This has been one of the most foundational questions for a religious seeker: whether the divine can be known, whether the divine can become an object, whether the divine can be encountered, whether I can meet him. A religious mind has always been asking, enquiring, searching, seeking knowledge of the divine.
But this sutra says that the divine knows all. But no one can know the divine. The divine is the knower and everything is the known. The divine is the subjectivity and everything is just an object.
And the divine can never be reduced to an object - it is impossible. The very nature of the divine is subjectivity.
Soren Kierkegaard has said that subjectivity is spirituality. By subjectivity is meant the knower. When I know something I am the subject and the thing known is the object. Can I, myself, ever become an object of myself? Can I encounter myself? Can I have an interview with myself? Is it possible to make myself into an object? It is impossible. My intrinsic nature is subjectivity. I can make anything an object, but I remain continuously, constantly, eternally, the subject, the knower. I cannot know myself in the same way that I know other things, but still I can know that I am. This knowledge must be qualitatively different from all other knowledge.
How do you know yourself? Everyone knows he is. Who has informed you about yourself? Who has introduced you to yourself? Who can be a witness that you are? Have you known yourself through the eyes? Have you known yourself through the hands? Have you known yourself through any sense? No, no sense gives information about me. My eyes say many things about other things - the whole world. My ears inform me of a different dimension of the universe - the sound dimension. My eyes inform me about the light dimension. My senses go on giving me information about the world, but no one, no sense gives me any information about myself.
All that I know about the world is through the senses, and all that I feel about myself is not at all concerned with the senses. Then who informs me? Who gives me the feeling that I am? How do I stumble upon it? How do I come to know it? And it is deep-rooted. I can doubt my eyes, because sometimes they inform me in a very misguided way. Sometimes I see something and it is not there.
Sometimes I see something as real, and it proves to be a dream. Sometimes I see something, go near to it, and it is not there; it was just a deception, a hallucination.
So I cannot believe my eyes absolutely; I cannot believe my ears absolutely - every sense can be deceptive. But this information which I have about myself, this feeling, this rootedness in existence...
no sense informs me and yet it is indubitable, I cannot doubt it.
Can you doubt yourself? You can doubt everything: you can doubt the divine, you can doubt the world, but you cannot doubt yourself, because even to doubt you will be needed. Even to doubt you will have to assume that you are: the doubter is. This "I," this feeling of I-amness.... From where have you got it? It seems from nowhere. It bubbles up in yourself; it is not something coming to you from outside, but something from yourself.
This word "information" is beautiful. Really, when we use information, we should use OUT-formation.
Only one information is there: that is the feeling of myself. This is INformation - it comes from IN, from nowhere. There is no source other than me. This is the only INformation - the ONLY, I say. But it is, and it is absolutely there; you cannot doubt it. Doubt is impossible. This feeling that "I am," is not knowledge in the ordinary use of the word, because knowledge means a division between the known and the knower. Here, in me, the known and the knower are one, they are not divided.
So how to call it knowledge? Or if we insist on calling it knowledge, we have to qualify it, we have to give a different meaning to the very word. Knowledge means: the division between the known and the knower. If I call this self-knowledge, that means: without any division between the knower and the known. How can knowledge exist without the division? So, this is not knowledge; rather, this is an existential feeling. This is less like knowing and more like being.
This being is not known by anything else - it is known by itself - so this being can never be made an object. It can never be put before; it is always behind. It always transcends; it always goes beyond.
You can never put it before yourself, because you are it and you will always be standing out and out and out. In English the word "ecstasy" is good, and "existence" is also good, and very relevant.
The word "existence" means to stand out. Heidegger, Sartre, Marcel, Camus - they all have played with this word "existence." They say existence means to stand out. This being always stands out.
Wherever you put it, it is always out. It is never involved in the known - it always goes beyond. The word "ecstasy" also means the same. Ecstasy also means standing out.
This subjectivity, this knower, is always deep in existence, in deep ecstasy, and it can never be reduced to an object. Why? This sutra insists that this can never be reduced to an object, because God can never be known. You have a God within you; it goes on transcending. If all objects are dissolved from the mind, then you become suddenly aware of your own being. This being has no limitation, and this being is not yours; this being belongs to the whole universe.
Without object, without thought, when you become aware of your being, you also become aware of the whole being, of the whole ground of the being. The being-ness in all existence... you become aware of it not again as a knower, because no being can be known in that way. Again you are dissolved into it, you become one with it. Again you know it as an existential feeling. So the way we express that someone has known God is wrong. If we say that someone is seeing God, again it is wrong.
But language has to be used, and any word is going to be wrong. So any word can be used, because all words are equally fallacious - because all words are invented for objects, things; and God is not an object, consciousness is not an object. And there is no word for something which is known without any objectivity, as a subject. This becomes a problem.
But this is only a problem if one tries to understand it intellectually.
It is not a problem if one takes a jump into it and knows it existentially. That's the difference between a philosophical approach and a religious approach. The philosophical approach is to understand; the religious approach is to be.
So a religious mind is never searching after knowing; a religious mind is always seeking being. A religious mind means a search to be deep in God, not to know him; to be one with him, not to be a knower; to live in him, to live him, not to know him. If you are trying to know him then only your intellect will be involved. If you are trying to live him, love him, be him, then your totality will be involved. And unless your totality is involved, nothing is possible. Unless you are totally involved, dissolved into it, the ultimate cannot be known, cannot be felt. It remains always beyond. With your intellect it always escapes.
Go into it as a whole. Try to live the divine, not to know it. Try to be divine; do not try to make it an object. Only then it is known. And to be the divine, what is to be done?
We cannot do anything with the divine. We can do only something with ourselves. We can dissolve ourselves, we can surrender ourselves. We can commit a deep suicide - not of the body, but of the mind. And that deep suicide of the mind is SAMADHI.
That deep suicide of the mind is meditation.