Friday, July 3, 2009

We have to live in the present and not in the past

Re: India’s Independence and the Spiritual Destiny: Part C
by rakesh on Tue 30 Jun 2009 09:16 PM IST Profile Permanent Link mirror of tomorrow
"Today we dismiss those words as time-barred, forgetting that he had put his yogic force in them in the context of what he saw as falsehood and fraud. By forgetting them, we are entrenching ourselves more and more into falsehood and fraud. We are strengthening falsehood and fraud more and more. Has the power which Sri Aurobindo put in his words waned and disappeared? Or is it that we are putting more and more obstacles in its working? It seems there is no end to our stupidity."

We do not know what Sri Aurobindo would have said about the state of current affairs since the possibilities have changed. There seems to be a lot of evidence in his writings that he changed his views depending on the world circumstances and possibilities. We have to live in the present and not in the past. We have to learn to judge for ourselves the present circumstances and take action or have a participatory discussions with people to come to the right decision.
You are right when you say that government is not supposed to do everything. We as citizens have to participate in building better democratic institutions in the field of education, art and culture, health. People are not free do act. They are still deprived of basic necessities like education, food and health. How can we expect them to act wisely and build the nation when we have not even given them basic necessities. Am I straying away from spirituality? NO, absolutely not.
People who are fortunate to have a better education, wealth and culture should work for the betterment of the underprivileged society. We Indians have multiple excuses not to help the society. The most popular unfortunately is spirituality. Reply
by rakesh on Wed 01 Jul 2009 05:40 AM IST Profile Permanent Link
My point is that although knowledge of the past in important for future action, the present circumstances matter the most. We cannot extrapolate the past to the present and say that somebody would have done the same thing now. That would be mental speculation on our part.
There are several instances where Sri Aurobindo talked about possibilities of action on current circumstances in Nirod's talks with Sri Aurobindo during the second world war... Sri Aurobindo has written a lot about Indian state of social life and how it degraded due to other worldly spirituality whose impact still shows in our callousness about society. Reply

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