My professor of logic said, “You have been torturing me, now you have started torturing faraway people. He lives in Germany, now…it is none of your business to harass people.”

I said, “I am not harassing him, I am simply saying that if he really means it then he should remove this sentence.”

He was one of the best minds. Even his own teacher, Bertrand Russell, had recognized him as a better logician than himself. But he never replied to me, because to reply to me would have meant he had to remove that sentence from the book. There is no logical defense about it. Whatever you say, you are saying something. Even if you say, “Nothing can be said about it,” you are still saying something about it. So logic has its own subtleties.

Ta Hui is a well-trained professional logician, but any logician – if he goes to the very extreme of his own logical thinking – is bound to come to the point at which logic has to be left behind, because logic ends and existence continues. You have to leave logic behind and go with existence. But then you have to start speaking a different language.

Rather than simply saying, “There is only one existence, hence only one person” – in which case he knows he will be committing a logical mistake – he uses the same device that has been used for centuries in this country. He says, “There are not two existences, there are not two persons.” He is indicating the one, but without saying anything about it, simply denying the duality, but not affirming the oneness – because the moment you affirm the oneness you have affirmed the whole multitude of numbers.

It is not something philosophical; now his statements are becoming more and more existential.

We are all part of one oceanic unity.

Our separation is an illusion.

Except our separation there is no other illusion, and because of the separation there are all kinds of problems: enemies, friends, anger, hate, love – all the problems of ambition, struggle, conquering, dominating, becoming somebody special.

But the moment you realize that there is nothing that separates you from anything in existence…not only the human beings but the animals of the wild, the trees, the birds, the stars – they are all part of one organic unity. And I emphasize the word organic, because there are two kinds of unities.