{"id":3044,"date":"2013-07-13T01:45:36","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:45:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=3044"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:45:36","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:45:36","slug":"23-the-spiritual-aim-and-life-vol-25-the-human-cycle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/01-works-of-sri-aurobindo\/03-cwsa\/25-the-human-cycle\/23-the-spiritual-aim-and-life-vol-25-the-human-cycle","title":{"rendered":"-23_The Spiritual Aim and Life.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\n\n
<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tChapter XXI <\/font> <\/b><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe Spiritual Aim and Life <\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tA <\/font>SOCIETY<\/b> founded upon spirituality will differ in two essential points from the normal human society which
\n begins from and ends with the lower nature. The normal human society starts from the gregarious instinct modified by a diversity and possible antagonism of interests, from an
\nassociation and clash of egos, from a meeting, combination, conflict of ideas, tendencies and principles; it tries first to patch
\nup an accommodation of converging interests and a treaty of peace between discords, founded on a series of implied contracts,
\nnatural or necessary adjustments which become customs of the aggregate life, and to these contracts as they develop it gives
\nthe name of social law. By establishing, as against the interests which lead to conflict, the interests which call for association and
\nmutual assistance, it creates or stimulates sympathies and habits of helpfulness that give a psychological support and sanction to
\nits mechanism of law, custom and contract. It justifies the mass of social institutions and habitual ways of being which it thus
\ncreates by the greater satisfaction and efficiency of the physical, the vital and the mental life of man, in a word, by the growth and
\nadvantages of civilisation. A good many losses have indeed to be written off as against these gains, but those are to be accepted
\nas the price we must pay for civilisation. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe normal society treats man essentially as a physical, vital and mental being. For the life, the mind, the body are the three terms of existence with which it has some competence to
\ndeal. It develops a system of mental growth and efficiency, an intellectual, aesthetic and moral culture. It evolves the vital side
\nof human life and creates an ever-growing system of economic efficiency and vital enjoyment, and this system becomes more
\nand more rich, cumbrous and complex as civilisation develops.   <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 222<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\tDepressing by its mental and vital overgrowth the natural vigour
\nof the physical and animal man, it tries to set the balance right by systems of physical culture, a cumbrous science of habits
\nand remedies intended to cure the ills it has created and as much amelioration as it can manage of the artificial forms of living that
\nare necessary to its social system. In the end, however, experience shows that society tends to die by its own development, a sure
\nsign that there is some radical defect in its system, a certain proof that its idea of man and its method of development do not
\ncorrespond to all the reality of the human being and to the aim of life which that reality imposes.\n\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThere is then a radical defect somewhere in the process of human civilisation; but where is its seat and by what issue
\nshall we come out of the perpetual cycle of failure? Our civilised development of life ends in an exhaustion of vitality and a refusal
\nof Nature to lend her support any further to a continued advance upon these lines; our civilised mentality, after disturbing the
\nbalance of the human system to its own greater profit, finally discovers that it has exhausted and destroyed that which fed
\nit and loses its power of healthy action and productiveness. It is found that civilisation has created many more problems
\nthan it can solve, has multiplied excessive needs and desires the satisfaction of which it has not sufficient vital force to sustain,
\nhas developed a jungle of claims and artificial instincts in the midst of which life loses its way and has no longer any sight of
\nits aim. The more advanced minds begin to declare civilisation a failure and society begins to feel that they are right. But the
\nremedy proposed is either a halt or even a retrogression, which means in the end more confusion, stagnation and decay, or a
\nreversion to “Nature” which is impossible or can only come about by a cataclysm and disintegration of society; or even a
\ncure is aimed at by carrying artificial remedies to their acme, by more and more Science, more and more mechanical devices, a
\nmore scientific organisation of life, which means that the engine shall replace life, the arbitrary logical reason substitute itself for
\ncomplex Nature and man be saved by machinery. As well say that to carry a disease to its height is the best way to its cure. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIt may be suggested on the contrary and with some chance of knocking
\n\t\t\tat the right door that the radical defect of all our systems is
\n\t\t\ttheir deficient development of just that which society has most
\n\t\t\tneglected, the spiritual element, the soul in man which is his true
\n\t\t\tbeing. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 223<\/p>\n

\n

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\n\t\t\tEven to have a healthy body, a strong vitality
\nand an active and clarified mind and a field for their action and enjoyment, carries man no more than a certain distance;
\nafterwards he flags and tires for want of a real self-finding, a satisfying aim for his action and progress. These three things do
\nnot make the sum of a complete manhood; they are means to an ulterior end and cannot be made for ever an aim in themselves.
\nAdd a rich emotional life governed by a well-ordered ethical standard, and still there is the savour of something left out, some
\nsupreme good which these things mean, but do not in themselves arrive at, do not discover till they go beyond themselves. Add
\na religious system and a widespread spirit of belief and piety, and still you have not found the means of social salvation. All
\nthese things human society has developed, but none of them has saved it from disillusionment, weariness and decay. The ancient
\nintellectual cultures of Europe ended in disruptive doubt and sceptical impotence, the pieties of Asia in stagnation and decline. Modern society has discovered a new principle of survival, progress, but the aim of that progress it has never discovered,
\n\t\t\t\u2014 unless the aim is always more knowledge, more equipment, convenience and comfort, more enjoyment, a greater and still
\ngreater complexity of the social economy, a more and more cumbrously opulent life. But these things must lead in the end
\nwhere the old led, for they are only the same thing on a larger scale; they lead in a circle, that is to say, nowhere: they do not
\nescape from the cycle of birth, growth, decay and death, they do not really find the secret of self-prolongation by constant selfrenewal which is the principle of immortality, but only seem for a moment to find it by the illusion of a series of experiments each
\nof which ends in disappointment. That so far has been the nature of modern progress. Only in its new turn inwards, towards a
\ngreater subjectivity now only beginning, is there a better hope; for by that turning it may discover that the real truth of man is
\nto be found in his soul. It is not indeed certain that a subjective
\nage will lead us there, but it gives us the possibility, can turn in that direction, if used rightly, the more inward movement.
\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\tIt will be said that this is an old discovery and that it governed the old societies under the name of religion. But that was
\nonly an appearance. The discovery was there, but it was made for the life of the individual only, and even for him it looked beyond
\nthe earth for its fulfilment and at earth only as the place of his preparation for a solitary salvation or release from the burden
\nof life. Human society itself never seized on the discovery of the soul as a means for the discovery of the law of its own being
\nor on a knowledge of the soul’s true nature and need and its fulfilment as the right way of terrestrial perfection. If we look
\nat the old religions in their social as apart from their individual aspect, we see that the use society made of them was only of
\ntheir most unspiritual or at any rate of their less spiritual parts. It made use of them to give an august, awful and would-be
\neternal sanction to its mass of customs and institutions; it made of them a veil of mystery against human questioning and a shield
\nof darkness against the innovator. So far as it saw in religion a means of human salvation and perfection, it laid hands upon
\nit at once to mechanise it, to catch the human soul and bind it on the wheels of a socio-religious machinery, to impose on
\nit in the place of spiritual freedom an imperious yoke and an iron prison. It saddled upon the religious life of man a Church,
\na priesthood and a mass of ceremonies and set over it a pack of watchdogs under the name of creeds and dogmas, dogmas
\nwhich one had to accept and obey under pain of condemnation to eternal hell by an eternal judge beyond, just as one had to
\naccept and to obey the laws of society on pain of condemnation to temporal imprisonment or death by a mortal judge below.
\nThis false socialisation of religion has been always the chief cause of its failure to regenerate mankind. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tFor nothing can be more fatal to religion than for its spiritual
\n\t\t\telement to be crushed or formalised out of existence by its outward
\n\t\t\taids and forms and machinery. The falsehood of the old social use of
\n\t\t\treligion is shown by its effects. <\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\tHistory has exhibited more than once the coincidence of the greatest
\n\t\t\treligious fervour
\nand piety with darkest ignorance, with an obscure squalor and long vegetative stagnancy of the mass of human life, with the
\nunquestioned reign of cruelty, injustice and oppression, or with an organisation of the most ordinary, unaspiring and unraised
\nexistence hardly relieved by some touches of intellectual or halfspiritual light on the surface,
\n\t\t\t\u2014 the end of all this a widespread
\nrevolt that turned first of all against the established religion as the key-stone of a regnant falsehood, evil and ignorance. It is
\nanother sign when the too scrupulously exact observation of a socio-religious system and its rites and forms, which by the very
\nfact of this misplaced importance begin to lose their sense and true religious value, becomes the law and most prominent aim
\nof religion rather than any spiritual growth of the individual and the race. And a great sign too of this failure is when the
\nindividual is obliged to flee from society in order to find room for his spiritual growth; when, finding human life given over to
\nthe unregenerated mind, life and body and the place of spiritual freedom occupied by the bonds of form, by Church and Shastra,
\nby some law of the Ignorance, he is obliged to break away from all these to seek for growth into the spirit in the monastery, on
\nthe mountain-top, in the cavern, in the desert and the forest. When there is that division between life and the spirit, sentence
\nof condemnation is passed upon human life. Either it is left to circle in its routine or it is decried as worthless and unreal, a
\nvanity of vanities, and loses that confidence in itself and inner \u00b4<\/i>
\n\u00af<\/i> faith in the value of its terrestrial aims, sraddha<\/i>, without which
\nit cannot come to anything. For the spirit of man must strain towards the heights; when it loses its tension of endeavour, the
\nrace must become immobile and stagnant or even sink towards darkness and the dust. Even where life rejects the spirit or the
\nspirit rejects life, there may be a self-affirmation of the inner being; there may even be a glorious crop of saints and hermits
\nin a forcing-soil of spirituality, but unless the race, the society, the nation is moved towards the spiritualisation of life or moves
\nforward led by the light of an ideal, the end must be littleness, weakness and stagnation. Or the race has to turn to the intellect
\nfor rescue, for some hope or new ideal, and arrive by a circle
\nthrough an age of rationalism at a fresh effort towards the restatement of spiritual truth and a new attempt to spiritualise
\nhuman life.   <\/p>\n

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\n

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\n\t\t\tThe true and full spiritual aim in society will regard man
\nnot as a mind, a life and a body, but as a soul incarnated for a divine fulfilment upon earth, not only in heavens beyond, which
\nafter all it need not have left if it had no divine business here in the world of physical, vital and mental nature. It will therefore
\nregard the life, mind and body neither as ends in themselves, sufficient for their own satisfaction, nor as mortal members full
\nof disease which have only to be dropped off for the rescued spirit to flee away into its own pure regions, but as first instruments of the soul, the yet imperfect instruments of an unseized diviner purpose. It will believe in their destiny and help them to
\nbelieve in themselves, but for that very reason in their highest and not only in their lowest or lower possibilities. Their destiny
\nwill be, in its view, to spiritualise themselves so as to grow into visible members of the spirit, lucid means of its manifestation,
\nthemselves spiritual, illumined, more and more conscious and perfect. For, accepting the truth of man’s soul as a thing entirely
\ndivine in its essence, it will accept also the possibility of his whole being becoming divine in spite of Nature’s first patent
\ncontradictions of this possibility, her darkened denials of this ultimate certitude, and even with these as a necessary earthly
\nstarting-point. And as it will regard man the individual, it will regard too man the collectivity as a soul-form of the Infinite, a
\ncollective soul myriadly embodied upon earth for a divine fulfilment in its manifold relations and its multitudinous activities.
\nTherefore it will hold sacred all the different parts of man’s life which correspond to the parts of his being, all his physical,
\nvital, dynamic, emotional, aesthetic, ethical, intellectual, psychic evolution, and see in them instruments for a growth towards a
\ndiviner living. It will regard every human society, nation, people or other organic aggregate from the same standpoint, sub-souls,
\nas it were, means of a complex manifestation and self-fulfilment of the Spirit, the divine Reality, the conscious Infinite in man
\nupon earth. The possible godhead of man because he is inwardly
\nof one being with God will be its one solitary creed and dogma.    <\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\tBut it will not seek to enforce even this one uplifting dogma
\nby any external compulsion upon the lower members of man’s natural being; for that is
\nnigraha<\/i>, a repressive contraction of the
\nnature which may lead to an apparent suppression of the evil, but not to a real and healthy growth of the good; it will rather
\nhold up this creed and ideal as a light and inspiration to all his members to grow into the godhead from within themselves, to
\nbecome freely divine. Neither in the individual nor in the society will it seek to imprison, wall in, repress, impoverish, but to let
\nin the widest air and the highest light. A large liberty will be the law of a spiritual society and the increase of freedom a sign
\nof the growth of human society towards the possibility of true spiritualisation. To spiritualise in this sense a society of slaves,
\nslaves of power, slaves of authority, slaves of custom, slaves of dogma, slaves of all sorts of imposed laws which they live
\nunder rather than live by them, slaves internally of their own weakness, ignorance and passions from whose worst effect they
\nseek or need to be protected by another and external slavery, can never be a successful endeavour. They must shake off their
\nfetters first in order to be fit for a higher freedom. Not that man has not to wear many a yoke in his progress upward; but
\nonly the yoke which he accepts because it represents, the more perfectly the better, the highest inner law of his nature and its
\naspiration, will be entirely helpful to him. The rest buy their good results at a heavy cost and may retard as much as or even
\nmore than they accelerate his progress. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe spiritual aim will recognise that man as he grows in
\nhis being must have as much free space as possible for all its members to grow in their own strength, to find out themselves
\nand their potentialities. In their freedom they will err, because experience comes through many errors, but each has in itself a
\ndivine principle and they will find it out, disengage its presence, significance and law as their experience of themselves deepens
\nand increases. Thus true spirituality will not lay a yoke upon science and philosophy or compel them to square their conclusions
\nwith any statement of dogmatic religious or even of assured
\nspiritual truth, as some of the old religions attempted, vainly, ignorantly, with an unspiritual
\n\t\t\tobstinacy and arrogance.  <\/p>\n

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\n

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Each
\npart of man’s being has its own dharma which it must follow and will follow in the end, put on it what fetters you please.
\nThe dharma of science, thought and philosophy is to seek for truth by the intellect dispassionately, without prepossession and
\nprejudgment, with no other first propositions than the law of thought and observation itself imposes. Science and philosophy
\nare not bound to square their observations and conclusions with any current ideas of religious dogma or ethical rule or aesthetic
\nprejudice. In the end, if left free in their action, they will find the unity of Truth with Good and Beauty and God and give these a
\ngreater meaning than any dogmatic religion or any formal ethics or any narrower aesthetic idea can give us. But meanwhile they
\nmust be left free even to deny God and good and beauty if they will, if their sincere observation of things so points them. For all
\nthese rejections must come round in the end of their circling and return to a larger truth of the things they refuse. Often we find
\natheism both in individual and society a necessary passage to deeper religious and spiritual truth: one has sometimes to deny
\nGod in order to find him; the finding is inevitable at the end of all earnest scepticism and denial.\n\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe same law holds good in Art; the aesthetic being of man rises similarly on its own curve towards its diviner possibilities.
\nThe highest aim of the aesthetic being is to find the Divine through beauty; the highest Art is that which by an inspired
\nuse of significant and interpretative form unseals the doors of the spirit. But in order that it may come to do this greatest
\nthing largely and sincerely, it must first endeavour to see and depict man and Nature and life for their own sake, in their own
\ncharacteristic truth and beauty; for behind these first characters lies always the beauty of the Divine in life and man and Nature
\nand it is through their just transformation that what was at first veiled by them has to be revealed. The dogma that Art must be
\nreligious or not be at all, is a false dogma, just as is the claim that it must be subservient to ethics or utility or scientific truth or
\nphilosophic ideas. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 230 <\/p>\n

\n

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\n\t\t\tArt may make use of these things as elements,
\nbut it has its own svadharma<\/i>, essential law, and it will rise to the widest spirituality by following out its own natural lines with
\nno other yoke than the intimate law of its own being. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tEven with the lower nature of man, though here we are
\nnaturally led to suppose that compulsion is the only remedy, the spiritual aim will seek for a free self-rule and development
\nfrom within rather than a repression of his dynamic and vital being from without. All experience shows that man must be
\ngiven a certain freedom to stumble in action as well as to err in knowledge so long as he does not get from within himself his
\nfreedom from wrong movement and error; otherwise he cannot grow. Society for its own sake has to coerce the dynamic and
\nvital man, but coercion only chains up the devil and alters at best his form of action into more mitigated and civilised movements;
\nit does not and cannot eliminate him. The real virtue of the dynamic and vital being, the Life Purusha, can only come by his
\nfinding a higher law and spirit for his activity within himself; to give him that, to illuminate and transform and not to destroy
\nhis impulse is the true spiritual means of regeneration. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThus spirituality will respect the freedom of the lower members, but it will not leave them to themselves; it will present to them the truth of the spirit in themselves, translated into their
\nown fields of action, presented in a light which illumines all their activities and shows them the highest law of their own freedom.
\nIt will not, for instance, escape from scientific materialism by a barren contempt for physical life or a denial of Matter, but
\npursue rather the sceptical mind into its own affirmations and denials and show it there the Divine. If it cannot do that, it is
\nproved that it is itself unenlightened or deficient, because onesided, in its light. It will not try to slay the vitality in man by
\ndenying life, but will rather reveal to life the divine in itself as the principle of its own transformation. If it cannot do that, it is
\nbecause it has itself not yet wholly fathomed the meaning of the creation and the secret of the Avatar. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe spiritual aim will seek to fulfil itself therefore in a fullness of life and man’s being in the individual and the race which
\nwill be the base for the heights of the spirit, \u2014 the base becoming in the end
\n\t\t\tof one substance with the peaks.  <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 230<\/p>\n

\n

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It will not proceed by a scornful neglect of the body, nor by an ascetic starving of the
\nvital being and an utmost bareness or even squalor as the rule of spiritual living, nor by a puritanic denial of art and beauty
\nand the aesthetic joy of life, nor by a neglect of science and philosophy as poor, negligible or misleading intellectual pursuits,
\n\t\t\t\u2014 though the temporary utility even of these exaggerations as against the opposite excesses need not be denied; it will be all
\nthings to all, but in all it will be at once their highest aim and meaning and the most all-embracing expression of themselves
\nin which all they are and seek for will be fulfilled. It will aim at establishing in society the true inner theocracy, not the false
\ntheocracy of a dominant Church or priesthood, but that of the inner Priest, Prophet and King. It will reveal to man the divinity
\nin himself as the Light, Strength, Beauty, Good, Delight, Immortality that dwells within and build up in his outer life also the
\nkingdom of God which is first discovered within us. It will show man the way to seek for the Divine in every way of his being,
\nsarvabhavena<\/i>,1<\/sup> and so find it and live in it, that however \u2014 even
\nin all kinds of ways \u2014 he lives and acts, he shall live and act in that,2<\/sup> in the Divine, in the Spirit, in the eternal Reality of his
\nbeing. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t1 Gita. <\/font> <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t2 Gita. <\/font> Sarvatha vartamano’pi sa yogi mayi vartate.<\/font><\/i>
\n   <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 231<\/font><\/font><\/font><\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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