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These are things that everybody has an opinion about (religion or poliHcs). [Smiles] You don’t have to necessarily come to Satsang to get these answers. Talk to any grand-pa, uncle or…

Yeah, whatever appeals to you [Smile] you can talk to them. [Silence] If you go to CalcuZa especially then everybody will have very strong opinions about all of these things no? Every conversaHon is about poliHcs and this one is good and this one is bad. But in Satsang, we are trying to come to that discovery which is beyond these intellectual conclusions and these ephemeral conclusions. What amongst all of these is going to last? What is going to last beyond Hme? Because the root cause of suffering, whether you read a scripture form ten thousand years ago or you read ‘Talks with Ramana’ form hundred years ago or you come to Satsang every day, you will noHce that this freedom from suffering is only about your Self-RecogniHon which is beyond anything, any mental conclusions that you make about the world. The contexts from those Hmes were different. We started from the Hmes of tribes, then the Hmes of kings and queens, then the Hmes of democracy, the Hmes of the BriHsh when Bhagwan [Sri Raman Maharishi] was sharing Satsang and this Hme now. I am not saying this just for the Indian context but anywhere in the world. If you were in Europe you could talk about then Greeks and then those Hmes. But the quesHons, if we read Socrates or Plato today or you read it so many thousands of years ago, the core of the issues are the same. What are the core of the issues? What exists? Now that is called in western philosophy metaphysics, ontology, or something like that. What exists? What is real? What has being? All these quesHons were basically around what Is, no? Just a simple quesHon of what Is? Then that is the primary main quesHon. Then the second quesHon is ‘What is knowing and can anything be known?’ So this is called ‘Epistemology.’ But the same thing in our philosophy also. What does it need to know? Every day we are talking about Self-Knowledge. I am saying ‘this means of knowing, not this means of knowing, not this.’ So we are defining what knowing means? Can anything truly be known? So these are the two main branches. Then the third one which is that of ‘how to live?’ Ethics, what is the right way, what is the wrong way? Somebody asked at the beginning of Satsang about this, what is the right way to live? What is the wrong way to live? Now when these three get jumbled up and mixed up and confused. So we are trying to figure out what is the right way to live but you are already presuming the existence of an independent enHty but we have not really answered what Is? Which is the thing, and then it is a very limiHng sort of perspecHve, a very limiHng sort of perspecHve and in a way what has happened to all religions is that the ‘how to live’ aspect, the ethical aspect, which is very caught up in the culture, tradiHon, in the righteousness of those Hme-periods gets taken to be the Hmeless Truth. But the Hmeless poinHng to what Is and what is true Self-Knowledge, that gets pushed into the background. Maybe because it is simpler for the human intellect to understand ‘I should do this, I should not do that. I should be like this, I should not be like that.’ So what is happening in most religious constructs is that this aspect which is that ‘This is good to do, this is bad do. You should do like this, you should not do like this’ gets more prominence than the poinHng to the other two aspects which is ‘What actually Is’ or ‘What is real’ and ‘is there is a way to know’, ‘is there any true knowing?’ ‘What is knowing actually?’ these get missed out.