Tao Upanishad #84

In the West and the East, knowledge has very different meanings.
In the West, by knowledge is meant: knowing something in relation to the outer, knowing something in relation to objects. In the East, knowledge means: knowing the knower, knowing the one who knows. Therefore in the West, knowledge slowly became science; the search there was to know everything except the knower. In the East, knowledge slowly became experience, became religion, because the whole inquiry is to be made into the one who is inquiring.
The Eastern stance is: until we know ourselves, there is no essence in knowing anything else. And however much we may know without knowing ourselves, our ignorance will not be dispelled by it. Information will increase, ignorance will not be removed. We will become learned, not wise. Only one who knows himself is wise. So the Eastern search is inward; the Western search is outward. One who becomes capable in knowing the outer will become powerful; his instruments, his tools, his conveniences, his affluence will increase. One who becomes capable in knowing the inner will become peaceful. Understand this well. One who is skillful in outer knowledge will have more and more means available for pleasure; it is not necessary that bliss will increase. For bliss does not depend on conveniences; bliss depends on the inner capacity of the one who enjoys. One who enters inner knowing may not have his outer conveniences increase; rarely do they. But his capacity for bliss goes on growing.
That which is hidden within you—if that is developed, the East calls it knowledge; if information increases, the West calls it knowledge. Hence the West can call Einstein wise; can call Hegel, Kant wise. The East will not call them wise; the East will call Buddha wise, will call Lao Tzu wise.
There is a great difference between Einstein and Buddha. If there were a competition in information, Einstein would win. What information does Buddha have? But if there were any competition in self-sovereignty, in the dignity of one’s own being, Einstein would prove to be zero. Buddha has something that is inner; Einstein has something that is outer. Einstein does not have the capacity for inner bliss. If you keep this fundamental distinction in mind, Lao Tzu’s sutras will be understood; otherwise, it is difficult to understand them.
'Without stepping out of your own door, one can know what is happening in the world.'
It will seem impossible to us. For if the morning paper does not arrive, how will we know what is happening in the world? And if we do not hear the news on the radio, how will we know what is happening in the world? Our point also appears right: whatever is happening in the world can be known only if news of it reaches us.
Lao Tzu says, 'Without stepping out of your own door, one can know what is happening in the world.'
This is a different kind of knowing. Lao Tzu is saying: it will not be known what happened in Burma, where a boat sank, where a war broke out; but the person who knows himself knows what a human being will be doing on the earth—violence will be flaring up; suicides will be happening; people will be going mad. There is no need to know its details. But one who recognizes man knows what must be happening in the world. And only one who recognizes himself can recognize man. One who knows his own mind knows what must be happening everywhere. He may not know the expanse, but he knows the root.
You go to an astrologer, to a palmist, and they tell you a few things. Perhaps you think that something is being told to you on a very scientific basis—then you are thinking wrongly. The astrologer, the palmist, has a traditional understanding of what goes on in the human mind. To tell you the details, what is happening to you in particular, is difficult. But what is happening, in essence, can be told—because it is happening to everyone.
A friend of mine is an astrologer. Whosever hand he looks at, he will tell him that money comes, but it does not stay in the hand. In whose hand does it stay? If money could stay, it would not be money; it would have no meaning. Money means it moves, it flows, it circulates, it changes hands—only then it has value. Money is money only when it changes hands. If it remains in the hand, it is dust. Value comes into it only when it goes from one hand to another. The space in-between—that is its value.
So the more money moves, the more valuable it becomes. The countries where money travels more become that much richer. America is not as rich as it appears; it appears so because money moves very fast. If an Indian is given money in hand, he will hold on to it as long as he can, until he is forced to let it go. The American—money that will come into his hand twenty years later, he lets go today. He is buying things on installments that he will pay for in twenty years. The money will come to him twenty years later; he has let it go today. He borrows. Because so much money is in motion, changing so many hands, America appears so wealthy. The whole American economics stands on this: the more you spend, the more prosperous you become.
Value enters money when it changes hands; only then is its value known. So it is right—that is the very nature of money. And then it is also the nature of the human mind that however much you may get, however much you may hold back, you will always feel that money does not stay. There are reasons. Because the impulse to make it stay has no limit. You want all wealth to accumulate. That cannot happen. And however much may accumulate, it will still seem to you that it is less than what could have been.
Hence tell the richest man and the most miserly man as well that money comes to your hand and does not stay; he too will accept that this is true.
Say to anyone, my friend says, that the mind is restless.
To have a mind is to have restlessness. Where there is mind, there will be restlessness. The mind is not restless; the mind itself is restlessness. Therefore it can be said without fail to anyone that the mind is restless. For this there is no need to look at a person, nor any need to read the lines of his hand. Restlessness is the very nature of mind. And such a person as has no mind will hardly ever go to an astrologer. No Buddha will go to show his hand to an astrologer. If someone says this about Buddha, it would be wrong—but Buddhas do not go to astrologers.
In fact, only the restless man goes to the astrologer. Only he is eager to know about the future whose present is full of misery. One who is in so much pain today that he feels like committing suicide—he wants to know a little about the future, whether there is some hope so that he can pass today, live through it, somehow get by. To get some convenience for living from the hope of tomorrow—that is why a man goes to the astrologer. No one goes to an astrologer except the unhappy.
So if the astrologer says the mind is restless, the heart is sorrowful, full of torment, surrounded by worries—there is no need to know anything. If the astrologer understands his own mind, he has nearly understood the minds of all human beings. The whole business of astrology runs on a simple understanding of the mind. I am not saying that astrology is false; but the astrology that is true is not available with the street-corner palmists. That is a very inner science; no business can be made of it. But the one who makes a business is doing so on the basis of understanding the human mind.
Tell anyone that there is a lack of love in his life; it will apply to all. If one is unmarried, it will apply that there is a lack of love; and if one is married, it will apply that there is a lack of love. Love never fills to the brim. No one ever feels that he has received as much love as should have been. That thirst is infinite; even if an ocean of love were to be had, it would still not be fulfilled. So it is difficult to find a person in whose case, if you say there is a lack of love, you would be wrong.
You can say to every person that you do good to people and in response they do you harm. Everyone believes so—whether they do good or not makes no difference. Every person thinks, I am doing good, and in return I receive bad. These are characteristics of the mind. For them there is no need to know person by person. It is a fixed assumption of mind that I do good and people do bad to me. Has anyone ever thought that I do bad to people and people do good to me? Have you ever met a man who says, what a strange world—that I do bad to people and they do good to me! You will not meet such a man, because that is not the rule of mind. Although everyone tries in every possible way to do bad from his own side and tries to snatch every possible good from the other, still the mind always says that I did good and others did bad.
The Sufi fakirs say: do good and throw it into the well. The sign of a good man is that he does good and throws this fact into the well—never raises it again, never again says by mistake that 'I did good'; only then is he a good man. No one becomes good by doing good; he is good who, having done good, forgets.
If we understand the common tendencies of the mind, there is no need to pick up the newspaper or to listen to the radio to understand what is happening in the world. And the newspaper repeats the same thing daily. What happened yesterday is happening today; what happened the day before yesterday is happening today. The same will happen tomorrow. Read the newspaper of any day without reading the date—there will be no great difference. Knowing man as he is, one can infer what is going on.
Lao Tzu says: if a human being has even a little inkling of the inner mind, he will know what is happening in the world. There is no need to know each trivial event. The broad laws of life become clear.
And why do we want to know each event? We want to know because we have no idea of the broad law. And even if we read newspapers our whole life, we do not get any sense of human nature. Human nature is what is to be understood; what man does is secondary. What will a mind filled with lust do, what will a mind filled with anger do, what will a mind filled with greed do, what will a mind filled with violence do—if these basic formulas are clear to us, then we can declare once and for all what will happen tomorrow, what will happen the day after.
Three hundred years ago, in the West, an astrologer made announcements for three hundred years. And nearly all his announcements in these three hundred years proved true. There are three reasons for the correctness of his announcements. First, he announced wars. Every ten years a great war occurs. Psychologists say that in ten years a man accumulates so much hatred that an explosion in war becomes necessary. Just as if you go on heating water, at one hundred degrees it will turn into steam, and if the kettle is closed, the kettle will burst. Since all religions and all moral teachings advise that the kettle of the mind be kept closed, therefore every ten years war becomes inevitable. In those three hundred years of announcements, he declared war every ten years.
Then, what kind of men wage war? Not every kind of man wages war; a certain type does. It is a very interesting thing that we remember the names of people, but we never notice the type. Hitler or Stalin or Mao or Genghis or Taimurlane, Nadir, Napoleon, Alexander—history reads the names; but the intelligent person does not care about the labels, he looks at the type hidden behind them. If we remove the names, Hitler and Stalin are men of exactly the same mould; Napoleon and Alexander are men of exactly the same mould. The labels differ; what is hidden within is exactly the same.
Whenever a war occurs every ten years, one Napoleon, one Hitler, one Stalin is needed. The man who made those announcements three hundred years ago enumerated the characteristics of those personalities—that this kind of man will initiate war. And they always prove right, because whoever the man may be—be it Hitler who starts the war, or Mussolini, or Tojo, whoever it is—names do not matter. The characteristics are so accurate that when Hitler begins, those who believe in that astrologer say: look, three hundred years ago each characteristic of Hitler was described. The astrologer has no connection with Hitler; he has enumerated the traits of the type of man who initiates war; they apply.
This human mind has types. And those same types are always on the earth, and there is nearly a repetition. History is a long repetition; everything repeats there, the same things happen again and again. Details change, names change, but the original sources of events do not change.
Lao Tzu is saying, 'Without stepping out of your own door, one can know what is happening in the world.'
He is saying it in this sense. But such a person will need complete knowledge of his own mind. One who knows his own mind rightly has known the whole of humanity. Nothing remains left to be known. And if you cannot recognize another person, its total meaning is only this: that you have not yet recognized yourself. If some other person seems puzzling to you, seems mysterious, that you cannot understand him—the total meaning is simply that you have not yet become acquainted with the humanity within you.
If one understands a single drop of the ocean rightly, the whole ocean is understood. The ocean is very vast; the drop is very small. But whatever is in the ocean exists subtly in the drop as well. Then the ocean is only the expansion of the drop, or the drop is only the condensation of the ocean. One who has tasted the drop and known that it is salty knows that the whole ocean is full of saltiness. Then there is no need to taste the whole ocean again and again. And one who goes on tasting the ocean here and there and still cannot be certain—understand that he is a fool.
If I have understood the mind within me, I have understood the mind of all humanity. That is why the saints become compassionate; because by understanding their own mind they come to know how weak man is! How poor man is! How helpless man is! Therefore they can forgive man. Their forgiveness arises out of the understanding of their own mind. And if a saint cannot forgive someone, understand that he is not yet a saint. He does not even know how helpless man is.
Those whom you take to be sadhus and saints are almost people like you—standing in just as deep ignorance. They cannot forgive you; they declare you criminals. If some small mistake happens from you, no forgiveness arises in their heart. Certainly, they do not yet have complete understanding of their own mind; and they do not have the sense that man is weak and full of error. Or else they have pushed their own mistakes, their own mind so deep into the unconscious that their connections have been severed.
One who understands himself rightly—then no human being in this world remains a stranger to him. And whatever crime any human being can commit on this earth, the one who understands his own mind knows: I too could have done it. And for what I could do myself, to be angry at another, to punish him, to throw him into hell—this is absurd. The moment one understands the mind rightly, he knows: the worst of the worst is hidden within me, and the best of the best too. Therefore saints neither condemn the bad nor praise the good—because both possibilities are their own possibilities. Buddha is hidden within them; Hitler is hidden within them. Ram and Ravana both! Ravana too is a part of their own being, and Ram too is a part of their own being. And the battle is not somewhere outside; it is within. And these two characters are not characters of some story; they are the names of two parts of one’s own mind. And both parts are mine. Then neither does Ram remain worship-worthy, nor does Ravana remain condemnable.
This will be a little difficult to hear. Because we can still understand that one should not condemn Ravana—but at least worship Ram. But remember: one who worships will also condemn. One who honors will also dishonor. So if some sadhu honors Mahavira, honors Ram, honors Krishna—how will he be able to refrain from insulting Ravana?
Therefore the supreme saint neither condemns nor praises. His utterances are statements of fact, not evaluations. If water flows downward, he will say: water flows downward. But there is no condemnation in it; it is only information about the fact of water. If fire burns, he will say: fire burns. But there is no condemnation in it, for the dharma of fire is to burn. It is information about the fact.
As someone becomes capable of rightly understanding his own mind, the whole world is understood—that humanity is a single occurrence, with minor differences. Those differences are differences of measure, differences of degree. Someone is hot at ninety-eight degrees, someone at ninety-seven degrees, someone at ninety-nine degrees. Such are the differences among human beings. But one who has understood heat understands the degrees as well.
'Without stepping out of your own door, one can know what is happening in the world.'
But to know one’s own mind is no event smaller than knowing the world. To know one’s own mind is almost to know the whole world. It is just as vast, just as complex. The same vast jungle of the immense is there. If someone begins to uncover the fine fibers of his mind, he has entered into the immense, into a very great happening.
Psychologists say that in this small human mind are all the remembrances of evolution. On the earth—according to the evolutionists—man has been here for about a million years at least. The earth has existed for about four billion years. In a million years, whatever man has known, all those impressions are in your mind. That is only speaking of man. But evolutionists say that man is not a broken incident, he is a link in a chain. Behind man is the chain of animals; behind animals is the chain of plants. So in four billion years whatever has happened on this earth, the subtle imprints of all that are in your mind. And if we fully understand this mathematics, then whatever happened in animals before man, whatever happened in trees before animals, whatever happened in the earth before trees—if the signs of all that are in our mind, then when the earth had not yet formed, in the nebula out of which the earth was born, whatever was happening there, its signs should also be in us. This means that the entire chain of Existence is within us; whatever has ever happened in this Existence, we carry it hidden within us—it is part of our mind. And this is only backward! Forward too this reasoning is just as true—that whatever will ever happen in this world, the seeds of it are also within us. The human mind is the whole Existence; spread out in all dimensions—past and future.
Physiologists say that when a child grows in the mother’s womb, in nine months he completes as much of a journey as man has completed in the entire history of the past. The first moment of the child—when the first living cell is in the mother’s womb—he begins from where the first fish egg was born in the ocean. Because physiologists say that the fish is the first form of man. So the child in the mother’s womb begins by living like a fish. And there are substantial facts in their assertion. The water in the mother’s womb is exactly like the water of the ocean in which the fish swims. It has the same amount of salt as the ocean has. It has the same chemicals as the ocean. The mother’s womb contains water exactly like the ocean’s water in which the child begins to swim—the fish begins to swim for the first time. And then in nine months—what in evolution took roughly a billion years—the child quickly completes all the steps in nine months. A moment comes when the child is like a monkey; only after that does he begin to be like a human child. He nearly completes the whole chain in a short time. Those events which took us millions of years to complete in history, in evolution, the child completes in moments—but he completes them. He certainly passes through them.
In the body also, in the mind also, the whole history is hidden. Lao Tzu’s statement is scientific. If a person recognizes the entire circumference of his mind and body, of his Existence, of his person, then what is happening in the world, and what had happened where, and what will happen where—not only the present but the past and the future too—begin to show their subtle glimpses to him. Western scientists, by experimenting in laboratories, have arrived at conclusions; the Eastern yogis, by diving only into their own mind, by searching, have arrived at conclusions. The conclusions are almost the same; the difference is not very great.
Darwin said that man was born from animals. Christianity opposed it very much. Because Christianity has no very old history of Yoga, and no very great tradition of yogis. Christianity is a ritualistic religion. It does not have sources of experience as living as those of the Buddhists or Hindus or Jains in India. Christianity opposed it, because it seemed absurd that till yesterday we believed that man was born of God, that God himself is man’s father, and suddenly Darwin declared that we have no knowledge of God; man’s father is the ape. To shift the father from God towards the monkey felt very insulting. Where man was just a little below the gods—now he was joined with monkeys!
But the Eastern yogis have continually said that man’s consciousness has evolved forward out of the animals. We have continually said that after wandering through 8.4 million wombs, man has become human. Had Darwin said this in India, we would have had no difficulty. Because Darwin was saying only a very small thing. He was saying only this much—that from one womb, the ape’s womb, man has come; we have been saying from 8.4 million wombs! In that are small caterpillars, worms, insects, moths—everyone. All forms of life in this world—through them all man has passed, and then he has become man. The conception of evolution as we have it—Western science still needs a little time to reach there. But we did not know this by experimenting in a laboratory. We knew it by understanding the human mind. And everything is hidden in the human mind. The marks of the whole journey and the dust of the infinite pilgrimage are settled upon man’s mind. We only tried to open a single drop of man—to recognize what the entire history of man is; the known, the unknown, through where all man has passed.
'Without peeping out of your windows, one can see the Tao of Heaven.'
And what is happening in the world—that is fine; more important than that: what is the ultimate nature of life, what is Tao! And where is that source of life from which all bliss, all music, all juice arises! From where life springs, expands, from where life germinates—what is that original nature! Lao Tzu says: without opening the windows of your house, without peeping through them, one can see even the Tao of Heaven. To know the nature of this earth is one thing; even the nature of Heaven, the ultimate truth, the last layer of bliss—there is a way to know it within oneself.
If the mind is known, the world is known. And if the chaitanya hidden behind the mind is known, then the ultimate nature of the world—the truth, that final event of Existence beyond which one cannot go—that Tao, that Rta, that Dharma can be known.
But we do not even become acquainted with the mind. And consciousness is hidden behind the mind. By consciousness I mean that element which sees the mind.
A Western scientist, Delgado, was performing a unique experiment. His experiments are precious, and in the future much of human life will depend on them. Through that experiment he reached a very ancient truth—of which he has no inkling. He was experimenting that whenever a specific center of someone’s brain is touched with electricity, particular memories sprout. There are some seventy million nerves in the brain, and every nerve is a center of special memories. If that nerve is touched with electricity, if an electric current is put into it, it immediately comes alive; and the memories hidden in it begin to come out the way words emerge from a tape recorder—the memories hidden in that nerve begin to appear on the screen of the brain.
Suppose a certain part of your brain is touched, and in that part a childhood memory is hidden—that you were five years old, running in a garden, trying to catch a butterfly—that memory will instantly be aroused. And it will not only arise as a memory; it will feel as if you are again five years old and running in the garden. It will appear as a living event, and the whole memory will replay. Remove the electricity, and the memory will stop. Touch it again, and it will begin exactly from where it began before, in precisely the same sequence.
Delgado has touched the same spot three hundred, six hundred times with electricity; the memory starts again from exactly the same point. As soon as the electricity is removed, the memory goes back into its circuit; at the touch it again begins from A B C. The patients on whom he was experimenting—brain patients—when the memory was aroused the first time, they completely forgot that they were separate; they became one with that memory. But when it was aroused the second, third, tenth, fiftieth time, gradually the patient began to separate from the memory; the memory began to run like a film on a screen and the patient became a witness. He stepped aside, he began to watch from a distance. Now he knows that electricity is being applied and a memory is being aroused, a recorded memory is reappearing. And he has stood far away; now he is watching. Now he knows that I am seeing this, and I am separate. The patient who underwent this experiment six or seven hundred times experienced a very unique bliss. Delgado has written that it was beyond our understanding why this bliss was arising!
That bliss is the very bliss that the Upanishads call the bliss of the sakshi; which Lao Tzu is indicating when he says that even if one does not peep through the door or open the window, he can know within himself the secret of Tao.
That witnessing is Dharma; it is the ultimate center of our destiny, of our nature. The day we become capable of standing apart and watching even the mind—begin to see our own mind as if it belongs to someone else—thoughts moving in our own brain no longer seem to be ours, our identification breaks, we stand far away, our attachment to them is shattered, the bridge between collapses—we become only the seer. The very moment a person becomes the seer of his mind, the secret of the Tao of Heaven opens before him. That is why Lao Tzu calls it the Tao of Heaven—because it is supreme bliss. Heaven means supreme bliss; such bliss that has no end. The chain of that great bliss reveals itself the moment one becomes established in witnessing.
If we understand the mind, we have understood the world; if we understand consciousness, we have understood Brahman. In the drop of man, in that small drop, both are hidden—on its circumference, the world; at its center, Brahman. Each human being is a small replica of the whole Existence, a tiny atomic reflection. If we recognize his circumference, the world is understood; if we understand his center, the Paramatman is understood.