One night, three dacoits raided a village dwelling and took the householder as hostage. They made him carry the loot, and when they were near their village, the leader wanted to kill their hostage as he was of no further use to them.
The second bandit didn’t want to be a murderer, though he wanted the hostage to suffer. So, they left behind their victim bound and gagged. But the third robber soon returned, unbound the man and pointed the way to his village. The grateful householder invited him home, but the robber said, ‘Alas, friend, a bandit can go only so far.’
The robbers, said Sri Ramakrishna, were examples of tamas, apathy; rajas, passion; and sattva, purity, respectively. One needs to transcend sattva to attain moksha.
In his seminal work ‘A Brief History of Time‘, Stephen Hawking too used the razor effectively. Imagine, he says, a set of laws that determines events completely for a supernatural being, beyond the comprehension of ordinary humans. ‘However, it seems better to employ the principle known as Occam’s razor and cut out all the features of the theory that cannot be observed.’ Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing inessential to take away.