About the Book :
This book is mainly about the realm between the transience of things and the Truth of things, the middle state between What-is and the Holy.
The first chapter deals with man's condition: suffering, evanescence and finitude; and the second considers possible ways of escaping this condition. A god deal of suffering could be eradicated by radically transforming society through concerted rational human action. Salvation is the experience with certitude of peace, security, and contentment. We are saved by the meaning of our thought and acts and by the sympathy and compassion we feel and evoke.
The third chapter is concerned with two basic forms of religious action - sacrifice and worship. Sacrifice is giving up of what one has leading to transformation of life, while worship is taking refuge in God with the prayerful thought that one in sinful, naught, and helpless and that. He is the only means of salvation. The fourth chapter grapples with the questions of God's existence, non-appearance, silence, absence and death, and the dialectic of atheism and the relation between religion and ethics. A few arrive at an awareness of Being, while to some others it is revealed as a Person; but most of us have to be satisfied with believing what cannot be proved, and it is a glorious risk - a great wager - to have faith in the Unconditioned Being or the Supreme Person. But atheism does not necessarily lead to the deification of man or history or to immorality; nor is it true that "there is no virtue of there is no immortality". Without a belief in God or immortality some can live, endure, and meaning, and engage themselves in ethical endeavours of the highest type.
"I have found by listening to Prof. Murty's talks that I can follow his language - and that there is in his talks a sort of perception of the value of the great Myth that is God: and that one without being a philosopher can find some pleasure, some bhava-vilasa or superficial aesthetic spiritual joy, from the prasanga, the upanyasa- the illustrative discourse on a great theme - that he makes. I .find Prof. Murty's talks stimulating, to say the least; ."- Dr. Suniti Kumar Chatterjee, National Professor of India in Humanities.
About the Author:
Professor Satchidananda Murty has been teaching philosophy in Andhra University for about a quarter century. He has been Visiting Professor at the University of Princeton and the Indian Institute of Advanced Study and has lectured in many European and American universities. Professor Murty has been General President of the Indian Philosophical Congress and the Akhila Bharatya Darsan Parishad. Presently he is a National Fellow in Humanities.
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