Hey Madhav!

 মাধব, বহুত মিনতি করি তোয়ে   

দেই  তুলসী তিল দেহ সমর্পিলু ,

দয়া জনি ছোড়বি মোয়ে। 

গনইতে দোষ গুণলেশ না পাইবি 

জব  তুঁহুঁ করবি বিচার ,

জগতের নাথ জগতে কহায়সি,

জগ বাহির নই মুই ছার। 

Probably Govindadas. More than 500 years ago. (I wrote this from memory, bits and pieces of which are fading now); read around 1981, in class 11 or 12. A rough translation would go as follows:

My Lord, I beg you fervently

Supplicating you with the ritual offerings (tulsi and til, basil leaf and sesame seed)

Please have mercy on me.

When the time comes for You to judge me, you will not find a trace of virtue, but

They call You the Lord of the world, 

Do remember, I, insignificant though I am

I do not exist outside this world.

The hour of judgment is approaching. Today, I can only supplicate: 'Lead, kindly light, for the night is dark, and I am far from home', or 

আরো কতদূরে সে আনন্দধাম ? 

And, as another Bengali adage goes,

বিশ্বাসে মিলায় কৃষ্ণ, তর্কে বহুদূর। 

The life of the spirit, part four

Now, to answer the questions that I myself raised at the end of the last post on this subject.

Materially speaking, I had a difficult early life, though we were never exactly poor, made harder still because in my mid-teens we abruptly fell on hard times, and then there was a long struggle before I was comfortably off again and reasonably secure in an Indian urban middle class sense. That should be kept in mind if one is to appreciate what I am going to say in the following paragraphs.

Two very helpful things happened to me early on that made it much easier to cope with worldly life than it is for most people of my class. One, I became intensely and empathetically aware of extreme poverty around me, which made bearing my own cross, such as it was, a relative breeze because I had made a habit of counting my blessings constantly, as few people do. Two, I learnt early to define my own real (worldly) needs clearly and definitively. There were things that were essential, things that were nice to have or do but not really necessary for my physical and mental wellbeing, and things that were most definitely unwanted, distasteful, harmful to my health, pocket and peace. Interestingly, that set of values has never altered much, only more and more items have by themselves moved from the second category to the last. I must add a third thing here upon reflection: ever growing contempt and lack of pity for people who waste their lives endlessly chasing the things in the second and third categories. Here is an illustrative though not exhaustive list of things in my three categories.

In the first were things like living in my own house, a fixed and moderate work routine, a bit of regular leisure, occasional holidays to travel in, lots of reading and watching movies and writing, not having to kowtow to society and bosses at the workplace, much ‘quality time’ to give to my daughter (and now mother), money enough to fulfill every basic need of the family, including education, healthcare, insurance and saving for old age, and much scope for adda with likeminded people. Through economy, diligence, persistence and God’s grace I have achieved all that, though some of it took time (so what? Only makes the achievements sweeter).

In the second category came things like swimming round the year, going frequently to beautiful places abroad, savouring haute cuisine now and then, becoming ‘famous’ for my work, living in a much cleaner, quieter, greener, more orderly place with a much more temperate climate and suchlike. I have enjoyed a bit of all that, and I hanker less and less for them with the passage of years, except perhaps for the last.

In the third category come all the things that most people around me run after all through life – everything from high scores in examinations to fancy weddings and regular parties at posh hotels and constantly replaced fashionable clothes, shopping for and flaunting branded goods of all kinds, obsessing over looks, counting ‘likes’ on social media and, above all, doing things simply because ‘everybody’ around them is doing the same, from watching cricket on TV to going on pilgrimages to seeking a job in Bangalore or Umrica. I have tasted most such things, found all of them unnecessary or downright silly and annoying after a bit, so I stopped wanting these things for myself early on, nor do I want them for my daughter. As I said earlier, I feel only contempt and complete lack of pity for the ‘sufferings’ of such people, because they have brought all that suffering – from severe indebtedness to poor health, perpetual frustration, jealousy, discontent and depression – upon themselves. Tagore describes them with these words: ami joto bhaar joraye phelechhi/ sokoli hoyechhe bojha (I have entangled myself with a burden which is hard to carry).

Many sad and bad things have happened to me, and will continue to happen, yet I have walked through my life with on the whole much less angst and misery than most. Tell me, reader, can you see how being ‘spiritual’ has helped me all along the way, or do I have to spell it out even further?

And this was only the passive aspect of being spiritual – not being affected overmuch by the ways of the world. I would not have ventured to write such a long and involved series of essays unless I was sure there was a positive side also – being able to ‘enjoy’ this worldly life (despite always having known that ‘Life is sorrow’) much more than the average individual because I have been spiritual for most of my life: at least since I started praying every night in kindergarten. That is what I shall briefly touch upon next.

To begin with, I have had immense pleasure, while at the same time acquiring knowledge of every kind, from reading all my life (I always say that 90% of all I know came from outside syllabi and textbooks), and listening to music. The same goes for writing, and I have been writing stuff since I was a pre-teen. I have greatly enjoyed the gift of laughter, and thousands of ex-students will vouch that I have shared it with them. I have been a good listener to more people than I can remember or count, and, as I have found out for myself, good listeners are desperately needed and very hard to find. These things in turn have hugely helped in my professional work; even more so the fact that through endless drudgery, disappointment and frustration (so many people simply can’t or won’t learn), I have been able to regard my work as a calling and not just a means of livelihood. I fear I would have burnt out much sooner otherwise: teaching is not everyone’s cup of tea.

I have found time for lots of sleep, which, as the Bard famously wrote, ‘knits up the ravelled sleeve of care’, as also walked tens of thousands of kilometers, and while I am infinitely thankful for it, I congratulate myself that I could do it because I could determinedly cut off all kinds of distractions and silly engagements all along. I have eaten a lot of good food without falling ill, simply because I never overindulged my palate. I have trained myself not to be too unhappy about all the things that I supposedly wanted and did not get in this lifetime – and lo! it turned out by and by that I never really wanted those things very much after all, only imagined for a while that I did, from a particular girl to a particular job (hence the prayer ‘not my will, O Lord, but Thy will be done’ has become ever more profoundly meaningful). I have learned to bear pain and sorrow and loss without making too much fuss, especially in the traditionally prescribed demonstrative way. I no longer expect much by way of lasting love and companionship from human beings. This has been particularly hard to learn and accept, because I was born deeply emotional and expectant with a very long memory, but now it is well learnt: all I have to remind myself whenever I feel bad is that people are weak and confused and changeable, they like to cheat themselves and pretend what they do not feel, so anyone who is looking for true love simply must turn to either fairy tales or to God. I am sure that both for myself and my loved ones, death, if it comes at the end of a decently long life and without too much pain and shame and dragging along, should be welcomed with open arms. And, finally, that life only makes sense if one spends the largest part of it looking for That Which Stands Beyond – see Come to God, the last chapter of my book (and that was written more than twenty years ago, when I was far from being an old man).

All this is what I have tried and found out and benefited from through my pursuit of spirituality as I understand it. Yoga and pranayam, mantras and wondering about God have filled the interstices, in case you haven’t noticed. Though I have not once claimed that they are essential and primary, the reflective reader will perhaps realize that in a very fundamental sense, they are. Also, as some of my best readers have pointed out, I have said most of these things here and there in a scattered way in numerous blogposts, so in a sense I am saying nothing new. Indeed, there is nothing new about the pursuit of spirituality: all that needs to be said has been said countless times over thousands of years. The point is to help people understand how important, necessary and life-changing it can be if they can see its urgent relevance in the here and now. If I get to know that I have helped half a dozen people to see it, my life’s work will have been well done.

By the way, I am delighted that this series of essays has brought back an old favourite post of mine, The worship of the wealthy, into the most-read list. I should have liked many more people to read up the post titled Socialism calling, part two, also.

Beyond this point, I should like to field questions, if there are any. Otherwise, I think I have now written enough on this subject.

The life of the spirit, part three

The quest for a (more) spiritual life will be meaningless and uninteresting to three kinds of people. There are, first, those (many hundred millions, alas, still) who are so poor that the mere quotidian struggle to keep their heads above water usually takes up all their time and energy (and yet, even they often indulge in painting, dancing, music, storytelling and religious rituals – witness the flourishing arts of our tribals. Food for much thought). Then there are those who are not fully human at all, even if they are fairly well off (no insult intended, but that’s the way a vast proportion of people are, quite content with endlessly pursuing only the animal impulses – eat, sleep, breed, fight and preen: especially more and more common among our relatively well off, ‘educated’ urban middle classes. Food for much thought again!), and those who are so happily engaged with worldly pursuits (whether it be business or government or scientific research or something like that) that they don’t need or have time for anything else. But a caveat: some members of even the second category feel the sudden and urgent need for spirituality, especially when they are badly shaken up by some or other kind of unexpected trauma or begin to grow old, tired and sick; and even those who belong to the last category might gradually begin to realize how badly things are going for the world as a consequence of the way humankind is living (waste, pollution, climate change, extreme inequality, increasing infantilization of culture, collapse of civilized manners and so on), and wonder whether or not they need to make drastic changes simply to survive for any significant length of time as a flourishing species. In that sense this kind of public thinking should not be irrelevant or uninteresting for anybody.

Also recall that I wrote before about ‘the cravings of the spirit’. By which I mean that there is some very deep and powerful urge in many if not most people to seek satisfactions of the sort that are not strictly sensual and material; not passively ‘consumed’ (as in watching  TV or Instagram Reels), not ‘profitable’ in the lazy, contemporary, narrowly commercial sense. The love of literature, art, music, sport and the pursuit of knowledge for their own sake is the example that is most accessible to the understanding here: so is a common housewife’s desire to keep her house tidy and pretty, to the extent that she does it for her own aesthetic pleasure, not to make her neighbours jealous. There are others, even in this day and age, who pursue ideals of justice and equity and love (even for animals and plants) with the same doggedness, with no significant personal ‘returns’. We know of countless people who have found deep and abiding satisfaction in such things even if they have not brought money or power or fame (most great artists and scientists were like that until very recently, historically speaking); indeed, they often had to give up the lure of the ‘safe and comfortable’ life and actively court hardship, ridicule, isolation and even physical danger in the relentless pursuit of their ideals. So many scientists have died without ever reaping the just rewards of their labour and talent; so many artists have found recognition only after death. There is much talk about ‘motivation’ today (and most motivational speakers cannot imagine what to ‘motivate’ you about except how to become rich and famous quickly without much risk and effort!) – what sort of ‘motivation’ urged such people on, do you think, unless it were the goading of the spirit?

So, spirituality – as I have been labouring to underscore – is not essentially about God and gurus and mantras and pilgrimages to ‘holy’ places and special codes of dressing and eating and so forth. But yes, spirituality is most definitely about becoming a) less material minded, b) less bothered about what the herd is doing, c) more comfortable, even happy, with silence and solitude, d) more willing to cut out endless distractions (get off social media, turn off your phone, grow a distaste for partying!), e) more interested in finding out what you really want most out of life (you can’t have everything – if you love to sleep, or if you are forever suffering from FOMO, becoming a billionaire should not be one of your goals), and f) more determined to focus on things that really matter to you.

This last is about learning to meditate. Again, as I have learnt from a lifetime of teaching and keep telling my pupils, meditation is all about stilling your mind and focusing on the task at hand, and that need not have anything to do with God and all that stuff. People have traffic accidents, quarrel over trifles, forget what they learnt only weeks or months ago, cannot long maintain exercise and diet regimens, make stupid mistakes in examinations and idiotic investments, simply because they cannot decide on and focus on their priorities. The spiritual mind is the habitually meditative mind, and the meditative mind is a calm, firm, well-sorted, focused mind. To some it comes instinctively, even from childhood, but a lot of people can learn to become like that through long and earnest practice. Therein lies hope, therein lies my motivation for writing in this vein…

Two questions are likely to arise at this point: a) have you tried it yourself? and b) what have you got from it? So the next installment is going to be of a very personal nature, trying to answer those questions.

The life of the spirit, part two

The little I have learnt about spiritualism in this lifetime is that you must begin by going through the steps listed below:

Accept that pain, loss, failure, sickness, disillusionment, frustration and death are inevitable – for everybody (The Buddha’s First Noble Truth was ‘Life is suffering’. Anyone who claims otherwise is a fool or a charlatan).

Accept that they cannot be ‘cured’, ‘solved’ or avoided by any sane worldly means. The wisest and kindest man can at best show you how to lessen that suffering.

Accept that the more you confuse ‘having fun’ or being ‘successful’ with joy or happiness (in the Sanskrit sense of ananda, bliss, which absolutely insists on a lot of resignation, acceptance, self-control, moderation in all things, tolerance of things you consider ‘bad’ and quietness of mind/spirit/soul), the more desperately you chase wealth/power/social status and fame in the hope that these things will save you from unhappiness, the more frantically you try to lengthen life and therefore fear death above all things, the more unhappy you will become.

Realize that you are much more a mind than a body, even if you do not understand (or refuse to accept) that you are something even higher and less explainable in material terms – a spirit or soul. You feel everything, even pleasure and pain, ultimately with your mind, not any part of your body (when the body-mind connection is turned off, as under anesthesia, you feel no pain even if your hand is amputated!). Being spiritual does not have to be learned from priests, monks and gurus – ask any great sportsman and s/he will tell you that the wonders they achieve is ultimately with their minds; they have only trained their bodies with endless hard work and patience and discipline to do what the mind tells the body to do. Being spiritual is an experience that can come from doing anything you do with love and respect and attention – whether it be cooking or surgery or gardening or mathematics or teaching; it is understanding that the mind appreciates beautiful music or lovely scenery, the gadgets you use to access them hardly matter, the money you have spent on your widescreen TV or home theatre or DSLR camera is a trivial and inconsequential thing, essentially money wasted. Newton did not have an electronic calculator, Michelangelo and Mozart did not have Meta or Gemini at their elbows to help them create immortal masterpieces; Wordsworth needed only an appreciative mind to exult in the beauty of the bank of daffodils.

The Great Masters of Living (E.F. Schumacher’s phrase) both in the east and west were always right – as one of our holy books pithily puts it, trying to achieve satisfaction by indulging your sense pleasures more and more is just as stupid and futile as trying to douse a fire by pouring ghee on it. Human greed knows no limits: give a single man the entire planet, and all he will say is ‘Only one planet?’ Check with Elon Musk. Of course poverty is bad, but cultivation of self-control and learning to be happy as soon as our most basic material needs are satisfied is absolutely essential for everyone to find a modicum of contentment with life and the planet to continue to be liveable for long (everyone needs and deserves a decent roof overhead, no one needs a palace; everyone needs to eat, no one needs to gorge at five star eateries; a bicycle may be a need as a luxury limousine is not; limitless uncontrolled growth in any part of the body is a cancer, and so is the chimera of perpetual economic growth). As soon as the basic needs are satisfied – and to do that one needs to exert one’s fullest efforts to curb the seven deadly sins inside his mind – one must, if one wants to survive with the least possible unhappiness, turn to satisfying more and more the cravings of the spirit, and even to do that, one must consciously and assiduously cultivate (to use Buddhist teaching again, though I have read the very same injunctions in every major religion) the virtues of karuna, maitri, upeksha and mudita: compassion, friendship, equanimity and joy in the joy of others.

Most people, even those who are not poor and sincerely looking for directions to a better life, will throw up their hands in despair already at this point: ‘It’s too much, too different from everything we have been taught, too hard, we just can’t do it!’ See what I meant in the last post about our basic philosophical orientation having gone seriously wrong since at least five hundred years ago? In the middle ages – at least in Europe, and Europe has been teaching the rest of the world everything for many centuries now – they tilted too far in the other direction: religion got a vice like grip on the human mind, and taught that everything about life on this earth was sick and bad and transient, so we should wallow in the muck while we live and wait for all our rewards in ‘heaven’. And then we decided to create ‘heaven on earth’ with war weapons, large industries, advertising, global trade and big government along with democratic and socialistic ideals steadily being turned into laws to make a better world. I shall insist once again at this point that much good has certainly been achieved by such means – I most definitely do not want to go back and live in the world of a thousand years ago in any country. But now we have reached a critical juncture; as a 20^th century philosopher put it, we have a choice only between the Buddha and the Bomb. If we in the mass cannot learn to become at least a little more spiritual, I frankly think we are doomed.

And yet I have hope, if only very slight. It arises when I see and hear about so many people searching and asking questions, even after having a lot of conventional fun and achieving a lot of worldly success, when I see attendance at meditation classes swelling, when I hear of the minimalist movement attracting more and more experimenters in many countries, when I learn about people backpacking and travelling around the world on shoestring budgets and greatly enjoying the experience, when I read about very big businessmen and politicians acknowledging in rare candid moments that things are going badly wrong in every sphere of life, when I see the technocratic approach spawning a hundred new problems as it solves ten old ones, when I meet reasonably happy people much more often among the relatively poor than in my own social class…

Turn inwards. I shall end this part of the continuing series by quoting some of my favourite lines from a very revered Hindu text, Adi Shankaracharya’s Mohmudgar:

Satsangatwe nissangatwam/ nissangatwe nirmohatwam/ nirmohatwe nishchalatatwam/ nishchalatatwe jivan mukti.

From associating with good people you learn to be glad with solitude/ from solitude you learn to lose illusions/ from losing illusions you become still* inside/ from stillness comes true freedom.

*A footnote: In early (Hinayana) Buddhism, a spiritually enlightened person was called ‘Thera’, derived from the Sanskrit ‘sthira’, meaning still.

The life of the spirit

In a now already famous remark made not long before he died, Professor Stephen Hawking said he believed the rise of AI would spell the end of ‘civilization as we know it’.

Perhaps that might be indeed how we are doomed to go – in The Time Machine fashion, or in its more ‘updated’ versions, as in the Blade Runner and Matrix series of movies. Or perhaps some vast, benign, globe-girdling nonhuman super intelligence is going to preserve and protect us far into the very dim and distant future, the way many of Bradbury’s and Asimov’s best stories tell us things might turn out. Preserve and protect us ‘for our own good’, as farmers preserve and protect herds of sheep. ‘Civilization as we know it’ destroyed by our own hyper-creative cleverness. Mercifully (very selfishly speaking), I shall not be around to witness that ‘heaven’.

Otherwise… otherwise, from all I have understood about the human mind and human condition from my lifelong study of history, politics, war, economics, environmental science, psychology, literature and religion along with my own experience of ‘real’ life, I believe we can survive and thrive indefinitely, with or without much aid or dread from AI, by our own efforts, but we must change our concerns and priorities far more drastically than most present-day thinkers can imagine.

For too long – at least since the dawn of the European Renaissance – we have thought of changing and improving the outside world. And indeed, with the help of increasingly more powerful technology and organization, we have changed and even ‘improved’ things beyond the wildest dreams of even most kings in pre-Renaissance days. The common man enjoys far more freedoms and rights today and a far higher ‘standard of living’ than were available to all but kings and emperors (even kings and emperors didn’t have anesthesia or twitter) for all of history before the last two hundred years.  And yet, if we call that progress, we simply cannot deny the facts that it is the same idea of progress that has brought in its train imperialism and monstrous colonial exploitation, gigantic world wars, massive permanent unemployment and inequality and poverty amidst plenty, impending environmental catastrophe, and a global pandemic of ‘diseases of the rich’, from obesity to depression to maniacal road rage to perpetual distraction and endless thrill seeking, to mention a small handful of appalling, seemingly unavoidable troubles, or obstacles to human happiness as I prefer to think about them. I believe the root of this conundrum is that our basic philosophical orientation – in the mass, that is – became seriously wrong after the middle ages.

Combined with a deeply settling and widely spreading conviction (which philosophers have long named materialism) that this world of sensual phenomena and things is all there is, and that this one body, one life, is all we have (to be ‘enjoyed’ to the fullest as long as we have it), and increasing conceit that natural resources are infinite, only waiting passively to be exploited, and that ever advancing technology can fix every problem (even those of ageing and loneliness!), humankind became ever more obsessed with the single problem of amassing and consuming ‘wealth’ (again, understood in purely material terms). And as they wished, so it happened, especially since the Industrial Revolution got going – though already 200 years ago a poet was warning ‘ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, where wealth accumulates, and men decay.’ By the mid-20th  century, increasing the annual gross domestic product became the sole real religion, nay mania, of every significant country. On top of material engineering, the vast and ghastly experiments with socialism – the idea that society could be engineered like dead materials so cleverly that poverty and inequality (in Marxist philosophy the sole real problems we have ever faced: absolutely childish incomprehension of that infinitely complex thing called human psychology) could be forever abolished and instantly heaven would be recreated on earth – taught us, at least a few of us, that life was not so simple, and the cost of tampering too much with nature, both that outside and that inside us, was unaffordable. The alarm bells started ringing by the 1970s, with warnings like ‘The Limits to Growth’ and concepts like ‘spaceship earth’ and books like The Affluent Society and Greed is not enough, Globalization and its discontents,  Doughnut Economics and Capital in the 21st century coming to widespread attention, coupled with fear of sudden and total nuclear annihilation.

And yet, how did we respond? Worldwide, we maniacally accelerated the pursuit of economic growth, at the cost of every other major concern, having convinced ourselves that if things were indeed going very badly with the majority everywhere, the one and only panacea lay in even more rapid and relentless growth (hand in hand with cure-all technology). There is no serious search for alternatives, at least among the movers and shakers of the world, for better ways of shaping and facing the future, even now, with a quarter of the 21st century already behind us. Even though there are more fat people around us than hungry ones for the first time in history, more well-off people complaining of frustrated, aimless, boring, empty lives than have ever existed before, more evidence of rapid environmental damage with every passing year, more danger of catastrophic wars again, we cannot begin to think that there are very many things which are very wrong with ourselves that we desperately need to change, and urgently too. This is what I have observed over all my adult life, since the early 1980s.

Not that there aren’t people around who have been telling us what we need to do; they have always been around. By them, I mean the religious people, the people who keep telling us to give greater attention and a bigger role to the spiritual dimension of our lives. And I start immediately by clearing the decks – I deny legitimacy to every religious guru who is trying to aggrandize and enrich himself by peddling soothing or tantalizing mumbo jumbo, every doctrine which ultimately encourages stupidity and fanaticism and goads its followers to start behaving like some sort of Elect, divinely authorized to belittle, hurt and destroy followers of all other belief systems. To avoid much repetition while clarifying my ideas about a healthy spiritual life, I shall draw the reader’s attention to at least two old blogposts, My views on religion: a summary to begin with, and Socialism calling, part two. It would help if you read up those two essays before continuing with this one.

I have been feeling increasingly sick of watching my fellow human beings scrabbling just to ‘make a living’ lifelong, whether they are earning thousands or millions, hurting and cheating one another shamefully in the process, badly damaging and uglifying everything around them (forests turned into shopping malls, oceans turned into vast lifeless dumping grounds for waste), and yet lamenting all the time that they can find neither peace nor happiness. This is not an old man’s plaint: I started feeling like that in my teens, and even those blogposts mentioned above are many years old. A very thoughtful, observant and sensitive ex student in his early twenties recently remarked that while old men have always cribbed about present times, it is a novel phenomenon that many people even of his age are now feeling the same. Nice and clever people cannot find even folks of their own age to have meaningful conversations with, cannot trust that everyone will not let them down or betray them when they are tested. Things are going from bad to worse … that is not an illusion.

So, to turn into more ‘spiritual’, less harmful persons, what do we need to do? Most certainly not what a lot of people are doing right now – celebrating ever more puja-s with ever more gusto, relying more and more on once-supposedly obsolete and silly myths and superstitions and talismans, going more on pilgrimages like tourists, abusing and growing more violent against those of other faiths: all this comes from being actively ir-religious, from being driven by those same deep evil instincts, fear, greed, envy, hatred, malice, the lust for recognition (power and status, however trivial and transient) that drive us (almost everyone from billionaire and dictator to the man in the street), forever insecure and discontented, in the material sphere of life. To be spiritual is to be inwardly directed, and simultaneously to live in a way that is the least burdensome on people and nature all around us. Where the outside world is concerned, we need to become nicer to others – more gentle, more honest, more considerate, more charitable, more friendly as far as possible – that is something we need today far more than law and technology to make the outside world a better place to live in. John Lennon sang a very anti-religious song titled Imagine many years ago. Imagine how wonderful the world would be if most people behaved with one another as I have described above. And the really bad thing is that there are still lots of good but sad and lonely people around, of all ages, but they never get a fair chance to live a good life only because they are being constantly cheated, humiliated, shoved around and left behind by the bad lot. But I insist that even dealing better with the outside world first calls for changing ourselves inside.

Before going any further, a disclaimer. I do NOT consider myself a very spiritually evolved person (certainly not yet) as compared to the true Great Masters down the ages, from the Buddha to Sri Ramakrishna. And yet, I do believe that if most people realized at least the very little I have realized in this lifetime and put that realization into practice, they would certainly be less unhappy, and the world would certainly be a much better place to live in – if not heaven on earth. But to give a better shape to what I understand by a spiritual life, let me break this essay up at this point and beg the reader to wait for part two. It goes without saying that intelligent comments, even in the form of earnest questions, would make it easier for me to write it.