The world of matter, when it is fully controlled, is the solution for the problems of man. We have fast-moving vehicles, and mechanisms and engines which can produce rapidly commodities which will take years for us to till by ploughing and working manually and when the powers of electricity were discovered latterly, people thought they are veritably in heaven. Today, even today at this moment you know the suzerainty of electrical powers in the world. You cannot move an inch without the aid of an electric force. For everything there is the need for the summoning of what you call electric energy, whatever be that operation of yours. A day may come when we may not even swallow our food without some push button work and that may be the apotheosis and the goal of our achievements. Today, we are far more advanced in the operation of physical matter than I referred to as the middle of the 19th Century and the beginning of the 20th Century. It was the time when Newton ruled the world of science. He was the God of science. Even today he is a God in some way because of his studies and researches in the fields of physical manipulation and the operations of matter.

Now, the word matter is a crucial word and that became the deity which man began to worship. Everything that you have to control and anything that is necessary for your comfort as an appurtenance coming from outside is matter, a material value. All your joy is there outside; it is in a machine; it is in an office; it is in some action which is to be performed in some place, it is somewhere outside you. The feeling that all values of human life are somewhere outside the human being is the feeling of materialists. Anything that is worthwhile in life is outside you. It is not inside you because what is inside you is the mind, and the mind it is that has to summon support from forces outside. The dependence of the human individual on forces which are outside the human individual is called the philosophy of materialism. This was highlighted almost to the breaking point at the beginning of the 20th Century, when it was a very great thing to be educated along these lines and an educated person was a past master in the knowledge of handling material power. The curriculum of studies and the syllabus in schools and colleges were framed in such a manner that it adapted itself very ably into this outlook of life which was framed in the light of material science and we in India are well aware of this fact. When we compare the present system of education with the minutiae written by Macaulay many many years back, who wrote the system of education, a policy of training people, the very very fundamentals of learning on the basis of a commercial interpretation of life was developed, which is the child of material philosophy. A commercial outlook is begot by materialistic science. So everyone who is wholly a commercial person is also a materialist.

Education which was framed under the ages of this kind of philosophy of education became the guiding line for the normal behaviour by people of all fields of life; man sold himself to the devil as it were. Goethe, the great German poet wrote an epic of the Faust which is the story of a person who sold himself to a devil, and you must read that epic to know the conditions under which man may be compelled to do these things. There is a time in the life of a man when he would not mind bargaining with a devil and say, "Here I am, purchase me," for a comfort and a dizzy feeling of satisfaction that comes from an atmosphere totally outside me. It is heaven selling itself to hell, telling, "Hell, my dear, come and possess me." I am not giving the story of something that happened in the past merely, it is something that is happening even today. We may not be under the lordship of Newton the physicist, today. Macaulay is dead and the classical materialists of science are not today so very prominently working as they did earlier. You may say that there are saints and sages and spiritual institutions. Yes, that is true, but the generality of outlook of people has not changed. Dispassionately looking and interpreting, honestly viewing things from the bottom of one's heart-the outlook in general, basically of people, has not changed. We may not call ourselves materialists and one of you may think that commercial life is the whole of life.

You are religious people doing prayers every day, studying scriptures and doing meditation. But, it is necessary to understand that what it is to be a materialist in order to know whether one is free from its clutches. A lack of confidence in powers that are not entirely outside and a wholesale confidence in powers entirely placed outwardly in life is a tendency to materialism. The love of money for instance, which can make a person go giddy in the head, can make a person collapse into death and coma when money in the form of gold and silver is lost, and anything associated with this kind of outlook is nothing but a apotheosism or deification of materialism. Each one has to be a judge for one's own self. Because each man is finally a client before the supreme judge, the Almighty creator; there is no proxy, no advocate here, when we are placed face to face in the court of the universal judiciary. "Yes, everything shall be fine,"-there is no use saying that. There is a heart inside our heart and that which is within the heart will be our lawyer who will argue dispassionately, properly without any kind of twisting of facts.

In this light viewed, we would find that much change has not taken place in the general evaluation of things in life, even after 80 years have past; we are in the 85th year of the 20th Century. But 85 years in human history is very little. Some action has been taken already by the Time Spirit because I mentioned to you that some time during the beginning of the 20th century or a few years before, it appeared that the world was going to the breaking point. Even as the powers of health in our body give a long rope to every one of us and they take action only when we go to the breaking point, many of us are not aware that we tending towards illness because the illness is felt only when it is manifest outside as a head ache or a tummy pain, etc. A little tendency to inward non-alignment of the psyche cannot be known unless it comes to the conscious level of our mind, and in a similar way we may not know what work is going on in the world. You should not say, "So many years have passed." So many are only the beginning of the first step as it were of the working of the Time Spirit.

The materialist forces come, as I said, to the breaking point and anything carried to the extreme tends to the tilting of the balance to the other side and suddenly there is the catastrophe. A world war took place and you can imagine what kind of catastrophe it was. The abolition, the annihilation of life and placing people in utter insecurity, which one feels when the temperature of the body rises to 105°F. Precarious, one does not know when one will be alive or dead. One will be alive or one may not. That kind of high temperature of action of the moving spirit of the world is what we call a cataclysm, a cyclone, a war, a battle, a destruction and a sorrow, which comes in a pronounced manner and in a most unexpected fashion which will almost break the heart of a person. You can imagine how we feel at that time when we are so bad in our health that we do not know what will become of us. But these are the rectifying forces of nature emerged forth at that time.

Great personalities-you may call them incarnations, Avatara, Purushas, the healing spirits of mankind-incarnated themselves in different parts of the world. When we speak of incarnations, generally we think of Jesus Christ, Lord Krishna, Rama, Mohammad, Guru Nanak, and these are the people who come to our mind when we think of incarnations. But a divine interference need not necessarily be in the form of these well-known personalities. It can be any event which sets right the whole situation, and it can be any person who sees to it that things are all right. It may be a village head. Why go so far to people who are well-known in history? A little person in the village who is the head of a village in a community may be a rectifying medium for a little trouble there and it is a divine interference.

Anything that contributes to the maintenance of a balance in society or in the personality of an individual is the coming into action of God Himself, because God is another name for the power of balance. Anything that sets a thing in a state of equilibrium is the work of God. It may be so very insignificantly manifest as not to be noticed by even the person who is benefited, just as yesterday I was not feeling well, today I am all right for reasons I do not know. I took rest, I feel better. What has happened to you? Something has worked, not to the knowledge of your own self even. What do you mean by taking rest and becoming better? It is a way of saying. It is another way of accepting that a healing power has worked and what you call rest is nothing but the working of that healing power, introducing itself, even without announcing itself to you and without even your knowledge of its having done any work at all. In this sense whenever there is peace of mind, whenever we are healthy, whenever we feel comfortable and satisfied, we may be sure: God has worked.

Now, such pronounced actions of God make themselves felt in human history. This was the theme with which I began, and these pronounced manifestations in human history, from our point of view at least, are the descent of great personalities, and it was my intention during these days to bestow a little thought on the role played by these masters who were felt as if they were touching our skin in the various parts of the world, and only if you know history very well, you can know who these persons were. They include even great Generals of the army, not merely those whom you regarded as holy people. Field Marshals who won astounding victories are also to be taken into consideration in the assessment of the manner in which God works. God's action is pleasant and unpleasant both. As I mentioned, to have a high fever is not a pleasant phenomenon but it is a necessary phenomenon, and that which is necessary need not necessarily be a psychological satisfaction. A psyche which is attached to the bodily conditions of prejudice and a narrow-minded attitude to things in general; so that which is good for us is not always pleasant to us and the good and the necessary sometimes looks like an unpleasant occurrence because of our inability to think impartially, being wedded, as we are, to a total partial and individual outlook of things. So thus came personalities of a lofty stature right from spiritual leaders like Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, Swami Vivekananda, Swami Rama Tirtha; social resuscitating powers like Raja Ram Mohan Roy and great political geniuses turned into great masters of spirit like Sri Aurobindo Gosh and there are Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and there are others you all know very well. 

They come and go. They come for doing a thing and do it and go, and they go in a manner it is necessary for them to go, not as we prescribe. They may go in any way and how they have to bear this exit is left to the discretion of the great director of this drama of the cosmos. The wages will be paid according to the performance. But everybody is paid the wages and in this great saga of the coming of masters, geniuses, we have one among us whom we have seen, the great master Swami Sivananda whose life some of us witnessed physically and many of you have heard and read about, whose coming as being a transforming dramatic touch even to the life of people for which the entire procedure and methodology of spiritual action can be regarded as the story of the ascent of man to God, a story which he lived in his own personality and a story through which we have to pass each one of us individually, a story which is also the theme of every one of the works that he wrote, which microscopically are in miniature, may be said to be the story of the world in its aspiration for God.

These issues shall receive our attention.