Sachchidananda 'The Life Divine' Book I,Ch.9, 10, 11, 12 - Track 504

I believe that these seven pages are so crystallized that you might say that if you really pursue these seven pages, no intellectual doubt will remain that God exists.  The nature God is described here because the question is not only the belief in God’s existence or intellectual conviction, but what kind of God exists. There are many wrong notions about God and this Chapter does not try to prove every wrong notion of God, but that which really exists, God who really exists as He is, of that God you can have an intellectual conviction. If you read these seven pages quite thoroughly, I don’t say that it is very easy to read these seven pages thoroughly. We are actually attempting to study these seven pages and we might succeed to a great extent, but as I said that even in that path of intellectual Jnana Yoga, this is only the first step. Once you are sure it makes it extremely easy afterwards to concentrate, to think of God in the way in which it is proposed here. If you really go into that movement then it takes very little afterwards to jump into the experience of the Reality. Of course that also very easy does not mean really easy, but it is relatively easy, if you don’t have this and yet you concentrate and pass through the process of Jnana Yoga, You might say it is extremely difficult, almost impossible. It’s a part of the process and this is true of every intellectual yoga, it’s not only integral yoga, but even if you take Adaivtic Vedanta yoga, there also the intellectual process is tremendous.

 Buddhist yoga for example, In fact if you go to Buddhist monasteries most of the time what they are doing is not experiencing, what is prescribed but only intellectually discussing so that you are sure that shunya is the only answer. The whole practice of Buddhist monasteries is to prove to the mind that all the intellectual questions can be answered only when you arrive at shunya. They have developed over thousands of years, since Buddha’s time started 2500 years have passed, very strict methods of intellectual argumentation have been found and proposition are made, counter proposition are made.

These arguments, counter argument and everything is so expounded that every line, by lane of intellectual thought that it is quite easy to arrive at silence of the mind. Because normally when the mind is not silent, what is the reason? There are many reasons of the wavering of the mind but one of them is the intellectual doubt about the ultimate existence. Ultimately a time comes when you say, how do I know and that creates so much of disbalance and wavering of consciousness that you have to arrive at a certainty before the mind becomes still, but that is one way of stilling. It’s not the only method of stilling.

Question: Human beings have a lot of problems and questions. You are tensed you try and get the answers from the people around you. But I think after reading this chapter, one doesn’t need to go to anybody. You know the answer within you and you don’t have to run around and ask people to solve your problem. You can solve it yourself.

Answer: You are quite right. This is wonderful experience. It’s a fact that if intellectually you are sure that God exists and the kind of God that is described here, is not, bearded man living as if in the seventh heaven, but a real, pure existence. 

Before I come to the next aspect of the question you must know that one of the most important elements of the modern science is expounded by Einstein and his most important discovery is that whereas previously we use to speak about space and time. He said we have now to speak of space-time, this is one of the great discoveries he has made. This is one of the highest points of scientific thought, not philosophical thought. Normally we have two strands in our perception of things meaning thereby that perception of space, much of which we can see physically, which you can even measure by inches and feet and kilometers and time, which we don’t see, as we see space. Nobody sees time, we only experience time mentally, whereas space we can measure physically. But time is not physically seen by us it is only mentally conceived and time is measured in movement of events. So many events which are occurring and when we think of this unfolding of events, we become aware of time. There was a time, when we used to think that time is something. If it is 12:15 now here, it is 12:15 all over Delhi, there is one time which is uniform for the whole of Delhi, or at least for whole of India, or at least those portions of India which come under this particular level of the spread of the sun. In other words you could say that simultaneously, when I am talking to you a train is passing through Delhi simultaneously at the same time. So many cars are speeding past on the roads of Delhi simultaneously. 

Einstein was thinking of space and time at the highest point he concluded that the notion of simultaneity is wrong. There is no such thing in simultaneity in time. For each point of space there is a specific time. The time is not something like a cloud hanging over a large area of space, for every point of space there is a specific time, which is peculiar to that space. This is regarded as one of the most important ideas, which if not today, tomorrow your children in classes 4-5 they will start studying because this idea is now one of the highest point reached at the highest level of scientific thought. Twenty years ago, I had seen a book which had attempted to make pictures for children’s book. It’s not ordinary book for adults to show them how space and time are related to each other in the way in which Einstein has seen it, so that for every space there is a dimension of time.