Limitless – Beyond the Capacity of Our Thinking

That which pervades the whole universe is subtlest, is indestructible. But that which fills this whole universe, is gross, is destructible.

“Try to understand it like this. A room is completely empty; there is not a single thing in it. Emptiness is pervading the whole room. Actually, the right thing to say will be that the emptiness existed even when there was no room there. It was only later on that we enclosed that emptiness by raising walls all around.

When the room was not there, the emptiness still was. And when the room will not be there anymore, the emptiness will still be.

“When the room is, then too that emptiness is. The room has been built, it will be destroyed some day. Once it was not, and some day again it will not be. But that emptiness, that space, the void, the sky, was there before, is now, and will be hereafter too.

“Using words like was or is is not appropriate, because to say ‘is’ to that which has never been non-existent is not right. To say ‘is’ for things that can also become non-existent is fine. It is all right to say ‘the tree is’ or ‘the man is,’ but it is not correct to say “existence is.’ To say ‘existence is’ in reference to existence is to make a repetition.

“Existence actually means ‘that which is’ so there is no need to repeat it by saying, ‘existence is,’ in other words, ‘that which is, is.’ That’s precisely what it means, and nothing else.

To say ‘is’ for something that can never be non-existent is meaningless.

“That is why a man of such great religiousness as Buddha never used the words ‘the ultimate reality is.’ Ignorant people took him to be an irreligious man, but Buddha felt it would be a very wrong thing to say this because is should only be used for something that can become non-existent too.

“To say ‘man is’ would be fine. We can use is for man – ‘is’ is a phenomenon that has happened to him. In time it will be gone. But to say ‘the ultimate reality is’ is not right, because the ultimate reality means isness . Using the word is for that which always is, is a very weak expression, is a wrong expression, is tautology.

The emptiness is always there. It was there even when the room was not.

“Then we placed furniture in the room, we put up wall hangings and pictures, and then we sat there. The room was decorated in all sorts of ways and is full of things. Now there are two things in the room: firstly, the emptiness that has always been there, and secondly, the filling caused by things, which were not always there.

And the most interesting thing is that we never see that emptiness, we only see the filling. In a room we see that which fills it, but not that which is empty.

“When you enter a room you see only the things that are there. You don’t see that which has always been there. You don’t see, and also it’s invisible. Even if you notice the emptiness, one should say it is in reference to the fillings.

“For example, here is this chair. You can see the empty space around it. You can see that there is empty space all around the chair, but you never see that there is a chair in the middle of an empty space. And the reality is that it is the chair that is placed in the middle of emptiness.

The chair can be removed, not the emptiness. The emptiness can be filled up but cannot be removed.

“You can remove a chair from a room because the chair is not part of the isness of the room, but you cannot remove emptiness from the room. At the most you can suppress the emptiness of the room by filling it up with things. If everything was removed from the room, you would say, ‘There is nothing here.’ You would only see the walls of the room. And if the walls were also removed, you would say, ‘There is no room here at all.’

“But the walls are not the room. The empty space within the four walls is the room. The English word room is good; it means an empty space. The very word room means an empty space.

But we are not able to see the empty space, even the idea of an empty space doesn’t occur to us because we don’t have any awareness of it.

“Actually, the empty space has always been so much around us that we have never felt the need to see it.

It is the same as this vast sky, this space stretching out to infinity, this empty space expanding into endlessness with no boundary or limits, neither beginning nor ending anywhere.

Remember, anything that is emptiness can neither begin nor end anywhere.

“Only fullness caused by things can have a beginning and an end; emptiness cannot have a beginning or an end. What could the beginning and the end of the emptiness of a room be? Yes, the walls have a beginning and an end, the things in the room have a beginning and an end, but the space doesn’t have any boundaries.

Sky means that which is limitless. This infinite space that you see all around is truth, reality.

“And within this infinity all that appears, all that is created and withers away is untruth, unreal.

“A tree comes into the world, and for some time the empty space is filled with greenery. Flowers blossom, and for a while the empty space is filled with fragrance. Then the flowers wither away, the tree topples down, and the empty space carries on being where it was. But in fact, even when the tree was there and the flowers were blossoming, there was no difference to the emptiness. It remained the same.

“Things get created and destroyed. Whatsoever gets created and is destroyed is gross, is visible. Whatsoever is not created and not destroyed is subtle, incomprehensible and invisible. Even calling it ‘subtle’ is not right, but Krishna is helpless when he uses this word. It isn’t right, but it can’t be helped – there is no other choice.

Actually, when we say subtle we still mean it to be part of something gross.

“When we say small it means part of some larger thing. When we say very subtle, we mean a great deal less gross. But in the language used by man, even the subtle is related with the gross, the material. Even if we say tinier than the tiniest, it still has a relationship with the gross, with matter.

Human language is made of dualities; it consists of pairs.

“But when Krishna says subtle, indestructible, it is in no way part of something gross. What Krishna is calling subtle, indestructible is that which is not gross. It is sheer helplessness; we don’t have a word for it. The closest incorrect expression that can be given is subtle, the least incorrect word that it can be assigned is subtle. There is no word for it, so we have to give it some name.

“The words we have created are funny. Even if we find the word that is the most opposite of a particular word, it makes no difference, it will still be related to that particular word. For example, if we say, ‘It is limitless,’ we are deriving the word limitless from the word limit.

“Now it is very interesting that in the word limit there is no sense of ‘limitless’ but the word limitless carries the sense of ‘limit’ in it.

No matter how vast we may imagine ‘the limitless’ to be, what we actually imagine is, at the most, a vast, vast, faraway limit.

“Regardless of how much we may think, what we mean is, at the most, to keep on pushing the limit as far as possible. But our thinking cannot comprehend that there will be no limit. That is inconceivable.

‘Limitless’ is beyond the capacity of our thinking.

“When we say, ‘This room is empty,’ what we mean in our minds is that the room is filled with emptiness. So we also treat emptiness like a thing, an object: ‘filled with emptiness’ or ‘full of emptiness’ – as if emptiness were a thing, while what emptiness actually means is ‘where there is nothing.’ But even if we say ‘There is nothing,’ we are still using nothing as a thing. The English word nothing is made out of no and thing.

Even in saying ‘nothing’ you have to bring thing in.

“The point is that we cannot think without considering the thing, the gross.

“So take Krishna’s use of the word subtle as the helplessness of man. It doesn’t mean some part of the gross, of the material; it doesn’t mean even the tiniest part of gross. Subtle means that which simply isn’t gross, that which has nothing to do with gross, with matter.

“And what is gross? That which is visible is gross, that which can be touched is gross, that which can be heard is gross – actually whatsoever comes in the grasp of our senses is gross.

“But it also is not that if tomorrow you develop a very powerful telescope or microscope and it catches something, then that thing can be called ‘subtle.’ No. Whatsoever can be grasped is gross. A telescope only increases the capacity of your eyes; it is doing nothing else. It is as if your eyes have become more powerful.

But regardless of how profound an instrument we may develop, whatsoever comes within its range will be nothing but gross.

“All such instruments and mechanisms are nothing but extensions of our senses; they are additions to our senses.

“For example, when a man looks through his spectacles, he sees what he couldn’t see before without them, but this doesn’t mean that he is now seeing something subtle. Scientists are now able to see things that are very far away, very far away, but those objects are still gross.

“Whatsoever can be seen, whatsoever can be heard, whatsoever can be touched, whatsoever falls within the grasp of our senses is gross.

The subtle means that which does not, cannot, and will not be made to fall within the capacity of man’s senses. In fact, the subtle is that which even thoughts cannot grasp.

“Until only yesterday, the atom was the subtlest thing. Now even the atom has been split into electrons, the neutron and the proton. Now the scientists say that these are the minutest, the subtlest, because they are simply beyond the range of any vision. They can only be guessed at or inferred.

But even that which can be inferred is not subtle, because even inference is a part of human thought.

“Hence, what the scientists are calling ‘the electron’ is also not what Krishna means by ‘subtle, indestructible.’ Even beyond the electron… Actually, it would be more correct to say: That which is always beyond, that which remains beyond, wherever and howsoever far or deep you may reach, that which is always transcendental, is the subtle.

“Remaining beyond is its very characteristic: That which always remains beyond the reach of your grasp, that which always remains – and will always remain – beyond. It will be good to understand this thoroughly.

We have two words: unknown and unknowable.

“Ordinarily, when we try to understand the subtle we feel as if it is the unknown. No. Krishna is not calling this ‘subtle,’ because that which is unknown can become known. That is not subtle. That which has the possibility of being known sometime, even in infinity, is not subtle. Only the gross, only matter, can be known. It may not be known today, but it will be tomorrow – and if not tomorrow, then maybe some other time. But whatever can be known is gross.

Only that which can never be known, that which is always left out of knowing, that which always remains out of the grasp of knowing, is unknowable.

“Subtle is that which just can never be known. So subtle doesn’t mean that we will be able to know it once we have better instruments.

“People come and ask me: ‘Will science ever be able to know godliness?’

“Whatever science will come to know will not be godliness, because godliness means precisely that which doesn’t fall within the grasp of knowing. If a scientific laboratory gets hold of godliness one day, it will turn into matter. In fact, up to the point where godliness can be grasped, it is still what is called matter.

The beginning of godliness is from that point where it is impossible to grasp.

“It is very important to really understand what Krishna means by subtle, because only the subtle is reality, truth, sat. Whatever can be grasped will be unreal, asat. It may be here today; tomorrow it will not be. Only that which cannot be grasped is real, is sat.

“For example, you enter a room and you see a flower. The flower is fresh in the morning, but by the evening it will have withered away. Beneath the flower is a stone statue. It was there in the morning, it will be there in the evening too; but in one hundred years, two hundred years, three hundred years, or a thousand years from now, it will disintegrate.

“The flower withered away in a day and the stone, being a stone, will turn into dust after thousands of years – but that makes no difference. There is only one thing in the room that will never disintegrate or fall apart, and that is the ‘roominess’ of the room, the emptiness that is there.

That alone will never be destroyed. That alone is the subtle; that alone is the real.

“All the rest that is in the room will be destroyed.

“I have read a story about a Taoist painter…

“Once, a Taoist master asked his disciples to paint a picture for him.

“The disciples asked, ‘What should the theme be? What is the subject?’

“The master replied, ‘Paint a picture of a cow eating grass.’

“The disciples showed their paintings to the master. All the paintings were good, except one painting brought by a monk that was rather startling because he had brought a blank sheet of paper.

“The master asked, ‘Weren’t you able to paint anything?’

“The disciple said: ‘No. I have done a painting. You can see for yourself.’

“The master looked at the paper. The other disciples also looked at the paper, and then they all looked at the man and asked, ‘Where is the cow?’

“He replied: ‘The cow has left after eating the grass.’

“They asked, ‘Okay, so where is the grass?’

“He replied, ‘The cow ate it all.’

“So they asked, ‘Then what is left?’

“He replied: ‘I have painted that which was there before the cow was and the grass was and which remains after the cow has gone and the grass is gone.’

“They all cried, ‘But this is a blank paper!’

“And he said, ‘This is all that remains: this emptiness, this blankness!’

“It is this emptiness, this blankness, that Krishna is calling ‘subtle.’

That which remains after the rising and falling of all the waves, that which always remains is the truth, is the real.”