Earlier one of the greatest of reformers of the last hundred and fifty years had adopted the exact opposite course, and thereby accomplished both— he had lifted the lives of millions, and at the same time he had transformed and raised our society. That reformer was from a caste which was not just untouchable but unapproachable— the reformer of course was Narayan Guru, who lived from 1854 to 1928. He did not heckle and spit at our tradition as an outsider. He never made truck with the conquerors and subjugators of India. He attained the highest states of spiritual awareness by immersing himself in the teachings of the Upanishads. He attained those states by practising the austerities and following the methods which our great seers had uncovered. As he attained these states, his entire life became a refutation of the claims of the orthodox as to their superiority, his beatific state became a refutation of the assertions of the orthodox that the esoteric lore was closed to the lower castes. And as he had attained those states, he received universal homage.

If the Upanishads help us to rise above the glamour of the fleshly life, it is because their authors, pure of soul ever striving towards the divine, reveal to us their pictures of the splendours of the unseen. The Upanishads are respected not because they are a part of Sruti or revealed literature and so hold a reserved position, but because they have inspired generations of Indians with vision and strength by their inexhaustible significance and spiritual power. Indian thought has constantly turned to these scriptures for fresh illumination and spiritual recovery or recommencement, and not in vain. The fire still burns bright on their altars. Their light is for the seeing eye and their message is for the seeker after truth.

By way of a personal compromise, he became an adept of the "noble and pure" wisdom of the Parsees as a means of escaping from the "narrow circle of Hebraic-Rabbinic thought and of reaching the depth and amplitude of Sanskrit".

Amongst the sacred books of the past, the Upanishads can be called the truth the Himalayas of the soul. Their passionate wanderings of discovery to find that sun of the spirit in us, from whom we have the light of our consciousness and the fire of our life; the greatness of their questions, and the sublime simplicity of their answers; their radiance of joy...

The asceticism of the medieval saints and of the yogis of India, the Hellenistic mystery initiations, the ancient philosophies of the East and of the West, are techniques for the shifting of the emphasis of individual consciousness away from the garments. The preliminary meditations of the aspirant detach his mind and sentiments from the accidents of life and drive him to the core. “I am not that, not that,” he meditates: “not my mother or son who has just died; my body, which is ill or aging; my arm, my eye, my head; not the summation of all these things. I am not my feeling; not my mind; not my power of intuition.” By such meditations he is driven to his own profundity and breaks through, at last, to unfathomable realizations. No man can return from such exercises and take very seriously himself as Mr. So-an-so of Such-and-such a township, U.S.A. — Society and duties drop away. Mr. So-and-so, having discovered himself big with man, becomes indrawn and aloof. This is the stage of Narcissus looking into the pool, of the Buddha sitting contemplative under the tree, but it is not the ultimate goal; it is a requisite step, but not the end. The aim is not to see, but to realize that one is, that essence; then one is free to wander as that essence in the world. Furthermore: the world too is of that essence. The essence of oneself and the essence of the world: these two are one. Hence separateness, withdrawal, is no longer necessary. Wherever the hero may wander, whatever he may do, he is ever in the presence of his own essence — for he has the perfected eye to see. There is no separateness. Thus, just as the way of social participation may lead in the end to a realization of the All in the individual, so that of exile brings the hero to the Self in all.

The superior man honors his virtuous nature, and maintains constant inquiry and study, seeking to carry it out to its breadth and greatness, so as to omit none of the more exquisite and minute points which it embraces, and to raise it to its greatest height and brilliancy, so as to pursue the course of the Mean. He cherishes his old knowledge, and is continually acquiring new. He exerts an honest, generous earnestness, in the esteem and practice of all propriety. Thus, when occupying a high situation he is not proud, and in a low situation he is not insubordinate. When the kingdom is well governed, he is sure by his words to rise; and when it is ill governed, he is sure by his silence to command forbearance to himself.

In the long history of man's endeavor to grasp the fundamental truths of being, the metaphysical treatises known as the Upanishads hold an honored place ... they are replete with sublime conceptions and with intuitions of universal Truth ... The Upanishads undoubtedly have great historical and comparative value, but they are also of great present-day importance. It is evident that the monism of the Upanishads has exerted and will continue to exert an influence on the monism of the West; for it contains certain elements, which penetrate deeply into the truths which every philosopher must reach in a thoroughly grounded explanation of experience."

the Upanishads are "sublime emanations of the Human mind".

When someone reaches insights into creation on the path of his ascetic life,

Talk about a "higher consciousness" superior to reason naturally comforts persons who find mental exertion painful, and notions about transcendental powers naturally console persons who do not have the courage or stamina to confront the realities of a universe that was not made for man. These ideas, in the form in which they are peddled by Uspenski and Orage, are derived from the early Hindu mystics of the Vedas and Upanishads. They did reach a state of exalted consciousness -- by the use of what they called soma, which, as R. G. Weston has shown, was simply the Amanita muscaria, a mushroom that has been for millennia a prime source of religiosity.

In the case of a person who has attained to this converse of contemplation in his ascetic way of life,

In the state of elevation, the mystic may be able to read heavenly books in languages and characters previously unknown to him and learn the heavenly names of things and beings in including his own eternal name which is different from his wordly name.

It can be seriously contented if he possessed wisdom of the highest order. If he had, he would not have sought to weaken Islam and the Muslim community of the Subcontinent. At least he would have refrained from interfering with the established principals of Islam. Even Vincent Smith, who narrates Akbar’s aberrations from Islam with relish, concludes that ‘the whole scheme was the outcome of ridiculous vanity, a monstrous growth of unrestrained autocracy...’ How can it then be asserted that Akbar possessed wisdom in the highest degree?

The greater achievement of this brilliant man was to retain unto the last a progressive social vision and empathy with millions of India's poor and deprived citizens. He did not flinch from doing what he considered right — whether it was joining a queue of citizens to cast his vote (before him, heads of state did not vote) or creatively interpreting and exercising presidential discretion or speaking his mind on issues that mattered.