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The Guiding Light
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Also by the author
My Journey: Transforming Dreams Into Action
The Righteous Life: The Very Best of A.P.J. Abdul Kalam
Governance for Growth in India
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First published by
Rupa Publications India Pvt. Ltd 2015
7/16, Ansari Road, Daryaganj
New Delhi 110002

Sales Centres:
Allahabad Bengaluru Chennai
Hyderabad Jaipur Kathmandu
Kolkata Mumbai

Anthology and introduction copyright © A.P.J. Abdul Kalam 2015

Copyright for the individual pieces vest with the authors or their estates

All rights reserved.
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Contents
Introduction
On Reading
Faith
Belief
Difficulties
Odds and Ends
Tributes
Some Thoughts
Radiance
The Might of Time
Acknowledgements
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Introduction
I don’t remember the first book I ever read. It is almost as if books were
always there in my life, a solid, tactile presence that exuded comfort and
assurance. Yet, I know it was not so. When I was growing up, I lived in a
small town in southern India—Rameswaram. It did not have a library, and of
course no bookshops. We studied the holy book, the Koran, diligently and
pored over our schoolbooks. For anything more there were the newspapers.
For a while I worked as a newspaper delivery boy, during the days of World
War II, and the feel of crisp, fresh paper on my fingers is a sensation that still
gives me pleasure.
My introduction into the world of books and reading happened through
my friend, brother-in-law and first mentor, Jallaluddin. He was, at the time,
when I was about ten years old, the only fully literate adult inhabitant of the
town. He had studied up to the Intermediate level and then gave up as he
needed to start working and earning. But he had an expansive, curious mind.
His interests lay beyond the concerns of the island and there were evenings
when he read reports from the newspapers and told us of a world beyond the
one we inhabited. It was he who told us about the current political situation,
news of the War, prices of precious metals, and all other such information. I
spent a lot of time with him, watching him read or writing letters for the
people of the town which they dictated to him. Somewhere, the power of the
written word imprinted on my mind. I understood that to know and love
reading meant the freedom to travel to any kind of world I wanted to. It could
be the world of religion or philosophy—what I learnt in my Koran class. Or it
could be poetry and imagination. Or it could be understanding the words of
famous people and their lives.
Once I was older, I started reading more voraciously. I was still rather
penniless since most of the little money I got was used to pay my bills while I
studied at the Madras Institute of Technology. However, I discovered a tiny
bookshop at Moore Market in Madras (now Chennai) whose owner was
happy to lend me books for a small deposit. I started reading in earnest,
quickly making my way through the classics, translations, collections of
poetry and essays. I found works explaining concepts from different religions
interesting and I studied the holy books and texts of Hinduism, Christianity,
Buddhism, the works of Confucius. The seeds for this were perhaps laid by
my father, who was a deeply religious man and knew the texts of Islam
closely. By now my mind was getting ever more thirsty and I needed to know
many answers.
Once I started working and got deeper into the world of science, the
questions about connections between the worldly and the spiritual intrigued
me. How are we all connected? Does science negate spirituality? How can we
keep our beliefs while delving into matters that require theorems and proofs
to establish their existence? I read the works of great scientists and
philosophers who have studied these matters. Questions of morality and codes
to live one’s life by were also playing on my mind and the works of thinkers
like J. Krishnamurthi, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Sri Aurobindo helped me to
understand not only myself but the rapidly unfolding world around me. These
essays and books helped me analyse situations better and understand my
fellow workers and their motivations clearly.
One work that has been almost like a code for living for me is the
Thirukural. It was written by saint poet Thiruvalluvar over 2,000 years ago in
the great age of Tamil Sangam literature and consists of couplets or kurals.
Each of these contains a profound truth or moral code, expressed in a few
words but enfolding astonishing wisdom within it. There has been hardly any
moment of conflict or despair in my life that the Thirukural has not helped to
resolve.
The other literary form that has intrigued and captivated me from my
school days is poetry. I can still recall a few poems that appeared in our
literature textbooks. Later, I read the works of Shakespeare and Milton and
Donne. Milton’s Paradise Lost has been a particular favourite for decades and
I have read and reread those lines over and over again. The works of Indian
masters like Tagore and Bharatiar and Aurobindo too have deeply touched me
with their visions for humankind and deep nationalistic strain. The immediate
passion that a poem can capture is perhaps unparalleled in any other form. I
myself have written a number of poems and each time I try to distil the
essence of what I want to say into the lines, I think of the great poems I have
loved and admired.
As I grew older, I started thinking more and more about this nation of ours
and where we are all headed. What is the role of each citizen? What does the
youth want? What are they entitled to? What are their responsibilities? What
is the vision that we need to keep before us as we traverse the path towards a
better and brighter future for each one of us? At this time in my life, I also
became a writer myself. I published my first book successfully and before I
knew it I had authored quite a number of titles. With each one not only did I
get to understand the requirements of a writer better, I started thinking more
deeply on issues of development and vision. My reading became more
oriented towards this as I had to understand large amounts of data, look
critically at reports and draw inferences that would help lay out a vision
document, one we called Vision 2020. Along with these, reading the works of
Gandhi, Lincoln, and the histories of nations kept me inspired to keep
working on the mission of finding ways to make India a developed nation in
the near future and within our lifetimes.
In this book are included lines from literary, religious and philosophical
works that have inspired and guided me all through my life. There are
quotations from religious texts that I have read closely and often quoted in my
writings and lectures. There are the works of classical greats like Milton,
Shakespeare, Donne, Tagore. There are some couplets or kurals from the
Thirukural that I hope will inspire readers who haven’t yet been introduced to
this great work, to seek out the text either in original or in a good translation
and read it. There are extracts from essays that I have found thought
provoking and which I feel are essential reading for everybody. The book has
been divided into sections and the quotations in each fit within some broad
frameworks like faith, inspirations, duties, tributes etc. But these are great
works of literature and their universal appeal can be understood by reading
them in any context one wishes to place them in.
The following pages are a tribute to the books and texts that have created
me as a thinking being. I hope every reader will not only appreciate these
particular quotations, but also make an effort to read as many of these works
in their entireties to understand the thoughts better and in a deeper manner.
This book is a little window to further wonders and many more worlds
beyond the ones we go about in. I hope I have been able to open a few doors
and windows and helped bring in some gusts of fresh thought and ideas into
your worlds.
A list of some of my favourite books

Light from Many Lamps, edited Lillian Watson
Man the Unknown, Alexis Carrell
Thirukural, Thiruvalluvar
Code Name God, Mani Bhaumik
Secret the Power, Rhonda Byrne
Works of Kabir
Silappathikaram, Ilango Adigal

Everyday Greatness, Stephen Covey
Gitanjali, Rabindranath Tagore
Paradise Lost, John Milton

The Prophet, Khalil Gibran
The Seat of the Soul, Gary Zukav

Holy Koran
Bhagavad Gita
Holy Bible
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On Reading
I hear all the time that people are reading less and less these days. Perhaps
there are more distractions, more gadgets, our lives are too busy to find a
quiet corner and savour a book. Yet, this is a habit that we need to keep alive
in ourselves and inculcate in future generations. Reading is to the mind what a
good meal is to the body. It sustains, it nourishes, it helps us think, it helps us
grow. I have for years spoken about a few simple things we can do in our
homes and around us to keep this habit alive. I hope you will agree with my
suggestions and try to implement some of them.
• Build home libraries. Gather books in one and twos and slowly build up
a collection. Keep this library as a gift for future generations, filling it with
beautiful meaningful books.
• Read with your children. If you are a parent, keep aside some part of the
day when you sit with your children and read together. It could be the
same book that you read together, or each can have his/her own book that
you read in companionable silence.
• If you are a teacher, or part of a school, bring interesting, age-
appropriate books into the classroom and read them together with the
children. Begin discussions around them that will make them think and
love the act of reading.
• Visit bookstores and libraries when you go to any new place.
Sometimes you may find more information hidden away there than you
expected.
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Faith
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In the name of Allah, the All-Merciful, the Mercy Giving.
All praise for Allah, Lord of the Worlds.
The All-Merciful, the Mercy Giving.
Master of the day of judgment.
You alone we worship and you alone we seek help from.
Show (guide) us the straight path.
The path of those upon whom you have bestowed (your) favours
and not of those who incurred your wrath (anger) and not of
those who have gone astray.
—Holy Koran
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The mighty Lord on high, our deeds, as if at hand, espies:
The gods know all men do, though men would fain their deeds disguise.
Whoever stands, whoever moves, or steals from place to place,
Or hides him in his secret cell the gods his movements trace.
This earth is his, to him belong those vast and boundless skies;
Both seas within him rest, and yet in that small pool he lies.
Whoever far beyond the sky should think his way to wing,
He could not there elude the grasp of Varuna the king.
The ceaseless winkings all he counts of every mortal’s eyes:

He wields this universal frame, as gamester throws his dice.
Those knotted nooses which thou fling’st, o god, the bad to snare—
All liars let them overtake, but all the truthful spare.
—Atharva Veda, Book 4, Hymn 6
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1. Judge not, that ye be not judged.
2. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what
measure ye mete, it shall be measured unto you.
3. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but
considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?
4. Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me cast out the mote out of thine
eye; and lo, the beam is in thine own eye?
5. Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of thine own eye; and then
shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.
6. Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls
before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and
rend you.
7. Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall
be opened unto you:
8. For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to
him that knocketh it shall be opened.
…
15. Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but
inwardly are ravening wolves.
16. By their fruits ye shall know them. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or
figs of thistles?
17. Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but the corrupt tree
bringeth forth evil fruit.
18. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring
forth good fruit.
19. Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into
the fire.
20. Therefore by their fruits ye shall know them.
—Matthew 7, Holy Bible
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Guard yourself from six things, and I am your security for paradise. When
you speak, speak the truth, perform what you promise, discharge your trust,
be chaste in thought and action, and withhold your hand from striking, from
taking that which is unlawful and bad.
—Holy Koran
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1. Judge me, O Lord; for I have walked in mine integrity:
I have trusted also in the Lord; therefore I shall not slide.
2. Examine me, O Lord, and prove me;
Try my reigns and my heart.
3. For thy loving kindness is before mine eyes:
And I have walked in thy truth..
…
8. Lord, I have loved the habitation of thy house,
And the place where thine honour dwelleth.
9. Gather not my soul with sinners,
Nor my life with bloody men:
10. In whose hands is mischief,
And their right hand is full of bribes.
11. But as for me, I will walk in mine integrity:
Redeem me, and be merciful unto me.
—Psalm 26, Holy Bible
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If there be righteousness in the heart, there will be beauty in
character,
If there be beauty in character, there will be harmony in the home.
If there be harmony in the home, there will be order in the nation.
If there be order in the nation, there will be peace in the world.
—Confucius
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The Truth says: I consider the heart,
Not the form made from water and clay.
You say: I have a heart within me, whereas
The heart is above God’s throne, not below.
—Rumi
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1. For all this I considered in my heart even to declare all this,
that the righteous, and the wise, and their works, are in the
hand of God: no man knoweth either love or hatred by all
that is before them.
10. Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for
there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom,
in the grave, wither thou goest.
11. I returned, and saw under the sun, that the rice is not to
the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to
the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet
favour to men of skill: but time and chance happeneth to
them all.
—Ecclesiastes 9, Holy Bible
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Moha refers to that which is opposed to knowledge. Actually real knowledge
is the understanding that every living being is eternally a servitor of the Lord,
but instead of thinking oneself in that position, the living entity thinks that he
is not a servant, that he is the master of this material world, for he wants to
lord it over the material nature. That is his illusion. This illusion can be
overcome by the mercy of the Lord or by the mercy of a pure devotee. When
that illusion is over, one agrees to act in Krishna consciousness.
—Bhagavad Gita As It is, His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami
Prabhupada
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A personal effort is needed to preserve one’s faith, to let it grow within. Later
—much later—one day, looking back, we may see that everything that
happened, even what seemed to us the worst, was a Divine Grace to make us
advance on the way; and then we become aware that the personal effort too
was a grace.
—Questions and Answers, The Mother
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There is One God
He is the Supreme Truth.
He, the Creator,
Is without fear and without hate.
He, the Omnipresent,
Pervades the universe.
He is not born,
Nor does He die to be born again.
By His grace shalt thou worship Him.
Before time itself

There was truth.
When time began to run its course
He was the truth.
Even now, He is the truth
And evermore shall truth prevail.
—The Japji
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Belief
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O ye who believe! fear God and believe in his apostle: two portions of his
mercy will He give you. He will bestow on you light to walk in, and He will
forgive you: for God is Forgiving, Merciful;
That the people of the Book may know that they have no control over
aught of the favours of God, and that these gifts of grace are in the hands of
God, and that He vouchsafeth them to whom he will; for God is of immense
bounty.
—Holy Koran
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God can do tremendous things through the person who doesn’t care about
who gets the credit and is willing to share the credit, share the power, and
share the glory…
It’s better to let somebody else do a worse job than I would do, than not
have it done at all. The surprising thing is that, more often than not, they do a
better job of it than I would have done!
—Tough Times Never Last, But Tough People Do! Robert H. Schuller
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WHAT GOD HATH PROMISED
God hath not promised skies always blue,

Flower strewn pathways all our lives through,
God hath not promised sun without rain,
Joy without sorrow, peace without pain.
But God hath promised strength for the day,

Rest for the labour, light for the way,
Grace for the trials, help from above,
Unfailing sympathy, undying love.
God hath not promised we shall not know
Toil and temptation, trouble and woe;
He hath not told us we shall not bear
Many a burden, many a care.
God hath not promised smooth roads and wide,

Swift, easy travel, needing no guide;
Never a mountain rocky and steep,
Never a river turbid and deep.
—Annie Johnson Flint
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I belong to no nation, no civilization, no society, no race, but to the Divine. I
obey no master, no ruler, no law, no social convention, but the Divine. To
Him I have surrendered all, will, life and self; for Him I am ready to give all
my blood, drop by drop, if such is His will, with complete joy; and nothing in
his service can be sacrifice, for all is perfect delight.
—The Mother: The Story of Her Life, Georges Van Vrekhem
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THIS IS MY PRAYER TO THEE
This is my prayer to thee, my lord—strike, strike at the root of

penury in my heart.
Give me the strength lightly to bear my joys and sorrows.
Give me the strength to make my love fruitful in service.
Give me the strength never to disown the poor or bend my knees
before insolent might.
Give me the strength to raise my head high above daily trifles.
And give me the strength to surrender my strength to thy will
with love.
—Rabindranath Tagore
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PARADISE LOST (an extract)
What if the sun

Be centre to the world; and other stars,
By his attractive virtue and their own
Incited, dance about him various rounds?
Their wandering course, now high, now low, then hid,
Progressive, retrograde, or standing still,
In six thou seest, and what if seventh to these
The planet earth, so steadfast though she seem,
Insensibly three different motions move?
Which else to several spheres thou must ascribe,
Moved contrary with thwart obliquities;
Or save the sun his labour, and that swift
Nocturnal and diurnal rhomb supposed,
Invisible else above all stars, the wheel
Of day and night; which needs not thy belief,
If earth, industrious of herself, fetch day
Travelling east, and with her part averse
From the sun’s beam meet night, her other part
Still luminous by his ray. What if that light,
Sent from her through the wide transpicuous air,
To the terrestrial moon be as a star
Enlightening her by day, as she by night
This earth reciprocal, if land be there,
Fields and inhabitants: Her spots thou seest
As clouds, and clouds my rain, and rain produce
Fruits in her soften’d soil, for some to eat
Allotted there; and other suns perhaps,
With their attendant moons, thou wilt descry,
Communicating male and female light;
Which two great sexes animate the world,
Stored in each orb perhaps with some that live:
For such vast room in nature unpossess’d
By living soul, desert and desolate,
Only to shine, yet scarce to contribute
Each orb a glimpse of light, convey’d so far
Down to this habitable, which returns
Light back to them, is obvious to dispute.
But whether thus these things, or whether not;
Whether the sun, predominant in heaven,
Rise on the earth; or earth rise on the sun;
He from the east his flaming road begin,
Or she from west her silent course advance,
With inoffensive pace that spinning sleeps
On her soft axle; while she paces even,
And bears thee soft with the smooth air along;
Solicit not thy thoughts with matters hid;
Leave them to God above; him serve and fear.
Of other creatures, as him pleases best,
Wherever placed, let him dispose; joy thou
In what he gives to thee, this Paradise
And thy fair Eve; heaven is for thee too high
To know what passes there; be lowly wise:
Think only what concerns thee, and thy being;
Dream not of other worlds; what creatures there
Live, in what state, condition, or degree:
Contented that thus far hath been reveal’d,
Not of Earth only, but of highest heaven.
—John Milton
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I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what
direction we are moving: To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes
with the wind and sometimes against it, but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie
at anchor.
—The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, Oliver Wendell Holmes
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I would like to tell the young men and women before me not to lose hope and
courage. Success can only come to you by courageous devotion to the task
lying in front of you. I can assert without fear of contradiction that the quality
of the Indian mind is equal to the quality of any Teutonic, Nordic or Anglo-
Saxon mind. What we lack is perhaps courage … We need a spirit of victory,
a spirit that will carry us to our rightful place under the sun, a spirit, which
will recognize that we, as inheritors of a proud civilization, are entitled to a
rightful place on this planet.
—C.V. Raman
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PREPAREDNESS
For all your days prepare.

And meet them ever alike:
When you are the anvil, bear—
When you are the hammer, strike.
—Edwin Markham
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OPPORTUNITY
They do me wrong who say I come no more

When once I knock and fail to find you in;
For every day I stand outside your door
And bid you wake, and rise to fight and win.
Wail not for precious chances passed away!

Weep not for golden ages on the wane!
Each night I burn the records of the day—
At sunrise every soul is born again!
Dost thou behold thy lost youth all aghast?

Dost reel from righteous Retribution’s blow?
Then turn from blotted archives of the past
And find the future’s pages white as snow.
Art thou a mourner? Rouse thee from thy spell;

Art thou a sinner? Sins may be forgiven;
Each morning gives thee wings to flee from hell,
Each night a star to guide thy feet to heaven.
Laugh like a boy at splendors that have sped,

To vanished joys be blind and deaf and dumb;
My judgments seal the dead past with its dead,
But never bind a moment yet to come.
Though deep in mire, wring not your hands and weep;

I lend my arm to all who say ‘I can!’
No shame-faced outcast ever sank so deep
But yet might rise and be again a man!
—Walter Malone
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THE PRAYER OF SAINT FRANCIS
Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace.

Where there is hatred, let me sow love,
Where there is injury, pardon,
Where there is doubt, faith,
Where there is despair, hope,
Where there is darkness, light,
Where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master,
Grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console,
To be understood as to understand,
To be loved, as to love;
For it is in giving that we receive,

It is in forgiving that we are forgiven,
And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
—St. Francis of Assisi
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Thus a religious man is not really one who puts on a robe or a loincloth, or
lives on one meal a day, or has taken innumerable vows to be this and not to
be that, but is he who is inwardly simple, who is not becoming anything. Such
a mind is capable of extraordinary receptivity, because there is no barrier,
there is no fear, there is no going towards something; therefore it is capable of
receiving grace, God, truth, or what you will.
—The First and Last Freedom, Jiddu Krishnamurti
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12
The time that my journey takes is long and the way of it long. I came out on
the chariot of the first gleam of light, and pursued my voyage through the
wildernesses of worlds leaving my track on many a star and planet.
It is the most distant course that comes nearest to thyself, and that training is
the most intricate which leads to the utter simplicity of a tune.
The traveller has to knock at every alien door to come to his own, and one has
to wander through all the outer worlds to reach the innermost shrine at the
end.
My eyes strayed far and wide before I shut them and said ‘Here art thou!’
The question and the cry ‘Oh, where?’ melt into tears of a thousand streams
and deluge the world with the flood of the assurance ‘I am!’
13
The song that I came to sing remains unsung to this day. I have spent my days
in stringing and in unstringing my instrument. The time has not come true, the
words have not been rightly set; only there is the agony of wishing in my
heart.
The blossom has not opened; only the wind is sighing by. I have not seen his
face, nor have I listened to his voice; only I have heard his gentle footsteps
from the road before my house.
The livelong day has passed in spreading his seat on the floor; but the lamp
has not been lit and I cannot ask him into my house. I live in the hope of
meeting with him; but this meeting is not yet.
14
My desires are many and my cry is pitiful, but ever didst thou save me by
hard refusals; and this strong mercy has been wrought into my life through
and through.
Day by day thou art making me worthy of the simple, great gifts that thou
gavest to me unasked—this sky and the light, this body and the life and the
mind—saving me from perils of overmuch desire. There are times when I
languidly linger and times when I awaken and hurry in search of my goal; but
cruelly thou hidest thyself from before me.
Day by day thou art making me worthy of thy full acceptance by refusing me
ever and anon, saving me from perils of weak, uncertain desire.
16
I have had my invitation to this world’s festival, and thus my life has been
blessed. My eyes have seen and my ears have heard.
It was my part at this feast to play upon my instrument, and I have done all I
could.
Now, I ask, has the time come at last when I may go in and see thy face and
offer thee my silent salutation?
—Gitanjali, Rabindranath Tagore
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Since we consider men in the place that they hold, and value them according
to those places, and ask not how they got thither, when we see man made the
love of the Father, the price of the Son, the temple of the Holy Ghost, the
signet upon God’s hand, the apple of God’s eye, absolutely, unconditionally
we cannot annihilate man, not evacuate, not evaporate, not extenuate man to
the levity, to the vanity, to the nullity of this text, Surely men altogether, high
and low, are lighter than vanity. For, man is not only a contributary creature,
but a total creature; he does not only make one, but he is all; he is not a piece
of the world, but the world itself; and next to the glory of God, the reason
why there is a world.
But we must not determine this consideration here, that man is something,
a great thing, a noble creature, if we refer him to his end, to his interest in
God, to his reversion in heaven; but when we consider man in his way, man
amongst men, man is not nothing, not unable to assist man, not unfit to be
relied upon by man; for, even in that respect also, God hath made hominem
homini Deum, he hath made one man able to do the offices of God to another,
in procuring his regeneration here, and advancing his salvation hereafter; as
he says, Saviours shall come up on Mount Sion; which is the church.
—John Donne
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CROSSING THE BAR
Sunset and evening star,

And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,
But such a tide as moving seems asleep,

Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.
Twilight and evening bell,

And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;
For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place

The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar.
—Alfred Lord Tennyson
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THE SCHOLAR-GIPSY (an extract)
Thou hast not lived, why should’st thou perish, so?

Thou hadst one aim, one business, one desire;
Else wert thou long since number’d with the dead!
Else hadst thou spent, like other men, thy fire!
The generations of thy peers are fled,
And we ourselves shall go;
But thou possessest an immortal lot,
And we imagine thee exempt from age
And living as thou liv’st on Glanvil’s page,
Because thou hadst—what we, alas! have not.
For early didst thou leave the world, with powers

Fresh, undiverted to the world without,
Firm to their mark, not spent on other things;
Free from the sick fatigue, the languid doubt,
Which much to have tried, in much been baffled, brings.
O life unlike to ours!
Who fluctuate idly without term or scope,
Of whom each strives, nor knows for what he strives,
And each half lives a hundred different lives;
Who wait like thee, but not, like thee, in hope.
Thou waitest for the spark from heaven! and we,
Light half-believers of our casual creeds,
Who never deeply felt, nor clearly will’d,
Whose insight never has borne fruit in deeds,
Whose vague resolves never have been fulfill’d;
For whom each year we see
Breeds new beginnings, disappointments new;
Who hesitate and falter life away,
And lose to-morrow the ground won to-day—
Ah! do not we, wanderer! await it too?
Yes, we await it!—but it still delays,

And then we suffer! and amongst us one,
Who most has suffer’d, takes dejectedly
His seat upon the intellectual throne;
And all his store of sad experience he
Lays bare of wretched days;
Tells us his misery’s birth and growth and signs,
And how the dying spark of hope was fed,
And how the breast was soothed, and how the head,
And all his hourly varied anodynes.
—Matthew Arnold
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THIS, TOO, SHALL PASS AWAY
Art thou in misery, brother? Then I pray

Be comforted. Thy grief shall pass away.
Art thou elated? Ah, be not too gay;
Temper thy joy: this, too, shall pass away.
Art thou in danger? Still let reason sway,
And cling to hope: this, too, shall pass away.
Tempted art thou? In all thine anguish lay
One truth to heart: this, too, shall pass away.
Do rays of loftier glory round thee play?
Kinglike art thou? This, too, shall pass away!
Whate’er thou art, wher’er thy footsteps stray,
Heed these wise words: This, too, shall pass away.
—Paul Hamilton Hayne
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Of what use is learning if it fails to lead
To the holy feet of all-knowing God?
—Chapter 1, Verse 2
…
Real joy springs from virtue alone; all other joys
Are painful and devoid of praise.
…
The only thing to do is virtuous deeds
The thing to avoid is vicious deeds.
—Thirukural
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Difficulties
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Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their soul,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not
even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with
His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the Archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is
stable.
—The Prophet, Khalil Gibran
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The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore that all progress
depends on the unreasonable man.
—Man and Superman, George Bernard Shaw
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One should be very careful in accepting gifts. Even though on account of
learning and good qualities, a person may be worth of accepting presents, he
should never get attached to gifts, for by accepting gifts, the divine light in
him gets extinguished.
—Manu Smriti
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The angel is free because of his knowledge,
the beast because of his ignorance,
between the two remains the son of man to struggle.
—Rumi
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Is it not true that into our education have come a slackness and a softness? Is
hard effort prominent? The world of thought can be entered in no other way.
—The Ever-Present Past, Edith Hamilton
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Disease is a personal event. It consists of the individual himself. There are as
many different diseases as patients.
However, it would have been impossible to build up a science of medicine
merely by compiling a great number of individual observations. The facts had
to be classified and simplified with the aid of abstractions. In this way disease
was born. And medical treatises could be written. A kind of science was built
up, roughly descriptive, rudimentary, imperfect, but convenient, indefinitely
perfectible and easy to teach. Unfortunately, we have been content with this
result. We did not understand that treatises describing pathological entities
contain only a part of the knowledge indispensable to those who attend the
sick. Medical knowledge should go beyond the science of diseases. The
physician must clearly distinguish the sick human being described in his
books from the concrete patient whom he has to treat, who must not only be
studied, but, above all, relieved, encouraged, and cured. His role is to discover
the characteristics of the sick man’s individuality, his resistance to pathogenic
factors, his sensibility to pain, the value of his organic activities, his past, and
his future. The outcome of an illness in a given individual has to be predicted,
not by a calculation of the probabilities, but by a precise analysis of the
organic, humoral, and psychological personality of this individual. In fact,
medicine, when confining itself to the study of diseases, amputates a part of
its own body.
—Man the Unknown, Alexis Carrel
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It is rare to be born as a human being
It is still more rare to be born without any deformity
Even if you are born without any deformity
It is rare to acquire knowledge and education
Even if one could acquire knowledge and education
It is still rare to offer service to mankind
And contemplate on higher self.
If one leads such a selfless divine life
The gates of heaven open to greet such an evolved soul.
—Avvaiyar
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Who remains true to his conscience
Lives forever in all noble hearts.
…
Superior is one who speaks the truth earnestly
To those who do penance and charity.
…
Water provides only external purity
Truth reveals internal purity.
…
Of all good things that we have found
Nothing surpasses truth profound.
—Thirukural
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And you, too, youthful reader, will realize the Vision (not the idle wish) of
your heart, be it base or beautiful, or a mixture of both, for you will always
gravitate toward that which you, secretly, most love. Into your hands will be
placed the exact results of your own thoughts; you will receive that which you
earn; no more, no less. Whatever your present environment may be, you will
fall, remain, or rise with your thoughts, your Vision, your Ideal. You will
become as small as your controlling desire; as great as your dominant
aspiration.
—As a Man Thinketh, James Allen
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My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to
save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave
I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and
if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do
that. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause,
and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. I
shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors and I shall adopt new views
so fast as they shall appear to be true views.
—From Slavery to Freedom, John Hope Franklin
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Think ever of rising higher. Let it be your only thought. Even if your object be
not attained, the thought itself will have raised you.
…
Forget anger towards anyone
For it begets evil and pain.
…
To guard yourself, keep wrath at bay
Unchecked, ire will yourself slay.
—Thirukural
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Let us learn the meaning of economy. Economy is a high, humane office, a
sacrament, when its aim is grand; when it is the prudence of simple tastes,
when it is practised for freedom, or love, or devotion. Much of the economy
which we see in houses is of a base origin, and is best kept out of sight.
Parched corn eaten to-day, that I may have roast fowl to my dinner Sunday, is
a baseness; but parched corn and a house with one apartment, that I may be
free of all perturbations, that I may be serene and docile to what the mind
shall speak, and girt and road-ready for the lowest mission of knowledge or
goodwill, is frugality for gods and heroes.
Can we not learn the lesson of self-help? Society is full of infirm people,
who incessantly summon others to serve them. They contrive everywhere to
exhaust for their single comfort the entire means and appliances of that luxury
to which our invention has yet attained. Sofas, ottomans, stoves, wine, game-
fowl, spices, perfumes, rides, the theatre, entertainments—all these they want,
they need, and whatever can be suggested more than these they crave also, as
if it was the bread which should keep them from starving; and if they miss
any one, they represent themselves as the most wronged and most wretched
persons on earth. One must have been born and bred with them to know how
to prepare a meal for their learned stomach. Meantime they never bestir
themselves to serve another person; not they! they have a great deal more to
do for themselves that they can possibly perform, nor do they once perceive
the cruel joke of their lives, but the more odious they grow, the sharper is the
tone of their complaining and craving. Can anything be so elegant as to have
few wants and to serve them one’s self, so as to have somewhat left to give,
instead of being always prompt to grab? It is more elegant to answer one’s
own needs than to be richly served; inelegant perhaps it may look to-day, and
to a few, but it is an elegance forever and to all.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
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If the amount of information in science doubles every nine months and decays
at 30 per cent a year, how long does one's expertise last? Without constantly
updating your knowledge base you could end up with as little as 15 per cent
of your technical knowledge relevant within just five years. However, when
you can google just about anything, knowledge acquisition becomes more
important than knowledge retention.
—Rookie Smarts, Liz Wiseman
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A DOCTOR’S STORY OF LIFE AND DEATH
Everyone wants to live a life that is free of illness. Any sickness triggers the
primal fear of death in us. To most people, however, death remains a hidden
secret. We are irresistibly attracted towards the very anxieties we find most
terrifying. Every attendant by the side of a mortally stricken loved one
brushes with the danger of death in a manner that is more emotional than any
other experience one can ever encounter in life. Very few of us, including
those in the medical profession, seem psychologically able to cope with the
thought of our own state of death. The idea of permanent unconsciousness is
too scary to even think of.
I am more concerned with human life than anything else in the whole
cosmos; to me how a man lives is more fascinating than how a star dies. If
there is a God, He is present as much in the creation of each of us as He was
at the creation of the earth. The human condition is the mystery that engages
my fascination, not society, country, humanity, and so on. To me, man is God,
the centre of everything. Those who accomplish the most—measured in
money, intelligence, skills, happiness, or love—are the ones who make the
most of their genetic inheritance. Even identical twins that share exactly the
same genes turn out differently. Whether we reach our potential depends on
many factors, but we are born as unique individuals with our own
distinguished characteristics and capabilities. There is also an inherent flaw
built in each of us that has the potential of growing into a serious malady at
any point of our life. Whether it turns into a disease or how much or how far
is all unique.
I have lived with the awareness of death’s imminence for more than half a
century and saw several thousand doors people take for their exits. I am living
in my eighth decade. There is no way to foretell whether this is to be my last
decade or whether there will be more. I maintain good health but beyond an
absence of a disease, good health is a guarantee of nothing. The only certainty
that I have about my life, and by implication my death, is another of those
wishes we all have in common; I want to exit without suffering. There are
those who wish to die quickly, perhaps with instantaneous suddenness,
perhaps in sleep; there are those who wish to go after a brief, anguish-free
illness, just long enough for everyone who loves them to be by their side. I
think I belong to the earlier category. I believe in dying before death comes.
The world in me must die before I in it die so that I can look back quietly and
dissolve into divinity:
There is a flame within me that has stood

Unmoved, untroubled through a mist of years,
Knowing nor love nor laughter hope or fears,
Nor foolish throb of ill, nor wine of good,
I feel no shadow of the winds that brood.
I hear no whisper of a tide that veers,
I weave no thought of passion, nor of tears.
What I hope, unfortunately, is not what I expect. I have seen too many deaths
to ignore the overwhelming odds against it. Like most people, I probably
suffer with physical as well as emotional distress that accompanies many
mortal illnesses. Like many of my patients, I too may compound the pained
uncertainty of my last months by the further agony of indecision. It is a very
difficult job to decide for a doctor whether to continue with a treatment or
give in. It is even more difficult for a patient to decide whether to be treated
for the possibility of more time or to call it a day and a life. As Ramana
Maharishi said,
Mountain of medicine!
Why hesitate to give the
Medicine ending confusion
Arunchala!
I have no fear of the future because I am completely convinced that the

situations I have been thrust in are providential. I am doing God’s work. I am
walking in the centre of His will. He is leading me. I am following Him. He is
guiding me. I am making His chosen decisions. He relieves me of
responsibility when it is beyond me, and He knows when and where that is.
Faith in God and innate goodness provide the perfect pathway from here to
eternity.
—K. Subbarao with Arun K. Tiwari
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Men are divided into those who take notice by themselves and understand,
those who do not understand except through warning and instruction, and
who benefit from neither, is like the division of the bosom of the earth into
parts where water collects and increases until it bursts out by itself into
springs of living water, parts where water collects but cannot be reached
without digging and arid parts where not even digging will avail.
—The Book of Knowledge, Gazzali
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There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction
that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for
better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good,
no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed
on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides
in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do,
nor does he know until he has tried.
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LEAVE ME ALONE! Leave me alone! I am too pure for thee.
Touch me not! Hath not my world just now become perfect?
My skin is too pure for thy hands. Leave me alone, thou dull, doltish, stupid
day! Is not the midnight brighter?
The purest are to be masters of the world, the least known, the strongest, the
midnight-souls, who are brighter and deeper than any day.
O day, thou gropest for me? Thou feelest for my happiness? For thee am I
rich, lonesome, a treasure-pit, a gold chamber?
O world, thou wantest me? Am I worldly for thee? Am I spiritual for thee?
Am I divine for thee? But day and world, ye are too coarse,
—Have cleverer hands, grasp after deeper happiness, after deeper

unhappiness, grasp after some God; grasp not after me:
—Mine unhappiness, my happiness is deep, thou strange day, but yet am I no

God, no God’s-hell: deep is its woe.
—Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche
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A PSALM OF LIFE
Tell me not, in mournful numbers,

Life is but an empty dream! —
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.
Life is real! Life is earnest!

And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.
Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,

Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each tomorrow
Find us farther than to-day.
Art is long, and Time is fleeting,

And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.
In the world’s broad field of battle,

In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!
Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!

Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act, act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o’erhead!
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;
Footprints, that perhaps another,

Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.
Let us, then, be up and doing,

With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labour and to wait.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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Uncertainty, in the presence of vivid hopes and fears, is painful, but must be
endured if we wish to live without the support of comforting fairy tales. It is
not good either to forget the questions that philosophy asks, or to persuade
ourselves that we have found indubitable answers to them. To teach how to
live without certainty, and yet without being paralysed by hesitation, is
perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who
study it.
—History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell
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NO MATTER WHAT YOU KNOW (an extract)
Reality is always soft clay,

ever shifting and changing its shape.
Fire it into form, and
at the very moment
you are hailing it as final truth
it will break in your hands.
—Dorothy Walters
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Sincere regard for truth is loyalty and disregard for truth is treachery. The
weak amongst you shall be strong with me until I have secured his rights, if
Allah will; and the strong amongst you shall be weak with me until I have
wrested from him the rights of others, if Allah will. Obey me so long as I
obey Allah and His Messenger (Muhammad, pbuh). But if I disobey Allah
and His Messenger, ye owe me no obedience.
—Abu Bakr As-Siddiq (R): The First Caliph of Islam,
Abdul Basit Ahmad
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DEATH BE NOT PROUD
Death be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadful, for, thou art not so,
For, those, whom thou think’st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,
Rest of their bones, and souls deliverie.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,
And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,
And better then thy stroake; why swell’st thou then;
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And Death shall be no more, death thou shalt die!
—John Donne
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Odds and Ends
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DARIUS GREEN AND HIS FLYING-MACHINE (an extract)
… with thimble and thread

And wax and hammer, and buckles and screws,
And all such things as geniuses use; —
Two bats for patterns, curious fellows!
A charcoal-pot and a pair of bellows;
Some wire, and several old umbrellas;
A carriage-cover, for tail and wings;
A piece of a harness; and straps and strings;
And a big strong box,
In which he locks
These and a hundred other things.
…
So day after day
He stitched and tinkered and hammered away,
Till at last ‘t was done,
The greatest invention under the sun!
—John Townsend Trowbridge
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ALICE IN WONDERLAND (an extract)
The Bellman looked uffish, and wrinkled his brow.

‘If only you’d spoken before!
It’s excessively awkward to mention it now,
With the Snark, so to speak, at the door!
‘We should all of us grieve, as you well may believe,

If you never were met with again—
But surely, my man, when the voyage began,
You might have suggested it then?
‘It’s excessively awkward to mention it now—

As I think I’ve already remarked.’
And the man they called ‘Hi!’ replied, with a sigh,
‘I informed you the day we embarked.
‘You may charge me with murder—or want of sense—

(We are all of us weak at times):
But the slightest approach to a false pretence
Was never among my crimes!
‘I said it in Hebrew—I said it in Dutch—

I said it in German and Greek:
But I wholly forgot (and it vexes me much)
That English is what you speak!’
—Lewis Carroll
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Let craft, ambition, spite,
Be quenched in Reason’s night,
Till weakness turn to might,
Till what is dark be light,
Till what is wrong be right!
—Sylvie and Bruno, Lewis Carroll
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DAFFODILS
I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they

Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
—William Wordsworth
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Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of fear. Except a
creature be part coward, it is not a compliment to say it is brave; it is merely a
loose misapplication of the word. Consider the flea!—incomparably the
bravest of all the creatures of God, if ignorance of fear were courage. Whether
you are asleep or awake he will attack you, caring nothing for the fact that in
bulk and strength you are to him as are the massed armies of the earth to a
sucking child; he lives both day and night and all days and nights in the very
lap of peril and the immediate presence of death, and yet is no more afraid
than is the man who walks the streets of a city that was threatened by an
earthquake ten centuries before. When we speak of Clive, Nelson, and
Putnam as men who ‘didn’t know what fear was,’ we ought always to add the
flea—and put him at the head of the procession.
—Pudd’nhead Wilson, Mark Twain
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Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had
discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it—namely, that in
order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the
thing difficult to attain. If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the
writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of
whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is
not obliged to do. And this would help him to understand why constructing
artificial flowers or performing on a tread-mill is work, while rolling ten-pins
or climbing Mont Blanc is only amusement. There are wealthy gentlemen in
England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a
daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerable
money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into
work and then they would resign.
—The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain
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AN ESSAY ON MAN (an extract)
Cease then, nor order imperfection name:

Our proper bliss depends on what we blame.
Know thy own point: This kind, this due degree
Of blindness, weakness, Heav’n bestows on thee.
Submit.—In this, or any other sphere,
Secure to be as blest as thou canst bear:
Safe in the hand of one disposing pow’r,
Or in the natal, or the mortal hour.
All nature is but art, unknown to thee;
All chance, direction, which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony, not understood;
All partial evil, universal good:
And, spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite,
One truth is clear, ‘Whatever is, is right.’
—Epistle 1, Alexander Pope
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‘Estella!’
‘I am greatly changed. I wonder you know me.’
The freshness of her beauty was indeed gone, but its indescribable
majesty and its indescribable charm remained. Those attractions in it, I had
seen before; what I had never seen before, was the saddened softened light of
the once proud eyes; what I had never felt before, was the friendly touch of
the once insensible hand.
We sat down on a bench that was near, and I said, ‘After so many years, it
is strange that we should thus meet again, Estella, here where our first
meeting was! Do you often come back?’
‘I have never been here since.’
‘Nor I.’
The moon began to rise, and I thought of the placid look at the white
ceiling, which had passed away. The moon began to rise, and I thought of the
pressure on my hand when I had spoken the last words he had heard on earth.
Estella was the next to break the silence that ensued between us.
‘I have very often hoped and intended to come back, but have been
prevented by many circumstances. Poor, poor old place!’
The silvery mist was touched with the first rays of the moonlight, and the
same rays touched the tears that dropped from her eyes. Not knowing that I
saw them, and setting herself to get the better of them, she said quietly:
‘Were you wondering, as you walked along, how it came to be left in this
condition?’
‘Yes, Estella.’
‘The ground belongs to me. It is the only possession I have not
relinquished. Everything else has gone from me, little by little, but I have kept
this. It was the subject of the only determined resistance I made in all the
wretched years.’
‘Is it to be built on?’
‘At last it is. I came here to take leave of it before its change. And you,’
she said, in a voice of touching interest to a wanderer, ‘you live abroad still?’
‘Still.’
‘And do well, I am sure?’
‘I work pretty hard for a sufficient living, and therefore—Yes, I do well.’
‘I have often thought of you,’ said Estella.
‘Have you?’
‘Of late, very often. There was a long hard time when I kept far from me,
the remembrance of what I had thrown away when I was quite ignorant of its
worth. But, since my duty has not been in-compatible with the admission of
that remembrance, I have given it a place in my heart.’
‘You have always held your place in my heart,’ I answered.
And we were silent again, until she spoke.
‘I little thought,’ said Estella, ‘that I should take leave of you in taking
leave of this spot. I am very glad to do so.’
‘Glad to part again, Estella? To me, parting is a painful thing. To me, the
remembrance of our last parting has been ever mournful and painful.’
‘But you said to me,’ returned Estella, very earnestly, “God bless you,
God forgive you!” And if you could say that to me then, you will not hesitate
to say that to me now—now, when suffering has been stronger than all other
teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have
been bent and broken, but—I hope—into a better shape. Be as considerate
and good to me as you were, and tell me we are friends.’
‘We are friends,’ said I, rising and bending over her, as she rose from the
bench.
‘And will continue friends apart,’ said Estella.
I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the
morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so, the evening
mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they
showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.
—Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
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Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
—Macbeth, William Shakespeare
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CANAAN (an extract)
Evil is not good’s absence but gravity’s

everlasting bedrock and its fatal chains
inert, violent, the suffrage of our days.
—Geoffrey Hill
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SONNET 43
When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see,

For all the day they view things unrespected;
But when I sleep, in dreams they look on thee,
And darkly bright, are bright in dark directed.
Then thou, whose shadow shadows doth make bright,
How would thy shadow’s form form happy show
To the clear day with thy much clearer light,
When to unseeing eyes thy shade shines so!
How would, I say, mine eyes be blessed made
By looking on thee in the living day,
When in dead night thy fair imperfect shade
Through heavy sleep on sightless eyes doth stay!
All days are nights to see till I see thee,
And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me.
—William Shakespeare
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Epistemic absolutism. Knowledge is absolute, in the sense that it is impossible
for a person to have better, or to have worse, knowledge of a fact. (For
example, it is not possible to know that one is in Australia—and, later on, to
know better that one is in Australia.)
That kind of absolutism is deeply entrenched in standard epistemological
thinking. Regardless, we will find that there is good reason to regard it as
being false.
—Good Knowledge, Bad Knowledge, Stephen Hetherington
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Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them; that
only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in
whatever way they like.
—Lao Tzu
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The appearance of things changes according to the emotions; and thus we see
magic and beauty in them, while the magic and beauty are really in ourselves.
—The Broken Wings, Khalil Gibran
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THE TAME BIRD WAS IN A CAGE
THE tame bird was in a cage, the free bird was in the forest.
They met when the time came, it was a decree of fate.
The free bird cries, ‘O my love, let us fly to the wood.’
The cage bird whispers, ‘Come hither, let us both live in the cage.’
Says the free bird, ‘Among bars, where is there room to spread one’s wings?’
‘Alas,’ cries the caged bird, ‘I should not know where to sit perched in the
sky.’
The free bird cries, ‘My darling, sing the songs of the woodlands.’
The cage bird sings, ‘Sit by my side, I’ll teach you the speech of the learned.’
The forest bird cries, ‘No, ah no! songs can never be taught.’
The cage bird says, ‘Alas for me, I know not the songs of the woodlands.’
Their love is intense with longing, but they never can fly wing to wing.
Through the bars of the cage they look, and vain is their wish to know each
other.
They flutter their wings in yearning, and sing, ‘Come closer, my love!’
The free bird cries, ‘It cannot be, I fear the closed doors of the cage.’
The cage bird whispers, ‘Alas, my wings are powerless and dead.’
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About dreams. It is usually taken for granted that you dream of something
that has made a particularly strong impression on you during the day, but it
seems to me it’s just the contrary. Often it’s something you paid no attention
to at the time—a vague thought that you didn’t bother to think out to the end,
words spoken without feeling and which passed unnoticed—these are the
things that return at night, clothed in flesh and blood, and they become the
subjects of dreams, as if to make up for having been ignored during waking
hours.
—Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak
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Tributes
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WITH YOUR WIND IN MY SAIL
With your wind in my sail

I’ll snap the rope
I’m ready to sink
I’m willing to sink
My morning is wasted
My evening too
Don’t hold me back
Close to the shore
I stay up all night
For the boatman
The waves just
Play with me
I’ll befriend the storm
I shan’t fear its fury
Set me free
The storm will save me
For I’m willing to die
With your wind in my sail.
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She walks with raised head, with her eyes straight,
She has her principles, unafraid of anybody!
She has a lofty and knowledge based pride,
Women of excellence, don’t falter from the chosen path,
She drives ignorance away. She welcomes the bliss of life,
With learned mind, this is the Dharma of emerging woman.
—Subramaniya Bharathiar
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The truly great are not the men of wealth, of possessions, not men who gain
name and fame, but those who testify to the truth in them and refuse to
compromise whatever be the cost. They are determined to do what they
consider to be right. We may punish their bodies, refuse them comforts, but
we cannot buy their souls, we cannot break their spirits. Whoever possesses
this invulnerability of spirit even to a little extent deserves our admiration.
—Living with a Purpose, S. Radhakrishnan
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Before he [Al] could talk straight, he ran down to the Milan shipyards and
watched the men building boats for Great Lakes shipping. There, he asked the
shipbuilders hundreds of questions. Why could you see a hammer hit a board
before you could hear it, if you were at a distance? Why did you have to fit
joints carefully? What was pitch made of? Some of the questions the men
could answer and some they couldn’t. One of them jokingly said to Samuel
Edison, ‘It would save time to hire a man especial to answer your young one’s
questions.’
—Young Edison: The True Story of Edison’s Boyhood, W.E. Wise
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Gandhi’s on-the-earth simplicity, devoid of the appearances or reality of
power, emphasized his authority. Gandhi had no power to compel, punish, or
reward. His power was nil, his authority enormous. It came of love. Living
with him one could see why he was loved: he loved. Not merely in isolated
incidents, but day in, and day out, morning, noon, and night, for decades, in
every act and word, he had manifested his love of individuals and of mankind.
—Gandhi: His Life and Message for the World, Louis Fischer
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I first met him when I joined the Institute as a student in 1953. That is now
nearly fifty years ago, but my recollections of early encounters with him are
still vivid. I recall a tall, handsome, young man who would jump out of his
sporty little MG car, wearing a red shirt and a broad smile, racing across the
staircase in the Department and cheerfully saying ‘Good morning’ as he
stepped into the class room. Dhawan brought to the Institute an element of
youth, freshness, modernity, earnestness and Californian informality that
captivated the students and many colleagues. In short, he was a star on the
campus.
To anyone who walked into the laboratory that he set up at the Institute,
one thing that caught immediate attention was that everything looked
different, and worked well. The laboratory managed to convey an impression
of both science and engineering; it had 100 hp compressors running wind
tunnels, as well as lenses and galvanometers measuring what was going on in
those tunnels. In a very real sense I think Dhawan established, at IISc and—
by example—elsewhere in the country, a tradition of scientific research on
engineering problems. His laboratory also had a variety of little devices,
rigged up by him with great and obvious pleasure, to make things a bit easier
for the experimenter. Among these ‘gizmos’, as he loved to call them, I
remember a pretty little thing for electroplating 5 micron tungsten wires with
copper, so that they could later be soldered for making hot wire probes—I
started my life in the laboratory, like so many students of fluid dynamics
everywhere in the world at that time, struggling to make these fragile probes
for wind tunnel measurements of fluctuating velocities in turbulent flows. I
still recall Dhawan teaching me to make these probes, telling me about the
ritual one had to follow—‘like doing pooja’, he would say. The fine wires we
needed for these probes were not easily available, and Dhawan had obtained
from his friends in the United States various bits of platinum and tungsten
wire which came stuck on the back of letters written to him: we used to hoard
them like misers.
He was the father of experimental fluid dynamics research in India, and
indeed was in many ways the first engineering scientist of the country.
…
The principles that Dhawan formulated and applied (but,
characteristically, never stated) in running the country’s space programme can
be easily inferred from the way he operated. First of all he devised a
programme that was societally conscious, with objectives that could be
widely understood (weather, natural resource-mapping, communications,
etc.). He had supreme confidence in the ability of Indian engineers and
scientists, even when they did not have degrees from IITs or foreign
universities. He kept the technology development work open and transparent
to the national scientific community through an elaborate system of reviews
(some of them held in the big auditorium in the Vikram Sarabhai Space
Centre at Trivandrum, filled to capacity on such occasions; the tradition was
quickly established here that the junior-most engineer could ask awkward
questions of the big project leaders)… He managed his projects through a
small group of very able directors, and another small group of bright young
whiz-kids in his office (protecting them from the natural dislike of their
colleagues). He took the responsibility when there were failures, but let others
take credit when there were successes (as Kalam has pointed out). He
maintained accountability through peer pressure, but shielded his engineers
from blame for honest failures. He developed a promotion and assessment
system that had some unique features, enabling the more productive engineers
to move ahead of their colleagues but not too rapidly, retaining the confidence
of the bulk of the staff in the fairness of the system. And he insisted,
successfully, that the national space programme should be a purely civilian
enterprise.
And there were some other unusual things about his management style.
He shunned publicity, and rarely held forth before the media—so much so
that people were often surprised how forceful he could be in private, or within
the four walls of Council or Commission.
I think of him as a critical optimist in everything he did.
But what specially distinguished Dhawan from many other eminent
scientists and engineers were his extraordinary qualities as a leader and a
human being, his great personal charm, and his keen social conscience. When
the Sriharikota Range was being built, he rejected a proposal to fence the
range to keep cattle from it, noting that the range had belonged to the cattle
and the tribals living there, and making alternative arrangements. He set up a
museum housing the artifacts that were found at the site. The mechanics
making his pet gizmos for him in the Institute laboratories—some of them
highly skilled but hardly educated—felt they were his friends, even as the
students and his own class-fellows in India and abroad did. He could be, and
was, a tough man many times, but never on personal considerations.
If he sometimes seemed indecisive, that was because he accommodated so
many diverse points of view within himself; after knowing him for some time
I felt I could recognize the churning that went on in his mind on those critical
occasions as he balanced, in his own very rational way, all those competing
ideas and forces; and he often shared these thoughts with his close colleagues
before he made his decisions.
He was, most of all, the undeclared but widely accepted moral and social
conscience of the scientific community. He was a great man.
—Roddam Narasimha
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Mrs Bixby, Boston, Massachusetts.
Dear Madam,
I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the
Adjutant-General of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons who
have died gloriously on the field of battle. I feel how weak and fruitless must
be any word of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a
loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the
consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save.
I pray that our heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement,
and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the
solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the
altar of freedom.
Yours very sincerely and respectfully,

A. Lincoln
—Abraham Lincoln
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The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot
grave to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet
swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by
the better angels of our nature.
—Abraham Lincoln
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With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as
God gives us to see the right, let us strive to finish the work we are in, to bind
up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and
for his widow and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just
and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
—Abraham Lincoln
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You need to know that you are different, you need to realize that you are
much more than what you think you are, and you need to actualize this
through your actions, by achieving more than you think you can.
...
Dangerous—what danger can there be? Fear is the noose of the weak, courage
is the ornament of the strong.
...
Experience gives knowledge, and knowledge is strength. Strength is peace,
and I was at peace. While climbing a peak, you go up and also down. The
essential thing is to keep moving—climbing up and down are irrelevant in the
journey of life.
—Tiya: A Parrot’s Journey Home, Samarpan
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I remember Mr Pestonji Padshah. I had been on friendly terms with him ever
since my stay in England. I first met him in a vegetarian restaurant in London.
I knew of his brother Mr Barjorji Padshah by his reputation as a ‘crank’. I had
never met him, but friends said that he was eccentric. Out of pity for the
horses he would not ride in tramcars, he refused to take degrees in spite of a
prodigious memory, he had developed an independent spirit, and he was a
vegetarian, though a Parsi. Pestonji had not quite this reputation, but he was
famous for his erudition even in London. The common factor between us,
however, was vegetarianism, and not scholarship, in which it was beyond my
power to approach him.
I found him out again in Bombay. He was Protonotary in the High Court.
When I met him he was engaged on his contribution to a Higher Gujarati
Dictionary. There was not a friend I had not approached for help in my South
African work. Pestonji Padshah, however, not only refused to aid me, but
even advised me not to return to South Africa.
‘It is impossible to help you,’ he said, ‘But I tell you I do not like even
your going to South Africa. Is there lack of work in our own country? Look,
now, there is not a little to do for our language. I have to find out scientific
words. But this is only one branch of the work. Think of the poverty of the
land. Our people in South Africa are no doubt in difficulty, but I do not want a
man like you to be sacrificed for that work. Let us win self-government here
and we shall automatically help our coutrymen there. I know I cannot prevail
upon you, but I will not encourage any one of your type to throw in his lot
with you.’
I did not like this advice, but it increased my regard for Mr Pestonji
Padshah. I was struck with his love for the country and for the mother tongue.
The incident brought us closer to each other. I could understand his point of
view. But far from giving up my work in South Africa. I became firmer in my
resolve. A patriot cannot afford to ignore any branch of service to the mother
land. And for me the text of the Gita was clear and emphatic:
Finally, this is better, that one do

His own task as he may, even though he fail,
Than take tasks not his own, though they seem good.
To die performing duty is no ill:
But who seeks other roads shall wander still.
—An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with Truth, M.K.
Gandhi
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My political ideal is democracy. Let every man be respected as an individual
and no man idolized. In my opinion, an autocratic system of coercion soon
degenerates; force attracts men of low morality.
—The World As I See It, Albert Einstein
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In Peace and Silence the Eternal manifests; allow nothing to disturb you and
the Eternal will manifest; have perfect equality in face of all and the Eternal
will be there....
—Prayer and Meditation, The Mother
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LOOK TO THIS DAY
Look to this day:

For it is life, the very life of life.
In its brief course
Lie all the verities and realities of your existence.
The bliss of growth,
The glory of action,
The splendour of achievement
Are but experiences of time.
For yesterday is but a dream
And tomorrow is only a vision;
And today well-lived, makes
Yesterday a dream of happiness
And every tomorrow a vision of hope.
Look well therefore to this day;
Such is the salutation to the ever-new dawn!
—Kalidasa
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Einstein’s space is no closer to reality than Van Gogh’s sky. The glory of
science is not in a truth more absolute than the truth of Bach or Tolstoy, but in
the act of creation itself. The scientist’s discoveries impose his own order on
chaos, as the composer or painter imposes his; an order that always refers to
limited aspects of reality, and is based on the observer’s frame of reference,
which differs from period to period as a nude by Rembrandt differs from a
nude by Edouard Manet.
—The Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler
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IF
If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;

If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
—Rudyard Kipling
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Some Thoughts
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THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER (an excerpt)
‘The Sun now rose upon the right:

Out of the sea came he,
Still hid in mist, and on the eft
Went down into the sea.
‘And the good south wind still blew behind,

But no sweet bird did follow,
Nor any day for food or play
Came to the mariners’ hollo!
‘And I had done a hellish thing,

And it would work ‘em woe:
For all averred, I had killed the bird
That made the breeze to blow.
‘Ah wretch!’ said they, ‘the bird to slay,
That made the breeze to blow!’
‘Nor dim nor red, like God’s own head,

The glorious Sun uprist:
Then all averred, I had killed the bird
That brought the fog and mist.
‘Twas right,’ said they, ‘such birds to slay,
That bring the fog and mist.’
‘The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,

The furrow followed free;
We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea.
‘Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down,
‘Twas sad as sad could be;
And we did speak only to break
The silence of the sea!
‘All in a hot and copper sky,

The bloody Sun, at noon,
Right up above the mast did stand,
No bigger than the Moon.
‘Day after day, day after day,

We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.
‘Water, water everywhere,

And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.
‘The very deep did rot: O Christ!

That ever this should be!
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea.
‘About, about, in reel and rout

The death-fires danced at night;
The water, like a witch’s oils,
Burnt green, and blue and white.
‘And some in dreams assured were

Of the spirit that plagued us so;
Nine fathom deep he had follow’d us
From the land of mist and snow.
‘And every tongue, through utter drought,
Was withered at the root:
We could not speak, no more than if
We had been choked with soot.
‘Ah! Well a-day! what evil looks

Had I from old and young!
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.’
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Persons who have no faith in human nature are apt to think that such
conditions are eternal in man—that the moral ideals are only for individuals
but the race belongs to that primitive nature which is for the animal. And
according to them, in the racial life, it is necessary that the animal should
have its full scope of training in the cult of suspicion, jealousy, fierce
destructiveness, cruel rapacity. They contemptuously brand optimism as
sentimental weakness, and yet in spite of that virulent skepticism an
enormous change has worked itself out in course of the growth of civilization
from the darkest abyss of savagery. I refuse to believe that human society has
reached its limit of moral possibility. And we must work all our strength for
the seemingly impossible, and must believe that there is a constant urging in
the depth of human soul for the attainment of the perfect, the urging which
secretly helps us in all our endeavour for the good. This faith has been my
only asset in the educational mission which I have made my life’s work, and
almost unaided and alone, I struggle along my path. I try to assert in my
words and works that education has its only meaning and object in freedom—
freedom from ignorance about the laws of the universe, and freedom from
passion and prejudice in our communication with the human world.
I invited thinkers and scholars from foreign lands to let our boys know
how easy it is to realise our common fellowship, when we deal with those
who are great, and that it is the puny who with their petty vanities set up
barriers between man and man.
—The Ideals of Education, Rabindranath Tagore
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BRAHMA
‘If the red slayer think he slays,

Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the winding ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.
‘Far or forgot to me is near;

Shadow and sunlight are the same;
The vanished gods to me appear;
And one to me are shame and fame.
They reckon ill who leave me out;

When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt,
I am the hymn the Brahmin sings.
The strong gods pine for my abode,

And pine in vain the sacred Seven;
But thou, meek lover of the good!
Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.
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My mother had given me an advice. ‘Son, in your entire lifetime, if you can
save or better someone else’s life, your birth as a human being and your life is
a success. You have the blessing of the Almighty God.’
—M.K. Gandhi
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The undisciplined man doesn’t wrong himself alone—
he sets fire to the whole world.
Discipline enabled Heaven to be filled with light;
discipline enabled the angels to be immaculate and holy
…
The world’s flattery and hypocrisy is a sweet morsel:

eat less of it, for it is full of fire.
Its fire is hidden while its taste is manifest,
but its smoke becomes visible in the end.
…
You were born with potential.

You were born with goodness and trust.
You were born with ideals and dreams.
You were born with greatness.
You were born with wings.
You are not meant for crawling, so don’t.
You have wings.
Learn to use them and fly.
—Rumi
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You have shown through your works, that it is possible to succeed without
violence even with those who have not discarded the method of violence. We
may hope that your example will spread beyond the borders of your country,
and will help to establish an international authority, respected by all, that will
take decisions and replace war conflicts.
—Albert Einstein (in a letter to M.K. Gandhi)
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1. Do not be ashamed to be helped; the task before you is to accomplish
what falls to your lot, like a soldier in a storming party. Suppose you are
lame and cannot scale the wall by yourself, yet it can be done with
another’s help.
2. Let not the future trouble you; for you will come to it, if come you must,
bearing with you the same reason which you are using now to meet the
present.
3. It is a property of man to love even those who stumble. This feeling
ensues if it occurs to you at the time that men are your kindred and go
wrong because of ignorance and against their will; that in a little while
both of you will be dead; but, above all, that he did you no harm, for he
did not make your governing self worse than it was before.
—Meditations, Marcus Aurelius
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COURAGE
Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace.

The soul that knows it not, knows no release
From little things;
Knows not the livid loneliness of fear
Nor mountain heights, where bitter joy can hear
The sound of wings.
How can life grant us boon of living, compensate
For dull gray ugliness and pregnant hate
Unless we dare
The soul’s dominion? Each time we make a choice, we pay
With courage to behold resistless day
And count it fair.
—Amelia Earhart
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…our aim in founding the State was not the disproportionate happiness of any
one class, but the greatest happiness of the whole; we thought that in a State
which is ordered with a view to the good of the whole we should be most
likely to find justice, and in the ill-ordered State injustice: and, having found
them, we might then decide which of the two is the happier. At present, I take
it, we are fashioning the happy State, not piecemeal, or with a view of making
a few happy citizens, but as a whole; and by-and-by we will proceed to view
the opposite kind of State. Suppose that we were painting a statue, and
someone came up to us and said, Why do you not put the most beautiful
colours on the most beautiful parts of the body—the eyes ought to be purple,
but you have made them black—to him we might fairly answer, Sir, you
would not surely have us beautify the eyes to such a degree that they are no
longer eyes; consider rather whether, by giving this and the other features
their due proportion, we make the whole beautiful.
—Dialogues of Plato
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THIS, TOO, WILL PASS (an extract)
This, too, will pass. O heart, say it over and over,

Out of your deepest sorrow, out of your deepest grief,
No hurt can last forever
Will bring relief.
perhaps tomorrow
This, too, will pass.
—Grace Noll Crowell
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When good things come, men see them as gain
When evils come, why complain?
…
What is stronger than destiny? It is a power
That prevails over human endeavour.
—Thirukural
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WHERE THE MIND IS WITHOUT FEAR
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
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HUMAN LIFE’S MYSTERY
We sow the glebe, we reap the corn,
We build the house where we may rest,
And then, at moments, suddenly,
We look up to the great wide sky,
Inquiring wherefore we were born…
For earnest or for jest?
The senses folding thick and dark

About the stifled soul within,
We guess diviner things beyond,
And yearn to them with yearning fond;
We strike out blindly to a mark
Believed in, but not seen.
We vibrate to the pant and thrill

Wherewith Eternity has curled
In serpent-twine about God’s seat;
While, freshening upward to His feet,
In gradual growth His full-leaved will
Expands from world to world.
And, in the tumult and excess

Of act and passion under sun,
We sometimes hear—oh, soft and far,
As silver star did touch with star,
The kiss of Peace and Righteousness
Through all things that are done.
God keeps His holy mysteries

Just on the outside of man’s dream;
In diapason slow, we think
To hear their pinions rise and sink,
While they float pure beneath His eyes,
Like swans adown a stream.
Abstractions, are they, from the forms

Of His great beauty?—exaltations
From His great glory?—strong previsions
Of what we shall be?—intuitions
Of what we are—in calms and storms,
Beyond our peace and passions?
Things nameless! which, in passing so,

Do stroke us with a subtle grace.
We say, ‘Who passes?’—they are dumb.
We cannot see them go or come:
Their touches fall soft, cold, as snow
Upon a blind man’s face.
Yet, touching so, they draw above

Our common thoughts to Heaven’s unknown,
Our daily joy and pain advance
To a divine significance,
Our human love—O mortal love,
That light is not its own!
And sometimes horror chills our blood

To be so near such mystic Things,
And we wrap round us for defence
Our purple manners, moods of sense—
As angels from the face of God
Stand hidden in their wings.
And sometimes through life’s heavy swound
We grope for them!—with strangled breath
We stretch our hands abroad and try
To reach them in our agony,—
And widen, so, the broad life-wound
Which soon is large enough for death.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
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‘…although liberal education isn’t perfect, it is the best preparation there is
for life and its exigencies.… Liberal education has helped me in that most
human of desires—the yearning to make order and sense of out of my
experience.’
—Seeing Life Whole, Dana Cook Grossman
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The Dhamma should be taught to others only when five qualities are
established within the person teaching. Which five?
1. The Dhamma should be taught with the thought, ‘I will speak step-by-
step.’
2. The Dhamma should be taught with the thought, ‘I will speak explaining
the sequence [of cause & effect].’
3. The Dhamma should be taught with the thought, ‘I will speak out of
compassion.’
4. The Dhamma should be taught with the thought, ‘I will speak not for the
purpose of material reward.’
5. The Dhamma should be taught with the thought, ‘I will speak without
hurting myself or others.’
—Udayi Sutta: About Udayin, Anguttara Nikaya
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Most people in the world struggle to correct problems they see in their outer
life. However, what most of these people do not realize is their problems in
the outer world are a result of their beliefs, inner conflict, and fears and that
all of this originates from a false sense of self. This means that there will be
no end to their problems in the outer world until they solve the original
problem, their belief in the false self.
—Understand The True Self: The Treasure Within, Floyd Jerred
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Radiance
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Then a ploughman said, Speak to us of Work.
And he answered, saying:
You work that you may keep pace with the earth and the soul of the earth.
For to be idle is to become a stranger unto the seasons, and to step out of life’s
procession that marches in majesty and proud submission towards the infinite.
When you work you are a flute through whose heart the whispering of the
hours turns to music.
Which of you would be a reed, dumb and silent, when all else sings together
in unison?
Always you have been told that work is a curse and labour a misfortune.
But I say to you that when you work you fulfil a part of earth’s furthest
dream, assigned to you when that dream was born,
And in keeping yourself with labour you are in truth loving life, And to love
life through labour is to be intimate with life’s inmost secret.
…
And what is it to work with love?
It is to weave the cloth with threads drawn from your heart, even as if your
beloved were to wear that cloth.
It is to build a house with affection, even as if your beloved were to dwell in
that house.
It is to sow seeds with tenderness and reap the harvest with joy, even as if
your beloved were to eat the fruit.
It is to charge all things you fashion with a breath of your own spirit, And to
know that all the blessed dead are standing about you and watching.
…
Work is love made visible.
And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you
should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of
those who work with joy.
For if you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread that feeds but
half man’s hunger.
And if you grudge the crushing of the grapes, your grudge distils a poison in
the wine.
And if you sing though as angels, and love not the singing, you muffle man’s
ears to the voices of the day and the voices of the night.
—The Prophet, Khalil Gibran
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Then all the tax collectors and the sinners drew near to Him to hear Him. And
the Pharisees and the scribes complained, saying, ‘This Man receives sinners
and eats with them.’ So He spoke this parable to them, saying:
‘What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he loses one of them, does
not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness, and go after the one which is lost
until he finds it? And when he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders,
rejoicing. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and
neighbors, saying to them, “Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep
which was lost!” I say to you that likewise there will be more joy in heaven
over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine just persons who need no
repentance.’
—The Parable of the Lost Sheep, Holy Bible
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Ramanujan’s belief in the Hindu gods, it stands repeating, did not explain his
mathematical genius. But his openness to supernatural influences hinted at a
mind endowed with slippery, flexible, and elastic notions of cause and effect
that left him receptive to what those equipped with more purely logical gifts
could not see; that found union in what others saw as unrelated; that embraced
before prematurely dismissing.
—The Man Who Knew Infinity, Robert Kanigel
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At the age of ten I saw my first airplane. It was sitting in a slightly enclosed
area at the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines. It was a thing of rusty wire and
wood and looked not at all interesting. One of the grown-ups who happened
to be around pointed it out to me and said: ‘Look, dear, it flies.’ I looked as
directed but confess I was much more interested in an absurd hat made of an
inverted peach-basket which I had just purchased for fifteen cents.
What psychoanalysts would make of this incident, in the light of
subsequent behavior, I do not know. Today I loathe hats for more than a few
minutes on the head and am sure I should pass by the niftiest creation if an
airplane were anywhere around.
—Last Flight, Amelia Earhart
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Only the individual can think, and thereby create new values for society—
nay, even set up new moral standards to which the life of the community
conforms. Without creative, independently thinking and judging personalities
the upward development of society is as unthinkable as the development of
the individual personality without the nourishing soil of the community.
The health of society thus depends quite as much on the independence of
the individuals composing it as on their close social cohesion.
—The World As I See It, Albert Einstein
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THE AENEID (an extract)
Arms, and the man I sing, who, forc’d by fate,

And haughty Juno’s unrelenting hate,
Expell’d and exil’d, left the Trojan shore.
Long labors, both by sea and land, he bore,
And in the doubtful war, before he won
The Latian realm, and built the destin’d town;
His banish’d gods restor’d to rites divine,
And settled sure succession in his line,
From whence the race of Alban fathers come
And the long glories of majestic Rome.
O Muse! the causes and the crimes relate;
What goddess was provok’d, and whence her hate;
For what offense the Queen of Heav’n began
To persecute so brave, so just a man;
Involv’d his anxious life in endless cares,
Expos’d to wants, and hurried into wars!
Can heav’nly minds such high resentment show,
Or exercise their spite in human woe?
Against the Tiber’s mouth, but far away,
An ancient town was seated on the sea;
A Tyrian colony; the people made
Stout for the war, and studious of their trade:
Carthage the name; belov’d by Juno more
Than her own Argos, or the Samian shore.
Here stood her chariot; here, if Heav’n were kind,
The seat of awful empire she design’d.
Yet she had heard an ancient rumor fly,
(Long cited by the people of the sky,)
That times to come should see the Trojan race
Her Carthage ruin, and her tow’rs deface;
Nor thus confin’d, the yoke of sov’reign sway
Should on the necks of all the nations lay.
She ponder’d this, and fear’d it was in fate;
Nor could forget the war she wag’d of late
For conqu’ring Greece against the Trojan state.
Besides, long causes working in her mind,
And secret seeds of envy, lay behind;
Deep graven in her heart the doom remain’d
Of partial Paris, and her form disdain’d;
The grace bestow’d on ravish’d Ganymed,
Electra’s glories, and her injur’d bed.
Each was a cause alone; and all combin’d
To kindle vengeance in her haughty mind.
For this, far distant from the Latian coast
She drove the remnants of the Trojan host;
And sev’n long years th’ unhappy wand’ring train
Were toss’d by storms, and scatter’d thro’ the main.
Such time, such toil, requir’d the Roman name,
Such length of labor for so vast a frame.
—Book 1, Virgil
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In order that a man may enter into Cosmic Consciousness he must belong (so
to speak) to the top layer of the world of Self Consciousness. Not that he need
have an extraordinary intellect (this faculty is rated, usually far above its real
value and does not seem nearly so important, from this point of view, as do
some others) though he must not be deficient in this respect, either. He must
have a good physique, good health, but above all he must have an exalted
moral nature, strong sympathies, a warm heart, courage, strong and earnest
religious feeling. All these being granted, and the man having reached the age
necessary to bring him to the top of the self conscious mental stratum, some
day he enters Cosmic Consciousness. What is his experience? Details must be
given with diffidence, as they are only known to the writer in a few cases, and
doubtless the phenomena are varied and diverse. What is said here, however,
may be depended on as far as it goes. It is true of certain cases, and certainly
touches upon the full truth in certain other cases, so that it may be looked
upon as being provisionally correct.
a. The person, suddenly, without warning, has a sense of being immersed in

a flame, or rose-colored cloud, or perhaps rather a sense that the mind is
itself filled with such a cloud of haze.
b. At the same instant he is, as it were, bathed in an emotion of joy,
assurance, triumph, ‘salvation.’ The last word is not strictly correct if
taken in its ordinary sense, for the feeling, when fully developed, is not
that a particular act of salvation is effected, but that no special ‘salvation’
is needed, the scheme upon which the world is built being itself sufficient.
c. Simultaneously or instantly following the above sense and emotional
experiences there comes to the person an intellectual illumination quite
impossible to describe. Like a flash there is presented to his
consciousness a clear conception (a vision) in outline of the meaning and
drift of the universe. He does not come to believe merely; but he sees and
knows that the cosmos, which to the self conscious mind seems made up
of dead matter, is in fact far otherwise—is in very truth a living presence.
He sees that instead of men being, as it were, patches of life scattered
through an infinite sea of non-living substance, they are in reality specks
of relative death in an infinite ocean of life. He sees that the life which is
in man is eternal, as all life is eternal; that the soul of man is as immortal
as God is; that the universe is so built and ordered that without any
peradventure all things work together for the good of each and all; that the
foundation principle of the world is what we call love, and that the
happiness of every individual is in the long run absolutely certain. The
person who passes through this experience will learn in the few minutes,
or even moments, of its continuance more than in months or years of
study, and he will learn much that no study ever taught or can teach.
Especially does he obtain such a conception of THE WHOLE, or at least
of an immense WHOLE, as dwarfs all conception, imagination or
speculation, springing from and belonging to ordinary self consciousness,
such a conception as makes the old attempts to mentally grasp the
universe and its meaning petty and even ridiculous.
d. Along with moral elevation and intellectual illumination comes what must
be called, for want of a better term, a sense of immortality. This is not an
intellectual conviction, such as comes with the solution of a problem, nor
is it an experience such as learning something unknown before. It is far
more simple and elementary, and could better be compared to that
certainty of distinct individuality, possessed by each one, which comes
with and belongs to self consciousness.
e. With illumination the fear of death which haunts so many men and women
at times all their lives falls off like an old cloak—not, however, as a result
of reasoning—it simply vanishes.
f. The same may be said of the sense of sin. It is not that the person escapes
from sin; but he no longer sees that there is any sin in the world from
which to escape.
g. The instantaneousness of the illumination is one of its most striking
features. It can be compared with nothing so well as with a dazzling flash
of lightning in a dark night, bringing the landscape which had been
hidden into clear view.
h. The previous character of the man who enters the new life is an important
element in the case.
i. So is the age at which illumination occurs. Should we hear of a case of
cosmic consciousness occurring at twenty, for instance, we should at first
doubt the truth of the account, and if forced to believe it we should expect
the man (if he lived) to prove himself, in some way, a veritable spiritual
giant.
j. The added charm to the personality of the person who attains to cosmic
consciousness is always, it is believed, a feature in the case.
k. There seems to the writer to be sufficient evidence that, with cosmic
consciousness, while it is actually present, and lasting (gradually passing
away) a short time thereafter, a change takes place in the appearance of
the subject of illumination. This change is similar to that caused in a
person’s appearance by great joy, but at times (that is, in pronounced
cases) it seems to be much more marked than that. In these great cases in
which illumination is intense the change in question is also intense and
may amount to a veritable ‘transfiguration.’ Dante says that he was
‘transhumanized into a God.’ There seems to be a strong probability that
could he have been seen at that moment he would have exhibited what
could only have been called ‘transfiguration.’
—Cosmic Consciousness, Richard Maurice Bucke
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The Might of Time
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To view the fleeting as everlasting
Is foolish and degrading.
…
Men cannot claim even a moment as theirs
Yet give themselves to countless plans.
…
The bond between the body and the soul
Is like a bird leaving an egg-shell.
—Thirukural
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Unfortunately, there is a trap that lies in waiting for even the most brilliant
strategist. In fact, sometimes it is the most brilliant strategist that is most
susceptible. The trap is delay, usually caused by the desire to overanalyze the
situation and make it perfect before proceeding. Too many strategists want the
perfect situation, all the information, everything ‘just so’ before proceeding.
—Act Now!, William A. Cohen
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It is, in fact, normal and necessary for us to ‘forget’ in this fashion, in order to
make room in our conscious minds for new impressions and ideas. If this did
not happen, everything we experienced would remain above the threshold of
consciousness and our minds would become impossibly cluttered. This
phenomenon is so widely recognized today that most people who know
anything about psychology take it for granted.
But just as conscious contents can vanish into the unconscious, new
contents, which have never yet been conscious, can arise from it. One may
have an inkling, for instance, that something is on the point of breaking into
consciousness—that ‘something is in the air,’ or that one ‘smells a rat.’ The
discovery that the unconscious is no mere depository of the past, but is also
full of germs of future psychic situations and ideas, led me to my own new
approach to psychology.
—Man and His Symbols, Carl G. Jung
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Gandhi was so detached from his physical environment that going to jail did
not disrupt his work at all, and he drove some of his hardest bargains from
behind jail walls. Usually the walls were those of Yeravda Prison, where he
felt so much at home that once, when a British interrogator asked for his
address, he answered, ‘Yeravda.’ When a man does everything in the spirit of
worship, everywhere he goes is sacred, and Gandhi used to mark his jail
letters Yeravda Mandir, which means ‘Yeravda temple.’
—Gandhi, The Man: The Story of His Transformation,
Eknath Easwaran
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As a leader, one must sometimes take actions that are unpopular, or whose
results will not be known for years to come. There are victories whose glory
lies only in the fact that they are known to those who win them. This is
particularly true of prison, where you must find consolation in being true to
your ideals, even if no one else knows of it.
—Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela
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The contact with poets, forest saints and the best wits of the land, the glimpse
into the first awakening of Ancient India’s mind as it searched, at times
childishly and naively, at times with a deep intuition, but at all times earnestly
and passionately, for the spiritual truths and the meaning of existence—this
experience must be highly stimulating to anyone, particularly because the
Hindu culture is so different and therefore has so much to offer.
—The Wisdom of India, Yutang Lin
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THE SERPENT. Eve.
EVE (startled) Who is that?
THE SERPENT. It is I. I have come to shew you my beautiful new hood. See
(she spreads a magnificent amethystine hood)!
EVE (admiring it) Oh! But who taught you to speak?
THE SERPENT. You and Adam. I have crept through the grass, and hidden,
and listened to you.
EVE. That was wonderfully clever of you.
THE SERPENT. I am the most subtle of all the creatures of the field.
EVE. Your hood is most lovely. (She strokes it and pets the serpent).
Pretty thing! Do you love your godmother Eve?
THE SERPENT. I adore her. (She licks Eve’s neck with her double tongue).
EVE (petting her) Eve’s wonderful darling snake. Eve will never be lonely
now that her snake can talk to her.
THE SERPENT. I can talk of many things. I am very wise. It was I who
whispered the word to you that you did not know. Dead. Death. Die.
EVE (shuddering) Why do you remind me of it? I forgot it when I saw your
beautiful hood. You must not remind me of unhappy things.
THE SERPENT. Death is not an unhappy thing when you have learnt how to
conquer it.
EVE. How can I conquer it?
THE SERPENT. By another thing, called birth.
EVE. What? (Trying to pronounce it) B-birth?
THE SERPENT. Yes, birth.
EVE. What is birth?
THE SERPENT. The serpent never dies. Some day you shall see me come out
of this beautiful skin, a new snake with a new and lovelier skin. That is birth.
EVE. I have seen that. It is wonderful.
THE SERPENT. If I can do that, what can I not do? I tell you I am very
subtle. When you and Adam talk, I hear you say ‘Why?’ Always ‘Why?’ You
see things; and you say ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say
‘Why not?’ I made the word dead to describe my old skin that I cast when I
am renewed. I call that renewal being born.
EVE. Born is a beautiful word.
THE SERPENT. Why not be born again and again as I am, new and beautiful
every time?
EVE. I! It does not happen: that is why.
THE SERPENT. That is how; but it is not why. Why not?
—Back to Methuselah, George Bernard Shaw
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Time is the inexplicable raw material of everything. With it, all is possible;
without it, nothing. The supply of time is truly a daily miracle, an affair
genuinely astonishing when one examines it.
You wake up in the morning, and lo! your purse is magically filled with
twenty-four hours of the unmanufactured tissue of the universe of your life! It
is yours. It is the most precious of possessions. No one can take it away from
you. It is unstealable. And no one receives either more or less than you
receive.
In the realm of time there is no aristocracy of wealth, and no aristocracy
of intellect. Genius is never rewarded by even an extra hour a day. And there
is no punishment. Waste your infinitely precious commodity as much as you
will, and the supply will never be withheld from you. No mysterious power
will say, ‘This man is a fool, if not a knave. He does not deserve time; he shall
be cut off at the meter.’ It is more certain than government bonds, and
payment of income is not affected on Sundays. Moreover, you cannot draw on
the future. Impossible to get onto debt! You can only waste the passing
moment. You cannot waste tomorrow; it is kept for you. You can not waste
the next hour. It is kept for you.
You have to live on this twenty-four hours of daily time. Out of it you
have to spin health, pleasure, money, content, respect and the evolution of
your mortal soul. Its right use, its most effective use, is a matter of the highest
urgency and of the most thrilling actuality. All depends on that. Your
happiness—the elusive prize that you are all clutching for, my friends!—
depends on that.
If one cannot arrange that an income of twenty-four hours a day shall
exactly cover all proper items of expenditure, one does muddle one’s whole
life indefinitely.
We never shall have any more time. We have, and we have always had, all
the time there is.
—How to Live on Twenty-four Hours a Day, Arnold Bennett
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See the flower, how generously it distributes perfume and honey. It gives to
all, gives freely of its love. When its work is done, it falls away quietly. Try to
be like the flower, unassuming despite all its qualities.
—Bhagavad Gita
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Acknowledgements
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for permission to reprint:

‘Satish Dhawan’, Current Science Vol. 82, No. 2 (25 January 2005),
Roddam Narasimha
A Doctor’s Story of Life and Death, K. Subbarao with Arun Tiwari, Ocean
Books
The Japji and the Rehras: The Morning and Evening Prayer of the Sikhs,
translated by Khushwant Singh, Rupa Publications India
Tagore for the 21st Century Reader, translated by Arunava Sinha, Aleph
Book Company
Thirukkural: Pearls of Inspiration, translated by M. Rajaram, Rupa
Publications India
The publishers would like to acknowledge Shrutikeerti Khurana for her
work in compiling the quotations.
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OceanofPDF.

A list of some of my favourite books

Secret the Power, Rhonda Byrne

Silappathikaram, Ilango Adigal

Paradise Lost, John Milton

The Seat of the Soul, Gary Zukav

The ceaseless winkings all he counts of every mortal’s eyes:

Before time itself

God hath not promised skies always blue,

But God hath promised strength for the day,

God hath not promised smooth roads and wide,

This is my prayer to thee, my lord—strike, strike at the root of

What if the sun

For all your days prepare.

They do me wrong who say I come no more

Wail not for precious chances passed away!

Dost thou behold thy lost youth all aghast?

Art thou a mourner? Rouse thee from thy spell;

Laugh like a boy at splendors that have sped,

Though deep in mire, wring not your hands and weep;

Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace.

For it is in giving that we receive,

Sunset and evening star,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,

Twilight and evening bell,

For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place

Thou hast not lived, why should’st thou perish, so?

For early didst thou leave the world, with powers

Yes, we await it!—but it still delays,

Art thou in misery, brother? Then I pray

There is a flame within me that has stood

I have no fear of the future because I am completely convinced that the

—Have cleverer hands, grasp after deeper happiness, after deeper

—Mine unhappiness, my happiness is deep, thou strange day, but yet am I no

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,

Life is real! Life is earnest!

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,

In the world’s broad field of battle,

Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!

Footprints, that perhaps another,

Let us, then, be up and doing,

Reality is always soft clay,

Death be not proud, though some have called thee

… with thimble and thread

The Bellman looked uffish, and wrinkled his brow.

‘We should all of us grieve, as you well may believe,

‘It’s excessively awkward to mention it now—

‘You may charge me with murder—or want of sense—

‘I said it in Hebrew—I said it in Dutch—

I wandered lonely as a cloud

Continuous as the stars that shine

The waves beside them danced; but they

For oft, when on my couch I lie

Cease then, nor order imperfection name:

Evil is not good’s absence but gravity’s

When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see,

With your wind in my sail

Yours very sincerely and respectfully,

Finally, this is better, that one do

Look to this day:

If you can keep your head when all about you

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;