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• Personal Growth

March 2007

By Life Positive

Indians and non Indians come together in extolling the unique soul of India. this is the India we must actualize if we are to realize our destiny

India does not rise as other countries do, for self or when she is strong, to trample on the weak. She is rising to shed the eternal light entrusted to her over the world. India has always existed for humanity and not for herself and it is for humanity and not for herself that she must be great…

India of the ages is not dead nor has she spoken her last creative word; she lives and has still something to do for herself and the human peoples. And that which must seek now to awake is not anglicized oriental people, docile pupil of the West and doomed to repeat the cycle of the occident’s success and failure, but still the ancient immemorable Shakti recovering her deepest self, lifting her head higher towards the supreme source of light and strength and turning to discover the complete meaning and a vaster form of her Dharma.
– Shri Aurobindo

Those whose only aim is to barter the energies of life for gold, or name, or any other enjoyment; those to whom the tramp of embattled cohorts is the only manifestation of power; those to whom the enjoyment of the senses is the only bliss that life can give – to   these, India will appear as an immense desert whose every blast is deadly to the development of life – as it is known to them.

But to those whose thirst for life has been quenched forever by drinking from the stream of immortality that flows from far away beyond the world of the senses, whose souls have cast away – as a serpent its slough – the threefold bondages of lust, gold and fame; who, from their height of calmness, look with love and compassion upon the petty quarrels and jealousies and fights for little gilded puff-balls, filled with dust, called ‘enjoyment’ by those under a sense-bondage; to those whose accumulated force of past good deeds has caused the scales of ignorance to fall off from their eyes, making them see through the vanity of name and fame – to such wheresoever they be, India, the motherland and eternal mine of spirituality, stands transfigured, a beacon of hope to every one in search of Him who is the only real Existence in a universe of vanishing shadows…

Civilizations have arisen in other parts of the world. In ancient and modern times, wonderful ideas have been carried forward from one race to another…But mark you, my friends, it has been always with the blast of war trumpets and the march of embattled cohorts. Each idea had to be soaked in a deluge of blood….. Each word of power had to be followed by the groans of millions, by the wails of orphans, by the tears of widows. This, many other nations have taught; but India for thousands of years peacefully existed. Here activity prevailed when even Greece did not exist… Even earlier, when history has no record, and tradition dares not peer into the gloom of that intense past, even from until now, ideas after ideas have marched out from her, but every word has been spoken with a blessing behind it and peace before it. We, of all nations of the world, have never been a conquering race, and that blessing is on our head, and therefore we live…!

…This is the ancient land, where wisdom made its home before it went into any other country… Here is the same India whose soil has been trodden by the feet of the greatest sages that ever lived… Look back, therefore, as far as you can, drink deep of the eternal fountains that are behind, and after that look forward, march forward, and make India brighter, greater, much higher, than she ever was.
– Swami Vivekananda

This is indeed India!

The land of dreams and romance, of fabulous wealth and fabulous poverty, of splendor and rags, of palaces and hovels, of famine and pestilence, of genii and giants and Aladdin lamps, of tigers and elephants, the cobra and the jungle, the country of hundred nations and a hundred tongues, of a thousand religions and two million gods, cradle of the human race, birthplace of human speech, mother of history, grandmother of legend, great-grandmother of traditions, whose yesterday’s bear date with the moldering antiquities for the rest of nations – the one sole country under the sun that is endowed with an imperishable interest for alien prince and alien peasant, for lettered and ignorant, wise and fool, rich and poor, bond and free, the one land that all men desire to see, and having seen once, by even a glimpse, would not give that glimpse for the shows of all the rest of the world combined.
– Mark Twain

When I read the Bhagavad Gita and reflect about how God created this universe, everything else seems so superfluous.
– Albert Einstein

If I were asked under what sky the human mind has most fully developed some of its choicest gifts, has most deeply pondered on the greatest problems of life, and has found solutions, I should point to India.
– Max Mueller (German scholar)

After the conversations about Indian philosophy, some of the ideas of quantum physics that had seemed so crazy suddenly made much more sense.
– W. Heisenberg (German physicist)

Our present knowledge of the nervous system fits in so accurately with the internal description of the human body given in the Vedas (5,000 years ago). Then the question arises whether the Vedas are really religious books or books on anatomy of the nervous system and medicine.
– Rele (Jewish writer)

The Indian way of life provides the vision of the natural, real way of life. We veil ourselves with unnatural masks. On the face of India are the tender expressions which carry the mark of the Creator’s hand.
– George Bernard Shaw (Irish playwright)

India conquered and dominated China culturally for 20 centuries without ever having to send a single soldier across her border!”
– Hu Shih (former Ambassador of China to USA)

The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of wonderful structure, more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin and more exquisitely refined than either.
– Sir William Jones (English scholar)

Mother India is in many ways the mother of us all. Nothing should more deeply shame the modern student than the recency and inadequacy of his acquaintance with India…. This is the India that patient scholarship is now opening up like a new intellectual continent to that Western mind which only yesterday thought civilization an exclusive Western thing… Perhaps in return for conquest, arrogance and spoliation, India will teach us the tolerance and gentleness of the mature mind, the quiet content of the unacquisitive soul, the calm of the understanding spirit, and a unifying, a pacifying love for all living things.
– Will Durant (American philosopher)

If there is one place on the face of earth where all the dreams of living men have found a home from the very earliest days when man began the dream of existence, it is India!
– Romaine Rolland (French writer)

It is already becoming clear that a chapter which had a Western beginning will have to have an Indian ending if it is not to end in self-destruction of the human race. At this supremely dangerous moment in human history, the only way of salvation is the ancient Hindu way. Here we have the attitude and spirit that can make it possible for the human race to grow together into a single family.
– Arnold Joseph Toynbee (British historian)

God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the West… keeping the world in chains. If our nation took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts.
– Gandhi

Now it is not good for the Christian’s health to hustle the Hindu brown.

For the Christian riles and the Hindu smiles and weareth the Christian down;

And the end of the fight is a tombstone white with the name of the late deceased

And the epitaph drear, “ A fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.”
– Rudyard Kipling (British writer and poet. This was in the context of the missionaries who came here with the Good News)

It is not only a country and something geographical, but the home and the youth of the soul, the everywhere and nowhere, the oneness of all times.
– Herman Hesse (German poet and novelist)

As flowing rivers disappear in the sea, losing their name and form, thus a wise man, freed from name and form, goes to the divine person who is beyond all.” Such a theory of life and death will not please Western man, whose religion is as permeated with individualism as are his political and economic institutions. But it has satisfied the philosophical Hindu mind with astonishing continuity.
– Will Durant (American philosopher)

Enter Hinduism’s myths, her magnificent symbols, her several hundred images of God, her rituals that keep turning night and day like never ending prayer wheels. It is obtuse to confuse Hinduism’s images with idolatry, and their multiplicity with polytheism. They are ‘runways’ from which the sense-laden human spirit can rise for its “flight of the alone to the Alone.

Even village priests will frequently open their temple ceremonies with the following beloved invocation:

O Lord, forgive three sins that are due to my human limitations:

Thou art everywhere, but I worship you here; Thou art without form, but I worship you in these forms; Thou needest no praise, yet I offer you these prayers and salutations.

Lord, forgive three sins that are due to my human limitations.
– Huston Smith (American professor)

Going forward, you have a broad and beautiful street, full of rows of fine houses and streets of the sort I have described, and it is to be understood that the houses belong to men rich enough to afford such. In this street live many merchants, and there you will find all sorts of rubies, and diamonds, and emeralds, and pearls, and seed pearls, and cloths, and every other sort of thing there is on earth and that you may wish to buy
– Domingos Paes (Portuguese traveler who visited Hampi during the reign of Vijayanagar Empire {AD 1520-22})

In India I found a race of mortals living upon the Earth but not adhering to it. Inhabiting cities, but not being fixed to them, possessing everything but possessed by nothing.
– Apollonius Tyanaeus ( Greek thinker and traveler)

There are some parts of the world that, once visited, get into your heart and won’t go. For me, India is such a place. When I first visited, I was stunned by the richness of the land, by its lush beauty and exotic architecture, by its ability to overload the senses with the pure, concentrated intensity of its colors, smells, tastes, and sounds. It was as if all my life I had been seeing the world in black and white and, when brought face-to-face with India, experienced everything re-rendered in brilliant technicolor.
– Keith Bellows (Vice-President, National Geographic Society)

The most elegant and sublime of these is a representation of the creation of the universe at the beginning of each cosmic cycle, a motif known as the cosmic dance of Lord Shiva, the god, called in this manifestation, Nataraja, the Dance King. In the upper right hand is a drum whose sound is the sound of creation. In the upper left hand is a tongue of flame, a reminder that the universe, now newly created, billions of years from now will be utterly destroyed. These profound and lovely images are, I like to imagine, a kind of premonition of modern astronomical ideas.
– Dr.Carl Sagan (American astrophysicist)

It is India that gave us the ingenious method of expressing all numbers by ten symbols, each receiving a value of position as well as an absolute value, a profound and important idea which appears so simple to us now that we ignore its true merit. But its very simplicity, the great ease which it has lent to all computations, puts our arithmetic in the first rank of useful inventions, and we shall appreciate the grandeur of this achievement the more when we remember that it escaped the genius of Archimedes and Apollonius, two of the greatest men produced by antiquity.
– Pierre Simon de Laplace ( French mathematician & philosopher)

According to me, the influence of Sanskrit literature on our time will not be lesser than what was in the 16th century Greece’s influence on Renaissance. One day, India’s wisdom will flow again on Europe and will totally transform our knowledge and thought.
– Arthur Schopenhauer (German philosopher)

The writers of the Indian philosophies will survive, when the British dominion in India shall long have ceased to exist, and when the sources which it yielded of wealth and power are lost to remembrances.
– Lord Warren Hastings ( first governor general of British India)

I believe that the civilization India has evolved is not to be beaten in the world. Nothing can equal the seeds sown by our ancestry. Rome went; Greece shared the same fate; the might of the Pharaohs was broken; Japan has become westernized; of China nothing can be said; but India is still, somehow or other, sound at the foundation.
– Gandhi

India is eternal. Though the beginnings of her numerous civilizations go so far back in time that they are lost in the twilight of history, she has the gift of perpetual youth. Her culture is ageless and is as relevant to this present 20th century as it was to the 20th century before Christ.
– Nani Ardeshir Palkhiwala (Indian lawyer & philanthropist)

We of the Occident are about to arrive at a crossroads that was reached by the thinkers of India hundreds of years before Christ.
– Heinrich Zimmer (German historian & Indologist)

Our sublimest delusion is that India is backward. This predicates, of course, that we are progressive. If backwardness and progress depend on the rate at which one can gobble up vanities perhaps India does not need our aid…India’s devotion to being good rather than being clever comes nearer the heart of a true civilization. Cleverness dies on the tongue like a social pleasantry, goodness echoes round the universe in an unextinguishable reality. We in the West are too busy to see that science without soul is like words without meaning. India’s greatness is in her humility; her weakness is her strength… She is grave and old and stupendous. Her accents are for the calm and gracious…  It is true, that India is royal…India has been royal at heart from her very foundations of her memory…

…India indeed has a preciousness which a materialistic age is in danger of missing. Some day the fragrance of her thought will win the hearts of men. This grim chase after our own tails which marks the present age cannot continue for ever. The future contains a new human urge towards the real beauty and holiness of life. When it comes India will be searched by loving eyes and defended by knightly hands.
– W. J. Grant

You live in time, we live in space. You’re always on the move; we’re always at rest. Religion is our first love; we revel in metaphysics. Science is your passion; you delight in physics. You believe in freedom of speech; you strive for articulation. We believe in freedom of silence; we lapse into meditation.
– Prof. Hari Dam (Indian Professor of Philosophy )

In the literature of Asia is a great poetry. There is also profound wisdom and some very difficult metaphysics…Long ago I studied the ancient Indian languages, and while I was chiefly interested at that time in philosophy, I read a little poetry too; and I know that my own poetry shows the influence of Indian thought and sensibility.
– T S Eliot (poet & playwright)

 The multiplicity of the manifestations of the Indian genius as well as their fundamental unity gives India the right to figure on the first rank in the history of civilized nations. Her civilization, spontaneous and original, unrolls itself in a continuous time across at least 30 centuries, without interruption, without deviation. Ceaselessly in contact with foreign elements which threatened to strangle her, she persevered victoriously in absorbing them, assimilating them and enriching herself with them. Thus she has seen the Greeks, the Scythians, the Afghans, the Mongols pass before her eyes in succession and is regarding with indifference the Englishmen – confident to pursue under the accidence of the surface the normal course of her high destiny.
– Sylvain Levi (French orientalist)

We do not yet realize that while we are turning upside down the material world of the East with our technical proficiency, the East with its psychic proficiency, is throwing our spiritual world into confusion. We have never yet hit upon the thought that while we are overpowering the Orient from without, it may be fastening its hold upon us from within.
– Carl Gustav Jung (psychoanalyst)

Vedanta is the most impressive metaphysics the human mind has conceived.
– Alfred North Whitehead (British mathematician and philosopher)

The Hindu genius is a love for abstraction and, at the same time, a passion for the concrete image. At times it is rich, at others prolix. It has created the most lucid and the most instinctive art. It is abstract and realistic, sexual and intellectual, pedantic and sublime. It lives between extremes, it embraces the extremes, rooted in the earth and drawn to an invisible beyond.
– Octovio Paz (Mexican Nobel Prize laureate in Literature)

A special charm of studying Indian philosophy today is that it is more truly Western, in the modern, scientific sense, than any system of philosophy that the West has produced. Whereas Western rationalism has broken down under the impact of scientific discoveries, Indian thought cheerfully rides the crest of the wave, and is only pushed higher by every new scientific finding.
– Swami Kriyananda (Founder, Ananda Sangha)

Precious stones or durable materials – gold, silver, bronze, marble, onyx or granite – have been used by ancient people in an attempt to immortalize themselves. Not so, however, the ancient Vedic Aryans (Indians). They turned to what may seem the most volatile and insubstantial material of all – the spoken word …The pyramids have been eroded by the desert wind, the marble broken by earthquakes, and the gold stolen by robbers, while the Veda is recited daily by an unbroken chain of generations, traveling like a great wave through the living substance of mind…
– Dr.Jean LeMee (French author)

India has all along been trying experiments in evolving a social unity within which all the different peoples could be held together, while fully enjoying the freedom of maintaining their differences. The tie has been as loose as possible, yet as close as circumstances permitted. This has produced something like a United States of a social federation, whose common name is Hinduism.
– Rabindranath Tagore (Indian poet & philosopher)

Besides the discoverers of geometry and algebra, the constructors of human speech, the parents of philosophy, the primal expounders of religion, the adepts in psychological and physical science, how even the greatest of our biological and theologians seem dwarfed! Name of us any modern discovery, and we venture to say that Indian history need not long be searched before the prototype will be found on record. Here we are with the transit of science half accomplished, and all our Vedic ideas in process of readjustment to the theories of force correlation, natural selection, atomic polarity and evolution. And here, to mock our conceit, our apprehension, and our despair, we may read what Manu said, perhaps 10,000 years before the birth of Christ: The first germ of life was developed by water and heat. Water ascends towards the sky in vapors; from the sun it descends in rain, from the rains are born the plants, and from the plants, animals.
– Louis Francois Jacolliot (French diplomat & author)

Compared to Islam and Christianity, Hinduism’s doctrines are extraordinarily fluid, and multiform. India deals in images and metaphors. Restless, subtle and argumentative as Hindu thought is, it is less prone than European theology to the vice of distorting transcendental ideas by too stringent definition. It adumbrates the indescribable by metaphors and figures. It is not afraid of inconsistencies which may illustrate different aspects of the infinite, but it rarely tries to cramp the Divine within the limits of a logical phrase.
– Sir Charles Eliot (British diplomat)

India is the land of dreams. India had always dreamt – more of the bliss that is man’s final goal. And this has helped India to be more creative in history than any other nation. Hence the effervescence of myths and legends, religions and philosophies, music, and dances and the different styles of architecture.
– Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (German philosopher)

Another important Vedantic concept is that all human beings, because of their shared spirituality, are members of a single family. The Upanishads have an extraordinary phrase for the human race, ‘Amritasya putrah’ (children of immortality), because we carry within our consciousness the light and the power of the Brahman regardless of race, color, creed, sex, caste or nationality. That is the basis of the concept of human beings as an extended family — ‘Vasudhaiva kutumbakam’ .
– Dr.Karan Singh (Indian diplomat and politician)

We, on the contrary, now send to the Brahmans English clergymen and evangelical linen-weavers, in order out of sympathy to put them right, and to point out to them that they are created out of nothing, and that they ought to be grateful and pleased about it. But it is just the same as if we fired a bullet at a cliff. In India, our religions will never at any time take root; the ancient wisdom of the human race will not be supplanted by the events in Galilee. On the contrary, Indian wisdom flows back to Europe, and will produce a fundamental change in our knowledge and thought
– Arthur Schopenhauer (German philosopher)

No other country has live with so complicated a past so equably, assimilating everything that has happened to it… Religion flourishes here as it does nowhere else. Other lands may surrender themselves totally to a particular faith, but in India most creeds are deeply rooted and acknowledged fervently. Virtually the whole population practices some form of devotion. The Indian without the slightest feeling for the Divine, without a spiritual dimension to his life, is exceedingly rare. Incomparable and inimitable she is, India is also our great paradigm.
– Geoffrey Moorhouse (English historian & author)

Courtesy: http://www.pratheep.com/quotes.html