Manav Kendra

The World in Flames

We are, fortunately or unfortunately, living in a potentially dangerous era in human history. It is an age of electronics. It is an age torn by all kinds of strifes and storms; social, political, religious, ideological and what not; when country is set against destructive armaments. Man is just playing the antics, like an ape, on the top of a steep precipice and knows not what avalanche of fire and brimstone, he may at any unguarded moment and unwittingly let loose and engulf the world in flames. In the midst of a tumultuous turmoil of jarring element, we are living under the very shadow of death. With all our progress in arts and sciences and the tremendous strides taken by us in the field of technology, we have not been able to free ourselves from fear and tensions, and to lead a peaceful existence. It is because man has so constituted himself by his rapacious instinct as to become wholly selfish. As such, he is constantly at war with his fellow being, with the result that there is always going on an unequal war – war of one against all and all against one, and the more so he is at war even with his own self.

War has thus become a normal course of life; and the breathing space that we get in between the wars is what we euphemistically call ‘peace’ – which is however a period of preparation of fresh struggle for ascendancy, no matter at what cost, may be by total annihilation of mankind with victory for neither, and success appearing momentarily like a will-o’-the-wisp and vanishing into thin air the next moment. What we so assiduously seek is only a peace of the silent graveyard of the dead and not a living and lasting peace born out of Love, goodness and goodwill. With the best of intentions, we are willy-nilly hurting headlong to our doom. With the deadliest means we wish to preserve life, forgetting that it is the means that justify the end and not vice-versa. We cannot have peace with the fires of selfish lust, hatred and ill-will smouldering our hearts.

It is to save us from the mighty precipitous fall that the Spirit and Power of God assumes human form and comes in the likeness of Man because man alone is the teacher of man in the various strata of life. The human soul can only be saved by the Great Informing Soul that works at a chosen Human Pole – call Him as one may, a Murshid, a Teacher, a Master, a Saint or a Satguru. It is He Who can save our Souls and none else can. It is an axiomatic truth that has stood the test of time. Seeing the whole world in the deadliest grip of the invisible flame of human lust, He strives to save all by whatsoever means in His power.