Infinite is the universe… and its mysteries and secrets

Another thing to note is that psychic force has infinite dimensions. It is not absolutely necessary that a person who has attained the fourth plane should know about the moon. It is possible he is not interested to know; he may not consider it worth knowing. Such persons were interested in knowing other things – things which were more valuable according to them – and they have completed their search in these directions. For instance, they were eager to know if spirits were an actuality or not – and they have known. Now science has discovered that spirits are there. Those who had reached the fourth body were eager to know where people go after death and how.

Those who reached the fourth plane had hardly any interest in the material world. They did not care about the diameter of the earth. To expect them to be interested in such matters is like children telling a grownup, “We do not consider you wise because you cannot tell us how a doll is made. The boy next door knows all about it. He is all-knowing.” They are right in their own way, because they are interested in knowing what is inside the doll, whereas the elders cannot be.

The inquiry of a man of the fourth plane changes dimensions. He wants to know other things. He wants to know about the journey of the soul after death: where a man goes when he dies, what paths he travels, what the principles of the journey are, how he is born again, and whether his birth and birthplace could be foretold. This man is not interested in man going to the moon: that is irrelevant for him. He is eager to find ways for man’s enlightenment, because that alone is meaningful for him. Such a man was always anxious to know how the atman entered the womb when a child was conceived, whether an atman could be helped to choose the right womb, and how long it takes for an atman to enter the embryo.

There is a Tibetan book called The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Everyone in Tibet who attained the fourth body has worked on one project: how a person can best be assisted after death. Suppose you are dead: I love you, but I cannot help you after death. But in Tibet there is a full arrangement to guide and assist a man and to encourage him to take a special birth and enter a special womb. Science will still take time to discover this, but it will discover it, there is no difficulty. And the Tibetans have found ways and means to test the validity of these happenings also.

In Tibet, when the Dalai Lama dies he tells beforehand where he will take birth next and how the others should recognize him. He leaves symbols behind for his recognition. Then after he dies the search starts all over the country. The child that tells the secret of the symbol is taken to be the incarnation of the dead lama, because he alone knows the secret. The present Dalai Lama was discovered in this manner. The Dalai Lama preceding him had left a symbol. A special saying was proclaimed in every village, and the child who could explain it was understood to be the one in whom the former lama’s soul had taken entry. The search took long, but finally the child was discovered who could explain the code. It was a very secret formula, and only the authentic Dalai Lama could know its meaning.

So the curiosity of a man of the fourth plane is entirely different. Infinite is the universe and infinite are its mysteries and secrets. Do not think that we have discovered all that is to be discovered by present-day scientific research. A thousand new sciences will come to light because there are thousands of different directions and dimensions. And when new sciences develop people will call us non-scientific people, because we will not have known what they will know. But we should not call the ancient people non-scientific; it is only that their curiosity was of a different nature. The possible dimensions for inquiry are so diverse and so many.

We can very well ask that as we have found cures to many illnesses, why did these people of the fourth plane not find them? You will be shocked to know the number of herbal remedies prescribed in the Ayurvedic and Yunanic branches of medicine. How could these people, without the aid of research in laboratories, discover the proper cures for every illness? There is every possibility that this was brought about by the use of the fourth body.

There is a well-known story about Vaidya Lukman which tells that he would go up to each plant and ask what were its uses. Now, this story has become meaningless in the world of today. It seems to be a failure of logic to expect plants to talk. It is also a fact that until the last fifty years plants were not supposed to have life. But now science admits there is life in plants. Thirty years ago we did not believe that plants also breathe; now we admit that they do. Fifteen years ago we did not believe that plants could feel, but in the last fifteen years we have had to admit that they do. When you approach a plant in anger its psychic state changes, and when you approach it in love then again it changes. So it will not be out of place if we discover in the next fifty years that we can talk to plants also – but this will be a gradual development.

However, Lukman proved it long ago. But this mode of conversation could not have been the same as ours. To become one with plants is a quality of the fourth body. Then they can be questioned. I believe this story, because there is no mention of any laboratory huge enough in those days where Lukman could have carried out his research on the millions of varieties of herbs he brought into use. It is improbable, because each herb would require a lifetime to reveal its secret if done scientifically, whereas this man talked of unlimited herbs. Now science admits the efficiency of many of these herbal cures in illness and they are still used. All of the research of the past is the research of the men of the fourth plane.

Now we treat thousands of illnesses, which is very unscientific. The man of the fourth plane will say, “There are no illnesses at all. Why are you treating them?” Now science understands this and allopathy is using new methods of treatment. In some hospitals in America they are working on new methods. Suppose there are ten patients suffering from the same ailment. Five are given water injections and the other five are given the regular medicinal treatment. Then the findings show that the patients of each group respond to their treatment equally. This proves that those treated with water were not really ill but had an illusion of illness. If these people were given the regular treatment for this illness it would have poisoned their systems and brought about contrary results. They required no treatment.

Many illnesses are born out of unnecessary treatment and then they are difficult to cure. If you have no real illness – only a phantom illness – the medicine for that illness will have to act in some way even though the necessary conditions of the illness are not within you. It will create poisons within for which you will have to undergo new treatments. The phantom illness will go on giving way to some actual malady. According to science, ninety percent of illnesses are psycho-somatic. Fifty years ago modern science refused to believe this, but now allopathy admits it as fifty percent. I say they will have to admit to forty percent more, because that is the reality.

There is now no one to define what the man on the fourth plane knew; no one has tried to interpret him. There is no man who can put his knowledge in the right perspective in today’s scientific terms; this is the only difficulty. Once this can be done there will be no problem. But the language of parables is very different.

Today science says that the sun’s rays pass through a prism and break into seven parts, and in this way they become distributed into seven colours. The rishis of the Vedas say, “The sun god has seven horses of seven colours.” Now this is the language of parables. “The sun has seven horses of different colours and he rides them,” means that the sun’s rays break into seven parts. The latter is a parable and the former is the scientific version. We will have to understand the language of parables just as we understand the language of science today. There should not be any difficulty.

People with parapsychic faculties predict things much earlier and science understands them much later. But then predictions are all in a symbolic language. It is only when science proves the same facts that they are put down in the normal day-to-day language. Before that there is no language. You will be surprised to know, if you investigate in all directions, that science is just a recent arrival and language and mathematics came much earlier. Those who discovered language and mathematics, what statistics could they have used? What means could they have had – what measure? How did they come to know that the earth goes around the sun once a year? It is this one revolution of the earth around the sun that has been taken as one year. Now, this is a very old discovery – very much before science; the same is the case with the fact that there are three hundred sixty-five days in a year. But there does not seem to have been any scientific means behind the ancient seers. Therefore, psychic vision is the only alternative answer.

A very strange fact came to light. A man in Arabia has in his possession a map of the world which is seven hundred years old. This is an aerial view of the world which could not possibly have been conceived of on land. There are only two solutions: either there were airplanes seven hundred years ago – and this does not seem possible – or some person lifted himself that high in his fourth body and then drew the map. One thing is certain: there were no airplanes then. But this aerial map of the world was made seven hundred years ago. What does this mean?

If we were to study Charak and Sushrut, two ancient masters of the science of herbs, we would be shocked to know that they have described everything about the human body which scientists came to know by dissection. There could be only two means of knowing. One possibility is that surgery had become so subtle that there could be no evidence of surgery being carried out – because no surgical instruments or books on surgery have been discovered. But there are descriptions of very minute parts of the human body – parts so minute that science could discover them only much later, parts which only twenty-five years ago scientists refused to accept as being present. But these have been described by these ancient physicians. There is a second possible way by which they could have known: a person in a state of vision may have entered the human body and seen these things.

Today we know that x-rays can enter the human body. If a man said that he could photograph our bones a hundred years ago we would not have believed him. Today we have to believe because it is so. But do you know: the eyes of a man in the fourth body can see even more deeply than an x-ray, and that a picture of your body can be made which is more complete than that which is made as a result of dissection. Surgery developed in the West because there they bury their dead. In a place like India where the body is burned this was not possible. And you will be surprised to know that this research came about with the help of thieves, so they would steal the dead bodies and sell them to the physicians for research and studying.

The custom of cremation was also the idea of psychic persons, because they believed that the soul had difficulty in taking a new birth if the body of the previous life still remained. It then hovered around the old body. If the body is burned to ashes the soul will be rid of this encumbrance – because once it sees the body turning to ashes, in the next body it will perhaps realize that what it considered to be its own was after all only a destructible thing.

So there was cremation in India, and hence no way of dissecting the human body. In the West thieves had stolen the bodies from burial grounds and sold them to scientists for their research. There were court cases and many other difficulties for these people, because stealing a corpse and dissecting it were both considered crimes.

So what we have come to know by countless dissections, books three thousand years old reveal without any dissection. This only proves that there is another method by which things can be known besides scientific experimentation. Sometime I shall talk in detail on this subject so that you may understand better.

Osho, In Search of the Miraculous, Vol 2, Ch 4 (translated from Hindi)

Read the whole series: Seven Chakras