Upgrading THE tempo is enhanced. Even so moves Life. The other way is towards Death. The infra-red may be the base, the starting; but the run is towards the ultra-violet. As you advance, you must quicken your steps. The bird flies quicker than the worm can crawl. The daring pilot would shoot rocket-like past the sound-barrier. The body walks slow. The pulse beats swifter: Instincts and desires rush faster still. Thought out-speeds them all. But consciousness ranges supreme. In its superlative sweep it embraces the two eternities, so it seems to stand still. Tadejati tannaijati, the Upanishad says. That is the law of motion. The higher one rises,

Rishi Dirghatama MANY of the Upanishadic rishis are familiar to you. Vedic rishis are perhaps not so. Today I will speak of one of the Vedic rishis. Some names of great Vedic rishis must have reached your ears-Vashishtha, Vishwamitra, Atri, Parasara, Kanwa (I do not know if it is the same Kanwa of whom Kalidasa speaks in his Shakuntala), Madhuchchanda. All of them are seers of mantra, hearers of mantra, creators of mantra; all of them occupy a large place in the Veda. Each one of them has his speciality, each one delivers a mantra that is in its tone, temper and style his own although the subject matter, the substance, the fundamental realisation is everywhere the same. For

Humanism and Humanism A GOOD many European scholars and philosophers have found Indian spirituality and Indian culture, at bottom, lacking in what is called "humanism."¹ So our scholars and philosophers on their side have been at pains to rebut the charge and demonstrate the humanistic element in our tradition. It may be asked however, if such a vindication is at all necessary, or if it is proper to apply a European standard of excellence to things Indian. India may have other measures, other terms of valua­tion. Even if it is proved that humanism as defined and under­stood in the West is an unknown thing in India, yet that need not necessarily be taken as a sign o

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