RETURN TO ROOTS, RETURN TO RAMAKRISHNA

RETURN TO ROOTS, RETURN TO RAMAKRISHNA 

Swamiji's words are great but in activating them unto social welfare we must not compromise ourselves to money as is the wont these days. The message was delivered by the Master and the method shown, and we must not stray a bit from the original course. We must never assume that the peerless Paramahamsa and his peerless protégé were not wise enough to see through the tide of times and make room for adjustments thereof which we now need to make by diluting their delivered message to our monetary convenience, nay, even worse, to a corruption far more lethal for long-term organisational sustenance, the brazen greed for gold which the Master so abjured and exhorted his disciples to do likewise. That things have changed thereafter and are changing rapidly for the worse, that ideals are being shamelessly compromised, to a multitude of foolish followers lending support for the same that will eventually seal the fate of the Order, is a matter serious enough for us, lay devotees, to alter our stance and build our lives in the original mould of the Master without seeking amended modes offered otherwise to move things along, so that we may resist the decline of the dispensation. Upon our personal honesty and integrity lies the future fate of the Master's Mission which draws strength and succour from us to carry its course along. 

Resist greed and thwart pecuniary pursuits by renunciates whose primary purpose ought to be propagation of their preceptor's principles rather than pursuing gold-gains to fulfil high-sounding welfare aims, noble no doubt when executed in a scrupulous manner in line with primary principles, not so when done otherwise. What is required is renunciation and scrupulous adherence to the Master's message and his Apostle's directives for the spiritual regeneration of the world which mission has been forsaken for the contemptible course of architectural expansion. 

Return to roots and salvage the situation. The Avatar did not descend to earth for such puerile pursuits as his followers have reduced him to being the apparent inspiration of. We may be lay devotees but we are devotees nonetheless. Upon us lies as much the responsibility for steering the course of the Master's movement as it does with the monks. 🕉 

Written by Sugata Bose

WHAT WE MUST DO

WHAT WE MUST DO

The West has destroyed a lot of world civilisation, robbed the world's resources to build its civilisation. But a golden material civilisation it has built for sure despite all its destructive defects. 

Merely shouting Hindu superiority or blaming the colonists for every evil that besets us today will be of no avail. The world will move on and we have to move with it as did our ancestors who exceeded limits and extended their civilisational horizons by beating time and spreading the seeds of civilisation around. Instead of venting infertile feelings of injury and injustice meted out to us, we should rebuild our motherland following the blue print laid down by the Rishis of antiquity and modernity both. We must stand peerless in the comity of nations in every sphere of national endeavour before we lay claim, if at all, of being Vishvaguru and all such puerile propositions. Vande Mataram! 

Written by Sugata Bose

IT IS INTELLECTUAL INDEED!

IT IS INTELLECTUAL INDEED!

Western intellectuals are content to rationalise on religion, some submitting to its tenets and vociferously vouching for it through tortuous methods of the mind, others rejecting the same, citing the sheer lack of empirical evidence to support the claims of religion, while so few in a genuine search for Truth attempt to go to its foundation which lies in spiritual experience. It is words all the way from the podium, the pulpit, the platform that hide the Word even as they pretend to express it in tangible terms, but the depth does not show its face amidst such verbal violence, such arrogance of the spirit that arrogates to itself exclusive possession of the Truth and negation of all else that it deems culturally alien. But Truth laughs at such supremacist supposition and goes its way while pretenders to it keep at their verbal disputations to no satisfactory end. Eventually it is cultural supremacy that is sought in the garb of religion and no honest pursuit of it for the sake of arriving at Truth. The same old suppositions of Christ being crucified to redeem humanity of its supposed Original Sin being transmitted through generations right from its apple-eating inception in Eden, being attempted to be imposed on the world for whatever purpose Christian proselytism stands for with all its assumptions of heathen ignorance and the saving grace of Christ alone that can rescue them from perdition. It is intellectual indeed!

Written by Sugata Bose

THE NOCTURNAL DANCE

THE NOCTURNAL DANCE

There has never been a day but a long long night in space where dust is not but for stars that shine and send their radiant darts to light up rotating bodies that block them. All things lit up are those that have impeded the passage of light. And as they rotate following their spatial curves, their timely tides of advancing and receding light alternate experience of day and night. A nocturnal journey is on through cosmic space-time where the space-ships are lit up by their stellar patrons in a rotating dance of shifting bands. Verily, verily, Kepler's music of the spheres is on, and much more, the waltzing couples are adding flavour. Mozart, thou truly art in the high heavens!

Written by Sugata Bose

Photo : The Mozart family on tour: Leopold, Wolfgang and Nannerl. Watercolour by Carmontelle, ca. 1763. [courtesy, Wikipedia]

HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF YET AGAIN

HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF YET AGAIN 

Our spiritual organisations must remember that like the medieval Catholic Church that indulged in indulgences to raise ill-begotten money, they are also, in a far lesser degree though, going astray, steadily moving away from the scrupulous path trodden by and upheld as spiritual ideal by Sri Ramakrishna, here pertinently regarding money. After all, the wise must learn their lessons from history unless, of course, the rot has so set in that a return to original principles seems to the powers that be the foolishness of the unpractical idealist. Such rationalisation, though, will further the decay unto the Order being rendered spiritually redundant in the not so long a run. After all, covert commerce is not saintliness and this the people understand. 

Written by Sugata Bose

MESSAGES GALORE ... 78

MESSAGES GALORE ... 78

1. Love seeks the beautiful. 

2. Peace must be for art to endure.

3. Of what avail is ideology if it teaches you to kill? 

4. Religious submission somehow stifles rational thinking and opens the gateway to brainwashing, for it lays a precondition on all such endeavour---faith, the nemesis of it all.

5. Jesus is not unique. Many a Hindu Avatar and sage have been spiritually greater than him, Ramakrishna being the latest among them.

6. সৌন্দর্যের মূল উপাদান ব্রহ্মচর্য | অখণ্ড পবিত্রতায় দিব্য সৌন্দর্য বিকশিত হয় | চিত্তের মালিন্যে রূপ আবৃত হয়ে পড়ে |

7. Words of wisdom are words of peace. Justice cannot be with the sword.

8. Karma will recoil. There is no escape save in building up the defences of freedom. The living-free has transcended Karma.

9. A rich man qualifies himself by his wealth. And that is his poverty, the poverty of the spirit.

10.

Right now we are in the psychophysical age with all its disharmonies and conflicts. Next will come the spiritual age when all is peace and harmony. But that is quite a distance away. The question, though, is: Will man survive to see a better day?

Photo: The poet's hope, the physicist's worry.

11. Through a thousand pores of the poor the coffers of the rich fill.

12. When death governs a cult and apocalypse is aspired for, the world becomes a dangerous place in these days of possible nuclear doom.

13. The Government ought to establish universities in the name of Aryabhatta, Bhaskaracharya, Brahma Gupta and other Indian geniuses.

14. The Guru displeased, Truth recedes.

7

15. Miracles do not prove saintliness. Why then is it incumbent upon Christians---besides fulfilling other necessary criteria such as holiness, having mystical visions, charity, poverty, obedience---to at least perform two miracles to qualify for sainthood?

16. 14 July, 1789. Bastille Day. The Revolution breaks out. France undergoing cataclysmic change. The Bourbons about to be uprooted.

17. 

Endless is the wait,

Endless the toil.

If life be of no purpose,

Why the seed? why the soil?

18. 

Is there a stir that beckons a new moon?

Are the rumblings of a new revolution?

Will the sun shine where the desert moon has set?

19. Appropriating the prophets of other religions as your own and ingesting their message with adjustments and alterations suited to the purpose is a clever way of founding a faith and initiating the proselytising process.

20. Tricking the gullible with cleverly crafted arguments that hide toxic truths about your faith and converting them is patently evil.

21. Strange allegiance people have to scripture by forsaking reason which is the best guide to avoiding crude errors of belief!

22. 

নয়ননন্দিনী,

হৃদয়বন্দিনী,

প্রাণস্পন্দিনী ||

নয়ননন্দন,

যশবন্দন,

হৃদয়স্পন্দন ||

23. As yet Vivekananda throbs in my veins. 

অদ্যাবধি বিবেকানন্দ স্পন্দিত ধমনীতে |

24. May the mind be dust-free even as the body is dirt-free!

25. Christian dogmatism is no less entrenched than Islamic dogmatism. The two faiths are in a titanic struggle of 1400 years for supremacy.

26. We should not unduly speak in high treble. That is a sure sign of effeminacy. Our voice-throw must be moderate, musical and modest.

27. The Jews never forget the torment their ancestors endured. How can Hindus so easily forget theirs? Read your history.

28. When a bigot asks someone to be open-minded about his bigotry, that is the height of it. Aye, that is the depth of it too.

29. Christian ignorance about Vedantic universalism is truly astounding. We need to send capable preachers, not charlatans, across the world far more. Swamiji desired so.

30. We have so much to give to the world. Oblivious of our Hindu heritage, how niggardly in effect have we been in a world tormented by spiritual ignorance. What as Buddhists we had once done, as Vedantists we must once more do. And Vedanta here means the gamut of Hindu spiritual experience and philosophy, not just its crest jewel that is Shankara's Advaita Vedanta.

31. Read what I write and add on value to it through your considered observations along lines pertinent to the posts. Do not insult my thoughts with casual praises of the Lord, made manifest in the appended photographs, with stereotypical chants raised in an unthinking manner as if in inertial reflex mode. The world needs deep thinkers, not superficial commenters. Do you not remember what Swamiji said to Nivedita? "Awake, awake, great ones! The world is burning with misery. Can you yet sleep?"

32. Such stupendous silence is stifling.

33. When responses come 1 : 100, then it is known that the seeds of separation have been sown, soon to bear their toxic fruit.

34. হৃদয়েশ | [coined the word.]

35. Science! Science! Science is the call of the hour. That is the way to national progress. Neglect it and you plunge into the dark.

36. One can understand why Ahmadiyyas are persecuted in Pakistan. But why the Shias when Muhammad Ali Jinnah himself was a Shia?

37. India can develop if we participate in its development. It is the citizens that transform a nation.

38. Muhammad Bakhtiyar Khilji took Islamic intolerance to new heights as he destroyed the world's first university, Nalanda.

39. 

NALANDA

Muhammad Bakhtiyar Khilji took Islamic intolerance to new heights as he destroyed the world's first university, Nalanda.

9 million books, handwritten and palm leaf manuscripts, perished to the flames as Nalanda's library was burnt down over 90 days.

Professors and pupils were slaughtered alike as Bakhtiyar Khilji spared no means to obliterate Buddhism and establish Islam.

When Bologna, Oxford and Cambridge were in the womb of unborn time, Nalanda flourished, only to brought down by Islamic onslaught.

And now Nalanda has reopened. But the old one is gone, never to return. Heritage once lost is never regained. Were it otherwise!

Hiuen Tsang studied in Nalanda and taught here. He not only carried manuscripts with him to China but Buddhism with it.

Nalanda may have died for good, burnt by barbarians, but its life throbs across Asia in the pulsating currents of civilisation.

40. Ideas shape civilisation.

41. Since 9/11 the West has woken up to an understanding of Islamic texts. We, however, are asleep despite 1300 years of sufferance.

42. The problem with both Islam and Christianity is that they are both inherently exclusive and intolerant of all other faiths.

43. We have been orphaned after Christopher Hitchens has left. Now Douglas Murray has taken up cudgels for the cause but not quite, for Murray, despite his trenchant opposition to Islamic fundamentalism, is not quite of the intellectual order of Hitchens who remains simply a class apart.

44. I heard the reformist Jewish Rabbi Jonathan Romain speak the language of Ramakrishna that all religions are valid paths to God. 

[https://youtu.be/yfbkTnKi3Cc?si=ugVh7xCr28HfU3uK] 

45. What a cursed life it is to be born super-rich when to maintain it you have to hobnob with politicians of questionable character!

46. RRRCCC [Rapid Reading Reliability with Clarity of Conception through Concentration]. Also known as R3C3. [Coined the stuff.]

47. I am not a body. My form floats above me, separate save in umbilical vision, sundered, yet, lingering.

48. Jihad is at the very heart of Islam, the expansionist thrust through warfare at every level till the world is Dar-ul-lslam.

49. Mere money-chasing is weakening the Hindus. This excessive Vaishyahood is weakening our civilisational defence.

50. Generations later when history will be duly chronicled, the Anglo-Americans will be shown their rightful place for their perpetration of mass violence on humanity.  Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, Vietnam, China, India, the Middle East, Latin America, the Pacific Islands, Phillipines, Africa---how many more must be named?---will seek justice from the long arm of Karma.

51. The greater the concentration, the deeper the knowledge. 

52. Plans, plans and plans! No end to it. When will the hour to execute a single plan come? When the hour has run out?

53. Christ said, "Love thy neighbour as thyself." Christians understood, "Convert thy neighbour to thy creed."

54. Does love mean anything beyond self-interest? Where self-interest ends, love begins.

55. Mass stupidity on Facebook prompts me to quit posting there anything. X seems a better option. Let's see what results from the change. Or, are men universally fools? Is that the reason why there's such an online rush where angels fear to tread by breaking divine injunction? Culture at its nadir now.

56. If great men compromise, small fools will follow suit.

57. Truth is sacrificed at the scaffold of convenience. Thus, evil, though detected early, is allowed to proliferate till it has established its hegemony that is impossible to dislodge.

58. A corrosive culture must not be pandered to under any pretext. If allowed to proliferate, it will in a trice ruin civilisation that has been built over ages.

59. Do not fear the Day of Judgement. No such thing ever will be. Your karma is continually resolving unto your eventual freedom. No heaven or hell can bind you. You are the Lord of all you manifest. But be moral. Hurt not others, for that is the greatest sin. 

60. Islam is all assertion, no proof.

61. The mind cannot but assign partners to God, for the mind by its very nature partitions forms and ideas, and this carries on to its conception of God as well. Monotheism is merely a statement, no more. The monotheist is in practice a polytheist as there is no escape from it in the mental plane of plurality. Where the mind dissolves in samadhi (transcendence of space-time), there the Void or the Whole reveals its figurative face. The Void or the Whole is not One but is the nullity which is the resolution of multitudinous phenomena, the positives and the negatives annihilating each other to reveal the Void or the Whole. 🕉

62. Do you know it is necessary to honour a teacher, far more, revere a Guru without looking to pecuniary considerations? Alas, India has forgotten this ancient lesson and sunk to abysmal depths of ignorance!

63. It is easy to say, ''I revere someone as God,'' difficult to actualise it in one's daily deeds and interaction.

64. Free am I save in real bonds of love and light and of a life beyond that immerses itself in earthy earth while transcending the bounds of heaven.

65. How grim is the demographic situation in Assam?

66. Ultimately demography determines destiny, for who can resist the collective might of toxicity, reinforced ritually by what passes as prayer?

67. Southern India was less impaired by Islamic conquest which is why it as yet leads the rest of India in culture, science and the arts.

68. All religions ought to heartily accept critical scrutiny. If any religion refuses, it will be open admission of its falsity.

69. যারা অর্থকে জীবনের পরমার্থ জ্ঞান করেছে, তাদের জীবন বৃথা |

70. ছবির প্রতি অতি আনুগত্য জড়বুদ্ধির পরিচায়ক | চিন্তাশীল ব্যক্তিরা ভাবগ্রহণে অধিক যত্নবান হন, স্থূল রূপে তত নন | তথ্যের থেকে তাই তত্ত্ব বড় |

71. মহাশূণ্যকে কি প্রহার করা যায় ? সূক্ষ্ম---সে তো স্থূলের ঊর্ধ্বে, ধরাছোঁয়ার বাইরে | মারবে কি দিয়ে ?

72. যিনি ক্ষমাশীল, যিনি সর্বংসহ, তিনি মহাপুরুষ | তাঁর প্রেমের অন্ত নেই | এমনই এক অচিন পাখি শ্রীরামকৃষ্ণ যাঁর ইয়ত্তা করা যায় না |

73. Demographic change is once more exposing the inherent weakness of democracy as people hell-bent on annihilating democracy are doing so by using democratic privileges to the hilt. Europe is being rapidly Islamised as immigration is upsetting the demographic balance. Game up?

74. Man labours but for love, love which is the unifying seed of wisdom.

75. যখন মানুষ সুন্দরকে সুন্দরের জন্যই ভালবাসে, স্থূল স্বার্থের জন্য নয়, তখনই তাকে ভক্তি বলে |

76. Is the 'democratic' left democratic and the 'fascist' right fascist? Or, is it a leftist narrative of convenience till power be seized?

77. One day I will melt into thin air.

78. Few, alas, few recognise genius in time, although all in due course reap the benefits of it.

79. 

2 + 2 = 4

Can you reform this truth?

The same goes with Islam, the 'perfect' faith on earth. Being perfect, it cannot be reformed.

80. দেবদেবীর পূজা খুব হল কিন্তু মানুষকে প্রতিনিয়ত করা হল অপমান | তবে পণ্ড হল পূজা, বৃথা সর্ব আড়ম্বর |

81. The polluted mind cannot love with gay abandon. The mind freed of earthly dross becomes the instrument fit to feel love.

82. অক্ষর ব্রহ্ম কি নামেই ব্রহ্ম ? কদাপি নয় | সব শব্দে আবৃত, মায়ার আবরণ | তথ্যে তত্ত্ব ঢাকা | মূল সত্য তো শব্দাতীত |

83. একটি ধর্ম মানার মত ধর্ম--তার নাম প্রেম |

84. 

The light of love is the light of day. 

From atom to cosmos is its sway.

85. 

The compassionate one who descended to earth to raise us to the highest heaven of freedom and light. My prostration on this blessed day at the lotus feet of the divine one. Bless erring humanity, Gurudev, and lead us onto the royal road that heads straight to the room there as yet awaits the peerless Paramahamsa to receive us with open arms. Shubha Gurupurnima to all!

86. I have been a useless Guru if I have not been able to help root out the egotistic impulse from the hearts and minds of my disciples.

87. তমোগুণের আধিক্য সমাজে, নিশ্চেতনের প্রাবল্য | গুরু কি করবেন ?

88. The first requisite for spiritual living is discipline of time. A casual attitude to time-keeping violates the spiritual norm.

89. Worldliness is killing spirituality. Ritual observances are fine but they lack solidity in the face of this hankering after desires.

90. 

আমি বড় নই, আমি ছোট নই, আমি সকলের সমান | এর নাম সাম্যবোধ | এটি অন্তরঙ্গ | আর এক আছে বহিরঙ্গ---সাম্যবাদ | কিন্তু বোধ ব্যতীত কি বাদ দাঁড়ায় ? দাঁড়ায় না | তাই এত হত্যা, এত হিংসা সাম্যবাদের নামে |

আলোকচিত্র : বীরেন্দ্রনাথ চট্যোপাধ্যায় যিনি কমিউনিস্ট ছিলেন ও কমিউনিস্টদের হাতেই ১৯৩৭ সালে সোভিয়েত রাশিয়ায় হত হন |

91. সব সমস্যা জগতে | সব সমাধান ঠাকুরে |

92. Europe is getting sadly Islamised. There will be a great decline in European culture in consequence. This is the bitter truth.

93. 

Life's a thorn.

Blessed be the morn.

94. Society is another name for mutual help. Where hindrance occurs, barbarism reigns. We have to combat such an emerging barbaric situation across the world as cultural clashes take place in an evolving global order, seeds sown in medieval times, now gaining a 'fresher' fruition along festering lines. Out of this will emerge the integrated global order. Or, will it?

95. I am who I am. 

96. Kāleshvari destroys only to renew.

97. There is a great churn going on in the world. A modern society is evolving out of medieval ashes.

98. If the Almighty God is the creator of the universe but He is Himself uncreated, then it may logically follow that the universe itself is uncreated and needs no Creator to bring it into existence. 'Anādi srishty, ananta srishty' (Beginningless creation, endless creation). Here the Sanatan Dharma uses the term 'manifestation' instead of 'creation'. Carl Sagan has beautifully explained this idea in the following most thought-provoking and unconventional video presentation by a scientist, here an astrophysicist.

https://youtu.be/Ugyrzr5Ds8o?si=wJNlKLixJfq_xUkF

99. Evil doctrine breeds evil-doers.

100. Muslims should read the Qur'an themselves and rationalise without allowing clerical intervention to inhibit judgement.

BARBARISM AND HERITAGE

BARBARISM AND HERITAGE

Some of the best literature were destroyed by barbarians in both civilised garb and in tribal civilisational pretension. Alexander of Macedonia, pupil if Plato destroyed the ancient Imperial Library of Persepolis, wiping out the grand literary heritage of ancient Persia with its sophisticated religion founded by Zarathrustra. Later the Arab hordes invaded Persia and in their mad zealotry of Islam destroyed the remnants of the ancient Persian culture that had been saved by the Parthuans and the Sasanians. What survives of Zoroastrianism owes itself to rock inscriptions and oral transmission through the generational link. This aspect of political, ideological and theological fanaticism Swami Vivekananda spoke of in his inaugural address at the Chicago Parliament of Religions on 11 September, 1893. Much of civilisation has been destroyed. What remains we must assiduously preserve and protect. Peace is the primary necessity for it, not blind proselytism that can destroy the Bamiyan Buddhas without turning a hair, burn down Nalanda out of massive religious ignorance and bigotry, and attempt the wiping out if an entire race by way of the barbaric Final Solution. 🕉 Shanti! Shanti! Shanti!

Written by Sugata Bose

Photo: top to bottom---entry of Alexander into Babylon; thd ruins of Persepolis; Alexander cutting the Gordian Knot; Alexander being tutored by Aristotle.