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Sri Aurobindo
From "The Human Cycle"
Chapter 21
The Spiritual Aim and Life
(Arya - April 1918)
A society founded upon spirituality will differ in two essential points
from the normal human society which 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 association
and clash of egos, from a meeting, combination, conflict of ideas, tendencies
and principles; it tries first to patch up an accommodation of converging
interests and a treaty of peace between discords, founded on a series
of implied contracts, natural or necessary adjustments which become customs
of the aggregate life, and to these contracts as they develop it gives
the name of social law. By establishing, as against the interests which
lead to conflict, the interests which call for association and mutual
assistance, it creates or stimulates sympathies and habits of helpfulness
that give a psychological support and sanction to its mechanism of law,
custom and contract. It justifies the mass of social institutions and
habitual ways of being which it thus creates by the greater satisfaction
and efficiency of the physical, the vital and the mental life of man,
in a word, by the growth and advantages of civilisation. A good many losses
have indeed to be written off as against these gains, but those are to
be accepted as the price we must pay for civilisation.
The 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 deal. It develops a system of mental
growth and efficiency, an intellectual, aesthetic and moral culture. It
evolves the vital side of human life and creates an ever-growing system
of economic efficiency and vital enjoyment, and this system becomes more
and more rich, cumbrous and complex as civilisation develops. Depressing
by its mental and vital overgrowth the natural vigour of the physical
and animal man, it tries to set the balance right by systems of physical
culture, a cumbrous science of habits and remedies intended to cure the
ills it has created and as much amelioration as it can manage of the artificial
forms of living that are necessary to its social system. In the end, however,
experience shows that society tends to die by its own development, a sure
sign that there is some radical defect in its system, a certain proof
that its idea of man and its method of development do not correspond to
all the reality of the human being and to the aim of life which that reality
imposes.
There is then a radical defect somewhere in the process of human civilisation;
but where is its seat and by what issue shall we come out of the perpetual
cycle of failure? Our civilised development of life ends in an exhaustion
of vitality and a refusal of Nature to lend her support any further to
a continued advance upon these lines; our civilised mentality, after disturbing
the balance of the human system to its own greater profit, finally discovers
that it has exhausted and destroyed that which fed it and loses its power
of healthy action and productiveness. It is found that civilisation has
created many more problems than it can solve, has multiplied excessive
needs and desires the satisfaction of which it has not sufficient vital
force to sustain, has developed a jungle of claims and artificial instincts
in the midst of which life loses its way and has no longer any sight of
its aim. The more advanced minds begin to declare civilisation a failure
and society begins to feel that they are right. But the remedy proposed
is either a halt or even a retrogression, which means in the end more
confusion, stagnation and decay, or a reversion to “Nature”
which is impossible or can only come about by a cataclysm and disintegration
of society; or even a cure is aimed at by carrying artificial remedies
to their acme, by more and more Science, more and more mechanical devices,
a more scientific organisation of life, which means that the engine shall
replace life, the arbitrary logical reason substitute itself for complex
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.
It may be suggested on the contrary and with some chance of knocking at
the right door that the radical defect of all our systems is their deficient
development of just that which society has most neglected, the spiritual
element, the soul in man which is his true being. Even to have a healthy
body, a strong vitality and an active and clarified mind and a field for
their action and enjoyment, carries man no more than a certain distance;
afterwards he flags and tires for want of a real self-finding, a satisfying
aim for his action and progress. These three things do not make the sum
of a complete manhood; they are means to an ulterior end and cannot be
made for ever an aim in themselves. Add a rich emotional life governed
by a well-ordered ethical standard, and still there is the savour of something
left out, some supreme good which these things mean, but do not in themselves
arrive at, do not discover till they go beyond themselves. Add a religious
system and a widespread spirit of belief and piety, and still you have
not found the means of social salvation. All these things human society
has developed, but none of them has saved it from disillusionment, weariness
and decay. The ancient intellectual 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, - unless the aim is
always more knowledge, more equipment, convenience and comfort, more enjoyment,
a greater and still greater complexity of the social economy, a more and
more cumbrously opulent life. But these things must lead in the end where
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 escape from the
cycle of birth, growth, decay and death, they do not really find the secret
of self-prolongation by constant self-renewal which is the principle of
immortality, but only seem for a moment to find it by the illusion of
a series of experiments each of which ends in disappointment. That so
far has been the nature of modern progress. Only in its new turn inwards,
towards a greater subjectivity now only beginning, is there a better hope;
for by that turning it may discover that the real truth of man is to be
found in his soul. It is not indeed certain that a subjective age will
lead us there, but it gives us the possibility, can turn in that direction,
if used rightly, the more inward movement.
It will be said that this is an old discovery and that it governed the
old societies under the name of religion. But that was only an appearance.
The discovery was there, but it was made for the life of the individual
only, and even for him it looked beyond the earth for its fulfilment and
at earth only as the place of his preparation for a solitary salvation
or release from the burden of 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 or on a knowledge of the
soul's true nature and need and its fulfilment as the right way of terrestrial
perfection. If we look at the old religions in their social as apart from
their individual aspect, we see that the use society made of them was
only of their most unspiritual or at any rate of their less spiritual
parts. It made use of them to give an august, awful and would-be eternal
sanction to its mass of customs and institutions; it made of them a veil
of mystery against human questioning and a shield of darkness against
the innovator. So far as it saw in religion a means of human salvation
and perfection, it laid hands upon it at once to mechanise it, to catch
the human soul and bind it on the wheels of a socio-religious machinery,
to impose on it in the place of spiritual freedom an imperious yoke and
an iron prison. It saddled upon the religious life of man a Church, a
priesthood and a mass of ceremonies and set over it a pack of watchdogs
under the name of creeds and dogmas, dogmas which one had to accept and
obey under pain of condemnation to eternal hell by an eternal judge beyond,
just as one had to accept and to obey the laws of society on pain of condemnation
to temporal imprisonment or death by a mortal judge below. This false
socialisation of religion has been always the chief cause of its failure
to regenerate mankind.
For nothing can be more fatal to religion than for its spiritual element
to be crushed or formalised out of existence by its outward aids and forms
and machinery. The falsehood of the old social use of religion is shown
by its effects.
History has exhibited more than once the coincidence of the greatest religious
fervour and piety with darkest ignorance, with an obscure squalor and
long vegetative stagnancy of the mass of human life, with the unquestioned
reign of cruelty, injustice and oppression, or with an organisation of
the most ordinary, unaspiring and unraised existence hardly relieved by
some touches of intellectual or half-spiritual light on the surface, -
the end of all this a widespread revolt that turned first of all against
the established religion as the key-stone of a regnant falsehood, evil
and ignorance. It is another sign when the too scrupulously exact observation
of a socio-religious system and its rites and forms, which by the very
fact of this misplaced importance begin to lose their sense and true religious
value, becomes the law and most prominent aim of religion rather than
any spiritual growth of the individual and the race. And a great sign
too of this failure is when the individual is obliged to flee from society
in order to find room for his spiritual growth; when, finding human life
given over to the unregenerated mind, life and body and the place of spiritual
freedom occupied by the bonds of form, by Church and Shastra, by 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 the mountain-top, in the
cavern, in the desert and the forest. When there is that division between
life and the spirit, sentence of condemnation is passed upon human life.
Either it is left to circle in its routine or it is decried as worthless
and unreal, a vanity of vanities, and loses that confidence in itself
and inner faith in the value of its terrestrial aims, shraddhâ,
without which it cannot come to anything. For the spirit of man must strain
towards the heights; when it loses its tension of endeavour, the race
must become immobile and stagnant or even sink towards darkness and the
dust. Even where life rejects the spirit or the spirit rejects life, there
may be a self-affirmation of the inner being; there may even be a glorious
crop of saints and hermits in a forcing-soil of spirituality, but unless
the race, the society, the nation is moved towards the spiritualisation
of life or moves forward led by the light of an ideal, the end must be
littleness, weakness and stagnation. Or the race has to turn to the intellect
for rescue, for some hope or new ideal, and arrive by a circle through
an age of rationalism at a fresh effort towards the restatement of spiritual
truth and a new attempt to spiritualise human life.
The true and full spiritual aim in society will regard man not 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 after 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 regard the life, mind and body neither
as ends in themselves, sufficient for their own satisfaction, nor as mortal
members full of 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 believe in themselves,
but for that very reason in their highest and not only in their lowest
or lower possibilities. Their destiny will be, in its view, to spiritualise
themselves so as to grow into visible members of the spirit, lucid means
of its manifestation, themselves spiritual, illumined, more and more conscious
and perfect. For, accepting the truth of man's soul as a thing entirely
divine in its essence, it will accept also the possibility of his whole
being becoming divine in spite of Nature's first patent contradictions
of this possibility, her darkened denials of this ultimate certitude,
and even with these as a necessary earthly starting-point. And as it will
regard man the individual, it will regard too man the collectivity as
a soul-form of the Infinite, a collective soul myriadly embodied upon
earth for a divine fulfilment in its manifold relations and its multitudinous
activities. Therefore it will hold sacred all the different parts of man's
life which correspond to the parts of his being, all his physical, vital,
dynamic, emotional, aesthetic, ethical, intellectual, psychic evolution,
and see in them instruments for a growth towards a diviner living. It
will regard every human society, nation, people or other organic aggregate
from the same standpoint, sub-souls, as it were, means of a complex manifestation
and self-fulfilment of the Spirit, the divine Reality, the conscious Infinite
in man upon earth. The possible godhead of man because he is inwardly
of one being with God will be its one solitary creed and dogma.
But it will not seek to enforce even this one uplifting dogma by any external
compulsion upon the lower members of man's natural being; for that is
nigraha, a repressive contraction of the nature which may lead to an apparent
suppression of the evil, but not to a real and healthy growth of the good;
it will rather hold up this creed and ideal as a light and inspiration
to all his members to grow into the godhead from within themselves, to
become freely divine. Neither in the individual nor in the society will
it seek to imprison, wall in, repress, impoverish, but to let in 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 of the growth of human society
towards the possibility of true spiritualisation. To spiritualise in this
sense a society of slaves, slaves of power, slaves of authority, slaves
of custom, slaves of dogma, slaves of all sorts of imposed laws which
they live under rather than live by them, slaves internally of their own
weakness, ignorance and passions from whose worst effect they seek or
need to be protected by another and external slavery, can never be a successful
endeavour. They must shake off their fetters 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 only the yoke which he accepts because it represents,
the more perfectly the better, the highest inner law of his nature and
its aspiration, will be entirely helpful to him. The rest buy their good
results at a heavy cost and may retard as much as or even more than they
accelerate his progress.
The spiritual aim will recognise that man as he grows in his being must
have as much free space as possible for all its members to grow in their
own strength, to find out themselves and their potentialities . In their
freedom they will err, because experience comes through many errors, but
each has in itself a divine principle and they will find it out, disengage
its presence, significance and law as their experience of themselves deepens
and increases. Thus true spirituality will not lay a yoke upon science
and philosophy or compel them to square their conclusions with any statement
of dogmatic religious or even of assured spiritual truth, as some of the
old religions attempted, vainly, ignorantly, with an unspiritual obstinacy
and arrogance. Each part 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. The Dharma of science, thought and philosophy is to seek for truth
by the intellect dispassionately, without prepossession and prejudgment,
with no other first propositions than the law of thought and observation
itself imposes. Science and philosophy are not bound to square their observations
and conclusions with any current ideas of religious dogma or ethical rule
or aesthetic prejudice. 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 greater meaning than any dogmatic religion or any formal ethics or any
narrower aesthetic idea can give us. But meanwhile they must 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 these rejections must come round in
the end of their circling and return to a larger truth of the things they
refuse. Often we find atheism both in individual and society a necessary
passage to deeper religious and spiritual truth: one has sometimes to
deny God in order to find him; the finding is inevitable at the end of
all earnest scepticism and denial.
The same law holds good in Art; the aesthetic being of man rises similarly
on its own curve towards its diviner possibilities. The highest aim of
the aesthetic being is to find the Divine through beauty; the highest
Art is that which by an inspired use of significant and interpretative
form unseals the doors of the spirit.
But in order that it may come to do this greatest thing largely and sincerely,
it must first endeavour to see and depict man and Nature and life for
their own sake, in their own characteristic truth and beauty; for behind
these first characters lies always the beauty of the Divine in life and
man and Nature and it is through their just transformation that what was
at first veiled by them has to be revealed.
The dogma that Art must be religious 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 philosophic ideas. Art may make use of these things
as elements, but it has its own svadharma, essential law, and it
will rise to the widest spirituality by following out its own natural
lines with no other yoke than the intimate law of its own being.
Even with the lower nature of man, though here we are naturally led to
suppose that compulsion is the only remedy, the spiritual aim will seek
for a free self-rule and development from within rather than a repression
of his dynamic and vital being from without. All experience shows that
man must be given 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 freedom
from wrong movement and error; otherwise he cannot grow. Society for its
own sake has to coerce the dynamic and vital man, but coercion only chains
up the devil and alters at best his form of action into more mitigated
and civilised movements; it does not and cannot eliminate him.
The real virtue of the dynamic and vital being, the Life Purusha, can
only come by his finding a higher law and spirit for his activity within
himself; to give him that, to illuminate and transform and not to destroy
his impulse is the true spiritual means of regeneration.
Thus 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 own fields of action,
presented in a light which illumines all their activities and shows them
the highest law of their own freedom.
It will not, for instance, escape from scientific materialism by a barren
contempt for physical life or a denial of Matter, but pursue rather the
sceptical mind into its own affirmations and denials and show it there
the Divine. If it cannot do that, it is proved that it is itself unenlightened
or deficient, because one-sided, in its light. It will not try to slay
the vitality in man by denying 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 because it has itself not yet wholly fathomed the meaning
of the creation and the secret of the Avatar.
The spiritual aim will seek to fulfil itself therefore in a fullness of
life and man's being in the individual and the race which will be the
base for the heights of the spirit, - the base becoming in the end of
one substance with the peaks. It will not proceed by a scornful neglect
of the body, nor by an ascetic starving of the vital being and an utmost
bareness or even squalor as the rule of spiritual living, nor by a puritanic
denial of art and beauty and the aesthetic joy of life, nor by a neglect
of science and philosophy as poor, negligible or misleading intellectual
pursuits, - though the temporary utility even of these exaggerations as
against the opposite excesses need not be denied; it will be all things
to all, but in all it will be at once their highest aim and meaning and
the most all-embracing expression of themselves in which all they are
and seek for will be fulfilled. It will aim at establishing in society
the true inner theocracy, not the false theocracy of a dominant Church
or priesthood, but that of the inner Priest, Prophet and King. It will
reveal to man the divinity in himself as the Light, Strength, Beauty,
Good, Delight, Immortality that dwells within and build up in his outer
life also the kingdom 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, sarvabhâvena
[in the Gita] and so find it and live in it, that however - even in all
kinds of ways - he lives and acts, he shall live and act in that [in the
Gita: sarvathâ vartamâno'pi sa yogî mayi vartate.],
in the Divine, in the Spirit, in the eternal Reality of his being.
Sri Aurobindo
in "The Human Cycle" - SABCL Volume
15 - pages 208-217
published by Sri
Aurobindo Ashram - Pondicherry
diffusion by SABDA
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