This gives me the chance to explain to you the meaning of individual. No dictionary, no encyclopedia will help. For them it will be very far- fetched to connect individual with indivisibility, that which cannot be divided. And if it cannot be divided, you cannot have a taste of it. You will either have to have it, or decide to remain in ignorance, but you cannot say, “I have got a little bit of enlightenment.” That way it does not work.

You cannot say, “I am partially enlightened.” Be, totally. And what name you give to that totality of your being is up to you. For the moment I have chosen the word enlightenment, because it has the quality of dispelling all darkness, misery, anguish, negativity; it brings you to your positive being, it brings you to your very heart, saying “Yes,” with every beat of the universe surrounding you.

But it is not possible to have a partial experience. Just look at it this way: can you say to someone, “I am partially in love with you, just thirty percent. I will try a little more, but for the moment I am one third of my being in love with you”? If you say this to anybody he or she will think somebody has escaped from the madhouse. Even love cannot be divided, that’s why love has always been taken as an example of enlightenment. The only thing that is similar in both is that they are indivisible.

But we are all living partial lives. We love partially: obviously it is going to be very pseudo, very superficial, very unreal and false – a deception and nothing more. We are meditating partially. But nothing happens that way.

Nature does not allow these great experiences in part. Nature is not America – you cannot have things in installments. This American idea of installments is absolutely against existence. Why not have it whole when it is available? You can cut things into pieces, but not beings into pieces; beings will be dead if you cut them into pieces.

This is one of the most difficult problems for the scientific mind, because it is accustomed to dissecting. Everything has to be dissected; only then can science accept its existence. And the consciousness of man cannot be dissected; hence science continues to deny that there is any being, any immortal consciousness in man. It is really hilarious – everything is in the lab of the scientist except the scientist himself; he is not there. He cannot accept that he is, unless he puts himself on the dissecting table, sees all the qualities, possibilities, inquires into every part, pulls them apart, joins them together again and sees what happens.

Naturally if you cut up a living being and then join it together again, you will have a corpse on your hands – life will have disappeared.

It happened…

Charles Darwin was celebrating his sixtieth birthday with his friends, the children of his neighborhood. He was very friendly with children, with animals, with birds, with trees; that was his lifelong work: to inquire into evolution. He was interested in anything that grows.