Banning Richardson - East & West meet in The Maharshi #3

[Guest guest]

......

 

It has been my fate that I should meet and know great

and famous men and women from all parts of the world,

including saints like Sri Bhagavan Maharshi and Mahatma

Gandhi, religious leaders like the late Archbishop Temple of

Canterbury, Presidents of the United States, Ministers and

Prime Ministers of Great Britain, France and other countries,

great musicians like Toscanini, Chaliapin and Egon Petri,

scientists like Fritz Haber and Lord Rutherford, and many

others. In such circumstances one undergoes a process of

clarification of values and of realization of human failings. I

have often been profoundly shocked by the pettiness and

lack of spiritual understanding of some of these “great men”.

 

The consequence is that one comes slowly to realize that

only a saint can match one’s idealization of human thought

and conduct. So when one comes into the presence of a

man who is “good” not merely because he shuns “evil,” but

because his love is universal and falls alike on the just and

the unjust, then one experiences immediate recognition of a

soul that is not great as the World values greatness, but great

when compared to an absolute standard of valuesa precious

stone, an emerald without flaw. It is a difference not merely

of quality, but of kind.

 

I have never been long enough with Gandhiji to say

whether my impression of his spirit is equally exalted, but in

the presence of Sri Bhagavan Maharshi I felt an inward joy

which suffused my consciousness and made “thinking” seem

superfluous. One communes with the Divine; thought is useful

only later when one seeks to analyze and understand the

communion, and even then its value is much over-rated. It is

over-rated because, more often than not, it leads one away from

one’s super-conscious apprehension of Being into a whirlpool

of egoism disguised as reality.

 

Such an experience was mine when I left Tiruvannamalai.

So strong was my egoistic desire to explain all spiritual matters

in orthodox Christian terms, that, no sooner had I read that Sri

Bhagavan had as a boy attended a mission school, than I insisted

on explaining away his teaching as a mere adaptation of Christ’s

teaching. I realize now how near I was to the truthtruth which

would have revealed itself to me then had I felt the need of

discarding my pride in favour of humility.

 

It is of course true that Sri Bhagavan teaches what Jesus

the Christ taught. (sanskrit).......and He who taught 2000

years ago that ‘I am in my Father, and my Father is in me. I and

my Father are one’, said in fact the same as He who teaches

today in Tiruvannamalai.

 

“See thyself and see the Lord”

That is the revealed word,

and hard is its sense indeed,

For the seeing Self is not to be seen,

How then is the Sight of the Lord?

To be food unto Him, that indeed is to see Him.

 

Only, their audiences were different, with different religious

traditions and at different levels of understanding. Had Christ

said “See thyself and see the Lord,” he would have been

immediately attacked, even by moderate Jews for blasphemy of

the worst type. Indeed, he was attacked when he went no farther

than saying, “I and my Father are one.” But his very moderation

has led to later misinterpretation of his message as meaning

“I alone am and will be the incarnation of God.”

 

 

 

 

.................to be continued

 

taken from Golden Jubilee Souvenir 1896-1946