{"id":3507,"date":"2013-07-13T01:49:01","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:49:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=3507"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:49:01","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:49:01","slug":"15-reason-and-religion-vol-the-human-cycle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/01-works-of-sri-aurobindo\/02-other-editions\/the-human-cycle\/15-reason-and-religion-vol-the-human-cycle","title":{"rendered":"-15_Reason and Religion.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\n\n
\n

\nCHAPTER XIII<\/b> <\/font><\/p>\n

\nREASON AND RELIGION<\/b> <\/font><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\nI<\/font>T<\/b> WOULD seem then that reason is an insufficient,
\noften an inefficient, even a stumbling and at its best a very partially
\nenlightened guide for humanity in that great endeavour which is the real heart
\nof human progress and the inner justification of our existence as souls, minds
\nand bodies upon the earth. For that endeavour is not only the effort to survive
\nand make a place for ourselves on the earth as the animals do, not only having
\nmade to keep it and develop its best vital and egoistic or communal use for the
\nefficiency and enjoyment of the individual, family or the collective ego,
\nsubstantially as is done by the animal families and colonies, in bee-hive or
\nant-hill for example, though in the larger, many-sided way of reasoning animals;
\nit is also, and much more characteristically of our human as distinguished from
\nour animal element, the endeavour to arrive at a harmonised inner and outer
\nperfection, and, as we find in the end, at its highest height, to culminate in
\nthe discovery of the divine Reality behind our existence and the complete and
\nideal Person within us and the shaping of human life in that image. But if that
\nis the truth, then neither the Hellenic ideal of an all-round philosophic,
\naesthetic, moral and physical culture governed by the enlightened reason of man
\nand led by the wisest minds of a free society, nor the modern ideal of an
\nefficient culture and successful economic civilisation governed by the
\ncollective reason and <\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 136<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\norganised knowledge of mankind can be either the
\nhighest or the widest goal of social development. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nThe Hellenic ideal was roughly expressed in the old
\nLatin maxim, a sound mind in a sound body. And by a sound body the ancients
\nmeant a healthy and beautiful body well-fitted for the rational use and
\nenjoyment of life. And by a sound mind they meant a clear and balanced reason
\nand an enlightened and well- trained mentality,\u2014trained in the sense of ancient
\nnot of modern education. It was not to be packed with all available information
\nand ideas, cast in the mould of science and a rational utility and so prepared
\nfor the efficient performance of social and civic needs and duties, for a
\nprofessional avocation or for an intellectual pursuit; rather it was to be
\ncultured in all its human capacities intellectual, moral, aesthetic, trained to
\nuse them rightly and to range, freely, intelligently and flexibly in all
\nquestions and in all practical matters of philosophy, science, art, politics and
\nsocial living. The ancient Greek mind was philosophic, aesthetic and political;
\nthe modem mind has been scientific, economic and utilitarian. The ancient ideal
\nlaid stress on soundness and beauty and sought to build up a fine and rational
\nhuman life; the modem lays very little or no stress on beauty, prefers rational
\nand practical soundness, useful adaptation, just mechanism and seeks to build up
\na well-ordered, well-informed and efficient human life. Both take it that man is
\npartly a mental, partly a physical being with the mentalised physical life for
\nhis field and reason for his highest attribute and his highest possibility. But
\nif we follow to the end the new vistas opened by the most advanced tendencies of
\na subjective age, we shall be led back to a still more ancient truth and ideal
\nthat overtops both the Hellenic and the modem levels. For we shall then seize
\nthe truth that man is a developing spirit trying here to find and fulfil itself
\nin the forms of mind, life and body; and we shall perceive luminously growing
\nbefore us die greater ideal of a <\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 137<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\ndeeply conscious self-illumined, self-possessing,
\nself-mastering soul in a pure and perfect mind and body. The wider field it
\nseeks will be, not the mentalised physical life with which man has started, but
\na new spiritualised life inward and outward, by which the perfected internal
\nfigures itself in a perfected external living. Beyond man’s long intelligent
\neffort towards a perfected culture and a rational society there opens the old
\nreligious and spiritual ideal, the hope of the kingdom of heaven within us and
\nthe city of God upon earth. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nBut if the soul is the true sovereign and if its
\nspiritual self- finding, its progressive largest widest integral fulfilment by the
\npower of the spirit are to be accepted as the ultimate secret of our evolution,
\nthen since certainly the instinctive being of man below reason is not the means
\nof attaining that high end and since we find that reason also is an insufficient
\nlight and power, there must be a superior range of being with its own proper
\npowers,\u2014 liberated soul-faculties, a spiritual will and knowledge higher than
\nthe reason and intelligent will,\u2014by which alone entire conscious self-fulfilment
\ncan become possible to the human being. We must remember that our aim of self-fulfilment
\nis an integral unfolding of the Divine within us, a complete evolution of the
\nhidden divinity in the individual soul and the collective life. Otherwise we may
\nsimply come back to an old idea of individual and social living which had its
\ngreatness, but did not provide all the conditions of our perfection. That was
\nthe idea of a spiritualised typal society. It proceeded upon the supposition
\nthat each man has his own peculiar nature which is born from and reflects one
\nelement of the divine nature. The character of each individual, his ethical
\ntype, his training, his social occupation, his spiritual possibility must be
\nformed or developed within the conditions of that peculiar element; the
\nperfection he seeks in this life must be according to its law. The theory of
\nancient Indian culture\u2014its practice, as is the way of human <\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 138<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\npractice, did not always correspond to the
\ntheory\u2014worked upon this supposition. It divided man in society into the fourfold
\norder\u2014an at once spiritual, psychic, ethical and economic order\u2014of the Brahmin,
\nKshatriya, Vaishya and Shudra,\u2014practically, the spiritual and intellectual man,
\nthe dynamic man of will, the vital, hedonistic and economic man, the material
\nman; the whole society organised in these four
\nconstituent classes represented the complete image of the creative and active
\nGodhead. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nA different division of the typal society is quite
\npossible. But whatever the arrangement or division, the typal principle cannot
\nbe the foundation of an ideal human society. Even according to the Indian theory
\nit does not belong either to the periods of man’s highest attainment or to the
\neras of his lowest possibility; it is neither the principle of his ideal age,
\nhis age of the perfected Truth, Satyayuga, Kritayuga, in which he lives
\naccording to some high and profound realisation of his divine possibility, nor
\nof his iron age, the Kali-yuga, in which he collapses towards the life of the
\ninstincts, impulses and desires with the reason degraded into a servant of this
\nnether life of man. This too precise order is rather the appropriate principle
\nof the intermediate ages of his cycle in which he attempts to maintain some
\nimperfect form of his true law, his dharma,<\/i> by willpower and force of
\ncharacter in the Treta, by law, arrangement and fixed convention in the Dwapara.*
\nThe type is not the integral man, it is the fixing and emphasizing of the
\ngenerally prominent part of his active nature. But each man contains in himself
\nthe whole divine potentiality and therefore the Shudra cannot be rigidly
\nconfined within his Shudrahood, nor the Brahmin in his Brahminhood, but each
\ncontains within himself the potentialities and the need of perfection of his
\nother elements of a divine manhood. In the Kali age these potentialities may act
\nin <\/font><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n* Therefore it is said that Vishnu is the King in
\nthe Treta, but in the Dwapara the arranger and codifier of the knowledge and the
\nlaw. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 139<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\na state of crude disorder, the anarchy of our being
\nwhich covers our confused attempt at a new order. In the intermediate ages the
\nprinciple of order may take refuge in a limited perfection, suppressing some
\nelements to perfect others. But the law of the Satya age is the large
\ndevelopment of the whole truth of our being in the realisation of a spontaneous
\nand self-supported spiritual harmony. That can only be realised by the
\nevolution, in the measure of which our human capacity in its enlarging cycles
\nbecomes capable of it, of the spiritual ranges of our being and the unmasking of
\ntheir inherent light and power, their knowledge and their divine capacities. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nWe shall better understand what may be this higher
\nbeing and those higher faculties, if we look again at the dealings of the reason
\nwith the trend towards the absolute in our other faculties, in the divergent
\nprinciples of our complex existence. Let us study especially its dealings with
\nthe suprarational in them and the infrarational, the two extremes between which
\nour intelligence is some sort of mediator. The spiritual or suprarational is
\nalways turned at its heights towards the Absolute; in its extension, living in
\nthe luminous infinite, its special power is to realise the infinite in the
\nfinite, the eternal unity in all divisions and differences. Our spiritual
\nevolution ascends therefore through the relative to the absolute, through the
\nfinite to the infinite, through all divisions to oneness. Man in his spiritual
\nrealisation begins to find and seize hold on the satisfying intensities of the
\nabsolute in the relative, feels the large and serene presence of the infinite in
\nthe finite, discovers the reconciling law of a perfect unity in all divisions
\nand differences. The spiritual will in his outer as in his inner life and
\nformulation must be to effect a great reconciliation between the secret and
\neternal reality and the finite appearances of a world which seeks to express and
\nin expressing seems to deny it. Our highest faculties then will be those which
\nmake this possible because they have <\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 140<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nin them the intimate light and power and joy by
\nwhich these things can be grasped in direct knowledge and experience, realised
\nand made normally and permanently effective in will, communicated to our whole
\nnature. The infrarational on the other hand has its origin and basis in the
\nobscure infinite of the Inconscient; it wells up in instincts and impulses,
\nwhich are really the crude and more or less haphazard intuitions of a
\nsubconscient physical, vital, emotional and sensational mind and will in us. Its
\nstruggle is towards definition, towards self-creation, towards finding some
\nfinite order of its obscure knowledge and tendencies. But it has also the
\ninstinct and force of the infinite from which it proceeds; it contains obscure,
\nlimited and violent velleities that move it to grasp at the intensities of the
\nabsolute and pull them down or some touch of them into its finite action: but because it proceeds by ignorance and not by
\nknowledge, it cannot truly succeed in this more vehement endeavour. The life of
\nthe reason and intelligent will stands between that upper and this nether power.
\nOn one side it takes up and enlightens the life of the instincts and impulses
\nand helps it to find on a higher plane the finite order for which it gropes. On
\nthe other side it looks up towards the absolute, looks out towards the infinite,
\nlooks in towards the One, but without being able to grasp and hold their
\nrealities; for it is able only to consider them with a sort of derivative and
\nremote understanding, because it moves in the relative and, itself limited and
\ndefinite, it can act only by definition, division and limitation. These three
\npowers of being, the suprarational, rational and infrarational are present, but
\nwith an infinitely varying prominence in all our activities. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nThe limitations of the reason become very
\nstrikingly, very characteristically, very nakedly apparent when it is confronted
\nwith that great order of psychological truths and experiences which we have
\nhitherto kept in the background\u2014the religious being of man and his religious
\nlife. Here is a realm at which <\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 141<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nthe intellectual reason gazes with the bewildered
\nmind of a foreigner who hears a language of which the words and the spirit are
\nunintelligible to him and sees everywhere forms of life and principles of
\nthought and action which are absolutely strange to his experience. He may try to
\nlearn this speech and understand this strange and alien life; but it is with pain
\nand difficulty, and he cannot succeed unless he has, so to speak, unlearned
\nhimself and become one in spirit and nature with the natives of this celestial
\nempire. Till then his efforts to understand and interpret them in his own
\nlanguage and according to his own notions end at the worst in a gross
\nmisunderstanding and deformation. The attempts of the positive critical reason
\nto dissect the phenomena of the religious life sound to men of spiritual
\nexperience like the prattle of a child who is trying to shape into the mould of
\nhis own habitual notions the life of adults or the blunders of an ignorant mind
\nwhich thinks fit to criticise patronisingly or adversely the labours of a
\nprofound , thinker or a great scientist. At the best even this futile labour can
\nextract, can account for only the externals of the things it attempts to
\nexplain; the spirit is missed, the inner matter is left out, and as a result of
\nthat capital omission even the account of the externals is left without real
\ntruth and has only an apparent correctness. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nThe unaided intellectual reason faced with the
\nphenomena of the religious life is naturally apt to adopt one of two attitudes,
\nboth of them shallow in the extreme, hastily presumptuous and erroneous. Either
\nit views the whole thing as a mass of superstition, a mystical nonsense, a
\nfarrago of ignorant barbaric survivals,\u2014that was the extreme spirit of the
\nrationalist now happily, though not dead, yet much weakened and almost moribund,
\n\u2014or it patronises religion, tries to explain its origins, to get rid of it by
\nthe process of explaining it away; or it labours gently or forcefully to reject
\nor correct its superstitions, crudities, absurdities,<\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 142<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\n to purify it into an abstract nothingness or
\npersuade it
\n<\/b>to
\n<\/b>purify itself in the light of the reasoning intelligence; or it allows it a
\nrole, leaves it perhaps for the edification of the ignorant, admits its value as
\na moralising influence or its utility to the State for keeping the lower classes
\nin order, even perhaps tries to invent that strange chimera, a rational
\nreligion. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nThe former attitude has on its positive side played
\na powerful part in the history of human thought, has even been of a considerable
\nutility in its own way\u2014we shall have to note briefly hereafter how and why\u2014to
\nhuman progress and in the end even to religion; but its intolerant negations are
\nan arrogant falsity, as the human mind has now sufficiently begun to perceive.
\nIts mistake is like that of a foreigner who thinks everything in an alien
\ncountry absurd and inferior because these things are not his own ways of acting
\nand thinking and cannot be cut out by his own measures or suited to his own
\nstandards. So the thoroughgoing rationalist asks the religious spirit, if it is
\nto stand, to satisfy the material reason and even to give physical proof of its
\ntruths, while the very essence of religion is the discovery of the immaterial
\nSpirit and the play of a supra-physical consciousness. So too he tries to judge
\nreligion by his idea of its externalities, just as an ignorant and obstreperous
\nforeigner might try to judge a civilisation by the dress, outward colour of life
\nand some of the most external peculiarities in the social manners of the
\ninhabitants. That in this he errs in company with certain of the so-called
\nreligious themselves, may be his excuse, but cannot be the justification of his
\nignorance. The more moderate attitude of the rational mind has also played its
\npart in the history of human thought. Its attempts to explain religion have
\nresulted in the compilation of an immense mass of amazingly ingenious
\nperversions, such as certain pseudo-scientific attempts to form a comparative
\nScience of Religion. It has built up in the approved modem style immense facades
\nof theory with stray bricks of misunderstood<\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 143<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\n facts for their material. Its mild condonations of religion have led to superficial phases of thought which have
\npassed quickly away and left no trace behind them. Its efforts at the creation
\nof a rational religion, perfectly well-intentioned, but helpless and
\nunconvincing, have had no appreciable effect and have failed like a dispersing
\ncloud, chhinn\u00e1bhra iva nashyati.<\/i> <\/font><\/p>\n

\nThe deepest heart, the inmost essence of religion,
\napart from its outward machinery of creed, cult, ceremony and symbol, is the
\nsearch for God and the finding of God. Its aspiration is to discover the
\nInfinite, the Absolute, the One, the Divine who is all these things and yet no
\nabstraction but a Being. Its work is a sincere living out of the true and
\nintimate relations between man and God, relations of unity, relations of
\ndifference, relations of an illuminated knowledge, an ecstatic love and delight,
\nan absolute surrender and service, a casting of every part of our existence out
\nof its normal status into an uprush of man towards the Divine and a descent of
\nthe Divine into man. All this has nothing to do with the realm of reason or its
\nnormal activities; its aim, its sphere, its process is suprarational. The
\nknowledge of God is not to be gained by weighing the feeble arguments of reason
\nfor or against his existence: it is to be gained only by a self-transcending and
\nabsolute consecration, aspiration and experience. Nor does that experience
\nproceed by anything like rational scientific experiment or rational philosophic
\nthinking. Even in those parts of religious discipline which seem most to
\nresemble scientific experiment, the method is a verification of things which
\nexceed the reason and its timid scope. Even in those parts of religious
\nknowledge which seem most to resemble intellectual operations, the illuminating
\nfaculties are not imagination, logic and rational judgment, but revelations,
\ninspirations, intuitions, intuitive discernments that leap down to us from a
\nplane of suprarational light. The love of God is an infinite and absolute
\nfeeling which does not admit of any rational limitation and does not use a language<\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 144<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\n of rational worship and adoration; the
\ndelight in God is that peace and bliss which passes all understanding. The
\nsurrender to God is the surrender of the whole being to a suprarational light,
\nwill, power and love and his service takes no account of the compromises with
\nlife which the practical reason of man uses as the best part of its method in
\nthe ordinary conduct of mundane existence. Wherever religion really finds
\nitself, wherever it opens itself to its own spirit,\u2014there is plenty of that sort
\nof religious practice which is halting, imperfect, half-sincere, only half-sure
\nof itself and in which reason can get in a word,\u2014its way is absolute and its
\nfruits are ineffable. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nReason has indeed a part to play in relation to
\nthis highest field of our religious being and experience, but that part is quite
\nsecondary and subordinate. It cannot lay down the law for the religious life, it
\ncannot determine in its own right the system of divine knowledge; it cannot
\nschool and lesson the divine love and delight; it cannot set bounds to spiritual
\nexperience or lay its yoke upon the action of the spiritual man. Its sole
\nlegitimate sphere is to explain as best it can, in its own language and to the
\nrational and intellectual parts of man, the truths, the experiences, the laws of
\nour suprarational and spiritual existence. That has been the work of spiritual
\nphilosophy in the East and \u2014much more crudely and imperfectly done\u2014of theology
\nin the West, a work of great importance at moments like the present when the
\nintellect of mankind after a long wandering is again turning towards the search
\nfor the Divine. Here there must inevitably enter a part of those operations
\nproper to the intellect, logical reasoning, inferences from the data given by
\nrational experience, analogies drawn from our knowledge of the apparent facts of
\nexistence, appeals even to the physical truths of science, all the apparatus of
\nthe intelligent mind in its ordinary workings. But this is the weakest part of
\nspiritual philosophy. It convinces the rational mind only where the intellect is
\nalready predisposed <\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 145<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nto belief, and even if it convinces, it cannot give
\nthe true knowledge. Reason is safest when it is content to take the profound
\ntruths and experiences of the spiritual being and the spiritual life, just as
\nthey are given to it, and throw them into such form, order and language as will
\nmake them the most intelligible or the least unintelligible to the reasoning
\nmind. Even then it is not quite safe, for it is apt to harden the order into an
\nintellectual system and to present the form as if it were the essence. And, at
\nbest, it has to use a language which is not the very tongue of the suprarational
\ntruth but its inadequate translation and, since it is not the ordinary tongue
\neither of the rational intelligence, it is open to non-understanding or
\nmisunderstanding by the ordinary reason of mankind. It is well-known to the
\nexperience of the spiritual seeker that even the highest philosophising cannot
\ngive a true inner knowledge, is not the spiritual light, does not open the gates
\nof experience. All it can do is to address the consciousness of man through his
\nintellect and, when it has done, to say, "I have tried to give you the truth in
\na form and system which will make it intelligible and possible to you; if you
\nare intellectually convinced or attracted, you can now seek the real knowledge,
\nbut you must seek it by other means which are beyond my province." <\/font><\/p>\n

\nBut there is another level of the religious life in
\nwhich reason might seem justified in interfering more independently and entitled
\nto assume a superior role. For as there is the suprarational life in which
\nreligious aspiration finds entirely what it seeks, so too there is also the
\ninfrarational life of the instincts, impulses, sensations, crude emotions, vital
\nactivities from which all human aspiration takes its beginning. These too feel
\nthe touch of the religious sense in man, share its needs and experience, desire
\nits satisfactions. Religion includes this satisfaction also in its scope, and in
\nwhat is usually called religion it seems even to be the greater part, sometimes
\nto an external view almost the <\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 146<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nwhole; for the supreme purity of spiritual
\nexperience does not appear or is glimpsed only through this mixed and turbid
\ncurrent. Much impurity, ignorance, superstition, many doubtful elements must
\nform as the result of this contact and union of our highest tendencies with our
\nlower ignorant nature. Here it would seem that reason has its legitimate part;
\nhere surely it can intervene to enlighten, purify, rationalise the play of the
\ninstincts and impulses. It would seem that a religious reformation, a movement
\nto substitute a "pure" and rational religion for one that is largely
\ninfrarational and impure, would be a distinct advance in the religious
\ndevelopment of humanity. To a certain extent this may be, but, owing to the
\npeculiar nature of the religious being, its entire urge towards the
\nsuprarational, not without serious qualifications, nor can the rational mind do
\nanything here that is of a high positive value. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nReligious forms and systems become effete and
\ncorrupt and have to be destroyed, or they lose much of their inner sense and
\nbecome clouded in knowledge and injurious in practice, and in destroying what is
\neffete or in negating aberrations reason has played an important part in
\nreligious history. But in its endeavour to get rid of the superstition and
\nignorance which have attached themselves to religious forms and symbols,
\nintellectual reason unenlightened by spiritual knowledge tends to deny and, so
\nfar as it can, to destroy the truth and the experience which was contained in
\nthem. Reformations which give too much to reason and are too negative and
\nprotestant, usually create religions which lack in wealth of spirituality and
\nfullness of religious emotion; they are not opulent in their contents; their
\nform and too often their spirit is impoverished, bare and cold. Nor are they
\nreally rational; for they live not by their reasoning and dogma which to the
\nrational mind is as irrational as that of the creeds they replace, still less by
\ntheir negations, but by their positive quantum of faith and fervour which is
\nsuprarational in its whole <\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 147<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\naim and has too its infrarational elements. If
\nthese seem less gross to the ordinary mind than those of less self-questioning
\ncreeds, it is often because they are more timid in venturing into the realm of
\nsuprarational experience. The life of the instincts and impulses on its
\nreligious side cannot he satisfyingly purified by reason, but rather by being
\nsublimated, by being lifted up into the illuminations of the spirit. The natural
\nline of religious development proceeds always by illumination; and religious
\nreformation acts best when either it reilluminates rather than destroys old
\nforms or, where destruction is necessary, replaces them by richer and not by
\npoorer forms, and in any case when it purifies by suprarational illumination,
\nnot by rational enlightenment. A purely rational religion could only be a cold
\nand bare Deism, and such attempts have always failed to achieve vitality and
\npermanence; for they act contrary to .the dharma,<\/i> the natural law and
\nspirit of religion. If reason is to play any decisive part, it must be an
\nintuitive rather than an intellectual reason, touched always by spiritual
\nintensity and insight. For it must be remembered that the infrarational also has
\nbehind it a secret truth which does not fall within the domain of the Reason and
\nis not wholly amenable to its judgments. The heart has its knowledge, the life
\nhas its intuitive spirit within it, its intimations, divinations, outbreaks and
\nupflamings of a Secret Energy, a divine or at least semi-divine aspiration and
\noutreaching which the eye of intuition alone can fathom and only intuitive
\nspeech or symbol can shape or utter. To root out these things from religion or
\nto purge religion of any elements necessary for its completeness because the
\nforms are defective or obscure, without having the power to illuminate them from
\nwithin or the patience to wait for their illumination from above or without
\nreplacing them by more luminous symbols, is not to purify but to pauperise. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nBut the relations of the spirit and the reason need
\nnot be, <\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 148<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nas they too often are in our practice, hostile or
\nwithout any point of contact. Religion itself need not adopt for its principle
\nthe formula "I believe because it is impossible" or Pascal’s "I believe because
\nit is absurd." What is impossible or absurd to the unaided reason, becomes real
\nand right to the reason lifted beyond itself by the power of the spirit and
\nirradiated by its light. For then it is dominated by the intuitive mind which is
\nour means of passage to a yet higher principle of knowledge. The widest
\nspirituality does not exclude or discourage any essential human activity or
\nfaculty, but works rather to lift all of them up out of their imperfection and
\ngroping ignorance, transforms them by its touch and makes them the instruments
\nof the light, power and joy of the divine being and the divine nature. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 149<\/font><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

CHAPTER XIII REASON AND RELIGION   IT WOULD seem then that reason is an insufficient, often an inefficient, even a stumbling and at its best…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[81],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3507","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-human-cycle","wpcat-81-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3507","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=3507"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3507\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3507"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3507"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3507"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}