Changes

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

==What is Religion?== ...religion is Most religions affirm the spiritual and ethical life existence of the individual, the relations of his soul with a God and the intimate dealings of his will and character with other individualsrules to be followed to obey Him, and no monarch or governing classbut there are some Godless religions, not even a theocracy or priesthoodsuch as socio-political organisations which, can really substitute itself for in the soul name of an Ideal or the individual or for State, claim the soul of a nationsame right to be obeyed.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/the-drive-towards-legislative-and-social-centralisation-and-uniformity#p10</ref><center>~</center>

The Supreme To seek Truth freely and to approach it freely along his own lines is, finally, Pure Ecstasy, Absolute Bliss, NANDAa man’s right. Now just as SAT and CHIT are the same, so are SAT and CHIT not different from NANDA; just as Existence But each one should know that his discovery is Consciousness good for him alone and cannot be separated from Consciousness, so Conscious Existence it is Bliss and cannot not to be separated from Blissimposed on others. <ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/1813/theaims-philosophyand-of-the-upanishadsprinciples#p36p237,p244,p245</ref>

 God is Universal...universal religion, he is Omnipresenta system, Infinite, not subject to limitsa thing of creed and intellectual belief and dogma and outward rite.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/1825/an-incomplete-work-ofsummary-vedanticand-exegesisconclusion#p2p11</ref>

...universal Sri Aurobindo defines religionas the seeking after the spiritual, a systemthat is, the Supermind, a thing of creed what is beyond the ordinary human consciousness, and intellectual belief and dogma and outward ritewhat ought to influence life from a higher realm. 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<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/07/25/summary-andmay-conclusion1955#p11p8</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. 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 the final aim and achievement 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 essence usually leaned on religion as its support or its way to experience; it has been the outcome 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 is 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 discovery pure truth of the immaterial Spirit 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 play sheer contact of a supraphysical 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 consciousnessand the integral knowledge.<ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2522/reasonthe-evolution-of-andthe-spiritual-religionman#p8p11</ref>

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 the reason, because it goes to the suprarational. And so how can reason help in .among 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 the development and beyond the field transformation of reason. Reason can judge things which belong to the rational domain of ordinary life. And as he says laterman, the true role of reason is all are not equally accessible to be like a control and an organiser of the movements of human life in the mind and the vital. <ref>http://incarnatewordhumanity.in/cwm/07/25-may-1955#p8</ref>

===Brahman=== Brahman, we have seen, is the Universal Consciousness The one which Is can be practised and delights in Being; impersonal, infinite, eternal, omnipresent, sole-existingone might say, the One than whom there “understood”—although it is no other, and all things and creatures have only a phenomenal existence in Brahman and by Brahman. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/18/certainly not an-incomplete-work-of-vedantic-exegesis#p2</ref> ===The Lord===In “understanding”—by the universe there is a constant relation greatest number of Oneness and Multiplicity. This expresses itself as human beings—those who live almost exclusively in the universal Personality and physical consciousness—is the many Personsreligious method, precisely because it is based on fixed creeds and both between the One and the Many and among the Many themselves there is the possibility of an infinite variety of relationspractices. These relations are determined Simply by the play an act of the divine existence, the Lord, entering into His manifested habitations. They exist at first as conscious relations between individual souls; they are then taken faith or a collective suggestion—above all a collective suggestion—many human beings who have not yet reached any considerable inner development can take up by them and used as a means of entering into conscious relation with the One. It is this entering into various relations with the One which is the object and function path of Religion. All religions are justified by this essential necessity; all express one Truth in various ways and move by various paths to one goalreligion. <ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/1709/the18-june-lord1958#p13p4,p5</ref>

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

===TheocracyNature of Religions===

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

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

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

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

We give Each religion has helped mankind. Paganism increased in man the light of beauty, the name largeness and height of religion 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 any concept of the world or the universe which is presented as the exclusive Truth be religiously faithful in which one must have an absolute faith, generally because this Truth is declared action and zealously devoted to God; Hinduism has opened to him the largest 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 in the result of a revelationway.<ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/13/aimsthoughts-and-principlesglimpses#p237p20</ref>

==Religion of Vedanta,Hindus==If it were asked by anyone what is this multitudinous, shifting, expanding, apparently amorphous or at all events multimorphous sea What People Have Made Out of religious thought, feeling, philosophy, spiritual experience we call Hinduism, what it is characteristically and essentially, we might answer in one word, the religion of Vedanta. And if it were asked what are the Hindus with their unique and persistent difference from all other races, we might again answer, the children of Vedanta. For at the root of all that we Hindus have done, thought and said through these thousands of years of our race-history, behind all we are and seek to be, there lies concealed, the fount of our philosophies, the bedrock of our religions, the kernel of our thought, the explanation of our ethics and society, the summary of our civilisation, the rivet of our nationality, this one marvellous inheritance of ours, the Vedanta. Nor is it only to Hindu streams that this great source has given of its life-giving waters. == Religion?=Vedanta as the Source for All Religions===Buddhism, the teacher of one third of humanity, drank from its inspiration. Christianity, the offspring of Buddhism, derived its ethics and esoteric teaching at second-hand from the same source. Through Persia Vedanta put its stamp on Judaism, through Judaism, Christianity and Sufism on Islam, through Buddha on Confucianism, through Christ and mediaeval mysticism and Catholic ceremonial, through Greek and German philosophy, through Sanscrit learning...<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/18/the-religion-of-vedanta#p1</ref>

===Ancient Hindus===The ancient Hindus, therefore, insisted on Veda as the supreme authority, allowing Philosophy, Science & Religion only as subordinate helps to knowledge, because they perceived the danger of giving too unlicensed a freedom to these great but inferior powers. Religion, putting Veda away into a sacred oblivion, follows the impulses of the undisciplined heart, not purified, but full of the vital impulses, chittam pranair otam, and becomes spasmodic, ignorant, narrow, obscurantist, sectarian, cruel, violent. Philosophy acknowledging Veda in theory but relying instead on her own intellectual self-sufficiency, ends People follow religion by living in words, a thing of vain disputations & exultant logic-splitting, abstract, unpractical and visionary. Sciencesocial habit, 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 order not to deny get into the truth bad books of Science, but to complete, correct and illuminate itothers. For the Veda also says with Scienceinstance, Annam vai Brahma, Prano vai Brahma; it acknowledges the animal, the Pashu in man & God as the Master of the Animal, the Pashupati; but by completing the knowledge and putting it in its right relations, it completes him also & liberates him, lifts the Pashu to the Pashupati and enables him to satisfy himself divinely by enjoying even in matter the supramaterial and replacing egoistic and selfish power by an universal mastery & helpfulness and egoistic & unsatisfying pleasures by a bliss in which he can become one with his fellows, a bliss divine & universal.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/17/part-ii-the-field-and-instruments-of-vedanta-1#p6</ref> ===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; village 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 difficult 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 go to the very organreligious ceremonies, pronounced by the consensus of human opinion insufficient for such inquiries,—the intellectall your neighbours will point at you.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/17/chapter-ii#p6</ref> ...there was a great Vedic age of advanced civilisation broken afterwards by Time and circumstance and of which modern Hinduism presents us only some preserved, collected or redeveloped fragments; I shall suppose But that the real meaning & justification of Purana, Tantra, Itihasa & Yoga can only be discovered by a rediscovery of their old foundation and harmonising secret in the true sense of the Veda, and in this light I shall proceed, awaiting its confirmation or refutation and standing always on the facts of Veda, Vedanta & Yoga.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/17/the-isha-upanishad#p2</ref>===Upanishads===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 and one only. All the Smritis, the Puranas, the Darshanas, the Dharmashastras, the writings of Shaktas, Shaivas, Vaishnavas, Sauras, as well as the whole of Buddhism and its Scriptures are merely so many explanations, comments and interpretations from different sides, of these various aspects of the one and only Truth. This Truth is the sole foundation on which all religions can rest as on a sure and impregnable rock;—and more than a rock, for a rock may perish but this endures for ever. Therefore is the religion of the Aryas called the Sanatana Dharma, the Law Sempiternal. Nor are the Hindus in error when they declare the Sruti has absolutely nothing 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 sight, but do with spiritual. Therefore the Vedas are justly called Sruti or revelation. Of these the Rig, Yajur, Sama & Atharvan are the fertilising rain which gave the plant of the Truth nourishment and made it grow, the Brahmanas are the forest in which the plant is found, the Aranyakas are the soil in which it grows, the Upanishads are the plant itself, roots, stalk, leaves, calix and petals, and the flower which manifests itself once and for ever is the great saying SO AHAM—I AM HE which is the culmination of the Upanishads. Salutation to the SO AHAM. Salutation to the Eternal who is without place, time, cause or limit, Salutation to my Self who am the Eternal.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/17/the-ishavasyopanishad-with-a-commentary-in-english#p4</ref> ==What is Hindu Life?==To put the individual Self in intimate relation with the Eternal is the aim of Hindu life, its religion, its polity, its ethicsnothing at all.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/18/an-incomplete-work-of-vedantic-exegesis#p7</ref> ==Essence of Hindu Religion==every Upanishad has in it an element of Yoga as well as an element of Sankhya, the scientific psychology on which Yoga is founded. Vedanta, the perception of the relations between God in Himself and God in the world, Sankhya, the scientific, philosophical and psychological analysis of those relations and Yoga, called also by the Rishis Yajna, their practical application in social life, religious worship and individual discipline & self-perfection, is and has always been the whole substance of the Hindu religion.<ref>http:cwm/08/incarnateword.in/cwsa/18/the23-means-of-realisation#p1</ref> ===Nature of Religion=== Religion belongs to the higher mind of humanity. It is the effort of man's higher mind to 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 are many. 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-19291956#p1,p2p12</ref>

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

==What Else is Religion?Buddhism==

...religious consciousness which Buddhism is limited & enslaved by the turning away from ''duḥkha'' and its creeds and causes to which its particular way the peace of worship is a master and Nirvana. The ''duḥkhavāda'' did not a servantexist in India, because except in the theory of the Vaishnava ''viraha''; otherwise it leaves no room for was not considered as a means or even a "Personal" Godstage in the sadhana. <ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2529/religionjainism-as-the-law-ofand-lifebuddhism#p6p8</ref>

The idea of Buddhist Nirvana and the Adwaitin’s Moksha are the same thing. It corresponds to a realisation in which one does not feel oneself any longer as an individual with such a name or such a Personal God isform, howeverbut an infinite eternal Self spaceless (even when in space), a contradiction timeless (even when in termstime). <ref>https://incarnateword. This all religions confess, but the next moment they nullify their confession by assuming in Him a Personality. /cwsa/29/jainism-and-buddhism#p9</ref>  ==Christianity==

The Universal cannot be personalWe know how the Christian religion came into existence. It was certainly not Jesus who made what is known as Christianity, but some learned and very clever men put their heads together and built it up into the Omnipresent cannot be excluded from anything or creature thing we see. There was nothing divine in the world He universally pervades way in which it was formed, and possessesthere is nothing divine either in the way in which it functions. The moment we attribute And yet the excuse or occasion for the formation was undoubtedly some revelation from what one could call a Divine Being, a Being who came from elsewhere bringing down with him from a higher plane a certain qualities Knowledge and Truth for the earth. He came and suffered for his Truth; but very few understood what he said, few cared to God, we limit Him find and create a double principle in hold to the worldTruth for which he suffered.<ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/1803/an-incomplete-work-of9-vedanticjune-exegesis1929#p2p29</ref>

===Misunderstanding About God=Islam==

...we regard him with Mahomed tried to re-establish the Jews as a God Asiatic gospel of Power and Might & Wrath and Justice, or with human equality in the Moslems as God the Judge and Governor and Manager of the world or with the early Christians as a God of Love, yet all agree spirit. All men are equal in regarding Him as a PersonIslam, definable, imaginable, limited in His Nature by certain qualities though not limited in His Powers, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent & yet by a mysterious paradox quite separate from His creatures and His world. He creates, judges, punishes, rewards, favours, condemns, loves, hateswhatever their social position or political power, nor is pleased, is angry, for all the world like a any man of unlimited powers, and is indeed a Superior Man, a shadow of man's soul thrown out on debarred from the huge background full development of the Universehis manhood by his birth or low original station in life. The intellectual and moral difficulties of this conception All men are well-known. An Omnipotent God of Love, brothers in spite Islam and the bond of religious unity overrides all glosses, remains inconsistent with the anguish other divisions and differences. But Islam also was limited and miseryimperfect, because it confined the red slaughter and colossal sum ideal of torture brotherhood and multitudinous suffering which pervades this world and is the condition of its continuance; an Omnipotent God of Justice who created & caused sin, yet punishes man for falling into equality to the traps He has Himself set, is an infinite & huge inconsistency, an insane contradiction in terms; a God limits of wrath, a jealous Godsingle creed, who favours & punishes according to His caprice, fumes over insults and preens Himself at was farther deflected from its true path by the sound of praise is much lower than the better sort of men rude and, as an inferior, unworthy undeveloped races which it drew into its embrace. Another revelation of the adoration of the saints. An omnipresent God cannot be separate from His world, an infinite God cannot be limited in Time or Space or qualitiesold truth is needed. <ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsa/1807/an-incomplete-work-of-vedanticasiatic-exegesisdemocracy#p24p1</ref>

===What People have made out Why - Importance of Religion?===

People follow religion by social habit, in order not to get into the bad books ==Purpose of others. For instance, in a village it is difficult not to go to religious ceremonies, for all your neighbours will point at you. But that has absolutely nothing to do with spiritual life, nothing at all. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/23-may-1956#p12</ref><center>~</center>Just try to see, I don't feel that you are sincere, neither you nor your flock. You all went there to fulfil a social duty and a social custom, but not at all because you really wanted to enter into communion with God.""Enter into communion with God! But we can't do that! All that we can do is to say some good words, but we have no capacity to enter into communion with God."<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/23-may-1956#p1,p2,p4,p5,p23</ref><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#p20</ref>Religion==

===State ''Q. Sweet Mother, is religion a necessity in the life of Religion===the ordinary man?''

Religion''A:''In the life of societies it is a necessity, for it serves as a corrective to collective egoism which ought to have led the way, but owing to its greater dependence without this control, could take on its external parts and its infrarational rather excessive proportions.The level of collective consciousness is always lower than its spiritual impulses has been as muchthe individual level. It is very noticeable, for example, that when men gather in a group or even morecollect in great numbers, a sower the level of discord as consciousness falls a teacher great deal. The consciousness of unitycrowds is much lower than individual consciousness,—religion and the collective consciousness of society is beginning to realisecertainly lower than the consciousness of the individuals constituting it.There it is a necessity. In ordinary life, a little dimly and ineffectively as yetan individual, that spirituality is after all its own chief business and true aim and that whether he knows it or not, always has a religion but the object of his religion is also sometimes of a very inferior kind…. The god he worships may be the god of success or the god of money or the god of power, or simply a family god: the god of children, the god of the common element and family, the common bond god of all religionsthe ancestors. As these influences grow and come more and more consciously There is always a religion. The quality of the religion is very different according to cooperate with each other, it might be hoped that the necessary psychological modification will quietly, graduallyindividual, but still irresistibly and at last with an increasing force of rapidity take place which can prepare it is difficult for a real human being to live and fundamental change to go on living, to survive in the life without having something like a rudiment of humanityan ideal which serves as the ''centre'' for his existence. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/internationalism#p5</ref><center>~</center>Religious thought cannot Most of the time he doesn’t know it and if he were asked what his ideal is, he would be used unless unable to formulate it is liberated from ; but he has one, vaguely, something that seems to him the influence of religionsmost precious thing in life. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/1509/religion16-july-1958#p33p3,p34p4,p5,p37p6</ref>

===Religion and DanceTo Seek Our True Self===

The dance was once one of the highest expressions of the inner life; it was associated with religion and it was an important limb in sacred ceremony, in the celebration of festivals, in the adoration of the Divine. In some countries it reached a ..very high degree of beauty and an extraordinary perfection. In Japan they kept up the tradition essence of religion is the dance as a part discovery of the religious life immaterial Spirit and, because the strict sense play of beauty and art is a natural possession of the Japanese, they did not allow it to degenerate into something of lesser significance and smaller purpose. It was the same in India. It is true that in our days there have been attempts to resuscitate the ancient Greek and other dances; but the religious sense is missing in all such resurrections and they look more like rhythmic gymnastics than dancesupraphysical consciousness. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0325/28reason-julyand-1929religion#p22p8</ref>

For, if you want to find one teaching, one doctrine upon which to base To see your progress, you will never find anything—or, to be more exact, you will find something else, for Self in all creatures and all creatures in accordance with your Self—that is the climateunshakeable foundation of all religion, the agelove, the civilisationpatriotism, the teaching given is quite conflicting. When one person saysphilanthropy, "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 dogmahumanity, of everything which rises above selfishness 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 falsehoodgross utility. But all this has never led to anything and has only created confusion.<ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0417/8the-januaryishavasyopanishad-with-a-commentary-in-1951english#p14p86</ref>

"... religion's real business is to prepare man'Qs 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.If someone follows a 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 a good capacityto take up as much of man's mentality, vitality, physicality as it can he go farther and reach identification with give all his activities a turn towards the spiritual direction, the revelation of a spiritual meaning in them, the Divine?'' ''A: ''Religion is always imprint of a limitation for spiritual refinement, the spiritbeginning of a spiritual character. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/09/16-july-1958#p1</ref> If a In all the higher powers of his life man has a spiritual may be said to be seeking, blindly enough, for God. To get at the Divine and Eternal in himself and the world and to harmonise them, to put his being and his life independently in tune with the Infinite reveals itself in these parts of his mental formations nature as his concealed aim and his destiny. He sets out to arrive at his highest and largest and most perfect self, and the set limits 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 he lives, then we give the name of God. To get at this as a spiritual life makes himpresence is the aim of religion, so to saygrow into harmony with its eternal nature of right, love, cross strength and purity is the religious principles aim of ethics, to enjoy and enter something higher. But his consecration must come from within mould ourselves into the harmony of its eternal beauty and not be formal. If it comes exclusively from delight is the formaim and consummation of our aesthetic need and nature, then to know and to be according to its eternal principles of truth is the limitation is so great that he cannot go fartherend of science and philosophy and of all our insistent drive towards knowledge. <ref>httpshttp://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0525/2the-suprarational-ultimate-septemberof-1953life#p5,p8p1</ref>

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...word "God". It is a word (I have told you For this at least four or five times) reason philosophy has never been able to express "something" you do not know but are trying satisfy any except the intellectual few and was even for a time relegated to attain. There is only one thing oblivion by the imperious contempt of Science which thought that's important: that is it had discovered a complete solution of the Universe, a sincere truth and persistent will, for these things don't happen in a twinkling. So one must persevere. When someone feels that he is not advancing, he must not get discouraged; he must try law of life independent of religion and yet able to find out what it is supersede religion in its peculiar province of reaching & regulating the nature sources of conduct and leading mankind in its evolution. But it has now become increasingly clear that is opposingScience has failed to substantiate its claims, and then make that a belief in evolution or the necessary progress. And suddenly one goes forward. And when you reach supremacy of physical laws or the end you have an experience. And what is remarkable is that people who have followed altogether different paths, with altogether different mental constructions, from subjection of the greatest believer ephemeral individual to the most unbelieving, even materialists, have arrived at that experience, it interests of the slightly less ephemeral race is the same no substitute for everyone. Because it is true—because it is reala belief in Christ or Buddha, because it is for the law of Divine Love or the sole realitytrust in Divine Power & Providence. And it is quite simply that. I do not say anything more. This is of no importance… Religion which satisfies the heart and controls conduct, cannot in its average conceptions permanently satisfy the way one speaks about it, what is important is reason and thus exposes itself to follow gradual loss of empire over the path, your path, no matter which—yes, to go theremind.<ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0618/17an-incomplete-work-of-februaryvedantic-1954exegesis#p6p19</ref>

...very few people, very few, an insignificant number, go the aim of religion: its purpose is to church or temple link the human with a true religious feeling, that is, not to pray the Divine and beg for something from God but to offer themselves, give thanks, aspire, give themselves. There is hardly one in a million who does so doing sublimate the thought and life and flesh so that. So they do not have may admit the power rule of changing the atmosphere. Perhaps when they are there, they manage to get across, break through soul and go somewhere and touch something divinespirit. But the large majority of people who go only because of superstition, egoism and self-interest, create an atmosphere of this kind, and that is what you breathe in when you go to knowledge must be something more than a church creed or temple. Only, as you go there with a very good feeling, you tell yourself, "Oh, what a quiet place for meditation!"<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/06/30-june-1954#p30</ref> == Supramental Revolution== "A great thing would be done if all these God-visions could embrace and cast themselves into each othermystic revelation; but intellectual dogma and cult-egoism stand in the way." It is not in the mental consciousness that these things can his thinking mind must be harmonised and synthesised. For this able to accept it is necessary , to rise above and find correlate it with the idea behind the thought. Sri Aurobindo shows here, for example, what each principle of these religions represents in human effort, aspiration and realisation. Instead of taking these religions in their outward forms which are precisely dogmas things and intellectual conceptions, if we take them in their spirit, in the principle they represent, there is no difficulty in unifying them. They are simply different aspects of human progress which complete each other perfectly well and should be united with many others yet to form a more total and more complete progress, a more perfect understanding observed truth of life, a more integral approach to the Divine. And even universe: this unification which already demands a return to is the Spirit behind things, is not enough; there must be added to it a vision work of the futurephilosophy, and in the goal towards which humanity is moving, field of the future realisation truth of the world, that last "spirit it can only be done by a spiritual revolution" Sri Aurobindo speaks aboutphilosophy, which will open a new age, that is, the supramental revolution.In the supramental consciousness all these things are no longer contradictory whether intellectual in its method or exclusiveintuitive. They But all knowledge and endeavour can reach its fruition only if it is turned into experience and has become complementary. It is only the mental form which divides. What this mental form represents should be united to what all the other mental forms represent in order to make a harmonious whole. And that is part of the essential difference between a religion consciousness and its established operations; in the true spiritual life.Religion exists almost exclusively in its formsfield all this religious, occult or philosophical knowledge and endeavour must, its cultsto bear fruition, end in a certain set an opening up of ideas, and it becomes great only through the spirituality of a few exceptional individuals, whereas true spiritual lifeconsciousness, in experiences that found and above all what the supramental realisation will becontinually heighten, is independent of every precise, intellectual form, every limited form of life. It embraces all possibilities expand and manifestations enrich that consciousness and makes them the expression, in the vehicle building of a higher and more universal truth.A new religion would not only be useless but very harmful. It is a new life which must be created; it is a new consciousness which must be expressed. This is something beyond intellectual limits and mental formulae. It action that is a living truth which must manifest.Everything in its essence and its conformity with the 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 spirit: 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 work of the[p.78] entire problem not only for the individual but also for the collectivity:"All would change if man could once consent to be spiritualised; but his nature, mental and vital spiritual realisation and physical, is rebellious to the higher lawexperience. He loves his imperfection."<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0922/3the-evolution-aprilof-1957the-spiritual-man#p10,p12,p13,p14,p15,p16,p17,p18,p19</ref>

In the true controlling power universe there is an inner discrimination, a psychic sense and tact, a superior intervention constant relation of guidance from above or an innate Oneness and luminous inner guidanceMultiplicity. But still this line of development too is necessaryThis expresses itself as the universal Personality and the many Persons, because there must be a bridge and both between the spirit One and the Many and among the intellectual reason: Many themselves there is the light possibility of a spiritual or at least a spiritualised intelligence is necessary for an infinite variety of relations. These relations are determined by the fullness play of our total inner evolution, and without it, if another deeper guidance is lackingthe divine existence, the inner movement may be erratic and undisciplinedLord, turbid entering into His manifested habitations. They exist at first as conscious relations between individual souls; they are then taken up by them and mixed used as a means of entering into conscious relation with unspiritual elements or one-sided or incomplete in its catholicitythe One. For the transformation of the Ignorance It is this entering into various relations with the integral Knowledge One which is the growth in us of a spiritual intelligence ready to receive a higher light object and canalise it for all the parts function of our nature is an intermediate Religion. All religions are justified by this essential necessity of great importance; all express one Truth in various ways and move by various paths to one goal."<ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0917/24-septemberthe-1958lord#p2p11</ref>

The deepest heart, the inmost essence of religion, apart from its outward machinery of creed, cult, ceremony and symbol, is the search for God and the finding of God...Its aspiration is to discover the Infinite, the Absolute, the One, the highest occultism Divine, who is that which discovers the secret movements all these things and dynamic supernormal possibilities yet no abstraction but a Being. Its work is a sincere living out of Mind the true and Life intimate relations between man and Spirit God, relations of unity, relations of difference, relations of an illuminated knowledge, an ecstatic love and uses them in their native force or by delight, an applied process for the greater effectivity absolute surrender and service, a casting of every part of our mental, vital existence out of its normal status into an uprush of man towards the Divine and spiritual being. <ref>http://incarnateworda descent of the Divine into man.in/cwm/09/10-september-1958#p1</ref>

=Why 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- Importance 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 Religion?=suprarational light.

==Purpose The love of Religion==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 existence.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/reason-and-religion#p9</ref>

"Religion's real business is The attitude 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 emergebe taken towards religionsA benevolent goodwill towards all worshippers. 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 realityAn enlightened indifference towards all religions. In the meanwhile it has to take up as much All religions are partial approximations 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 one sole Truth that is far above them, the imprint of a spiritual refinement, the beginning of a spiritual character.<ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwm/0915/16-july-1958religion#p1p21,p22,p23,p24</ref>

''Q. Sweet MotherIf you want to appraise the real value 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 birth, 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 religion a necessity welcomed as good in another. Things have an inner value and become real to you only when you have acquired them by the life 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 ordinary man?'true 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."

''A:''In 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 life ages and manifesting in a multitude of societies it is a necessityforms. Each of us has been born in many different countries, belonged to many different nations, for it serves followed many different religions. Why must we accept the last one as a corrective to collective egoism the best? The experiences gathered by us in all these many lives in different countries and varying religions, are stored up in that inner continuity of our consciousness whichpersists through all births. There are multiple personalities there created by these past experiences, without and when we become aware of this controlmultitude within us, it becomes impossible to speak of one particular form of truth as the only truth, one country as our only country, could take on excessive proportionsone religion as the only true religion.The level There are people who have been born into one country, although the leading elements of collective their consciousness is always lower than obviously belong to another. I have met some born in Europe who were evidently Indians; I have met others born in Indian bodies who were as evidently Europeans. In Japan I have met some who were Indian, others who were European. And if any of them goes to the country or enters into the individual levelcivilisation to which he has affinity, he finds himself there perfectly at home. It <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/9-june-1929#p9,p10,p11</ref><center>~</center>Let us take an altogether ordinary example which is very noticeablepartial 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, for examplestudy, that when men gather in a group practise the religion or collect in great numbersphilosophy of another country, you can change the level conditions of consciousness falls your inner development. It is a little more difficult, that is, it asks for a great dealgreater effort for liberation, but it is very far from being impossible. The consciousness of crowds is much lower than individual consciousnessIn fact there are many people who do it, and the collective consciousness who love to free themselves from what comes to them from their present birth; by some sort of society is certainly lower than 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 consciousness consequences of the individuals constituting ityour birth completely.<ref>httpshttp://incarnateword.in/cwm/0907/16-julynovember-19581955#p3,p4,p5p69</ref>

There it is a necessity''Q. In ordinary lifeMother, an individual, whether he knows it or not, always has a religion but the object of his religion is sometimes of a very inferior kind.... The god he worships may here Sri Aurobindo writes:A great thing would be the god of success or the god of money or the god of power, or simply a family god: the god of children, the god of the family, the god of the ancestors. There is always a religion. The quality of the religion is very different according to the individual, done if all these God-visions could embrace and cast themselves into each other; but it is difficult for a human being to live intellectual dogma and to go on living, to survive cult-egoism stand in life without having something like a rudiment of an ideal which serves as the centre for his existenceway. Most of the time he doesn't know it and if he were asked what his ideal is, he would be unable to formulate it; but he has one, vaguely, something that seems to him the most precious thing in life.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/09/16-july-1958#p6</ref>'

===''How Religion Helped Mankindis it possible to fuse into one all these views?===''

All would change if man could once consent to ''A:'' It is not in the mental consciousness that these things can be spiritualised; but his nature, mental harmonised and vital and physical, synthesised. For this it is rebellious necessary to rise above and find the higher lawidea behind the thought. He loves his imperfectionSri Aurobindo shows here, for example, what each of these religions represents in human effort, aspiration and realisation.The Spirit is the truth Instead of our being; mind and life and body taking these religions in their imperfection outward forms which are its masksprecisely dogmas and intellectual conceptions, but if we take them in their perfection spirit, in the principle they represent, there is no difficulty in unifying them. They are simply different aspects of human progress which complete each other perfectly well and should be its mouldsunited with many others yet to form a more total and more complete progress, a more perfect understanding of life, a more integral approach to the Divine. To be spiritual only And even this unification which already demands a return to the Spirit behind things, is not enough; that prepares there must be added to it a number vision of souls for heaventhe future, but leaves the earth very much where it was. Neither goal towards which humanity is a compromise moving, the way future realisation of salvation.The the world knows three kinds of , that last "spiritual revolution. The material has strong results" Sri Aurobindo speaks about, the moral and intellectual are infinitely larger in their scope and richer in their fruits, but the spiritual are the great sowings.If the triple change could coincide in which will open a perfect correspondencenew age, a faultless work would be done; but the mind and body of mankind cannot hold perfectly a strong spiritual inrush: most that is spilt, much of the rest is corrupted. Many intellectual and physical upturnings of our soil are needed to work out a little result from a large spiritual sowing. <ref>https://incarnatewordsupramental revolution.in/cwsa/13/thoughts-and-glimpses#p16,p17,p18,p19</ref>

== Necessity of Religion ==In the supramental consciousness all these things are no longer contradictory or exclusive.They all become complementary..spiritual religion of humanity It is only the hope of the futuremental form which divides. spiritual life insists on freedom and variation in its self-expression and means of development<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/summary-and-conclusion#p11</ref>… they have been clinging What this mental form represents should be united to a religion, it is because that religion has helped them in one way or another, it has helped what all the other mental forms represent in them precisely something which wanted order to have make 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'') and it goes on like harmonious whole. And that. It is the essential difference between 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 anotherreligion and the true spiritual life.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/15/7-september-1963#p19</ref>

==Why Morality?==Its Religion exists almost exclusively in its forms, its cults, in a certain set of ideas, and it becomes great only through the spirituality of a few exceptional individuals, whereas true aim spiritual life, and above all what the supramental realisation will be, is a preparation independent of every precise, intellectual form, every limited form of life. It embraces all possibilities and manifestations and purification of makes them the soul to fit it for expression, the presence vehicle of Goda higher and more universal truth.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/18/an-incomplete-work-of-vedantic-exegesis#p7</ref>

...it is true that religion when it identifies itself the key of the entire problem not only with a creedfor the individual but also for the collectivity:"All would change if man could once consent to be spiritualised; but his nature, a cultmental and vital and physical, a Church, a system of ceremonial forms, may well become a retarding force and there may therefore arise a necessity for the human spirit is rebellious to reject its control over the varied activities of lifehigher law. He loves his imperfection."<ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/2509/religion-as-the-law3-ofapril-life1957#p6</ref> ===Religion of Humanity=== ...we must recognise the fact that in a time of great activity, of high aspiration, of deep sowing, of rich fruit-bearingp9, such as the modern age with all its faults and errors has beenp10, a time especially when humanity got rid of much that was cruelp11, evilp12, ignorantp13, darkp14, odiousp15, not by the power of religion, but by the power of the awakened intelligence and of human idealism and sympathy.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/religion-as-the-law-of-life#p2p18</ref>

The aim A revolutionary reconstruction of religion, philosophy, science, art and society is the last inevitable outcome. It proceeds at first by the religion light of humanity was formulated in the eighteenth century individual mind and reason, by a sort its demand on life and its experience of primal intuitionlife; that aim was and but it is still must go from the individual to re-create human society in the image of three kindred ideas, liberty, equality and fraternityuniversal. None of these has really been won in spite For the effort of all the progress individual soon shows him that has been achieved. The liberty that has been so loudly proclaimed as an essential he cannot securely discover the truth and law of modern progress is an outward, mechanical and unreal liberty. The equality that has been so much sought after and battled for is equally an outward and mechanical his own being without discovering some universal law and will turn out truth to be an unreal equalitywhich he can relate it. Fraternity Of the universe he is not even claimed to be a practicable principle of the ordering of life and what part; in all but his deepest spirit he is put forward as its substitute subject, a small cell in that tremendous organic mass: his substance is the outward drawn from its substance and mechanical principle of equal association or at by the best a comradeship law of labour. appeal to its life the vital and physical mind law of man rather than his inner beinglife is determined and governed. It has limited his effort to the attempt to revolutionise political From a new view and social institutions and to bring about such a modification knowledge of the ideas world must proceed his new view and sentiments knowledge of the common mind him self, of mankind as would make these institutions practicable; it has worked at the machinery his power and capacity and limitations, of human life his claim on existence and on the outer mind much more than upon high road and the soul distant or immediate goal of the racehis individual and social destiny. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/the-religioncoming-of-humanitythe-subjective-age#p5p3</ref>

The deepest heartsense-obscured, limited and desire-driven individual self must raise itself out of the dark pit of sense-obsession into the inmost essence clear air of religionthe spirit, apart from its outward machinery must disembarrass itself of creedservile bondage to bodily, cult, ceremony and symbol, is the search for God emotional & intellectual selfishness and assume the finding freedom & royalty of God. Its aspiration is to discover the Infiniteuniversal love and beneficence, must expand itself from the Absolutenarrow, the Onepetty, inefficient ego till it becomes commensurate with the Divineinfinite, 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-powerful, relations omnipresent Self 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; then is its aimof existence attained, then is its sphere, its process is suprarationalpilgrimage ended. The knowledge of God is not to This may be gained done by weighing realising the feeble arguments of reason for or against his existence: it is to be gained only Eternal in oneself by a self-transcending and absolute consecrationknowledge, aspiration and experience. rational scientific experiment or rational philosophic thinking. Even by realising oneself in those parts of religious discipline which seem most to resemble scientific experiment, the method is a verification of things which exceed Him by Love as God the reason and its timid scope. Even in those parts of religious knowledge which seem most to resemble intellectual operationsBeloved, or by realising Him as the illuminating faculties are not imagination, logic and rational judgment, but revelations, inspirations, intuitions, intuitive discernments that leap down to us from a plane Lord 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 all in God is that peace His universe and bliss which passes all understandingits creatures by works. The surrender to God This realisation is the surrender true crown 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 existenceany ethical system.<ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2518/reasonan-andincomplete-work-of-vedantic-religionexegesis#p9p6</ref>

A religion 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 humanity may the mental life should be either an intellectual 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 sentimental idealanimal 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 living dogma with intellectualfamily and then die, psychological —the vital and practical effectsphysical life, or else a spiritual aspiration and rule human edition of living, partly the signanimal round, partly the cause of a change human enlargement of soul in humanityThe religion of humanity was mind-born in the eighteenth century, the mānasa putra little animal sector and arc of the rationalist thinkers who brought it forward 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 substitute for the formal spiritualism double motive of ecclesiastical ChristianityNature, an insistent duality in her human purpose. It tried Man is here to learn from her how to control and create; but she evidently means him not only to give itself a body control, create and constantly re-create in Positivismnew and better forms himself, his own inner existence, which was an attempt his mentality, but also to control and re-create correspondingly his environment. He has to formulate turn Mind not only on itself, but on Life and Matter and the material existence; that is very clear not only from the dogmas law and nature of this religionthe terrestrial evolution, but on too heavily from his own past and present history. And there comes from the observation of these conditions and severely rationalistic a basis for acceptance even by an Age of Reason. Humanitarianism 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 been its most prominent emotional resultwonderfully exceeded his animal beginnings, into something more than mental, more than human, into a being spiritual and divine. PhilanthropyEven if he cannot do that, social service yet he may have to open his mind to what is beyond it and other kindred activities have been its outward expression 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 good workshis nature. DemocracyIn any case the fullness of Life is his evident object, socialismthe widest life and the highest life possible to him, pacificism are to whether that be a complete humanity or a great extent its bynew and divine race. We must recognise both his need of integrality and his impulse of self-products or at least owe much exceeding if we would fix rightly the meaning of his individual existence and the perfect aim and norm of their vigour to its inner presencehis society.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/thecivilisation-religion-ofand-humanityculture#p1p2</ref>

The fundamental idea ...it is true that mankind is 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 for the godhead human spirit to be worshipped and served by man 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 respectspirit, in what is beyond the serviceintellect, beyond the progress aesthetic and ethical and practical being of man, and to inform and govern these members of the human our being and human life are by the chief duty higher light and the chief aim law of the human spirit. No other idolReligionism, neither on the nationcontrary, entrenches itself in some narrow pietistic exaltation of the Statelower members or lays exclusive stress on intellectual dogmas, the family nor anything else ought to take its place; they are only worthy of respect so far as they are images of the human spirit forms and enshrine its presence ceremonies, on some fixed and aid its selfrigid moral code, on some religio-political or religio-manifestationsocial system...Science even, though it is one of the chief modern idols.Man Not that these things are altogether negligible or that they must be sacred to man regardless of all distinctions unworthy or unnecessary or that a spiritual religion need disdain the aid of raceforms, creedceremonies, colour, nationality, status, political creeds or social advancementsystems. The body of On the contrary, they are needed by man is because the lower members have to be respected, made immune from violence exalted and outrageraised before they can be fully spiritualised, fortified by science against disease before they can directly feel the spirit and preventable deathobey its law. The life of man An intellectual formula is to be held sacredoften needed by the thinking and reasoning mind, preserveda form or ceremony by the aesthetic temperament or other parts of the infrarational being, strengtheneda set moral code by man’s vital nature in their turn towards the inner life. But these things are aids and supports, ennoblednot the essence; precisely because they belong to the rational and infrarational parts, uplifted. The heart of man is to they can be held sacred alsonothing more and, given scopeif too blindly insisted on, protected from violationmay even hamper the suprarational light. Such as they are, from suppressionthey have to be offered to man and used by him, from mechanisation, freed from belittling influences. The mind of man is but not to be released from all bonds, allowed freedom imposed on him as his sole law by a forced and range inflexible domination. In the use of them toleration and opportunity, given all its means free permission of self-training and self-development and organised in variation is the play first rule which should be observed. The spiritual essence of its powers for religion is alone the one thing supremely needful, the service of humanitything to which we have always to hold and subordinate to it every other element or motive.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/religion-as-the-religionlaw-of-humanitylife#p2p6</ref>

...A spiritual religion of humanity has exercised and how fruitful is the hope of the future. By this is not meant what is ordinarily called a work it has done. It accomplished rapidly many things which orthodox universal religion failed to do effectively, largely because it acted as a constant system, a thing of creed and intellectual belief and dogma and critical solvent, an unsparing assailant of the thing outward rite. Mankind has tried unity by that is means; it has failed and an unflinching champion of the thing deserved to fail, because there can beno universal religious system, faithful always to the futureone in mental creed and vital form. The inner spirit is indeed one, while orthodox religion allied itself with but more than any other the powers spiritual life insists on freedom and variation in its self-expression and means of the present, even development.A religion of humanity means the pastgrowing realisation that there is a secret Spirit, bound itself by its pact with them and could act only at best as a moderating but not as a reforming force. Faithdivine Reality, even an intellectual faithin which we are all one, must always be a worker of miraclesthat humanity is its highest present vehicle on earth, that the human race and this religion of humanity, even without taking bodily shape or a compelling form or a visible the human being are the means of self-effectuation, was yet able to effect comparatively much of what by which it set out to dowill progressively reveal itself here. It implies a growing attempt to some degree humanised society, humanised law live out this knowledge and punishment, humanised bring about a kingdom of this divine Spirit upon earth. By its growth within us oneness with our fellow-men will become the outlook leading principle of man on manall our life, abolished legalised torture and the cruder forms not merely a principle of slaverycooperation but a deeper brotherhood, raised those who were depressed a real and fallen, gave large hopes to humanity, stimulated philanthropy an inner sense of unity and charity equality and a common life. There must be the service realisation by the individual that only in the life of mankind, encouraged everywhere his fellow-men is his own life complete. There must be the realisation by the desire of freedom, put a curb race that only on oppression the free and greatly minimised its more brutal expressions. It gave new conceptions full life of the dignity of the human being individual can its own perfection and opened new ideas permanent happiness be founded. There must be too a discipline and new vistas a way of his educationsalvation in accordance with this religion, that is to say, self-development and potentiality. It spread enlightenment; a means by which it made can be developed by each man feel more his responsibility for within himself, so that it may be developed in the progress and happiness life of the race; . … But if it raised the average self-respect and capacity is at all a truth of mankind; our being, then it gave hope to must be the serf, self-assertion truth to the downtrodden which all is moving and made the labourer in his manhood it must be found the potential equal means of a fundamental, an inner, a complete, a real human unity which would be the rich one secure base of a unification of human life. A spiritual oneness which would create a psychological oneness not dependent upon any intellectual or outward uniformity and powerfulcompel a oneness of life not bound up with its mechanical means of unification, but ready always to enrich its secure unity by a free inner variation and a freely varied outer self-expression, this would be the basis for a higher type of human existence. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/thesummary-religionand-of-humanityconclusion#p3p11</ref>

=How?==Religion and Spirituality=How to Achieve Morality?==The sense-obscured, limited and desire-driven individual self must raise itself out of the dark pit of sense-obsession into the clear air of the spirit, must disembarrass itself of servile bondage to bodily, emotional & intellectual selfishness and assume the freedom & royalty of universal love and beneficence, must expand itself from the narrow, petty, inefficient ego till it becomes commensurate 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. <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'Q. Sweet Mother, Hinduism will not object but it insists that the Law with which man must put himself into relation what is the Eternal in the universe, that in this permanent difference between yoga and stable Truth manreligion?''s nature fulfils itself out of the transient seemings of his daily existence and that 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 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.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''A:''Ah! my child.. These two laws of action together make what is called Karmayoga or the putting of ourselves into relation with that which is Eternal by means of and in our works. Before, then, we can understand what Karmayoga it 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 as though you were asking me the phenomena of the Universe difference between a dog 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>a cat!

==Religion Imagine someone who, in some way or other, has heard of something like the Divine or has a personal feeling that something of the kind exists, and Its Counterparts==begins to make all sorts of efforts: efforts of will, of discipline, efforts of concentration, all sorts of efforts to find this Divine, to discover what He is, to become acquainted with Him and unite with Him. Then this person is doing yoga.

===ReligionNow,Science if this person has noted down all the processes he has used and Philosophy===constructs a fixed system, and sets up all that he has discovered as absolute laws―for example, he says: the Divine is like this, to find the Divine you must do this, make this particular gesture, take this attitude, perform this ceremony, and you must admit that this is the truth, you must say, "I accept that this is the Truth and I fully adhere to it; and your method is the only right one, the only one which exists"― if all that is written down, organised, arranged into fixed laws and ceremonies, it becomes a religion.<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/23-may-1956#p1,p2,p4,p5</ref><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.

A religion therefore which claims to be eternal, must not be content with satisfying the heart and imagination, it must answer to the satisfaction The time of the intellect the questions with which philosophy religions is preoccupied. A philosophy which professes to explain the world-problem once for all, 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 Eternalover.

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 being; it has developed 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 Eternal.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/18/an-incomplete-work-of-vedantic-exegesis#p27</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 entered the cry age of the atheistic Roman poetuniversal spirituality, "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 experience 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, Vaishnavainitial purity.<ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/2515/religion-as-the-law-of-life#p4p29,p30,p31,p32</ref>

...in order to accomplish all its future this idea and religion For me religions are forms, much too human, of humanity has to make itself more explicit, insistent and categorically imperativespiritual life. For otherwise it can only work with clarity in the minds Each one expresses one aspect of the few single and with the mass it will be only a modifying influenceeternal Truth, but will not be the rule in expressing it exclusive of human life. the enemy of all humanityother aspects,real religion, is human egoism, the egoism of the individual, the egoism of class it deforms and nationdiminishes it. None has the love of mankind, not right to recognise a real unity between man and man. For that essentially must be call itself the aim of the religion of humanityonly true one, as any more than it must be has the earthly aim of all human religion, love, mutual recognition of human brotherhood, a living sense of human oneness and practice of human oneness in thought, feeling and life, right to deny the ideal which was expressed first some thousands of years ago truth contained in the ancient Vedic hymn and must always remain the highest injunction others. And all of the Spirit within us them together would not suffice to human life upon earth. With that done, express the one necessary psychological change will have been effected without Supreme Truth which no formal and mechanical, no political and administrative unity can be real and secure. If it is donebeyond all expression, 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 naturewhilst being present in each one.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/2515/the-religion-of-humanity#p4p10</ref>

...brotherhood Those who carry within themselves a spiritual destiny and are born to realise the real key Divine, to the triple gospel of the idea of humanity. The union of liberty and equality can only be achieved by the power of human brotherhood and it cannot be founded on anything else. But brotherhood exists only become conscious in the soul Him and by the soul. When the soul claims freedomlive Him, it is the freedom of its self-developmentwill arrive, the self-development of the divine in man in all his being. When it claims equalityno matter what path, what it way they follow. That is claiming is that freedom equally for all to say, even in religion there are people who have had the spiritual experience and found the recognition Divine―not because of the same soulreligion, the same godhead usually in all human beings. When spite of 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. Everything served their purpose.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/2508/the23-religion-ofmay-humanity1956#p7</ref>

The unaided intellectual reason faced with the phenomena widest spirituality does not exclude or discourage any essential human activity or faculty, but works rather to lift all of the religious life is naturally apt to adopt one them up out of two attitudestheir imperfection and groping ignorance, both of transforms them shallow in the extreme, hastily presumptuous by its touch and erroneous. Either it views makes them the whole thing as a mass instruments of superstition, a mystical nonsense, a farrago of ignorant barbaric survivals,—that was the extreme spirit of the rationalist now happily, though not deadlight, yet much weakened power and almost moribund,—or it patronises religion, tries to explain its origins, to get rid joy 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 divine being and the light of the reasoning intelligencedivine nature.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/reason-and-religion#p7p13</ref>

...suprarational The Spirit is the truth of our being; mind and life and body in which religious aspiration finds entirely what it seekstheir imperfection are its masks, so too there but in their perfection should be its moulds. To be spiritual only is also the infrarational life not enough; that prepares a number of souls for heaven, but leaves the instincts, impulses, sensations, crude emotions, vital activities from which all human aspiration takes its beginningearth very much where it was.<ref>http://incarnatewordNeither is a compromise the way of salvation.in/cwsa/25/reason-and-religion#p12</ref><center>~</center>The widest spirituality does not exclude or discourage any essential human activity or facultyworld knows three kinds of revolution. The material has strong results, but works rather to lift all of them up out of the moral and intellectual are infinitely larger in their imperfection scope and groping ignorancericher in their fruits, transforms them by its touch and makes them but the instruments of spiritual are the light, power and joy of the divine being and the divine naturegreat sowings.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/reason-and-religion#p13</ref>

===Religion of HumanityIf the triple change could coincide in a perfect correspondence, conclusion===...while it is possible to construct a precarious faultless work would be done; but the mind and quite mechanical unity by political and administrative meansbody of mankind cannot hold perfectly a strong spiritual inrush: most is spilt, the unity much of the human race, even if achieved, can only be secured and can only be made real if the religion of humanity, which rest is at present the highest active ideal of mankind, spiritualises itself corrupted. Many intellectual and becomes the general inner law physical upturnings of human lifeour soil are needed to work out a little result from a large spiritual sowing. <ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2513/summarythoughts-and-conclusionglimpses#p1p17,p18,p19</ref>

A religion of humanity means For it is into the growing realisation Divine within them that there men and mankind have to grow; it is not an external idea or rule that has to be imposed on them from without. Therefore the law of a secret Spirit, a divine Reality, in which we are all one, that humanity growing inner freedom 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 be most honoured in the spiritual age of this divine Spirit upon earthmankind. By its growth True it is that so long as man has not come within us oneness with our fellowmeasurable distance of self-men will become the leading principle of all our life, knowledge and has not merely a principle of cooperation but a deeper brotherhoodset his face towards it, a real and an inner sense he cannot escape from the law of unity external compulsion and equality all his efforts to do so must be vain. He is and a common life. There always must be , so long as that lasts, the realisation by the individual that only in slave of others, the life slave of his fellow-men is family, his caste, his clan, his Church, his society, his own life completenation. There We must be feel and obey the compulsion of the Spirit if we would establish our inner right to escape other compulsion. Therefore even in the unregenerated state we find that the healthiest, the realisation by truest, the race most living growth and action is that only on which arises in the free largest possible freedom and full life that all excess of compulsion is either the individual can its own perfection and permanent happiness be founded. There must be too law of a discipline and gradual atrophy or a way tyranny varied or cured by outbreaks of salvation in accordance with this religionrabid disorder. And as soon as man comes to know his spiritual self, he does by that is to saydiscovery, a means often even by which the very seeking for it can be developed by each man within himself, so that it may be developed in as ancient thought and religion saw, escape from the outer law and enter into the life law of the racefreedom. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/summaryconditions-for-the-andcoming-of-a-spiritual-conclusionage#p11p15</ref>

Democracy and Socialism are, as we have already said, the sign that that self-consciousness is beginning to ripen into fullnessIn spirituality..<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/we must seek for the-drive-towards-legislative-directing light and-social-centralisation-the harmonising law, and-uniformity#p8</ref> ==Failure in religion only in proportion as it identifies itself with this spirituality. So long as it falls short of Religion== Religion itself had become fixed in dogmas this, it is one human activity and ceremoniespower among others, sects and churches , even if it be considered the most important and had lost for the most partpowerful, it cannot wholly guide the others. If it seeks always to fix them into the limits of a creed, an unchangeable law, except a particular system, it must be prepared to see them revolting from its control; for although they may accept this impress for a few individualstime and greatly profit by it, in the end they must move by the law of their being towards a freer activity and an untrammelled movement. Spirituality respects the freedom of the human soul, direct contact with because it is itself fulfilled by freedom; and the deepest meaning of freedom is the power to expand and grow towards perfection by the living founts law of spiritualityone’s own nature, ''dharma''. A period This liberty it will give to all the fundamental parts of negation was necessaryour being. They had It will give that freedom to be driven back philosophy and science which ancient Indian religion gave,—freedom even to deny the spirit, if they will,—as a result of which philosophy and science never felt in upon ancient India any necessity of divorcing themselvesfrom religion, nearer but grew rather into it and under its light. It will give the same freedom to man’s seeking for political and social perfection and to all his other powers and aspirations. Only it will be vigilant to illuminate them so that they may grow into the light and law of the spirit, not by suppression and restriction, but by a self-searching, self-controlled expansion and a many-sided finding of their own eternal sourcesgreatest, highest and deepest potentialities. For all these are potentialities of the spirit.<ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/civilisationreligion-as-the-andlaw-of-barbarismlife#p8p9</ref>

false socialisation In reality, there is no division and the Self in me is the same as the Self in you and the same as the Self up yonder in the Sun. The unity of spiritual existence is the basis of all true religion has been always and true morality. We know indeed that as God is not contained in His universe, but the chief cause universe is in Him, so also God is not contained within a man. When the Sruti says elsewhere that the Purusha lies hidden in the heart of its failure our being and is no larger than the size of a man's thumb, it simply means that to regenerate mankind - It saddled upon the religious life mind of man a Churchunder the dominion of Avidya his body, vitality, mind, reason bulk so largely, the Spirit seems a priesthood small and indistinguishable thing indeed inside so many and a mass of ceremonies bulky sheaths and set over coverings. But in reality, it a pack of watchdogs under is body, vitality, mind & reason forming the name of creeds apparent man that are small and trifling and dogmasit is the Spirit or real man that is large, dogmas which one had to accept and obey under pain of condemnation to eternal hell grandiose & mighty. The apparent man exists in & by an eternal judge beyondthe real, just as one had not the real in the apparent; the body is in the soul, not the soul in the body. Yet for the convenience of language and our finite understanding we are compelled to accept say that the soul is in the body and that God is within the man; for that is how it naturally presents itself to obey us who use the laws mental standpoint and the language of society on pain a finite intelligence. The Lord, from our standpoint, is within all His creatures and He is the real self of condemnation to temporal imprisonment or death by a mortal judge belowall His creatures. My self and yourself are not really two but one. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/17/the-law-of-renunciation#p12</ref>

"Foster by sacrifice the gods," says the Gita, "and let those gods foster you; fostering each other ye shall attain the supreme good,—param sreyah." Attaining the supreme good we pass beyond the gods and come to God; we leave Veda to arrive at Vedanta or, rather, fulfil Veda in Vedanta.Then we are no longer content to sacrifice this or that possession, giving a share, making reservations, but offer unreservedly & unconditionally the supreme sacrifice, yielding up on the highest of all altars all that we are and possess; we give no longer to Agni, Indra, Varuna or Mitra, but to the supreme & universal Lord, ''bhoktáram yajnatapasám'.prominent aim of religion rather than any spiritual growth of Then, too, we receive in return not wealth, nor cattle nor horses nor lands nor empire, not joys'nor powers nor brilliances nor capacities, but God Himself & the individual world with all these things in them as trifles and playthings for the racesoul to enjoy as God enjoys, possessing them and yet not possessing, wholly unbound by possession. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2517/chapter-ii-the-spiritualgolden-aimrule-of-living-enjoyment-and-liferenunciation#p5,p6p10</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 ==Drawbacks of religion 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.in/cwm/09/24-september-1958#p16</ref>Religion==

===Duties All religions have saved a number of souls, but none yet has been able to spiritualise mankind. For that there is needed not cult and creed, but a Man===sustained and all-comprehending effort at spiritual self-evolution.

Each part of man's being has its own dharma which it must follow and will follow The changes we see in the endworld today are intellectual, put on it what fetters you please. The dharma of sciencemoral, 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 and conclusions with any current ideas of religious dogma or ethical rule or aesthetic prejudice. In the end, if left free physical in their action, they will find the unity of Truth with Good ideal 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>httpintention://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/the-spiritual-aim-and-life#p9</ref><center>~</center>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 revolution waits for the indispensable satisfaction of the gross needs which our physical its hour 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 throws up, marry, get his livelihood, support a family and then die,—the vital meanwhile its waves here 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 Until it comes from the observation sense 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 others cannot do that, yet he may have to open his mind to what is beyond it be understood and to govern his life more and more by the light and power that he receives from something greater than himself. Man's consciousness till then all interpretation of the divine within himself present happening and the world is the supreme fact forecast of his existence and to grow into that may very well be the intention of his man’s future are vain things. For its nature. In any case the fullness of Life is his evident object, the widest life and the highest life possible to himpower, whether event are 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 which will determine the meaning next cycle of his individual existence and the perfect aim and norm of his societyour humanity.<ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2513/civilisationthoughts-and-cultureglimpses#p2p21,p22</ref>

It is ... religions are always mistaken—always—because they want to standardise the expression of an experience and impose it on everyone as an irrefutable truth that . …That is why all active being is a seeking for Godthe religions, a seeking for some highest self and deepest Reality secret withinhowever beautiful they may be, behind and above ourselves and thingshave always led man to the worst excesses. All the crimes, a seeking for the hidden Divinity: horrors perpetrated in the truth which we glimpse through name of religionare among the darkest stains on human history, lies concealed behind all life; it is the great secret and simply because of life, that which it this little initial error: wanting what is in labour true for one individual to discover and to make real to its self-knowledgebe true for the mass or collectivity.<ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/2509/the24-suprarationalseptember-good1958#p1p15,p16</ref>

If mankind For as there 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.suprarational life in/cwsa/25/conditions-for-the-coming-of-a-spiritual-age#p8</ref><center>~</center>For it is into the Divine within them that men and mankind have to grow; it is not an external idea or rule that has to be imposed on them from without. Therefore the law of a growing inner freedom is that which will be most honoured in the spiritual age of mankind. True it is that so long as man has not come within measurable distance of self-knowledge and has not set his face towards religious aspiration finds entirely what itseeks, he cannot escape from the law of external compulsion and all his efforts to do so must be vain. He too there is and always must be, so long as that lasts, also the slave infrarational life of others, the slave of his familyinstincts, his casteimpulses, his clansensations, his Churchcrude emotions, his society, his nationvital activities from which all human aspiration takes its beginning. We must These too feel and obey the compulsion touch of the Spirit if we would establish our inner right to escape other compulsionreligious sense in man, share its needs and experience, desire its satisfactions. Therefore even Religion includes this satisfaction also in the unregenerated state we find that the healthiestits scope, the truest, the most living growth and action is that which arises in the largest possible freedom and that all excess of compulsion what is either the law of a gradual atrophy or a tyranny varied or cured by outbreaks of rabid disorder. And as soon as man comes usually called religion it seems even to know his spiritual self, he does by that discovery, often even by be the very seeking for itgreater part, as ancient thought and religion saw, escape from sometimes to an external view almost the outer law and enter into the law of freedom.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/conditions-whole; for-the-coming-supreme purity of-a-spiritual-age#p15</ref><center>~</center>A revolutionary reconstruction of religionexperience does not appear or is glimpsed only through this mixed and turbid current. Much impurity, philosophyignorance, sciencesuperstition, art and society is the last inevitable outcome. It proceeds at first by many doubtful elements must form as the light result of the individual mind this contact and union of our highest tendencies with our lower ignorant nature. Here it would seem that reason, by has its demand on life and its experience of lifelegitimate part; but here surely it must go from the individual can intervene to enlighten, purify, rationalise the universal. For the effort play of the individual soon shows him that he cannot securely discover the truth instincts and law of his own being without discovering some universal law and truth to which he can relate itimpulses. Of the universe he is It would seem that a part; in all but his deepest spirit he is its subjectreligious reformation, a small cell in movement to substitute a “pure” and rational religion for one that tremendous organic mass: his substance is drawn from its substance largely infrarational and by the law of its life the law of his life is determined and governed. From impure, would be a new view and knowledge of the world must proceed his new view and knowledge of him self, of his power and capacity and limitations, of his claim on existence and the high road and distinct advance in the distant or immediate goal religious development of his individual and social destinyhumanity. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/thereason-comingand-of-the-subjective-agereligion#p3p12</ref>

===Religion in Ethical Man and Aesthetic ManDependence on Outer Forms===

There The spiritual spirit is in our mentality not contrary to a side religious feeling of willadoration, conduct, character which creates the ethical man; there devotion and consecration. But what is another side of sensibility to the beautiful,—understanding beauty wrong 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 religions is the ethical rule; he feels it to be a barrier to his aesthetic freedom and an oppression on the play fixity 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 mind clinging 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 formula 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 religionan exclusive truth. Even when fully accepted, it is not for their own sake One must always remember 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 formulas are only 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 mental expression of the aesthetic impulse beyond a very narrow truth and carefully guarded limit that this truth can always be combined with a strict ethical life. He evolves the puritan who objects to pleasure on principle; not only expressed 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 capacitiesmany other ways.<ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/2515/aesthetic-and-ethical-culturereligion#p4p3</ref>

What is farther needed is the awakening of a certain visionReligion itself had become fixed in dogmas and ceremonies, an insight sects and an intuitive response in churches and had lost for the soul. Reason which studies always from outsidemost part, cannot give this inner and more intimate contact; it has to aid itself by except for a more few individuals, direct insight springing from contact with the soul itself living founts of spirituality. A period of negation was necessary. They had to be driven back and in upon themselves, nearer to call at every step on their own eternal sources. Now that the intuitive mind to fill up the gap stress of its negation is past and they are raising their heads, we see them seeking for their own deficienciestruth, reviving by virtue of a return upon themselves and a new self-discovery. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/thecivilisation-suprarationaland-beautybarbarism#p7p8</ref>

It is in truth seekingAs for example, as with all people brought up in a certain religion their experiences will always be coloured by this religion, for the Divine, the All-Beautiful in man, in nature, in life, in thought, in art; for God is Beauty and Delight hidden in the variation of his masks and forms. When, fulfilled in our growing sense and knowledge of beauty and delight in beauty and our power for beautyfact, we are able to identify ourselves in soul with this Absolute and Divine in all the forms and activities of the world and shape an image of our inner and our outer life in reach the highest image we can perceive and embody very source of the All-Beautiful, then the aesthetic being in us who was born for this end, has fulfilled himself and risen to his divine consummation. To find highest beauty is to find God; to reveal, to embody, to create, as we say, highest beauty is to bring out of our souls thing one must free oneself from the living image and power of Godexternal formation. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/2507/the22-suprarationaljune-beauty1955#p11p14</ref>

In all the higher powers of his life man may be said Religion, which ought to be seeking, blindly enough, for God. To get at the Divine and Eternal in himself and have led the world and to harmonise themway, but owing to put his being its greater dependence on its external parts and his life in tune with the Infinite reveals itself in these parts of his nature its infrarational rather than its spiritual impulses has been as his concealed aim and his destiny. He sets out to arrive at his highest and largest and most perfect selfmuch, and the moment he at all touches upon itor even more, 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 a sower of God. To get at this discord as a spiritual presence is the aim teacher of religionunity, —religion is beginning to grow into harmony with its eternal nature of rightrealise, lovea little dimly and ineffectively as yet, strength and purity that spirituality is the aim of ethics, to enjoy and mould ourselves into the harmony of after all its eternal beauty own chief business and delight is the true aim and consummation of our aesthetic need and nature, to know and to be according to its eternal principles of truth that it is also the end of science and philosophy common element and the common bond of all our insistent drive towards knowledgereligions.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/the-suprarational-ultimate-of-life#p1</ref> ===Society As these influences grow and Life=== But all this seems to be something above our normal come more and usual being; it is something into which we strive more consciously to growcooperate with each other, but it does not seem to might be hoped that 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 experiencenecessary psychological modification will quietly, the higher truthgradually, but with interests, physical needs, desires, vital necessities. This is real to it, all the rest is a little shadowy; It accepts ethics as a bond still irresistibly 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 at last 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 increasing force of beauty. It allows religion a fixed rapidity take 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 for which can prepare a moment to pause in the affairs of the world real 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 fundamental change in societies which like the Indian erect spirituality as their aim and principle. 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 efficiencyhumanity.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/the-suprarational-ultimate-of-lifeinternationalism#p2p5</ref>

Religion too by putting God far above in distant heavens made It saddled upon the religious life of man too much a Church, a priesthood and a mass of ceremonies and set over it a worm pack of watchdogs under the earth little name of creeds and vile before his Creator dogmas, dogmas which one had to accept and admitted only obey under pain of condemnation to eternal hell by a caprice an eternal judge beyond, just as one had to accept and to obey the laws of society on pain of his favour condemnation to temporal imprisonment or death by a doubtful salvation in superhuman worldsmortal judge below.<ref>https://incarnatewordThis false socialisation of religion has been always the chief cause of its failure to regenerate mankind.in/cwsa/25/the-unseen-power#p10</ref>

== Practice For nothing can be more fatal to religion than for its spiritual element to be crushed or formalised out of Ideal Religion==existence by its outward aids and forms and machinery. The falsehood of the old social use of religion is shown by its effects. History has exhibited more than once the coincidence of the greatest religious fervour and piety with darkest ignorance, with an obscure squalor and long vegetative stagnancy of the mass of human life, with the unquestioned reign of cruelty, injustice and oppression, or with an organisation of the most ordinary, unaspiring and unraised existence hardly relieved by some touches of intellectual or halfspiritual light on the surface,—the end of all this a widespread revolt that turned first of all against the established religion as the key-stone of a regnant falsehood, evil and ignorance. It is another sign when the too scrupulously exact observation of a socio-religious system and its rites and forms, which by the very fact of this misplaced importance begin to lose their sense and true religious value, becomes the law and most prominent aim of religion rather than any spiritual growth of the individual and the race. And a great sign too of this failure is when the individual is obliged to flee from society in order to find room for his spiritual growth; when, finding human life given over to the unregenerated mind, life and body and the place of spiritual freedom occupied by the bonds of form, by Church and Shastra, by some law of the Ignorance, he is obliged to break away from all these to seek for growth into the spirit in the monastery, on the mountain-top, in the cavern, in the desert and the forest. When there is that division between life and the spirit, sentence of condemnation is passed upon human life. Either it is left to circle in its routine or it is decried as worthless and unreal, a vanity of vanities, and loses that confidence in itself and inner faith in the value of its terrestrial aims, ''śraddhā'', without which it cannot come to anything. For the spirit of man must strain towards the heights; when it loses its tension of endeavour, the race must become immobile and stagnant or even sink towards darkness and the dust.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/the-spiritual-aim-and-life#p5,p6</ref>

For God has expressed us in many principles & not one. He has ranged them one over the other & commanded us not to destroy one in order to satisfy another, not to sanction internal civil war and perpetrate spiritual suicide, but to rise from one principle to the other, taking it up with us as we go, fulfilling the lower first in itself and then in the higher. We have to dissociate our sense of being from body & vitality and become mind, to dissociate it from mind and become vijnanam, to dissociate it from vijnanam and become divine bliss, awareness & being, Sachchidanandam manifest in phenomenal existence, to dissociate it from Sachchidanandam and become That which is in the world Sachchidanandam, not in order to destroy body, vitality, mind, knowledge, manifested bliss & being but to transcend and satisfy them more mightily, without being limited by their conditions, to become through them yet beyond them infinite, divine & universal. Destroy them we cannot without blotting out ourselves and entering into the Sunyam Brahma; but we can maim ourselves in the world by the attempt to destroy them. For thus are we made and we can be no other,—evam twayi nanyatheto'sti. "Thus is it in thee and it is not otherwise." Purnata, fullness is the true law of our progression.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/17/part-ii-the-field-and-instruments-of-vedanta-1#p5</ref> ===How to Interpret Religion?=== ...if you seek the interpretation of your religion from Christians, atheists and agnostics, you will hear more wonderful things than that. What do you think of Charvak's interpretation of Vedic religion as neither pantheistic nor polytheistic but a plutotheistic invention of the Brahmins? An European or his disciple in scholarship can no more enter into the spirit of the Veda than the wind can blow freely in a closed room. And pedants especially can never go beyond the manipulation of words. Men like Max Muller presume to lecture us on our Veda & Vedanta because they know something of Sanscrit grammar; but when we come to them for light, we find them playing marbles on the doorsteps of the outer court of the temple. They had not the adhikar to enter, because they came in a spirit of arrogance with preconceived ideas to teach & not to learn; and their learning was therefore not helpful towards truth, but only towards grammar. <ref>http://incarnatewordQ.in/cwsa/17/the-ishavasyopanishad-with-If someone follows a-commentary-in-english#p139</ref><center>~</center>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 wisergood capacity, gentler, purer; Judaism can he go farther and Islam how to be religiously faithful in action and zealously devoted to God; Hinduism has opened to him reach identification with the largest 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 in the way. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/09/3-april-1957#p5</ref>Divine?''

Now Religion is sattwic with always a natural impulse towards light, it cannot be tamasic, it can have no dealings with limitation for the enemies of the Devas; and if something calling itself religion, attempts to suppress light, you may be sure it is not religion but an impostor masquerading in her namespirit.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/17/the-ishavasyopanishad-with-a-commentary-in-english#p197</ref>

===Religion If a man has a spiritual life independently of his mental formations and Old Nations=== All the old nations perished because set limits in the pride of intellect they abandoned their dharma, their religion. Indiawhich he lives, China still live. What was the force that enabled India beaten down & trampled by mailed fist & iron hoof ever to survive immortallythen this spiritual life makes him, ever so to resistsay, ever to crush down cross the conqueror of religious principles and enter something higher. But his consecration must come from within and not be formal. If it comes exclusively from the hour at last beneath her gigantic footform, ever to raise her mighty head again to then the stars? It limitation is because she never lost hold of religion, never gave up her faith in the spirit. Therefore the promise of Srikrishna ever holds good; therefore the Adyashakti, the mighty Chandi, ever descends when the people turn to her and tramples the Asura to piecesso great that he cannot go farther.<ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/1705/the-ishavasyopanishad-with-a2-commentary-inseptember-english1953#p217p5,p6,p7,p8</ref>

For me religions are formsThe idea of a Personal God is, much too humanhowever, of spiritual lifea contradiction in terms. Each one expresses one aspect of the single and eternal TruthThis all religions confess, but the next moment they nullify their confession by assuming in expressing it exclusive of the other aspects, it deforms and diminishes itHim a Personality. None has the right to call itself the only true oneThe Universal cannot be personal, any more than it has the right to deny the truth contained Omnipresent cannot be excluded from anything or creature in the othersworld He universally pervades and possesses. And all of them together would not suffice The moment we attribute certain qualities to express the Supreme Truth which is beyond all expressionGod, even whilst being present we limit Him and create a double principle in each onethe world."<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/1518/religionan-incomplete-work-of-vedantic-exegesis#p10p1</ref>

The truth ...we regard him with the Jews as a God of Power and Might & Wrath and Justice, or with the Moslems as God the Judge and Governor and Manager of Sri Aurobindo is the world or with the early Christians as a truth God of love Love, yet all agree in regarding Him as a Person, definable, imaginable, limited in His Nature by certain qualities though not limited in His Powers, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent & yet by a mysterious paradox quite separate from His creatures and light and mercyHis world. He creates, judges, punishes, rewards, favours, condemns, loves, hates, is good and great and compassionate pleased, is angry, for all the world like a man of unlimited powers, and Divine. And it is He who will have indeed a Superior Man, a shadow of man's soul thrown out on the huge background of the final victoryUniverse.<ref>http://incarnatewordThe intellectual and moral difficulties of this conception are well-known.An Omnipotent God of Love, in/cwm/15/3-april-1962#p4</ref> ===Religion spite of all glosses, remains inconsistent with the anguish and misery, the red slaughter and colossal sum of torture and Spirituality=== Religions are based on creeds multitudinous suffering which are spiritual experiences brought down to pervades this world and is the condition of its continuance; an Omnipotent God of Justice who created & caused sin, yet punishes man for falling into the traps He has Himself set, is an infinite & huge inconsistency, an insane contradiction in terms; a God of wrath, a level where they become more easy jealous God, who favours & punishes according to graspHis caprice, but fumes over insults and preens Himself at the cost sound of their integral purity praise is much lower than the better sort of men and truth, as an inferior, unworthy of the adoration of the saints.The time An omnipresent God cannot be separate from His world, an infinite God cannot be limited in Time or Space or qualities. Intellectually the whole concept becomes incredible. Science, Philosophy, the great creeds which have set Knowledge as the means of salvation, have always been charged with atheism because they deny these conceptions of the Divine Nature. Science and Philosophy & Knowledge take their revenge by undermining the faith of the believers in the ordinary religions is overthrough an exposure of the crude and semi-savage nature of the ideas which religion has woven together into a bizarre texture of clumsy paradoxes and dignified with the name of God.We have entered They show triumphantly that the age ordinary conceptions of universal spiritualityGod when analysed are incredible to the intellect, unsatisfactory and sometimes revolting to the moral sense and, if they succeed in one or two cases in satisfying the heart, succeed only by magnificently ignoring the claims of spiritual experience in its initial puritythe reason. <ref>httpshttp://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/1518/religionan-incomplete-work-of-vedantic-exegesis#p29,p30,p31,p32p24</ref>

...it will be Religion always tends to make God in the age of God" (God is still too religious) I have put "image of man, a magnified and aggrandised image, but in the ONE"—because end it will truly be the age of Unityis always a god with human qualities.<ref>https://incarnatewordThis is what makes it possible for people to treat him as they would treat a human enemy.in/cwm/15/religion#p33In some countries,p34</ref> ==Principal Means of Intellectual Knowledge== The three principal means of intellectual knowledge are anumanawhen their god does not do what they want, pratyaksha they take him and aptavakya. Anumana, inference from data, depends for its value on throw him into the possession of the right data, river![Based on the right observation Aphorism 59 -One of the data including the drawing greatest comforts of the right analogies, the unerring perception religion is that you can get hold of true identity & rejection of false identity, the just estimate of difference & contrast, God sometimes and finally on give him a satisfactory beating. People mock at the power folly 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-the-instruments-and-field-ofaphorism-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. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/17/book-iii#p3</ref> ===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 Here we do not have religion. We replace religion by the Eternal Selfspiritual life, that man's nature must seek its fulfilment in that which is permanent & eternal in truer, deeper and higher at the Universe and same time, that it is to which his evolution movessay, closer to the Divine. They discovered that his higher self was For the Self of his Universe and that by a certain manner of action, by a certain spirit Divine is in actioneverything, man escaped from his limitations and realised his higher Selfbut we are not conscious of it. 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 proceedsimmense progress that man must make.<ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/1713/the-eternal-insri-hisaurobindo-universeashram#p6p48</ref>

The heathen who worships stocks and stones has come nearer to the truth of things, than the enlightened professor of "rational" religion, who declares God to be omnipresent and yet in the next breath pronounces the objects in which He is present to be void of anything that can command religious reverence.There is no error in "idolatry"; the error is in the mind of the idolater who worships the stone as stone and the stock as stock, thinking that is God, and forgets or does not realise that it is the Divine Presence in them which is alone worship-worthy.it is an imperfect religion which thus yields to the domination of the mind and senses and allows them to determine what is or is not God. Good is a mask and evil is a mask; both are eidola, valid for the purposes of life in phenomena, but when we seek that which is beyond phenomena, we must resolutely remove the mask and see only the face children of God behind it. To the Karmayogin there Auroville 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, replace the Knower with all thought, action and existence for His field exclusiveness 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 one religion 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 wide faith 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 basisknowledge.<ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/1713/theaims-eternal-in-hisand-universeprinciples#p74p421</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?''

===The Law ''A:''People who say that are fools who don’t even know what they are talking about. You only have to read all that Sri Aurobindo has written to know that it is impossible to base a religion on his works, because he presents each problem, each question in all its aspects, showing the truth contained in each way of Renunciation===seeing things, and he explains that in order to attain the Truth you must realise a synthesis which goes beyond all mental notions and emerge into a transcendence beyond thought. …

Divisibility of the Indivisible is one of those profound paradoxes of Vedantic thought which increasing Knowledge will show to be deep and far-reaching truths. It used to be implicitly believed I repeat that human personality was a single and indivisible thing; yet recently a school when we speak of psychologists has grown up who consider man as a bundle of various personalities rather than a single, homogeneous and indivisible consciousness. For it has been found that a single man Sri Aurobindo there can divide himself or be divided into several personalities, each living its own life and unconscious of the other, while yet again another personality may emerge in him which is conscious no question of the others and yet separate from all of them. This is true; nevertheless, the man all through remains one and the same, not only in body but in his psychical existence; for there is a deeper substratum in him which underlies all these divided personalities and is wider than all of them put together. The truth is that the waking personality is only the apparent man, not the real. Personality is the creation of memory, for memory is its basis and pedestal. If the pedestal, then, be divided and put apart, the superstructure also must be in the same act divided and put apart. But the waking memory is only a part, a selection teaching nor even of a wider latent memory which has faithfully recorded all that happens not in the man's present life onlyrevelation, but in all his past. The personality which corresponds with this latent unerring memory is the true personality of an action from the manSupreme; it is his soul, one infinite and indivisible, and its apparent divisions are merely the result of Avidya, false knowledge, due to defective action of the waking memory. So the apparent division of the divine Self into many human selves, of the indivisible Paramatman into many Jivatmans, is simply the result of Avidya due to the action of the Maya or self-imposed illusion of Isha, the great Force who has willed that the One by this force of Maya should become phenomenally manifold. In reality, there is no division and the Self in me is the same as the Self in you and the same as the Self up yonder in the Sun. The unity of spiritual existence is the basis of all true religion and true morality. We know indeed that as God is not contained in His universe, but the universe is in Him, so also God is not contained within a man. When the Sruti says elsewhere that the Purusha lies hidden in the heart of our being and is no larger than the size of a man's thumb, it simply means that to the mind of man under the dominion of Avidya his body, vitality, mind, reason bulk so largely, the Spirit seems a small and indistinguishable thing indeed inside so many and bulky sheaths and coverings. But in reality, it is body, vitality, mind & reason forming the apparent man that are small and trifling and it is the Spirit or real man that is large, grandiose & mighty. The apparent man exists in & by the real, not the real in the apparent; the body is in the soul, not the soul in the body. Yet for the convenience of language and our finite understanding we are compelled to say that the soul is in the body and that God is within the man; for can be founded on that is how it naturally presents itself to us who use the mental standpoint and the language of a finite intelligence. The Lord, from our standpoint, is within all His creatures and He is the real self of all His creatures. My self and yourself are not really two but one. This is the second truth proceeding logically from the first, on which the Karmayogin has to lay fast hold. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/17/the-law-of-renunciation#p14</ref>

==Rule But men are so foolish that they can change anything into a religion, so great is their need of Living=="Foster by sacrifice 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 gods," says 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 59 - One of the Gita, "greatest comforts of religion is that you can get hold of God sometimes and let those give him a satisfactory beating. People mock at the folly of savages who beat their gods foster youwhen their prayers are not answered; fostering each other ye shall attain 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 supreme goodage. This is an age of energy, ''śakti'',—param sreyahand love." Attaining At the beginning of the supreme good we pass beyond Age of Iron (''Kali''), the gods human tendencies try to fulfil themselves by subordinating knowledge and come to God; we leave Veda action to arrive at Vedanta ordevotion, ratherand with the support of love, fulfil Veda truth and energy try and succeed in Vedantaspreading the message of love. Then we are no longer content to sacrifice this or that possessionThe friendliness and charity of Buddhism, giving a sharethe teaching of love in Christianity, making reservationsthe equality and brotherhood of Islam, but offer unreservedly & unconditionally the supreme sacrificedevotion and sentiment of love in the Puranic religion is a result of these attempts. In the Age of Iron the eternal religion, yielding up on helped by the highest spirit of all altars all that we are and possess; we give no longer to Agnifriendliness, action, devotion, Indralove, Varuna or Mitraequality and brotherhood, but does good to humanity. Entering into and manifesting in the supreme & universal LordAryan religion, bhoktáram yajnatapasám. Thencomposed of knowledge, toodevotion and non-attached action, we receive in return not wealththese same powers are seeking for expansion and self-fulfilment. The signs of that energy of expression are severe austerity, nor cattle nor horses nor lands nor empirehigh ideals, not joys nor powers nor brilliances nor capacitiesand noble action. When this race becomes once more a seeker after austere perfection, but God Himself & the world with all these things in them as trifles full of high ideals and playthings for undertaker of noble efforts, it should be understood that the soul to enjoy as God enjoys, possessing them world’s progress is under way and yet not possessing, wholly unbound by possession.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/17/chapter-ii-the-golden-rule-withdrawal ofanti-living-enjoyment-religious titanic forces and-renunciation#p10</ref>the rise of divine forces is inevitable once again. Hence this type of education too is needed at the present time.

===What When the religion of the race and of the time-spirit are fulfilled, the eternal religion will spread and establish itself throughout the world, without let or hindrance. All that the Lord has ordained from before, about which there are prophecies in the ancient canons, ''śastras'', those too will be felt and realised in action. The entire world will come to the Knower of Brahman, who will arise in the Aryan land, as learners in the 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 Difference Between Yoga and Religion?===Indians are rising, that is why this fresh awakening of Aryan ideas.<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/09/our-religion#p6,p7</ref>

Now, if this person has noted down all the processes he has used Religion and constructs a fixed system, and sets up all that he has discovered as absolute laws―for example, he says: the Divine is like this, philosophy seek to find the Divine you must do this, make this particular gesture, take this attitude, perform this ceremony, and you must admit that this is the truth, you must say, "I accept that this is the Truth and I fully adhere to itrescue man from his ego; and your method is then the only right one, the only one which exists"― if all that is written down, organised, arranged into fixed laws and ceremonies, it becomes a religionkingdom of heaven within will be spontaneously reflected in an external divine city.[Aphorism 200]<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/0810/23aphorism-may199-1956200#p1,p2,p4,p5</ref><center>~</center>===Vijnana=== The evolution of vijnana out of mind is inevitable for the same reason that the evolution of life out of matter was inevitable or the evolution of mind out of life, because the vijnana or pure Idea, already involved Aphorism 242—How much hatred and stupidity men succeed in matter, life packing up decorously and mind, demands & will procure, perhaps by the pull from a higher world where the Idea would be the dominant power & basic principle, its own release out of the limitations of sensational mentality. Just as we found matter to be a formation out of life-energy, & life-energy to be a formation out of mind, so mind is a formation out of vijnana. That which has constituted & governs stone or tree, animal or man, is not matter, nor life, nor mind, but the Idea involved in these three masks of conscious being.labelling "Religion"!] <ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/1710/chapter-v-the-soul-causality-andaphorism-law241-of-nature242#p44p2</ref><center>~</center>==Dangers of Religion Creation==You express your faith too by putting God far above in Sri Aurobindo with certain words which are for you the best expression distant heavens made man too much of a worm of this faith; this is quite all right. But if you are convinced that these very words are the earth little and vile before his Creator and admitted only correct ones by a caprice of his favour to express what Sri Aurobindo is, then you become dogmatic and are ready to create a religiondoubtful salvation in superhuman worlds.<ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/1525/religionthe-unseen-power#p5p10</ref><center>~</center> =Religion at Sri Aurobindo Ashram=Here we do not … they have been clinging to a religion. We replace , it is because that religion by the spiritual lifehas helped them in one way or 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 truer, deeper responsible (''Mother laughs'') and higher at the same time, it goes on like that . It is a lack of compassion to say, closer want to pull them out of that—it is better to the Divineleave them where they are. For the Divine is in everythingI 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, but we because it would not be good—they are not conscious capable of it. This is the immense progress that man must makehaving another. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/1315/sri7-aurobindoseptember-ashram1963#p44p19</ref>

...The fundamental idea is that mankind is the godhead to be worshipped and served by man and that the respect, the service, the children progress of Auroville should replace the exclusiveness human being and human life are the chief duty and the chief aim of one religion by the wide faith 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 knowledgerespect so far as they are images of the human spirit and enshrine its presence and aid its self-manifestation. ..<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/13/aims-and-principles#p412</ref>

Religion always tends Man must be sacred to make God in the image man regardless of all distinctions of race, creed, colour, nationality, status, political or social advancement. The body of manis to be respected, a magnified made immune from violence and aggrandised imageoutrage, but in the end it fortified by science against disease and preventable death. The life of man is always a god with human qualitiesto be held sacred, preserved, strengthened, ennobled, uplifted. This The heart of man is what makes it possible for people to treat him as they would treat a human enemybe held sacred also, given scope, protected from violation, from suppression, from mechanisation, freed from belittling influences. In some countriesThe mind of man is to be released from all bonds, when their god does not do what they wantallowed freedom and range and opportunity, they take him given all its means of self-training and throw him into the river![Based on aphorism 59 self-One of development and organised in the greatest comforts play of religion is that you can get hold of God sometimes and give him a satisfactory beating. People mock at its powers for the folly service of savages who beat their gods when their prayers are not answered; but it is the mockers who are the fools and the savageshumanity.] <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/1025/aphorismthe-religion-59of-humanity#p1,p3p2</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 erroneous...men are so foolish that they can change anything into Either it views the whole thing as a mass of superstition, a mystical nonsense, a religionfarrago of ignorant barbaric survivals, so great is their need —that was the extreme spirit of a fixed framework for their narrow thought and limited action. They do the rationalist now happily, though not feel secure unless they can assert this is true dead, yet much weakened and that is notalmost moribund,—or it patronises religion, tries to explain its origins, to get rid of it by the process of explaining it away; but such or it labours gently or forcefully to reject or correct its superstitions, crudities, absurdities, to purify it into an assertion becomes impossible 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 anyone who has read and understood what Sri Aurobindo has written. Religion and Yoga do not belong the edification of the ignorant, admits its value as a moralising influence or its utility to the same plane of being and spiritual life can exist State for keeping the lower classes in all its purity only when it is free from all mental dogmaorder, even perhaps tries to invent that strange chimera, a rational religion.[Based on aphorism 59] <ref>httpshttp://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/1025/aphorismreason-and-59religion#p7,p11</ref>

Religion and Yoga do not belong to the same plane Each part of man's being has its own dharma which it must follow and spiritual life can exist will follow in all its purity only when the end, put on it what fetters you please. The dharma of science, thought and philosophy is free from all mental 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 dogmaor ethical rule or aesthetic prejudice. [Based on aphorism 59 - One of In the end, if left free in their action, they will find the greatest comforts unity of Truth with Good and Beauty and God and give these a greater meaning than any dogmatic religion is that you or any formal ethics or any narrower aesthetic idea can get hold of give us. But meanwhile they must be left free even to deny God sometimes and give him a satisfactory beatinggood and beauty if they will, if their sincere observation of things so points them. People mock at For all these rejections must come round in the folly end of savages who beat their gods when their prayers are not answeredcircling and return to a larger truth of the things they refuse. Often we find atheism both in individual and society a necessary passage to deeper religious and spiritual truth: one has sometimes to deny God in order to find him; but it the finding is inevitable at the mockers who are the fools end of all earnest scepticism and the savagesdenial.] <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/1025/aphorismthe-spiritual-aim-and-59life#p11p9</ref>

Religion and philosophy seek to rescue man from his ego; then ...it will be the kingdom age of God" (God is still too religious) I have put "of heaven within the ONE"—because it will truly be spontaneously reflected in an external divine citythe age of Unity. [Aphorism 200]<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/1015/aphorism-199-200religion#p2p33,p34</ref>

''QThe 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. Which There is better: religion or atheism?'' ''A:''So long no error in "idolatry"; the error is in the mind of the idolater who worships the stone as stone and the stock as religions existstock, thinking that is God, atheism will be indispensable to counterand forgets or does not realise that it is the Divine Presence in them which is alone worship-balance themworthy. Both must disappear to make way The stock or the stone is not God, for it is only an eidolon, a sincere symbol of His presence; but the worship of it as a symbol is not superstitious or degrading; it is true and disinterested search for Truth 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 total consecration 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 object domination of this searchthe mind and senses and allows them to determine what is or is not God. [Based onAphorism 241—Atheism Good is a mask and evil is a necessary protest against mask; both are eidola, valid for the wickedness purposes of life in phenomena, but when we seek that which is beyond phenomena, we must resolutely remove the Churches mask and see only the narrowness face of creedsGod 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 uses it is within us all; as the Self pure, calm and eternal, and as a stone to smash these soiled cardthe 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-241eternal-242in-his-universe#p3,p4p67</ref>

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>