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the seer, has the vision. "The race must obey this double principle of persistence and mutation or bear the penalty of a decay and deterioration that may taint even its living centre.
996
The crying need of the hour is taking recourse to the basic cultural framework of harmoniously synthesising the spiritual grounding with the material needs/ scientific attitude, persistence with dynamism. A community need not become an exclusive worshipper of material progress for affluence. The Indian cultural traditional has withstood the ravages of time not certainly through a materialistic world view. A proper synthesis between spiritualism and materialism is possible and India's genius can achieve it as prophesied by the great modern seer Sri Aurobindo.
The greatest single factor other than the sincere political will to rejuvenate the country and preserve its democratic egalitarian structure is education. Education is nothing if it is not value-education. Through the system itself, through the example of the teacher some basic human values, e.g., fellow-feeling, sharing with others, discerning of the right and wrong and practising the right, not encroaching upon others' rights, spirit of tolerance and mutual understanding can be generated. The ultimate goal is achievement of human freedom, political, economic and cultural, which manifests itself in creativity.
It is not a little interesting to note that Karl Max, advocating and upholding the theory of dialectical materialism, has in the end of the journey through violent revolution, reached a fully spiritualistic conception of man - man free from alicnation and contradiction - returning to him through creativity - actualizing all his potentialities and becoming a Complete Man. Interestingly again, Rabindranath, through a completely different route, e.g., that of the Indian tradition, reaches the same man, creative and always "exceeding himself" through the "surplus" in him and becoming the Universal Man. So the ideal is there and it is beaconing us to proper action.
27
Whatever the challenges of the present times, our motherland with its tradition and readjustment of the traditional values to the contemporary needs will be able to face up to them and retain its own perspective. Darkness is the deepest just before the dawn. And that glorious dawn has been signalled by our greatest modern teachers and revolutionaries like Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, Rabindranath and Gandhi.
1.
Sri Aurobindo - The Foundations of Indian Culture, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, Fifth Impression, 1985, p.2
2. Quoted by William Adam in his Law and Custom of Slavery in British India. Sri Aurobindo - The Foundations of Indian Culture, p.6.
3.
4. Ibid, p.11
5. Ibid, p.32.
6. Ibid, pp.32-33.
Notes and References
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January-March 1993
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