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Om
purnam adaha
purnam idam
purnat purnam udachyate
purnasya purnam adaya purnam evavashishyate

Om
That is the whole.
This is the whole.
From wholeness emerges wholeness.
Wholeness coming from wholeness,
wholeness still remains.

P. D. Ouspensky has written a tremendously significant book, Tertium Organum. The fundamental of Tertium Organum is based and rooted in this sutra: From the whole comes the whole, yet the whole remains behind, intact. From that comes this. That is whole, this is whole, but even though it has come from the whole, the whole is not reduced in any way. It remains the same, as if nothing has been taken out of it.

This is a strange mantra, one of the strangest ones because it goes against the very idea of arithmetic. It belongs to meta-mathematics. The ordinary mathematics will not agree with this. If you take something from anything, then that much is reduced in the original, and if you take the whole then nothing is left behind.

Ouspensky has done a great service to humanity by proposing a higher mathematics, a mathematics of the beyond. That’s what the Upanishads are.

First, the whole is not a finite entity. If it is finite, then of course if you take something out of it, it will be reduced, it will not be the same anymore. The whole is infinite, so whatsoever you take from it, it remains still the infinite. Where can you take it? The whole pervades all, so the very idea of taking is just an idea. As far as reality is concerned nothing is taken out of it and nothing is added unto it, it is always as it has always been.

Secondly, in ordinary mathematics the whole is the sum total of its parts. In the higher mathematics that is not so: the whole is not the sum total of its parts, it is more than that. That more is very significant. If you cannot understand that more you will remain absolutely unaware of the religious dimension of things.

For example, the beauty of a roseflower, is it just a sum total of its parts? It should be, according to the ordinary mathematics – it is not. The beauty is something more. Just by putting all the chemicals: the water, the earth, the air, and everything that constitutes the flower – even if you put all that together, the beauty will not arise. The beauty is something more, hence in analysis it disappears.

If you go to the chemist, the scientist, to inquire about the beauty of a rose, he will analyze it. Analysis is the method of science. Analysis means breaking it into its parts so that you can know of what it constitutes. But the moment you break it into parts, the invisible more disappears. The invisible more exists in the organic unity, you cannot analyze it. It is synthesis. It is totality.

The same is true about all the higher values. A beautiful poem is not just the words that compose it; it is something more. Otherwise anybody who can put words together in a rhythmical form will become a Shakespeare, a Kalidas, a Milton, a Shelley. Then any linguist, grammarian, will become a great poet. That does not happen. You may know the entire grammar of the language, you may be acquainted with all the words of the language, still to be a poet is a totally different phenomenon. Poetry comes first then come the words, not vice versa – it is not that you arrange the words and the poetry arises.

Once, a few of the students of Charles Darwin played a trick on the great scientist – because he was continuously searching about all forms of life and he was always categorizing to what species a certain animal or insect belongs to.
It was his birthday and his students thought of playing a trick, just a joke. They dissected many insects and glued their parts – legs from one insect, wings from another, head from the third one, the body from the fourth, and so on. At least from twenty insects they managed to glue together a new insect which exists nowhere.
They brought it to Charles Darwin and they said, “Here is a great surprise for you, as a birthday present. You may have never come across this insect! And we have been hiding it for this day. Can you tell us what species it belongs to, what is its name?”
Darwin looked at the insect and he asked only one question to the students: “Does it hum?”
They said, “Yes, when it was alive it used to hum.”
“Then,” he said, “it is a humbug!”

You can put parts together, but you will create only a humbug, you will not be able to create life. You will not be able to create a new form, a new manifestation of something living.

The Upanishads talk about two trinities. One is called satyam shivam sundaram. Satyam means truth. Shivam means good, virtue, goodness. Sundaram means beauty. The Upanishads say these three are beyond ordinary mathematics.

They also talk of another trinity: Sat-chit-anand – sat, chit, anand. Sat means being. Chit means consciousness. Anand means bliss. The Upanishads say this trinity also belongs to the higher realm, the world of synthesis, wholeness. It is beyond ordinary logic, ordinary mathematics.

These two trinities are far more beautiful, far more meaningful than the Christian trinity of God the father and Christ the son and the Holy Ghost. Compared to these two trinities the Christian trinity looks very immature, childish. Sometimes even children have more insight than the Christian trinity.

When Sigmund Freud said that God the father is nothing but a deep desire of an immature person to cling to the father, the idea of father, it is a father fixation, he was right. But he had never heard about satyam shivam sunderam or sat-chit-anand. He would not have been able to say anything derogatory about these ultimate visions. The Christian trinity is certainly very childish, and I say to you, sometimes even children are far more intelligent.

A small child was asking another child, his friend… They were learning the alphabet and the first child asked the second, “Why it is so that B always comes before C?”
And the other child said, “Obviously, you can see only if you are. First you have to be and then only you can see! That’s why C comes after B. How can it come before?”

Now even these two children are far more developed, far more perceptive than the Christian trinity – father, son, Holy Ghost – what nonsense they are talking about!

Higher values are truth, good, beauty, being, consciousness, bliss. Why they are called higher? – because they don’t come within the realm of the lower mathematics. The lower mathematics means the whole is simply the sum total of its parts, that defines the world of the lower mathematics. The higher mathematics, the meta-mathematics, means the whole is more than the sum total of its parts.

You cannot know beauty by analysis; it needs a different vision, a synthetic vision. The poet can understand beauty, not the scientist. The painter can understand beauty, but not the chemist. Truth can be understood only by a mystic, not by a philosopher. It can be understood by a lover, but not by a logician. It can be comprehended by intuition, but not by intellect. Intellect divides; intuition puts things together, and not only puts things together – it creates an organic unity. Life can be looked at in two ways: the scientific, the analytical, or the religious, the synthetical.

Today’s sutras are of such great value that they are incomparable in the whole of religious literature. Even in the world of the Upanishads – there are one hundred and eight Upanishads in all – these sutras are incomparable, unique.

The first sutra:

[Into a blinding darkness go they who worship action alone.
Into an even greater darkness go they who worship meditation.]

Action means that which is external to you, meditation means that which is internal to you. Action is outer, meditation is inner. Action is extroversion, meditation is introversion. Action is an objective approach; science is rooted in it, hence science insists on experimentation. And because science insists on action, experiment, it destroys all that is more than the external – it denies. It simply denies the world of interiority, the world of subjectivity. It is so absurd that science accepts the outer without accepting the inner. How can the outer exist at all without the inner? It is nonsensical.

If there is a coin, it is bound to have two aspects, you cannot find a coin which has only one aspect to it, only a one-sided coin; it is impossible. Howsoever thin you make it, it will always have two sides to it. You cannot make it so thin that it has only one side.

But science goes on insisting on this foolishness: that the external is true and the internal is false. It believes in matter, but it does not believe in consciousness. It says matter has validity, and science asks for objective validity. Of course the world of subjectivity cannot have an objective validity – it is so obvious. The very asking is wrong. The inner cannot come and manifest itself as the outer, but science is blind about it. Those who believe in science say that consciousness is illusory.

Karl Marx, who thinks he is creating a scientific communism, says that consciousness is an epiphenomenon, a byproduct of matter. It does not exist in its own right; it is just a combination of material elements, chemistry, physics. It is just a combination, nothing more than that. When a person dies the elements start falling apart and then there is no consciousness left. Hence there is no immortality, no soul. Man becomes just a machine with a wrong notion that it has a soul. Man is not a he or she but only an it.

This scientific approach has colored even the world of psychology. In fact, ninety percent of the psychologists should not use the word psychology at all; it is just wrong for them to use the word because they deny the psyche, and still they go on using the word psychology. Ninety percent of psychologists belong to the school called Behaviorism: Pavlov, Skinner, Delgado and others. They say man is nothing but his behavior, there is nobody inside him. The inside exists not; whatsoever man is, he is on the outside. Hence he can be studied just like any object, any other object. He can be studied like any other machine.

The Isa Upanishad says:

[Into blinding darkness go they who worship action alone.]
-They are falling into a blinding darkness by only following the outer, the extrovert, the objective. They are losing all sense of the inner. They will exist like robots.

That’s why it was so easy for a man like Joseph Stalin to kill millions of people. You see the strange world of logic? Krishna could say to his disciple Arjuna, “You can kill, there is no problem because the soul is eternal; it cannot be killed, it cannot be burned. No weapon can enter it. Nainam chhindanti shastrani: there is no way – no sword, no spear can even touch it. Nainam dahati pavakah: neither the fire can burn it. The soul is immortal, eternal; only the body dies.”

Hence he says to his disciple Arjuna, “Don’t be worried, don’t feel guilty. You can kill because nothing is killed: Na hanyate hanyamane sharire. When you kill a body, nothing is killed because the body is already dead and the soul is immortal, so who is killed? The body is already dead, has always been dead, it is matter. And the soul has always been immortal, is still immortal. You are only de-linking them, and there is nothing wrong in de-linking them. You are just separating them – separating the essential from the nonessential. In fact, you are doing a great service to the person you are killing! He himself was not able to separate the essential from the nonessential, you have done it for him.”

Joseph Stalin could kill millions of people – the logic was totally different, but the result is the same. That’s why I say the world of logic is very strange. Joseph Stalin is a scientific communist, a fanatic follower of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. He says there is no soul, so nothing is killed – you can kill. The body is only matter, and the matter will remain. The air will remain in the air, the earth will go back to the earth, the water will go to water, and all the elements will be dispersed back. There is no soul, so nothing is killed. Without any guilt he killed millions of people.

Arjuna also killed millions of people without any guilt. Mao Zedong did the same, but their approaches are very different. But it seems, to deny one – either the external or the internal – is dangerous. Its ultimate outcome will be destruction.

Hence the Isa Upanishad is right:

[Into a blinding darkness go they who worship action alone.
Into an even greater darkness go they who worship meditation.]

Meditation alone again leads to another extreme. Meditation means the internal, the subjective; it means introversion. And obviously the introverts start denying all external reality, they start saying it is maya, it is illusion.

Karl Marx says the inner is illusory, an epiphenomenon. And Shankara and Berkeley say the external is illusory, the internal is the only truth. Both are incapable of accepting the totality. They choose, they are not choiceless people.

Religion is born out of choiceless awareness. The first, who has chosen action alone, becomes a scientist. The second, who has chosen meditation alone, becomes a philosopher. But both miss the whole.

And remember one thing: the half-truth is far more dangerous than the untrue itself; the partial truth is more harmful than the untrue itself. Why? – because it is very difficult to refute the partial truth because it has something of truth in it, although it is partial, but because of that presence it is difficult to deny it.

It is difficult to deny Karl Marx and it is difficult to deny Shankara. Both are believers of one aspect of reality, neither of them are religious. One is moving toward the external, the other is moving to the internal, and reality is both and more.

That’s my approach here, the total approach to life. Therefore I don’t say to my sannyasins, “Escape to the monasteries or to the Himalayan caves.” I don’t say, “Renounce the world.” Renouncing the world means renouncing action. Then what will you be doing in your caves and in your monasteries? Then only meditation is left.

In the past this has been the case: either a person lived in the world, then he was very active, but his action was superficial because there was no meditation in him, no depth, no inner world. He was just his behavior, he was just his outer garb, his periphery. Naturally he created a superficial world with no depth, with no height; he created a very poor world.

Then there was the other extremist who escaped from the world. Seeing its superficiality, seeing its peripheralness, he renounced it. Of course he started going deeper into himself, but his going deeper into himself became uncreative. He has depth, but that depth remains unexpressed. He was silent, but there was no song in it. And when a silence is without song it is dead, it has depth but no manifestation. You may be a great painter but unless you paint, what is the point of being a great painter? You may be a great poet but unless you sing, what is the point of your being a great poet?

So, on the one hand there were people who had chosen action, the world – the extroverts; and on the other hand were the introverts who had chosen their own being. Both were lopsided. Hence I agree with the Upanishads: life has to be total, not lopsided. Only then is there balance and in that balance is music, in that balance there is a center and a circumference. In that balance you are rooted in yourself, but you are not uncreative, you are creative.

The monks, the nuns, down the ages have been absolutely uncreative, they have not contributed anything to the world. In fact, the superficial people have contributed far more, hence this emphasis.

The Isa Upanishad says:

[Into blinding darkness go they who worship action alone.
Into an even greater darkness…] - Remember the emphasis. -
[Into an even greater darkness go they who worship meditation.] Alone.

The Upanishads are really courageous, they say the truth as it is, with no compromise. Nobody would have thought that the Upanishads would be so hard on meditation. It can be easily understood that they are hard on the extrovert mind, but they are harder on the introvert for the simple reason that the extrovert is superficial, but at least he has contributed something to the world.

You can see it. The East has lived with meditation alone and the West has lived with action alone. The West lives in a kind of blindness, but the East lives in a deeper darkness, in a deeper blindness. The Western mind is superficial, but it at least has contributed much: technology, industry, scientific farming. It has given people a better standard of life; it may not have given them a better quality of life, but at least it has given them a better standard of life. It has given them better houses, better roads, better cars, better airplanes. It may not have given them a better consciousness, but it has contributed, it has been creative – of course superficially.

But the East, which became escapist in the name of meditation, became basically a dropout, it has not contributed even that much. What have your so-called saints in the East contributed? It is poor because of those saints, and it is going to remain poor unless those saints are no longer respected. But people go on respecting the same old rotten traditions. They cannot see – deeper is their blindness, darker is their darkness. They cannot even see who the cause of all this misery is.

Twenty-two centuries of slavery in India. Who is the cause of all this? Your saints, your mahatmas, your so-called sages who escape to the monasteries, who escape to the Himalayan caves, to the forests, to the jungles – and you have worshipped them, you have respected them. When you respect somebody it means deep down you would also like to be like him, that’s what respect means.

The word respect is beautiful, it means seeing again and again – re-spect. When you pass a beautiful woman, if she is really beautiful you will have to look again and again. That is respect, seeing again and again. You will walk slowly, you will find excuses to go back, you will enter the same shop the woman has entered, you will start asking for the same commodities she is purchasing so that you can be on the same counter. You will not be looking at things, you will be looking at her. This is respect – the literal meaning of the word. When you respect a person it means you are fascinated, infatuated. You would like to be like him. And the East still goes on respecting the same fools who are the cause of its misery, its starvation, its whole ugly state.

People are dying. Sixty percent of people in India are starving, and by the end of this century India will be the biggest country as far as population is concerned. It is going to surpass China. By the end of this century it will be the most populated country. Right now its problems are immense – what is going to happen by the end of this century? A great calamity is waiting. At least half of the population will die through starvation, famine, floods. By God’s grace something is bound to happen!

Who is responsible for all this? – the people who have insisted at least for three thousand years continuously that the real is inner and the outer is maya, illusory, why bother about it?

In the whole world things have changed, except in this unfortunate country. India is not yet part of the twentieth century, it lags behind at least one thousand years. People in India have not yet even been able to provide themselves with simple toilet facilities. The whole country is used as a vast latrine and nobody seems to be bothered about it. It is taken for granted. The whole country is living in unhygienic conditions, in illness, but that too is taken for granted. We have found explanations and rationalizations for it – that it is because of our past karmas that we are suffering. That means all the sinners are born only in India and all the saints are born in the Western countries – which are materialist. They should not go there at all! But these are ways to avoid seeing the truth. The truth is that you have praised the inner too much and destroyed the outer.

I agree with the Upanishad, that if you have to choose between action and meditation it is better you choose action. It will lead to darkness, but it will not be as dark as it will be if you choose only meditation alone. But there is no need to choose in the first place – you can have both! When you can have both, why choose?

[For It is other than meditation]
- The truth is other than meditation.

[It is other than action.]
- The truth is far more than action: it is both and more. And you will know the more only if you are capable of creating a synthesis between the outer and the inner, between action and meditation. Meditate, but let your meditation be expressed in action. Act, and let your action become a part of your meditation. There is no dualism, there is no antagonism between the two. One can act meditatively. One can dance meditatively.

When you dance meditatively your dance starts having a new flavor – something of the divine enters it – because if you are dancing meditatively then the ego disappears, the dancer disappears. That is the whole art of meditation: disappearance of the ego, disappearance of the mind. The dancer become thoughtless, silent. The dance continues and the dancer disappears. This is what I call the divine quality. Now it is as if God is dancing through you, you are no longer there.

One of the greatest dancers of this age was Nijinsky, and by coincidence there must have happened a certain synthesis between dance and meditation in him. He was not the master of it because he had never learned the art of meditation. It must have happened, just as a consequence of his total effort to go into dance, his total commitment.

A miracle used to happen – once in a while Nijinsky would take such high jumps, leaps in the air, which were not physically possible because of the gravitation of the earth. The spectators were simply mystified, they would miss a few beats of their hearts. It was a miracle to see Nijinsky moving, as if there was no gravitation – he would take such high leaps and so easily.

The second thing was when he would start descending back, he would come as a feather comes, very slowly, as if there is no hurry, as if the gravitation is not pulling him like a magnet. It is, according to scientific rules, impossible, but what can you do when it is happening?

Even scientists observed Nijinsky and they were puzzled. Again and again Nijinsky was asked, “How do you manage it?”
He said, “That I cannot say because when it happens I am not there. I have tried to manage it and I have always failed. Whenever I try to manage it, it doesn’t happen. Once in a while when I forget myself completely, when I am utterly abandoned, it happens. It happens on its own, I cannot manage. I cannot say that tomorrow it will happen. You are not the only one who is surprised. When it happens, I am myself surprised, utterly surprised because I become weightless.”

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❂ Here ends part 1. Go to pearl 608 for part 2.