Quest for Truth: Followed by Time, Space and Man

This book presents an article published in 1963 and since translated into Spanish and French but being published in book form in English for the first time.

The book records the vision of a truth seeker unclouded by theological dogmatism or sectarian bigotry. It is a quintessential exposition of the direct awareness of reality unmediated by the inherently defective instruments we use in our efforts to gain knowledge. All our exertion to obtain authentic knowledge about Reality are foredoomed to be frustrated by the inbuilt constraints of our psychological organism. Hence we only grope in the twilight borderland between the real and the unreal mistaking the phantasma of appearance for the substance of reality. Thus the central paradox in our search for truth is that in order to know Reality as it is the knower should disappear, i.e. the ego-mind should spontaneously dissolve itself in its substratum- the thought free consciousness with which the ultimate Reality is homogeneous. With the dissolution of the ego-mind the subject-object dichotomy eliminates itself and Truth shines in its original effulgence.

Banamali Lahiry, retired teacher of Chemistry of Banaras Hindu University, belongs to a family of sages whose graphic description he has given in the Epilogue from his personal experience. He expounds here the quintessence of the age-old Indian wisdom in a simple and clear way without technical terms, easily understandable to the modern reader.