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is acquaintance: science is not knowledge. It has to change from moment to moment. Every day something new is known, we become acquainted with something new, and science has to change. So science can never be absolute in the sense that philosophy can be. Philosophy is absolute because we are not thinking about the outside, but thinking about the inside of humanity, about the inside of the human being: the innermost, the subjective core of the mind. Philosophy can be absolute, but philosophy cannot be the whole. The outside has been left out of it.
Science is a part. Philosophy, too, is a part. Only religion can be the whole, because in religion we are not dividing reality into the objective and the subjective. We are taking reality as it is, as the whole. This whole cannot be thought about; this whole can only be felt. Religion is knowing, through feeling.
India has been emphasizing feeling rather than thinking. The Indian mind, the eastern mind, has been nonthinking, nonspeculative, nonscientific -- and, religious. All religions were born in the East, even Christianity. The West has not given birth to a single religion. Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism -- all these religions were born in the East. The eastern mind has looked through a third dimension. That has been its basic contribution.
I am using the term 'Indian' or 'eastern' just to make the point clear to you. But do not call it 'Indian', call it 'religious', because in the West, too, there have been persons like Eckhart, Bohme, Heidegger, Marcel and Berdayev who were religious. In a way they were eastern, though born in the West.
There have also been persons in the East who were not religious, who have thought in terms of science. In fact, the first glimpses of science came in China. But they could not be developed in the East because the eastern mind has become obsessed with the third dimension: the religious. And the West could not develop a religious tradition because the West became obsessed with the scientific. And of course there have been persons of a philosophical leaning in both the West and the East.
Now a new world is evolving, a new
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