ALL THAT GLISTERS IS NOT GOLD

From the number of likes to the post on the degradation of the environment where the Niagara Falls has posed for the post picture instead of the popular ones of Thakur-Ma-Swamiji, one can guess people's attitude to the environment. It is pic, pic and pic alone that draws the attention of the common man here. Only sensationalism and superficiality gain ground in our beloved motherland by far. I shudder to contemplate the fate of this vast mass of humanity that inhabits this blessed terrain. Our sense of appreciation is so restricted, our horizons so stunted that even after seven decades of political independence we limp on with a pathetic gait, never forgetting, though, to strut about oftentimes in vainglory about the past and, thus, perpetuating our misery in material and spiritual terms both, leave aside the cultural element altogether.

It is a futile attempt apparently to seek to change the mindset of a vast mass of humanity, a veritable sea of peoples overnight. It will take five to six generations, Swamiji had said, before this nation rises to its full stature reminiscent of its ancient glorious past. The India of the future will be the seat of the spiritual civilisation of the world and she will be its spiritual preceptor. To that hope I write what I write, often inspired, frustrated at times but never in a give-it-up attitude altogether that will hinder my faith in man, however unresponsive he may surface seem to my own myopic vision. When the superficiality of the populace clouds the vision of the One within, I despair the sunken state of humanity hither but when sanity restores clarity of perception, I am at peace again, raring to go at the issues that encounter us all, for we carry the charge of the Swami who had bled his way to death as he breathed his life into the sleeping mass of humanity here, almost dead to the senses but still blazing deep beneath the rotting surface with the fire of the rishis, never quite extinguished despite the torment of a thousand years of servitude.

This, however, cannot be the reason why we must wallow in the mire of material misapprehension of all that is spiritually worthwhile in life, forsaking the depth culture that so characterised the Indian civilisation from antiquity to modern times. There is a dire need for reviving the intellectual culture in our land of fabled fertility of the mind. We were the inventors of the numeral system that forms the foundation of mathematics in particular and science in general. We were the discoverers of the singularity of the Atman which is the foundation of the individual self and that of Brahman which is the foundation of the infinite series of universes that form phenomena. And again the grand equation, Atman = Brahman, we were the ones to unravel and, thereby, we had ages ago given the world the blueprint for future civilisation, uncovered for them the track of human evolution through the dark night of ignorance that has befuddled man ever since he discovered his own coarser identity as a terrestrial animal being.

And is this the fallen state of the children of the rishis that they merely marvel at the surface glitter of gold while paying scant respect to the interior grandeur of all else in the domain of the mind or of the spirit? Whither wisdom then?