The Sacred And The Secular-Part I

Swami Chinmayananda

oi-Priya

By Priya Devi

Wednesday, April 25, 2012, 10:11

The machine age is certainly making an honest effort to create a glorious world that can provide a greater happiness for its generation. Indeed, superficially viewed, the present age is spectacular in its luxurious arrangements. But a cook alone cannot promise a happy dinner though he can make tasty dishes. The guests must have a healthy appetite.

The world of objects in itself is not life. Man living in the world and coming in contact with the available order of things comes to experience his share of joy or sorrow and this transaction is called life. Out of the marriage between man and the world is produced the incandescence of' life'.

The scientific age, with its production, technology, quick transport, cheap prices, etc has brought all the objects of enjoyment at the very elbow of even the poorest man living in the most distant corners of the world. This is indeed a great success which deserves our sincere compliments.

But the stupendous folly is when the champions of materialism thoughtlessly conclude that the happiness of man can be substantially increased simply by a steady improvement in the utilitarian comforts made available in the world outside. The best of the dinners served is but a bitter suffering to the one who is running a slight temperature. The dinner may be good but the enjoy-er is not sufficiently tuned up with the objects of joy. So the equation of happiness is not correctly formed.

Philosophy and religion try to tune up man; philosophy rehabilitates the enjoyer's personality; religion reorients man to live in perfect equanimity in all possible exigencies of existence.

There was a time, especially in the medieval era, when religion got itself over-emphasized and came to throttle the development of science and technology. They labelled science as witchcraft, and banned its growth in society, resulting in the horrid dark-age of a tragic European culture steeped in superstitions, distorted by fanaticisms and tarred by foolishness.

The stalwart intellect in its heroic pace can never be stemmed by such meagre fencing, propped up by irrational fancies, thoughtless prejudices, idle beliefs and sapless superstitions. The storming surge of a progressive generation of those days dashed down the feeble fencing, and gathering new momentum at each stride, changed for itself its progressive course, discovering in its onward rush new beauties tapping new resources from the secret chambers of Nature's inexhaustible treasure-house, congratulating itself at every new invention and discovery.

Science has thus grown in power and might, winning for man a thousand comforts which our forefathers would not have even dreamt of! The progress of science and the victory of materialism are, no doubt, great achievements for man and yet how sad!

To be continued