CHAPTER XXIV
The
Advent and Progress of the Spiritual Age
Page-246
future. More is needed; a general spiritual awakening
and aspiration in mankind is indeed the large necessary motive-power, but the
effective power must be something greater. There must be a dynamic re-creating
of individual manhood in the spiritual type.
For the way
that humanity deals with an ideal is to be satisfied with it as an aspiration which is for the most part left only
as an aspiration, accepted only as a
partial influence. The ideal is not allowed to mould the whole life, but
only more or less to colour it; it is often used even as a cover and a plea for
things that are diametrically opposed to its real spirit. Institutions are
created which are supposed, but too lightly supposed to embody that spirit and the fact that the ideal is
held, the fact that men live under its institutions is treated as
sufficient. The holding of an ideal becomes almost an excuse for not living
according to the ideal; the existence of its institutions is sufficient to
abrogate the need of insisting on the spirit that made the institutions. But
spirituality is in its very nature a thing subjective and not mechanical; it is
nothing if it is not lived inwardly and if the outward life does not flow out
of this inward living. Symbols, types, conventions, ideas are not sufficient. A
spiritual symbol is only a meaningless ticket, unless the thing symbolised is
realised in the spirit. A spiritual convention may lose or expel its spirit and
become a falsehood. A spiritual type may be a temporary mould into which
spiritual living may flow, but it is also a limitation and may become a prison
in which it fossilises and perishes. A spiritual idea is a power, but only when
it is both inwardly and outwardly creative. Here we have to enlarge and to
deepen the pragmatic principle that truth is what we create, and in this sense
first, that it is what we create within us, in other words, what we become.
Undoubtedly, spiritual truth exists eternally beyond, independent of us in the
heavens of the Spirit; but it is of no avail for humanity here, it does not
become truth of earth, truth of life until it is lived. The divine perfection
is always there above us; but for man to become divine in consciousness and act
and to live inwardly and outwardly the divine life is what is meant by
spirituality; all lesser meanings given to the word are inadequate fumblings or
impostures.
Page-247
This, as the subjective religions recognise, can only be
brought about by an individual change in each human life. The collective soul
is there only as a great half-subconscient source of the individual existence;
if it is to take on a definite psychological form or a new kind of collective
life, that can only come by the shaping growth of its individuals. As will be
the spirit and life of the individuals constituting it, so will be the realised
spirit of the collectivity and the true power of its life. A society that lives
not by its men but by its institutions is not a collective soul, but a machine;
its life becomes a mechanical product and ceases to be a living growth.
Therefore the coming of a spiritual age must be preceded by the appearance of
an in- creasing number of individuals who are no longer satisfied with the
normal intellectual, vital and physical existence of man, but perceive that a
greater evolution is the real goal of humanity and attempt to effect it in
themselves, to lead others to it and to make it the recognised goal of the
race. In proportion as they succeed and to the degree to which they carry this
evolution, the yet unrealised potentiality which they represent will become an
actual possibility of the future.
A great
access of spirituality in the past has ordinarily had for its result the coming
of a new religion of a special type and its endeavour to impose itself upon
mankind as a new universal order. This, however, was always not only a
premature but a wrong crystallisation which prevented rather than helped any
deep and serious achievement. The aim of a spiritual age of mankind must indeed
be one with the essential aim of subjective religions, a new birth, a new
consciousness, an upward evolution of the human being, a descent of the Spirit
into our members, a spiritual reorganisation of our life; but if it limits
itself by the old familiar apparatus and the imperfect means of a religious
movement, it is likely to register another failure. A religious movement brings
usually a wave of spiritual excitement and aspiration that communicates itself
to a large number of individuals and there is as a result a temporary uplifting
and an effective formation, partly spiritual, partly ethical, partly dogmatic
in its nature. But the wave, after a generation or two or at most a few
generations, begins to subside; the formation remains. If there has
Page-248
been a very powerful movement with a great spiritual
personality if as its source, it may leave behind a central influence and an
inner discipline which may well be the starting-point of fresh waves; but these
will be constantly less powerful and enduring in proportion as the movement
gets farther and farther away from its source. For meanwhile in order to bind
together the faithful and at the same time to mark them off from the
unregenerated outer world, there will have grown up a religious order, a
Church, a hierarchy, a fixed and unprogressive type of ethical living, a set of
crystallised dogmas, ostentations, ceremonials, sanctified superstitions, an
elaborate machinery for the salvation of man- kind. As a result spirituality is
increasingly subordinated to intellectual belief, to outward forms of conduct
and to external ritual, the higher to the lower motives, the one thing
essential to aids and instruments and accidents. The first spontaneous and
potent attempt to convert the whole life into spiritual living yields up its
place to a set system of belief and ethics touched by spiritual emotion; but
finally even that saving element is dominated by the outward machinery, the
sheltering structure becomes a tomb. The Church takes the place of the Spirit
and a formal subscription to its creed, rituals and order is the thing
universally demanded; spiritual living is only practised by the few within the
limits prescribed by their fixed creed and order. The majority neglect even
that narrow effort and are contented to replace by a careful or negligent piety
the call to a deeper life. In the end it is found that the spirit in the
religion has become a thin stream choked by sands; at the most brief occasional floodings of its dry bed of conventions still prevent it from becoming a memory
in the dead chapters of Time.
The ambition of a particular
religious belief and form to universalise and impose itself is contrary to the
variety of human nature and to at least one essential character of the Spirit.
For the nature of the Spirit is a spacious inner freedom and a large unity into
which each man must be allowed to grow according to his own nature. Again - and this is yet another source of inevitable
failure - the usual tendency of these credal religions
is to turn towards an after-world and to make the
regeneration of the earthly life a secondary motive; this tendency grows in
Page-249
proportion as the original hope of a present universal
regeneration of mankind becomes more and more feeble. Therefore, while many new
spiritual waves with their strong special motives and disciplines must
necessarily be the forerunners of a spiritual age, yet their claims must be
subordinated in the general mind of the race and of its spiritual leaders to
the recognition that all motives and disciplines are valid and yet none
entirely valid since they are means and not the one thing to be done. The one
thing essential must take precedence, the conversion of the whole life of the
human being to the lead of the Spirit. The ascent of man into heaven is not the
key, but rather his ascent here into the spirit and the descent also of the
Spirit into his normal humanity and the transformation of this earthly nature.
For that and not some post mortem salvation is the real new birth for which
humanity waits as the crowning movement of its long obscure and painful course.
Therefore
the individuals who will most help the future of humanity in the new age will
be those who will recognise a spiritual evolution as the destiny and therefore
the great need of the human being. Even as the animal man has been largely
converted into a mentalised and at the top a highly mentalised humanity, so too
now or in the future an evolution or conversion -
it does not greatly matter which figure we use or what theory we adopt to
support it - of the present type of humanity into a spiritualised humanity is
the need of the race and surely the intention of Nature; that evolution or
conversion will be their ideal and endeavour. They will be comparatively
indifferent to particular belief and form and leave men to resort to the
beliefs and forms to which they are naturally drawn. They will only hold as
essential the faith in this spiritual conversion, the attempt to live it out
and whatever knowledge - the form of
opinion into which it is thrown does not so much matter - can be converted into
this living. They will especially not make the mistake of thinking that this
change can be effected boy machinery and outward institutions; they will know
and never forget that it has to be lived out by each man inwardly or it can
never be made a reality for the kind. They will adopt in its heart of meaning
the inward view of the East which bids man seek the secret of his destiny and
sal-
Page-250
vation within; but
also they will accept, though with a different turn given to it, the
importance which the West rightly attaches to life and to the making the best
we know and can attain the general rule of all life. They will not make society
a shadowy background to a few luminous spiritual figures or a rigidly fenced ~
and
earth-bound
root for the growth of a comparatively rare and sterile flower of
ascetic spirituality. They will not accept the theory that the many must
necessarily remain for ever on the lower ranges of life and only a few climb
into the free air and the light, but will start from the standpoint of the
great spirits who have striven to regenerate the life of the earth and held
that faith in spite of all previous failures. Failures must be originally numerous
in everything great and difficult, but the time comes when the experience of
past failures can be profitably used and the gate that so long resisted opens.
In this as in all great human aspirations and endeavours, an a priori declaration of impossibility is
a sign of ignorance and weakness, and the motto of the aspirant's endeavour
must be the solvitur ambulando1
of the
discoverer. For by the doing the difficulty will be solved. A true beginning
has to be made; the rest is a work for Time in its sudden achievements or its
long patient labour.
The thing to
be done is as large as human life, and there- fore the individuals who lead the
way will take all human life for their province. These pioneers will consider
nothing as alien to them, nothing as outside their scope. For every part of
human life has to be taken up by the spiritual, - not only the intellectual,
the aesthetic, the ethical, but the dynamic, the vital, the physical; therefore
for none of these things or the activities that spring from them will they have
contempt or aversion, however they may
insist on a change of the spirit and a transmutation of the form. In each power of our nature they will seek for its own
proper means of conversion; knowing that the Divine is conceal- ed in all, they
will hold that all can be made the Spirit's means of self finding and all can
be converted into its instruments of divine living. And they will see that the
great necessity is the conversion of the normal into the spiritual mind and the
opening of that
1
The
answer of Stephenson to those who argued by strict scientific logic that his
engine on rails could not and should not move, "Your difficulty is solved
by its moving."
Page-251
mind again into its own higher reaches and more and more
integral movement. For before the decisive change can be made, the stumbling
intellectual reason has to be converted into the precise and luminous
intuitive, until that again can rise into higher ranges to overmind and
supermind or gnosis. The uncertain and stumbling mental will has to rise
towards the sure intuitive and into a higher divine and gnostic will, the
psychic sweetness, fire and light of the soul behind the heart, hrdaye guhāyām, has to alchemise our
crude emotions and the hard egoisms and clamant desires of our vital nature.
All our other members have to pass through a similar conversion under the
compelling force and light from above. The leaders of the spiritual march will
start from and use the knowledge and the means that past effort has developed in
this direction, but they will not take them as they are without any deep
necessary change or limit themselves by what is now known or cleave only to
fixed and stereotyped systems or given groupings of results, but will follow
the method of the Spirit in Nature. A constant rediscovery and new formulation
and larger synthesis in the mind, a mighty remoulding in its deeper parts
because of a greater enlarging Truth not discovered or not well fixed before,
is that Spirit's way with our past achievement when he moves to the greatness
of the future.
This
endeavour will be a supreme and difficult labour even for the individual, but
much more for the race. It may well be that, once started, it may not advance
rapidly even to its first decisive stage; it may be that it will take long
centuries of effort to come into some kind of permanent birth. But that is not
altogether inevitable, for the principle of such changes in Nature seems to be
a long obscure preparation followed by a swift gathering up and precipitation
of the elements into the new birth, a rapid conversion, a transformation that
in its luminous moment figures like a miracle. Even when the first decisive
change is reached, it is certain that all humanity will not be able to rise to
that level. There cannot fail to be a division into those who are able to live
on the spiritual level and those who are only able to live in the light that
descends from it into the mental level. And below these too there might still
be a great mass influenced from above but not yet ready for the light. But even
that would be a transfor-
Page-252
mation and a beginning far beyond anything yet attained.
This hierarchy would not mean as in our present vital living an egoistic
domination of the undeveloped by the more developed, but a guidance of the
younger by the elder brothers of the race and a constant working to lift them
up to greater spiritual level and wider horizons.. And for the leaders too this
ascent to the first spiritual levels would not be the end of the divine march,
a culmination that left nothing more to be achieved on earth. For there would
be still yet higher levels within the supramental realm, as the old Vedic poets
knew when they spoke of the spiritual life as a constant ascent, -
"State is born upon state; covering after covering be- comes conscious of
knowledge; in the lap of the Mother the soul sees."
This at
least is the highest hope, the possible destiny that opens out before the human
view, and it is a possibility which the progress of the human mind seems on the
way to redevelop. If the light that is being born increases, if the number of
individuals who seek to realise the possibility in themselves and in the world
Page-253
grows large and they get nearer the right way, then the
Spirit who is here in man, now a concealed divinity, a developing light and
power, will descend more fully as the Avatar of a yet unseen and unguessed
Godhead from above into the soul of mankind and into the great individualities
in whom the light and power are the strongest. There will then be fulfilled the
change that will prepare the transition of human life from its present limits
into those larger and purer horizons; the earthly evolution will have taken its
great impetus upward and accomplished the revealing step in a divine
progression of which the birth of thinking and aspiring man from the animal
nature was only an obscure preparation and a far-off promise.
THE END
Page-254
Home