Evil, Non-resistance to; Government, Resistance to; National characteristics, East Indian
The reason for the astonishing fact that a majority of working people
submit to a handful of idlers who control their labour and their very
lives is always and everywhere the same--whether the oppressors and
oppressed are of one race or whether, as in India and elsewhere, the
oppressors are of a different nation.
This phenomenon seems particularly strange in India, for there more than
two hundred million people, highly gifted both physically and mentally,
find themselves in the power of a small group of people quite alien
to them in thought, and immeasurably inferior to them in religious
morality.
From your letter and the articles in _Free Hindustan_ as well as from
the very interesting writings of the Hindu Swami Vivekananda and
others, it appears that, as is the case in our time with the ills of all
nations, the reason lies in the lack of a reasonable religious teaching
which by explaining the meaning of life would supply a supreme law for
the guidance of conduct and would replace the more than dubious precepts
of pseudo-religion and pseudo-science with the immoral conclusions
deduced from them and commonly called 'civilization'.
Your letter, as well as the articles in _Free Hindustan_ and Indian
political literature generally, shows that most of the leaders of public
opinion among your people no longer attach any significance to the
religious teachings that were and are professed by the peoples of India,
and recognize no possibility of freeing the people from the oppression
they endure except by adopting the irreligious and profoundly immoral
social arrangements under which the English and other pseudo-Christian
nations live to-day.
And yet the chief if not the sole cause of the enslavement of the
Indian peoples by the English lies in this very absence of a religious
consciousness and of the guidance for conduct which should flow from
it--a lack common in our day to all nations East and West, from Japan to
England and America alike.
II
_O ye, who see perplexities over your heads, beneath your feet, and to
the right and left of you; you will be an eternal enigma unto yourselves
until ye become humble and joyful as children. Then will ye find Me, and
having found Me in yourselves, you will rule over worlds, and looking
out from the great world within to the little world without, you will
bless everything that is, and find all is well with time and with you._
KRISHNA.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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