{"id":2112,"date":"2013-07-13T01:39:31","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:39:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=2112"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:39:31","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:39:31","slug":"61-the-divine-life-vol-21-22-the-life-divine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/01-works-of-sri-aurobindo\/03-cwsa\/21-22-the-life-divine\/61-the-divine-life-vol-21-22-the-life-divine","title":{"rendered":"-61_The Divine Life.html"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\n\n
\n <\/p>\n

\n
\nChapter XXVIII <\/b>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n
\nThe Divine Life <\/font><\/b>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\nO seeing Flame, thou carriest man of the crooked ways into
\nthe abiding truth and the knowledge.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n
\nRig Veda<\/i>.1<\/font><\/sup>  <\/span> <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\nI purify earth and heaven by the Truth.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n
\nRig Veda<\/i>.2<\/font><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\nHis ecstasy, in one who holds it, sets into motion the two
\nbirths, the human self-expression and the divine, and moves between them.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n
\nRig Veda<\/i>.3<\/font><\/sup> <\/span> <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\nMay the invincible rays of his intuition be there seeking
\nimmortality, pervading both the births; for by them he sets flowing in one
\nmovement human strengths and things divine.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n
\nRig Veda<\/i>.4<\/font><\/sup> <\/span> <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\nLet all accept thy will when thou art born a living god from
\nthe dry tree, that they may attain to divinity and reach by the speed of thy
\nmovements to possession of the Truth and the Immortality.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\nRig Veda<\/i>.5<\/font><\/sup> 
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n
\nO<\/font>UR ENDEAVOUR<\/b> has been to discover what is the
\nreality and significance of our existence as conscious beings in the material
\nuniverse and in what direction and how far that significance once discovered
\nleads us, to what human or divine future. Our existence here may indeed be an
\ninconsequential freak of Matter itself or of some Energy building up Matter, or
\nit may be an inexplicable freak of the Spirit. Or, again, our existence here may
\nbe an arbitrary fantasy of a supracosmic Creator. In that case it has no
\nessential significance,  \u2014 no significance at all if Matter or an inconscient
\nEnergy is the
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\n1 I. 31. 6.      2 I. 133. 1.     
\n3 IX. 86. 42.      4 IX. 70. 3.     
\n5 I. 68. 2.   <\/font> <\/span> <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 1051<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n

\tfantasy-builder, for then it is at best the stray
\n\tdescription of a wandering spiral of Chance or the hard curve of a blind
\n\tNecessity; it can have only an illusory significance which vanishes into
\n\tnothingness if it is an error of the Spirit. A conscious Creator may indeed
\n\thave put a meaning into our existence, but it must be discovered by a
\n\trevelation of his will and is not self-implied in the self-nature of things
\n\tand discoverable there. But if there is a self-existent Reality of which our
\n\texistence here is a result, then there must be a truth of that Reality which
\n\tis manifesting, working itself out, evolving here, and that will be the
\n\tsignificance of our own being and life. Whatever that Reality may be, it is
\n\tsomething that has taken upon itself the aspect of a becoming in Time, 
\n\t\u2014 an indivisible becoming, for our present and our future carry in
\n\tthemselves, transformed, made other, the past that created them, and the
\n\tpast and present already contained and now contain in themselves, invisible
\n\tto us because still unmanifested, unevolved, their own transformation into
\n\tthe still uncreated future. The significance of our existence here
\n\tdetermines our destiny: that destiny is something that already exists in us
\n\tas a necessity and a potentiality, the necessity of our being’s secret and
\n\temergent reality, a truth of its potentialities that is being worked out;
\n\tboth, though not yet realised, are even now implied in what has been already
\n\tmanifested. If there is a Being that is becoming, a Reality of existence
\n\tthat is unrolling itself in Time, what that being, that reality secretly is
\n\tis what we have to become, and so to become is our life’s significance.
\n\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nIt is consciousness and life that must be the keywords to
\nwhat is being thus worked out in Time; for without them Matter and the world of
\nMatter would be a meaningless phenomenon, a thing that has just happened by
\nChance or by an unconscious Necessity. But consciousness as it is, life as it is
\ncannot be the whole secret; for both are very clearly something unfinished and
\nstill in process. In us consciousness is Mind, and our mind is ignorant and
\nimperfect, an intermediate power that has grown and is still growing towards
\nsomething beyond itself: there were lower levels of consciousness that came
\nbefore it and out of which it arose, there must very evidently be higher levels
\nto  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 1052<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n\twhich it is itself arising. Before our thinking,
\n\treasoning, reflecting mind there was a consciousness unthinking but living
\n\tand sentient, and before that there was the subconscious and the
\n\tunconscious; after us or in our yet unevolved selves there is likely to be
\n\twaiting a greater consciousness, self-luminous, not dependent on
\n\tconstructive thought: our imperfect and ignorant thought-mind is certainly
\n\tnot the last word of consciousness, its ultimate possibility. For the
\n\tessence of consciousness is the power to be aware of itself and its objects,
\n\tand in its true nature this power must be direct, self-fulfilled and
\n\tcomplete: if it is in us indirect, incomplete, unfulfilled in its workings,
\n\tdependent on constructed instruments, it is because consciousness here is
\n\temerging from an original veiling Inconscience and is yet burdened and
\n\tenveloped with the first Nescience proper to the Inconscient; but it must
\n\thave the power to emerge completely, its destiny must be to evolve into its
\n\town perfection which is its true nature. Its true nature is to be wholly
\n\taware of its objects, and of these objects the first is self, the being
\n\twhich is evolving its consciousness here, and the rest is what we see as
\n\tnot-self,  \u2014 but if existence is indivisible, that too must in reality
\n\tbe self: the destiny of evolving consciousness must be, then, to become
\n\tperfect in its awareness, entirely aware of self and all-aware. This perfect
\n\tand natural condition of consciousness is to us a superconscience, a state
\n\twhich is beyond us and in which our mind, if suddenly transferred to it,
\n\tcould not at first function; but it is towards that superconscience that our
\n\tconscious being must be evolving. But this evolution of our consciousness to
\n\ta superconscience or supreme of itself is possible only if the Inconscience
\n\twhich is our basis here is really itself an involved Superconscience; for
\n\twhat is to be in the becoming of the Reality in us must be already there
\n\tinvolved or secret in its beginning. Such an involved Being or Power we can
\n\twell conceive the Inconscient to be when we closely regard this material
\n\tcreation of an unconscious Energy and see it labouring out with curious
\n\tconstruction and infinite device the work of a vast involved Intelligence
\n\tand see, too, that we ourselves are something of that Intelligence evolving
\n\tout of its involution, an emerging consciousness whose emergence  
\n\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 1053<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n cannot stop short on the way until the Involved has evolved
\n\tand revealed itself as a supreme totally self-aware and all-aware
\n\tIntelligence. It is this to which we have given the name of Supermind or
\n\tGnosis. For that evidently must be the consciousness of the Reality, the
\n\tBeing, the Spirit that is secret in us and slowly manifesting here; of that
\n\tBeing we are the becomings and must grow into its nature. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nIf consciousness is the central secret, life is the outward
\nindication, the effective power of being in Matter; for it is that which
\nliberates consciousness and gives it its form or embodiment of force and its
\neffectuation in material act. If some revelation or effectuation of itself in
\nMatter is the ultimate aim of the evolving Being in its birth, life is the
\nexterior and dynamic sign and index of that revelation and effectuation. But
\nlife also, as it is now, is imperfect and evolving; it evolves through growth of
\nconsciousness even as consciousness evolves through greater organisation and
\nperfection of life: a greater consciousness means a greater life. Man, the
\nmental being, has an imperfect life because mind is not the first and highest
\npower of consciousness of the Being; even if mind were perfected, there would be
\nstill something yet to be realised, not yet manifested. For what is involved and
\nemergent is not a Mind, but a Spirit, and mind is not the native dynamism of
\nconsciousness of the Spirit; supermind, the light of gnosis, is its native
\ndynamism. If then life has to become a manifestation of the Spirit, it is the
\nmanifestation of a spiritual being in us and the divine life of a perfected
\nconsciousness in a supramental or gnostic power of spiritual being that must be
\nthe secret burden and intention of evolutionary Nature.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nAll spiritual life is in its principle a growth into divine
\nliving. It is difficult to fix the frontier where the mental ceases and the
\ndivine life begins, for the two project into each other and there is a long
\nspace of their intermingled existence. A great part of this interspace,  \u2014
\nwhen the spiritual urge does not turn away from earth or world altogether, 
\n\u2014 can be seen as the process of a higher life in the making. As the mind and
\nlife become illumined with the light of the spirit, they put on or reflect
\nsomething of the divinity, the secret greater Reality, and this must increase  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 1054<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n\tuntil the interspace has been crossed and the whole
\n\texistence is unified in the full light and power of the spiritual principle.
\n\tBut, for the full and perfect fulfilment of the evolutionary urge, this
\n\tillumination and change must take up and re-create the whole being, mind,
\n\tlife and body: it must be not only an inner experience of the Divinity, but
\n\ta remoulding of both the inner and outer existence by its power; it must
\n\ttake form not only in the life of the individual but as a collective life of
\n\tgnostic beings established as a highest power and form of the becoming of
\n\tthe Spirit in the earth-nature. For this to be possible the spiritual entity
\n\tin us must have developed its own integralised perfection not only of the
\n\tinner state of the being but of the outgoing power of the being and, with
\n\tthat perfection and as a necessity of its complete action, it must have
\n\tevolved its own dynamis and instrumentation of the outer existence.
\n\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThere can undoubtedly be a spiritual life within, a kingdom
\nof heaven within us which is not dependent on any outer manifestation or
\ninstrumentation or formula of external being. The inner life has a supreme
\nspiritual importance and the outer has a value only in so far as it is
\nexpressive of the inner status. However the man of spiritual realisation lives
\nand acts and behaves, in all ways of his being and acting, it is said in the
\nGita, "he lives and moves in Me"; he dwells in the Divine, he has realised the
\nspiritual existence. The spiritual man living in the sense of the spiritual
\nself, in the realisation of the Divine within him and everywhere, would be
\nliving inwardly a divine life and its reflection would fall on his outer acts of
\nexistence, even if they did not pass  \u2014 or did not seem to pass  \u2014
\nbeyond the ordinary instrumentation of human thought and action in this world of
\nearth-nature. This is the first truth and the essence of the matter; but still,
\nfrom the point of view of a spiritual evolution, this would be only an
\nindividual liberation and perfection in an unchanged environmental existence:
\nfor a greater dynamic change in earth-nature itself, a spiritual change of the
\nwhole principle and instrumentation of life and action, the appearance of a new
\norder of beings and a new earth-life must be envisaged in our idea of the total
\nconsummation, the divine issue.  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n
\nPage <\/font>\u2013 1055<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\n Here the gnostic change assumes a primary importance; all
\n\tthat precedes can be considered as an upbuilding and a preparation for this
\n\ttransmuting reversal of the whole nature. For it is a gnostic way of dynamic
\n\tliving that must be the fulfilled divine life on earth, a way of living that
\n\tdevelops higher instruments of world-knowledge and world-action for the
\n\tdynamisation of consciousness in the physical existence and takes up and
\n\ttransforms the values of a world of material Nature.
\n\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nBut always the whole foundation of the gnostic life must be
\nby its very nature inward and not outward. In the life of the spirit it is the
\nspirit, the inner Reality, that has built up and uses the mind, vital being and
\nbody as its instrumentation; thought, feeling and action do not exist for
\nthemselves, they are not an object, but the means; they serve to express the
\nmanifested divine Reality within us: otherwise, without this inwardness, this
\nspiritual origination, in a too externalised consciousness or by only external
\nmeans, no greater or divine life is possible. In our present life of Nature, in
\nour externalised surface existence, it is the world that seems to create us; but
\nin the turn to the spiritual life it is we who must create ourselves and our
\nworld. In this new formula of creation, the inner life becomes of the first
\nimportance and the rest can be only its expression and outcome. It is this,
\nindeed, that is indicated by our own strivings towards perfection, the
\nperfection of our own soul and mind and life and the perfection of the life of
\nthe race. For we are given a world which is obscure, ignorant, material,
\nimperfect, and our external conscious being is itself created by the energies,
\nthe pressure, the moulding operations of this vast mute obscurity, by physical
\nbirth, by environment, by a training through the impacts and shocks of life; and
\nyet we are vaguely aware of something that is there in us or seeking to be,
\nsomething other than what has been thus made, a spirit self-existent,
\nself-determining, pushing the nature towards the creation of an image of its own
\noccult perfection or Idea of perfection. There is something that grows in us in
\nanswer to this demand, that strives to become the image of a divine Somewhat,
\nand is impelled also to labour at the world outside that has been given to it
\nand to remake that too  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n
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\n

\n\tin a greater image, in the image of its own spiritual and
\n\tmental and vital growth, to make our world too something created according
\n\tto our own mind and self-conceiving spirit, something new, harmonious,
\n\tperfect.
\n\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n\tBut our mind is obscure, partial in its notions, misled
\n\tby opposite surface appearances, divided between various possibilities; it
\n\tis led in three different directions to any of which it may give an
\n\texclusive preference. Our mind, in its search for what must be, turns
\n\ttowards a concentration on our own inner spiritual growth and perfection, on
\n\tour own individual being and inner living; or it turns towards a
\n\tconcentration on an individual development of our surface nature, on the
\n\tperfection of our thought and outer dynamic or practical action on the
\n\tworld, on some idealism of our personal relation with the world around us;
\n\tor it turns rather towards a concentration on the outer world itself, on
\n\tmaking it better, more suited to our ideas and temperament or to our
\n\tconception of what should be. On one side there is the call of our spiritual
\n\tbeing which is our true self, a transcendent reality, a being of the Divine
\n\tBeing, not created by the world, able to live in itself, to rise out of
\n\tworld to transcendence; on the other side there is the demand of the world
\n\taround us which is a cosmic form, a formulation of the Divine Being, a power
\n\tof the Reality in disguise. There is too the divided or double demand of our
\n\tbeing of Nature which is poised between these two terms, depends on them and
\n\tconnects them; for it is apparently made by the world and yet, because its
\n\ttrue creator is in ourselves and the world instrumentation that seems to
\n\tmake it is only the means first used, it is really a form, a disguised
\n\tmanifestation of a greater spiritual being within us. It is this demand that
\n\tmediates between our preoccupation with an inward perfection or spiritual
\n\tliberation and our preoccupation with the outer world and its formation,
\n\tinsists on a happier relation between the two terms and creates the ideal of
\n\ta better individual in a better world. But it is within us that the Reality
\n\tmust be found and the source and foundation of a perfected life; no outward
\n\tformation can replace it: there must be the true self realised within if
\n\tthere is to be the true life realised in world and Nature.  
\n\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n
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\n

\n

\n\tIn the growth into a divine life the spirit must be our
\n\tfirst preoccupation; until we have revealed and evolved it in our self out
\n\tof its mental, vital, physical wrappings and disguises, extricated it with
\n\tpatience from our own body, as the Upanishad puts it, until we have built up
\n\tin ourselves an inner life of the spirit, it is obvious that no outer divine
\n\tliving can become possible. Unless, indeed, it is a mental or vital godhead
\n\tthat we perceive and would be,  \u2014 but even then the individual mental
\n\tbeing or the being of power and vital force and desire in us must grow into
\n\ta form of that godhead before our life can be divine in that inferior sense,
\n\tthe life of the infraspiritual superman, mental demi-god or vital Titan,
\n\tDeva or Asura. This inner life once created, to convert our whole surface
\n\tbeing, our thought, feeling, action in the world, into a perfect power of
\n\tthat inner life, must be our other preoccupation. Only if we live in that
\n\tdeeper and greater way in our dynamic parts, can there be a force for
\n\tcreating a greater life or the world be remade whether in some power or
\n\tperfection of Mind and Life or the power and perfection of the Spirit. A
\n\tperfected human world cannot be created by men or composed of men who are
\n\tthemselves imperfect. Even if all our actions are scrupulously regulated by
\n\teducation or law or social or political machinery, what will be achieved is
\n\ta regulated pattern of minds, a fabricated pattern of lives, a cultivated
\n\tpattern of conduct; but a conformity of this kind cannot change, cannot
\n\tre-create the man within, it cannot carve or cut out a perfect soul or a
\n\tperfect thinking man or a perfect or growing living being. For soul and mind
\n\tand life are powers of being and can grow but cannot be cut out or made; an
\n\touter process or formation can assist or can express soul and mind and life
\n\tbut cannot create or develop it. One can indeed help the being to grow, not
\n\tby an attempt at manufacture, but by throwing on it stimulating influences
\n\tor by lending to it one’s forces of soul or mind or life; but even so the
\n\tgrowth must still come from within it, determining from there what shall be
\n\tmade of these influences and forces, and not from outside. This is the first
\n\ttruth that our creative zeal and aspiration have to learn, otherwise all our
\n\thuman endeavour is foredoomed to turn in  
\n\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

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\n
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\n

\n\ta futile circle and can end only in a success that is a
\n\tspecious failure.
\n\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nTo be or become something, to bring something into being is
\nthe whole labour of the force of Nature; to know, feel, do are subordinate
\nenergies that have a value because they help the being in its partial
\nself-realisation to express what it is and help it too in its urge to express
\nthe still more not yet realised that it has to be. But knowledge, thought,
\naction,  \u2014 whether religious, ethical, political, social, economic,
\nutilitarian or hedonistic, whether a mental, vital or physical form or
\nconstruction of existence,  \u2014 cannot be the essence or object of life; they
\nare only activities of the powers of being or the powers of its becoming,
\ndynamic symbols of itself, creations of the embodied spirit, its means of
\ndiscovering or formulating what it seeks to be. The tendency of man’s physical
\nmind is to see otherwise and to turn the true method of things upside down,
\nbecause it takes as essential or fundamental the surface forces or appearances
\nof Nature; it accepts her creation by a visible or exterior process as the
\nessence of her action and does not see that it is only a secondary appearance
\nand covers a greater secret process: for Nature’s occult process is to reveal
\nthe being through the bringing out of its powers and forms, her external
\npressure is only a means of awakening the involved being to the need of this
\nevolution, of this self-formation. When the spiritual stage of her evolution is
\nreached, this occult process must become the whole process; to get through the
\nveil of forces and get at their secret mainspring, which is the spirit itself,
\nis of cardinal importance. To become ourselves is the one thing to be done; but
\nthe true ourself is that which is within us, and to exceed our outer self of
\nbody, life and mind is the condition for this highest being, which is our true
\nand divine being, to become self-revealed and active. It is only by growing
\nwithin and living within that we can find it; once that is done, to create from
\nthere the spiritual or divine mind, life, body and through this instrumentation
\nto arrive at the creation of a world which shall be the true environment of a
\ndivine living,  \u2014 this is the final object that Force of Nature has set
\nbefore us. This then is the first necessity, that the individual,  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

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\n
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\n

\n each individual, shall discover the spirit, the divine
\n\treality within him and express that in all his being and living. A divine
\n\tlife must be first and foremost an inner life; for since the outward must be
\n\tthe expression of what is within, there can be no divinity in the outer
\n\texistence if there is not the divinisation of the inner being. The Divinity
\n\tin man dwells veiled in his spiritual centre; there can be no such thing as
\n\tself-exceeding for man or a higher issue for his existence if there is not
\n\tin him the reality of an eternal self and spirit.
\n\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nTo be and to be fully is Nature’s aim in us; but to be fully
\nis to be wholly conscious of one’s being: unconsciousness, half consciousness or
\ndeficient consciousness is a state of being not in possession of itself; it is
\nexistence, but not fullness of being. To be aware wholly and integrally of
\noneself and of all the truth of one’s being is the necessary condition of true
\npossession of existence. This self-awareness is what is meant by spiritual
\nknowledge: the essence of spiritual knowledge is an intrinsic self-existent
\nconsciousness; all its action of knowledge, indeed all its action of any kind,
\nmust be that consciousness formulating itself. All other knowledge is
\nconsciousness oblivious of itself and striving to return to its own awareness of
\nitself and its contents; it is self-ignorance labouring to transform itself back
\ninto self-knowledge.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nBut also, since consciousness carries in itself the force of
\nexistence, to be fully is to have the intrinsic and integral force of one’s
\nbeing; it is to come into possession of all one’s force of self and of all its
\nuse. To be merely, without possessing the force of one’s being or with a
\nhalf-force or deficient force of it, is a mutilated or diminished existence; it
\nis to exist, but it is not fullness of being. It is possible, indeed, to exist
\nonly in status, with the force of being self-gathered and immobile in the self;
\nbut, even so, to be in dynamis as well as in status is the integrality of
\nexistence: power of self is the sign of the divinity of self,  \u2014 a
\npowerless spirit is no spirit. But, as the spiritual consciousness is intrinsic
\nand self-existent, so too this force of our spiritual being must be intrinsic,
\nautomatic in action, self existent and self-fulfilling. What instrumentality it
\nuses, must be  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

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\n
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\n

\n\tpart of itself; even any external instrumentality it uses
\n\tmust be made part of itself and expressive of its being. Force of being in
\n\tconscious action is will; and whatever is the conscious will of the spirit,
\n\tits will of being and becoming, that all the existence must be able
\n\tharmonically to fulfil. Whatever action or energy of action has not this
\n\tsovereignty or is not master of the machinery of action, carries in it by
\n\tthat defect the sign of an imperfection of the force of being, of a division
\n\tor disabling segmentation of the consciousness, of an incompleteness in the
\n\tmanifestation of the being.
\n\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nLastly, to be fully is to have the full delight of being.
\nBeing without delight of being, without an entire delight of itself and all
\nthings is something neutral or diminished; it is existence, but it is not
\nfullness of being. This delight too must be intrinsic, self existent, automatic;
\nit cannot be dependent on things outside itself: whatever it delights in, it
\nmakes part of itself, has the joy of it as part of its universality. All
\nundelight, all pain and suffering are a sign of imperfection, of incompleteness;
\nthey arise from a division of being, an incompleteness of consciousness of
\nbeing, an incompleteness of the force of being. To become complete in being, in
\nconsciousness of being, in force of being, in delight of being and to live in
\nthis integrated completeness is the divine living.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nBut, again, to be fully is to be universally. To be in the
\nlimitations of a small restricted ego is to exist, but it is an imperfect
\nexistence: in its very nature it is to live in an incomplete consciousness, an
\nincomplete force and delight of existence. It is to be less than oneself and it
\nbrings an inevitable subjection to ignorance, weakness and suffering: or even if
\nby some divine composition of the nature it could exclude these things, it would
\nbe to live in a limited scope of existence, a limited consciousness and power
\nand joy of existence. All being is one and to be fully is to be all that is. To
\nbe in the being of all and to include all in one’s being, to be conscious of the
\nconsciousness of all, to be integrated in force with the universal force, to
\ncarry all action and experience in oneself and feel it as one’s own action and
\nexperience, to feel all selves as one’s own self, to feel all delight  
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

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\n of being as one’s own delight of being is a necessary
\n\tcondition of the integral divine living.
\n\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nBut thus to be universally in the fullness and freedom of
\none’s universality, one must be also transcendentally. The spiritual fullness of
\nthe being is eternity; if one has not the consciousness of timeless eternal
\nbeing, if one is dependent on body or embodied mind or embodied life, or
\ndependent on this world or that world or on this condition of being or that
\ncondition of being, that is not the reality of self, not the fullness of our
\nspiritual existence. To live only as a self of body or be only by the body is to
\nbe an ephemeral creature, subject to death and desire and pain and suffering and
\ndecay and decadence. To transcend, to exceed consciousness of body, not to be
\nheld in the body or by the body, to hold the body only as an instrument, a minor
\noutward formation of self, is a first condition of divine living. Not to be a
\nmind subject to ignorance and restriction of consciousness, to transcend mind
\nand handle it as an instrument, to control it as a surface formation of self, is
\na second condition. To be by the self and spirit, not to depend upon life, not
\nto be identified with it, to transcend it and control and use it as an
\nexpression and instrumentation of the self, is a third condition. Even the
\nbodily life does not possess its own full being in its own kind if the
\nconsciousness does not exceed the body and feel its physical oneness with all
\nmaterial existence; the vital life does not possess its own full living in its
\nown kind if the consciousness does not exceed the restricted play of an
\nindividual vitality and feel the universal life as its own and its oneness with
\nall life. The mentality is not a full conscious existence or activity in its own
\nkind if one does not exceed the individual mental limits and feel a oneness with
\nuniversal Mind and with all minds and enjoy one’s integrality of consciousness
\nfulfilled in their wealth of difference. But one must transcend not only the
\nindividual formula but the formula of the universe, for only so can either the
\nindividual or the universal existence find its own true being and a perfect
\nharmonisation; both are in their outer formulation incomplete terms of the
\nTranscendence, but they are that in their essence, and it is only by becoming
\nconscious of that essence that  
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\n\tindividual consciousness or universal consciousness can
\n\tcome to its own fullness and freedom of reality. Otherwise the individual
\n\tmay remain subject to the cosmic movement and its reactions and limitations
\n\tand miss his entire spiritual freedom. He must enter into the supreme divine
\n\tReality, feel his oneness with it, live in it, be its self-creation: all his
\n\tmind, life, physicality must be converted into terms of its supernature; all
\n\this thought, feelings, actions must be determined by it and be it, its
\n\tself-formation. All this can become complete in him only when he has evolved
\n\tout of the Ignorance into the Knowledge and through the Knowledge into the
\n\tsupreme Consciousness and its dynamis and supreme delight of existence; but
\n\tsome essentiality of these things and their sufficient instrumentation can
\n\tcome with the first spiritual change and culminate in the life of the
\n\tgnostic supernature.
\n\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThese things are impossible without an inward living; they
\ncannot be reached by remaining in an external consciousness turned always
\noutwards, active only or mainly on and from the surface. The individual being
\nhas to find himself, his true existence; he can only do this by going inward, by
\nliving within and from within: for the external or outer consciousness or life
\nseparated from the inner spirit is the field of the Ignorance; it can only
\nexceed itself and exceed the Ignorance by opening into the largeness of an inner
\nself and life. If there is a being of the transcendence in us, it must be there
\nin our secret self; on the surface there is only an ephemeral being of nature,
\nmade by limit and circumstance. If there is a self in us capable of largeness
\nand universality, able to enter into a cosmic consciousness, that too must be
\nwithin our inner being; the outer consciousness is a physical consciousness
\nbound to its individual limits by the triple cord of mind, life and body: any
\nexternal attempt at universality can only result either in an aggrandisement of
\nthe ego or an effacement of the personality by its extinction in the mass or
\nsubjugation to the mass. It is only by an inner growth, movement, action that
\nthe individual can freely and effectively universalise and transcendentalise his
\nbeing. There must be for the divine living a transference of the centre and
\nimmediate source of dynamic effectuation of the being from out inward;  
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\n for there the soul is seated, but it is veiled or half
\n\tveiled and our immediate being and source of action is for the present on
\n\tthe surface. In men, says the Upanishad, the Self-Existent has cut the doors
\n\tof consciousness outward, but a few turn the eye inward and it is these who
\n\tsee and know the Spirit and develop the spiritual being. Thus to look into
\n\tourselves and see and enter into ourselves and live within is the first
\n\tnecessity for transformation of nature and for the divine life.
\n\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThis movement of going inward and living inward is a
\ndifficult task to lay upon the normal consciousness of the human being; yet
\nthere is no other way of self-finding. The materialistic thinker, erecting an
\nopposition between the extrovert and the introvert, holds up the extrovert
\nattitude for acceptance as the only safety: to go inward is to enter into
\ndarkness or emptiness or to lose the balance of the consciousness and become
\nmorbid; it is from outside that such inner life as one can construct is created,
\nand its health is assured only by a strict reliance on its wholesome and
\nnourishing outer sources,  \u2014 the balance of the personal mind and life can
\nonly be secured by a firm support on external reality, for the material world is
\nthe sole fundamental reality. This may be true for the physical man, the born
\nextrovert, who feels himself to be a creature of outward Nature; made by her and
\ndependent on her, he would lose himself if he went inward: for him there is no
\ninner being, no inner living. But the introvert of this distinction also has not
\nthe inner life; he is not a seer of the true inner self and of inner things, but
\nthe small mental man who looks superficially inside himself and sees there not
\nhis spiritual self but his life-ego, his mind-ego and becomes unhealthily
\npreoccupied with the movements of this little pitiful dwarf creature. The idea
\nor experience of an inner darkness when looking inwards is the first reaction of
\na mentality which has lived always on the surface and has no realised inner
\nexistence; it has only a constructed internal experience which depends on the
\noutside world for the materials of its being. But to those into whose
\ncomposition there has entered the power of a more inner living, the movement of
\ngoing within and living within brings not a darkness or dull emptiness but an
\n <\/span><\/p>\n

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\n\tenlargement, a rush of new experience, a greater vision,
\n\ta larger capacity, an extended life infinitely more real and various than
\n\tthe first pettiness of the life constructed for itself by our normal
\n\tphysical humanity, a joy of being which is larger and richer than any
\n\tdelight in existence that the outer vital man or the surface mental man can
\n\tgain by their dynamic vital force and activity or subtlety and expansion of
\n\tthe mental existence. A silence, an entry into a wide or even immense or
\n\tinfinite emptiness is part of the inner spiritual experience; of this
\n\tsilence and void the physical mind has a certain fear, the small
\n\tsuperficially active thinking or vital mind a shrinking from it or dislike, 
\n\t\u2014 for it confuses the silence with mental and vital incapacity and the void
\n\twith cessation or non-existence: but this silence is the silence of the
\n\tspirit which is the condition of a greater knowledge, power and bliss, and
\n\tthis emptiness is the emptying of the cup of our natural being, a liberation
\n\tof it from its turbid contents so that it may be filled with the wine of
\n\tGod; it is the passage not into non-existence but to a greater existence.
\n\tEven when the being turns towards cessation, it is a cessation not in
\n\tnon-existence but into some vast ineffable of spiritual being or the plunge
\n\tinto the incommunicable superconscience of the Absolute. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nIn fact, this inward turning and movement is not an
\nimprisonment in personal self, it is the first step towards a true universality;
\nit brings to us the truth of our external as well as the truth of our internal
\nexistence. For this inner living can extend itself and embrace the universal
\nlife, it can contact, penetrate, englobe the life of all with a much greater
\nreality and dynamic force than is in our surface consciousness at all possible.
\nOur utmost universalisation on the surface is a poor and limping endeavour, 
\n\u2014 it is a construction, a make-believe and not the real thing: for in our
\nsurface consciousness we are bound to separation of consciousness from others
\nand wear the fetters of the ego. There our very selflessness becomes more often
\nthan not a subtle form of selfishness or turns into a larger affirmation of our
\nego; content with our pose of altruism, we do not see that it is a veil for the
\nimposition of our individual self, our ideas, our mental and vital personality,
\nour need of ego-enlargement  
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\n upon the others whom we take up into our expanded orbit. So
\n\tfar as we really succeed in living for others, it is done by an inner
\n\tspiritual force of love and sympathy; but the power and field of
\n\teffectuality of this force in us are small, the psychic movement that
\n\tprompts it is incomplete, its action often ignorant because there is contact
\n\tof mind and heart but our being does not embrace the being of others as
\n\tourselves. An external unity with others must always be an outward joining
\n\tand association of external lives with a minor inner result; the mind and
\n\theart attach their movements to this common life and the beings whom we meet
\n\tthere; but the common external life remains the foundation,  \u2014 the
\n\tinward constructed unity, or so much of it as can persist in spite of mutual
\n\tignorance and discordant egoisms, conflict of minds, conflict of hearts,
\n\tconflict of vital temperaments, conflict of interests, is a partial and
\n\tinsecure superstructure. The spiritual consciousness, the spiritual life
\n\treverses this principle of building; it bases its action in the collective
\n\tlife upon an inner experience and inclusion of others in our own being, an
\n\tinner sense and reality of oneness. The spiritual individual acts out of
\n\tthat sense of oneness which gives him immediate and direct perception of the
\n\tdemand of self on other self, the need of the life, the good, the work of
\n\tlove and sympathy that can truly be done. A realisation of spiritual unity,
\n\ta dynamisation of the intimate consciousness of one-being, of one self in
\n\tall beings, can alone found and govern by its truth the action of the divine
\n\tlife.
\n\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nIn the gnostic or divine being, in the gnostic life, there
\nwill be a close and complete consciousness of the self of others, a
\nconsciousness of their mind, life, physical being which are felt as if they were
\none’s own. The gnostic being will act, not out of a surface sentiment of love
\nand sympathy or any similar feeling, but out of this close mutual consciousness,
\nthis intimate oneness. All his action in the world will be enlightened by a
\ntruth of vision of what has to be done, a sense of the will of the Divine
\nReality in him which is also the Divine Reality in others, and it will be done
\nfor the Divine in others and the Divine in all, for the effectuation of the
\ntruth of purpose of the All as seen  
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\n\tin the light of the highest Consciousness and in the way
\n\tand by the steps through which it must be effectuated in the power of the
\n\tSupernature. The gnostic being finds himself not only in his own fulfilment,
\n\twhich is the fulfilment of the Divine Being and Will in him, but in the
\n\tfulfilment of others; his universal individuality effectuates itself in the
\n\tmovement of the All in all beings towards its greater becoming. He sees a
\n\tdivine working everywhere; what goes out from him into the sum of that
\n\tdivine working, from the inner Light, Will, Force that works in him, is his
\n\taction. There is no separative ego in him to initiate anything; it is the
\n\tTranscendent and Universal that moves out through his universalised
\n\tindividuality into the action of the universe. As he does not live for a
\n\tseparate ego, so too he does not live for the purpose of any collective ego;
\n\the lives in and for the Divine in himself, in and for the Divine in the
\n\tcollectivity, in and for the Divine in all beings. This universality in
\n\taction, organised by the all-seeing Will in the sense of the realised
\n\toneness of all, is the law of his divine living.
\n\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nIt is, then, this spiritual fulfilment of the urge to
\nindividual perfection and an inner completeness of being that we mean first when
\nwe speak of a divine life. It is the first essential condition of a perfected
\nlife on earth, and we are therefore right in making the utmost possible
\nindividual perfection our first supreme business. The perfection of the
\nspiritual and pragmatic relation of the individual with all around him is our
\nsecond preoccupation; the solution of this second desideratum lies in a complete
\nuniversality and oneness with all life upon earth which is the other concomitant
\nresult of an evolution into the gnostic consciousness and nature. But there
\nstill remains the third desideratum, a new world, a change in the total life of
\nhumanity or, at the least, a new perfected collective life in the earth-nature.
\nThis calls for the appearance not only of isolated evolved individuals acting in
\nthe unevolved mass, but of many gnostic individuals forming a new kind of beings
\nand a new common life superior to the present individual and common existence. A
\ncollective life of this kind must obviously constitute itself on the same
\nprinciple as the life of the gnostic individual. In our present human  
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\n existence there is a physical collectivity held together by
\n\tthe common physical life-fact and all that arises from it, community of
\n\tinterests, a common civilisation and culture, a common social law, an
\n\taggregate mentality, an economic association, the ideals, emotions,
\n\tendeavours of the collective ego with the strand of individual ties and
\n\tconnections running through the whole and helping to keep it together. Or,
\n\twhere there is a difference in these things, opposition, conflict, a
\n\tpractical accommodation or an organised compromise is enforced by the
\n\tnecessity of living together; there is erected a natural or a constructed
\n\torder. This would not be the gnostic divine way of collective living; for
\n\tthere what would bind and hold all together would be, not the fact of life
\n\tcreating a sufficiently united social consciousness, but a common
\n\tconsciousness consolidating a common life. All will be united by the
\n\tevolution of the Truth-consciousness in them; in the changed way of being
\n\twhich this consciousness would bring about in them, they will feel
\n\tthemselves to be embodiments of a single self, souls of a single Reality;
\n\tillumined and motived by a fundamental unity of knowledge, actuated by a
\n\tfundamental unified will and feeling, a life expressing the spiritual Truth
\n\twould find through them its own natural forms of becoming. An order there
\n\twould be, for truth of oneness creates its own order: a law or laws of
\n\tliving there might be, but these would be self-determined; they would be an
\n\texpression of the truth of a spiritually united being and the truth of a
\n\tspiritually united life. The whole formation of the common existence would
\n\tbe a self-building of the spiritual forces that must work themselves out
\n\tspontaneously in such a life: these forces would be received inwardly by the
\n\tinner being and expressed or self-expressed in a native harmony of idea and
\n\taction and purpose.
\n\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nAn increasing mechanisation, a standardisation, a fixing of
\nall into a common mould in order to ensure harmony is the mental method, but
\nthat would not be the law of this living. There would be a considerable free
\ndiversity between different gnostic communities; each would create its own body
\nof the life of the spirit: there would be, too, a considerable free diversity in
\nthe self-expression of the individuals of a single community. But  
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\n\tthis free diversity would not be a chaos or create any
\n\tdiscord; for a diversity of one Truth of knowledge and one Truth of life
\n\twould be a correlation and not an opposition. In a gnostic consciousness
\n\tthere would be no ego-insistence on personal idea and no push or clamour of
\n\tpersonal will and interest: there would be instead the unifying sense of a
\n\tcommon Truth in many forms, a common self in many consciousnesses and
\n\tbodies; there would be a universality and plasticity which saw and expressed
\n\tthe One in many figures of itself and worked out oneness in all diversities
\n\tas the inherent law of the Truth-consciousness and its truth of nature. A
\n\tsingle Consciousness-Force, of which all would be aware and see themselves
\n\tas its instruments, would act through all and harmonise their action
\n\ttogether. The gnostic being would feel a single consonant Force of
\n\tsupernature acting in all: he would accept its formation in himself and obey
\n\tor use the knowledge and power it gave him for the divine work, but he would
\n\tbe under no urge or compulsion to set the power and knowledge in him against
\n\tthe power and knowledge of others or affirm himself as an ego striving
\n\tagainst other egos. For the spiritual self has its own inalienable joy and
\n\tplenitude inviolable in all conditions, its own infinity of truth of being:
\n\tthat it feels always in fullness whatever may be the outward formulation.
\n\tThe truth of the spirit within would not depend on a particular formation;
\n\tit would have no need, therefore, to struggle for any particular outward
\n\tformulation and self-affirmation: forms would arise of themselves
\n\tplastically, in suitable relation to other formulations and each in its own
\n\tplace in the whole formulation. Truth of gnostic consciousness and being
\n\testablishing itself can find its harmony with all other truth of being
\n\taround it. A spiritual or gnostic being would feel his harmony with the
\n\twhole gnostic life around him, whatever his position in the whole. According
\n\tto his place in it he would know how to lead or to rule, but also how to
\n\tsubordinate himself; both would be to him an equal delight: for the spirit’s
\n\tfreedom, because it is eternal, self-existent and inalienable, can be felt
\n\tas much in service and willing subordination and adjustment with other
\n\tselves as in power and rule. An inner spiritual freedom can accept its  
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\n place in the truth of an inner spiritual hierarchy as well
\n\tas in the truth, not incompatible with it, of a fundamental spiritual
\n\tequality. It is this self-arrangement of Truth, a natural order of the
\n\tspirit, that would exist in a common life of different degrees and stages of
\n\tthe evolving gnostic being. Unity is the basis of the gnostic consciousness,
\n\tmutuality the natural result of its direct awareness of oneness in
\n\tdiversity, harmony the inevitable power of the working of its force. Unity,
\n\tmutuality and harmony must therefore be the inescapable law of a common or
\n\tcollective gnostic life. What forms it might take would depend upon the will
\n\tof evolutionary manifestation of the Supernature, but this would be its
\n\tgeneral character and principle.
\n\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThis is the whole sense and the inherent law and necessity of
\nthe passage from the purely mental and material being and life to the spiritual
\nand supramental being and life, that the liberation, perfection, self-fulfilment
\nfor which the being in the Ignorance is seeking can only be reached by passing
\nout of his present nature of Ignorance into a nature of spiritual self-knowledge
\nand world knowledge. This greater nature we speak of as Supernature because it
\nis beyond his actual level of consciousness and capacity; but in fact it is his
\nown true nature, the height and completeness of it, to which he must arrive if
\nhe is to find his real self and whole possibility of being. Whatever happens in
\nNature must be the result of Nature, the effectuation of what is implied or
\ninherent in it, its inevitable fruit and consequence. If our nature is a
\nfundamental Inconscience and Ignorance arriving with difficulty at an imperfect
\nknowledge, an imperfect formulation of consciousness and being, the results in
\nour being, life and action and creation must be, as they now are, a constant
\nimperfection and insecure half result, an imperfect mentality, an imperfect
\nlife, an imperfect physical existence. We seek to construct systems of knowledge
\nand systems of life by which we can arrive at some perfection of our existence,
\nsome order of right relations, right use of mind, right use and happiness and
\nbeauty of life, right use of the body. But what we achieve is a constructed
\nhalf-rightness mixed with much that is wrong and unlovely and unhappy; our
\nsuccessive constructions, because of the vice in them and because  
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\n\tmind and life cannot rest permanently anywhere in their
\n\tseeking, are exposed to destruction, decadence, disruption of their order,
\n\tand we pass from them to others which are not more finally successful or
\n\tenduring, even if on one side or another they may be richer and fuller or
\n\tmore rationally plausible. It cannot be otherwise, because we can construct
\n\tnothing which goes beyond our nature; imperfect, we cannot construct
\n\tperfection, however wonderful may seem to us the machinery our mental
\n\tingenuity invents, however externally effective. Ignorant, we cannot
\n\tconstruct a system of entirely true and fruitful self-knowledge or
\n\tworld-knowledge: our science itself is a construction, a mass, of formulas
\n\tand devices; masterful in knowledge of processes and in the creation of apt
\n\tmachinery, but ignorant of the foundations of our being and of world-being,
\n\tit cannot perfect our nature and therefore cannot perfect our life.
\n\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nOur nature, our consciousness is that of beings ignorant of
\neach other, separated from each other, rooted in a divided ego, who must strive
\nto establish some kind of relation between their embodied ignorances; for the
\nurge to union and forces making for union are there in Nature. Individual and
\ngroup harmonies of a comparative and qualified completeness are created, a
\nsocial cohesion is accomplished; but in the mass the relations formed are
\nconstantly marred by imperfect sympathy, imperfect understanding, gross
\nmisunderstandings, strife, discord, unhappiness. It cannot be otherwise so long
\nas there is no true union of consciousness founded upon a nature of
\nself-knowledge, inner mutual knowledge, inner realisation of unity, concord of
\nour inner forces of being and inner forces of life. In our social building we
\nlabour to establish some approach to unity, mutuality, harmony, because without
\nthese things there can be no perfect social living; but what we build is a
\nconstructed unity, an association of interests and egos enforced by law and
\ncustom and imposing an artificial constructed order in which the interests of
\nsome prevail over the interests of others and only a half accepted half
\nenforced, half natural half artificial accommodation keeps the social whole in
\nbeing. Between community and community there is a still worse accommodation with
\na constant recurrence  
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\n of the strife of collective ego with collective ego. This
\n\tis the best that we can do and all our persistent readjustments of the
\n\tsocial order can bring us nothing better than an imperfect structure of
\n\tlife.
\n\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nIt is only if our nature develops beyond itself, if it
\nbecomes a nature of self-knowledge, mutual understanding, unity, a nature of
\ntrue being and true life that the result can be a perfection of ourselves and
\nour existence, a life of true being, a life of unity, mutuality, harmony, a life
\nof true happiness, a harmonious and beautiful life. If our nature is fixed in
\nwhat it is, what it has already become, then no perfection, no real and enduring
\nhappiness is possible in earthly life; we must seek it not at all and do the
\nbest we can with our imperfections, or we must seek it elsewhere, in a
\nsupraterrestrial hereafter, or we must go beyond all such seeking and transcend
\nlife by an extinction of nature and ego in some Absolute from which this strange
\nand unsatisfactory being of ours has come into existence. But if in us there is
\na spiritual being which is emerging and our present state is only an
\nimperfection of half-emergence, if the Inconscient is a starting-point
\ncontaining in itself the potency of a superconscience and supernature which has
\nto evolve, a veil of apparent Nescience in which that greater consciousness is
\nconcealed and from which it has to unfold itself, if an evolution of being is
\nthe law, then what we are seeking for is not only possible but part of the
\neventual necessity of things. It is our spiritual destiny to manifest and become
\nthat supernature,  \u2014 for it is the nature of our true self, our still
\noccult, because unevolved, whole being. A nature of unity will then bring
\ninevitably its life-result of unity, mutuality, harmony. An inner life awakened
\nto a full consciousness and to a full power of consciousness will bear its
\ninevitable fruit in all who have it, self-knowledge, a perfected existence, the
\njoy of a satisfied being, the happiness of a fulfilled nature.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n\tAn innate character of the gnostic consciousness and the
\n\tinstrumentation of supernature is a wholeness of sight and action, a unity
\n\tof knowledge with knowledge, a reconciliation of all that seems contrary in
\n\tour mental seeing and knowing, an identity of Knowledge and Will acting as a
\n\tsingle power in  
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\n\tperfect unison with the truth of things; this inborn
\n\tcharacter of supernature is the foundation of the perfect unity, mutuality,
\n\tharmony of its action. In the mental being there is a discord of its
\n\tconstructed knowledge with the real or the whole truth of things, so that
\n\teven what is true in it is often or is eventually ineffective or only
\n\tpartially effective. Our discoveries of truth are overthrown, our passionate
\n\teffectuations of truth are frustrated; often the result of our action
\n\tbecomes part of a scheme we did not intend for a purpose whose legitimacy we
\n\twould not acknowledge, or the truth of the idea is deceived by the actual
\n\toutcome of its pragmatic success. Even if there is a successful realisation
\n\tof the idea, yet because the idea is incomplete, an isolated construction of
\n\tthe mind separate from the one and whole truth of things, its success must
\n\tsooner or later end in disillusionment and a new endeavour. The discordance
\n\tof our seeing and our notions with the true truth and the whole truth of
\n\tthings, the partiality and superficiality of our mind’s deceptive
\n\tconstructions, is the cause of our frustration. But there is also not only a
\n\tdiscord of knowledge with knowledge but of will with will and of knowledge
\n\twith will in the same being, a division and disharmony between them, so that
\n\twhere the knowledge is ripe or sufficient, some will in the being opposes it
\n\tor the will fails it; where the will is powerful, vehement or firmly or
\n\tforcefully effective, knowledge guiding it to its right use is lacking. All
\n\tkinds of disparity and maladjustment and incompleteness of our knowledge,
\n\twill, capacity, executive force and dealing intervene constantly in our
\n\taction, our working out of life, and are an abundant source of imperfection
\n\tor ineffectivity. These disorders, defects and disharmonies are normal to a
\n\tstatus and energy of Ignorance and can only be dissolved by a greater light
\n\tthan that of mind nature or life nature. An identity and authenticity and a
\n\tharmony of truth with truth are the native character of all gnostic seeing
\n\tand action; as the mind grows into the gnosis, our mental seeing and action
\n\tlifted into the gnostic light or visited and ruled by it would begin to
\n\tpartake of this character and, even if still restricted and within limits,
\n\tmust become much more perfect and within these limits effective: the  
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\n causes of our incapacity and frustration would begin to
\n\tdiminish and disappear. But also the larger existence will invade the mind
\n\twith the potencies of a greater consciousness and a greater force, a
\n\tbringing out of new powers of the being. Knowledge is power and act of
\n\tconsciousness, Will is conscious power and conscious act of force of being;
\n\tboth in the gnostic being will reach greater magnitudes than any we now
\n\tknow, a higher degree of themselves, a richer instrumentation: for wherever
\n\tthere is an increase of consciousness, there is an increase of the potential
\n\tforce and the actual power of the existence.
\n\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n\tIn the terrestrial formulation of Knowledge and Power,
\n\tthis correlation is not altogether apparent because there consciousness
\n\titself is concealed in an original Inconscience and the natural strength and
\n\trhythm of its powers in their emergence are diminished and disturbed by the
\n\tdiscordances and the veils of the Ignorance. The Inconscient there is the
\n\toriginal, potent and automatically effective Force, the conscious mind is
\n\tonly a small labouring agent; but that is because the conscious mind in us
\n\thas a limited individual action and the Inconscient is an immense action of
\n\ta universal concealed Consciousness: the cosmic Force, masked as a material
\n\tEnergy, hides from our view by its insistent materiality of process the
\n\toccult fact that the working of the Inconscient is really the expression of
\n\ta vast universal Life, a veiled universal Mind, a hooded Gnosis, and without
\n\tthese origins of itself it could have no power of action, no organising
\n\tcoherence. Life-Force also in the material world seems to be more dynamic
\n\tand effective than Mind; our Mind is free and fully powerful in idea and
\n\tcognition only: its force of action, its power of effectuation outside this
\n\tmental field is obliged to work with life and matter as instruments and,
\n\tunder the conditions imposed on it by life and matter, our mind is hampered
\n\tand half effective. But even so we see that Nature-force in the mental being
\n\tis much more powerful to deal with himself and with life and matter than
\n\tNature-force in the animal; it is the greater force of consciousness and
\n\tknowledge, the greater emerged force of being and will that constitute this
\n\tsuperiority. In human life itself the vital man seems to have a stronger
\n\tdynamis of action than  
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\n\tthe mental man because of his superiority in kinetic life-force: the intellectual tends to be effective in thought but ineffective in power over the world, while the kinetic vital man of action dominates life. But it is his use of mind that enables him to arrive at a full exploitation of this superiority, and in the end the mental man by his power of knowledge, his science, is able to extend the mastery of existence far beyond what life in matter could accomplish by its own agencies or what the vital man could accomplish with his life-force and life-instinct without that increase of effective knowledge. An immensely greater power over existence and over Nature must come when a still greater consciousness emerges and replaces the hampered operations of the mental Energy in our too individualised and restricted force of existence.
\n\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nA certain fundamental subjection of mind to life and matter and an acceptance of this subjection, an inability to make the law of Mind directly dominant and modify by its powers the blinder law and operations of these inferior forces of being, remains even in the midst of our greatest mental mastery over self and things; but this limitation is not insuperable. It is the interest of occult knowledge that it shows us 
\n\u2014 and a dynamic force of spiritual knowledge brings us the same evidence  \u2014 that this subjection of Mind to Matter, of the spirit to a lesser law of life is not what it at first appears to be, a fundamental condition of things, an inviolable and unalterable rule of Nature. The greatest, most momentous natural discovery that man can make is this that mind, and still more the force of the spirit, can in many tried and yet untried ways and in all directions  \u2014 by its own nature and direct power and not only by devices and contrivances such as the superior material instrumentation discovered by physical Science  \u2014 overcome and control life and matter. In the evolution of the gnostic supernature this direct power of consciousness, this direct action of the force of the being, its free mastery and control of life and matter, would be consummated and reach their acme. For the greater knowledge of the gnostic being would not be in the main an outwardly acquired or learned knowledge, but the result of an evolution of consciousness and  
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\n of the force of consciousness, a new dynamisation of the being. As a consequence, he would awake to and possess many things, a clear and complete knowledge of self, a direct knowledge of others, a direct knowledge of hidden forces, a direct knowledge of the occult mechanism of mind and life and matter, which are beyond our present attainment. This new knowledge and action of knowledge would be based on an immediate intuitive consciousness of things and an immediate intuitive control of things; an operative insight, now supernormal to us, would be the normal functioning of this consciousness, and an integral assured effectivity both in the mass of action and in its detail would be the outcome of the change. For the gnostic being would be in unison and communion with the
\n\tConsciousness-Force that is at the root of everything: his vision and his will would be the channel of the supramental Real-Idea, the
\n\tself-effective Truth-Force; his action would be a free manifestation of the power and workings of the root Force of existence, the force of an all-determining conscious spirit whose formulations of consciousness work out inevitably in mind, life and matter. Acting in the light and power of the supramental knowledge, the evolving gnostic being would be more and more master of himself, master of the forces of consciousness, master of the energies of Nature, master of his instrumentation of life and matter. In the lesser status, the intermediate stages or formations of the evolving gnostic nature this power would not be present in its fullness: but in some degree of its activities it would be there; incipient and increasing with the ascent of the scale, it would be a natural concomitant of the growth of consciousness and knowledge.
\n\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nA new power and powers of consciousness would be, then, an inevitable consequence of an evolution of
\nConsciousness-Force passing beyond mind to a superior cognitive and dynamic principle. In their essential nature these new powers must have the character of a control of mind over life and matter, of the conscious life-will and life-force over matter, of the spirit over mind, life and matter; they would have the character also of a breaking down of the barriers between soul and soul, mind and  
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\n\tmind, life and life: such a change would be indispensable for the instrumentation of the gnostic life. For a total gnostic or divine
\n\tliving would include not only the individual life of the being but the life
\n\tof others made one with the individual in a common uniting consciousness. Such a life must have for its main constituting power a spontaneous and innate, not a constructed, unity and harmony; this can only come by a greater identity of being and consciousness between individual and individual unified in their spiritual substance, feeling themselves to be self and self of one self-existence, acting in a greater unitarian force of knowledge, a greater power of the being. There must be an inner and direct mutual knowledge based upon a consciousness of oneness and identity, a consciousness of each other’s being, thought, feeling, inner and outer movements, a conscious communication of mind with mind, of heart with heart, a conscious impact of life upon life, a conscious interchange of forces of being with forces of being; in any absence or deficiency of these powers and their intimate light there could not be a real or complete unity or a real and complete natural fitting of each individual’s being, thought, feeling, inner and outer movements with those of the individuals around him. A growing basis and structure of conscious unanimism, we might say, would be the character of this more evolved life.
\n\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nHarmony is the natural rule of the spirit, it is the inherent law and spontaneous consequence of unity in multiplicity, of unity in diversity, of a various manifestation of oneness. In a pure
\n\tand blank unity there could be indeed no place for harmony, for there is
\n\tnothing to harmonise; in a complete or a governing diversity there must be either discord or a fitting together of differences, a constructed harmony. But in a gnostic unity
\n\tin multiplicity the harmony would be there as a spontaneous expression of
\n\tthe unity, and this spontaneous expression presupposes a mutuality of consciousness aware of other consciousness by a direct inner contact and interchange. In infrarational life harmony is secured by an instinctive oneness of nature and oneness of the action of the nature, an instinctive communication, an instinctive or direct vital-intuitional sense-understanding by  
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\n which the individuals of an animal or insect community are able to co-operate. In human life this is replaced by understanding through sense-knowledge and mental perception and communication of ideas by speech, but the means that have to be used are imperfect and the harmony and co-operation incomplete. In a gnostic life, a life of superreason and supernature, a self-aware spiritual unity of being and a spiritual conscious community and interchange of nature would be the deep and ample root of understanding: this greater life would have evolved new and superior means and powers of uniting consciousness inwardly with consciousness; intimacy of consciousness communicating inwardly and directly with consciousness, thought with thought, vision with vision, sense with sense, life with life, body-awareness with body-awareness, would be its natural basic instrumentation. All these new powers taking up the old outward instruments and using them as a subordinate means with a far greater power and to more purpose would be put to the service of the self-expression of the spirit in a profound oneness of being and life.
\n\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nAn evolution of innate and latent but as yet unevolved powers of consciousness is not considered admissible by the modern mind, because these exceed our present formulation of Nature and, to our ignorant preconceptions founded on a limited experience, they seem to belong to the supernatural, to the miraculous and occult; for they surpass the known action of material Energy which is now ordinarily accepted as the sole cause and mode of things and the sole instrumentation of the World-Force. A human working of marvels, by the conscious being discovering and developing an instrumentation of material forces overpassing anything that Nature has herself organised, is accepted as a natural fact and an almost unlimited prospect of our existence; an awakening, a discovery, an instrumentation of powers of consciousness and of spiritual, mental and life forces overpassing anything that Nature or man has yet organised is not admitted as possible. But there would be nothing supernatural or miraculous in such an evolution, except in so far as it would be a supernature or superior nature to ours just as human  
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\n\tnature is a supernature or superior nature to that of animal or plant or material objects. Our mind and its powers, our use of reason, our mental intuition and insight, speech, possibilities of philosophical, scientific, aesthetic discovery of the truths and potencies of being and a control of its forces are an evolution that has taken place: yet it would seem impossible if we took our stand on the limited animal consciousness and its capacities; for there is nothing there to warrant so prodigious a progression. But still there are vague initial manifestations, rudimentary elements or arrested possibilities in the animal to which our reason and intelligence with their extraordinary developments stand as an unimaginable journey from a poor and unpromising point
\n\tof departure. The rudiments of spiritual powers belonging to the gnostic
\n\tsupernature are similarly there even in our ordinary composition, but only occasionally and sparsely active. It is not irrational to suppose that at this much higher stage of the evolution a similar but greater progression starting from these rudimentary beginnings might lead to another immense development and departure.
\n\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nIn mystic experience,  \u2014 when there is an opening of the inner centres, or in other ways, spontaneously or by will or endeavour or in the very course of the spiritual growth,  \u2014 new powers of consciousness have been known to develop; they present themselves as if an automatic consequence of some inner opening or in answer to a call in the being, so much so that it has been found necessary to recommend to the seeker not to hunt after these powers, not to accept or use them. This rejection is logical for those who seek to withdraw from life; for all acceptance of greater power would bind to life or be a burden on the bare and pure urge towards liberation. An indifference to all other aims and issues is natural for the
\nGod-lover who seeks God for His own sake and not for power or any other inferior attraction; the pursuit of these alluring but often dangerous forces would be a deviation from his purpose. A similar rejection is a necessary self-restraint and a spiritual discipline for the immature seeker, since such powers may be a great, even a deadly peril; for their supernormality may easily  
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\n feed in him an abnormal exaggeration of the ego. Power in itself may be dreaded as a temptation by the aspirant to perfection, because power can abase as well as elevate; nothing is more liable to misuse. But when new capacities come as an inevitable result of the growth into a greater consciousness and a greater life and that growth is part of the very aim of the spiritual being within us, this bar does not operate; for a growth of the being into supernature and its life in supernature cannot take place or cannot be complete without bringing with it a greater power of consciousness and a greater power of life and the spontaneous development of an instrumentation of knowledge and force normal to that supernature. There is nothing in this future evolution of the being which could be regarded as irrational or incredible; there is nothing in it abnormal or miraculous: it would be the necessary course of the evolution of consciousness and its forces in the passage from the mental to the gnostic or supramental formulation of our existence. This action of the forces of supernature would be a natural, normal and spontaneously simple working of the new higher or greater consciousness into which the being enters in the course of his self-evolution; the gnostic being accepting the gnostic life would develop and use the powers of this greater consciousness, even as man develops and uses the powers of his mental nature.
\n\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nIt is evident that such an increase of the power or powers of consciousness would be not only normal but indispensable to a greater and more perfect life. Human life with its partial harmony, in so far as that is not maintained by the imposition of a settled law and order on the constituent individuals through
\n\ta partly willing, partly induced, partly forced or unavoidable acceptance,
\n\treposes on the agreement of the enlightened or interested elements in their mind, heart, life-sense, an assent to a composite body of common ideas, desires, vital satisfactions, aims of existence. But there is in the mass of constituting individuals an imperfect understanding and knowledge of the ideas, life-aims, life-motives which they have accepted, an imperfect power in their execution, an imperfect will to maintain them always unimpaired, to carry them out fully or to bring the life  
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\n\tto a greater perfection: there is an element of struggle and discord, a mass of repressed or unfulfilled desires and frustrated wills, a simmering suppressed unsatisfaction or an awakened or eruptive discontent of unequally satisfied interests; there are new ideas, life-motives that break in and cannot be correlated without upheaval and disturbance; there are life-forces at work in human beings and their environment that are at variance with the harmony that has been constructed, and there is not the full
\n\tpower to overcome the discord and dislocations created by a clashing
\n\tdiversity of mind and life and by the attack of disrupting forces in universal Nature. What is lacking is a spiritual knowledge and spiritual power, a power over self, a power born of inner unification with others, a power over the surrounding or invading world-forces, a full-visioned and fully equipped power
\n\tof effectuation of knowledge; it is these capacities missing or defective in
\n\tus that belong to the very substance of gnostic being, for they are inherent in the light and dynamis of the gnostic nature.
\n\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nBut, in addition to the imperfect accommodation of the minds, hearts, lives of the constituting individuals in a human society, the mind and the life of the individual himself are actuated by forces that are not in accord with each other; our attempts to accord them are imperfect, and still more imperfect is our force to put any one of them into integral or satisfying execution in life. Thus the law of love and sympathy is natural to our consciousness; as we grow in spirit, its demand on us increases: but there is also the demand of the intellect, the push of the vital force and its impulses in us, the claim and pressure of many other elements that do not coincide with the law of love and sympathy, nor do we know how to fit them all into the whole law of existence or to render any or all of them either justly and entirely effective or imperative. In order to make them concordant and actively fruitful in the whole being and whole life, we have to grow into a more complete spiritual nature; we have, by that growth, to live in the light and force of a higher and larger and more integral consciousness of which knowledge and power, love and sympathy and play of life-will are all natural  
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\n and ever-present accorded elements; we have to move and act in a light of Truth which sees intuitively and spontaneously the thing to be done and the way to do it and intuitively and spontaneously fulfils itself in the act and the force,  \u2014 taking up into that intuitive spontaneity of their truth, into its simple spiritual and supreme normality, the complexity of our forces of being and suffusing with their harmonised realities all the steps of Nature.
\n\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nIt should be evident that no rationalised piecing together or ingenuity of mental construction can accord or harmonise this complexity; it is only the intuition and self-knowledge of an awakened spirit that can do it. That would be the nature of the evolved supramental being and his existence; his spiritual sight and sense would take up all the forces of the being in a unifying consciousness and bring them into a normality of accorded action: for this accord and concord are the true normality of the spirit; the discord, the disharmony of our life and nature is abnormal to it although it is normal to the life of the Ignorance. It is indeed because it is not normal to the spirit that a knowledge within us is dissatisfied and strives towards a greater harmony in our existence. This accord and concord of the whole being, which is natural to the gnostic individual, would be equally natural to a community of gnostic beings; for it would rest on a union of self with self in the light of a common and mutual self-awareness. It is true that in the total terrestrial existence of which the gnostic life would be a part, there would be still continuing within it a life belonging to a less evolved order; the intuitive and gnostic life would have to fit into this total existence and carry into it as much of its own law of unity and harmony as may be possible. Here the law of spontaneous harmony might seem to be inapplicable, since the relation of the gnostic life with the ignorant life around it would not be
\n\tfounded on a mutuality of self-knowledge and a sense of one being and common
\n\tconsciousness; it would be a relation of action of knowledge to action of ignorance. But this difficulty need not be so great as it seems now to us; for the gnostic knowledge would carry in it a perfect understanding of the consciousness  
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\n\tof the Ignorance, and it would not be impossible, therefore, for an assured gnostic life to harmonise its existence with that of all the less developed life coexistent with it in the earth-nature.
\n\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nIf this is our evolutionary destiny, it remains for us to see where we stand at this juncture in the evolutionary progression,  \u2014 a progression which has been cyclic or spiral rather than in a straight line or has at least journeyed in a very zigzag swinging curve of advance,  \u2014 and what prospect there is of any turn towards a decisive step in the near or measurable future. In our human aspiration towards a personal perfection and the
\n\tperfection of the life of the race the elements of the future evolution are
\n\tforeshadowed and striven after, but in a confusion of half-enlightened knowledge; there is a discord between the necessary elements, an opposing emphasis, a profusion of rudimentary unsatisfying and ill-accorded solutions. These sway between the three principal preoccupations of our idealism,  \u2014 the complete single development of the human being in himself, the perfectibility of the individual, a full development of the collective being, the perfectibility of society, and, more pragmatically restricted, the perfect or best possible relations of individual with individual and society and of community with community. An exclusive or dominant emphasis is laid sometimes on the individual, sometimes on the collectivity or society, sometimes on a right and balanced relation between the individual and the collective human whole. One idea holds up the growing life, freedom or perfection of the human individual as the true object of our existence, 
\n\u2014 whether the ideal be merely a free self-expression of the personal being or a self-governed whole of complete mind, fine and ample life and perfect body, or a spiritual perfection and liberation. In this view society is there only as a field of activity and growth for the individual man and serves best its function when it gives as far as possible a wide room, ample means, a sufficient freedom or guidance of development to his thought, his action, his growth, his possibility of fullness of being. An opposite idea gives the collective life the first or the sole importance; the existence, the growth of the race is all: the individual has to live for the society or for mankind,  
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\n or, even, he is only a cell of the society, he has no other use or purpose of birth, no other meaning of his presence in Nature, no other function. Or it is held that the nation, the society, the community is a collective being, revealing its soul in its culture, power of life, ideals, institutions, all its ways of self-expression; the individual life has to cast itself in that mould of culture, serve that power of life, consent only to exist as an instrument for the maintenance and efficiency of the collective existence. In another idea the perfection of man lies in his ethical and social relations with other men; he is a social being and has to live for society, for others, for his utility to the race: the society also is there for the service of all, to give them their right relation, education, training, economic opportunity, right frame of life. In the ancient cultures the greatest emphasis was laid on the community and the fitting of the individual into the community, but also there grew up an idea of the perfected individual; in ancient India it was the idea of the spiritual individual that was dominant, but the society was of extreme importance because in it and under its moulding influence the individual had to pass first through the social status of the physical, vital, mental being with his satisfaction of interest, desire, pursuit of knowledge and right living before he could reach fitness for a truer self-realisation and a free spiritual existence. In recent times the whole stress has passed to the life of the race, to a search for the perfect society, and latterly to a concentration on the right organisation and scientific mechanisation of the life of mankind as a whole;
\n\tthe individual now tends more to be regarded only as a member of the
\n\tcollectivity, a unit of the race whose existence must be subordinated to the common aims and total interest of the organised society, and much less or not at all as a mental or spiritual being with his own right and power of existence. This tendency has not yet reached its acme everywhere, but everywhere it is rapidly increasing and heading towards dominance.
\n\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThus, in the vicissitudes of human thought, on one side the individual is moved or invited to discover and pursue his own self-affirmation, his own development of mind and life and body, his own spiritual perfection; on the other he is called on to efface
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\n\tand subordinate himself and to accept the ideas, ideals, will, instincts, interests of the community as his own. He is moved by Nature to live for himself and by something deep within him to affirm his individuality; he is called upon by society and by a certain mental idealism to live for humanity or for the greater good of the community. The principle of self and its interest is
\n\tmet and opposed by the principle of altruism. The State erects its godhead
\n\tand demands his obedience, submission, subordination, self-immolation; the individual has to affirm against this exorbitant claim the rights of his ideals, his ideas, his personality, his conscience. It is evident that all this conflict of standards is a groping of the mental Ignorance of man seeking to find its way and grasping different sides of the truth but unable by its want of integrality in knowledge to harmonise them together. A unifying and harmonising knowledge can alone find the way, but that knowledge belongs to a deeper principle of our being to which oneness and integrality are native. It is only by finding that in ourselves that we can solve the problem of our existence and with it the problem of the true way of individual and communal living.
\n\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThere is a Reality, a truth of all existence which is greater and more abiding than all its formations and manifestations; to find that truth and Reality and live in it, achieve the most perfect manifestation and formation possible of it, must be the secret of perfection whether of individual or communal being. This Reality is there within each thing and gives to each of its formations its power of being and value of being. The universe is a manifestation of the Reality, and there is a truth of the universal existence, a Power of cosmic being, an all-self or world-spirit. Humanity is a formation or manifestation of the Reality in the universe, and there is a truth and self of humanity, a human spirit, a destiny of human life. The community is a formation of the Reality, a manifestation of the spirit of man, and there is a truth, a self, a power of the collective being. The individual is a formation of the Reality, and there is a truth of the individual, an individual self, soul or spirit that expresses itself through the individual mind, life and body and can express itself too  
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\n in something that goes beyond mind, life and body, something even that goes beyond humanity. For our humanity is not the whole of the Reality or its best possible self-formation or
\n\tself-expression,  \u2014 the Reality has assumed before man existed an infrahuman formation and self-creation and can assume after him or in him a suprahuman formation and self-creation. The individual as spirit or being is not confined within his humanity; he has been less than human, he can become more than human. The universe finds itself through him even as he finds himself in the universe, but he is capable of becoming more than the
\n\tuniverse, since he can surpass it and enter into something in himself and in
\n\tit and beyond it that is absolute. He is not con fined within the community; although his mind and life are, in a way, part of the communal mind and life, there is something in him that can go beyond them. The community exists by the individual, for its mind and life and body are constituted by the mind and life and body of its composing individuals; if that were abolished or disaggregated, its own existence would be abolished or disaggregated, though some spirit or power of it might form again in other individuals: but the individual is not a mere cell of the collective existence; he would not cease to exist if separated or expelled from the collective mass. For the collectivity, the community is not even the whole of humanity and it is not the world: the individual can exist and find himself elsewhere in humanity or by himself in the world. If the community has a life dominating that of the individuals which constitute it, still it does not constitute their whole life. If it has its being which it seeks to affirm by the life of the individuals, the individual also has a being of his own which he seeks to affirm in the life of the community. But he is not tied to that, he can affirm himself in another communal life, or, if he is strong enough, in a nomad existence or in an eremite solitude where, if he cannot pursue or achieve a complete material living, he can spiritually exist and find his own reality and indwelling self of being.
\n\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThe individual is indeed the key of the evolutionary movement; for it is the individual who finds himself, who becomes conscious of the Reality. The movement of the collectivity is a  
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\n\tlargely subconscious mass movement; it has to formulate and express itself through the individuals to become conscious: its general mass consciousness is always less evolved than the consciousness of its most developed individuals, and it progresses in so far as it accepts their impress or develops what they develop. The individual does not owe his ultimate allegiance either to the State which is a machine or to the community which is a part of life and not the whole of life: his allegiance must be to the Truth, the Self, the Spirit, the Divine which is in him and in all; not to subordinate or lose himself in the mass, but to find and express that truth of being in himself and help the community and humanity in its seeking for its own truth and fullness of being must be his real object of existence. But the extent to which the power of the individual life or the spiritual Reality within it becomes operative, depends on his own development: so long as he is undeveloped, he has to subordinate in many ways his undeveloped self to whatever is greater than it. As he develops, he moves towards a spiritual freedom, but this freedom is not something entirely separate from all-existence; it has a solidarity with it because that too is the self, the same spirit. As he moves towards spiritual freedom, he moves also towards spiritual oneness. The spiritually realised, the liberated man is preoccupied, says the Gita, with the good of all beings; Buddha discovering the way of Nirvana must turn back to open that way to those who are still under the delusion of their constructive instead of their real being  \u2014 or non-being; Vivekananda, drawn by the Absolute, feels also the call of the disguised Godhead in humanity and most the call of the fallen and the suffering, the call of the self to the self in the obscure body of the universe. For the awakened individual the realisation of his truth of being and his inner liberation and perfection must be his primary seeking,  \u2014 first, because that is the call of the Spirit within him, but also because it is only by liberation and perfection and realisation of the truth of being that man can arrive at truth of living. A perfected community also can exist only by the perfection of its individuals, and perfection can come only by the discovery and affirmation in life by each of his own spiritual being and  
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\n the discovery by all of their spiritual unity and a resultant life unity. There can be no real perfection for us except by our inner self and truth of spiritual existence taking up all truth of the instrumental existence into itself and giving to it oneness, integration, harmony. As our only real freedom is the discovery and disengagement of the spiritual Reality within us, so our only means of true perfection is the sovereignty and self-effectuation of the spiritual Reality in all the elements of our nature.
\n\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nOur nature is complex and we have to find a key to some perfect unity and fullness of its complexity. Its first evolutionary basis is the material life: Nature began with that and man also has to begin with it; he has first to affirm his material and vital existence. But if he stops there, there can be for him no evolution; his next and greater preoccupation must be to find himself as a mental being in a material life 
\n\u2014 both individual and social  \u2014 as perfected as possible. This was the direction which the Hellenic idea gave to European civilisation, and the Roman reinforced  \u2014 or weakened  \u2014 it with the ideal of organised power: the cult of reason, the interpretation of life by an intellectual thought critical, utilitarian, organising and constructive, the government of life by Science are the last outcome of this inspiration. But in ancient times the higher creative and dynamic element was the pursuit of an ideal truth, good and beauty and the moulding of mind, life and body into perfection and harmony by this
\n\tideal. Beyond and above this preoccupation, as soon as mind is sufficiently
\n\tdeveloped, there awakes in man the spiritual preoccupation, the discovery of a self and inmost truth of being and the release of man’s mind and life into the truth of the Spirit, its perfection by the power of the Spirit, the solidarity, unity, mutuality of all beings in the Spirit. This was the Eastern ideal carried by Buddhism and other ancient disciplines to the coasts of Asia and Egypt and from there poured by Christianity into Europe. But these motives, burning for a time like dim torchlights in the confusion and darkness created by the barbaric flood that had submerged the old civilisations, have been abandoned by the modern spirit which has found another light, the light of Science. What the modern spirit has sought for is the economic  
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\n\tsocial ultimate, 
\n\u2014 an ideal material organisation of civilisation and comfort, the use of reason and science and education for the generalisation of a utilitarian rationality which will make the individual a perfected social being in a perfected economic society. What remained from the spiritual ideal was 
\n\u2014 for a time  \u2014 a mentalised and moralised humanitarianism relieved of all religious colouring and a social ethicism which was deemed
\n\tall-sufficient to take the place of a religious and individual ethic. It was so far that the race had reached when it found itself hurried forward by its own momentum into a subjective chaos and a chaos of its life in which all received values were overthrown and all firm ground seemed to disappear from its social organisation,
\n\tits conduct and its culture. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nFor this ideal, this conscious stress on the
\n\tmaterial and economic life was in fact a civilised reversion to the first state of man, his early barbaric state and its preoccupation with life and matter, a spiritual retrogression with the resources of the mind of a developed humanity and a fully evolved Science at its disposal. As an element in the total complexity of human life this stress on a perfected economic and material existence has its place in the whole: as a sole or predominant stress it is for humanity itself, for the evolution itself full of danger. The first danger is a resurgence of the old vital and material primitive barbarian in a civilised form; the means Science has put at our disposal eliminates the peril of the subversion and destruction of an effete civilisation by stronger primitive peoples, but it is the resurgence of the barbarian in ourselves, in civilised man, that is the peril, and this we see all around us. For that is bound to come if there is no high and strenuous mental and moral ideal controlling and uplifting the vital and physical man in us and no spiritual ideal liberating him from himself into his inner being. Even if this relapse is escaped, there is another danger,  \u2014 for a cessation of the evolutionary urge, a crystallisation into a stable comfortable mechanised social living without ideal or outlook is another possible outcome. Reason by itself cannot long maintain the race in its progress; it can do so only if it is a mediator between the life and body and something higher and  
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\n greater within him; for it is the inner spiritual necessity, the push from what is there yet unrealised within him that maintains in him, once he has attained to mind, the evolutionary stress, the spiritual nisus. That renounced, he must either relapse and begin all over again or disappear like other forms of life before him as an evolutionary failure, through incapacity to maintain or to serve the evolutionary urge. At the best he will remain arrested in some kind of mediary typal perfection, like other animal kinds, while Nature pursues her way beyond him to a greater creation.
\n\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nAt present mankind is undergoing an evolutionary crisis in which is concealed a choice of its destiny; for a stage has been reached in which the human mind has achieved in certain
\n\tdirections an enormous development while in others it stands arrested and
\n\tbewildered and can no longer find its way. A structure of the external life has been raised up by man’s ever-active mind and life-will, a structure of an unmanageable hugeness and complexity, for the service of his mental, vital, physical claims and urges, a complex political, social, administrative, economic, cultural machinery, an organised collective means for his intellectual, sensational, aesthetic and material satisfaction. Man has created a system of civilisation which has become too big for his limited mental capacity and understanding and his still more limited spiritual and moral capacity to utilise and manage, a too dangerous servant of his blundering ego and its appetites. For no greater seeing mind, no intuitive soul of knowledge has yet come to his surface of consciousness which could make this basic fullness of life a condition for the free growth of something that exceeded it. This new fullness of the means of life might be, by its power for a release from the incessant unsatisfied stress of his economic and physical needs, an opportunity for the full pursuit of other and greater aims surpassing the material existence, for the discovery of a higher truth and good and beauty, for the discovery of a greater and diviner spirit which would intervene and use life for a higher perfection of the being: but it is being used instead for the multiplication of new wants and an aggressive expansion of the collective ego. At the same time Science has put at his disposal  
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\n\tmany potencies of the universal Force and has made the life of humanity materially one; but what uses this universal Force is a little human individual or communal ego with nothing universal in its light of knowledge or its movements, no inner sense or power which would create in this physical drawing together of the human world a true life unity, a mental unity or a spiritual oneness. All that is there is a chaos of clashing mental ideas, urges of individual and collective physical want and need, vital claims and desires, impulses of an ignorant life-push, hungers and calls for life satisfaction of individuals, classes, nations, a rich fungus of political and social and economic nostrums and notions, a hustling medley of slogans and panaceas for which men are ready to oppress and be oppressed, to kill and be killed, to impose them somehow or other by the immense and too formidable means placed at his disposal, in the belief that this is his way out to something ideal. The evolution of human mind and life must necessarily lead towards an increasing universality; but on a basis of ego and segmenting and dividing mind this opening to the universal can only create a vast pullulation of unaccorded ideas and impulses, a surge of enormous powers and desires, a chaotic mass of unassimilated and intermixed mental, vital and physical material of a larger existence which, because it is not taken up by a creative harmonising light of the spirit, must welter in a universalised confusion and discord out of which it is impossible to build a greater harmonic life. Man has harmonised life in the past by organised ideation and limitation; he has created societies based on fixed ideas or fixed customs, a fixed cultural system or an organic life-system, each with its own order; the throwing of all these into the
\n\tmelting-pot of a more and more intermingling life and a pouring in of
\n\tever new ideas and motives and facts and possibilities call for a new, a
\n\tgreater consciousness to meet and master the increasing potentialities of existence and harmonise them. Reason and Science can only help by standardising, by fixing everything into an artificially arranged and mechanised unity of material life. A greater whole-being, whole-knowledge, whole-power is needed to weld all into a greater unity of whole-life.  
\n\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

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\n\tA life of unity, mutuality and harmony born of a deeper and wider truth of our being is the only truth of life that can successfully replace the imperfect mental constructions of the past which were a combination of association and regulated conflict, an accommodation of egos and interests grouped or dovetailed into each other to form a society, a consolidation by common general life-motives, a unification by need and the pressure of struggle with outside forces. It is such a change and such a reshaping of life for which humanity is blindly beginning to seek, now more and more with a sense that its very existence depends upon finding the way. The evolution of mind working upon life has developed an organisation of the activity of mind and use of Matter which can no longer be supported by human capacity without an inner change. An accommodation of the
\n\tego-centric human individuality, separative even in association, to a system
\n\tof living which demands unity, perfect mutuality, harmony, is imperative. But because the burden which is being laid on mankind is too great for the present littleness of the human personality and its petty mind and small life-instincts, because it cannot operate the needed change, because it is using this new apparatus and organisation to serve the old infraspiritual and infrarational life-self of humanity, the destiny of the race seems to be heading dangerously, as if impatiently and in spite of itself, under the drive of the vital ego seized by colossal forces which are on the same scale as the huge mechanical organisation of life and scientific knowledge which it has evolved, a scale too large for its reason and will to handle, into a prolonged confusion and perilous crisis and darkness of violent shifting incertitude. Even if this turns out to be a passing phase or appearance and a tolerable structural accommodation is found which will enable mankind to proceed less catastrophically on its uncertain journey, this can only be a respite. For the problem is fundamental and in putting it evolutionary Nature in man is confronting herself with a critical choice which must one day be solved in the true sense if the race is to arrive or even to survive. The evolutionary nisus is pushing towards a development of the cosmic Force in terrestrial life which needs a larger mental and  
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\n\tvital being to support it, a wider mind, a greater wider more conscious unanimised Life-Soul, Anima, and that again needs an unveiling of the supporting Soul and spiritual Self within to maintain it.
\n\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nA rational and scientific formula of the vitalistic and materialistic human being and his life, a search for a perfected economic society and the democratic cultus of the average man are all that the modern mind presents us in this crisis as a light for its solution. Whatever the truth supporting these ideas, this is clearly not enough to meet the need of a humanity which is
\n\tmissioned to evolve beyond itself or, at any rate, if it is to live, must
\n\tevolve far beyond anything that it at present is. A life instinct in the race and in the average man himself has felt the inadequacy and has been driving towards a reversal of values or a discovery of new values and a transfer of life to a new foundation. This has taken the form of an attempt to find a simple and ready-made basis of unity, mutuality, harmony for the common life, to enforce it by a suppression of the competitive clash of egos and so to arrive at a life of identity for the community in place of a life of difference. But to realise these desirable ends the means adopted have been the forcible and successful materialisation of a few restricted ideas or slogans enthroned to the exclusion of all other thought, the suppression of the mind of the individual, a mechanised compression of the elements of life, a mechanised unity and drive of the life-force, a coercion of man by the State, the substitution of the communal for the individual ego. The communal ego is idealised as the soul of the nation, the race, the community; but this is a colossal and may turn out to be a fatal error. A forced and imposed unanimity of mind, life, action raised to their highest tension under the drive of something which is thought to be greater, the collective soul, the collective life, is the formula found. But this obscure collective being is not the soul or self of the community; it is a life-force that rises from the subconscient and, if denied the light of guidance by the reason, can be driven only by dark massive forces which are powerful but dangerous for the race because they are alien to the conscious evolution of which man is the trustee and bearer.  
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\n It is not in this direction that evolutionary Nature has pointed mankind; this is a reversion towards something that she had left
\n\tbehind her. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nAnother solution that is attempted reposes still on the materialistic reason and a unified organisation of the economic life of the race; but the method that is being employed is the same, a forced compression and imposed unanimity of mind and life and a mechanical organisation of the communal existence. A unanimity of this kind can only be maintained by a compression of all freedom of thought and life, and that must bring about either the efficient stability of a termite civilisation or a drying up of the springs of life and a swift or slow decadence. It is through the growth of consciousness that the collective soul and its life can become aware of itself and develop; the free play of mind
\n\tand life is essential for the growth of consciousness: for mind and life are
\n\tthe soul's only instrumentation until a higher instrumentation develops; they must not be inhibited in their action or rendered rigid, unplastic and unprogressive. The difficulties or disorders engendered by the growth of the individual mind and life cannot be healthily removed by the suppression of the individual; the true cure can only be achieved by his progression to a greater consciousness in which he is fulfilled and perfected.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nAn alternative solution is the development of an enlightened reason and will of the normal man consenting to a new socialised life in which he will subordinate his ego for the sake of the right arrangement of the life of the community. If we inquire how this radical change is to be brought about, two agencies seem to be suggested, the agency of a greater and better mental knowledge, right ideas, right information, right training of the social and civic individual and the agency of a new social machinery which will solve everything by the magic of the social machine cutting humanity into a better pattern. But it has not been found in experience, whatever might have once been hoped, that education and intellectual training by itself can change man;
\n\tit only provides the human individual and collective ego with better
\n\tinformation and a more efficient machinery for its self affirmation, but leaves it the same unchanged human ego. Nor  
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\n\tcan human mind and life be cut into perfection 
\n\u2014 even into what is thought to be perfection, a constructed substitute,  \u2014 by any
\n\tkind of social machinery; matter can be so cut, thought can be so cut, but
\n\tin our human existence matter and thought are only instruments for the soul and the life-force. Machinery cannot form the soul and life-force into standardised shapes; it can at best coerce them, make soul and mind inert and stationary and regulate the life’s outward action; but if this is to be effectively done, coercion and compression of the mind and life are indispensable and that again spells either unprogressive stability or decadence.
\n\tThe reasoning mind with its logical practicality has no other way of getting
\n\tthe better of Nature's ambiguous and complex movements than a regulation and mechanisation of mind and life. If that is done, the soul of humanity will either have to recover its freedom and growth by a revolt and a destruction of the machine into whose grip it has been cast or escape by a withdrawal into itself and a rejection of life. Man’s true way out is to discover his soul and its self-force and instrumentation and replace by it both the mechanisation of mind and the ignorance and disorder of life-nature. But there would be little room and freedom for such a movement of self-discovery and self-effectuation in a closely regulated and mechanised social existence.
\n\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThere is the possibility that in the swing back from a mechanistic idea of life and society the human mind may seek refuge in a return to the religious idea and a society governed or sanctioned by religion. But organised religion, though it can provide a means of inner uplift for the individual and preserve in it or behind it a way for his opening to spiritual experience, has not changed human life and society; it could not do so because, in governing society, it had to compromise with the lower parts of life and could not insist on the inner change of the whole being; it could insist only on a credal adherence, a formal acceptance of its ethical standards and a conformity to institution, ceremony and ritual. Religion so conceived can give a religio-ethical colour or surface tinge, 
\n\u2014 sometimes, if it maintains a strong kernel of inner experience, it can generalise to some extent an incomplete spiritual tendency; but it does not transform the race, it cannot  
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\n create a new principle of the human existence. A total spiritual direction given to the whole life and the whole nature can alone lift humanity beyond itself. Another possible conception akin to the religious solution is the guidance of society by men of spiritual attainment, the brotherhood or unity of all in the faith or in the discipline, the spiritualisation of life and society by the taking up of the old machinery of life into such a unification or inventing a new machinery. This too has been attempted before without success; it was the original founding idea of more than one religion: but the human ego and vital nature were too strong for a religious idea working on the mind and by the mind to overcome its resistance. It is only the full emergence of the soul, the full descent of the native light and power of the Spirit and the consequent replacement or transformation and uplifting of our insufficient mental and vital nature by a spiritual and supramental supernature that can effect this evolutionary miracle.
\n\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nAt first sight this insistence on a radical change of nature might seem to put off all the hope of humanity to a distant evolutionary future; for the transcendence of our normal human nature, a transcendence of our mental, vital and physical being, has the appearance of an endeavour too high and difficult and at present, for man as he is, impossible. Even if it were so, it would still remain the sole possibility for the transmutation of life; for to hope for a true change of human life without a change of human nature is an irrational and unspiritual proposition; it is to ask for something unnatural and unreal, an impossible miracle. But what is demanded by this change is not something altogether distant, alien to our existence and radically impossible; for what has to be developed is there in our being and not something outside it: what evolutionary Nature presses for, is an awakening to the knowledge of self, the discovery of self, the manifestation of the self and spirit within us and the release of its self-knowledge, its self-power, its native self-instrumentation. It is, besides, a step for which the whole of evolution has been a preparation and which is brought closer at each crisis of human destiny when the mental and vital evolution of the being touches  
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\n\ta point where intellect and vital force reach some acme of tension and there is a need either for them to collapse, to sink back into a torpor of defeat or a repose of unprogressive quiescence or to rend their way through the veil against which they are straining. What is necessary is that there should be a turn in humanity felt by some or many towards the vision of this change, a feeling of its imperative need, the sense of its possibility, the will to make it possible in themselves and to find the way. That trend is not absent and it must increase with the tension of the crisis in human world-destiny; the need of an escape or a solution, the feeling that there is no other solution than the spiritual cannot but grow and become more imperative under the urgency of critical circumstance. To that call in the being there must always be some answer in the Divine Reality and in Nature.
\n\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n\tThe answer might, indeed, be only individual; it might result in a
\n\tmultiplication of spiritualised individuals or even, conceivably though not probably, a gnostic individual or individuals isolated in the unspiritualised mass of humanity. Such isolated realised beings must either withdraw into their secret divine kingdom and guard themselves in a spiritual solitude or act from their inner light on mankind for what little can be prepared in such conditions for a happier future. The inner change can begin to take shape in a collective form only if the gnostic individual finds others who have the same kind of inner life as himself and can form with them a group with its own autonomous existence or else a separate community or order of beings with its own inner law of life. It is this need of a separate life with its own rule of living adapted to the inner power or motive force of the spiritual existence and creating for it its native atmosphere that has expressed itself in the past in the formation of the monastic life or in attempts of various kinds at a new separate collective living self-governed and other in its spiritual principle than the ordinary human life. The monastic life is in its nature an association of other-worldly seekers, men whose whole attempt is to find and realise in themselves the spiritual reality and who form their common existence by rules of living which help them in that endeavour. It is not usually an effort to create a new  
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\tlife-formation which will exceed the ordinary human society and create a new
\n\tworld-order. A religion may hold that eventual prospect before it or attempt some first approach to it, or a mental idealism may make the same endeavour. But these attempts have always been overcome by the persistent inconscience and ignorance of our human vital nature; for that nature is an obstacle which no mere idealism or incomplete spiritual aspiration can change in its recalcitrant mass or permanently dominate. Either the endeavour fails by its own imperfection or it is invaded by the imperfection of the outside world and sinks from the shining height of its aspiration to something mixed and inferior on the ordinary human level. A common spiritual life meant to express the spiritual and not the mental, vital and physical being must found and maintain itself on greater values than the mental, vital, physical values of the ordinary human society; if it is not so founded, it will be merely the normal human society with a difference. An entirely new consciousness in many individuals transforming their whole being, transforming their mental, vital and physical nature-self, is needed for the new life to appear; only such a transformation of the general mind, life, body nature can bring into being a new worthwhile collective existence. The evolutionary nisus must tend not merely to create a new type of mental beings but another order of beings who have raised their whole existence from our present mentalised animality to a greater spiritual level of the earth-nature.
\n\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nAny such complete transformation of the earth-life in a
\n\tnumber of human beings could not establish itself altogether at once; even
\n\twhen the turning-point has been reached, the decisive line crossed, the new life in its beginnings would have to pass through a period of ordeal and arduous development. A general change from the old consciousness taking up the whole life into the spiritual principle would be the necessary first step; the preparation for this might be long and the transformation itself once begun proceed by stages. In the individual it might after a certain point be rapid and even effect itself by a bound, an evolutionary saltus; but an individual transformation would not be the creation of a new type of beings or a new collective life.  
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\n\tOne might conceive of a number of individuals thus evolving separately in the midst of the old life and then joining together to establish the nucleus of the new existence. But it is not likely that Nature would operate in this fashion, and it would be difficult for the individual to arrive at a complete change while still enclosed in the life of the lower nature. At a certain stage it might be necessary to follow the age-long device of the separate community, but with a double purpose, first to provide a secure atmosphere, a place and life apart, in which the consciousness of the individual might concentrate on its evolution in surroundings where all was turned and centred towards the one endeavour and, next, when things were ready, to formulate and develop the new life in those surroundings and in this prepared spiritual atmosphere. It might be that, in such a concentration of effort, all the difficulties of the change would present themselves with a concentrated force; for each seeker, carrying in himself the possibilities but also the imperfections of a world that has to be transformed, would bring in not only his capacities but his difficulties and the oppositions of the old nature and, mixed together in the restricted circle of a small and close common life, these might assume a considerably enhanced force of obstruction which would tend to counterbalance the enhanced power and concentration of the forces making for the evolution. This is a difficulty that has broken in the past all the efforts of mental man to evolve something better and more true and harmonious than the ordinary mental and vital life. But if Nature is ready and has taken her evolutionary decision or if the power of the Spirit descending from the higher planes is sufficiently strong, the difficulty would be overcome and a first evolutionary formation or formations would be possible.
\n\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nBut if an entire reliance upon the guiding Light and Will and a luminous expression of the truth of the Spirit in life are to be the law, that would seem to presuppose a gnostic world, a world in which the consciousness of all its beings was founded on this basis; there it can be understood that the life-interchange of gnostic individuals in a gnostic community or communities would be by its very nature an understanding and harmonious  
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\n process. But here, actually, there would be a life of gnostic beings proceeding within or side by side with a life of beings in the Ignorance, attempting to emerge in it or out of it, and yet the law of the two lives would seem to be contrary and to offend against each other. A complete seclusion or separation of the life of a spiritual community from the life of the Ignorance would then seem to impose itself: for otherwise a compromise between the two lives would be necessary and with the compromise a danger of contamination or incompleteness of the greater existence; two different and incompatible principles of existence would be in contact and, even though the greater would influence the lesser, the smaller life would also have its effect on the greater, since such mutual impact is the law of all contiguity and interchange. It might even be questioned whether conflict and collision would not be the first rule of their relation, since in the life of the Ignorance there is present and active the formidable influence of those forces of Darkness, supporters of evil and violence, whose interest it is to contaminate or destroy all higher Light that enters into the human existence. An opposition and intolerance or even a persecution of all that is new or tries to rise above or break away from the established order of the human Ignorance, or if it is victorious, an intrusion of the lower forces into it, an acceptance by the world more dangerous than its opposition, and in the end an extinction, a lowering or a contamination of the new principle of life, have been a frequent phenomenon of the past; that opposition might be still more violent and a frustration might be still more likely if a radically new light or new power were to claim the earth for its heritage. But it is to be supposed that the new and completer light would bring also a new and completer power. It might not be necessary for it to be entirely separate; it might establish itself in so many islets and from there spread through the old life, throwing out upon it its own influences and filtrations, gaining upon it, bringing to it a help and illumination which a new aspiration in mankind might
\n\tafter a time begin to understand and welcome. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nBut these are evidently
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\n\tForce has taken place and the life of the gnostic being becomes as much as that of the mental being an established part of the terrestrial world-order. If we suppose the gnostic consciousness to be established in the earth-life, the power and knowledge at its disposal would be much greater than the power and knowledge of mental man, and the life of a community of gnostic beings, supposing it to be separate, would be as safe against attack as the organised life of man against any attack by a lower species. But as this knowledge and the very principle of the gnostic nature would ensure a luminous unity in the common life of gnostic beings, so also it would be sufficient to ensure a dominating harmony and reconciliation between the two types of life. The influence of the supramental principle on earth would fall upon the life of the Ignorance and impose harmony on it within its limits. It is conceivable that the gnostic life would be separate, but it would surely admit within its borders as much of human life as was turned towards spirituality and in progress towards the heights; the rest might organise itself mainly on the mental principle and on the old foundations, but, helped and influenced by a recognisable greater knowledge, it would be likely to do so on lines of a completer harmonisation of which the human collectivity is not yet capable. Here also, however, the mind can only forecast probabilities and possibilities; the supramental principle in Supernature would itself determine according to the
\n\ttruth of things the balance of a new world-order. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nA gnostic Supernature
\n\ttranscends all the values of our nor
\n\tmal ignorant Nature; our standards and values are created by ignorance and
\n\ttherefore cannot determine the life of Super nature. At the same time our present nature is a derivation from Supernature and is not a pure ignorance but a half-knowledge; it is therefore reasonable to suppose that whatever spiritual truth there is in or behind its standards and values will reappear in the higher life, not as standards, but as elements transformed, uplifted out of the ignorance and raised into the true harmony of a more luminous existence. As the universalised spiritual individual sheds the limited personality, the ego, as he rises beyond mind to a completer knowledge in Supernature, the conflicting  
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\n ideals of the mind must fall away from him, but what is true behind them will remain in the life of Supernature. The gnostic consciousness is a consciousness in which all contradictions are cancelled or fused into each other in a higher light of seeing and being, in a unified self-knowledge and world-knowledge. The gnostic being will not accept the mind’s ideals and standards; he will not be moved to live for himself, for his ego, or for humanity or for others or for the community or for the State; for he will be aware of something greater than these half-truths, of the Divine Reality, and it is for that he will live, for its will in himself and in all, in a spirit of large universality, in the light of the will of the Transcendence. For the same reason there can be no conflict between self-affirmation and altruism in the gnostic life, for the self of the gnostic being is one with the self of all,  \u2014 no conflict between the ideal of individualism and the collective ideal, for both are terms of a greater Reality and only in so far as either expresses the Reality or their fulfilment serves the will of the Reality, can they have a value for his spirit. But at the same time what is true in the mental ideals and dimly figured in them will be fulfilled in his existence; for while his consciousness exceeds the human values so that he cannot substitute mankind or the community or the State or others or himself for God, the affirmation of the Divine in himself and a sense of the Divine in others and the sense of oneness with humanity, with all other beings, with all the world because of the Divine in them and a lead towards a greater and better affirmation of the growing Reality in them will be part of his life action. But what he shall do will be decided by the Truth of the Knowledge and Will in him, a total and infinite Truth that is not bound by any single mental law or standard but acts with freedom in the whole reality, with respect for each truth in its place and with a clear knowledge of the forces at work and the intention in the manifesting Divine Nisus at each step of cosmic evolution and in each event and circumstance.
\n\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nAll life for the achieved spiritual or gnostic consciousness must be the manifestation of the realised truth of spirit; only what can transform itself and find its own spiritual self in that  
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\n\tgreater Truth and fuse itself into its harmony can be accorded a life-acceptance. What will so survive the mind cannot determine, for the supramental gnosis will itself bring down its own truth and that truth will take up whatever of itself has been put forth in our ideals and realisations of mind and life and body. The forms it has taken there may not survive, for they are not likely to be suitable without change or replacement in the new existence; but what is real and abiding in them or even in their forms will undergo the transformation necessary for survival. Much that is normal to human life would disappear. In the light of gnosis the many mental idols, constructed principles and systems, conflicting ideals which man has created in all domains of his mind and life, could command no acceptance or reverence; only the truth, if any, which these specious images conceal, could have a chance of entry as elements of a harmony founded on a much wider basis. It is evident that in a life governed by the gnostic consciousness war with its spirit of antagonism and enmity, its brutality, destruction and ignorant violence, political strife
\n\twith its perpetual conflict, frequent oppression, dishonesties, turpitudes,
\n\tselfish interests, its ignorance, ineptitude and muddle could have no ground for existence. The arts and the crafts would exist, not for any inferior mental or vital amusement, entertainment of leisure and relieving excitement or pleasure, but as expressions and means of the truth of the spirit and the beauty and delight of existence. Life and the body would be no longer tyrannous masters demanding nine tenths of existence for their satisfaction, but means and powers for the expression of the spirit. At the same time, since matter and the body are accepted, the control and the right use of physical things would be a part of the realised life of the spirit in the manifestation in
\n\tearth-nature. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\nIt is almost universally supposed that spiritual life must
\n\tnecessarily be a life of ascetic spareness, a pushing away of all that is not absolutely needed for the bare maintenance of the body; and this is valid for a spiritual life which is in its nature and intention a life of withdrawal from life. Even apart from that ideal, it might be thought that the spiritual turn must always make for  
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\n an extreme simplicity, because all else would be a life of vital desire and physical self-indulgence. But from a wider standpoint this is a mental standard based on the law of the Ignorance of which desire is the motive; to overcome the Ignorance, to delete the ego, a total rejection not only of desire but of all the things that can satisfy desire may intervene as a valid principle. But this standard or any mental standard cannot be absolute nor can it be binding as a law on the consciousness that has arisen above desire; a complete purity and self-mastery would be in the very grain of its nature and that would remain the same in poverty or in riches: for if it could be shaken or sullied by either, it would not be real or would not be complete. The one rule of the gnostic life
\n\twould be the self-expression of the Spirit, the will of the Divine Being;
\n\tthat will, that self-expression could manifest through extreme simplicity or through extreme complexity and opulence or in their natural balance,  \u2014 for beauty and plenitude, a hidden sweetness and laughter in things, a sunshine and gladness of life are also powers and expressions of the Spirit. In all directions the Spirit within determining the law of the nature would determine the frame of the life and its detail and circumstance. In all there would be the same plastic principle; a rigid standardisation, however necessary for the mind’s arrangement of things, could not be the law of the spiritual life. A great diversity and liberty of self-expression based on an underlying unity might well become manifest; but everywhere there would be harmony and truth of order.
\n\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nA life of gnostic beings carrying the evolution to a higher supramental status might fitly be characterised as a divine life; for it would be a life in the Divine, a life of the beginnings of a spiritual divine light and power and joy manifested in material
\n\tNature. That might be described, since it surpasses the mental human level,
\n\tas a life of spiritual and supramental superman
\n\thood. But this must not be confused with past and present ideas of
\n\tsupermanhood; for supermanhood in the mental idea consists of an overtopping of the normal human level, not in kind but in degree of the same kind, by an enlarged personality, a magnified and exaggerated ego, an increased power of mind, an
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\n\tincreased power of vital force, a refined or dense and massive exaggeration of the forces of the human Ignorance; it carries
\n\talso, commonly implied in it, the idea of a forceful domination over
\n\thumanity by the superman. That would mean a superman hood of the Nietzschean type; it might be at its worst the reign of the “blonde beast” or the dark beast or of any and every beast, a return to barbaric strength and ruthlessness and force: but this would be no evolution, it would be a reversion to an old strenuous barbarism. Or it might signify the emergence of the Rakshasa or Asura out of a tense effort of humanity to surpass and transcend itself, but in the wrong direction. A violent and turbulent exaggerated vital ego satisfying itself with a supreme tyrannous or anarchic strength of self-fulfilment would be the type of a Rakshasic supermanhood: but the giant, the ogre or devourer of the world, the Rakshasa, though he still survives, belongs in spirit to the past; a larger emergence of that type would be also a retrograde evolution. A mighty exhibition of an overpowering force, a self-possessed, self-held, even, it may
\n\tbe, an ascetically self-restrained mind-capacity and life-power, strong,
\n\tcalm or cold or formidable in collected vehemence, subtle, dominating, a sublimation at once of the mental and vital ego, is the type of the Asura. But earth has had enough of this kind in her past and its repetition can only prolong the old lines; she can get no true profit for her future, no power of self-exceeding, from the Titan, the Asura: even a great or supernormal power in it could only carry her on larger circles of her old orbit. But what has to emerge is something much more difficult and much more simple; it is a self-realised being, a building of the spiritual self, an intensity and urge of the soul and the deliverance and sovereignty of its light and power and beauty,  \u2014 not an egoistic supermanhood seizing on a mental and vital domination over humanity, but the sovereignty of the Spirit over its own instruments, its possession of itself and its possession of life in the power of the spirit, a new consciousness in which humanity itself shall find its own self-exceeding and self-fulfilment by the revelation of the divinity that is striving for birth within it. This is the sole true supermanhood and the  
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\n one real possibility of a step forward in evolutionary Nature.
\n\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nThis new status would indeed be a reversal of the present law of human consciousness and life, for it would reverse the whole principle of the life of the Ignorance. It is for the taste of the Ignorance, its surprise and adventure, one might say, that the soul has descended into the Inconscience and assumed the disguise of Matter, for the adventure and the joy of creation and discovery, an adventure of the spirit, an adventure of the mind and life and the hazardous surprises of their working in Matter, for the discovery and conquest of the new and the unknown; all this constitutes the enterprise of life and all this, it might seem, would cease with the cessation of the Ignorance. Man’s life is made up of the light and the darkness, the gains and losses, the difficulties and dangers, the pleasures and pains of the Ignorance, a play of colours moving on a soil of the general neutrality of Matter which has as its basis the nescience and insensibility of the Inconscient. To the normal life-being an existence without the reactions of success and frustration, vital joy and grief, peril and passion, pleasure and pain, the vicissitudes and uncertainties of fate and struggle and battle and endeavour, a joy of novelty and surprise and creation projecting itself into the unknown, might seem to be void of variety and therefore void of vital savour. Any life surpassing these things tends to appear to it as something featureless and empty or cast in the figure of an
\n\timmutable sameness; the human mind's picture of heaven is the incessant
\n\trepetition of an eternal monotone. But this is a misconception; for an entry into the gnostic consciousness would be an entry into the Infinite. It would be a self-creation bringing out the Infinite infinitely into form of being, and the interest of the Infinite is much greater and multitudinous as well as more imperishably delightful than the interest of the finite. The evolution in the Knowledge would be a more beautiful and glorious manifestation with more vistas ever unfolding themselves and more intensive in all ways than any evolution could be in the Ignorance. The delight of the Spirit is ever new, the forms of beauty it takes innumerable, its godhead ever young and the taste of delight,
\nrasa<\/i>, of the Infinite eternal and inexhaustible. The   <\/span> <\/p>\n

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\n\tgnostic manifestation of life would be more full and fruitful and its interest more vivid than the creative interest of the Ignorance; it would be a greater and happier constant miracle.
\n\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nIf there is an evolution in material Nature and if it is an evolution of being with consciousness and life as its two
\nkey-terms
\n\tand powers, this fullness of being, fullness of conscious ness, fullness of life must be the goal of development towards which we are tending and which will manifest at an early or later stage of our destiny. The self, the spirit, the reality that is disclosing itself out of the first inconscience of life and matter, would evolve its complete truth of being and consciousness in that life and matter. It would return to itself  \u2014 or, if its end as an individual is to return into its Absolute, it could make that return also,  \u2014 not through a frustration of life but through a spiritual
\n\tcompleteness of itself in life. Our evolution in the Ignorance with its
\n\tchequered joy and pain of self-discovery and world discovery, its half fulfilments, its constant finding and missing, is only our first state. It must lead inevitably towards an evolution in the Knowledge, a self-finding and self-unfolding of the Spirit, a self-revelation of the Divinity in things in that true power of itself in Nature which is to us still a Supernature.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

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\n
\nTHE END<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

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