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Introduction
The Story of Narayana Guru is the
story of the awakening and resurrection of the masses of India. Using the gentle power of
persuasion, he influenced the proud Brahmins and the haughty rulers to
accept the neglected masses of India as their fellow humans. By rousing the dormant dignity of
self-respect in his fellow untouchables, he instilled dynamics in their
quest for freedom. Through
the acquisition of the required skills and education, they were further
inspired by the Guru to aspire for their own equal share of all
opportunities within the mainstream of socioeconomic and politicocultural
advancements. With the aid of
his own brilliant disciples, he revitalized his contemporary literature
and revolutionized the value vision of his time. For those who were denied places
for public worship he installed temples of harmony and purity. To those for whom education was
denied he gave schools and exhorted them to free their spirits with the
power of knowledge. For
millions, social injustice perpetuated by tradition had remained an
insurmountable barrier over centuries.
Narayana Guru provided them the
motivation to stir and collectively wield power to legislate new laws that
could successfully correct the diehard customs of the past. It was not by resorting to
violence or pressure tactics that the Guru revolutionized the people but
by offering his dignified example for them to see and follow. He was a sage on par with Buddha,
Lao Tsu and Socrates. He was
a persuasive teacher like Jesus and an upholder of social justice like
Prophet Mohammed. As a
philosopher his penetrating thought surpasses the climaxes of Descartes
and Spinoza and amends the conclusions of Kent, Hegal and Marx. His integral vision excels
Bergson’s study of the philosophical reductions of Edmund Husserl and Karl
Jaspers. His mystical
exaltations are similar to those of Blake and Rumi.
Narayana Guru’s
Epistemology
In this epistemology, Narayana Guru
is neither an idealist nor a materialist. His philosophy is unitive and
holistic. Matter and spirit
are relevant idea when one has to deal with the empirical world of things
(perpetual) and the cognitive world of ideas (conceptual). There is no need to place one
above the other. This world
is not a random coalescence of chaotically flying molecules, nor is it the
phantom imagination of a mischievous spirit. A person placed in this enormous
setting can choose to play one’s history evolving or reading game of
socio-political significance.
He or she can vertically ascend from one’s individuated
consciousness of ‘I’ to a transcendental reality of being one with
all.
Narayana Guru’s theory of knowledge
is wide and panoramic and he is no purist who will shout at any
philosopher “no space-no space”.
In Narayana Guru’s philosophical ‘commons’ there is a welcome and
appropriate room for every philosopher, whether it is an extreme idealist
like Emmanuel Kant or an extreme materialist like Karl Marx. Truth is many faceted, and it is
not philosophical to patent any one vision.
To those who fanatically hold on to
views such as ‘this alone’ or ‘that alone,’ Narayana Guru has a gentle
admonition. He realized them
that neither this nor that, nor the particular meaning speculated could be
the ultimate way. It is more
sensible to give up all problems of personal preferences whether positive
or negative and allow the varieties of empirical transaction to parade as
ever, the variants of the subjective to float along.
Guru’s Logic
Jesus said, ‘The Sabbath is for man
and not man for the Sabbath.’
He cannot say exactly the same about logic, because logic does not
alter its norms to suit our whims.
Karl Marx put a good rejoinder; “The truth that is useless to man
is no truth at all.” Narayana
Guru thinks similarly about logic.
Logic is and should be the correct
means to assemble facts and seek solutions. Missing links of information are
likely to play tricks when coupled with conditioned likes and dislikes,
our paranoia or our prejudiced anticipation’s of rewards. The Guru was not enamored with all
the signs and squiggles of formal and symbolic logic.
To him perception carries the stamp
of verity for transactional purposes, and perception is a psychologically
generated phenomenon that is an amalgam of the essence of the things
presented and the individuated consciousness to which the world is
given. After perception the
next reliable means to attain to truth is inference. The ground of truth in inference
refers directly to the vertical essence of things. Yet specific horizontal aspect of
anything can be unique or variant and for that reason detrimental to the
precise assertion of truth.
Narayana Guru assigns a high value to the testimony of comparison,
as it implies the certitude of experimental proof and the fairly valid
assessment made by knowledgeable persons.
Guru’s Ethical
Teachings
The dynamic core of ethics is
‘sharing happiness with the other.’
What is unethical is obstructing dual sharing and even worse I
inflicting conditions that are negatively oriented. Narayana Guru taught we should
first be selfish in the big way of identifying with the true happiness
one’s self. We do not deny to anyone any good value that we cherish. We do this by remaining
mindful of the dialectical situation in which we are placed and being true
to our counterpart. Making ourselves solely responsible, as we would do to
our own self.
It was Jesus who said, ‘those who
are not with me are against me, and those who are not against me are with
me.’ In active or passive
ways, people segregate even to the extent of apartheid camps of exclusive
groups. Color, religions,
language, nationality and food habits are all elements that separate
person from person. The Guru
did not see any rationale in curtailing the bounds of love. He wanted socializing to be put on
the ground of common biologic fact rather than on whimsical
prejudices. “Man is one kind,
one religion and of one God”, he declared.
Narayana Guru’s Theory of
Beauty
Beauty is the vision of the
self-mirrored in the non-self.
The closer the image is to the truthfulness of the self greater is
the impact of beauty. The
self is characteristically the existent, the subsistent and the ground of
all values. In the scale of
existence the eternal is polarized with the transient. As each suggests other, beauty is
perceived as a dialectical interaction of opposites that cancel each other
out. The pole star is
beautiful and even so is the violet that blooms for a day. The beauty of subsistence makes
the daily bread, the feeding mother, the bread winning father, the farm of
abundance, the rain cloud and the guardians of the abundance. Beauty is affective; this gives
the individuated self its dynamic link with the existential actuality of
the given world. Obtaining
the steady state of being established in the eternal equipoise is the
state samatva or yoga. In
pure art there is constant weaning of the senses from the agitating influx
of the incoming stimuli and the directing of the spontaneous flow of
invoked energy to a cosmic significance or to an intense humanization of
inspirational aesthetic implosion.
Narayana Guru describes this as the all-consuming flame of
knowledge filling the conscientious self from the alpha to omega, which
can be likened to the rising ten thousand orbs in the sky of
consciousness. Such was a wonder Narayana Guru who lived in the worlds of
human interest. It is only
appropriate to think of him as universal
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