Religion and Social Values : 28.

3: The Reason for Birth and Death : 7.


It is space, time and causal relation which deal a death blow at our personality. The reason behind this phenomenon is, as mentioned earlier, that the universe does not behave in the way we behold it with our eyes or try to understand it with our mind. It is controlled by a law which is supernatural and beyond the comprehension of the logical intellect or the scientific understanding. What we call space and time—or, as people today say, space-time—is a mysterious complex in which we as individuals are involved. It is a network of relations.


The space-time causal complex is a network of relations which surpasses the understanding of man. This network of relations cannot become the object of the understanding of man’s mind, because he himself is involved in these relations, just as a thread is involved in the network of a fabric or a piece of cloth. And just as a particular thread in a cloth cannot know the cloth unless it also knows itself simultaneously because of its inseparable relation to the entire structure of the cloth, in the same way, man cannot know that this is the case unless he knows himself and knows everything through himself and himself through everything.

This is the great difficulty before us. Here we seem to be entering into a field of a new type of education altogether, where to know oneself is to know all things and to know all things is to know oneself simultaneously. To know oneself is to know the whole universe, and vice versa. Thus, universal freedom and personal freedom mean one and the same thing because of the peculiar nature of the involvement of individuals in the space-time complex. Space and time are not outside us. We cannot see space, though we appear to be seeing it with our eyes. 

It is inwardly woven into the very fibre of our personality. There is space inside us also. Space is not outside anything, nor can it be said to be inside everything, because the very conception of a localised existence is impossible without the conception of space. What we call length, breadth and height is nothing but space defined in a particular manner. So when we say “I am occupying space”, we are not defining ourselves properly, because we are ourselves a configuration of space. The dimension of our body or personality is a local description of a point in space. And we are not merely in space—we are not only sitting here on this seat, in this hall—but also we are now at such and such time, on this day of the year, and so on. Therefore, we are in a locality of space and a point in time.

To  be  continued  ...