Great things were done in the past and man’s history had never been dull—and this was in spite of war and struggle and rampage. He has built schools of thought, he has built monuments, he has built centres of excellence in arts and sciences and crafts. He gave Philosophy, he gave the Tao, he gave Vedanta, he gave Religion, even as he engaged himself in secular occupations in many richnesses of life. Today we witness some other kind of marvel. The Greeks built in the 5th century BC the Parthenon on the Acropolis and dedicated it to Athena, the Goddess of Wisdom. Much before that, more than two thousand years ago, was constructed the Great Pyramid of Giza, the largest in Egypt. It is said that the shape of the Pyramid represents the primordial mound from which the earth was created. Ajanta Caves are monuments dating from the second century BC. These contain paintings and sculpture considered to be masterpieces of religious and pictorial art. Look at the statue of the Buddha and we feel a vast but solid peace filling the whole place, it entering into our depths. The Taj Mahal is "a teardrop on the cheek of time." Shah Jahan commissioned it in 1631. Twenty thousand people for twenty-two years were deployed to work on it. A fleet of a thousand elephants brought the material from all over India. Michelangelo painted twelve thousand square feet of the Sistine Chapel ceiling between 1508 and 1512. And today in this age of ours! Wednesday 10 September 2008! It is a golden day in the annals of physics. It marks the beginning of a new set of experiments planned on a scale that never happened in the long and troubled days of mankind. Their findings are expected to throw light on the commencement and evolution of the universe in which we live. If matter is the foundation of this vast enterprise, then it becomes our natural curiosity also to know what really is there in matter that makes it so attractive, so potentially rich to give rise to this marvel of creation. That also means, possibly, the wonders that are locked in its bosom will be slowly disclosed to us, in the unfolding course of time. Could matter give away its secrets to us? Would it? Perhaps the Large Hadron Collider is but one small step in that mighty direction. It is built into the spirit of man that looks at its own depths and wonders how he arrived on the scene when nothing of the kind exists anywhere else...   more »

Here therefore exists the origin of error, falsehood, wrong and evil in the consciousness and will of the individual; a limited consciousness growing out of nescience is the source of error, a personal attachment to the limitation and the error born of it the source of falsity, a wrong consciousness governed by the life-ego the source of evil. But it is evident that their relative existence is only a phenomenon thrown up by the cosmic Force in its drive towards evolutionary self-expression, and it is there that we have to look for the significance of the phenomenon. Emergence of the life-ego is a machinery of cosmic Nature for the affirmation of the individual, for his self-disengagement from the indeterminate mass substance of the subconscient, for the appearance of a conscious being on a ground prepared by the Inconscience; the principle of life-affirmation of the ego is the necessary consequence. But because it does these things as a separate ego for its separate advantage life-discord, conflict, disharmony arise, and it is the products of this life-discord and disharmony that we call wrong and evil. Nature accepts them because they are necessary circumstances of the evolution, necessary for the growth of the divided being; they are products of ignorance, supported by an ignorant consciousness that founds itself on division, by an ignorant will that works through division, by an ignorant delight of existence that takes the joy of division...   more »

A Truth supreme has forced the world to be;
It has wrapped itself in Matter as in a shroud,
A shroud of Death, a shroud of Ignorance.
It compelled the suns to burn through silent Space,
Flame-signs of its uncomprehended Thought
In a wide brooding ether’s formless muse:
It made of Knowledge a veiled and struggling light,
Of Being a substance nescient, dense and dumb,
Of Bliss the beauty of an insentient world.
In finite things the conscious Infinite dwells:
Involved it sleeps in Matter’s helpless trance,
It rules the world from its sleeping senseless Void;
Dreaming it throws out mind and heart and soul
To labour crippled, bound, on the hard earth;
A broken whole it works through scattered points;
Its gleaming shards are Wisdom’s diamond thoughts,
Its shadowy reflex our ignorance.   more »