Let Us Be Gods-Part V II

Add as a preferred source on Google

No wonder, therefore, that when this compromise between dogmatism and experimental knowledge was rising amongst the Western people, their creative power, their idealism disappeared from the earth. When the First World War came I was in college. The whole civilized world was horrified. And you know the watchword of that war was: 'The war to save democracy. This is the last war of mankind.' People felt shaken by that terrible war. They could not believe human beings could behave like that. Well, today it is nothing. The First World War is nothing. It was just only the beginning of a breakfast, what to speak of dinner. Then came the Second World War. We were all horrified by the strafing of populations by the German warplanes. Afterwards, when the Allies went to war, they outdid the Germans. It's a tale of greatest horror, the way the Allies bombed the German cities and other places.

What made these horrors possible? What made it possible for the Germans to establish concentration camps and perpetrate such horrors upon mankind? Germany is not a bad nation. It has produced some of the greatest systems of philosophy. There have been many mystics, great scientists and musicians amongst the Germans. What made such horrors possible? For some reason idealism had died. If you lose idealism, you are as a clod of earth. You have nothing left of what you call human, what to speak of divine.

Well, my understanding is that when the mind is divided, it loses power. If you make religion a matter of mere dogmatic surrender, you are a weakling. God cannot make you an instrument of His will. You are nothing. You haven't got anything within you. You have lost the power of thinking, you have lost the power of initiative. Modern Western man is not facing all the implications of knowledge. You are getting one knowledge from science. I won't mention philosophy because philosophy has destroyed itself more or less. I understand that philosophy is trying to revive itself again. But it hasn't got any individuality of its own anymore. It just follows in the footsteps of science. It has become a camp-follower; its adherents just playing with words and their significance, and in that way becoming great philosophers.

Well, so I shall speak of religion and science. Science is holding its own. People say this world is real in the face of what science has found out about the constitution of matter. Yet anybody who has read even newspaper articles, what to speak of books on science, knows that matter has become dematerialised. You cannot perceive what matter really is. You cannot. So much so, that it is now admitted that all these fine particles of matter defined by the atomic scientists cannot be seen by any means. They have to be inferred. They are so subtle and so immaterial that they have only inferential existence.

How is it then that this same original matter has clustered together and appears to us as having shape and size and form? How do you reconcile this contradiction? How do you explain why a formless thing appears to us as having form? The only thing you can say is that you are seeing wrongly. Your vision is incorrect, you see. And that is exactly what the old idealistic systems of philosophy maintained. They all maintained that, including Western idealism. Why is it called idealism? Because they say everything is idea. The so-called concrete universe is nothing but idea. That is why such systems of thought are called idealism.

About the author

Swami Ashokananda

Swami Ashokananda (1893-1969) was a much-venerated monk of the Ramakrishna Order. He was ordained into sannyasa by Swami Shivananda, and was the editor of Prabuddha Bharata, an English monthly of the Ramakrishna Order brought out from the Advaita Ashrama, Mayavati in Uttaranchal. He was an outstanding writer and speaker and the leader of the Vedanta Society of Northern California (San Fransisco) from 1931 until his passing away in 1969.