Everywhere in Nature we see symmetry—lines, curves, angles and ellipses meet us at every turn. The most ancient of Seers discerned the design of the constellations in the starry firmament. The modern observer describes the pattern of an element or an atom. Look at the crystal; it is exquisite in shape as in transparency. A grain of sand or of salt has a geometrical form. Every flower dazzles us, not only with its colour and fragrance, but also with its structure. Every blade of grass, every leaf, every fruit, presents to us a form and a shape. This phenomenon is so common in Nature that often we fail to read the message or to enjoy the beauty of the design that surrounds us on every side.

When we observe this, the question suggests itself to us: Is there a purpose in what looks like the "hobby" of Mother Nature to create design and pattern all the time, everywhere? Why all this symmetry? Is it meaningless?

Let us turn from the wonderful world of Nature outside us and look within ourselves. Our body is composed of many parts and different systems. Through the cerebro-spinal system we see one picture; through the sympathetic system, another. Again, every organ is built according to a plan. The eye, the ear, the liver, the spleen, everything in the body has a shape, and one organ approaches and joins itself to another organ according to a definite design. When we study the functions of these different organs we find that the shape of each is most intimately related to the shape of every other organ; and all of them combine in a co-ordinated form we know as the body. Even a little knowledge convinces us that Nature did not produce the shapes and forms of these organs aimlessly; the very shapes are indicative of their purpose.

In the study of our subject, it is necessary that we grasp the underlying principle of this phenomenon. Everywhere in Nature there is design with which beauty is associated; but something more than beauty, which endows even seemingly unattractive forms with a kind of beauty. There is purpose; every design reveals beauty and brings to us intimations of purpose.

From the visible and the known we pass on to the invisible and the unknown. No one doubts that human life has a purpose, though there are differences of view as to that purpose. The great philosophers of India have reasoned to prove that life has a purpose—a study of the Upanishads shows that. The early poets of India have sung about the design of life, as the Vedic hymns clearly indicate. It is a fashion nowadays to turn for guidance to the West and look for something new all the time, overlooking that in India, thousands of years ago, the human mind solved and the human heart realized the meaning and purpose of life.

We carry within ourselves certain intuitions—call them instincts, if you like, or hunches, or premonitions. We all know that there is in our body a kind of feeling for what is healthful to it. Similarly, there is in our heart an instinctive feeling for what constitutes moral duty, or nobility. Again, we have in our very soul-consciousness a feeling that life cannot be meaningless, that it has a purpose, a divine purpose. Often there is no authorization from a doctor for our bodily instinct; there is no priest who can override a moral feeling; and similarly no scientist can do away with the soul-intuition that life has a meaning and a purpose. Our difficulty is to read correctly and to understand the design of life. People want to know the true meaning of existence so that they may live worthily. Their intuitive feeling that there is some divine purpose to life also tells them that it cannot be petty or small; it must be a grand, beautiful purpose. Therefore if we were to live truly according to the design of life, fulfilling its real purpose, our own life would be grand and beautiful and radiant—grand with power, beautiful with peace, radiant with joy.

Nature all around us reveals that the life-process is rhythmic. Then why is our own life not rhythmic? And how can we make it rhythmic? Can we handle our own life in such a fashion that we are able, consciously and deliberately, to trace the design of power and peace and beauty? If we desire a house built for us, we take the assistance of the architect in determining the plan or the design of the house. In getting our clothes made, we seek the help of the tailor. Is there anything or anyone we can consult about the design of life? The one unanimous answer that ancient poets and prophets have given us is to seek and to establish some philosophy of life. Most people live without any basis of philosophy. They live aimlessly, and their very enjoyments and sufferings fail to bring them understanding. It is true philosophy that helps us to perceive the design of life.

One of the greatest of difficulties that stands in our way in perceiving the design of life is the mental habit whereby we lose ourselves in the innumerable details of existence. We become absorbed in our daily affairs and leave ourselves no time to look at the whole of life, with steady insight. Because of this, the very first lesson that philosophy offers us is to detach ourselves, at least for a time, from our daily rut.

"Distance lends enchantment to the view," the poet with his insight has said. So also philosophy teaches us to stand away from the hustle and bustle of life, on some high ridge, and look at life as a whole and not in parts. Our elations and depressions vanish when we survey the whole of life with the aid of noble, universal thoughts. True philosophy provides that ridge and altitude. We have to learn the technique of separating ourselves from the bustle and tumult of duties and recreations. To put it another way, we must find time nay, we must make time, to be in the high company in which all our ordinary humdrum doings fall into a back place, and we obtain a vision of magnificence and beauty. Our own life, in spite of its weaknesses, will look beautiful, will appear magnificent from a truly philosophical height.

How to do this? The very first step is the company of great books. In our time, any number of books are published, but how many among them are great books? One of the tests of a great book is its capacity to reveal to us the whole design of life. There are poems and novels and essays which reveal a bit of life's design, but there are great books which have become immortal and which reveal to us the full design of life. Take, for instance, such a gem as the Bhagavad-Gita, or Buddha's Dhammapada, or Lao Tzu's Tao Te King. They give us ideas which are like mirrors; just as our form and face are reflected in a mirror, so our life's design, its beauty and grandeur and holy purpose, are reflected in the ideas of these great books.

Take such a verse as the following from the Gita, describing the spiritual soul of man, of every one of us:

It is not a thing of which a man may say, "It hath been, it is about to be, or is to be hereafter"; for it is without birth and meeteth not death; it is ancient, constant, and eternal, and is not slain when this its mortal frame is destroyed. (II, 20)

What an inspiring vision it is! Our life looks full of grandeur, for we catch a glimpse of our immortality. The body will die, but we will not. The body came into existence when it was born; in our inner nature we are birthless and deathless, but never purposeless. We know that we are weak and frail and full of errors and limitations, but in the company of such a verse, applying its significance to our own lives, we feel like heroes, like gods, and our life becomes full of charm lent to it by the soul. The first thing we need in life is confidence in our own divinity, in our own inner strength, our own heart's resourcefulness. We get all that in a single verse of the Gita.

What about the daily sordidness of life? What about our weaknesses? What about the mistakes we make? What about our sins of omission and commission? All of us know that god and devil are both fighting in us, in our brain and blood. We do not need any philosopher to tell us that. As Zoroaster states in his famous sermon in the first Gatha, there are two spirits, Spenta Mainyu and Angra Mainyu, and they battle with each other, everywhere in Nature. They battle in us also; in fact they are the makers of the design of life of each one of us. The important and practical point is what we do with them. What shall we do with our ambitions, our passions, our angers, our greeds, our irritabilities? How shall we suppress them? On the other hand, how to maintain and sustain the peace we have felt sometimes, however rarely, the patience we have exercised on some occasions, the selflessness we have shown for our own kin and friends and which we want to show to all? In the Dhammapada the Buddha says:

The Self is the Lord of self; what higher Lord could there be? When a man subdues well his self, he will find a Lord very difficult to find. (Verse 160)

There is a play upon the word "Self." The Spiritual Self is the Lord of the lower Karmic or personal and passional self. Here we get a clue. Who is to help us? As the Buddha says, within us there is a Great Lord; sitting in our heart is the Soul, and by its aid we can control and purify and raise our own personal self. We do not need anyone outside of us; let us look within, seek in our own heart for the Master and Guide. Call him Christ or Krishna or by any other name; but we are It—the Divine, the Eternal, the Immortal. But that Real in us, the Soul, the Self, the Lord, is enmeshed in our desires and passions, in our hate and anger, in our greed and selfishness. Let us call the spark of divine fire in our heart to our aid and thus we shall be able to transfer the beauty and grandeur of life of which we have had only a fleeting glimpse, into our own hearth and home.

An important philosophical principle emerges. We are not able to see the design of life because we live in watertight compartments; one day we are in an irritable mood and forget our divinity, and so fail to control ourselves. Another day we are in a good and virtuous mood of contentment, and we forget that only a short while ago we were hissing like a poisonous serpent. We suffer from two main blemishes and we suffer from them unconsciously to ourselves. When we are selfish and forget our divinity, we are overpowered by doubt; when we are unselfish and forget that in us lives a devil, we are overcome by hypocrisy. These two, doubt and hypocrisy, are called the unpardonable sins of the higher or spiritual life. Doubt does not proceed from our doubting of others; it is rooted in doubt of our own divinity. Similarly, hyprocrisy starts within ourselves when we forget and become blind to our own defects and weaknesses. If we stop doubting our own divinity and eradicate hypocrisy about our own demoniac or satanic nature, we shall have reached the spiritual ridge from where our life not only looks grand and beautiful, but from which we have acquired the power and the faculty to transfer the beauty of our vision to our own home, to our own daily routine where grace and graciousness fill and envelop everything.

If doubt and hypocrisy are our enemies and blind us to the design of life, grace and graciousness are the friends who raise for us the curtain and show to us that design. These two are like soul and body—grace is a divine quality and is like the soul whose body is formed of gracious acts and gracious words. Religious people, not understanding the real nature of grace, pray to God. Christians in their churches, Hindus in their temples, ask for the grace of Christ or of Krishna and are often and often disappointed because no real response comes. Grace may be called "spiritual electricity" and it needs a form, a vehicle, to manifest itself. Therefore if we want to have divine grace permeate and surround us, we must speak words and perform deeds that are gracious. It is said that "words without thoughts never to heaven go"; it is equally true that grace does not flow from high heaven unless vessels and vehicles of holy words and noble deeds are prepared on earth.

How to cultivate graciousness and thus invite the divine flow of grace into our own lives? In the Tao Te King there is Lao Tzu's teaching about the "three precious truths." The first is gentleness; the second is economy; the third is humble retirement. Lao Tzu says that with gentleness we can be bold, but he complains that nowadays people give up gentleness and are all for being bold. Then, with economy people can become liberal, but they are not economical and still want to be liberal. Thirdly, with humility and retirement people can become vessels of high honour, but he complains that they will not take the hindmost place and seek only to be in the front rank. So gentleness, economy and humility are the virtues that bring to us the vision of Tao-Te, the Way of Virtue. The design of life is perceived and known when the grace of our own Spirit expresses itself as graciousness all around.

It is not just what we do or where we do it but how we do it that matters. How do we speak to others? When we speak, it is not only the words that matter but also the tone. Likewise it is the mode and the method of the performance of deeds that makes them gracious or otherwise. Words and acts are the channels through which the grace of our own Spirit, or the divinity within us, pours itself out and manifests as graciousness. It is the cultivation of this attitude in all we say and do that enables us to live true to the design of the Great Life of Spirit.

Within us is the source of divinity. It is futile to look for it outside. In our heart and mind are the seeds of grace; by effort we should make them sprout. All can do it. Whatever our station in life, whatever we may have to do, by paying attention to the how, to the tone of speech, the mode of action, we can attain the peace which is full of power, the wisdom which is full of love, the service which is full of sacrifice. Thus we shall be able to realize the vision seen from the mountain top and say: "Life is beautiful in spite of ugliness; life is strong in spite of weaknesses; life is one great rhythmic song in spite of the clatter and the din which surrounds us on every side."

Let us remember that there is a creative force in this universe, working to pull down the gigantic mountain of evil, a power that is able to make a way out of no way and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

—Martin Luther King, Jr.