_O ye who sit in bondage and continually seek and pant for freedom, seek
only for love. Love is peace in itself and peace which gives complete
satisfaction. I am the key that opens the portal to the rarely
discovered land where contentment alone is found._ KRISHNA.
What is now happening to the people of the East as of the West is
like what happens to every individual when he passes from childhood to
adolescence and from youth to manhood. He loses what had hitherto guided
his life and lives without direction, not having found a new standard
suitable to his age, and so he invents all sorts of occupations, cares,
distractions, and stupefactions to divert his attention from the misery
and senselessness of his life. Such a condition may last a long time.
When an individual passes from one period of life to another a time
comes when he cannot go on in senseless activity and excitement as
before, but has to understand that although he has outgrown what before
used to direct him, this does not mean that he must live without any
reasonable guidance, but rather that he must formulate for himself an
understanding of life corresponding to his age, and having elucidated
it must be guided by it. And in the same way a similar time must come in
the growth and development of humanity. I believe that such a time has
now arrived--not in the sense that it has come in the year 1908, but
that the inherent contradiction of human life has now reached an extreme
degree of tension: on the one side there is the consciousness of the
beneficence of the law of love, and on the other the existing order of
life which has for centuries occasioned an empty, anxious, restless, and
troubled mode of life, conflicting as it does with the law of love and
built on the use of violence. This contradiction must be faced, and
the solution will evidently not be favourable to the outlived law of
violence, but to the truth which has dwelt in the hearts of men from
remote antiquity: the truth that the law of love is in accord with the
nature of man.
But men can only recognize this truth to its full extent when they
have completely freed themselves from all religious and scientific
superstitions and from all the consequent misrepresentations and
sophistical distortions by which its recognition has been hindered for
centuries.
To save a sinking ship it is necessary to throw overboard the ballast,
which though it may once have been needed would now cause the ship to
sink. And so it is with the scientific superstition which hides the
truth of their welfare from mankind. In order that men should embrace
the truth--not in the vague way they did in childhood, nor in the
one-sided and perverted way presented to them by their religious and
scientific teachers, but embrace it as their highest law--the complete
liberation of this truth from all and every superstition (both
pseudo-religious and pseudo-scientific) by which it is still obscured
is essential: not a partial, timid attempt, reckoning with traditions
sanctified by age and with the habits of the people--not such as was
effected in the religious sphere by Guru-Nanak, the founder of the
sect of the Sikhs, and in the Christian world by Luther, and by similar
reformers in other religions--but a fundamental cleansing of religious
consciousness from all ancient religious and modern scientific
superstitions.
If only people freed themselves from their beliefs in all kinds of
Ormuzds, Brahmas, Sabbaoths, and their incarnation as Krishnas and
Christs, from beliefs in Paradises and Hells, in reincarnations and
resurrections, from belief in the interference of the Gods in the
external affairs of the universe, and above all, if they freed
themselves from belief in the infallibility of all the various Vedas,
Bibles, Gospels, Tripitakas, Korans, and the like, and also freed
themselves from blind belief in a variety of scientific teachings about
infinitely small atoms and molecules and in all the infinitely great and
infinitely remote worlds, their movements and origin, as well as from
faith in the infallibility of the scientific law to which humanity is
at present subjected: the historic law, the economic laws, the law of
struggle and survival, and so on--if people only freed themselves from
this terrible accumulation of futile exercises of our lower capacities
of mind and memory called the 'Sciences', and from the innumerable
divisions of all sorts of histories, anthropologies, homiletics,
bacteriologics, jurisprudences, cosmographies, strategies--their name
is legion--and freed themselves from all this harmful, stupifying
ballast--the simple law of love, natural to man, accessible to all and
solving all questions and perplexities, would of itself become clear and
obligatory.