The purpose of this book is to bring together in a convenient and coherent form some of the many HERMES articles written by Prof. Raghavan Iyer on the subjects of meditation and self-study. In truth, meditation and self-study represent two sides of one human activity. The one is the centrifugal movement of consciousness expanding to Universals beyond the limits of Self; the other is the centripetal movement focusing with laser-like precision upon the particulars within the limits of Self. They represent roughly the principles of Buddhi and Manas acting within the incarnated Manasic principle; for the spiritual aspirant they should - in time - become as natural as breathing in and breathing out. These two aspects of the inbreathing and outbreathing within the neophyte's consciousness are dealt with in the three treatises of The Voice of the Silence and Prof. Iyer's seminal article, Meditation and Self-Study: "We might begin to wonder whether perhaps there is a golden chord that connects the golden sphere of a man of meditation and the complex intermediary realms in which he must, by pain and anguish and awakening, by knitting together minute golden moments rescued from a great deal of froth and self-deception, come to know himself. If there were not a fundamental connection between meditation and self-study, something of the uniquely precious wisdom in this great text would be lost to us. When we begin to realize this in our lives, we come to appreciate that, while we may not be in a position to make judgments about teachers and schools in a vast and largely unrecorded history or in our own time, nonetheless we do know that there is something profoundly important in stressing both meditation and self-study, in bringing the two together. We must reconcile what looked like a pair of opposites and get beyond despair to something else which allows an existential and dynamic balance between meditation and self-study.
About the Author: Raghavan Narasimhan Iyer was born in Madras, India on March 10, 1930, the son of Narasimhan Iyer and Lakshmi Iyer. He was educated at the Universities of Bombay and Oxford. At Bombay he received first class honors in Economics and won a variety of commendations and prizes, including the Chancellor's Medal. At the age of 18 he became the youngest lecturer in the University of Bombay, at Elphinstone College. After being awarded his master's degree in Advanced Economics in Bombay, he was sent as the sole Rhodes Scholar for India for 1950 to Magdalen College, Oxford. He secured First Class Honors in Philosophy, Politics and Economics and later received the D. Phil. Degree in moral and political philosophy. While a student at Oxford, he was elected President of the Oxford Union, the Voltaire Society, the Oxford Majlis, the Oxford University Peace Association, the Oxford Social Studies Association and several other societies. In 1956 he returned to Oxford, where he taught Moral and Political Philosophy for eight years. He was Fellow and Lecturer in Politics at St. Anthony's College, Oxford, and Visiting Professor at the Universities of Oslo, Ghana and Chicago. He also lectured at the College of Europe in Belgium, the Erasmus Seminar in Holland, and at Harvard, Bowdoin, Berkeley, U.C.L.A., Rand Corporation and the California Institute of Technology. He was actively associated with the world federalist movement in Europe, participated in many television and radio programmes of the B.B.C. and lectured at various international conferences in Sweden, Holland, Germany, Switzerland, Greece, Italy, Yugoslavia and Japan. He settled permanently in Santa Barbara in 1965, where he was a Professor of Political Science at the University of California at Santa Barbara until his retirement in 1986. He became a Consultant to the Fund for the Republic, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Academy of World Studies and the Management Development Institute of the State of California. From 1971 to 1982 he was a member of the Club of Rome, and from 1978 to 1988 he was a member of the Reform Club in London. In the Spring of 1985 he was Alton Brooks Visiting Professor of Religion at the University of Southern California. He was also a member of the American Society for Legal and Political Philosophy,