"Namastè is a salutation which essentially means that I greet and acknowledge God-Spirit that resides within you.

"Ram Dass describes it this way [Namastè means] "I honor place in you in which entire universe dwells. I honor place in you which is of love, of truth, of light, and of peace. When you are in that place in you, and I am in that place in me, we are one."

"This greeting is usually done with a gesture of hands held close to heart in prayer position. It is a a wonderful way of expressing love and respect for our fellows."

I have been asked to tell you what seem to me to be some of important things—permanently human—which men are likely to forget during hours of a severe political crisis.

Permanent things, of course, do not have to be fought for—they are permanent. We are not their creators and defenders. Rather—it is our privilege (our privilege as individuals: our privilege as nations) to experience them. And it is our private loss if we neglect them. We may fight for our right to experience these values. But fight must not be conducted on a public battlefield. This fight must be conducted in individual mind. Public conquerors are frequently losers in this secret struggle.

Permanent things, furthermore, are not possessed exclusively by democracies; not exclusively even by Western world.

My theme, therefore, forbids me to be partial to war-cries of day. I respect my theme, and I shall try to do it justice. I am not competent to speak of every permanent human value. I shall confine myself, therefore, to those which have been my special disciplinarians: those associated with Way of Knowledge.

Which of these are likely to be forgotten during hours of a severe political crisis? All of them, I should say. I think that everything which does not serve most immediate economic and political ends is likely to be forgotten.

I think, in first place, that critical objectivity of student of society is likely to be forgotten—either forgotten or suppressed. For example: The president of Columbia University has declared that present conflict is a war ‘between beasts and human beings, between brutal force and kindly helpfulness,’ Yet Columbia professors laboriously taught, during twenties and thirties something about duties of objective intelligence in face of sensational propaganda: and no educated gentleman can possibly believe that British Empire or French Empire or American Empire was unselfishly founded in ‘kindly helpfulness.’ without gunpowder or without perfectly obscene brutality.

It is not surprising, of course, that there should be a strain of opportunism in those public gentlemen who are in a position to tell multitude what to think; but that our universities—those institutions which have plumed themselves in their dignified objectivity—should begin now to fling about gutter-slogans of our newspaper cartoons, seems to be a calamity of first order.

Perhaps our students must prepare themselves to remember (without any support for our institutions of higher learning) that there are two sides to every argument, that every government since governments began, has claimed to represent special blessings of heavenly realm, that every man (even an enemy) is human, and that no empire (not even a merchant empire) is founded on ‘kindly helpfulness.’

When there was no crisis on horizon, we were told that objectivity was a good. Now that something seems to threaten our markets—or to threaten perhaps even more than that—we are warned (and this by still another of our university presidents) that real fifth-columnist in this country is critical intellectual. What kind of leaders are these men, anyhow?—snorting through one nostril about book-burnings in Germany, wheezing through other at critical intelligences in our own Republic?