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<center>God gives Himself to His whole creation; no one religion holds the monopoly of His Grace. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/15/religion#p1</ref></center> =Why - Importance of What is Religion?=
==Purpose We give the name of Religion==religion to any concept of the world or the universe which is presented as the exclusive Truth in which one must have an absolute faith, generally because this Truth is declared to be the result of a revelation.
To see your Self in all creatures Most religions affirm the existence of a God and all creatures in your Self—that is the unshakeable foundation of all religionrules to be followed to obey Him, lovebut there are some Godless religions, patriotismsuch as socio-political organisations which, philanthropyin the name of an Ideal or the State, humanity, of everything which rises above selfishness and gross utilityclaim the same right to be obeyed.
"Religion's real business is to prepare man's mind, life To seek Truth freely and bodily existence for the spiritual consciousness to take approach it up; freely along his own lines is a man’s right. But each one should know that his discovery is good for him alone and it has to lead him to that point where the inner spiritual light begins fully to emerge. It is at this point that religion must learn to subordinate itself, not to insist be imposed on its outer characters, but give full scope to the inner spirit itself to develop its own truth and reality. In the meanwhile it has to take up as much of man's mentality, vitality, physicality as it can and give all his activities a turn towards the spiritual direction, the revelation of a spiritual meaning in them, the imprint of a spiritual refinement, the beginning of a spiritual characterothers.<ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwm/0913/16aims-julyand-1958principles#p1p237,p244,p245</ref>
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''Q. Sweet Mother..universal religion, a system, a thing of creed and intellectual belief and dogma and outward rite. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/summary-and-conclusion#p11</ref><center>~</center>...Sri Aurobindo defines religion as the seeking after the spiritual, that is, the Supermind, of what is beyond the ordinary human consciousness, and what ought to influence life from a higher realm. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/07/25-may-1955#p8</ref><center>~</center>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 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 and proceeded in its own strength, either satisfied with mental knowledge or confident to discover its own path of experience and effective discipline. Spiritual experience has used all the three means as a starting-point, but it has also dispensed with them all, relying on its own pure strength: discouraging occult knowledge and powers as dangerous lures and entangling obstacles, it has sought only the pure truth of the spirit; dispensing with philosophy, it has arrived instead through the heart's fervour or a necessity 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 life integral knowledge.<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-evolution-of -the ordinary -spiritual-man#p11</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.
''A:''In The one which can be practised and, one might say, “understood”—although it is certainly not an “understanding”—by the life greatest number of societies human beings—those who live almost exclusively in the physical consciousness—is the religious method, precisely because it is a necessity, for it serves as a corrective to collective egoism which, without this control, could take based on excessive proportionsfixed creeds and practices.The level Simply by an act of faith or a collective consciousness is always lower than the individual level. It is very noticeable, for example, that when men gather in suggestion—above all a group or collect in great numbers, the level of consciousness falls a great deal. The consciousness of crowds is much lower than individual consciousness, and the collective consciousness of society is certainly lower than suggestion—many human beings who have not yet reached any considerable inner development can take up the consciousness path of the individuals constituting itreligion.<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/09/1618-julyjune-1958#p3,p4,p5</ref>
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There it ...religion is a necessity. In ordinary the spiritual and ethical life, an of the individual, whether he knows it or not, always has a religion but the object relations of his religion is sometimes of a very inferior kind.... The god he worships may be soul with God and the god intimate dealings of success his will and character with other individuals, and no monarch or the god of money or the god of powergoverning class, not even a theocracy or simply a family god: the god of children, the god of the familypriesthood, can really substitute itself for the god soul of the ancestors. There is always a religion. The quality of the religion is very different according to the individual, but it is difficult or for a human being to live and to go on living, to survive in life without having something like a rudiment of an ideal which serves as the centre for his existence. Most soul 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 lifea nation.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0925/16the-drive-julytowards-legislative-and-social-centralisation-and-1958uniformity#p6p10</ref>
===How Religion Helped Mankind?Nature of Religions===
All would change if Religion belongs to the higher mind of humanity. It is the effort of man could once consent 's higher mind to be spiritualised; but his natureapproach, as far as lies in its power, mental and vital and physicalsomething beyond it, is rebellious something to which humanity gives the higher law. He loves his imperfection.The name God or Spirit is or Truth or Faith or Knowledge or the truth Infinite, some kind of our being; Absolute, which the human mind cannot reach and life and body yet tries to reach. Religion may be divine in their imperfection are its masks, but ultimate origin; in their perfection should be its moulds. To be spiritual only actual nature it is not enoughdivine but human. In truth we should speak rather of religions than of religion; that prepares a number of souls for heaventhe religions made by man are many. These different religions, even when they had not the same origin, but leaves have most of them been made in the same way. ...All religions have each the earth very much where it wassame story to tell. Neither The occasion for its birth is the coming of a compromise great Teacher of the world. He comes and reveals and is the way incarnation of salvationa Divine Truth.The world knows three kinds But men seize upon it, trade upon it, make an almost political organisation out of revolutionit. The material has strong resultsreligion is equipped by them with a government and policy and laws, with its creeds and dogmas, the moral its rules and intellectual are infinitely larger in their scope regulations, its rites and richer in their fruitsceremonies, all binding upon its adherents, but the spiritual are the great sowingsall absolute and inviolable.If Like the triple change could coincide in a perfect correspondenceState, a faultless work would be done; but it too administers rewards to the mind loyal and body of mankind cannot hold perfectly a strong spiritual inrush: most is spiltassigns punishments for those that revolt or go astray, much of for the rest is corrupted. Many intellectual heretic and physical upturnings of our soil are needed to work out a little result from a large spiritual sowing. <ref>https://incarnatewordthe renegade.in/cwsa/13/thoughts-and-glimpses#p16,p17,p18,p19</ref>
== Necessity The first and principal article of Religion ==...spiritual religion of humanity these established and formal religions runs always, "Mine is the hope of supreme, the futureonly truth, all others are in falsehood or inferior. spiritual life insists on freedom and variation in its self-expression and means of development<ref>http://incarnateword" For without this fundamental dogma, established credal religions could not have existed.in/cwsa/25/summary-If you do not believe and-conclusion#p11</ref>… they have been clinging to a religion, it is because proclaim that religion has helped them in you alone possess the one way or another, it has helped in them precisely something which wanted to have a certitudethe highest truth, you will 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'') impress people and it goes on like that. It is a lack of compassion to want to pull them out of that—it is better to leave make them where they are. I never dispute with someone who has a faith—let him keep his faith! I take care not flock to tell him anything that might shake his faith, because it would not be good—they are not capable of having another.<ref>http://incarnatewordyou.in/cwm/15/7-september-1963#p19</ref>
==Why Morality?==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. 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 you to approach the spiritual life. Taking it up in a serious and earnest spirit, you can try to find out what truth is there, what aspiration lies hidden in it, what divine inspiration has undergone transformation and deformation here by the human mind and a human organisation, and with an appropriate mental stand you can get religion even as it is to throw some light on your way and to lend some support to your spiritual endeavour. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/9-june-1929#p1,p2,p3,p4</ref>Its <center>~</center>In every religion there are some who have evolved a high spiritual life. But it is not the religion that gave them their spirituality; it is they who have put their spirituality into the religion. Put anywhere else, born into any other cult, they would have found there and lived there the same spiritual life. It is their own capacity, it is some power of their inner being and not the religion they profess that has made them what they are. This power in their nature is such that religion to them does not become a slavery or a bondage. Only as they have not a strong, clear and active mind, they need to believe in this or that creed as absolutely true aim 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 preparation certain distance on the paths of the Spirit. Religion has been an impulse to the worst things and purification of the soul best; if the fiercest wars have been waged and the most hideous persecutions carried on in its name, it has stimulated too supreme heroism and self-sacrifice in its 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 fit use its inner substance, it for can be your jumping-board into the presence realm of Godthe Spirit.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/1803/an9-incompletejune-work1929#p5</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 ofdivine love and charity; Buddhism has shown him a noble way to be wiser, gentler, purer, Judaism and Islam how to be religiously faithful in action and zealously devoted to God; Hinduism has opened to him 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>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/13/thoughts-vedanticand-exegesisglimpses#p7p20</ref>
===What People Have Made Out of Religion?===
People follow religion by social habit, in order not to get into the bad books of others. For instance, in a village it is difficult not to go to religious ceremonies, for all your neighbours will point at you. But that has absolutely nothing to do with spiritual life, nothing at all. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/23-may-1956#p12</ref><center>~</center>… to fulfil a social duty and a social custom, but not at all because you really wanted to enter into communion with God. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/23-may-1956#p23</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><center>~</center>...very few people, very few, an insignificant number, go to church or temple with a true religious feeling, that religion is, not to pray and beg for something from God but to offer themselves, give thanks, aspire, give themselves. There is hardly one in a million who does that. So they do not have the power of changing the atmosphere. Perhaps when it identifies itself they are there, they manage to get across, break through and go somewhere and touch something divine. 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 a church or temple. Only, as you go there with a creedvery good feeling, you tell yourself, "Oh, what a quiet place for meditation!"<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/06/30-june-1954#p30</ref><center>~</center>Religion itself has been imposed on men; it is often supported by a cultsuggestion 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, a Church"I am compelled, I cannot do otherwise"? Truth is self-evident and has not to be imposed upon the world. The strength and greatness of a system religion is adjudged by men according to the number of ceremonial formsthose that follow it, although the real greatness is not there. The greatness of spiritual truth is. ...Religions may reckon their greatness by the number of their believers, but Truth would still be Truth if it had not even a single follower. The average man is drawn towards those who make great pretensions; he does not go where Truth is quietly manifesting. Those who make great pretensions need to proclaim loudly and to advertise; for otherwise they would not attract great numbers of people. The work that is done with no care for what people think of it is not so well become known, does not so easily draw multitudes. But Truth requires no advertisement; it does not hide itself but it does not proclaim itself either. It is content to manifest, regardless of results, not seeking approbation or shunning disapprobation, not attracted or troubled by the world's acceptance or denial. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/9-june-1929#p13</ref><center>~</center>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 retarding force little shadowy; It accepts ethics as a bond and there may therefore arise an influence, but it does not live for ethical good; its real gods are vital need and utility and the desires of the body. If it governs its life partly by ethical laws because otherwise vital need, desire, utility in seeking their own satisfaction through many egoistic individuals would clash among themselves and destroy their own aims, it does not feel called upon to make its life entirely ethical. It concerns itself still less with beauty; even if it admits things beautiful as an embellishment and an amusement, a satisfaction and pastime of the eye and ear and mind, nothing moves it imperatively to make its life a thing of beauty. It allows religion a necessity fixed place and portion, on holy days, in the church or temple, at the end of life when age and the approach of death call the attention forcibly away from this life to other life, at fixed times in the week or the day when it thinks it right for a moment to pause in the human spirit affairs of the world and remember God: but to reject make the whole of life a religion, a remembering of God and a seeking after him, is a thing that is not really done even in societies which like the Indian erect spirituality as their aim and 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 control over 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 varied activities ethical man, the artist, the thinker, the man of lifereligion; it gives them a place, does some homage to them, assigns some room to the things they represent, but for itself it is content to follow mainly after its own inherent principle of vital satisfaction, vital necessity and utility, vital efficiency.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/religion-asthe-thesuprarational-lawultimate-of-life#p6p2</ref>
===Religion of Humanity=Hinduism==
To put the individual Self in intimate relation with the Eternal is the aim of Hindu life, its religion, its polity, its ethics.Morality is not for its own sake, nor for the pleasures of virtue, nor for any reward here or in another life, nor for the sake of society; these are false aims and false sanctions.Its true aim is a preparation and purification of the soul to fit it for the presence of God.we The sense-obscured, limited and desire-driven individual self must recognise raise itself out of the fact that in a time dark pit of great activity, sense-obsession into the clear air of high aspirationthe spirit, must disembarrass itself of deep sowingservile bondage to bodily, emotional & intellectual selfishness and assume the freedom & royalty of rich fruit-bearinguniversal love and beneficence, such as must expand itself from the modern age narrow, petty, inefficient ego till it becomes commensurate with the infinite, all -powerful, omnipresent Self of All; then is its faults and errors has been, a time especially when humanity got rid aim of much that was cruelexistence attained, evilthen is its pilgrimage ended. This may be done by realising the Eternal in oneself by knowledge, ignorantby realising oneself in Him by Love as God the Beloved, darkor by realising Him as the Lord of all in His universe and all its creatures by works. This realisation is the true crown of any ethical system. For whether we hold the aim of morality to be the placing of oneself in harmony with eternal laws, odiousor the fulfilment of man’s nature, not by or the natural evolution of man in the power direction of religionhis highest faculties, Hinduism will not object but by it insists that the Law with which man must put himself into relation is the Eternal in the power universe, that in this permanent and stable Truth man’s nature fulfils itself out of the awakened intelligence and transient seemings of human idealism his daily existence and sympathythat to this goal his evolution moves.<ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2518/religionan-asincomplete-thework-lawof-ofvedantic-lifeexegesis#p2p6</ref>
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The aim 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 religion impulses of humanity was formulated in the eighteenth century by a sort undisciplined heart, not purified, but full of primal intuition; that aim was the vital impulses, ''chittam pranair otam'', and it is still to rebecomes spasmodic, ignorant, narrow, obscurantist, sectarian, cruel, violent. Philosophy acknowledging Veda in theory but relying instead on her own intellectual self-create human society sufficiency, ends by living in the image words, a thing of three kindred ideasvain disputations & exultant logic-splitting, libertyabstract, equality unpractical and fraternityvisionary. None of these has really been won Science, denying Veda altogether, arrogant & bigoted in spite of all her own conceit, makes man a materialist, a pashanda. What the progress that has been achieved. The liberty that has been so loudly proclaimed Hindus foresaw and dreaded and strove to organise their society against it, erecting barrier upon artificial barrier as an essential of modern progress their own knowledge & grasp upon Veda diminished, is an outward, mechanical now growing actual and unreal libertyimminent. The equality that has been so much sought after and battled for is equally an outward and mechanical and will turn out way to be an unreal equality. Fraternity avoid it is not even claimed to be a practicable principle of deny the ordering truth of life Science, but to complete, correct and what is put forward as its substitute is illuminate it. For the outward and mechanical principle of equal association or at Veda also says with Science, Annam vai Brahma, Prano vai Brahma; it acknowledges the best a comradeship of labour. appeal to animal, the vital and physical mind of Pashu in man rather than his inner being. It has limited his effort to & God as the attempt to revolutionise political and social institutions and to bring about such a modification Master of the ideas and sentiments of Animal, the common mind of mankind as would make these institutions practicablePashupati; it has worked at but by completing the machinery of human life knowledge and on putting it in its right relations, it completes him also & liberates him, lifts the outer mind much more than upon Pashu to the soul of Pashupati and enables him to satisfy himself divinely by enjoying even in matter the racesupramaterial 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/2517/part-ii-the-religionfield-and-instruments-of-humanityvedanta-1#p5p6</ref>
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The deepest A religion therefore which claims to be eternal, must not be content with satisfying the heartand imagination, it must answer to the inmost essence satisfaction of religionthe intellect the questions with which philosophy 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, apart from but on actual observation and its outward machinery truths must always be capable of creed, cult, ceremony 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 symbolwithout sacrificing intellectual convincingness, is comprehensiveness & accuracy impregnate with itself the search for God springs of human activity; and it must have the finding power of Godbringing the human self into direct touch with the Eternal. Its aspiration The Vedantic religion claims to be the eternal religion because it satisfies all these demands. It is to discover intellectually comprehensive in its explanation of all the Infinite, problems that perplex the Absolute, human mind; it brings the One, contradictions of the Divine, who is all these things 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 yet no abstraction 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 Beingperfect and intimate union with the Eternal.<ref>http://incarnateword. Its in/cwsa/18/an-incomplete-work -of-vedantic-exegesis#p27</ref><center>~</center>If it were asked by anyone what is a sincere living out this multitudinous, shifting, expanding, apparently amorphous or at all events multimorphous sea of the true religious thought, feeling, philosophy, spiritual experience we call Hinduism, what it is characteristically and intimate relations between man and Godessentially, relations of unitywe might answer in one word, relations the religion of Vedanta. And if it were asked what are the Hindus with their unique and persistent differencefrom all other races, relations we might again answer, the children of Vedanta. For at the root of an illuminated knowledgeall that we Hindus have done, an ecstatic love thought and delightsaid through these thousands of years of our race-history, an absolute surrender behind all we are and serviceseek to be, there lies concealed, a casting the fount of every part our philosophies, the bedrock of our existence out religions, the kernel of its normal status into an uprush our thought, the explanation of man towards our ethics and society, the Divine and a descent summary of our civilisation, the Divine into man. All rivet of our nationality, this has nothing to do with the realm one marvellous inheritance of reason or its normal activities; its aimours, its sphere, its process is suprarationalthe Vedanta. The knowledge of God Nor is not it only to be gained by weighing the feeble arguments Hindu streams that this great source has given of reason for or against his existence: it is to be gained only by a selfits life-transcending and absolute consecration, aspiration and experiencegiving waters. rational scientific experiment or rational philosophic thinking. Even in those parts of religious discipline which seem most to resemble scientific experimentBuddhism, the method is a verification teacher of one third of things which exceed the reason and humanity, drank from its timid scopeinspiration. Even in those parts Christianity, the offspring of religious knowledge which seem most to resemble intellectual operationsBuddhism, derived its ethics and esoteric teaching at second-hand from the illuminating faculties are not imaginationsame source. Through Persia Vedanta put its stamp on Judaism, through Judaism, logic Christianity and rational judgmentSufism on Islam, but revelationsthrough Buddha on Confucianism, inspirationsthrough Christ and mediaeval mysticism and Catholic ceremonial, intuitionsthrough Greek and German philosophy, intuitive discernments that leap down to us from a plane through Sanscrit learning...<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/18/the-religion-of suprarational light. -vedanta#p1</ref> ==Buddhism==
The love of God Buddhism is an infinite the turning away from ''duḥkha'' and absolute feeling which does not admit of any rational limitation and does not use a language of rational worship and adoration; its causes to the delight in God is that peace and bliss which passes all understandingof Nirvana. The surrender to God is ''duḥkhavāda'' did not exist in India, except in the surrender theory of the whole being to Vaishnava ''viraha''; otherwise it was not considered as a means or even 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 stage in the ordinary conduct of mundane existencesadhana.<ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2529/reasonjainism-and-religionbuddhism#p9p8</ref>
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A religion of humanity may be either an intellectual and sentimental ideal, a living dogma with intellectual, psychological and practical effects, or else a spiritual aspiration The Buddhist Nirvana and rule of living, partly the sign, partly Adwaitin’s Moksha are the cause of a change of soul in humanityThe religion of humanity was mind-born in the eighteenth century, the mānasa putra of the rationalist thinkers who brought it forward as a substitute for the formal spiritualism of ecclesiastical Christianitysame thing. It tried corresponds to give itself a body realisation in Positivism, which was an attempt to formulate the dogmas of this religion, but on too heavily and severely rationalistic a basis for acceptance even by an Age of Reason. Humanitarianism has been its most prominent emotional result. Philanthropy, social service and other kindred activities have been its outward expression of good works. Democracy, socialism, pacificism are to a great extent its by-products or at least owe much of their vigour to its inner presence.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/the-religion-of-humanity#p1</ref><center>~</center>The fundamental idea is that mankind is the godhead to be worshipped and served by man and that the respect, the service, the progress of the human being and human life are the chief duty and the chief aim of the human spirit. No other idol, neither the nation, the State, the family nor anything else ought to take its place; they are only worthy of respect so far as they are images of the human spirit and enshrine its presence and aid its self-manifestation...Science even, though it is one of the chief modern idols.Man must be sacred to man regardless of all distinctions of race, creed, colour, nationality, status, political or social advancement. The body of man is to be respected, made immune from violence and outrage, fortified by science against disease and preventable death. The life of man is to be held sacred, preserved, strengthened, ennobled, uplifted. The heart of man is to be held sacred also, given scope, protected from violation, from suppression, from mechanisation, freed from belittling influences. The mind of man is to be released from all bonds, allowed freedom and range and opportunity, given all its means of self-training and self-development and organised in the play of its powers for the service of humanity.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/the-religion-of-humanity#p2</ref><center>~</center>...religion of humanity has exercised and how fruitful a work it has done. It accomplished rapidly many things which orthodox religion failed to do effectively, largely because it acted does not feel oneself any longer as a constant intellectual and critical solvent, an unsparing assailant of the thing that is and an unflinching champion of the thing to be, faithful always to the future, while orthodox religion allied itself individual with the powers of the present, even of the past, bound itself by its pact with them and could act only at best as such a moderating but not as name or such a reforming force. Faithform, but an infinite eternal Self spaceless (even an intellectual faith, must always be a worker of miracles, and this religion of humanitywhen in space), timeless (even without taking bodily shape or a compelling form or a visible means of self-effectuation, was yet able to effect comparatively much of what it set out to do. It to some degree humanised society, humanised law and punishment, humanised the outlook of man on man, abolished legalised torture and the cruder forms of slavery, raised those who were depressed and fallen, gave large hopes to humanity, stimulated philanthropy and charity and the service of mankind, encouraged everywhere the desire of freedom, put a curb on oppression and greatly minimised its more brutal expressions. It gave new conceptions of the dignity of the human being and opened new ideas and new vistas of his education, self-development and potentiality. It spread enlightenment; it made man feel more his responsibility for the progress and happiness of the race; it raised the average self-respect and capacity of mankind; it gave hope to the serf, self-assertion to the downtrodden and made the labourer when in his manhood the potential equal of the rich and powerfultime). <ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2529/thejainism-religionand-of-humanitybuddhism#p3p9</ref> ==Christianity==
=How?===How to Achieve Morality?==The sense-obscured, limited and desire-driven individual self must raise itself out of We know how the dark pit of sense-obsession Christian religion came into the clear air of the spiritexistence. It was certainly not Jesus who made what is known as Christianity, must disembarrass itself of servile bondage to bodily, emotional & intellectual selfishness but some learned and assume the freedom & royalty of universal love very clever men put their heads together and beneficence, must expand itself from the narrow, petty, inefficient ego till built it becomes commensurate with up into the infinite, all-powerful, omnipresent Self of All; then is its aim of existence attained, then is its pilgrimage endedthing we see. This may be done by realising There was nothing divine in the Eternal way in oneself by knowledgewhich it was formed, by realising oneself and there is nothing divine either in the way in Him by Love as God which it functions. And yet the Beloved, excuse or by realising Him as occasion for the Lord of all in His universe 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 Knowledge and all its creatures by worksTruth for the earth. This realisation is He came and suffered for his Truth; but very few understood what he said, few cared to find and hold to the true crown of any ethical systemTruth for which he suffered. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/1803/an-incomplete-work-of9-vedanticjune-exegesis1929#p6p29</ref>
==Islam=Morality in Hinduism===For whether we hold the aim of morality to be the placing of oneself in harmony with eternal laws, or the fulfilment of man's nature, or the natural evolution of man in the direction of his highest faculties, Hinduism will not object but it insists that the Law with which man must put himself into relation is the Eternal in the universe, that in this permanent and stable Truth man's nature fulfils itself out of the transient seemings of his daily existence and that to this goal his evolution moves. 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 Mahomed tried to give up re-establish the natural desire for Asiatic gospel of human equality in the fruits of our works and surrender all we do, think, feel and spirit. All men are into the keeping of the Eternalequal in Islam, and the second is to identify ourself with all creatures in the Universe both individually and collectivelywhatever their social position or political power, realising our larger Self in others. These two laws of action together make what nor is called Karmayoga or any man debarred from the putting full development of ourselves into relation with that which is Eternal his manhood by means of and his birth or low original station in our workslife. Before, then, we can understand what Karmayoga is, we must understand entirely and utterly what is this Eternal Being with whom we must put ourselves All men are brothers in relation Islam and what are His relations with our self, with the phenomena bond of the Universe religious unity overrides all other divisions and with the creatures that people itdifferences. The Vedantic knowledge of BrahmanBut Islam also was limited and imperfect, because it confined the Vedantic Cosmogony, the Vedantic explanation ideal of brotherhood and equality to the coexistence limits of Brahman with the Universea single creed, and was farther deflected from its true path by the Eternal with rude and undeveloped races which it drew into its embrace. Another revelation of the Transient, the Transcendent with the Phenomenal, the One with the Many, are what we have first to studyold truth is needed. <ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsa/1807/an-incomplete-work-of-vedanticasiatic-exegesisdemocracy#p7p1</ref>
==Why - Importance of Religion and Its Counterparts=?=
===Purpose of Religion,Science and Philosophy===
A religion therefore which claims to be eternal''Q. Sweet Mother, must not be content with satisfying the heart and imagination, it must answer to the satisfaction of the intellect the questions with which philosophy 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 a necessity in the heart & imagination and without sacrificing intellectual convincingness, comprehensiveness & accuracy impregnate with itself the springs life of human activity; and it must have the power of bringing the human self into direct touch with the Eternal. ordinary man?''
The Vedantic religion claims to be ''A:''In the eternal religion because life of societies it is a necessity, for it satisfies all these serves as a corrective to collective egoism which, without this control, could take on excessive proportions.demandsThe level of collective consciousness is always lower than the individual level. It is intellectually comprehensive very noticeable, for example, that when men gather in its explanation a group or collect in great numbers, the level of all consciousness falls a great deal. The consciousness of crowds is much lower than individual consciousness, and the problems that perplex collective consciousness of society is certainly lower than the human mind; it brings the contradictions consciousness of the world into harmony by individuals constituting it.There it is a single luminous law of being; necessity. In ordinary life, an individual, whether he knows it or not, always has developed in Yoga a process religion but the object of his religion is sometimes of spiritual experience by which its assertions can a very inferior kind…. The god he worships may be tested and confirmed; the law 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 being it has discovered seizes not only on the intellect religion is very different according to the individual, but it is difficult for a human being to live and to go on living, to survive in life without having something like a rudiment of an ideal which serves as the deepest emotions ''centre'' for his existence. Most of man the time he doesn’t know it and calls into activity if he were asked what his highest ethical instinctsideal is, he would be unable to formulate it; and its whole aim and end is but he has one, vaguely, something that seems to bring him the individual self into a perfect and intimate union with the Eternalmost precious thing in life.<ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/1809/an-incomplete-work-of16-vedanticjuly-exegesis1958#p27p3,p4,p5,p6</ref>
===What Humans Need to do About Religion?To Seek Our True Self===
We need not for instance lay a too excessive stress on the superstitions, aberrations, violences, crimes even, which Churches and cults and creeds have favoured, admitted, sanctioned, supported or exploited for their own benefit, the mere hostile enumeration of which might lead one to echo the cry of the atheistic Roman poet, "To such a mass of ills could religion persuade mankind."Christianity has left furrowed across the mediaeval history of Europe almost from the days of Constantine, its first hour of secular triumph, down to ..very recent times, or the sanguinary comment which such an institution as the Inquisition affords on the claim of religion to be the directing light and regulating power in ethics and society, or religious wars and wide-spread State persecutions on its claim to guide the political life of mankind. But we must observe the root of this evil, which is not in true religion itself, but in its infrarational parts, not in spiritual faith and aspiration, but in our ignorant human confusion essence of religion with a particular creed, sect, cult, religious society or Church. So strong is the human tendency to this error that even the old tolerant Paganism slew Socrates in the name discovery of religion and morality, feebly persecuted non-national faiths like the cult of Isis or the cult of Mithra immaterial Spirit and more vigorously what it conceived to be the subversive and anti-social religion play 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, Vaishnavaa supraphysical consciousness.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/religionreason-asand-the-law-of-lifereligion#p4p8</ref>
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...To see your Self in order to accomplish all its future this idea creatures and religion of humanity has to make itself more explicit, insistent and categorically imperative. For otherwise it can only work with clarity all creatures in the minds of the few and with the mass it will be only a modifying influence, but will not be the rule of human life. the enemy of all humanity,real religion, your Self—that is human egoism, the egoism of the individual, the egoism of class and nation. the love of mankind, not to recognise a real unity between man and man. For that essentially must be the aim of the religion of humanity, as it must be the earthly aim unshakeable foundation of all human religion, love, mutual recognition of human brotherhoodpatriotism, a living sense of human oneness and practice of human oneness in thoughtphilanthropy, feeling and lifehumanity, the ideal which was expressed first some thousands of years ago in the ancient Vedic hymn and must always remain the highest injunction of the Spirit within us to human life upon earth. With that done, the one necessary psychological change will have been effected without everything which no formal and mechanical, no political rises above selfishness and administrative unity can be real and securegross utility. If it is done, that outward unification may not even be indispensable or, if indispensable, it will come about naturally, not, as now it seems likely to be, by catastrophic means, but by the demand of the human mind, and will be held secure by an essential need of our perfected and developed human nature.<ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2517/the-religionishavasyopanishad-with-a-commentary-ofin-humanityenglish#p4p86</ref>
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"...brotherhood the religion's real key business is to prepare man's mind, life and bodily existence for the triple gospel of spiritual consciousness to take it up; it has to lead him to that point where the idea of humanityinner spiritual light begins fully to emerge. The union of liberty 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 equality can only be achieved by reality. In the power meanwhile it has to take up as much of human brotherhood and man's mentality, vitality, physicality as it cannot be founded on anything else. But brotherhood exists only in the soul can and by give all his activities a turn towards the soul. When spiritual direction, the soul claims freedomrevelation of a spiritual meaning in them, it is the freedom imprint of its self-developmenta spiritual refinement, the selfbeginning of a spiritual character. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/09/16-july-development 1958#p1</ref>In all the higher powers of his life man may be said to be seeking, blindly enough, for God. To get at the divine Divine and Eternal in man in all himself and the world and to harmonise them, to put his being. When it claims equality, what it is claiming is that freedom equally for all and his life in tune with the recognition Infinite reveals itself in these parts of the same soulhis nature as his concealed aim and his destiny. He sets out to arrive at his highest and largest and most perfect self, and the same godhead in moment he at all human beings. When touches upon it strives for brotherhood, it is founding that equal freedom of this self-development on a common aim, a common life, a unity in him appears to be one with some great Soul and Self of mind Truth and Good and feeling founded upon Beauty in the world to which we give the recognition name of God. To get at this inner as a spiritual unity.freedompresence is the aim of religion, equality, unity are the to grow into harmony with its eternal attributes nature of the Spirit. It right, love, strength and purity is the practical recognition aim of this truthethics, it is to enjoy and mould ourselves into the awakening harmony of the soul in man its eternal beauty and delight is the attempt to get him to live from his soul aim and not from his ego which is the inner meaning consummation of religionour aesthetic need and nature, to know and it to be according to its eternal principles of truth is that to which the religion end of humanity also must arrive before it can fulfil itself in the life science and philosophy and of the raceall our insistent drive towards knowledge.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/the-religionsuprarational-ultimate-of-humanitylife#p7p1</ref>
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The unaided intellectual reason faced with Religion, however imperfect, has the secret of that mastery; religion can conquer the phenomena 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 religious life is naturally apt intellectual few and was even for a time relegated to adopt one oblivion by the imperious contempt of Science which thought that it had discovered a complete solution of two attitudesthe Universe, both a truth and a law of life independent of them shallow religion and yet able to supersede religion in its peculiar province of reaching & regulating the extreme, hastily presumptuous sources of conduct and erroneousleading mankind in its evolution. Either But it views has now become increasingly clear that Science has failed to substantiate its claims, and that a belief in evolution or the whole thing as a mass supremacy of physical laws or the subjection of the ephemeral individual to the interests of superstition, the slightly less ephemeral race is no substitute for a mystical nonsensebelief in Christ or Buddha, a farrago for the law of ignorant barbaric survivalsDivine Love or the trust in Divine Power & Providence. … Religion which satisfies the heart and controls conduct,—that was cannot in its average conceptions permanently satisfy the reason and thus exposes itself to gradual loss of empire over the mind. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/18/an-incomplete-work-of-vedantic-exegesis#p19</ref><center>~</center>...the aim of religion: its purpose is to link the human with the Divine and in so doing sublimate the thought and life and flesh so that they may admit the extreme spirit rule of the rationalist now happily, though not dead, yet much weakened soul and almost moribund,—or spirit. But this knowledge must be something more than a creed or a mystic revelation; his thinking mind must be able to accept it patronises religion, tries to explain its originscorrelate it with the principle of things and the observed truth of the universe: this is the work of philosophy, to get rid and in the field of it by the process truth of explaining the spirit it away; can only 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 labours gently 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 forcefully philosophical knowledge and endeavour must, to reject or correct its superstitionsbear fruition, cruditiesend in an opening up of the spiritual consciousness, absurditiesin experiences that found and continually heighten, to purify it into an abstract nothingness or persuade it to purify itself expand and enrich that consciousness and in the building of a life and action that is in conformity with the light truth of the reasoning intelligencespirit: this is the work of spiritual realisation and experience.<ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2522/reasonthe-evolution-of-the-andspiritual-religionman#p7p12</ref>
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In the universe there is a constant relation of Oneness and Multiplicity...suprarational life in which religious aspiration finds entirely what it seeksThis expresses itself as the universal Personality and the many Persons, so too and both between the One and the Many and among the Many themselves there is also the infrarational life possibility of an infinite variety of relations. These relations are determined by the play of the instinctsdivine existence, impulsesthe Lord, sensations, crude emotions, vital activities from entering into His manifested habitations. They exist at first as conscious relations between individual souls; they are then taken 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 of Religion. All religions are justified by this essential necessity; all human aspiration takes its beginningexpress one Truth in various ways and move by various paths to one goal.<ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2517/reason-andthe-religionlord#p12p11</ref>
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The widest spirituality does not exclude or discourage any essential human activity or facultydeepest heart, but works rather to lift all the inmost essence of them up out religion, apart from its outward machinery of their imperfection creed, cult, ceremony and groping ignorancesymbol, transforms them by its touch is the search for God and makes them the instruments finding of God. Its aspiration is to discover the lightInfinite, the Absolute, the One, the Divine, who is all these things and yet no abstraction but a Being. Its work is a sincere living out of the true and intimate relations between man and God, relations of unity, relations of difference, relations of an illuminated knowledge, an ecstatic love and delight, power an absolute surrender and joy service, a casting of every part of our existence out of its normal status into an uprush of man towards the divine being Divine and a descent of the Divine into man. All this has nothing to do with the divine naturerealm of reason or its normal activities; its aim, its sphere, its process is suprarational.<ref>httpThe knowledge of God is not to be gained by weighing the feeble arguments of reason for or against his existence://incarnatewordit is to be gained only by a self-transcending and absolute consecration, aspiration and experience. rational scientific experiment or rational philosophic thinking.Even in/cwsa/25/those parts of religious discipline which seem most to resemble scientific experiment, the method is a verification of things which exceed the reason-and-religion#p13</ref>its timid scope. Even in those parts of religious knowledge which seem most to resemble intellectual operations, the illuminating faculties are not imagination, logic and rational judgment, but revelations, inspirations, intuitions, intuitive discernments that leap down to us from a plane of suprarational light.
===Religion The love of Humanity, conclusion===...while it God is possible to construct an infinite and absolute feeling which does not admit of any rational limitation and does not use a precarious language of rational worship and quite mechanical unity by political adoration; the delight in God is that peace and administrative means, bliss which passes all understanding. The surrender to God is the unity surrender of the human racewhole being to a suprarational light, even if achievedwill, can only be secured power and love and can only be made real if his service takes no account of the compromises with life which the religion practical reason of humanity, which is at present man uses as the highest active ideal best part of mankind, spiritualises itself and becomes its method in the general inner law ordinary conduct of human lifemundane existence. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/summaryreason-and-conclusionreligion#p1p9</ref> =How to Ascend Beyond Religions?= The attitude to be taken towards religionsA benevolent goodwill towards all worshippers.An enlightened indifference towards all religions.All religions are partial approximations of the one sole Truth that is far above them. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/15/religion#p21,p22,p23,p24</ref>
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A religion If you want to appraise the real value of humanity means the growing realisation that there is a secret Spirit, a divine Reality, religion in which we you are all one, that humanity is its highest present vehicle on earth, that the human race and the human being are the means by which it will progressively reveal itself here. It implies a growing attempt born or brought up or to live out this knowledge and bring about have a kingdom correct perspective of this divine Spirit upon earth. By its growth within us oneness with our fellow-men will become the leading principle of all our life, not merely a principle of cooperation but a deeper brotherhoodcountry or society to which you belong by birth, if you want to find out how relative a real and an inner sense of unity and equality and a common life. There must be the realisation by thing the individual that only in the life of his fellow-men particular environment is his own life complete. There must into which you happened to be the realisation by the race that thrown and confined, you have only on to go round the free and full life of the individual can its own perfection earth and permanent happiness be founded. There must be too a discipline and a way of salvation in accordance with this religion, see that what you think good is to say, a means by which it can be developed by each man within himself, so that it may be developed in the life of the race. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/summary-looked upon as bad elsewhere and-conclusion#p11</ref><center>~</center>Democracy and Socialism are, what is considered as we have already said, the sign that that self-consciousness bad in one place is beginning to ripen into fullness.<ref>http://incarnatewordwelcomed as good in another.in/cwsa/25/the-drive-towards-legislative-and-social-centralisation-and-uniformity#p8</ref>
==Failure Things have an inner value and become real to you only when you have acquired them by the exercise of Religion==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 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."
Religion itself had become fixed If we go a little way within ourselves, we shall discover that there is in dogmas each of us a consciousness that has been living throughout the ages and ceremoniesmanifesting in a multitude of forms. Each of us has been born in many different countries, sects belonged to many different nations, followed many different religions. Why must we accept the last one as the best? The experiences gathered by us in all these many lives in different countries and churches varying religions, are stored up in that inner continuity of our consciousness which persists through all births. There are multiple personalities there created by these past experiences, and had lost for when we become aware of this multitude within us, it becomes impossible to speak of one particular form of truth as the most partonly truth, except for a few individualsone country as our only country, direct contact with one religion as the living founts of spiritualityonly true religion. A period There are people who have been born into one country, although the leading elements of negation was necessarytheir consciousness obviously belong to another. They had to be driven back and I have met some born in Europe who were evidently Indians; I have met others born in upon themselvesIndian bodies who were as evidently Europeans. In Japan I have met some who were Indian, nearer others who were European. And if any of them goes to their own eternal sourcesthe country or enters into the civilisation to which he has affinity, he finds himself there perfectly at home.<ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/2503/civilisation9-andjune-barbarism1929#p8p9,p10,p11</ref>
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false socialisation Let us take an altogether ordinary example which is very partial and very superficial. You are born in India. Being born in India you are born with a certain religious and philosophic attitude. But if for some reason or other you want to free yourself from this atavism and influence, if you begin to follow, study, practise the religion or philosophy of religion has been always another country, you can change the chief cause conditions of its failure to regenerate mankind - your inner development. It saddled upon the religious life of man is a Churchlittle more difficult, that is, it asks for a priesthood and a mass of ceremonies and set over greater effort for liberation, but it is very far from being impossible. In fact there are many people who do it a pack of watchdogs under the name of creeds and dogmas, dogmas which one had who love to accept and obey under pain of condemnation free themselves from what comes to eternal hell them from their present birth; by an eternal judge beyond, just as one had some sort of special taste they like to accept and seek elsewhere what they think they won't be able to obey find at home. And in this way you change the laws consequences of society on pain of condemnation to temporal imprisonment or death by a mortal judge belowyour birth completely.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/07/16-november-1955#p69</ref>
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''Q...prominent aim of religion rather than any spiritual growth of the individual and the race. <ref>httpMother, here Sri Aurobindo writes://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/the-spiritual-aimA great thing would be done if all these God-visions could embrace and cast themselves into each other; but intellectual dogma andcult-life#p5,p6</ref>egoism stand in the way.'' ''How is it possible to fuse into one all these views?''
That ''A:'' It is not in the mental consciousness that these things can be harmonised and synthesised. For this it is why all necessary to rise above and find the idea behind the thought. Sri Aurobindo shows here, for example, what each of these religionsrepresents in human effort, however beautiful aspiration and realisation. Instead of taking these religions in their outward forms which are precisely dogmas and intellectual conceptions, if we take them in their spirit, in the principle they may represent, there is no difficulty in unifying them. They are simply different aspects of human progress which complete each other perfectly well and should beunited with many others yet to form a more total and more complete progress, have always led man a more perfect understanding of life, a more integral approach to the worst excessesDivine. All And even this unification which already demands a return to the crimesSpirit behind things, is not enough; there must be added to it a vision of the horrors perpetrated in future, the goal towards which humanity is moving, the name future realisation of religion are among the darkest stains on human historyworld, that last "spiritual revolution" Sri Aurobindo speaks about, which will open a new age, and simply because of this little initial error: wanting what that is true for one individual to be true for , the mass or collectivity.<ref>http://incarnatewordsupramental revolution.in/cwm/09/24-september-1958#p16</ref>
===Duties of In the supramental consciousness all these things are no longer contradictory or exclusive. They all become complementary. It is only the mental form which divides. What this mental form represents should be united to what all the other mental forms represent in order to make a Man===harmonious whole. And that is the essential difference between a religion and the true spiritual life.
Each part Religion exists almost exclusively in its forms, its cults, in a certain set of man's being has its own dharma which ideas, and it must follow becomes great only through the spirituality of a few exceptional individuals, whereas true spiritual life, and above all what the supramental realisation will follow in be, is independent of every precise, intellectual form, every limited form of life. It embraces all possibilities and manifestations and makes them the endexpression, put on the vehicle of a higher and more universal truth. A new religion would not only be useless but very harmful. It is a new life which must be created; it what fetters you pleaseis a new consciousness which must be expressed. This is something beyond intellectual limits and mental formulae. It is a living truth which must manifest.Everything in its essence and its truth should be included in this realisation. The dharma This realisation must be an expression as total, as complete, as universal as possible of science, thought the divine reality. Only that can save humanity and philosophy the world. That is the great spiritual revolution of which Sri Aurobindo speaks. And this is what he wanted us to seek realise. ... ...the key of the entire problem not only for the individual but also for truth by the intellect dispassionatelycollectivity:"All would change if man could once consent to be spiritualised; but his nature, without prepossession mental and vital and prejudgmentphysical, with no other first propositions than is rebellious to the higher law . He loves his imperfection."<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/09/3-april-1957#p9,p10,p11,p12,p13,p14,p15,p18</ref><center>~</center>A revolutionary reconstruction of thought religion, philosophy, science, art and observation itself imposessociety is the last inevitable outcome. Science It proceeds at first by the light of the individual mind and philosophy are not bound reason, by its demand on life and its experience of life; but it must go from the individual to square their observations the universal. For the effort of the individual soon shows him that he cannot securely discover the truth and conclusions with any current ideas law of religious dogma or ethical rule or aesthetic prejudicehis own being without discovering some universal law and truth to which he can relate it. In Of the enduniverse he is a part; in all but his deepest spirit he is its subject, if left free a small cell in their actionthat tremendous organic mass: his substance is drawn from its substance and by the law of its life the law of his life is determined and governed. From a new view and knowledge of the world must proceed his new view and knowledge of him self, they will find the unity of Truth with Good his power and capacity and Beauty limitations, of his claim on existence and God the high road and give these a greater meaning than any dogmatic religion the distant or any formal ethics or any narrower aesthetic idea can give usimmediate goal of his individual and social destiny. <ref>http://incarnateword. But meanwhile they in/cwsa/25/the-coming-of-the-subjective-age#p3</ref><center>~</center>The sense-obscured, limited and desire-driven individual self must be left free even raise itself out of the dark pit of sense-obsession into the clear air of the spirit, must disembarrass itself of servile bondage to deny God bodily, emotional & intellectual selfishness and good assume the freedom & royalty of universal love and beauty if they willbeneficence, 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, if their sincere observation 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 things so points themany ethical system. <ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2518/thean-incomplete-spiritualwork-aimof-andvedantic-lifeexegesis#p9p6</ref>
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It would seem at first sight that since man is pre-eminently the mental being, the development of the mental faculties and the richness of the mental life should be his highest aim,—his preoccupying aim, even, as soon as he has got rid of the obsession of the life and body and provided for the indispensable satisfaction of the gross needs which our physical and animal nature imposes on us. Knowledge, science, art, thought, ethics, philosophy, religion, this is man's real business, these are his true affairs. To be is for him not merely to be born, grow up, marry, get his livelihood, support a family and then die,—the vital and physical life, a human edition of the animal round, a human enlargement of the little animal sector and arc of the divine circle; rather to become and grow mentally and live with knowledge and power within himself as well as from within outward is his manhood. But there is here a double motive of Nature, an insistent duality in her human purpose. Man is here to learn from her how to control and create; but she evidently means him not only to control, create and constantly re-create in new and better forms himself, his own inner existence, his mentality, but also to control and re-create correspondingly his environment. He has to turn Mind not only on itself, but on Life and Matter and the material existence; that is very clear not only from the law and nature of the terrestrial evolution, but from his own past and present history. And there comes from the observation of these conditions and of his highest aspirations and impulses the question whether he is not intended, not only to expand inwardly and outwardly, but to grow upward, wonderfully exceeding himself as he has wonderfully exceeded his animal beginnings, into something more than mental, more than human, into a being spiritual and divine. Even if he cannot do that, yet he may have to open his mind to what is beyond it and to govern his life more and more by the light and power that he receives from something greater than himself. Man's consciousness of the divine within himself and the world is the supreme fact of his existence and to grow into that may very well be the intention of his nature. In any case the fullness of Life is his evident object, the widest life and the highest life possible to him, whether that be a complete humanity or a new and divine race. We must recognise both his need of integrality and his impulse of self-exceeding if we would fix rightly the meaning of his individual existence and the perfect aim and norm of his society.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/civilisation-and-culture#p2</ref>
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It ...it is the truth true that all active being is religion when it identifies itself only with a creed, a cult, a Church, a seeking for Godsystem of ceremonial forms, may well become a seeking retarding force and there may therefore arise a necessity for the human spirit to reject its control over the varied activities of life. There are two aspects of religion, true religion and religionism. True religion is spiritual religion, that which seeks to live in the spirit, in what is beyond the intellect, beyond the aesthetic and ethical and practical being of man, and to inform and govern these members of our being by the higher light and law of the spirit. Religionism, on the contrary, entrenches itself in some narrow pietistic exaltation of the lower members or lays exclusive stress on intellectual dogmas, forms and ceremonies, on some highest self fixed and rigid moral code, on some religio-political or religio-social system. Not that these things are altogether negligible or that they must be unworthy or unnecessary or that a spiritual religion need disdain the aid of forms, ceremonies, creeds or systems. On the contrary, they are needed by man because the lower members have to be exalted and deepest Reality secret withinraised before they can be fully spiritualised, behind before they can directly feel the spirit and above ourselves obey its law. An intellectual formula is often needed by the thinking and thingsreasoning mind, a seeking for form or ceremony by the hidden Divinity: aesthetic temperament or other parts of the truth which we glimpse through religioninfrarational being, lies concealed behind all a set moral code by man’s vital nature in their turn towards the inner life. But these things are aids and supports, not the essence; it precisely because they belong to the rational and infrarational parts, they can be nothing more and, if too blindly insisted on, may even hamper the suprarational light. Such as they are, they have to be offered to man and used by him, but not to be imposed on him as his sole law by a forced and inflexible domination. In the use of them toleration and free permission of variation is the great secret first rule which should be observed. The spiritual essence of lifereligion is alone the one thing supremely needful, that the thing to which it is in labour we have always to discover hold and subordinate to make real to its self-knowledgeit every other element or motive.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/religion-as-the-suprarationallaw-of-goodlife#p1p6</ref>
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If mankind A spiritual religion of humanity is the hope of the future. By this is not meant what is ordinarily called a universal religion, a system, a thing of creed and intellectual belief and dogma and outward rite. Mankind has tried unity by that means; it has failed and deserved to fail, because there can be spiritualisedno universal religious system, one in mental creed and vital form. The inner spirit is indeed one, but more than any other the spiritual life insists on freedom and variation in its self-expression and means of development.A religion of humanity means the growing realisation that there is a secret Spirit, a divine Reality, in which we are all one, that humanity is its highest present vehicle on earth, that the human race and the human being are the means by which it will progressively reveal itself here. It implies a growing attempt to live out this knowledge and bring about a kingdom of this divine Spirit upon earth. By its growth within us oneness with our fellow-men will become the leading principle of all our life, not merely a principle of cooperation but a deeper brotherhood, a real and an inner sense of unity and equality and a common life. There must first be the realisation by the individual that only in the mass cease to life of his fellow-men is his own life complete. There must be the material or realisation by the race that only on the vital man free and become full life of the psychic individual can its own perfection and the true mental beingpermanent happiness be founded. It may There must be questioned whether such too a mass progress or conversion discipline and a way of salvation in accordance with this religion, that is possible; but to say, a means by which it can be developed by each man within himself, so that it may be developed in the life of the race. … But if it is notat all a truth of our being, then it must be the truth to which all is moving and in it must be found the spiritualisation means of mankind as a whole is fundamental, an inner, a complete, a real human unity which would be the one secure base of a unification of human life. A spiritual oneness which would create a psychological oneness not dependent upon any intellectual or outward uniformity and compel a oneness of life not bound up with its mechanical means of unification, but ready always to enrich its secure unity by a free inner variation and a freely varied outer self-expression, this would be the basis for a chimerahigher type of human existence.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/conditionssummary-forand-conclusion#p11</ref> ===Religion and Spirituality=== ''Q. Sweet Mother, what is the-coming-difference between yoga and religion?'' ''A:''Ah! my child... it is as though you were asking me the difference between a dog and a cat! Imagine someone who, in some way or other, has heard of something like the Divine or has a personal feeling that something of the kind exists, and begins to make all sorts of efforts: efforts of will, of discipline, efforts of concentration, all sorts of-efforts to find this Divine, to discover what He is, to become acquainted with Him and unite with Him. Then this person is doing yoga. Now, if this person has noted down all the processes he has used and constructs a fixed system, and sets up all that he has discovered as absolute laws―for example, he says: the Divine is like this, to find the Divine you must do this, make this particular gesture, take this attitude, perform this ceremony, and you must admit that this is the truth, you must say, "I accept that this is the Truth and I fully adhere to it; and your method is the only right one, the only one which exists"― if all that is written down, organised, arranged into fixed laws and ceremonies, it becomes areligion.<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/23-spiritualmay-age1956#p8p1,p2,p4,p5</ref>
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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 Religions are based on them from without. Therefore the law of a growing inner freedom is that creeds which will be most honoured in the are 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 it, he cannot escape from the law of external compulsion and all his efforts experiences brought down to do so must be vain. He is and always must be, so long as that lasts, the slave of others, the slave of his family, his caste, his clan, his Church, his society, his nation. We must 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 truest, the most living growth and action is that which arises in the largest possible freedom and that all excess of compulsion 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 level where they become more easy to know his spiritual selfgrasp, he does by that discovery, often even by the very seeking for it, as ancient thought and religion saw, escape from the outer law and enter into the law of freedom.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/conditions-for-the-coming-of-a-spiritual-age#p15</ref><center>~</center>A revolutionary reconstruction of religion, philosophy, science, art and society is the last inevitable outcome. It proceeds but at first by the light of the individual mind and reason, by its demand on life and its experience of life; but it must go from the individual to the universal. For the effort cost of the individual soon shows him that he cannot securely discover the truth and law of his own being without discovering some universal law their integral purity and truth to which he can relate it. Of the universe he is a part; in all but his deepest spirit he is its subject, a small cell in that tremendous organic mass: his substance is drawn from its substance and by the law of its life the law of his life is determined and governed. From a new view and knowledge of the world must proceed his new view and knowledge of him self, of his power and capacity and limitations, of his claim on existence and the high road and the distant or immediate goal of his individual and social destiny. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/the-coming-of-the-subjective-age#p3</ref>
===Religion in Ethical Man and Aesthetic Man===The time of religions is over.
There is in our mentality a side of will, conduct, character which creates the ethical man; there is another side of sensibility to the beautiful,—understanding beauty in no narrow or hyper-artistic sense,—which creates the artistic and aesthetic man. Therefore there can be such a thing as a predominantly or even exclusively ethical culture; there can be too, evidently, a predominantly or even exclusively aesthetic culture. There are at once created two conflicting ideals which must naturally stand opposed and look askance at each other with a mutual distrust or even reprobation. The aesthetic man tends to be impatient of the ethical rule; he feels it to be a barrier to his aesthetic freedom and an oppression on the play of his artistic sense and his artistic faculty; he is naturally hedonistic,—for beauty and delight are inseparable powers,—and the ethical rule tramples on pleasure, even very often on quite innocent pleasures, and tries to put a strait waistcoat on We have entered the human impulse to delight. He may accept the ethical rule when it makes itself beautiful or even seize on it as one age of his instruments for creating beautyuniversal spirituality, but only when he can subordinate it to the aesthetic principle of his nature,—just as he is often drawn to religion by its side of beauty, pomp, magnificent ritual, emotional satisfaction, repose or poetic ideality and aspiration,—we might almost say, by the hedonistic aspects of religion. Even when fully accepted, it is not for their own sake that he accepts them. The ethical man repays this natural repulsion with interest. He tends to distrust art and the aesthetic sense as something lax and emollient, something spiritual experience in its nature undisciplined and by its attractive appeals to the passions and emotions destructive of a high and strict self-control. He sees that it is hedonistic and he finds that the hedonistic impulse is non-moral and often immoral. It is difficult for him to see how the indulgence of the aesthetic impulse beyond a very narrow and carefully guarded limit can be combined with a strict ethical life. He evolves the puritan who objects to pleasure on principle; not only in his extremes—and a predominant impulse tends to become absorbing and leads towards extremes—but in the core of his temperament he remains fundamentally the puritan. The misunderstanding between these two sides of our nature is an inevitable circumstance of our human growth which must try them to their fullest separate possibilities and experiment in extremes in order that it may understand the whole range of its capacitiesinitial purity.<ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/2515/aesthetic-and-ethical-culturereligion#p4p29,p30,p31,p32</ref>
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What is farther needed is For me religions are forms, much too human, of spiritual life. Each one expresses one aspect of the awakening of a certain visionsingle and eternal Truth, an insight and an intuitive response but in expressing it exclusive of the soul. Reason which studies always from outsideother aspects, cannot give this inner it deforms and more intimate contact; diminishes it . None has the right to aid call itself by a the only true one, any more direct insight springing from than it has the soul itself and right to call at every step on deny the truth contained in the intuitive mind others. And all of them together would not suffice to fill up express the gap of its own deficienciesSupreme Truth which is beyond all expression, even whilst being present in each one. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/2515/the-suprarational-beautyreligion#p7p10</ref>
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It is in truth seeking, as in religion, for Those who carry within themselves a spiritual destiny and are born to realise the Divine, the All-Beautiful to become conscious in manHim and live Him, in naturewill arrive, in lifeno matter what path, in thoughtwhat way they follow. That is to say, even in art; for God is Beauty religion there are people who have had the spiritual experience and Delight hidden in found the variation Divine―not because of his masks and forms. Whenthe religion, fulfilled usually in our growing sense and knowledge spite of beauty and delight in beauty and our power for beautyit, we are able to identify ourselves in soul with this Absolute and Divine in all the forms and activities of notwithstanding it―because they had the world and shape an image of our inner urge and our outer life in the highest image we can perceive and embody of the All-Beautiful, then the aesthetic being in us who was born for this end, has fulfilled himself urge led them there despite all obstacles and risen to his divine consummationthrough them. 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 the living image and power of GodEverything served their purpose. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/2508/the23-suprarationalmay-beauty1956#p11p7</ref>
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In The widest spirituality does not exclude or discourage any essential human activity or faculty, but works rather to lift all the higher powers of his life man 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 in tune with the Infinite reveals itself in these parts up out of his nature as his concealed aim their imperfection and his destiny. He sets out to arrive at his highest and largest and most perfect selfgroping ignorance, transforms them by its touch and makes them the moment he at all touches upon it, this self in him appears to be one with some great Soul and Self instruments of Truth and Good and Beauty in the world to which we give the name of God. To get at this as a spiritual presence is the aim of religionlight, to grow into harmony with its eternal nature of right, love, strength power and purity is the aim joy of ethics, to enjoy and mould ourselves into the harmony of its eternal beauty divine being and delight is the aim and consummation of our aesthetic need and divine nature, to know and to be according to its eternal principles of truth is the end of science and philosophy and of all our insistent drive towards knowledge.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/thereason-suprarationaland-ultimate-of-lifereligion#p1p13</ref><center>~</center>The Spirit is the truth of our being; mind and life and body in their imperfection are its masks, but in their perfection should be its moulds. To be spiritual only is not enough; that prepares a number of souls for heaven, but leaves the earth very much where it was. Neither is a compromise the way of salvation.
===Society The world knows three kinds of revolution. The material has strong results, the moral and Life===intellectual are infinitely larger in their scope and richer in their fruits, but the spiritual are the great sowings.
But all this seems to be something above our normal and usual being; it is something into which we strive to grow, but it does not seem to be If the normal stuff, the natural being or atmosphere of the individual and the society triple change could coincide in their ordinary consciousness and their daily life. That life is practical and not idealistic; it is concerned not with good, beauty, spiritual experience, the higher truth, but with interests, physical needsa perfect correspondence, desires, vital necessities. This is real to it, all the rest is a little shadowyfaultless work would be done; It accepts ethics as a bond and an influence, but it does not live for ethical good; its real gods are vital need and utility and the desires of the body. If it governs its life partly by ethical laws because otherwise vital need, desire, utility in seeking their own satisfaction through many egoistic individuals would clash among themselves and destroy their own aims, it does not feel called upon to make its life entirely ethical. It concerns itself still less with beauty; even if it admits things beautiful as an embellishment and an amusement, a satisfaction and pastime of the eye and ear and mind, nothing moves it imperatively to make its life a thing of beauty. It allows religion a fixed place and portion, on holy days, in the church or temple, at the end body 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 mankind cannot hold perfectly a moment to pause in the affairs of the world and remember Godstrong spiritual inrush: but to make the whole of life a religionmost is spilt, a remembering much of God and a seeking after him, is a thing that the rest is not really done even in societies which like the Indian erect spirituality as their aim and principlecorrupted. It admits philosophy in a still more remote fashion; Many intellectual and if nowadays it eagerly seeks after science, that is because science helps prodigiously the satisfaction physical upturnings of its vital desires, needs and interests: but it does not turn our soil are needed 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 work out a special type, the saint, the ethical man, the artist, the thinker, the man of religion; it gives them little result from 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 efficiencylarge spiritual sowing.<ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2513/thethoughts-suprarationaland-ultimate-of-lifeglimpses#p2p17,p18,p19</ref>
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Religion too by putting God far above in distant heavens made man too much of a worm of For it is into the earth little Divine within them that men and vile before his Creator and admitted only by a caprice of his favour mankind have to a doubtful salvation in superhuman worlds.<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/the-unseen-power#p10</ref> == Practice of Ideal Religion== It was necessary at one time grow; it is not an external idea or rule that has to insist even exclusively be imposed on them from without. Therefore the idea law of individual salvation so a growing inner freedom is that which will be most honoured in the sense spiritual age of a Beyond might be driven into mankind. True it is that so long as man's mentality, as it was necessary at one time to insist on a heaven has not come within measurable distance of joys for the virtuous self-knowledge and pious so that man might be drawn by that shining bait has not set his face towards it, he cannot escape from the practice law of religion external compulsion and the suppression of all his unbridled animalityefforts to do so must be vain. But He is and always must be, so long as that lasts, the lures slave of earth have to be conqueredothers, so also have the lures slave of heavenhis family, his caste, his clan, his Church, his society, his nation. The lure of a pleasant Paradise of We must feel and obey the rewards compulsion of virtue has been rejected by man; the Upanishads belittled it ages ago Spirit if we would establish our inner right to escape other compulsion. Therefore even in India the unregenerated state we find that the healthiest, the truest, the most living growth and it action is now no longer dominant that which arises in the mind largest possible freedom and that all excess of compulsion is either the people; the similar lure in popular Christianity and popular Islam has no meaning for the conscience law of a gradual atrophy or a tyranny varied or cured by outbreaks of modern humanityrabid disorder. The lure of a release from birth and death and withdrawal from the cosmic labour must also be rejectedAnd as soon as man comes to know his spiritual self, as it was rejected he does by Mahayanist Buddhism which held compassion and helpfulness to be greater than Nirvana. As the virtues we practise must be done without demand of earthly or heavenly rewardthat discovery, so often even by the salvation we seek must be purely internal and impersonal; very seeking for it must be the release from egoism, the union with the Divine, the realisation of our universality as well as our transcendenceancient thought and religion saw, and no salvation should be valued which takes us away escape from the love of God in humanity outer law and enter into the help we can give to the world. If need be, it must be taught, "Better hell with the rest law of our suffering brothers than a solitary salvationfreedom. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/1825/conditions-for-the-coming-of-a-lastspiritual-wordage#p10p15</ref>
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Thou shalt not be negligent of thy works unto In spirituality... we must seek for the Gods or thy works unto directing light and the Fathersharmonising law, and in religion only in proportion as it identifies itself with this spirituality. Let thy father So long as it falls short of this, it is one human activity and power among others, and, even if it be unto thee as thy God considered the most important and thy mother as thy Goddess whom thou adorestthe most powerful, it cannot wholly guide the others. Serve If it seeks always to fix them into the Master as limits of a creed, an unchangeable law, a particular system, it must be prepared to see them revolting from its control; for although they may accept this impress for a God time and as greatly profit by it, in the end they must move by the law of their being towards a God freer activity and an untrammelled movement. 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''. This liberty it will give to all the stranger within thy dwellingfundamental parts of our being. The works It will give that are without blame before freedom to philosophy and science which ancient Indian religion gave,—freedom even to deny the peoplespirit, thou shalt do these with diligence if they will,—as a result of which philosophy and science never felt in ancient India any necessity of divorcing themselves from religion, 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 no othersaspirations. The deeds we have done Only it will be vigilant to illuminate them so that are good they may grow into the light and law of the spirit, not by suppression and righteousrestriction, thou shalt practise these as but by a self-searching, self-controlled expansion and a religion many-sided finding of their greatest, highest and no othersdeepest potentialities. For all these are potentialities of the spirit. <ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsa/1825/taittiriyareligion-as-the-law-of-upanishadlife#p92p9</ref>
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For although the determination to live by the best light we have is importantIn reality, it is equally important to know what that light there is no division and how we came by it, whether by the inspiration of Self in me is the heart & the satisfaction of same as the emotional being, as Self in ordinary religion, or by the working of the observation you and the logical faculties as in ordinary Science or by intellectual revelation as Newton discovered gravitation or by spiritual intuition same as the Self up yonder in the methods Sun. The unity of spiritual existence is the great founders basis of all true religion or by a higher principle and true morality. We know indeed that as God is not contained in us which sums up and yet transcends all these mighty channels of His universe, but the Jnanam Brahma. It universe is in Him, so also God is such not contained within a higher undivided principle from which Vedanta professes to derive its knowledgeman. man dwelling When the Sruti says elsewhere that the Purusha lies hidden in the lower mind but using matter & vitality from above and from below taking possession heart of reason our being and imagination, seems, is no larger than the size of all beings on earth, to be at the top. But above a man's present positionthumb, above it simply means that to the heart in which he dwells & mind of man under the imagination & reason to which he rises there opens out a wider atmosphere dominion of lifeAvidya his body, vitality, mind, there shoots down on him a more full & burning splendour of strength & knowledgereason bulk so largely, the Spirit seems a more nectarous lustre of joy & beautysmall and indistinguishable thing indeed inside so many and bulky sheaths and coverings. For man in his heart is awake; But in his reason & imaginationreality, half awake, not yet buddha, but in that higher principle he it is asleep. It is to him a state of sushupti. Yet secretlybody, subliminallyvitality, unknown to the egoistic mind he takes from this slumber his waking thought & knowledge, though he is compelled by reason forming the limitations of mind to mistake & misuse apparent man that are small and trifling and it. For that slumber is the Spirit or real waking and our waking is a state of dream and delusion in which we use a distorted truth & establish a world of false relations.Gita says, ''Yasyam jagrati bhutani sa nisha pashyato muneh''.In man that which is night to all creatureslarge, he who has mastered his own being is awake; that in which these creatures are awake, is night to the eye of the awakened seergrandiose & mighty. The Vedantists call this principle apparent man exists in & by the namereal, vijnanam, an entire & pervading principle of knowledge which puts everything not the real in its true light & its right relations. It is from vijnanam that Veda descends to usthe apparent; the movement of this higher principle body is in the soul, not the soul in the source of all internal revelationbody. It is Yet for the drishti convenience of which language and our finite understanding we are compelled to say that the Veda soul is in the result, it body and that God is within the sruti which in its expression the Veda man; for that is, how it is the smriti of the Rishi which gives naturally presents itself to us who use the intelligent part, mental standpoint and the manishi in him language of a perfect account of finite intelligence. The Lord, from our standpoint, is within all His creatures and He is the vision & inspired hearing real self of the seer in him, the Kaviall His creatures. My self and yourself are not really two but one. <ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsa/17/part-ii-the-field-and-instrumentslaw-of-vedanta-1renunciation#p4p12</ref>
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For mankind although evolving towards vijnana yet dwells in "Foster by sacrifice the mind. He has to be fulfilled in mind before he can rise taking up mind with him into gods," says the vijnanamaya selfGita,—the mahan atma"and let those gods foster you; fostering each other ye shall attain the supreme good,—just as—param sreyah." Attaining the supreme good we pass beyond the gods and come to God; we leave Veda to arrive at Vedanta or, in his animal staterather, he had to be fulfilled in body & vitality before he could develop freely fulfil Veda in mindVedanta. Thus it comes about Then we are no longer content to sacrifice this or that even when Veda manifests in possession, giving a share, making reservations, but offer unreservedly & unconditionally the mental worldsupreme sacrifice, it has although yielding up on the higher & truer, to highest of all altars all that we are and possess; we give an account of itself no longer to the lower & more fallibleAgni, Indra, to ScienceVaruna or Mitra, but to Philosophy the supreme & to Religionuniversal Lord, ''bhoktáram yajnatapasám'. It must answer their doubts & questionsThen, too, we receive in return not wealth, it must satisfy all their right and permissible demands. For although from the ideal point of view it is an anomaly that the higher should be cross-questioned by the lowernor cattle nor horses nor lands nor empire, the source of truth by the propagators of half-truth and errornot joys'nor powers nor brilliances nor capacities, yet from but God Himself & the evolutionary point of view an anomaly is often the one right world with all these things in them as trifles and indispensable process. For if we act otherwise, if we deny playthings for instance the claims of the reason in order soul to serve revelation only & exclusively—though we ought to serve her first and chiefly—we are in danger of defeating man's evolutionenjoy as God enjoys, which consists in self-fulfilment possessing them and yet notpossessing, except as a temporary means to an end, wholly unbound by possession.<ref>http://incarnateword.in self/cwsa/17/chapter-ii-the-golden-rule-mortification. Otherwise, we are in danger of becoming by a one-sided exaggeration selfliving-injurers, selfenjoyment-slayers, atmaha, and incurring that condemnation to the sunless & gloomy states beyond of which the Isha Upanishad speaks.-renunciation#p10</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 ==Drawbacks 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>Religion==
===How All religions have saved a number of souls, but none yet has been able to Interpret Religion?===spiritualise mankind. For that there is needed not cult and creed, but a sustained and all-comprehending effort at spiritual self-evolution.
...if you seek The changes we see in the interpretation of your religion from Christiansworld today are intellectual, moral, atheists physical in their ideal and agnostics, you will hear more wonderful things than thatintention: the spiritual revolution waits for its hour and throws up meanwhile its waves here and there. What do you think Until it comes the sense of Charvak's the others cannot be understood and till then all interpretation of Vedic religion as neither pantheistic nor polytheistic but a plutotheistic invention present happening and forecast of man’s future are vain things. For its nature, power, event are that which will determine the Brahmins? An European or his disciple in scholarship can no more enter into the spirit next cycle of the Veda than the wind can blow freely our humanity. <ref>https://incarnateword.in a closed room/cwsa/13/thoughts-and-glimpses#p21,p22</ref><center>~</center>. And pedants especially can never go beyond .. religions are always mistaken—always—because they want to standardise the manipulation expression of wordsan experience and impose it on everyone as an irrefutable truth. Men like Max Muller presume to lecture us on our Veda & Vedanta because …That is why all the religions, however beautiful they know something of Sanscrit grammar; but when we come may be, have always led man to them for lightthe worst excesses. All the crimes, we find them playing marbles on the doorsteps of horrors perpetrated in the outer court name of religion are among the temple. They had not the adhikar to enterdarkest stains on human history, and simply because they came in a spirit of arrogance with preconceived ideas this little initial error: wanting what is true for one individual to teach & not to learn; and their learning was therefore not helpful towards truth, but only towards grammarbe true for the mass or collectivity. <ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/1709/the-ishavasyopanishad-with24-aseptember-commentary-in-english1958#p139p15,p16</ref>
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Each religion has helped mankind. Paganism increased For as there is the suprarational life in man which religious aspiration finds entirely what it seeks, so too there is also the light infrarational life of beautythe instincts, impulses, sensations, crude emotions, vital activities from which all human aspiration takes its beginning. These too feel the largeness and height touch of his lifethe religious sense in man, his aim at a many-sided perfection; Christianity gave him some vision of divine love share its needs and charity; Buddhism has shown him a noble way to be wiserexperience, gentlerdesire its satisfactions. Religion includes this satisfaction also in its scope, purer; Judaism and Islam how in what is usually called religion it seems even to be religiously faithful in action and zealously devoted the greater part, sometimes to Godan external view almost the whole; Hinduism for the supreme purity of spiritual experience does not appear or is glimpsed only through this mixed and turbid current. Much impurity, ignorance, superstition, many doubtful elements must form as the result of this contact and union of our highest tendencies with our lower ignorant nature. Here it would seem that reason has opened its legitimate part; here surely it can intervene to him enlighten, purify, rationalise the largest play of the instincts and profoundest spiritual possibilitiesimpulses. A great thing It would be done if all these God-visions could embrace seem that a religious reformation, a movement to substitute a “pure” and cast themselves into each other; but intellectual dogma rational religion for one that is largely infrarational and cult-egoism stand impure, would be a distinct advance in the wayreligious development of humanity. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/0925/3reason-apriland-1957religion#p5p12</ref>
===Religion NowDependence on Outer Forms===
Now Religion The spiritual spirit is sattwic with not contrary to a natural impulse towards lightreligious feeling of adoration, it cannot be tamasic, it can have no dealings with devotion and consecration. But what is wrong in the religions is the enemies fixity of the Devas; mind clinging to one formula as an exclusive truth. One must always remember that formulas are only a mental expression of the truth and if something calling itself religion, attempts to suppress light, you may that this truth can always be sure it is not religion but an impostor masquerading expressed in her namemany other ways.<ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/1715/the-ishavasyopanishad-with-a-commentary-in-englishreligion#p197p3</ref><center>~</center>===Religion itself had become fixed in dogmas and ceremonies, sects and churches and Old Nations=== All had lost for the old nations perished because in most part, except for a few individuals, direct contact with the pride living founts of intellect they abandoned their dharma, their religionspirituality. India, China still liveA period of negation was necessary. What was the force that enabled India beaten down & trampled by mailed fist & iron hoof ever They had to survive immortallybe driven back and in upon themselves, ever nearer to resist, ever to crush down their own eternal sources. Now that the conqueror stress of the hour at last beneath her gigantic footnegation is past and they are raising their heads, we see them seeking for their own truth, ever to raise her mighty head again to the stars? It is because she never lost hold reviving by virtue of religiona return upon themselves and a new self-discovery.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/civilisation-and-barbarism#p8</ref><center>~</center>As for example, never gave with all people brought up her faith in the spirit. Therefore the promise of Srikrishna ever holds gooda certain religion their experiences will always be coloured by this religion; therefore the Adyashaktiand in fact, to reach the mighty Chandi, ever descends when very source of the people turn to her and tramples thing one must free oneself from the Asura to piecesexternal formation.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/1707/the-ishavasyopanishad-with22-a-commentary-injune-english1955#p217p14</ref>
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For me religions are formsReligion, which ought to have led the way, but owing to its greater dependence on its external parts and its infrarational rather than its spiritual impulses has been as much too human, or even more, a sower of spiritual life. Each one expresses one aspect discord as a teacher of the single unity,—religion is beginning to realise, a little dimly and eternal Truthineffectively as yet, but in expressing that spirituality is after all its own chief business and true aim and that it exclusive of is also the other aspects, it deforms common element and diminishes itthe common bond of all religions. None has the right As these influences grow and come more and more consciously to call itself the only true onecooperate with each other, any more than it has might be hoped that the right to deny the truth contained necessary psychological modification will quietly, gradually, but still irresistibly and at last with an increasing force of rapidity take place which can prepare a real and fundamental change in the others. And all life of them together would not suffice to express the Supreme Truth which is beyond all expression, even whilst being present in each onehumanity."<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/1525/religioninternationalism#p10p5</ref>
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The truth It saddled upon the religious life of Sri Aurobindo is man a truth Church, a priesthood and a mass of love ceremonies and light and mercy. He is good set over it a pack of watchdogs under the name of creeds and great dogmas, dogmas which one had to accept and compassionate obey under pain of condemnation to eternal hell by an eternal judge beyond, just as one had to accept and Divineto obey the laws of society on pain of condemnation to temporal imprisonment or death by a mortal judge below. And it is He who will have This false socialisation of religion has been always the final victory.<ref>http://incarnatewordchief cause of its failure to regenerate mankind.in/cwm/15/3-april-1962#p4</ref>
===Religion For nothing can be more fatal to religion than for its spiritual element to be crushed or formalised out of existence by its outward aids and Spirituality===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>
Religions are based on creeds which are spiritual experiences brought down to a level where they become more easy to grasp, but at the cost of their integral purity and truth.The time of religions is over.We have entered the age of universal spirituality, of spiritual experience in its initial purity. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/15/religion#p29,p30,p31,p32</ref><center>~</center>...it will be the age of God" (God is still too religious) I have put "of the ONE"—because it will truly be the age of Unity.<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/15/religion#p33,p34</ref>===Curtails Spirit’s Freedom===
==Principal Means of Intellectual Knowledge==''Q.If someone follows a religion and has a good capacity, can he go farther and reach identification with the Divine?''
The three principal means of intellectual knowledge are anumana, pratyaksha and aptavakya. Anumana, inference from data, depends for its value on the possession of the right data, on the right observation of the data including the drawing of the right analogies, the unerring perception of true identity & rejection of false identity, the just estimate of difference & contrast, and finally on the power of right reasoning from the right data. Pratyaksha is the process by which the things themselves about which we gather data are brought into our ken; aptavakya is evidence, the testimony of men who have themselves been in possession of the knowledge we seek.<ref>http''A://incarnateword.in/cwsa/17/part-ii-the-instruments-and-field-of-vedanta#p1</ref><center>~</center>But the end of evolution ''It 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://incarnatewordimpossible.in/cwsa/17/book-iii#p3</ref>
===Ego and Religion===is always a limitation for the spirit.
If a man has a spiritual life independently of his mental formations and the set limits in which he lives, then this spiritual life makes him, so to say, cross the religious principles and enter something higher. But his consecration must come from within and not be formal. If it comes exclusively from the form, then the limitation is so great that he cannot go farther.<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/05/2-september-1953#p5,p6,p7,p8</ref><center>~</center>The idea of a Personal God is, however, a contradiction in terms. This all religions confess, but the next moment they nullify their confession by assuming in Him a Personality. The Universal cannot be personal, the Omnipresent cannot be excluded from anything or creature in the world He universally pervades and possesses. The moment we attribute certain qualities to God, we limit Him and create a double principle in the world. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/18/an-incomplete-work-of-vedantic-exegesis#p1</ref><center>~</center>...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 the world or with the early Christians as a God of 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 His world. He creates, judges, punishes, rewards, favours, condemns, loves, hates, is pleased, is angry, for all the world like a man of unlimited powers, and is indeed a Superior Man, a shadow of man's soul thrown out on the huge background of the Universe. The intellectual and moral difficulties of this conception are well-known. An Omnipotent God of Love, in spite of all glosses, remains inconsistent with the anguish and misery, the red slaughter and colossal sum of torture and multitudinous suffering which pervades this world and is the condition of its continuance; an Omnipotent God of Justice who created & caused sin, yet punishes man for falling into the traps He has Himself set, is an infinite & huge inconsistency, an insane contradiction in terms; a God of wrath, a jealous God, who favours & punishes according to His caprice, fumes over insults and preens Himself at the sound of praise is much lower than the better sort of men and, as an inferior, unworthy of the adoration of the saints. An omnipresent God cannot be separate from His world, an infinite God cannot be limited in Time or Space or 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 through 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. They show triumphantly that the ordinary conceptions of God 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 the reason. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/18/an-incomplete-work-of-vedantic-exegesis#p24</ref><center>~</center>Religion always tends to make God in the image of man, a magnified and aggrandised image, but in the end it is always a god with human qualities. This is what makes it possible for people to treat him as they would treat a human enemy. In some countries, when their god does not do what they want, they take him and throw him into the river![Based on Aphorism 59 -One of the greatest comforts of religion is that you can get hold of God sometimes and give him a satisfactory beating. People mock at the folly of savages who beat their gods when their prayers are not answered; but it is the mockers who are the fools and the savages.]<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/10/aphorism-59#p1,p3</ref><center>~</center>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.
"Recognise that you are yourself, others not yourself, and make a rule of life out of the moral consequences of that distinction; desire only that to which you have a right,"—this is the solution of ordinary ethics. But still man remains universal; if egoistic vice is the poison of his life, egoistic virtue is not its fulfilment; he breaks back towards sin and unregulated desire or forwards towards something beyond vice and virtue.
"Desire what you please, enjoy what you can, but without violating my laws and conventions," is the dyke raised by society; but man is a universal as well as a social unit and the societies he creates are a Procrustean bed which he moulds and remoulds without ever finding his measure. He supports himself on social conventions, laws & equities, but cannot limit himself by his supports. "Desire is sinful; observe duty and the Shastra, discourage & punish enjoyment," is the Puritan's law of self-repression.
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.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/17/chapter-iii-the-golden-rule-of-life-desire-egoism-and-possession#p20</ref>
=Integral Yoga - Not a Religion=
You express your faith in Sri Aurobindo with certain words which are for you the best expression of this faith; this is quite all right. But if you are convinced that these very words are the only correct ones to express what Sri Aurobindo is, then you become dogmatic and are ready to create a religion.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/15/religion#p5</ref>
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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>
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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>
Ah! my child... it is as though you were asking me the difference between a dog and a cat!Imagine someone who, in some way or other, has heard of something like the Divine or has a personal feeling that something of the kind exists, and begins to make all sorts of efforts: efforts of will, of discipline, efforts of concentration, all sorts of efforts to find this Divine, to discover what He is, to become acquainted with Him and unite with Him. Then this person is doing yoga.=More on Religion=
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>
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...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>
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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>
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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>
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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>
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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>
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''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>
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There are four very great events in history, the siege of Troy, the life and crucifixion of Christ, the exile of Krishna in Brindavan and the colloquy with Arjuna on the field of Kurukshetra. The siege of Troy created Hellas, the exile in Brindavan created devotional religion (for before there was only meditation and worship), Christ from his cross humanised Europe, the colloquy at Kurukshetra will yet liberate humanity. Yet it is said that none of these four events ever happened. [ Aphorism 40]
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/10/aphorism-40#p1</ref>
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...if one has faith in the god of a religion, how can one have faith in the incarnate Divine? That is quite right.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/17/1-june-1934#p2</ref>
=More on Religion=Ramakrishna Paramahamsa==
==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 Paramahamsa==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.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/17/chapter-iii#p9</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 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. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/17/chapter-iii#p9</ref><center>~</center>"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>
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