|
|
|
(This web site is under
reconstruction. Please reach Contents to
reach any part of this Book)
Tapping the Reservoir of Power Within for Others' Good
218. The ancient
Indian sages discovered by their experience that our reality is one
with that of Brahman or Godhead in His nature, substance, power and
capacity. So, in our reality we are all a wave of the ocean of infinity
or universal consciousness. This truth means that we have for our use
the infinite cosmic power of the mind if we can purify it. Purification
restores the mind to its innate state to receive its infinite power.
The sages explained the simple methodology for receiving this gift of
God. If we live in our innate divinity, that is non-violence,
righteousness, compassion and benevolence or godliness, or reach near
God through any religion or path, a few of His powers come to us
without asking. Overwhelmed by material achievements in parts, many
modern Indians forgot this discovery of limitless power available to us
and had no faith in it. Cosmic power is the capacity to bring about
lasting benefits without tangible means that include minor psychic
power or mantra. All miracles or inexplicable phenomena by human beings
in all religions are the proof of the use of this cosmic power by them.
Our objective, however, should be God and not powers. As myriad objects
in the world, the powers are neither good nor bad. If we acquire any
power, our pride destroys us by its selfish use. We can advance towards
and reach God only by the annihilation of our outer self or the 'I.' Sages annihilated their
'I' and thereafter found that whatever revived egotism or the wicked
'I' consciousness, was a fall from where they reached. They advised
their disciples to shun powers without first annihilating their
egotism. Annihilation of the ego invokes God's grace to bestow on us
unimaginable powers. Mahatma Gandhi demonstrated the power he received
by his selflessness, unshakable faith in God and living by that faith
in the universal core of Sanaatana Dharma.
The peculiar feature of
his cosmic powers was that he was not aware of his having them because
he never asked for them and therefore never expected them. It was his
powers that suggested to him strange, unusual and harmless methods that
people jeered at. His half nakedness, living with the socially lowest
untouchables, cleaning by his own choice his dry system latrine when he
was in jail, non-violence, spinning of cotton yarn and making salt from
the sea water were unheard of and ridiculous methods to accomplish the
impossible task that he set for himself – the independence of his
motherland from the greatest empire that ever was.
219. Some of the
cosmic powers could be acquired by methods that made powers the
objective of their seeker. The sages on the right path had annihilated
their 'I.' They could use these
powers selflessly because they received them without asking. The sages
did not go about offering their ware to all and sundry that would
revive their egotism for their own downfall. Unlike the sages, a seeker
of powers for the sake of powers finds his egotism strengthened by
powers. This prevents him from being selfless as sages were in the use
of powers which, therefore, destroy him. A preliminary discipline is
necessary for making our nature selfless to save us from being
destroyed by powers. The sages therefore repeat discipline so that when
powers flow into us, we use them selflessly by nature. In emphasizing
self-discipline sages therefore avoid mention of powers lest they
become our objective and destroy us.
220. We face the
doubling of scientific and techno-logical advance in a decade or less
today that repeatedly leaves us behind. We have also to face an
increase in the sickness of some sections of affluent society, the
absence of peace and contentment generally, increase in crime and fall
in moral values at places. To remedy these two situations, we need
selfless teachers for imparting requisite education. We need to
increase the capacity of our mind and transformation of our attitude
permanently to heal sickness of society by our exemplary selflessness
and compassion. This education is teaching the core of all religions on
which variety of cultures is based. This education makes us understand
our neighbour better because we know what he believes and why he
believes what he believes as his religion. This education has to make
the use of our mind as the instrument for under-standing and developing
respect for the best in all Holy Books because all Holy Books are good
for their followers. Yet this education will go beyond all Holy Books
because no Holy Book can limit the limitless God to what it says about
God, what He does or does not do or can or cannot do. Any holy book
cannot circumscribe the manner in which God deals with human beings. No
book can be the last word on God and His relationship with us that He
can establish with us in limitless ways. This education will inculcate
respect in us for all beliefs to narrow them down to the essentially
practical and those that bestow bliss on all. This education can create
a ripple effect to benefit all. It will create good people that are
much needed. Unable to define the problem, many people search for the
short and the long term remedies but so far without success.
Teachers can transmit spirituality
or subjective know-ledge to students if they have the qualifications
that follow. They should have firm faith in God as a reality for their
succour, be free from any immutable religious beliefs and have respect
for others' faith and experience. They should motivate all thought,
word and act by love for all as the base of all virtues. Virtues will
revive empowering spirituality. Love is best expressed in non-violence,
selflessness, self-control and self-sacrifice in thought, word and
action and in acceptance of diversity in thought, concepts and
religious beliefs of others. They should not interfere with others'
personal lives and beliefs or try to change the latter. These teachers
can transmit subjective knowledge by exemplary selflessness and the
objective knowledge by speech. Such teachers are found at all levels
where learning and character command respect of students and of their
parents. In addition, the community looks after teachers' needs to free
their minds from the burden of their livelihood and incidental care for
their total immersion in selflessness for society. The Shree
Raamacharita Maanasa gives steps for rapid attainment of such teachers'
qualification in subjective knowledge to tap cosmic power for their
selfless use. This is the greatness of this Book.
Incidentally, many decades ago, a
beginning was made in the USA to advance the study in
universities of subjective education or metaphysics and comparative
religions. Metaphysics is a study of that which is beyond the material.
The scope of this subject therefore can extend to the limitlessness of
intangible phenomena. Metaphysics can include the study of the reality
of the intangible, its relationship with the ultimate unchanging
reality, the relationship of both to the tangible and the extent of the
benefit we can derive from this study. The Indian rishis completed
this study to find the secret of receiving a mind empowered to its
limitlessness. The rishis left their lessons for the benefit of
humanity.
So far the West does not treat the
study of the mind as being as important as science and technology. It
is a pity that the West is enamoured of the product and treats the
creator of the product as not worth studying because it does not know
how to study the mind. The educated Indians’ alien mind-set follows
this ignorance because it refuses to know Indian legacy for an
empowered mind. The ancient Indian sages treated the mind as more
powerful than its most powerful product and so concentrated on
receiving a mind empowered to its limitlessness. They left simple tips
of disciplines that even the illiterate masses could follow to make the
Indian subcontinent lead the world in material and spiritual prosperity
for unknown millenniums till the beginning of the nineteenth century.
In the West, metaphysics was
segregated from philosophy by the age of reason a few centuries ago.
This segregation cut off from us conviction in faith in God that was
the only basis for all virtues or godliness. This is because reason and
science and laws based on them cannot convince us of the value of any
virtue when we live in virtue. Law can punish one who hurts us but
cannot protect us from hurt. We seek and receive protection from God.
Secondly, God and not reason, science and laws, gives us consequences
of virtue to strengthen our persistence in them. Lastly, that virtue
has value for us cannot be tangibly proven on which reason and science
rest. The Indian rishis discovered the relationship of the
intangible as the reality underlying the tangible. This discovery made
them discover the way to experience the expanse of the intangible and
how to make use of this knowledge for the betterment of human society.
This investigation found ways and means to make use of the intangible
to its limitlessness.
For all this research, the
instrument was the mind. The rishis therefore concentrated on the
working of the mind and the role of the five senses and the six
passions in it. The six passions are Kaama (desire including
lust), krodha (anger), lobha (greed), moha
(attachment or the feeling of mine) ahamkaara (pride) and matsara
(envy). The rishis discovered that the overwhelming power of
passions polluted and weakened and control over them purified and
strengthened our mind. They discovered that the mind could receive
limitless power of the intangible reality if it was pure. Every
religion emphasizes the need for purifying our mind for a path of
virtue to bliss and to God in life. Both of these discoveries
were unobjection-able from the point of view of any pure religion based
on benevolence for all. ‘Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall
see God,’ is the most significant statement of Jesus in the Gospels
because it also finally establishes that God is visible in a form the
seeker can see with his eyes. This statement is a universal truth and
was experienced by Indian rishis earlier than and after Jesus. The
visibility of God is a universally experienced truth because if it was
not so, either our concept of God as a reality or that of His supremacy
by His omnipotence and omniscience is wrong or our faith in them is
wrong inasmuch as the equipment for His experience and vision, namely,
the heart and mind that He gives us, are inadequate for their objective
God. So, the followers of all religions have been seeing God of their
individual concept tangibly but wisely keep it to themselves in
unbelieving environment.
The rishis discovered what comprised impurities in the mind and
the disciplines for purifying the mind to make it an efficient
instrument for probing into the intangible. They also found simple and
easy methods that the masses incapable of the rigours of any mental or
religious disciplines used to sustain subcontinental prosperity for
millenniums. To receive the limitless power to serve humanity
selflessly as our service to God can be called one of the objectives of
Sanaatana Dharma.
This Indian study of the working of the mind and how to receive its
limitless potential can become the subject matter of metaphysics to
make it a useful science of the mind. For example, an Indian discovery
was that when there was no desire, the mind ceased to exist for that
moment. When there was no mind, there was no ‘I’ consciousness. Yet
this state was the source of the empowerment of the mind because it
removed the partition of the ‘I’ as the observable self from our jeeva-atmaa
or God within. This desireless mind and intellect ceased to be
separate from and became one with our jeevaatmaa or God within.
The mind became empowered by this oneness for the service of humanity.
Without selflessness, the power of the mind dwindles and the mind
becomes weak. In short, the discovery was that a mind filled with the
‘I’ as the doer was an obstacle to the flow of cosmic power in our body
and mind both. When the 'I' realizes that not the 'I' but God does and
is all and after doing its duty diligently dedicates all and itself to
God, leaving the result of its diligence for God's choice, the mind
becomes desireless for results or of desires as such. A desireless
mind is a pure mind without even the impurity of the 'I' in it. This
mind becomes linked to the cosmos to receive its power unhindered by
any impurities. This is what the rishis experienced and laid down
as the law. The first discipline for receiving an empowered mind
therefore became the annihilation of the 'I' or the self by our
cons-tant alertness to selflessness. In common parlance this state is
called total surrender to God or the conviction and constant attitude
that I do not exist and only God exists and whatever comes to me to do
is done by Him and not by me. I use my mind and intellect correctly and
to its limit and that too happens by God’s guidance. This Indian
discovery is unobjectionable to any religion and so was availed of by
followers of six religions other than two main Hindu and Muslim in India.
For the experience of the
intangibles as also for the study of the working of the mind for
receiving its full potential, we need a mind unconditioned by any
beliefs of any religion including Hinduism. Beliefs restrain the reach
of the mind beyond beliefs. The maximum benefit from intangibles is for
man as man who existed before any religion came into being or beliefs
were articulated to condition man’s mind. Without an unconditioned or
wholly free mind it is difficult to delve into the intangibles to see
their relationship with the tangible to derive the full benefit of this
knowledge. A conditioned mind cannot reach the limitlessness of the
intangible because of the limitation of a message or revelation in the
mind. Not being constrained by any pre-existing beliefs of any religion
and doing research for man as man, the rishis could reach the
limitless. The modern researchers are inhibited by beliefs and society.
The use of the mind to cure
disease through faith in religion is becoming popular in the West
today. This will succeed more if faith takes precedence over and
eliminates the mind. The Indian discovery was that the freedom from
human misery in its myriad forms that included disease, was instantly
secured by the elimination of the mind. It was the active mind that
obstructed the natural process of keeping the body fit to overcome
environment, the replacement of the diseased part of the body and
recovery from illness. When the mind does not interfere with nature,
nature cures the disease. It is for this reason that sleep helps
recovery. In sleep the mind does not interfere with natural recovery.
The mind is eliminated by purifying it. A pure mind and jeevaatmaa
or God within us are one. An impure mind is not one with God.
There-fore, it separates itself from God for the body to suffer and the
mind to feel the suffering.
Some guide books on the
Science of the 'Mind (God)' on how to use the 'Mind' for healing help
some who are blessed by their noble past to be benevolent in nature and
comparatively pure in heart. These books are useless for impure hearts
that do not observe the minimum disciplines for their purity, even with
persistent meditation on positive affirmations in the guide books. For
example, an affirmation says, ‘God within me is mighty to heal,’ or ‘I
do not inherit disease. I am born of Pure Spirit.’ (EHM 508) This
guided meditation does not fructify where the heart is impure without
any effort towards its purity first. This is because God Who is the
source of the cure is pure and obviously responds to the intent and
effort to purify the heart first. Yet one's strong faith when one
turns to God can do miracles. Such people are rare. Those who live a
life based on love for all as one with themselves are already linked to
God and therefore gain from such guide books that they do not need.
That is why all religions give importance to the pure heart. So
Indian rishis concen-trated on devising ways and means for
purifying the heart for the curing of all diseases. A pure heart or
mind as mentioned above ceases to exist. It allows cosmic impulses
unknowingly to reach inside us to cure diseases. It does not need gurus
and guide books.
The science of yoga that
the rishis left does make use of the mind to cure diseases. But
this science needs advanced gurus who are rare. Moreover, only a
few can reach them and fewer can follow the disciplines of
yoga. Tulaseedaasa follows Vedanta from which he teaches us the
science of receiving a curative mind with limitless powers without the
need of gurus, yogas, books and disciplines not easy for many.
Incidentally, the overwhelming power of the age of reason since
Voltaire and the attractions of the products of science on one hand and
lack of faith in the reality of God of our concept as our protector,
who nourishes us and is our all, deprived the educated civilized mind
its capacity to see reality. This conditioned mind bereft of
spirituality seldom questions the base of the basics or the cause of a
cause. For example, it never inquired into the cause of Mahatma
Gandhi’s power that broke the greatest ever empire half a century ago.
This educated and civilized mind has not yet realized that the mind is
more powerful than its product such as reaching the moon. Even
after seeing the power of the selfless mind based on faith in God of a
few Al Qaeda leaders to demolish the symbols of the military and
financial powers of the greatest country in September 2001, there is no
awareness that the mind needs to be studied and researched for its
power. The completed research into the working of the mind, its
weaknesses and strengths, its rationale and the spiritual methodology
for receiving its limitless power is available as a gift of Indian
rishis to humanity. Mahatma Gandhi lived by that spiritual research to
receive some of that power. There is however a little awakening in some
quarters in the West. A little before this Selection going to the
press, Professor Klaus Schwab, President of the internationally
prestigious World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, persuaded
Ex-Archbishop of Canterbury, the Chief Rabbi of Russia, the President
of the Islamic World Conference from Saudi Arabia, the Head of Shiah
Muslims in Iran, the head of the Buddhist Church in Japan, a Hindu
leader from India and a few others to chip in how spirituality can help
bring amity in the nations of the world who rest on global economic
bowl to feed humanity. All religious and economic leaders attended the
annual meeting in Davos on 24
January 2003.
221.
The first step for tapping powers for advancement is to make God our
objective, believe that He is a reality and understand that there is
nothing outside God. The reality of all of us is one with us in God.
Next we find that the 'I' consciousness persists and it yearns for a
'you.' God strengthens the yearning of our 'I' and provides the 'you'
in His Incarnation. God is omnipotent to incarnate in a human form to
manifest His divinity in full. He can manifest it throughout His human
life or in a part of that life. He can do it in some words spoken or
deeds done or in all of them. That he does so is experienced. Such part
Incarnations are called ansha avataaras. We cannot limit God to
what we think or argue about it because the basic belief of all
religions is that He is limitless, omnipotent and omniscient and can
and does do many things that we cannot imagine. We can seldom know the
why of all His doings.
We can
dedicate our daily work and all to Him. We can also visualize God
in our mind as our loving mother and dedicate our all to Her. We must
have faith that God is real for us and knows the limitation of our
minds and beliefs and reaches all who yearn for Him in the manner the
seeker can think, visualize and believe. This going across of love
beyond all is a truth because of the clear possibility of a response by
God’s omnipotence, omni-science and omnipresence to the sincere
yearning of any.
This dedication and a constant
link somehow to a personal God purifies our mind and is essential for
our objective. Power is, however, secondary to our primary objective of
reaching God. Without that objective, the power itself is destructive
for us. If we do not believe that God appears physically in a human
form, we can visualize our God in the manner of our choice. We
should have faith in His being real and the only all-inclusive and
pervasive reality that there can be. We should know of our reality
being one with that reality.
222. Next, we
should know that when passions are our masters, we are ourselves our
enemy. They prevent expansion of the capacity of our mind to its limit
and sap our energy by ignoble distractions. Our conviction in the law
of karma with God's supremacy over it for our relief in the jnaana
that all are one with us in God and in the value of our prayer for
freedom from passions gradually purifies our mind. The pollutants are
bad thoughts such as envy, greed, hatred and grudge. A purified mind
develops love for all and harmony with the cosmos. By God's grace, this
mind receives limitless power for our selfless benevolence. Our
surrender to God annihilates our ego to prevent the misuse of powers
for our destruction.
223. Our
six passions become power for us when we are free of them. For example,
we develop the desire to be of use to society. We become angry at
injustice to the meek and weak. We become greedy of putting in greater
effort in caring for the needy and the weak and for treating them as
our own. We sublimate our pride into humility to appreciate excellence
for emulation for our greater effici-ency. We get envious of saints to
emulate them in their selflessness. This sublimation of passions into
our friends is the experience of many selfless social workers. So, they
appear generally without any burden, need or disabling, and appear
tireless.
224.
Next, we have to align our intellect with our inmost Self or God
within. We do it by establishing some link to Him. We believe that we
are His servants to do only the right and treat it as His bidding. Our
intellect gets guidance from introspection. Introspection shows that
the mind is nothing but a bundle of desires pandering to our senses and
passions. If there is no desire, there is no mind but a pure mind.
Fortunately desires arise one at a time. The intellect retains only
those desires that are for the sustenance of our body for its purpose.
It retains desires that are selfless or prompt actions motivated by
love and good for all.
225. Our
mind thus purified and controlled by an aligned intellect makes us
content, detached from worldly attractions and desires. It is one with
our jeevaatmaa and so receives power to achieve anything
noble. Our concen-tration on our objective, God, advances us on the
noble selfless task we set for ourselves uncannily without our ever
being aware of our increasing powers. The rapidity of our advance and
the unexpected manner in which circum-stances shape themselves for that
rapidity only surprise us to express our gratitude to God. Our mind is
polluted easily the moment our intellect forgets its alignment with
the jeevaatmaa. This happens through the snapping of our
link to God. This forgetfulness ceases our control over our senses,
passions and desires to make us ignorant and powerless again.
226. Since
we cannot keep the purified mind void of thought, the Shree
Raamacharita Maanasa advises us to fill it with the thought and
readiness to do good to all. A purified mind taps the reservoir of
cosmic power for others' good and bliss. There is nothing noble beyond
its reach or impossible for it. This is because thought is energy. By
its condensation, when thought is pure, it can materialize into
congenial situations.
227. Some
are born with cosmic powers. Some receive powers by living in love and
selflessly. This living removes obstacles from their noble path and
gives them success and happiness without their knowing their power. In
common parlance they are called fortunate persons. A well-known example
of a man who followed the above Advaitic Sanaatana steps, which
bestowed cosmic powers unasked without knowing it and so desiring
powers, was Mahatma Gandhi. The cosmic power intuitively suggested to
him unique and simple steps that 400 million people could follow. He
revived people's faith in non-violence to secure independence for their
country in the age of the atomic bomb. No stranger weapon for victory
than non-violence could be imagined for breaking the greatest ever
empire.
228. In addition
to the above means in the Shree Raamacharita Maanasa, cosmic power
for selfless and benevolent use is obtainable by spiritual disciplines
that are given in ancient Indian scriptures. Gurus to teach those
disciplines are almost non-existent today. Viveka-nanda also said,
‘Each man is only a conduit for the infinite ocean of knowledge and
power that lies beyond mankind. It (Raj Yoga) teaches that desire and
wants are in man, and that wherever and whenever a desire, a want, a
prayer has been fulfilled, it was out of this infinite magazine that
the supply came, and not from any supernatural being.’ The source of
all power and munificence, God, is within us.
229. The
discovery of this inexhaustible cosmic power within and of the means
for tapping made Indian sages give secondary importance to their
advance in natural sciences. Sages left science for pursuit by others
but treated science as essential knowledge. Indian sages rightly gave
pre-eminence to and concentrated on empowerment of the mind over its
products called science and technology. Sanaatana Dharma always
encouraged scientific method of inquiry for bodily comfort as also for
mental advancement. Mental advancement was for the superior enjoyment
of the mind in truth, beauty, art, literature and philosophy. It was
also for spiritual advancement for continual bliss independent of our
outside. Service for giving joy to others found expression in
handicrafts and fine art, architecture, sculpture, painting, dance,
drama and music of a high order. There is no clash in Sanaatana
Dharma in the triad of spirituality, arts and science. The three are
all knowledge, the superior for peace and happiness and inferior for
physical comfort.
Ancient India made tremendous advance
in physical sciences and this advance would continue. Objective science
is scattered in several Indian scriptures starting from the Rigveda.
The freedom to ask the right question with a constructive purpose and
in humility about any concept of Sanaatana Dharma and any subject
of knowledge strengthens our enlightened faith in it and in its
philosophy. This freedom gives no quarter to bigotry. The faith
encourages us to live in concepts to manifest our dormant perfection in
the three fields of objective, subject-tive and spiritual knowledge.
The bigotry today in all communities has to be snuffed out by the
educated in India. We can do it only
by recognizing that we do not know our own religion to its core
because of our educa-tional system for 170 years. We have to replace
our ignorance by knowledge of our own religion and thereafter also of
our neighbours', to understand them better for mutual harmony. This
personal knowledge will destroy the monopoly of the knowledge of our
heritage by bigots. Our ignorance has mortgaged our intelligence to
bigots who are claimants of knowledge today.
230. The sages
pursued the science of identifying ourselves with our reality as Satchidaananda
Brahman or the Universal Consciousness. This science secures success
for the individual through bliss for society without much effort. It
secures the objective without the means, a fruit without a garden, a
cure without medicine, a destina-tion without travel and an access
transcending all physical obstacles. This capacity could be acquired by
all and used only selflessly for public benefit. It makes each man a
mere instrument for a public purpose. This appears unbelievable today.
This capacity in varying measure acquired by a large majority of
followers of all religions in the Indian subcontinent made India a world leader in both
material and spiritual prosperity for unknown millenniums till the
early nineteenth century. This capacity is glimpsed occasionally in
some of its facets throughout world history till today. Minor examples
are miraculous powers of healing without medicine and even from a
distance, psy-chic powers, clairvoyance and miracles of lasting
benevo-lent effect. All these activities are gratis and for the good of
the people. These and freedom from environment enjoyed by some are
beyond the instant ken of science. This superior capacity is achievable
tomorrow. How to regain this lost ancient Indian science of doing the
apparently impossible by man for the good of man is brought out to some
extent in the Shree Raamacharita Maanasa. As a spiritual science
for receiving a mind empowered to its limitlessness, it awaits
re-employment for human welfare and continual happiness by revival of
the ancient Indian heritage of eight religions by knowing each for
their followers to live in them to set an example of amity first.
Of What use are Religion and Its Philosophy?
231. What is the use of
religion? A religion can comprise going to a specified place of
worship, doing prescribed worship, ceremonials, prayers and fasts,
visiting places of pilgrimage, listening to religious discourses and
believing in any one or more holy books to be trusted as final. Such a
religion may reject all other books, thought and beliefs as wrong or
unworthy. It may separate itself from others as ‘we’ and ‘they.’ It may
not be willing to accept different thoughts and concepts as a
possibility and worth an experiment. It may confer privileges to any in
society on specious grounds. Such a religion may not be of much use to
many of us today.
232.
A religion may become subject to barriers among human beings in the
form of immutable parochial, regional and institutional customs,
ceremonial, traditions and thought patterns. It may discourage
questions, or thinking for ourselves beyond specified perimeters. After
understanding all that has been ever reached through history, messages,
revelations and past thought and experience, it may prevent our trying
to reach beyond all. It may put a limit on our intellect and heart by
denying their right to experiment with innocuous personal urges or
different beliefs. Such a religion may not be of much use to many of us
today.
233. Love is the
relationship God, the Creator, gave to man for his dealing with man and
with Himself since man was created. We learn to practise love from our
birth as hurt none and help all. A religion may be based wholly on love
for all as one with us. It may treat all as ‘we’ or as ‘they’ and not
‘we’ and ‘they’ in reality. It may exhort all to express all religious
beliefs only in love for all. It may believe in a God as the
personification of mothers’ love even for an errant child ignoring her,
disobeying her, forgetful of her, questioning her authority
or quarreling with her. It may believe that no one has the power
to disobey God because if one could then he could defy God. That would
mean that God ceases to be omnipotent. It may believe that no one can
insult or hurt God because one can do that only to a known entity and
God cannot be known. It may believe that God never gave any name to
Himself because no name can encompass Him. So, God is in the name by
which any man calls him. That is why God has myriad names that men gave
Him. As fire burns anyone that touches it, a religion may believe that
a name of God purifies the person calling that name regardless of the
person’s good or bad intent in giving that name to God. So, a name or
thought of God with the intent to insult or hurt God purifies the
person. The reason for this belief may be that if God could be insulted
or hurt, that is affected or touched, God was not the Almighty. A
religion may believe that God made man in his image of perfection in
divinity and one with God in his reality because He is the only
all-encompassing and all-pervasive reality that there can be and is. It
may believe that we can make use of this gift of God of our oneness
with Him for accomplish-ing noble tasks for securing bliss for
humanity. It may believe in the sacrifice of the selfish self and
living in that self which encompasses all. Such a religion with
limitless possibilities for man to experiment fearlessly with his
concept of God in his relationship with man and society can be useful
for many today.
234. In addition to the religion
described in the preceding paragraph, the religion of immense need and
use today for us as individuals, can be that which encourages us to
probe into the reality of ourselves, of the Creation and of the Creator
and their interrelationship for our daily use. Such a religion should
encourage us to know our purpose and full potential on the earth. It
should permit us to follow our own concepts in these matters by our
experiment, after or without reading holy books about them, for our
happiness. The experiments should however be harmless for any. It
should ignore the practices and rituals in pursuit of our concepts if
we find them unnecessary from our experience. It should give us
suggestions for our optional use. Or, it should let us pursue
independently our concepts for providing solutions for getting rid of
our misery, which solutions are harmless for others. For our faith in
the value of virtues, it should give us their basis for us to make an
effort to acquire them even by some sacrifice. For example, why should
I be good and loving at all? Quoting a scripture as an answer does not
satisfy a questioning mind. No amount of reasoning or logic can prove
the worth of any virtue in the tangible manner as physical science
proves its premises. If the beliefs in a religion and its philosophy
give us the rationale for those beliefs and convince us of the value of
virtues, then such a religion is useful today.
235. The
acceptance of all discoveries of knowledge and beliefs as good for
their followers and freedom to think on the value of precepts,
practices and beyond is found in Vedanta. This acceptance makes
Vedanta, as the practical essence of Sanaatana Dharma, a useful
religion today. Almost no believer in a loving and merciful God is
outside its ambit of belief and its rationale in thought. Fortunately,
this religion comprises beliefs and their philosophy inside us, and
demands disciplined conduct motivated by love for all. It does not
insist on any ceremonial or visible outward practices. As a matter of
fact, Sanaatana Dharma belongs to humanity inasmuch as it is our
innate inalienable nature and reality. It is a religion of man as such
without need for observable religious practices. It however insists
upon self-discipline and control to serve the good of all as one with
us in reality.
236. The variety
in cultures and also in values and morality arises from religious
beliefs. These beliefs provide our ideals. They define what is noble
and become our guide. Logic cannot prove the worth of any virtue or
nobility. For virtues we rely upon faith or our religion. All this is
the use of religion for us.
237.
Incidentally, the current language that is a part of culture belongs to
a region and not to a religion. The language of a religion, if there is
any, is that of its earliest recorded sacred religious book. For
example, Arabic is for Islam, Greek for Christians, Sanskrit
for Sanaatana Dharma and so on. The language of any follower of
any religion is that of the place where he lives and speaks
it. Urdu and Hindi are the languages of northern part of the
Indian sub continent. In India, they are not the
languages of either Muslims or Hindus but of followers of eight
religions in the northern region. A Muslim in the South speaks one of
the regional languages and not Urdu. A Hindu does not speak Hindi
in the South.
Incidentally, it is the duty of
the Indian state as much as of those who take pride in the unity in
diversity of our multicultural heritage to take note of this fact. Urdu
was born in India and will be nourished
and sustained by India. Bangladesh rejected it and Pakistan gives pre-eminence to
its regional languages. The purity of the pronunciation of Urdu
language will be retained in India by as many if not all Urdu books
being republished in Devanaagiri or Hindi script with care for
correct spellings for pronunciation of Urdu letters peculiar to it,
such as in khay as in Khudaa, zay,zaal, zu-aad,
zo-yay, as in zaree, zariyaa, zaay’a, zaalim, ghai-ayan as
in Ghalib, fay as in Firdausi and quaaf as in quaatil
(murderer) and a few others. By law the Hindi script should provide for
dots in all writing and printing devices to sustain the purity of the
pronunciation of Urdu words. It is a tragedy that both Persian and Urdu
suffer continuous distortion of pronunci-ation from the congenital
allergy of its scholars to avoid use of even inadequate ‘maatraas’
or vowels in script. Urdu ‘maatraas,’ however, are not enough
to retain purity of pronunciation of Urdu.
238. The
use of Sanaatana Dharma is that it emphasi-zes that education that
instils in us awareness of our reality to use it for attaining harmony
among all men. Education is much more than mere literacy or acquisition
of skill for earning a livelihood. It is not accumulation of
information, which is not of direct use for us for the pursuit of our
happiness. The awareness of our reality comes from humble questioning
of the basics to discriminate between reality and untruth, right and
wrong and the worthwhile and worthless for our continual happiness.
Information otherwise useful, may not train us in develop-ing this
discrimination. This discrimination is the founda-tion of all virtues,
values and all that is worthwhile in life. Ancient Indian sages
rejected information not relevant to the purpose of our life. Without a
purpose and this educa-tion, the mind is a source of sorrow as shown in
waste of natural resources, pollution of environment and exploita-tion
of the weak and wars. The religion that shows us a purpose and gives us
this education is useful today.
239. Sanaatana Dharma holds that we need
proper education (Brahmacharya) to eliminate our misery in all
its forms. Correct education should transform our nature permanently to
live in love and virtue. Scientific and other education merely provides
for a livelihood and physical comfort, a few cures of physical diseases
and a little mastery over environment. For freedom from fear and misery
and to secure continual bliss for self through that of society,
individuals need transformation to live in our divinity by control over
our senses and six passions. This living expands our individuality into
universality for the continual bliss for self through that of society
and for all. This transformation is from being a slave of our five
senses and six passions to getting control over them. This permanent
transformation makes us live in our divinity to serve society for its
relief in prosperity and happiness. Without this transformation we are
susceptible to regress into selfish narrowness overwhelmed by senses
and passions to restore misery. Science does not help in this
transformation. This transformation is across all man-made barriers
called religions. The use of Sanaatana Dharma is that it has an
educational system for this transformation of all across all barriers.
It is called Brahmacharya. It can be added as a course of
study, as mathematics, to our present educational system from the
kindergarten stage to post-graduate for those who choose to study it.
This course does not need a change of one’s religion because it was
crafted before any religion came into existence.
240. Only that
mind is wholly scientific which is not confined to things around us but
also inquires into the inside of us in the depth of our mind. By
exploring inside us, the Indian sages discovered our mental potential
and how to receive it to make us free from fear, particularly of
disease, adversity and of the future. They discovered methods for
overcoming situations and factors beyond our present-day control and
also means for continual happi-ness. So, reviving the Indian
methodology for acquiring a wholly scientific mind for all subjects
including religion, metaphysics and the psychic is useful today.
241. Ancient
Indian sages discovered that all power that there was in the cosmos was
not in our control till we attained self-control. With self-control,
our mind could reach beyond the senses. It reaches daily in knowing
another man's attitude, character and qualities. Reaching beyond, the
mind could tap this power of the cosmos. After that, the mind could
create energy, matter and congenial situations for selfless tasks. In
short, it could do the impossible for humanity. The sages prescribed
discip-lines that the present educational system needs to experi-ment
with for continual health and happiness of both the individual and
society.
242. Indian sages
found that the obstacle to making use of the potential of our mind was
our artificial nature of imperfection superimposed on the innate
divinity of the mind. To get rid of this superimposition, and manifest
our divine nature of a perfect human being, sages prescribed
disciplines for life to be acquired in adolescence through Brahmacharya.
The first discipline is that of speech. Disciplines purify our mind to
activate our unexplored but dormant divine mind. In a little time we
understand the rationale of disciplines of Sanaatana Dharma to
make them our second nature by practice. Not time for practice, but a
change in attitude secures a mind capable of doing the unimaginable in
benevolence.
243. Indian sages
brought out the oneness of man and woman but separateness of their
nature for their distinct roles. Fortitude, patience, love, which is
often selfless, self-control and self-sacrifice especially for their
honour, are ingredients of women's nature. Mothers exemplify love in
the form of compassion, giving and self-sacrifice. Women in ancient India commanded respect.
Tradition gave them security for the performance of their selfless
duty. Little of that security survives today. Man's role is to provide
chaste love to the spouse, security to the family, the wherewithal for
survival and leisure for self-expression and progress to all
individuals in the family. The two roles of man and woman have to be
strengthened separately for a healthy society. Unable to see the
worthwhile today, we burden both and particularly women.
244. To the
ancient Indian sages were revealed man's problems and their solutions
in the eternal verities known as Sanaatana Dharma. Business,
industry and many other human activities also face daily problems. We
create problems in the workplace because we are unaware of verities
such as the power of selfless unilateral trust, care and compassion. If
we understand the verities of Sanaatana Dharma, applying them in
daily life prevents and cures problems.
245. For example,
our belief in our oneness with all and our living in it, eliminate
discrimination and being judgmental, which otherwise cause
dissatisfaction and inefficiency among workers. This belief of
acceptance replaces control by cooperation. It makes us share
problems and set an example of understanding the other and of
persuasion. This is because we keep in mind that everyone has the same
equipment to think, act and feel as we have but in varying degree. Mere
authority rests on fear and not respect of love which oneness demands
and secures through sharing as equals. Love makes us provide
opportunity for blossoming of talents to encourage the mediocre among
workers towards excellence.
246. Karma tells
us that we get happiness by giving it. Living in this knowledge, we
share with everyone a little more of our profits for them to share our
happiness. This becomes easier if we accept that our higher talent,
capa-bility and performance which make us the head of our set up, are
gifts from God and not so much of our own achievement. As one seed sown
returns a million fruit, the sharing with and caring for workers
increases our opportu-nities and capacity for both in a multiple
measure. This translates into an expansion of the enterprise, increase
in profits and happiness all round.
247. Being alert to the
power of passions, we do not let our passion, pride, obstruct our
setting an example. On investigation, an auto producer discovered that
the fault was in design. It was not in the quality of workers' perfor-
mance. In the infallibility and pride of the management, it had earlier
found fault with workers. The faith that others too have intelligence
and honesty of purpose changes our pride into humility. It makes our
worker a team player to chip in more than his due. Our setting an
example of hard work and dedication imbued by a feeling of togetherness
is easy if we are humble. Its transparency brings forth the best in
each co-worker for best joint results for the enterprise.
248. The control
of the passion, greed, makes the enterprise human for its best
performance because it attracts loyalty. We control excess of greed by
treating the enterprise not as owned by us but as a trusteeship from
employees. It is just a matter of attitude. Selflessness and caring
treat employees as human beings. Some entrepre-neurs are experimenting
with controlled greed and caring of workers in
their organizations. We have to watch whether they succeed in
global competition. At places they led to international partnerships,
diversification, expansion, and a competitive edge.
249. Sometimes an
enterprise misses easy communi-cation. Workers respond instantaneously
to an employer's transparency in his care for workers. Transparency is
easy if we practise care with firm faith in oneness, karma and Satchidaananda
nature in corporate life. The first is for humility and the second is
for freedom from fear. The last is for spreading happiness by sharing
it. This three-pronged approach makes the worker see the employer's
intent in care for the employees to encourage free exchange of thought.
By transparent empathy, a supervi-sor can draw his subordinate to
present his problem that the supervisor can treat as his own, to
suggest a solution. It frees the subordinate from fear and anxiety for
his best performance. Faith in the law of karma enables each worker to
concentrate on the work in hand for excellence. He is uninhibited by
inefficiency, if any, of the past and is fearless of the result.
250.
A Vedantic precept is the annihilation of the self. In corporate
culture, it translates into making the motive behind our enterprise the
proper discharge of our trust that provides nourishment to our workers.
In this approach the profit and competitiveness of the enterprise are
directed primarily in workers' interest. The employer's interest that
includes shareholders’ as owner is second-dary. This selflessness of
the employer's attitude is uncannily transparent to workers for their
maximum input to expand the enterprise. This selflessness that serves
God's children also invokes God's grace that inspires the employer with
intuitive ideas. These lead to innovation, initiative and
diversification for being ahead of the market for more beneficial
discharge of his duty as a trustee. This transformation into
selflessness will increase profits to benefit all and make banks seek
as clients such dynamic corporations.
251. If we know
that we are born perfect in divinity, excellence is our nature. It
reflects daily in our repeated if not constant desire to do better than
before. Our other nature propelled by selfishness, anger and hate
prevents the surfacing of our excellence. We get rid of the other
nature by understanding that under the law of karma it is useless to
nourish the other nature. This is because this nature arises from our
thinking that others cause our situation comprising daily
work,environment and prob-lems. We have to understand that no one can
cause it though sometimes it appears to be so. Our situation is the
best that we ourselves earned. So, it is best to entrust our diligence
and the anxiety for the fruit of our work to God for giving us the best
in our interest. This attitude rests on understanding the law of karma.
It frees us from any expectations from our employees and hurt from our
offending competitors or others. We transfer both of these to God for
whatever He gives us. This leaves us free from worry to concentrate on
the work in hand for the success of our enterprise. This concentration
secures excellence for the corporation and happiness to us.
252. A problem
today is violence not only in films, television and videos but also in
neighbourhoods. Violence is prevalent in news items in sport, business,
politics and almost every competitive activity, in expressions such as
'kill them, blast them, train our guns on a problem and blow them
away.’ Violent .thought and speech soon result in violent actions. The
control of thought and speech is the crying need today. We easily
acquire it if we know the Vedantic truth that it is either all 'I'
or all 'you,' not 'I' and 'you.' So, blast whom?
253. The law of
karma teaches us that what we do comes back to us manifold as its
consequence. So, we become greedy of doing good to our neighbours. This
creates caring neighbourhoods to improve their quality of life. Our
activity in benevolence eliminates exclusiveness. Living in groups with
the fear of the stranger and many ills arise from our 'we' and 'they'
attitude. These are notice-able in neighbourhoods of crimes and
violence. If only we experiment with faith in the precept that doing
good by and large results in good coming out of it and no one can hurt
us unless we earned it ourselves, our neighbourhood can expand its
benevolence to become more inclusive. This reduces fear and insecurity
and diminishes crimes because the potential criminal ordinarily is
hungry of care and compassion.
254. The Indian
sages had to devise the disciplines and methodology for receiving the
limitless power of our mind one with God. Some sages demonstrated the
unbelievable power of the mind, which flowed into them by observing
disciplines. Others showed the power to cure many diseases by mantra.
They designed the mantras and the disciplines to learn their use in
such simple manner that ordinary householders could cure diseases.
Others taught how to acquire freedom from the onset of any disease and
casting aside their perfectly healthy body at the end its term on the
earth by their choice. Luckily for humanity many of the cures by mantra
and herbs and disciplines were taken to China by scholars who visited India from times immemorial to
survive till today. This is because China was never subjected to
coercive indoctrin-ation of ignorance as effectively as the educated in
India were by the British. All
the Indian sages who observed disciplines were never in need or
nourishment or shelter. Many lived in society to serve it such
as Vasishttha. Mahatma Gandhi demonstrated the immense power of
the mind by observing some of the ancient Indian universal disciplines.
Mantra cures were common and the Author saw many such cures barely
twenty-four years ago. Muslims believed in them and encouraged them.
The British discouraged them and destroyed our faith in them to sell
their export of chemicals and pharmaceuticals.
An Alien Mind-Set
255. Trading with rich
South East Asian countries, companies of Portugal, Spain, Holland and France became rich before the
East India Company was chartered in Britain in 1601.
There was bloodshed between European nations and the British in the South East Asia. The British wisely
confined themselves to India to take away its spices
and in addition, its gems, silks and other valuable handicrafts, which
were in great demand in Europe. In the next two hundred
years Britain used its muskets to
defeat the French and extend its power over territories. With the
industrial revolution from the beginning of nineteenth century, British
manufactured goods needed India as a market. The East
India Company stopped importing Indian goods to Europe. The Indian war of
independence in 1857 led the British Crown to take over the rule over
the Indian territories. To rule without the gun and to make India a market became British
objectives.
256.
For export from Britain, the destruction of
every worthwhile manual production in India had to be the British
objective and policy. For rule without the gun, the rich zameendaars
(big landowners) and moneyed classes had to be made the instrument.
This rule needed loyalty. Loyalty needed respect. Respect needed the
British to offer something better than what the instrument, namely
advanced Indians, had. The British knew the worth of Indian heritage as
early as 1770 when Warren Hastings warned the British that Indian
heritage would survive the British. The British settlers saw the
unbelievable for over an earlier century saw the unbelievable and scary
psychic power of the mind of the common people of India.
The Author remembers two true
instances in the British true story magazine, World Wide or the Wide
World, in the thirties of the last century. A British officer halted
for the night in a dak bungalow in a rainy night on a hill station.
Soon a large number of villagers forced him to leave the Bungalow to
move down the road to the next Bungalow. A furlong down the road this
officer heard a loud rumbling and turned to see the Bungalow he left
slide down the hill.
Another officer surveying through
his binoculars the bank of the Ganges saw that a man came out
of bushes on the opposite bank, jumped into the river and pulled out a
floating dead body tied to bamboos. He removed the ropes and the
clothes and the dead body. Taking off his commoner’s clothes he lay
down between the bamboos. A few minutes later, the dead man rose. On
this, the officer galloped his horse across to reach this dead man now
alive. He had clothed himself in the live man’s clothes and was tying
him, now that he was dead to the bamboos to throw in the river. On the
officer accosting this new man, he told the officer that he needed a
robust body for the task that remained uncompleted and was not
committing any crime or hurting anyone. The Britisher left dazed.
Innumerable similar and stranger experiences of uncanny power and those
of mantra cures of snake bites and many incurable diseases and herbal
cures of other diseases by ordinary householders convinced the British
that they could never overcome and rule over Indian people with this
wide-spread knowledge and power of the mind of even in ordinary
householders and not of recluses only.
So to rule India, the British needed
Indians to rule on their behalf. The British needed to get rid of this
widespread power of knowledge. Its ignorance alone could secure the
loyalty of their human instrument to the British. By their system of
educating the British substituted the knowledgeable mind of the
instrument by what the British wanted – ignorance and non-belief.
So, the solution was to destroy the memory of the
heritage through education as inescapable means of livelihood for the
class of society that set the example for the masses. Therefore, the
conversion of the mind was the most important of the three-pronged
objective of export, administration and loyalty. This conversion to an
alien culture was the greatest massive conversion of the leading
section of people that ever took place in India. This brilliant
three-pronged British objective of export, administration by the locals
and loyalty to British rule had to govern every element of British
policy through sophisti-cation in India for about a hundred years from
1835 to 1947. History is replete with examples of
questionable means by the victorious and the powerful to gain any
objective at the cost of the vanquished and weak. This century from
1857 changed India from prosperity to
poverty for the masses and from power to powerlessness of the educated.
This also gives credence to the British adopting any means to bring
about this change. Research alone can establish facts.
257.
For example, English textiles needed elimination of spinners and
weavers of Dacca muslin of air-spun
fineness. English pharmaceuticals needed elimination of mantra and
herbal cures by logic and statistical proof. For example, was it
checked that the snake that bit the cured was poisonous because only
one in ten was poisonous? Where was the proof that mantra cured all
poisonous snake bites? The same logic was applied to Aayurvedic
(Vedic Indian) and Yunaanee (originally from Greece) systems of medicine
practiced by Hakims. English became the medium of all subjects in
colleges and Sanskrit was eliminated except in a name. The result is
that today only a few thousand with good knowledge of Sanskrit may be
surviving in North India with the country's
population of more than a billion. British educational policy cut the
educated and the teacher class from their roots to make them ignorant
for many generations. Many lost faith in the value of faith itself.
They ceased to believe that India had an original cultural
heritage and that India was materially and
spiritually rich millenniums before the Christian era and for about two
millenniums thereafter. Many developed aversion and hate for our
heritage.
Western economics gave respectability to excess of greed in the guise
of incentive. Labour as a mere factor of production reduced the need in
the entrepreneur of character, selflessness and compassion that were
needed for dealing with human beings who as labour became a commodity
disposable at the mercy of market trends. The absence of these
qualities boosts selfishness and pride. The buyer and seller, the
producer and the user, the ruler and the ruled and the superiority of
the race, created the mind-set of ‘we’ and ‘they. ‘We’ and ‘they’ was
the antithesis of the oneness of all of Advaita
or Sanaatana Dharma. In addition, it strengthened the passion of
attachment or ‘moha.’ To divert the mind from their heritage,
the British popularized the perverse aspect of western culture
that treated the highest happiness as that through and for the body. It
negated the ancient Indian concept of the body being only a means for
and not the source of the highest happiness. The highest happiness was
not through and for the body. This perverse western culture
strengthened the passion of lust. The status and titles the British
bestowed on the educated in a feudal society governed by warrant of
precedence, destroyed social equality that was inherent in the Shruti
concept of Varnadharma. In addition, it strengthened the
passion of pride and aversion and hate of the poor. Thus the British
education strengthened the six passions which the ancient Indians
advised us to curb and subdue to receive an empowered mind. The British Indian State as separate
from dharma forced the educated to serve the state and eschew or
reject dharma.
Dharma was the perennially
worthwhile intangibles for living in them. The educated attached
themselves to the worthless tangibles as the means of their livelihood,
status, name and fame in the British Raj. They were forced to reject
the worthwhile intangibles that sustained Indian prosperity for
millenniums. All this resulted in a rapid fall in values and character
among the educated. This was the conversion of the Indian mind into the
alien mind in a hundred years. The conversion by modern education
destroyed for us our heritage of virtues and perennial values to cause
most of the indefensible vices in leadership and of modern urban
educated Indian society. Its immediate effect was neglect of and denial
of patronage and encouragement to every worthwhile native activity for
progress of society. This rapidly led to poverty.
258. For the
prehistoric period, Puranas and Itihaasa (old
traditions and history) were well-known oral traditions in India. Oral traditions were
formed by a scientific system of repeated observation by succeeding
generations of the same lesson but with different experiences leading
to it. So, worthwhile tradition more than a record of history prevailed
in India for prehistoric period
of the Vedas. The traditional Raamaayana and the Mahaabhaarata
were later recorded with the invention of writing. Mahaabhaarata
battle ended on the night of 17 and 18 February in 3102 BC. The bridge
that Shree Raama built between India and Lanka is visible to
NASA scientists today. See Appendix 4.
259. In the
absence of recorded history in India, the British could only
use a record as a weapon to destroy belief in all oral tradition on
which Indian scriptures and all values and virtues were based. This,
and insistence on tangible proof crushed the educated Indian's ancient
right and nature to question the basics of any view. It no longer
asked, ‘Can unquestionable history be recorded of the times before the
dawn of writing and recording history? Can any record of history ever
be the truth and nothing but the truth? Can the “original” evidence be
checked for authenticity and bias by collateral evidence?’ We see today
in the age of far superior facilities for communication and
verification, a biased record of events and words in the media. ‘Can
history ever prove that what it did not record never happened? Does
history invariably give the viewpoint of the vanquished voiceless mass
of people? Can history prove all unrecorded oral tradition as
unreliable?’ If so, paternity and maternity will be false unless an
authentic record is available by eye witnesses of conception and birth
and absence of liaison in between. The rishis put history in its
proper place by insisting on living in the present and not letting the
past grudge and grievance make us slip into wrong karma for our
adversity again.
260. So,
the rishis developed oral tradition of benevo-lent lessons from
the past events without giving as much importance to events, persons,
dates and regions. They laid down immutable tests for removing the
crust or chaff from, and rechecking truths of lessons both in oral
traditions and in scriptures. They showed that under the law of karma
forgetting painful memories to live correctly in the present secured
peace and prosperity for all. They relegated facts of history to their
deserved inferior place because of the above-mentioned faults of
history. They gave pre-eminence to avoidance of our past errors that
arose from the ignorance of our reality. This relegation of history was
necessary for living an error free life in the present with dynamic
fearlessness to derive the benefit of the law of karma.
261. A personal
experience will illustrate the power of the alien mind-set through a
foreign language and thinking, which the British created in just a
century. This alien mind-set persists among many till today. In 1956,
the Author asked a petty revenue official in the retiring year of his
service in Kanpur, U.P. India, about the
conditions of service when he started service. The official started his
boy's service in 1916 as a peon. He saved his niggardly salary to
supplement his pension. Designated zameen-daars (big
landowners) arranged for his milch cow, monthly groceries,
clothing for the family, tuition and board for his children's education
till college, medical assistance, expenses in marriages in the family
and other ceremonial expenses. The official's first duty was to visit
every month each of his patron zameendaars and inquire if
any needed anything that the official could do. Secondly, the official
had to be alert to any information about an untoward occurrence. He
gave a verbal report of both to his immediate superior in office. He
was not concerned with nor was supposed to pursue the matter further.
The zameendaars reported any unhappiness with the officials to
the British District Officer directly. The District Officer fixed the
munificence that all officials enjoyed from zameendaars for
the revenue and police bureaucracy from the lowest to its head.
262 The
Author could not find any reason to disbelieve this old petty revenue
official's description. There was no reason to think that he cooked up
this brilliant administra-tive and information and espionage set up for
the Author. The official's version was a statement of facts in which he
lived. He could not imagine the sophistication of the system that
rested on it. The facts were distinct possibi-lities. This information
explains, in correct perspective, many not so honourable British
methods of enslaving India. It also gives the
reason for the heartlessness of the steel frame of bureaucracy headed
by Indians that the British left behind and its die-hard tradition of
unconcern for and aversion to the poor among many till today.
Incidentally, a
personal experience shows on the one hand the absence of the spirit of
service in some in the Indian legacy of this British bureaucracy
generally and on the other the ability of the people to live in a near
Ram Rajya of Mahatma Gandhi's vision in the absence of
bureaucracy. Working in the central government, the Author was posted
to Kanpur in 1956-57 to experience
district administration by starting as an Assistant Collector. Annual
winter tours required his inspection of revenue records at the village
level. The Author asked his court reader to fix the Author's camp at
villages that were not reachable by car. Among others, the Author
camped at a village last inspected by a British Officer in 1942. The villagers were courtesy personified. The
operation in this village of a near Ram Rajya as probably Mahatma
Gandhi envisioned is described in Appendix 2. At
another camp at a village, the Author found the patwaaree's
land record was blank instead of being complete for the Author's
check. This patwaaree was corruption personified
free from fear of inspection, who would make every entry on payment of
bribe. This showed the suffering caused to the people by the
selfishness of the bureaucracy who would not inspect a village for the
inconvenience of going on a bike for two miles. Another instance was
shocking. The Deputy of the Tahsildar who is equivalent to a Sub
Deputy County Executive, requested the Author to sign papers for the
issue of zameendaaree bonds (See Glossary) which were
complete for three years but for these signatures. The Author's
predecessor hoodwinked the inspectors to get away for his tenure of
three years by fudging figures to show the work completed. All the
villagers that the Author inspected in two years were alert to the
politics of the state and the centre by having transistor radios.
Another instance of the
ignorance of the steel frame comes to mind. It was 1951.
A meeting in the Defence Ministry of secretaries of four ministries,
the three Service Chiefs, the Chief Commissioner and Senior
Superinten-dent of Police of Delhi and a few other officers was to
decide among other things the ticket for the open air stands in the
Irwin Stadium near India Gate for folk dances in Republic Day
celebrations on 26 January 1951. In the bitter cold of Delhi there was no public bus
service from the stadium. Rs. 5.00 was decided. So,
the junior most officer in the meeting, the Author, asked if the ticket
was for the family or an individual? One secretary woke up. On
reconsideration, the ticket was reduced to Re. One. Later on, the
Author being pulled up for his temerity, offered the annoyed ICS boss
that he would offer the boss a pack of 100 tickets for Rs. 25.
This callous ignorance of the Steel frame forced the Headquarters Delhi
Area, to conscript every truck in the army to bring from and take back
to the cantonment as many people free of charge as could be brought to
fill the Stadium to show Nehru that dances from different parts of
India were popular.
263. For the
British, the petty revenue official's version pointed to the Author
pointed a perfect second line of administration by Indians. It reduced
the cost of administration to the British exchequer. It ensured
uninterrupted collection of land revenue. A poor rainfall or a famine
was almost always for the poor and for the Zameendaars but did
not affect the British revenue.
264.
Incidentally, subject to research to the contrary of which the Author
is not aware, the Indian pillars of the steel frame of bureaucracy did
not persuade Jawahar Lal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of
independent India, to revise pay scales of
the subordinate bureaucracy substantially and immediately. The Indian
pillars invited a British expert, Sir Paul H. Appleby. His 'Report of
Survey on Public Administration in India, 1953' held that India's was one of the
cheapest Administrations. Obviously, the First Central Pay Commission
of 1950 did not raise scales of pay substantially to replace even
partially the perqui-sites the zameendaars were providing
to the bureaucracy. So, these Indian pillars of the British steel frame
laid a firm foundation for corruption as a forced necessity for the
honest among the lower poor sections of the bureaucracy of independent India. Till today there is no
system to protect the honest official’s life and family. Eighty-four
Executive Officers in Bihar State Service were missing without
trace, some for over two years, as reported in the Statesman Weekly of 24 October 1998.
265 The British gave
status and respect to the land-lords and the rich. For converting those
of easy consci-ence among them to start a Western trend for others by
their example, it was more than probable that the British attracted
them to the perverted aspect of the Western way of living. This aspect
rested on the belief that we had only one life to enjoy. The highest
enjoyment was only sensu-ous through and for the body as our reality.
Setting examples by the British for the rich classes at the cost of the
poor locals was easy. For the worst among the rich, this would be a
licence for profligacy and crime. The worse the offence the more loyal
the offender would be to seek British protection against a stray
victim's wrath. To pay for bureaucracy as in the preceding paragraphs
would be the price the wicked would gladly pay for their free licence.
The price would ensure their safety and security and the British their
land revenue and a loyal instrument to rule indirectly. A small
minority of the wicked among zamee-daars could meet British
needs and leave the gentle zameendaars alone.
266. Subject to
research, these possibilities could be facts. Two other British
administrative and judicial practices show that these possibilities
were facts. The police never recorded a FIR (First Information Report)
of a crime from the poor against the loyalists. Justice begins by
entertaining the prayer of the victim of injustice. If the prayer is
not allowed, administration and justice both are horrendous for the
poor. Unfortunately, this British practice of 'NO FIR' continues till
today thanks to the steel frame of bureaucracy headed by Indians that
the British left for us and the inability of the alien mind-set of the
educated in all walks of life to see the continuance of this rampant
slavery for practically all victim of crime in the country. If
they could see this reality, it would have disappeared.
267. In civil
matters, the British judicial system could give immortality to a case
against the rich. Moti Lal Nehru (died in 1931), the father
of Jawahar Lal Nehru, filed a civil matter in a local court. Mr.
D.N. Gobardhan, an advocate, was arguing this matter in the Supreme
Court in mid nineties. A life span of 65 years to a civil case, if
filed by a poor man, can break the back of generations of the poor who
dared to challenge the rich and loyalist zameendaar usurper
of the poor man’s best land. There must be thousands, if not a hundred
of thousands of cases hurting the poor in the country. The alien
mind-set of the educat-ed in India, including that of
fifteen Law Commissions is inhuman as it does not free the poor from
this misery.
268. With such a
double-pronged system of injustice, the British Prime Minister could
declare in the Parliament in London that the British Empire in India was justly administered
(equal money costs for postponement of a civil matter in the court) and
a cheaply administered country (paid for by its wicked rich). India was a haven of peace
without crime (no FIR). For the world, the scientific education, the
railways, telegraph and telephone in India was the munificence of
the King Emperor for the advance-ment of backward India. In reality they were
only for the British administrative and military needs and for British
exports to India. Things became a bit hot
for the British in India, after the Khilafat
National Movement against the British in India following the First
World War of 1914-1918. This movement was in protest
against the breach of promises made by the British to Turkey, a Muslim country,
during the war. Before that, the voice of the poor victims of injustice
by the rich was never heard and justice was not for the poor in the
British courts in India. This was in spite of
some British judges of enviable character worth emula-tion who could
not dare to go against their Government policy and system. Only
reliable research can show the facts. The Author is not aware of this
research and would welcome information about this particular aspect of
the matter.
269.
Incidentally, in spite of the British policy of dividing the Hindu and
Muslim communities since 1907, the two remained together. The two
demonstrated their strengthened unity in the Khilafat National
Movement. The leaders of this movement were Mohammed Ali and Shaukat
Ali, popularly called Ali Brothers. In 1919, this unity made Muslims in
Delhi invite
Swami Shradhanand, the Head of the Arya Samaj, which was
a proselytizing section of the Hindus, to give a discourse in
the Jaamaa Masjid of Delhi. It was a memorial
service to victims of British police action that killed protestors.
Obviously through the Advaita School of Vedanta
of Sanaatana Dharma, the Swami also explained a reason from the
Indian point of view that was underlying two basic tenets of Islam. It
showed the commonness between the core of the two religions, Islam and
Hinduism. It aided the consolidation of the unity of their followers as
an Indian nation. The first tenet was the Ummah
(brotherhood of Islam) and the second, one imperceptible God without a
second. In his explanation, the Swami brought out that the two beliefs
were not alien to India, being already available
in Advaita of Vedanta. The Arya Samaj rests on Advaita.
This unity in the core of Hinduism and Islam and sincere show of unity
among the followers of both scared the British. Apparently unable to
break this unity for a few years, the British hired an
assassin, Abdul Rashid. By two bullets, he assassinated
Swami Shradhanand in 1926. Unfortunately for
the British, Swamiji's servant pinned down on the spot the
assassin and the British were forced to sentence their hireling to
death. A few hired bigots by the British on both sides ensured hurt to
Hindu-Muslim unity after this incident as the British intended. The
bloody aftermath of assassination close to the Author's home in Delhi are still vivid in his
memory. After independence of the country, the alien mind-set of
leaders hires bigots till today in the name of secularism and, as a
reaction to it, in the name of religion, by the wages of name, fame and
leadership to spread bigotry all round in the country as tit for tat.
270. The Ali
Brothers had earlier declared that they were Indians first and Muslims
next. They echoed the Muslim will the world over. All Muslims are
nationalists first. No Muslim country permits any Muslim from another
country without a visa unless there is a separate agree-ment for free
travel between any two countries or there is migration of refugees.
Many modern Indians forget these recent facts as also our heritage of
acceptance that accommodated in peace and harmony among followers of
eight religions in the lanes and by-lanes of India for centuries. Many
English educated moderns treat commun-al hatred as inherent in Islam
and Hinduism. They cannot see that it is not possible for Hindus and
Muslims to live in close neighbourhoods for centuries but with
continuous communal clashes. Many do not see that poverty and social
and gender discriminations in both Hindus and Muslims are national
problems and not religions. Till today, after more than fifty years of
independence, moderns do not unanimously and forcefully insist that
Hindus and Muslims have been and are one as an Indian nation to
strengthen its solidarity.
271.Ignorant of any religion and Indian
heritage of amity for six generations, the bulk of this English
educated alien mind-set of all communities has deliberately mortgaged
itself to the claimants of knowledge of religions and follows mean and
selfish political leaders blindly. This mind has lost its ancient
Indian right to ask these claimants basic questions. (See Geetaa
18:63) This sacrosanct right denied the finality of any scripture
because it demanded the use of God’s gift of our healthy mind to ask
the right and purposeful questions such as, is love not the core of all
religions? Are there two Almighty Gods or the same one with different
names and appearance in forms? Who can take away from a man's mind, his
concept of or form of his loving God in which form that man has
experienced the grace of God? Is there no way in any religion to
prevent our mind from producing hate to cause unneces-sary bloodshed
and continuously? Does any religion prevent its followers absolutely
from living in peace with followers of another religion even when the
followers of the other religion share their prosperity equally with
all? Is there any religion that does not provide those universal
principles by which its follower has first to live as a human
being? Have not all followers of all religions been living in
this universal all over the world? Is it possible that followers are
misguided by beliefs superimposed over this universal by leaders of
that religion for the leaders’ selfish purposes, such as hegemony,
power or aggrandizement, to cause all wars in the name of
religion? Is it common sense that God wanted man to fight in the name
of religion and kill innocent people? There are other basic
questions to invite answers to prove the oneness in the core of all
religions in love. This is because every true religion provides for a
way of living for its followers that rests on humanness. Everything not
helping this in the holy books of that religion is a superimposition
not needed by the masses for their peaceful and progressive living with
their neighbours. Humanity survives by this provision of love in all
religions and not by hate and violence. No society anywhere today makes
the study of all religions compul-sory for all to reach this core of
amity by exchange of knowledge to secure prosperity for all. The
knowledge that tells us why and how to relate our concept of the
reality of God and godliness with our daily conduct with all as one
with us is the need of the day. Leadership of society that calls itself
civilized prefers ignorance of amity. It is content with the increasing
gap in prosperity between we the 'haves' and they, the 'have nots.'
This right
to question and to learn by experiments with lessons learnt by those we
respect, extracted the practical essence of our ancient heritage in
Vedanta. By living by this essence the Indian ethos of oneness
surviv-es in the Indian mind of the masses of all religions. This mind
is unsullied by indoctrination of ignorance of our heritage and
stuffing of alien culture of the last sixteen decades among the
educated. The alien mind-set of the educated can neither fix nor has
the strength to pursue as a national aim that is the removal of poverty
because it demands self-sacrifice of oneness with the poor that Mahatma
Gandhi demonstrated by living in that oneness. That universal oneness
in or before God is in the core of all religions. It surfaces by the
knowledge of and experi-ence of living in the core of beliefs of all
religions that is the second nature of masses of India. It was this
religion-based oneness of at least four centuries after Akbar in the
lanes of India that was destroyed in
the minds of the educated by the British. The British did it by
injecting ignorance of our heritage of oneness for over a century.
Thereafter they successfully injecting communal discord in the educated
in just four decades from 1906-1907 with the founding of the Muslim
League.
The
alien mind-set cannot establish by reason the oneness of all
communities in India as a nation. That
universal oneness in or before God is in the core of all religions. By
providing article 28(1) in the Indian Constitution that Government
cannot finance education of all the eight religions in India, this
alien mind has ensured that this ancient oneness should not again
surface in India. No greater treachery can be imagined than this
article. No blame attaches to anyone for this treachery because
alien minds of members of all communities were ignorant of the reality.
This reality was that centuries old amity in the masses arose from the
knowledge of the neighbours' beliefs. This amity with knowledge was too
deeply ingrained in the masses to be ruffled by four decades of
temporary communal clashes engineered by the British only in small
pockets of fifteen percent of the urban population leaving the rural
and uneducated area of more than ninety percent of the population
unaffected by and large.
The alien mind-set is incapable of seeing grass-root reality of the
wisdom of the harmony in the masses following eight religions in India. It does not see that
living with faith in the humanness and selflessness in the core of all
religions for over a millennium they remained mentally and spiritually
strong as one body to follow non-violence. Hardly any people in the
world accept non-violence as a weapon of victory. So, the alien
mind-set among the educated of all communities persists in continuing
with ignorance of all religions in the name of secularism. Few among
the educated can define the essential beliefs of their religion in
a few words. The knowledgeable should be able to do it. It is
this ignorance that made the educated Indians lap up a British advice.
It was that religion and politics were not subjects for conversation in
polite socie-ty. In seminars, board meetings, college debates and
group-discussions on the TV and elsewhere any subject is discussed
because the participants are knowledgeable. If the educated were
knowledgeable about eight religions they would never have shied from
discussing dharma and state or politics in polite society in India. This is because the two
are inseparable in India’s lifeblood from ancient
times. The 80 per cent rural population in India demons-trates this truth
till today in every election. (See Appendix 2) And when we separate the
two as we have done by article 28(1) in the Constitution we get in half
a century increasingly indefensible aspects of life, character, morals
and the way of life strikingly in some affluent urban section of India and wholly in politics.
But the alien mind-set does not inquire into the cause of the
indefensible.
The alien mind-set nourishes the
two injections of ignorance and communal discord in the name of
religion and secularism. No wonder the wise illiterate has ensured that
after the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, the purveyors of this
alien mind among the secularists and the bigots of both major
communities are kept out of political power for ten years at the
centre. This is because they act against the humanness in all religions
and so against the country. If the alien mind-set could see reality
there would have been no secular party because we would all be living
in the spiritual heritage of oneness of all in our ancient ethos. For
harmonious living, this ethos eliminated the offensive element in
visible practices of all religions. It put practices in their proper
place as one’s private matter with no offence
intended to others.
It was only in 2002 that a little awareness of Indian ethos moved the
alien mind-set of the Supreme Court to throw away the shackles of their
sacrosanct respect for the British law of evidence on which our law is
based. The Court transferred the onus of proof of innocence on the
alleged accused in cases of rape. The court thereby restored justice
denied to the victim so far who could rarely, if ever, produce
witnesses to convict the accused as required under the present law.
272.
The powerful legacy of the alien mind-set in politicians, leaders,
lawyers, judges, bureaucrats, reformers, the rich and any one of any
consequence among the English educated did not set the poor of all
communities free from British slavery of no FIR and inordinate delay in
civil justice in more than fifty years. The exceptions to this mind-set
were negligible and without power. If by a simple law, every letter to
a police station becomes automatically a registered FIR in the post
office, the crime figures in India will chastise all
political leaders. A simple law can rid the judicial procedure codes of
provisions, which can be misconstrued to give long life to matters in
courts. Another law can ensure that no post of a judge at any level
remains unfilled for more than a month. To start with, the law can
create posts of judges in proportion to population at one fourth of the
average in advanced countries. A law can tie costs for postponement of
court cases to the means of the parties slightly weight-ed against the
better off, including heads of Government Departments and Chief
Executive Officers of corporations. It can provide for rigorous
imprisonment for perjury in declaration of means. Payment of costs to
be made to parties by crossed account payee cheque to parties by the
Court to avoid it being pocketed as a whole by the counsel as at
present. The counsel should get only the percentage of it as that of
the value of the suit as his fees. This one law can make
arrears of court cases in millions to evaporate in no time. After these
simple measures, laws will be observed by today's privi-legeed by
inescapable necessity. The British slavery of the poor on these two
counts will end overnight. Fifteen Law Commissions comprising eminent
lawyers and judges all of an alien mind-set in half a century could not
see the reality of the slavery of the poor to free him by one stroke of
the law. The modernism in the educated and in leader-ship in all fields
has not yet regained its Indian heritage of self-sacrifice to care for
the poor and to give priority to laws for relief to the poor. It has
taken fifty-five years of independence to dawn on the alien mind-set of
the judiciary and the Supreme Court of India that it is absurd for a
rape victim to provide witnesses to prove the accused guilty. They were
blinded by the British axiom that one is innocent until proved guilty
as if nothing more just can ever exist for all situations. The alien
mind of the judiciary has still to see the reality that the suicide of
a woman carrying a suspicion of demand on her by her in-laws needs onus
of proof of innocence on the in-laws.
273. A few other
examples of a mind-set alien to Indian heritage are given below.
People get the government
they deserve. It means the people should set the example for rulers,
the children for parents, the students for teachers, the congregation
for the preacher and so on. Sanaatana Dharma fixes responsibility
for setting example of living in virtue where it rests, namely, on the
ruler, the leader, the guru, the teacher, the preacher, the parents and
elders. (See Geetaa 3:21 )
God
helps those who help themselves. Those who help themselves do not need
God. This western wisdom has no place in India. In Sanaatana Dharma God
is for the helpless and needy. God serves those who do all work
diligently and selflessly as duty (nishkaama karma) and serve
others selflessly (paropkaara parama dharma). In this way they
do God's own work of sustaining the Creation and become God's efficient
instruments. This efficiency is through their becoming free from
need, disease and fear and receiving an empowered mind for excellence
and success. Shree Krishna drove the chariot of his
devotee Arjuna. In the din of battle, Shree Krishna received
instructions for speed and direction of the chariot on his back from
the toes of Arjuna. Please see Geetaa 3:22-25. In the ancient
Indian tradition, touching anyone by the toes signifies disdain for the
person touched.
The
greatest good of the greatest number is the outer limit of practical
wisdom. Against the larger number of the majority of 51, the minority
of 49 can be ignored. In Sanaatana Dharma, wisdom or humanness or
divinity is to see that every mouth born is with two hands and two feet
to work and a mind to think and so society cannot escape its
responsibility to provide work for all, even if it be in the nature of
famine relief work continuously at State expense. With minimum greed
for entrepreneurship and a little sacrifice on everyone's part in
selflessness, society has to provide work for everyone. Knowledge
of Sanaatana heritage and practice of Brahmacharya
throughput life secured prosperity and consequent under population till
early nineteenth century.
The greatest British legacy is
the forced ignorance of our heritage among the educated and the
resultant poverty and its scientific aftermath of overpopulation. The
remedy is regaining knowledge of the core of eight religi-ons in India to develop selflessness
and amity and thereby a unity of empowered and patriotic minds by the
educated for more rapid advancement in science and technology than we
can think. Sanaatana Dharma solved the problem of over population by
students' compulsory discipline of Brahmacharya for every
person, including householders. That population decreases with
prosperity and increases with adversity is a scientific fact. Poverty
is the cause of India's over population and
not vice versa as the alien mind-set stubbornly maintains.
274. Organization and
system today are supreme in society. Ancient India knew both as susceptible
to corrupt-tion and the dictatorship of conformity. Both deprived the
unrestricted but purposeful use of individual mind to ques-tion the
basics in any view, authority or law howsoever sacrosanct. This ancient
right to put the right question is repeated in the Geetaa 18:63. Ancient India did not provide any
obligatory group activity in Sanaatana Dharma. Even satyasanga,
nearest to one, is voluntary. For society, Sanaatana Dharma
emphasized individual dedication and example of selflessness. In a
society where everyone thinks of the other first, in selfless
bene-volence at a little self-abnegation, and a society that has no
rights but only duties, the present form of a system
or organization is hardly necessary. Open and cooperative
group activity is, however, welcome.
275. A very
recent example of the mind steeped in ancient heritage in international
relations was the explo-sion of the atomic bomb as a proof of India's
determination of self-defence as its dhaarmic duty
regardless of cost and any perception of threat. Following this
explosion, in 1999, the aggression on the Kargil border of Kashmir in India by General Parvez
Musharraf, the present President of Pakistan, needed vacation of the
aggression. Though in possession of the atomic bomb, India kept it aside. A.B.
Vajpayee, the Prime Minister, and George Fernandez, the Defence
Minister of India, offered to Pakistan safe pass-age to
withdrawing Pakistan soldiers. The modern
alien mind-set of the media and of the educated in India howled against this
offer as demoralizing the Armed Forces of India. It never occurred
to these moderns that if the objec-tive was only the vacation of
aggression, why kill and be killed. Contrary to the wisdom of Indian
human heritage of sanctity of human life through non-violence, the
reaction of opinion on this incident shows that a human solution just
does not occur or appeal to this modern alien mind-set.
276. In a way, an
example of the inability of the alien mind-set to see reality is this.
On the Muslims who came from outside India, the effect of the
example of Indian people living in Sanaatana tradition of
non-violence and amity was substantial. In eight centuries by the
middle of Akbar's reign, exchange of informed thought between
scholars who are invariably an unwitting component of every army and
the local scholars from the eighth century and between communities in
close neighbourhoods had become a natural phenomenon. It established a
tradition among the commoners of living together in amity by devout
followers of both in their religions. The translation of Ramayana
in Persian in Akbar's time and the Upani-shads in
Shah Jehan's time, show the continuity in the interest in
knowledge of and not ignorance as at present, in a multi religious
culture. The study of Vedanta by Muslim religious scholars brought
harmony in communities by finding commonness in the core of beliefs.
The know-ledge of their religion by a few Indian Muslim scholars was
well respected. The English translation of the Holy Koran, written in
the late twenties by Abdullah Yusuf Ali, an Indian Muslim, is one
of the most respected versions of the Holy Book and is now on the
Internet. Exchange of thought arising from sharing prosperity by masses
for centuries persuaded Islamic scholars to adopt the Indian
traditional right to question the base of the basics of thought,
belief, religion or practice. This surfaced the liberal message in
Qur’an S. 1:1, 3:7, 10:99, 49:13, S.109, S.112 and other verses to
accord preeminence to Dharma or spirituality (Roohaaniyat) in
Islam. It ensured that Talibani Islam of 1988 onwards in Afghanistan could never raise its
head in Muslim masses. The practise of this spiritual Islam by Muslim
masses was blissful in the ancient Advaitic security of the
heart they received from masses of other religions in India. It distanced them from
earlier tradition of aggression and conquest in the defence of Islam.
In India Muslim masses followed the wisdom that pride in a wrong
follower of a religion who made achievements in the name of religion is
loyalty to the follower and treachery to religion. The Dhaarmic or
spiritual Islam enabled continuance of oneness in masses of eight
religions to add to common culture on the spiritual soil of India.
The
soil facilitated Muslims to develop a tradition over centuries to live
liberally. Girls and boys educated themselves in modern subjects for
pursuit of professional lives. This facility of communication with
other advanced communities and its example of a different way of
thinking to result in living in amity with all religions in India for
centuries was not found in all the countries in the Islamic world to
the same extent. Today the leading scientist, APJ Abdul Kalam, and
the richest man, Azim Premji, of India, are both Muslims. At
the time of this manuscript going to the Press, APJ Abdul Kalam is
elected the President of India by 90 percent of votes. For the last ten
years through three Parliamentary elections, the masses of both
communities rejected the demolition of Babri Masjid of 1992 and
punished the bigots of both communi-ties by keeping them and their
direct and indirect patrons, the secularists, out of political power at
the nation's centre. Because of their wisdom of ancient heritage, the
masses can see through the anti-religion and anti-national agenda and
activities of the alien mind-set. All this proves that, they are fools
who call India a Hindu State or country implying that
Hinduism as a religion dictates its laws and governance.
Under the inspiration of
Sir Sayyad Ahmad Khan, who founded the Aligarh Muslim University, Muslims in India received religious
education in madrsas (schools) and other education in the
University to make them live in their religion and also advance in
sciences. Muslims advanced shoulder to shoulder with Hindus in science
and technolo-gy. Muslims of a united independent India were free to live in a
uniquely liberal way of their own design and crafting. This freedom to
and design their way living in their religion devoutly in India was not available to
Muslims in other countries. This was because the others did not have an
opportunity to live with highly advanced infidels or disbelie-vers in
close neighbourhoods who had an older and advanced religion and culture
of their own. Understanding the
Holy Qur’an S. 3:7, as it should be understood, Muslims
in India were free from the hold
of narrowness in their faith by interpreters of their holy books
because of the ancient tradition in India of asking questions. (See paragraph 277) The
understanding interpreters could make use of the knowledge available in
the advanced Indian tradition that provided answers consistent with the
universal in Islam. That appears as one of the reasons for Daar-ul-Uloom University at Deoband, in the
U.P., to acquire in about a century pre-eminence in the Muslim world
that equaled the status of Jaam’a-e-Azhar University in Cairo, which was the oldest
centre of theology in Islam.
On the eve of Partition,
Muslims were fit to set an example to the rest of the Muslim world of
how Islam was support-ive of scientific advancement and modernity and
living in amity with non-Muslims. Partition snatched away that chance
of Muslim World leadership from Muslims of the Indian subcontinent.
Partition was therefore a greater loss to Muslims than to Hindus of the
subcontinent. It was a still greater loss to India to show the surviving
spiritual heritage of its soil to create among Muslims a love for
living by the best aspect of Islam, namely, acceptance of all and
peace. This view of the reality of the damage that partition did to
Muslims and to India is invisible to the
modern alien mind-set of the leadership and of the media of both
communities in the subcontinent. Will the masses of Muslims of the
three divided parts of the subcontinent rise to their towering height
of world leadership that the soil of the subcontinent made possible but
was snatched away from them by the brilliance of British manipulation
of the mind of their educated leaders half a century ago? Will the
Hindu masses unsullied by alien education facilitate this as they have
done in their wisdom of oneness for more than a millennium in the lanes
and by-lanes of the subcontinent to sustain and share the ancient
leadership in prosperity of the subcontinent? One wonders.
277. The country is at the peak of communal
tension today by half a century of treachery by the alien mind-set.
(See Glossary) This alien mind
continues from English-educated leaders and their successors in all
communities. It was typified by Jawahar Lal Nehru. Nehru was
aware of the greatness of India, was a patriot and a
brilliant scholar. He studied some scriptural literature but through
Western scholars and a pure rationalist’s mind apparently without faith in the real
practical benefit from the precepts he studied. A similar study by
other leaders is not so well known. Nehru’s mind
was Westernized. According to Stanley Wolpert's recent
biography ‘Nehru: A Tryst with Destiny, 'Nehru confided in John
Kenneth Galbraith, the American ambassador: 'Galbraith, I am the
last English-man to rule India.' Nehru was a victim of
history of dates, persons and events and conclusions drawn from them.
Indian rishis had rejected this kind of history. They never left
their name or years of events. They used history selectively to
remember the wrong we did to any and the good others did to us and to
forget the good we did to any and the wrong any did to us. This
selective history was for our self-advancement dynamically by living
unhindered by our past under the law of karma. The westernized
mind of Nehru and other leaders was immersed in the age of reason.
One wonders if it excluded Shrad-dhaa and vishvaasa
(faith with respect) in the reality of God, the benefit people secured
from this faith when they lived in this belief in the reality of our
access to the intangible cosmic power thereby and of direct
relationship with God. All this inside the believers was also called
mysticism by many. So, as pure rationalists these leaders’ minds could
analyze the philosophy of beliefs but failed to get the practical from
philosophy to understand, believe and benefit from beliefs. Apparently
they did not believe in our empowering relationship with the intangible
Reality, Brahman, with its tangible form in all human beings but
manifesting as active or dormant in each in varying degrees. Maybe they
failed to grasp the material benefit that flows from the message of the Vedas
and the Upanishads as they studied them without faith underlying their
contents. The only continuing single cause for material
prosperity of the Indian sub continent was this message. These leaders could, however, observe
from their contact with the masses that there was strength in the
masses but apparently could not know that its secret was perennial
verities or Sanaatana Dharma that the Upanishads presented as
Vedanta that the people practised as their second nature. The people
inherited this nature from unknown generations of their ancestors who
lived by these verities. The people were not conscious of Vedanta
in their nature. This knowledge crucial to India and to its
strength eluded Nehru and others because it involved faith in
God as a reality for our intimate daily relationship with Him. It
needed knowing and having faith in disciplines to purify our mind for
living by a purified mind as our source of cosmic
power.
Mahatma Gandhi intuitively
lived in the universal in Sana-atana Dharma and an intimate
relationship with God every moment of his life. Mahatma Gandhi called
God Truth for the rationalists and Allah and Raama for the wise
and faithful minds of the masses that were unsullied by pure
rationalist education. Mahatma Gandhi might have tried to explain an
Indian’s faith in God and the perennial verities arising from that
faith to his rationalist colleagues in the language they could
understand. He, however never talked about religion. He answered
questions about his personal disciplines and beliefs. He stuck to
the principle that example was invariably superior to preaching. He saw
that his example however, failed to create faith in God and carry
conviction in this faith as a reality in his rationalist audience. This
was particularly with Nehru, who was so close to him to learn from his
example for 31 years. Had Mahatma Gandhi succeeded, he would not have
been rejected by all the leaders ignorant of his Advaitic
principles by which Jinnah was one with the centuries old oneness of
both Hindus and Muslims. So, Mahatma Gandhi gave it up in despair
in 1947.
It is as difficult to prove
that God is a reality for our intimate relationship as it is to prove
that He is not a reality. Mahatma Gandhi’s faith in God also came from
his being a votary of the Geetaa and Tulaseedaasa’s
Raama-ayana that rest on Sanaatana principles. Nehru and many
leaders had all the noble qualities a man could have to be endeared to
the people and to Mahatma Gandhi who found him his own
reflection. Nehru’s and the leaders’ ancestral alien mind-set,
however, apparently could not see the source of Mahatma Gandhi’s power
that he received by living by those principles. This was in spite
of Nehru being so close to Mahatma Gandhi for years.
Many of these rationalist leaders were exemplary in every respect but
were generally ignorant of or had no faith in the perennial in the
beliefs of Islam and Sanaatana Dharma both. This ignorance rejects
both religions as an encumbrance on the Indian State and a burden on the
people that obstructs progress. This ignorance refuses to believe that
the living by people in these principles over millenniums made the soil
of the country spirituality, the blood in its citizen’s veins faith in
God and nature’s munificence the people’s ally, to make the
subcontinent advance and prosper.
Nehru and many leaders were very humane, compassionate and rightly
popular with the masses. But their completely alien mind-set deprived
them of the strength to persist in the universal. So, they did not
receive even a fraction of the power that Mahatma Gandhi received
unknowingly and unasked by intuitively living in the universal
Sanaatana principles. There does not readily come forth any explanation
of his power. An explanation, however, hardly seems necessary because
unknown to him, his life demonstrated the truth of the power that
living by Advaita bestows on its follower. It was a
fraction of this power in the masses because they were following Advaitic
oneness in disciplines diluted by paucity of gurus and the passage of
time. Yet their power was sufficient to make India prosperous for
millenniums. Mahatma Gandhi could envision the power of the masses to
overcome the temporary aberration of communalism engineered by the
British rulers as the masses overcame for centuries the hatred sowed by
misguided rulers in the past and maintained harmony of communities in
the lanes and by-lanes of India. Made ignorant by
British education of this ancient ethos of
amity in India the alien mind-set of
the other leaders was too weak to trust the restoration of amity as a
certainty. These leaders could not realize or see that Hindu Muslim
amity was possible only in India and not in any other
Muslim country. Muslims elsewhere had no opportunity to live with a
majority of people of an ancient peaceful but advanced heritage of
unassailable thought and its practice by the masses for centuries
before the arrival of Muslims.
So, the untrained minds of
these leaders were liable to pollution by the overwhelming power of one
or more of the six passions and were consequently weak. The minds
dithered unknowingly in crises and hesitated in taking a principled
stand that Mahatma Gandhi invariably took. He treated the people of India not as belonging to
different religions but as human beings first and last and one with us
as Indians. The ignorant alien mind-set of the Congress Party
leadership did not follow Mahatma Gandhi consistently. From 1937 it
tasted ministerial power in provincial autonomy. This taste polluted
the mind perma-nently with greed for ministerial power and so made it
weak and incapable of seeing reality. It alienated Muslims and ended
with rejecting Mahatma Gandhi along with his
universal principles of Sanaatana Dharma, by which he lived his
life. This rejection also included Mahatma Gandhi’s offer to
Mountbatten to make M.A.Jinnah, the first Prime Minister of a united
independent India of which Jinnah was
an eminent citizen. Jinnah was then the leader of the Muslim
League, the largest political party of communal Muslims. This
offer for Jinnah was in strict accord with Advaita of
Vedanta in the spirit of oneness of all in India as one people and
nation.
Mahatma Gandhi’s thought, word and act was by Advaitic
Sanaatana Dharma. Because of his relentlessly strict self-imposed Brahmacharya
discipline, Mahatma Gandhi controlled his six passions. So, his
mind was pure and free from the six passions including ego and greed
for power. So, his powerful mind discerned the reality in followers of
eight religions in the masses of their faith in the permanent
Indianness to regain oneness rapidly. This oneness that was a reality
was disturbed superficially and temporarily only in small pockets of
fifteen percent of the population of urban areas only by two decades of
British engineered communal clashes in urban areas. Mahatma Gandhi’s
offer for Jinnah rested on this faith in the people’s resilience to
restore oneness of all communities through amity rapidly. On reaching
the goal of their self-less lives as freedom fighters and brimming with
the ego of achievers, it seems the alien minds of almost all
other leaders of all parties were apparently polluted by passions such
as greed for ministerial power, ego and the feeling of ‘we’ and ‘they.'
These minds untrained in Sanaatana Brahmacharya disciplines
that enable us to see reality were unaware of these insidious passions
that polluted them to make them and their will power weak. So, these
leaders could not see the reality behind Mahatma Gandhi’s faith in the
spiritual power of the Indian masses of eight religions. Unlike
Hindus, Muslims had their madarsas that were deeply
influenced by Vedanta in
practice that continued to impart Dhaarmic knowledge of Islam to
counter to some extent the enforced ignorance of Islam by British
education. The nationalist Muslims obviously had this faith in ample
measure to distance themselves from the Muslim League but were ignored
by the alien mind-set of Hindu leaders of the Congress and Left
parties. It is the polluted and weak minds of leaders who clash and
cause clashes. The masses do not and dislike clashes. This reality was
invisible to the ignorant alien mind-set of leaders.
This rejection frustrated Mahatma Gandhi to give up perhaps for once
his habit to stake his life on principles because 31 years of his
example of control over his six passions to live in faith in the
oneness of all in God could not change the alien mind-set of almost all
other educated leaders of all communities.
This
rejection broke the country. It created a justified feeling in all
Muslims that the Hindu majority that also constituted the Congress
Party of India and left parties would never trust Muslims. This alien
mind-set rejected the liberal and the best element of Islam that had
over a ninety percent following that was typified by Abdul Kalam
Azad in Bengal to Khan Abdul
Gaffar Khan and his brother Dr Khan Sahib of the Tribal North West
Frontier areas. These areas are culturally one with Afghanistan today. Khan Abdul
Gaffar Khan was a devout Muslim. By proper understanding of the holy
Qur’an and contact with Mahatma Gandhi and his example, he became a
votary of non-violence that the word Islam means. He was popularly
known as Frontier Gandhi. His party of Red Shirts was a force in the
tribal Muslim areas that the West today looks down upon as living by
the law of the sword. Non-violence in the Red Shirt Muslims of the
tribal areas was a reflection of the universal Sanaatana
principles in the universal of Islam.
The alien
mind of the British-educated Indian leaders never knew that in
India Sanaatana Dharma, dharma, religion, philosophy of both,
the followers and their way of life were six distinct recognizable
and flourishing entities. Yet the six rested on the individual's
concept of the reality of God and his intimate relationship with Him
through his religion for the prosperity of the subcontinent. This mind
never knew that an Indian’s relationship inside him with God or his
religion was an inalienable element of his life, being and thought in
all its aspects and that that was true Indianness across all
communities. Being a victim of the age of pure reason bereft of the
heart and so a votary of the tangible only as the reality, this alien
mind-set mistook the observable religious practices of an Indian as
expres-sing the totality of his inside relationship with God which was
his religion by which he lived. After independence, this alien mind
totally ignored this Indianness that was inside all Indians.
For the English educated, Vivekananda had summed up
this Indianness. ‘Each is potentially divine. The goal is to
manifest this Divinity within, by controlling nature, external and
internal. Do this either by work, or worship, or psychic control, or
philosophy – by one, or more, or all of these - and be free. This is
the whole of religion. Doctrines, or dogmas, or rituals, or books, or
temples, or forms, are but secondary details.’… ‘It (religion) has made
man what he is, and will make of this human animal a God.’…Take
religion away from human society and what will remain? Nothing but a
forest of brutes.'
The alien mind-set of Indian leaders grouped all the six distinct
entities as religion not in its noble meaning as Vivekananda
described, but as an obnoxious obstruction to national
advancement. (See Appendix 3) This mind ignored the most
valuable part of India’s history of greatness
and its cause, namely, Indianness. This mind was made by its
hereditary British education a slave of tangibility that saw events as
Indian history without the ability to see the underlying perennial
currents that led to its greatness. This greatness was through oneness
in the universal of all religions that the people of the Indian soil
could see and follow. This mind of the secularists did not provide the
Muslim community left in India after the Partition,
encouragement in a concrete form by liberal education, care of the
poor, of the widows and orphaned children, removal of gender
inequalities and provision of work with the help of its liberal
leaders, who were available throughout the country.
This alien Indian mind treated the Western form of democracy as the
cradle for India's future greatness and
pure politics as the motive force to rock that cradle. This mind
therefore treated Indian society not as comprising human beings but as
a mere political entity. Thus, from political angle, the Muslim
community was nothing but statistics of votes. Muslim vote banks were
all that matter-ed to the alien mind that comprised Western secularists
in many political parties in which the majority were Hindus. This alien
mind-set took the cheap and easy course of appeasement of self-serving
mercenary Muslim Mullahs for political gain. Mullahs' appeasement was
possible only at the cost of the majority of Hindus. So appeasement was
given the constitutionally respectable and politically convenient name
of secularism. This appeasement hardened the Mullahs into a demanding
bigotry and pushed the large bulk of the best among the Muslims into a
voiceless corner of denial of expression of their liberal view at
variance with those of the Mullahs.
If this Western secular mind
was not alien to Indian culture of oneness of all, the Partition would
not have taken place. The poison of communalism injected for only four
decades from 1907 by the British would have been correctly diagnosed as
of temporary effect. Article 28(1) of the Indian Constitution referred
to in paragraphs 62
to 64 above
would never have enshrined the Indian Constitution to perpetuate that
ignorance of our spiritual heritage for prosperity that the British
forced upon our minds. Article 28 would not have ensured a
society of the callous among the educated. Compulsory study of
comparative religions to replace ignorance by knowledge would have
ennobled our Constitution. This study in the basics would have restored
harmony, gradual union of minds by exchange of informed thought and the
path for their empowerment for rapid advancement in just two or three
national elections. It would have been in the same manner that three
last elections in four years, 1996 to 1999, destroyed absolute power of
any political party and person, made one-party rule disappear and
shifted the political axis of India from Delhi to State capitals. Old
respect for all religions would have revived faster than one could
think because it was a permanent ethos of our country. The knowledge of
this ethos was temporarily suppressed in, if not eliminated from the
British-educated only for the evil British purpose to govern the
country by divide and rule and if worse came to worst, to leave the
country in smithereens.
The educated leaders of the
Congress Party and those who rejected Mahatma Gandhi, however, did not
know the strength and importance of this ancient Indian ethos. This
ancient ethos surfaced over waves of Muslim invaders in the earlier
eight centuries. It surfaced in Akbar’s time and got settled for
good. It restored respect for all religions for four centuries. It is
absurd to deny this respect in the lanes and by-lanes of India just because one or two
bigoted potentates acted against it.
278. The alien
mind-set does not know that Sanaatana Dharma is not congruent with
many practices of Hinduism as explained in paragraphs 81 to 83 above.
From ancient times, India does not know religion
as we recognize it today by its visible practices. If a follower
of Sanaatana Dharma cannot afford a yagya or havana, ceremonies with
offering of food to fire, or some practices in pursuit of
his Sanaatana relationship with God, he does not cease to be a
true follower of Sanaatana Dharma. It can be safely said that as a
religion Sanaatana Dharma has no oblige-tory visible practices.
Many of the educated in India know only Hinduism
visible through its practices. They neither know nor can define the
inner Dharma without visible practices in which India lives. This Dharma
is man’s innate nature from which man cannot alienate himself. This
Dharma is inside every son of India regardless of his
religion because it is in essence humanism. That is why no follower of
any avowed religion has any problem in living by the universal
principles of Sanaatana Dharma without the slightest change in the
visible practices of his religion. This is what the Muslims on arriving
from outside found in India after centuries of
observing how the local people lived. So, they had no problem in living
by it to create that harmony that sustained India’s leadership of the
world in richness. Obviously followers of Islam as a religion have also
their humane aspect as followers of any other religion have. They lived
in it in India for centuries. History
has a record of the inhuman aspect in the followers of all religions.
All religions are good for their followers.
279. To refuse to
make Jinnah the prime Minister of united India was to ‘accept’ the two
nation theory. This rejection labeled all Muslims as not trustworthy in
a democracy. This alien mind of the educated leaders was weak, nervous
and trembling later in the tense unmanageable situation in the Punjab before the Partition in
1947 that its Governor, Jenkins, reported to Mountbatten. Not Mahatma
Gandhi because of the strength he received from living by Sanaatana
Dharma. His power from living in Sanaatana principles could later
prevent single-handed a massacre of a million in Bengal in the Partition that
Jenkins and his 60,000 soldiers could not prevent in the Punjab. The Congress Party of
India showed disrespect to Mahatma Gandhi when it rejected him and
broke the country against his vow to see it ‘over his dead body’ and by
adhering to western secularism seems set to break the nation again. In
a way, it can be said that this secular Party insults spiritually
religious and exemplary Mahatma Gandhi by keeping
a large-size picture of Mahatma Gandhi in every session it holds. It is
an insult because Mahatma Gandhi was the personifica-tion of one
country, one nation and one Indian culture of the knowledge and
practice of Advaitic Sanaatana one-ness of humanity. It is a
tragedy of the modern alien mind-set of the parties who clamour for India as a nation of one
culture that they cannot till today recognize that Mahatma Gandhi
personified that one culture. So, the one-culture one-nation parties
have no place for Mahatma Gandhi in their annual sessions. This tragedy
of Mahatma Gandhi is a tribute to Great Britain's educational system
that makes the Indian educated blind to reality and perpetuates
ignorance of the Indian heritage of amity among followers of eight
religions.
The beauty of this British educational legacy of coercive ignorance of
our heritage for prosperity and power in coming millenniums is that it
continues with honour and respect in the minds of the educated for over
half a century after independence from the British. In the name of
secularism, this honour and respect obstinately refuses to replace our
ignorance of the best of all religions by a compulsory course of study
of comparative religions in every school and college in India. This course will make
use of the universal in all religions to teach the science of a mind
empowered to its limitlessness to followers of all religions to receive
the empowered mind from God through their own religion. This beneficial
science that is India's gift to
humanity.
280.
In fifty years, this alien mind-set has made bigotry rampant among a
few Mullahs. As a result, the whole of the decent and peaceful Muslim
community in India is living in fear if it
puts forward the beautiful liberal aspect of Islam. That aspect is
acceptance of all and living in peace with non-believers
and disbelievers that Chapter 109 of the Holy Koran lays down. The
decent and liberal Muslims cannot refer to it. These poor souls have
perforce to say that the rights of Islam are supreme over the country.
If so, it makes the bigots of other communities wonder if there are any
Indian Muslims or only Muslims in India. Indian Muslims have
enjoyed freedom from narrow-minded orthodoxy of muIlahs for
centuries. It is obvious that the Taliban version of Islam as
practised in Afghanistan from about 1988 till
2001 is repugnant to Indian Muslims. Yet, no Muslim group of scholars
dared to say this forcefully, openly and repeatedly when
Imam Bukhari of Jaama Masjid Delhi eulogized Taliban
version of Islam in 2002. No vociferous and repeatedly
dissenting voice was heard from any Muslim or any secularist. Nor was
there a howl of protest from the media itself as if the media
subscribed to Imam Bukhari and the Taliban both.
One wonders why.
Four centuries of Muslim way of life in India ending in 1947
demonstrate the Islamic (peaceful) version of Islam in a non-Islamic
country. The peaceful version of Islam continues among the vast
majority of Muslims in the three countries of the Indian sub-continent
whose minds are not sullied by alien education or perverted by
post-independence Mullahs. History is witness to the two sides of
the minds of followers of all religions in their conduct from time to
time.
On the other side, the
backlash from half a century of Western secularism of the ignorant
alien mind-set that strengthened bigotry among Mullahs threatens the
majority of Hindus. This threat is perceived by decent and
knowledgeable Hindus for whom to live in the past, its grudge and the
spirit of restoring history is a negation of non-violence and the law
of karma of Sanaatana Dharma. These Hindus dare not ask basic
questions that can show how the mind of their leadership sometimes acts
against the fundamentals of Advaitic Sanaatana Dharma.
For fear of ostracism, these Hindus have perforce to say that the
demolition of the Babri Masjid at Ayodhyaa in 1992, was
correct. Further, these Hindus have perforce to say that the greatest
meritorious deed (punya) for a Muslim is to convert or kill a
non-Muslim and so Muslims cannot live in peace with non-Muslims. The
net result is that ignorance is so rampant among the educated that the
decent knowledgeable among all communities are scared to speak the
truth of the inescapably human aspect of their religion boldly.
The obvious solution is to instil in all the knowledge of the core
of all religions to remove ignorance. Knowledge by all will destroy the
monopoly of knowledge of a few in both communities. It is the ignorance
of many and the bigotry of the few that is continuously doing damage to
our country and retarding progress to uplift the poor. India’s problem after the
British is poverty. Knowledge of religions and living by their core was
always the source of noble character and virtue and so of prosperity. India’s problem from 1947 is
ignorance of the educated India of the art of living in
the universal in the eight religions. This ignorance is creating havoc
through its leadership. The universal heritage of Advaita or
oneness of all is the second nature and the power of Indian masses that
needs to be nurtured by the education that restores knowledge of the
core of all religions. This nature also needs selfless leadership at
all levels to use the power of the masses to get rid of poverty.
281. Centuries
after coming to India by seeing the peaceful
life of Indians, Muslims took to their peaceful aspect of Islam and, in
practice, put aside its violent aspect for four centuries ending in
1906-07. Thereafter, the British poison of communalism
was injected in communities. The alien mind-set of secularists is now
upsetting this Muslim gain of centuries in peaceful religious living by
strengthening the Talibani Mullahs. For the majority
community, the persistence of secularists for decades in their
denigration of our ancient heritage needed to be stopped.
Unfortunately, the excess of zeal of the ignorant alien mind-set of the
educated in the majority community also made many of them bigots as a
backlash to the treachery by ignorance and not by design to Indian
heritage of the alien mind-set of the secularists. In this backlash,
many leaders of the majority community show by their views and some by
their actions that forgetting Vedic Sanaatana Dharma they
ignorantly act against it.
The present day violence in India is the culmination of
feeding the Muslim bigots at the cost of the Hindu majority for
half a century by the alien mind. This alien mind pervades the
educated in both Hindus and Muslims. This mind-set cannot see that
Indian ethos eliminates the problem of the church and state that
western secularism guards against. (See paragraphs 61 onward
above.) This mind does nothing to ameliorate the condition of the poor
among Muslim masses. It does not advance them by social service and
education to make them move shoulder to shoulder with the advancing
majority as they were doing before Indian independence. The alien
mind-set of all has brought us to the verge of a second partition of India not by territory but in
the mind of the nation. That is why the Indian President, Abdul
Kalam’s first call after his inauguration in 2002 that he repeats is
for union of minds or Advaita in practice as the core of all
religions.
282. The alien mind
introduced Western secularism in the Indian Constitution as in the
west. The state should have nothing to do with any religion and could
even reject it. So, by article 28(1) in the Constitution India, the
independent Indian State was prevented for half a
century from teaching children, morals, virtue and culture for
harmonious living in all communities. This is because all morals,
virtues and their values arise from respective beliefs in relation to
the concept of God in each community. The obvious reality is that
science and law cannot protect every citizen’s life. The state can only
punish a murderer. So a citizen seeks and receives protection and
security from God when he follows virtuous or godly life in accordance
with his religion. Article 28(1) therefore is recognition by the
Constitution makers of their ignorance of the elementary reality of
every virtuous man receiving his security from God. It was also the
ignorance of that legacy of oneness in the spirituality of all
religions in their core that the Indian heritage could surface in the
amity of the followers of eight religions for centuries. It sustained India’s prosperity. The core
of beliefs of every religion needs to be taught. As a practical
necessity the text of this core should be extracted from the Holy Book
and put together but separately as the preamble to every Holy Book but
integral to the volume without changing anything in the Text of the
Book. This preamble will be all that the devout follower needs to learn
to live in peace with all and in godliness of his religion. This is
because religion ensures the protection and survival of its followers
by their living as human beings first and last. Any scriptural
injunction contrary to this core of religious beliefs in the preamble
is either to be changed or ignored as an irrelevant superimposition
that is changeable with times. Man’s faith in God and the pursuit of
the basic in faith makes him free from fear to pursue a daily life of
virtue.
No form of government can protect
all its virtuous citizens against all crimes. To make up this inherent
deficiency, the facilities for teaching all religions equally to all
through text books by elected authors of respective religions becomes
the duty of the state. Reason and science could not prove the value of
virtues and create conviction in them. Faith in God and perennial laws
based on that faith alone could create that conviction in virtues and
their value and in God’s protection by living in them. Because of
secularism of article 28(1), no course of comparative study of each of
the eight religions flourishing in India could be prescribed in
any school or college immediately following independence. Thereby the
alien mind treacherously perpetuates the continuous fall in character,
morals and virtues among the educated by British-inculcated ignorance
of the religious base on which they stand. In addition, the educated
will never learn that valuable in our multi religious heritage that can
give us the power to regain our world leadership of old. That heritage
is the universal science of the mind empowered to its limitlessness
that India discovered before any
religion came into existence. It is a science for humanity that is in
the core of all religions. but cannot ever be a part of our educational
curriculum because of article 28(1) of the Constitution.
283. If the modern Indian mind in
1947 had not been so ignorant and had a little of the universal in
Sanaatana heritage, it would have known that secularism should mean
respect for all religions through knowledge of each by all but with
preeminence for none and none dictating the affairs of the state. This
true secularism was inalienable to the ancient Indian ethos of pluralism as
explained in paragraphs 61 to 71 above. This
mind would have been strong and confident to realize that the British
poison of communalism of over three decades needed to be instantly
removed from the national body politic. This poison was injected in a
few of the selfish leaders of the minority community whom the British
could manage. India could get rid of this
poison faster than one could think. The British damage of more than a
century to the educated Indian minds could be undone in a few years.
Both could be achieved without offending any community and in the
spirit of pluralism that should have been enshrined as the teaching of
all religions in the Constitution. It would have undone the British
mischief of making us ignorant for a century.
The
remedy was comparative religions as a compulsory course of study for
all state aided schools and optional in all colleges that received any
State aid. Half a dozen scholars could be elected or selected as
authors by followers of each religion by any method of the choice of
the community within a year of the passing of the law for the country.
After a year the State could nominate for one year, authors from
followers of a religion who were unable to elect them. The large number
of sects in some religions by law could hold a conference to determine
the maximum in beliefs that they agree and upon and the scholars for
their authorship. This maximum would have been the content of that
religion for the textbooks to be written by elected scholars. These
scholars would have written in specified time chapters not exceeding a
specified size in one textbook for each grade to bring out the best or
the core of each religion.
The core would
obviously have been love for all. And that is what is needed for
harmony in human society. Not millions of scholars of each religion but
teachers of the local and English language of any religion could teach
the subject by law. Also, any student of any religion could ask a
question about the beliefs of his own or any other religion. All
religions have a great element of truth in them. And truth does not
fear questions. This was necessary for informed exchange of thought
among students and parents. Scholars of each religion in a Central
Board of Religions could separately publish answers to questions about
their religion each year in one compendium for each religion as
reference books for all libraries at State expense. In addition, these
reference books with an exhaustive index to search questions by key
words could be put on the Internet for international understanding of
the liberal aspect of eight religions from the Indian point of
view.
Within a short time after the introduction of this
compulsory course of study of eight religions by all, informed
discussion could take all to the practical core of all religions. In
that core lies the science of the mind empowered to its limitlessness
that Tulaseedaasa is teaching us for five centuries. This mind is a
gift of God and not of a religion. Our religion helps us to receive it
from Him. This mind would have regained India’s amity to set an
example for the world that badly needs it. This daily teaching of all
religions by a language teacher of any religion and questions by
children to teachers and parents would have woken up the nation to
confine itself to the core of all religions which is love. The
knowledge of this core can get rid of the Muslims' pride of rulership
of part of India and the Hindus' of
Hindu Raashttra (state) or Hindutva. This is because the
humility with knowledge of religions will make followers of both one
before God. Masses followers of all religions showed this humility by
living in that oneness for centuries. Knowledge of all religions will
revive shortly this one culture that politicians who are ignorant of
all religions and of this ancient practical Advaitic culture
and heritage of oneness or Indianness clamour for and fight about today.
Any concept of culture of India that excludes the
culture arising from any of the eight religions in India is the negation of the
most ancient Indian concept of Advaita that survives in the
form of amity between masses of followers of eight religions in India. Indian culture is
the Advaitic unity of human beings that spreads from India's countless millenniums
to today. There is no cut off historical date in the continuity in the
masses of this unique Indian culture of oneness for power called Advaita.
India stands in its ancient
majesty for this oneness of humanity.
The revival of knowledge of all
religions would have made the sons of the Indian soil recollect that
their ancient sages had nothing before them to be proud of. They
started from scratch. That is why every child born has nothing to be
proud of. Pride is instilled in it as it grows. The sages taught us to
live in the present but with humility before God. After entrusting the
past to God after forgetting it except to remember the good others did
to us and the hurt we did to others, the sages taught us the universal
law of karma. This law is honoured by all religions to carve out our
own grand fate. The sages taught us the science of a mind
empowered to its limitlessness to achieve anything noble howsoever
impossible it looked. We have to revive the learning from the manner in
which Mahatma Gandhi lived in the universal Sanaatana principle of Advaita.
This principle is available to all without anyone stepping out of his
own religion and to receive the limitless power of the mind from God
through his religion as Mahatma Gandhi received.
Living by it can again become the
national character and second nature of the English educated to
reconvert their alien minds to Indianness. Love is the base of all
virtues and the core of all religions. The whole scheme would have cost
a penny for an ounce of gold for the nation. The generations after
independence would have grown in knowledge of the ancient heritage in
values, morals and virtues that kept the followers of eight religions
in harmony in close neighbourhoods for centuries for the prosperity of
all. Gujrat would not have been in flames in February 2002. Earlier
fires and demolition of Babri Masjid in 1992 would not have occurred.
The prospect today of their repetition would not have loomed as a
certainty in the near future. The rot of increasing indefensible
aspects of society in India would have never set in
by article 28(1) of the Constitution.
284.
The British system of education has largely destroyed the capacity to
see reality but made us proud of our modern knowledge. A reality is
that a person’s culture, his way of thinking, his values, his
priorities and day-to-day attitudes arise from his religious beliefs.
To understand a person it helps if we understand the background of his
beliefs. Another reality is that a religion is more than mere knowledge
of beliefs. It is living humanly in that knowledge. From ever for
millions, this human living by religion is the only reliable source of
contentment, peace and freedom from fear. These three elude all
nations, isms and philosophies of the West. Both realities are more
true of the people of the Indian subcontinent than of others and of the
modern West. But the alien mind-set in India ceased to treat religion
as knowledge of any use in life. So the remedy of supplementary education of religions
equally mentioned above could not strike this mind on our independence.
We cannot deny intelligence in the educated that could see this
reality. The mystery is that intelligence eluded the educated mind of
those with a voice in the affairs of the country and continues to do so
till today. One wonders.
285.
In the name of modernism, secularism and even religion, the aggravating
damage to India continues by the
obstinacy of the alien mind-set in persisting in ignorance of the
universal common in eight religions in India. Ignorance of our
heritage of eight religions serves some of the educated because it
secures their supremacy of being educated though in incomplete
knowledge. It serves the secularists because it gives them freedom to
cultivate bigotry as their instrument for political power. It serves
the bigots because, supported by the ignorance of the educated and
secularists, they remain the monopolists of religious knowledge and the
leaders of their flock. Fortunately, the ethos of India is not dead. It is
vibrant in 80 percent of the people to steadily upset the apple cart of
the powerful trinity of science, reason and secularism enshrined in the
Indian Constitution. This ethos is the universal core of all religions
known to India from ancient times as Advaita
or oneness for amity. The alien mind refuses to see that amity,
or godliness forces nature to become an ally in its munificence to
eliminate poverty. This treacherous mind ensures its vote banks through
bigoted religious leadership. It forces ignorance of all religions as a
state policy to promote the thought into a conviction that Hindus and
Muslims cannot live amicably together. So, it is a waste of time, money
and energy to devise anything that goes against this conviction.
In five decades of independence this mind has
effectively subjected the liberal religious scholars of all religions
to threats to their life. It has forced all scholars to follow the
approach of the bigots on pain of death. It might even have made Indian
bigots in the Muslim community as hosts to invite enemy militants from
foreign countries. It has made blaming the majority for the result of
its treachery a fine art. It has obstinately denied any course of study
of comparative religions by holding that the state is secular. The
state cannot do anything with religion. It is blind and cannot see that
the study of comparative religions makes the Indian State truly Indian by
knowledge for impartial respect for all religions and not through
ignorance as at present. Under the Constitution, the State has to be
even-handed in approach to their followers through ignorance of all
religions. So, the Supreme Court has to search for quoting Western
authorities for our religions instead of the original text in Arabic or
Sanskrit. All this obstinacy of half a century is because it sees that
knowledge among the faithful is fatal to bigotry. Death of bigotry is
the death of Western secularism and so, the political suicide of
secularists. It created a backlash of bigotry in the majority and in
all religions in India as a poison more deadly
than the British poison of communalism.
286.
No man of any alien origin, beliefs or religion was ever persecuted by
any native ruler in India on account of his
religion. This was only because it was the millenniums old nature of
Indians to know and understand the aliens’ point of view by
understanding its basis, namely why he believed what he believed as his
religion. So, to know and not remain ignorant of others’ religions was
an inalienable part of our ancient heritage. It was this knowledge that
nourished eight religions in India for four centuries till
the British policy of divide and rule from 1907 and the conversion of
the mind of the educated Indians to ignorance of our heritage. A
compulsory course of study of comparative religions with freedom to ask
non-derogatory and purposeful questions to understand the base of the
basics of any religious belief, is therefore possible only in India because of this
traditional insistence on knowledge. This knowledge arises from the
citizens’ fundamental right to ask basic questions to reach the truth
and the duty to test truth by experimenting with it in life. This right
and duty comprise Indian heritage because India rejects the finality of
any holy book, including the Vedas, or any arbiter of our religion that
because religion is our direct
relationship with God. Sanaatana Dharma treats all religions as good
for their followers. This is because all religions rest on that core of
beliefs that enables all followers to live as human beings from first
to last by living in love that God teaches every human being since his
birth as His religion. This core is the universal innate divine nature
of a human being that is from ever to ever or Sanaatana. All
other beliefs of a religion including some of Hinduism that are other
than this Sanaatana core are a superimposition on that core. Without
this superimposition every uneducated commoner of every religion in his
heart can and does advance in spirituality or nearness to God. This is
because God does not prescribe any single compulsory course of
education for all to reach Him other than love for all as one with
oneself or Advaita. Each person takes his own time or rebirths
for that divine nature to surface and settle to end his journey in his
origin that is God. Ancient Indian sages insisted upon the use of our
mind even to question God’s own word. (See Geetaa 18:63) This right to
question the base of the basics is not possible in a country where any
holy book is final or there is a final arbiter of religion.
It is time that leaders of all religions in India coolly realize that
every religion has in it that element that enables its followers to
sustain love for the survival of the human race. They should locate
that element in their holy books. They should put it additionally on
the page next to the title page of the holy book as the core of their
religion without disturbing the book. This reminder to this core in
humanness to all followers will eliminate from them differentiation,
aversion and hate and the need for the superior or the only religion.
It will restore understanding and amity in the country, which are fast
disappearing due to the ignorance of this core and its universal
purpose.
287.
There is an awakening among many educated Indians. They want to know.
But they are away from politics and are voiceless in the making of
national policy to provide knowledge. They are chipping in in
their own humble way to serve the country.
If what is stated in the above
paragraphs about the damage done by the alien mind-set to our country
appears an exaggeration or incorrect in any manner to the bulk of those
in weighty positions or in politics, the test is simple. Let their
leaders resolve in the Parliament unanimously to force the government
of the day to propose a law in the next session of the Parliament for
compulsory study of comparative religions as outlined above. This
course will answer for all students the daily question: Why should I do
what I do or don’t do? It will replace with knowledge the ignorance
pervading today. That will destroy from
each religion the wraps of superstition and subterfuge created by its
powerful minions and bigots. It will show the common universal
base in humanness in all religions for the survival of their followers
as human beings. The subcontinent will again lead the world in the path
of peace, harmony, prosperity and spirituality by virtuous living
through knowledge by each individual. It will crush the divisiveness
fostered in the country by the alien mind-set. It will restore amity.
It will regain empowered minds. It will show the world the necessity of
understanding the point of view and needs of the other. It will avoid
hate, the material pride of countries, the talk of clash of
civilizations and all divisive thoughts arising from ignorance of
others’ variety of attitudes. By this compulsory course of study, India
will lead where others have faltered for centuries because this path
rests on our faith in God as a reality to relate to intimately both by
the individual and the State. The State relates to God intimately by
enabling every citizen to receive an empowered mind from God through
his own religion that the State facilitates to teach. Other countries
have generally followers of one religion and do not feel the necessity
to teach that religion because those religions have inbuilt system of
teaching. Sanaatana Dharma has only guru-disciple tradition that relies
wholly upon the disciple’s willingness
to undergo requisite disciplines. Besides the British
educational system destroyed even that voluntary system and the inbuilt
systems of some other religions. So, there is need for the State to
teach all the core of all religions in India.
Having suffered enough,
it is time that the Indian Constitution gets rid of the concept called
secular. The Constitution should provide compulsory knowledge of
religions for respect for all to result in care for their followers
humanely. The state will frame and enforce universal human laws that
ensure freedom to ask questions and the observance of individual or
group practices that do not denigrate or hurt the sensitivities of the
followers of other religions. Religious beliefs and conduct that
violate humanness and fairness will not be allowed to be practised. For
example, horrendous caste practices, punishment by cutting of limbs and
denial of equal rights to women for pursuit of a career will be
prohibited. Onus of proof of innocence will be on the alleged rapist or
on the in-laws in the suicide of a Hindu wife. No reasonable
maintenance will be denied to a divorced wife or a widow, children and
old people.
288.
In the Indian tradition, exemplary individual leadership in
selflessness and humility, however, becomes necessary at every level
and in every field. Humility annihilates the ‘I.’ This annihilation
accounts for the use of passive voice in Indian languages because the
subject or the doer of everything is God not the ‘I.’ Selflessness or nishkaama
karma brought about munificence in our ancient times. This needs
conviction by our trust in the experience of sages and others.
(See Geetaa 3:21) We need to look at the intrinsic value of the
lesson of another’s experience. The religion, the credibility, the
possibility or practicality of an experience of others is irrelevant.
Questioning credibility leads to lack of respect for elders and others
and so can destroy the base for a caring society.
289
These ideas appear utopian because they are of universal belief and
application and deny the least bit of excessive selfishness that the
modern rationalist individualism often tends to become. These ideas
have been given up in the age of reason. The survival of the human race
in peace and harmony, however, is not possible in the complete absence
of these ideas in practice by all. In one way or at one time or the
other, all of us live in these ideas unconsciously. Our awareness of
these ideas as worthwhile transforms all of us first and then the human
society into the ideal. Our rishis left for practice in daily
life, simple methods for our transformation from the primitive to the
human and then to the divine.
290.
In ignorance of their knowledge, many modern Indians treat ancient
Indian discoveries of perennial verities as a mere religion and as
divisive as some religions become by their practices. Without inquiry
and experimentation, these moderns hold all ancient research in thought
to form beliefs as irrelevant to modern times of science and technology
for advancing the standard of living. The pursuit of this standard
ignores a superior quality of life enjoyed by selflessness in the
service of society. The divisive attitude of ‘we’ and ‘they,’ where
‘we’ is pre-eminent, is essential to the pursuit of a standard of
living. It leads ultimately to what some call the clash of
civilizations.
This modern mind forgets the ancient Indian pre-eminence of the mind
over its products. It remains happy with a limited mind. Science
accepts that we use only one tenth potential of our mind. Yet
the moderner does not believe that that potential is
limitless power of the mind within our reach. It does not believe what
it sees. It saw Mahatma Gandhi’s limitless power but did not believe it
to try and find how he received it. It relies on history distorted by
alien rulers to lose faith in worthwhile oral Indian tradition based on
wisdom gained from repeated observation. This mind does not even
experiment with this wisdom.
Without asking basic questions, it tends to rely on experts' models
that are often motivated. It does not base economics on a little
sacrifice for others’ good that humanness demands. This humanness is
awareness that all are one with us. This awareness is ancient Indian
heritage. In modern economics, the modern mind helplessly accepts the
diabolic power of money through inside knowledge of a few by stock
trading. These few control national economy and through that the
Government and its policy to take care only of the rich and always at
the cost of the poor. Ancient selflessness can destroy the inhuman
power of money. For instance, it can make a start with a tax at the
rate of five rupee or more for both sale and purchase of every thousand
rupees worth of stock in all exchanges in India. Let India show a path to the world
against the howl of economic theory. At no cost to them, this will make
the richest who play with money to provide for or subsidize heavily all
schemes for the education and upliftment of the poor in India who sweat for
every paisa or cent.
291.
The modern mind-set shies from asking basic questions because the last
answer is oneness of all or the Indian heritage of Advaita. For
it, oneness is ideal. It insists on what is practical. The
practical is for us and the ideal is for all. So, this inhuman limit of
practicality creates the divisive rule of 'we' and 'they.' It
interprets religions by this rule to increase the gap between the
‘haves and have-nots’. It has created the spectre of a clash of
civilizations. It refuses to see that the words clash and civilization
are contradictory. A civilized man cares for the other and does not
clash with him. The alien mind-set of many educated Indians sees every
problem as technical, economic, political and international. Very
seldom it sees a problem as human. So, a human solution becomes
impractical. In other words, we live in an age of inhuman practicality
in India.
292.
For example, western emphasis is on individuality and independence. The
two eliminate self- sacrifice for the others’ good. This
individuality emphasizes selfishness and makes parents separate
adult children from them and insist on independence for selfish
enjoyment in old age. For this individualistic society in the West, the
welfare state and not children have to take care of old people in homes
for the old. The ancient Indian concept is that old age is for prayers
for humanity and that the service of mother and father takes precedence
over that of God. We keep God in the home of our heart and parents in
our homes. So the alien mind-set cluttered Indian cities with flats of
three rooms or less as in some western cities. It removed parents from
children's intimate responsibility. Many English-educated Indians still
consider this modernism as a valuable legacy of Britain to the backward
illiterate India.
293.
It is the opposite of this modernism that survives by ancient oral
tradition in the illiterate masses of India. So, they could follow
Mahatma Gandhi, who lived in ancient Indian heritage. The power of the
two broke up the greatest empire that ever was. This indigenous mind
unsullied by alien language and culture today has destroyed absolute
power of any person or political party in just four years in the last
three general elections of 1996, 1998 and 1999.
Thereby it cut off the root of corruption in political life. It
produced a stable government of more than 14 parties. It has shifted
power from the centre to states for India's rapid advancement and
its benefits to reach the poorest. It has changed the political map of India. The modern still
decries the wise illiterate as ignorant. The illiterate kept bigots and their
sponsors or cause, the secularists, away from effective power at the centre. (See Appendix 2)
294.
Many moderns now believe that science and technology bring about all
advancement in the standard of living from the backward old days.
Scientific advancement helps no doubt. The pursuit of science and
technology was always welcome in ancient India and is so today. What
the ancient Indians taught us was how an individual could live free
from the mounting need of comfort, a little control over environment
and a few cures of diseases, that is all that science and technology
provide. These two do not inculcate any virtue to eradicate the animal
in man or to make man human and compassionate. A spiritual living calls
it foolish not to advance in and avail of the benefits of science and
technology. What spiritual living means is to base all thought and
action on the motive of the wellbeing of all through care, compassion
and non-violence. To make this base our attitude and by our alertness
to this attitude to make this living our second nature is all that
spiritual living demands.
This spiritual life is nothing but a virtuous life
inherent in the core of all religions. There is nothing awe inspiring
in spirituality. It frees us from the universal human problem
of need, disease and fear and makes us independent of our
environment. Death is just the end of an individual's term on the earth
and nothing more.
This spiritual living alone can advance science and technology for
human welfare and not for patenting products for selfish gain or for
basing national economy on weapons for daily destruction of lives such
as land mines or for an international policy thriving on causing
conflicts in other countries. This living saves the misuse of science
from exploding the atomic bomb. It prevents dangerous direction of
research into fields that clearly show potential for disaster. Its
insistence on benevolence for all and not for some or ‘we,’ gives
scientific advance a human objective different from the present narrow, national or
sectarian objective. This living shows us a noble purpose for our life.
The pity is that we have so conditioned our mind for need of tangible
proof that many cease to believe that we can live in virtue with
profit. We do not have faith that virtuous living is beneficial in
reality and the survival of the human race is possible because all
sometime or the other live in it more of the time rather than less.
Conclusion
295. Life has a purpose
beyond bodily comfort and enjoyment to which science and technology
add. That purpose gives man the quality of life that disregards a
standard of living as unimportant. That quality of life frees every man
from poverty, disease, strain, anxiety and fear and ensures harmony and
peace within and without in our family and society. This life that is
superior in basics to the modern in many ways was experienced and lived
in for millenniums in the form of material and spiritual prosperity in India. Each age has its
standard of comfort and luxury that continuously changes and so is
incomparable in the absence of a yardstick, data and so in absolute
terms because each age reaches it to its maximum. This was
enjoyed by the common man in India but ruined by the
selfishness and ego of the rulers. Till today science and technology
have not been able to make all individuals reach this quality of life.
The two could not make rulers more human to eliminate poverty. Instead
the modern rulers marginally reduce or increase those below the poverty
line in the world. Modern Indians disregard a superior quality of life
which is man's innate hunger. This disregard leads some today to think
of a clash of civilizations. This is a problem today in India and elsewhere. So in India while continuing to
advance in science and technology, we need to think and to look into
our heritage and act beyond the limits of modern perceptions, to make
life worthwhile for all human beings.
296.
The modern mind has made many forget the power of nishkaama
karma or selfless service of human society, on which India stood to its full
stature. This modern mind-set has to change to provide at every level
and in every section of Indian life that spark of selfless leadership
that Mahatma Gandhi demonstrated. This spark is needed for the
surfacing of the dormant strength of India's masses. With the
English language as the medium for national exchange of thought, the
alien mind has to shed its ignorance of our heritage as a tribute to
our motherland. Its patriotism should rest on an intellect in harmony
with the heart for compassion for the less fortunate. This
harmonized mind rests only on developing selflessness as the divine key
for our freedom from need, disease and fear. Selflessness draws its
strength from our faith in God in reality as our mother. It needs
contentment, sincerity in diligence, and dedication of our service to
our family and society to God. God changes everything for our good but
in His time. In addition, we have to pray to God to give us the
strength to set us on benevolence towards all. This practical
selflessness will ensure independence of thought and belief, which is a
personal religion. This harmonized mind has to see every problem,
from a human angle first and last. It has to strengthen national unity
in acceptance and love of diversity across man-made barriers called
religions. It needs knowledge of all religions for this purpose. It has
to secure prosperity by advancement with its limitless power accruing
to it by its selflessness and compassion in the core of all religions
as love. This is not a utopian ideal. It is inherent in all of us and
needs a little of awareness and strength in our faith that its pursuit
can never hurt us in the long run because if we do not pursue it our
long run extends to many lives.
297. To sum up,
as a nation, the first step is to see reality. The reality is that the
fall from living in Sanaatana principles made the rulers of India weak to be defeated by
Muslim invaders from the eighth century onwards. The people, however,
lived by those principles to withstand Islam for centuries. In the same
way the people and their leader Mahatma Gandhi lived in Sanaatana
principles and were strong to throw out the British and secure
independence of India. The British educated
leaders, however, ignorant of Sanaatana principles, were weak and
broke the country into two and led the country to the verge of a second
partition today besides creating continuously innumerable indefensible
characteristics in the country.
Another reality is this. No state can make laws to prevent crimes
from taking place because deterrence by punishment has proved to be
useless. The hard labour in jails of yester years has yielded to
luxurious jails from which many criminals prefer not to be released.
The rishis discovered that all crimes and misconduct in thought, word
and deed was traceable to the excess of the power of one or more of the
six passions. The rishis advised prophylactic discipline to control
passions to secure freedom from want, disease and fear to eliminate the
need for crime. These prophylactic disciplines are not taught in the
world today through knowledge of the core of each religion. So,
modernism is competing with the overwhelming power of six passions in
creating crimes. Tulaseedaasa is teaching us the disciplines, their
methodology and rationale for freedom from passions for followers
of all religions.
Another reality is this. The people of the subcontinent lived in
prosperity because they were one in their mind in amity through living
devoutly in the core of their religion and knowledge of neighbours’
religion.
This knowledge created understanding and amity that continued at least
from Akbar's times, 1556 onwards although there is nothing to
prove that it was different earlier. The tragedy is that reading of
history makes us forget the masses of people to distort our perspective
by confining it to rulers. This living devoutly and in amity empowered
the minds of the masses to continue the unrivalled prosperity of the
subcontinent. Knowledge of the core of all religions took place
through exchange of informed thought between scholars from the eighth
century. This strengthened in Muslims in India Sufism that was
essentially freedom from rituals and practices. This freedom or
the Advaitic Sanaatana Dharma is what Tulaseedaasa later
repeated in his Ramayan.
The British education
destroyed that knowledge from the educated of both religions. So this
ignorant mind became alien. The Indian mind of the masses was powerful
and the alien mind of the educated was weak. The reality is that the
alien mind was neither of Hindu nor of Muslim masses. So,
not Mountbatten or the British directly or any religion or any
person or identifiable group or the people caused the Partition of the
Indian subcontinent. The weak alien mind of all leaders Hindus and
Muslims caused the partition. This appears strange for victims of
history of incomplete facts. Facts are incomplete because the reality
is that no one can ever know the impurities such as ego, greed for
power, selfishness and so on that weakened the minds of the active
players in the event nor the unrecorded happenings to reach
incontrovertible truth. So, it is not wisdom to point fingers on
any. If we accept this basis, we shall get rid of all the hatred that
pollutes India today. By burying the
past as the law of karma teaches us, we can carve a scintillating
future for our country. But it clearly seems only by knowledge of the
core of all religions.
The next reality is that the educated alien mind-set is ignorant of our
heritage of the empowered mind and its methodology for receiving it by
every human being. This ignorance makes educated India substantially what it is
-- almost a mess of ignorance empowering spirituality and so
absence of virtue in leadership practically in
all sections and at all levels. It is transparent that article 28(1) of
our Constitution that prohibits teaching of religions perpetuates our
ignorance. Ignorance rapidly promotes characterlessness
and virtuelessness in the country that rest on our religion or God
who alone protects us if we are virtuous.
The next reality is that followers of eight religions in India used the old methodology
for centuries to maintain leadership in prosperity of the sub-continent
for a millennium. If so, each one of us can receive an empowered mind
by knowledge of the core or the universal in all religions in which
their followers in masses live all over the world. This is because the
power flows from its source that is God through all religions. The
comparative study of religions will make everyone know the core of all
religions that is love. With love restored as the base of virtues,
virtues will return to all and power to their
minds to see that the reality of all realities is oneness of human
beings as human beings first and last. This step by step course is one
of the crying needs of our nation today to rid India of its alien mind-set.
The first step is to change article 28(1) of the Indian Constitution to
provide for a compulsory course of study of comparative religions,
eight in all, in every educational institution irrespective of the
source of its finances. This will undo the damage to India for a century and a half
by forced indoctrination of ignorance of our priceless heritage. It
will change our way of looking at things from our Indian or human point
of view. It will see reality and will help our advance rapidly in
science and technology by an empowered mind. It will set an example to
the world of followers of eight religions living in amity and resultant
prosperity as before the British interruption.
There is a
fast method for replacing this alien mind-set and to regain the path
for India’s peace, prosperity and
world leadership that India enjoyed. The method is
to have faith in the great Indian discovery of the oneness of our
reality with that of God as a truth for our personal benefit. Next, we
have to believe that this reality is for all for making use of it to
receive a mind empowered to its limitlessness. This mind is a corollary
from the Indian discovery of the oneness of our reality with that of
God or Advaita. To pursue this belief, we have to probe into
the ancient simple daily disciplines for it. After knowing the
rationale for these disciplines, we can practice them daily. After
understanding their rationale, their practice does not demand
time. It needs an attitude to become our second nature in our
present-day busy life. This nature in the large majority of minds of
followers of all religions that are unsullied by the present system of
education in the subcontinent is the continuing link with our culture
and heritage. The disciplines and their rationale to persuade us to
acquire the attitude to become our second nature is a practical Indian
philosophy. This philosophy is for the benefit of mankind and not
the monopoly of any religion or region. This philosophy is not
inconsistent with any religion because it was discovered and proved by
living by it before any religion was born. Moreover it is a matter of
the mind not affecting the practice of any religion so long as the
practice is based on love. This is what Tulaseedaasa tries to
convey. The chapters that follow attempt to present it from his book
the Shree Raamacharita Maanasa.
Previous
Next
(This web site is under reconstruction. Please reach Contents to
reach any part of this Book)
|
