Only a particle of existence is known

How can there be a beginning? A beginning means that there was nothing before it. And how can this world come out of nothing? Something can only come out of something; something cannot come out of nothing. That is absurd. How can something come out of nothing? If it comes at all, there must have been something preceding it.

The Upanishads say that this is not the first world, this is not the first creation. It is only one chain in a long, beginningless, endless procession of existences. Worlds have been in being and then they have disappeared. Just as a child is born, then he becomes young, then old, and then he dies. But the child is born of parents and those parents were also born of other parents. And this goes on and you cannot find the beginning.

The Upanishads have no concept of Adam and Eve, the first man and the first woman. They say there has never been a first woman and a first man. The first is just nonsense: we are always in the middle. The beginning was never there and so the end is not going to be there.

Just like a child, the earth is born out of parents. There may have been a collision between two big stars. When two parents collided, the earth was born. Now scientists say that something like this must have happened: a collision of two stars. Who knows if the Upanishads are not true? When two stars, one feminine and one male, collide, the earth is born. The earth is alive; it is not dead. There are dead earths also. Now scientists suspect that the moon may be a dead earth. It may have been alive some time back.

This earth is alive. The greenery of the trees is just part of its life. Your consciousness is just part of its growth. It has been evolving. It is young; it will become old. It will die, but somewhere else life will erupt. Now scientists say that at least there is a mathematical possibility of fifty thousand earths being alive in the whole of existence – fifty thousand planets alive! This is just a mathematical possibility. We have no contact with other living earths but when one earth dies another is born. Somewhere birth happens, somewhere death; somewhere death happens, somewhere birth. Life goes on continuing. It is a continuity – an eternal continuity.

Whatsoever we know is always a very small, atomic part. Backwards, it spreads to the beginningless beginning; forwards, it spreads to the endless end. We are always in the middle. Only a particle of existence is known. And this whole existence, so vast, is still a part. The whole is also a part because it is the manifested.

Look at me: I am communicating something to you. Whatsoever I communicate is just the manifested part. There remains in my heart much that is uncommunicated: that is the unmanifest part. My silence is the unmanifest part; my words are the manifest part. In my words a part of my silence is being communicated but my words are not my whole being. My words are just a part, and behind that part a deeper silence is hidden.

A poet is singing a song – Rabindranath or a Shelley or a Yeats is singing a song: that song is just a manifest part of the poet’s being but thousands and thousands of songs can be born out of that being.

The Upanishads say this whole world, this universe, is just a song which has become manifest. In the heart of the divine infinite songs are waiting to be manifested. He has been singing many songs which have disappeared. He is singing this one right now; he will sing many. We can be acquainted only with one song but not even with the one song in its totality – just with a part of its tune, just a fragment, just a word, a gesture. The infinite remains unknown around it.

Osho, The Supreme Doctrine, Ch 8