Posts
If you drop a stone into a lake it is not only the water next to where the stone drops that is disturbed but the whole mass of water in the lake is disturbed—some more, some less. This happens because the water is one single mass, each drop of the water being connected
with the drop next to it, so that if one drop is knocked the rest of the drops feel the shock. It is like the human body where one single diseased cell can infect the whole system, ultimately crippling it.
Indian philosophy abhors the idea of isolationism. If you think you can thrive while others are suffering you are mistaken. If others suffer you will suffer too whether you like it or not. It may be you will not suffer immediately but the problems responsible for a single individual's suffering may grow to affect the destiny of the whole
community unless the community girds up its loins to nip the problems in the bud before it gets too late. The individual and the community are one single whole, united and indivisible; it is like the part and the whole, one dependent upon the other, just as the parts themselves are dependent upon each other. In the good of one is
the good of all just as no single part can enjoy happiness by denying it to other parts. The concepts of one world and one human family flow from this unity of existence.
It is this sense of oneness that provides the basis of the great social virtues one hears so much about—love, goodwill, friendship, charity, and so on. Why should one care for others unless one realizes that it is to one's own interest that one should do so? Why should not one
exploit others for one's own gain unless it is that to do so is to hurt one's own interest? It is this fact of identity of interests that is the rafson d'etre for the origin of families and nations and finally, one single human family.
This sense of oneness grows as man grows in his power of understanding the forces that shape his destiny. He realizes the value of co-operation to fight the hostile forces of Nature to create an environment that will give him security and comfort. Later, he realizes that he cannot survive by fighting Nature but by striking a
relationship of give and take only, for his continued hostility against Nature can in the end recoil on himself, as indeed it has started doing now, thanks to man's thoughtless depredations against Nature over the centuries. 'Save Nature' is the call now. for man has realized, hopefully not too late, that by hurting Nature man hurts himself. Everywhere today one hears of the hazards environmental pollution poses to mankind and there is a growing awareness that man and his environment are so interdependent that man can neglect his environment only at peril to himself. Man makes his environment as
much as the environment makes man.
Indian thinkers say that existence itself is one. Man, animal, plant, the elements—all that exists is basically one, the same thing varying only in degrees of manifestation. The universe is like a big banyan tree, with its trunk, boughs, leaves, and shoots, an integral whole despite its diverse details and every one of its details drawing its sap from the same source. There is diversity but underneath the diversity there is a unity. The diversity is important just as the unity is important. The former is an expression of the latter. Both are identical, their
essence being the same.
Social concern must focus more on the small than on the big, else progress may suffer. The atom may indeed be a drag on the whole universe.