RESCUE OF INDIA,

SPIRITUAL VALUES AND MATERIAL VALUES

Article by Master K.H. originally published in "La Nación", Buenos Aires – Argentina. March 1926.

TO THE WEST:

"We have not been defeated; the spirit is not overcome.

As surely as the sun rises in the east, we will rise and regain our primacy.

Your conventional and utilitarian hegemonism has humiliated us, but it has not conquered us.

We have been meditating, and we will soon prove to you that our patience has been saving while your authoritarianism has gnawed at your insides...

"Our wisdom begins where your hypotheses and selfishness end" ...

The Orient

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The most difficult problem confronting philosophers and thinkers is that of the valuation of life. What criteria should it establish in order to assess the fair value of human life? What is the value of the aspirations of the heart? Is material progress, advancement in the means of production, refinement of customs, the ambition to dominate, the sound and sure criterion of Western civilization? And what is said of the individual is equally applicable to the life of societies. A few years ago, the famous poet Rabindranath Tagore visited Japan and the press sounded a warning note advising students not to attend his lectures because the poet belongs to a humiliated nation subject to foreign domination. India, it is true, its long and extensive territories are occupied by alien forces, its sources of wealth are exploited by foreign capital, but has its spirit been conquered? Greece was defeated by the Roman legions, but its soul, its culture, its civilization, its philosophy and its great religious and political ideals, far from being defeated, took possession of the Roman spirit, and today Latin literature is unintelligible if the great and immortal works of the Greek writers, poets and playwrights are not thoroughly studied. The political system, the religions that flourished in the best days of the Roman empire were imported from Helas, from the nation despised by the Roman armies. The Roman flag was hoisted over the Acropolis of Athens, but the Greek spirit dominated over the Minerva of Rome. Which of these two nations was the greater? Which of them deserves the respect of the human race? Which is more valuable, spirit or matter?

The spirit and spiritual and religious ideals remain free and independent, exercising over all who come into contact with them. Ideals are eternal, matter expires. Dean Inge, author of several books on philosophy, writes in this regard: "New York may boast of being the capital of all the monetary significance of the world, of possessing the best markets in the world, and of governing the traffic of the whole world, but Asia boasts of its lofty religious and spiritual traditions, which in the end are the only ones that endure. Bishop Berkeley, the father of idealist philosophy in England, also writes: "He who has not meditated on God, the soul, and the supreme may well perhaps be a prosperous worm of the earth; but he will never become a true patriot and brilliant statesman." Y.C.F. Andrews, a profound connoisseur of the Oriental soul and especially of the spirit that animates India, recently said in a speech at Behar: "The more I consider and meditate on the historical problems of Asia, the cradle of all religious civilizations, the more I become convinced that the vitality of its peoples is due to their religiosity. Nations have perished, yet the nations of Asia survive all cataclysms and vicissitudes. It is not without historical significance that all the founders of the great religions without exception were born in Asia. But if the time were to come when the peoples and nations of Asia, India, and their inhabitants, hypnotized by the material power of Europe and America, would abandon their divine mission in the field of spirit and religion, then it cannot be said what India and the whole world would lose. Asia has always placed unlimited faith in spiritual ideals. He has placed his hope in the divine, in the transcendental, not in material possessions.

In 1913, speaking to a meeting of occultists and free Buddhists in Madras, we said, among other things, the excerpts we copied: "There is nothing left for us but to continue persevering. The materialistic power which oppresses us will soon be exhausted in its strength, and the very agony with which the West reveals itself to be afflicted must be to us the spur that exalts us to our true integrity independent of spirit. In the face of the overwhelming powers called "laws" and in the face of cannons, there is no possible dilemma. "To oppose it, it's madness. "Non-cooperation" is ridiculous. But to sit idly by would be worse, shameful. The legal whips of the materialized and corrupt West and its criminal jaws of steel that are eager to vomit destruction, desolation and death, must not intimidate us. Let them humiliate us, but let them not enslave us!

Let us submit our matter to them, but we will not give up our spirit. Let us be spiritually immovable. Let us not allow ourselves to be touched by the spirit, then, and let our spirituality not be weakened! Let's continue to grow closer to our traditional way of life! Even more! Let us despise this titanic advance of the perverse and corrupting rule of the West; Let us not be conquered by their materialism.

Rather, we should strive to unify. The whole of the East is just spirituality; Egypt, Turkey, Persia, India, Mongolia, China and Japan are in unison in belief. Confucius, Muhammad, and Buddha had the same goal; The only thing that differentiates us are the languages and the ethnographic conditions. The spiritual life is our great and only concern.

Once the whole East is unified, and we continue in our object of "spiritualizing" ourselves, we will have fortified ourselves, and instead of having to counteract the overwhelming power of the West, it will be weakened and yield under the invincible power of our "spirituality."

Let's not even be pessimistic. The West depends a lot on us, physically and spiritually. Our gold and our raw materials are known throughout the civilizing world. Our knowledge, seen through the esoteric veil that protects us, is the substantial basis of the wisdom of the West. Our philosophical creeds are the subject of much attention. And then you have Buddhism, Kabbalah, Taoism, Mohammedanism, Bahaism, Brahmanism, Theosophy, and other religions and sects which are so fervently studied that they are not unknown anywhere in the world, and finally, Solutionist Occultism or Rational Esotericism is invading all spheres of human activity and taking possession of the best prepared elements of the spiritual and scientific world. Can anything better be said about us? Is there a more convenient condition than ours? Are not all these, brethren, manifestations of the most advantageous situation in which we find ourselves, notwithstanding all the recriminations of servitude and decadence which are hurried against us?

Believe me, brethren, we can go even further. While Europe is falling apart and rotten apart with its selfishness and pretended wisdom that makes it more and more savage (more barbaric), we will be regaining our place. And it is incumbent upon us to take an interest in assuming the directorship whose privilege we have retained for millennia, and to utterly destroy the West's fateful evil (civilization).

Our spirituality is invincible, and, much to the chagrin of Westerners, we are the victors of those who insist on being our executioners... and shine.

The spiritual sun of the East will never cease to rise and shine to fertilize the exhausted walls of the corrupt West of civilization, with truer fertilizers than spirituality.

This sun is our own humble greatness, as formidable as it is incomprehensible to the deluded criterion that humiliates, despises and exploits us.

This is the most important message that India presents to a materialized world, to a world dominated by ideas of material gain, to a world whose criterion of valuation is none other than commercial or mercenary importance.

And that nation is enormous because of the extent of its spirit and its superiority over the rest of humanity, in short, because it exercises dominion over most of the inhabitants of the globe.

What do ideals about God, the soul, and the highest good matter in the progress of the world? Candide say it! Is a civilized society that is based on pseudo-principles of liberty and equity, and on the power of armies and navies, despite the League of Nations and conferences, stable and true? We do not mean to say that Asians are all animated by such high religious and spiritual ideals; materialism has gained adherents in these forcibly colonized lands. What we do affirm without fear of contradiction is that the whole of oriental literature, the most genuine expression of the Hindu and yellow soul, is by nature saturated with an eminently religious environment, conducive to abstract elegies. And he is preaching to the world, which prides itself on being civilized, that what matters to it is the magnanimous ideal, the sublime and unchained aspiration of the vile narrowness of materiality. Rabbi Darti Ben Natchoun in his "Spiritual Revolution" has rightly said: "Material interests can serve to unite individuals and nations, but only spiritual ideals of true brotherhood can build up the association of individuals and collectivities and make it lasting in a spirit of goodness and justice.

K.H.