THE ETERNAL GANGA FLOWS

THE ETERNAL GANGA FLOWS

Place yourself in the current of India's history and heritage, her culture and civilisation, but without over-involvement that attaches, and see what a mighty power permeates your being. Study Hinduism and be one with it till you have lost your sense of individual separateness and become integrated with the universal being. This is what Swamiji meant when he told Swami Virajananda to meditate 5 minutes a day and study 13 hours 55 minutes instead of the daily practice of 14 hours of meditation that he was doing then at Mayavati. This is svaadhyay in its truest sense, in its widest connotation, in its deepest reading. This conduces to the flourishing of the individual self and the collective cause of which it is a part. This sort of depth-concentration on the nation's past keeps the present vibrating with vigour and ensures the right unfolding of the future.

The Hindu tradition is diverse and deep but it has a central message emanating from the Upanishads, the divinity of all existence. Man is only man on the surface but he is all God within. And once that is realised, the veil of matter drops and it is the Spirit all over from core to crust, rolling, mingling, coalescing to integrate the different orders of existence while remaining frozen within as an unmoving mass of solidified, self-brooding wholeness of absolute consciousness, deathless, boundless entity, unfettered by duality which has simply vanished into nothingness.

This is the beginning and this is the endpoint of Hindu spiritual realisation. All else is its manifestation in the earthly context, in the temporal text of human evolution. Therefore, I reiterate. Place yourself in this current of Hindu heritage and history that is an interweaving of the temporal and the transcendental, and see what a mighty transformation in your understanding and appreciation of life comes. This is called being a Hindu.

Written by Sugata Bose