Guruji: Now what do we mean by a better dream? You take any person in the world away from a group and corner him or her and ask the question: “What would you prefer - peace or war? What would you prefer - love or hate? What would you prefer - violence or affection?” You'll find out that the answer in every case is unique. There can be no two opinions about it. We are made as children by God, and if you want to know how we were made by God, all we have to do is to look towards the children. A child, unless he's indoctrinated - whether you are a Jew, or you are a Christian, or you are a Muslim, or a Hindu, no such distinctions exist in the mind of the child. They go to everyone with the same love and affection, everyone can kiss them and they are just bundles of joy. That’s how God had intended us to be.
And what do we make of ourselves? We imagine ourselves to have certain identities, certain role models. We are molded by the society as well as our family; we have these roles and we tend to get entrapped in them. We have to realize that we are much bigger than what we think we are. Let me try to explain this concept in a slightly different way. The way we perceive this world, is conditioned by our senses. We have five channels of communication in the world, of knowing about the world. Either we see it, or we hear it, or we smell it, or we touch it. So let us look at the characteristics of each of these things. Let’s look at our sense of sight. What is near to us appears bigger than what is far away, that’s an inverse square law. So it is acting like a local magnifier. Out of the entire electromagnetic spectrum that is available for possible vision, we only see one octave - from 3,800 angstroms to about 6,000 angstroms. We do not see the ultraviolet, we do not see infrared, we do not see a microwave, we see none of these things. If we want to see, we have to develop separate instruments to be able to do that. We are spectrally delimited and we are locally magnifying. Let’s look at our sense of hearing. What is inside of this room, we hear, what is outside, we do not hear. And the sense of touch - you do not know what is more than two millimetres away from your body. The skin doesn't sense that. There’s a very sharp cut off. That cut off occurs two millimetres from the surface of your body. Once you go inside the body you do not have a feeling. The feeling is there only on the skin surface. The skin also measures the temperature and it also measures the pain, but these are all local. If somebody is pushing a tube through your arteries, you won't know it because you don't feel the blood that is flowing through, do you? So the feeling is confined only on a surface. Every one of our senses of sight, of smell, of hearing, every one of these things is acting like a local magnifier. Now, having understood this, suppose I ask you to wear a scanning electron microscope, which magnifies everything by effect of 100,000, attach it to your eyes and discover how this room appears to you. We may keep on searching this room, covering every bit of it for a million years, a billion years, but you will never make out how this room looks like.
In order to see this room as we humans see it, you have got to throw away that scanning electron microscope. The range of this instrument is not appropriate for having a universal vision. Our vision is also limited in so many other ways. For example, we said that what is near to us appears big, but what is faraway from us, appears small. So in such a sense what kind of an emotional interaction with the world I can have? What is closer to me is more important to me than what is far away, right? So the affections that you have, the attachments that you have, these things are brought about by the nature of your senses. If you think of a small cube, a wooden cube and hold it there, it appears with a certain size. You are not able to look at this thing from all points of view from all directions in space. Your view is conditioned to one particular angle of looking. If you are able to look at the cube from all possible directions, how would that cube look like to you? Would it have a spherical geometry? If you were able to look at the cube from all possible time slots, how has it evolved to becoming the cube today? It was a piece of wood, and this was a part of a tree, if you go back in time. It was a seed and it was the earth. And before it was the earth, it was an intergalactic dust. And before that, it was merged into one single point, at the origin of the Universe, the Big Bang. So you see, if you trace its history towards later time, again you will find that it's going to merge into the Cosmos. So let us admit honestly that we do not have a universal vision, because we are born with the senses with which we are observing and these senses are limiting.
Your attachments are the sources for your appreciation of the Universe, of your division of the Universe into so many different fields, of your classifications, of your cognitions. All these things are based on that drawing out of yourself from yourself. And this multiplicity, this projection is coming from the nature of your senses.
There are two ways of knowing things. When I say that I know that this is a glass, then my mind is functioning, thinking mind is functioning. It’s comparing this object with so many different objects and it has ruled out all the other possibilities, which did not belong to this. It was compared to a cat, it was compared to the tiger, a lion, a human being, a library, a book, all these comparisons have failed. It said - it is not this, it's not this, it's not this, it's not this. And among all the glasses it has abstracted certain kinds of information and recognized that this is a glass. So it is when you say that you know something, this act of knowing is like a knife, it is cutting or separating something from the rest. It is divisible. The nature of knowing, the act of cognition is dividing the whole into parts. Okay, so the more you want to know, the more you want to become an expert about something, the finer and finer is your discrimination going to be. You are cutting the Universe into smaller and smaller slices and trying to appreciate this and maybe trying to synthesize the relationships between them. But basically the knowledge is divisive, the thinking mind is discriminative.
Discrimination is the faculty of the thinking mind. So this means that given a starting point, which is yourself, you're going into branches, you are dividing yourself into your thinking mind and your knowing mind, and then you are going further into branches and subbranches and so on. You are going down into an ever evolving tree. You are going to the roots, so this is multiplying. In other words you can say that thinking mode of being is a centrifugal force, which tends to move away from the center. If you are standing on the top of the tree on the surface of a sphere and the sphere is rotating. Let us say, only at the center you are stable. A little motion away from this, you are pushed away and you are in an unstable equilibrium. So a thinking mind is behaving like a convex surface on which you are sitting. It is defocusing, it does not remain focused at a particular point because it wants to go out and search.The feeling mind is the opposite of this. It is a centering device, it's based on love. Here, what you are trying to do is to eliminate the distinctions you are seeing - without your eyes, you are hearing, without your ears, you are thinking, without your mind. The feeling is a centering device is the way of the heart. The heart is the receptive thing. When you are in love what do you do? You make love. You embrace and that is uniting. It is making 2 into 1, if you know how to make 2 into 1, then you know how to make 3 into 1, because you can first convert 3 into 2 and then 2 into 1. And by a process of continuous successive reductions you can bring an infinity into 1. So the love is a uniting principle. And knowing is like pushing away from yourself. It is something like hate. If you hate somebody, would you like to be near that person? You would like to push them away.
So when you try to discriminate with the thought, when you are trying to know, when you try to cognize, when you try to name somebody or something as belonging to this or that, you are creating a division between yourself and the other and this division is the cause of the trouble. It will not be the cause of the trouble if your two modes are functioning.The probing or the pushing away and the inviting or receptive functions are balanced. This is what they say in different languages, in different cultures. They are called by different names. In the Tao, the merging of the Yin and Yang, the positive and negative energies. The male is probing, knowing, thinking mind, acting. And the female - the receptive aspect. So when you balance your energies, when you balance this probing, this action, the thinking with the female principle, which is based on love, then this action that you are performing in the world becomes meaningful. This action must support and be supported by the female aspect, the receptivity.
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