because you had gone miles. Not at all. The day you see that knowledge is futile, you are instantly out. It is not that “I walked a thousand miles on knowledge’s path—now I must unlearn the Gita, the Quran, the Upanishads.” No—no need to forget. It is enough to know: what I have remembered is not knowledge, it is only memory. The matter ends. It is not my knowing; it is someone else’s. It is borrowed, stale—not mine, not my realization, not original. Knowing just this is enough. There is no need to forget the Gita.
A gentleman used to come to me. One day he said, “Your words have touched me so deeply that I tied up my Gita and Upanishads and threw them into the well.”
I said, “What fault had the well committed? Now the well will be in as much trouble as you were. If it starts reading the Gita and Upanishads, it is finished! What will become of the poor well? It has no hands and feet—how will it get rid of them? Why trouble the well?”
He said, “What are you saying! I thought you would be very pleased.”
I said, “It is not a question of my pleasure. If you throw your Gita and Upanishads into a well, that only shows you are not free of them yet. Attachment remains. Earlier you believed that resting your head upon the Gita would bring knowledge; now you believe throwing it into a well will bring knowledge. But either way, you are still tied to the Gita—whether you throw it into a well or put it on your head.”
Do not burn the scriptures. They are very useful. Do not throw them into wells—the wells are not at fault. Man created them; man must carry them. What can wells do? No—neither throw nor burn. Scriptures are valuable; their greatest value is that by reading them you will become free of them. You will know: I found nothing. So read the scriptures, explore knowledge—but keep checking: did anything happen? Did I gain anything? Only words, words, words—no truth at all! And when you are surrounded by a web of words and it becomes clear that you received nothing but words—only words—
One more small story, and I will finish.
There was a very unusual man, Lawrence. He lived long in Arabia—took part in the Arab revolution. Gradually he loved the Arabs so much he became almost Arab. Then he took some Arab friends to Paris to show them the city. There was a big fair; he said, “Come, I’ll show you Paris.” He housed them in a great hotel; showed them the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre—everything grand. But the Arabs took delight in none of it. They were interested in something utterly unexpected. In the Louvre, they would say, “Hurry—let’s go back to the hotel!”
He took them to the exhibition—great marvels. Showed them the Eiffel Tower; they said, “Let’s hurry back,” and as soon as they reached, they darted into the bathrooms. He wondered, “What is this?”
Even in the cinema, midway they would insist on returning and all eight or ten of them would disappear into their bathrooms. He asked, “What is going on?”
It turned out that for them the greatest miracle was the tap—the faucet! They were desert dwellers; for them it was a great miracle: turn the handle and water flows! They kept going in twenty times a day just to open the faucet and watch the water.
On the day of departure, the car was ready, luggage loaded—but the Arabs had vanished. He searched; asked the manager; looked around the hotel—worried they might wander off, as they did not know the language. But they were nowhere outside. Then it occurred to him: perhaps they have gone into the bathrooms—time to leave.
He went and found each in his bathroom trying to remove the faucet! He asked, “What are you doing, you fools?”
They said, “We want to take these taps home. They are wonderful—just open them and water comes!”
He said, “Idiots! Taking the taps will do nothing; behind them is a whole network, a great reservoir. Pipes lead from there to here. The tap alone is nothing.”
But the poor fellows thought, “Such a small thing—take it home to Arabia, and it will be marvelous! Whoever sees it will be amazed: turn the tap—water flows!”
The scriptures are only taps. Behind them is a vast network. Opening the scripture’s tap will not make wisdom flow. Behind the Gita is a vast network—a reservoir named Krishna. You carry the Gita under your arm and repeat their mistake. Nothing happens by clutching scriptures; they are only taps. Nothing can flow from them by themselves. You must reach the reservoir behind—the source—then you too will become scripture. What you speak will become scripture. But you must reach that reservoir—the living spring of God, of truth. Taps alone won’t help.
Taps are being sold—some even free. The Gita Press in Gorakhpur prints taps. Keep them in your homes for two or four pennies. Open the tap and let the stream of wisdom flow—no, nothing will flow from taps. Not knowledge, but the capacity to know.
And if any questions remain, I will speak of them tomorrow morning.
You have listened to me with such quiet—my gratitude. In the end, I bow to the God seated within all. Please accept my pranam.
Osho's Commentary
To break man into fragments and then try to know Truth from any one fragment cannot become the doorway to the indivisible. If the indivisible is to be known, only an indivisible human being can know it.
Neither by action can it be known, because action is but a fragment of man. Nor by knowledge, because knowledge too is only a fragment. Nor by feeling, by devotion, because that also is a fragment of man.
It can be known only from the undivided. And remember, by adding these three together the undivided is not created. When these three are left behind, whatsoever remains is the undivided. Through addition the whole never comes to be. In the sum, fragments still remain present.
For example, by adding Hindu and Muslim you can never establish unity. Even if Hindu and Muslim join hands, two fragments still persist. But if the Hindu is no longer a Hindu, the Muslim no longer a Muslim, then that which remains is unity. By joining Hindu and Muslim, unity will not come. When both the Hindu and the Muslim cease to be Hindu and Muslim, then what remains—humanity—will be one.
Attempts have been made to add the intellect, the heart, and action—let us yoke these three together. But what is made by adding these three is not undivided. That which is produced by addition cannot be the whole. The fragments will inevitably remain. They will be joined perhaps, yet they will still be there. The indivisible is found only when the fragments are left behind. It is found through transcendence, through going beyond. When we rise above the fragments, then it is found.
The undivided is not an addition; the undivided is freedom from fragments.
The human mind is a mechanism of fragmentation. The mind looks at things by breaking them into parts. You have seen a ray of the sun: if that ray passes through a piece of glass, a prism, it breaks into fragments, into seven parts, seven colors arise. The sunray itself is only white. White is not a color. White is not a color! When the ray is refracted by the prism, then the seven colors become visible.
The prism of the intellect, the shard of the intellect, the very style of the intellect’s seeing, is to view by breaking. The intellect can only see by fragmenting. It never sees the togetherness. It can see only parts, never the whole.
So the intellect breaks life’s truth into many fragments. Those fragments are created by the intellect and are false in the same way that a stick looks bent when placed in water. It does not become bent—only appears so. Take it out of the water and it is straight again. It did not become straight; it was straight already. Only that appearance of bending, created by the medium of water, departs. Put it back in water and again the stick appears bent.
Does the stick truly become bent in water? Put your hand in and touch it and you will know it has not bent. But even your hand will appear bent. In the medium of water, everything appears askew.
In the medium of intellect, everything is broken, becomes bits and pieces. And mind has three basic pieces: thought, feeling, and action. Therefore, whenever mind looks, it looks by dividing. Mind can also perform one more trick—try to add these three together—but that addition will not be the whole. The mind’s addition will be utterly deceptive. Mind may paste them together from above, but the fragments remain. That which we add remains what it was—joined yet still separate.
If the indivisible Truth is to be known, the mind must be transcended. And in transcending it, neither action helps, nor feeling, nor knowledge. This needs to be understood clearly—then I will speak to your questions from yesterday.
To know the indivisible I too must stand indivisible, for I can know only that which I am. I cannot know that which I am not.
You have eyes—therefore you can know the ray of the sun. Without eyes you could not know it. To know the sun, eyes are necessary. The blind will not know the sun. You hear sound—so ears are necessary. You must have something within you; only then can you know something without.
If the indivisible is to be known, what must you have? If the indivisible is to be known, an indivisible consciousness must be within you—an integrated consciousness in which there is no break, no fragment.
But what we presently have is a mind that is all in pieces. Mind is fragmentariness. This is the very way of mind’s being, its very structure.
And this structure has utility in certain directions. It is necessary that in some dimensions the mind see in fragments. It has its use. When a person is thinking, if simultaneously he also indulges feeling, thinking becomes difficult. When a scientist thinks, at that moment he must be freed of all feeling. If he carries feeling within, he will not remain a scientist. Feeling means prejudice, bias.
There is a Dr. Banerjee—you may have heard his name—at Jaipur University, who researches reincarnation. He came to see me in Bombay. Ten or twenty people had gathered to listen to our dialogue. Dr. Banerjee said, “I want to prove scientifically that reincarnation happens!”
I said to him, “What you have just said is already unscientific.”
He asked, “What do you mean?”
I said, “A scientist does not want to prove anything. And if he wants to prove, it means that before he begins he has already decided what is to be proven. You say, ‘I want to prove scientifically that reincarnation exists.’ This very statement is unscientific. It is not yet proven, and yet in your mind it is already taken as proven—and you want to prove that!”
The scientist says, “I do not know whether reincarnation is or is not. Whatever is, I want to know.” He should have no feeling of his own, otherwise he will prove in accordance with his feeling. If a scientist carries feeling, he cannot be a scientist. He must drop all feeling. He must only think. There should be no bias. If even a trace of bias is there, his research will no longer be scientific.
Therefore the mind must be divided. For the work of mind, division is essential; otherwise thinking would be impossible. That is why very emotional people cannot think; their feeling interferes.
Nations saturated with feeling have not been able to become scientific. Our own nation, for example, is excessively driven by feeling; hence science did not take birth. For science to be born, feeling must be put aside.
And if someone is very emotional and, in between, science and thought enter him, he will also be in trouble. If someone’s face looks beautiful to you and your thought intrudes—“Why does it look beautiful?”—you will soon be in difficulty, because beauty is a matter of feeling, not of thought. No logic is needed for it. If logic comes in, you will be in trouble. You will not be able to find why it looks beautiful.
If I fall in love with someone and begin to analyze scientifically why I have fallen in love, love will be lost. Love will not remain, because for love there is no need of scientific thought. Hence those who think in a very scientific manner become incapable of love.
Those who think in a very scientific way cannot write poetry, because poetry has no need of thought. The less thought there is, the more poetry flows. If I go to a scientist and say, “My beloved’s face seems to me like the moon,” he will say, “You have lost your senses! What relation is there between the moon and a woman’s face? If we put them on a scale, there is no balance at all. The moon is one thing, a woman’s face another. What connection is there?” He will put me in a fix—and I will not be able to prove that a face can be like the moon. It cannot be—mathematically. But in feeling it can be; in mathematics it cannot. Mathematics and feeling belong to different worlds, their journeys are different.
Mind works in three dimensions. And one who has to act should not be too emotional either; otherwise action will be hindered. One who has to act should not be overly thoughtful; otherwise thought will obstruct action.
I have heard of a thinker who enlisted for the First World War. The war was raging; he joined the army. But he was a thinker. In military training when the command came, “Left turn!” everyone turned left, but he stood still.
His officer asked, “Why don’t you turn?”
He said, “I cannot do anything without thinking. I am thinking—why should I turn left?”
The officer said, “If you go on thinking like this, you are of no use to us. In the military, thinking will not do—command is supreme. You don’t need to think. If ordered, ‘Left turn!’—you turn left.”
But the man said, “First let me think why I should turn.”
He was taught for many days, but he could not even manage left and right. If he did not think, he could not act. But he had been recruited, so the officer sent him to the military mess, the dining hall, to do some work there.
Peas had arrived for the vegetable. He was told, “Separate the small peas from the big.” After an hour the officer came and found the man sitting with the dish exactly as it was—eyes closed! The officer said, “What are you doing? You haven’t done even this much!”
He said, “I have fallen into great difficulty. You are right—separate the small from the big. But there are some peas exactly in the middle—neither small nor big. Where am I to put them? Until this is decided, nothing is possible for me. First I must think, then I can do.”
Mind is divided. For the mind’s work it is necessary that it be compartmentalized. Therefore mind does not know Truth—because Truth is not a utility.
Truth is the knowing of that which is indivisible. Perhaps even ‘knowing’ is not right, because with knowing, knowledge is recalled. So when we say ‘knowing Truth,’ do not take it as knowledge. Knowing Truth means becoming one with Truth. But then ‘becoming one’ evokes the sense of feeling. With the one we love, we become one. Yet even ‘becoming one with Truth’ is not what feeling means.
So the fact is: whether we call it knowing, being, or doing—no word is adequate. All our words were coined for the mind’s three functions—for action, for feeling, or for knowledge. Our entire language is mind-made. That is why those who have known Truth say, “It is difficult to say,” because no language has been developed by the mind to express it.
The language the mind has developed serves three functions. Mind can do—there is language for that. Mind can love—there is language for that. Mind can think—there is language for that. But when mind is not doing any of the three, there is no language for it. And there is a reason for this.
There cannot be language then, because mind itself is not there. What remains is not mind; hence there is no language for it.
Further, language requires two—the speaker and the listener. As long as mind remains, language remains, because as long as mind remains there is ‘I’ and ‘you.’
But where mind is no more, there is no listener and no speaker. There is neither I nor you. Only that which is, remains. There, the distinction of I–Thou has fallen. Who will speak, and who will listen? Therefore no language could develop there. No language could be developed to express Truth. Thus all the scriptures are attempts to say Truth—attempts that fail, not attempts that succeed. None has succeeded yet, nor is it that success will come later. It cannot succeed—because beyond mind there is no instrument of language at all.
But man insists on understanding through language. How else will he understand? Since man says, “We will understand only in language,” three pathways remain: Karma Yoga, Bhakti Yoga, and Jnana Yoga. These are devices to say something within language. But what is said is no longer Truth—because it is said through the mind’s fragments. It becomes false to the same extent that in the medium of water the stick appears bent. In the medium of mind, Truth is divided into three, and the very division turns it false. Only as the indivisible can Truth be Truth.
It is as if I see a flower and then cut it into fifty pieces. I give you one piece and say, “The beauty that I knew—if not the whole, at least the fiftieth part you will know.”
No—you will not know even a fiftieth. The flower’s beauty was in the undivided flower. By making fifty pieces, the fiftieth part will not carry beauty. Nothing of beauty will come to you. You will even suspect I am mad: I call the flower supremely beautiful, and you hold a broken petal from which nothing of that beauty can be known. If I say, “It is the fiftieth part,” you will think, “If I multiply this by fifty in my mind, perhaps it will be right.” Even if you multiply your petal by fifty, you will say, “No beauty forms out of this. The flower was not fifty times this—the flower was something altogether different—undivided.”
A man is alive. We cut him into pieces, scatter bone and flesh. Someone who loved him, who kept saying, “He is so beautiful, so beloved,” we bring to him and say, “Here is your beautiful, your beloved.” He will say, “This is not that man. I have never loved these bones, this skin, this flesh and marrow. That which I loved—this is not it.”
We say, “But it is all of him. Put it on the scale: the weight is the same as the man’s. Take it to the laboratory: the same amount of aluminum as in his bones is here. The same phosphorus. Check everything—the same blood is present, the same flesh.”
Still the lover will say, “Forgive me—this is not the man—because the man was an undivided unity, and these are scattered fragments. And there are things which manifest only in the whole and are lost in the parts. They do not exist in the parts.”
Mind is a process of breaking. Mind is a process of fragmentation. Its way is to shatter things.
It has utility in this world, but not in that. In the world where we live among men, among other minds, there it has usefulness. But where we have to live with the Paramatman, there it has no use. There the mind must be dropped utterly.
For the world, mind is a meaningful instrument; for Truth, mind is an obstacle. For the world, mind is a cooperation; for Truth, mind is a hindrance, an obstruction.
Our difficulty is that we think: if mind works in the world, why not for Truth? We are committing the same mistake as thinking: a bullock cart moves on the ground—why not fly in the sky? The bullock cart moves on earth; precisely therefore it cannot fly. For the sky, a different vehicle is needed, because the dimension changes. The bullock cart travels from A to B along a straight, horizontal line. The airplane has to rise—vertically—from below toward above. The cart goes forward; the plane goes upward. The journeys are utterly different; the vehicles utterly different.
In the world one goes outward; in Truth one goes inward.
In the world one relates with others; in Truth one relates with oneself.
In Truth there is no use of the mind. And our three paths—of knowledge, of devotion, of action—are paths of the mind. Therefore by those paths no one has ever reached Truth, nor can anyone reach.