Chapter 36: Wake Up and You Are It
In the West it used to be thought that Aristotle was such a person - he created logic, the whole system of logic alone, and for two thousand years it has remained the same. But in this century things have changed, because new discoveries in physics have made it absolutely necessary to find something better than Aristotle. The new findings in physics have created a problem, because if you follow Aristotle’s logic then you cannot accept those findings. Those findings are against Aristotle’s logic, but you cannot deny reality. Reality is reality! You can change the logic - which is man-made - but you cannot change the behavior of electrons. It is not in your power, it is existential. So a non-Aristotelean logic has grown up.
The second case was geometry. Euclid has reigned for hundreds of years as a perfect master as far as geometry is concerned, but in this century that too has got into trouble. Non-Euclidean geometries have evolved. They had to be evolved because of the new discoveries of physics.
For example, you have heard that the closest distance between two points makes a straight line, but the discovery of the physicists is that there is no straight line at all. A straight line is impossible, for the simple reason that you are sitting on a global earth. You can draw a straight line here on the floor, but it is not a straight line because it is part of a circle. If you go on drawing it from both ends, one day they will meet somewhere and you will see that it has become a circle. So the small piece that you were thinking was a straight line was not a straight line; it was just such a small part of a circle that you could not see the curve. The curve was invisible - it was so small, but it was there.
Where are you going to draw a straight line? - because all stars, all planets, everything is global, is round. So wherever you draw a line, howsoever small it is, it looks absolutely straight - even with scientific instruments you can see that it is straight - but go on making it bigger and bigger, and it will become a part of a circle. So it was an arc, not a straight line. In the same way everything from Euclid has been canceled.
Patanjali remains the only person yet, and perhaps may remain the only person, who has created a whole science alone, and has remained for five thousand years without any challenge from any corner. He calls it the turiya, the fourth. He is so scientific a man that one simply feels amazed.
Five thousand years ago, he had the courage, the insight, the awareness, to say that God is only a hypothesis. It can help you to become awakened but it is not a reality, it is only a device. There is no God to be achieved; it is only a hypothesis.
A few people can be helped by hypothesis - they can use it - but remember, it is not a reality. Once you have become awakened, it disappears, the same way as your dreams disappear when you wake up. It was so real in your dream that sometimes it happens that even after you have awakened there is some effect left of the reality of the dream: your heart is beating faster, you are perspiring, trembling, still afraid. Now you know perfectly it was a dream, but you are still crying, your tears are there. The dream was non-existential, but it has affected you because for that period you had taken it to be real.