Darshan – In Gita Verse 11.3 O greatest of all personalities, O supreme form, though I see You here before me in Your actual position, as You have described Yourself, I wish to see how You have entered into this cosmic manifestation. I want to see that form of Yours.
Now Arjuna has a desire to have Darshan of Krishna’s cosmic manifestation.
What does darshan mean?
Darshan means to look and philosophy means to think, they are just the opposite of each other, they cannot be joined together in any way. Darshan means a look like a child’s, when distinctions have been dropped.
When you make the two one, and when you make the inner as the outer… Because this inner and outer is also a distinction.
Leave the outer, come to the inner; move within, drop the without. But you can misunderstand the whole thing, because when you drop the without, the within will be dropped automatically. When the outer is no more, how can the inner exist? They are relative terms: the inner exists only as the opposite of the outer; when there is no more outer there is no more inner. First you drop the outer, and then the inner drops automatically by itself; there is no in, no out, you have become one. If there is still inner and outer then you are still two, not yet one, you are still divided.
That’s why Zen monks have said one of the strangest things ever asserted: they say this world is God; they say ordinary life is religion; they say everything as it is, is okay. Nothing is to be changed because the very concept of change creates the two: that which is, has to be changed into something which ought to be. A has to be changed into B, the two come in. They say this very world is divine; God is not somewhere else, because that somewhere else creates a duality. God is not the creator and you are not the creature; you are God. God is not the creator: this very creation is divine, the very creativity is God.
Mind always tries to make distinctions, that is the mind’s specialty. The more distinctions you can make, the more clever a mind you have. And the mind will always say, “These mystics are a little foolish, because boundaries are not clear.” That’s why they call religion mysticism, and by mysticism they don’t mean a very good thing. They mean something vague like mist, something cloudy, something that is not a clear reality, but like a dream.
These mystics are fools to logicians because they don’t make distinctions, and distinctions are everything you have to make; you have to know what is what! And logic thinks the more distinctions you can make, the nearer you come to reality. That is why science – which follows logic, which is the application of logic and nothing else – has reached the atom; making distinctions, by and by, separating everything, they have reached the atom.
Religion, not separating but joining, dropping the boundaries not drawing the boundaries, has reached the ultimate, the one. Science has reached the atom, which means the many, the infinitely many; and religion has reached the one, the infinitely one. The approaches: science uses mind and mind makes boundaries, clear-cut distinctions; religion doesn’t use mind and then all the boundaries disappear, everything becomes everything else, things are meeting. The trees are meeting the sky, the sky is dropping into the trees; the earth is meeting heaven, heaven is reaching the earth.
And if you look deep into life, you will find that these mystics are right. All boundaries are man-made, there are no boundaries in reality. They are useful, utilitarian, but not true; they help in certain ways, but they hinder also in certain other ways.
Science is trying to penetrate existence through the objective approach and religion tries to penetrate the same reality through the subjective approach – and Yoga is the synthesis of both.
The word science is beautiful, it means the capacity to see. It means exactly what the Indian word darshan means. The word darshan should not be translated as philosophy, it can be translated more accurately as science, the capacity to see.
Science is trying to penetrate the ultimate through the objective, from the outside. Religion is trying to penetrate the same ultimate through the subjective. And Yoga is the highest synthesis: Yoga is both science and religion, together.
Yoga is a supra science and a supra religion. Yoga is neither Hindu nor Mohammedan nor Christian, it is supra religious. And of course it is a supra science because it is the science of man – it is the science of the scientist himself. It touches the ultimate. The ultimate synthesis.
Once you touch the ultimate synthesis then you have the capacity to see.
In my Bhagavad Gita Verse 9.8, blog, I wrote Darshan means seeing. Not thinking, but seeing.
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