The Roar of Awakening - A transformation that shall touch the core of his existence

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THE MEETING OF EAST AND WEST

The Roar of Awakening

 

" We of the Occident are about to arrive at a crossroads that was

reached by the thinkers of India some seven hundred years before

Christ. This is the real reason why we become both vexed and

stimulated, uneasy yet interested, when confronted with the concepts

and images of Oriental wisdom. This crossing is one to which the

people of all civilizations come in the typical course of the

development of their capacity and requirement for religious

experience, and India's teachings force us to realize what its

problems are. But we cannot take over the Indian solutions. We must

enter the new period our own way and solve its questions for

ourselves, because though truth, the radiance of reality, is

universally one and the same, it is mirrored variously according to

the mediums in which it is reflected. Truth appears differently in

different lands and ages according to the living materials out of

which its symbols are hewn.

 

Concepts and words are symbols, just as visions, rituals, and images

are; so too are the manners and customs of daily life. Through all of

these a transcendent reality is mirrored. They are so many metaphors

reflecting and implying something which, though thus variously

expressed, is ineffable, though thus rendered multiform, remains

inscrutable. Symbols hold the mind to truth but are not themselves

the truth, hence it is delusory to borrow them. Each civilization,

every age, must bring forth its own.

 

We shall therefore have to follow the difficult way of our own

experiences, produce our own reactions, and assimilate our sufferings

and realizations. Only then will the truth that we bring to

manifestation be as much our own flesh and blood as is the child it's

mother's; and the mother, in love with the Father, will then justly

delight in her offspring as His duplication. The ineffable seed must

be conceived, gestated, and brought forth from our own substance, fed

by our blood, if it is to be the true child through which its mother

is reborn, and the Father, the divine Transcendent Principle, will

then also be reborn—delivered, that is to say, from the state of non-

manifestation, non-action, apparent non-existence. We cannot borrow

God. We must effect His new incarnation from within ourselves.

Divinity must descend, somehow, into the matter of our own existence

and participate in this peculiar life-process...

 

The chief aim of Indian thought is to unveil and integrate into

consciousness what has been thus resisted and hidden by the forces of

life—not to explore and describe the visible world. The supreme and

characteristic achievement of the Brahman mind (and this has been

decisive, not only for the course of Indian philosophy, but also for

the history of Indian civilization) was its discovery of the Self

(atman) as an independent, imperishable entity, underlying the

conscious personality and bodily frame. Everything that we normally

know and express about ourselves belongs to the sphere of change, the

sphere of time and space, but this Self (atman) is forever

changeless, beyond time, beyond space and the veiling net of

causality, beyond measure, beyond the domination of the eye. The

effort of Indian philosophy has been, for millenniums, to know this

adamantine Self and make the knowledge effective in human life. And

this enduring concern is what has been responsible for the supreme

morning calm that pervades the terrible histories of the Oriental

world—histories no less tremendous, no less horrifying, than our own.

Through the vicissitudes of physical change a spiritual footing is

maintained in the peaceful-blissful ground of Atman; eternal,

timeless, and imperishable Being.

 

Indian, like Occidental, philosophy imparts information concerning

the measurable structure and powers of the psyche, analyzes man's

intellectual faculties and the operations of his mind, evaluates

various theories of human understanding, establishes the methods and

laws of logic, classifies the senses and studies the process by which

experiences are apprehended and assimilated, interpreted and

comprehended. Hindu philosophers, like those of the West, pronounce

on ethical values and moral standards. They study also the visible

traits of phenomenal existence, criticizing the data of external

experience and drawing deductions with respect to the supporting

principles. India, that is to say, has had, and still has, its own

disciplines of psychology, ethics, physics, and metaphysical theory.

But the primary concern—in striking contrast to the interests of the

modern philosophers of the West—has always been, not information, but

transformation: a radical changing of man's nature and, therewith, a

renovation of his understanding both of the outer world and of his

own existence; a transformation as complete as possible, such as will

amount when successful to a total conversion or rebirth.

 

In this respect Indian philosophy sides with religion to a far

greater extent than does the critical, secularized thinking of the

modern West. It is on the side of such ancient philosophers as

Pythagoras, Empedocles, Plato, the Stoics, Epicurus and his

followers, Plotinus, and the Neoplatonic thinkers. We recognize the

point of view again in St. Augustine, the medieval mystics such as

Meister Eckhart, and such later mystics as Jakob Bohme of Silesia.

Among the Romantic philosophers it reappears in Schopenhauer.

 

The attitudes toward each other of the Hindu teacher and the pupil

bowing at his feet are determined by the exigencies of this supreme

task of transformation. Their problem is to effect a kind of

alchemical transmutation of the soul. Through the means, not of a

merely intellectual understanding, but of a change of heart (a

transformation that shall touch the core of his existence), the pupil

is to pass out of bondage, beyond the limits of human imperfection

and ignorance, and transcend the earthly plane of being. "

 

Philosophies Of India, Heinrich Zimmer,

Princeton University Press; 1989, pages 1-5

ISBN-10: 0691017581

ISBN-13: 978-0691017587