Chapter 5: The Way of Wisdom, the Way of Love
I. 104. Aisa lo nahin tai sa, lo
O how may I ever express that secret word?
O how can I say he is not like this,
and he is like that?
If I say that he is within me,
the universe is ashamed.
If I say that he is without me,
it is falsehood.
He makes the inner and the outer worlds
to be indivisibly one;
the conscious and the unconscious,
both are his footstools.
He is neither manifest nor hidden,
he is neither revealed nor unrevealed:
there are no words to tell that which he is.
II. 56. Dariya ki lahar dariyao hai ji
The river and its waves are one surf.
Where is the difference
between the river and its waves?
When the wave rises, it is the water;
and when it falls,
it is the same water again.
Tell me, sir, where is the distinction?
Because it has been named a wave,
shall it no longer be considered as water?
Within the absolute,
the worlds are being told like beads.
Look upon that rosary
with the eyes of wisdom.
The truth is known and yet not known - known in a sense and not known in another; known because we are part of it, but not known because we are not separate from it. To know something, the knower has to be separate, and yet again, to know something really, how can you know it if you are separate? This is the basic problem that faces the seeker of truth. We are one with it, there is no space between us and the truth, so we cannot become the knower. We cannot separate the known from the knower - there is no way to separate them - and knowledge exists only when the knower and known are separate.
Knowledge is a bridge between the object and the subject. If they are not separate, the bridge cannot exist. So the first thing to be remembered: truth is not known in the ordinary sense, cannot be known in the ordinary sense.
Yet there is a knowing of sorts - a totally different type of knowing, of a totally different quality. The knowing is more like love than knowledge. You know a woman or a man when you are deep in love. When your boundaries meet and mingle and merge, when you are no longer separate, when you cannot say where you end and where your woman starts, when there are no fences and no defenses, when you are simply overlapping, overflowing into each other - the division has disappeared and you have become indivisible - there is a sort of knowing. You know. Before it, all that you used to think of as knowledge was just illusory.