Aldous Huxley: "The Perennial Philosophy" THIS latest work of Aldous Huxley is a collection of sayings of sages and saints and philosophers from all over the world and of all times. The sayings are arranged under several heads such as "That art Thou", "The Nature of the Ground", "Divine Incarnation", "Self-Knowledge", "Silence", "Faith" etc., which clearly give an idea of the contents and also of the "Neo-Brahmin's" own personal preoccupation. There is also a running commentary, rather a note on each saying, meant to elucidate and explain, naturally from the compiler's standpoint, what is obviously addressed to the initiate. A similar compilation was p

Nicholas Berdyaev : God Made Human NICHOLAS Berdyaev is an ardent worker, as a Russian is naturally expected to be, in the cause of the spiritual rehabilitation of mankind. He is a Christian, a neo-Christian: some of his conclusions are old-world truths and bear repetition and insistence; others are of a more limited, conditional and even doubtful nature. His conception of the value of human person, the dignity and the high reality he gives to it, can never be too welcome in a world where the individual seems to have gone the way of vanished empires and kings and princes. But even more important and interesting is the view he underlines that the true person is a spiritual being, tha

Upanishadic Symbolism A certain rationalistic critic divides the Upanishadic symbols into three categories – those that are rational and can be easily understood by the mind; those that are not understood by the mind and yet do not go against reason, having nothing inherently irrational in them and may be simply called non-rational; those that seem to be quite irrational, for they go frankly against all canons of logic and common sense. As an example of the last, the irrational type, the critic cites a story from the Chhn�dogya, which may be rendered thus: There was an aspirant, a student who was seeking after knowledge. One day there appeared to him a white dog. Soo

Towards the Future THE Buddhists consider being as a stream of consciousness, a ceaseless flow of sensations. An individual formation, a creature, a human person has no permanent self-identity. It is like the Heraclitean river where one does not bathe twice in the same water. Besides, .what is more interesting, it is not an uninterrupted continuous flow with no gap or hiatus, but a movement of disconnected units. It is an unending series of disparate moments of consciousness. The sense of continuity is a make-believe, an illusion. We know today, thanks to modern science, of the mystery of particles. The ultimate constituents of the material world consist of particles (or

The World is One WE say not only that India is one and indivisible (and for that matter, Bengal too is one and indivisible, since we have to repeat axiomatic truths that have fallen on evil days and on evil tongues) but that also the whole world is one and indivisible. They who seek to drive in a wedge anywhere, who are busy laying some kind of cordon sanitaire across countries and nations or cultures and civilisations, in the name of a bigoted ideology, are, to say the least, doing a disservice to humanity, indeed they are inviting a disaster and catastrophe to the world and equally to themselves. For that is an attempt to stem the high tide of Nature's swell towards a global uni

The Shakespearean Word THE Vedic rishi, says the poet, by his poetic power, brings out forms, beautiful forms in the high heaven. In this respect, Shakespeare is incomparable. He has through his words painted pictures, glowing living pictures of undying beauty. Indeed all poets do this, each in his own way. To create beautiful concrete images that stand vivid before the mind's eye is the natural genius of a poet. Here is a familiar picture, simple and effective, of a material vision: Cold blows the blast across the moor The sleet drives hissing in the wind, Yon toilsome mountain lies before, A dreary treeless waste behind. Or we may take a pictori

Robert Graves ROBERT GRAVES is not a major poet, and certainly not a great poet. He is a minor poet. But in spite of his minor rank he is a good poet: here he presents up a jewel, a beautiful poem¹ both in form and substance. He has indeed succeeded, as we shall see, in removing the veil, the mystic golden lid, partially at least and revealed to our mortal vision a glimpse of light and beauty and truth, made them delightfully sink into and seep through our aesthetic sense. Like the poet his idol also is of a lower rank or of a plebeian status. He keeps away from such high gods as Indra and Agni and Varuna and Mitra: great poets will sing their praises. He will take care of the less

Two Sonnets of Shakespeare ON the occasion of the 400th birth anniversary of Shakespeare, I present to you today two of the great Shakespearean sonnets. The sonnets, as you know, are all about love. They are however characterised by an incredible intensity and perhaps an equally incredible complexity, for the Shakespearean feeling is of that category. Shakespeare has treated love in a novel way; he has given a new figure to that common familiar sentiment. And incidentally he has given a new sense and bearing to Death. From a human carnal base there is a struggle, an effort here to rise into something extracorporeal; that is, something outside and independent of the body and imperso

Two Mystic Poems in Modern Bengali Here is the first one as I translate it: BARITONE¹ Let us all move together, one and all, Together into the cavern of the ribs, Raise there a song of discordant sounds – Red and blue and white, kin or alien. Listen, the groan plays on: Dreams as if possessed Swing, like bats on branches; Page - 212 Is now the time for the dance? Come, let us all move together, one and all. Let the streams meet in the body, one -and all, Yes, let the bones brighten up still more; Let us all go around the fire And scrape and eat of the very Liver, the Muse's self – Let us go, let us