{"id":3065,"date":"2013-07-13T01:45:43","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:45:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=3065"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:45:43","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:45:43","slug":"25-conditions-for-the-coming-of-a-spiritual-age-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\/25-conditions-for-the-coming-of-a-spiritual-age-vol-25-the-human-cycle","title":{"rendered":"-25_Conditions for the Coming of a Spiritual Age.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\n\n
\n

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

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t
\n\t\t\tConditions for the Coming
\nof a Spiritual Age <\/font><\/b> <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tA <\/font>CHANGE<\/b> of this kind, the change from the mental and vital to the spiritual order of life, must necessarily be
\naccomplished in the individual and in a great number of individuals before it can lay any effective hold upon the community. The Spirit in humanity discovers, develops, builds its formations first in the individual man: it is through the progressive and formative individual that it offers the discovery and the chance of a new self-creation to the mind of the race.
\nFor the communal mind holds things subconsciently at first or, if consciously, then in a confused chaotic manner: it is only
\nthrough the individual mind that the mass can arrive at a clear knowledge and creation of the thing it held in its subconscient
\nself. Thinkers, historians, sociologists who belittle the individual and would like to lose him in the mass or think of him chiefly
\nas a cell, an atom, have got hold only of the obscurer side of the truth of Nature’s workings in humanity. It is because man
\nis not like the material formations of Nature or like the animal, because she intends in him a more and more conscious evolution,
\nthat individuality is so much developed in him and so absolutely important and indispensable. No doubt what comes out in the
\nindividual and afterwards moves the mass, must have been there already in the universal Mind and the individual is only an
\ninstrument for its manifestation, discovery, development: but he is an indispensable instrument and an instrument not merely
\nof subconscient Nature, not merely of an instinctive urge that moves the mass, but more directly of the Spirit of whom that
\nNature is itself the instrument and the matrix of his creations. All great changes therefore find their first clear and effective
\npower and their direct shaping force in the mind and spirit of an individual or
\n\t\t\tof a limited number of individuals.   <\/p>\n

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The mass follows, but unfortunately in a very imperfect and confused fashion
\nwhich often or even usually ends in the failure or distortion of the thing created. If it were not so, mankind could have advanced on
\nits way with a victorious rapidity instead of with the lumbering hesitations and soon exhausted rushes that seem to be all of
\nwhich it has yet been capable. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tTherefore if the spiritual change of which we have been
\nspeaking is to be effected, it must unite two conditions which have to be simultaneously satisfied but are most difficult to bring
\ntogether. There must be the individual and the individuals who are able to see, to develop, to re-create themselves in the image
\nof the Spirit and to communicate both their idea and its power to the mass. And there must be at the same time a mass, a
\nsociety, a communal mind or at the least the constituents of a group-body, the possibility of a group-soul which is capable
\nof receiving and effectively assimilating, ready to follow and effectively arrive, not compelled by its own inherent deficiencies,
\nits defect of preparation to stop on the way or fall back before the decisive change is made. Such a simultaneity has never yet
\nhappened, although the appearance of it has sometimes been created by the ardour
\n\t\t\tof a moment. That the combination must happen some day is a
\n\t\t\tcertainty, but none can tell how many attempts will have to be made
\n\t\t\tand how many sediments of spiritual experience will have to be
\n\t\t\taccumulated in the subconscient mentality of the communal human
\n\t\t\tbeing before the soil is ready. For the chances of success are
\n\t\t\talways less powerful in a difficult upward effort affecting the very
\n\t\t\troots of our nature than the numerous possibilities of failure. The
\n\t\t\tinitiator himself may be imperfect, may not have waited to become
\n\t\t\tentirely the thing that he has seen. Even the few who have the
\n\t\t\tapostolate in their charge may not have perfectly assimilated and
\n\t\t\tshaped it in themselves and may hand on the power of the Spirit
\n\t\t\tstill farther diminished to the many who will come after them. The
\n\t\t\tsociety may be intellectually, vitally, ethically, temperamentally
\n\t\t\tunready, with the result that the final acceptance of the spiritual
\n\t\t\tidea by the society may be also the beginning of its debasement and
\n\t\t\tdistortion and of the consequent departure or diminution of the
\n\t\t\tSpirit. <\/p>\n

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\nAny or all of these things may happen, and the result
\nwill be, as has so often happened in the past, that even though some progress is made and an important change effected, it will
\nnot be the decisive change which can alone re-create humanity in a diviner image. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tWhat then will be that state of society, what that readiness of the common mind of man which will be most favourable to
\nthis change, so that even if it cannot at once effectuate itself, it may at least make for its ways a more decisive preparation than
\nhas been hitherto possible? For that seems the most important element, since it is that, it is the unpreparedness, the unfitness of
\nthe society or of the common mind of man which is always the chief stumbling-block. It is the readiness of this common mind
\nwhich is of the first importance; for even if the condition of society and the principle and rule that govern society are opposed
\nto the spiritual change, even if these belong almost wholly to the vital, to the external, the economic, the mechanical order,
\nas is certainly the way at present with human masses, yet if the common human mind has begun to admit the ideas proper to
\nthe higher order that is in the end to be, and the heart of man has begun to be stirred by aspirations born of these ideas, then
\nthere is a hope of some advance in the not distant future. And here the first essential sign must be the growth of the subjective
\nidea of life, \u2014 the idea of the soul, the inner being, its powers, its possibilities, its growth, its expression and the creation of a
\ntrue, beautiful and helpful environment for it as the one thing of first and last importance. The signals must be there that are
\nprecursors of a subjective age in humanity’s thought and social endeavour. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThese ideas are likely first to declare their trend in philosophy,
\n\t\t\tin psychological thinking, in the arts, poetry, painting, sculpture,
\n\t\t\tmusic, in the main idea of ethics, in the application of subjective
\n\t\t\tprinciples by thinkers to social questions, even perhaps, though
\n\t\t\tthis is a perilous effort, to politics and economics, that hard
\n\t\t\trefractory earthy matter which most resists all but a gross
\n\t\t\tutilitarian treatment. There will be new unexpected
\ndepartures of science or at least of research, \u2014 since to such a turn in its most fruitful seekings
\n\t\t\tthe orthodox still deny the name of science. <\/p>\n

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Discoveries will be made that thin the walls between soul and matter; attempts there will be to extend exact knowledge into the psychological and psychic realms with a realisation of the truth that these have laws of their own which are other
\nthan the physical, but not the less laws because they escape the external senses and are infinitely plastic and subtle. There will be
\na labour of religion to reject its past heavy weight of dead matter and revivify its strength in the fountains of the spirit. These are
\nsure signs, if not of the thing to be, at least of a great possibility of it, of an effort that will surely be made, another endeavour
\nperhaps with a larger sweep and a better equipped intelligence capable not only of feeling but of understanding the Truth that
\nis demanding to be heard. Some such signs we can see at the present time although they are only incipient and sporadic and
\nhave not yet gone far enough to warrant a confident certitude. It is only when these groping beginnings have found that for
\nwhich they are seeking, that it can be successfully applied to the remoulding of the life of man. Till then nothing better is
\nlikely to be achieved than an inner preparation and, for the rest, radical or revolutionary experiments of a doubtful kind with
\nthe details of the vast and cumbrous machinery under which life now groans and labours.\n\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tA subjective age may stop very far short of spirituality; for the subjective turn is only a first condition, not the thing
\nitself, not the end of the matter. The search for the Reality, the true self of man, may very easily follow out the natural order
\ndescribed by the Upanishad in the profound apologue of the seekings of Bhrigu, son of Varuna. For first the seeker found
\nthe ultimate reality to be Matter and the physical, the material being, the external man our only self and spirit. Next he fixed
\non life as the Reality and the vital being as the self and spirit; in the third essay he penetrated to Mind and the mental being;
\nonly afterwards could he get beyond the superficial subjective through the supramental Truth-Consciousness to the eternal, the
\nblissful, the ever creative Reality of which these are the sheaths.   <\/p>\n

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\nBut humanity may not be as persistent or as plastic as the son of Varuna, the search may stop short anywhere. Only if it is
\nintended that he shall now at last arrive and discover, will the Spirit break each insufficient formula as soon as it has shaped
\nitself and compel the thought of man to press forward to a larger discovery and in the end to the largest and most luminous of all.
\nSomething of the kind has been happening, but only in a very external way and on the surface. After the material formula
\nwhich governed the greater part of the nineteenth century had burdened man with the heaviest servitude to the machinery of
\nthe outer material life that he has ever yet been called upon to bear, the first attempt to break through, to get to the living
\nreality in things and away from the mechanical idea of life and living and society, landed us in that surface vitalism which had
\nalready begun to govern thought before the two formulas inextricably locked together lit up and flung themselves on the
\n\u00b4<\/i> lurid pyre of the world-war. The vital elan <\/i>has brought us no
\ndeliverance, but only used the machinery already created with a more feverish insistence, a vehement attempt to live more
\nrapidly, more intensely, an inordinate will to act and to succeed, to enlarge the mere force of living or to pile up a gigantic efficiency of the collective life. It could not have been otherwise even if this vitalism had been less superficial and external, more
\ntruly subjective. To live, to act, to grow, to increase the vital force, to understand, utilise and fulfil the intuitive impulse of
\nlife are not things evil in themselves: rather they are excellent things, if rightly followed and rightly used, that is to say, if they
\nare directed to something beyond the mere vitalistic impulse and are governed by that within which is higher than Life. The Lifepower is an instrument, not an aim; it is in the upward scale the first great subjective supraphysical instrument of the Spirit
\nand the base of all action and endeavour. But a Life-power that sees nothing beyond itself, nothing to be served except its own
\norganised demands and impulses, will be very soon like the force of steam driving an engine without the driver or an engine in
\nwhich the locomotive force has made the driver its servant and not its controller. 
\n  <\/p>\n

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\n\tIt can only add the uncontrollable impetus
\nof a high-crested or broad-based Titanism, or it may be even a nether flaming demonism, to the Nature forces of the material
\nworld with the intellect as its servant, an impetus of measureless unresting creation, appropriation, expansion which will end in
\nsomething violent, huge and “colossal”, foredoomed in its very nature to excess and ruin, because light is not in it nor the soul’s
\ntruth nor the sanction of the gods and their calm eternal will and knowledge.\n\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tBut beyond the subjectivism of the vital self there is the possibility of a mental subjectivism which would at first perhaps,
\nemerging out of the predominant vitalism and leaning upon the already realised idea of the soul as a soul of Life in action
\nbut correcting it, appear as a highly mentalised pragmatism. This first stage is foreshadowed in an increasing tendency to
\nrationalise entirely man and his life, to govern individual and social existence by an ordered scientific plan based upon his
\ndiscovery of his own and of life’s realities. This attempt is bound to fail because reason and rationality are not the whole of man
\nor of life, because reason is only an intermediate interpreter, not the original knower, creator and master of our being or of
\ncosmic existence. It can besides only mechanise life in a more intelligent way than in the past; to do that seems to be all that
\nthe modern intellectual leaders of the race can discover as the solution of the heavy problem with which we are impaled. But it
\nis conceivable that this tendency may hereafter rise to the higher idea of man as a mental being, a soul in mind that must develop
\nitself individually and collectively in the life and body through the play of an ever-expanding mental existence. This greater
\nidea would realise that the elevation of the human existence will come not through material efficiency alone or the complex
\nplay of his vital and dynamic powers, not solely by mastering through the aid of the intellect the energies of physical Nature
\nfor the satisfaction of the life-instincts, which can only be an intensification of his present mode of existence, but through
\nthe greatening of his mental and psychic being and a discovery, bringing forward and organisation of his subliminal nature and
\nits forces, the utilisation of a larger mind and a larger life waiting for
\n\t\t\tdiscovery within us.   <\/p>\n

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\nIt would see in life an opportunity for the joy and power of knowledge, for the joy and power of beauty,
\nfor the joy and power of the human will mastering not only physical Nature, but vital and mental Nature. It might discover
\nher secret yet undreamed-of mind-powers and life-powers and use them for a freer liberation of man from the limitations of
\nhis shackled bodily life. It might arrive at new psychic relations, a more sovereign power of the idea to realise itself in the act,
\ninner means of overcoming the obstacles of distance and division which would cast into insignificance even the last miraculous
\nachievements of material Science. A development of this kind is far enough away from the dreams of the mass of men, but
\nthere are certain pale hints and presages of such a possibility and ideas which lead to it are already held by a great number
\nwho are perhaps in this respect the yet unrecognised vanguard of humanity. It is not impossible that behind the confused morning
\nvoices of the hour a light of this kind, still below the horizon, may be waiting to ascend with its splendours. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tSuch a turn of human thought, effort, ideas of life, if it took hold of the communal mind, would evidently lead to a profound
\nrevolution throughout the whole range of human existence. It would give it from the first a new tone and atmosphere, a loftier
\nspirit, wider horizons, a greater aim. It might easily develop a science which would bring the powers of the physical world into
\na real and not only a contingent and mechanical subjection and open perhaps the doors of other worlds. It might develop an
\nachievement of Art and Beauty which would make the greatness of the past a comparatively little thing and would save the
\nworld from the astonishingly callous reign of utilitarian ugliness that even now afflicts it. It would open up a closer and freer
\ninterchange between human minds and, it may well be hoped, a kindlier interchange between human hearts and lives. Nor need
\nits achievements stop here, but might proceed to greater things of which these would be only the beginnings. This mental and
\npsychic subjectivism would have its dangers, greater dangers even than those that attend a vitalistic subjectivism, because its
\npowers of action also would be greater, but it would have what
\nvitalistic subjectivism has not and cannot easily have, the chance of a detecting discernment, strong safeguards and a powerful
\nliberating light.  <\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\tMoving with difficulty upward from Matter to spirit, this is
\nperhaps a necessary stage of man’s development. This was one principal reason of the failure of past attempts to spiritualise
\nmankind, that they endeavoured to spiritualise at once the material man by a sort of rapid miracle, and though that can be
\ndone, the miracle is not likely to be of an enduring character if it overleaps the stages of his ascent and leaves the intervening levels untrodden and therefore unmastered. The endeavour may succeed with individuals,
\n\t\t\t\u2014 Indian thought would say with
\nthose who have made themselves ready in a past existence, \u2014 but it must fail with the mass. When it passes beyond the few, the
\nforceful miracle of the spirit flags; unable to transform by inner force, the new religion
\n\t\t\t\u2014 for that is what it becomes \u2014 tries
\nto save by machinery, is entangled in the mechanical turning of its own instruments, loses the spirit and perishes quickly or
\ndecays slowly. That is the fate which overtakes all attempts of the vitalistic, the intellectual and mental, the spiritual endeavour
\nto deal with material man through his physical mind chiefly or alone; the endeavour is overpowered by the machinery it creates
\nand becomes the slave and victim of the machine. That is the revenge which our material Nature, herself mechanical, takes
\nupon all such violent endeavours; she waits to master them by their concessions to her own law. If mankind is to be spiritualised, it must first in the mass cease to be the material or the vital man and become the psychic and the true mental being. It
\nmay be questioned whether such a mass progress or conversion is possible; but if it is not, then the spiritualisation of mankind
\nas a whole is a chimera. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tFrom this point of view it is an excellent thing, a sign of
\ngreat promise, that the wheel of civilisation has been following its past and present curve upward from a solid physical knowledge through a successive sounding of higher and higher powers that mediate between Matter and Spirit. The human intellect in
\nmodern times has been first drawn to exhaust the possibilities
\nof materialism by an immense dealing with life and the world upon the basis of Matter as the sole reality, Matter as the Eternal,
\n˙<\/i>    <\/p>\n

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\nMatter as the Brahman, annam brahma<\/i>. Afterwards it had begun
\nto turn towards the conception of existence as the large pulsation of a great evolving Life, the creator of Matter, which would have
\nenabled it to deal with our existence on the basis of Life as the \u00af.<\/i>
\noriginal reality, Life as the great Eternal, prano brahma<\/i>. And already it has in germ, in preparation a third conception, the
\ndiscovery of a great self-expressing and self-finding inner Mind other than our surface mentality as a master-power of existence,
\nand that should lead towards a rich attempt to deal with our possibilities and our ways of living on the basis of Mind as the
\noriginal reality, the great Eternal, mano brahma<\/i>. It would also be a sign of promise if these conceptions succeeded each other
\nwith rapidity, with a large but swift evocation of the possibilities of each level; for that would show that there is a readiness in our
\nsubconscient Nature and that we need not linger in each stage for centuries. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tBut still a subjective age of mankind must be an adventure full of perils and uncertainties as are all great adventures of the
\nrace. It may wander long before it finds itself or may not find itself at all and may swing back to a new repetition of the cycle.
\nThe true secret can only be discovered if in the third stage, in an age of mental subjectivism, the idea becomes strong of the mind
\nitself as no more than a secondary power of the Spirit’s working and of the Spirit as the great Eternal, the original and, in spite of
\nthe many terms in which it is both expressed and hidden, the sole \u00af  \u00af<\/i>
\nreality, ayam atma brahma<\/i>. Then only will the real, the decisive endeavour begin and life and the world be studied, known, dealt
\nwith in all directions as the self-finding and self-expression of the Spirit. Then only will a spiritual age of mankind be possible. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tTo attempt any adequate discussion of what that would mean, and in an inadequate discussion there is no fruit, is beyond
\nour present scope; for we should have to examine a knowledge which is rare and nowhere more than initial. It is enough to say
\nthat a spiritual human society would start from and try to realise three essential truths of existence which all Nature seems to be
\n \t\t\tan attempt to hide by their opposites and which therefore are as yet
\n\t\t\tfor the mass of mankind only words and dreams, God, freedom, unity.  <\/p>\n

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Three things which are one, for you cannot realise freedom and unity unless you realise God, you cannot
\npossess freedom and unity unless you possess God, possess at once your highest Self and the Self of all creatures. The freedom
\nand unity which otherwise go by that name, are simply attempts of our subjection and our division to get away from themselves
\nby shutting their eyes while they turn somersaults around their own centre. When man is able to see God and to possess him,
\nthen he will know real freedom and arrive at real unity, never otherwise. And God is only waiting to be known, while man
\nseeks for him everywhere and creates images of the Divine, but all the while truly finds, effectively erects and worships images
\nonly of his own mind-ego and life-ego. When this ego pivot is abandoned and this ego-hunt ceases, then man gets his first real
\nchance of achieving spirituality in his inner and outer life. It will not be enough, but it will be a commencement, a true gate and
\nnot a blind entrance. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tA spiritualised society would live like its spiritual individuals, not in the ego, but in the spirit, not as the collective ego, but as the collective soul. This freedom from the egoistic standpoint would be its first and most prominent characteristic. But the elimination of egoism would not be brought about, as it is
\nnow proposed to bring it about, by persuading or forcing the individual to immolate his personal will and aspirations and his
\nprecious and hard-won individuality to the collective will, aims and egoism of the society, driving him like a victim of ancient
\nsacrifice to slay his soul on the altar of that huge and shapeless idol. For that would be only the sacrifice of the smaller to the
\nlarger egoism, larger only in bulk, not necessarily greater in quality or wider or nobler, since a collective egoism, result of
\nthe united egoisms of all, is as little a god to be worshipped, as flawed and often an uglier and more barbarous fetish than the
\negoism of the individual. What the spiritual man seeks is to find by the loss of the ego the self which is one in all and perfect
\nand complete in each and by living in that to grow into the image of its
\n\t\t\tperfection, \u2014 individually, be it noted, though with an
\n\t\t\tall-embracing universality of his nature and its conscious
\n\t\t\tcircumference.   <\/p>\n

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\nIt is said in the old Indian writings that while in the second age, the age of Power, Vishnu descends as the
\nKing, and in the third, the age of compromise and balance, as the legislator or codifier, in the age of the Truth he descends
\nas Yajna, that is to say, as the Master of works and sacrifice manifest in the heart of his creatures. It is this kingdom of God
\nwithin, the result of the finding of God not in a distant heaven but within ourselves, of which the state of society in an age of the
\nTruth, a spiritual age, would be the result and the external figure. Therefore a society which was even initially spiritualised
\nwould make the revealing and finding of the divine Self in man the supreme, even the guiding aim of all its activities, its education, its knowledge, its science, its ethics, its art, its economical and political structure. As it was to some imperfect extent in
\nthe ancient Vedic times with the cultural education of the higher classes, so it would be then with all education. It would embrace
\nall knowledge in its scope, but would make the whole trend and aim and the permeating spirit not mere worldly efficiency,
\nthough that efficiency would not be neglected, but this selfdeveloping and self-finding and all else as its powers. It would
\npursue the physical and psychic sciences not in order merely to know the world and Nature in her processes and to use them for
\nmaterial human ends, but still more to know through and in and under and over all things the Divine in the world and the ways of
\nthe Spirit in its masks and behind them. It would make it the aim of ethics not to establish a rule of action whether supplementary
\nto the social law or partially corrective of it, the social law that is after all only the rule, often clumsy and ignorant, of the biped
\npack, the human herd, but to develop the divine nature in the human being. It would make it the aim of Art not merely to
\npresent images of the subjective and objective world, but to see them with the significant and creative vision that goes behind
\ntheir appearances and to reveal the Truth and Beauty of which things visible to us and invisible are the forms, the masks or the
\nsymbols and significant figures.   <\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\tA spiritualised society would treat in its sociology the individual, from the saint to the criminal, not as units of a social
\nproblem to be passed through some skilfully devised machinery and either flattened into the social mould or crushed out of it,
\nbut as souls suffering and entangled in a net and to be rescued, souls growing and to be encouraged to grow, souls grown and
\nfrom whom help and power can be drawn by the lesser spirits who are not yet adult. The aim of its economics would be not to
\ncreate a huge engine of production, whether of the competitive or the cooperative kind, but to give to men
\n\t\t\t\u2014 not only to some
\nbut to all men each in his highest possible measure \u2014 the joy of work according to their own nature and free leisure to grow
\ninwardly, as well as a simply rich and beautiful life for all. In its politics it would not regard the nations within the scope of
\ntheir own internal life as enormous State machines regulated and armoured with man living for the sake of the machine and
\nworshipping it as his God and his larger self, content at the first call to kill others upon its altar and to bleed there himself so
\nthat the machine may remain intact and powerful and be made ever larger, more complex, more cumbrous, more mechanically
\nefficient and entire. Neither would it be content to maintain these nations or States in their mutual relations as noxious engines
\nmeant to discharge poisonous gas upon each other in peace and to rush in times of clash upon each other’s armed hosts
\nand unarmed millions, full of belching shot and men missioned to murder like war-planes or hostile tanks in a modern battlefield. It would regard the peoples as group-souls, the Divinity concealed and to be self-discovered in its human collectivities,
\ngroup-souls meant like the individual to grow according to their own nature and by that growth to help each other, to help the
\nwhole race in the one common work of humanity. And that work would be to find the divine Self in the individual and the
\ncollectivity and to realise spiritually, mentally, vitally, materially its greatest, largest, richest and deepest possibilities in the inner
\nlife of all and their outer action and nature. For it is into the Divine within them that men and mankind
\nhave to grow; it is not an external idea or rule that has to be imposed on them
\n\t\t\tfrom without.    <\/p>\n

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\nTherefore the law of a growing inner freedom is that which will be most honoured in the
\nspiritual age of mankind. True it is that so long as man has not come within measurable distance of self-knowledge and has
\nnot set his face towards it, he cannot escape from the law of external compulsion and all his efforts to do so must be vain.
\nHe is and always must be, so long as that lasts, the slave of others, the slave of his family, his caste, his clan, his Church, his
\nsociety, his nation; and he cannot but be that and they too cannot help throwing their crude and mechanical compulsion on him,
\nbecause he and they are the slaves of their own ego, of their own lower nature. We must feel and obey the compulsion of the Spirit
\nif we would establish our inner right to escape other compulsion: we must make our lower nature the willing slave, the conscious
\nand illumined instrument or the ennobled but still self-subjected portion, consort or partner of the divine Being within us, for it
\nis that subjection which is the condition of our freedom, since spiritual freedom is not the egoistic assertion of our separate
\nmind and life but obedience to the Divine Truth in ourself and our members and in all around us. But we have, even so, to
\nremark that God respects the freedom of the natural members of our being and that he gives them room to grow in their
\nown nature so that by natural growth and not by self-extinction they may find the Divine in themselves. The subjection which
\nthey finally accept, complete and absolute, must be a willing subjection of recognition and aspiration to their own source of
\nlight and power and their highest being. Therefore even in the unregenerated state we find that the healthiest, the truest, the
\nmost living growth and action is that which arises in the largest possible freedom and that all excess of compulsion is either
\nthe law of a gradual atrophy or a tyranny varied or cured by outbreaks of rabid disorder. And as soon as man comes to know
\nhis spiritual self, he does by that discovery, often even by the very seeking for it, as ancient thought and religion saw, escape
\nfrom the outer law and enter into the law of freedom. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tA spiritual age of mankind will perceive this truth. It will not try
\n\t\t\tto make man perfect by machinery or keep him straight by tying up
\n\t\t\tall his limbs. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 <\/span>258<\/p>\n

\n

<\/font> <\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n

It will not present to the member of the society his higher self in the person of the policeman,
\nthe official and the corporal, nor, let us say, in the form of a socialistic bureaucracy or a Labour Soviet. Its aim will be to
\ndiminish as soon and as far as possible the need of the element of external compulsion in human life by awakening the inner
\ndivine compulsion of the spirit within and all the preliminary means it will use will have that for its aim. In the end it will
\nemploy chiefly if not solely the spiritual compulsion which even the spiritual individual can exercise on those around him,
\n\t\t\t\u2014
\nand how much more should a spiritual society be able to do it, \u2014 that which awakens within us in spite of all inner resistance
\nand outer denial the compulsion of the Light, the desire and the power to grow through one’s own nature into the Divine. For the
\nperfectly spiritualised society will be one in which, as is dreamed by the spiritual anarchist, all men will be deeply free, and it will
\nbe so because the preliminary condition will have been satisfied. In that state each man will be not a law to himself, but
\nthe <\/i>law,
\nthe divine Law, because he will be a soul living in the Divine Reality and not an ego living mainly if not entirely for its own
\ninterest and purpose. His life will be led by the law of his own divine nature liberated from the ego.\n\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tNor will that mean a breaking up of all human society into the isolated action of individuals; for the third word of the Spirit
\nis unity. The spiritual life is the flower not of a featureless but a conscious and diversified oneness. Each man has to grow into the
\nDivine Reality within himself through his own individual being, therefore is a certain growing measure of freedom a necessity
\nof the being as it develops and perfect freedom the sign and the condition of the perfect life. But also, the Divine whom he thus
\nsees in himself, he sees equally in all others and as the same Spirit in all. Therefore too is a growing inner unity with others
\na necessity of his being and perfect unity the sign and condition of the perfect life. Not only to see and find the Divine in oneself,
\nbut to see and find the Divine in all, not only to seek one’s own individual liberation or perfection, but to seek the liberation and
\nperfection of others is the complete law of the spiritual being.    <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 259 <\/p>\n

\n

<\/font> <\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n

\nIf
\nthe divinity sought were a separate godhead within oneself and not the one Divine, or if one sought God for oneself alone, then
\nindeed the result might be a grandiose egoism, the Olympian egoism of a Goethe or the Titanic egoism imagined by Nietzsche,
\nor it might be the isolated self-knowledge or asceticism of the ivory tower or the Stylites pillar. But he who sees God in all, will
\nserve freely God in all with the service of love. He will, that is to say, seek not only his own freedom, but the freedom of all, not
\nonly his own perfection, but the perfection of all. He will not feel his individuality perfect except in the largest universality, nor his
\nown life to be full life except as it is one with the universal life. He will not live either for himself or for the State and society, for
\nthe individual ego or the collective ego, but for something much greater, for God in himself and for the Divine in the universe. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe spiritual age will be ready to set in when the common mind of man begins to be alive to these truths and to be moved
\nor desire to be moved by this triple or triune Spirit. That will mean the turning of the cycle of social development which we
\nhave been considering out of its incomplete repetitions on a new upward line towards its goal. For having set out, according to
\nour supposition, with a symbolic age, an age in which man felt a great Reality behind all life which he sought through symbols,
\nit will reach an age in which it will begin to live in that Reality, not through the symbol, not by the power of the type or of
\nthe convention or of the individual reason and intellectual will, but in our own highest nature which will be the nature of that
\nReality fulfilled in the conditions \u2014 not necessarily the same as now \u2014 of terrestrial existence. This is what the religions have
\nseen with a more or less adequate intuition, but most often as in a glass darkly, that which they called the kingdom of God on
\nearth, \u2014 his kingdom within in man’s spirit and therefore, for the one is the material result of the effectivity of the other, his
\nkingdom without in the life of the peoples.   <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 260<\/p>\n

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

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