Page 21 - All India Magazine Nov-2026

gests at once the right reasons for its being the truth; viveka the
power which makes at once the necessary limitations and distinc-
tions & prevents intellectual error from creeping in or an imperfect
truth from being taken for the whole satyam.
The importance of viveka for the purposes of man's progress
in his present stage, is supreme. At present in the greatest men the
powers of the vijnana act not in their own power, place & nature,
but in the intellect; as helpers of the intellect & occasional guides.
Directly we get an intuition or revelation, the intellect, memory,
imagination, logical faculty seize hold of it & begin to disguise it in
a garb of mingled truth & error, bringing down truth to the level of
the nature, sanskaras and preferences of a man instead of purify-
ing & elevating his nature & judgments to the level of the truth.
Without viveka, these powers are as dangerous to man as they are
helpful. The light they give is brighter than the light of the intellect,
but the shadow which the intellect creates around them is often
murkier than the mist of ignorance which surrounds ordinary intel-
lectual knowledge. Thus men who use these powers ignorantly, of-
ten stumble much more than those who walk by the clear though
limited light of the intellect. When these powers begin to work in
us, we must be dhira and sthira and not be led away by our enthu-
siasm; we must give time for the viveka to seize on our thoughts
& intuitions, arrange them, separate their intellectual from their
vijnanamaya elements, correct their false extensions, false limita-
tions, misapplications & assign them their right application, right
extension, right limitation,—make, in the image of the Upanishads,
the vyuha or just marshalling of the rays of the sun of knowledge,
suryasya rashmayah. Knowledge is not for the hasty mind but only
for the dhira, who can sit long accumulating & arranging his store
and does not rush away with fragments like a crow darting off with
the first morsel of food on which it can seize.

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