It is often said: "India has no history," meaning that the material facts that mark its development are badly dated or are not dated at all and, consequently, difficult to classify chronologically.
It is almost made into a reproach. No one hesitates to blame it on the lack of organization inherent in Oriental civilizations, and to see there, moreover, a proof that India has a great need to submit to European methods and swallow Europe's sense of order.
But historical intuition, however little one has, must try to get closer to the bottom of things. This is why history has some interest, because the aspects of life are not of equal importance to all peoples. It is necessary to ask why India is "without history."
It is because, for it, material facts count little. It is the experience, for which they could be the occasion, that counts. The experience alone is preserved. What good is it to preserve the memory of contingent facts? What good to put what is secondary in the foreground? What good to make enduring what is by nature transitory? The Earth itself changes form. But experience leads to supreme knowledge, to the knowledge of the permanent. In a hundred ways, with various expressions and symbols, India has consigned this knowledge to its sacred texts. It is not interested in the rest. The history of India is, above all, the history, on the human plane, of a set of spiritual forces for which before and after have little importance.
For those who sense the soul of a country behind the adventures of its destiny in time, the imposing vision of Indian epics indeed retains, in this respect, priority over the muddled chronologies of princes, Chalukyas or Yadavas - or Rajputs - even accounts of the immortal defeats that gave only the land to the Afghans, Turks, or Mongols, and only the gold to successive overseas Empires.
Ancient India left, of its historical life, still less light than medieval India. In books reporting the history of the Gods, impersonal and symbolic accounts of the system of human experience; in books of yogic asceticism, containing the anonymous acquisitions of the sages, the experience of those who knew how to control their consciousness, to realize in it the harmony of the World, and who heard in their ears the music of the celestial spheres: here, for India, is the essential; here is what was worth the trouble of preserving from a past of several millennia, as rich in warlike glories and peaceful flowerings as that of any other great people.
Other peoples have preserved lists of their kings and ruins of their temples: they have a history. But they lost the tradition of the essential that India has preserved.
India has the cult of the impersonal, of the universal.
To its history even, it does not attach any other importance than that of an individual experience. Land of burgeoning civilization, of complex religion, with innumerable contradictory aspects, society subdivided to infinity, in which there is place for all, it sees, in any "special case" that is affirmed in the name of its own value, the unjustified exaggeration of a small part that fails in its role by leaving its place.
It is unaware of national fanaticism, considering itself from the point of view of Man.
It is unaware, by the same token, of the idolatry of Man and all the stupidities and atrocities that accompany it in civilizations flowering under the sign of "science." It inserts Man in the world of the Living. For it, only that which is universal, of a cosmic universality, is really worthy of being exalted. And the Individual, the Nation, Man, the Earth, are only points of view on this reality and this supreme value which is expressed in each one of them and exceeds them all: Being....
iTunesYael Naïm - New Soul
SONGFACTSNew Soul
01-20-08 - Saving the World through Saving Yourself
01-13-08 - Ibn Rushd: The Great Muslim Philosopher
01-06-08 - Voltaire: The Incomparable Infidel
12-30-07 - Chuang Tzu / This Human World
12-17-07 - Hinduism: Philosophy of Idol Worship
12-09-07 - Mysteries of Ground Radio
12-03-07 - Ralph Waldo Emerson: Nature
11-25-07 - The Christian Nation Myth
11-18-07 - The Golden Verses of Pythagoras
11-12-07 - The Visible and Invisible Worlds
11-05-07 - On The Nature of Things
10-28-07 - Strings on the Winds
10-21-07 - Heaven & Hell - Chapter 57
10-14-07 - The Most Holy Trinosophia
10-08-07 - Breaking the Authority of the Bastard Curse
09-30-07 - Silent Teachings and Sat-sang
09-24-07 - The Right to Ignore the State
09-16-07 - Edgar Cayce Akashic Records
09-03-07 - Life and Teachings of Hermes Trismegistus
08-26-07 - Science Fiction, Wars & a Meaning to Life
08-19-07 - Plato's Science of Maieutic Psychagogy
08-12-07 - The Lightning and the Sun
08-05-07 - The Uses of Disaster:...
07-30-07 - Those loving bonobos...
07-22-07 - The Days of Noah
07-15-07 - Terror Attacks & Protecting Infrastructure
07-08-07 - Science the Destroyer
07-01-07 - Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion
06-24-07 - Nihilism: The Question of Truth
06-17-07 - Earthly Lesson of Jesus' Crucifixion
06-10-07 - Lyrics: Shrunken Heads
06-03-07 - Eugene Debs 1918 Anti-war speech
05-28-07 - Freedom from Experiences
02-10-07 - Arcana Coelestia n. 9407
02-04-07 - The Crowd, by Gustave le Bon
01-27-07 - War of Assumption
01-21-07 - New Types of Weapons
01-14-07 - Chaos and Terror
01-09-07 - Helen Keller as Mystic