<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN">
<HTML>
<HEAD>
	<META HTTP-EQUIV="CONTENT-TYPE" CONTENT="text/html; charset=utf-8">
	<TITLE></TITLE>
	<META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="Namo WebEditor v4.0">
	<META NAME="CREATED" CONTENT="20040107;18002500">
	<META NAME="CHANGED" CONTENT="20040216;22194500">
	<STYLE>
	<!--
		@page { size: 21.59cm 27.94cm; margin-left: 1.06cm; margin-right: 2.54cm; margin-top: 2.54cm; margin-bottom: 2.54cm }
		P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm }
	-->
	</STYLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY LANG="en-US">
<div align="center">
	<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%">
		<tr>
			<td>
<p align="center" style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><b>
<font size="4">The Basis of Unity</font></b></p>
			<p align="center" style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">&nbsp;</p>
<P ALIGN=CENTER STYLE="font-style:normal; text-indent:0.34cm; page-break-after:avoid; font-weight: medium; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<FONT SIZE=3><b>I</b></FONT></P>
			<P ALIGN=CENTER STYLE="font-style:normal; text-indent:0.34cm; page-break-after:avoid; font-weight: medium; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
&nbsp;</P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.34cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<FONT SIZE=3>A MODERN society or people cannot have religion, that is
to say, credal religion, as the basis of its organized collective
life. I t was mediaeval society and people that were organized on
that line. Indeed mediaevalism means nothing more – and nothing
less – than that. But whatever the need and justification in the
past, the principle is an anachronism under modern conditions. It was
needed, perhaps, to keep alive a truth which goes into the very roots
of human life and its deepest aspira&shy;tion; and it was needed also
for a dynamic application of that truth on a larger scale and in
smaller details, on the mass of mankind and in its day to day life.
That was the aim of the Church Militant and the Khilafat; that was
the spirit, although in a more Sattwic way, behind the Buddhistic
evan&shy;gelism or even Hindu colonization.</FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.34cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<FONT SIZE=3>The truth behind a credal religion is the aspiration
towards the realization of the Divine, some ultimate reality that
gives a permanent meaning and value to the human life, to the
existence lodged in this 'sphere of sorrow' here below. Credal
paraphernalia were necessary to express or buttress this core of
spiritual truth when mankind, in the mass, had not attained a certain
level of enlightenment in the mind and a certain degree of
development in its life-relations. The modern age is modern precisely
because it had attained to a necessary extent this mental
enlightenment and this life development. So the scheme or scaffolding
that was required in the past is no longer unavoidable and can have
either no reality at all or only a modified utility.</FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.34cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<FONT SIZE=3>A modern people is a composite entity, especially with</FONT><BR>
			</P>
<P ALIGN=CENTER STYLE="border-bottom:1px solid black; padding-top:0cm; padding-right:0cm; padding-bottom:0.07cm; padding-left:0cm; border-top-style:none; border-right-style:none; border-left-style:none; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<FONT SIZE=3>Page – 51</FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><FONT SIZE=3>regard
to its religious affiliation. Not religion, but culture is the basis
of modern collective life, national or social. Culture includes in
its grain that fineness of temperament which appreciates all truths
behind all forms, even when there is a personal allegiance to one
particular form.</FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.34cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<FONT SIZE=3>In India, it is well known, the diversity of
affiliations is colossal, <I>sui generis. </I>Two major affiliations
have today almost cut the country into two; and desperate remedies
are suggested which are worse than the malady itself, as they may
kill the patient outright. If it is so, it is, I repeat, the
mediaeval spirit that is at:, the bottom of the trouble.</FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.34cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<FONT SIZE=3>The rise of this spirit in modern times and conditions
is a phenomenon that has to be explained and faced: it is a ghost
that has come out of the' past and has got to be laid and laid for
good. First of all, it is a reaction from modernism; it is a reaction
from the modernist denial of certain fundamental and eternal truths,
of God, soul, and immortality: it is a reaction from the modernist
affirmation of the mere economic man. And it is also a defensive
gesture of a particular complex of consciousness that has grown and
lives powerfully and now apprehends expurgation and elimination.</FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.34cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<FONT SIZE=3>In Europe such a contingency did not arise, because the
religious spirit, rampant in the days of Inquisitions and St.
Bartholomews, died away: it died, and (or, because) it was replaced
by a spirit that was felt as being equally, if not more, authentic
and, which for the moment, suffused the whole consciousness with a
large and high afflatus, commensurate with the amplitude of man's
aspiration. I refer, of course, to the spirit of the Renaissance. It
was a spirit profane and secular, no doubt, but on that level it
brought a catholicity of temper and a richness in varied interest –
a humanistic culture, as it is called – which constituted a living
and unifying ideal for Europe. That spirit culminated in the great
French Revolution which was the final <I><FONT FACE="Arial Narrow, sans-serif">coup
</FONT>de grace </I>to all that still remained of mediaevalism, even
in its outer structure, political and economical. </FONT>
</P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.34cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<FONT SIZE=3>In India the spirit of renascence came very late, late
almost by three centuries; and even then it could not flood the whole
of the continent in all its nooks and corners, psychological and
physical. There were any number of pockets (to use a current</FONT><BR>
			</P>
<P ALIGN=CENTER STYLE="border-bottom:1px solid black; padding-top:0cm; padding-right:0cm; padding-bottom:0.07cm; padding-left:0cm; border-top-style:none; border-right-style:none; border-left-style:none; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<FONT SIZE=3>Page – 52</FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><FONT SIZE=3>military
phrase) left behind which guarded the spirit of the past and offered
persistent and obdurate resistance. Perhaps, such a dispensation was
needed in India and inevitable also; inevitable, because the
religious spirit is closest to India's soul and is its most direct
expression and cannot be uprooted so easily; needed, because India's
and the world's future demands it and depends upon it.</FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.34cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<FONT SIZE=3>Only, the religious spirit has to be bathed and purified
and enlightened by the spirit of the renascence: that is to say, one
must learn and understand and realize that Spirit is the thing –
the one thing needful – </FONT><FONT SIZE=3 face="Times New Roman Baltic,serif"><I>Tamevaikam
jÄnatha</I></FONT><FONT SIZE=3><I><FONT FACE="Times New Roman Baltic, serif">; </FONT></I>'religions' are its names and forms, appliances
and decorations. Let us have by all means the religious spirit, the
fundamental experience that is the inmost truth of all religions,
that is the matter of our soul; but in our mind and life and body let
there be a luminous catholicity, let these organs and instruments be
trained to see and compare and appreciate the variety, the numberless
facets which the one Spirit naturally presents to the human
consciousness. </FONT><FONT SIZE=3 face="Times New Roman"><I>Ekam sat</I></FONT><FONT SIZE=3 face="Times New Roman,serif"><I>
viprÄh bahudhÄ vadanti.</I></FONT><FONT SIZE=3><I><FONT FACE="Times New Roman Baltic, serif"> </FONT></I>It is an ancient truth that man
discovered even in his earliest seekings; but it still awaits an
adequate expression and application in life.</FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=CENTER STYLE="text-indent:0.34cm; page-break-after:avoid; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<FONT SIZE=3><B>II</B></FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.34cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<BR>
<FONT SIZE=3>India's historical development is marked by a special
characteristic which is at once the expression of her inmost nature
and the setting of a problem which she has to solve for herself and
for the whole human race. I have spoken of the diversity and
divergence of affiliations in a modern social unit. But what
distinguishes India from all other peoples is that the diversity and
divergence have culminated here in contra&shy;dictoriness and mutual
exclusion.</FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.34cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<FONT SIZE=3>The first extremes that met in India and fought and
gradually coalesced to form a single cultural and social whole were,
as is well known, the Aryan and the non-Aryan. Indeed, the geologists
tell us, the land itself is divided into two parts structurally quite
different and distinct, the Deccan plateau and the Himalayan ranges
with the Indo-Gangetic plain: the</FONT><BR>
			</P>
<P ALIGN=CENTER STYLE="border-bottom:1px solid black; padding-top:0cm; padding-right:0cm; padding-bottom:0.07cm; padding-left:0cm; border-top-style:none; border-right-style:none; border-left-style:none; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<FONT SIZE=3>Page – 53</FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><FONT SIZE=3>former
is formed out of the most ancient and stable and, on the whole,
horizontally bedded rocks of the earth, while the latter is of
comparatively recent origin, formed out of a more flexible and weaker
belt (the Himalayan region consisting of a colossal flexing and
crumpling of strata). The disparity is so much that a certain group
of geologists hold that the Deccan plateau did not at all form part
of the Asiatic continent, but had drifted and dashed into it: in fact
the Himalayas are the result of this mighty impact. The usual
division of an Aryan and a Dravidian race may be due to a memory of
the clash of the two continents and their races.</FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.34cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<FONT SIZE=3>However, coming to historical times, we see wave after
wave of the most heterogeneous and disparate elements – Sakas and
Huns and Greeks, each bringing its quota of exotic material &shy;enter
into the oceanic Indian life and culture, lose their separate foreign
identity and become part and parcel of the common whole. Even so, –
a single unitary body was formed out of such varied and shifting
materials – not in the political, but in a socio-religious sense.
For a catholic religious spirit, not being solely doctrinal and
personal, admitted and embraced in its supple and wide texture almost
an infinite variety of approaches to the Divine, of forms and norms
of apprehending the Beyond. It has been called Hinduism: it is a vast
synthesis of multiple affiliations. It expresses the characteristic
genius of India and hence Hinduism and Indianism came to be looked
upon as synonymous terms. And the same could be defined also as Vedic
religion and culture, for its invariable basis – the bed-rock on
which it stood firm and erect – was the Vedas, the Knowledge seen
by the sages. But there had already-risen a voice of dissidence and
discord-that of Buddha, not so much, perhaps, of Buddha as of
Buddhism. The Buddhistic enlightenment and discipline did not admit
the supreme authority of the Vedas; it sought other bases of truth
and reality. It was a great denial; and it meant and worked for a
vital schism. The denial of the Vedas by itself, perhaps, would not
be serious, but it became so, as it was symptomatic of a deeper
divergence. Denying the Vedas, the Buddhistic spirit denied life. It
was quite a new thing in the. Indian consciousness and spiritual
discipline. And it left such a stamp there that even today it stands
as the dominant character of</FONT><BR>
			</P>
<P ALIGN=CENTER STYLE="border-bottom:1px solid black; padding-top:0cm; padding-right:0cm; padding-bottom:0.07cm; padding-left:0cm; border-top-style:none; border-right-style:none; border-left-style:none; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<FONT SIZE=3>Page – 54</FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><FONT SIZE=3>the
Indian outlook. However, India's synthetic genius rose to the
occasion and knew how to bridge the chasm, close up the fissure, and
present again a body whole and entire. Buddha became one of the
Avataras : the discipline of Nirvana and Maya was reserved as the
last duty to be performed at the end of life, as the culmination of a
full-length span of action and achievement; the way to Moksha lay
through Dharma and Artha and Kama, Sannyasa had to be built upon
Brahmacharya and Garhasthya. The integral ideal was epitomized by
Kalidasa in his famous lines about the character of the Raghus:</FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="margin-left:1.01cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<FONT SIZE=3>They devoted themselves to study in their boyhood, in
youth they pursued the objects of life; when old they took to
spiritual austerities, and in the end they died united with the
higher consciousness.</FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.34cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<FONT SIZE=3>Only this process of integration was not done in a day,
it took some centuries and had to pass through some unpleasant
intermediary stages.</FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.34cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<FONT SIZE=3>And still this was not the last – it could not be the
last – antithesis that had to be synthetized. The dialectical
movement led to a more serious and fiercer contradiction. The
Buddhistic schism was after all a division brought about from within:
it could be said that the two terms of the antinomy belonged to the
same genus and were commensurable. The idea or experience of Asat and
Maya was not unknown to the Upanishads, only it had not there the
exclusive stress which the later developments gave it. Hence quite a
different, an altogether foreign body was imported into what was or
had come to be a homogeneous entity, and in a considerable mass.
Unlike the previous irruptions that merged and were lost in the
general life and consciousness, Islam entered as a leaven that
maintained its integrity and revolutionized Indian life and culture
by infusing into its tone a Semitic accent. After the Islamic impact
India could not be what she was before – a change became inevitable
even in the major note. It<B> </B>was a psychological cataclysm
almost on a par with the geological one that formed her body; but the
spirit behind which created the body was working automatically,
inexorably towards the </FONT><BR>
</P>
<P ALIGN=CENTER STYLE="border-bottom:1px solid black; padding-top:0cm; padding-right:0cm; padding-bottom:0.07cm; padding-left:0cm; border-top-style:none; border-right-style:none; border-left-style:none; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<FONT SIZE=3>Page – 55</FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><FONT SIZE=3>greater
and more difficult synthesis demanded by the situa&shy;tion. Only the
thing is to be done now consciously, not through an unconscious
process of <I>laissez-faire </I>as on the inferior stages of
evolution in the past. And that is the true genesis of the present
conflict.</FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.34cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<FONT SIZE=3>History abounds in instances of racial and cultural
im&shy;mixture. Indeed, all major human groupings of today are
invariably composite formations. Excepting, perhaps, some primitive -
aboriginal tribes there are no pure races existent. The Briton, the
Dane, the Anglo-Saxon, and the Norman have combined to form the
British; a Frenchman has a Gaul, a Roman, a Frank in him; and a
Spaniard's blood would show an Iberian, a Latin, a Gothic, a Moorish
element in it. And much more than a people, a culture in modern times
has been a veritable cockpit of multifarious and even incongruous
elements. There are instances also in which a perfect fusion could
not be accomplished, and one element had to be rejected or crushed
out. The complete disappearance of the Aztecs and Mayas in South
America, the decadence of the Red Indians in North America, of the
Negroes in Africa as a result of a fierce clash with European peoples
and European culture illustrate the point.</FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.34cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<FONT SIZE=3>Nature, on the whole, has solved the problem of blood
fusion and mental fusion of different peoples, although on a smaller
scale. India today presents the problem on a larger scale and on a
higher or deeper level. The demand is for a spiritual fusion and
unity. Strange to say, although the Spirit is the true bed-rock of
unity – since, at bottom, it means identity – it is on this plane
that mankind has not yet been able to really meet and coalesce.
India's genius has been precisely working in the line of a perfect
solution of this supreme problem.</FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.34cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<FONT SIZE=3>Islam comes with a full-fledged spiritual soul and a
mental and vital formation commensurable with that inner being and
consciousness. It comes with a dynamic spirit, a warrior mood, that
aims at conquering the physical world for the Lord, a temperament
which Indian spirituality had not, or had lost long before, if she
had anything of it. This was, perhaps, what Vivekananda meant when he
spoke graphically of a Hindu soul with a Muslim body. The Islamic
dispensation, however, brings with it not only something complementary, </FONT><BR>
			</P>
<P ALIGN=CENTER STYLE="border-bottom:1px solid black; padding-top:0cm; padding-right:0cm; padding-bottom:0.07cm; padding-left:0cm; border-top-style:none; border-right-style:none; border-left-style:none; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<FONT SIZE=3>Page – 56</FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<FONT SIZE=3>but also something contradictory, if not for anything else, at least
for the strong individuality which does not easily yield to
assimilation. Still, in spite of great odds, the process of
assimilation was going on slowly and surely. But of late it appears
to have come to a dead halt; difficulties have been presented which
seem insuperable.</FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.34cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<FONT SIZE=3>If religious toleration were enough, if that made up
man's highest and largest achievement, then Nature need not have
attempted to go beyond cultural fusion; a liberal culture is the
surest basis for a catholic religious spirit. But such a spirit of
toleration and catholicity, although it bespeaks a widened
consciousness, does not always enshrine a profundity of being. Nobody
is more tolerant and catholic than a dilettante, but an ardent
spiritual soul is different.</FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.34cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<FONT SIZE=3>To be loyal to one's line of self-fulfilment, to follow
one's self-law, <I>swadharma, </I>wholly and absolutely – without
this no spiritual life is possible – and yet not to come into clash
with other lines and loyalties, nay more, to be in positive harmony
with them, is a problem which has not been really solved. It was
solved, perhaps, in the consciousness of a Ramakrishna, a few
individuals here and there, but it has always remained a source of
conflict and disharmony in the general mind even in the field of
spirituality. The clash of spiritual or religious loyalties has taken
such an acute form in India today, they have been carried to the
bitter extreme, in order, we venture to say, that the final synthesis
might be absolute and irrevocable. This is India's mission to 'York
out, and this is the lesson which she brings to the world.</FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.34cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<FONT SIZE=3>The solution can come, first, by going to the true
religion of the Spirit, by being truly spiritual and not merely
religious, for, as we have said, real unity lies only in and through
the Spirit, since Spirit is one and indivisible; secondly, by
bringing down something – a great part, indeed, if not the whole –
of this puissant and marvellous Spirit into our life of emotions and
sensations and activities.</FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.34cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<FONT SIZE=3>If it is said that this is an ideal for the few only,
not for the mass, our answer to that is the answer of the Gita<I> –
Yad yad acharati sreshthah. </I>Let the few then practise and achieve
the ideal: the mass will have to follow as far as it is possible and
necessary. It is the very character of the evolutionary system of</FONT><BR>
			</P>
<P ALIGN=CENTER STYLE="border-bottom:1px solid black; padding-top:0cm; padding-right:0cm; padding-bottom:0.07cm; padding-left:0cm; border-top-style:none; border-right-style:none; border-left-style:none; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<FONT SIZE=3>Page – 57</FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><FONT SIZE=3>Nature,
as expressed in the principle of symbiosis, that any considerable
change in one place (in one species) is accompanied by a
corresponding change in the same direction in other contiguous places
(in other associated species) in order that the poise and balance of
the system may be maintained.</FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.34cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<FONT SIZE=3>It is precisely strong nuclei that are needed (even,
perhaps, one strong nucleus is sufficient) where the single and
integrated spiritual consciousness is an accomplished and established
fact: that acts inevitably as a solvent drawing in and assimilating
or transforming and re-creating as much, of the surroundings as its
own degree and nature of achievement inevitably demand.</FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent:0.34cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<FONT SIZE=3>India did not and could not stop at mere cultural fusion
– which was a supreme gift of the Moguls. She did not and could not
stop at another momentous cultural fusion brought about by the
European impact. She aimed at something more. Nature demanded of her
that she should discover a greater secret of human unity and through
progressive experiments apply and establish it in fact. Christianity
did&quot; not raise this problem of the greater synthesis, for the
Christian peoples were more culture-minded than religious-minded. It
was left for an Asiatic people to set the problem and for India to
work out the solution.</FONT></P>
<P ALIGN="center" STYLE="text-indent:0.34cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">

<FONT SIZE=3>Page – 58</FONT></P>
<hr align="justify" style="text-indent:0.34cm;">
<P ALIGN="right" style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0">
<a title="Home" href="-00_-Content"><img src="/Nolini/Volume-1/_Gif_Image/house01_green.gif" width="28" height="23" border="0" alt="house06_white.gif"></a></P>
<div align="right"> 
	<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"> </div>
			</td>
		</tr>
	</table>
</div>
</BODY>
</HTML>