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Sri Aurobindo
From "The Human Cycle"
Chapter 24
The Advent and Progress of the Spiritual Age
(Arya - July 1918 - revised in 1949)
If a subjective age, the last sector of a social cycle, is to find its
outlet and fruition in a spiritualised society and the emergence of mankind
on a higher evolutionary level, it is not enough that certain ideas favourable
to that turn of human life should take hold of the general mind of the
race, permeate the ordinary motives of its thought, art, ethics, political
ideals, social effort, or even get well into its inner way of thinking
and feeling. It is not enough even that the idea of the kingdom of God
on earth, a reign of spirituality, freedom and unity, a real and inner
equality and harmony - and not merely an outward and mechanical equalisation
and association - should become definitely an ideal of life; it is not
enough that this ideal should be actively held as possible, desirable,
to be sought and striven after, it is not enough even that it should come
forward as a governing preoccupation of the human mind. That would evidently
be a very great step forward, - considering what the ideals of mankind
now are, an enormous step. It would be the necessary beginning, the indispensable
mental environment for a living renovation of human society in a higher
type. But by itself it might only bring about a half-hearted or else a
strong but only partially and temporarily successful attempt to bring
something of the manifest spirit into human life and its institutions.
That is all that mankind has ever attempted on this line in the past.
It has never attempted to work out thoroughly even that little, except
in the limits of a religious order or a peculiar community, and even there
with such serious defects and under such drastic limitations as to make
the experiment nugatory and without any bearing on human life. If we do
not get beyond the mere holding of the ideal and its general influence
in human life, this little is all that mankind will attempt in the future.
More is needed; a general spiritual awakening and aspiration in mankind
is indeed the large necessary motive-power, but the effective power must
be something greater. There must be a dynamic re-creating of individual
manhood in the spiritual type.
For the way that humanity deals with an ideal is to be satisfied with
it as an aspiration which is for the most part left only as an aspiration,
accepted only as a partial influence. The ideal is not allowed to mould
the whole life, but only more or less to colour it; it is often used even
as a cover and a plea for things that are diametrically opposed to its
real spirit. Institutions are created which are supposed, but too lightly
supposed to embody that spirit and the fact that the ideal is held, the
fact that men live under its institutions is treated as sufficient. The
holding of an ideal becomes almost an excuse for not living according
to the ideal; the existence of its institutions is sufficient to abrogate
the need of insisting on the spirit that made the institutions. But spirituality
is in its very nature a thing subjective and not mechanical; it is nothing
if it is not lived inwardly and if the outward life does not flow out
of this inward living. Symbols, types, conventions, ideas are not sufficient.
A spiritual symbol is only a meaningless ticket, unless the thing symbolised
is realised in the spirit. A spiritual convention may lose or expel its
spirit and become a falsehood. A spiritual type may be a temporary mould
into which spiritual living may flow, but it is also a limitation and
may become a prison in which it fossilises and perishes. A spiritual idea
is a power, but only when it is both inwardly and outwardly creative.
Here we have to enlarge and to deepen the pragmatic principle that truth
is what we create, and in this sense first, that it is what we create
within us, in other words, what we become. Undoubtedly, spiritual truth
exists eternally beyond independent of us in the heavens of the spirit;
but it is of no avail for humanity here, it does not become truth of earth,
truth of life until it is lived. The divine perfection is always there
above us; but for man to become divine in consciousness and act and to
live inwardly and outwardly the divine life is what is meant by spirituality;
all lesser meanings given to the word are inadequate fumblings or impostures.
This, as the subjective religions recognise, can only be brought about
by an individual change in each human life. The collective soul is there
only as a great half-subconscient source of the individual existence;
if it is to take on a definite psychological form or a new kind of collective
life, that can only come by the shaping growth of its individuals. As
will be the spirit and life of the individuals constituting it, so will
be the realised spirit of the collectivity and the true power of its life.
A society that lives not by its men but by its institutions, is not a
collective soul, but a machine; its life becomes a mechanical product
and ceases to be a living growth. Therefore the coming of a spiritual
age must be preceded by the appearance of an increasing number of individuals
who are no longer satisfied with the normal intellectual, vital and physical
existence of man, but perceive that a greater evolution is the real goal
of humanity and attempt to effect it in themselves, to lead others to
it and to make it the recognised goal of the race. In proportion as they
succeed and to the degree to which they carry this evolution, the yet
unrealised potentiality which they represent will become an actual possibility
of the future.
A great access of spirituality in the past has ordinarily had for its
result the coming of a new religion of a special type and its endeavour
to impose itself upon mankind as a new universal order. This, however,
was always not only a premature but a wrong crystallisation which prevented
rather than helped any deep and serious achievement. The aim of a spiritual
age of mankind must indeed be one with the essential aim of subjective
religions, a new birth, a new consciousness, an upward evolution of the
human being, a descent of the spirit into our members, a spiritual reorganisation
of our life; but if it limits itself by the old familiar apparatus and
the imperfect means of a religious movement, it is likely to register
another failure. A religious movement brings usually a wave of spiritual
excitement and aspiration that communicates itself to a large number of
individuals and there is as a result a temporary uplifting and an effective
formation, partly spiritual, partly ethical, partly dogmatic in its nature.
But the wave after a generation or two or at most a few generations begins
to subside; the formation remains. If there has been a very powerful movement
with a great spiritual personality as its source, it may leave behind
a central influence and an inner discipline which may well be the starting-point
of fresh waves; but these will be constantly less powerful and enduring
in proportion as the movement gets farther and farther away from its source.
For meanwhile in order to bind together the faithful and at the same time
to mark them off from the unregenerated outer world, there will have grown
up a religious order, a Church, a hierarchy, a fixed and unprogressive
type of ethical living, a set of crystallised dogmas, ostentatious ceremonials,
sanctified superstitions, an elaborate machinery for the salvation of
mankind. As a result spirituality is increasingly subordinated to intellectual
belief, to outward forms of conduct and to external ritual, the higher
to the lower motives, the one thing essential to aids and instruments
and accidents. The first spontaneous and potent attempt to convert the
whole life into spiritual living yields up its place to a set system of
belief and ethics touched by spiritual emotion; but finally even that
saving element is dominated by the outward machinery, the sheltering structure
becomes a tomb. The Church takes the place of the spirit and a formal
subscription to its creed, rituals and order is the thing universally
demanded; spiritual living is only practised by the few within the limits
prescribed by their fixed creed and order. The majority neglect even that
narrow effort and are contented to replace by a careful or negligent piety
the call to a deeper life. In the end it is found that the spirit in the
religion has become a thin stream choked by sands; at the most brief occasional
floodings of its dry bed of conventions still prevent it from becoming
a memory in the dead chapters of Time.
The ambition of a particular religious belief and form to universalise
and impose itself is contrary to the variety of human nature and to at
least one essential character of the Spirit. For the nature of the Spirit
is a spacious inner freedom and a large unity into which each man must
be allowed to grow according to his own nature. Again - and this is yet
another source of inevitable failure - the usual tendency of these credal
religions is to turn towards an afterworld and to make the regeneration
of the earthly life a secondary motive; this tendency grows in proportion
as the original hope of a present universal regeneration of mankind becomes
more and more feeble. Therefore while many new spiritual waves with their
strong special motives and disciplines must necessarily be the forerunners
of a spiritual age, yet their claims must be subordinated in the general
mind of the race and of its spiritual leaders to the recognition that
all motives and disciplines are valid and yet none entirely valid since
they are means and not the one thing to be done. The one thing essential
must take precedence, the conversion of the whole life of the human being
to the lead of the spirit. The ascent of man into heaven is not the key,
but rather his ascent here into the spirit and the descent also of the
spirit into his normal humanity and the transformation of this earthly
nature. For that and not some post mortem salvation is the real new birth
for which humanity waits as the crowning movement of its long obscure
and painful course.
Therefore the individuals who will most help the future of humanity in
the new age will be those who will recognise a spiritual evolution as
the destiny and therefore the great need of the human being. Even as the
animal man has been largely converted into a mentalised and at the top
a highly mentalised humanity, so too now or in the future an evolution
or conversion - it does not greatly matter which figure we use or what
theory we adopt to support it - of the present type of humanity into a
spiritualised humanity is the need of the race and surely the intention
of Nature; that evolution or conversion will be their ideal and endeavour.
They will be comparatively indifferent to particular belief and form and
leave men to resort to the beliefs and forms to which they are naturally
drawn. They will only hold as essential the faith in this spiritual conversion,
the attempt to live it out and whatever knowledge - the form of opinion
into which it is thrown does not so much matter - can be converted into
this living. They will especially not make the mistake of thinking that
this change can be effected by machinery and outward institutions; they
will know and never forget that it has to be lived out by each man inwardly
or it can never be made a reality for the kind. They will adopt in its
heart of meaning the inward view of the East which bids man seek the secret
of his destiny and salvation within; but also they will accept, though
with a different turn given to it, the importance which the West rightly
attaches to life and to the making the best we know and can attain the
general rule of all life. They will not make society a shadowy background
to a few luminous spiritual figures or a rigidly fenced and earth-bound
root for the growth of a comparatively rare and sterile flower of ascetic
spirituality. They will not accept the theory that the many must necessarily
remain for ever on the lower ranges of life and only a few climb into
the free air and the light, but will start from the standpoint of the
great spirits who have striven to regenerate the life of the earth and
held that faith in spite of all previous failure. Failures must be originally
numerous in everything great and difficult, but the time comes when the
experience of past failures can be profitably used and the gate that so
long resisted opens. In this as in all great human aspirations and endeavours,
an a priori declaration of impossibility is a sign of ignorance and weakness,
and the motto of the aspirant's endeavour must be the solvitur ambulando
of the discoverer. For by the doing the difficulty will be solved. A true
beginning has to be made; the rest is a work for Time in its sudden achievements
or its long patient labour.
The thing to be done is as large as human life, and therefore the individuals
who lead the way will take all human life for their province. These pioneers
will consider nothing as alien to them, nothing as outside their scope.
For every part of human life has to be taken up by the spiritual, - not
only the intellectual, the aesthetic, the ethical, but the dynamic, the
vital, the physical; therefore for none of these things or the activities
that spring from them will they have contempt or aversion, however they
may insist on a change of the spirit and a transmutation of the form.
In each power of our nature they will seek for its own proper means of
conversion; knowing that the Divine is concealed in all, they will hold
that all can be made the spirit's means of self-finding and all can be
converted into its instruments of divine living. And they will see that
the great necessity is the conversion of the normal into the spiritual
mind and the opening of that mind again into its own higher reaches and
more and more integral movement. For before the decisive change can be
made, the stumbling intellectual reason has to be converted into the precise
and luminous intuitive, until that again can rise into higher ranges to
overmind and supermind or gnosis. The uncertain and stumbling mental will
has to rise towards the sure intuitive and into a higher divine and gnostic
will, the psychic sweetness, fire and light of the soul behind the heart,
hridaye guhâyâm, has to alchemise our crude emotions and the
hard egoisms and clamant desires of our vital nature. All our other members
have to pass through a similar conversion under the compelling force and
light from above. The leaders of the spiritual march will start from and
use the knowledge and the means that past effort has developed in this
direction, but they will not take them as they are without any deep necessary
change or limit themselves by what is now known or cleave only to fixed
and stereotyped systems or given groupings of results, but will follow
the method of the Spirit in Nature. A constant rediscovery and new formulation
and larger synthesis in the mind, a mighty remoulding in its deeper parts
because of a greater enlarging Truth not discovered or not well fixed
before, is that Spirit's way with our past achievement when he moves to
the greatnesses of the future.
This endeavour will be a supreme and difficult labour even for the individual,
but much more for the race. It may well be that, once started, it may
not advance rapidly even to its first decisive stage; it may be that it
will take long centuries of effort to come into some kind of permanent
birth. But that is not altogether inevitable, for the principle of such
changes in Nature seems to be a long obscure preparation followed by a
swift gathering up and precipitation of the elements into the new birth,
a rapid conversion, a transformation that in its luminous moment figures
like a miracle. Even when the first decisive change is reached, it is
certain that all humanity will not be able to rise to that level. There
cannot fail to be a division into those who are able to live on the spiritual
level and those who are only able to live in the light that descends from
it into the mental level. And below these too there might still be a great
mass influenced from above but not yet ready for the light. But even that
would be a transformation and a beginning far beyond anything yet attained.
This hierarchy would not mean as in our present vital living an egoistic
domination of the undeveloped by the more developed, but a guidance of
the younger by the elder brothers of the race and a constant working to
lift them up to a greater spiritual level and wider horizons. And for
the leaders too this ascent to the first spiritual levels would not be
the end of the divine march, a culmination that left nothing more to be
achieved on earth. For there would be still yet higher levels within the
supramental realm, as the old Vedic poets knew when they spoke of the
spiritual life as a constant ascent, -
brahmânas tvâ shatakrata
ud vamsham iva yemire.
yat sânoh sânum âruhad
bhûri aspashta kartvam, -
"The priests of the word climb thee like a ladder, O hundred-powered.
As one ascends from peak to peak, there is made clear the much that has
still to be done."
But once the foundation has been secured, the rest develops by a progressive
self-unfolding and the soul is sure of its way. As again it is phrased
by the ancient Vedic singers, -
abhyavasthâh pra jâyante
pra vavrer vavrish ciketa.
upasthe mâtur vi caste.
"State is born upon state; covering after covering becomes conscious
of knowledge;
in the lap of the Mother the soul sees."
This at least is the highest hope, the possible destiny that opens out
before the human view, and it is a possibility which the progress of the
human mind seems on the way to redevelop. If the light that is being born
increases, if the number of individuals who seek to realise the possibility
in themselves and in the world grows large and they get nearer the right
way, then the Spirit who is here in man, now a concealed divinity, a developing
light and power, will descend more fully as the Avatar of a yet unseen
and unguessed Godhead from above into the soul of mankind and into the
great individualities in whom the light and power are the strongest. There
will then be fulfilled the change that will prepare the transition of
human life from its present limits into those larger and purer horizons;
the earthly evolution will have taken its grand impetus upward and accomplished
the revealing step in a divine progression of which the birth of thinking
and aspiring man from the animal nature was only an obscure preparation
and a far-off promise.
[End of "The Human Cycle"]
Sri Aurobindo
in "The Human Cycle" - SABCL Volume
15 - pages 246-254
published by Sri
Aurobindo Ashram - Pondicherry
diffusion by SABDA
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