Chapter II, Hinduism, The World—Welcome and Farewell, Summary and Analysis

The Hindu conception includes innumerable galaxies centering on worlds of finer or coarser natures from which souls journey on the ultimate pathway to God. Utopia on earth is a fiction as the world is simply a bridge to the eternal. Nevertheless, the Hindu denies the independence of the natural world, suggesting that if the divine base of everything were removed, the earth would instantly collapse into nothingness. There are, however, different perceptions of the world as in the case of the average person who perceives only through human senses, and that of the yogi who has risen to a higher level of consciousness. The natural world is not illusion, the Hindu says, but there is something tricky about it, like how a rope lying in...