SIMPLICITY, THOU MY BEST FRIEND, I CAN NEVER FORSAKE THEE

SIMPLICITY, THOU MY BEST FRIEND, I CAN NEVER FORSAKE THEE

There is something called intellectual violence and this is a most pernicious influence that can pulverise the soul for the while. Beware of such intellectuals who tend to take away your basic freedom to have your simple faiths and beliefs that do harm to none and give you immense succour and solace.

Simplicity is the element that modern education, with all its sophistries, robs you of, the basic feature of your nature, the foundation of your existence, the fundamental value upon which spiritual civilisation has been built and has flourished. This simplicity hold on to at any cost and do not let anyone endowed with superior intellectual strength and greater dexterity in argumentation pervert you from your radial line of evolution. They may posit arguments to sway you from your course but hold on to your ground and do not let them sweep you off-course. More often than not, these are surface thinkers who have no idea of the deeper realities of life and existence and attempt to force their half-baked fallacious views on others without contemplating its corrosive consequence. Better orthodoxy than this modern heterodoxy, as Swamiji used to say, for the former has character backing it while the latter is a mass of undigested heterogeneous influences, ill-absorbed and unassimilated, that flounder at every point in real life.

Simplicity gives peace for it is of the nature of God who is your ultimate reality, your essential existence. This simplicity is innate in man and is only lost by the superimposition of artificial modes of thinking consequent on an increasing alienating materialistic education that forms a crust of data that hides the truth resident in the inner recesses of the being. Thus have Wordsworth and Tagore and all other poets who have lived in close communion with Nature exhorted man to rekindle kinship with Nature. Their view has been that communion with Nature will weed off this artificial accretion on the soul and reestablish our natural bond with all that abound around us and with our own deeper Self that lies captive within material confines.

Therefore, go back to Nature, say some, and some say, go back to the Vedas. But it all boils down to the primeval call of the Spirit, "Come ye all unto Me and I shall release thee from the fetters that bind thee and cause thee sorrow." The Buddha is then vindicated and so is Christ. Ramakrishna then laughs in his childlike innocence and Chaitanya sings to ecstasy. Krishna plays the flautist's dream and Rama restores Ahalya.

Written by Sugata Bose