Changes

There are four main lines which Nature has followed in her attempt to open up the inner being,—religion, occultism, spiritual thought and an inner spiritual realisation and experience: the three first are approaches, the last is the decisive avenue of entry. All these four powers have worked by a simultaneous action, more or less connected, sometimes in a variable collaboration, sometimes in dispute with each other, sometimes in a separate independence. Religion has admitted an occult element in its ritual, ceremony, sacraments; it has leaned upon spiritual thinking, deriving from it sometimes a creed or theology, sometimes its supporting spiritual philosophy,—the former, ordinarily, is the occidental method, the latter the oriental: but spiritual experience is We give the final aim and achievement name of religion, its sky and summit. But also religion has sometimes banned occultism or reduced its own occult element to a minimum; it has pushed away the philosophic mind as a dry intellectual alien, leaned with all its weight on creed and dogma, pietistic emotion and fervour and moral conduct; it has reduced to a minimum or dispensed with spiritual realisation and experience. Occultism has sometimes put forward a spiritual aim as its goal, and followed occult knowledge and experience as an approach to it, formulated some kind of mystic philosophy: but more often it has confined itself to occult knowledge and practice without any spiritual vistas; it has turned to thaumaturgy or mere magic or even deviated into diabolism. Spiritual philosophy has very usually leaned on religion as its support or its way to experience; it has been the outcome concept of realisation and experience or built its structures as an approach to it: but it has also rejected all aid,—or all impediment,—of religion and proceeded in its own strength, either satisfied with mental knowledge or confident to discover its own path of experience and effective discipline. Spiritual experience has used all the three means as a starting-point, but it has also dispensed with them all, relying on its own pure strength: discouraging occult knowledge and powers as dangerous lures and entangling obstacles, it has sought only the pure truth of the spirit; dispensing with philosophy, it has arrived instead through the heart's fervour world or a mystic inward spiritualisation; putting behind it all religious creed, worship and practice and regarding them as an inferior stage or first approach, it has passed on, leaving behind it all these supports, nude of all these trappings, to the sheer contact of the spiritual Reality. All these variations were necessary; the evolutionary endeavour of Nature has experimented on all lines in order to find her true way and her whole way towards the supreme consciousness and the integral knowledge. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/09/18-june-1958#p1</ref><center>~</center>...among the four activities or realisations he mentions—religion, occultism, spiritual philosophy and spiritual experience—which are necessary for the development and transformation of man, all are not equally accessible to humanity.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/09/18-june-1958#p4</ref><center>~</center>...the aim of religion: its purpose universe which is to link the human with presented as the Divine and exclusive Truth in so doing sublimate the thought and life and flesh so that they may admit the rule of the soul and spirit. But this knowledge which one must be something more than a creed or a mystic revelation; his thinking mind must be able to accept ithave an absolute faith, to correlate it with the principle of things and the observed truth of the universe: generally because this Truth is the work of philosophy, and in the field of the truth of the spirit it can only declared to be done by a spiritual philosophy, whether intellectual in its method or intuitive. But all knowledge and endeavour can reach its fruition only if it is turned into experience and has become a part of the consciousness and its established operations; in the spiritual field all this religious, occult or philosophical knowledge and endeavour must, to bear fruition, end in an opening up of the spiritual consciousness, in experiences that found and continually heighten, expand and enrich that consciousness and in the building result of a life and action that is in conformity with the truth of the spirit: this is the work of spiritual realisation and experiencerevelation. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/09/18-june-1958#p2</ref>

...religion is the spiritual To seek Truth freely and ethical life of the individual, the relations of to approach it freely along his soul with God and the intimate dealings of own lines is a man’s right. But each one should know that his will discovery is good for him alone and character with other individuals, and no monarch or governing class, it is not even a theocracy or priesthood, can really substitute itself for the soul of the individual or for the soul of a nationto be imposed on others.<ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/2513/the-drive-towards-legislativeaims-and-social-centralisation-and-uniformityprinciples#p10p237,p244,p245</ref>

 The Supreme is...universal religion, finallya system, Pure Ecstasy, Absolute Bliss, NANDA. Now just as SAT and CHIT are the same, so are SAT a thing of creed and CHIT not different from NANDA; just as Existence is Consciousness intellectual belief and cannot be separated from Consciousness, so Conscious Existence is Bliss dogma and cannot be separated from Blissoutward rite. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/1825/thesummary-philosophy-of-theand-upanishadsconclusion#p36p11</ref>

 God ...Sri Aurobindo defines religion as the seeking after the spiritual, that is Universal, he the Supermind, of what is Omnipresentbeyond the ordinary human consciousness, Infinite, not subject and what ought to limitsinfluence life from a higher realm.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/1807/an-incomplete-work-of25-vedanticmay-exegesis1955#p2p8</ref>

There are four main lines which Nature has followed in her attempt to open up the inner being,—religion, occultism, spiritual thought and an inner spiritual realisation and experience: the three first are approaches, the last is the decisive avenue of entry.All these four powers have worked by a simultaneous action, more or less connected, sometimes in a variable collaboration, sometimes in dispute with each other, sometimes in a separate independence..universal religionReligion has admitted an occult element in its ritual, ceremony, sacraments; it has leaned upon spiritual thinking, deriving from it sometimes a systemcreed or theology, sometimes its supporting spiritual philosophy,—the former, ordinarily, is the occidental method, a thing the latter the oriental: but spiritual experience is the final aim and achievement of creed religion, its sky and summit. But also religion has sometimes banned occultism or reduced its own occult element to a minimum; it has pushed away the philosophic mind as a dry intellectual belief alien, leaned with all its weight on creed and dogma , pietistic emotion and outward ritefervour and moral conduct; it has reduced to a minimum or dispensed with spiritual realisation and experience. Mankind Occultism has sometimes put forward a spiritual aim as its goal, and followed occult knowledge and experience as an approach to it, formulated some kind of mystic philosophy: but more often it has tried unity by that meansconfined itself to occult knowledge and practice without any spiritual vistas; it has turned to thaumaturgy or mere magic or even deviated into diabolism. Spiritual philosophy has very usually leaned on religion as its support or its way to experience; it has failed been the outcome of realisation and deserved experience or built its structures as an approach to failit: but it has also rejected all aid, because there can be no universal religious system—or all impediment, one —of religion and proceeded in its own strength, either satisfied with mental knowledge or confident to discover its own path of experience and effective discipline. Spiritual experience has used all the three means as a starting-point, but it has also dispensed with them all, relying on its own pure strength: discouraging occult knowledge and powers as dangerous lures and entangling obstacles, it has sought only the pure truth of the spirit; dispensing with philosophy, it has arrived instead through the heart's fervour or a mystic inward spiritualisation; putting behind it all religious creed , worship and practice and regarding them as an inferior stage or first approach, it has passed on, leaving behind it all these supports, nude of all these trappings, to the sheer contact of the spiritual Reality. All these variations were necessary; the evolutionary endeavour of Nature has experimented on all lines in order to find her true way and vital formher whole way towards the supreme consciousness and the integral knowledge.<ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2522/summarythe-andevolution-of-the-spiritual-conclusionman#p11</ref>

...very essence of religion is the discovery of the immaterial Spirit and the play of a supraphysical consciousness.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/reason-and-religion#p8</ref><center>~</center>Sri Aurobindo defines religion as the seeking after the spiritual, that is, the Supermind, of what is beyond the ordinary human consciousness, and what ought to influence life from a higher realm. So, as religion seeks this it is beyond among the reason, because it goes to the suprarational. And so how can reason help in the realm of religion? What four activities or realisations he means is that if one uses reason to judge the field of religion and progress in itmentions—religion, one is sure to make mistakesoccultism, because reason is not the master there spiritual philosophy and it is not capable of enlightening. If you want to judge any religion with your reason, you spiritual experience—which are sure to make mistakes, necessary for it is outside and beyond the field of reason. Reason can judge things which belong to the rational domain of ordinary life. And as he says later, the true role of reason is to be like a control development and an organiser of the movements transformation of human life in the mind and the vital. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/07/25-may-1955#p8</ref> ===Brahman=== Brahman, we have seen, is the Universal Consciousness which Is and delights in Being; impersonal, infinite, eternal, omnipresent, sole-existing, the One than whom there is no otherman, and all things and creatures have only a phenomenal existence in Brahman and by Brahmanare not equally accessible to humanity. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/18/an-incomplete-work-of-vedantic-exegesis#p2</ref>

===The Lord===In the universe there is a constant relation of Oneness one which can be practised and Multiplicity. This expresses itself as the universal Personality and the many Persons, and both between the One and the Many and among the Many themselves there one might say, “understood”—although it is the possibility of certainly not an infinite variety of relations. These relations are determined by “understanding”—by the play greatest number of human beings—those who live almost exclusively in the divine existence, physical consciousness—is the Lordreligious method, entering into His manifested habitationsprecisely because it is based on fixed creeds and practices. They exist at first as conscious relations between individual souls; they are then taken up Simply by them and used as an act of faith or a collective suggestion—above all a means of entering into conscious relation with the One. It is this entering into various relations with the One which is collective suggestion—many human beings who have not yet reached any considerable inner development can take up the object and function path of Religion. All religions are justified by this essential necessity; all express one Truth in various ways and move by various paths to one goalreligion. <ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/1709/the18-june-lord1958#p13p4,p5</ref>

Gods are those who are turned to ...religion is the spiritual and ethical life of the Lightindividual, who live in the Power relations of his soul with God and the Knowledge; that is what the Buddha meansintimate dealings of his will and character with other individuals, and no monarch or governing class, he does not mean even a theocracy or priesthood, can really substitute itself for the gods soul of religion. They are beings who have the divine nature, who may live in human bodies, but free from ignorance and falsehoodindividual or for the soul of a nation. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0325/happinessthe-drive-towards-legislative-and-social-centralisation-and-uniformity#p16p10</ref>

===TheocracyNature of Religions===

Religion belongs to the higher mind of humanity...true theocracy It is the kingdom effort of man's higher mind to approach, as far as lies in its power, something beyond it, something to which humanity gives the name God or Spirit or Truth or Faith or Knowledge or the Infinite, some kind of Absolute, which the human mind cannot reach and yet tries to reach. Religion may be divine in its ultimate origin; in its actual nature it is not divine but human. In truth we should speak rather of religions than of religion; for the religions made by man and are many. These different religions, even when they had not the kingdom same origin, have most of them been made in the same way. ...All religions have each the same story to tell. The occasion for its birth is the coming of a Pope, a priesthood or great Teacher of the world. He comes and reveals and is the incarnation of a sacerdotal classDivine Truth.<ref>http://incarnatewordBut men seize upon it, trade upon it, make an almost political organisation out of it.in/cwsa/25/The religion-as-is equipped by them with a government and policy and laws, with its creeds and dogmas, its rules and regulations, its rites and ceremonies, all binding upon its adherents, all absolute and inviolable. Like the State, it too administers rewards to the loyal and assigns punishments for those that revolt or go astray, for the heretic and the-law-of-life#p5</ref>renegade.

===Philosophy of Vedanta=== The philosophy of the Upanishads is the basis of all Indian religion first and morals and to a considerable extent principal article of Hindu politics, legislation these established and society. Its practical importance to [our] race is therefore immense. the Unity of all things is the rock on which the Upanishads have been built. Evolution has been discovered and [analyzed] by Science; Evolution of a kind is implied at every turn by the Vedanta. Vedantism like Scienceformal religions runs always, [but] after its own fashion, [is] severely conscientious in its logical processes and rigorously experimental; [Vedantism] has mastered physical and psychical laws which Science ["Mine is] now beginning to handle. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/18/the-philosophy-of-the-upanishads#p2</ref> === Adwaita Philosophy===In the Vedantic theory of this Universe and its view of the nature of the Brahman and Its relations to the phenomena that make up this Universesupreme, there is one initial paradox from which the whole Vedantic philosophyonly truth, religion and ethics take their start. We have seen that all others are in existence as we see it there is Something that is eternal, immutable and one, to which we give the name of Brahman, amidst an infinite deal that is transient, mutable and multifoldfalsehood or inferior. Brahman as the eternal, immutable and one, is not manifest but latent; This Brahman, " For without this Sacchidanandamfundamental dogma, this eternal Consciousness unknowable, unnameable and indefinable, which reason cannot analyse, nor imagination put into any shape, nor the mind and senses draw within their jurisdiction, is the Transcendent Reality which alone truly exists. The sole existence of this Turiya Brahman or Transcendent Eternal Consciousness is the basis of the Adwaita philosophy.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/18/an-incomplete-work-of-vedantic-exegesis#p4</ref> === Visishtadwaita=== even though Brahman be the One Self, He has become Many by His own Iccha or Will and the exercise of His Will is established credal religions could not for a moment or limited by time & space or subject to fatigue, but for everhave existed. He is eternal and therefore His Iccha is eternal and the Many Selves which live in Him by His Iccha are eternal and If you do not perish, for they also being really Brahman the Self are indistinguishable from Him in nature and though their bodies, mind-forms and all else may perish, cannot themselves perish. He may draw them into Himself in utter communion, but He can also release them again into separate communion, and this is actually what happens. All else is transient believe and changes & passes, but the Self proclaim that is One and you alone possess the Self that is Many are both of them real and eternal; and still they are One Self.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/18/an-incomplete-work-of-vedantic-exegesis#p5</ref> ===Dwaita=== This eternity of one or the Oneself and eternity of the Many-Selves shows that both are real without beginning and without end and the difference between them is therefore without beginning and end. The One is true and the Many are truehighest truth, and the One is you will not and cannot be the Many, though the Many live in and for the One. This is Dwaita<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/18/an-incomplete-work-of-vedantic-exegesis#p5</ref><center>~</center>Religion, however imperfect, has the secret of that mastery; religion can conquer the natural instincts and desires of man, metaphysics can only convince him logically that they ought to be conquered—an immense difference. For this reason philosophy has never been able to satisfy any except the intellectual few impress people and was even for a time relegated to oblivion by the imperious contempt of Science which thought that it had discovered a complete solution of the Universe, a truth and a law of life independent of religion and yet able to supersede religion in its peculiar province of reaching & regulating the sources of conduct and leading mankind in its evolution. But it has now become increasingly clear that Science has failed make them flock to substantiate its claims, and that a belief in evolution or the supremacy of physical laws or the subjection of the ephemeral individual to the interests of the slightly less ephemeral race is no substitute for a belief in Christ or Buddha, for the law of Divine Love or the trust in Divine Power & Providence… Religion which satisfies the heart and controls conduct, cannot in its average conceptions permanently satisfy the reason and thus exposes itself to gradual loss of empire over the mindyou. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/18/an-incomplete-work-of-vedantic-exegesis#p19</ref><center>~</center>In spirituality, then, understood in this sense, we must seek for the directing light and the harmonising law, and in religion only in proportion as it identifies itself with this spirituality...Spirituality respects the freedom of the human soul, because it is itself fulfilled by freedom; and the deepest meaning of freedom is the power to expand and grow towards perfection by the law of one's own nature, dharma. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/religion-as-the-law-of-life#p9</ref>

=== Potentialities The articles and dogmas of a religion are mind-made things and, if you cling to them and shut yourself up in a code of life made out for you, you do not know and cannot know the truth of the Spirit===that lies beyond all codes and dogmas, wide and large and free.When you stop at a religious creed and tie yourself in it, taking it for the only truth in the world, you stop the advance and widening of your inner soul.But if you look at religion from another angle, it need not always be an obstacle to all men.selfIf you regard it as one of the higher activities of humanity and if you can see in it the aspirations of man without ignoring the imperfection of all man-searchingmade things, it may well be a kind of help for you to approach the spiritual life. Taking it up in a serious and earnest spirit, self-controlled expansion you can try to find out what truth is there, what aspiration lies hidden in it, what divine inspiration has undergone transformation and deformation here by the human mind and a many-sided finding of their greatesthuman organisation, highest and deepest potentialitieswith an appropriate mental stand you can get religion even as it is to throw some light on your way and to lend some support to your spiritual endeavour.<ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/2503/religion-as9-thejune-law-of-life1929#p9p1,p2,p3,p4</ref>

God gives Himself In every religion there are some who have evolved a high spiritual life. But it is not the religion that gave them their spirituality; it is they who have put their spirituality into the religion. Put anywhere else, born into any other cult, they would have found there and lived there the same spiritual life. It is their own capacity, it is some power of their inner being and not the religion they profess that has made them what they are. This power in their nature is such that religion to His whole creationthem does not become a slavery or a bondage. Only as they have not a strong, clear and active mind, they need to believe in this or that creed as absolutely true and to give themselves up to it without any disturbing question or doubt. I have met in all religions people of this kind and it would be a crime to disturb their faith. For them religion is not an obstacle. An obstacle for those who can go farther, it may be a help for those who cannot, but are yet able to travel a certain distance on the paths of the Spirit. Religion has been an impulse to the worst things and the best; no one religion holds if the fiercest wars have been waged and the most hideous persecutions carried on in its name, it has stimulated too supreme heroism and self-sacrifice in its cause. Along with philosophy it marks the limit the human mind has reached in its highest activities. It is an impediment and a chain if you are a slave to its outer body; if you know how to use its inner substance, it can be your jumping-board into the monopoly realm of His Gracethe Spirit. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/1503/religion9-june-1929#p1p5</ref>

We give Each religion has helped mankind. Paganism increased in man the name of religion to any concept light of the world or the universe which is presented as the exclusive Truth in which one must have an absolute faithbeauty, generally because this Truth is declared to be the result of a revelation.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/13/aims-largeness and-principles#p237</ref> ==Religion height of Vedanta,Hindus==If it were asked by anyone what is this multitudinous, shiftinghis life, expanding, apparently amorphous or his aim at all events multimorphous sea a many-sided perfection; Christianity gave him some vision of religious thought, feeling, philosophy, spiritual experience we call Hinduism, what it is characteristically divine love and essentiallycharity; Buddhism has shown him a noble way to be wiser, we might answer in one wordgentler, the religion of Vedanta. And if it were asked what are the Hindus with their unique and persistent difference from all other racespurer, we might again answer, the children of Vedanta. For at the root of all that we Hindus have done, thought Judaism and said through these thousands of years of our race-history, behind all we are and seek Islam how to be, there lies concealed, the fount of our philosophies, the bedrock of our religions, the kernel of our thought, the explanation of our ethics religiously faithful in action and society, the summary of our civilisation, the rivet of our nationality, this one marvellous inheritance of ours, the Vedanta. Nor is it only zealously devoted to Hindu streams that this great source God; Hinduism has given of its life-giving waters. ===Vedanta as opened to him the Source for All Religions===Buddhism, the teacher of one third of humanity, drank from its inspirationlargest and profoundest spiritual possibilities. Christianity, the offspring of Buddhism, derived its ethics and esoteric teaching at secondA great thing would be done if all these God-hand from the same source. Through Persia Vedanta put its stamp on Judaism, through Judaism, Christianity visions could embrace and Sufism on Islam, through Buddha on Confucianism, through Christ cast themselves into each other; but intellectual dogma and mediaeval mysticism and Catholic ceremonial, through Greek and German philosophy, through Sanscrit learning.cult egoism stand in the way..<ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsa/1813/thethoughts-religion-ofand-vedantaglimpses#p1p20</ref> ===Ancient Hindus===The ancient Hindus, therefore, insisted on Veda as the supreme authority, allowing Philosophy, Science & Religion only as subordinate helps to knowledge, because they perceived the danger of giving too unlicensed a freedom to these great but inferior powers. Religion, putting Veda away into a sacred oblivion, follows the impulses of the undisciplined heart, not purified, but full of the vital impulses, chittam pranair otam, and becomes spasmodic, ignorant, narrow, obscurantist, sectarian, cruel, violent. Philosophy acknowledging Veda in theory but relying instead on her own intellectual self-sufficiency, ends by living in words, a thing of vain disputations & exultant logic-splitting, abstract, unpractical and visionary. Science, denying Veda altogether, arrogant & bigoted in her own conceit, makes man a materialist, a pashanda.

===What the Hindus foresaw and dreaded and strove to organise their society against it, erecting barrier upon artificial barrier as their own knowledge & grasp upon Veda diminished, is now growing actual and imminent. The way to avoid it is not to deny the truth People Have Made Out of Science, but to complete, correct and illuminate it. For the Veda also says with Science, Annam vai Brahma, Prano vai Brahma; it acknowledges the animal, the Pashu in man & God as the Master of the Animal, the Pashupati; but by completing the knowledge and putting it in its right relations, it completes him also & liberates him, lifts the Pashu to the Pashupati and enables him to satisfy himself divinely by enjoying even in matter the supramaterial and replacing egoistic and selfish power by an universal mastery & helpfulness and egoistic & unsatisfying pleasures by a bliss in which he can become one with his fellows, a bliss divine & universal.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/17/part-ii-the-field-and-instruments-of-vedanta-1#p6</ref> Religion?===

===Veda===three of the external aids by which Veda has been perpetuated in India, People follow religion, Yoga, the guru-parampara, this fundamental principle is amply admitted. Religion starts from revelation; it rests upon spiritual and moral experience. Yoga, admitting the truth of verbal revelation, the word of God & the word of the Master, yet starts from experience and rises, as a result of experimental development by fixed methodssocial habit, to the use of intuitive and revelatory knowledge. The Guru-parampara starts with the word of the Guru, accepted as the knowledge of one who has seen, and proceeds to personal mastery by the experience of the disciple who may indeed go beyond his master & even modify his knowledge, but is in order not allowed to disown his starting-point. But there is one of our great Indian spiritual activities which has developed progressively in the direction of rationalistic methods and given the responsibility for nine-tenths of its work in these supra-sensuous fields to the very organ, pronounced by the consensus of human opinion insufficient for such inquiries,—the intellect.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/17/chapter-ii#p6</ref> ...there was a great Vedic age of advanced civilisation broken afterwards by Time and circumstance and of which modern Hinduism presents us only some preserved, collected or redeveloped fragments; I shall suppose that the real meaning & justification of Purana, Tantra, Itihasa & Yoga can only be discovered by a rediscovery of their old foundation and harmonising secret in the true sense of the Veda, and in this light I shall proceed, awaiting its confirmation or refutation and standing always on get into the facts bad books of Veda, Vedanta & Yoga.<ref>http://incarnatewordothers.in/cwsa/17/the-isha-upanishad#p2</ref>===Upanishads===Upanishads are a grand harmonious and perfectly luminous wholeFor instance, expressing in its various aspects the single and universal Truth; for under the myriad contradictions of phenomena (prapancha) there is one Truth and one only. All the Smritis, the Puranas, the Darshanas, the Dharmashastras, the writings of Shaktas, Shaivas, Vaishnavas, Sauras, as well as the whole of Buddhism and its Scriptures are merely so many explanations, comments and interpretations from different sides, of these various aspects of the one and only Truth. This Truth is the sole foundation on which all religions can rest as on a sure and impregnable rock;—and more than a rock, for a rock may perish but this endures for ever. Therefore village it is the religion of the Aryas called the Sanatana Dharma, the Law Sempiternal. Nor are the Hindus in error when they declare the Sruti to be eternal and without beginning and the Rishis who composed the hymns to be only the witnesses who saw the truth and put it in human language; for this seeing was difficult not mental sight, but spiritual. Therefore the Vedas are justly called Sruti or revelation. Of these the Rig, Yajur, Sama & Atharvan are the fertilising rain which gave the plant of the Truth nourishment and made it grow, the Brahmanas are the forest in which the plant is found, the Aranyakas are the soil in which it grows, the Upanishads are the plant itself, roots, stalk, leaves, calix and petals, and the flower which manifests itself once and for ever is the great saying SO AHAM—I AM HE which is the culmination of the Upanishads. Salutation to the SO AHAM. Salutation to the Eternal who is without place, time, cause or limit, Salutation go to my Self who am the Eternal.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/17/the-ishavasyopanishad-with-a-commentary-in-english#p4</ref> ==What is Hindu Life?==To put the individual Self in intimate relation with the Eternal is the aim of Hindu life, its religion, its polity, its ethics.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/18/an-incomplete-work-of-vedantic-exegesis#p7</ref> ==Essence of Hindu Religion==every Upanishad has in it an element of Yoga as well as an element of Sankhya, the scientific psychology on which Yoga is founded. Vedanta, the perception of the relations between God in Himself and God in the world, Sankhya, the scientific, philosophical and psychological analysis of those relations and Yoga, called also by the Rishis Yajna, their practical application in social life, religious worship and individual discipline & self-perfection, is and has always been the whole substance of the Hindu religion.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/18/the-means-of-realisation#p1</ref> ===Nature of Religion=== Religion belongs to the higher mind of humanity. It is the effort of man's higher mind to approachceremonies, as far as lies in its power, something beyond it, something to which humanity gives the name God or Spirit or Truth or Faith or Knowledge or the Infinite, some kind of Absolute, which the human mind cannot reach and yet tries to reach. Religion may be divine in its ultimate origin; in its actual nature it is not divine but human. In truth we should speak rather of religions than of religion; for the religions made by man are manyall your neighbours will point at you. These different religions, even when they had not the same origin, have most of them been made in the same way. All religions have each the same story But that has absolutely nothing to tell. The occasion for its birth is the coming of a great Teacher of the world. He comes and reveals and is the incarnation of a Divine Truth. But men seize upon it, trade upon it, make an almost political organisation out of it. The religion is equipped by them do with a government and policy and laws, with its creeds and dogmas, its rules and regulations, its rites and ceremoniesspiritual life, nothing at all binding upon its adherents, all absolute and inviolable. Like the State, it too administers rewards to the loyal and assigns punishments for those that revolt or go astray, for the heretic and the renegade.<ref>httpshttp://incarnateword.in/cwm/0308/923-junemay-19291956#p1,p2p12</ref>

The first and principal article of these established and formal religions runs always, "Mine is the supreme, the only truth, all others are in falsehood or inferior." For without this fundamental dogma, established credal religions could not have existed. If you do not believe and proclaim that you alone possess the one or the highest truth, you will not be able … to impress people and make them flock to you.The articles and dogmas of fulfil a religion are mind-made things social duty and, if you cling to them and shut yourself up in a code of life made out for yousocial custom, you do but not know and cannot know the truth of the Spirit that lies beyond all codes and dogmas, wide and large and free. When you stop at a religious creed and tie yourself in it, taking it for the only truth in the world, you stop the advance and widening of your inner soul.if you look at religion from another angle, it need not always be an obstacle to all men. If you regard it as one of the higher activities of humanity and if you can see in it the aspirations of man without ignoring the imperfection of all man-made things, it may well be a kind of help for because you really wanted to approach the spiritual life. Taking it up in a serious and earnest spirit, you can try to find out what truth is there, what aspiration lies hidden in it, what divine inspiration has undergone transformation and deformation here by the human mind and a human organisation, and enter into communion with an appropriate mental stand you can get religion even as it is to throw some light on your way and to lend some support to your spiritual endeavourGod. <ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwm/0308/923-junemay-19291956#p4p23</ref>

In every religion there are some who have evolved a high spiritual life. But it is not the religion that gave them their spirituality; it is they who have put their spirituality into the religion. Put anywhere else, born into any other cult, they would have found there and lived there the same spiritual life. It is their own capacity, it is some power of their inner being and not may be said that the religion they profess that has made them what they are. This power in their nature is such that religion to them does not become a slavery or a bondage. Only as they have not a strong, clear and active mind, they need to believe in this adopt or that creed as absolutely true and to give themselves up to it without any disturbing question follow or doubt. I have met participate in all religions people of this kind and it would be a crime to disturb their faith. For them religion as it is not an obstaclefound all ready-made, arises rather from the "herd instinct" in human beings. An obstacle for those who can go farther, it may The true thing would be a help for those who cannot, but are yet able each one to travel a certain distance on the paths find that form of the Spirit. Religion has been an impulse to the worst things adoration or cult which is his own and the best; if the fiercest wars have been waged expresses spontaneously and the most hideous persecutions carried on in its name, it has stimulated too supreme heroism and self-sacrifice in its cause. Along individually his own special relation with philosophy it marks the limit the human mind has reached in its highest activities. It is an impediment and a chain if you are a slave to its outer bodyDivine; if you know how to use its inner substance, it can that would be your jumping-board into the realm of the Spiritideal condition.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/0308/91-juneaugust-19291956#p5p20</ref>

If you want ...very few people, very few, an insignificant number, go to appraise the real value of the religion in which you are born or brought up church or to have temple with a correct perspective of the country or society to which you belong by birthtrue religious feeling, if you want to find out how relative a thing the particular environment that is into which you happened , not to be thrown pray and confinedbeg for something from God but to offer themselves, give thanks, aspire, you give themselves. There is hardly one in a million who does that. So they do not have only the power of changing the atmosphere. Perhaps when they are there, they manage to get across, break through and go round somewhere and touch something divine. But the earth large majority of people who go only because of superstition, egoism and self-interest, create an atmosphere of this kind, and see that is what you think breathe in when you go to a church or temple. Only, as you go there with a very good is looked upon as bad elsewhere and feeling, you tell yourself, "Oh, what is considered as bad in one a quiet place is welcomed as good in another. for meditation!"<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/0306/930-june-19291954#p9p30</ref>

Things have an inner value and become real to you only when you have acquired them Religion itself has been imposed on men; it is often supported by the exercise a suggestion of religious fear or by some spiritual or other menace. There can be no such imposition in your relation with the Divine; it must be free , your own mind's and heart's choice, taken up with enthusiasm and joy. What union can that be in which one trembles and says, "I am compelled, I cannot do otherwise"? Truth is self-evident and has not when they have been to be imposed upon youthe world. If you want to be sure The strength and greatness of your a religion, you must choose it; if you want is adjudged by men according to be sure the number of your countrythose that follow it, you must choose it; if you want to be sure although the real greatness is not there. The greatness of your family, even that you must choosespiritual truth is. ... If you accept without question what has been given you Religions may reckon their greatness by Chancethe number of their believers, you can never but Truth would still be sure whether Truth if it had not even a single follower. The average man is good or bad for you, whether it drawn towards those who make great pretensions; he does not go where Truth is the true thing quietly manifesting. Those who make great pretensions need to proclaim loudly and to advertise; for your lifeotherwise they would not attract great numbers of people. Step back from all The work that forms your natural environment or inheritanceis done with no care for what people think of it is not so well known, made up and forced upon you by Nature's blind mechanical process; does not so easily draw within and look quietly and dispassionately at thingsmultitudes. Appraise them, choose freelyBut Truth requires no advertisement; it does not hide itself but it does not proclaim itself either. Then you can say with an inner truthIt is content to manifest, "This is my familyregardless of results, this my countrynot seeking approbation or shunning disapprobation, this my religionnot attracted or troubled by the world's acceptance or denial. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/9-june-1929#p10p13</ref>

If we go That [atmosphere of the individual and the society in their ordinary consciousness and their daily life] life is practical and not idealistic; it is concerned not with good, beauty, spiritual experience, the higher truth, but with interests, physical needs, desires, vital necessities. This is real to it, all the rest is a little way within ourselvesshadowy; It accepts ethics as a bond and an influence, we shall discover that there is but it does not live for ethical good; its real gods are vital need and utility and the desires of the body. If it governs its life partly by ethical laws because otherwise vital need, desire, utility in each seeking their own satisfaction through many egoistic individuals would clash among themselves and destroy their own aims, it does not feel called upon to make its life entirely ethical. It concerns itself still less with beauty; even if it admits things beautiful as an embellishment and an amusement, a satisfaction and pastime of us a consciousness that has been living throughout the ages eye and manifesting in ear and mind, nothing moves it imperatively to make its life a multitude thing of formsbeauty. Each of us has been born It allows religion a fixed place and portion, on holy days, in many different countriesthe church or temple, belonged at the end of life when age and the approach of death call the attention forcibly away from this life to many different nationsother life, followed many different religions. Why must we accept at fixed times in the week or the day when it thinks it right for a moment to pause in the affairs of the last one as world and remember God: but to make the best? The experiences gathered by us whole of life a religion, a remembering of God and a seeking after him, is a thing that is not really done even in all these many lives societies which like the Indian erect spirituality as their aim and principle. It admits philosophy in different countries a still more remote fashion; and varying religionsif nowadays it eagerly seeks after science, are stored up in that inner continuity is because science helps prodigiously the satisfaction of our consciousness which persists through all birthsits vital desires, needs and interests: but it does not turn to seek after an entirely scientific life any more than after an entirely ethical life. There are multiple personalities there created by A more complete effort in any one of these past experiencesdirections it leaves to the individual, to the few, and when we become aware to individuals of a special type, the saint, the ethical man, the artist, the thinker, the man of this multitude within usreligion; it gives them a place, does some homage to them, assigns some room to the things they represent, but for itself it becomes impossible is content to speak follow mainly after its own inherent principle of one particular form vital satisfaction, vital necessity and utility, vital efficiency.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/the-suprarational-ultimate-of-life#p2</ref> ==Hinduism== To put the individual Self in intimate relation with the Eternal is the aim of truth as Hindu life, its religion, its polity, its ethics. Morality is not for its own sake, nor for the only truthpleasures of virtue, one country as our only countrynor for any reward here or in another life, one religion as nor for the only sake of society; these are false aims and false sanctions. Its true religionaim is a preparation and purification of the soul to fit it for the presence of God. There are people who have been born The sense-obscured, limited and desire-driven individual self must raise itself out of the dark pit of sense-obsession into one countrythe clear air of the spirit, must disembarrass itself of servile bondage to bodily, emotional & intellectual selfishness and assume the freedom & royalty of universal love and beneficence, must expand itself from the narrow, petty, although inefficient ego till it becomes commensurate with the leading elements infinite, all-powerful, omnipresent Self of All; then is its aim of their consciousness obviously belong to anotherexistence attained, then is its pilgrimage ended. I have met some born This may be done by realising the Eternal in Europe who were evidently Indians; I have met others born oneself by knowledge, by realising oneself in Indian bodies who were Him by Love as evidently Europeans. In Japan I have met some who were IndianGod the Beloved, others who were Europeanor by realising Him as the Lord of all in His universe and all its creatures by works. And if This realisation is the true crown of any ethical system. For whether we hold the aim of them goes morality to be the country placing of oneself in harmony with eternal laws, or enters the fulfilment of man’s nature, or the natural evolution of man in the direction of his highest faculties, Hinduism will not object but it insists that the Law with which man must put himself into relation is the Eternal in the universe, that in this permanent and stable Truth man’s nature fulfils itself out of the civilisation transient seemings of his daily existence and that to which he has affinity, he finds himself there perfectly at homethis goal his evolution moves. <ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0318/9an-incomplete-work-of-junevedantic-1929exegesis#p11p6</ref>

The ancient Hindus, therefore, insisted on Veda as the supreme authority, allowing Philosophy, Science & Religion only as subordinate helps to knowledge, because they perceived the danger of giving too unlicensed a freedom to these great but inferior powers. Religion itself has been imposed on men; it is often supported by , putting Veda away into a suggestion sacred oblivion, follows the impulses of the undisciplined heart, not purified, but full of religious fear or by some spiritual or other menace. There can be no such imposition in your relation with the Divine; it must be freevital impulses, your own mind's and heart's choicechittam pranair otam'', taken up with enthusiasm and joybecomes spasmodic, ignorant, narrow, obscurantist, sectarian, cruel, violent. What union can that be Philosophy acknowledging Veda in which one trembles and saystheory but relying instead on her own intellectual self-sufficiency, "I am compelledends by living in words, I cannot do otherwise"? Truth is selfa thing of vain disputations & exultant logic-evident splitting, abstract, unpractical and has not to be imposed upon visionary. Science, denying Veda altogether, arrogant & bigoted in her own conceit, makes man a materialist, a pashanda. What the world. The strength Hindus foresaw and dreaded and greatness of a religion is adjudged by men according strove to the number of those that follow organise their society against it, although the real greatness erecting barrier upon artificial barrier as their own knowledge & grasp upon Veda diminished, is not therenow growing actual and imminent. The greatness of spiritual truth way to avoid it is .Religions may reckon their greatness by not to deny the number truth of their believersScience, but Truth would still be Truth if it had not even a single follower. The average man is drawn towards those who make great pretensions; he does not go where Truth is quietly manifesting. Those who make great pretensions need to proclaim loudly complete, correct and to advertise; for otherwise they would not attract great numbers of peopleilluminate it. The work that is done For the Veda also says with no care for what people think Science, Annam vai Brahma, Prano vai Brahma; it acknowledges the animal, the Pashu in man & God as the Master of it is not so well knownthe Animal, does not so easily draw multitudes. But Truth requires no advertisementthe Pashupati; it does not hide itself but by completing the knowledge and putting it does not proclaim itself either. It is content to manifestin its right relations, regardless of resultsit completes him also & liberates him, not seeking approbation or shunning disapprobation, not attracted or troubled lifts the Pashu to the Pashupati and enables him to satisfy himself divinely by enjoying even in matter the world's acceptance or denialsupramaterial and replacing egoistic and selfish power by an universal mastery & helpfulness and egoistic & unsatisfying pleasures by a bliss in which he can become one with his fellows, a bliss divine & universal.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0317/9part-ii-the-field-and-instruments-of-junevedanta-19291#p13p6</ref>

Let us take an altogether ordinary example A religion therefore which is very partial claims to be eternal, must not be content with satisfying the heart and very superficial. You are born in India. Being born in India you are born imagination, it must answer to the satisfaction of the intellect the questions with a certain religious and philosophic attitudewhich philosophy is preoccupied. But if A philosophy which professes to explain the world-problem once for some reason or other you want to free yourself from this atavism all, must not be satisfied with logical consistency and influencecomprehensiveness; it must like Science base its conclusions not merely on speculative logic, if you begin to followbut on actual observation and its truths must always be capable of verification by experiment so that they may be not merely conceivable truth but ascertained truth; it must like religion seize on the heart & imagination and without sacrificing intellectual convincingness, study, practise comprehensiveness & accuracy impregnate with itself the religion or philosophy springs of another country, you can change human activity; and it must have the conditions power of your inner developmentbringing the human self into direct touch with the Eternal. The Vedantic religion claims to be the eternal religion because it satisfies all these demands. It is a little more difficult, intellectually comprehensive in its explanation of all the problems that is, perplex the human mind; it asks for brings the contradictions of the world into harmony by a greater effort for liberation, but single luminous law of being; it is very far from has developed in Yoga a process of spiritual experience by which its assertions can be tested and confirmed; the law of being impossible. In fact there are many people who do it, who love to free themselves from what comes to them from their present birthhas discovered seizes not only on the intellect but on the deepest emotions of man and calls into activity his highest ethical instincts; by some sort of special taste they like and its whole aim and end is to seek elsewhere what they think they won't be able to find at home. And in this way you change bring the individual self into a perfect and intimate union with the consequences of your birth completelyEternal.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0718/16an-incomplete-work-of-novembervedantic-1955exegesis#p69p27</ref>

...every definite mental formation always gives a particular colouring to the If it were asked by anyone what is this multitudinous, shifting, expanding, apparently amorphous or at all events multimorphous sea of religious thought, feeling, philosophy, spiritual experience. As for examplewe call Hinduism, with all people brought up in a certain religion their experiences will always be coloured by this religion; what it is characteristically and essentially, we might answer in factone word, to reach the very source religion of Vedanta. And if it were asked what are the thing one must free oneself Hindus with their unique and persistent difference from all other races, we might again answer, the external formationchildren of Vedanta.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/07/22For at the root of all that we Hindus have done, thought and said through these thousands of years of our race-june-1955#p14</ref><center>~</center>Those who carry within themselves a spiritual destiny history, behind all we are and are born seek to realise the Divinebe, to become conscious in Him and live Himthere lies concealed, will arrivethe fount of our philosophies, no matter what paththe bedrock of our religions, what way they follow. That is to saythe kernel of our thought, even in religion there are people who have had the spiritual experience explanation of our ethics and found society, the Divine―not because summary of our civilisation, the religionrivet of our nationality, usually in spite this one marvellous inheritance of itours, notwithstanding it―because they had the inner urge and Vedanta. Nor is it only to Hindu streams that this urge led them there despite all obstacles and through them. Everything served their purpose.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/23great source has given of its life-may-1956#p7</ref><center>~</center>giving waters.Buddhism, the teacher of one third of humanity, drank from its inspiration..it may be said that Christianity, the need to adopt or follow or participate in a religion as it is found all readyoffspring of Buddhism, derived its ethics and esoteric teaching at second-made, arises rather hand from the "herd instinct" in human beingssame source. The true thing would be for each one to find that form of adoration or cult which is his own Through Persia Vedanta put its stamp on Judaism, through Judaism, Christianity and Sufism on Islam, through Buddha on Confucianism, through Christ and mediaeval mysticism and expresses spontaneously Catholic ceremonial, through Greek and individually his own special relation with the Divine; that would be the ideal conditionGerman philosophy, through Sanscrit learning... <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0818/1the-augustreligion-of-1956vedanta#p20p1</ref>

==What Else is Religion?Buddhism==

...religious consciousness which Buddhism is limited & enslaved by the turning away from ''duḥkha'' and its creeds and causes to which its particular way of worship is a master and not a servant, because it leaves no room for a "Personal" God. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/religion-as-the-law-peace of-life#p6</ref> The idea of a Personal God is, however, a contradiction in termsNirvana. This all religions confess, but the next moment they nullify their confession by assuming in Him a Personality.  The Universal cannot be personal, the Omnipresent cannot be excluded from anything or creature ''duḥkhavāda'' did not exist in the world He universally pervades and possesses. The moment we attribute certain qualities to GodIndia, we limit Him and create a double principle except in the world.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/18/an-incomplete-work-theory of-vedantic-exegesis#p2</ref> ===Misunderstanding About God===...we regard him with the Jews Vaishnava ''viraha''; otherwise it was not considered as a God of Power and Might & Wrath and Justice, means or with the Moslems as God the Judge and Governor and Manager of the world or with the early Christians as even a God of Love, yet all agree stage in regarding Him as a Person, definable, imaginable, limited in His Nature by certain qualities though not limited in His Powers, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent & yet by a mysterious paradox quite separate from His creatures and His world. He creates, judges, punishes, rewards, favours, condemns, loves, hates, is pleased, is angry, for all the world like a man of unlimited powers, and is indeed a Superior Man, a shadow of man's soul thrown out on the huge background of the Universe. The intellectual and moral difficulties of this conception are well-known. An Omnipotent God of Love, in spite of all glosses, remains inconsistent with the anguish and misery, the red slaughter and colossal sum of torture and multitudinous suffering which pervades this world and is the condition of its continuance; an Omnipotent God of Justice who created & caused sin, yet punishes man for falling into the traps He has Himself set, is an infinite & huge inconsistency, an insane contradiction in terms; a God of wrath, a jealous God, who favours & punishes according to His caprice, fumes over insults and preens Himself at the sound of praise is much lower than the better sort of men and, as an inferior, unworthy of the adoration of the saints. An omnipresent God cannot be separate from His world, an infinite God cannot be limited in Time or Space or qualitiessadhana. <ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsa/1829/anjainism-incompleteand-work-of-vedantic-exegesisbuddhism#p24p8</ref>===What People have made out of Religion?===People follow religion by social habit, in order not to get into the bad books of others. For instance, in a village it is difficult not to go to religious ceremonies, for all your neighbours will point at you. But that has absolutely nothing to do with spiritual life, nothing at all.<refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/23-may-1956#p12~</refcenter>Just try to see, I don't feel that you are sincere, neither you nor your flock. You all went there to fulfil a social duty and a social custom, but not at all because you really wanted to enter into communion with God.""Enter into communion with God! But we can't do that! All that we can do is to say some good words, but we have no capacity to enter into communion with God."<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/23-may-1956#p1,p2,p4,p5,p23</ref> Those who carry within themselves a spiritual destiny The Buddhist Nirvana and are born to realise the Divine, to become conscious in Him and live Him, will arrive, no matter what path, what way they follow. That is to say, even in religion there Adwaitin’s Moksha are people who have had the spiritual experience and found the Divine―not because of the religion, usually in spite of it, notwithstanding it―because they had the inner urge and this urge led them there despite all obstacles and through themsame thing. Everything served their purpose.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/23-may-1956#p7</ref> ...it may be said that the need It corresponds to adopt or follow or participate in a religion as it is found all ready-made, arises rather from the "herd instinct" realisation in human beings. The true thing would be for each which one to find that form of adoration or cult which is his own and expresses spontaneously and individually his own special relation does not feel oneself any longer as an individual with the Divine; that would be the ideal condition.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/1-august-1956#p20</ref>===State of Religion===Religion, which ought to have led the way, but owing to its greater dependence on its external parts and its infrarational rather than its spiritual impulses has been as much, such a name or even more, such a sower of discord as a teacher of unity,—religion is beginning to realise, a little dimly and ineffectively as yet, that spirituality is after all its own chief business and true aim and that it is also the common element and the common bond of all religions. As these influences grow and come more and more consciously to cooperate with each other, it might be hoped that the necessary psychological modification will quietly, graduallyform, but still irresistibly and at last with an increasing force of rapidity take place which can prepare a real and fundamental change in the life of humanity.<ref>http://incarnateword.infinite eternal Self spaceless (even when in/cwsa/25/internationalism#p5</ref> Religious thought cannot be used unless it is liberated from the influence of religions<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/15/religion#p33space),p34,p37</ref> ===Religion and Dance===The dance was once one of the highest expressions of the inner life; it was associated with religion and it was an important limb in sacred ceremony, in the celebration of festivals, in the adoration of the Divine. In some countries it reached a very high degree of beauty and an extraordinary perfection. In Japan they kept up the tradition of the dance as a part of the religious life and, because the strict sense of beauty and art is a natural possession of the Japanese, they did not allow it to degenerate into something of lesser significance and smaller purpose. It was the same in India. It is true that in our days there have been attempts to resuscitate the ancient Greek and other dances; but the religious sense is missing timeless (even when in all such resurrections and they look more like rhythmic gymnastics than dancetime).<ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0329/28jainism-julyand-1929buddhism#p22p9</ref>

''QWe know how the Christian religion came into existence. It was certainly not Jesus who made what is known as Christianity, but some learned and very clever men put their heads together and built it up into the thing we see.If someone follows a religion There was nothing divine in the way in which it was formed, and has there is nothing divine either in the way in which it functions. And yet the excuse or occasion for the formation was undoubtedly some revelation from what one could call a good capacityDivine Being, can a Being who came from elsewhere bringing down with him from a higher plane a certain Knowledge and Truth for the earth. He came and suffered for his Truth; but very few understood what he go farther said, few cared to find and reach identification with hold to the Divine?''Truth for which he suffered. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/9-june-1929#p29</ref>

If a man has a spiritual life independently Mahomed tried to re-establish the Asiatic gospel of his mental formations and the set limits human equality in which he lives, then this spiritual life makes him, so to say, cross the religious principles and enter something higher. But his consecration must come from within and not be formal. If it comes exclusively from the form, then the limitation is so great that he cannot go farther.<ref>https://incarnatewordspirit.All men are equal in/cwm/05/2-september-1953#p5Islam,p8</ref> ...word "God". It is a word (I have told you this at least four whatever their social position or five times) to express "something" you do not know but are trying to attain. There is only one thing that's important: that is a sincere and persistent willpolitical power, for these things don't happen in a twinkling. So one must persevere. When someone feels that he nor is not advancing, he must not get discouraged; he must try to find out what it is in the nature that is opposing, and then make the necessary progress. And suddenly one goes forward. And when you reach the end you have an experience. And what is remarkable is that people who have followed altogether different paths, with altogether different mental constructions, any man debarred from the greatest believer to the most unbelieving, even materialists, have arrived at that experience, it is the same for everyone. Because it is true—because it is real, because it is the sole reality. And it is quite simply that. I do not say anything more. This is full development of no importance, the way one speaks about it, what is important is to follow the path, your path, no matter which—yes, to go there.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/06/17-february-1954#p6</ref> ...very few people, very few, an insignificant number, go to church his manhood by his birth or temple with a true religious feeling, that is, not to pray and beg for something from God but to offer themselves, give thanks, aspire, give themselves. There is hardly one low original station in a million who does thatlife. So they do not have the power of changing the atmosphere. Perhaps when they All men are there, they manage to get across, break through brothers in Islam and go somewhere and touch something divine. But the large majority bond of people who go only because of superstition, egoism and self-interest, create an atmosphere of this kind, and that is what you breathe in when you go to a church or temple. Only, as you go there with a very good feeling, you tell yourself, "Oh, what a quiet place for meditation!"<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/06/30-june-1954#p30</ref> == Supramental Revolution=="A great thing would be done if religious unity overrides all these God-visions could embrace and cast themselves into each other; but intellectual dogma divisions and cult-egoism stand in the waydifferences." It is not in the mental consciousness that these things can be harmonised But Islam also was limited and synthesised. For this imperfect, because it is necessary to rise above and find confined the idea behind the thought. Sri Aurobindo shows here, for example, what each ideal of these religions represents in human effort, aspiration and realisation. Instead of taking these religions in their outward forms which are precisely dogmas and intellectual conceptions, if we take them in their spirit, in the principle they represent, there is no difficulty in unifying them. They are simply different aspects of human progress which complete each other perfectly well and should be united with many others yet to form a more total brotherhood and more complete progress, a more perfect understanding of life, a more integral approach equality to the Divine. And even this unification which already demands a return to the Spirit behind things, is not enough; there must be added to it a vision limits of the future, the goal towards which humanity is moving, the future realisation of the world, that last "spiritual revolution" Sri Aurobindo speaks about, which will open a new agesingle creed, that is, the supramental revolution.In the supramental consciousness all these things are no longer contradictory or exclusive. They all become complementary. It is only the mental form which divides. What this mental form represents should be united to what all the other mental forms represent in order to make a harmonious whole. And that is the essential difference between a religion and the true spiritual life.Religion exists almost exclusively in its forms, was farther deflected from its cults, in a certain set of ideas, and it becomes great only through the spirituality of a few exceptional individuals, whereas true spiritual life, and above all what path by the supramental realisation will be, is independent of every precise, intellectual form, every limited form of life. It embraces all possibilities rude and manifestations and makes them the expression, the vehicle of a higher and more universal truth.A new religion would not only be useless but very harmful. It is a new life undeveloped races which must be created; it is a new consciousness which must be expressed. This is something beyond intellectual limits and mental formulae. It is a living truth which must manifest.Everything in drew into its essence and its truth should be included in this realisationembrace. This realisation must be an expression as total, as complete, as universal as possible Another revelation of the divine reality. Only that can save humanity and the world. That is the great spiritual revolution of which Sri Aurobindo speaks. And this is what he wanted us to realise.He has traced its broad outline in the very book we shall start reading next Wednesday: The Supramental Manifestation.And the first sentence I read today remains the key of the[p.78] entire problem not only for the individual but also for the collectivity:"All would change if man could once consent to be spiritualised; but his nature, mental and vital and physical, old truth is rebellious to the higher lawneeded. He loves his imperfection."<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/09/3-april-1957#p10,p12,p13,p14,p15,p16,p17,p18,p19</ref> the true controlling power is an inner discrimination, a psychic sense and tact, a superior intervention of guidance from above or an innate and luminous inner guidance. But still this line of development too is necessary, because there must be a bridge between the spirit and the intellectual reason: the light of a spiritual or at least a spiritualised intelligence is necessary for the fullness of our total inner evolution, and without it, if another deeper guidance is lacking, the inner movement may be erratic and undisciplined, turbid and mixed with unspiritual elements or one-sided or incomplete in its catholicity. For the transformation of the Ignorance into the integral Knowledge the growth in us of a spiritual intelligence ready to receive a higher light and canalise it for all the parts of our nature is an intermediate necessity of great importance."<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0907/24-september-1958#p2</ref>  ...the highest occultism is that which discovers the secret movements and dynamic supernormal possibilities of Mind and Life and Spirit and uses them in their native force or by an applied process for the greater effectivity of our mental, vital and spiritual being.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/09/10-septemberasiatic-1958democracy#p1</ref>

The level of collective consciousness is always lower than the individual level. It is very noticeable, for example, that when men gather in a group or collect in great numbers, the level of consciousness falls a great deal. The consciousness of crowds is much lower than individual consciousness, and the collective consciousness of society is certainly lower than the consciousness of the individuals constituting it.There it is a necessity. In ordinary life, an individual, whether he knows it or not, always has a religion but the object of his religion is sometimes of a very inferior kind…. The god he worships may be the god of success or the god of money or the god of power, or simply a family god: the god of children, the god of the family, the god of the ancestors. There is always a religion. The quality of the religion is very different according to the individual, but it is difficult for a human being to live and to go on living, to survive in life without having something like a rudiment of an ideal which serves as the ''centre'' for his existence. Most of the time he doesn’t know it and if he were asked what his ideal is, he would be unable to formulate it; but he has one, vaguely, something that seems to him the most precious thing in life.<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/09/16-july-1958#p3,p4,p5,p6</ref>

There it is a necessity. In ordinary life, an individual, whether he knows it or not, always has a religion but the object ..very essence of his religion is sometimes of a very inferior kind.... The god he worships may be the god discovery of success or the god of money or immaterial Spirit and the god play of power, or simply a family godsupraphysical consciousness.<ref>http: //incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/reason-and-religion#p8</ref><center>~</center>To see your Self in all creatures and all creatures in your Self—that is the god unshakeable foundation of childrenall religion, love, patriotism, philanthropy, the god of the familyhumanity, the god of everything which rises above selfishness and gross utility. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/17/the ancestors-ishavasyopanishad-with-a-commentary-in-english#p86</ref><center>~</center>".. There is always a religion. The quality of the religion 's real business is very different according to prepare man's mind, life and bodily existence for the individual, but spiritual consciousness to take it up; it has to lead him to that point where the inner spiritual light begins fully to emerge. It is difficult for a human being at this point that religion must learn to live and subordinate itself, not to go insist on livingits outer characters, but give full scope to survive in life without having something like a rudiment of an ideal which serves as the centre for his existenceinner spirit itself to develop its own truth and reality. Most In the meanwhile it has to take up as much of the time he doesnman't know s mentality, vitality, physicality as it can and if he were asked what give all his ideal isactivities a turn towards the spiritual direction, he would be unable to formulate it; but he has onethe revelation of a spiritual meaning in them, vaguelythe imprint of a spiritual refinement, something that seems to him the most precious thing in lifebeginning of a spiritual character.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/09/16-july-1958#p6p1</ref>===How Religion Helped Mankind?=== "All would change if In all the higher powers of his life man could once consent may be said to be spiritualised; but his natureseeking, blindly enough, mental for God. To get at the Divine and Eternal in himself and vital the world and physicalto harmonise them, is rebellious to put his being and his life in tune with the higher lawInfinite reveals itself in these parts of his nature as his concealed aim and his destiny. He loves sets out to arrive at his imperfection."The Spirit is highest and largest and most perfect self, and the truth moment he at all touches upon it, this self in him appears to be one with some great Soul and Self of our being; mind Truth and life Good and body Beauty in their imperfection are its masks, but in their perfection should be its mouldsthe world to which we give the name of God. To be get at this as a spiritual only presence is the aim of religion, to grow into harmony with its eternal nature of right, love, strength and purity is not enough; that prepares a number the aim of souls for heavenethics, but leaves to enjoy and mould ourselves into the earth very much where it was. Neither harmony of its eternal beauty and delight is a compromise the way aim and consummation of salvation."The world knows three kinds our aesthetic need and nature, to know and to be according to its eternal principles of revolution. The material has strong results, truth is the moral end of science and intellectual are infinitely larger in their scope philosophy and richer of all our insistent drive towards knowledge.<ref>http://incarnateword.in their fruits/cwsa/25/the-suprarational-ultimate-of-life#p1</ref><center>~</center>Religion, but however imperfect, has the spiritual are secret of that mastery; religion can conquer the great sowingsnatural instincts and desires of man, metaphysics can only convince him logically that they ought to be conquered—an immense difference."If For this reason philosophy has never been able to satisfy any except the intellectual few and was even for a time relegated to oblivion by the triple change could coincide in imperious contempt of Science which thought that it had discovered a perfect correspondencecomplete solution of the Universe, a faultless work would be done; but the mind truth and body a law of life independent of mankind cannot hold perfectly a strong spiritual inrush: most is spilt, much religion and yet able to supersede religion in its peculiar province of reaching & regulating the rest is corruptedsources of conduct and leading mankind in its evolution. Many intellectual But it has now become increasingly clear that Science has failed to substantiate its claims, and that a belief in evolution or the supremacy of physical upturnings laws or the subjection of our soil are needed the ephemeral individual to work out a little result from a large spiritual sowing. == Necessity the interests of Religion ==...spiritual religion of humanity the slightly less ephemeral race is no substitute for a belief in Christ or Buddha, for the hope law of Divine Love or the futuretrust in Divine Power & Providence. spiritual life insists on freedom … Religion which satisfies the heart and variation controls conduct, cannot in its self-expression average conceptions permanently satisfy the reason and means thus exposes itself to gradual loss of developmentempire over the mind. <ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2518/summaryan-incomplete-work-of-andvedantic-conclusionexegesis#p11p19</ref>… they have been clinging to a <center>~</center>...the aim of religion, it : its purpose is because to link the human with the Divine and in so doing sublimate the thought and life and flesh so that religion has helped them in one way they may admit the rule of the soul and spirit. But this knowledge must be something more than a creed or another, it has helped in them precisely something which wanted to have a certitude, not to have to search but to mystic revelation; his thinking mind must be able to rest on something solid without being responsible for accept it, to correlate it with the principle of things and the observed truth of the solidity—somebody else universe: this is responsible (''Mother laughs'') the work of philosophy, and in the field of the truth of the spirit it goes on like thatcan only be done by a spiritual philosophy, whether intellectual in its method or intuitive. It But all knowledge and endeavour can reach its fruition only if it is turned into experience and has become a lack part of compassion the consciousness and its established operations; in the spiritual field all this religious, occult or philosophical knowledge and endeavour must, to want to pull them out bear fruition, end in an opening up of the spiritual consciousness, in experiences that found and continually heighten, expand and enrich that consciousness and in the building of that—it a life and action that is better to leave them where they are. I never dispute in conformity with someone who has a faith—let him keep his faith! I take care not to tell him anything that might shake his faith, because it would not be good—they are not capable the truth of the spirit: this is the work of having anotherspiritual realisation and experience.<ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/1522/7the-septemberevolution-1963of-the-spiritual-man#p19p12</ref><center>~</center>==Why Morality?==Its true aim In the universe there is a preparation constant relation of Oneness and Multiplicity. This expresses itself as the universal Personality and the many Persons, and both between the One and the Many and among the Many themselves there is the possibility of an infinite variety of relations. These relations are determined by the play of the divine existence, the Lord, entering into His manifested habitations. They exist at first as conscious relations between individual souls; they are then taken up by them and purification used as a means of entering into conscious relation with the soul to fit it for One. It is this entering into various relations with the One which is the presence object and function of GodReligion. All religions are justified by this essential necessity; all express one Truth in various ways and move by various paths to one goal.<ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsa/1817/an-incomplete-work-of-vedanticthe-exegesislord#p7p11</ref><center>~</center>The deepest heart, the inmost essence of religion, apart from its outward machinery of creed, cult, ceremony and symbol, is the search for God and the finding of God. Its aspiration is to discover the Infinite, the Absolute, the One, the Divine, who is all these things and yet no abstraction but a Being. Its work is a sincere living out of the true and intimate relations between man and God, relations of unity, relations of difference, relations of an illuminated knowledge, an ecstatic love and delight, an absolute surrender and service, a casting of every part of our existence out of its normal status into an uprush of man towards the Divine and a descent of the Divine into man.

A religion of humanity may be either an intellectual and sentimental ideal, a living dogma with intellectual, psychological and practical effects, or else a spiritual aspiration and rule of living, partly the sign, partly the cause of a change of soul in humanityThe religion of humanity was mind-born in the eighteenth century, the mānasa putra of the rationalist thinkers who brought it forward as a substitute for the formal spiritualism of ecclesiastical Christianity. It tried =How to give itself a body in Positivism, which was an attempt to formulate the dogmas of this religion, but on too heavily and severely rationalistic a basis for acceptance even by an Age of Reason. Humanitarianism has been its most prominent emotional result. Philanthropy, social service and other kindred activities have been its outward expression of good works. Democracy, socialism, pacificism are to a great extent its by-products or at least owe much of their vigour to its inner presence.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/the-religion-of-humanity#p1</ref>Ascend Beyond Religions?=

The fundamental idea is that mankind is the godhead attitude to be worshipped and served by man and that the respect, the service, the progress of the human being and human life taken towards religionsA benevolent goodwill towards all worshippers.An enlightened indifference towards all religions.All religions are the chief duty and the chief aim partial approximations of the human spiritone sole Truth that is far above them. <ref>https://incarnateword. No other idolin/cwm/15/religion#p21, neither the nationp22, the Statep23, the family nor anything else ought p24</ref><center>~</center>If you want to take its place; they are only worthy of respect so far as they are images of appraise the human spirit and enshrine its presence and aid its self-manifestation...Science even, though it is one real value of the chief modern idols.Man must be sacred religion in which you are born or brought up or to man regardless have a correct perspective of all distinctions of race, creed, colour, nationality, status, political the country or social advancement. The body of man is society to be respected, made immune from violence and outrage, fortified which you belong by science against disease and preventable death. The life of man is to be held sacred, preserved, strengthened, ennobledbirth, uplifted. The heart of man is if you want to be held sacred also, given scope, protected from violation, from suppression, from mechanisation, freed from belittling influences. The mind of man find out how relative a thing the particular environment is into which you happened to be released from all bonds, allowed freedom thrown and range and opportunityconfined, given all its means of self-training you have only to go round the earth and self-development see that what you think good is looked upon as bad elsewhere and organised what is considered as bad in one place is welcomed as good in the play of its powers for the service of humanity.<ref>http://incarnatewordanother.in/cwsa/25/the-religion-of-humanity#p2</ref>

...religion of humanity has exercised and how fruitful a work it has done. It accomplished rapidly many things which orthodox religion failed to do effectively, largely because it acted as a constant intellectual and critical solvent, Things have an unsparing assailant of the thing that is inner value and an unflinching champion of the thing become real to be, faithful always to the future, while orthodox religion allied itself with you only when you have acquired them by the powers exercise of the presentyour free choice, even of the past, bound itself by its pact with them and could act only at best as a moderating but not as a reforming forcewhen they have been imposed upon you. Faith, even an intellectual faith, must always If you want to be a worker sure of miracles, and this your religion of humanity, even without taking bodily shape or a compelling form or a visible means of self-effectuation, was yet able to effect comparatively much of what you must choose it set out ; if you want to do. It to some degree humanised society, humanised law and punishment, humanised the outlook be sure of man on manyour country, abolished legalised torture and the cruder forms of slavery, raised those who were depressed and fallen, gave large hopes you must choose it; if you want to humanity, stimulated philanthropy and charity and the service be sure of mankindyour family, encouraged everywhere the desire of freedom, put a curb on oppression and greatly minimised its more brutal expressionseven that you must choose. It gave new conceptions of the dignity of the human being and opened new ideas and new vistas of his educationIf you accept without question what has been given you by Chance, self-development and potentiality. It spread enlightenment; you can never be sure whether it made man feel more his responsibility is good or bad for the progress and happiness of the race; you, whether it raised is the average self-respect true thing for your life. Step back from all that forms your natural environment or inheritance, made up and capacity of mankindforced upon you by Nature's blind mechanical process; it gave hope to the serf, self-assertion to the downtrodden draw within and made the labourer in his manhood the potential equal of the rich look quietly and powerfuldispassionately at things.<ref>http://incarnatewordAppraise them, choose freely.in/cwsa/25/the-religion-of-humanity#p3</ref>=How?===How to Achieve Morality?==The sense-obscured, limited and desire-driven individual self must raise itself out of the dark pit of sense-obsession into the clear air of the spirit, must disembarrass itself of servile bondage to bodily, emotional & intellectual selfishness and assume the freedom & royalty of universal love and beneficence, must expand itself from the narrow, petty, inefficient ego till it becomes commensurate Then you can say with the infinitean inner truth, all-powerful, omnipresent Self of All; then "This is its aim of existence attainedmy family, then is its pilgrimage ended. This may be done by realising the Eternal in oneself by knowledgethis my country, by realising oneself in Him by Love as God the Beloved, or by realising Him as the Lord of all in His universe and all its creatures by worksthis my religion. This realisation is the true crown of any ethical system. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/18/an-incomplete-work-of-vedantic-exegesis#p6</ref>"

===Morality If we go a little way within ourselves, we shall discover that there is in Hinduism===For whether we hold each of us a consciousness that has been living throughout the aim ages and manifesting in a multitude of morality forms. Each of us has been born in many different countries, belonged to be many different nations, followed many different religions. Why must we accept the last one as the placing best? The experiences gathered by us in all these many lives in different countries and varying religions, are stored up in that inner continuity of oneself in harmony with eternal lawsour consciousness which persists through all births. There are multiple personalities there created by these past experiences, or the fulfilment and when we become aware of man's naturethis multitude within us, or the natural evolution it becomes impossible to speak of one particular form of man in truth as the direction of his highest facultiesonly truth, one country as our only country, Hinduism will not object but it insists that one religion as the Law with which man must put himself only true religion. There are people who have been born into relation is one country, although the Eternal leading elements of their consciousness obviously belong to another. I have met some born in Europe who were evidently Indians; I have met others born in Indian bodies who were as evidently Europeans. In Japan I have met some who were Indian, others who were European. And if any of them goes to the country or enters into the universecivilisation to which he has affinity, that he finds himself there perfectly at home. <ref>https://incarnateword.in this permanent /cwm/03/9-june-1929#p9,p10,p11</ref><center>~</center>Let us take an altogether ordinary example which is very partial and stable Truth man's nature fulfils itself out of the transient seemings of his daily existence very superficial. You are born in India. Being born in India you are born with a certain religious and that philosophic attitude. But if for some reason or other you want to free yourself from this goal his evolution moves. This consummation may be reached by ethical means through a certain manner of action atavism and a certain spirit in action which is influence, if you begin to follow, study, practise the essence religion or philosophy of Karmamargaanother country, you can change the Way conditions of Worksyour inner development. It is a little more difficult, that is, it asks for a greater effort for liberation, but it is very far from being impossible. In fact there are many people who do it, one who love to free themselves from what comes to them from their present birth; by some sort of special taste they like to seek elsewhere what they think they won't be able to find at home. And in this way you change the three ways by which the spirit consequences of man may see, embrace & become Godyour birth completely. <ref>httpshttp://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/1807/an-incomplete-work16-ofnovember-vedantic-exegesis1955#p6p69</ref><center>~</center>''Q. Mother, here Sri Aurobindo writes:A great thing would be done if all these God-visions could embrace and cast themselves into each other; but intellectual dogma and cult-egoism stand in the way.''

===Laws of Karmamarga===The first law of Karmamarga ''How is it possible to give up the natural desire for the fruits of our works and surrender all we do, think, feel and are fuse into the keeping of the Eternal, and the second is to identify ourself with one all creatures in the Universe both individually and collectively, realising our larger Self in others. These two laws of action together make what is called Karmayoga or the putting of ourselves into relation with that which is Eternal by means of and in our works. Before, then, we can understand what Karmayoga is, we must understand entirely and utterly what is this Eternal Being with whom we must put ourselves in relation and what are His relations with our self, with the phenomena of the Universe and with the creatures that people it. The Vedantic knowledge of Brahman, the Vedantic Cosmogony, the Vedantic explanation of the coexistence of Brahman with the Universe, the Eternal with the Transient, the Transcendent with the Phenomenal, the One with the Many, are what we have first to study. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/18/an-incomplete-work-of-vedantic-exegesis#p7</ref>these views?''

==Religion ''A:'' It is not in the mental consciousness that these things can be harmonised and synthesised. For this it is necessary to rise above and Its Counterparts=====Religionfind the idea behind the thought. Sri Aurobindo shows here, for example, what each of these religions represents in human effort,Science aspiration and Philosophy===A religion therefore realisation. Instead of taking these religions in their outward forms which claims to be eternalare precisely dogmas and intellectual conceptions, if we take them in their spirit, in the principle they represent, must not there is no difficulty in unifying them. They are simply different aspects of human progress which complete each other perfectly well and should be content united with satisfying the heart many others yet to form a more total and imaginationmore complete progress, a more perfect understanding of life, it must answer a more integral approach to the satisfaction of the intellect the questions with which philosophy is preoccupiedDivine. A philosophy And even this unification which professes already demands a return to explain the world-problem once for allSpirit behind things, must is not be satisfied with logical consistency and comprehensivenessenough; it must like Science base its conclusions not merely on speculative logic, but on actual observation and its truths there must always be capable added to it a vision of verification by experiment so that they may be not merely conceivable truth but ascertained truth; it must like religion seize on the heart & imagination and without sacrificing intellectual convincingnessfuture, comprehensiveness & accuracy impregnate with itself the springs of human activity; and it must have goal towards which humanity is moving, the power future realisation of bringing the human self into direct touch with world, that last "spiritual revolution" Sri Aurobindo speaks about, which will open a new age, that is, the Eternalsupramental revolution.

The Vedantic religion claims to be In the eternal religion because it satisfies supramental consciousness all these demandsthings are no longer contradictory or exclusive. They all become complementary. It is intellectually comprehensive in its explanation of only the mental form which divides. What this mental form represents should be united to what all the problems that perplex the human mind; it brings the contradictions of the world into harmony by a single luminous law of being; it has developed other mental forms represent in Yoga order to make a process of spiritual experience by which its assertions can be tested and confirmed; the law of being it has discovered seizes not only on the intellect but on the deepest emotions of man and calls into activity his highest ethical instincts; and its harmonious whole aim and end . And that is to bring the individual self into essential difference between a perfect religion and intimate union with the Eternal.<ref>http://incarnatewordtrue spiritual life.in/cwsa/18/an-incomplete-work-of-vedantic-exegesis#p27</ref>

===What Humans Need to do About Religion?===exists almost exclusively in its forms, its cults, in a certain set of ideas, and it becomes great only through the spirituality of a few exceptional individuals, whereas true spiritual life, and above all what the supramental realisation will be, is independent of every precise, intellectual form, every limited form of life. It embraces all possibilities and manifestations and makes them the expression, the vehicle of a higher and more universal truth.

We need A new religion would not for instance lay only be useless but very harmful. It is a new life which must be created; it is a too excessive stress on the superstitions, aberrations, violences, crimes even, new consciousness which Churches must be expressed. This is something beyond intellectual limits and cults and creeds have favoured, admitted, sanctioned, supported or exploited for their own benefit, the mere hostile enumeration of mental formulae. It is a living truth which might lead one to echo the cry of the atheistic Roman poet, "To such a mass of ills could religion persuade mankindmust manifest."Christianity has left furrowed across the mediaeval history of Europe almost from the days of Constantine, Everything in its essence and its first hour of secular triumphtruth should be included in this realisation. This realisation must be an expression as total, down to very recent timesas complete, or the sanguinary comment which such an institution as the Inquisition affords on the claim universal as possible of religion to be the directing light divine reality. Only that can save humanity and regulating power in ethics and society, or religious wars and wide-spread State persecutions on its claim to guide the political life of mankindworld. But we must observe That is the root great spiritual revolution of this evil, which is not in true religion itself, but in its infrarational parts, not in spiritual faith and aspiration, but in our ignorant human confusion of religion with a particular creed, sect, cult, religious society or ChurchSri Aurobindo speaks. So strong And this is the human tendency to this error that even the old tolerant Paganism slew Socrates in the name of religion and morality, feebly persecuted non-national faiths like the cult of Isis or the cult of Mithra and more vigorously what it conceived he wanted us to be the subversive and anti-social religion of the early Christians; and even in still more fundamentally tolerant Hinduism with all its spiritual broadness and enlightenment it led at one time to the milder mutual hatred and occasional though brief-lived persecution of Buddhist, Jain, Shaiva, Vaishnavarealise. ..<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/religion-as-the-law-of-life#p4</ref>

...in order to accomplish all its future this idea and religion the key of humanity has the entire problem not only for the individual but also for the collectivity:"All would change if man could once consent to make itself more explicitbe spiritualised; but his nature, insistent mental and categorically imperative. For otherwise it can only work with clarity in the minds of the few vital and with the mass it will be only a modifying influencephysical, but will not be is rebellious to the rule of human lifehigher law. He loves his imperfection."<ref>https://incarnateword. the enemy in/cwm/09/3-april-1957#p9,p10,p11,p12,p13,p14,p15,p18</ref><center>~</center>A revolutionary reconstruction of all humanityreligion, philosophy,real religionscience, art and society is human egoism, the egoism last inevitable outcome. It proceeds at first by the light of the individualmind and reason, the egoism by its demand on life and its experience of class and nation. life; but it must go from the love of mankind, not individual to recognise a real unity between man and manthe universal. For that essentially must be the aim effort of the religion individual soon shows him that he cannot securely discover the truth and law of humanity, as his own being without discovering some universal law and truth to which he can relate it must be . Of the earthly aim of universe he is a part; in all human religion, love, mutual recognition of human brotherhoodbut his deepest spirit he is its subject, a living sense of human oneness and practice of human oneness small cell in thought, feeling that tremendous organic mass: his substance is drawn from its substance and life, by the ideal which was expressed first some thousands law of years ago in its life the ancient Vedic hymn and must always remain the highest injunction law of the Spirit within us to human his life upon earthis determined and governed. With that done, From a new view and knowledge of the one necessary psychological change will have been effected without which no formal world must proceed his new view and mechanicalknowledge of him self, no political of his power and administrative unity can be real capacity and secure. If it is done, that outward unification may not even be indispensable or, if indispensable, it will come about naturally, notlimitations, as now it seems likely to be, by catastrophic means, but by the demand of his claim on existence and the human mind, high road and will be held secure by an essential need the distant or immediate goal of our perfected his individual and developed human naturesocial destiny.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/the-religioncoming-of-humanitythe-subjective-age#p4p3</ref><center>~</center>...brotherhood the real key to the triple gospel of the idea of humanity. The union of liberty sense-obscured, limited and equality can only be achieved by the power desire-driven individual self must raise itself out of human brotherhood and it cannot be founded on anything else. But brotherhood exists only in the soul and by the soul. When the soul claims freedom, it is the freedom dark pit of its selfsense-development, obsession into the self-development clear air of the divine in man in all his being. When it claims equalityspirit, must disembarrass itself of servile bondage to bodily, what it is claiming is that freedom equally for all emotional & intellectual selfishness and assume the recognition freedom & royalty of universal love and beneficence, must expand itself from the same soulnarrow, the same godhead in all human beings. When it strives for brotherhoodpetty, inefficient ego till it is founding that equal freedom of self-development on a common aim, a common life, a unity of mind and feeling founded upon becomes commensurate with the recognition of this inner spiritual unity.freedominfinite, equalityall-powerful, unity are the eternal attributes omnipresent Self of the Spirit. It All; then is the practical recognition its aim of this truthexistence attained, it then is its pilgrimage ended. This may be done by realising the awakening of the soul Eternal in oneself by knowledge, by realising oneself in man and Him by Love as God the attempt to get him to live from his soul and not from his ego which is Beloved, or by realising Him as the inner meaning Lord of religion, all in His universe and it all its creatures by works. This realisation is that to which the religion true crown of humanity also must arrive before it can fulfil itself in the life of the raceany ethical system.<ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2518/thean-incomplete-religionwork-of-humanityvedantic-exegesis#p7p6</ref><center>~</center> The unaided intellectual reason faced with It would seem at first sight that since man is pre-eminently the mental being, the development of the mental faculties and the phenomena richness of the religious mental life is naturally apt to adopt one should be his highest aim,—his preoccupying aim, even, as soon as he has got rid of two attitudes, both the obsession of them shallow in the extreme, hastily presumptuous life and body and erroneous. Either it views provided for the whole thing as a mass indispensable satisfaction of superstitionthe gross needs which our physical and animal nature imposes on us. Knowledge, science, art, thought, ethics, philosophy, religion, this is man's real business, these are his true affairs. To be is for him not merely to be born, grow up, marry, get his livelihood, support a mystical nonsensefamily and then die,—the vital and physical life, a farrago human edition of ignorant barbaric survivalsthe animal round,—that was a human enlargement of the extreme spirit little animal sector and arc of the rationalist now happilydivine circle; rather to become and grow mentally and live with knowledge and power within himself as well as from within outward is his manhood. But there is here a double motive of Nature, though an insistent duality in her human purpose. Man is here to learn from her how to control and create; but she evidently means him not deadonly to control, yet much weakened create and constantly re-create in new and almost moribundbetter forms himself, his own inner existence,—or it patronises religionhis mentality, tries but also to control and re-create correspondingly his environment. He has to explain its originsturn Mind not only on itself, to get rid but on Life and Matter and the material existence; that is very clear not only from the law and nature of it by the process terrestrial evolution, but from his own past and present history. And there comes from the observation of explaining it away; or it labours gently or forcefully these conditions and of his highest aspirations and impulses the question whether he is not intended, not only to expand inwardly and outwardly, but to reject or correct its superstitionsgrow upward, wonderfully exceeding himself as he has wonderfully exceeded his animal beginnings, into something more than mental, cruditiesmore than human, absurditiesinto a being spiritual and divine. Even if he cannot do that, yet he may have to purify open his mind to what is beyond it and to govern his life more and more by the light and power that he receives from something greater than himself. Man's consciousness of the divine within himself and the world is the supreme fact of his existence and to grow into an abstract nothingness that may very well be the intention of his nature. In any case the fullness of Life is his evident object, the widest life and the highest life possible to him, whether that be a complete humanity or persuade it to purify itself in a new and divine race. We must recognise both his need of integrality and his impulse of self-exceeding if we would fix rightly the light meaning of his individual existence and the reasoning intelligenceperfect aim and norm of his society.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/reasoncivilisation-and-religionculture#p7p2</ref><center>~</center>...suprarational life in which religious aspiration finds entirely what it seeks, so too there is also the infrarational life of the instinctstrue that religion when it identifies itself only with a creed, impulsesa cult, sensationsa Church, crude emotionsa system of ceremonial forms, vital activities from which all may well become a retarding force and there may therefore arise a necessity for the human aspiration takes spirit to reject its beginningcontrol over the varied activities of life.<ref>http://incarnatewordThere are two aspects of religion, true religion and religionism.in/cwsa/25/reason-and-True religion is spiritual religion#p12</ref> The widest spirituality does not exclude or discourage any essential human activity or faculty, but works rather that which seeks to lift all live in the spirit, in what is beyond the intellect, beyond the aesthetic and ethical and practical being of them up out of their imperfection man, and groping ignorance, transforms them by its touch to inform and makes them the instruments govern these members of our being by the higher light, power and joy law of the divine being and spirit. Religionism, on the divine nature.<ref>http://incarnateword.contrary, entrenches itself in/cwsa/25/reasonsome narrow pietistic exaltation of the lower members or lays exclusive stress on intellectual dogmas, forms and ceremonies, on some fixed and rigid moral code, on some religio-andpolitical or religio-social system. Not that these things are altogether negligible or that they must be unworthy or unnecessary or that a spiritual religion#p13</ref> ===Religion need disdain the aid of Humanityforms, conclusion===ceremonies, creeds or systems.On the contrary, they are needed by man because the lower members have to be exalted and raised before they can be fully spiritualised, before they can directly feel the spirit and obey its law..while it An intellectual formula is possible to construct often needed by the thinking and reasoning mind, a form or ceremony by the aesthetic temperament or other parts of the infrarational being, a precarious and quite mechanical unity set moral code by political man’s vital nature in their turn towards the inner life. But these things are aids and administrative meanssupports, not the unity of essence; precisely because they belong to the human racerational and infrarational parts, they can be nothing more and, if too blindly insisted on, may even if achievedhamper the suprarational light. Such as they are, can only they have to be secured offered to man and can only used by him, but not to be made real if imposed on him as his sole law by a forced and inflexible domination. In the religion use of them toleration and free permission of humanity, variation is the first rule which should be observed. The spiritual essence of religion is at present alone the highest active ideal of mankindone thing supremely needful, spiritualises itself the thing to which we have always to hold and becomes the general inner law of human lifesubordinate to it every other element or motive.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/summaryreligion-andas-the-law-of-conclusionlife#p1p6</ref><center>~</center>A spiritual religion of humanity is the hope of the future. By this is not meant what is ordinarily called a universal religion, a system, a thing of creed and intellectual belief and dogma and outward rite. Mankind has tried unity by that means; it has failed and deserved to fail, because there can be no universal religious system, one in mental creed and vital form. The inner spirit is indeed one, but more than any other the spiritual life insists on freedom and variation in its self-expression and means of development.A religion of humanity means the growing realisation that there is a secret Spirit, a divine Reality, in which we are all one, that humanity is its highest present vehicle on earth, that the human race and the human being are the means by which it will progressively reveal itself here. It implies a growing attempt to live out this knowledge and bring about a kingdom of this divine Spirit upon earth. By its growth within us oneness with our fellow-men will become the leading principle of all our life, not merely a principle of cooperation but a deeper brotherhood, a real and an inner sense of unity and equality and a common life. There must be the realisation by the individual that only in the life of his fellow-men is his own life complete. There must be the realisation by the race that only on the free and full life of the individual can its own perfection and permanent happiness be founded. There must be too a discipline and a way of salvation in accordance with this religion, that is to say, a means by which it can be developed by each man within himself, so that it may be developed in the life of the race. … But if it is at all a truth of our being, then it must be the truth to which all is moving and in it must be found the means of a fundamental, an inner, a complete, a real human unity which would be the one secure base of a unification of human life. A spiritual oneness which would create a psychological oneness not dependent upon any intellectual or outward uniformity and compel a oneness of life not bound up with its mechanical means of unification, but ready always to enrich its secure unity by a free inner variation and a freely varied outer self-expression, this would be the basis for a higher type of human existence.

Democracy ===Religion and Socialism are, as we have already said, the sign that that self-consciousness is beginning to ripen into fullness.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/the-drive-towards-legislative-and-social-centralisation-and-uniformity#p8</ref>Spirituality===

==Failure of Religion==Religion itself had become fixed in dogmas and ceremonies''Q. Sweet Mother, sects and churches and had lost for what is the most part, except for a few individuals, direct contact with the living founts of spirituality. A period of negation was necessary. They had to be driven back and in upon themselves, nearer to their own eternal sources.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/civilisation-difference between yoga and-barbarism#p8</ref>religion?''

false socialisation of religion has been always ''A:''Ah! my child... it is as though you were asking me the chief cause of its failure to regenerate mankind - It saddled upon the religious life of man a Church, a priesthood and difference between a mass of ceremonies dog 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.cat!

...prominent aim Imagine someone who, in some way or other, has heard of religion rather than any spiritual growth something like the Divine or has a personal feeling that something of the individual kind exists, and begins to make all sorts of efforts: efforts of will, of discipline, efforts of concentration, all sorts of efforts to find this Divine, to discover what He is, to become acquainted with Him and the raceunite with Him.<ref>http://incarnatewordThen this person is doing yoga.in/cwsa/25/the-spiritual-aim-and-life#p5,p6</ref>

That is why Now, if this person has noted down all the religionsprocesses he has used and constructs a fixed system, however beautiful they may beand sets up all that he has discovered as absolute laws―for example, he says: the Divine is like this, have always led man to find the worst excesses. All the crimesDivine you must do this, make this particular gesture, take this attitude, the horrors perpetrated in the name of religion are among the darkest stains on human historyperform this ceremony, and simply because of you must admit that this little initial error: wanting what is true for one individual to be true for the mass or collectivity.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/09/24-september-1958#p16</ref>===Duties of a Man===Each part of man's being has its own dharma which it must follow and will follow in the endtruth, put on it what fetters you please. The dharma of sciencemust say, thought and philosophy "I accept that this is to seek for truth by the intellect dispassionately, without prepossession Truth and prejudgment, with no other first propositions than the law of thought and observation itself imposes. Science and philosophy are not bound I fully adhere to square their observations it; and conclusions with any current ideas of religious dogma or ethical rule or aesthetic prejudice. In your method is the endonly right one, the only one which exists"― if left free in their actionall that is written down, organised, they will find the unity of Truth with Good arranged into fixed laws and Beauty and God and give these ceremonies, it becomes 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.<ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/2508/the23-spiritualmay-aim-and-life1956#p9p1,p2,p4,p5</ref><center>~</center>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.

It would seem at first sight that since man is pre-eminently the mental being, the development of the mental faculties and the richness of the mental life should be his highest aim,—his preoccupying aim, even, as soon as he has got rid of the obsession of the life and body and provided for the indispensable satisfaction of the gross needs which our physical and animal nature imposes on us. Knowledge, science, art, thought, ethics, philosophy, religion, this is man's real business, these are his true affairs. To be is for him not merely to be born, grow up, marry, get his livelihood, support a family and then die,—the vital and physical life, a human edition of the animal round, a human enlargement of the little animal sector and arc of the divine circle; rather to become and grow mentally and live with knowledge and power within himself as well as from within outward is his manhood. But there is here a double motive of Nature, an insistent duality in her human purpose. Man is here to learn from her how to control and create; but she evidently means him not only to control, create and constantly re-create in new and better forms himself, his own inner existence, his mentality, but also to control and re-create correspondingly his environment. He has to turn Mind not only on itself, but on Life and Matter and the material existence; that is very clear not only from the law and nature of the terrestrial evolution, but from his own past and present history. And there comes from the observation of these conditions and of his highest aspirations and impulses the question whether he is not intended, not only to expand inwardly and outwardly, but to grow upward, wonderfully exceeding himself as he has wonderfully exceeded his animal beginnings, into something more than mental, more than human, into a being spiritual and divine. Even if he cannot do that, yet he may have to open his mind to what is beyond it and to govern his life more and more by the light and power that he receives from something greater than himself. Man's consciousness of the divine within himself and the world is the supreme fact The time of his existence and to grow into that may very well be the intention of his nature. In any case the fullness of Life religions is his evident object, the widest life and the highest life possible to him, whether that be a complete humanity or a new and divine race. We must recognise both his need of integrality and his impulse of self-exceeding if we would fix rightly the meaning of his individual existence and the perfect aim and norm of his society.<ref>http://incarnatewordover.in/cwsa/25/civilisation-and-culture#p2</ref>

It is The world knows three kinds of revolution. The material has strong results, the truth that all active being is a seeking for God, a seeking for some highest self and deepest Reality secret within, behind moral and above ourselves and things, a seeking for the hidden Divinity: the truth which we glimpse through religion, lies concealed behind all life; it is the great secret of life, that which it is intellectual are infinitely larger in labour to discover their scope and to make real to its self-knowledge.<ref>http://incarnateword.richer in/cwsa/25/the-suprarational-good#p1</ref> If mankind is to be spiritualisedtheir fruits, it must first in but the mass cease to be spiritual are the material or the vital man and become the psychic and the true mental beinggreat sowings. It may be questioned whether such a mass progress or conversion is possible; but if it is not, then the spiritualisation of mankind as a whole is a chimera.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/conditions-for-the-coming-of-a-spiritual-age#p8</ref>

A revolutionary reconstruction All religions have saved a number of religion, philosophy, sciencesouls, art and society is the last inevitable outcome. It proceeds at first by the light of the individual mind and reason, by its demand on life and its experience of life; but it must go from the individual none yet has been able to the universalspiritualise mankind. For the effort of the individual soon shows him that he cannot securely discover the truth there is needed not cult and law of his own being without discovering some universal law and truth to which he can relate it. Of the universe he is a part; in all creed, but his deepest spirit he is its subject, a small cell in that tremendous organic mass: his substance is drawn from its substance sustained and by the law of its life the law of his life is determined and governed. From a new view and knowledge of the world must proceed his new view and knowledge of him all-comprehending effort at spiritual self, of his power and capacity and limitations, of his claim on existence and the high road and the distant or immediate goal of his individual and social destiny.<ref>http://incarnateword-evolution.in/cwsa/25/the-coming-of-the-subjective-age#p3</ref>

===Religion in Ethical Man and Aesthetic ManDependence on Outer Forms===There is in our mentality a side of will, conduct, character which creates the ethical man; there is another side of sensibility to the beautiful,—understanding beauty in no narrow or hyper-artistic sense,—which creates the artistic and aesthetic man. Therefore there can be such a thing as a predominantly or even exclusively ethical culture; there can be too, evidently, a predominantly or even exclusively aesthetic culture. There are at once created two conflicting ideals which must naturally stand opposed and look askance at each other with a mutual distrust or even reprobation. The aesthetic man tends to be impatient of the ethical rule; he feels it to be a barrier to his aesthetic freedom and an oppression on the play of his artistic sense and his artistic faculty; he is naturally hedonistic,—for beauty and delight are inseparable powers,—and the ethical rule tramples on pleasure, even very often on quite innocent pleasures, and tries to put a strait waistcoat on the human impulse to delight. He may accept the ethical rule when it makes itself beautiful or even seize on it as one of his instruments for creating beauty, but only when he can subordinate it to the aesthetic principle of his nature,—just as he is often drawn to religion by its side of beauty, pomp, magnificent ritual, emotional satisfaction, repose or poetic ideality and aspiration,—we might almost say, by the hedonistic aspects of religion. Even when fully accepted, it is not for their own sake that he accepts them. The ethical man repays this natural repulsion with interest. He tends to distrust art and the aesthetic sense as something lax and emollient, something in its nature undisciplined and by its attractive appeals to the passions and emotions destructive of a high and strict self-control. He sees that it is hedonistic and he finds that the hedonistic impulse is non-moral and often immoral. It is difficult for him to see how the indulgence of the aesthetic impulse beyond a very narrow and carefully guarded limit can be combined with a strict ethical life. He evolves the puritan who objects to pleasure on principle; not only in his extremes—and a predominant impulse tends to become absorbing and leads towards extremes—but in the core of his temperament he remains fundamentally the puritan. The misunderstanding between these two sides of our nature is an inevitable circumstance of our human growth which must try them to their fullest separate possibilities and experiment in extremes in order that it may understand the whole range of its capacities.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/aesthetic-and-ethical-culture#p4</ref>

What The spiritual spirit is farther needed not contrary to a religious feeling of adoration, devotion and consecration. But what is wrong in the religions is the awakening fixity of the mind clinging to one formula as an exclusive truth. One must always remember that formulas are only a mental expression of the truth and that this truth can always be expressed in many other ways. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/15/religion#p3</ref><center>~</center>Religion itself had become fixed in dogmas and ceremonies, sects and churches and had lost for the most part, except for a certain visionfew individuals, an insight direct contact with the living founts of spirituality. A period of negation was necessary. They had to be driven back and an intuitive response in upon themselves, nearer to their own eternal sources. Now that the soulstress of negation is past and they are raising their heads, we see them seeking for their own truth, reviving by virtue of a return upon themselves and a new self-discovery. Reason which studies <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/civilisation-and-barbarism#p8</ref><center>~</center>As for example, with all people brought up in a certain religion their experiences will always be coloured by this religion; and in fact, to reach the very source of the thing one must free oneself from outsidethe external formation.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/07/22-june-1955#p14</ref><center>~</center>Religion, cannot give this inner which ought to have led the way, but owing to its greater dependence on its external parts and its infrarational rather than its spiritual impulses has been as much, or even more intimate contact; it has , a sower of discord as a teacher of unity,—religion is beginning to aid itself by realise, a little dimly and ineffectively as yet, that spirituality is after all its own chief business and true aim and that it is also the common element and the common bond of all religions. As these influences grow and come more direct insight springing from and more consciously to cooperate with each other, it might be hoped that the soul itself necessary psychological modification will quietly, gradually, but still irresistibly and to call at every step on last with an increasing force of rapidity take place which can prepare a real and fundamental change in the intuitive mind to fill up the gap life of its own deficiencieshumanity.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/the-suprarational-beautyinternationalism#p7p5</ref><center>~</center>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.

In all the higher powers of his life man may be said to be seeking, blindly enough, for God''Q. To get at the Divine If someone follows a religion and Eternal in himself and the world and to harmonise them, to put his being and his life in tune with the Infinite reveals itself in these parts of his nature as his concealed aim and his destiny. He sets out to arrive at his highest and largest and most perfect selfhas a good capacity, and the moment can he at all touches upon it, this self in him appears to be one with some great Soul and Self of Truth go farther and Good and Beauty in the world to which we give the name of God. To get at this as a spiritual presence is the aim of religion, to grow into harmony reach identification with its eternal nature of right, love, strength and purity is the aim of ethics, to enjoy and mould ourselves into the harmony of its eternal beauty and delight is the aim and consummation of our aesthetic need and nature, to know and to be according to its eternal principles of truth is the end of science and philosophy and of all our insistent drive towards knowledge.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/the-suprarational-ultimate-of-life#p1</ref>Divine?''

===Society and Life===But all this seems to be something above our normal and usual being; it is something into which we strive to grow, but it does not seem to be the normal stuff, the natural being or atmosphere of the individual and the society in their ordinary consciousness and their daily life. That life is practical and not idealistic; it is concerned not with good, beauty, spiritual experience, the higher truth, but with interests, physical needs, desires, vital necessities. This is real to it, all the rest Religion is always a little shadowy; It accepts ethics as a bond and an influence, but it does not live for ethical good; its real gods are vital need and utility and the desires of the body. If it governs its life partly by ethical laws because otherwise vital need, desire, utility in seeking their own satisfaction through many egoistic individuals would clash among themselves and destroy their own aims, it does not feel called upon to make its life entirely ethical. It concerns itself still less with beauty; even if it admits things beautiful as an embellishment and an amusement, a satisfaction and pastime of the eye and ear and mind, nothing moves it imperatively to make its life a thing of beauty. It allows religion a fixed place and portion, on holy days, in the church or temple, at the end of life when age and the approach of death call the attention forcibly away from this life to other life, at fixed times in the week or the day when it thinks it right limitation for a moment to pause in the affairs of the world and remember God: but to make the whole of life a religion, a remembering of God and a seeking after him, is a thing that is not really done even in societies which like the Indian erect spirituality as their aim and principlespirit. It admits philosophy in a still more remote fashion; and if nowadays it eagerly seeks after science, that is because science helps prodigiously the satisfaction of its vital desires, needs and interests: but it does not turn to seek after an entirely scientific life any more than after an entirely ethical life. A more complete effort in any one of these directions it leaves to the individual, to the few, and to individuals of a special type, the saint, the ethical man, the artist, the thinker, the man of religion; it gives them a place, does some homage to them, assigns some room to the things they represent, but for itself it is content to follow mainly after its own inherent principle of vital satisfaction, vital necessity and utility, vital efficiency.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/the-suprarational-ultimate-of-life#p2</ref>

 Religion too by putting God far above in distant heavens made If a man too much of has a worm spiritual life independently of his mental formations and the earth little set limits in which he lives, then this spiritual life makes him, so to say, cross the religious principles and vile before enter something higher. But his Creator consecration must come from within and admitted only by a caprice of his favour to a doubtful salvation in superhuman worldsnot be formal. If it comes exclusively from the form, then the limitation is so great that he cannot go farther. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/2505/the2-unseenseptember-power1953#p10p5,p6,p7,p8</ref>== Practice of Ideal Religion==<center>~</center>It was necessary at one time to insist even exclusively on the The idea of individual salvation so that the sense of a Beyond might be driven into man's mentalityPersonal God is, however, as it was necessary at one time to insist on a heaven of joys for the virtuous and pious so that man might be drawn by that shining bait towards the practice of religion and the suppression of his unbridled animalitycontradiction in terms. But as the lures of earth have to be conqueredThis all religions confess, so also have but the lures of heaven. The lure of a pleasant Paradise of the rewards of virtue has been rejected next moment they nullify their confession by man; the Upanishads belittled it ages ago assuming in India and it is now no longer dominant in the mind of the people; the similar lure in popular Christianity and popular Islam has no meaning for the conscience of modern humanityHim a Personality. The lure of a release from birth and death and withdrawal from the cosmic labour must also Universal cannot be rejectedpersonal, as it was rejected by Mahayanist Buddhism which held compassion and helpfulness to be greater than Nirvana. As the virtues we practise must Omnipresent cannot be done without demand of earthly excluded from anything or heavenly reward, so creature in the salvation world He universally pervades and possesses. The moment we seek must be purely internal and impersonal; it must be the release from egoism, the union with the Divine, the realisation of our universality as well as our transcendenceattribute certain qualities to God, we limit Him and no salvation should be valued which takes us away from the love of God create a double principle in humanity and the help we can give to the world. If need be, it must be taught, "Better hell with the rest of our suffering brothers than a solitary salvation."<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/18/aan-incomplete-work-of-lastvedantic-wordexegesis#p10p1</ref> Thou shalt not be negligent of thy works unto the Gods or thy works unto the Fathers. Let thy father be unto thee as thy God and thy mother as thy Goddess whom thou adorest. Serve the Master as a God and as a God the stranger within thy dwelling. The works that are without blame before the people, thou shalt do these with diligence and no others. The deeds we have done that are good and righteous, thou shalt practise these as a religion and no others.<refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/18/taittiriya-upanishad#p92~</refcenter> 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 regard him with the inspiration Jews as a God of the heart Power and Might & the satisfaction of the emotional being, as in ordinary religionWrath and Justice, or by with the working of Moslems as God the observation Judge and Governor and the logical faculties as in ordinary Science or by intellectual revelation as Newton discovered gravitation or by spiritual intuition as in the methods Manager of the great founders of religion world or by a higher principle in us which sums up and yet transcends all these mighty channels of with the Jnanam Brahma. It is such early Christians as 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 God of reason and imaginationLove, seems, of yet all beings on earth, to be at the top. But above man's present position, above the heart agree in which he dwells & the imagination & reason to which he rises there opens out regarding Him as a wider atmosphere of lifePerson, definable, there shoots down on him a more full & burning splendour of strength & knowledgeimaginable, a more nectarous lustre of joy & beauty. For man limited in his heart is awake; His Nature by certain qualities though not limited in his reason & imaginationHis Powers, omniscient, half awakeomnipotent, not omnipresent & yet buddha, but in that higher principle he is asleep. It is to him by a state of sushuptimysterious paradox quite separate from His creatures and His world. Yet secretlyHe creates, judges, punishes, rewards, favours, condemns, subliminallyloves, unknown to the egoistic mind he takes from this slumber his waking thought & knowledgehates, though he is compelled by the limitations of mind to mistake & misuse it. For that slumber pleased, is angry, for all the real waking and our waking is world like a state man of dream unlimited powers, and delusion in which we use is indeed a distorted truth & establish Superior Man, a world shadow of false relations.Gita says, man''Yasyam jagrati bhutani sa nisha pashyato muneh''.In that which is night to all creatures, he who has mastered his own being is awake; that in which these creatures are awake, is night to s soul thrown out on the eye huge background of the awakened seerUniverse. The Vedantists call intellectual and moral difficulties of this principle by the name, vijnanamconception are well-known. An Omnipotent God of Love, an entire & pervading principle of knowledge which puts everything in its true light & its right relations. It is from vijnanam that Veda descends to us; the movement of this higher principle is the source spite of all internal revelation. It is glosses, remains inconsistent with the drishti of which the Veda is the resultanguish and misery, it is the sruti red slaughter and colossal sum of torture and multitudinous suffering which in its expression the Veda is, it pervades this world and is the smriti condition of the Rishi which gives to the intelligent part, the manishi in him a perfect account its continuance; an Omnipotent God of the vision Justice who created & inspired hearing of the seer in himcaused sin, the Kavi.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/17/part-ii-the-field-and-instruments-of-vedanta-1#p4</ref> For mankind although evolving towards vijnana yet dwells in punishes man for falling into the mind. traps He has to be fulfilled in mind before he can rise taking up mind with him into the vijnanamaya selfHimself set,—the mahan atma,—just as, in his animal state, he had to be fulfilled in body is an infinite & vitality before he could develop freely in mind. Thus it comes about that even when Veda manifests in the mental worldhuge inconsistency, it has although the higher & truer, to give an account insane contradiction in terms; a God of itself to the lower & more falliblewrath, to Sciencea jealous God, to Philosophy who favours & punishes according to Religion. It must answer their doubts & questionsHis caprice, it must satisfy all their right fumes over insults and permissible demands. For although from preens Himself at the ideal point sound of view it praise is an anomaly that the higher should be cross-questioned by the much lower, than the source better sort of truth by the propagators of half-truth men 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 endinferior, in self-mortification. Otherwise, we are in danger unworthy of becoming by a one-sided exaggeration self-injurers, self-slayers, atmaha, and incurring that condemnation to the sunless & gloomy states beyond adoration of which the Isha Upanishad speakssaints. For An omnipresent God cannot be separate from His world, an infinite God has expressed us cannot be limited in many principles & not oneTime or Space or qualities. He has ranged them one over Intellectually the other & commanded us not to destroy one in order to satisfy anotherwhole concept becomes incredible. Science, not to sanction internal civil war and perpetrate spiritual suicidePhilosophy, but to rise from one principle to the othergreat creeds which have set Knowledge as the means of salvation, taking it up have always been charged with us as we go, fulfilling atheism because they deny these conceptions of the lower first in itself and then in the higherDivine Nature. We have to dissociate our sense of being from body & vitality Science and become mind, to dissociate it from mind and become vijnanam, to dissociate it from vijnanam and become divine bliss, awareness Philosophy & 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 Knowledge take their revenge by their conditions, to become through them yet beyond them infinite, divine & universal. Destroy them we cannot without blotting out ourselves and entering into undermining the Sunyam Brahma; but we can maim ourselves in the world by faith of the attempt to destroy them. For thus are we made and we can be no other,—evam twayi nanyatheto'sti. "Thus is it believers in thee and it is not otherwise." Purnata, fullness is the true law ordinary religions through an exposure of our progression.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/17/part-ii-the-field-crude andsemi-instruments-savage nature of-vedanta-1#p5</ref>  ===How to Interpret Religion?=== ...if you seek the interpretation of your ideas which 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 has woven together 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 bizarre texture 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 clumsy paradoxes and dignified with the doorsteps name of the outer court of the templeGod. They had not show triumphantly that the adhikar to enter, because they came in a spirit ordinary conceptions of arrogance with preconceived ideas to teach & not God when analysed are incredible 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>  "Each religion has helped mankind. Paganism increased in man the light of beauty, the largeness and height of his life, his aim at a many-sided perfection; Christianity gave him some vision of divine love and charity; Buddhism has shown him a noble way to be wiser, gentlerintellect, purer; Judaism unsatisfactory and Islam how sometimes revolting to be religiously faithful in action and zealously devoted to God; Hinduism has opened to him the largest moral sense and profoundest spiritual possibilities. A great thing would be done , if all these God-visions could embrace and cast themselves into each other; but intellectual dogma and cult-egoism stand they succeed in one or two cases in satisfying the way. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/09/3-april-1957#p5</ref>  ===Religion Now===Now Religion is sattwic with a natural impulse towards lightheart, it cannot be tamasic, it can have no dealings with succeed only by magnificently ignoring the enemies claims 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 namereason.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/1718/thean-ishavasyopanishadincomplete-withwork-aof-commentaryvedantic-in-englishexegesis#p197p24</ref><center>~</center> ===Religion and Old Nations===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 always tends 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 make God in the spirit. Therefore the promise image of Srikrishna ever holds good; therefore the Adyashaktiman, 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 magnified and eternal Truthaggrandised image, but in expressing it exclusive of the other aspects, end 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 always a truth of love and light and mercygod with human qualities. He This is good and great and compassionate and Divine. And what makes it is He who will have the final victory.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/15/3-april-1962#p4</ref>   ===Religion and Spirituality===Religions are based on creeds which are spiritual experiences brought down possible for people to treat him as they would treat a level where human enemy. In some countries, when their god does not do what they become more easy to graspwant, but at they take him and throw him into the cost of their integral purity and truth.river!The time [Based on Aphorism 59 -One of religions is over.We have entered the age of universal spirituality, greatest comforts of spiritual experience in its initial purity.<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/15/religion#p29,p30,p31,p32</ref> ...it will be the age is that you can get hold of God" (God is still too religious) I have put "of the ONE"—because it will truly be the age of Unity.<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/15/religion#p33,p34</ref> ==Principal Means of Intellectual Knowledge==The three principal means of intellectual knowledge are anumana, pratyaksha sometimes and aptavakyagive him a satisfactory beating. Anumana, inference from data, depends for its value on People mock at the possession folly of the right data, on the right observation of the data including the drawing of the right analogies, the unerring perception of true identity & rejection of false identity, the just estimate of difference & contrast, and finally on the power of right reasoning from the right data. Pratyaksha is the process by which the things themselves about which we gather data savages who beat their gods when their prayers are brought into our kennot answered; aptavakya but it is evidence, the testimony of men mockers who have themselves been in possession of are the fools and the knowledge we seeksavages.]<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/1710/part-ii-theaphorism-instruments-and-field-of-vedanta59#p1,p3</ref> But the end of evolution is to liberate the permanent from the impermanent, the spiritual from the material, the Self from its bondage to the three gunas and the false conceptions which that bondage creates. This liberation or release must therefore be the final aim of religion and ethics, otherwise religion and ethics will be out of harmony with the truth of things and therefore false or imperfect. Religion and ethics must train the individual self in a man to discover its universality, to see himself in all creatures and all creatures in himself, and the ideal or ethically perfect man is the one who has attained to this vision and observes it habitually in his thoughts and actions as the one law of his life.<refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/17/book-iii#p3~</refcenter>  ===Ego and Religion===Throughout the human ages we seek an escape or a remedy, but all our solutions fail because either they seek escape from the results of ego by affirming the ego or else deny or unduly limit God's purpose in the ego. "Accept your limitations, work and enjoy as perfectly as you may within boundaries," is the creed of a practical Paganism. For a century or two it may serve man's need indifferently, but he is infinite and universal and after a time Nature in him heaves restlessly and strains out towards its element.

Asceticism digs deeper into the truth of things, "Compromise will not do" it cries; "flee utterly from the objects of desire, escape from the field of ego, shun the world." It is an escape, not a solution; God in man may admit escape for the few, but He denies it to the many, for He will not allow His purpose in life and world to be frustrated. Religion digs still deeper: “Replace many desires by one, drive out the desires of this miserable earth by the desire of God and of a future world not besieged by these unsatisfied yearnings.” But to postpone the problem to another life is not to solve it; and to desire God apart from life and not in life is to divide the unity of His being. He will indulge a few in that evasion, but not the mass of mankind; therefore the many have to return with hearts still hungry from the doors of the temple; therefore the successive moulds of religion fail, lose their virtue and are cast away and broken. For Truth is imperative and demands inexorably its satisfaction. And the truth is always this that man is universal being seeking an universal bliss and self-realisation and cannot repose permanently on the wayside, in hedged gardens, or in any imperfect prison whatsoever or bounded resting place.

The Hindus perceived that it was all these at once but they discovered that the law with which the soul must put itself in relation was the law of the Eternal Self, that man's nature must seek its fulfilment in that which is permanent & eternal in the Universe and that it is to which his evolution moves. They discovered that his higher self was the Self of his Universe and that by a certain manner of action, by a certain spirit in action, man escaped from his limitations and realised his higher Self. This way of Works is Karmayoga and Karmayoga therefore depends on the Hindu conception of Brahman, the Transcendent Self and its relations to the Universe. From this all Hindu ethics proceeds.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/17/the-eternal-in-his-universe#p6</ref>  The heathen who worships stocks and stones has come nearer to the truth of things, than the enlightened professor of "rational" religion, who declares God to be omnipresent and yet in the next breath pronounces the objects in which He is present to be void of anything that can command religious reverence.There is no error in "idolatry"; the error is in the mind of the idolater who worships the stone as stone and the stock as stock, thinking that is God, and forgets or does not realise that it is the Divine Presence in them which is alone worship-worthy.it is an imperfect religion which thus yields to the domination of the mind and senses and allows them to determine what is or is not God. Good is a mask and evil is a mask; both are eidola, valid for the purposes of life in phenomena, but when we seek that which is beyond phenomena, we must resolutely remove the mask and see only the face of God behind it. To the Karmayogin there should be nothing common or unclean. There is nothing from which he has the right to shrink; there is none whom he can dare to loathe. For God is within us all; as the Self pure, calm and eternal, and as the Antaryamin or Watcher within, the Knower with all thought, action and existence for His field of observation, the Will behind every movement, every emotion, every deed, the Enjoyer whose presence makes the pain and pleasure of the world. Mind, Life and all our subjective consciousness and the elements of our personal existence and activity, depend on His presence for the motive-force of their existence. And He is not only within us, but within all that is. What we value within ourselves, we must not belittle in others; what we cherish within ourselves, we must not hurt in others; what we love in ourselves, we must not hate in others. For that which is within us, is the Divine Presence, and that which is in others, is the same Divine Presence. To remember this is worth all the moral teachings and ethical doctrines in the world. Vedanta has been declared by those who have not chosen to understand it, a non-moral or even immoral philosophy. But the central truth of Vedanta enfolds in a single phrase all the highest ethics of the world. Courage, magnanimity, purity, justice, charity, mercy, beneficence, loving kindness, forgiveness, tolerance, all the highest demands that the most exalted ethical teacher can make on humanity are contained in that single doctrine; and find in it their one adequate philosophical justification and sole natural basis.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/17/the-eternal-in-his-universe#p74</ref>  ===The Law of Renunciation===Divisibility of the Indivisible is one of those profound paradoxes of Vedantic thought which increasing Knowledge will show to be deep and farIntegral Yoga -reaching truths. It used to be implicitly believed that human personality was a single and indivisible thing; yet recently a school of psychologists has grown up who consider man as a bundle of various personalities rather than a single, homogeneous and indivisible consciousness. For it has been found that a single man can divide himself or be divided into several personalities, each living its own life and unconscious of the other, while yet again another personality may emerge in him which is conscious of the others and yet separate from all of them. This is true; nevertheless, the man all through remains one and the same, not only in body but in his psychical existence; for there is a deeper substratum in him which underlies all these divided personalities and is wider than all of them put together. The truth is that the waking personality is only the apparent man, not the real. Personality is the creation of memory, for memory is its basis and pedestal. If the pedestal, then, be divided and put apart, the superstructure also must be in the same act divided and put apart. But the waking memory is only a part, a selection of a wider latent memory which has faithfully recorded all that happens not in the man's present life only, but in all his past. The personality which corresponds with this latent unerring memory is the true personality of the man; it is his soul, one infinite and indivisible, and its apparent divisions are merely the result of Avidya, false knowledge, due to defective action of the waking memory. So the apparent division of the divine Self into many human selves, of the indivisible Paramatman into many Jivatmans, is simply the result of Avidya due to the action of the Maya or self-imposed illusion of Isha, the great Force who has willed that the One by this force of Maya should become phenomenally manifold. In reality, there is no division and the Self in me is the same as the Self in you and the same as the Self up yonder in the Sun. The unity of spiritual existence is the basis of all true religion and true morality. We know indeed that as God is not contained in His universe, but the universe is in Him, so also God is not contained within a man. When the Sruti says elsewhere that the Purusha lies hidden in the heart of our being and is no larger than the size of a man's thumb, it simply means that to the mind of man under the dominion of Avidya his body, vitality, mind, reason bulk so largely, the Spirit seems a small and indistinguishable thing indeed inside so many and bulky sheaths and coverings. But in reality, it is body, vitality, mind & reason forming the apparent man that are small and trifling and it is the Spirit or real man that is large, grandiose & mighty. The apparent man exists in & by the real, not the real in the apparent; the body is in the soul, not the soul in the body. Yet for the convenience of language and our finite understanding we are compelled to say that the soul is in the body and that God is within the man; for that is how it naturally presents itself to us who use the mental standpoint and the language of a finite intelligence. The Lord, from our standpoint, is within all His creatures and He is the real self of all His creatures. My self and yourself are not really two but one. This is the second truth proceeding logically from the first, on which the Karmayogin has to lay fast hold.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/17/the-law-of-renunciation#p14</ref>  ==Rule of Living=="Foster by sacrifice the gods," says the Gita, "and let those gods foster you; fostering each other ye shall attain the supreme good,—param sreyah." Attaining the supreme good we pass beyond the gods and come to God; we leave Veda to arrive at Vedanta or, rather, fulfil Veda in Vedanta. Then we are no longer content to sacrifice this or that possession, giving Not a share, making reservations, but offer unreservedly & unconditionally the supreme sacrifice, yielding up on the highest of all altars all that we are and possess; we give no longer to Agni, Indra, Varuna or Mitra, but to the supreme & universal Lord, bhoktáram yajnatapasám. Then, too, we receive in return not wealth, nor cattle nor horses nor lands nor empire, not joys nor powers nor brilliances nor capacities, but God Himself & the world with all these things in them as trifles and playthings for the soul to enjoy as God enjoys, possessing them and yet not possessing, wholly unbound by possession.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/17/chapter-ii-the-golden-rule-of-living-enjoyment-and-renunciation#p10</ref>  ===What is the Difference Between Yoga and Religion?===Ah! my child... it is as though you were asking me the difference between a dog and a cat!Imagine someone who, in some way or other, has heard of something like the Divine or has a personal feeling that something of the kind exists, and begins to make all sorts of efforts: efforts of will, of discipline, efforts of concentration, all sorts of efforts to find this Divine, to discover what He is, to become acquainted with Him and unite with Him. Then this person is doing yoga. Now, if this person has noted down all the processes he has used and constructs a fixed system, and sets up all that he has discovered as absolute laws―for example, he says: the Divine is like this, to find the Divine you must do this, make this particular gesture, take this attitude, perform this ceremony, and you must admit that this is the truth, you must say, "I accept that this is the Truth and I fully adhere to it; and your method is the only right one, the only one which exists"― if all that is written down, organised, arranged into fixed laws and ceremonies, it becomes a religion.<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/23-may-1956#p1,p2,p4,p5</ref>   ===Vijnana===The evolution of vijnana out of mind is inevitable for the same reason that the evolution of life out of matter was inevitable or the evolution of mind out of life, because the vijnana or pure Idea, already involved in matter, life and mind, demands & will procure, perhaps by the pull from a higher world where the Idea would be the dominant power & basic principle, its own release out of the limitations of sensational mentality. Just as we found matter to be a formation out of life-energy, & life-energy to be a formation out of mind, so mind is a formation out of vijnana. That which has constituted & governs stone or tree, animal or man, is not matter, nor life, nor mind, but the Idea involved in these three masks of conscious being.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/17/chapter-v-the-soul-causality-and-law-of-nature#p44</ref>  

  =Religion at Sri Aurobindo Ashram=<center>~</center>Here we do not have religion. We replace religion by the spiritual life, which is truer, deeper and higher at the same time, that is to say, closer to the Divine. For the Divine is in everything, but we are not conscious of it. This is the immense progress that man must make.<ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwm/13/sri-aurobindo-ashram#p44p48</ref><center>~</center>

<ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwm/13/aims-and-principles#p412p421</ref><center>~</center>''Q. Many people say that the teaching of Sri Aurobindo is a new religion. Would you say that it is a religion?''

Religion always tends to make God in the image I repeat that when we speak of Sri Aurobindo there can be no question of a teaching nor even of man, a magnified and aggrandised imagerevelation, but in the end it is always a god with human qualities. This is what makes it possible for people to treat him as they would treat a human enemy. In some countries, when their god does not do what they want, they take him and throw him into the river![Based on aphorism 59 -One of an action from the greatest comforts of Supreme; no religion is can be founded on that you can get hold of God sometimes and give him a satisfactory beating. People mock at the folly of savages who beat their gods when their prayers are not answered; but it is the mockers who are the fools and the savages.]<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/10/aphorism-59#p1,p3</ref>

...But men are so foolish that they can change anything into a religion, so great is their need of a fixed framework for their narrow thought and limited action. They do not feel secure unless they can assert this is true and that is not; but such an assertion becomes impossible for anyone who has read and understood what Sri Aurobindo has written. Religion and Yoga do not belong to the same plane of being and spiritual life can exist in all its purity only when it is free from all mental dogma. [Based on aphorism Aphorism 59- One of the greatest comforts of religion is that you can get hold of God sometimes and give him a satisfactory beating. People mock at the folly of savages who beat their gods when their prayers are not answered; but it is the mockers who are the fools and the savages.] <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/10/aphorism-59#p7,p8,p10,p11</ref><center>~</center>The performance of the racial religion will make it easier to serve the spirit of the age. This is an age of energy, ''śakti'', and love. At the beginning of the Age of Iron (''Kali''), the human tendencies try to fulfil themselves by subordinating knowledge and action to devotion, and with the support of love, truth and energy try and succeed in spreading the message of love. The friendliness and charity of Buddhism, the teaching of love in Christianity, the equality and brotherhood of Islam, the devotion and sentiment of love in the Puranic religion is a result of these attempts. In the Age of Iron the eternal religion, helped by the spirit of friendliness, action, devotion, love, equality and brotherhood, does good to humanity. Entering into and manifesting in the Aryan religion, composed of knowledge, devotion and non-attached action, these same powers are seeking for expansion and self-fulfilment. The signs of that energy of expression are severe austerity, high ideals, and noble action. When this race becomes once more a seeker after austere perfection, full of high ideals and undertaker of noble efforts, it should be understood that the world’s progress is under way and the withdrawal of anti-religious titanic forces and the rise of divine forces is inevitable once again. Hence this type of education too is needed at the present time.

Religion and Yoga do not belong to When the same plane religion of being the race and spiritual life can exist in all its purity only when it is free from all mental dogma. [Based on aphorism 59 of the time- One of spirit are fulfilled, the greatest comforts of eternal religion is will spread and establish itself throughout the world, without let or hindrance. All that you can get hold of God sometimes the Lord has ordained from before, about which there are prophecies in the ancient canons, ''śastras'', those too will be felt and give him a satisfactory beatingrealised in action. People mock at The entire world will come to the folly Knower of savages Brahman, who beat their gods when their prayers are not answered; but it is will arise in the mockers who are Aryan land, as learners in the fools ways of wisdom and religion, and accepting Bharat as a place of pilgrimage they will accept her superiority with bowed heads. It is to bring that day nearer that the savagesIndians are rising, that is why this fresh awakening of Aryan ideas.]<ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/1009/aphorismour-59religion#p11p6,p7</ref>

<center>~</center>''QAphorism 242—How much hatred and stupidity men succeed in packing up decorously and labelling "Religion"!] <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/10/aphorism-241-242#p2</ref><center>~</center>Religion too by putting God far above in distant heavens made man too much of a worm of the earth little and vile before his Creator and admitted only by a caprice of his favour to a doubtful salvation in superhuman worlds. <ref>https://incarnateword. Which in/cwsa/25/the-unseen-power#p10</ref><center>~</center>… they have been clinging to a religion, it is better: because that religion has helped them in one way or atheism?another, it has helped in them precisely something which wanted to have a certitude, not to have to search but to be able to rest on something solid without being responsible for the solidity—somebody else is responsible ('' Mother laughs''A) and it goes on like that. It is a lack of compassion to want to pull them out of that—it is better to leave them where they are. I never dispute with someone who has a faith—let him keep his faith! I take care not to tell him anything that might shake his faith, because it would not be good—they are not capable of having another.<ref>http:''So long //incarnateword.in/cwm/15/7-september-1963#p19</ref><center>~</center>The fundamental idea is that mankind is the godhead to be worshipped and served by man and that the respect, the service, the progress of the human being and human life are the chief duty and the chief aim of the human spirit. No other idol, neither the nation, the State, the family nor anything else ought to take its place; they are only worthy of respect so far as religions existthey are images of the human spirit and enshrine its presence and aid its self-manifestation. ...<center>~</center>Man must be sacred to man regardless of all distinctions of race, creed, colour, nationality, status, political or social advancement. The body of man is to be respected, made immune from violence and outrage, fortified by science against disease and preventable death. The life of man is to be held sacred, preserved, atheism will strengthened, ennobled, uplifted. The heart of man is to be indispensable held sacred also, given scope, protected from violation, from suppression, from mechanisation, freed from belittling influences. The mind of man is to counterbe released from all bonds, allowed freedom and range and opportunity, given all its means of self-training and self-development and organised in the play of its powers for the service of humanity.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/the-religion-of-balance humanity#p2</ref><center>~</center>The unaided intellectual reason faced with the phenomena of the religious life is naturally apt to adopt one of two attitudes, both of themshallow in the extreme, hastily presumptuous and erroneous. Both must disappear Either it views the whole thing as a mass of superstition, a mystical nonsense, a farrago of ignorant barbaric survivals,—that was the extreme spirit of the rationalist now happily, though not dead, yet much weakened and almost moribund,—or it patronises religion, tries to explain its origins, to get rid of it by the process of explaining it away; or it labours gently or forcefully to reject or correct its superstitions, crudities, absurdities, to purify it into an abstract nothingness or persuade it to purify itself in the light of the reasoning intelligence or it allows it a role, leaves it perhaps for the edification of the ignorant, admits its value as a moralising influence or its utility to make way the State for keeping the lower classes in order, even perhaps tries to invent that strange chimera, a sincere rational religion.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/reason-and-religion#p7</ref><center>~</center>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 disinterested search 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 total consecration 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 object end of this searchtheir circling and return to a larger truth of the things they refuse. [Based onAphorism 241—Atheism is Often we find atheism both in individual and society a necessary protest against 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.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/the-spiritual-aim-and-life#p9</ref><center>~</center>...it will be the age of God" (God is still too religious) I have put "of the ONE"—because it will truly be the age of Unity.<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/15/religion#p33,p34</ref><center>~</center>The heathen who worships stocks and stones has come nearer to the wickedness truth of things, than the Churches enlightened professor of "rational" religion, who declares God to be omnipresent and yet in the narrowness next breath pronounces the objects in which He is present to be void of creedsanything that can command religious reverence. There is no error in "idolatry"; the error is in the mind of the idolater who worships the stone as stone and the stock as stock, thinking that is God uses , and forgets or does not realise that it is the Divine Presence in them which is alone worship-worthy. The stock or the stone is not God, for it is only an eidolon, a symbol of His presence; but the worship of it as a stone symbol is not superstitious or degrading; it is true and ennobling. Every ceremony which reminds us of the presence of the Eternal in the transient, is, if performed with a religious mind, a spiritual help and assists in the purification of consciousness from the obscuration of the senses. To the ordinary intelligence, however, the idea of Brahman’s omnipresence, if pushed home, becomes a stumbling-block. How can that which is inert, senseless and helpless be full of that which is divine and almighty? … This kind of spiritual and intellectual weakness loves to see God in everything good and pleasant and beautiful, but ignores Him in what is evil, ugly or displeasing. But it is an imperfect religion which thus yields to the domination of the mind and senses and allows them to determine what is or is not God. Good is a mask and evil is a mask; both are eidola, valid for the purposes of life in phenomena, but when we seek that which is beyond phenomena, we must resolutely remove the mask and see only the face of God behind it. To the Karmayogin there should be nothing common or unclean. There is nothing from which he has the right to shrink; there is none whom he can dare to smash these soiled cardloathe. For God is within us all; as the Self pure, calm and eternal, and as the Antaryamin or Watcher within, the Knower with all thought, action and existence for His field of observation, the Will behind every movement, every emotion, every deed, the Enjoyer whose presence makes the pain and pleasure of the world. Mind, Life and all our subjective consciousness and the elements of our personal existence and activity, depend on His presence for the motive-housesforce of their existence. And He is not only within us, but within all that is. What we value within ourselves, we must not belittle in others; what we cherish within ourselves, we must not hurt in others; what we love in ourselves, we must not hate in others.242—How much hatred For that which is within us, is the Divine Presence, and stupidity men succeed that which is in packing up decorously others, is the same Divine Presence. To remember this is worth all the moral teachings and labelling "Religion"!]ethical doctrines in the world. <ref>httpshttp://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/1017/aphorismthe-eternal-in-241his-242universe#p3,p4p67</ref><center>~</center>

Of this supreme offer a life recently lived in an obscure corner of the earth seems to me to be the very incarnation & illuminating symbol,—the life of the Paramhansa Ramakrishna of Dakshineswar. Not for any body of teachings that he left behind, not for any restricted type of living, peculiar system of ethics or religious panacea for the ills of existence,—but because it brought once more into the world with an unexampled thoroughness & liberality the great Vedantic method of experience & inner revelation & showed us its possibilities. An illiterate, poor & obscure Bengali peasant, one who to the end of his life used a patois full of the most rustic forms & expressions, ignorant of Sanscrit, of any language but his own provincial dialect, ignorant of philosophy & science, ignorant of the world, yet realised in himself all the spiritual wisdom of the ages, shed in his brief sayings a light so full, so deep on the most difficult profundities of our inner being, the most abstruse questions of metaphysics that the most strenuous thinkers & the most learned Pandits were impressed by his superiority. By what process did he arrive at this great store of living knowledge? Never by any intellectual process, by any steps of reasoning. In all the things of the intellect, even the most elementary, he was as simple as a child, more unsophisticated than the most ignorant peasant of his native village....The secret of his success was that always he lived & saw; where most men only reason and translate thought into sentiment, feel and translate emotion into terms of thinking, he saw with the heart or a higher faculty & threw out his vision into experience with a power of realisation of which modern men have long ceased to be capable. thus living everything to its full conclusion of mental & physical experience his soul opened more & more to knowledge, to direct truth, to the Satyam in things, until the depths hid nothing from him & the heights became accessible to his tread.He first has shown us clearly, entirely & without reserve or attenuating circumstance, the supreme importance of being over thinking, but being, not in terms of the body & life merely, like the sensational & emotional man or the man of action, but in the soul as well and the soul chiefly, in the central entity of this complex human symbol. Therefore he was able to liberate us from the chains imposed by the makeshifts of centuries. He broke through the limitations of the Yogic schools, practised each of them in turn & would reach in three days the consummation which even to powerful Yogins is the accomplishment of decades or even of more lives than one; broke through the limitations of religion and fulfilled himself in experience as a worshipper of Christ and of Allah while all the time remaining in the individual part of him a Hindu of the sect of the Shaktas; broke through the limitations of the Guruparampara, &, while using human teachers for outward process & discipline, yet received his first & supreme initiation from the eternal Mother herself and all his knowledge from the World-Teacher within; broke through the logical limitations of the metaphysical schools and showed us Dwaita & Adwaita inextricably yet harmoniously one in experience, even as they are shown to us in Veda & Vedanta.Thus, establishing experience and inward revelation as the supreme means of the highest knowledge, his became one of the seed-lives of humanity; and the seed it held was the loosening of the bonds of the rational intellect & the return of humanity's journey from its long detour on the mid-plateaus of reason towards the footpath that winds up to the summits of the spirit.

 "God's will, be it joy or sorrow; God's will, be it the triumph of good or the siege of the evil." This is a great mantra & has mighty effects. But it does not 'Curated by itself give a secure abiding place. GodMohan'''s will may bring doubt & then there is anguish; may bring loss of the Divine presence, separation from the Beloved & then there is a greater agony. The intellectual man has the intellect God has given him to satisfy. The active man has the impulse to work, but at every step is faced with the difficulties of religion & ethics.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/17/a-commentary-on-the-isha-upanishad#p52</ref>