MY MASTER

SWAMIJI'S TIME: J.K. SIVAN

MY MASTER -1

Whenever there is a spiritual adjustment, it should come from the Orient. When the Orient wants to learn about machine-making they should learn from the Occident. When the Occident wants to learn about spirituality, about God, about the soul, about the meaning and the mystery of this universe, Occident has to learn from the Orient.

This is about one who has been the mover of such a wave in India. Before going into the life of that man, I will present before you the secret of India. If those whose eyes have been blinded by the glamor of material things, whose whole dedication of life is to eating, drinking and enjoying, whose whole ideal of possession is lands and gold, whose whole ideal of pleasure is in the sensations,*

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, if such as these go to India,

what do they see? Poverty, squalor, superstition, darkness, hideousness everywhere.

Why? Because in their minds enligihtenment means dress, education, social politeness.

When the Western nations have used every effort to improve their material position, India has done differently. There lives the only race in the world which, in the whole history of humanity, never went beyond their frontiers to conquer anyone, who never coveted that which belonged to anyone else, and whose only fault was that their lands were so fertile, and their wits so keen, that they accumulated wealth by the hard labor of their hands, and so tempted other nations to come and despoil them. They are contented 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 kill, which the fire cannot burn, nor the water wet, which heat cannot dry, nor death kill; and to them this true nature of man is as real as is any material object 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 when a man declares that this is a world of ideas, that it is all a dream, he casts off clothes and property to demonstrate that what he believes and thinks is true.

There it is that a man sits on the banks 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 bit of straw. Therein lies

their heroism, ready to face death as a brother, because they are convinced that there is no death for them. Therein He has the strength that has made them invincible through hundreds of years of oppression and foreign invasions, and foreign tyranny.

The nation lives to-day, and in that nation even in the days of the direst disaster, spiritual giants have never failed to arise.

...to continue....