Shuddhananda Bharati
HERE is an original synthetic treatise upon the ’Twelve Aphorisms’ revealed to a perfect Saint Meikandar. The Tamil word ’Meikandar’ means ’Sathya Dharshi’ or the ’Truth-seer’ who, being a perfect Yogi and a Divine Jnani, speaks from within the highest and the purest TRUTH about the three eternal entities-God, Soul, and the Universe. This book guides the seekers and thinkers of the Eternal Truth, who strive to master the quintessence of the ’Agama Siddhanta’ and ’Tantra’ works of our ancient sages. Critically viewed, metaphysics deserves a very subtle interpretative medium of expression, and our author exquisitely levels his medium to the spiritual interior of higher experience.Yogi Sri Shuddhananda Bharatiar, the author of this spiritual interpretation, is a poet, playwright, critic, and a linguist too, who is ever living in Divine Communion. He has mastered all the religions and the various systems of yogas and philosophies, both ancient and modern; and he has written a number of soul-elevating books in English, French, and Tamil, which would be published in our series.Man seeks the fountain of Bliss. But he wanders after mirages. He wants peace. But he treads the path of bondage. He pants for liberation. But vital desire entangles him in misery. His pragmatic intellect dreams of world empires and material millenniums. It divines the laws of the physical nature. Science in its hands plays a double game of construction and destruction. It makes machines and engines for the human convenience. At the same it bombs and torpedoes human existence. It conspires to play at chess the lives of millions. It makes humanity food for powder. Bombs drown the Bible-voice, Infernal smoke chokes the free breath of man. Man has after all become a weaponed asura. Saviours have come and gone. But the world has not yet been saved from the ferocious beast in man. Blind passion, quenchless desire, vital egoism, pitiless selfishness and false-hood have degraded man and made him a prisoner in the hell of misery and ignorance.Is this life? Is this man’s destiny? What is man? What is the world? Who lives in the body? How did it come? Neither life nor the world is in our control. Who moves them both? The soul seeks a Bliss, a freedom, a light, and a peace beyond the dark turmoil of life. How to attain that Bliss of Freedom? Listen to Saint Thayumanavar who calls you:'Come collectively, O humanity, to realize the Supreme. Tread not the path of falsehood. Come, then, let us find the Divine Presence. It shall give us liberation. Come united; limitless flood of supreme Bliss of the Unique One that plays as the Many. He is the Life of lives dancing in hearts. Come, let us seek love to attain His Grace. The time is now!'Here is the end and aim of life. Man lives in his vital egoism, forgetting the God in him and in the universe. He trumpets over a little conquest of the elemental nature. He is quite ignorant of himself and his Lord. That is why he suffers and commits suicide with his boasted intellect. He has much externalized life and must hence internalize it, ingather his mind, and be centre in, instead of centre out. He must pass through a course of spiritual evolution; touch his soul and attain its Lord. How to do it? Our seers show the way.Vedas and Agamas are the two eternal sources of Divine knowledge that lead man to God. ’Veda’ means the knowledge that leads man to the Divine. ’Agama’ means Divine approach. Both accept the divine essence in man, and the goal of life as the Divine at- one-ment. Both are the centripetal and centrifugal forces of the Supreme Truth. The Vedas teach us about the ceremonies conducive to mental purification, the modes of divine worship according to individual predilections, and throw light upon the path of Knowledge that leads to the Divine.
