The message of Bahagavan Das on the present significance of the Vedic Social Order

from its Aryan home in India into modern consciousness, not merely as being of historic interest, but of urgent social concern.

It seems hard to modern man to realise and accept that certain profound aspects of truth concerning the nature of reality and the ordering of the universe and of life altogether on this planet may already have been known to man for thousands of years. We have seen how over the centuries old truths seem to have been superseded by new ones in constant succession, each opening up new horizons to man. And now, because Science, which was man’s latest hope, always proceeds by destroying its own hypotheses and building on new ones and because our mere intellectual thinking cannot tell us the secret of organic order, we are tempted to give up any idea that truth can be known. And this leads to the conclusion that happiness, which tends to mean material and physical comfort, is the real end and aim of man’s social life.

Now although the profoundest truths about reality, the universe and human life were indeed known to early man through the revelations of the sages and religious teachers, they were only known by intuition and accepted by faith. It was the knowledge of a child, wholly uncritical and without free will. Since those days Man has been growing his critical mind. It started with Greek philosophy and particularly with Socrates, and thence Plato and Aristotle, and went on right through modern European philosophy culminating in Kant, after whose critique naiveté is no longer possible for serious thought. And during all this time the Church guarded Man’s intuitive sense of Order, appearing reactionary, but performing a very necessary function.

Now we have developed our critical mind and our intellectual thinking so far that we have the freewill to live in complete social and international disorder and the ability to destroy our whole world. Now, therefore, it is supremely necessary to bring into our thinking again the notion Order. We see that there is order in the universe and in nature and there is a most complex and wonderful order in our own bodies, an order capable of supporting and being the vehicle for self-consciousness and self-conscious thinking. Analytical thinking cannot, however much it tries, discover the principles of this organic order, but the key to the thinking which can discover it has been given to us in ancient Indian thought, in the Athanasian Creed and it has been worked

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