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The eyes see the world, and they see nothing other than the world. The concern of the mind, which beholds the world through the sense organs, is confined only to the world. It does not see anything beyond the world; it does not see anything other than the world. There is nothing superintending over the world. The world manages itself somehow, with its own physical and chemical laws. This is the doctrine of materialism. It also implies a kind of atheism. It is materialism because the world of matter is looked upon as something self-sufficient. It can explain itself by itself. The world does not require something else to explain itself. If everything is self-explicable, there is no need for another factor to be introduced in order to understand or explain what it is.
The theory of physical matter, which was advanced by Isaac Newton, Laplace and others, concluded that the whole world can be explained by the laws operating within the world itself. The components of the world in space and time are self-explanatory. Laplace went even beyond, ahead of Newton, and said the entire universe can be explained on the map of human understanding. If only we had the place to keep this world in front of us, we would see it with our own eyes as self-explicable. It was not merely a doctrine of materialism in the sense of the self-sufficiency of space, time and matter, it was a peculiar doctrine of matter being contained in space. Newton's law of gravitation, and any other laws that he adumbrated, imply that the world, which is material, is inside space, and space is something like a cup, as it were, within which this material universe is contained.
It was long after Newton that a discovery was made by scientists and physicists that space is not a cup or a vessel, inside which the world is sitting. Space, as well as time, and the world of matter, are one complete organism. The cup is part of the inner content, and the inner content is part of the cup. The cup, so-called, in which they thought the material world is contained, is organically connected with the content itself, and we cannot separate the cup from the content and the content from the cup. Therefore, the world is not inside space; the world is spatio-temporal. Here we are in the second step of the advance of material science. In the beginning it was only matter within space. Now it is not matter within space, but matter inseparable from space.
What happens then? We have some stuff which cannot be called either space or matter. It cannot be called matter, because it is connected with space, inseparable from space. It cannot be called merely space, because it contains material substance. And it is in the process of evolution, which is a characteristic of the time process. So space, time and matter come together in the understanding of what this universe is. What is this universe? It is space-time-matter, or space-time-object. According to this great discovery before us, the words 'space', 'time' and 'object' do not imply three things. They are three facets, three phases, three conditioning factors of one thing which cannot be called either space, time or matter because it is involved in everything that space is, time is or matter is, and yet is much more than what space is, time is or matter is. Inasmuch as matter has been identified with what space is or time is, it appears to be a lump of substance located somewhere. The earth is somewhere, and the other planets are somewhere else. They are not everywhere. Here, this idea has been melted down. It is as if all the planets, all the suns, moons, stars and galaxies are melted into one liquid and thrown everywhere that space is. This is an analogy, an illustration for us to think about how modern science has changed our understanding of matter.
The identification of spatial expanse with the material content of the cosmos implies the diffusion of the so-called localised matter into the expanse of space itself so that it is liquefied, as it were—rarefied, as it were, as space itself is—and the universe is not in some place; it is wherever space is. As space cannot be regarded as a solid substance, the universe also cannot be regarded as a solid substance. We can imagine where science has taken us. The universe is not a solid substance, because we do not identify with solidity anything that is capable of being identified with space itself.
Thus, the definition the universe that obtains later on by these modern theories is that it is capable of description only in terms of words such as spatio-temporal continuum—'spatio' because it is connected with space, 'temporal' because it is connected with the time process of evolution, and 'continuum' which is a substance. But our idea of substance is that it is a solid matter existing somewhere, and this is not something existing somewhere; it is existing everywhere. The universe is an everywhereness not in the sense of a heavy stuff stuck somewhere because of the content that has evolved within it, but because it is a continuum, it is a movement, it is a flux. The universe is a transition, but a transition towards what? Here modern science stops; it cannot go further. It is satisfied with saying that the universe is a liquefied movement, as it were, a fluxation of a content which cannot be described in any physically oriented language. We can only call it a kind of continuum, but a continuum of what?
Everything is made of electrical energy, but what is electricity made of? It is made of force. What is force made of? It is made of motion. But motion of what? It is motion of motion only, because there is no substance there to be moving. It is a birdless flying. We do not require a bird for flying; there can be only flying without a bird. Therefore, a substanceless non-entity, as it were, is this peculiar continuum. We cannot call it materialism in the crass sense of the early Greek thinkers, or even of Newton, because the matter of these materialists, or the earlier classical physicists, has been boiled down to liquid. Therefore, we cannot call it materialism in the ordinary crass sense, but it is materialism nevertheless because of the universe being conceived even at this moment as something of the nature of an object of perception. We can observe the universe and experiment upon it. Even today science is a process of observation and experimentation, and observation and experimentation imply the objectivity of the thing which is observed or experimented upon. Thus, materialism continues in science even today, though it is not that old, crass materialism of the earlier classical science.
Now, here we are still in the stage of atheism. We have advanced in physics to such an extent that we have melted down the whole cosmos into a liquid. In spite of that, we are atheists because we see nothing beyond this so-called spatio-temporal continuum. There is nothing visible to the eyes because, in the laboratory of experiment and observation, we see nothing outside this so-called electromagnetic continuum. Materialism and atheism go together even in their most rarefied form. There is no question of religion here. We do not have to adore somebody outside the universe. In spite of this rarefied perception of the universe as a molten mass, as it were, it is still self-explanatory. It is capable of explanation by mathematical and physical laws. Instead of pure physical computations, we now have more advanced mathematical forms of it. Physics uses mathematics, and the latest definition of the nature of the universe is not in terms of physical laws, but in terms of mathematical equations. And equations, to the horror of even the scientist himself, are the operations of the mind of the scientist. Does it mean that the world is made of mind?
Sir Arthur Eddington and Sir James Jeans, top-level physicists, put a cap on all the observing and experimenting physicists by saying that we are heading towards a dangerous, deep abyss, and we are seeing before us, as the vast universe, that which seems to be within our skull. They shook the very root of physical science, and toppled it upon the mental field of observation that is possible only by an intelligence. Does the universe, therefore, reveal itself as cosmic intelligence? Let the scientist not say anything. He closes his mouth lest he be dubbed as a madman, because no physicist will say that the world is made of intelligence, though privately he feels that it cannot but be that. Physics leads to metaphysics, which it has already become, practically.
The metaphysical implications of modern science have been explained in two great books, written by well-polished thinkers who have delved into the metaphysical foundations of modern science. One book is preliminary, and the other book is more advanced. First there is Philosophical Aspects of Modern Science by C.E.M. Joad. He was a British thinker, very interesting to read. But more interesting is The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science by Edwin Burtt of Cornell University, New York, who was in this Ashram for sometime as our guest, but now God has taken him to heaven. Then we have got the well-known book called The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra, which is the Bhagavadgita of modern science.
Thus, in the earlier stages of religious awareness we seem to be encountering a physical world, and the so-called self-explanatory character of the physical and mathematical laws of the world free us from having any necessity for a God above the universe. But I ask you to remember what I told you in our earlier sessions, that the mind of man is made in such a way that it seeks causes behind effects. How does the phenomenon occur? All this that I have told you about modern physics, etc., is the 'how' of the operation of physical forces, but why do they operate in that manner? Here religion begins. Where the physics and mathematics of science end, religion commences.
In the earlier stages of the religious consciousness, therefore, there is a habit of the mind to delve into the causes of phenomena. I am briefly repeating what I said sometime back. The earlier stages of religion commenced with the discovery of there being causes behind phenomena, and it ended with the location of manifold causes behind the manifold phenomena, so that in the earliest stages of religion we have a concept of many gods. It is a pluralism of divinities, heaven populated by angels and divinities of every kind, and every god is adorable. And for different purposes of our life we seem to be adoring different gods: Ganesha for one purpose, Devi for another, Durga, Lakshmi, Saraswati, Zeus, Odin, Thor, and so on. We have got one god for every little occurrence in this world or to fulfil some of our desires. For every desire there is one god connected with it, so that the whole world is populated by gods and gods everywhere. This is one stage of religion, which cannot be regarded as a false form of religion.
Do not be under the impression that the earlier stages of religion are false and the later stages are true. We are not moving from false religion to real religion or true religion. We are only moving from lesser levels of religion to higher forms of religion. We should not think that the lesser levels are wrong or absurd, in the same way as a kindergarten stage or a first standard and second standard of education are not false in the eyes of a postgraduate Ph.D. student. We cannot say the kindergarten education is a false education. We have transcended it. It was the footstool on which we stood for the sake of higher education.
In a similar manner, the concept of divinities populating heaven as the causes of all phenomena is one concept of religion, valid in its own way. We can summon these gods if we want, so they cannot be called false gods. Though they are real gods, there are more real things than they. Therefore, they become subsumed under that higher level in the same way as we have got a government with so many officials. Each official is real in himself, there is no false official in the government, but there are degrees of authority, the lesser and the higher. The lesser official has an authority, but the higher official includes the authority of the lower one. That is the way in which we can conceive an organism of administration as well as the organism of the whole cosmos of perception and religious consciousness.
Pluralism, the concept of the multiplicity of gods, then gives way to the concept of there being one central power, as there is one central government in spite of there being thousands of officials working as members of this central authority. A central government is not sitting in one place; it is pervading the entire country. Similarly, this universal God who is the operator of the cosmos is all-pervading, existing everywhere, just as in every little speck of dust of a country the government is present, though it cannot be seen with the eyes. We cannot see with our eyes that the government is present in even one inch of the ground of the country, but we can see it by manifesting it through a particular process. The government is an operating medium, it is an operating power, but it is not a physical object. Similarly, God is not a person, which fact comes to high relief by the concept of there being a God who pervades all things, and inasmuch as the pervasion is of all things, there cannot be a spatial limitation of God.
Theistic conceptions in religion somehow or other feel a necessity for a personal God. We cannot get over this idea of personality, because our heart is in the personality. Our feelings are lodged in a person. We are persons, though we are not only persons. There is something in us which is impersonal. The concept of the personality of a human individual is also to be shed. There is somebody called Vishnu, Narayana, John or Joseph. He looks like a person; he has a personality, but what is this personality? It is made up of certain inner components. Of course, on a casual outlook or even with a little bit of application of common sense, we can know that Joseph is not merely a combination of the limbs of the body. When Joseph says “I am coming”, it is not his hands or legs that are speaking. None of the organs of the body are saying “I am coming”. Who is speaking? The body did not make the statement. The mind also did not make the statement, really speaking, because this person who said “I am coming” has a capacity to continue to exist even when the mind is not operating, as in sleep, for instance. In deep sleep Joseph existed. He was not thinking at that time. He existed minus the mind, and minus the organs of the physical body. So a statement such as “I am coming” may not be capable of association entirely with the body or with the mind. It is neither the body nor the mind; it is not a person. Therefore, Joseph is basically not a person. He is an impersonality assuming a personality through his mind and body. We cannot say Joseph does not exist as a person. We can have a photograph of him, and we can see him and touch him. We can speak to him as an individual. Therefore, Joseph is a person, but he is not merely a person. He has an impersonal character behind him which makes him one with all that is capable of being designated as human, etc. Thus, when even in the case of an ordinary human being, impersonality is at the back of personality, then why not with God?
A personality of God is necessary. Because we cannot pray to God with a feeling that there is an emptiness or vacuum in front of us, a kind of portrait is presented before our mind. We paint a picture of God before our mind, and then we pray to God. Unless God is there in front of us, we cannot pray to Him. Even if God is not in front of us, He must at least be everywhere. Even the everywhereness of God is a kind of form that we are attributing to God. The personality of God need not necessarily be a location in one particular spot in space. It can also be an all-pervading personality—as we have in the concept of the Visvarupa, the Cosmic Form, for instance. The eleventh chapter of the Bhagavadgita describes the Cosmic Form of God. Even then it was a form—the Cosmic Form, the Visvarupa, as it is called; rupa is form, though it is visva. It is a manifested universality, universality manifest; therefore, we call it Visvarupa, God, All-form. It is not one form but All-form. Nevertheless, it is a form, so even the All-form is a form. Therefore, the concept of God, freed from all locations in physical personality, also takes a form.
The necessity to conceive God as having a personality or a form arises because we are still continuing to exist as beholders of this great God. Arjuna did not vanish. He was there, beholding this Cosmic Form. The beholder continues to be beholding that which is otherwise inclusive of all things. Can we imagine this mystery? The Visvarupa is inclusive of even Arjuna himself, yet Arjuna was beholding it. It is a peculiar, intriguing situation, the borderland, as it were, of this world and the other world, the personality and the non-personal universality. It is impossible to describe how Arjuna could behold the Cosmic Form when the Cosmic Form also included him.
The peculiar period of transition of religious awareness during which the personality of the beholder somehow seems to be continuing in spite of the acceptance of the universality and the inclusiveness of the All-being is the penultimate stage of the concept of the personality of God. We cannot know how such a thing is possible. We accept the universality of God. “O All! O Thou which are All!” Arjuna cries, and yet he is there to make this statement, to offer this prayer. This offering of prayer to the universal All is made by somebody who is offering this prayer. That person has to exist, and because of that person's existence somehow or other in an intriguing fashion, surpassing ordinary human psychological explanation, certain advanced levels of religious awareness are incapable of description in terms of the mould into which modern psychology is cast. Religious psychology is very difficult to explain. It is not ordinary Freudian psychology, general psychology or abnormal psychology; it is religious psychology.
If you are interested in advanced studies, you may read a very interesting book on this subject, religious psychology, written by James Bissett Pratt. The name of the book is The Religious Consciousness. Another book which you can read to your advantage is The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James, a well-known author. These two books will give you a certain insight into the nature of the superior psychological forums of religion which transcend ordinary psychological findings.
Thus, here we are in a stage of religion where the theistic concept of the personality of God becomes something inseparable from our necessity to adore God. As religious people, we have to adore God. We feel a joy in summoning God. We cry before God: “Come! I am in distress, O Thou All. Come at this moment. I am sinking. I am entering into the abyss and the bowels of the earth, in sorrow. O All, come!” Thus great saints cry. Draupadi cried, Sita cried, all cried. Whom are they crying for? They have a vision of something whose hands seem to be operating just near them. Draupadi cried out in the court of the Kurus for help from somebody who was not there, and who could not be there. She was crying for Krishna's help, and Krishna was in Dvarka, a thousand miles away from the Kuru's place. What good was there in crying? But when the soul cries, it does not think of distance. That idea of distance between one thing and another thing is a mental operation; but religious crying is not mental crying. It is not crying with the voice of the throat, it is not the words of language. The cry of the soul for God is not a word that is uttered by the tongue or a description in language that is known to humanity. The soul speaks, and the soul has no spatial distance.
“Oh my dear child, you have gone!” a mother cries, even if her child died in London and she is here in Uttar Pradesh. The heart of the mother melts for something that she has lost in an accident that took place in London, and she does not think about the distance between Uttar Pradesh and London. The sorrow is so deep in the mother. It has sunk into her soul, and her soul is crying, “My child, my only one, you have gone!” Where is the distance between the mother and the child? All distance in space and time is a concoction of the mental operations in terms of space and time. But religion is not a mental operation. If we think that religious consciousness is only the work of the mind, something that we are thinking as we are thinking a marketplace or a vegetable shop, then it is not religion. Actually, religion takes root in our personality only when the soul acts. Very rarely does the soul act in a person. We are shells rather than real personalities. We are broken fragments of mental operations. We think and think and think, but thinking is not religion, and God will not listen to our summoning, because God is the Universal Soul. As God is the Universal Soul, He will respond to the calls of our soul.
The government responds to another government through its ambassador. An ambassador is the medium
of contact of one government with another. Direct contact between governments is not done. A citizen in one country cannot directly send a petition to another government except through the embassy, as it is expected to be done. Similarly, the ambassador of God is in our hearts, and only through the ambassador will we speak. It is not in the heart in the physical sense; it is what we call the soul.
The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad mentions that the soul of man is the indicator of the presence of God in a person. The soul is the mark of God in us. It is a map drawn by God in our own personality. As through a map we can know the location of a particular thing, the map that is drawn in our own heart by God Himself, as the soul in us, will indicate where God is. Our conscience is the outer crust of this soul that is within us, and the soul speaks.
It is very difficult to know when the soul speaks. Mostly in our ordinary life, our soul seems dead for us. We are only physical bodies and minds, and souls we have none. We have a mind, we have an intellect, we have feelings, sometimes very deep, but we have no soul. When does the soul act? When we are fast asleep the soul operates, and that is why the joy that we feel in deep sleep is superior to any kind of joy we can think of in this world. The best of milk and honey, the best of social position, the best of monetary conditions of which we are in possession cannot equal the joy of deep sleep. If we do not sleep for fifteen days, then we will see what happens. Emperors will say, “I don't want any kingdom. Let me sleep!” This is because, as the Upanishad tells us very briefly and beautifully, the joy of an emperor is external. It is not organic to the person. The joys appearing to be emanating from our possessions are external to us, and inasmuch as they are external, they are not organic to us. Inasmuch as they are not organic to us, they are not ours. Inasmuch as they are not ours, those joys are not our joys. They are only concoctions, imaginations, illusions, and therefore they split, which is why all the joys of the world end in bereavement. The king will die, the mother will lose her child, the husband will lose his wife, the wife will lose her husband, the owner will lose his property; but we cannot lose ourselves.
Only that which you really own can become the source of your real happiness. That which you do not really own cannot become the source of your joy. Inasmuch as one day these things will leave you, everything is capable of causing bereavement. They cannot become the source of your joy. Not your money, not your father, not your mother, not your husband, not your wife, not your child, not even your body can give you happiness, because all these things are capable of being lost one day. Therefore, they are not you. They may be yours, but they are not you. Therefore, the real joy, which is you, is not in these things.
In deep sleep you are temporarily divested, as it were, from a connection with the body and the mind, and all its relations. In deep sleep the soul emerges, slumbering though it is, but it cannot see properly. Though it is groping, it is the soul that is groping. Therefore, it is a joy surpassing all the conceptual enjoyments of the world. There are other times when you are likely to see the soul acting, such as when you are drowning in water. Only those who have almost drowned know what it means to feel that everything is over, finished. Deep down what they think at that time, nobody can explain in words. It is said that the whole personality, from its very root, comes up, and you will see all that happened to you right from your birth. Like a reel of film that is projected on a screen, the whole life of a person will be seen. This happens because, at the time of death, the soul acts because the bodily and the mental associations are wrenched out bit by bit. The nerves crack at that time. It is said in a frightening, or rather humorous style, that the pain that one feels at the time of death is like seventy-two thousand scorpion stings. The idea is that there are seventy-two thousand nerve knots, and they all crack at that time. You can imagine what happens when one nerve knot is breaking; intense agony will be felt at that time, and suppose seventy-two thousand knots break. But the knots need not break in the case of the person who is really detached, who has lived an unselfish and charitable life, who has not grabbed another's property, who has not exploited anybody, who has not hurt others, who has been good, who has never entertained ill feelings towards anybody. In that person's case, the nerves will not crack. Their body will be automatically dropped like the slough of a snake. This is a solace for all of us.
Have you seen a slough of a snake, a long dry skin? It looks like a snake with the mouth, eyes, everything, but it is not a snake. The snake does not feel the pain of the sloughing because it is detached, like a dry coconut which is unconnected with the shell. If a raw coconut is breaking, it will feel the pain. Your soul should be like a dry coconut when you depart from this body, so that the shell may go, and the coconut will not feel that the shell is going.
The point is that the soul acts at death, and also in deep sleep; and in very rare moments of uncontrollable agony and ecstasy beyond the capacity of the mind, the soul acts. When everything is lost and your life itself is at stake, the soul acts. Or if the whole world has come under your possession, the soul acts. If you are the emperor of the entire earth, which is something unthinkable, unimaginable, then also the soul will act.
But in religion, the soul also acts. You do not have to become an emperor for the soul to act. You need not be sleeping or be prepared to die for the soul to act. You can consciously rouse the soul into action by an operation of what is called religious consciousness. The soul wanting God is actually what is called religion.