Bhagavagd Gita - Session 1 - Track 106

He is akartā but He is also kartā: “kartāram…māṁ” (IV, 13). I am akartā, but also“kartāram…māṁ”. He says himself “I am also the doer”. Therefore Sri Krishna says that this is when you understand this contradiction, and then only you understand the problem and then the solution. Sri Krishna says very clearly: “I am both the immobile and the mobile, I am akṣara, I am also kṣara, and I go beyond both of them because I am puruṣottama”. Therefore, the Divine if you want to understand the world, it starts with this basic proposition that the Purushottama is something ‘wonderful’: it is He, who in Silence can produce millions of universes, through Silence, on the basis of Silence, that is the capacity of the Divine: Silence is at once ‘immobility’ and yet ‘greater power’.

In fact, even in the human psychology, when do we become most powerful? The only way by which you can become most powerful is by attaining to Silence. So long as you are drifting, wavering in your thoughts, there is no stability; when there is no stability, there is no force. A lion for example sits very quietly; at the right moment it springs into action, within a moment it finishes its task and sits again very quietly. It is a strength, which comes from a great quietude. This is the nature of the Reality that ‘Silence is fullness’, fullness, which is not incapable of manifestation. It is not a zero: silence is not emptiness. It is that from where things manifest.

That is why even in our very ordinary situations, when you are looking for a solution of a problem, we are told first of all: “gather yourself”. When you don’t gather you are only reacting. A problem is there before you go on reacting to it, but reaction will not produce a solution. Gather yourself. Be very, very quiet. In that quietude, you will find an answer emerging out of it. This is the experience even of school children: when a problem is to be solved in mathematics, and you cannot find a solution, you become very, very quiet and then you will find suddenly an idea coming out, and the solution is found. This is the power of silence.

Therefore those who believe that silence is emptiness are wrong; silence is nothing but a state of fullness. In fullness there is no need of anything, therefore akartā: that which is full requires nothing to be done. It has everything within itself, therefore has no need to do anything at all. Therefore Sri Krishna says: “I have no need in the three worlds to do anything at all and yet”, He says “yet I go on doing all the time”. It is only when you are full that you have the capacity of manifesting fully; if you are not full then you are still striving to attain something from outside; but when you are really full then you have the real capacity of manifesting without any obstruction, an irresistible manifestation. Those who believe that silence is emptiness is a wrong idea. Silence is not emptiness, although emptiness may be a condition for attaining that silence. Before you become full, you have to throw away all that is there, dirt in you, throw it away, and then become absolutely empty so that the real fullness enters into you.