{"id":3091,"date":"2013-07-13T01:45:52","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:45:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=3091"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:45:52","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:45:52","slug":"20-the-infrarational-age-of-the-cycle-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\/20-the-infrarational-age-of-the-cycle-vol-25-the-human-cycle","title":{"rendered":"-20_The Infrarational Age of the Cycle.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\n\n
\n

\t\t\t <\/p>\n

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

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe Infrarational Age of the Cycle <\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tI<\/font>N SPIRITUALITY<\/b> then would lie our ultimate, our only hope for the perfection whether of the individual or of the communal man; not the spirit which for its separate satisfaction
\nturns away from the earth and her works, but that greater spirit which surpasses and yet accepts and fulfils them. A spirituality
\nthat would take up into itself man’s rationalism, aestheticism, ethicism, vitalism, corporeality, his aspiration towards knowledge, his attraction towards beauty, his need of love, his urge towards perfection, his demand for power and fullness of life
\nand being, a spirituality that would reveal to these ill-accorded forces their divine sense and the conditions of their godhead,
\nreconcile them all to each other, illumine to the vision of each the way which they now tread in half-lights and shadows, in
\nblindness or with a deflected sight, is a power which even man’s too self-sufficient reason can accept or may at least be brought
\none day to accept as sovereign and to see in it its own supreme light, its own infinite source. For that reveals itself surely in the
\nend as the logical ultimate process, the inevitable development and consummation of all for which man is individually and
\nsocially striving. A satisfying evolution of the nascent spirituality still raw and inchoate in the race is the possibility to which an
\nage of subjectivism is a first glimmer of awakening or towards which it shows a first profound potentiality of return. A deeper,
\nwider, greater, more spiritualised subjective understanding of the individual and communal self and its life and a growing
\nreliance on the spiritual light and the spiritual means for the final solution of its problems are the only way to a true social
\nperfection. The free rule, that is to say, the predominant lead, control and influence of the developed spiritual man
\n\t\t\t\u2014 not the
\nhalf-spiritualised priest, saint or prophet or the raw religionist \u2014 is our hope for a divine guidance of the race.   <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013182<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

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

A spiritualised
\nsociety can alone bring about a reign of individual harmony and communal happiness; or, in words which, though liable to abuse
\nby the reason and the passions, are still the most expressive we can find, a new kind of theocracy, the kingdom of God upon
\nearth, a theocracy which shall be the government of mankind by the Divine in the hearts and minds of men.\n\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tCertainly, this will not come about easily, or, as men have always vainly hoped from each great new turn and revolution of
\npolitics and society, by a sudden and at once entirely satisfying change and magical transformation. The advance, however it
\ncomes about, will be indeed of the nature of a miracle, as are all such profound changes and immense developments; for they
\nhave the appearance of a kind of realised impossibility. But God works all his miracles by an evolution of secret possibilities
\nwhich have been long prepared, at least in their elements, and in the end by a rapid bringing of all to a head, a throwing together
\nof the elements so that in their fusion they produce a new form and name of things and reveal a new spirit. Often the decisive
\nturn is preceded by an apparent emphasising and raising to their extreme of things which seem the very denial, the most uncompromising opposite of the new principle and the new creation. Such an evolution of the elements of a spiritualised society is
\nthat which a subjective age makes at least possible, and if at the same time it raises to the last height of active power things
\nwhich seem the very denial of such a potentiality, that need be no index of a practical impossibility of the new birth, but on
\nthe contrary may be the sign of its approach or at the lowest a strong attempt at achievement. Certainly, the whole effort of a
\nsubjective age may go wrong; but this happens oftenest when by the insufficiency of its materials, a great crudeness of its startingpoint and a hasty shallowness or narrow intensity of its inlook into itself and things it is foredoomed to a fundamental error of
\nself-knowledge. It becomes less likely when the spirit of the age is full of freedom, variety and a many-sided seeking, a persistent effort after knowledge and perfection in all the domains of human activity; that can well convert itself into an intense and
\nyet flexible straining after the infinite and the divine on many
\nsides and in many aspects. In such circumstances, though a full advance may possibly not be made, a great step forward can be
\npredicted.   <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013<\/font>183<\/p>\n

\n

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

\n\t\t\tWe have seen that there are necessarily three stages of the
\nsocial evolution or, generally, of the human evolution in both individual and society. Our evolution starts with an infrarational
\nstage in which men have not yet learned to refer their life and action in its principles and its forms to the judgment of the
\nclarified intelligence; for they still act principally out of their instincts, impulses, spontaneous ideas, vital intuitions or obey
\na customary response to desire, need and circumstance, \u2014 it is these things that are canalised or crystallised in their social institutions. Man proceeds by various stages out of these beginnings towards a rational age in which his intelligent will more or less
\ndeveloped becomes the judge, arbiter and presiding motive of his thought, feeling and action, the moulder, destroyer and recreator of his leading ideas, aims and intuitions. Finally, if our analysis and forecast are correct, the human evolution must
\nmove through a subjective towards a suprarational or spiritual age in which he will develop progressively a greater spiritual,
\nsupra-intellectual and intuitive, perhaps in the end a more than intuitive, a gnostic consciousness. He will be able to perceive a
\nhigher divine end, a divine sanction, a divine light of guidance for all he seeks to be, think, feel and do, and able, too, more
\nand more to obey and live in this larger light and power. That will not be done by any rule of infrarational religious impulse
\nand ecstasy, such as characterised or rather darkly illumined the obscure confusion and brute violence of the Middle Ages, but by
\na higher spiritual living for which the clarities of the reason are a necessary preparation and into which they too will be taken
\nup, transformed, brought to their invisible source. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThese stages or periods are much more inevitable in the
\npsychological evolution of mankind than the Stone and other Ages marked out by Science in his instrumental culture, for they
\ndepend not on outward means or accidents, but on the very nature of his being. But we must not suppose that they are
\nnaturally exclusive and absolute in their nature, or complete in their tendency
\n\t\t\tor fulfilment when they come, or rigidly marked off from each other
\n\t\t\tin their action or their time.   <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013184<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

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

For they not
\nonly arise out of each other, but may be partially developed in each other and they may come to coexist in different parts of
\nthe earth at the same time. But, especially, since man as a whole is always a complex being, even man savage or degenerate, he
\ncannot be any of these things exclusively or absolutely, \u2014 so long as he has not exceeded himself, has not developed into the
\nsuperman, has not, that is to say, spiritualised and divinised his whole being. At his animal worst he is still some kind of thinking
\nor reflecting animal: even the infrarational man cannot be utterly infrarational, but must have or tend to have some kind of play
\nmore or less evolved or involved of the reason and a more or less crude suprarational element, a more or less disguised working
\nof the spirit. At his lucid mental best, he is still not a pure mental being, a pure intelligence; even the most perfect intellectual is
\nnot and cannot be wholly or merely rational, \u2014 there are vital urgings that he cannot exclude, visits or touches of a light
\nfrom above that are not less suprarational because he does not recognise their source. No god, but at his highest a human being
\ntouched with a ray of the divine influence, man’s very spirituality, however dominant, must have, while he is still this imperfectly
\nevolved human, its rational and infrarational tendencies and elements. And as with the psychological life of individuals, so
\nmust it be with the ages of his communal existence; these may be marked off from each other by the predominant play of one
\nelement, its force may overpower the others or take them into itself or make some compromise, but an exclusive play seems to
\nbe neither intended nor possible. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThus an infrarational period of human and social
\n\t\t\tdevelopment need not be without its elements, its strong elements of
\n\t\t\treason and of spirituality. Even the savage, whether he be primitive
\n\t\t\tor degenerate man, has some coherent idea of this world and the
\n\t\t\tbeyond, a theory of life and a religion. To us with our more
\n\t\t\tadvanced rationality his theory of life may seem incoherent, because
\n\t\t\twe have lost its point of view and its principle of mental
\n\t\t\tassociations. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013<\/font>185<\/p>\n

\n

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

\n\t\t\tBut it is still an act of reason, and
\nwithin its limits he is capable of a sufficient play of thought both ideative and practical, as well as a clear ethical idea and motive,
\nsome aesthetic notions and an understood order of society poor and barbarous to our view, but well enough contrived and put
\ntogether to serve the simplicity of its objects. Or again we may not realise the element of reason in a primitive theory of life or
\nof spirituality in a barbaric religion, because it appears to us to be made up of symbols and forms to which a superstitious value
\nis attached by these undeveloped minds. But this is because the reason at this stage has an imperfect and limited action and the
\nelement of spirituality is crude or undeveloped and not yet selfconscious; in order to hold firmly their workings and make them
\nreal and concrete to his mind and spirit primitive man has to give them shape in symbols and forms to which he clings with
\na barbaric awe and reverence, because they alone can embody for him his method of self-guidance in life. For the dominant
\nthing in him is his infrarational life of instinct, vital intuition and impulse, mechanical custom and tradition, and it is that to
\nwhich the rest of him has to give some kind of primary order and first glimmerings of light. The unrefined reason and unenlightened spirit in him cannot work for their own ends; they are bond-slaves of his infrarational nature. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAt a higher stage of development or of a return towards a fuller evolution,
\n\t\t\t\u2014 for the actual savage in humanity is perhaps not the original primitive man, but a relapse and reversion towards primitiveness,
\n\t\t\t\u2014 the infrarational stage of society may
\narrive at a very lofty order of civilisation. It may have great intuitions of the meaning or general intention of life, admirable ideas
\nof the arrangement of life, a harmonious, well-adapted, durable and serviceable social system, an imposing religion which will
\nnot be without its profundities, but in which symbol and ceremonial will form the largest portion and for the mass of man
\nwill be almost the whole of religion. In this stage pure reason and pure spirituality will not govern the society or move large
\nbodies of men, but will be represented, if at all, by individuals at first few, but growing in number as these two powers increase
\nin their purity and vigour and attract more and more votaries.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013<\/font>186<\/p>\n

\n

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

\n\t\t\tThis may well lead to an age, if the development of reason is
\nstrongest, of great individual thinkers who seize on some idea of life and its origins and laws and erect that into a philosophy, of
\ncritical minds standing isolated above the mass who judge life, not yet with a luminous largeness, a minute flexibility of understanding or a clear and comprehensive profundity, but still with power of intelligence, insight, acuteness, perhaps even a preeminent social thinker here and there who, taking advantage of some crisis or disturbance, is able to get the society to modify
\nor reconstruct itself on the basis of some clearly rational and intelligent principle. Such an age seems to be represented by the
\ntraditions of the beginnings of Greek civilisation, or rather the beginnings of its mobile and progressive period. Or if spirituality predominates, there will be great mystics capable of delving into the profound and still occult psychological possibilities of
\nour nature who will divine and realise the truth of the self and spirit in man and, even though they keep these things secret and
\nimparted only to a small number of initiates, may yet succeed in deepening with them the crude forms of the popular life. Even
\nsuch a development is obscurely indicated in the old traditions of the mysteries. In prehistoric India we see it take a peculiar
\nand unique turn which determined the whole future trend of the society and made Indian civilisation a thing apart and of its
\nown kind in the history of the human race. But these things are only a first beginning of light in the midst of a humanity which
\nis still infrarational as well as infra-spiritual and, even when it undergoes the influence of these precursors, responds only obscurely to their inspirations and without any clearly intelligent or awakened spiritual reception of what they impart or impose.
\nIt still turns everything into infrarational form and disfiguring tradition and lives spiritually by ill-understood ceremonial and
\ndisguising symbol. It feels obscurely the higher things, tries to live them in its own stumbling way, but it does not yet understand; it cannot lay hold either on the intellectual form or the spiritual heart of their significance. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAs reason and spirituality develop, they begin to become a larger and more diffused force, less intense perhaps, but wider
\n \t\t\tand more effective on the mass.   <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 187<\/p>\n

\n

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

\n\t\t\tThe mystics become the sowers of the seed of an immense spiritual development in which whole
\nclasses of society and even men from all classes seek the light, as happened in India in the age of the Upanishads. The solitary individual thinkers are replaced by a great number of writers, poets, thinkers, rhetoricians, sophists, scientific inquirers, who pour
\nout a profuse flood of acute speculation and inquiry stimulating the thought-habit and creating even in the mass a generalised
\nactivity of the intelligence, \u2014 as happened in Greece in the age of the sophists. The spiritual development, arising uncurbed by
\nreason in an infrarational society, has often a tendency to outrun at first the rational and intellectual movement. For the greatest
\nilluminating force of the infrarational man, as he develops, is an inferior intuition, an instinctively intuitional sight arising
\nout of the force of life in him, and the transition from this to an intensity of inner life and the growth of a deeper spiritual
\nintuition which outleaps the intellect and seems to dispense with it, is an easy passage in the individual man. But for humanity
\nat large this movement cannot last; the mind and intellect must develop to their fullness so that the spirituality of the race may
\nrise securely upward upon a broad basis of the developed lower nature in man, the intelligent mental being. Therefore we see
\nthat the reason in its growth either does away with the distinct spiritual tendency for a time, as in ancient Greece, or accepts it
\nbut spins out around its first data and activities a vast web of the workings of the intelligence, so that, as in India, the early
\nmystic seer is replaced by the philosopher-mystic, the religious thinker and even the philosopher pure and simple. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tFor a time the new growth and impulse may seem to take possession of a whole community as in Athens or in old Aryan
\nIndia. But these early dawns cannot endure in their purity, so long as the race is not ready. There is a crystallisation, a lessening
\nof the first impetus, a new growth of infrarational forms in which the thought
\n\t\t\tor the spirituality is overgrown with inferior accretions or it is
\n\t\t\timbedded in the form and may even die in it, while the tradition of
\n\t\t\tthe living knowledge, the loftier life and activity remains the
\n\t\t\tproperty of the higher classes or a highest class.  <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 188<\/p>\n

\n

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

The multitude remains infrarational in its habit of mind, though perhaps it may still keep in capacity an enlivened intelligence or a profound or subtle spiritual receptiveness as its gain from the past. So long as the hour of the rational age has not
\narrived, the irrational period of society cannot be left behind; and that arrival can only be when not a class or a few but the
\nmultitude has learned to think, to exercise its intelligence actively \u2014 it matters not at first however imperfectly
\n\t\t\t\u2014 upon their life,
\ntheir needs, their rights, their duties, their aspirations as human beings. Until then we have as the highest possible development a
\nmixed society, infrarational in the mass, but saved for civilisation by a higher class whose business it is to seek after the reason and
\nthe spirit, to keep the gains of mankind in these fields, to add to them, to enlighten and raise with them as much as possible the
\nlife of the whole. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tAt this point we see that Nature in her human mass tends
\nto move forward slowly on her various lines of active mind and life towards a greater application of reason and spirituality
\nwhich shall at last bring near the possibility of a rational and, eventually, a spiritual age of mankind. Her difficulties proceed
\nfrom two sides. First, while she originally developed thought and reason and spirituality by exceptional individuals, now she
\ndevelops them in the mass by exceptional communities or nations, \u2014 at least in the relative sense of a nation governed, led
\nand progressively formed and educated by its intellectually or spiritually cultured class or classes. But the exceptional nation
\ntouched on its higher levels by a developed reason or spirituality or both, as were Greece and later Rome in ancient Europe,
\nIndia, China and Persia in ancient Asia, is surrounded or neighboured by enormous masses of the old infrarational humanity
\nand endangered by this menacing proximity; for until a developed science comes in to redress the balance, the barbarian has
\nalways a greater physical force and unexhausted native power of aggression than the cultured peoples. At this stage the light
\nand power of civilisation always collapses in the end before the attack of the outer darkness.    <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 190 <\/p>\n

\n

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

\n\t\t\tThen ascending Nature has to train the conquerors more or less
\n\t\t\tslowly, with long difficulty
\nand much loss and delay to develop among themselves what their incursion has temporarily destroyed or impaired. In the end
\nhumanity gains by the process; a greater mass of the nations is brought in, a larger and more living force of progress is applied,
\na starting-point is reached from which it can move to richer and more varied gains. But a certain loss is always the price of this
\nadvance. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tBut even within the communities themselves reason and
\nspirituality at this stage are always hampered and endangered \u00b4
\nby existing in a milieu and atmosphere not their own. The elite, the classes in charge of these powers, are obliged to throw them
\ninto forms which the mass of human ignorance they lead and rule will accept, and both reason and spirituality tend to be stifled
\nby these forms, to get stereotyped, fossilised, void of life, bound up from their natural play. Secondly, since they are after all part
\nof the mass, these higher enlightened elements are themselves much under the influence of their infrarational parts and do
\nnot, except in individuals, arrive at the entirely free play of the reason or the free light of the spirit. Thirdly, there is always
\nthe danger of these elements gravitating downward to the ignorance below or even collapsing into it. Nature guards herself
\nby various devices for maintaining the tradition of intellectual and spiritual activity in the favoured classes; here she makes it a
\npoint of honour for them to preserve and promote the national culture, there she establishes a preservative system of education
\nand discipline. And in order that these things may not degenerate into mere traditionalism, she brings in a series of intellectual or
\nspiritual movements which by their shock revivify the failing life and help to bring about a broadening and an enlarging and
\nto drive the dominant reason or spirituality deeper down into the infrarational mass. Each movement indeed tends to petrify
\nafter a shorter or longer activity, but a fresh shock, a new wave arrives in time to save and regenerate. Finally, she reaches the
\npoint when, all immediate danger of relapse overcome, she can proceed to her next decisive advance in the cycle of social evolution. This must take the form of an attempt to universalise first of all the habit of reason and the application of the intelligence
\n \t\t\tand intelligent will to life.  <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 190<\/p>\n

\n

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

Thus is instituted the rational age of human society, the great endeavour to bring the power of the
\nreason and intelligence to bear on all that we are and do and to organise in their light and by their guiding force the entire
\nexistence of the race.   <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\tPage \u2013 191<\/p>\n

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

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