P

EDITORIAL
Call of the Eternal
Life in society naturally entails being assailed
by innumerable non-spiritual sensations
and knowledge. The spiritual
longing latent in everyone slowly becomes
smothered with layers upon layers of worldly
impressions, and one turns sceptical about the
existence of God. This fact has remained unchanged
in every age, but the process of being
educated and living in today’s society has an
added dimension: making humans more prone
to psychological alienation. Just as before, there
comes a time in everyone’s life when the delusive
layers are torn away. It is also true, however,
that as the scum covering water when pushed
aside eventually returns to the same place, so all
these layers of delusion return and settle to make
us again our familiar selves. This is the inescapable
inner story of every human being, which has
been repeated, to a greater or lesser degree, down
the ages, and will be so in the future as well. This
rending of the delusive layers is interpreted variously
in different religions as divine grace or the
effect of good karma, but there is unanimity that
it is a call to a higher life. Another area in which
religions are in agreement is that this call comes
when suffering is at its zen ith and life hurls down
to its nadir.
Life is turbulent; no life however comfortable
is smooth sailing, nor will ever be: this is
another erroneous belief one needs to reject.
In this turbulence there are periodic upheavals
that change the course of one’s life, either
for better or worse. The danger lies in mistaking
these inevitable upheavals for a divine call.
PB July 2011
Even when the call is genuine there are some
who make a feeble search for answers, to finally
find their desultory attempts thwarted.
Others find their beastly urges standing as an
obstruction before the opening visions, only
to be violently thrown back to the familiar lair.
Swami Vivekananda, in his characteristically
powerful way, describes it: ‘To us all come such
thoughts in moments of great depression; but
such are the temptations surrounding us, that
the next moment we forget. For a moment it
seemed that the doors of the heavens were going
to be opened, for the moment it seemed as if
we were going to plunge into the light effulgent;
but the animal man again shakes off all
these angelic visions. Down we go, animal man
once more, eating and drinking and dying, and
dying and drinking and eating again and again.’
One has to pass the gauntlet, and very few are
willing to undertake the pains and struggles it
involves. Swamiji continues: ‘But there are exceptional
minds which are not turned away so
easily, which once attracted can never be turned
back, whatever may be the temptation in the
way, which want to see the Truth, knowing that
life must go. They say, let it go in a noble conquest,
and what conquest is nobler than the
conquest of the lower man, than this solution of
the problem of life and death, of good and evil?’
Sri Ramakrishna also says: ‘All men are by no
means on the same level. It is said that there are
four classes of men: the bound, the struggling,
the liberated, and the ever-free.’ Souls struggling
for freedom are the ‘exceptional minds’; they
473