Go further, still. The doctrine of relativity lands us in mere idea of the cosmos. The space-time stuff which they speak of as the ultimate substance is not a hard reality. Neither space nor time can be called a hard reality like a table. But, researchers into the substance of physics seem to conclude that the hardest realities, like hills and rocks, are constituted of configurations of the space-time continuum. We cannot understand what this space-time continuum is except as a mathematical heap of point events in the brain of the scientist—but, not a human scientist. Here Berkeley rectified himself when he said that the world is an idea—not of Mr. Berkeley, but of a larger being in whom all the individual ideas are also included. We again come to Hiranyagarbha in Vedanta philosophy, though such words are not used by Berkeley or Plato.

Plato uses the words “the idea of the good”, a strange definition of his. We may say “idea of God”, if we like. It is not idea of God, but idea which is God. Actually, God is only an idea—not our idea, but idea as such, which is the cause of all other ideas. The Yoga Vasishtha goes into great detail in the explanation of this point that the whole universe is mind—not my mind or your mind, but mind as such—pure, impersonal existence of which our minds, thoughts, feelings and volitions are ripples. Read the great book of Samuel Alexander, Space, Time and Deity, which is a great exposition of the structure of the universe, made on the basis of the modern theory of relativity.

The physical universe, which is so hard and real, is only space-time. Space-time is not a substance; it is not something tangible. We cannot touch it. We cannot see it. We cannot sense it. We cannot taste it. We cannot smell it. And a thing which cannot be sensed is not a reality at all. But, that is the reality. It configures, pinpoints, pressurises itself into a movement, a force. Space-time becomes motion, manifesting itself into primary qualities of length, breadth and height. Remember that length, breadth and height do not mean the length, breadth and height of substances; they have never come into being.

These are difficult things that only a mathematician will understand or a purely impersonal thinker will be able to appreciate. How can there be the conception of length, breadth and height unless objects are there? But space-time is itself without dimensions; it has no dimensions. It is a four-dimensional thing, not a three-dimensional substance; and, we do not know what a four-dimensional thing is. It is only an idea, a meaningless thing for us. It becomes primary qualities like length, breadth and height, etc. Geometrical patterns are called primary qualities, which manifest themselves as secondary qualities of colour, sound, taste, smell, etc. The world has not come into being yet. We have only tanmatras—shabda, sparsa, rupa, rasa, gandha, says the Vedanta philosophy. Shabda, sparsa, rupa, rasa, gandha—sound, touch, etc.—are not substances, but are principles behind the objects which produce these sensations. The world is not earth, water, fire, air and ether, hard substances, but is shabda, sparsa, rupa, rasa, gandha, comparable to the secondary qualities of Aristotle and Plato, and the modern scientists.

Oh, what a wonder! We seem to be living in a dreamland, like Alice in Wonderland. We are not living in the world as it appears. The primary qualities condensing themselves into secondary qualities of sensations solidify themselves, as it were, into hard realities like the heaviness that we feel when we get an electric shock. So, by these conclusions it appears that the solidity and the substantiality of this physical world is comparable to the solidity and the substantiality of the mountain that we felt weighing heavy in our hand when we had a high voltage shock. Does the world exist? No one knows.

Our own body is also of the same nature. This substantiality of the world, which has been reduced to practically nothing but a sensation and an idea of a cosmic existence, also includes the very notion of our body so that, by these conclusions, we also go and the scientist also goes. Sir Arthur Eddington said that no scientist can live in this world without going mad. Fortunately, he did not want to go mad—because under these conclusions, no one can exist here for three minutes. Buddha said that a really perceiving individual cannot exist in this world for three days. He will melt into nothing. But, that perception has not arisen in us; that is the reason why we are very happy here. Therefore, ignorance is the cause of our very comfortable existence.

This comparative study of Eastern conclusions with Western discoveries seems to make us feel that all great men think alike—whether Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, or Acharya Sankara or Vidyaranya Swami. Ideas, therefore, are not ideas of things which are earlier than the ideas, just as space and time are not subsequent to the substances we call the objective world; they are precedent to the objective world.

It is a fine conclusion of Sir James Jeans, for instance, that God must be a mathematician. It is not a man thinking mathematical points, but mathematics itself. How can one think only mathematics, without a person thinking mathematics? He says it is a mathematical consciousness, highly abstract, purely impersonal, and the universe is nothing but conceptions of mathematics. Today we are in this world of modern physics; and, what is Hiranyagarbha, what is Ishvara, but these things in the Sanskrit language? What are shabda, sparsa, rupa, rasa and gandha? They are only conceptual precedents of the hard things called earth, water, fire, air and ether—including our physical bodies? We can imagine why we have difficulties in meditation, why we cannot do japa, we cannot do prayer, we get angry over little things and we fly at the throat of another. It is because we are yet to be spiritual. Religion has not yet entered us fully. We are playing jokes with God, at least for now.

These deeper truths are cannot easily enter our minds, because we are very busy bodies—with bricks and mortar, vegetables, tea and coffee. These are greater realities than these supernal ideas that are the contents of our religious and spiritual consciousness. I raised these ideas before you to bring about a comparison between the great thinkers of the East like Acharya Sankara, the Upanishads and the Bhagavadgita, and Western thinkers like Plato, Aristotle and Kant. They seem to think alike, only in different languages and giving different definitions.

So we are now face to face with a great reality, the God of the cosmos. We have passed through an analysis. If you remember what I told you earlier in the preceding lessons, we have conducted a study of the essential nature of the human being by a study of the three states of consciousness—waking, dream and deep sleep. We studied epistemological processes, the perception of the world, how we come in contact with things, and how we know that the world exists at all. This, also, we have concluded. Many of you may not remember it; but, think over it.

Now we are facing the third principle, the Ultimate Reality of the cosmos. Call it the Absolute, call it sat-chit-ananda, God, Ishvara, Hiranyagarbha, Virat—whatever it is. Here, true religion begins. Real religion is an awareness of the presence of the Supreme Being. It is well said that religion begins where intellect ends, where reason fails. When religion commences controlling our life, we cease to be a mere intellectual scientist or philosopher. We are no more a thinker, but a person who lives Reality. Religion is living Reality, and not merely thinking Reality or analysing academically. All this has been gone over already in earlier lessons. We have thought enough philosophically and academically, and we shall not touch this subject again.

We shall enter into true religion, which is God-consciousness itself in some proportion, in some measure, in a modicum. To face God and to encounter Him in our actual life is to live religion. So, religion is not ringing a bell, waving a light or chanting a mantra; it is encountering God face to face. Religion is superior to philosophy, if we understand religion in the true sense of the term. Religion is not Hinduism, Christianity, Buddhism. It is the art of envisaging God-being—man melting like ice vanishing before the blaze of the sun. When the sun of God-consciousness rises, this hard substance called body-consciousness evaporates into an ethereal nothing. Gradually, we begin to approximate God-being.

The life of religion is the way of gradual approximation to God-consciousness. Here, true love begins to preponderate in our lives. We do not merely think God as philosophers and academicians and professors. We love God; and, we cannot love a thing which is not really there. We cannot love a thing which is only an idea, a concept in our mind. All love is an urge of the soul to contact that which it feels as a hard reality in front of itself. Every love is God-love, finally. The final stuff of the universe may be said to be love.

I have been telling you, sometimes, that there is some secret meaning in the last verse of the eleventh chapter of the Bhagavadgita, when we are told that bhakti is supreme: bhaktya tu ananyaya sakya aham evam vidha. Naham vedair na tapasa na danena na cejyaya; sakya evam-vidho drashtum.The bhakti that Sri Krishna speaks of towards the end of the eleventh chapter is not the ordinary obeisance to an idol. It is not a mass that is performed in a church. It is a melting of our being before the Absolute. Therefore Bhagavan Sri Krishna says, “Not charity, not philanthropy, not study, not austerity is capable of bringing about this great vision that you had, Arjuna.” Na veda yajnadhyayanair na danair na ca kriyabhir na tapobhi rugraih; evam rupah sakya aham nr-loke. Bhaktya tu ananyaya sakya. “Only by devotion can I be seen, contacted.” Jnatum drastum ca tattvena pravestum. “I am capable of being known, seen and entered into.” Three words are used towards the end of the eleventh chapter of the Bhagavadgita: ‘knowing’, ‘seeing’ and ‘entering’. Arjuna knew and saw, but never entered into it. Therefore he was the same Arjuna even after the Bhagavadgita. He never merged into the Supreme Being.

Religion is knowing, seeing and entering into. Knowing is considered by such thinkers like Ramanuja, the great propounder of the Visishta-advaita philosophy, as inferior to devotion. I am now digressing a little from the point I was discussing into another thing altogether, which is also interesting. “Knowledge, or jnana, is not equal to bhakti,” said Ramanuja, the great propounder of the doctrine or philosophy called the Visishta-advaita; and Acharya Sankara said that jnana is superior to bhakti. It may appear that they oppose each other, though really there is no opposition. They have laid emphasis on different aspects of the same question. Why does Bhagavan Sri Krishna say that nothing except bhakti can make us fit to see the vision of God? He seems to be speaking like Ramanuja, and not like Sankara. But they are saying the same thing, in different languages. There is no contradiction between them. Knowing, seeing and entering into signify the processes of contacting God by degrees.

There are, in the parlance of Vedanta, two types of knowledge: paroksa jnana and aparoksa jnana. Paroksa is indirect knowledge, and aparoksa is direct knowledge. That God exists is indirect knowledge. I am inseparable from God-being; this is direct knowledge. Now we do not feel that we are inseparable from God’s being. That knowledge has not come to us, so we have not entered such a height of religious consciousness as to be convinced that we are inseparable from God’s existence. But we are convinced enough to feel that God exists. At least, the people seated here are perhaps convinced that God must be. He is. Circumstances compel us to feel confident that God must be; God is. But, we have not gone to such an extent as to feel that we are inseparable from Him. That is a little higher stage. We have known in an indirect way. Jnana has come, but darshana, or the vision of God, has not come.

We are not seeing the Virat in front of us, notwithstanding the fact that we are seeing the Virat. This whole cosmos is that; but we have somehow segregated our personality from this Virat-consciousness. A cell in the body is seeing the body as if it is outside it. The way in which we are seeing the universe now is something like the possibility of a particular organism called a cell in the body separating itself in notion—not really, of course—from the body organism, and looking at the body. What would be the condition, the experience, of a cell in our own body notionally isolating itself from the organism to which it belongs and considering the body as a world outside it? You can imagine the stupidity of it.

This is exactly what we are doing. We think that the world is outside us because we fly into space and drive in a motorcar on the road, because a peculiar notion has become a reality in our minds that the world is outside us—though we are a part of the world. So, the idea that the Virat is an object of perception and world is external to us is notional, and not realistic. All our difficulties are notional, in the end. They have no reality or substance in themselves. We are bound by our minds, our thoughts, our feelings and our willing.

Hence, when Acharya Sankara says that jnana is superior and Ramanuja says that bhakti is superior, they are saying the same thing. By bhakti, Ramanuja means that love of God which supersedes intellectual activity or mere knowing that God exists; and when Sankara says that jnana, or knowledge, is superior, he means knowledge which is identical with being and which is the same as parabhakti, or love of God, where the soul is in communion with the being of God.

The highest devotion is the same as the highest knowledge. Jnana and parabhakti are the same. The gauna bhakti, or the secondary love of God, which is more ritualistic and formal, is inferior; but, Ramanuja’s bhakti is the surging of soul and a melting of personality in God’s experience. It is to become mad with God-love, as we hear in the case of Spinoza, Ramakrishna Paramahansa, Tukharam, etc. Their bhakti was not simply the love of God that churchgoer or a templegoer has. It is a kind of ecstasy in which the personality has lost itself in God-being. That is jnana, and that is bhakti. In the ultimate reaches there is no difference between Ramanuja and Sankara, and Bhagavan Sri Krishna’s dictum is of a similar character.

Now, when we are discussing the final point in our studies, we are gradually losing attachment to this obsessional notion that we are tied up to this little Mr. and Mrs. body only, and we are located in a physical world called India, America, Japan, etc.; and we are slowly trying to become citizens of a larger dimension, which is wider than this earth—perhaps even larger than this solar system and this physical cosmos. When we enter into the true religious life, we become real children of God.