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Main Index
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is one's inner poverty. It is not at all surprising that Buddha and Mahavira, in the midst of their worldly riches, felt their inner poverty so keenly.
Because of the great riches science has brought mankind, people are gradually waking up to the fact that outer wealth does not guarantee inner peace and freedom.The advances of science have slowly shattered this age-old conviction. The progress of science has not only shown man the benefits of science, it has also bared its faults. Science is not as useless as the orthodox religious leaders used to believe, nor is it as infallible as its blind supporters once thought it was. Whenever this kind of blind faith exists, things are never perceived as they really are.
Faith has always been a great blindfold. Blind faith smothers facts with ready-made formulas, clouds the truth with cut and dried theories. Shrouding a fact in theories is running away from the fact itself. Looking squarely at facts as they are is to widen one's vision, and what one learns then does not constrict life but liberates it from all narrow-mindedness. By viewing life through this haze of preconceptions, humanity has reduced itself to a crippled and stagnant state. Man cannot view life as a whole. He has never looked at life except through the veil of his own subjective selection; he has never seen life as it is, in its perfection, in its unity.
Religion has denied the outer in many ways, and in reaction others have denied the existence of an inner being. Science has done this. And so religion and science have long been each other's rivals. But this competition has not really been between religion and science, it has been a war of one mental state with another, of one human tendency with another.
The human mind is motivated by its predispositions; it swings from one state to another like the pendulum of a clock. One mental state simply gives birth to another, but the truth is not to be found in any of these conditions. No condition can be perfect; it is not in its nature to be perfect. Reality only exists in between these mental states, in between these conditions. Reality is only present when all conditions have dissolved,
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