That is the reason the East is poor and starving. And unless the Eastern genius understands this, we can go on importing science from the West but it will not get roots into our beings. If our approach remains the same as it has been for five thousand years, science will only be something foreign. That’s how it is.

In India you can find a scientist, world famous in his field of work, and still living a very unscientific life. He may be consulting the palmist and the astrologer. He may be going to take a bath in the Ganges so the sins of many, many lives are washed away. He may still believe in a thousand and one things which are simply superstitious – and still he is a scientist! Science remains something peripheral; his soul still remains rooted in the ancient past of the East, which is unscientific.

The East has suffered much because of one-dimensionality. And now the West is suffering again for the same reason: one-dimensionality. The West has chosen to be scientific at the cost of being religious. Now godliness is denied, the soul is denied. Man was reduced first to an animal and now to a machine. Man loses all glory, all grandeur. Man loses all hope, all future. The moment man loses his interiority he loses depth, he becomes superficial. The Western man is rich as far as things are concerned, but is very poor as far as soul is concerned – inwardly poor, outwardly rich.

This is the state of affairs right now.

And between these two a few artists exist who have something of both dimensions. But even the artist is not satisfied, because he is something of both but he is neither a scientist nor a religious person – just having a few glimpses of both the worlds. He remains in a kind of limbo: he never settles, he remains a vagabond. He moves like a shuttle between those two worlds. He does not contribute much: because he is not a scientist he cannot contribute scientifically and he is not religious so he cannot contribute religiously. At the most his art remains decorative; at the most it can make life a little more beautiful, a little more comfortable, convenient. But that is not much.

I propose the fourth way. The true man will be all three simultaneously: he will be a scientist, an artist, and religious. And I call the fourth man the spiritual man. That’s where I differ from Albert Einstein and Gautam Buddha and Picasso – from them all. You must remember my differences.

Buddha is one-dimensional – tremendously beautiful. As far as his own inner world is concerned he is the greatest master, the master of the inner, unsurpassable, but he remains one-dimensional. He attains to immense peace, silence, bliss, but does not contribute to the world in any objective way.