Changes

== Practice of Ideal Religion==

For although the determination to live by the best light we have is important, it is equally important to know what that light is and how we came by it, whether by the inspiration of the heart & the satisfaction of the emotional being, as in ordinary religion, or by the working of the observation and the logical faculties as in ordinary Science or by intellectual revelation as Newton discovered gravitation or by spiritual intuition as in the methods of the great founders of religion or by a higher principle in us which sums up and yet transcends all these mighty channels of the Jnanam Brahma. It is such a higher undivided principle from which Vedanta professes to derive its knowledge. man dwelling in the lower mind but using matter & vitality from above and from below taking possession of reason and imagination, seems, of all beings on earth, to be at the top. But above man's present position, above the heart in which he dwells & the imagination & reason to which he rises there opens out a wider atmosphere of life, there shoots down on him a more full & burning splendour of strength & knowledge, a more nectarous lustre of joy & beauty.

For man in his heart is awake; in his reason & imagination, half awake, not yet buddha, but in that higher principle he is asleep. It is to him a state of sushupti. Yet secretly, subliminally, unknown to the egoistic mind he takes from this slumber his waking thought & knowledge, though he is compelled by the limitations of mind to mistake & misuse it. For that slumber is the real waking and our waking is a state of dream and delusion in which we use a distorted truth & establish a world of false relations.

For mankind although evolving towards vijnana yet dwells in the mind. He has to be fulfilled in mind before he can rise taking up mind with him into the vijnanamaya self,—the mahan atma,—just as, in his animal state, he had to be fulfilled in body & vitality before he could develop freely in mind. Thus it comes about that even when Veda manifests in the mental world, it has although the higher & truer, to give an account of itself to the lower & more fallible, to Science, to Philosophy & to Religion. It must answer their doubts & questions, it must satisfy all their right and permissible demands. For although from the ideal point of view it is an anomaly that the higher should be cross-questioned by the lower, the source of truth by the propagators of half-truth and error, yet from the evolutionary point of view an anomaly is often the one right and indispensable process. For if we act otherwise, if we deny for instance the claims of the reason in order to serve revelation only & exclusively—though we ought to serve her first and chiefly—we are in danger of defeating man's evolution, which consists in self-fulfilment and not, except as a temporary means to an end, in self-mortification. Otherwise, we are in danger of becoming by a one-sided exaggeration self-injurers, self-slayers, atmaha, and incurring that condemnation to the sunless & gloomy states beyond of which the Isha Upanishad speaks.

For God has expressed us in many principles & not one. He has ranged them one over the other & commanded us not to destroy one in order to satisfy another, not to sanction internal civil war and perpetrate spiritual suicide, but to rise from one principle to the other, taking it up with us as we go, fulfilling the lower first in itself and then in the higher. We have to dissociate our sense of being from body & vitality and become mind, to dissociate it from mind and become vijnanam, to dissociate it from vijnanam and become divine bliss, awareness & being, Sachchidanandam manifest in phenomenal existence, to dissociate it from Sachchidanandam and become That which is in the world Sachchidanandam, not in order to destroy body, vitality, mind, knowledge, manifested bliss & being but to transcend and satisfy them more mightily, without being limited by their conditions, to become through them yet beyond them infinite, divine & universal. Destroy them we cannot without blotting out ourselves and entering into the Sunyam Brahma; but we can maim ourselves in the world by the attempt to destroy them. For thus are we made and we can be no other,—evam twayi nanyatheto'sti. "Thus is it in thee and it is not otherwise." Purnata, fullness is the true law of our progression.

<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/17/part-ii-the-field-and-instruments-of-vedanta-1#p5</ref>

===How to Interpret Religion?===

...if you seek the interpretation of your religion from Christians, atheists and agnostics, you will hear more wonderful things than that. What do you think of Charvak's interpretation of Vedic religion as neither pantheistic nor polytheistic but a plutotheistic invention of the Brahmins? An European or his disciple in scholarship can no more enter into the spirit of the Veda than the wind can blow freely in a closed room. And pedants especially can never go beyond the manipulation of words. Men like Max Muller presume to lecture us on our Veda & Vedanta because they know something of Sanscrit grammar; but when we come to them for light, we find them playing marbles on the doorsteps of the outer court of the temple. They had not the adhikar to enter, because they came in a spirit of arrogance with preconceived ideas to teach & not to learn; and their learning was therefore not helpful towards truth, but only towards grammar. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/17/the-ishavasyopanishad-with-a-commentary-in-english#p139</ref>

Now Religion is sattwic with a natural impulse towards light, it cannot be tamasic, it can have no dealings with the enemies of the Devas; and if something calling itself religion, attempts to suppress light, you may be sure it is not religion but an impostor masquerading in her name.

<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/17/the-ishavasyopanishad-with-a-commentary-in-english#p197</ref>

All the old nations perished because in the pride of intellect they abandoned their dharma, their religion. India, China still live. What was the force that enabled India beaten down & trampled by mailed fist & iron hoof ever to survive immortally, ever to resist, ever to crush down the conqueror of the hour at last beneath her gigantic foot, ever to raise her mighty head again to the stars? It is because she never lost hold of religion, never gave up her faith in the spirit. Therefore the promise of Srikrishna ever holds good; therefore the Adyashakti, the mighty Chandi, ever descends when the people turn to her and tramples the Asura to pieces.

<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/17/the-ishavasyopanishad-with-a-commentary-in-english#p217</ref>

For me religions are forms, much too human, of spiritual life. Each one expresses one aspect of the single and eternal Truth, but in expressing it exclusive of the other aspects, it deforms and diminishes it. None has the right to call itself the only true one, any more than it has the right to deny the truth contained in the others. And all of them together would not suffice to express the Supreme Truth which is beyond all expression, even whilst being present in each one."

<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/15/religion#p10</ref>

The truth of Sri Aurobindo is a truth of love and light and mercy. He is good and great and compassionate and Divine. And it is He who will have the final victory.

<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/15/3-april-1962#p4</ref>

Religions are based on creeds which are spiritual experiences brought down to a level where they become more easy to grasp, but at the cost of their integral purity and truth.

The time of religions is over.

==Principal Means of Intellectual Knowledge==