Eternity and Freedom (An Old And Rare Book)

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In this work, Eternity and Freedom, the author has attempted to build his own idealistic system of thought, somewhat on the lines of Sri Aurobindo's The Life Divine and Hegel's The Phenomenology of Mind. This book is an independent philosophical treatise although based on the ancient Indian metaphysical concepts. In the tradition of the works of Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, Ram Tirtha and Radhakrishnan, this book contains a re-statement of the fundamental concept of the Vedas and Vedänta-the domi- nant reality of an absolute spiritual substance. With regard to monism and qualified non-dualism, the position supported here is more in the line of Vyāsa and Rāmānuja than that of Samkara and Anandagiri. Philosophy, for me, has been mainly a philosophy of life-Lebensphilosophie. My contacts with the Hindu idealist movements in the contemporary India, intensified, in my mind and heart, a quest for the knowledge of God and soul. Tragic encounters with death also deepened the philosophic urge. The lives of Dayananda, Vivekananda, Ramatirtha, Shraddhananda, Narayana Swami and Munishvarānanda demonstrated to me the excellence of the path of self-abnegation and tapasyā. Buddha's renunciation of his ancestral home revealed to me, in my early qays, the superiority of the life of the wanderer to that of the house-keeper. The vision of discussions of philosophical and ethical problems before a group of listeners, in evening sermons, as carried on by Gautama Buddha, did delight me. In my days as a college student and research scholar (1938-1946), the career of a religious preacher appeared to me to be more exalted and meaningful than that of an academician. The life of a scholar-teacher dependent on the money released by the British Imperial Government in India, looked as a tame and simple affair.