The realisation of advaita

The world’s most famous scientist, Albert Einstein, once made a very significant statement: Creation may be spiritual in origin, but that doesn’t mean that everything created is spiritual. Let us accept the world is a mystery. Nature is neither solely material nor entirely spiritual.

With this statement, Einstein comes close to the realisation what Indian mystics have been experiencing for thousands of years. They have termed this realisation as advaita, the experience of nonduality. Einstein says that nature is neither solely material nor entirely spiritual. But the eastern mystics are truly existential and they don’t see any division, any duality in the material and the spiritual. The outer (the material) and the inner (the spiritual) may appear as separate — in reality, it is all one. Appearances are illusions.

The modern enlightened mystic, Osho, explains: There are two kinds of illusions in this world — one, the illusion of matter; second, the illusion of I, the ego. Both are basically false, but only by coming closer to them does one become aware they don’t exist. As science draws closer to matter, matter disappears; as religion draws nearer I the I disappears. Religion has discovered that the I is nonexistent, and science has discovered that matter is nonexistent. The closer we come, the more we become disillusioned.

The mystic concludes: The experience of what remains after the disappearance of I is the experience of godliness. The experience becomes at once expansive — dropping I, “you” also drops, “he” also drops, and only an ocean of consciousness remains. In that state you will see that only godliness is.

This is the mysterious realisation of advaita.

Einstein contemplates: Man, too, is more than flesh and blood. Behind each cause is still another cause; the end or the beginning of all causes has yet to be found. But the fact is that contemplation is all mind stuff and is confined to the mind only, but meditation is a step further. It takes us into the realm of no-mind.

The writer is editor of

Osho World