The Secret Of India... I will try to present before you the secret of India, what India means. If those whose eyes have been blinded by the glamour of material things, whose whole dedication of life is to eating and drinking and enjoying, whose ideal of possession is lands and gold, whose ideal of pleasure is that of the senses, whose god is money, and whose goal is a life of ease and comfort in this world and death after that whose minds never look forward, and who rarely think of anything higher than the sense objects in the midst of which they live;- such as these go to India , what do they see? Poverty, squalor, superstition, darkness, hideousness everywhere. Why? Because in their minds enlightenment means dress, education, social politeness. Whereas, occidental nations have used every effort to improve their material position, India has done differently. There live the only men in the world, who, in the whole history of humanity, never went beyond their frontiers to conquer anyone, who never coveted that which that which belonged to anyone else, whose only fault was that their lands were so fertile, and they accumulated wealth by the hard labor of their hands, and so tempted other nations to come and despoil them. They are content to be despoiled, and to be called barbarians, and in return, they want to send to this world visions of the supreme, to lay bare for the world the secrets of human nature, to rend the veil that conceals the real man, because they know the dream, because they know that behind this materialism lives the real divine nature of man which no sin can tarnish, no crime can spoil, no lust can taint; which fire cannot burn, nor water wet, which heat cannot dry, nor death kill; and to them this true nature of man is as real as is any material to the senses of an occidental. Just as you are brave to jump at the mouth of a cannon with a hurrah; just as you are brave in the name of patriotism, to stand up and give up your lives for your country, so are they brave in the name of god.There it is that a man sits on the bank of a river, when he has known that life is eternal, and wants to give up his body just as nothing, just as you can give up a straw. Therein lies their heroism that they are ready to face death as a brother because they are convinced that there is no death for them. Therein lies the strength that has made them invincible through hundreds of years of oppression and foreign invasion and tyranny. The nation lives today, and in that nation, even in the days of the direst disaster, spiritual giants have never failed to arise. Asia produces giants in spirituality, just as the occident produces giant in politics, giants in science. In the beginning of the present century, when western influence began to pour into India, when western conquerors, sword in hand, came to demonstrate to the children of the sages that they were mere barbarians, a race of dreamers, that their religion was but mythology, and god and soul and everything they had been struggling for, were mere words without meaning, that the thousands of years of struggle, the thousands of years of endless renunciation, had all been in vain, the question began to be agitated among young men at the universities, whether the whole national existence up to then had been a failure, whether they must begin a new on the occidental plan, tear up their old books, burn their philosophies, drive away their preachers, and break down their temples. Did not the occidental conqueror, the man who demonstrated his religion with sword and gun, say that all the old ways were mere superstition and idolatry? “As I have said, the idea of reform came to India when it seemed as if the wave of materialism that had invaded her shores would sweep away the teachings of the sages. But the nation had borne the shocks of the thousand such waves of change. This one was mild in comparison. Wave after wave had flooded the land, breaking and crushing everything for hundreds of years; and “victory unto Allah” had rent the skies of India, but these floods subsided, leaving the national ideals unchanged. The Indian nation cannot be killed. Deathless it stands, and it will stand, so long as that spirit shall remain as the background, so long as her people do not give up their spirituality. Beggars they may remain, poor and poverty-stricken; dirt and squalor may surround them perhaps throughout all the time, but let them not give up their god, let them not forget that they are the children of the sages. Just as in the west, even the man in the street wants to trace his descent from some robber-baron of the middle ages, so in India, even an emperor on the throne wants to trace his descent from some beggar sage in the forest, from a man who wore the bark of a tree, lived upon the fruits of the forest and communed with God. That is the type of descent we want, and so long as holiness is thus supremely venerated, India cannot die. __________________________Swami Vivekananda
Posted on: Thu, 21 Nov 2013 06:09:14 +0000
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