The Economy of Permanence: A Quest for a Social Order Based on Non-violence (स्थायी अर्थतन्त्र)

Economy of Permanence
INTRODUCTORY
What is permanent? What is transient?
Apart from God there is nothing that can be said to be permanent. He is the
only being with neither beginning nor end. Human intellect being limited, it is
not possible for it to comprehend fully what is everlasting in the absolute
sense. Such a conception refers to conditions beyond Time and Space. The laws
of God, Truth and Love, are absolutes being unchangeable and permanent in
the strictest sense of the term.
Within Time and Space there is no such thing as absolute permanency.
Everything begins somewhere and ceases to exist sometime. The interval that
separates the two moments varies. In some cases it is short, and in others it is
long. A flower blooms in the morning, by the evening it is faded and gone. Its
life is but a few hours. Tortoises are reputed to live for centuries, while a unit
of millions of years is required to compute the age of our universe. So in
comparison with the flower, the tortoise is said to be long-lived while the world
is Permanent. It is all a matter of relative terms.
Nature (when it is not a term convertible with God) is limited by Time and
Space. It came into existence once in the remote past and will cease to be
sometime in the future. Human life rarely reaches even a hundred years while
the unit to reckon the life of Nature will run into astronomical figures. Hence
the life of man is said to be Transient in comparison with that of Nature which
is Permanent. It is in this relative sense that we speak of 'An Economy of
Permanence'.
www.mkgandhi.org
Page 7