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.