CHAPTER
XXIV
The Evolution of the Spiritual Man
Even as men
come to Me, so I accept them. It is my path that men
follow from all sides....
Whatever form the worshipper chooses to
worship with faith, I set in him firm
faith in it, and with that faith
he puts his yearning into his adoration and
gets his desire
dispensed by Me. But limited is that fruit. Those whose
sacrifice
is to the gods, to elemental spirits, reach the gods, reach the
elemental spirits, but those whose sacrifice is to Me, to Me they
come.
Gita.1
In these there
is not the Wonder and the Might; the truths occult
exist not for the mind of
the ignorant.
Rig Veda.2
As a seer
working out the occult truths and their discoveries of
knowledge, he brought
into being the seven Craftsmen of heaven
and in the light of day they spoke and
wrought the things of their
wisdom.
Rig Veda.3
Seer-wisdoms,
secret words that speak their meaning to the seer.
Rig Veda.4
None knows the
birth of these; they know each other's way of be-
getting: but the Wise perceives
these hidden mysteries, even that
which the great Goddess, the many-hued
Mother, bears as her
teat of knowledge.
Rig Veda.5
Made certain of
the meaning of the highest spiritual knowledge,
purified in their being.
Mundaka Upanishad.6
He strives by
these means and has the knowledge: in him this spirit
enters into its supreme
status.... Satisfied in knowledge, having
built up their spiritual being, the Wise,
in union with the spiritual
self, reach the Omnipresent everywhere and enter
into the All.
Mundaka Upanishad.7
In the earliest stages of evolutionary Nature we
are met by the dumb secrecy of her inconscience;
there is no revelation of any significance or purpose in her works, no hint
1
IV. 11; VII.
21-23; IX. 25. 2 VII. 61. 5. 3 IV. 16. 3. 4 IV. 3.
16. 5
VII. 56. 2, 4. 6 III.
2. 6. 7 III. 2.
4, 5.
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of any other principles of being than that first
formulation which is her immediate preoccupation and seems to be for ever her
only business: for in her primal works Matter alone appears, the sole dumb and
stark cosmic reality. A Witness of creation, if there had been one conscious
but uninstructed, would only have seen appearing out of a vast abyss of an
apparent non-existence an Energy busy with the creation of Matter, a material
world and material objects, organising the infinity
of the Inconscient into the scheme of a boundless
universe or a system of countless universes that stretched around him into
Space without any certain end or limit, a tireless creation of nebulae and
star-clusters and suns and planets, existing only for itself, without a sense
in it, empty of cause or purpose. It might have seemed to him a stupendous
machinery without a use, a mighty meaningless movement, an aeonic
spectacle without a witness, a cosmic edifice without an inhabitant; for he
would have seen no sign of an indwelling Spirit, no being for whose delight it
was made. A creation of this kind could only be the outcome of an inconscient Energy or an illusion-cinema, a shadow-play or
puppet-play of forms reflected on a superconscient
indifferent Absolute. He would have seen no evidence of a soul and no hint of
Mind or Life in this immeasurable and interminable display of Matter. It would
not have seemed to him possible or imaginable that there could at all be in
this desert universe for ever inanimate and insensible an outbreak of teeming
life, a first vibration of something occult and incalculable, alive and
conscious, a secret spiritual entity feeling its way towards the surface.
But
after some aeons, looking out once more on that vain
panorama, he might have detected in one small corner at least of the universe
this phenomenon, a corner where Matter had been prepared, its operations
sufficiently fixed, organised, made stable, adapted
as a scene of a new development,—the phenomenon of a living Matter, a Life in
things that had emerged and become visible: but still the Witness would have
understood nothing, for evolutionary Nature still veils her secret. He would
have seen a Nature concerned only with establishing this outburst of Life, this
new creation, but Life living for itself with no significance in it,—a wanton
and abundant creatrix busy
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scattering the seed of her new power and
establishing a multitude of its forms in a beautiful and luxurious profusion
or, later, multiplying endlessly genus and species for the pure pleasure of
creation: a small touch of lively colour and movement
would have been flung into the immense cosmic desert and nothing more. The
Witness could not have imagined that a thinking mind would appear in this
minute island of life, that a consciousness could awake in the Inconscient, a new and greater subtler vibration come to
the surface and betray more clearly the existence of the submerged Spirit. It
would have seemed to him at first that Life had somehow become aware of itself
and that was all; for this scanty new-born mind seemed to be only a servant of
life, a contrivance to help life to live, a machinery for its maintenance, for
attack and defence, for certain needs and vital
satisfactions, for the liberation of life-instinct and life-impulse. It could
not have seemed possible to him that in this little life, so inconspicuous amid
the immensities, in one sole species out of this petty multitude, a mental
being would emerge, a Mind serving Life still but also making Life and Matter
its servants, using them for the fulfilment of its
own ideas, will, wishes,—a mental being who would create all manner of
utensils, tools, instruments out of Matter for all kinds of utilities, erect
out of it cities, houses, temples, theatres, laboratories, factories, chisel
from it statues and carve cave-cathedrals, invent architecture, sculpture,
painting, poetry and a hundred crafts and arts, discover the mathematics and
physics of the universe and the hidden secret of its structure, live for the
sake of Mind and its interests, for thought and knowledge, develop into the
thinker, the philosopher and scientist and, as a supreme defiance to the reign
of Matter, awake in himself to the hidden Godhead, become the hunter after the
invisible, the mystic and the spiritual seeker.
But
if after several ages or cycles the Witness had looked again and seen this
miracle in full process, even then perhaps, obscured by his original experience
of the sole reality of Matter in the universe, he would still not have
understood; it would still seem impossible to him that the hidden Spirit could
wholly emerge, complete in its consciousness, and dwell upon the earth as the
self-knower and world-knower, Nature's ruler and
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possessor. “Impossible!” he might say, “all that
has happened is nothing much, a little bubbling of sensitive grey stuff of
brain, a queer freak in a bit of inanimate Matter moving about on a small dot
in the Universe.” On the contrary, a new Witness intervening at the end of the
story, informed of the past developments but unobsessed
by the deception of the beginning, might cry out, “Ah, then, this was the
intended miracle, the last of many,—the Spirit that was submerged in the Inconscience has broken out from it and now inhabits,
unveiled, the form of things which, veiled, it had created as its
dwelling-place and the scene of its emergence.” But in fact a more conscious
Witness might have discovered the clue at an early period of the unfolding,
even in each step of its process; for at each stage Nature's mute secrecy,
though still there, diminishes; a hint is given of the next step, a more
overtly significant preparation is visible. Already, in what seems to be inconscient in Life, the signs of sensation coming towards
the surface are visible; in moving and breathing Life the emergence of
sensitive Mind is apparent and the preparation of thinking Mind is not entirely
hidden, while in thinking Mind, when it develops, there appear at an early
stage the rudimentary strivings and afterwards the more developed seekings of a spiritual consciousness. As plant-life
contains in itself the obscure possibility of the conscious animal, as the
animal-mind is astir with the movements of feeling and perception and the
rudiments of conception that are the first ground for man the thinker, so man
the mental being is sublimated by the endeavour of
the evolutionary Energy to develop out of him the spiritual man, the fully
conscious being, man exceeding his first material self and discoverer of his
true self and highest nature.
But if this is to be
accepted as the intention in Nature, there are two questions that put
themselves at once and call for a
definitive answer,—first, the exact nature of
the transition from mental to spiritual being and, when that is given, the
process and method of the evolution of the spiritual out of the mental man. It
would at first sight seem evident that as each gradation emerges not only out
of its precedent grade but in it, as Life emerges in Matter and is largely
limited and deter-
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mined in its self-expression by its material
conditions, as Mind emerges in Life-in-Matter and is similarly limited and
determined in its self-expression by life-conditions and material conditions,
so Spirit too must emerge in a Mind embodied in Life-in-Matter and must be
largely limited and determined by the mental conditions in which it has its
roots as well as the life-conditions, the material conditions of its existence
here. It might even be maintained that, if there has been any evolution of the
spiritual in us, it is only as a part of the mental evolution, a special
operation of man's mentality; the spiritual element is not a distinct or
separate entity and cannot have an independent emergence or a supramental future. The mental being can develop a spiritual
interest or preoccupation and may evolve perhaps in consequence a spiritual as
well as an intellectual mentality, a fine soul-flower of his mental life. The
spiritual may become a predominant trend in some men just as in others there is
a predominant artistic or pragmatic trend; but there can be no such thing as a
spiritual being taking up and transforming the mental into the spiritual
nature. There is no evolution of the spiritual man; there is only an evolution
of a new and possibly a finer and rarer element in a mental being. This then is
what has to be brought out,—the clear distinction between the spiritual and the
mental, the nature of this evolution and the factors which make it possible and
inevitable that there should be this emergence of the Spirit in its true
distinct character, not remaining, as it now for the most part is in its
process or seems to be in its way of appearance, a subordinate or a dominating
feature of our mentality, but defining itself as a new power which will finally
overtop the mental part and replace it as the leader of the life and nature.
It is quite true that to
a surface view Life seems only an operation of Matter, Mind an activity of
Life, and it might seem to follow that what we call the soul or spirit is only
a power of mentality, soul a fine form of Mind, spirituality a high activity of
the embodied mental being. But this is a superficial view of things due to the
thought's concentrating on the appearance and process and not looking at what
lies behind the process. One might as well on the same lines have
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concluded that electricity is only a product or
operation of water and cloud matter, because it is in such a field that
lightning emerges; but a deeper inquiry has shown that both cloud and water have,
on the contrary, the energy of electricity as their foundation, their
constituent power or energy-substance: that which seems to be a result is,—in
its reality, though not in its form,—the origin; the effect is in the essence
pre-existent to the apparent cause, the principle of the emergent activity
precedent to its present field of action. So it is throughout evolutionary
Nature; Matter could not have become animate if the principle of Life had not
been there constituting Matter and emerging as a phenomenon of Life-in-Matter;
Life-in-Matter could not have begun to feel, perceive, think, reason, if the
principle of Mind had not been there behind life and substance, constituting it
as its field of operation and emergent in the phenomenon of a thinking life and
body: so too spirituality emerging in Mind is the sign of a power which itself
has founded and constituted life, mind and body and is now emerging as a
spiritual being in a living and thinking body. How far this emergence will go,
whether it will become dominant and transform its instrument, is a subsequent
question; but what is necessary first to posit is the existence of Spirit as
something else than Mind and greater than Mind, spirituality as something other
than mentality and the spiritual being therefore as something distinct from the
mental being: Spirit is a final evolutionary emergence because it is the
original involutionary element and factor. Evolution
is an inverse action of the involution: what is an ultimate and last derivation
in the involution is the first to appear in the evolution; what was original
and primal in the involution is in the evolution the last and supreme
emergence.
It is true again that it
is difficult for man's mind to distinguish entirely the soul or self or any
spiritual element in him from the mental and vital formation in which it makes
its appearance; but that is only so long as the emergence is not complete. In
the animal mind is not quite distinct from its own life-matrix and life-matter;
its movements are so involved in the life-movements that it cannot detach
itself from them, cannot
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stand separate and observe them; but in man mind
has become separate, he can become aware of his mental operations as distinct
from his life-operations, his thought and will can disengage themselves from
his sensations and impulses, desires and emotional reactions, can become
detached from them, observe and control them, sanction or cancel their
functioning: he does not as yet know the secrets of his being well enough to be
aware of himself decisively and with certitude as a mental being in a life and
body, but he has that impression and can take inwardly that position. So too at
first soul in man does not appear as something quite distinct from mind and
from mentalised life; its movements are involved in
the mind-movements, its operations seem to be mental and emotional activities;
the mental human being is not aware of a soul in him standing back from the
mind and life and body, detaching itself, seeing and controlling and moulding their action and formation: but, as the inner
evolution proceeds, this is precisely what can, must and does happen,—it is the
long-delayed but inevitable next step in our evolutionary destiny. There can be
a decisive emergence in which the being separates itself from thought and sees
itself in an inner silence as the spirit in mind, or separates itself from the
life-movements, desires, sensations, kinetic impulses and is aware of itself as
the spirit supporting life, or separates itself from the body-sense and knows
itself as a spirit ensouling Matter: this is the
discovery of ourselves as the Purusha, a mental being
or a life-soul or a subtle self supporting the body. This is taken by many as a
sufficient discovery of the true self and in a certain sense they are right;
for it is the Self or Spirit that so represents itself in regard to the
activities of Nature, and this revelation of its presence is enough to
disengage the spiritual element: but self-discovery can go farther, it can even
put aside all relation to form or action of Nature. For it is seen that these
selves are representations of a divine Entity to which mind, life and body are
only forms and instruments: we are then the Soul looking at Nature, knowing all
her dynamisms in us, not by mental perception and observation, but by an
intrinsic consciousness and its direct sense of things and its intimate exact
vision, able therefore by its emergence
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to put a close control on our nature and change it.
When there is a complete silence in the being, either a stillness of the whole
being or a stillness behind unaffected by surface movements, then we can become
aware of a Self, a spiritual substance of our being, an existence exceeding
even the soul-individuality, spreading itself into universality, surpassing all
dependence on any natural form or action, extending itself upward into a
transcendence of which the limits are not visible. It is these liberations of
the spiritual part in us which are the decisive steps of the spiritual
evolution in Nature.
It is only through these
decisive movements that the true character of the evolution becomes evident;
for till then there are only preparatory movements, a pressure of the psychic
Entity on the mind, life and body to develop a true soul-action, a pressure of
the Spirit or Self for liberation from the ego, from the surface ignorance, a
turning of the mind and life towards some occult Reality,—preliminary
experiences, partial formulations of a spiritualised
mind, a spiritualised life, but no complete change,
no probability of an entire unveiling of the soul or self or a radical
transformation of the nature. When there is the
decisive emergence, one sign of it is the status or action in us of an
inherent, intrinsic, self-existent consciousness which knows itself by the mere
fact of being, knows all that is in itself in the same way, by identity with
it, begins even to see all that to our mind seems external in the same manner,
by a movement of identity or by an intrinsic direct consciousness which
envelops, penetrates, enters into its object, discovers itself in the object,
is aware in it of something that is not mind or life or body. There is, then,
evidently a spiritual consciousness which is other than the mental, and it
testifies to the existence of a spiritual being in us which is other than our
surface mental personality. But at first this consciousness may confine itself
to a status of being separate from the action of our ignorant surface nature,
observing it, limiting itself to knowledge, to a seeing of things with a
spiritual sense and vision of existence. For action it may still depend upon
the mental, vital, bodily instruments, or it may allow them to act according to
their own nature and itself remain satisfied with self-experience
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and self-knowledge, with an inner liberation, an
eventual freedom: but it may also and usually does exercise a certain
authority, governance, influence on thought, life-movement, physical action, a
purifying uplifting control compelling them to move in a higher and purer truth
of themselves, to obey or be an instrumentation of an influx of some diviner
Power or a luminous direction which is not mental but spiritual and can be recognised as having a certain divine character,—the
inspiration of a greater Self or the command of the Ruler of all being, the Ishwara. Or the nature may obey the psychic entity's
intimations, move in an inner light, follow an inner guidance. This is already
a considerable evolution and amounts to a beginning at least of a psychic and
spiritual transformation. But it is possible to go farther; for the spiritual
being, once inwardly liberated, can develop in mind the higher states of being
that are its own natural atmosphere and bring down a supramental
energy and action which are proper to the Truth-Consciousness; the ordinary
mental instrumentation, life-instrumentation, physical instrumentation even,
could then be entirely transformed and become parts no longer of an ignorance
however much illumined, but of a supramental creation
which would be the true action of a spiritual Truth-Consciousness and
Knowledge.
At first this truth of
the spirit and of spirituality is not self-evident to the mind; man becomes
mentally aware of his soul as something other than his body, superior to his
normal mind and life, but he has no clear sense of it, only a feeling of some
of its effects on his nature. As these effects take a mental form or a
life-form, the difference is not firmly and trenchantly drawn, the
soul-perception does not acquire a distinct and assured independence. Very
commonly indeed, a complex of half-effects of the psychic pressure on the
mental and vital parts, a formation mixed with mental aspiration and vital
desires, is mistaken for the soul, just as the separative
ego is taken for the self, although the self in its true being is universal as
well as individual in its essence,—or just as a mixture of mental aspiration
and vital enthusiasm and ardour uplifted by some kind
of strong or high belief or self-dedication or altruistic eagerness is mistaken
for spirituality. But this vagueness and these confusions are
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inevitable as a temporary stage of the evolution
which, because ignorance is its starting-point and the whole stamp of our first
nature, must necessarily begin with an imperfect intuitive perception and an
instinctive urge or seeking without any acquired experience or clear knowledge.
Even the formations which are the first effects of the perception or urge or
the first indices of a spiritual evolution, must inevitably be of this
incomplete and tentative nature. But the error so created comes very much in
the way of a true understanding, and it must therefore be emphasised
that spirituality is not a high intellectuality, not idealism, not an ethical
turn of mind or moral purity and austerity, not religiosity or an ardent and
exalted emotional fervour, not even a compound of all
these excellent things; a mental belief, creed or faith, an emotional
aspiration, a regulation of conduct according to a religious or ethical formula
are not spiritual achievement and experience. These things are of considerable
value to mind and life; they are of value to the spiritual evolution itself as
preparatory movements disciplining, purifying or giving a suitable form to the
nature; but they still belong to the mental evolution,—the beginning of a
spiritual realisation, experience, change is not yet
there. Spirituality is in its essence an awakening to the inner reality of our
being, to a spirit, self, soul which is other than our mind, life and body, an
inner aspiration to know, to feel, to be that, to enter into contact with the
greater Reality beyond and pervading the universe which inhabits also our own
being, to be in communion with It and union with It, and a turning, a
conversion, a transformation of our whole being as a result of the aspiration,
the contact, the union, a growth or waking into a new becoming or new being, a
new self, a new nature.
In fact, the creative
Consciousness-Force in our earth existence has to lead forward, in an almost
simultaneous process but with a considerable priority and greater stress of the
inferior element, a double evolution. There is an evolution of our outward
nature, the nature of the mental being in the life and body, and there is
within it, pressing forward for self-revelation because with the emergence of
mind that revelation is becoming possible, a preparation at least, even the
beginning of an evolution of our
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ner being, our occult subliminal and spiritual
nature. But Nature's major preoccupation must necessarily be still and for a
long time the evolution of mind to its greatest possible range, height,
subtlety; for only so can be prepared the unveiling of an entirely intuitive
intelligence, of Overmind, of Supermind,
the difficult passage to a higher instrumentation of the Spirit. If the sole
intention were the revelation of the essential spiritual Reality and a
cessation of our being into its pure existence, this insistence on the mental
evolution would have no purpose: for at every point of the nature there can be
a breaking out of the Spirit and an absorption of our being into it; an
intensity of the heart, a total silence of the mind, a single absorbing passion
of the will would be enough to bring about that culminating movement. If
Nature's final intention were other-worldly, then too the same law would hold;
for everywhere, at any point of the nature, there can be a sufficient power of
the other-worldly urge to break through and away from the terrestrial action
and enter into a spiritual elsewhere. But if her intention is a comprehensive
change of the being, this double evolution is intelligible and justifies
itself; for it is for that purpose indispensable.
This, however, imposes a
difficult and slow spiritual advance: for, first, the spiritual emergence has
to wait at each step for the instruments to be ready; next, as the spiritual
formation emerges, it is mixed inextricably with the powers, motives, impulses
of an imperfect mind, life and body,—there is a pull on it to accept and serve
these powers, motives and impulses, a downward gravitation and perilous
mixture, a constant temptation to fall or deviation, at least a fettering, a
weight, a retardation; there is a necessity to return upon a step gained in
order to bring up something of the nature which hangs back and prevents a
farther step; finally, there is, by the very character of mind in which it has
to work, a limitation of the emerging spiritual light and power and a compulsion
on it to move by segments, to follow one line or another and leave altogether
or leave till later on the achievement of its own totality. This hampering,
this obstacle of the mind, life and body,—the heavy inertia and persistence of
the body, the turbid passions of the life-part, the obscurity and doubting incertitudes, denials, other-formulations of the mind,—
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is an impediment so great and intolerable that
the spiritual urge becomes impatient and tries rigorously to quell these
opponents, to reject the life, to mortify the body, to silence the mind and
achieve its own separate salvation, spirit departing into pure spirit and
rejecting from it altogether an undivine and obscure
Nature. Apart from the supreme call, the natural push of the spiritual part in
us to return to its own highest element and status, this aspect of vital and
physical Nature as an impediment to pure spirituality is a compelling reason
for asceticism, for illusionism, for the tendency to other-worldliness, the
urge towards withdrawal from life, the passion for a pure and unmixed Absolute.
A pure spiritual absolutism is a movement of the self towards its own supreme
selfhood, but it is also indispensable for Nature's own purpose; for without it
the mixture, the downward gravitation would make the spiritual emergence
impossible. The extremist of this absolutism, the solitary, the ascetic, is the
standard-bearer of the spirit, his ochre robe is its flag, the sign of a
refusal of all compromise,—as indeed the struggle of emergence cannot end by a
compromise, but only by an entire spiritual victory and the complete surrender
of the lower nature. If that is impossible here, then indeed it must be
achieved elsewhere; if Nature refuses submission to the emerging spirit, then
the soul must withdraw from her. There is thus a dual tendency in the spiritual
emergence, on one side a drive towards the establishment at all cost of the
spiritual consciousness in the being, even to the rejection of Nature, on the
other side a push towards the extension of spirituality to our parts of nature.
But until the first is fully achieved, the second can only be imperfect and
halting. It is the foundation of the pure spiritual consciousness that is the
first object in the evolution of the spiritual man, and it is this and the urge
of that consciousness towards contact with the Reality, the Self or the Divine
Being that must be the first and foremost or even, till it is perfectly
accomplished, the sole preoccupation of the spiritual seeker. It is the one
thing needful that has to be done by each on whatever line is possible to him,
by each according to the spiritual capacity developed in his nature.
In considering the
achieved course of the evolution of the spiritual being, we have to regard it
from two sides,—a
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consideration of the means, the lines of
development utilised by Nature and a view of the
actual results achieved by it in the human individual. There are four main
lines which Nature has followed in her attempt to open up the inner being,—religion,
occultism, spiritual thought and an inner spiritual realisation
and experience: the three first are approaches, the last is the decisive avenue
of entry. All these four powers have worked by a simultaneous action, more or
less connected, sometimes in a variable collaboration, sometimes in dispute
with each other, sometimes in a separate independence. Religion has admitted an
occult element in its ritual, ceremony, sacraments; it has leaned upon
spiritual thinking, deriving from it sometimes a creed or theology, sometimes
its supporting spiritual philosophy,—the former, ordinarily, is the occidental
method, the latter the oriental: but spiritual experience is the final aim and
achievement of religion, its sky and summit. But also religion has sometimes
banned occultism or reduced its own occult element to a minimum; it has pushed
away the philosophic mind as a dry intellectual alien, leaned with all its
weight on creed and dogma, pietistic emotion and fervour
and moral conduct; it has reduced to a minimum or dispensed with spiritual realisation and experience. Occultism has sometimes put
forward a spiritual aim as its goal, and followed occult knowledge and
experience as an approach to it, formulated some kind of mystic philosophy: but
more often it has confined itself to occult knowledge and practice without any
spiritual vistas; it has turned to thaumaturgy or mere magic or even deviated
into diabolism. Spiritual philosophy has very usually leaned on religion as its
support or its way to experience; it has been the outcome of realisation and experience or built its structures as an
approach to it: but it has also rejected all aid,—or all impediment,—of
religion and proceeded in its own strength, either satisfied with mental
knowledge or confident to discover its own path of experience and effective
discipline. Spiritual experience has used all the three means as a
starting-point, but it has also dispensed with them all, relying on its own
pure strength: discouraging occult knowledge and powers as dangerous lures and
entangling obstacles, it has sought only the pure truth of the spirit;
dispensing with philosophy, it has
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arrived instead through the heart's fervour or a mystic inward spiritualisation;
putting behind it all religious creed, worship and practice and regarding them
as an inferior stage or first approach, it has passed on, leaving behind it all
these supports, nude of all these trappings, to the sheer contact of the
spiritual Reality. All these variations were necessary; the evolutionary endeavour of Nature has experimented on all lines in order
to find her true way and her whole way towards the supreme consciousness and
the integral knowledge.
For each of these means
or approaches corresponds to something in our total being and therefore to
something necessary to the total aim of her evolution. There are four
necessities of man's self-expansion if he is not to remain this being of the
surface ignorance seeking obscurely after the truth of things and collecting
and systematising fragments and sections of
knowledge, the small limited and half-competent creature of the cosmic Force
which he now is in his phenomenal nature. He must know himself and discover and
utilise all his potentialities: but to know himself
and the world completely he must go behind his own and its exterior, he must
dive deep below his own mental surface and the physical surface of Nature. This
he can only do by knowing his inner mental, vital, physical and psychic being and
its powers and movements and the universal laws and processes of the occult
Mind and Life which stand behind the material front of the universe: that is
the field of occultism, if we take the word in its widest significance. He must
know also the hidden Power or Powers that control the world: if there is a
Cosmic Self or Spirit or a Creator, he must be able to enter into relation with
It or Him and be able to remain in whatever contact or communion is possible,
get into some kind of tune with the master Beings of the universe or with the
universal Being and its universal will or a supreme Being and His supreme will,
follow the law It gives him and the assigned or revealed aim of his life and
conduct, raise himself towards the highest height that It demands of him in his
life now or in his existence hereafter; if there is no such universal or
supreme Spirit or Being, he must know what there is and how to lift himself to
it out of his present imperfection and impotence. This approach is the aim of reli-
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gion: its purpose is to link
the human with the Divine and in so doing sublimate the thought and life and
flesh so that they may admit the rule of the soul and spirit. But this
knowledge must be something more than a creed or a mystic revelation; his
thinking mind must be able to accept it, to correlate it with the principle of
things and the observed truth of the universe: this is the work of philosophy,
and in the field of the truth of the spirit it can only be done by a spiritual
philosophy, whether intellectual in its method or intuitive. But all knowledge
and endeavour can reach its fruition only if it is
turned into experience and has become a
part of the consciousness and its established operations; in the spiritual
field all this religious, occult or philosophical knowledge and endeavour must, to bear fruition, end in an opening up of
the spiritual consciousness, in experiences that found and continually
heighten, expand and enrich that consciousness and in the building of a life
and action that is in conformity with the truth of the spirit: this is the work
of spiritual realisation and experience.
In
the very nature of things all evolution must proceed at first by a slow
unfolding; for each new principle that evolves its powers has to make its way
out of an involution in Inconscience and Ignorance.
It has a difficult task in pulling itself out of the involution, out of the
hold of the obscurity of the original medium, against the pull and strains, the
instinctive opposition and obstruction of the Inconscience
and the hampering mixture and blind obstinate retardations of the Ignorance.
Nature affirms at first a vague urge and tendency which is a sign of the push
of the occult, subliminal, submerged reality towards the surface; there are
then small half-suppressed hints of the thing that is to be, imperfect
beginnings, crude elements, rudimentary appearances, small, insignificant,
hardly recognisable quanta. Afterwards there are
small or large formations; a more characteristic and recognisable
quality begins to show itself, first partially, here and there or in a low
intensity, then more vivid, more formative; finally, there is the decisive
emergence, a reversal of the consciousness, the beginning of the possibility of
its radical change: but still much has to be done in every direction, a long
and difficult growth towards perfection lies before the evolutionary
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endeavour. The thing done has not
only to be confirmed, secured against relapse and the downward gravitation, against
failure and extinction, but opened out into all the fields of its
possibilities, its totality of entire self-achievement, its utmost height,
subtlety, riches, wideness; it has to become dominant, all-embracing,
comprehensive. This is everywhere the process of Nature and to ignore it is to
miss the intention in her works and get lost in the maze of her procedure.
It is this process that
has taken place in the evolution of religion in the human mind and
consciousness; the work done by it for humanity cannot be understood or
properly appreciated if we ignore the conditions of the process and their
necessity. It is evident that the first beginnings of religion must be crude
and imperfect, its development hampered by mixtures, errors, concessions to the
human mind and vital part which may often be of a very unspiritual character.
Ignorant and injurious and even disastrous elements may creep in and lead to
error and evil; the dogmatism of the human mind, its self-assertive narrowness,
its intolerant and challenging egoism, its attachment to its limited truths and
still greater attachment to its errors, or the violence, fanaticism, militant
and oppressive self-affirmation of the vital, its treacherous action on the
mind in order to get a sanction for its own desires and propensities, may very
easily invade the religious field and baulk religion of its higher spiritual
aim and character; under the name of religion much ignorance may hide, many
errors and an extensive wrong-building be permitted, many crimes even and
offences against the spirit be committed. But this chequered
history belongs to all human effort and, if it were to count against the truth
and necessity of religion, would count also against the truth and necessity of
every other line of human endeavour, against all
man's action, his ideals, his thought, his art, his science.
Religion has opened
itself to denial by its claim to determine the truth by divine autho rity, by inspiration, by a
sacrosanct and infallible sovereignty given to it from on high; it has sought
to impose itself on human thought, feeling, conduct without discussion or
question. This is an excessive and premature claim, although imposed in a way
on the religious idea by the imperative
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and absolute character of the inspirations and
illuminations which are its warrant and justification and by the necessity of
faith as an occult light and power from the soul amidst the mind's ignorance,
doubts, weakness, incertitudes. Faith is
indispensable to man, for without it he could not proceed forward in his
journey through the Unknown; but it ought not to be imposed, it should come as
a free perception or an imperative direction from the inner spirit. A claim to
unquestioned acceptance could only be warranted if the spiritual effort had
already achieved man's progression to the highest Truth-Consciousness total and
integral, free from all ignorant mental and vital mixture. This is the ultimate
object before us, but it has not yet been accomplished, and the premature claim
has obscured the true work of the religious instinct in man, which is to lead
him towards the Divine Reality, to formulate all that he has yet achieved in
that direction and to give to each human being a mould of spiritual discipline,
a way of seeking, touching, nearing the Divine Truth, a way which is proper to
the potentialities of his nature.
The wide and supple
method of evolutionary Nature providing the ampl est scope and preserving the true intention of the
religious seeking of the human being can be recognised
in the development of religion in India, where any number of religious
formulations, cults and disciplines have been allowed, even encouraged to
subsist side by side and each man was free to accept and follow that which was
congenial to his thought, feeling, temperament, build of the nature. It is
right and reasonable that there should be this plasticity, proper to
experimental evolution: for religion's real business is to prepare man's mind, life and bodily existence for the
spiritual consciousness to take it up; it has to lead him to that point where
the inner spiritual light begins fully to emerge. It is at this point that
religion must learn to subordinate itself, not to insist on its outer
characters, but give full scope to the inner spirit itself to develop its own
truth and reality. In the meanwhile it has to take up as much of man's
mentality, vitality, physicality as it can and give all his activities a turn
towards the spiritual direction, the revelation of a spiritual meaning in them,
the imprint of a spiritual refinement, the beginning of a spiritual character.
It is in this attempt
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that the errors of religion come in, for they
are caused by the very nature of the matter with which it is dealing, — that
inferior stuff invades the very forms that are meant to serve as intermediaries
between the spiritual and the mental, vital or physical consciousness, and
often it diminishes, degrades and corrupts them: but it is in this attempt that
lies religion's greatest utility as an intercessor between spirit and nature.
Truth and error live always together in the human evolution and the truth is
not to be rejected because of its accompanying errors, though these have to be
eliminated,—often a difficult business and, if crudely done, resulting in
surgical harm inflicted on the body of religion; for what we see as error is
very frequently the symbol or a disguise or a corruption or malformation of a
truth which is lost in the brutal radicality of the
operation,—the truth is cut out along with the error. Nature herself very
commonly permits the good corn and the tares and weeds to grow together for a
long time, because only so is her own growth, her free evolution possible.
Evolutionary Nature in
her first awakening of man to a rudimentary spiritual consciousness must begin
with a vague sense of the Infinite and
the Invisible surrounding the physical being, a sense of the limitation and
impotence of human mind and will and of something greater than himself concealed
in the world, of Potencies beneficent or maleficent which determine the results
of his action, a Power that is behind the physical world he lives in and has
perhaps created it and him, or Powers that inform and rule her movements while
they themselves perhaps are ruled by the greater Unknown that is beyond them.
He had to determine what they are and find means of communication so that he
might propitiate them or call them to his aid; he sought also for means by
which he could find out and control the springs of the hidden movements of Nature.
This he could not do at once by his reason because his reason could at first
deal only with physical facts, but this was the domain of the Invisible and
needed a supraphysical vision and knowledge; he had
to do it by an extension of the faculty of intuition and instinct which was
already there in the animal. This faculty, prolonged in the thinking being and mentalised, must have
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been more sensitive and active in early man, though
still mostly on a lower scale, for he had to rely on it largely for all his
first necessary discoveries: he had to rely also on the aid of subliminal
experience; for the subliminal too must have been more active, more ready to
upsurge in him, more capable of formulating its phenomena on the surface,
before he learned to depend completely on his intellect and senses. The
intuitions that he thus received by contact with Nature, his mind systematised and so created the early forms of religion.
This active and ready power of intuition also gave him the sense of supraphysical forces behind the physical, and his instinct
and a certain subliminal or supernormal experience of supraphysical
beings with whom he could somehow communicate turned him towards the discovery
of effective and canalising means for a dynamic utilisation of this knowledge; so were created magic and
the other early forms of occultism. At some time it must have dawned on him
that he had something in him which was not physical, a soul that survived the
body; certain supernormal experiences which became active because of the
pressure to know the invisible, must have helped to formulate his first crude
ideas of this entity within him. It would only be later that he began to realise that what he perceived in the action of the
universe was also there in some form within him and that in him also were
elements that responded to invisible powers and forces for good or for evil; so
would begin his religio-ethical formations and his
possibilities of spiritual experience. An amalgam of primitive intuitions,
occult ritual, religio-social ethics, mystical
knowledge or experiences symbolised in myth but with
their sense preserved by a secret initiation and discipline is the early, at
first very superficial and external stage of human religion. In the beginning
these elements were, no doubt, crude and poor and defective, but they acquired
depth and range and increased in some cultures to a great amplitude and
significance.
But
as the mental and life development increased,—for that is Nature's first
preoccupation in man and she does not hesitate to push it forward at the cost
of other elements that will need to be taken up fully hereafter,—there is a
tendency
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towards intellectualisation,
and the first necessary intuitive, instinctive and subliminal formations are
overlaid with the structures erected by a growing force of reason and mental
intelligence. As man discovers the secrets and processes of physical Nature, he
moves more and more away from his early recourse to occultism and magic; the
presence and felt influence of gods and invisible powers recedes as more and
more is explained by natural workings, the mechanical procedure of Nature: but
he still feels the need of a spiritual element and spiritual factors in his
life and therefore keeps for a time the two activities running together. But
the occult elements of religion, though still held as beliefs or preserved but
also buried in rites and myths, lose their significance and diminish and the intellectual
element increases; finally, where and when the intellectualising
tendency becomes too strong, there is a movement to cut out everything but
creed, institution, formal practice and ethics. Even the element of spiritual
experience dwindles and it is considered sufficient to rely only on faith,
emotional fervour and moral conduct; the first
amalgam of religion, occultism and mystic experience is disrupted, and there is
a tendency, not by any means universal or complete but still pronounced or visible,
for each of these powers to follow its own way to its own goal in its own
separate and free character. A complete denial of religion, occultism and all
that is supraphysical is the last outcome of this
stage, a hard dry paroxysm of the superficial intellect hacking away the
sheltering structures that are refuges for the deeper parts of our nature. But
still evolutionary Nature keeps alive her ulterior intentions in the minds of a
few and uses man's greater mental evolution to raise them to a higher plane and
deeper issues. In the present time itself, after an age of triumphant
intellectuality and materialism, we can see evidences of this natural
process,—a return towards inner self-discovery, an inner seeking and thinking,
a new attempt at mystic experience, a groping after the inner self, a
reawakening to some sense of the truth and power of the spirit begins to
manifest itself; man's search after his self and soul and a deeper truth of
things tends to revive and resume its lost force and to give a fresh life to
the old creeds, erect new faiths or
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develop independently of sectarian religions.
The intellect itself, having reached near to the natural limits of the capacity
of physical discovery, having touched its bedrock and found that it explains
nothing more than the outer process of Nature, has begun, still tentatively and
hesitatingly, to direct an eye of research on the deeper secrets of the mind
and the life-force and on the domain of the occult which it had rejected a
priori, in order to know what there may be in it that is true. Religion itself
has shown its power of survival and is undergoing an evolution the final sense
of which is still obscure. In this new phase of the mind that we see beginning,
however crudely and hesitatingly, there can be detected the possibility of a
pressure towards some decisive turn and advance of the spiritual evolution in
Nature. Religion, rich but with a certain obscurity in her first infrarational stage, had tended under the overweight of the
intellect to pass into a clear but bare rational interspace;
but it must in the end follow the upward curve of the human mind and rise more
fully at its summits towards its true or greatest field in the sphere of a suprarational consciousness and knowledge.
If we look at the past,
we can still see the evidences of this line of natural evolution, although most
of its earlier stages are hidden from us in the unwritten pages of prehistory.
It has been contended that religion in its beginnings was nothing but a mass of
animism, fetishism, magic, totemism, taboo, myth,
superstitious symbol, with the medicine-man as priest, a mental fungus of
primitive human ignorance, — later on at its best a form of Nature-worship. It
could well have been so in the primitive mind, though we have to add the
proviso that behind much of its beliefs and practices there may have been a
truth of an inferior but very effective kind that we have lost with our
superior development. Primitive man lives much in a low and small province of
his life-being, and this corresponds on the occult plane to an invisible Nature
which is of a like character and whose occult powers can be called into
activity by a knowledge and methods to which the lower vital intuitions and
instincts may open a door of access. This might be formulated in a first stage
of religious belief and practice which would
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be occult after a crude inchoate fashion in its
character and interests, not yet spiritual; its main element would be a calling
in of small life-powers and elemental beings to the aid of small life-desires
and a rude physical welfare.
But this primitive
stage,—if it is indeed such and not, in what we still see of it, a fall or a
vestige, a relapse from a higher knowledge belonging to a previous cycle of civilisation or the debased remnants of a dead or obsolete
culture,—can have been only a beginning. It was followed, after whatever
stages, by the more advanced type of religion of which we have a record in the
literature or surviving documents of the early civilised
peoples. This type, composed of a polytheistic belief and worship, a cosmology,
a mythology, a complexus of ceremonies, practices,
ritual and ethical obligations interwoven sometimes deeply into the social
system, was ordinarily a national or tribal religion intimately expressive of
the stage of evolution of thought and life reached by the community. In the
outer structure we still miss the support of a deeper spiritual significance,
but this gap was filled in in the greater more
developed cultures by a strong background of occult knowledge and practices or
else by carefully guarded mysteries with a first element of spiritual wisdom
and discipline. Occultism occurs more often as an addition or superstructure,
but is not always present; the worship of divine powers, sacrifice, a surface
piety and social ethics are the main factors. A spiritual philosophy or idea of
the meaning of life seems at first to be absent, but its beginnings are often
contained in the myths and mysteries and in one or two instances fully emerge
out of them so that it assumes a strong separate existence.
It is possible indeed
that it is the mystic or the incipient occultist who was everywhere the creator
of religion and imposed his secret discoveries in the form of belief, myth and practice
on the mass human mind; for it is always the individual who receives the
intuitions of Nature and takes the step forward dragging or drawing the rest of
humanity behind him. But even if we give the credit of this new creation to the
subconscious mass mind, it is the occultist and mystic element in that mind
which created it and it must have found individuals through
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whom it could emerge; for a mass experience or
discovery or expression is not the first method of Nature; it is at some one
point or a few points that the fire is lit and spreads from hearth to hearth,
from altar to altar. But the spiritual aspiration and experience of the mystics
was usually casketed in secret formulas and given only to a few initiates; it
was conveyed to the rest or rather preserved for them in a mass of religious or
traditional symbols. It is these symbols that were the heart's core of religion
in the mind of an early humanity.
Out of this second stage
there emerged a third which tried to liberate the secret spiritual experience
and knowledge and put it at the disposal of all as a truth that could have a
common appeal and must be made universally available. A tendency prevailed, not
only to make the spiritual element the very kernel of the religion, but to
render it attainable to all the worshippers by an exoteric teaching; as each
esoteric school had had its system of knowledge and discipline, so now each
religion was to have its system of knowledge, its creed and its spiritual
discipline. Here, in these two forms of the spiritual evolution, the esoteric
and the exoteric, the way of the mystic and the way of the religious man, we
see a double principle of evolutionary Nature, the principle of intensive and
concentrated evolution in a small space and the principle of expansion and
extension so that the new creation may be generalised
in as large a field as possible. The first is the concentrated dynamic and
effective movement; the second tends towards diffusion and status. As a result
of this new development, the spiritual aspiration at first carefully treasured
by a few became more generalised in mankind, but it
lost in purity, height and intensity. The mystics founded their endeavour on a power of suprarational
knowledge, intuitive, inspired, revelatory and on the force of the inner being
to enter into occult truth and experience: but these powers are not possessed
by men in the mass or possessed only in a crude, undeveloped and fragmentary
initial form on which nothing could be safely founded; so for them in this new
development the spiritual truth had to be clothed in intellectual forms of
creed and doctrine, in emotional forms of worship and in a simple but
significant ritual. At the same time
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the strong spiritual nucleus became mixed,
diluted, alloyed; it tended to be invaded and aped by the lower elements of
mind and life and physical nature. It was this mixture and alloy and invasion
of the spurious, this profanation of the mysteries and the loss of their truth
and significance, as well as the misuse of the occult power that comes by
communication with invisible forces, that was most dreaded by the early mystics
and prevented by secrecy, by strict discipline, by restriction to the few fit
initiates. Another untoward result or peril of the diffusive movement and the
consequent invasion has been the intellectual formalisation
of spiritual knowledge into dogma and the materialisation
of living practice into a dead mass of cult and ceremony and ritual, a mechanisation by which the spirit was bound to depart in
course of time from the body of the religion. But this risk had to be taken,
for the expansive movement was an inherent necessity of the spiritual urge in
evolutionary Nature.
Thus came into being the
religions which rely mainly or in the mass on creed and ritual for some
spiritual result, but yet hold because of their truth of experience, the
fundamental inner reality that was initially present in them and persists so
long as there are men to continue or renew it, a means for those who are
touched by the spiritual impulse to realise the
Divine and liberate the spirit. This development has led farther to a division
into two tendencies, catholic and protestant, one a tendency towards some
conservation of the original plastic character of religion, its many-sidedness
and appeal to the whole nature of the human being, the other disruptive of this
catholicity and insistent on a pure reliance on belief, worship and conduct
simplified so as to make a quick and ready appeal to the common reason, heart
and ethical will. This turn has tended to create an excessive rationalisation, a discrediting and condemnation of most of
the occult elements which seek to establish a communication with what is
invisible, a reliance on the surface mind as the sufficient vehicle of the
spiritual endeavour; a certain dryness and a
narrowness and paucity of the spiritual life have been a frequent consequence.
Moreover, the intellect having denied so much, cast out so much,
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has found ample room and opportunity to deny
more until it denies all, to negate spiritual experience and cast out
spirituality and religion, leaving only intellect itself as the sole surviving
power. But intellect void of the spirit can only pile up external knowledge and
machinery and efficiency and ends in a drying up of the secret springs of
vitality and a decadence without any inner power to save the life or create a
new life or any other way out than death and disintegration and a new beginning
out of the old Ignorance.
It would have been
possible for the evolutionary principle to have preserved its pristine
wholeness of movement while pressing on, by an expansion and not a disruption
of the wiser ancient harmony, to a greater synthesis of the principle of
concentration and the principle of diffusion. In India, we have seen, there has
been a persistence of the original intuition and total movement of evolutionary
Nature. For religion in India limited itself by no one creed or dogma; it not
only admitted a vast number of different formulations, but contained
successfully within itself all the elements that have grown up in the course of
the evolution of religion and refused to ban or excise any: it developed
occultism to its utmost limits, accepted spiritual philosophies of all kinds,
followed to its highest, deepest or largest outcome every possible line of
spiritual realisation, spiritual experience,
spiritual self-discipline. Its method has been the method of evolutionary
Nature herself, to allow all developments, all means of communication and
action of the spirit upon the members, all ways of communion between man and
the Supreme or Divine, to follow every possible way of advance to the goal and
test it even to its extreme. All stages of spiritual evolution are there in man
and each has to be allowed or provided with its means of approach to the
spirit, an approach suited to its capacity, adhikara. Even the primitive forms that survived were not banned
but were lifted to a deeper significance, while still there was the pressure to
the highest spiritual pinnacles in the rarest supreme ether. Even the exclusive
credal type of religion was not itself excluded; provided its affinity to the
general aim and principle was clear, it was admitted into the infinite variety
of the general order. But this plasticity sought to support itself on a fixed religio-social system,
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which it permeated with the principle of a
graded working out of the human nature turned at its height towards a supreme
spiritual endeavour; this social fixity, which was
perhaps necessary at one time for unity of life if not also as a settled and
secure basis for the spiritual freedom, has been on one side a power for
preservation but also the one obstacle to the native spirit of entire
catholicity, an element of excessive crystallisation
and restriction. A fixed basis may be indispensable, but if settled in essence,
this also must be in its forms capable of plasticity, evolutionary change; it
must be an order, but a growing order.
Nevertheless, the
principle of this great and many-sided religious and spiritual evolution was
sound, and by taking up in itself the whole of life and of human nature, by encouraging
the growth of intellect and never opposing it or putting bounds to its freedom,
but rather calling it in to the aid of the spiritual seeking, it prevented the
conflict or the undue predominance which in the Occident led to the restriction
and drying up of the religious instinct and the plunge into pure materialism
and secularism. A method of this plastic and universal kind, admitting but
exceeding all creeds and forms and allowing every kind of element, may have
numerous consequences which might be objected to by the purist, but its great
justifying result has been an unexampled multitudinous richness and a more than
millennial persistence and impregnable durability, generality, universality,
height, subtlety and many-sided wideness of spiritual attainment and seeking
and endeavour. It is indeed only by such a
catholicity and plasticity that the wider aim of the evolution can work itself
out with any fullness. The individual demands from religion a door of opening
into spiritual experience or a means of turning towards it, a communion with
God or a definite light of guidance on the way, a promise of the hereafter or a
means of a happier supraterrestrial future; these
needs can be met on the narrower basis of credal belief and sectarian cult. But
there is also the wider purpose of Nature to prepare and further the spiritual
evolution in man and turn him into a spiritual being; religion serves her as a
means for pointing his effort and his ideal in that direction and providing
each one who is ready with the possibility of taking a step upon the way
towards it. This end she serves by
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the immense variety of the cults she has
created, some final, standardised and definitive,
others more plastic, various and many-sided. A religion which is itself a
congeries of religions and which at the same time provides each man with his
own turn of inner experience, would be the most in consonance with this purpose
of Nature: it would be a rich nursery of spiritual growth and flowering, a vast
multiform school of the soul's discipline, endeavour,
self-realisation. Whatever errors Religion has
committed, this is her function and her great and indispensable utility and
service,—the holding up of this growing light of guidance on our way through
the mind's ignorance towards the Spirit's complete consciousness and
self-knowledge.
Occultism is in its
essence man's effort to arrive at a knowledge of secret truths and
potentialities of Nature which will lift him out of slavery to his physical
limits of being, an attempt in particular to possess and organise
the mysterious, occult, outwardly still undeveloped direct power of Mind upon
Life and of both Mind and Life over Matter. There is at the same time an endeavour to establish communication with worlds and
entities belonging to the supraphysical heights,
depths and intermediate levels of cosmic Being and to utilise
this communion for the mastery of a higher Truth and for a help to man in his
will to make himself sovereign over Nature's powers and forces. This human
aspiration takes its stand on the belief, intuition or intimation that we are
not mere creatures of the mud, but souls, minds, wills that can know all the
mysteries of this and every world and become not only Nature's pupils but her
adepts and masters. The occultist sought to know the secret of physical things
also and in this effort he furthered astronomy, created chemistry, gave an
impulse to other sciences, for he utilised geometry
also and the science of numbers; but still more he sought to know the secrets
of supernature. In this sense occultism might be
described as the science of the supernatural; but it is in fact only the
discovery of the supraphysical, the surpassing of the
material limit,—the heart of occultism is not the impossible chimera which
hopes to go beyond or outside all force of Nature and make pure phantasy and arbitrary miracle omnipotently
effective. What seems to us supernatural is in fact either a spon-
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taneous irruption of the phenomena of
other-Nature into physical Nature or, in the work of the occultist, a
possession of the knowledge and power of the higher orders or grades of cosmic
Being and Energy and the direction of their forces and processes towards the
production of effects in the physical world by seizing on possibilities of
interconnection and means for a material effectuality. There are powers of the
mind and the life-force which have not been included in Nature's present systematisation of mind and life in matter, but are
potential and can be brought to bear upon material things and happenings or
even brought in and added to the present systematisation
so as to enlarge the control of mind over our own life and body or to act on
the minds, lives, bodies of others or on the movements of cosmic Forces. The modern
admission of hypnotism is an example of such a discovery and systematised application,—though still narrow and limited,
limited by its method and formula,—of occult powers which otherwise touch us
only by a casual or a hidden action whose process is unknown to us or
imperfectly caught by a few; for we are all the time undergoing a battery of
suggestions, thought-suggestions, impulse-suggestions, will-suggestions,
emotional and sensational suggestions, thought-waves, life-waves that come on
us or into us from others or from the universal Energy, but act and produce
their effects without our knowledge. A systematized endeavour
to know these movements and their law and possibilities, to master and use the
power or Nature-force behind them or to protect ourselves from them would fall
within one province of occultism: but it would only be a small part even of
that province; for wide and multiple are the possible fields, uses, processes
of this vast range of little-explored Knowledge.
In modern times, as physical
Science enlarged its discoveries and released the secret material forces of
Nature into an action governed by human knowledge for human use, occultism
receded and was finally set aside on the ground that the physical alone is real
and Mind and Life are only departmental activities of Matter. On this basis,
believing material Energy to be the key of all things, Science has attempted to
move towards a control of mind and life processes by a knowledge of the
material instrumentation
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and process of our normal and abnormal mind and
life functionings and activities; the spiritual is
ignored as only one form of mentality. It may be observed in passing that if
this endeavour succeeded, it might not be without
danger for the existence of the human race, even as now are certain other
scientific discoveries misused or clumsily used by a humanity mentally and morally
unready for the handling of powers so great and perilous; for it would be an
artificial control applied without any knowledge of the secret forces which
underlie and sustain our existence. Occultism in the West could be thus easily
pushed aside because it never reached its majority, never acquired ripeness and
a philosophic or sound systematic foundation. It indulged too freely in the
romance of the supernatural or made the mistake of concentrating its major
effort on the discovery of formulas and effective modes for using supernormal
powers. It deviated into magic white and black or into a romantic or thaumaturgic paraphernalia of occult mysticism and the
exaggeration of what was after all a limited and scanty knowledge. These
tendencies and this insecurity of mental foundation made it difficult to defend
and easy to discredit, a target facile and vulnerable. In Egypt and the East
this line of knowledge arrived at a greater and more comprehensive endeavour: this ampler maturity can be seen still intact in the
remarkable system of the Tantras; it was not only a
many-sided science of the supernormal but supplied the basis of all the occult
elements of religion and even developed a great and powerful system of spiritual
discipline and self-realisation. For the highest
occultism is that which discovers the secret movements and dynamic supernormal
possibilities of Mind and Life and Spirit and uses them in their native force
or by an applied process for the greater effectivity
of our mental, vital and spiritual being.
Occultism is associated
in popular idea with magic and magical formulae and a supposed mechanism of the
supernatural. But this is only one side, nor is it altogether a superstition as
is vainly imagined by those who have not looked deeply or at all at this covert
side of secret Nature-Force or experimented with its possibilities. Formulas
and their application, a mechanisation of latent
forces, can be astonishingly effective in the occult use of
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mind-power and life-power just as it is in
physical Science, but this is only a subordinate method and a limited
direction. For mind and life forces are plastic, subtle and variable in their
action and have not the material rigidity; they need a subtle and plastic
intuition in the knowledge of them, in the interpretation of their action and
process and in their application,—even in the interpretation and action of
their established formulas. An overstress on mechanisation
and rigid formulation is likely to result in sterilisation
or a formalised limitation of knowledge and, on the
pragmatic side, to much error, ignorant convention, misuse and failure. Now
that we are outgrowing the superstition of the sole truth of Matter, a swing
backward towards the old occultism and to new formulations, as well as to a
scientific investigation of the still hidden secrets and powers of Mind and a
close study of psychic and abnormal or supernormal psychological phenomena, is
possible and, in parts, already visible. But if it is to fulfil
itself, the true foundation, the true aim and direction, the necessary
restrictions and precautions of this line of inquiry have to be rediscovered;
its most important aim must be the discovery of the hidden truths and powers of
the mind-force and the life-power and the greater forces of the concealed
spirit. Occult science is, essentially, the science of the subliminal, the
subliminal in ourselves and the subliminal in world-nature, and of all that is
in connection with the subliminal, including the subconscient
and the superconscient, and the use of it as part of
self-knowledge and world-knowledge and for the right dynamisation
of that knowledge.
An intellectual approach
to the highest knowledge, the mind's possession of it, is an indispensable aid
to this movement of Nature in the human being. Ordinarily, on our surface,
man's chief instrument of thought and action is the reason, the observing, understanding
and arranging intellect. In any total advance or evolution of the Spirit, not
only the intuition, insight, inner sense, the heart's devotion, a deep and
direct life-experience of the things of the Spirit have to be developed, but
the intellect also must be enlightened and satisfied; our thinking and
reflecting mind must be helped to understand, to form a reasoned and systematised idea of the goal, the method, the principles
of this
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highest development and activity of our nature
and the truth of all that lies behind it. Spiritual realisation
and experience, an intuitive and direct knowledge, a growth of inner
consciousness, a growth of the soul and of an intimate soul-perception, soul-vision
and a soul-sense, are indeed the proper means of this evolution: but the
support of the reflective and critical reason is also of great importance; if
many can dispense with it, because they have a vivid and direct contact with
inner realities and are satisfied with experience and insight, yet in the whole
movement it is indispensable. If the supreme truth is a spiritual Reality, then
the intellect of man needs to know what is the nature of that original Truth
and the principle of its relations to the rest of existence, to ourselves and
the universe. The intellect is not capable by itself of bringing us into touch with
the concrete spiritual reality, but it can help by a mental formulation of the
truth of the Spirit which explains it to the mind and can be applied even in
the more direct seeking: this help is of a capital importance.
Our thinking mind is
concerned mainly with the statement of general spiritual truth, the logic of
its absolute and the logic of its relativities, how they stand to each other or
lead to each other, and what are the mental consequences of the spiritual theorem
of existence. But besides this understanding and intellectual statement which
is its principal right and share, the intellect seeks to exercise a critical control; it may
admit the ecstatic or other concrete spiritual experiences, but its demand is
to know on what sure and well-ordered truths of being
they are founded. Indeed, without such a truth known and verifiable, our reason
might find these experiences insecure and unintelligible, might draw back from
them as possibly not founded on truth or else distrust them in their form, if
not in their foundation, as affected by an error, even an aberration of the
imaginative vital mind, the emotions, the nerves or the senses; for these might
be misled, in their passage or transference from the physical and sensible to
the invisible, into a pursuit of deceiving lights or at least to a misreception of things valid in themselves but marred by a
wrong or imperfect interpretation of what is experienced or a confusion and
disorder of the true spiritual values. If
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reason finds itself obliged to admit the
dynamics of occultism, there too it will be most concerned with the truth and
right system and real significance of the forces that it sees brought into
play; it must inquire whether the significance is that which the occultist
attaches to it or something other and perhaps deeper which has been
misinterpreted in its essential relations and values or not given its true
place in the whole of experience. For the action of our intellect is primarily
the function of understanding, but secondarily critical and finally organising, controlling and formative.
The means by which this
need can be satisfied and with which our nature of mind has provided us is
philosophy, and in this field it must be a spiritual philosophy. Such systems
have arisen in numbers in the East; for almost always, wherever there has been
a considerable spiritual development, there has arisen from it a philosophy
justifying it to the intellect. The method was at first an intuitive seeing and
an intuitive expression, as in the fathomless thought and profound language of
the Upanishads, but afterwards there was developed a critical method, a firm
system of dialectics, a logical organisation. The later
philosophies were an intellectual account1 or a logical
justification of what had been found by inner realisation;
or they provided, themselves, a mental ground or a systematised
method for realisation and experience.2 In
the West where the syncretic tendency of the
consciousness was replaced by the analytic and separative,
the spiritual urge and the intellectual reason parted company almost at the
outset; philosophy took from the first a turn towards a purely intellectual and
ratiocinative explanation of things. Nevertheless, there were systems like the
Pythagorean, Stoic, and Epicurean, which were dynamic not only for thought but
for conduct of life and developed a discipline, an effort at inner perfection
of the being; this reached a higher spiritual plane of knowledge in later
Christian or Neo-pagan thought-structures where East and West met together. But
later on the intellectualisation became complete and
the connection of philosophy with life and its energies or spirit and its
dynamism was either cut or confined to the little that the metaphysical
1 E.g., the Gita.
2 E.g., the Yoga philosophy of Patanjali.
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idea can impress on life and action by an abstract
and secondary influence. Religion has supported itself in the West not by philosophy
but by a credal theology; sometimes a spiritual philosophy emerges by sheer
force of individual genius, but it has not been as in the East a necessary
adjunct to every considerable line of spiritual experience and endeavour. It is true that a philosophic development of
spiritual thought is not entirely indispensable; for the truths of spirit can
be reached more directly and completely by intuition and by a concrete inner
contact. It must also be said that the critical control of the intellect over spiritual
experience can be hampering and unreliable, for it is an inferior light turned
upon a field of higher illumination; the true controlling power is an inner
discrimination, a psychic sense and tact, a superior intervention of guidance
from above or an innate and luminous inner guidance. But still this line of
development too is necessary, because there must be a bridge between the spirit
and the intellectual reason: the light of a spiritual or at least a spiritualised intelligence is necessary for the fullness of
our total inner evolution, and without it, if another deeper guidance is
lacking, the inner movement may be erratic and undisciplined, turbid and mixed
with unspiritual elements or one-sided or incomplete in its catholicity. For
the transformation of the Ignorance into the integral Knowledge the growth in
us of a spiritual intelligence ready to receive a higher light and canalise it for all the parts of our nature is an
intermediate necessity of great importance.
But none of these three
lines of approach can by themselves entirely fulfil
the greater and ulterior intention of Nature; they cannot create in mental man
the spiritual being, unless and until they open the door to spiritual
experience. It is only by an inner realisation of what these approaches are seeking after, by
an overwhelming experience or by many experiences building up an inner change,
by a transmutation of the consciousness, by a liberation of the spirit from its
present veil of mind, life and body that there can emerge the spiritual being.
That is the final line of the soul's progress towards which the others are
pointing and, when it is ready to disengage itself from the preliminary
approaches, then the real work has begun and the turning-point of the change
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is no longer distant. Till then all that the
human mental being has reached is a familiarity with the idea of things beyond
him, with the possibility of an other-worldly movement, with the ideal of some
ethical perfection; he may have made too some contact with greater Powers or
Realities which help his mind or heart or life. A change there may be, but not
the transmutation of the mental into the spiritual being. Religion and its
thought and ethics and occult mysticism in ancient times produced the priest
and the mage, the man of piety, the just man, the man of wisdom, many high
points of mental manhood; but it is only after spiritual experience through the
heart and mind began that we see arise the saint, the prophet, the Rishi, the Yogi, the seer, the spiritual sage and the
mystic, and it is the religions in which these types of spiritual manhood came into
being that have endured, covered the globe and given mankind all its spiritual
aspiration and culture.
When
spirituality disengages itself in the consciousness and puts on its distinctive
character, it is only at first a small kernel, a growing tendency, an
exceptional light of experience amidst the great mass of normal unenlightened
human mind, vitality, physicality which forms the outer self and engrosses our
natural preoccupation. There are tentative beginnings and a slow evolution and
hesitating emergence. An earlier first preliminary form of it creates a certain
kind of religiosity which is not the pure spiritual temperament, but is of the
nature of mind or life seeking or finding in itself a spiritual support or
factor; in this stage man is mostly preoccupied with the utilisation
of such contacts as he can get or construct with what is beyond him to help or
serve his mental ideas or moral ideals or his vital and physical interests; the
true turn to some spiritual change has not come. The first true formations take
the shape of a spiritualisation of our natural
activities, a permeating influence on them or a direction: there is a
preparatory influence or influx in some part or tendency of the mind or life,—a
spiritualised turn of thought with uplifting
illuminations, or a spiritualised turn of the
emotional or the aesthetic being, a spiritualised
ethical formation in the character, a spiritualised
urge in some life-action or other dynamic vital movement of the nature. An awareness
comes perhaps of an
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inner light, of a guidance or a communion, of a
greater Control than the mind and will to which something in us obeys; but all is
not yet recast in the mould of that experience. But when these intuitions and
illuminations grow in insistence and canalize themselves, make a strong inner
formation and claim to govern the whole life and take over the nature, then
there begins the spiritual formation of the being; there emerges the saint, the
devotee, the spiritual sage, the seer, the prophet, the servant of God, the soldier of the spirit. All these take
their stand on one part of the natural being lifted up by a spiritual light,
power or ecstasy. The sage and seer live in the spiritual mind, their thought
or their vision is governed and moulded by an inner
or a greater divine light of knowledge; the devotee lives in the spiritual
aspiration of the heart, its self-offering and its seeking; the saint is moved
by the awakened psychic being in the inner heart grown powerful to govern the
emotional and vital being; the others stand in the vital kinetic nature driven
by a higher spiritual energy and turned by it towards an inspired action, a God-
given work or mission, the service of some divine Power, idea or ideal. The
last or highest emergence is the liberated man who has realised
the Self and Spirit within him, entered into the cosmic consciousness, passed
into union with the Eternal and, so far as he still accepts life and action,
acts by the light and energy of the Power within him working through his human
instruments of Nature. The largest formulation of this spiritual change and
achievement is a total liberation of soul, mind, heart and action, a casting of
them all into the sense of the cosmic Self and the Divine Reality.1 The
spiritual evolution of the individual has then found its way and thrown up its
range of Himalayan eminences and its peaks of highest nature. Beyond this
height and largeness there opens only the supramental
ascent or the incommunicable Transcendence.
This then has been up
till now the course of Nature's evolution of the spiritual man in the human
mental being, and it may be questioned what is the exact sum of this
achievement and its actual significance. In the recent reaction towards the life
of the mind in Matter, this great direction and this rare change have
1 This is the essence of the spiritual
ideal and realisation held before us by the Gita.
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been stigmatised as no
true evolution of consciousness but rather a sublimated crudity of ignorance
deviating from the true human evolution, which should be solely an evolution of
life-power, the practical physical mind, the reason governing thought and
conduct and the discovering and organising
intelligence. In this epoch religion was pushed aside as an out-of-date superstition
and spiritual realisation and experience discredited
as a shadowy mysticism; the mystic in this view is the man who turns aside into
the unreal, into occult regions of a self-constructed land of chimeras and
loses his way there. This judgment proceeds from a view of things which is itself
bound to pass into discredit, because it depends ultimately on the false
perception of the material as alone real and the outward life as alone of
importance. But apart from this extreme materialistic view of things, it can be
and is still held by the intellect and the physical mind eager for human life-fulfilment,—and that is the prevalent mentality, the
dominant modern trend,—that the spiritual tendency in humanity has come to very
little; it has not solved the problem of life nor any of the problems with
which humanity is at grips. The mystic either detaches himself from life as the
other-worldly ascetic or the aloof visionary and therefore cannot help life, or
else he brings no better solution or result than the practical man or the man
of intellect and reason: by his intervention he rather disturbs the human
values, distorts them with his alien and unverifiable light obscure to the
human understanding and confuses the plain practical and vital issues life puts
before us.
But this is not the
standpoint from which the true significance of the spiritual evolution in man
or the value of spirituality can be judged or assessed; for its real work is
not to solve human problems on the past or present mental basis, but to create a
new foundation of our being and our life and knowledge. The ascetic or
other-worldly tendency of the mystic is an extreme affirmation of his refusal
to accept the limitations imposed by material Nature: for his very reason of
being is to go beyond her; if he cannot transform her, he must leave her. At
the same time the spiritual man has not stood back altogether from the life of
humanity; for the sense of unity with all beings, the stress of a universal
love and compassion, the will to spend the energies
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for the good of all creatures,1 are
central to the dynamic out-flowering of the spirit: he has turned therefore to
help, he has guided as did the ancient Rishis or the
prophets, or stooped to create and, where he has done so with something of the
direct power of the Spirit, the results have been prodigious. But the solution
of the problem which spirituality offers is not a solution by external means,
though these also have to be used, but by an inner change, a transformation of
the consciousness and nature.
If no decisive but only
a contributory result, an accretion of some new finer elements to the sum of
the consciousness, has been the general consequence and there has been no
life-transformation, it is because man in the mass has always deflected the
spiritual impulsion, recanted from the spiritual ideal or held it only as a
form and rejected the inward change. Spirituality cannot be called upon to deal
with life by a non-spiritual method or attempt to cure its ills by the
panaceas, the political, social or other mechanical remedies which the mind is
constantly attempting and which have always failed and will continue to fail to
solve anything. The most drastic changes made by these means change nothing;
for the old ills exist in a new form:
the aspect of the outward environment is altered, but man remains what he was;
he is still an ignorant mental being misusing or not effectively using his
knowledge, moved by ego and governed by vital desires and passions and the needs
of the body, unspiritual and superficial in his outlook, ignorant of his own
self and the forces that drive and use him. His life-constructions have a value
as expressions of his individual and collective being in the stage to which
they have reached or as a machinery for the convenience and welfare of his
vital and physical parts and a field and medium for his mental growth, but they
cannot take him beyond his present self or serve as a machinery to transform
him; his and their perfection can only come by his farther evolution. Only a
spiritual change, an evolution of his being from the superficial mental towards
the deeper spiritual consciousness, can make a real and effective difference.
To discover the spiritual being in himself is the main
1 Gita. The
Buddhist elevation of universal compassion, karunā
and sympathy (vasudhaiva kutumbakam,
the whole earth is my family), to be the highest principle of action, the
Christian emphasis on love indicate this dynamic side of the spiritual being.
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business of the spiritual man and to help others
towards the same evolution is his real service to the race; till that is done,
an outward help can succour and alleviate, but
nothing or very little more is possible.
It
is true that the spiritual tendency has been to look more beyond life than
towards life. It is true also that the spiritual change has been individual and
not collective; its result has been successful in the man, but unsuccessful or
only indirectly operative in the human mass. The spiritual evolution of Nature
is still in process and incomplete,—one might almost say, still only
beginning,—and its main preoccupation has been to affirm and develop a basis of
spiritual consciousness and knowledge and to create more and more a foundation
or formation for the vision of that which is eternal in the truth of the spirit.
It is only when Nature has fully confirmed this intensive evolution and
formation through the individual that anything radical of an expanding or
dynamically diffusive character can be expected or any attempt at collective
spiritual life,—such attempts have been made, but mostly as a field of
protection for the growth of the individual's spirituality,—acquire a successful
permanence. For till then the individual must be preoccupied with his own
problem of entirely changing his mind and life into conformity with the truth
of the spirit which he is achieving or has achieved in his inner being and
knowledge. Any premature attempt at a large-scale collective spiritual life is
exposed to vitiation by some incompleteness of the spiritual knowledge on its
dynamic side, by the imperfections of the individual seekers and by the
invasion of the ordinary mind and vital and physical consciousness taking hold
of the truth and mechanising, obscuring or corrupting
it. The mental intelligence and its main power of reason cannot change the
principle and persistent character of human life, it can only effect various mechanisations, manipulations, developments and
formulations. But neither is mind as a whole, even spiritualised,
able tochange it; spirituality liberates and
illumines the inner being, it helps mind to communicate with what is higher
than itself, to escape even from itself, it can purify and uplift by the inner
influence the outward nature of individual human beings: but so long as it has
to work in the human mass through
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mind as the instrument, it can exercise an
influence on the earth-life but not bring about a transformation of that life.
For this reason there has been a prevalent tendency in the spiritual mind to be
satisfied with such an influence and in the main to seek fulfilment
in other-life elsewhere or to abandon altogether any outward-going endeavour and concentrate solely on an individual spiritual
salvation or perfection. A higher instrumental dynamis
than mind is needed to transform totally a nature created by the Ignorance.
Another objection to the
mystic and his knowledge is urged, not against its effect upon life but against
his method of the discovery of Truth and against the Truth that he discovers.
One objection to the method is that it is purely subjective, not true independently
of the personal consciousness and its constructions, not verifiable. But this
ground of cavil has no great value: for the object of the mystic is
self-knowledge and God-knowledge, and that can only be arrived at by an inward
and not by an outward gaze. Or it is the supreme Truth of things that he seeks,
and that too cannot be arrived at by an outward inquiry through the senses or
by any scrutiny or research that founds itself on outsides and surfaces or by
speculation based on the uncertain data of an indirect means of knowledge. It
must come by a direct vision or contact of the consciousness with the soul and
body of the Truth itself or through a knowledge by identity, by the self that
becomes one with the self of things and with their truth of power and their
truth of essence. But it is urged that the actual result of this method is not
one truth common to all, there are great differences; the conclusion suggested
is that this knowledge is not truth at all but a subjective mental formation.
But this objection is based on a misunderstanding of the nature of spiritual
knowledge. Spiritual truth is a truth of the spirit, not a truth of the
intellect, not a mathematical theorem or a logical formula. It is a truth of
the Infinite, one in an infinite diversity, and it can assume an infinite
variety of aspects and formations: in the spiritual evolution it is inevitable
that there should be a many-sided passage and reaching to the one Truth, a
many-sided seizing of it; this many-sidedness is the sign of the approach of
the soul to a living reality, not to an abstraction or
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a constructed figure of things that can be petrified
into a dead or stony formula. The hard logical and intellectual notion of truth
as a single idea which all must accept, one idea or system of ideas defeating
all other ideas or systems, or a single limited fact or single formula of facts
which all must recognise, is an illegitimate
transference from the limited truth of the physical field to the much more
complex and plastic field of life and mind and spirit.
This
transference has been responsible for much harm; it brings into thought
narrowness, limitation, an intolerance of the necessary variation and
multiplicity of viewpoints without which there can be no totality of
truth-finding, and by the narrowness and limitation much obstinacy in error. It
reduces philosophy to an endless maze of sterile disputes; religion has been
invaded by this misprision and infected with credal dogmatism, bigotry and
intolerance. The truth of the spirit is a truth of being and consciousness and not a truth of
thought: mental ideas can only represent or formulate some facet, some mind-translated
principle or power of it or enumerate its aspects, but to know it one has to
grow into it and be it; without that growing and being there can be no true
spiritual knowledge. The fundamental truth of spiritual experience is one, its consciousness
is one, everywhere it follows the same general lines and tendencies of
awakening and growth into spiritual being; for these are the imperatives of the
spiritual consciousness. But also there are, based on those imperatives, numberless
possibilities of variation of experience and expression: the centralisation and
harmonisation of these possibles, but also the intensive sole following out of
any line of experience are both of them necessary movements of the emerging spiritual
Conscious-Force within us. Moreover, the accommodation of mind and life to the
spiritual truth, its expression in them, must vary with the mentality of the
seeker so long as he has not risen above all need of such accommodation or such
limiting expression. It is this mental and vital element which has created the
oppositions that still divide spiritual seekers or enter into their differing
affirmations of the truth that they experience. This difference and variation
is needed for the freedom of spiritual search and spiritual growth:
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to overpass differences is quite possible, but
that is most easily done in pure experience; in mental formulation the
difference must remain until one can exceed mind altogether and in a highest
consciousness integralise, unify and harmonise the many-sided truth of the Spirit.
In the evolution of the
spiritual man there must necessarily be many stages and in each stage a great
variety of individual formations of the being, the consciousness, the life, the
temperament, the ideas, the character. The nature of instrumental mind and the
necessity of dealing with the life must of itself create an infinite variety
according to the stage of development and the individuality of the seeker. But,
apart from that, even the domain of pure spiritual self-realisation
and self-expression need not be a single white monotone, there can be a great
diversity in the fundamental unity; the supreme Self is one, but the souls of
the Self are many and, as is the soul's formation of nature, so will be its
spiritual self-expression. A diversity in oneness is the law of the
manifestation; the supramental unification and
integration must harmonise these diversities, but to
abolish them is not the intention of the Spirit in Nature.
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