Chapter 13: Sweet Fruits
Intellect divides everything into two. The way intellect looks at things, nothing can remain undivided. Intellect is analysis, intellect is discrimination, intellect is division. This is why birth and death appear as two to us, because of our seeing through the intellect; otherwise they are not two. Birth is a beginning, death is the end; they are two extremes of the same thing. We see happiness and unhappiness as two separate things; this is because of the intellect, otherwise they are not two. This is why happiness can turn into unhappiness and unhappiness can turn into happiness. What appears as happiness today, by tomorrow morning can become unhappiness. The morning is far away; what appears as happiness now can become unhappiness in the next moment.
This should be impossible. If happiness and unhappiness are two things, two separate things, then our happiness should never become unhappiness and our unhappiness can never become happiness. But this change continues each moment. Now there is love, now it becomes hate. A moment ago there was attraction, now it becomes repulsion. A moment ago it was felt to be friendship, now it has become enmity. These are not two things, otherwise change from one to the other would be impossible. One who was alive a moment ago is dead now. So life and death cannot be two separate things, otherwise how can a living man be dead? How can life turn into death?
It is our error that we divide everything into two. Our very way of seeing is such that things are divided into two. When one puts this way of seeing aside, when one removes the mind from in front of one’s eyes and looks at the world without the mind, all divisions disappear. The experience of nonduality, the experience of vedanta in essence, is the experience of those who have looked at the world putting their intellect aside. Then the world is no longer the world, it becomes God. Then what we saw as the embodied soul within us and God out there, they too remain as nothing but two ends of one and the same reality. That which I am here, inside, and that which is spread there all over, both become one: Tattvamasi, ‘That art thou’.
You then experience that you are not only one of the ends of ‘that’. “The same sky of this vast existence is also touching my hand here. The same expanse of air which is surrounding the whole earth is also entering me as my breath.” The life-force of this whole existence is pulsating, and because of that all life is: the stars move and the sun rises and there is light from the moon, fruits come to the trees and the birds sing their songs, and man lives. “This life-force hidden within all - this great pulsation somewhere at the center of the universe and this tiny pulsation of my heart in my body, these must be the two ends of one and the same thing.” They are not two.
But this can be experienced only when not seen through the intellect. It is very difficult to see keeping the mind aside, because we normally see only through the intellect. Our habit is well-entrenched. How will you see other than through the intellect? Whatsoever you see, a thought will arise.