There is only the One, and it is this One that has divided itself into two and created an energy dynamic through the duality. All the bricks are the same, but when they are placed in opposition to each other they create an arch. A whole mansion can be created above this arch. The bricks are the same: Rama and Ravana are not made of two different kinds of bricks; good and evil are not made of two kinds of bricks. They are made of the same kind of bricks placed in opposition to one another.

Your saints are always trying to make the sinners disappear from the world, and they are not aware that saints exist only because of the sinners. They go on trying, but the sinners don’t disappear – they cannot. The sinner will disappear only when the saint also disappears, not before that. The world would be very boring and meaningless if both saints and sinners did not exist together. They both exist in the world because this world is a play, and for this play to go on the duality must continue.

If you can understand that this duality is a play, and if you can experience the oneness hidden behind this duality, then for you, the play is over. And if this play comes to an end for you, you have transcended this world. But as long as you have a preference for either side in this play, you will continue to be of the world. If you choose Rama against Ravana or Ravana against Rama, you will continue to be of the world. You have not yet understood the ultimate balance of life in which there is no choice at all between Rama and Ravana. It must be clear to you that this is just a play. This duality is the game of this world. You have to see the oneness that is hidden behind the duality.

In this sutra this oneness has been said in many ways:

I am the creator of the many Vedas, and it is I who teaches them. I have created Vedanta, the culmination of the Vedas, which are the Upanishads. All the Vedas speak of me.

“I speak of myself, because there is nothing other than myself….” Have you ever seen someone playing cards all by himself? People do this – they lay out cards for both sides and then they start playing both sides. This world is the same game played by the divine: the divine is both sides of the game. It makes the moves from both sides, there is no “other” in it. But this is the insight of Indian wisdom, and this insight has not happened anywhere else outside of India. Everywhere else, the apparent duality has been taken to be the ultimate; the oneness between the two has not been seen.

Christianity, Judaism and Islam have accepted that God and the Devil are two autonomous entities, that there is no connection anywhere, no contact, between the two. In India also, although the Jainas have not separated God and the Devil, they have divided the world and the state of liberation into opposite states. Hence, the Jainas are dualists: they believe that the two do exist – the world and the divine, the world and the state of ultimate liberation. In this sense, Jainas, Mohammedans, Christians and Jews are all unanimously in agreement that the world is divided into two entities, that it is not a oneness.