Osho,
I have heard you say that scientists are only now discovering things that people in the East knew five thousand years ago. How did we come to go backwards?

Science as such has no intrinsic value like life, like love, like blissfulness. These are ends in themselves. Science is only a means. This is the most essential thing to be understood.

Science is concerned with providing you the means to make life richer, profounder, more comfortable, more healthy. But science can do just the opposite too; it can be destructive, it can move in directions which are anti-life. Hence, science cannot be left only in the hands of the scientists. Something higher, something which is an end in itself must be the decisive factor in determining in what direction science should move, in what direction it should not move.

The concern of science is things, objects; it is not concerned at all with being. The word being is just nonexistential for the scientific mind. This is very idiotic because the scientist is a being himself. He is not a thing amongst other things.

Have you ever seen a chair doing scientific research? or a table? The scientist has something which things do not have: consciousness, life, being. But the problem for the scientist is that his methodology limits him. He has a limitation, he can only work on something which he can dissect, which he can set to work upon, which he can put in a test-tube.

Now, you cannot put your own consciousness in front of yourself. You cannot divide your being the way you have divided matter – into molecules, then into atoms, then into electrons. And they go on dividing.

Being is indivisible. There is no sword which can cut it in two. There is no method by which we can experiment upon consciousness; hence, science completely denies the existence of consciousness – because to accept the existence of consciousness is to accept your impotence too. You cannot do anything about it. Then science becomes a very small thing, concerned only with things. And things are utilitarian, their whole purpose is to be used…by whom?

Are things using things? clothes wearing clothes? food eating food? houses living in houses? The scientist is in a real dilemma. If he accepts consciousness, being, life, then he is accepting something higher than his reach, something which is beyond his methodology. And of course a scientist, as a scientist, cannot accept anything which is not proved in his lab – not only by himself but by thousands of other scientists around the world.

When the same conclusion is reached through millions of experiments, always the same, without any exception, then it becomes a scientific truth. Only then can the scientist accept it – that too only temporarily because tomorrow new facts may be found and things will have to be changed.