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Chapter 2: Bring the Inner and Outer into Harmony

You seem to be fulfilling two roles: an outer one in which you provoke and expose the structure of our society, and a more intimate one in which you encourage your disciples towards the ultimate. Could you please comment?

Existence consists of both: the inner and the outer. Unfortunately, for centuries the inner and the outer have been thought to be opposed to each other. They are not.

The teaching which proposes that the inner and the outer are opposed has caused a tremendous tension in man - because man is a miniature existence, a miniature cosmos. Whatever exists in man also exists on a wider scale in existence, and vice versa. If man can be understood in his totality, you have understood the whole. The function of the master is to bring the inner and outer into a harmony: to create opposition between them is poisoning you.

They are not opposed, they are one - two sides of the same coin, you cannot even separate them. Can you separate the inner from the outer? If they can be separated then what will you call the inner? What will you call the outer? Of what? Both are part of a coherent whole. But mankind has suffered tremendously because of the division. My function is to destroy the division completely, and to create a synchronicity in man’s outer life and his inner life.

The work is tremendously complicated and great because the outside, up to now, has been considered to be materialism. It has been condemned by the so-called holy people; you have been told to renounce it. If you are not capable of renouncing it you are a sinner. Life has been made a sin. And for centuries, the whole emphasis of all the religions and all the traditions has been on the inner. This is one side of the story.

The other side of the story is that matter is objective, visible; the inner reality seems to be just beautiful talk. So there have been philosophers and thinkers saying that only the outer is real; the inner is only an invention of the priests, it has no existence. These people have condemned spiritualism as nonsense. And both sides agree on one point: that the inner and the outer are contradictory - you can choose one, you cannot choose both.

My approach is a choiceless acceptance of both. Naturally I am against the materialist because I know the inner exists - in fact the outer exists only for the inner, for its protection, for its nourishment. And I am also against the so-called spiritualists because I cannot deny the reality of matter. It is so evidently there all around us, that only people who can close their eyes, their reasoning, their understanding, their intelligence, can believe that this is all illusion, that it does not really exist.

Just try. When you go out, go through the wall, not through the gate - and you will know whether it is illusion or reality. Even a Shankaracharya will go through the gate, not through the wall - and his whole life he will try to prove that the wall is an illusion, that it only appears to be, but it is not there.

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