A Wider Response from the Divine
By Karmayogi
Man, with his developed faculties
of Mind, is hopelessly groping in spite of his spectacular achievements. This
is very well seen if you review the efforts of great Minds a hundred or two
hundred years ago. Man was not less intelligent than today. But it is now clear
that he was barking up the wrong tree.
When a steam engine was fitted to a sailing ship and was brought for
demonstration, the British Admiralty laughed at the idea and refused to look at
it. It took 1600 years for man to realise that reading the Bible in English was
as sacred as reading it in Latin. Of course, the original Bible was written not
in Latin but in Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic. The truth is knowledge is above and
is descending in cascades of Light, while man is searching for it in Matter and
life. Naturally all kinds of superstitions arise and soon become sacred.
Concentration means dwelling on itself. What disturbs concentration is lack of
mental discipline which is unable to control running thoughts. Imagine a house
of five children running helter-skelter while serious business is discussed. That
house has no discipline and can achieve nothing. As the concentration
increases, mind becomes silent and understands without thinking. Scientists who
have spent a lifetime and succeeded in finally discovering it, know the
phenomenon of SILENCE at the time of revelation. But they disregard it. Had
they known the significance of SILENCE and cultivated it from the beginning,
the years of cerebral labour would have been abridged into a hundred hours of
silent contemplation.
All men of genius know the value of Silence, vision, intuition and revelation,
but in the modern context, they are shy of speaking their experience. Srinivasa
Ramanujam never thought, but simply went into silence. Shakespeare never wrote
by exercising his mental faculty. His was inspired writing. On reading The Life
Divine, Mother said She saw the intuition pouring down into the writing.
These are not ideas that can be placed before Western scientists. It is more
difficult to propose it to an Indian scientist whose Mind is Westernised,
meaning intellectually organised. I feel like parodying Marx, as Russell once
said of Indian mantras and African drum beating, ‘‘Intellectuals of
the world unite, you have noting to lose but your blind groping.''
Silence, vision, insight, intuition, subtlety, etc. are there in the Indian
soil, but they are not accessible simply to be picked up. Once they were all
well developed, but now they lie dormant in potential. One has to become
receptive, value them and cultivate them, until they are acquired as a settled
faculty.