{"id":2191,"date":"2013-07-13T01:40:01","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T08:40:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=2191"},"modified":"2013-11-28T15:07:29","modified_gmt":"2013-11-28T23:07:29","slug":"10-chapter-v-the-ascent-of-the-sacrifice-1-the-works-of-knowledge-the-psychic-being-vol-23-24-the-synthesis-of-yoga","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/01-works-of-sri-aurobindo\/03-cwsa\/23-24-the-synthesis-of-yoga\/10-chapter-v-the-ascent-of-the-sacrifice-1-the-works-of-knowledge-the-psychic-being-vol-23-24-the-synthesis-of-yoga","title":{"rendered":"-10_Chapter V The Ascent of the Sacrifice &#8211; 1 The Works of Knowledge &#8211; The Psychic Being.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span lang=\"en-gb\"><\/p>\n<div align=\"center\">\n<table border=\"0\" cellpadding=\"0\" cellspacing=\"0\" width=\"100%\">\n<tr>\n<td width=\"100%\" valign=\"top\">\n\t\t\t<span lang=\"en-gb\"><\/p>\n<p align=\"center\" style=\"line-height: 150%;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t<b><font size=\"4\">Chapter V <\/font><\/b><\/p>\n<p align=\"center\" style=\"line-height: 150%;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\" style=\"line-height: 150%;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t<b><font size=\"4\">The Ascent of the Sacrifice \u00ad 1<br \/>\n<\/font><\/b><\/p>\n<p align=\"center\" style=\"line-height: 150%;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\" style=\"line-height: 150%;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t<b><font size=\"4\">The Works of Knowledge \u2014 The Psychic Bein<\/font>g<br \/>\n\t\t\t<\/b><\/p>\n<p align=\"center\" style=\"line-height: 150%;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0;text-indent:0pt\">\n\t\t\t<b><font size=\"5\">T<\/font>HIS THEN<\/b> is in its foundations the integral knowledge of the Supreme and Infinite to whom we offer our sacrifice, and this the nature of the sacrifice itself in its triple character, \u2014 a sacrifice of works, a sacrifice of love and adoration, a sacrifice of knowledge. For even when we speak of the sacrifice of works by itself, we do not mean the offering only<br \/>\nof our outward acts, but of all that is active and dynamic in us; our internal movements no less than our external doings are<br \/>\nto be consecrated on the one altar. The inner heart of all work that is made into a sacrifice is a labour of self-discipline and<br \/>\nself-perfection by which we can hope to become conscious and luminous with a Light from above poured into all our movements of mind, heart, will, sense, life and body. An increasing light of divine consciousness will make us close in soul and one<br \/>\nby identity in our inmost being and spiritual substance with the Master of the world-sacrifice,<br \/>\n\t\t\t\u2014 the supreme object of existence<br \/>\nproposed by the ancient Vedanta; but also it will tend to make us one in our becoming by resemblance to the Divine in our<br \/>\nnature, the mystic sense of the symbol of sacrifice in the sealed speech of the seers of the Veda. <\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 25pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\tBut if this is to be the character of the rapid evolution from a mental to a spiritual being contemplated by the integral Yoga,<br \/>\na question arises full of many perplexities but of great dynamic importance. How are we to deal with life and works as they<br \/>\nnow are, with the activities proper to our still unchanged human nature? An ascension towards a greater consciousness, an occupation of our mind, life and body by its powers has been accepted as the outstanding object of the Yoga: but still life here, not<br \/>\nsome other-life elsewhere, is proposed as the immediate field of &nbsp;<\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 25pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\" style=\"line-height: 150%;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t<font size=\"2\">Page <font face=\"Times New Roman\">\u2013 <\/font>134<\/font><\/p>\n<hr>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 0pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\tthe action of the Spirit, \u2014 a transformation, not an annihilation<br \/>\nof our instrumental being and nature. What then becomes of the present activities of our being, activities of the mind turned<br \/>\ntowards knowledge and the expression of knowledge, activities of our emotional and sensational parts, activities of outward<br \/>\nconduct, creation, production, the will turned towards mastery over men, things, life, the world, the forces of Nature? Are<br \/>\nthey to be abandoned and to be replaced by some other way of living in which a spiritualised consciousness can find its true<br \/>\nexpression and figure? Are they to be maintained as they are in their outward appearance, but transformed by an inner spirit in<br \/>\nthe act or enlarged in scope and liberated into new forms by a reversal of consciousness such as was seen on earth when man<br \/>\ntook up the vital activities of the animal to mentalise and extend and transfigure them by the infusion of reason, thinking will,<br \/>\nrefined emotion, an organised intelligence? Or is there to be an abandonment in part, a preservation only of such of them as<br \/>\ncan bear a spiritual change and, for the rest, the creation of a new life expressive, in its form no less than in its inspiration and<br \/>\nmotive-force, of the unity, wideness, peace, joy and harmony of the liberated spirit? It is this problem most of all that has<br \/>\nexercised the minds of those who have tried to trace the paths that lead from the human to the Divine in the long journey of<br \/>\nthe Yoga. <\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 25pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\tEvery kind of solution has been offered from the entire<br \/>\nabandonment of works and life, so far as that is physically possible, to the acceptance of life as it is but with a new spirit<br \/>\nanimating and uplifting its movements, in appearance the same as they were but changed in the spirit behind them and therefore<br \/>\nin their inner significance. The extreme solution insisted on by the world-shunning ascetic or the inward-turned ecstatical and<br \/>\nself-oblivious mystic is evidently foreign to the purpose of an integral Yoga,<br \/>\n\t\t\t\u2014 for if we are to realise the Divine in the world,<br \/>\nit cannot be done by leaving aside the world-action and action itself altogether. At a less high pitch it was laid down by the<br \/>\nreligious mind in ancient times that one should keep only such actions as are in their nature part of the seeking, service or cult <\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 25pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\" style=\"line-height: 150%;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t<font size=\"2\">Page <font face=\"Times New Roman\">\u2013 <\/font>135<\/font><\/p>\n<hr>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 0pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\tof the Divine and such others as are attached to these or, in<br \/>\naddition, those that are indispensable to the ordinary setting of life but done in a religious spirit and according to the injunctions<br \/>\nof traditional religion and Scripture. But this is too formalist a rule for the fulfilment of the free spirit in works, and it is besides<br \/>\nprofessedly no more than a provisional solution for tiding over the transition from life in the world to a life in the Beyond which<br \/>\nstill remains the sole ultimate purpose. An integral Yoga must lean rather to the catholic injunction of the Gita that even the<br \/>\nliberated soul, living in the Truth, should still do all the works of life so that the plan of the universal evolution under a secret<br \/>\ndivine leading may not languish or suffer. But if all works are to be done with the same forms and on the same lines as they<br \/>\nare now done in the Ignorance, our gain is only inward and our life is in danger of becoming the dubious and ambiguous<br \/>\nformula of an inner Light doing the works of an outer Twilight, the perfect Spirit expressing itself in a mould of imperfection<br \/>\nforeign to its own divine nature. If no better can be done for a time, \u2014 and during a long period of transition something like<br \/>\nthis does inevitably happen, \u2014 then so it must remain till things are ready and the spirit within is powerful enough to impose its<br \/>\nown forms on the life of the body and the world outside; but this can be accepted only as a transitional stage and not as our<br \/>\nsoul&#8217;s ideal or the ultimate goal of the passage. <\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 25pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\tFor the same reason the ethical solution is insufficient; for<br \/>\nan ethical rule merely puts a bit in the mouth of the wild horses of Nature and exercises over them a difficult and partial control,<br \/>\nbut it has no power to transform Nature so that she may move in a secure freedom fulfilling the intuitions that proceed from a<br \/>\ndivine self-knowledge. At best its method is to lay down limits, to coerce the devil, to put the wall of a relative and very doubtful<br \/>\nsafety around us. This or some similar device of self-protection may be necessary for a time whether in ordinary life or in Yoga;<br \/>\nbut in Yoga it can only be the mark of a transition. A fundamental transformation and a pure wideness of spiritual life are the<br \/>\naim before us and, if we are to reach it, we must find a deeper solution, a surer supra-ethical dynamic principle. To be spiritual <\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 25pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\" style=\"line-height: 150%;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t<font size=\"2\">Page <font face=\"Times New Roman\">\u2013 <\/font>136<\/font><\/p>\n<hr>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 0pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\twithin, ethical in the outside life, this is the ordinary religious<br \/>\nsolution, but it is a compromise; the spiritualisation of both the inward being and the outward life and not a compromise<br \/>\nbetween life and the spirit is the goal of which we are the seekers. Nor can the human confusion of values which obliterates the<br \/>\ndistinction between spiritual and moral and even claims that the moral is the only true spiritual element in our nature be of any<br \/>\nuse to us; for ethics is a mental control, and the limited erring mind is not and cannot be the free and ever-luminous spirit. It is<br \/>\nequally impossible to accept the gospel that makes life the one aim, takes its elements fundamentally as they are and only calls<br \/>\nin a half-spiritual or pseudo-spiritual light to flush and embellish it. Inadequate too is the very frequent attempt at a misalliance<br \/>\nbetween the vital and the spiritual, a mystic experience within with an aestheticised intellectual and sensuous Paganism or exalted hedonism outside leaning upon it and satisfying itself in the glow of a spiritual sanction; for this too is a precarious and<br \/>\nnever successful compromise and it is as far from the divine Truth and its integrality as the puritanic opposite. These are all<br \/>\nstumbling solutions of the fallible human mind groping for a transaction between the high spiritual summits and the lower<br \/>\npitch of the ordinary mind-motives and life-motives. Whatever partial truth may be hidden behind them, that truth can only<br \/>\nbe accepted when it has been raised to the spiritual level, tested in the supreme Truth-consciousness and extricated from the soil<br \/>\nand error of the Ignorance. <\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 25pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\tIn sum, it may be safely affirmed that no solution offered<br \/>\ncan be anything but provisional until a supramental Truthconsciousness is reached by which the appearances of things<br \/>\nare put in their place and their essence revealed and that in them which derives straight from the spiritual essence. In the<br \/>\nmeanwhile our only safety is to find a guiding law of spiritual experience \u2014 or else to liberate a light within that can lead us on<br \/>\nthe way until that greater direct Truth-consciousness is reached above us or born within us. For all else in us that is only outward, all that is not a spiritual sense or seeing, the constructions, representations or conclusions of the intellect, the suggestions or<\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 25pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\" style=\"line-height: 150%;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t<font size=\"2\">Page <font face=\"Times New Roman\">\u2013 <\/font>137<\/font><\/p>\n<hr>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 0pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\tinstigations of the life-force, the positive necessities of physical<br \/>\nthings are sometimes half-lights, sometimes false lights that can at best only serve for a while or serve a little and for the rest either<br \/>\ndetain or confuse us. The guiding law of spiritual experience can only come by an opening of human consciousness to the<br \/>\nDivine Consciousness; there must be the power to receive in us the working and command and dynamic presence of the Divine<br \/>\nShakti and surrender ourselves to her control; it is that surrender and that control which bring the guidance. But the surrender is<br \/>\nnot sure, there is no absolute certitude of the guidance so long as we are besieged by mind formations and life impulses and<br \/>\ninstigations of ego which may easily betray us into the hands of a false experience. This danger can only be countered by the<br \/>\nopening of a now nine-tenths concealed inmost soul or psychic being that is already there but not commonly active within us.<br \/>\nThat is the inner light we must liberate; for the light of this inmost soul is our one sure illumination so long as we walk still<br \/>\namidst the siege of the Ignorance and the Truth-consciousness has not taken up the entire control of our Godward endeavour.<br \/>\nThe working of the Divine Force in us under the conditions of the transition and the light of the psychic being turning us always<br \/>\ntowards a conscious and seeing obedience to that higher impulsion and away from the demands and instigations of the Forces<br \/>\nof the Ignorance, these between them create an ever progressive inner law of our action which continues till the spiritual and<br \/>\nsupramental can be established in our nature. In the transition there may well be a period in which we take up all life and<br \/>\naction and offer them to the Divine for purification, change and deliverance of the truth within them, another period in which<br \/>\nwe draw back and build a spiritual wall around us admitting through its gates only such activities as consent to undergo the<br \/>\nlaw of the spiritual transformation, a third in which a free and all-embracing action, but with new forms fit for the utter truth<br \/>\nof the Spirit, can again be made possible. These things, however, will be decided by no mental rule but in the light of the soul<br \/>\nwithin us and by the ordaining force and progressive guidance of the Divine Power that secretly or overtly first impels, then <\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 0pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\" style=\"line-height: 150%;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t<font size=\"2\">Page <font face=\"Times New Roman\">\u2013 <\/font>138<\/font>&nbsp;<br \/>\n&nbsp;<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"text-indent: 0pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t&nbsp;begins clearly to control and order and finally takes up the whole<br \/>\nburden of the Yoga. <\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 25pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\tIn accordance with the triple character of the sacrifice we<br \/>\nmay divide works too into a triple order, the works of Knowledge, the works of Love, the works of the Will-in-Life, and see<br \/>\nhow this more plastic spiritual rule applies to each province and effects the transition from the lower to the higher nature. <\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 25pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 0pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t<font face=\"Times New Roman\">* *<\/font><\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 25pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\nIt is natural from the point of view of the Yoga to divide into two categories the activities of the human mind in its pursuit of<br \/>\nknowledge. There is the supreme supra-intellectual knowledge which concentrates itself on the discovery of the One and Infinite<br \/>\nin its transcendence or tries to penetrate by intuition, contemplation, direct inner contact into the ultimate truths behind the<br \/>\nappearances of Nature; there is the lower science which diffuses itself in an outward knowledge of phenomena, the disguises of<br \/>\nthe One and Infinite as it appears to us in or through the more exterior forms of the world-manifestation around us. These<br \/>\ntwo, an upper and a lower hemisphere, in the form of them constructed or conceived by men within the mind&#8217;s ignorant<br \/>\nlimits, have even there separated themselves, as they developed, with some sharpness&#8230;. Philosophy, sometimes spiritual or at<br \/>\nleast intuitive, sometimes abstract and intellectual, sometimes intellectualising spiritual experience or supporting with a logical apparatus the discoveries of the spirit, has claimed always to take the fixation of ultimate Truth as its province. But even<br \/>\nwhen it did not separate itself on rarefied metaphysical heights from the knowledge that belongs to the practical world and<br \/>\nthe pursuit of ephemeral objects, intellectual Philosophy by its habit of abstraction has seldom been a power for life. It has<br \/>\nbeen sometimes powerful for high speculation, pursuing mental Truth for its own sake without any ulterior utility or object,<br \/>\nsometimes for a subtle gymnastic of the mind in a mistily bright cloud-land of words and ideas, but it has walked or acrobatised far from the more tangible realities of existence. Ancient &nbsp;<\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 25pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\" style=\"line-height: 150%;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t<font size=\"2\">Page <font face=\"Times New Roman\">\u2013 <\/font>139<\/font><\/p>\n<hr>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 0pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\tPhilosophy in Europe was more dynamic, but only for the few;<br \/>\nin India in its more spiritualised forms, it strongly influenced but without transforming the life of the race&#8230;. Religion did not<br \/>\nattempt, like Philosophy, to live alone on the heights; its aim was rather to take hold of man&#8217;s parts of life even more than his<br \/>\nparts of mind and draw them Godwards; it professed to build a bridge between spiritual Truth and the vital and material human<br \/>\nexistence; it strove to subordinate and reconcile the lower to the higher, make life serviceable to God, Earth obedient to Heaven.<br \/>\nIt has to be admitted that too often this necessary effort had the opposite result of making Heaven a sanction for Earth&#8217;s desires;<br \/>\nfor, continually, the religious idea has been turned into an excuse for the worship and service of the human ego. Religion, leaving<br \/>\nconstantly its little shining core of spiritual experience, has lost itself in the obscure mass of its ever extending ambiguous compromises with life: in attempting to satisfy the thinking mind, it more often succeeded in oppressing or fettering it with a mass<br \/>\nof theological dogmas; while seeking to net the human heart, it fell itself into pits of pietistic emotionalism and sensationalism;<br \/>\nin the act of annexing the vital nature of man to dominate it, it grew itself vitiated and fell a prey to all the fanaticism, homicidal<br \/>\nfury, savage or harsh turn for oppression, pullulating falsehood, obstinate attachment to ignorance to which that vital nature<br \/>\nis prone; its desire to draw the physical in man towards God betrayed it into chaining itself to ecclesiastic mechanism, hollow<br \/>\nceremony and lifeless ritual. The corruption of the best produced the worst by that strange chemistry of the power of life which<br \/>\ngenerates evil out of good even as it can also generate good out of evil. At the same time in a vain effort at self-defence against<br \/>\nthis downward gravitation, Religion was driven to cut existence into two by a division of knowledge, works, art, life itself into<br \/>\ntwo opposite categories, the spiritual and the worldly, religious and mundane, sacred and profane; but this defensive distinction<br \/>\nitself became conventional and artificial and aggravated rather than healed the disease&#8230;. On their side Science and Art and the<br \/>\nknowledge of Life, although at first they served or lived in the shadow of Religion, ended by emancipating themselves, became <\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 0pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 0pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t&nbsp; <font size=\"2\">Page <font face=\"Times New Roman\">\u2013 <\/font>140<\/font><br \/>\n\t\t\t&nbsp; <\/p>\n<hr>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 0pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\testranged or hostile, or have even recoiled with indifference,<br \/>\ncontempt or scepticism from what seem to them the cold, barren and distant or unsubstantial and illusory heights of unreality to<br \/>\nwhich metaphysical Philosophy and Religion aspire. For a time the divorce has been as complete as the one-sided intolerance of<br \/>\nthe human mind could make it and threatened even to end in a complete extinction of all attempt at a higher or a more spiritual<br \/>\nknowledge. Yet even in the earthward life a higher knowledge is indeed the one thing that is throughout needful, and without<br \/>\nit the lower sciences and pursuits, however fruitful, however rich, free, miraculous in the abundance of their results, become<br \/>\neasily a sacrifice offered without due order and to false gods; corrupting, hardening in the end the heart of man, limiting his<br \/>\nmind&#8217;s horizons, they confine in a stony material imprisonment or lead to a final baffling incertitude and disillusionment. A sterile agnosticism awaits us above the brilliant phosphorescence of a half-knowledge that is still the Ignorance. <\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 25pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\tA Yoga turned towards an all-embracing realisation of the Supreme will not despise the works or even the dreams, if dreams<br \/>\nthey are, of the Cosmic Spirit or shrink from the splendid toil and many-sided victory which he has assigned to himself in the<br \/>\nhuman creature. But its first condition for this liberality is that our works in the world too must be part of the sacrifice offered<br \/>\nto the Highest and to none else, to the Divine Shakti and to no other Power, in the right spirit and with the right knowledge, by<br \/>\nthe free soul and not by the hypnotised bondslave of material Nature. If a division of works has to be made, it is between those<br \/>\nthat are nearest to the heart of the sacred flame and those that are least touched or illumined by it because they are more at a<br \/>\ndistance, or between the fuel that burns strongly and brightly and the logs that if too thickly heaped on the altar may impede<br \/>\nthe ardour of the fire by their rather damp, heavy and diffused abundance. But, otherwise, apart from this division, all activities<br \/>\nof knowledge that seek after or express Truth are in themselves rightful materials for a complete offering; none ought necessarily<br \/>\nto be excluded from the wide framework of the divine life. The mental and physical sciences which examine into the laws and <\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 25pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 0pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t&nbsp;<font size=\"2\">Page <font face=\"Times New Roman\">\u2013 <\/font>141<\/font><\/p>\n<hr>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 0pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\tforms and processes of things, those which concern the life of<br \/>\nmen and animals, the social, political, linguistic and historical and those which seek to know and control the labours and activities by which man subdues and utilises his world and environment, and the noble and beautiful Arts which are at once work<br \/>\nand knowledge, \u2014 for every well-made and significant poem, picture, statue or building is an act of creative knowledge, a living discovery of the consciousness, a figure of Truth, a dynamic form of<br \/>\nmental and vital self-expression or world-expression, \u2014<br \/>\nall that seeks, all that finds, all that voices or figures is a realisation of something of the play of the Infinite and to that extent<br \/>\ncan be made a means of God-realisation or of divine formation. But the Yogin has to see that it is no longer done as part of an<br \/>\nignorant mental life; it can be accepted by him only if by the feeling, the remembrance, the dedication within it, it is turned<br \/>\ninto a movement of the spiritual consciousness and becomes a part of its vast grasp of comprehensive illuminating knowledge. <\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 25pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\tFor all must be done as a sacrifice, all activities must have the One Divine for their object and the heart of their meaning.<br \/>\nThe Yogin&#8217;s aim in the sciences that make for knowledge should be to discover and understand the workings of the Divine<br \/>\nConsciousness-Puissance in man and creatures and things and forces, her creative significances, her execution of the mysteries,<br \/>\nthe symbols in which she arranges the manifestation. The Yogin&#8217;s aim in the practical sciences, whether mental and physical or<br \/>\noccult and psychic, should be to enter into the ways of the Divine and his processes, to know the materials and means<br \/>\nfor the work given to us so that we may use that knowledge for a conscious and faultless expression of the spirit&#8217;s mastery,<br \/>\njoy and self-fulfilment. The Yogin&#8217;s aim in the Arts should not be a mere aesthetic, mental or vital gratification, but, seeing<br \/>\nthe Divine everywhere, worshipping it with a revelation of the meaning of its own works, to express that One Divine in<br \/>\nideal forms, the One Divine in principles and forces, the One Divine in gods and men and creatures and objects. The theory<br \/>\nthat sees an intimate connection between religious aspiration and the truest and greatest Art is in essence right; but we must <\/p>\n<p align=\"center\" style=\"line-height: 150%;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\" style=\"line-height: 150%;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t<font size=\"2\">Page <font face=\"Times New Roman\">\u2013 <\/font>142<\/font><\/p>\n<hr>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 0pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\tsubstitute for the mixed and doubtful religious motive a spiritual<br \/>\naspiration, vision, interpreting experience. For the wider and more comprehensive the seeing, the more it contains in itself<br \/>\nthe sense of the hidden Divine in humanity and in all things and rises beyond a superficial religiosity into the spiritual life,<br \/>\nthe more luminous, flexible, deep and powerful will the Art be that springs from that high motive. The Yogin&#8217;s distinction from<br \/>\nother men is this that he lives in a higher and vaster spiritual consciousness; all his work of knowledge or creation must then<br \/>\nspring from there: it must not be made in the mind, \u2014 for it is a greater truth and vision than mental man&#8217;s that he has to<br \/>\nexpress or rather that presses to express itself through him and mould his works, not for his personal satisfaction, but for a<br \/>\ndivine purpose. <\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 25pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\tAt the same time the Yogin who knows the Supreme is not<br \/>\nsubject to any need or compulsion in these activities; for to him they are neither a duty nor a necessary occupation for the mind<br \/>\nnor a high amusement, nor imposed even by the loftiest human purpose. He is not attached, bound and limited by any nor has he<br \/>\nany personal motive of fame, greatness or personal satisfaction in these works; he can leave or pursue them as the Divine in him<br \/>\nwills, but he need not otherwise abandon them in his pursuit of the higher integral knowledge. He will do these things just as<br \/>\nthe supreme Power acts and creates, for a certain spiritual joy in creation and expression or to help in the holding together and<br \/>\nright ordering or leading of this world of God&#8217;s workings. The Gita teaches that the man of knowledge shall by his way of life<br \/>\ngive to those who have not yet the spiritual consciousness, the love and habit of<br \/>\n<i>all <\/i>works and not only of actions recognised as<br \/>\npious, religious or ascetic in their character; he should not draw men away from the world-action by his example. For the world<br \/>\nmust proceed in its great upward aspiring; men and nations must not be led to fall away from even an ignorant activity into a<br \/>\nworse ignorance of inaction or to sink down into that miserable disintegration and tendency of dissolution which comes upon<br \/>\ncommunities and peoples when there predominates the tamasic principle, the principle whether of obscure confusion and error <\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 25pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\" style=\"line-height: 150%;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t<font size=\"2\">Page <font face=\"Times New Roman\">\u2013 <\/font>143<\/font><\/p>\n<hr>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 0pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\tor of weariness and inertia. &#8220;For I too,&#8221; says the Lord in the<br \/>\nGita, &#8220;have no need to do works, since there is nothing I have not or must yet gain for myself; yet I do works in the world:<br \/>\nfor if I did not do works, all laws would fall into confusion, the worlds would sink towards chaos and I would be the destroyer<br \/>\nof these peoples.&#8221; The spiritual life does not need, for its purity, to destroy interest in all things except the Inexpressible or to cut<br \/>\nat the roots of the Sciences, the Arts and Life. It may well be one of the effects of an integral spiritual knowledge and activity<br \/>\nto lift them out of their limitations, substitute for our mind&#8217;s ignorant, limited, tepid or trepidant pleasure in them a free,<br \/>\nintense and uplifting urge of delight and supply a new source of creative spiritual power and illumination by which they can<br \/>\nbe carried more swiftly and profoundly towards their absolute light in knowledge and their yet undreamed possibilities and<br \/>\nmost dynamic energy of content and form and practice. The one thing needful must be pursued first and always; but all things<br \/>\nelse come with it as its outcome and have not so much to be added to us as recovered and reshaped in its self-light and as<br \/>\nportions of its self-expressive force. <\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 25pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 0pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t<font face=\"Times New Roman\">* *<\/font><\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 0pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\tThis then is the true relation between divine and human knowledge; it is not a separation into disparate fields, sacred and profane, that is the heart of the difference, but the character of<br \/>\nthe consciousness behind the working. All is human knowledge that proceeds from the ordinary mental consciousness interested<br \/>\nin the outside or upper layers of things, in process, in phenomena for their own sake or for the sake of some surface utility or<br \/>\nmental or vital satisfaction of Desire or of the Intelligence. But the same activity of knowledge can become part of the Yoga if it<br \/>\nproceeds from the spiritual or spiritualising consciousness which seeks and finds in all that it surveys or penetrates the presence<br \/>\nof the timeless Eternal and the ways of manifestation of the Eternal in Time. It is evident that the need of a concentration<br \/>\nindispensable for the transition out of the Ignorance may make &nbsp;<\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 0pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\" style=\"line-height: 150%;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t<font size=\"2\">Page <font face=\"Times New Roman\">\u2013 <\/font>144<\/font>\n\t\t\t<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 0pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\tit necessary for the seeker to gather together his energies and<br \/>\nfocus them only on that which will help the transition and to leave aside or subordinate for the time all that is not directly<br \/>\nturned towards the one object. He may find that this or that pursuit of human knowledge with which he was accustomed to<br \/>\ndeal by the surface power of the mind still brings him by reason of this tendency or habit out of the depths to the surface or down<br \/>\nfrom the heights which he has climbed or is nearing to lower levels. These activities then may have to be intermitted or put<br \/>\naside until, secure in a higher consciousness, he is able to turn its powers on all the mental fields; then, subjected to that light<br \/>\nor taken up into it, they are turned, by the transformation of his consciousness, into a province of the spiritual and divine. All<br \/>\nthat cannot be so transformed or refuses to be part of a divine consciousness he will abandon without hesitation, but not from<br \/>\nany preconceived prejudgment of its unfitness or its incapacity to be an element of the new inner life. There can be no fixed<br \/>\nmental test or principle for these things; he will therefore follow no unalterable rule, but accept or repel an activity of the mind<br \/>\naccording to his feeling, insight or experience until the greater Power and Light are there to turn their unerring scrutiny on all<br \/>\nthat is below and choose or reject their material out of what the human evolution has prepared for the divine labour. <\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 25pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\tHow precisely or by what stages this progression and change will take place must depend on the form, need and powers of the<br \/>\nindividual nature. In the spiritual domain the essence is always one, but there is yet an infinite variety and, at any rate in the integral Yoga, the rigidity of a strict and precise mental rule is seldom applicable; for, even when they walk in the same direction, no<br \/>\ntwo natures proceed on exactly the same lines, in the same series of steps or with quite identical stages of their progress. It may yet<br \/>\nbe said that a logical succession of the states of progress would be very much in this order. First, there is a large turning in which<br \/>\nall the natural mental activities proper to the individual nature are taken up or referred to a higher standpoint and dedicated by<br \/>\nthe soul in us, the psychic being, the priest of the sacrifice, to the divine service; next, there is an attempt at an ascent of the being <\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 25pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\" style=\"line-height: 150%;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t<font size=\"2\">Page <font face=\"Times New Roman\">\u2013 <\/font>145<\/font><br \/>\n&nbsp;<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 0pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\tand a bringing down of the Light and Power proper to some<br \/>\nnew height of consciousness gained by its upward effort into the whole action of the knowledge. Here there may be a strong<br \/>\nconcentration on the inward central change of the consciousness and an abandonment of a large part of the outward-going mental<br \/>\nlife or else its relegation to a small and subordinate place. At different stages it or parts of it may be taken up again from<br \/>\ntime to time to see how far the new inner psychic and spiritual consciousness can be brought into its movements; but that compulsion of the temperament or the nature which in human beings necessitates one kind of activity or another and makes it seem<br \/>\nalmost an indispensable portion of the existence, will diminish and eventually no attachment will be left, no lower compulsion<br \/>\nor driving force felt anywhere. Only the Divine will matter, the Divine alone will be the one need of the whole being; if there<br \/>\nis any compulsion to activity it will be not that of implanted desire or of force of Nature, but the luminous driving of some<br \/>\ngreater Consciousness-Force which is becoming more and more the sole motive power of the whole existence. On the other hand,<br \/>\nit is possible at any period of the inner spiritual progress that one may experience an extension rather than a restriction of the<br \/>\nactivities; there may be an opening of new capacities of mental creation and new provinces of knowledge by the miraculous<br \/>\ntouch of the Yoga-Shakti. Aesthetic feeling, the power of artistic creation in one field or many fields together, talent or genius<br \/>\nof literary expression, a faculty of metaphysical thinking, any power of eye or ear or hand or mind-power may awaken where<br \/>\nnone was apparent before. The Divine within may throw these latent riches out from the depths in which they were hidden or<br \/>\na Force from above may pour down its energies to equip the instrumental nature for the activity or the creation of which it<br \/>\nis meant to be a channel or a builder. But, whatever may be the method or the course of development chosen by the hidden<br \/>\nMaster of the Yoga, the common culmination of this stage is the growing consciousness of him alone as the mover, decider,<br \/>\nshaper of all the movements of the mind and all the activities of knowledge. <\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 0pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\" style=\"line-height: 150%;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t<font size=\"2\">Page <font face=\"Times New Roman\">\u2013 <\/font>146<\/font><\/p>\n<hr>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 0pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; There are two signs of the transformation of the seeker&#8217;s<br \/>\nmind of knowledge and works of knowledge from the process of the Ignorance to the process of a liberated consciousness<br \/>\nworking partly, then wholly in the light of the Spirit. There is first a central change of the consciousness and a growing<br \/>\ndirect experience, vision, feeling of the Supreme and the cosmic existence, the Divine in itself and the Divine in all things; the<br \/>\nmind will be taken up into a growing preoccupation with this first and foremost and will feel itself heightening, widening into<br \/>\na more and more illumined means of expression of the one fundamental knowledge. But also the central Consciousness in<br \/>\nits turn will take up more and more the outer mental activities of knowledge and turn them into a parcel of itself or an annexed<br \/>\nprovince; it will infuse into them its more authentic movement and make a more and more spiritualised and illumined mind its<br \/>\ninstrument in these surface fields, its new conquests, as well as in its own deeper spiritual empire. And this will be the second sign,<br \/>\nthe sign of a certain completion and perfection, that the Divine himself has become the Knower and all the inner movements,<br \/>\nincluding the activities of what was once a purely human mental action, have become his field of knowledge. There will be less<br \/>\nand less individual choice, opinion, preference, less and less of intellectualisation, mental weaving, cerebral galley-slave labour;<br \/>\na Light within will see all that has to be seen, know all that has to be known, develop, create, organise. It will be the Inner<br \/>\nKnower who will do in the liberated and universalised mind of the individual the works of an all-comprehending knowledge.  <\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 25pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\tThese two changes are the signs of a first effectuation in which the<br \/>\n\t\t\tactivities of the mental nature are lifted up, spiritualised,<br \/>\n\t\t\twidened, universalised, liberated, led to a consciousness of their<br \/>\n\t\t\ttrue purpose as an instrumentation of the Divine creating and<br \/>\n\t\t\tdeveloping its manifestation in the temporal universe. But this<br \/>\n\t\t\tcannot be the whole scope of the transformation; for it is not in<br \/>\n\t\t\tthese limits that the integral seeker can cease from his ascension<br \/>\n\t\t\tor confine the widening of his nature. For, if it were so, knowledge<br \/>\n\t\t\twould still remain a working of the mind, liberated, universalised,<br \/>\n\t\t\tspiritualised, but still, as all mind must be,&nbsp; <\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 25pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\" style=\"line-height: 150%;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t<font size=\"2\">Page <font face=\"Times New Roman\">\u2013 <\/font>147<\/font><\/p>\n<hr>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 0pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\tcomparatively restricted, relative, imperfect in the very essence<br \/>\nof its dynamism; it would reflect luminously great constructions of Truth, but not move in the domain where Truth is authentic,<br \/>\ndirect, sovereign and native. There is an ascension still to be made from this height, by which the spiritualised mind will<br \/>\nexceed itself and transmute into a supramental power of knowledge. Already in the process of spiritualisation it will have begun<br \/>\nto pass out of the brilliant poverty of the human intellect; it will mount successively into the pure broad reaches of a higher mind,<br \/>\nand next into the gleaming belts of a still greater free Intelligence illumined with a Light from above. At this point it will begin to<br \/>\nfeel more freely, admit with a less mixed response the radiant beginnings of an Intuition, not illumined, but luminous in itself,<br \/>\ntrue in itself, no longer entirely mental and therefore subjected to the abundant intrusion of error. Here too is not an end, for<br \/>\nit must rise beyond into the very domain of that untruncated Intuition, the first direct light from the self-awareness of essential<br \/>\nBeing and, beyond it, attain that from which this light comes. For there is an Overmind behind Mind, a Power more original and<br \/>\ndynamic which supports Mind, sees it as a diminished radiation from itself, uses it as a transmitting belt of passage downward<br \/>\nor an instrument for the creations of the Ignorance. The last step of the ascension would be the surpassing of Overmind itself<br \/>\nor its return into its own still greater origin, its conversion into the supramental light of the Divine Gnosis. For there in the<br \/>\nsupramental Light is the seat of a divine Truth-consciousness that has native in it, as no other consciousness below it can<br \/>\nhave, the power to organise the works of a Truth which is no longer tarnished by the shadow of the cosmic Inconscience and<br \/>\nIgnorance. There to reach and thence to bring down a supramental dynamism that can transform the Ignorance is the distant<br \/>\nbut imperative supreme goal of the integral Yoga. <\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 25pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\tAs the light of each of these higher powers is turned upon the human<br \/>\n\t\t\tactivities of knowledge, any distinction of sacred and profane,<br \/>\n\t\t\thuman and divine, begins more and more to fade until it is finally<br \/>\n\t\t\tabolished as otiose; for whatever is touched and thoroughly<br \/>\n\t\t\tpenetrated by the Divine Gnosis is transfigured <\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 25pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\" style=\"line-height: 150%;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t<font size=\"2\">Page <font face=\"Times New Roman\">\u2013 <\/font>148<\/font><\/p>\n<hr>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 0pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\tand becomes a movement of its own Light and Power, free from<br \/>\nthe turbidity and limitations of the lower intelligence. It is not a separation of some activities, but a transformation of them all by<br \/>\nthe change of the informing consciousness that is the way of liberation, an ascent of the sacrifice of knowledge to a greater and<br \/>\never greater light and force. All the works of mind and intellect must be first heightened and widened, then illumined, lifted into<br \/>\nthe domain of a higher Intelligence, afterwards translated into workings of a greater non-mental Intuition, these again transformed into the dynamic outpourings of the Overmind radiance, and those transfigured into the full light and sovereignty of the<br \/>\nsupramental Gnosis. It is this that the evolution of consciousness in the world carries prefigured but latent in its seed and in the<br \/>\nstraining tense intention of its process; nor can that process, that evolution cease till it has evolved the instruments of a perfect in<br \/>\nplace of its now imperfect manifestation of the Spirit. <\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 25pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 0pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t<font face=\"Times New Roman\">* *<\/font><\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 25pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\tIf knowledge is the widest power of the consciousness and its<br \/>\nfunction is to free and illumine, yet love is the deepest and most intense and its privilege is to be the key to the most profound<br \/>\nand secret recesses of the Divine Mystery. Man, because he is a mental being, is prone to give the highest importance to the<br \/>\nthinking mind and its reason and will and to its way of approach and effectuation of Truth and, even, he is inclined to hold that<br \/>\nthere is no other. The heart with its emotions and incalculable movements is to the eye of his intellect an obscure, uncertain and<br \/>\noften a perilous and misleading power which needs to be kept in control by the reason and the mental will and intelligence.<br \/>\nAnd yet there is in the heart or behind it a profounder mystic light which, if not what we call intuition,<br \/>\n\u2014 for that, though not<br \/>\nof the mind, yet descends through the mind, \u2014 has yet a direct touch upon Truth and is nearer to the Divine than the human<br \/>\nintellect in its pride of knowledge. According to the ancient teaching the seat of the immanent Divine, the hidden Purusha,<br \/>\n<i>\u00af&nbsp;\u00af<\/i> is in the mystic heart, \u2014 the secret heart-cave, <i>hr<font face=\"Times New Roman\">&#61484;<\/font>daye guh<font face=\"Times New Roman\">&#257;<\/font>y<font face=\"Times New Roman\">&#257;<\/font>m<\/i>,<br \/>\n<i>.<\/i> <\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 25pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\" style=\"line-height: 150%;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t<font size=\"2\">Page <font face=\"Times New Roman\">\u2013 <\/font>149<\/font><\/p>\n<hr>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 0pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\tas the Upanishads put it, \u2014 and, according to the experience of<br \/>\nmany Yogins, it is from its depths that there comes the voice or the breath of the inner oracle. <\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 25pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\tThis ambiguity, these opposing appearances of depth and blindness are created by the double character of the human emotive being. For there is in front in man a heart of vital emotion similar to the animal&#8217;s, if more variously developed; its emotions<br \/>\nare governed by egoistic passion, blind instinctive affections and all the play of the life-impulses with their imperfections, perversions, often sordid degradations, \u2014 a heart besieged and given over to the lusts, desires, wraths, intense or fierce demands or<br \/>\nlittle greeds and mean pettinesses of an obscure and fallen life-force and debased by its slavery to any and every impulse. This<br \/>\nmixture of the emotive heart and the sensational hungering vital creates in man a false soul of desire; it is this that is the crude<br \/>\nand dangerous element which the reason rightly distrusts and feels a need to control, even though the actual control or rather<br \/>\ncoercion it succeeds in establishing over our raw and insistent vital nature remains always very uncertain and deceptive. But<br \/>\nthe true soul of man is not there; it is in the true invisible heart hidden in some luminous cave of the nature: there under some<br \/>\ninfiltration of the divine Light is our soul, a silent inmost being of which few are even aware; for if all have a soul, few are conscious<br \/>\nof their true soul or feel its direct impulse. There dwells the little spark of the Divine which supports the obscure mass of our<br \/>\nnature and around it grows the psychic being, the formed soul or the real Man within us. It is as this psychic being in him<br \/>\ngrows and the movements of the heart reflect its divinations and impulsions that man becomes more and more aware of his soul,<br \/>\nceases to be a superior animal and, awakening to glimpses of the godhead within him, admits more and more its intimations of<br \/>\na deeper life and consciousness and an impulse towards things divine. It is one of the decisive moments of the integral Yoga<br \/>\nwhen this psychic being, liberated, brought out from the veil to the front, can pour the full flood of its divinations, seeings and<br \/>\nimpulsions on the mind, life and body of man and begins to prepare the upbuilding of divinity in the earthly nature.<\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 25pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\" style=\"line-height: 150%;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t<font size=\"2\">Page <font face=\"Times New Roman\">\u2013 <\/font>150<\/font><\/p>\n<hr>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 25pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t&nbsp;<br \/>\n&nbsp;As in the works of knowledge, so in dealing with the workings of the heart, we are obliged to make a preliminary distinction between two categories of movements, those that are<br \/>\neither moved by the true soul or aid towards its liberation and rule in the nature and those that are turned to the satisfaction<br \/>\nof the unpurified vital nature. But the distinctions ordinarily laid down in this sense are of little use for the deeper spiritual<br \/>\npurpose of Yoga. Thus a division can be made between religious emotions and mundane feelings and it can be laid down as a<br \/>\nrule of spiritual life that the religious emotions alone should be cultivated and all worldly feelings and passions must be rejected<br \/>\nand fall away from our existence. This in practice would mean the religious life of the saint or devotee, alone within with the<br \/>\nDivine or linked only to others in a common God-love or at the most pouring out the fountains of a sacred, religious or pietistic<br \/>\nlove on the world outside. But religious emotion itself is too constantly invaded by the turmoil and obscurity of the vital<br \/>\nmovements and it is often either crude or narrow or fanatical or mixed with movements that are not signs of the spirit&#8217;s perfection. It is evident besides that even at the best an intense figure of sainthood clamped in rigid hieratic lines is quite other than<br \/>\nthe wide ideal of an integral Yoga. A larger psychic and emotional relation with God and the world, more deep and plastic<br \/>\nin its essence, more wide and embracing in its movements, more capable of taking up in its sweep the whole of life, is imperative.  <\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 25pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\tA wider formula has been provided by the secular mind of man of which the basis is the ethical sense; for it distinguishes between the emotions sanctioned by the ethical sense and those that are egoistic and selfishly common and mundane. It is<br \/>\nthe works of altruism, philanthropy, compassion, benevolence, humanitarianism, service, labour for the well-being of man and<br \/>\nall creatures that are to be our ideal; to shuffle off the coil of egoism and grow into a soul of self-abnegation that lives only<br \/>\nor mainly for others or for humanity as a whole is the way of man&#8217;s inner evolution according to this doctrine. Or if this is<br \/>\ntoo secular and mental to satisfy the whole of our being, since there is a deeper religious and spiritual note there that is left<br \/>\n &nbsp;<\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 25pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\" style=\"line-height: 150%;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t<font size=\"2\">Page <font face=\"Times New Roman\">\u2013 <\/font>151<\/font><\/p>\n<hr>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 0pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\tout of account by the humanitarian formula, a religio-ethical<br \/>\nfoundation can be provided for it \u2014 and such was indeed its original basis. To the inner worship of the Divine or the Supreme<br \/>\nby the devotion of the heart or to the pursuit of the Ineffable by the seeking of a highest knowledge can be added a worship<br \/>\nthrough altruistic works or a preparation through acts of love, of benevolence, of service to mankind or to those around us. It<br \/>\nis indeed by the religio-ethical sense that the law of universal goodwill or universal compassion or of love and service to the<br \/>\nneighbour, the Vedantic, the Buddhistic, the Christian ideal, was created; only by a sort of secular refrigeration extinguishing the<br \/>\nfervour of the religious element in it could the humanitarian ideal disengage itself and become the highest plane of a secular system<br \/>\nof mental and moral ethics. For in the religious system this law of works is a means that ceases when its object is accomplished<br \/>\nor a side issue; it is a part of the cult by which one adores and seeks the Divinity or it is a penultimate step of the excision of<br \/>\nself in the passage to Nirvana. In the secular ideal it is promoted into an object in itself; it becomes a sign of the moral perfection<br \/>\nof the human being, or else it is a condition for a happier state of man upon earth, a better society, a more united life of the race.<br \/>\nBut none of these things satisfy the demand of the soul that is placed before us by the integral Yoga. <\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 25pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\tAltruism, philanthropy, humanitarianism, service are flowers of the mental consciousness and are at best the mind&#8217;s cold<br \/>\nand pale imitation of the spiritual flame of universal Divine Love. Not truly liberative from ego-sense, they widen it at most<br \/>\nand give it a higher and larger satisfaction; impotent in practice to change man&#8217;s vital life and nature, they only modify and<br \/>\npalliate its action and daub over its unchanged egoistic essence. Or if they are intensely followed with an entire sincerity of the<br \/>\nwill, it is by an exaggerated amplification of one side of our nature; in that exaggeration there can be no clue for the full<br \/>\nand perfect divine evolution of the many sides of our individualised being towards the universal and transcendent Eternal.<br \/>\nNor can the religio-ethical ideal be a sufficient guide, \u2014 for this is a compromise or compact of mutual concessions for mutual<br \/>\n &nbsp;<\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 25pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\" style=\"line-height: 150%;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t<font size=\"2\">Page <font face=\"Times New Roman\">\u2013 <\/font>152<\/font><\/p>\n<hr>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 0pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\tsupport between a religious urge which seeks to get a closer<br \/>\nhold on earth by taking into itself the higher turns of ordinary human nature and an ethical urge which hopes to elevate itself<br \/>\nout of its own mental hardness and dryness by some touch of a religious fervour. In making this compact religion lowers itself<br \/>\nto the mental level and inherits the inherent imperfections of mind and its inability to convert and transform life. The mind<br \/>\nis the sphere of the dualities and, just as it is impossible for it to achieve any absolute Truth but only truths relative or mixed<br \/>\nwith error, so it is impossible for it to achieve any absolute good; for moral good exists as a counterpart and corrective to<br \/>\nevil and has evil always for its shadow, complement, almost its reason for existence. But the spiritual consciousness belongs to<br \/>\na higher than the mental plane and there the dualities cease; for there falsehood confronted with the truth by which it profited<br \/>\nthrough a usurping falsification of it and evil faced by the good of which it was a perversion or a lurid substitute, are obliged to<br \/>\nperish for want of sustenance and to cease. The integral Yoga, refusing to rely upon the fragile stuff of mental and moral ideals,<br \/>\nputs its whole emphasis in this field on three central dynamic processes, \u2014 the development of the true soul or psychic being<br \/>\nto take the place of the false soul of desire, the sublimation of human into divine love, the elevation of consciousness from its<br \/>\nmental to its spiritual and supramental plane by whose power alone both the soul and the life-force can be utterly delivered<br \/>\nfrom the veils and prevarications of the Ignorance. <\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 25pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\tIt is the very nature of the soul or the psychic being to turn<br \/>\ntowards the divine Truth as the sunflower to the sun; it accepts and clings to all that is divine or progressing towards divinity,<br \/>\nand draws back from all that is a perversion or a denial of it, from all that is false and undivine. Yet the soul is at first but a<br \/>\nspark and then a little flame of godhead burning in the midst of a great darkness; for the most part it is veiled in its inner sanctum<br \/>\nand to reveal itself it has to call on the mind, the life-force and the physical consciousness and persuade them, as best they<br \/>\ncan, to express it; ordinarily, it succeeds at most in suffusing their outwardness with its inner light and modifying with its<br \/>\n &nbsp;<\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 25pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\" style=\"line-height: 150%;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t<font size=\"2\">Page <font face=\"Times New Roman\">\u2013 <\/font>153<\/font><\/p>\n<hr>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 0pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\tpurifying fineness their dark obscurities or their coarser mixture.<br \/>\nEven when there is a formed psychic being able to express itself with some directness in life, it is still in all but a few a smaller<br \/>\nportion of the being \u2014 &#8220;no bigger in the mass of the body than the thumb of a man&#8221; was the image used by the ancient seers<br \/>\n\u2014 and it is not always able to prevail against the obscurity or ignorant smallness of the physical consciousness, the mistaken<br \/>\nsurenesses of the mind or the arrogance and vehemence of the vital nature. This soul is obliged to accept the human mental,<br \/>\nemotive, sensational life as it is, its relations, its activities, its cherished forms and figures; it has to labour to disengage and<br \/>\nincrease the divine element in all this relative truth mixed with a continual falsifying error, this love turned to the uses of the<br \/>\nanimal body or the satisfaction of the vital ego, this life of an average manhood shot with rare and pale glimpses of godhead<br \/>\nand the darker luridities of the demon and the brute. Unerring in the essence of its will, it is obliged often under the pressure of its<br \/>\ninstruments to submit to mistakes of action, wrong placement of feeling, wrong choice of person, errors in the exact form of<br \/>\nits will, in the circumstances of its expression of the infallible inner ideal. Yet is there a divination within it which makes it<br \/>\na surer guide than the reason or than even the highest desire, and through apparent errors and stumblings its voice can still<br \/>\nlead better than the precise intellect and the considering mental judgment. This voice of the soul is not what we call conscience<br \/>\n\u2014 for that is only a mental and often conventional erring substitute; it is a deeper and more seldom heard call; yet to follow<br \/>\nit when heard is wisest: even, it is better to wander at the call of one&#8217;s soul than to go apparently straight with the reason and the<br \/>\noutward moral mentor. But it is only when the life turns towards the Divine that the soul can truly come forward and impose its<br \/>\npower on the outer members; for, itself a spark of the Divine, to grow in flame towards the Divine is its true life and its very<br \/>\nreason of existence. <\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 25pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\tAt a certain stage in the Yoga when the mind is sufficiently<br \/>\nquieted and no longer supports itself at every step on the sufficiency of its mental certitudes, when the vital has been steadied<br \/>\n &nbsp;<\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 25pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\" style=\"line-height: 150%;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t<font size=\"2\">Page <font face=\"Times New Roman\">\u2013 <\/font>154<\/font><\/p>\n<hr>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 0pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\tand subdued and is no longer constantly insistent on its own<br \/>\nrash will, demand and desire, when the physical has been sufficiently altered not to bury altogether the inner flame under the<br \/>\nmass of its outwardness, obscurity or inertia, an inmost being, long hidden within and felt only in its rare influences, is able<br \/>\nto come forward and illumine the rest and take up the lead of the Sadhana. Its character is a one-pointed orientation towards<br \/>\nthe Divine or the Highest, one-pointed and yet plastic in action and movement; it does not create a rigidity of direction like the<br \/>\none-pointed intellect or a bigotry of the regnant idea or impulse like the one-pointed vital force; it is at every moment and with a<br \/>\nsupple sureness that it points the way to the Truth, automatically distinguishes the right step from the false, extricates the divine or<br \/>\nGodward movement from the clinging mixture of the undivine. Its action is like a searchlight showing up all that has to be<br \/>\nchanged in the nature; it has in it a flame of will insistent on perfection, on an alchemic transmutation of all the inner and<br \/>\nouter existence. It sees the divine essence everywhere but rejects the mere mask and the disguising figure. It insists on Truth, on<br \/>\nwill and strength and mastery, on Joy and Love and Beauty, but on a Truth of abiding Knowledge that surpasses the mere<br \/>\npractical momentary truth of the Ignorance, on an inward joy and not on mere vital pleasure,<br \/>\n\u2014 for it prefers rather a purifying suffering and sorrow to degrading satisfactions, \u2014 on love winged upward and not tied to the stake of egoistic craving or<br \/>\nwith its feet sunk in the mire, on beauty restored to its priesthood of interpretation of the Eternal, on strength and will and mastery<br \/>\nas instruments not of the ego but of the Spirit. Its will is for the divinisation of life, the expression through it of a higher Truth,<br \/>\nits dedication to the Divine and the Eternal. <\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 25pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\tBut the most intimate character of the psychic is its pressure<br \/>\ntowards the Divine through a sacred love, joy and oneness. It is a divine Love that it seeks most, it is the love of the Divine<br \/>\nthat is its spur, its goal, its star of Truth shining over the luminous cave of the nascent or the still obscure cradle of the<br \/>\nnew-born godhead within us. In the first long stage of its growth and immature existence it has leaned on earthly love, affection, <\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 25pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\" style=\"line-height: 150%;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t<font size=\"2\">Page <font face=\"Times New Roman\">\u2013 <\/font>155<\/font><\/p>\n<hr>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 0pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t&nbsp;tenderness, goodwill, compassion, benevolence, on all beauty<br \/>\nand gentleness and fineness and light and strength and courage, on all that can help to refine and purify the grossness and commonness of human nature; but it knows how mixed are these human movements at their best and at their worst how fallen<br \/>\nand stamped with the mark of ego and self-deceptive sentimental falsehood and the lower self profiting by the imitation of a soul-movement. At once, emerging, it is ready and eager to break all the old ties and imperfect emotional activities and replace<br \/>\nthem by a greater spiritual Truth of love and oneness. It may still admit the human forms and movements, but on condition<br \/>\nthat they are turned towards the One alone. It accepts only the ties that are helpful, the heart&#8217;s and mind&#8217;s reverence for<br \/>\nthe Guru, the union of the God-seekers, a spiritual compassion for this ignorant human and animal world and its peoples, the<br \/>\njoy and happiness and satisfaction of beauty that comes from the perception of the Divine everywhere. It plunges the nature<br \/>\ninward towards its meeting with the immanent Divine in the heart&#8217;s secret centre and, while that call is there, no reproach<br \/>\nof egoism, no mere outward summons of altruism or duty or philanthropy or service will deceive or divert it from its sacred<br \/>\nlonging and its obedience to the attraction of the Divinity within it. It lifts the being towards a transcendent Ecstasy and is ready<br \/>\nto shed all the downward pull of the world from its wings in its uprising to reach the One Highest; but it calls down also<br \/>\nthis transcendent Love and Beatitude to deliver and transform this world of hatred and strife and division and darkness and<br \/>\njarring Ignorance. It opens to a universal Divine Love, a vast compassion, an intense and immense will for the good of all,<br \/>\nfor the embrace of the World-Mother enveloping or gathering to her her children, the divine Passion that has plunged into<br \/>\nthe night for the redemption of the world from the universal Inconscience. It is not attracted or misled by mental imitations or<br \/>\nany vital misuse of these great deep-seated Truths of existence; it exposes them with its detecting search-ray and calls down<br \/>\nthe entire truth of divine Love to heal these malformations, to deliver mental, vital, physical love from their insufficiencies or<br \/>\n &nbsp;<\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 0pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\" style=\"line-height: 150%;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t<font size=\"2\">Page <font face=\"Times New Roman\">\u2013 <\/font>156<\/font><\/p>\n<hr>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 0pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t&nbsp;their perversions and reveal to them their true abounding share<br \/>\nof the intimacy and the oneness, the ascending ecstasy and the descending rapture. <\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;text-indent: 25pt;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\tAll true Truth of love and of the works of love the psychic being accepts in their place: but its flame mounts always upward<br \/>\nand it is eager to push the ascent from lesser to higher degrees of Truth, since it knows that only by the ascent to a highest Truth<br \/>\nand the descent of that highest Truth can Love be delivered from the cross and placed upon the throne; for the cross is the sign<br \/>\nof the Divine Descent barred and marred by the transversal line of a cosmic deformation which turns it into a stake of suffering<br \/>\nand misfortune. Only by the ascent to the original Truth can the deformation be healed and all the works of love, as too<br \/>\nall the works of knowledge and of life, be restored to a divine significance and become part of an integral spiritual existence.<br \/>\n &nbsp; <\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\" style=\"line-height: 150%;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\" style=\"line-height: 150%;margin-top: 0;margin-bottom: 0\">\n\t\t\t<font size=\"2\">Page <font face=\"Times New Roman\">\u2013 <\/font>157<\/font><\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Chapter V &nbsp; The Ascent of the Sacrifice \u00ad 1 &nbsp; The Works of Knowledge \u2014 The Psychic Being &nbsp; THIS THEN is in its&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2191","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-23-24-the-synthesis-of-yoga","wpcat-46-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2191"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2191\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9578,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2191\/revisions\/9578"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}