What is sacred need not be secret. His teachings were profound, but were open, ehi passa, ehi passa, ‘come and see, come and see’, as he picturesquely expressed it. Addressing his disciple Ananda he said: The Tathagata has no secrecy; secrecy belongs to three things, O Ananda: to priest knowledge, to false knowledge, and to prostitutes.

It is imperative that our people turn away from the cheap and secret miracles of yoga and religion, indulgence in which had kept our people weak and superstitious and in political slavery for centuries, and turn to master the marvelous and beneficial and open ‘miracles’ of physical science for our individual and collective welfare.

What magic and miracles, performed in the name of a cheap religion and yoga, and held in secret by the performers, can compare with the ‘miracles’ performed by the physical sciences, verified and verifiable, open and communicable, whether in the field of curing of diseases, and that too, on a mass scale, increasing of food production, or putting a man or a vehicle on the Moon or the Mars and bringing both back to earth.

All beings, whose reason is obstructed and deeply deluded by the delusion of these pairs of opposites, do not know me, who am their very self, and hence also, they do not worship me as their own self.’

Some of our people, especially among our educated sections, including our administrative personnel, run after all sorts of magic and miracles, puerile and sterile, in the name of religion and yoga. In this age of the marvels of physical science, such religious magic and miracles appear infantile.

Yesam tvantagatam papam

Jananam punya-karmanam;

Te dvanda-moha-nirmuktah

This is the scientific spirit and temper which is highlighted in Sri Krsna’s exhortation to Arjuna in the Gita, and which is amplified in Sankaracarya’s commentary on the same.

Iccha-dvesa-samuthena

Dvandva-mohena bharata;

Sarvabhutani sammoham

The impurities of the mind constitute the obstructions to the knowledge of this ever-present divine immortal dimension of man. These impurities are centred in the ego, in its attachments and aversions and bondage to the organic system. Search for truth, either in the external world which yields scientific knowledge, or in the internal world which yields spiritual experience, calls for the elimination of these impurities which alone gives the mind power to penetrate from the surface to the depths of nature, external or internal.

A broad classification of the sciences into physical, biological, and social corresponds with three levels of organization of matter and energy, and not levels only, but also quite distinct kinds of organization. The three are sharply increasing orders of complexity, and each includes the lower grades. Vital organization is more intricate than physical organization, and it is added to and does not replace physical organization, which is also fully involved in vital organization. Social organization retains and sums the complexities of both these and adds its own still greater complexities’.

This Atman, (being) hidden in all beings, is not manifest to all. But it can be realised by all who are trained to inquire into subtle truths, by means of their sharp and subtle buddhi or pure reason’.

We get an echo of this concept of the sheaths covering reality in twentieth-century biology, with respect to the first three, including the Taittiriya Upanisad emphasis of ‘infilling of the succeeding by the preceding’; tenaisa purnah-‘this is infilled by that’. Says the American biologist George Gaylord Simpson (The Meaning of Evolution,)