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Wednesday, February 9, 2011

THE TRUTH_The raison d' etre.

THE COSMOS
THE MACROCOSM

The flowers that we see all around us are beautiful, beautiful is the rising of the morning sun, beautiful are the variegated hues of nature. The whole universe is beautiful, and man has been enjoying it since his appearance on earth. Sublime and awe-inspiring are the mountains; the gigantic rushing rivers rolling towards the sea, the trackless deserts, the infinite ocean, the starry heavens — all these are awe-inspiring, sublime, and beautiful indeed. The whole mass of existence which we call nature has been acting on the human mind since time immemorial. It has been acting on the thought of man, and as its reaction has come out the question: What are these, whence are they? As far back as the time of the oldest portion of that most ancient human composition, the Vedas, we find the same question asked: "Whence is this? When there was neither aught nor naught, and darkness was hidden in darkness, who projected this universe? How? Who knows the secret?" And the question has come down to us at the present time. Millions of attempts have been made to answer it, yet millions of times it will have to be answered again. It is not that each answer was a failure; every answer to this question contained a part of truth, and this truth gathers strength as time rolls on. I will try to present before you the outline of the answer that I have gathered from the ancient philosophers of India; in harmony with modern knowledge.

We find that in this oldest of questions a few points had been already solved. The first is that there was a time when there was "neither aught nor naught", when this world did not exist; our mother earth with the seas and oceans, the rivers, and mountains, cities and villages human races, animals, plants, birds, and planets and luminaries, all this infinite variety of creation, had no existence. Are we sure of that? We will try to trace how this conclusion is arrived at. What does man see around him? Take a little plant. He puts a seed in the ground, and later, he finds a plant peep out, lift itself slowly above the ground, and grow and grow, till it becomes a gigantic tree.

Then it dies, leaving only the seed. It completes the circle — it comes out of the seed, becomes the tree, and ends in the seed again. Look at a bird, how from the egg it springs, lives its life, and then dies, leaving other eggs, seeds of future birds. So with the animals, so with man. Everything in nature begins, as it were, from certain seeds, certain rudiments, certain fine forms, and becomes grosser and grosser, and develops, going on that way for a certain time, and then again goes back to that fine form, and subsides. The raindrop in which the beautiful sunbeam is playing was drawn in the form of vapour from the ocean, went far away into the air, and reached a region where it changed into water, and dropped down in its present form — to be converted into vapour again. So with everything in nature by which we are surrounded. We know that the huge mountains are being worked upon by glaciers and rivers, which are slowly but surely pounding them and pulverising them into sand, that drifts away into the ocean where it settles down on its bed, layer after layer, becoming hard as rocks, once more to be heaped up into mountains of a future generation. Again they will be pounded and pulverised, and thus the course goes on. From sand rise these mountains; unto sand they go.

If it be true that nature is uniform throughout, if it be true, and so far no human experience has contradicted it, that the same method under which a small grain of sand is created, works in creating the gigantic suns and stars and all this universe, if it be true that the whole of this universe is built on exactly the same plan as the atom, if it be true that the same law prevails throughout the universe, then, as it has been said in the Vedas, "Knowing one lump of clay we know the nature of all the clay that is in the universe." Take up a little plant and study its life, and we know the universe as it is. If we know one grain of sand, we understand the secret of the whole universe. Applying this course of reasoning to phenomena, we find, in the first place, that everything is almost similar at the beginning and the end. The mountain comes from the sand, and goes back to the sand; the river comes out of vapour, and goes back to vapour; plant life comes from the seed, and goes back to the seed; human life comes out of human germs, and goes back to human germs. The universe with its stars and planets has come out of a nebulous state and must go back to it. What do we learn from this?

We have yet something to teach to the world this is the very reason, the raison d’etre, that this nation has lived on in spite of hundreds of years of persecution, in spite of nearly thousand years of foreign rule and foreign oppression. This nation still lives; the raison d’etre is, it still hold to God, to the treasure-house of religion and spirituality, the fountain which will have to overflow and flood the world to bring in new life and new vitality to the We have yet something to teach to the world this is the very reason, the raison d’etre, that this nation has lived on in spite of hundreds of years of persecution, in spite of nearly thousand years of foreign rule and foreign oppression. This nation still lives; the raison d’etre is, it still hold to God, to the treasure-house of religion and spirituality, the fountain which will have to overflow and flood the world to bring in new life and new vitality to the Western and others, which are now almost borne down, half-killed, and degraded by political ambitions and social scheming.
But mark you,if you give up that spirituality, leaving it aside to go the materializing civilization of West, the result will be that in three generation you will be an extinct race; because the backbone of the nation will broken, the foundation upon which the national edifice has been built will be undermined, and the result will be annihilation all round.
Some of these old temples of Southern India, and those like Somnath of Gujarat will teach you volumes of wisdom, will give you a keener insight into history of the race than any amount of books. Mark how this temples bear the mark of hundred attacks and a hundred regenerations, continually destroyed and continually springing up out of the ruins, rejuvenated and strong as ever !That is the national mind, that is the national life-current.
We must have a hold on the spiritual and secular education of the nation. Do you understand ?..... The education that you are getting now has some good points, but it has tremendous disadvantage which so great that the good things are all weighed down. In the first place it is not a man-making education _It is merely and entirely a negative education. A negative education or any training that is based on negation, is worse than death.
(Cont.)

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