Bharatham : Uthishtatha-Jagratha : (wef-05/11/2012. )

29/03/2018 5. In the Ramayanam, we have such a contradictory picture of the personality of Rama, presented by Valmiki, where we are asked sometimes to look upon him as the perfected man and sometimes as a Perfection of divinity itself manifest. It is in the Yuddha Kandam of Valmiki's Ramayanam, (I am not talking of the Tulasidas Ramayanam because that has a different approach altogether) for the first time, we have a proclamation divinity of Rama, where Mandodari in deep sorrow over the death of Ravana, her husband, exclaims that it is Narayana that has come as Nara which fact is unknown to Ravana and due to his ignorance, he has mistaken Rama for human being. The contradiction which Valmiki brings out is that while he puts these words in the mouth of Mandodari, he puts a different type of statement in the mouth of Rama himself. When the whole theme is over, the drama has been played, Brahma comes and speaks to Rama, "Thou art Lord Narayana, Thy play in this wo

14/03/2018 4. i. In the Srimad-Bhagavata, one among the eighteen Puranas, at the very commencement itself, we are told that Vyasa felt the necessity of composing the Mahabharata and the Srimad-Bhagavata. And for a similar reason, was the Ramayana composed. We believe what we see with our eyes, what we hear with our ears, what we perceive with the other organs, and what we feel from our hearts. We are incapable of believing anything else. ii. Pure principles, though they may be eternal facts, are incapable of evoking the emotion of man. Hence, even the elite and the intelligentia of mankind today think of God in the Epic parlance, and not in the Upanishadic parlance. When you and I think of God, we think of the Epic God only and not the Upanishadic God or Vedic God. The meaning is that we think of a humanised relationship between ourselves and the Creator. iii. When we dehumanise the Creator or take Him above what the human mind is capable of conceiving, the

09/03/2018 3. i. We have two Epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, just as in the West they have two Epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. These two parallel movements of Epic stories, known as the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, give us a complete picture of the process of the advancement of the human soul towards its Perfection. It is not to be taken as a surprise that the culture of Bharatavarsha is a culture of the Spirit, so that anything that is said and done or believed in, is directly or indirectly connected with the march of the Spirit to the recognition of its Perfection. We have no other culture here except the culture of the Spirit. A connecting of the visible phenomena with what underlies the phenomena, is the significance of the Epics. And these two master-strokes of genius given to us by Valmiki and Vyasa, in the form of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, give us the religion of India. ii. There were some over-enthusiastic orientalists in the West parti