As soon as there is
awareness of wholeness, every moment becomes sacred, every movement is
sacred. The sense of oneness is no longer an intellectual connection. We
will in all our actions be whole, total, natural, without effort. Every
action or nonaction will have the perfume of wholeness. In this era, to
become a spiritual inquirer without social consciousness is a luxury
that we can ill afford, and to be a social activist without a scientific
understanding of the inner workings of the mind is the worst folly.
Neither approach in isolation has had any significant success. There is no
question now that an inquirer will have to make an effort to be socially
conscious or that an activist will have to be persuaded of the moral
crisis in the human psyche, the significance of being attentive to the
inner life. The challenge awaiting us is to go much deeper as human
beings, to abandon superficial prejudices and preferences, to expand
understanding to a global scale, integrating the totality of living, and
to become aware of the wholeness of which we are a manifestation. As we deepen in
understanding, the arbitrary divisions between inner and outer
disappear. The essence of life, the beauty and grandeur of life, is its
wholeness. Life in reality cannot be divided into the inner and the
outer, the individual and social. We may make arbitrary divisions for
the convenience of collective life, for analysis, but essentially any
division between inner and outer has no reality, no meaning. The total
revolution we are examining is not for the timid or the self-righteous.
It is for those who love truth more than pretense. It is for those who
sincerely, humbly want to find a way out of this mess that we, each one
of us, have created out of indifference, carelessness, and lack of moral
courage. (Vimala Thakar)