THE INDIVIDUAL AND HIS SELFISH CLAIMS
The life of an individual is so inextricably linked with the collective life of humanity that service to all becomes a natural outflow of enlightened living. Where it fails to be so, know for certain that ignorance pervades the mind of man, separating him in fractured consciousness from the rest of humanity, and this is the seed of all selfishness and sin whose darker derivatives are corruption and crime.
This sense of separateness springs from identification with the body where the individual clings to his physical self and knows it to be himself. Such smallness of conception in a world of vast integrations is unnatural and tends to fester into false philosophy, foolish notions about life and reality, and tends to drag humanity along the route reverse to all that is good and progressive and into the alleyway of archaic assumptions and absolutist injunctions. But that is by way of gregarious living in narrow sectarian terms where retrograde religion rules the roost.
Even on the personal plane in societies relatively unaffected by such herd instinct, where science and rationality play their seminal roles in secularising human relations, littleness of living still limits one to this selfish pursuit of individual dreams to the exclusion of a vaster human good. The boundary of the body then extends to provincial and national boundaries and the world gets broken into interest zones with their regional agendas of conflicting returns from each other. Separateness, thus, is ingrained in the physical man, gets deepened in the mental and the intellectual man, and education that is geared to the culture of the body, the mind and the intellect, fails to raise the consciousness of man that caters to harmony, peace and unity amidst the glittering diversity of life. A new type of education is, thus, needed that will address this pernicious persistence in human society.
And this is the education of the spirit. In short, it is spiritual education, free and fair, as opposed to the limiting doctrinaire schooling of exclusive religious faiths or of totalitarian political ideologies that glorify the gains of matter. It is a tall order to teach this message of the universal man in a world vitiated by pettiness of conception and pollution of the very intelligence that will behold the truths of the being. But humanity is at the crossroads of evolution where it will have to make a choice, whether to rise from the abyss of this abysmal living in the senses or to be sucked into the cosmic drain and be discharged into oblivion whence there shall be no return. The choice, perhaps, is ours or, perhaps, it is not. If we are the arbiters of our own fate, then we ought to act now, but if the burden of our karma has already carried us over the threshold to a stage of impending self-annihilation, then the suicide of civilisation will eventually end the dominance of this puny ego which has thus far covered up the effulgence of our stellar being.
Is there a destiny after all or is it purely in our hands to determine our future course of evolution unto a higher end where cooperative living, harmonious coexistence and peaceful pursuit of the spiritual ends of life will dominate the discourse and not its refracted incongruous caricature in the material manoeuvrings of mundane existence? We cannot wait to know and then act. We must act now or, else, perish.
Written by Sugata Bose
The life of an individual is so inextricably linked with the collective life of humanity that service to all becomes a natural outflow of enlightened living. Where it fails to be so, know for certain that ignorance pervades the mind of man, separating him in fractured consciousness from the rest of humanity, and this is the seed of all selfishness and sin whose darker derivatives are corruption and crime.
This sense of separateness springs from identification with the body where the individual clings to his physical self and knows it to be himself. Such smallness of conception in a world of vast integrations is unnatural and tends to fester into false philosophy, foolish notions about life and reality, and tends to drag humanity along the route reverse to all that is good and progressive and into the alleyway of archaic assumptions and absolutist injunctions. But that is by way of gregarious living in narrow sectarian terms where retrograde religion rules the roost.
Even on the personal plane in societies relatively unaffected by such herd instinct, where science and rationality play their seminal roles in secularising human relations, littleness of living still limits one to this selfish pursuit of individual dreams to the exclusion of a vaster human good. The boundary of the body then extends to provincial and national boundaries and the world gets broken into interest zones with their regional agendas of conflicting returns from each other. Separateness, thus, is ingrained in the physical man, gets deepened in the mental and the intellectual man, and education that is geared to the culture of the body, the mind and the intellect, fails to raise the consciousness of man that caters to harmony, peace and unity amidst the glittering diversity of life. A new type of education is, thus, needed that will address this pernicious persistence in human society.
And this is the education of the spirit. In short, it is spiritual education, free and fair, as opposed to the limiting doctrinaire schooling of exclusive religious faiths or of totalitarian political ideologies that glorify the gains of matter. It is a tall order to teach this message of the universal man in a world vitiated by pettiness of conception and pollution of the very intelligence that will behold the truths of the being. But humanity is at the crossroads of evolution where it will have to make a choice, whether to rise from the abyss of this abysmal living in the senses or to be sucked into the cosmic drain and be discharged into oblivion whence there shall be no return. The choice, perhaps, is ours or, perhaps, it is not. If we are the arbiters of our own fate, then we ought to act now, but if the burden of our karma has already carried us over the threshold to a stage of impending self-annihilation, then the suicide of civilisation will eventually end the dominance of this puny ego which has thus far covered up the effulgence of our stellar being.
Is there a destiny after all or is it purely in our hands to determine our future course of evolution unto a higher end where cooperative living, harmonious coexistence and peaceful pursuit of the spiritual ends of life will dominate the discourse and not its refracted incongruous caricature in the material manoeuvrings of mundane existence? We cannot wait to know and then act. We must act now or, else, perish.
Written by Sugata Bose
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