Sunday, 2 August 2020

FACEBOOK NEW MESSAGES AND TWEETS ... 12

FACEBOOK NEW MESSAGES AND TWEETS ... 12

1. It is difficult to believe in the historicity of Christ. No definite proof is there.

2. Tiresome is to encounter comments to my posts which are irrelevant. Please make pertinent observations.

3. Christianity destroyed the ancient civilisations of the world and brought in the Dark Ages.

4. Eventually, the Indian idea of Christ will overtake world Christian discourse. Else, the religion will perish.

5. Reason will drive sledgehammer blows into religion. Unless religions are founded in spiritual realisation, they are doomed.

6. He is the master of His mansion. Have we forgotten Him and claimed His house as our own?

7. Man has dressed up the world as he pleased and changed its very features. Such cosmetic surgery has made the world breathless.

8. The light whether it is internal or external matters not so long as it is light. This light is the stream of God's grace.

9. The Bible has been thus far much misinterpreted. It needs a fresh understanding in Indian light.

10. Jesus was of a higher dimension, a higher order, a higher altitude of spiritual reality than his countrymen. They sacrificed him !

11. The problem with prophets is that their disciples misrepresent them in the long run owing to secondary limitations.

12. God is above sect, yet, sects abound round him that divide the mansion of man.

13. In a la Biblical manner we can say we have all been sent unto earth to rid us of our imperfections. And we are our own prophets.

14. There is but one religion as there is but one science. Human misapprehensions divide and fragment the house of God.

15. Europe has had to rise through terrible superstition thrust on it by Christianity. Greek civilisation was darkened by the shroud.

16. Men who rely on miracles to substantiate the Spirit effectively contribute to retarding the progress of science.

17. Mass indoctrination can be terrible for it prepares the masses for violent action on the appointed day. A riot of colours then issues in flowing blood.

18. How many of you have read Nicolas Notovitch's book, 'The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ'? Did he visit India? Did he survive crucifixion? Did he live and die in Kashmir?

19. The Bodhi Tree and the Vivekananda Rock are the sites of spiritual enlightenment and insight of Indian sages from the ancient world to the modern. Symbols, they hold the mind of man !

20. Does science require a prophet or a messiah to substantiate its principles, to lend power or validity to them? Yet, religion holds humanity in its grip. Why?

21. Is religion to be rejected because it has no external evidence to offer that can justify its stupendous claims of God and enlightenment, heaven and hell, sin and salvation?

22. Vivekananda's message is so clear and simple, free of all ambiguity, yet full of the profoundest depths of philosophy.

23. Ambiguity has been resorted to both in the Bible and in the Quran to lend poetry and depth to the message what in simple terms is simply not there.

24. Earth we know is located on the edge of the Milky Way galaxy. But where is heaven located and where is hell? Are they super-physical spatial realms beyond the universe? Or are they located purely in the mind in human fear of the extinction of life?

25. Man worships God, not knowing he forever worships his Self, his own mind addressing itself while holding on to external symbols.

26. Do not in your vanity of possessing superior scriptural knowledge forget that the core of religion in its social aspect consists in the practice of love and service.

27. In the Ramakrishna Movement we have to be vigilant that we do not move away from the original and essential message of the Master.

28. I adore the whole of humanity for it is that to what I belong. Since remotest antiquity humanity has been an integrated whole despite apparent segmentation.

29. There is a need to harmonise relations across the community spectrum in a world increasingly fractured by narrow revivalism.

30. We have to work to save our planet, and one wonders, just how? So segregated is human thinking, so fractured our vision.

31. Mother Mary is as pure as purity itself. The only other one of such immaculate purity I can think of is our Mother Sarada Devi. And there are others like Meera Bai as well. But paucity of coloured space prevents their inclusion in the post proper.

32. Sri Ramakrishna considered Jesus Christ as a divine incarnation after having had his profound experience of the Messiah.

33. The more you people spread calumny against Jesus and his mother, the more will I post to propagate their greatness and glory.

34. Civilisation consists not merely in acquisition of knowledge but in expansion of the soul, in the refinement of the spirit.

35. The Sanatan Dharma addresses all of humanity as children of immortality. We, its legatees, must not in our vanity forget that.

36. গৃহীমাত্রেই দ্বৈতবাদী । অদ্বৈতের ভেরী বাজালে কি হবে ?

37. Mortal is the body. Fame, however long-lasting, is mortal too. The Spirit alone abides immortal for it is never born and cannot in consequence die.

38. Please visit my page and give a 'like' to it to increase its support base for the better propagation of my message.

39. Buddhism spread through the world by the imperial power of Ashok. Christianity did so by that of Constantine. How will the Ramakrishna Mission spread?

40. Name and form are superstitions.Yet the constant hypnosis of name and form all around us thrusts the burden of its ignorance on our impressionable souls, hiding from us our true selves and keeping us in 'servile fearfulness' of the elements of Nature.

41. May Mother shower Her blessings on all my sisters and brothers across vast humanity without bounds !

42. Conversion stands in the way of inter-faith harmony. If this urgency to grow in numbers goes in proselytising religions, there will arise mutual trust among religions and peace will prevail.

43. Our men and women both must stop this constant persecution of each other. A civilised polity demands this. Freedom is civility.

44. By insulting another you reduce your own life-span and that of the other. Honour others to live long and healthy.

45. Our country is divided into tiny warring units where each ugly infighting has to be won to the slave's delight. How can freedom be?

46. Ultimately, I am my only reader. I write as I read and I read what I write.

47. Countless martyrs have been to the motherland to achieve her freedom and to keep it secure. We must remember them in our prayers.

48. Netaji and his INA were battling in Burma against the British Indian forces for which Sam Manekshaw fought. Strange, is it not?

49. We have to spread like wildfire the message of the Rishis across the world. For this we need a handful of valorous souls, utterly fearless and strong.

50. Swami Brahmananda, the first President of the Ramakrishna Order. He served as helmsman for the longest period in the history of the Order from 1897 to 1922.

51. RKM monks must flood YouTube with videos. That is a very effective way of propagating the Sanatan Dharma.

52. Netaji and his INA were battling in Burma against the British Indian forces for which Sam Manekshaw fought. Strange, is it not?

53. Countless martyrs have been to the motherland to achieve her freedom and to keep it secure. We must remember them in our prayers.

54. Swami Vivekananda, the General President of the Ramakrishna Mission Association formed on 1 May, 1897 at Balaram Bose's residence.

55. Pronunciation must be good and so must diction be. Else, you mar your delivery and mess up your audience.

56. By lowering one's status and cheapening one's stance one hardly serves Hinduism. The Mother's work calls for heroes, neither cowering cowards nor ranting rogues.

57. There are some who simply wait on to pick faults in posts. They ignore all that is good and are mere fault-finders. Glory unto them, these chosen children of the Lord !

58. Atman = Brahman. The water in the pot is the water in the sea and is the very sea. This very point is the vast universe. Truth transcends though. These illustrations are mere hints to apprehend the Truth that lies beyond.

59. The world you see is none other than the Atman in apparent fracturing from its undivided state unto its prismatic dispersion.

60. 'Upanishad' means approximation unto identity with the Absolute Truth [Brahman].

61. A sense of superiority or a sense of inferiority both arise from a shift from the golden mean where Truth resides.

62. India loves the personality cult. So, perhaps, she is not yet ready for the Vedanta which has been her discovery in ancient times.

63. Is the concept of an omnipotent God presiding over human affairs a feudal concept and is the Vedantic idea of the sovereignty of each individual soul the democratic one?

64. Take the name 'Ramakrishna' and be free.

65. Whoever had hit upon the idea of image worship in India must have been the most marvellous psychologist cum mass communicator.

66. From morning till night it is image worship that goes on in Facebook. How wonderful that all the messages go in vain !

67. May fetters fall from human feet and men live free in peace !

68. The smaller the limit and the greater the stretch of concentration, the more powerful the personality of the spiritual man and of the material man, too. The smallness is in spatial focus and the stretch is in extension in time.

69. Ramakrishna = Love

70. Sri Ramakrishna is the Atman/Brahman made manifest in fullest measure by the inscrutable power of Yogamaya.

71. Mother Sarada is the Universal Mother and none else.

72. The main problem we face in inspiring others with the Word of God is that what we speak of we do not live in our lives.

73. Do not hurt others. You will get hurt back in equal measure and may be more.

74. Our country is right now passing through the rough admixture of rajas and tamas. Hence there is so much confusion.

75. We live in a democracy but we are hardly democrats. We carry the feudal mentality as the hangover of our past.

76. The beauty of the Ramakrishna Avatar is that he each time emerged the Guru of his Gurus after completing his study with them.

77. The spiritual person is never narrow. He practises the universal principles he espouses. He has no hatred in his heart.

78. Do not believe if anybody tells you that God does not exist. He exists as you yourself in every phase of your being.

79. Want to see God? Constantly think of Sri Ramakrishna.

80. Intense spirituality can never make a man frivolous while preaching. Frivolity must be renounced as well by the spiritual man.

81. A seat is given you in this universal theatre only if you have bought a ticket of desire.

82. Institutionalising religion creates corruption. We have to be vigilant this time. Who was Swami Nirmalananda?

83. Myths make a man greater and often doctrine makes a man smaller. Now reality lies in between.

84. Human civilisation has been built on a mountain of skulls. Human labour has been extracted by imperial masters to adorn what is best in historical beauty. The dead lie at the foundation of all the flourishes of civilisation.

85. Hatred is the result of the infighting of the bodily forces. Meditation leads to their harmony and spontaneous love is its overflow.

86. Do not mock someone's tears. You rob his peace and then mock at him. Is this humanity?

87. Divine incarnation or not, ultimately it boils down to improving the human condition by means of human labour under the inspiration of the Idea.

88. Forgiveness is the great spiritual act but forgetfulness the cardinal sin.

89. Was Christ a liberated soul, that is, a Brahmajnani like Sri Ramakrishna or Swami Vivekananda or Shankaracharya or Buddha?

90. Who was Swami Nirmalananda - disciple of Sri Ramakrishna or disciple of Swami Vivekananda? Contradictory information is coming to us from diverse sources.

91. Know a person who performs 'miracles' to prove his divinity to be a fraud instead and not a divine incarnation.

92. If you want to be spiritual, shed every superstition, each and every, to which you fondly cling. This is called true renunciation.

93. Stop following crooks who pose as classified Gurus. Follow the sages of ancient India. Of the moderns, follow Ramakrishna.

94. The inability to articulate truth in clearest terms is an act of moral cowardice.

95. Today, devotion to Netaji has been supplanted by hatred of Gandhiji and Pandit Nehru in quite a section of the lay public. Cultural decline is manifest in rather a mean manner.

96. I wonder how many people who criticise Pandit Nehru have read any of the classics written by him.

97. Few follow the drift of my posts. Alas, I am a failure as a writer !

98. প্রতিদিনের নেহরু-বিদ্বেষ দেশের কিছু মানুষের শিক্ষা, সংস্কৃতি ও রুচিগত দৈন্যের পরিচায়ক |

99. Having studied Vivekananda lifelong, I understood half of India. Having done Facebook, I have understood the other half. Now my understanding is complete. Alas, Vivekananda cries in the wilderness ! India has betrayed him.

100. A new day begins, a new battle-formation for the Kurukshetra of Facebook. 😂***😂 Paandavs and Kauravs arrayed. Let's see who wins.

WHAT A CONTRAST !


WHAT A CONTRAST !

Sect after sect have arisen in India and there has been no violence meted out to them. But the Protestant Reformation met with such a violent Catholic reprisal. Millions died in the subsequent wars. In contrast the Indian dharma tradition has seen the continuous rise of sects which has maintained its purity and vibrancy. Religion has ever been freshly affirmed by sages and saints and divine incarnations who have through their renewed realisations given invigorating impetus to it and in the process enriched the age-old tradition of the dharma that dates back to prehistory and stretches forth its arms to the unborn future with the message of hope and humanity.

Written by Sugata Bose

Saturday, 1 August 2020

THOUGHTS, THEY KEEP FLOWING


THOUGHTS, THEY KEEP FLOWING

1. Real great men have courage beyond bounds. They never shirk from doing what they think is right even if that means courting death. And this is called courage of conviction.

2. With mass support a leader becomes invincible. But the support must last for the masses are fickle and can be easily swayed to the contrary.

3. Develop a great reverence for learning, a yearning to know and self-enlighten, not merely in spiritual terms but in intellectual terms too. To learn is to live in Saraswati, let this be the ideal.

4. The simplistic division of the world between good and evil, between God and the Devil may suit ordinary minds, appeal to the masses but it is not the proper representation of truth. There is no such sharp demarcation between light and shade in human affairs for relativity assigns varying values to events in varying stations, altered positions, changing situations and evolving perspectives. Qualities are perceived through the prism of the mind and minds are many and so are perceptions. What may appear to one as good may be equally deemed by another as evil and rightly so, for the locations of judgement determine the outcome of assessment and the verdict thereof. Relativity rules it all.

5. Let not a church or an organisation come between you and your God. Independently strive for perfection.

6. The fate of the individual is in the individual's hands. Let no authority, however sacred, determine the course of your journey towards perfection.

7. The Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, by fixing spirituality to rigid doctrinaire ideas may have done irreparable damage to the free flow of spiritual thought in vast portions of the the world, and, in so doing, terribly retarded human progress and the advancement of civilisation.

Written by Sugata Bose

THEY WHO SHAPED THE WORLD


THEY WHO SHAPED THE WORLD

It is very difficult to come out of traditional trappings and yet not fall into crude error otherwise of imagined liberation. Real enlightenment lies in between the extremes of action and reaction. The path of Maya is slippery and precipitous is the fall when man transgresses from established norms amidst violent reform. Evolution is the way, the gradual growth of society unto a better order. But all delay causes endless suffering of the masses as tyranny of the privileged reigns supreme. The recourse then is to violent reform which, if left unbridled, resolves the forces into terrible revolution that consumes millions in its wake. Eventually, history takes its own inevitable course as the forces array against the existing order to overthrow it. Thesis, antithesis and synthesis follow in inevitable succession to forge the new social order and a new wave alters human destiny for good. Thus has civilisation progressed amidst persisting tyranny of the ages which have met with their doom when cataclysmic changes have overtaken them in the might to govern the hearts and minds of men. Tyranny has been replaced often by worse tyranny and mankind has been plunged in a darker dungeon. But often the forces have been for good and have ushered in seminal changes that have forever altered the landscape of man's movement for human hopes to find fulfilment, aspirations to gain utterance in reformed living and the barriers to drop from the path of pure progress unto a higher order of terrestrial life. Unto the ushering of these changes have been dedicated the lives of reformers and unto such we offer our belated obeisance.

Written by Sugata Bose

CHRIST AND COMMERCE, A COARSE CORRUPTION OF THE CLERGY


CHRIST AND COMMERCE, A COARSE CORRUPTION OF THE CLERGY

The western world has always been making commerce out of Christ. Earlier it was indulgences and now it is the dollar in so many other ways, but all in the name of Christ. No wonder Swami Vivekananda had chastised them in America thus, "If you want to live, go back to Christ. You are not Christians. Go back to Christ. Go back to him who had nowhere to lay his head. Better be ready to live in rags with Christ than to live in palaces without him.” Yes, and he paid a terrible price for his open admonition thus. He was reviled, cast aspersions on, and even was on the verge of being poisoned when his merciful Master Ramakrishna rescued him.

This has been a significant trend in Christendom, this commerce to keep the pleasure of the Pope alive, the extravagant style of living, the opulence at the cost of the poor whose fears of hellfire were capitalised on in selling indulgences that would reduce their term in purgatory, absolve them of their sins and secure them seats in eternal heaven, all at the cost of a copper coin or two. Out of such poor men's collections were built the fortunes of Rome, now the Vatican, the papal palaces and the cathedrals were built and decorated with Renaissance art and sculpture while the poor Christians, gullible and giving, were reduced to penury.

The commerce continues even unto this day and it is an irony that it has been historically so in the name of one of the most ascetic of all personalities in the history of the world. But such are the aberrations that are witnessed in all spiritual orders and organisations in lesser or larger measure and the Vatican has held premier position in this regard.

God bless the poor who, though ignorant and superstitious, were in their simplicity the truer followers of Christ and not those who adorned their earthly lives at their expense.

Written by Sugata Bose

SALVATION IS NOT QUITE THE LIBERATION OF THE SELF


SALVATION IS NOT QUITE THE LIBERATION OF THE SELF

The Christian idea of salvation is not quite the Hindu idea of liberation from primeval ignorance and the cycle of birth and death. Heaven and hell are ideas that are not central to the Sanatan Dharma, being of the order of ignorance as such. Even God is the final most refined form of relativistic ignorance that must be given up in the Hindu conception of the Spirit.

The Sanatan Dharma alone has this absolute idea of freedom that transcends space, time and causality, and in its such absolute conception all heavens and hells and gods and goddesses and even the almighty God dissolve into nothingness as so much eventual figment of imagination.

The non-dual Self or the Atman or the Brahman are ideas that are apprehended only in the Vedic scriptures and are to be found nowhere else. It is this solitary conception of the eternal solitude of the Self, the ground of all relativity, the absolute essence of existence transcending even God that is the gift of the Vedas to the world. Generations, perhaps centuries, may yet pass before the world in its wholeness appreciates this stupendous conception and then it may take millenia more to realise the essence of the idea for the world to be rid of the superstition of archaic, absolutist, exclusive religions like Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

The world has waited thousands of years to hear the glad tidings of the Vedas and it may yet wait several thousand years more, but heed it will for sure this truth of the Self for it is truth after all.

Written by Sugata Bose

AS THE BUBBLES RISE


AS THE BUBBLES RISE

1. The gap between thought and deed must be that of time only and never of intent. Sincerity binds the man of character in execution of his good thoughts, those that conduce to the good of oneself and the good of all. Unto such closeness of the inner call and its outer manifestation belongs the future of humanity.

2. Superstition allows us a release from material bonds in an erroneous way and gives us a sense of freedom which, after all, is surely the shadow of the real freedom that comes in spiritual realisation. Superstition is, thus, the layman's outlet from the rigid bonds of matter. No wonder the vast mass of humanity is superstitious. They all want freedom but know not how to achieve it.

3. In these dark days of depressing death may we repose our faith absolute in the Mother ! She is the source of life and She is the sustainer of life too. Who else can save us but our discretion in following the health directives while resting in the secure faith in Mother? Mother lends life to the dead and Mother preserves Her breath in the living as well. There is but one that I trust in the dark sea of delusive death -- Mother.

4. The life of a nation is its masses and the life of the masses is in the education they receive to lead a decent earthly existence with the wherewithal for their sustenance. It is here that the government and the citizenry must stress and not engage in wasteful activity that will conduce to nothing effective in the long run for lifting the masses out of their present plight. Poverty may be eradicated only through the dissemination of scientific education and through activation of the spirit of service among the people. To serve is grand -- this must be the motto and the leaders of the nation must exemplify this spirit to deserve the honorific of 'leader'.

5. We must have a change in attitude and that is to do our duties and not merely clamour for our rights as has become the common practice these days. A country cannot sustain a clamouring mass of people for long whose sole occupation is destructive work or idle indulgence in masses of negation. Affirmative action alone builds a nation and for this we may seek sufficient inspiration from our freedom fighters whose one aim in life was to liberate the motherland from bondage at any cost, even if that meant sacrificing their very lives for the cause. Millions have lost their lives to secure our freedom and we must become worthy inheritors of such by carrying on the grand tradition of sacrificial service for the nation. In such selfless living will be our fulfilment as a people and in such sacrificial service will be the furtherance of our spiritual civilisation dating from remotest antiquity unto this day.

Written by Sugata Bose