Namaste, Welcome to SAM-VAD (Together In Conversation), Today I would like to share excerpts from this monumental work by Dr. S. Radhakrishnan (India’s 2nd President), this classic book was first published in 1953.
Also as we begin today ‘let us remember this about ‘Attention’. Our life experience would ultimately amount to whatever we had paid attention to. Attention: is important and most of the times we are so indifferent to it. It is as fundamental as food; and we go blundering about, seeking ways to assuage the craving, instead of learning how to provide ourselves with what we need, sensibly and calmly. We feed the hunger blindly. Once the mechanism is brought to our attention and we begin to study it, it is as if a veil has been stripped off ordinary life, and we become freer in our action and choices.
It still remains in print and you can buy your book from the link below or from any bookstore near you or on-line portal accessible to you:
Excerpts:
Spiritual inclination is essential for the pursuit of spiritual life.
Several forms of meditation are advised. Symbols (pratika) are used as supports for meditation. We are free to use the symbols which are most in conformity with our personal tendencies.
The theological knowledge or vidya is different from the experience or anubhava of it. The experience is recorded as a pure and direct intellectual intuition in sruti. When we reflect on the experiences or their records and reduce them to a rational order we have smriti. While the first is the domain of metaphysical principles, the second applies these principles to individual and social conduct.
Though intuitive wisdom is different from knowledge of the senses or anything we can achieve by logical reflection, it is not to be confused with occultism, obscurantism, or extravagant emotion. It is not magical insight or heavenly vision, or special revelation obtained through supernatural powers. What we attain by vision, empirical or trans-empirical, belongs to the objective world.
Evil is the free act of the individual who uses his freedom for his own exaltation. It is fundamentally the choice which affirms the finite, independent self, its lordship and acquisitiveness against the universal will. Evil is the result of our alienation from the Real.
The general impression that the Upanishads require world denial is not correct. They insist on a spirit of detachment, vairagya, which is not indifference to the world. It is not abandonment of objects but non-attachment to them. We do not raise ourselves above the world by contempt for the world. It is the spirit of equanimity which is insisted upon. To be tranquil is to envy no man, to have no possessions that another can take away from us, to fear none.
In the sense of heightened awareness we do not forget the world, which seems strangely of one piece. We are lifted out of provincialism into perspective, as we become aware of something vaster, profounder, and more ultimate than the world.
Spiritual wisdom (vidya) does not abolish the world, but removes our ignorance (avidya) of it. When we rise to our true being, the selfish ego falls away from us and the true integral self takes possession of us. We continue to live and act in the world, though with a different outlook. The world continues, though it is no more alien to us. To live in this new consciousness is to live in eternity.
The distinction between sruti, what is heard, and smriti, what is remembered, between direct experience and traditional interpretation, is based on the distinction between sravana (hearing) and manana (reflection). The deposit of experience is not the same as the conclusion of theology. The primary data are the sruti: they are experiential; the formulated conclusions are secondary interpretations.
The Principal Upanishads – Dr. S. Radhkrishnan
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