To bring scientific growth into a synthetic vision with heart and religion was not possible in the past. In the first place there was no science – and it has changed a thousand and one things. Life can never be the same again.

And nobody has thought ever of the artistic people, that their contribution is also religious.

In my vision it is a triangle – science, religion, art.

And they are such different dimensions, they speak different languages, they contradict each other; they are not in agreement superficially – unless you have a deep insight in which they all can melt and become one.

My effort has been to do almost the impossible.

In my university days as a student, my professors were at a loss. I was a student of philosophy, and I was attending science classes – physics, chemistry and biology. Those professors were feeling very strange; “You are here in the university to study philosophy. Why are you wasting your time with chemistry?”

I said, “I have nothing to do with chemistry; I just want to have a clear insight into what chemistry has done, what physics has done. I don’t want to go into details, I just want the essential contribution.”

I was rarely in my classes, I was mostly in the library. My professors were continually saying, “What are you doing the whole day in the library? – because so many complaints have come from the librarian that you are the first to enter the library, and you have to be almost physically taken out of the library. The whole day you are there. And not only in the philosophical department, you are roaming around the library in all the departments which have nothing to do with you.”

I said to them, “It is difficult for me to explain to you, but my effort in the future is going to be to bring everything that has some truth in it into a synthetic whole and create a way of life which is inclusive of all, which is not based on arguments and contradictions, which is based on a deep insight into the essential core of all the contributions that have been made to human knowledge, to human wisdom.”

They thought I would go mad – the task I have chosen can lead anyone to madness, it is too vast. But they were not aware that madness is impossible for me, that I have left the mind far behind; I am just a watcher.

And the mind is such a delicate and complicated computer. Man has made great computers but none is yet comparable to the human mind. Just a single human mind has the capacity to contain all the libraries of the world. And just a single library – the British Museum library – has books, which if you go on making them like a wall, one by one, they will go three times round the earth. And that is only one big library. Moscow has the same kind of library – perhaps bigger. Harvard has the same kind of library.