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CHAPTER
XXI
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 Page – 208 vigour of the physical and animal man, it tries to set
the balance it by systems of physical culture, a cumbrous science of !bits 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. It may be suggested on the contrary and with some chance of knocking at the right door that the radical defect of all our sys- Page – 209 tems 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 tries 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 wide-spread 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 wi11 lead us there, but it gives us the possibility, can turn in that direction, if used rightly, the more inward movement. Page – 210 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 was made for the life of the individual only, and even for him 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 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 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 arid long vegetative stagnancy of the mass of human life, with the unquestioned reign of cruelty, injustice and oppression, or with Page-211 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 wide spread 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, sraddhii, 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 move 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. Page-212 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 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 wm 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, subsouls, 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. Page-213 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 prejudg- Page-214 ment, 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 came 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 Gad 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 rise similarly an 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 an and Nature and life far their awn sake, in their awn characteristic truth and beauty; far 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 line 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 Page-215 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. The spiritual aim will seek to fulfil itself therefore in a full- ness 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 Page-216 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 le 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 e Divine in every way of his being, sarvabhiivena, (Gita ) and so find it ld live in it, that however – even in all kinds of ways – he ‘yes and acts, he shall live and act in that,1 in the Divine, in the spirit, in the eternal Reality of his being.
1 Gita. Sarvathii vartamiino’pi sa yogi mayi variate Page-217 |