Religion: The Door of Feeling
Date Unknown
Question
WHAT IS THE BASIC INDIAN PHILOSOPHY?
As far as I am concerned, I do not see philosophy as Indian or non-Indian. It is not possible.
Philosophy is only universal. There can be no geographical division in the human mind. These
divisions, these distinctions, are political. Indian, Japanese and German, or eastern and western –
all these divisions are political. They have arisen out of the political mind. In the realm of philosophy
we apply them unnecessarily. Not only unnecessarily, but meaninglessly as well. There is no Indian
philosophy as such; there cannot be. Philosophy is a universal attitude.
You can see the world through three dimensions. One dimension is science: that is, thinking
empirically about reality. The second dimension is philosophy: thinking about reality speculatively.
And the third dimension is religion: not thinking about reality at all, but experiencing it.
Science is based on empirical experimentation, observation and objective thinking. Philosophy is
based on nonempirical, speculative thinking – subjectively based. Religion transcends both.
Religion is neither objective nor subjective. Religion conceives of the whole in terms of its
wholeness. That is why we use the term ’holy’. Holy means ’that which comprehends the whole’.
When we call a particular type of mind the Indian mind – when we designate it as such, when we
make this distinction – it is not a geographical distinction. When we say ’Indian’ – to me it means
that the world, the reality, is being seen neither through science nor through philosophy, but throughreligion. If you like you can say that this land – this country and the mind that has evolved here
has peered into reality through religion – not through philosophy, not through science. The third
dimension, religion, has been the basis for us.
When you think about it, any type of thinking is bound to be nothing more than an acquaintance.
When I think about you, I am outside you. I can go around and around you, but whatever I come to
know about you will just be an acquaintance. I cannot penetrate you, I cannot know you from within,
so it is an acquaintance.
Science is acquaintance: science is not knowledge. It has to change from moment to moment.
Every day something new is known, we become acquainted with something new, and science has
to change. So science can never be absolute in the sense that philosophy can be. Philosophy is
absolute because we are not thinking about the outside, but thinking about the inside of humanity,
about the inside of the human being: the innermost, the subjective core of the mind. Philosophy can
be absolute, but philosophy cannot be the whole. The outside has been left out of it.
Science is a part. Philosophy, too, is a part. Only religion can be the whole, because in religion
we are not dividing reality into the objective and the subjective. We are taking reality as it is, as the
whole. This whole cannot be thought about; this whole can only be felt. Religion is knowing, through
feeling.
India has been emphasizing feeling rather than thinking. The Indian mind, the eastern mind, has
been nonthinking, nonspeculative, nonscientific – and, religious. All religions were born in the East,
even Christianity. The West has not given birth to a single religion. Christianity, Islam, Hinduism,
Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism – all these religions were born in the East. The eastern mind has
looked through a third dimension. That has been its basic contribution.
Download Pdf Here