From the Editor’s Desk

In this age, if there is the need for anything it is for religion and religion alone rather than for anything else. There never was a time when its need was not felt, but its need at the present juncture is the greatest.

Religion is the verity of life and like all other verities, it is eternal and has stood the test of time. Verities are not verities but vanities if they differ with different persons, in different times or under different conditions. And if they do so, they become mere conveniences of life which one may accept or reject, adopt or modify just to suit individual idiosyncrasies to suit the exigencies of the moment.

Religion is life and life is religion. Life cannot be divorced from religion. Religious belief in one form or another is the very basis of life. One cannot knock the bottom from underneath one’s seat and yet be seated bolt upright.

But what is religion is the real problem. Every religion has a two-fold aspect: one preceding the other, the outer and the inner. Each of these serves a definite purpose in religious development. In fact, the one paves the way to the other.

Perfection is the goal of human life. Evolution is in the very nature of all that is. We are, one and all, unwittingly moving forward whether we wish it or not. Experience is the best teacher but it works inexorably by the rod. This path is circuitous and tortuous and interminably long, working in a vicious circle with no way out of the mighty maze of mind and matter. Again few there be who learn by experience in spite of hard knocks and buffets of the world. The more we strive, the mare we get entrapped in the karmic web.

A part cannot for ever remain a part. No man can be an island unto himself. The Self must expand and expand beyond measure so as to embrace the totality of God’s being. No religion is worth its salt unless it helps man in attaining the source and the essence of life. Constituted as we are after His own image and endowed with the spark of life in us, we feel restless until we rest in Him, the Ocean of All-Consciousness. This, indeed, is the plan and purpose of human life and human life is the means to attain that purpose. It is the function of religion to take an individual and make him an undivided whole. Herein lies the prime need for religion and he alone is religious who has become fearless and free from the shadows of the world and is prepared to walk fearlessly through the valley of the shadow of death. Each one can see for oneself how far one has conquered fear and lives and leads a fearless life in the fearsome sea of the world in which he, like flotsam, floats about with no roots to hold him against chance winds. The Saving Life-Lines within, if and when discovered, provide us with a safe anchorage to keep the barque of our life on the earth-plane on an even keel no matter how the storms may blow and the tempests may rage. This then is the function of religion and no one can deny its need. The Light of Life has ever been and will ever be the solace of life here and in the hereafter. But we have to take the religion, whatever it be, by I digging at the roots and not by merely learning it by rote. To shut our eyes ostrich-like in one’s feathers has never paid and will never pay.