MAN, THOU ART THE ETERNAL PRESENCE

MAN, THOU ART THE ETERNAL PRESENCE

If you do not have a past, you do not have a future. The isolated present perishes. This has its terrestrial significance as history amply testifies. But there is a transcendental connotation to the statement as well. He who has erased his past, has left for himself no future that will bind, as he stands transfigured in the eternal presence. Such is the reality of phenomenal man.

As a phenomenal being he must be rooted to his past, that is, to his heritage and history. Out of the past is built the present and out of the present the future. This continuity must not be lost by rupturing civilisation midway. History is a continous process and so is the flow of culture and civilisation. Revolutionary changes do more harm than good as the organic evolution of man is much slower. Thus, gradual reform is a surer way of altering social adjustments than rapid, ruthless, revolutionary change. The organic system of the individual resists such ruthless revolution and society, being the aggregate of such individual units, eventually overthrows such revolutionary regimes to reinstate the former times in altered resolution what protagonists of the revolution would term counter-revolution but what in truth is the synthesis along the spiral chain of the historical process.

Nonetheless, it is amply evident to all that a civilisation survives not merely by its branches but by its roots in real. Thus, to destroy a civilisation, the best way would be to bring about its cultural desecration and destruction. Culture gone, the race, reduced to barbarism in a generation, can be easily converted to the invading culture and where pockets of resistance result, such insurrection can be quelled by brute force and the vanquished force-fed the poison to obliterate resistance for good. This is what has historically happened to many a civilisation by conquering hordes who have inflicted deep wounds into the existing cultural fabric till the entire edifice has collapsed and crumbled and the ruins raised again into the refabricated alien altered culture. Such is the fate of the conquered unless they are deeply rooted to their past and the roots go so deep that external attacks but sever several surface branches even as the roots throw up fresh foliage along altered lines of least resistance but maintaining somehow the original cultural content, even if for the while camouflaged as the synthetic culture of the conquered and the conqueror. But assimilation goes on till the invading culture has been ingested and a stronger culture reflecting the original roots emerges, making the origin even more invincible. And such has been the destiny of India thus far.

Shall we forget our roots then? O, that will be a vain attempt for the entire flow of the ages will resist it and in futility shall the exercise be. Our history and heritage are our strength, our past the mine of infinite power and we must cherish it and out of it furnish our glorious future. Thus shall the race live, thus our motherland prosper to foster her heritage and culture, her age-old spirituality which she must give to the rest of the world, a charge that the Lord has entrusted unto her for the survival and the future flourishing of world civilisation.

The keynote of this entire discussion on Indian civilisation, though, is individual liberation from bondage and this does not exclude social charity in its every denomination. But the thrust of our civilisation is this impulse towards absolute freedom from phenomenal bonds and the attainment of Mukti or Moksha or Nirvana, call it by whatever name you like. Here, all of space-time-causality which forms a continuum and is an integral whole that can only in erroneous analysis be partitioned and viewed as the three elements of a structural whole, disappears in transcendent realisation of existential unity or oneness. Hence, the past vanishes and so does the future. The present, which is the first interface of the past and the future, necessarily vanishes, too, as its preceding and succeeding faces disappear. The interface can be between the pre and the post-faces in phenomena and that being no more, the interface also vanishes. The present gone, the soul is lifted to the spaceless, timeless, supracausal state where the eternal presence abides in transcendent Self-consciousness. The past having gone, memories have merged in existence absolute and the deeper memory of the eternity of the undying Self is revealed. The future, dissolved into frothy nothingness, is no more there to captivate the soul with false images that look real, but reforms into the luminous ideal universe of divine forms and names but with the golden lining of the shining transcendent truth percolating through it. The future again unfolds on the revisitation of earth by the sage returning to relative plane from his realm of absolute Self-consciousness. Earths and heavens and hells melt to coalesce into the divinised earth. The divine dance begins.

Written by Sugata Bose

17Nilanjana Chakraborty, Sharmistha Chatterjee and 15 others

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