Kaivalya Upanishad, Chapter 33

Some words must be understood first. VEDA is a very meaningful word. Ordinarily it indicates the four compilations: RIG, YAJUR, SAMA, ATTHARVA. But that is not the real meaning of it.

The word "veda" means knowledge, authentic knowledge. The English word "science" is the exact meaning of it. Science means knowledge, authentic knowledge. When I say authentic knowledge, I mean experimented, experienced, not speculative. You can speculate, you can think without going into any experience. One can think about love and can create theories, and can create a system, but this will not be authentic knowledge. You can speculate about love, but you cannot know it that way. One has to love, not to speculate, to know what love is. One has to live it, experience it, suffer it. One has to go through all the pain, all the suffering, all the blessing, everything. One has to know the unhappiness of it, and the happiness. One has to pass through it - then only one grows in love, and then only one knows. To live is the way, not to speculate.

You can go on speculating infinitely without ever touching the reality. By authentic knowledge, by veda is meant: something which has been experienced, not speculated. That is the difference between science and philosophy. Philosophy is speculation; science is experiment. And that is the difference between philosophy and religion also. Religion is also an experiment. So we can say, philosophy is speculation about everything, science is experience, experiment about the objective world, and religion is experience and experiment about the subjective world.

Veda is authentic knowledge about the inner one. Veda is the supreme science: science of the inner one, science of the subjectivity, science of the knower, not of the known, science of the consciousness itself.

This sutra says: I, ALONE, AM THE THEME TAUGHT IN THE VARIOUS Vedas. All the authentic sources of knowledge talk about me. I am the theme. The divine is the theme, the absolute is the theme, the ultimate is the theme. This can be understood.

I, ALONE, AM THE THEME TAUGHT IN THE VARIOUS VEDAS. I AM THE REVEALER OF THE UPANISHADS, THE VEDANTA AND OF THE VEDAS. I ALONE AM THE REAL KNOWER.

But the translation seems somewhere fallacious: I am the theme of the VEDAS, and also I am the creator of them. This will look strange. I am the creator of the VEDAS and also the theme; I am both. Why? - because there is no one else. The divine can talk about the divine, the divine can live the divine, the divine can express the divine.

For example, a painter paints something. The moment the painting is complete, the painter and the painting are separated. The painting becomes something in its own right. The painter can die, but the painting will live. The moment a painting is complete the painter cannot say, "I am my painting," because the painting can be destroyed and the painter can live - they become two.

So God is not just like a painter; rather, he is like a dancer - a dancer dancing. The dancer is the dance, you cannot separate them. If the dancer dies, the dance dies. And if the dance stops, there is no dancer, because a dancer is a dancer only when he is dancing.

If there is no dance then the dancer has stopped; he is not a dancer at all. And if the dancer dies there is no dance. So what is a dancer doing? He is dancing himself. He is the dance, he is the theme, he is the creator - everything. That's why India has chosen a dancer as the symbol of the divine - NATARAJ. It is meaningful, it is significant. It shows something, it indicates.

The world is a dance of the divine. The dancer is involved in the dance, and the dance is nothing but dancer expressed.

So this sutra says: I have created the VEDAS, but I am the theme of them. I have talked about myself, because there is no one else to talk about; there is no other reality.

FOR ME THERE IS NEITHER VIRTUE NOT SIN.

I SUFFER NOT DESTRUCTION, NEITHER HAVE I BIRTH, NOR BODY, NOR SENSES AND MIND.

This part of the sutra is even more strange. It says there is neither virtue nor sin for me.

To a Christian mind it will seem conceivable, because God means virtue. To the Jewish tradition, to Islam, to Christianity, God means virtue. Sin cannot be conceived in any way related to God. That's why Christianity, Jewish tradition, Islam, all have to create a second God: the devil, Lucifer, Satan, Beelzebub. They have created many names for the other god, the god of evil. But if you create two gods in the world - one of good and one of evil - you create a deep conflict which can never be reconciled.

How can two gods, totally contradictory and opposite, polar opposites, be reconciled? When? And how? - It seems impossible. Once you have made the rift, it become unbridgeable.

Who will win in the end? The devil, or God? The religious mind hopes that in the end God will win.

But why in the end? Why not now? Is God impotent just now? Why cannot he win this very moment?

Why in the end? And the devil goes on winning. The devil goes on winning not in the end, but just now, just here! It seems that this is just a hope; this end is just a hope, just a long postponement.

What to do with the devil? He goes on winning. So how to help good, how to help virtue? So we create a long postponement... in the end God will win. Why in the end? And how can he win in the end when he is defeated every moment? - because ultimately these moments will count. And if the devil goes on winning continuously, how in the end can God win? These defeats of the divine and these victories of the devil will count. In the end the devil seems more probable to win than God.

And how can God win if the devil is a force, an entity independent of God in itself? How can you destroy an independent force? And if you say that the devil is just a rebellious child of god, then again you make God very impotent. This child goes on winning, and God cannot do anything. And if this child is just a rebellious child, then rebellion is possible against God; some force can rebel against him.

Anyway, you create a rift, unbridgeable. And this rift creates a deep tension in the mind, because then you are also divided. Some part of your being becomes the devil and some parts divine. That's why Christianity proved so sadistic, and so masochistic - both.

Christianity created a very antibody attitude, so torturing oneself became virtue. Really, in the West the rebellion that exists today is just a part, a reaction of the whole Christian antibody attitude. If you go to the extreme, then somewhere the pendulum comes back, begins to come back. The body became something devilish, part of the devil in you, so you have to fight it. So Christian mystics are doing much violence to themselves - unnecessary violence, unneeded. But because of the rift between the devil and God, you have to choose in you what part belongs to God and what part to the devil.

The world, if divided into two, will create a division in you also, and then there is tension, anguish, anxiety. Silence becomes impossible; there is only a fight, a war, a continuous fight.

Look at the face of Jesus; look at the face of Buddha. There seems to be a vital difference: Jesus looks sad; you cannot conceive of a sad Buddha. Of course, Buddha is not laughing, but Buddha is also not sad. Christianity has a tradition which says that Jesus never laughed. If you look at the picture, the tradition seems right. Jesus looks sad, sorry, in anguish, in pain, in suffering. Jesus cannot dance; it is inconceivable. Jesus cannot laugh - why? The rift, the division: a constant fight within creates this sadness. Buddha is a reconciled one. The conflict has disappeared; he is now at ease with himself - nothing to fight with, nothing to fight for. He has accepted whatsoever is, is.

This acceptance comes only if you can think and conceive, "For me there is neither virtue nor sin."

The whole of Christianity revolves around the idea of sin, original sin. The whole of the mind is burdened by the sin Adam committed - the original sin overshadowing everything; and you are born a sinner, because Adam committed a sin. We are born in sin. Sadness is bound to come. Sadness, suffering, and ultimately a fight - how to overcome this sin?

So the basic thing becomes guilt. If I am born in sin, if I am a sinner, if sin is all around me, then guilt is a by-product. So I become guilty. That guiltiness will create sadness, futility, a life without a song, a life without a dance, a life without a laugh.

This sutra has to be understood deeply: FOR ME THERE IS NEITHER VIRTUE NOR SIN. God is not the virtuous one; God is both and neither. He expresses himself in both, and he can express himself in both because he is neither. These are his expressions, not his being.

But why put evil and good both in the divinity? The Indian concept is that good and bad balance existence; they are not contradictory, they are complementary. This conception of complementariness is very basic to Hindu thought. Nothing is contradictory, there is no deep opposition in anything; everything is interconnected and complements each other. The Hindu mind says that good cannot exist without evil, so evil is just a soil for the good to flower - a lotus flowering in dirty mud. That is the concept of the Hindu mind: the lotus out of dirty mud. The dirty mud is not against the lotus.

If you look at the lotus and the dirty mud, there seems to be no connection at all. The petals of the lotus - fresh, young, beautiful.... How can you conceive of any relationship with the mud, the dirty mud? But it is born out of that; it comes out of that. This beautiful lotus is just a growth of the dirty mud. So the dirty mud is not against the lotus, but just part and parcel of the whole process. At the one end is the lotus, at the other end is the dirty mud. At one end there is RAMA, at another end there is RAVANA, but they are interconnected - they are two parts of one process.

We cannot conceive of a lotus without dirty mud. Can you conceive vice versa? Can you conceive of dirty mud without a lotus? It may look like vice versa is possible. We can conceive of dirty mud without a lotus, but if there is no lotus, how can you call it dirty mud? The lotus gives you the concept of beauty, cleanliness. The lotus gives you the concept of cleanliness, freshness, beauty. If there is no lotus there will be no dirty mud; there will be mud, but not dirty. The dirtiness comes into the world with a lotus flowering. That lotus comes out of that dirtiness.

The Hindu concept is of a deep complementariness; nothing is opposite. Even virtue is not opposed to sin, it is only supplemented, complemented. It is only how it is supported, and they both support a deep symphony, they both are part of it. If you can conceive of virtue and sin as one process, only then you can conceive the Indian concept of God.

A Christian god is qualitatively different from a Hindu god. For a Christian mind, a Hindu god is not a god at all. Sometimes he looks profane - a KRISHNA dancing with women looks profane for a Christian mind. A Krishna fighting, or trying to convert Arjuna to fight, looks absolutely non-religious for a Christian mind. A Jesus saying, "If someone hits you on one cheek, give him the other," and a Krishna converting, convincing, arguing with Arjuna for a war - go into war; they become inconceivable.

But the basic problem arises because of this concept of non-contradictoriness in existence.

Existence is dual but not contradictory! And the duality is only in the expression, not in the ultimate source. The ultimate source remains the same. These contradictions are there, because without contradictions, without a dual nature, things cannot exist, the world cannot be. The world is there through duality.

Can you conceive of silence without noise?

Can you conceive of birth without death?

Can you conceive of beauty without ugliness?

They balance, they exist together.

They have a deep togetherness.

And you cannot deny one, and you cannot destroy one, and you cannot save one against the other.

So really, many problems arise because of this choosing - one has to be chosen against the other.

Look at it in this way: the whole of humankind has been trying to create a world which is without poverty. And the West has succeeded in it; it has created a world now which is without poverty. But look at the problem; it has many dimensions. One is, that whenever there is someone rich, someone becomes poor. The richer someone gets, the more someone else goes deeply down in poverty. It has existed in many dimensions. One person going up, one person going down, mm? That has been the old pattern.

That pattern has changed. Now the West is going up, the East is going down; the dimension has changed. Now the West goes on becoming richer, and the East goes on becoming poorer - one going up, the other going down. We can even conceive of a world where even this dimension dissolves. The whole earth becomes rich, but then a new dimension opens. The moment the whole earth becomes rich, everyone deep down becomes poor.

That is happening in the West. With affluence, everyone feels poorer, deep down empty, poor, just a beggar - nothing within. Everything all around... a new dimension of duality. When you have everything all around, deep down you become poor. No one else is now becoming poor because of you. You yourself, you have everything - every possession is there - and now, you feel that you are poor. A buddha feeling inner poverty, having everything, but not being.

When you have everything then the dimension of poverty has changed. You have everything and the being becomes poor. Now you are divided - not the world, but you are divided into two. Go on accumulating riches outside, and you will go on creating a deep valley of poverty inside. So only a rich man becomes really conscious of inner poverty.

We have created much to help the human body - many medicines, much science, many instruments, many things. This century has created much as far as medicine is concerned, human health is concerned. But are you aware that new diseases have come in? - they go on balancing. You create a medicine and a new disease bubbles up, but the balance remains the same. The balance remains the same, the proportion remains the same. You create a new medicine and a new disease comes up and brings the balance again to the same level. You create laws, you go on creating laws, and new criminal acts are invented - they go on balancing.

If we look at the world it is a deep balance, always balancing itself with the opposite. So what to do?

Stop fighting and poverty? No, go on fighting. But remember, it cannot be destroyed; it can only be changed from one dimension to another. And a deeper dimension may be more painful.

We solve one problem and another comes up, but the total number remains the same. The total number always remains the same. If you are aware of this totality, this duality, this complementariness, then what to do?

This awareness will tell you that this is just the dynamics of the world, you cannot change it. This is the very dynamics of the world: to be in duality, to be in antithesis, to be in a dialectical process.

The world works through dialectics, through duality, and the anti-thesis in not ANTI. It is anti only in language - the antithesis is just a balance.

I have been studying much about intelligence, and I have become aware that if one percent of the human minds are geniuses, then one percent balances them by being idiots. If ten percent are talented, highly talented, nearly geniuses, then ten percent are highly untalented, nearly idiots, fools.

Fifty percent are divided on the right and fifty on the left. And now this is a problem for psychologists:

if you create more talent, you create somewhere the opposite also.

For example, in America you have come to the point where universal education is possible, but now boys and girls are dropping out of universities. This is the only country which has come to a point where universal education has become possible - a dream fulfilled, but what is happening?

American boys and girls are dropping out. Everywhere in the world in poor countries, everyone is running, rushing for education; and in America they are running away from education, rushing away from education. What is happening? - a deep balance.

You have created intelligence to a high peak, now you will create foolishness to a deep valley. Only then there is balance. If you have created a highly structured society, you will create hippies - that is the balance. If you have come to a highly structured, planned society for the first time in the history of the world - everything planned, structured, patterned - you are bound to create an alternative society: unstructured, unplanned, chaotic. That gives the balance.

But we are not aware of this deep complementariness: sin and virtue are complementary.

This sutra says: FOR ME THERE IS NEITHER VIRTUE NOR SIN. It means that for me sin is not sin, and virtue if not virtue. It means that for me sin and virtue are not two opposites. It means that for me the totality is both and neither - they both complement each other and negate each other. So God is neither good nor evil; God is neutral. But the expression of the neutral is both good and evil.

Expression is inevitably dual; existence is non-dual.

I SUFFER NOT DESTRUCTION... because the total can never suffer destruction; only parts suffer destruction. How can the total suffer destruction?

Scientists say that nothing is added in existence, and nothing deleted. Not a single atom has been added, cannot be added. From where can you bring it... when we talk about the total, from where can you bring a single atom? Or if you want to destroy a single atom, how can you destroy it?

Where can you push it? Science says that nothing can be destroyed and nothing can be created.

The totality remains the same, but the parts change. A tree is destroyed, a body is dead; a flower is coming up, a tree is alive.

Things come up, things go down; things are born, things die.

But the totality remains as it is.

A tree dies because a tree is a part. When it dies it goes back down to the total, but the total remains the same. This sutra says: I SUFFER NOT DESTRUCTION, NEITHER HAVE I BIRTH.... How can the total be born? This point also must be looked at deeply.

All the religions have tried to think how the world came into being. Where is the beginning?

Christianity says that before Jesus Christ, four thousand years back, the world came into being, suddenly, in a week. In six days God created the world, and on the seventh day he relaxed. That's why the seventh day is a holiday. In six days he created the world - on a particular date. This is absurd, because this total cannot come out of nothing. And even if the world came into being, God was before it. So there was a world of a certain kind. God was there, so existence was there.

Hindus say this is beginningless and endless; existence is beginningless and endless. So worlds may be created and worlds may be destroyed, but existence continues. The Hindu mind says that one world is created and another is being destroyed simultaneously. A star is born and another star is dying. Our earth is just now old, and soon it will die. Whatsoever we do, the earth is going to die; now it is old. Many things will happen which will help it to die: the population explosion will help, atomic research will help, pollution will help, chaotic trend, revolutions, rebellions will help; everything will help this earth to die.

Man going to the moon is a very symbolic act. Whenever some planet dies, life tries to go somewhere else. It happens only then, never before. Whenever some planet is going to die, life begins to try to go somewhere else, to be replanted somewhere else.

Still scientists are not able to find out from where life came to this earth; there seems to be no reason how it can come up suddenly. It must have come from somewhere else. It is possible that some old earth dying, some ancient planet dying, and its sun.... Even one man and one woman transplanted to this earth would create the whole thing. It may have been Adam and Eve coming from some other planet which was dying; and two are enough to create millions.

It is felt deeply that this earth is going to die soon; that is why there is so much search to go beyond this earth - to the moon, to Mars, or to somewhere, somewhere to find a home again. Life is just going to die here. Neither politicians can help us, not pacifists. This earth is going to die. Everything born is bound to die some time. And for the earth, one thousand, two thousand years are nothing.

So it may continue, but it is just on the verge. Every symptom shows that it is just on the verge. So one earth may be born, another may die.

One world may be born. When I say world, I don't mean total, because there are many, many worlds.

Our world consists of the solar system: this sun and the family of this sun. We don't know. Out there are other worlds; there are many universes. We are totally unaware of them. Every day a new star is born and every day a star is dying, disappearing. But the whole remains, and the whole remains the same. It is neither born, nor is there any possibility of its being dead. It is beginningless and endless.

Lastly, this sutra says that I HAVE NEITHER BODY NOR SENSES NOR MIND. It is easy to understand that the total can have no body, the total can have no limitation. A body is a limitation; the total is bound to be infinite. Where can it end? If it ends somewhere that means something else begins. Every end is a beginning. Your house ends then the neighbor's house begins. Your village ends and another village begins - or a forest begins. Every ending is a beginning of something else.

Where can this total end? Where is the boundary? It can never be anywhere.

This is inconceivable for the mind, because the mind goes crazy if you think about it. If you think of the world ending nowhere, going on and on and on - infinitely on... the mind thinks, "Maybe if I can go on, the end may come." How can the world go on and on without any boundary where it ends?

Mind cannot conceive the infinite. That is the difficulty with the mind - not with the world, not with the universe. The universe is infinite and the mind is a window. It cannot think about the infinite; it can think only about the finite.

So there is no body, because body means a definition, body means a definite limit.

NOR SENSES.... The divine has no senses, the total has no senses. Senses are required to know the other. I can see you only because I have eyes. If you are there, then eyes are needed, but for God there is no you. He cannot say to anyone, "You." For the total there are no senses.

And lastly, mind - the divine has no mind. It appears absurd. We would like rather to think that the divine has the perfect mind, the absolute mind. But this sutra says: I have no mind. This is absurd, because we go on thinking about God on our own lines. We make God a perfect man; we conceive of God as a perfect man. So whatsoever man is, we go on perfecting in God. That's why the concept of God goes on changing with every age.

If you go back to the old Jewish God, he is angry, violent, because the whole of the human race was angry and violent; it was just coming out of the animal world. So no one objected to Moses, and no one said, "What type of God is this?" - because man was like that. So it was not a problem that God was angry. He must be totally angry - that was the only thing; he must have total power in his anger. So God could destroy cities, God could destroy the whole world if he became angry. Moses'

God is a very violent God, very jealous, angry - everything! But no one thought about it, that these things are ungodly, undivine - no one thought about it.

With a Christ everything changes, because with a christ, humanity has progressed much. Love becomes more human a quality than anger and violence. And when man begins to think in terms of love, he has to change his god again. Then Jesus says that God is love. Mm? That was the problem between Jesus and Jewish priests, because their god was angry, their god was jealous, their god was violent; and this man was saying that God is love - a different god comes into the world. We go on changing our god, because we go on changing. But our god always remains a perfection of ourselves, nothing else.

This sutra says that God has no mind, because God is not a man. With man, mind is a necessity, because man is ignorant, so he needs a mind to think about things which he doesn't know. Mind is part of ignorance. Mind is an instrument of ignorance - to know. God is not ignorant, so mind is not needed. He knows. Nothing is unknowable to him, nothing is unknown to him. The total knows, so mind is not required at all.

And it is logical that if there is no body, there can be no senses; and if there are no senses there can be no mind, because mind, senses, body, are one mechanism. Mind is the most subtle thing in the body, body the most gross, and senses in between created a duality in this also, that mind and body are two things - that is absolute nonsense. Mind is part of the body, the most subtle part, and body is just an outgoing of the mind in the gross - they are one. So man has not a body and mind; man has a body-mind, a psychosomatic oneness.

But the duality, the thinking of duality creates everywhere opposites, dualities. God has neither body, nor senses, nor mind - then what has he? To say that he has anything, will be again wrong. He has nothing; he is. He is not a having; he is a being. He possesses nothing because he is all. He has no possessions because he is all. What he can possess? He is nothing. When I say he is nothing, I mean he is no-thing; he is all.

Finally, even to say that he is, is wrong. We can say a man IS, - because a man can be: NOT.

We can say a thing IS because a thing may be: NOT. Is-ness implies the possibility of going into nothingness. We cannot say God is, because he cannot be; he cannot go into nothingness. We cannot say God is, because to say that God IS NOT, is not possible. So what to say?

When we say, "God is," linguistically we are saying, "Is is." Or we are saying, "God God." "God is," is not accurate; rather, it is better to say, "Isness is God; existence is God." Existence and God mean the same thing. Isness and God mean the same thing. So to say, "God is," is just to repeat - it is meaningless. That's why a buddha remains silent. He cannot say he is not, he cannot say he is, so he remains silent.

Now we must take a jump from the mind to the mindless....