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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 The first and principal article of Vedanta===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 philosophy 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 Upanishads is truth of the basis of Spirit that lies beyond all Indian religion codes and dogmas, wide and morals large and to free. When you stop at a considerable extent of Hindu politicsreligious creed and tie yourself in it, taking it for the only truth in the world, legislation you stop the advance and societywidening of your inner soul. Its practical importance But if you look at religion from another angle, it need not always be an obstacle to [our] race is therefore immenseall 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 Unity imperfection of all man-made 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, 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 rock human mind and a human organisation, and with an appropriate mental stand you can get religion even as it is to throw some light on which your way and to lend some support to your spiritual endeavour. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/9-june-1929#p1,p2,p3,p4</ref><center>~</center>In every religion there are some who have evolved a high spiritual life. But it is not the Upanishads 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 been builtfound there and lived there the same spiritual life. Evolution It is their own capacity, it is some power of their inner being and not the religion they profess that has been discovered 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 or that creed as absolutely true and [analyzed] by Science; Evolution 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 kind crime to disturb their faith. For them religion is implied at every turn by the Vedantanot an obstacle. Vedantism like ScienceAn obstacle for those who can go farther, it may be a help for those who cannot, [but] after 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; if the fiercest wars have been waged and the most hideous persecutions carried on in its own fashionname, [is] severely conscientious 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 logical processes highest activities. It is an impediment and rigorously experimentala chain if you are a slave to its outer body; [Vedantism] has mastered physical and psychical laws which Science [is] now beginning if you know how to handleuse its inner substance, it can be your jumping-board into the realm of the Spirit. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/1803/the9-philosophyjune-1929#p5</ref><center>~</center>Each religion has helped mankind. Paganism increased in man the light ofbeauty, 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, gentler, purer, Judaism and Islam how to be religiously faithful in action and zealously devoted to God; Hinduism has opened to him thelargest and profoundest spiritual possibilities. A great thing would be done if all these God-upanishadsvisions could embrace and cast themselves into each other; but intellectual dogma and cult egoism stand in the way. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/13/thoughts-and-glimpses#p2p20</ref>

=== Adwaita PhilosophyWhat People Have Made Out of Religion?===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 Universe, there is one initial paradox from which the whole Vedantic philosophy, religion and ethics take their start. We have seen that 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 multifold. Brahman as the eternal, immutable and one, is not manifest but latent; This Brahman, this Sacchidanandam, 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 SelfPeople follow religion by social habit, He has become Many by His own Iccha or Will and in order not to get into the exercise bad books of His Will others. For instance, in a village it is difficult not for a moment or limited by time & space or subject to fatiguego to religious ceremonies, but for everall your neighbours will point at you. He is eternal and therefore His Iccha is eternal and the Many Selves which live in Him by His Iccha are eternal and But that has absolutely nothing to do not perish, for they also being really Brahman the Self are indistinguishable from Him in nature and though their bodieswith spiritual life, mind-forms and nothing at 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 and changes & passes, but the Self that is One and the Self that is Many are both of them real and eternal; and still they are One Self.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/1808/an23-incomplete-work-of-vedanticmay-exegesis1956#p5p12</ref><center>~</center>===Dwaita=== This eternity of the Oneself … to fulfil a social duty 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 truea social custom, and the One is but not and cannot be the Many, though the Many live in and for the Oneat all because you really wanted to enter into communion with God. This is Dwaita<ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/1808/an23-incomplete-work-of-vedanticmay-exegesis1956#p5p23</ref>

Religion, however imperfect, has the secret of ...it may be said that mastery; religion can conquer the natural instincts and desires of man, metaphysics can only convince him logically that they ought need to be conquered—an immense difference. For this reason philosophy has never been able to satisfy any except the intellectual few and was even for adopt or follow or participate in a time relegated to oblivion by the imperious contempt of Science which thought that religion as it had discovered a complete solution of the Universeis found all ready-made, a truth and a law of life independent of religion and yet able to supersede religion in its peculiar province of reaching & regulating arises rather from the sources of conduct and leading mankind "herd instinct" in its evolutionhuman beings. But it has now become increasingly clear that Science has failed The true thing would be for each one to substantiate its claims, and find that a belief in evolution or the supremacy form of physical laws adoration or the subjection of the ephemeral individual to the interests of the slightly less ephemeral race cult which is no substitute for a belief in Christ or Buddha, for his own and expresses spontaneously and individually his own special relation with the law of Divine Love or the trust in Divine Power & Providence… Religion which satisfies ; that would be 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 mindideal condition. <ref>httpshttp://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/1808/an-incomplete-work-of1-vedanticaugust-exegesis1956#p19p20</ref>

In spirituality...very few people, thenvery few, understood in this sensean insignificant number, go to church or temple with a true religious feeling, that is, we must seek not to pray and beg for the directing light and the harmonising lawsomething from God but to offer themselves, give thanks, aspire, and give themselves. There is hardly one in religion only in proportion as it identifies itself with this spiritualitya million who does that...Spirituality respects So they do not have the freedom power of changing the human soulatmosphere. Perhaps when they are there, because it is itself fulfilled by freedom; they manage to get across, break through and the deepest meaning of freedom is the power to expand go somewhere and grow towards perfection by the law of one's own nature, dharmatouch something divine. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/religion-as-But the-law-large majority of-life#p9</ref> === Potentialities people who go only because of the Spirit===...superstition, egoism and self-searchinginterest, self-controlled expansion and a many-sided finding create an atmosphere of their greatestthis kind, highest and deepest potentialitiesthat 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/cwsacwm/2506/religion-as-the30-law-ofjune-life1954#p9p30</ref>

God gives Himself to His whole creationReligion itself has been imposed on men; it is often supported by 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 to be imposed upon the world. The strength and greatness of a religion holds is adjudged by men according to the number of those that follow it, although the real greatness is not there. The greatness of spiritual truth is. ...Religions may reckon their greatness by the monopoly number of their believers, 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 and to advertise; for otherwise they would not attract great numbers of people. The work that is done with no care for what people think of it is not so well known, does not so easily draw multitudes. But Truth requires no advertisement; it does not hide itself but it does not proclaim itself either. It is content to manifest, regardless of His Graceresults, not seeking approbation or shunning disapprobation, not attracted or troubled by the world's acceptance or denial. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/1503/religion9-june-1929#p1p13</ref>

We give the name of religion to any concept That [atmosphere of the world or individual and the universe which is presented as the exclusive Truth society in which one must have an absolute faith, generally because this Truth their ordinary consciousness and their daily life] life is declared to be the result of a revelation.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/13/aims-practical and-principles#p237</ref> ==Religion of Vedanta,Hindus==If not idealistic; it were asked by anyone what is this multitudinousconcerned not with good, shiftingbeauty, expandingspiritual experience, apparently amorphous or at all events multimorphous sea of religious thoughtthe higher truth, feelingbut with interests, philosophyphysical needs, spiritual experience we call Hinduismdesires, what vital necessities. This is real to it , all the rest is characteristically a little shadowy; It accepts ethics as a bond and essentially, we might answer in one wordan influence, but it does not live for ethical good; its real gods are vital need and utility and the religion desires of Vedantathe body. And if If it were asked what are the Hindus with governs its life partly by ethical laws because otherwise vital need, desire, utility in seeking their unique own satisfaction through many egoistic individuals would clash among themselves and persistent difference from all other racesdestroy their own aims, we might again answerit 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, the children a satisfaction and pastime of Vedanta. For at the root of all that we Hindus have doneeye and ear and mind, thought and said through these thousands nothing moves it imperatively to make its life a thing of years of our race-history, behind all we are beauty. It allows religion a fixed place and seek to beportion, there lies concealedon holy days, in the fount of our philosophieschurch or temple, at the bedrock end of our religions, life when age and the kernel approach of our thoughtdeath 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 for a moment to pause in the explanation affairs of our ethics the world and society, remember God: but to make the summary whole of our civilisationlife a religion, the rivet a remembering of our nationality, this one marvellous inheritance of oursGod and a seeking after him, is a thing that is not really done even in societies which like the VedantaIndian erect spirituality as their aim and principle. Nor is It admits philosophy in a still more remote fashion; and if nowadays it only to Hindu streams eagerly seeks after science, that this great source has given 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-giving waters. ===Vedanta as A more complete effort in any one of these directions it leaves to the Source for All Religions===Buddhismindividual, to the teacher few, and to individuals of one third of humanitya special type, the saint, drank from its inspiration. Christianitythe ethical man, the offspring of Buddhismartist, derived its ethics and esoteric teaching at second-hand from the same source. Through Persia Vedanta put its stamp on Judaismthinker, through Judaismthe man of religion; it gives them a place, Christianity and Sufism on Islamdoes some homage to them, through Buddha on Confucianismassigns some room to the things they represent, through Christ and mediaeval mysticism and Catholic ceremonialbut for itself it is content to follow mainly after its own inherent principle of vital satisfaction, through Greek vital necessity and German philosophyutility, through Sanscrit learning..vital efficiency.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/1825/the-religionsuprarational-ultimate-of-vedantalife#p1p2</ref>

==Hinduism=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.

To put the individual Self in intimate relation with the Eternal is the aim of Hindu life, its religion, its polity, its ethics. Morality is not for its own sake, nor for the pleasures of virtue, nor for any reward here or in another life, nor for the sake of society; these are false aims and false sanctions. Its true aim is a preparation and purification of the soul to fit it for the presence of God. 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 with the infinite, all-powerful, omnipresent Self of All; then is its aim of existence attained, then is its pilgrimage ended. This may be done by realising the Eternal in oneself by knowledge, 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 works. This realisation is the true crown of any ethical system. For whether we hold the aim of morality to be the placing of oneself in harmony with eternal laws, or 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 transient seemings of his daily existence and that to this goal his evolution moves. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/18/an-incomplete-work-of-vedantic-exegesis#p6</ref><center>~</center>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 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.

==Buddhism=Veda===three of the external aids by which Veda has been perpetuated in India, 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 methods, 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 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 Buddhism is the turning away from ''duḥkha'' and circumstance and of which modern Hinduism presents us only some preserved, collected or redeveloped fragments; I shall suppose that its causes to the real meaning & justification peace of PuranaNirvana. The ''duḥkhavāda'' did not exist in India, Tantra, Itihasa & Yoga can only be discovered by a rediscovery of their old foundation and harmonising secret except in the true sense theory of the Veda, and Vaishnava ''viraha''; otherwise it was not considered as a means or even a stage in this light I shall proceed, awaiting its confirmation or refutation and standing always on the facts of Veda, Vedanta & Yogasadhana.<ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsa/1729/thejainism-ishaand-upanishadbuddhism#p2p8</ref>===Upanishads===<center>~</center>Upanishads are a grand harmonious and perfectly luminous whole, expressing in its various aspects the single and universal Truth; for under the myriad contradictions of phenomena (prapancha) there is one Truth The Buddhist Nirvana 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 Adwaitin’s Moksha are merely so many explanations, comments and interpretations from different sides, of these various aspects of the one and only Truthsame thing. This Truth is the sole foundation on It corresponds to a realisation in which all religions can rest one does not feel oneself any longer as on an individual with such a sure and impregnable rock;—and more than name or such a rockform, for a rock may perish but this endures for ever. Therefore is the religion of the Aryas called the Sanatana Dharma, the Law Sempiternal. Nor are the Hindus in error an infinite eternal Self spaceless (even 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 not mental sightspace), 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 timeless (even when 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 to my Self who am the Eternal).<ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsa/1729/thejainism-ishavasyopanishad-with-a-commentary-inand-englishbuddhism#p4p9</ref>

==What is Hindu Life?Christianity==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 We know how the Christian religion came into existence. It was certainly not Jesus who made what is known as well as an element of SankhyaChristianity, but some learned and very clever men put their heads together and built it up into the scientific psychology on which Yoga is foundedthing we see. Vedanta, the perception of There was nothing divine in the relations between God way in Himself which it was formed, and God there is nothing divine either in the world, Sankhya, way in which it functions. And yet the excuse or occasion for the scientificformation was undoubtedly some revelation from what one could call a Divine Being, philosophical a Being who came from elsewhere bringing down with him from a higher plane a certain Knowledge and psychological analysis of those relations and Yoga, called also by Truth for the Rishis Yajna, their practical application in social life, religious worship earth. He came and individual discipline & self-perfectionsuffered for his Truth; but very few understood what he said, is few cared to find and has always been hold to the whole substance of the Hindu religionTruth for which he suffered.<ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/1803/the-means9-ofjune-realisation1929#p1p29</ref>

===Nature of Religion=Islam==

Religion belongs Mahomed tried to re-establish the higher mind of humanity. It is the 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 Asiatic gospel of Absolute, which the human mind cannot reach and yet tries to reach. Religion may be divine equality 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 manyspirit. 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 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 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 renegade.<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/9-june-1929#p1,p2</ref><center>~</center>The first and principal article of these established and formal religions runs always, "Mine is the supreme, the only truth, all others are equal in falsehood or inferior." For without this fundamental dogmaIslam, established credal religions could not have existed. If you do not believe and proclaim that you alone possess the one whatever their social position or the highest truthpolitical power, you will not be able to impress people and make them flock to you.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.if you look at religion nor is any man debarred from another angle, it need not always be an obstacle to all men. If you regard it as one of the higher activities full development 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 you 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 his manhood by the human mind and a human organisation, and 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 endeavour. <ref>http://incarnateword.his birth or low original station in/cwm/03/9-june-1929#p4</ref><center>~</center>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 All men 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 brothers in this or that creed as absolutely true Islam 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 bond of the Spirit. Religion has been an impulse to the worst things religious unity overrides all other divisions and the best; 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 causedifferences. Along with philosophy it marks the limit the human mind has reached in its highest activities. It is an impediment But Islam also was limited and a chain if you are a slave to its outer body; if you know how to use its inner substanceimperfect, because it can be your jumping-board into confined the realm ideal of the Spirit.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/9-june-1929#p5</ref><center>~</center>If you want brotherhood and equality to appraise the real value limits of the religion in which you are born or brought up or to have a correct perspective of the country or society to which you belong by birthsingle creed, if you want to find out how relative a thing the particular environment is into which you happened to be thrown and confined, you have only to go round the earth and see that what you think good is looked upon as bad elsewhere and what is considered as bad in one place is welcomed as good in another. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/9-june-1929#p9</ref><center>~</center>Things have an inner value and become real to you only when you have acquired them by the exercise of your free choice, not when they have been imposed upon you. If you want to be sure of your religion, you must choose it; if you want to be sure of your country, you must choose it; if you want to be sure of your family, even that you must choose. If you accept without question what has been given you by Chance, you can never be sure whether it is good or bad for you, whether it is the was farther deflected from its true thing for your life. Step back from all that forms your natural environment or inheritance, made up and forced upon you path by Nature's blind mechanical process; draw within and look quietly and dispassionately at things. Appraise them, choose freely. Then you can say with an inner truth, "This is my family, this my country, this my religion. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/9-june-1929#p10</ref><center>~</center>If we go a little way within ourselves, we shall discover that there is in each of us a consciousness that has been living throughout the ages and manifesting in a multitude of forms. Each of us has been born in many different countries, belonged to many different nations, followed many different religions. Why must we accept the last one as the best? The experiences gathered by us in all these many lives in different countries rude and varying religions, are stored up in that inner continuity of our consciousness undeveloped races which persists through all births. There are multiple personalities there created by these past experiences, and when we become aware of this multitude within us, it becomes impossible to speak of one particular form of truth as the only truth, one country as our only country, one religion as the only true religion. There are people who have been born drew into one country, although the leading elements of their consciousness obviously belong to anotherits embrace. 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 Another revelation of them goes to the country or enters into the civilisation to which he has affinity, he finds himself there perfectly at home. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/9-june-1929#p11</ref><center>~</center>Religion itself has been imposed on men; it is often supported by 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 to be imposed upon the world. The strength and greatness of a religion is adjudged by men according to the number of those that follow it, although the real greatness is not there. The greatness of spiritual old truth is needed.Religions may reckon their greatness by the number of their believers, 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 and to advertise; for otherwise they would not attract great numbers of people. The work that is done with no care for what people think of it is not so well known, does not so easily draw multitudes. But Truth requires no advertisement; it does not hide itself but it does not proclaim itself either. It is content to manifest, regardless of results, not seeking approbation or shunning disapprobation, not attracted or troubled by the world's acceptance or denial.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/9-june-1929#p13</ref><center>~</center>Let us take an altogether ordinary example which is very partial and very superficial. You are born in India. Being born in India you are born with a certain religious and philosophic attitude. But if for some reason or other you want to free yourself from this atavism and influence, if you begin to follow, study, practise the religion or philosophy of another country, you can change the conditions of your 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, 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 consequences of your birth completely.<ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/07/16-novemberasiatic-1955democracy#p69</ref><center>~</center>...every definite mental formation always gives a particular colouring to the experience. 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 the external formation.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/07/22-june-1955#p14</ref><center>~</center>Those who carry within themselves a spiritual destiny 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 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 them. Everything served their purpose.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/23-may-1956#p7</ref><center>~</center>...it may be said that the need to adopt or follow or participate in a religion as it is found all ready-made, arises rather from the "herd instinct" in human beings. The true thing would be for each one to find that form of adoration or cult which is his own and expresses spontaneously and individually his own special relation with the Divine; that would be the ideal condition. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/1-august-1956#p20p1</ref>

==What Else is Why - Importance of Religion?==

...religious consciousness which is limited & enslaved by its creeds and to which its particular way ==Purpose 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-of-life#p6</ref><center>~</center>The idea of a Personal God is, however, a contradiction in terms. This all religions confess, but the next moment they nullify their confession by assuming in Him a Personality. Religion==

The Universal cannot be personal, the Omnipresent cannot be excluded from anything or creature in the world He universally pervades and possesses''Q. The moment we attribute certain qualities to GodSweet Mother, we limit Him and create is religion a double principle necessity in the world.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/18/an-incomplete-work-life of-vedantic-exegesis#p2</ref>the ordinary man?''

===What People have made out ...very essence of religion is the discovery of the immaterial Spirit and the play of Religion?===a supraphysical consciousness.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/reason-and-religion#p8</ref><center>~</center>People follow To see your Self in all creatures and all creatures in your Self—that is the unshakeable foundation of all religion by social habit, love, patriotism, philanthropy, humanity, of everything which rises above selfishness and gross utility. <ref>https://incarnateword.in order /cwsa/17/the-ishavasyopanishad-with-a-commentary-in-english#p86</ref><center>~</center>"... religion's real business is to prepare man's mind, life and bodily existence for the 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 at this point that religion must learn to subordinate itself, not to insist on its outer characters, but give full scope to the inner spirit itself to develop its own truth and reality. In the meanwhile it has to take up as much of man's mentality, vitality, physicality as it can and give all his activities a turn towards the spiritual direction, the revelation of a spiritual meaning in them, the imprint of a spiritual refinement, the beginning of a spiritual character. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/09/16-july-1958#p1</ref>In all the higher powers of his life man may be said to be seeking, blindly enough, for God. To get into at the Divine and Eternal in himself and the world and to harmonise them, to put his being and his life in tune with the bad books Infinite reveals itself in these parts of othershis nature as his concealed aim and his destiny. For instanceHe sets out to arrive at his highest and largest and most perfect self, and the moment he at all touches upon it, this self in him appears to be one with some great Soul and Self of Truth and Good and Beauty in the world to which we give the name of God. To get at this as a village it spiritual presence is difficult not the aim of religion, to go grow into harmony with its eternal nature of right, love, strength and purity is the aim of ethics, to religious ceremoniesenjoy 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><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 and was even for all your neighbours will point at youa 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 absolutely nothing failed to do with spiritual lifesubstantiate 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, nothing at allcannot in its average conceptions permanently satisfy the reason and thus exposes itself to gradual loss of empire over the mind. <ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0818/23an-mayincomplete-work-of-vedantic-1956exegesis#p12p19</ref>

Just try ...the aim of religion: its purpose is to see, I don't feel link the human with the Divine and in so doing sublimate the thought and life and flesh so that you are sincere, neither you nor your flockthey may admit the rule of the soul and spirit. You all went there to fulfil But this knowledge must be something more than a social duty and creed or a social custommystic revelation; his thinking mind must be able to accept it, but not at all because you really wanted to enter into communion correlate it with Godthe principle of things and the observed truth of the universe: this is the work of philosophy, and in the field of the truth of the spirit it can only be done by a spiritual philosophy, whether intellectual in its method or intuitive.""Enter into communion with God! But we all knowledge and endeavour can't do 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! All found and continually heighten, expand and enrich that consciousness and in the building of a life and action that we can do is to say some good words, but we have no capacity to enter into communion in conformity with Godthe truth of the spirit: this is the work of spiritual realisation and experience."<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0822/23the-mayevolution-of-the-spiritual-1956man#p1,p2,p4,p5,p23p12</ref>

Those who carry within themselves In the universe there is a spiritual destiny constant relation of Oneness and Multiplicity. This expresses itself as the universal Personality and are born to realise the Divinemany Persons, to become conscious in Him and live Him, will arrive, no matter what path, what way they followboth between the One and the Many and among the Many themselves there is the possibility of an infinite variety of relations. That is to say, even in religion there These relations are people who have had the spiritual experience and found determined by the Divine―not because play of the religiondivine existence, usually in spite of itthe Lord, notwithstanding it―because entering into His manifested habitations. They exist at first as conscious relations between individual souls; they had are then taken up by them and used as a means of entering into conscious relation with the inner urge One. It is this entering into various relations with the One which is the object and function of Religion. All religions are justified by this urge led them there despite essential necessity; all obstacles express one Truth in various ways and through themmove by various paths to one goal. Everything served their purpose.<ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0817/23-maythe-1956lord#p7p11</ref>

...it may be said that The deepest heart, the need to adopt or follow or participate in a inmost essence of religion as it , apart from its outward machinery of creed, cult, ceremony and symbol, is found all ready-madethe search for God and the finding of God. Its aspiration is to discover the Infinite, the Absolute, the One, arises rather from the "herd instinct" in human beingsDivine, who is all these things and yet no abstraction but a Being. The Its work is a sincere living out of the true thing would be for each one to find that form and intimate relations between man and God, relations of unity, relations of difference, relations of adoration or cult which is his own an illuminated knowledge, an ecstatic love and expresses spontaneously delight, an absolute surrender and individually his own special relation with service, a casting of every part of our existence out of its normal status into an uprush of man towards the Divine; that would be and a descent of the ideal condition. <ref>http://incarnatewordDivine into man.in/cwm/08/1-august-1956#p20</ref>

===State All this has nothing to do with the realm of Religion===reason or its normal activities; its aim, its sphere, its process is suprarational. The knowledge of God is not to be gained by weighing the feeble arguments of reason for or against his existence: it is to be gained only by a self-transcending and absolute consecration, aspiration and experience. rational scientific experiment or rational philosophic thinking. Even in those parts of religious discipline which seem most to resemble scientific experiment, the method is a verification of things which exceed the reason and its timid scope. Even in those parts of religious knowledge which seem most to resemble intellectual operations, the illuminating faculties are not imagination, logic and rational judgment, but revelations, inspirations, intuitions, intuitive discernments that leap down to us from a plane of suprarational light.

Religion, The love of God is an infinite and absolute feeling which ought to have led the way, but owing to its greater dependence on its external parts does not admit of any rational limitation and its infrarational rather than its spiritual impulses has been as much, or even more, does not use a sower language of discord as a teacher of unity,—religion rational worship and adoration; the delight in God is beginning to realise, a little dimly that peace and ineffectively as yet, that spirituality is after bliss which passes all its own chief business and true aim and that it understanding. The surrender to God is also the common element and surrender of the common bond of all religions. As these influences grow and come more and more consciously whole being to cooperate with each othera suprarational light, it might be hoped that the necessary psychological modification will quietly, gradually, but still irresistibly power and love and at last his service takes no account of the compromises with an increasing force life which the practical reason of man uses as the best part of rapidity take place which can prepare a real and fundamental change its method in the life ordinary conduct of humanitymundane existence. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/internationalism#p5</ref><center>~</center>Religious thought cannot be used unless it is liberated from the influence of religions<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/15/reason-and-religion#p33,p34,p37p9</ref>

===Religion and Dance==How to Ascend Beyond Religions?=

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 Divineattitude to be taken towards religionsA benevolent goodwill towards all worshippers. In some countries it reached a very high degree of beauty and an extraordinary perfectionAn enlightened indifference towards all religions. In Japan they kept up the tradition All religions are partial approximations 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 one sole Truth that in our days there have been attempts to resuscitate the ancient Greek and other dances; but the religious sense is missing in all such resurrections and they look more like rhythmic gymnastics than dancefar above them. <ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwm/0315/28-july-1929religion#p21,p22</ref><center>~</center>For, if you want to find one teachingp23, one doctrine upon which to base your progress, you will never find anything—or, to be more exact, you will find something else, for in accordance with the climate, the age, the civilisation, the teaching given is quite conflicting. When one person says, "This is good", another will say, "No, this is bad", and with the same logic, the same persuasive force. Consequently, it is not upon this that one can build. Religion has always tried to establish a dogma, and it will tell you that if you conform to the dogma you are in the truth and if you don't you are in the falsehood. But all this has never led to anything and has only created confusion.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/04/8-january-1951#p14p24</ref>

''Q.If someone follows you want to appraise the real value of the religion in which you are born or brought up or to have a religion correct perspective of the country or society to which you belong by birth, if you want to find out how relative a thing the particular environment is into which you happened to be thrown and has a good capacityconfined, can he you have only to go farther round the earth and see that what you think good is looked upon as bad elsewhere and reach identification with the Divine?''what is considered as bad in one place is welcomed as good in another.

''A: ''Religion Things have an inner value and become real to you only when you have acquired them by the exercise of your free choice, not when they have been imposed upon you. If you want to be sure of your religion, you must choose it; if you want to be sure of your country, you must choose it; if you want to be sure of your family, even that you must choose. If you accept without question what has been given you by Chance, you can never be sure whether it is always a limitation good or bad for you, whether it is the spirittrue thing for your life. Step back from all that forms your natural environment or inheritance, made up and forced upon you by Nature's blind mechanical process; draw within and look quietly and dispassionately at things. Appraise them, choose freely. Then you can say with an inner truth, "This is my family, this my country, this my religion."

If we go a man little way within ourselves, we shall discover that there is in each of us a consciousness that has been living throughout the ages and manifesting in a spiritual life independently multitude of his mental formations forms. Each of us has been born in many different countries, belonged to many different nations, followed many different religions. Why must we accept the last one as the best? The experiences gathered by us in all these many lives in different countries and the set limits varying religions, are stored up in that inner continuity of our consciousness which he livespersists through all births. There are multiple personalities there created by these past experiences, then and when we become aware of this spiritual life makes himmultitude within us, so it becomes impossible to sayspeak of one particular form of truth as the only truth, one country as our only country, cross one religion as the religious principles and enter something higheronly true religion. There are people who have been born into one country, although the 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. But his consecration must come from within and not be formalIn Japan I have met some who were Indian, others who were European. If it comes exclusively from And if any of them goes to the country or enters into the formcivilisation to which he has affinity, then the limitation is so great that he cannot go fartherfinds himself there perfectly at home. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/0503/29-septemberjune-19531929#p5p9,p10,p8p11</ref>

Let us take an altogether ordinary example which is very partial and very superficial.You are born in India.Being born in India you are born with a certain religious and philosophic attitude.word "God". It is a word (I have told But if for some reason or other you want to free yourself from this at least four or five times) to express "something" atavism and influence, if you do not know but are trying begin to attain. There is only one thing that's important: that is a sincere and persistent willfollow, for these things don't happen in a twinkling. So one must persevere. When someone feels that he is not advancingstudy, he must not get discouraged; he must try to find out what it is in practise the nature that is opposingreligion or philosophy of another country, and then make the necessary progress. And suddenly one goes forward. And when you reach can change the end you have an experienceconditions of your inner development. And what It is remarkable is that people who have followed altogether different pathsa little more difficult, with altogether different mental constructions, from the greatest believer to the most unbelieving, even materialists, have arrived at that experienceis, it is the same asks for a greater effort for everyone. Because it is true—because it is realliberation, because but it is the sole realityvery far from being impossible. And it is quite simply that. I In fact there are many people who do not say anything more. This is of no importance, the way one speaks about it, who love to free themselves from what is important is 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 follow find at home. And in this way you change the path, consequences of your path, no matter which—yes, to go therebirth completely.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/0607/1716-februarynovember-19541955#p6p69</ref>

''Q...very few peopleMother, very few, an insignificant number, go to church or temple with a true religious feeling, that is, not to pray here Sri Aurobindo writes:A great thing would be done if all these God-visions could embrace and beg for something from God cast themselves into each other; but to offer themselves, give thanks, aspire, give themselves. There is hardly one in a million who does that. So they do not have the power of changing the atmosphere. Perhaps when they are there, they manage to get across, break through intellectual dogma and go somewhere and touch something divine. But the large majority of people who go only because of superstition, cult-egoism and self-interest, create an atmosphere of this kind, and that is what you breathe stand in when you go to a church or templethe way. 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>''

"''A great thing would :'' It is not in the mental consciousness that these things can be done if all harmonised and synthesised. For this it is necessary to rise above and find the idea behind the thought. Sri Aurobindo shows here, for example, what each of these religions represents in human effort, aspiration and realisation. Instead of taking these God-visions could embrace religions in their outward forms which are precisely dogmas and cast themselves into 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; but intellectual dogma perfectly well and should be united with many others yet to form a more total and cult-egoism stand in more complete progress, a more perfect understanding of life, a more integral approach to the wayDivine.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 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 age, that is, the supramental revolution.

Everything in its essence and its truth should be included in this realisation. This realisation must be an expression as total, as complete, as universal as possible 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:

<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/09/3-april-1957#p9,p10,p11,p12,p13,p14,p15,p16p18</ref><center>~</center>A revolutionary reconstruction of religion, philosophy, science, 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 to the universal. For the effort of the individual soon shows him that he cannot securely discover the truth 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 but his deepest spirit he is its subject,p17a small cell in that tremendous organic mass: his substance is drawn from its substance 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 self,p18of his power and capacity and limitations,p19of his claim on existence and the high road and the distant or immediate goal of his individual and social destiny. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/the-coming-of-the-subjective-age#p3</ref>

The sense-obscured, limited and desire-driven individual self must raise itself out of the true controlling power is an inner discrimination, a psychic dark pit of sense and tact-obsession into the clear air of the spirit, a superior intervention must disembarrass itself of guidance from above or an innate servile bondage to bodily, emotional & intellectual selfishness and luminous inner guidance. But still this line assume the freedom & royalty of development too is necessaryuniversal love and beneficence, because there must be a bridge between expand itself from the spirit and narrow, petty, inefficient ego till it becomes commensurate with the intellectual reason: the light infinite, all-powerful, omnipresent Self of a spiritual or at least a spiritualised intelligence All; then is necessary for the fullness its aim of our total inner evolution, and without itexistence attained, if another deeper guidance then is lackingits pilgrimage ended. This may be done by realising the Eternal in oneself by knowledge, by realising oneself in Him by Love as God the inner movement may be erratic and undisciplinedBeloved, turbid and mixed with unspiritual elements or one-sided or incomplete in its catholicity. For by realising Him as the transformation Lord of the Ignorance into the integral Knowledge the growth all in us of a spiritual intelligence ready to receive a higher light His universe and canalise it for all its creatures by works. This realisation is the parts of our nature is an intermediate necessity true crown of great importanceany ethical system."<ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0918/24an-incomplete-work-of-septembervedantic-1958exegesis#p2p6</ref>

...It would seem at first sight that since man is pre-eminently the highest occultism is that which discovers mental being, the secret movements and dynamic supernormal possibilities development of Mind the mental faculties and Life and Spirit and uses them in their native force or by an applied process for the greater effectivity richness of our the mentallife should be his highest aim, vital and spiritual being. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/09/10-september-1958#p1</ref> =Why - Importance —his preoccupying aim, even, as soon as he has got rid of Religion?= ==Purpose the obsession of Religion== To see your Self in all creatures the life and body and all creatures in your Self—that is provided for the unshakeable foundation indispensable satisfaction of all religionthe gross needs which our physical and animal nature imposes on us. Knowledge, science, art, lovethought, patriotismethics, philanthropyphilosophy, humanityreligion, of everything which rises above selfishness and gross utility. "Religionthis is man's real business , these are his true affairs. To be is for him not merely to prepare man's mindbe 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 bodily existence for arc of the spiritual consciousness 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 take it upcontrol and create; it has to lead but she evidently means him not only to that point where the control, create and constantly re-create in new and better forms himself, his own inner spiritual light begins fully existence, his mentality, but also to emergecontrol and re-create correspondingly his environment. It is at this point that religion must learn He has to subordinate turn Mind not only on itself, but on Life and Matter and the material existence; that is very clear not to insist on its outer charactersonly from the law and nature of the terrestrial evolution, but give full scope to the inner spirit itself to develop its from his own truth past and realitypresent history. In And there comes from the observation of these conditions and of his highest aspirations and impulses the meanwhile it has question whether he is not intended, not only to expand inwardly and outwardly, but to take up grow upward, wonderfully exceeding himself as much of man's mentalityhe has wonderfully exceeded his animal beginnings, into something more than mental, vitalitymore than human, physicality as 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 can and give all 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 activities a turn towards existence and to grow into that may very well be the intention of his nature. In any case the spiritual directionfullness of Life is his evident object, the revelation 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 a spiritual self-exceeding if we would fix rightly the meaning in them, the imprint of a spiritual refinement, his individual existence and the beginning perfect aim and norm of a spiritual characterhis society.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0925/16civilisation-julyand-1958culture#p1p2</ref>

''Q. Sweet Mother, ..it is true that religion when it identifies itself only with a creed, a cult, a Church, a system of ceremonial forms, may well become a retarding force and there may therefore arise a necessity in for the human spirit to reject its control over the varied activities of life . There are two aspects of religion, true religion and religionism. True religion is spiritual religion, that which seeks to live in the ordinary spirit, in what is beyond the intellect, beyond the aesthetic and ethical and practical being of man?'' ''A:''In , and to inform and govern these members of our being by the higher light and law of the spirit. Religionism, on the life contrary, entrenches itself in some narrow pietistic exaltation of societies it is a necessitythe lower members or lays exclusive stress on intellectual dogmas, for it serves as a corrective to collective egoism whichforms and ceremonies, without this controlon some fixed and rigid moral code, could take on excessive proportionssome religio-political or religio-social system.The level Not that these things are altogether negligible or that they must be unworthy or unnecessary or that a spiritual religion need disdain the aid of collective consciousness is always forms, ceremonies, creeds or systems. On the contrary, they are needed by man because the lower than members have to be exalted and raised before they can be fully spiritualised, before they can directly feel the individual levelspirit and obey its law. It An intellectual formula is very noticeableoften needed by the thinking and reasoning mind, for examplea form or ceremony by the aesthetic temperament or other parts of the infrarational being, that when men gather in a group or collect set moral code by man’s vital nature in great numberstheir turn towards the inner life. But these things are aids and supports, not the essence; precisely because they belong to the rational and infrarational parts, they can be nothing more and, if too blindly insisted on, may even hamper the level of consciousness falls suprarational light. Such as they are, they have to be offered to man and used by him, but not to be imposed on him as his sole law by a great dealforced and inflexible domination. The consciousness In the use of them toleration and free permission of crowds variation is much lower than individual consciousness, and the collective consciousness first rule which should be observed. The spiritual essence of society religion is certainly lower than alone the consciousness of one thing supremely needful, the individuals constituting thing to which we have always to hold and subordinate to itevery other element or motive.<ref>httpshttp://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0925/16religion-as-julythe-1958law-of-life#p3,p4,p5p6</ref>

There it A spiritual religion of humanity is the hope of the future. By this is not meant what is ordinarily called a necessity. In ordinary lifeuniversal religion, an individual, whether he knows it or nota system, always has a religion but the object thing of his religion is sometimes of a very inferior kind..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 god he worships may be inner spirit is indeed one, but more than any other the god spiritual life insists on freedom and variation in its self-expression and means of success or the god development.A religion of money or humanity means the god of powergrowing realisation that there is a secret Spirit, or simply a family god: the god of childrendivine Reality, in which we are all one, that humanity is its highest present vehicle on earth, that the god of human race and the family, human being are the god of the ancestorsmeans by which it will progressively reveal itself here. There is always It implies a growing attempt to live out this knowledge and bring about a religionkingdom of this divine Spirit upon earth. The quality By its growth within us oneness with our fellow-men will become the leading principle of the religion is very different according to the individualall our life, not merely a principle of cooperation but it is difficult for a human being to live and to go on livingdeeper brotherhood, to survive in life without having something like a rudiment of real and an ideal which serves as the centre for his existence. Most inner sense of the time he doesn't know it unity and equality and if he were asked what his ideal is, he would a common life. There must be unable to formulate it; but he has one, vaguely, something the realisation by the individual that seems to him only in the most precious thing in life.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/09/16of his fellow-july-1958#p6</ref> ===How Religion Helped Mankind?=== All would change if man could once consent to be spiritualised; but his nature, mental and vital and physical, men is rebellious to the higher law. He loves his imperfectionown life complete."The Spirit is There must be the realisation by the race that only on the truth of our being; mind free and full life and body in their imperfection are of the individual can its masks, but in their own perfection should and permanent happiness be its mouldsfounded. To There must be spiritual only is not enough; that prepares too a discipline and a number way of souls for heavensalvation in accordance with this religion, but leaves the earth very much where it was. Neither that is to say, a compromise means by which it can be developed by each man within himself, so that it may be developed in the way life of salvationthe race.The world knows three kinds … But if it is at all a truth of revolution. The material has strong resultsour being, then it must be the moral truth to which all is moving and intellectual are infinitely larger in their scope and richer in their fruitsit must be found the means of a fundamental, an inner, but the spiritual are the great sowings.If the triple change could coincide in a perfect correspondencecomplete, a faultless work real human unity which would be done; but the mind and body one secure base of mankind cannot hold perfectly a strong spiritual inrush: most is spilt, much unification of the rest is corruptedhuman life. Many A spiritual oneness which would create a psychological oneness not dependent upon any intellectual or outward uniformity and physical upturnings compel a oneness of our soil are needed life not bound up with its mechanical means of unification, but ready always to work out enrich its secure unity by a little result from free inner variation and a large spiritual sowing. == Necessity of Religion ==...spiritual religion of humanity is the hope of the future. spiritual life insists on freedom and variation in its freely varied outer self-expression and means , this would be the basis for a higher type of developmenthuman existence.

==Why Morality?=Religion and Spirituality===Its true aim is a preparation and purification of the soul to fit it for the presence of God.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/18/an-incomplete-work-of-vedantic-exegesis#p7</ref>

''A:''Ah! my child... it is true that religion when it identifies itself only with a creed, a cult, a Church, as though you were asking me the difference between a system of ceremonial forms, may well become a retarding force dog and there may therefore arise a necessity for the human spirit to reject its control over the varied activities of life.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/religion-as-the-law-of-life#p6</ref>cat!

===Religion Imagine someone who, in some way or other, has heard of Humanity===...we must recognise something like the fact Divine or has a personal feeling that in a time something of great activitythe kind exists, and begins to make all sorts of efforts: efforts of high aspirationwill, of deep sowingdiscipline, efforts of rich fruit-bearingconcentration, such as the modern age with all its faults and errors has been, a time especially when humanity got rid sorts of much that was cruelefforts to find this Divine, evilto discover what He is, ignorant, dark, odious, not by the power of religion, but by the power of the awakened intelligence to become acquainted with Him and of human idealism and sympathy<ref>http://incarnatewordunite with Him. Then this person is doing yoga.in/cwsa/25/religion-as-the-law-of-life#p2</ref>

The aim of Now, if this person has noted down all the religion of humanity was formulated in the eighteenth century by processes he has used and constructs a sort of primal intuition; that aim was and it is still to re-create human society in the image of three kindred ideas, libertyfixed system, equality and fraternity. None of these has really been won in spite of sets up all the progress that has been achieved. The liberty that he has been so loudly proclaimed discovered as an essential of modern progress absolute laws―for example, he says: the Divine is an outwardlike this, to find the Divine you must do this, make this particular gesture, take this attitude, perform this ceremony, mechanical and unreal liberty. The equality you must admit that has been so much sought after and battled for is equally an outward and mechanical and will turn out to be an unreal equality. Fraternity this is not even claimed to be a practicable principle of the ordering of life and what is put forward as its substitute truth, you must say, "I accept that this is the outward Truth and mechanical principle of equal association or at the best a comradeship of labour. appeal I fully adhere to the vital it; and physical mind of man rather than his inner being. It has limited his effort to your method is the attempt to revolutionise political and social institutions and to bring about such a modification of only right one, the ideas only one which exists"― if all that is written down, organised, arranged into fixed laws and sentiments of the common mind of mankind as would make these institutions practicable; ceremonies, it has worked at the machinery of human life and on the outer mind much more than upon the soul of the racebecomes a religion.<ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/2508/the-religion23-ofmay-humanity1956#p1,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.

The deepest heart, We have entered the inmost essence age of religionuniversal spirituality, 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. All this has nothing to do with the realm of reason or its normal activities; its aim, its sphere, its process is suprarational. The knowledge of God is not to be gained by weighing the feeble arguments of reason for or against his existence: it is to be gained only by a self-transcending and absolute consecration, aspiration and spiritual experience. rational scientific experiment or rational philosophic thinking. Even in those parts of religious discipline which seem most to resemble scientific experiment, the method is a verification of things which exceed the reason and its timid scope. Even in those parts of religious knowledge which seem most to resemble intellectual operations, the illuminating faculties are not imagination, logic and rational judgment, but revelations, inspirations, intuitions, intuitive discernments that leap down to us from a plane of suprarational light.  The love of God is an infinite and absolute feeling which does not admit of any rational limitation and does not use a language of rational worship and adoration; the delight in God is that peace and bliss which passes all understanding. The surrender to God is the surrender of the whole being to a suprarational light, will, power and love and his service takes no account of the compromises with life which the practical reason of man uses as the best part of its method in the ordinary conduct of mundane existenceinitial purity.<ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/2515/reason-and-religion#p9p29,p30,p31,p32</ref> 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 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.<refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/the-religion-of-humanity#p1~</refcenter> 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 For me religions are the chief duty and the chief aim of the human spirit. No other idolforms, neither the nation, the State, the family nor anything else ought to take its place; they are only worthy of respect so far as they are images of the much too human spirit and enshrine its presence and aid its self-manifestation...Science even, though it is one of the chief modern idols.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 spiritual life of man is to be held sacred, preserved, strengthened, ennobled, uplifted. The heart Each one expresses one aspect of man is to be held sacred also, given scope, protected from violation, from suppression, from mechanisation, freed from belittling influences. The mind of man is to be 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-humanity#p2</ref> ...religion of humanity has exercised single and how fruitful a work it has done. It accomplished rapidly many things which orthodox religion failed to do effectivelyeternal Truth, largely because it acted as a constant intellectual and critical solvent, an unsparing assailant of the thing that is and an unflinching champion of the thing to be, faithful always to the future, while orthodox religion allied itself with the powers of the present, 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 force. Faith, even an intellectual faith, must always be a worker of miracles, and this 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 in expressing it set out to do. It to some degree humanised society, humanised law and punishment, humanised the outlook exclusive of man on man, abolished legalised torture and the cruder forms of slavery, raised those who were depressed and fallen, gave large hopes to humanity, stimulated philanthropy and charity and the service of mankind, encouraged everywhere the desire of freedom, put a curb on oppression and greatly minimised its more brutal expressions. It gave new conceptions of the dignity of the human being and opened new ideas and new vistas of his educationother aspects, self-development and potentiality. It spread enlightenment; it made man feel more his responsibility for the progress deforms and happiness of the race; diminishes it raised the average self-respect and capacity of mankind; it gave hope to the serf, self-assertion to the downtrodden and made the labourer in his manhood the potential equal of the rich and powerful.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/None has the-religion-of-humanity#p3</ref>=How?===How right to Achieve Morality?==The sense-obscured, limited and desire-driven individual self must raise call 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 with the infinite, all-powerful, omnipresent Self of All; then is its aim of existence attained, then is its pilgrimage ended. This may be done by realising the Eternal in oneself by knowledgeonly true one, 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 works. 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 in Hinduism===For whether we hold the aim of morality to be the placing of oneself in harmony with eternal laws, or the fulfilment of man's nature, or the natural evolution of man in the direction of his highest faculties, Hinduism will not object but more than it insists that the Law with which man must put himself into relation is the Eternal in has the universe, that in this permanent and stable Truth man's nature fulfils itself out of the transient seemings of his daily existence and that right to this goal his evolution moves. This consummation may be reached by ethical means through a certain manner of action and a certain spirit in action which is deny the essence of Karmamarga, the Way of Works, one of the three ways by which the spirit of man may see, embrace & become God. <ref>https://incarnateword.truth contained in/cwsa/18/an-incomplete-work-of-vedantic-exegesis#p6</ref> ===Laws of Karmamarga===The first law of Karmamarga is to give up the natural desire for the fruits of our works and surrender all we do, think, feel and are into the keeping of the Eternal, and the second is to identify ourself with all creatures in the Universe both individually and collectively, realising our larger Self in others. These two laws And all of action them 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> ==Religion and Its Counterparts=====Religion,Science and Philosophy===A religion therefore which claims to be eternal, must would not be content with satisfying the heart and imagination, it must answer suffice to express the satisfaction of the intellect the questions with Supreme Truth which philosophy is preoccupied. A philosophy which professes to explain the world-problem once for beyond allexpression, must not be satisfied with logical consistency and comprehensiveness; it must like Science base its conclusions not merely on speculative logic, but 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, comprehensiveness & accuracy impregnate with itself the springs of human activity; and it must have the power of bringing 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 intellectually comprehensive in its explanation of all the problems that perplex the human mind; it brings the contradictions of the world into harmony by a single luminous law of even whilst being; it has developed present in Yoga 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 whole aim and end is to bring the individual self into a perfect and intimate union with the Eternaleach one.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/1815/an-incomplete-work-of-vedantic-exegesisreligion#p27p10</ref> ===What Humans Need to do About Religion?=== We need not for instance lay a too excessive stress on the superstitions, aberrations, violences, crimes even, which Churches and cults and creeds have favoured, admitted, sanctioned, supported or exploited for their own benefit, the mere hostile enumeration of which might lead one to echo the cry of the atheistic Roman poet, "To such a mass of ills could religion persuade mankind."Christianity has left furrowed across the mediaeval history of Europe almost from the days of Constantine, its first hour of secular triumph, down to very recent times, or the sanguinary comment which such an institution as the Inquisition affords on the claim of religion to be the directing light and regulating power in ethics and society, or religious wars and wide-spread State persecutions on its claim to guide the political life of mankind. But we must observe the root 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 Church. So strong 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 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, Vaishnava.<refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/religion-as-the-law-of-life#p4~</refcenter> ...in order to accomplish all its future this idea Those who carry within themselves a spiritual destiny and religion of humanity has are born to make itself more explicit, insistent and categorically imperative. For otherwise it can only work with clarity in realise the minds of the few and with the mass it will be only a modifying influence, but will not be the rule of human life. the enemy of all humanity,real religion, is human egoismDivine, the egoism of the individual, the egoism of class and nation. the love of mankind, not to recognise a real unity between man and man. For that essentially must be the aim of the religion of humanity, as it must be the earthly aim of all human religion, love, mutual recognition of human brotherhood, a living sense of human oneness and practice of human oneness become conscious in thought, feeling Him and lifelive Him, the ideal which was expressed first some thousands of years ago in the ancient Vedic hymn and must always remain the highest injunction of the Spirit within us to human life upon earth. With that donewill arrive, the one necessary psychological change will have been effected without which no formal and mechanicalmatter what path, no political and administrative unity can be real and securewhat way they follow. If it That is doneto say, that outward unification may not even be indispensable or, if indispensable, it will come about naturally, not, as now it seems likely to be, by catastrophic means, but by the demand of the human mind, and will be held secure by an essential need of our perfected and developed human nature.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/the-religion-of-humanity#p4</ref> ...brotherhood there are people who have had the real key to the triple gospel of the idea of humanity. The union of liberty spiritual experience and equality can only be achieved by found the power Divine―not because 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 freedomreligion, it is the freedom of its self-development, the self-development of the divine usually in man in all his being. When it claims equality, what it is claiming is that freedom equally for all and the recognition spite of the same soul, the same godhead in all human beings. When it strives for brotherhood, it is founding that equal freedom of self-development on a common aim, a common life, a unity of mind and feeling founded upon notwithstanding it―because they had the recognition of this inner spiritual unity.freedom, equality, unity are the eternal attributes of the Spirit. It is the practical recognition of urge and this truth, it is the awakening of the soul in man urge led them there despite all obstacles and the attempt to get him to live from his soul and not from his ego which is the inner meaning of religion, and it is that to which the religion of humanity also must arrive before it can fulfil itself in the life of the racethrough them.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/the-religion-of-humanity#p7</ref>  The unaided intellectual reason faced with the phenomena of the religious life is naturally apt to adopt one of two attitudes, both of them shallow in the extreme, hastily presumptuous and erroneousEverything served their purpose. 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<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/2508/reason23-andmay-religion1956#p7</ref> ...suprarational life in which religious aspiration finds entirely what it seeks, so too there is also the infrarational life of the instincts, impulses, sensations, crude emotions, vital activities from which all human aspiration takes its beginning.<refcenter>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/reason-and-religion#p12~</refcenter> 

===Religion The world knows three kinds of Humanity, conclusion===revolution...while it is possible to construct a precarious and quite mechanical unity by political and administrative means, the unity of the human race, even if achieved, can only be secured and can only be made real if the religion of humanity, which is at present the highest active ideal of mankind, spiritualises itself and becomes the general inner law of human life.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/summary-and-conclusion#p1</ref> 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.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/summary-and-conclusion#p11</ref> Democracy 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> ==Failure of Religion==Religion itself had become fixed in dogmas and ceremonies, sects and churches and had lost for 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-and-barbarism#p8</ref> false socialisation of religion The material has been always the chief cause of its failure to regenerate mankind - It saddled upon the religious life of man a Churchstrong results, 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. ...prominent aim of religion rather than any spiritual growth of the individual and the race.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/the-spiritual-aim-moral and-life#p5,p6</ref> That is why all the religions, however beautiful they may be, have always led man to the worst excesses. All the crimes, the horrors perpetrated in the name of religion intellectual are among the darkest stains on human history, and simply because of this little initial error: wanting what is true for one individual to be true for the mass or collectivity.<ref>http://incarnateword.infinitely larger 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 end, put on it what fetters you please. The dharma of science, thought and philosophy is to seek for truth by the intellect dispassionately, without prepossession and prejudgment, with no other first propositions than the law of thought and observation itself imposes. Science and philosophy are not bound to square their observations scope and conclusions with any current ideas of religious dogma or ethical rule or aesthetic prejudice. In the end, if left free richer in their actionfruits, they will find but the unity of Truth with Good and Beauty and God and give these a greater meaning than any dogmatic religion or any formal ethics or any narrower aesthetic idea can give us. But meanwhile they must be left free even to deny God and good and beauty if they will, if their sincere observation of things so points them.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/the-spiritual-aim-and-life#p9</ref> 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 of his existence and to grow into 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 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://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/civilisation-and-culture#p2</ref>  It is the truth that all active being is a seeking for God, a seeking for some highest self and deepest Reality secret within, behind 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 in labour to discover and to make real to its self-knowledgesowings.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/the-suprarational-good#p1</ref> If mankind is to be spiritualised, it must first in the mass cease to be the material or the vital man and become the psychic and the true mental being. 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=Integral Yoga -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 Not 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>Religion=

  =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>