World Religions Conference November 1957

Author(s): Sushil Muni
Publisher: Achal Singh Seth

Page 84

Dr. Radhakrishnan, Vice-President of India Reality cannot be described by words of language or concepts of logic. It is something which baffles all descriptions.
You find in the prologue to get espoused a conversation between the God and the Devil asking to find out whether the highest image conceived by man is truly representative of Godhead. God and the Devil came to the understanding that no image conceived by man can ever represent that great ultimate mystery. It is impossible for you to give in actual wordings an ac equate account. Homage which the human Individual can pay to the Supreme is humility, as what you call a silent adoration and to make out that it is impossible for any human being to understand fully and comprehensively. The moment you make it into an object of your consciousness you have taken way from it the true character-you have thrown it into the world of objective happening to which it does not belong.
The Supreme exceeds both existence and non existence and if you attempt to bring it into this world of objective happenings, you are reducing it : you are bringing it down to your own consciousness. It is in. the same spirit that the Buddha tells us,
For that Supreme Rality which cannot be expressed in words 'Akshra', where can there be shruti ? Where can there be teaching or updesha? Seeing you will not be able to understand that.
The greatest of them has said as Jesus saw him—1 am the Truth'. He meant that Truth is inwardly appropriated by man. When St. Paul tells, us 'it is not I that lives, but it is Christ that lives in me,' he has so completely appropriated the nature of being that he no more feels that he is a human individual. He appropriated or assimilated, so to say, the nature of that Supreme. Similarly, you find that almost all the great seers of the world divided as they may be, by race, nationality or creed, have all said it is impious for the human being to reduce the ultimate reality to the level of his consciousness. Therefore, it is that we are called upon to adopt an attitude of simple submission, resignation as the theory of Islam puts it to us. We should not, therefore think that the description which we are adopting is the only final, exculsive, infallible kind of description. We must be aware that ultimate reality is something for which we have not got any adequate account. This induces in us à sense of humility. It makes us believe that religion is a prepetual adventure. It is not orthodoxy that constitutes the essence of religion but it is adventure, it is modernity, it is a perpetcual quest ; it is only then will it be possible for us to understand what the spirit of true religion is. If this is so, it follows that
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