A Letter to a Hindu | Page 7

before used to direct him, this does not mean that he must live without
any reasonable guidance, but rather that he must formulate for himself

an understanding of life corresponding to his age, and having
elucidated it must be guided by it. And in the same way a similar time
must come in the growth and development of humanity. I believe that
such a time has now arrived--not in the sense that it has come in the
year 1908, but that the inherent contradiction of human life has now
reached an extreme degree of tension: on the one side there is the
consciousness of the beneficence of the law of love, and on the other
the existing order of life which has for centuries occasioned an empty,
anxious, restless, and troubled mode of life, conflicting as it does with
the law of love and built on the use of violence. This contradiction must
be faced, and the solution will evidently not be favourable to the
outlived law of violence, but to the truth which has dwelt in the hearts
of men from remote antiquity: the truth that the law of love is in accord
with the nature of man.
But men can only recognize this truth to its full extent when they have
completely freed themselves from all religious and scientific
superstitions and from all the consequent misrepresentations and
sophistical distortions by which its recognition has been hindered for
centuries.
To save a sinking ship it is necessary to throw overboard the ballast,
which though it may once have been needed would now cause the ship
to sink. And so it is with the scientific superstition which hides the truth
of their welfare from mankind. In order that men should embrace the
truth--not in the vague way they did in childhood, nor in the one-sided
and perverted way presented to them by their religious and scientific
teachers, but embrace it as their highest law--the complete liberation of
this truth from all and every superstition (both pseudo-religious and
pseudo-scientific) by which it is still obscured is essential: not a partial,
timid attempt, reckoning with traditions sanctified by age and with the
habits of the people--not such as was effected in the religious sphere by
Guru-Nanak, the founder of the sect of the Sikhs, and in the Christian
world by Luther, and by similar reformers in other religions--but a
fundamental cleansing of religious consciousness from all ancient
religious and modern scientific superstitions.
If only people freed themselves from their beliefs in all kinds of
Ormuzds, Brahmas, Sabbaoths, and their incarnation as Krishnas and
Christs, from beliefs in Paradises and Hells, in reincarnations and

resurrections, from belief in the interference of the Gods in the external
affairs of the universe, and above all, if they freed themselves from
belief in the infallibility of all the various Vedas, Bibles, Gospels,
Tripitakas, Korans, and the like, and also freed themselves from blind
belief in a variety of scientific teachings about infinitely small atoms
and molecules and in all the infinitely great and infinitely remote
worlds, their movements and origin, as well as from faith in the
infallibility of the scientific law to which humanity is at present
subjected: the historic law, the economic laws, the law of struggle and
survival, and so on--if people only freed themselves from this terrible
accumulation of futile exercises of our lower capacities of mind and
memory called the 'Sciences', and from the innumerable divisions of all
sorts of histories, anthropologies, homiletics, bacteriologics,
jurisprudences, cosmographies, strategies--their name is legion--and
freed themselves from all this harmful, stupifying ballast--the simple
law of love, natural to man, accessible to all and solving all questions
and perplexities, would of itself become clear and obligatory.

VII
__Children, look at the flowers at your feet; do not trample upon them.
Look at the love in your midst and do not repudiate it.__ KRISHNA.
__There is a higher reason which transcends all human minds. It is far
and near. It permeates all the worlds and at the same time is infinitely
higher than they.__
__A man who sees that all things are contained in the higher spirit
cannot treat any being with contempt.__
__For him to whom all spiritual beings are equal to the highest there
can be no room for deception or grief.__
__Those who are ignorant and are devoted to the religious rites only,
are in a deep gloom, but those who are given up to fruitless meditations
are in a still greater darkness.__
UPANISHADS, FROM VEDAS.
Yes, in our time all these things must be cleared away in order that
mankind may escape from self-inflicted calamities that have reached an
extreme intensity. Whether an Indian seeks liberation from subjection
to the English, or anyone else struggles with an oppressor either of his
own nationality or