27 January 2014 - QA 6

Gurudev, every sip of knowledge given by you is very juicy.  It is easy to digest too. Could you please talk a little on Yoga Vasishta in a simple manner?

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar: This is like asking to contain the ocean in a pot. Next to impossible. Yoga Vasistha is like the sky, like the ocean, you know. Time and again you should explore it yourself. It is self explanatory. It is more mystical and very symbolic too.
Self is like the sky, so empty, and it is also like the ocean, so full.

What the scientists say today is that in the universe, all the planets and stars are spherical because of the pressure of the space all around them. The space around the Sun is so thick, so full of energy, it keeps the Sun in the round shape.
What you see as an empty space is filled with energy. And a million times more energy than the Sun. Can you imagine this? The dark space around, i.e., this empty sky is filled with much more energy than the stars. And this is exactly what is said in the vedas: the darkness was enveloped by the darkness in the beginning. It is all energy, what the scientists today call the dark matter and dark energy.

There is a sutra in Rigveda, the sutra of creation. People never understood this: darkness covered by darkness. They thought it might be some poet's imagination, or that the poet is trying to say something but doesn't make any sense. This is what people interpreted for a long time. But today, when scientists speak the same language, there is resonance there. That is why science and spirituality are so close! The more you go into physics and quantum mechanics, the more you go into the ancient vedic knowledge, you see that at no point in time people were deprived of knowledge. It was available, whether people understood it or not, is a different thing.