WHEN ADULTS GIVE IN TO PICTURE-PLAY LIKE PUERILE PLAY-CHIDREN DO

WHEN ADULTS GIVE IN TO PICTURE-PLAY LIKE PUERILE PLAY-CHIDREN DO

Thakur-Ma-Swamiji's advent on earth has been in vain. All that they had needed was to have sent carload of beautifully posed photographs for their would-be devotees to look at and marvel. Sufficient unto the day has been the devotional element manifested even among the educated classes! And now the movement is taking the inevitable monetary turn.

Vivekananda cries in vain. He has been banished to the wilderness but will he ever emerge among the People of the Promised Land? History will hold us responsible for our individual and collective apathy to his message for he which he lived and bled to his divine martyrdom.

We are ungrateful descendants of the divine sages of yore to whom we trace our heritage only at the point of recounting our lineage to the priests while offering worship but whose grand legacy we spurn knowingly and unknowingly each moment as we allow ourselves to sink in the mire of mundane, material ignorance. Would it were otherwise! India's fate would have changed then.

A nation of irrational materialists -- and mark my words, 'irrational materialists' -- can scarce call itself spiritual except in the lowliest conception of the word. Whither our links to our lineage? Whither are we headed as such? A rudderless ship in a tempestuous sea? A sinking ship where the boarders are actively participating to drill fresh holes that water may enter and drown them all?

Why, brothers, must you be so unthinking as to your own destiny? Swamiji has exhorted you to think. In his celebrated address 'Is Vedanta the Future Religion' delivered at San Francisco in 1900 he said, "Let men be thinkers." Are you willing to be one? Or have you made up your mind that the brain is better to mortgage to buy the ephemeral pleasures of life before the icy chill of death seizes you and with it ceases your miserable existence on earth that was meant for a higher purpose of Self-discovery which went abegging in pursuit of devotion to pictures like play-children do?

Written by Sugata Bose