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Orginally posted by mercury6

Good one Jake.

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Orginally posted by jake3d

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Orginally posted by mercury6

Good one Jake.

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the truth had to be told.

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Late good morning with good morning news

World of politics appear to be a family affair......

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Try overtaking child's imagination

Anyways since someone mentioned Sri Aurobindo here is an Essay from him. Draw your own consclusions.

Are Indians naturally timid, passive people maybe even cowardly?
Why are people like Gandhi, Buddha, Mahavira born in a place like India?

Actually we are nothing like that. We are quite normal people with normal aspirations. Read on. Its just the method of achieving things are a little different from say the Western idea

Although to be fair we are a bickering lot.

Read on..

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The Indian Conception of Life

by Sri Aurobindo

The value of the Indian conception for life must depend on the relations and gradations by which this perfection is connected with out normal living. Put over against the latter without any connection, without any gradations leading up to it, it would either be a high unattainable ideal or the detached remote passion of a few exceptional spirits, or discourage the springs of our natural life by the too great contrast between this spiritual being and natural being. Something of the kind has happened in later times and given some room for the current Western impression about the exaggerated asceticism and otherworldliness of Indian religion and philosophy. But we must not be misled by the extreme overemphasis of certain tendencies. To get to the real meaning of the Indian idea of life we must go back to its best times and look not at this or that school of philosophy or at some side of it, but at the totality of the ancient philosophical thinking, religion, literature, art, society. The Indian conception in its soundness made no such mistake; it did not imagine that this great thing can or even ought to be done by some violent, intolerant, immediate leap. Even the most extreme philosophies do not go so far. Whether the workings of the Spirit in the universe are a reality or only a half reality, self-descriptive Lila or illusory Maya, whether it be an action of the Infinite Energy, Sakti, or a figment of some secondary paradoxical consciousness in the Eternal, Maya, life as an intermediate reality is nowhere denied by any school of Indian thinking. Indian thought recognized that the normal life of man has to be passed through conscientiously, developed with knowledge, its forms perused, interpreted, fathomed, its values worked out, possessed and lived, its enjoyments taken on their own level, before we can go on to self-existence or a supra-existence. The spiritual perfection which opens before man is the crown of a long, patient, millennial outflowering of the spirit in life and nature. This belief in a gradual spiritual progress and evolution is the secret of the almost universal Indian acceptance of the truth of reincarnation. By millions of lives in inferior forms the secret soul in the universe, conscious even in the inconscient, cetano acetanesu, has arrived at humanity: by hundreds, thousands, perhaps millions of lives man grows into his divine self-existence. Every life is a step which he can take backward or forward; by his action, his will in life, by the thought and knowledge that governs it, he determines what he is yet to be, yatha karma yatha srutam.

This conception of a spiritual evolution with a final spiritual perfection or transcendence of which human life is the means and an often repeated opportunity, is the pivot of the Indian conception of existence. It gives to our life a figure of ascent, in spirals or circles, which has to be filled in with knowledge and action and experience. There is room within it for all human aims, activities and aspirations; there is place in the ascent for all types of human character and nature. The spirit in the world assumes hundreds of forms, follows many tendencies, gives many shapes to his play or lila, and all are part of the mass of necessary experience; each has its justification, its law, its reason of being, its utility. The claim of sense satisfaction is not ignored, nor the soul's need of labor and heroic action, nor the hundred forms of the pursuit of knowledge, nor the play of the emotions or the demand of the aesthetic faculties. Indian culture did not deface nor impoverish the richness of the grand game of human life or depress or mutilate the activities of our nature. On the contrary it gave them, subject to a certain principle of harmony and government, their full, often their extreme value; it bade man fathom on his way all experience, fill in life opulently with color and beauty and enjoyment and give to his character and action a large rein and heroic proportions. This side of the Indian idea is stamped in strong relief over the epic and the classical literature, and to have read the Ramayana, the Mehabharata, the drams, the literary epics, the romances, the lyric and the great abundance of gnomic poetry, to say nothing of the massive remains of other cultural work and social and political system and speculation without perceiving this breadth, wealth and greatness, one must have read without eyes to see or without a mind to understand. But while the generous office of culture is to enrich, enlarge and encourage human life, it must also find in it a clue, give it a guiding law and subject it to some spiritual, moral and rational government. The greatness of the ancient Indian civilization consists in the power with which it did this work and the high and profound wisdom and skill with which, while basing society, ordering the individual life, encouraging and guiding human nature and propensity, it turned them all towards the realization of its master idea and never allowed the mind it was training to lose sight of the use of life as a passage of the Infinite and a discipline for spiritual perfection.

Two main truths are always kept in sight by the Indian mind whether in the government of life or in the discipline of spirituality. First, our being in its growth has stages through which it must pass. Then gain, life is complex, the nature of man is complex, and in each life man has to figure a certain sum of its complexity. The initial movement of life is that form of it which develops the powers of the ego in man; Kama, artha, self interest and desire are the original human motives. Indian culture gave a large recognition to this primary turn of our nature. These powers have to be accepted; the ego-life must be lived and the forces it evolves in the human being brought to fullness. But to get its full results and inspire it eventually to go beyond itself, it must be kept from making any too unbridled claim or heading furiously towards its satisfaction. There must be no internal or external anarchy. A life governed in any absolute or excessive degree by self-will, by passion, sense-attraction, self-interest, desire cannot be the whole natural rule of a human or a humane existence. The tempting imagination that it can, with which the Western mind has played in leanings our outbursts of what has been called Paganism, not at all justly, for the Greek or Pagan intelligence had a noble thought for self-rule, law and harmony, -- is alien to the Indian mentality. It perceived very well the possibility of a materialistic life and its attraction worked on certain minds and gave birth to the Carvaka philosophy; but this could not take hold or stay. Even it allowed to it when lived on a grand scale a certain perverse greatness, but a colossal egoism was regarded as the nature of the Asura and Raksasa, the Titanic, gigantic or demoniac type of spirit, not the proper life for man. Another power claims man, overtopping desire and self-interest and self-will, the power of the Dharma.

The Dharma, religious law of action, is not as in the Western idea, only a religious creed and cult inspiring an ethical and social rule, but the complete rule of our life, the harmony of the whole tendency of man to find a right and just law of his living. Every thing has its dharma, its law of life imposed on it by its nature, but the dharma for a man is a conscious imposition of a rule of ideal living on all his members. This Dharma develops, evolves, has stages, gradations of spiritual and ethical ascension. All men cannot follow in all things one common and invariable rule of action. Nature, the position, the work, aim and bent, the call of life, the call of the spirit within, the degree and turn of development, the adhikara or capacity differ too much in different men; life is too complex to admit of such an ideal simplicity. Man lives in society and by society, and every society has its own general dharma, its law of right stability and right functioning, and into this law the individual life must be fitted; but the individual's part in society, his own nature, the needs of his capacity and temperament all vary, and the social law on its side must make room for this variety. The man of knowledge, the man of power, the productive and acquisitive man, the priest, scholar, poet, artist, ruler, fighter, trader, tiller of the soil, craftsman, laborer, servant cannot all have the same training, be shaped in the same pattern, follow the same way of living or be all put under the same tables of the law. Each has his type of nature and there must be a rule for the perfection of that type, or each his function and there must be a canon and ideal of the function. The main necessity is that, that there must be in all things some wise and understanding canon and ideal; a lawless impulse of desire and interest and propensity cannot be allowed; even in the frankest following of desire and interest and propensity there must be a rule, a guidance, an ethic and science arising from and answering to some truth of the thing sought, a restraint, an order, a standard of perfection. The rule and training and result differ with the type of man and the type of function. The idea of the Indian social system was a harmony of this complexity of artha, kama and dharma.

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I once made a mistake, but I was wrong about it.

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Orginally posted by jake3d

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Orginally posted by mercury6

Good one Jake.

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the truth had to be told.

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I once made a mistake, but I was wrong about it.

When ur are talking abt a man like Gandhi ...it should be remember that he was assasinated. The outburst was not casual but a planned attempt. What had he done to an extent that he was assasinated? The first reason was of course the partition.. The second one being donating 55 million rupees to Pak against the injuries caused to them by our soldiers!!!!!! It is not exagerrated to blame him... but rightly justified... He sat for an fast unto death for his demand of 55 million rupees.. The govt. had no other option but to give the aid to Pakistan.....This is still fresh in most minds... If he had been stubborn and had decided not to bend against the demand of Jinnah for a seperate land for muslims then the picture of India could have been different.... And all u Canadian Desi's would be here in India!!!!! For it would have been a super-power equal to America.....I do not know that how many of u know this.. but even our national anthem is not in the praise of our nation...but in the praise of King George-V. But Nehru accepted it because it was easy to play it on the band instead of VANDE MATARAM...This is cumulative effect of many such aspects that people talk abt hatred.. and stuff... abt Gandhi.These chaps in the Western world know only half the story the other half we are still suffering... I think that much is enough.....

Thakare Chaitanya

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Orginally posted by chaitanyathakare1983


If he had been stubborn and had decided not to bend against the demand of Jinnah for a seperate land for muslims then the picture of India could have been different.... And all u Canadian Desi's would be here in India!!!!! For it would have been a super-power equal to America.....I do not know that how many of u know this.. but even our national anthem is not in the praise of our nation...but in the praise of King George-V.

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