(...Contd)

The gospel of life, then, is a gospel of non-attachment, of the immortality of the soul, of the ultimate liberation of the soul in the Cosmic. This is the teaching of the all-inclusive inwardness of existence. The indispensability of non-attachment becomes obvious from the concept of the oneness of life, of the unity of the universe.
If truth is one, attachment to outward forms is another name for clinging to falsehood, and a breach of truth, the inevitable result of which is misery. Culture tends to freedom, and freedom is only in impersonal life. Unselfishness and inward peace, or, at least, an effort to achieve this end, should mark the distinctive feature of culture, if it should last, and have any permanent significance. Knowledge which characterises such culture is not mere learning but faith and insight with an ethical background.
This is not possible without freedom of the mind from prejudice and from craving for things that perish.
Culture in India is synonymous with the blossoming of the faculty of the spiritual consciousness in different degrees, and by stages.
Higher than the animal man is the normal man. Higher than the normal man is the good man. Higher still is the saintly man. But above all is the divine man or God-man.
To act without attachment, to perform without reluctance one’s duties according to the station in which one is placed in society by one’s capacity and aptitude, and to be inwardly unified with the Divine Being, even while living in the world, is what constitutes the way to peace. The Sthitaprajna of the Bhagavad Gita is the Indian ideal of the highest type of culture.
Culture includes processes as bodily training, the discipline of the psychological faculties, the development of the consciousness of right and wrong, and good and bad, etc., which go by the names of physical culture, mental or intellectual culture, will-culture, memory-culture, thought- culture, moral and ethical culture, and the like.
For, culture is a progressive transfiguration of nature, a creative activity of the evolving mind of man to approximate itself to perfection, so far as it is possible for it with the knowledge and energy with which it is endowed at a given level of life.

(Contd...)