Institutional humanism

The first mantra of Sri Ishopanishad, one of the oldest of the Upanishads, states:

This is a call for a change in consciousness, not a change of institutions. It states that one must recognize the supremacy of God in the practical terms of ownership, and that Krishna's ownership extends to every being and object. Simply to pray to God to supply us with peace, after we've prayed for Him to supply us with plenty, is not the pure consciousness recommended in Sri Ishopanishad.

Similarly, in The Holy Bible, when asked what the first commandment of the Lord might be, Jesus Christ replied:

Love here is not an intonation or formality. It is advised to love God "with all thy heart," no simple matter. But Jesus Christ taught that, with this as the first business of life, the pure love of other beings could be achieved.

Like the message of Sri Ishopanishad, this message of Lord Jesus implies the ownership of God over man. To love God completely is to give oneself into His hands completely, to serve Him and follow Him completely.

It will be unnecessary, I think, to labor the point. There is a real fulfillment for human beings, and that fulfillment lies in the realm of transcendental bliss, the ecstasy of love of God. It has nothing to do with material prosperity, with material peace or war. And to achieve this state of fulfillment, one must recognize-in the most concrete of terms, terms of property rights-that God is supreme. If Americans, if Vietnamese, if peace workers and military strategists alike can give up their false concepts of ownership, if the United Nations can stop trying to parcel out the world's wealth as though it were the exclusive possession of mankind, then peace will prevail. Otherwise, the situation that presents itself is one of thieves trying to divide their spoils with equanimity. Being thieves in the first place, equanimity can never realistically be expected.

In this sense we must also look at the present labors of the peace movement as no more than karma-the reverse side of the coin of war. One man is trying to exploit Nature through battle, another through law, another through human consensus, another through fair play. Someone offers communism. Someone offers compassion. Someone offers freedom of the press. The problem, however, lies not in our systems, but in our directions. Until the human race gives up all its schemes for exploiting Nature, it will never be free of the evils of Nature. It will never be able to release itself from the dualities of pleasure and pain, affluence and poverty, war and peace, which are a part of Nature. And, furthermore, these schemes cannot be given up unless there is something better, something more desirable, to replace them. This most desirable of objects is love of God.

That the Rev. Coffin wastes his valuable time testing the constitutionality of worldly laws is therefore a commentary upon the pointlessness of the peace movement. That Dr. Spock stands at his side, trying to create in a nation's institutions a kind of humanism which its people do not feel in their own hearts, with his clinical advocacy of "preferably religious" convictions, punctuates the problem. The secular atmosphere of the Community Church auditorium, with its images only of Gandhi and Schweitzer, with its hymnals that proclaim true worship to be the "celebration of life," where God is only called upon to help us push forward our own affairs, perhaps completes the picture. It is a picture of good men chasing bad men, who are chasing good men all in circles, endlessly.