The Indian Spirit and the World's Future

Miracle

THE Indian mind and the European have many points in common, but there is also a marked difference. The difference can perhaps be best brought to light by referring to the word "miracle". The non-Indian world is always prone to be startled by supernatural events: the mouth gapes, the eyes bulge out and the hands shoot up. The unexpected has happened! The impossible has taken place! The Unknown has drawn aside its veil! In short, a miracle has occurred. The true Indian world has no such surprises. Magic and mystery are part and parcel of its life; the supernatural is not a sudden incursion from "nowhere" but just a visit from the other parts of the same building which we ourselves occupy. The mouth does not gape; it whispers greetings. The eyes do not bulge out; they give a look of recognition. The hands do not shoot up; they join in a quiet namaskar. In short, no miracle has occurred but just what one would expect since everything is Brahman. "That old man with a stick; that green bird hopping about - these too are Brahman," says the Upanishad. What is there to be surprised at if the old man suddenly threw away his stick and strode like a youngster or the green bird brought a message from Vishnu?

The presence of the so-called supernatural became so familiar, so immediate, so basic indeed that at a certain period of India's history the natural began to seem a miracle, an inexplicable wonder. How did the eternal One become the Many of Time? This question worried the Indian mind. And the answer was: Maya. The unexpected and the impossible are the teeming universe. Matter and not Spirit is the startling fact. This world of ours is a sudden incursion from "nowhere", its myriad maze a puzzling imposition on the smooth simplicity of the Beyond. An undivine miracle was seen instead of a divine one.

This extreme is a perversion, but it serves to emphasise India's sense of the naturalness of the Eternal. Not even in the most religious eras, the most religious countries, of Europe has that naturalness been felt so universally. Individuals have known

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it. "When the sun rises, do you not see a round disk of fire, something like a guinea?" said a practical-minded friend to Blake. And the poet replied; "Oh no, I see an immeasurable company of the heavenly host crying, 'Holy, Holy, Holy' to the Lord God Almighty." Here there is no line between Nature and Super-nature. St. Francis, calling the sun his brother and the moon his sister and all things one family of God, catches a spark of the Gita's Vasudeva sarvam, "All is the Divine." Many sentences of the German mystic Eckhart and some discourses of Lady Julian of Norwich are strangely reminiscent of the talks between master and disciple in the Upanishads. Individuals in Europe, therefore, can be said to have the Indian spirit. But the general mind tends to be different. Europe has much to give us; and there are plenty of indispensable values that have got submerged in India and have to return via the West. What it lacks on the whole is what is most native to us - the sense of continuity between man and God, between the world and the All-Wonderful.

This sense is born of India's intense pantheism. Not that India is pantheistic and nothing else. Indeed it is impossible to stop with the pantheistic vision. For, in that vision everything is equally the substance of God: all the distinctions we draw between true and false, high and low, beautiful and ugly, happy and miserable, vanish and nothing is left save a shining tissue of the infinite Spirit. Glorious is such a vision, but even to reach it one has to pick and choose among the dualities, one has to reject lust and greed and attachment, one has to practise purity and peace. In other words, to attain the essentially distinctionless Divine, one has to distinguish between values. The dividing line between the spiritual and the unspiritual brings in a God who at the same time is the universe and other than the universe, a transcendental Being who validates distinctions, supports the evolutionary movement and takes sides in the perilous drama of life without essentially ceasing to be both sides! Yes, without ceasing to be pantheos: this is important, this is what the non-Indian mind often forgets and what the Indian always remembers. By its remembrance, the Indian mind gets steeped in God's presence and not only feels most vividly the possibility of getting divinised but entertains the largest charity towards even that which it rejects and endeavours to outgrow.

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