Ram Swarup Quotes

Some see in this change a triumph of Nehru over Gandhi. They, of course, do not mean Nehru as a person for Nehru was merely a symbol and he represented, in his own way, a typical response, the response of a defeated nation trying to restore its self-respect and self-confidence through self-repudiation and identification with the ways of the victors. The approach was not altogether unjustified at one time. It had its compulsions and it had also a survival value for us. But its increasing influence can mean no good to us.

In order to qualify for Government grants, Shanti Niketan, the famous institution found by the great Rabindra Nath Tagore, the poet of the soul's Godward aspiration and a great representative of undying India, had to give up its Upanishadic motto: satyam, Sivam, sundaram. These figures represent the deepest and loftiest that spirituality has conceived about man, his aspirations and destiny, his hopes and possibilities. But to the modern secular ears of the present-day rulers, these terms sound communal and antiquated.

The Gita tells us that there are four kinds of people who take to God-life. Of them ,the afflicted (arta) are the very first ones. The rest in their order are the seekers of knowledge, the seekerse of truth as it is, and the seekers of wisdom. (p.180)

These similarities were not accidental caused by a “Hindu environment”, as some post-Macauliffe Akali scholars try to explain. They arose because the Sikh Gurus were Hindus; they were brought up and nourished on Hindu scriptures; they were shaped by the Santtradition of their day which derived from the Upanishads and the Yogas and Sikh Gurus were Vaishnavas who remembered their God by the name of Hari or Rama or Govinda.Nanak alone used the word “Hari’ 630 times; in the Adi Granth, it occurs 8,300 times. Similarly, the word ‘Rama’ appears 2,500 times. Whether one understands these names in their more popular and Pauranik sense or in their more Upanishadic and Yogic meaning, in either case there is no escape from the traditional identity.

But the meaning of a word does not reside in this last, visible part.... Indeed, in this status, it is the cause of the world, jagannidanam, and is Brahman Itself.

India's education had two aims, both organically linked. One was to strengthen our body and mind, our nerves and vitality. If the Indian teaching on this subject is followed faithfully, it ensures full, vigorous, healthy and long life. Similarly, it ensures health and unimpaired senses and a mind with undiminished powers. According to the Hindu Psychology, a man's mind and senses are powers of the soul. Therefore, they should be strengthened, widened, deepened, purified. "May I see and hear clearly and abundantly", is the repeated prayer in the, several Upanishads. Another variant of this prayer is: "May our eyes see the good, our ears hear the good." To see and hear and desire better, purer, finer and deeper is the first aim of Indian education. This means strengthening character, controlling desires and impulses, increasing powers of concentration and will. Not only this opens up our hidden powers, but this is even the basis of any fruitful life at all. If our senses and mind run their unbridled course, uninformed by any higher light, they will lead to self-destruction. But purified in the light of the soul, they become a blessing.

If there is sufficient aspiration, invoking, and soliciting, there is no doubt that even Gods apparently lost could come back again. They are there all the time. For nothing that has any truth in it can be destroyed. It merely goes out of manifestation; but it could reappear under propitious circumstances. So could the old Gods come to life again in response to new summons.

Muslims had destroyed and looted the temples. The British did not do that but they took over a good deal of the temple lands as a 'revenue measure'; they did not use the word 'confiscation' and, in fact, converted some of these lands into 'monetary remuneration'. As a result, according to the Government of India's own comprehensive study beginning in 1962 and lasting for over ten years, the ten thousand five hundred and odd temples of Tamilnadu have a total annual income of only rupees twenty-seven million, from all their moveable and immoveable properties I Over 5,000 temples have only an annual income of Rs.500/- each! There is almost no money for the pujas, and the priests also hardly get anything. The only people who get proper remunerations are the Government functionaries employed to overseer the working of the temples. The 14,000 priests in Madhya Pradesh got five naya paisa per month at the time of Independence; now they get six naya paisa according to the Madhya Pradesh Pujaris Mahasangh!

E. Hermann says that the Neo-Platonic doctrine of via negativa "from Dionysius onwards took an Asiatic rather than a Greek from". She does not explain what its Greek form was and how it differed from its "Asiatic" (Indian) form.

I must say that the Pagan movement will have a lot to do. The opposing forces are very powerful, and they have a long tradition of using force and repression. But I believe that a new spirit is rising and once the Pagans begin to speak, they are going to be heard.

We are also told that the Gurus repudiated pilgrimage to holy places. Is it true? Though as a “knower”, Nanak was above pilgrimage, yet he went on an extended pilgrimage, as his Udasis tell us, to Hardwar, Prayag, Varanasi, Gorkhmat (near Pilibhit), Ayodhya, Jagannatha Puri, Rameshwaram, Ujjain, Kurukshetra, Hinglaj, Gorakh-Hatri (a great Natha center near modern Peshawar). At Mathura, he visited Keshaav Rao Temple and bathed in the Yamuna.

History moves in strange ways.

Fundamentalism is not accidental but essential to Islam. It is inherent in those religious ideologies which are built on a narrow spiritual vision, have a limited psychic base, and which emphasise dogma and personalities, other than experience and impersonal truth. Islam's fundamentalism is rooted in its theology, its founder and his practices. It means that it will also have to be fought there. But this point is ill understood and, therefore, the struggle is at the best of times phoney war.

The ancient educational thinking also emphasized the importance of a certain atmosphere in which alone any worthwhile education is possible. First, there must be a complete rapport between the teacher and the taught. "May we study together. May God protect us both. May we never spite each other", that is the prayer of the teacher and the pupil with which several Upanishads open. There must be an atmosphere of serious inquiry, of hankering for truth for its own sake, of affection, deference, service and respect. Hindus believed that without this environment, no higher education is possible.

Perhaps a creed is best known by what it does when it holds political sway.