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=How?===How <center>God gives Himself to Achieve Morality?==The sense-obscured, limited and desire-driven individual self must raise itself out of the dark pit of sense-obsession into the clear air of the spirit, must disembarrass itself of servile bondage to bodily, emotional & intellectual selfishness and assume the freedom & royalty of universal love and beneficence, must expand itself from the narrow, petty, inefficient ego till it becomes commensurate with the infinite, all-powerful, omnipresent Self of AllHis whole creation; then is its aim of existence attained, then is its pilgrimage ended. This may be done by realising the Eternal in oneself by knowledge, by realising oneself in Him by Love as God the Beloved, or by realising Him as no one religion holds the Lord monopoly of all in His universe and all its creatures by works. This realisation is the true crown of any ethical systemGrace. <ref>httpshttp://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/1815/an-incomplete-work-of-vedantic-exegesisreligion#p6p1</ref></center>
=What is Religion?==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 to We give up the natural desire for the fruits name of our works and surrender all we do, think, feel and are into the keeping religion to any concept of the Eternal, and world or the second universe which is to identify ourself with all creatures in presented as the Universe both individually and collectively, realising our larger Self exclusive Truth in others. These two laws of action together make what is called Karmayoga or the putting of ourselves into relation with that which is Eternal by means of and in our works. Beforeone must have an absolute faith, then, we can understand what Karmayoga generally because this Truth is, we must understand entirely and utterly what is this Eternal Being with whom we must put ourselves in relation and what are His relations with our self, with declared to be the phenomena result of the Universe and with the creatures that people ita revelation. The Vedantic knowledge of Brahman, the Vedantic Cosmogony, the Vedantic explanation of the coexistence of Brahman with the Universe, the Eternal with the Transient, the Transcendent with the Phenomenal, the One with the Many, are what we have first to study. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/18/an-incomplete-work-of-vedantic-exegesis#p7</ref>
==Religion Most religions affirm the existence of a God and Its Counterparts==the rules to be followed to obey Him, but there are some Godless religions, such as socio-political organisations which, in the name of an Ideal or the State, claim the same right to be obeyed.
To seek Truth freely and to approach it 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 is not to be imposed on others. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/13/aims-and-principles#p237,p244,p245</ref><center>~</center>...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 mystic inward spiritualisation; putting behind it all religious creed, worship and practice and regarding them as an inferior stage or first approach, it has passed on, leaving behind it all these supports, nude of all these trappings, to the sheer contact of the spiritual Reality. All these variations were necessary; the evolutionary endeavour of Nature has experimented on all lines in order to find her true way and her whole way towards the supreme consciousness and the integral knowledge.<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-evolution-of-the-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. The one which can be practised and, one might say, “understood”—although it is certainly not an “understanding”—by the greatest number of human beings—those who live almost exclusively in the physical consciousness—is the religious method, precisely because it is based on fixed creeds and practices. Simply by an act of faith or a collective suggestion—above all a collective suggestion—many human beings who have not yet reached any considerable inner development can take up the path of religion. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/09/18-june-1958#p4,p5</ref><center>~</center>...religion is the spiritual and ethical life of the individual, the relations of his soul with God and the intimate dealings of his will and character with other individuals, and no monarch or governing class, not even a theocracy or priesthood, can really substitute itself for the soul of the individual or for the soul of a nation.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/the-drive-towards-legislative-and-social-centralisation-and-uniformity#p10</ref> ===Nature of Religions=== Religion belongs to the higher mind of humanity. It is the effort of man's higher mind to approach, as far as lies in its power, something beyond it, something to which humanity gives the name God or Spirit or Truth or Faith or Knowledge or the Infinite, some kind of Absolute, which the human mind cannot reach and yet tries to reach. Religionmay be divine in its ultimate origin; in its actual nature it is not divine but human. In truth we should speak rather of religions than of religion; for the religions made by man are many. These different religions, even when they had not the same origin, have most of them been made in the same way. ...All religions have each the same story to tell. The occasion for its birth is the coming of a great Teacher of the world. He comes and reveals and is the incarnation of a Divine Truth. But men seize upon it, trade upon it, make an almost political organisation out of it. The religion is equipped by them with a government and policy and laws, with its creeds and dogmas, its rules and regulations, its rites and ceremonies,Science all binding upon its adherents, all absolute and Philosophy===inviolable. Like the State, it too administers rewards to the loyal and assigns punishments for those that revolt or go astray, for the heretic and the renegade.
A religion therefore which claims to be eternalThe first and principal article of these established and formal religions runs always, must not be content with satisfying "Mine is the heart and imaginationsupreme, it must answer to the satisfaction of the intellect the questions with which philosophy is preoccupiedonly truth, all others are in falsehood or inferior. A philosophy which professes to explain the world-problem once for all" For without this fundamental dogma, must established credal religions could not be satisfied with logical consistency and comprehensiveness; it must like Science base its conclusions have existed. If you do not merely on speculative logic, but on actual observation believe and its truths must always be capable of verification by experiment so proclaim that they may be not merely conceivable truth but ascertained you alone possess the one or the highest truth; it must like religion seize on the heart & imagination and without sacrificing intellectual convincingness, comprehensiveness & accuracy impregnate with itself the springs of human activity; you will not be able to impress people and it must have the power of bringing the human self into direct touch with the Eternalmake them flock to you.
The Vedantic articles and dogmas of a religion claims are mind-made things and, if you cling to be 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 eternal advance and widening of your inner soul. But if you look at religion because from another angle, it satisfies need not always be an obstacle to all these demandsmen. It is intellectually comprehensive If you regard it as one of the higher activities of humanity and if you can see in its explanation 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 problems that perplex 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 mindand 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><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 brings is they who have put their spirituality into the contradictions of religion. Put anywhere else, born into any other cult, they would have found there and lived there the world into harmony by a single luminous law same spiritual life. It is their own capacity, it is some power of their inner being; it and not the religion they profess that has developed made them what they are. This power in Yoga their nature is such that religion to them does not become a slavery or a process bondage. Only as they have not a strong, clear and active mind, they need to believe in this or that creed as absolutely true and to give themselves up to it without any disturbing question or doubt. I have met in all religions people of spiritual experience by which its assertions 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 tested a help for those who cannot, but are yet able to travel a certain distance on the paths of the Spirit. Religion has been an impulse to the worst things and confirmedthe best; if the law of being fiercest wars have been waged and the most hideous persecutions carried on in its name, it has discovered seizes not only on stimulated too supreme heroism and self-sacrifice in its cause. Along with philosophy it marks the limit the intellect but on human mind has reached in its highest activities. It is an impediment and a chain if you are a slave to its outer body; if you know how to use its inner substance, it can be your jumping-board into the deepest emotions realm of the Spirit.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/9-june-1929#p5</ref><center>~</center>Each religion has helped mankind. Paganism increased in man the light of beauty, the largeness and calls into activity height of his life, his highest ethical instinctsaim at a many-sided perfection; Christianity gave him some vision of divine love and its whole aim charity; Buddhism has shown him a noble way to be wiser, gentler, purer, Judaism and Islam how to be religiously faithful in action and end is zealously devoted to God; Hinduism has opened to bring him the individual self largest and profoundest spiritual possibilities. A great thing would be done if all these God-visions could embrace and cast themselves into a perfect each other; but intellectual dogma and intimate union with cult egoism stand in the Eternalway.<ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsa/1813/anthoughts-incomplete-work-of-vedanticand-exegesisglimpses#p27p20</ref>
===What Humans Need to do About People Have Made Out of Religion?===
We need not for instance lay a too excessive stress on the superstitions, aberrations, violences, crimes even, which Churches and cults and creeds have favoured, admitted, sanctioned, supported or exploited for their own benefit, the mere hostile enumeration of which might lead one to echo the cry of the atheistic Roman poet, "To such a mass of ills could People follow 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 timesby social habit, 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 order not to guide get into the political life bad books of mankindothers. But we must observe the root of this evilFor instance, which in a village it is difficult not in true religion itselfto go to religious ceremonies, but in its infrarational parts, not in spiritual faith and aspiration, but in our ignorant human confusion of religion with a particular creed, sect, cult, religious society or Churchfor all your neighbours will point at you. So strong is the human tendency to this error But that even the old tolerant Paganism slew Socrates in the name of religion and morality, feebly persecuted non-national faiths like the cult of Isis or the cult of Mithra and more vigorously what it conceived has absolutely nothing to be the subversive and anti-social religion of the early Christians; and even in still more fundamentally tolerant Hinduism do with all its spiritual broadness and enlightenment it led life, nothing at one time to the milder mutual hatred and occasional though brief-lived persecution of Buddhist, Jain, Shaiva, Vaishnavaall.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/2508/religion-as-the23-lawmay-of-life1956#p4p12</ref>
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...in order … to accomplish all its future this idea and religion of humanity has to make itself more explicit, insistent fulfil a social duty and categorically imperative. For otherwise it can only work with clarity in the minds of the few and with the mass it will be only a modifying influencesocial custom, but will not be the rule of human life. the enemy of at all humanity,real religion, is human egoism, the egoism of the individual, the egoism of class and nation. the love of mankind, not because you really wanted to recognise a real unity between man and manenter into communion with God. For that essentially must be the aim of the religion of humanity, as it must be the earthly aim of all human religion, love, mutual recognition of human brotherhood, a living sense of human oneness and practice of human oneness in thought, feeling and life, 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 which no formal and mechanical, no political and administrative unity can be real and secure. 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/cwsacwm/2508/the23-religion-ofmay-humanity1956#p4p23</ref>
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...brotherhood the real key to the triple gospel of the idea of humanity. The union of liberty and equality can only be achieved by the power of human brotherhood and it cannot may be founded on anything else. But brotherhood exists only in said that the soul and by the soul. When the soul claims freedom, it is the freedom of its self-development, the self-development of the divine need to adopt or follow or participate in man in all his being. When it claims equality, what a religion as it is claiming is that freedom equally for found all and the recognition of the same soulready-made, arises rather from the same godhead "herd instinct" in all human beings. When it strives The true thing would be for brotherhood, it is founding each one to find that equal freedom form of self-development on a common aim, a common life, a unity of mind and feeling founded upon the recognition of this inner spiritual unity.freedom, equality, unity are the eternal attributes of the Spirit. It adoration or cult which is the practical recognition of this truth, it is the awakening of the soul in man his own and the attempt to get him to live from his soul expresses spontaneously and not from individually his ego which is own special relation with the inner meaning of religion, and it is Divine; that to which the religion of humanity also must arrive before it can fulfil itself in the life of would be the raceideal condition.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/2508/the1-religion-ofaugust-humanity1956#p7p20</ref>
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The unaided intellectual reason faced ...very few people, very few, an insignificant number, go to church or temple with the phenomena of the a true religious life feeling, that is naturally apt , not to adopt 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 two attitudeschanging the atmosphere. Perhaps when they are there, both of them shallow in the extremethey manage to get across, hastily presumptuous break through and go somewhere and erroneoustouch something divine. Either it views But the whole thing as a mass large majority of people who go only because of superstition, a mystical nonsenseegoism and self-interest, a farrago of ignorant barbaric survivals,—that was the extreme spirit create an atmosphere of the rationalist now happily, though not deadthis kind, yet much weakened and almost moribund,—or it patronises religion, tries that is what you breathe in when you go to explain its originsa church or temple. Only, to get rid of it by the process of explaining it away; or it labours gently or forcefully to reject or correct its superstitionsas you go there with a very good feeling, cruditiesyou tell yourself, absurdities"Oh, to purify it into an abstract nothingness or persuade it to purify itself in the light of the reasoning intelligencewhat a quiet place for meditation!"<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/2506/reason30-andjune-religion1954#p7p30</ref>
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Religion itself has been imposed on men; it is often supported by a suggestion of religious fear or by some spiritual or other menace.There can be no such imposition in your relation with the Divine; it must be free, your own mind's and heart's choice, taken up with enthusiasm and joy..suprarational life What union can that be in which religious aspiration finds entirely what one trembles and says, "I am compelled, I cannot do otherwise"? Truth is self-evident and has not to be imposed upon the world. The strength and greatness of a religion is adjudged by men according to the number of those that follow it seeks, so too although the real greatness is not there . The greatness of spiritual truth is also . ...Religions may reckon their greatness by the infrarational life 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 the instinctsit is not so well known, impulsesdoes 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, sensationsregardless of results, crude emotionsnot seeking approbation or shunning disapprobation, vital activities from which all human aspiration takes its beginningnot attracted or troubled by the world's acceptance or denial.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/2503/reason9-andjune-religion1929#p12p13</ref>
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The widest spirituality That [atmosphere of the individual and the society in their ordinary consciousness and their daily life] life is practical and not idealistic; it is concerned not with good, beauty, spiritual experience, the higher truth, but with interests, physical needs, desires, vital necessities. This is real to it, all the rest is a little shadowy; It accepts ethics as a bond and an influence, but it does not live for ethical good; its real gods are vital need and utility and the desires of the body. If it governs its life partly by ethical laws because otherwise vital need, desire, utility in seeking their own satisfaction through many egoistic individuals would clash among themselves and destroy their own aims, it does not exclude 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 discourage any essential human activity 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 faculty, the day when it thinks it right for a moment to pause in the affairs of the world and remember God: but works rather to lift all make the whole of them up out 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 imperfection aim and groping ignoranceprinciple. It admits philosophy in a still more remote fashion; and if nowadays it eagerly seeks after science, transforms them by that is because science helps prodigiously the satisfaction of its touch vital desires, needs and makes them 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 instruments of individual, to the lightfew, power and joy to individuals of a special type, the saint, the ethical man, the artist, the thinker, the divine being man of religion; it gives them a place, does some homage to them, assigns some room to the things they represent, but for itself it is content to follow mainly after its own inherent principle of vital satisfaction, vital necessity and the divine natureutility, vital efficiency.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/reasonthe-andsuprarational-ultimate-of-religionlife#p13p2</ref> ==Hinduism==
===Religion To put the individual Self in intimate relation with the Eternal is the aim of HumanityHindu life, its religion, its polity, conclusion===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..while it Its true aim is possible to construct a precarious preparation and quite mechanical unity by political purification of the soul to fit it for the presence of God. The sense-obscured, limited and administrative meansdesire-driven individual self must raise itself out of the dark pit of sense-obsession into the clear air of the spirit, must disembarrass itself of servile bondage to bodily, emotional & intellectual selfishness and assume the unity freedom & royalty of universal love and beneficence, must expand itself from the human racenarrow, petty, even if achievedinefficient ego till it becomes commensurate with the infinite, all-powerful, omnipresent Self of All; then is its aim of existence attained, can only then is its pilgrimage ended. This may be secured done by realising the Eternal in oneself by knowledge, by realising oneself in Him by Love as God the Beloved, or by realising Him as the Lord of all in His universe and can only 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 made real if the religion 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 humanityhis highest faculties, Hinduism will not object but it insists that the Law with which man must put himself into relation is at present the highest active ideal Eternal in the universe, that in this permanent and stable Truth man’s nature fulfils itself out of the transient seemings of his daily existence and that to this goal his evolution moves. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/18/an-incomplete-work-of-vedantic-exegesis#p6</ref><center>~</center>The ancient Hindus, therefore, insisted on Veda as the supreme authority, allowing Philosophy, Science & Religion only as subordinate helps to knowledge, because they perceived the danger of giving too unlicensed a freedom to these great but inferior powers. Religion, putting Veda away into a sacred oblivion, follows the impulses of mankindthe undisciplined heart, not purified, but full of the vital impulses, ''chittam pranair otam'', spiritualises itself and becomes spasmodic, ignorant, narrow, obscurantist, sectarian, cruel, violent. Philosophy acknowledging Veda in theory but relying instead on her own intellectual self-sufficiency, ends by living in words, a thing of vain disputations & exultant logic-splitting, abstract, unpractical and visionary. Science, denying Veda altogether, arrogant & bigoted in her own conceit, makes man a materialist, a pashanda. What the general inner law Hindus foresaw and dreaded and strove to organise their society against it, erecting barrier upon artificial barrier as their own knowledge & grasp upon Veda diminished, is now growing actual and imminent. The way to avoid it is not to deny the truth of Science, but to complete, correct and illuminate it. For the Veda also says with Science, Annam vai Brahma, Prano vai Brahma; it acknowledges the animal, the Pashu in man & God as the Master of human lifethe Animal, the Pashupati; but by completing the knowledge and putting it in its right relations, it completes him also & liberates him, lifts the Pashu to the Pashupati and enables him to satisfy himself divinely by enjoying even in matter the supramaterial and replacing egoistic and selfish power by an universal mastery & helpfulness and egoistic & unsatisfying pleasures by a bliss in which he can become one with his fellows, a bliss divine & universal. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2517/summarypart-ii-the-field-and-conclusioninstruments-of-vedanta-1#p1p6</ref>
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A religion of humanity means the growing realisation that there is a secret Spirit, a divine Reality, in therefore which we are all oneclaims to be eternal, that humanity is its highest present vehicle on earthmust not be content with satisfying the heart and imagination, that it must answer to the human race and satisfaction of the human being are intellect the means by questions with which it will progressively reveal itself herephilosophy is preoccupied. It implies a growing attempt A philosophy which professes to live out this knowledge and bring about a kingdom of this divine Spirit upon earth. By its growth within us oneness with our fellowexplain the world-men will become the leading principle of problem once for all our life, must not be satisfied with logical consistency and comprehensiveness; it must like Science base its conclusions not merely a principle on speculative logic, but on actual observation and its truths must always be capable of cooperation verification by experiment so that they may be not merely conceivable truth but a deeper brotherhoodascertained truth; it must like religion seize on the heart & imagination and without sacrificing intellectual convincingness, a real and an inner sense comprehensiveness & accuracy impregnate with itself the springs of unity human activity; and equality and a common life. There it must be have the realisation by power of bringing the individual that only in human self into direct touch with the life of his fellow-men is his own life completeEternal. There must The Vedantic religion claims to be the realisation by eternal religion because it satisfies all these demands. It is intellectually comprehensive in its explanation of all the race problems that only on perplex the human mind; it brings the free and full life contradictions of the individual can its own perfection and permanent happiness be founded. There must be too a discipline and world into harmony by a way single luminous law of salvation being; it has developed in accordance with this religion, that is to say, Yoga a means process of spiritual experience by which it its assertions can be developed by each man within himself, so that tested and confirmed; the law of being it may be developed in has discovered seizes not only on the intellect but on the life deepest emotions of man and calls into activity his highest ethical instincts; and its whole aim and end is to bring the raceindividual self into a perfect and intimate union with the Eternal. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2518/summaryan-andincomplete-work-of-vedantic-conclusionexegesis#p11p27</ref>
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Democracy If it were asked by anyone what is this multitudinous, shifting, expanding, apparently amorphous or at all events multimorphous sea of religious thought, feeling, philosophy, spiritual experience we call Hinduism, what it is characteristically and Socialism essentially, we might answer in one word, the religion of Vedanta. And if it were asked what arethe Hindus with their unique and persistent difference from all other races, as we might again answer, the children of Vedanta. For at the root of all that we Hindus have already done, thought and saidthrough these thousands of years of our race-history, behind all we are and seek to be, there lies concealed, the fount of our philosophies, the bedrock of our religions, the kernel of our thought, the explanation of our ethics and society, the summary of our civilisation, the rivet of our nationality, this one marvellous inheritance of ours, the sign Vedanta. Nor is it only to Hindu streams that that selfthis great source has given of its life-giving waters. Buddhism, the teacher of one third of humanity, drank from its inspiration. Christianity, the offspring of Buddhism, derived its ethics and esoteric teaching at second-consciousness is beginning to ripen into fullnesshand from the same source. Through Persia Vedanta put its stamp on Judaism, through Judaism, Christianity and Sufism on Islam, through Buddha on Confucianism, through Christ and mediaeval mysticism and Catholic ceremonial, through Greek and German philosophy, through Sanscrit learning...<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2518/the-drive-towards-legislative-andreligion-social-centralisation-andof-uniformityvedanta#p8p1</ref>
==Failure of ReligionBuddhism==
Religion itself had become fixed in dogmas Buddhism is the turning away from ''duḥkha'' and ceremonies, sects and churches and had lost for its causes to the most partpeace of Nirvana. The ''duḥkhavāda'' did not exist in India, except for a few individuals, direct contact with in the living founts theory of spirituality. A period of negation the Vaishnava ''viraha''; otherwise it was necessary. They had to be driven back and not considered as a means or even a stage in upon themselves, nearer to their own eternal sourcesthe sadhana.<ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2529/civilisationjainism-and-barbarismbuddhism#p8</ref>
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false socialisation of religion has been always The Buddhist Nirvana and the Adwaitin’s Moksha are the chief cause of its failure same thing. It corresponds to regenerate mankind a realisation in which one does not feel oneself any longer as an individual with such a name or such a form, but an infinite eternal Self spaceless (even when in space), timeless (even when in time). <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/jainism-and- buddhism#p9</ref> ==Christianity== We know how the Christian religion came into existence. It saddled upon the religious life of man a Churchwas certainly not Jesus who made what is known as Christianity, a priesthood but some learned and a mass of ceremonies very clever men put their heads together and set over built it a pack of watchdogs under up into the thing we see. There was nothing divine in the name of creeds way in which it was formed, and dogmas, dogmas there is nothing divine either in the way in which it functions. And yet the excuse or occasion for the formation was undoubtedly some revelation from what one had to accept could call a Divine Being, a Being who came from elsewhere bringing down with him from a higher plane a certain Knowledge and Truth for the earth. He came and obey under pain of condemnation to eternal hell by an eternal judge beyondsuffered for his Truth; but very few understood what he said, just as one had few cared to accept find and hold to obey the laws of society on pain of condemnation to temporal imprisonment or death by a mortal judge belowTruth for which he suffered.<centerref>~https://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/9-june-1929#p29</centerref> ==Islam== Mahomed tried to re-establish the Asiatic gospel of human equality in the spirit.All men are equal in Islam, whatever their social position or political power, nor is any man debarred from the full development of his manhood by his birth or low original station in life.All men are brothers in Islam and the bond of religious unity overrides all other divisions and differences.prominent aim But Islam also was limited and imperfect, because it confined the ideal of religion rather than any spiritual growth brotherhood and equality to the limits of a single creed, and was farther deflected from its true path by the individual rude and undeveloped races which it drew into its embrace. Another revelation of the raceold truth is needed. <ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2507/theasiatic-spiritual-aim-and-lifedemocracy#p5,p6p1</ref> =Why - Importance of Religion?= ==Purpose of Religion== ''Q. Sweet Mother, is religion a necessity in the life of the ordinary man?''
That ''A:''In the life of societies it is a necessity, for it serves as a corrective to collective egoism which, without this control, could take on excessive proportions.The level of collective consciousness is always lower than the individual level. It is very noticeable, for example, that when men gather in a group or collect in great numbers, the level of consciousness falls a great deal. The consciousness of crowds is much lower than individual consciousness, and the collective consciousness of society is why all certainly lower than the religionsconsciousness of the individuals constituting it.There it is a necessity. In ordinary life, an individual, whether he knows it or not, however beautiful they always has a religion but the object of his religion is sometimes of a very inferior kind…. The god he worships may bethe god of success or the god of money or the god of power, or simply a family god: the god of children, have always led man to the worst excesses. All god of the crimesfamily, the horrors perpetrated in god of the name ancestors. There is always a religion. The quality of the religion are among is very different according to the darkest stains individual, but it is difficult for a human being to live and to go on human historyliving, to survive in life without having something like a rudiment of an ideal which serves as the ''centre'' for his existence. Most of the time he doesn’t know it and simply because of this little initial error: wanting if he were asked what his ideal is true for , he would be unable to formulate it; but he has one individual , vaguely, something that seems to be true for him the mass or collectivitymost precious thing in life.<ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwm/09/2416-septemberjuly-1958#p16p3,p4,p5,p6</ref>
===Duties of a ManTo Seek Our True Self===
Each part of man's being has its own dharma which it must follow and will follow in the end, put on it what fetters you please. The dharma ..very essence of science, thought and philosophy religion is to seek for truth by the intellect dispassionately, without prepossession and prejudgment, with no other first propositions than discovery of the law of thought immaterial Spirit and observation itself imposes. Science and philosophy are not bound to square their observations and conclusions with any current ideas of religious dogma or ethical rule or aesthetic prejudice. In the end, if left free in their action, they will find the unity play of Truth with Good and Beauty and God and give these a greater meaning than any dogmatic religion or any formal ethics or any narrower aesthetic idea can give us. But meanwhile they must be left free even to deny God and good and beauty if they will, if their sincere observation of things so points themsupraphysical consciousness. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/the-spiritual-aimreason-and-lifereligion#p9p8</ref>
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It would seem at first sight that since man To see your Self in all creatures and all creatures in your Self—that is pre-eminently the mental beingunshakeable foundation of all religion, love, the development of the mental faculties and the richness of the mental life should be his highest aimpatriotism,—his preoccupying aimphilanthropy, evenhumanity, as soon as he has got rid of the obsession of the life everything which rises above selfishness and body and provided for gross utility. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/17/the indispensable satisfaction of the gross needs which our physical and animal nature imposes on us-ishavasyopanishad-with-a-commentary-in-english#p86</ref><center>~</center>"... 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 dieprepare man's mind,—the vital and physical life, a human edition of the animal round, a human enlargement of the little animal sector and arc of bodily existence for the divine circlespiritual consciousness to take it up; rather it has to lead him to that point where the inner spiritual light begins fully to become and grow mentally and live with knowledge and power within himself as well as from within outward is his manhoodemerge. But there It is here a double motive of Nature, an insistent duality in her human purpose. Man is here to at this point that religion must learn from her how to control and create; but she evidently means him subordinate itself, not only to controlinsist on its outer characters, create and constantly re-create in new and better forms himself, his own but give full scope to the inner existence, his mentality, but also spirit itself to control develop its own truth and re-create correspondingly his environmentreality. He In the meanwhile it has to turn Mind not only on itselftake up as much of man's mentality, vitality, but on Life and Matter physicality as it can and give all his activities a turn towards the material existence; that is very clear not only from spiritual direction, the law and nature revelation of a spiritual meaning in them, the terrestrial evolutionimprint of a spiritual refinement, but from the beginning of a spiritual character. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/09/16-july-1958#p1</ref>In all the higher powers of his own past and present historylife man may be said to be seeking, blindly enough, for God. And there comes from To get at the observation of these conditions Divine and of his highest aspirations Eternal in himself and impulses the question whether he is not intendedworld and to harmonise them, not only to expand inwardly put his being and outwardly, but to grow upward, wonderfully exceeding himself his life in tune with the Infinite reveals itself in these parts of his nature as he has wonderfully exceeded his animal beginnings, into something more than mental, more than human, into a being spiritual concealed aim and divinehis destiny. Even if he cannot do that, yet he may have He sets out to open arrive at his mind to what is beyond it highest and largest and to govern his life more most perfect self, and more by the light moment he at all touches upon it, this self in him appears to be one with some great Soul and power that he receives from something greater than himself. Man's consciousness Self of the divine within himself 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 supreme fact aim of his existence and religion, to grow into that may very well be the intention harmony with its eternal nature of his nature. In any case right, love, strength and purity is the fullness aim of Life is his evident objectethics, to enjoy and mould ourselves into the widest life harmony of its eternal beauty and delight is the highest life possible to him, whether that be a complete humanity or a new aim and divine race. We must recognise both his consummation of our aesthetic need of integrality and his impulse nature, to know and to be according to its eternal principles of self-exceeding if we would fix rightly truth is the meaning end of his individual existence science and the perfect aim philosophy and norm of his societyall our insistent drive towards knowledge.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/civilisationthe-suprarational-andultimate-of-culturelife#p2p1</ref>
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It is Religion, however imperfect, has the secret of that mastery; religion can conquer the natural instincts and desires of man, metaphysics can only convince him logically that they ought to be conquered—an immense difference. For this reason philosophy has never been able to satisfy any except the intellectual few and was even for a time relegated to oblivion by the truth imperious contempt of Science which thought that all active being is it had discovered a seeking for Godcomplete solution of the Universe, a seeking for some highest self truth and deepest Reality secret within, behind a law of life independent of religion and above ourselves yet able to supersede religion in its peculiar province of reaching & regulating the sources of conduct and thingsleading mankind in its evolution. But it has now become increasingly clear that Science has failed to substantiate its claims, and that a belief in evolution or the supremacy of physical laws or the subjection of the ephemeral individual to the interests of the slightly less ephemeral race is no substitute for a seeking belief in Christ or Buddha, for the hidden Divinity: law of Divine Love or the truth trust in Divine Power & Providence. … Religion which we glimpse through religion, lies concealed behind all life; it is satisfies the great secret of lifeheart and controls conduct, that which it is cannot in labour to discover its average conceptions permanently satisfy the reason and thus exposes itself to make real to its self-knowledgegradual loss of empire over the mind.<ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2518/thean-incomplete-work-of-suprarationalvedantic-goodexegesis#p1p19</ref>
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If mankind ...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 rule of the soul and spirit. But this knowledge must be spiritualisedsomething more than a creed or a mystic revelation; his thinking mind must be able to accept it, to correlate it must first in with the principle of things and the mass cease to be observed truth of the material or universe: this is the vital man work of philosophy, and become in the field of the psychic and truth of the true mental being. It may spirit it can only be questioned done by a spiritual philosophy, whether such a mass progress intellectual in its method or conversion is possible; but intuitive. But all knowledge and endeavour can reach its fruition only if it is notturned into experience and has become a part of the consciousness and its established operations; in the spiritual field all this religious, occult or philosophical knowledge and endeavour must, to bear fruition, end in an opening up of the spiritual consciousness, then in experiences that found and continually heighten, expand and enrich that consciousness and in the spiritualisation building of mankind as a whole life and action that is in conformity with the truth of the spirit: this is a chimerathe work of spiritual realisation and experience.<ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2522/conditions-for-the-comingevolution-of-athe-spiritual-ageman#p8p12</ref>
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For it is into In the Divine within them that men and mankind have to grow; it universe there is not an external idea or rule that has to be imposed on them from without. Therefore the law of a growing inner freedom is that which will be most honoured in the spiritual age constant relation of mankindOneness and Multiplicity. True it is that so long This expresses itself as man has not come within measurable distance of self-knowledge the universal Personality and has not set his face towards itthe many Persons, he cannot escape from and both between the One and the law of external compulsion Many and all his efforts to do so must be vain. He among the Many themselves there is and always must be, so long as that lasts, the slave possibility of an infinite variety of others, relations. These relations are determined by the slave play of his familythe divine existence, his castethe Lord, his clan, his Church, his society, his nationentering into His manifested habitations. We must feel They exist at first as conscious relations between individual souls; they are then taken up by them and obey the compulsion used as a means of entering into conscious relation with the Spirit if we would establish our inner right to escape other compulsionOne. Therefore even in It is this entering into various relations with the unregenerated state we find that the healthiest, the truest, the most living growth and action One which is that which arises in the largest possible freedom object and that all excess function of compulsion is either the law of a gradual atrophy or a tyranny varied or cured by outbreaks of rabid disorderReligion. And as soon as man comes to know his spiritual self, he does All religions are justified by that discovery, often even this essential necessity; all express one Truth in various ways and move by the very seeking for it, as ancient thought and religion saw, escape from the outer law and enter into the law of freedomvarious paths to one goal.<ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsa/2517/conditions-for-the-coming-of-a-spiritual-agelord#p15p11</ref>
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A revolutionary reconstruction The deepest heart, the inmost essence of religion, philosophyapart from its outward machinery of creed, sciencecult, art ceremony and society symbol, is the last inevitable outcome. It proceeds at first by search for God and the light finding of God. Its aspiration is to discover the individual mind and reasonInfinite, by its demand on life and its experience of life; but it must go from the individual to Absolute, the universal. For One, the effort of the individual soon shows him that he cannot securely discover the truth and law of his own being without discovering some universal law and truth to which he can relate it. Of the universe he Divine, who is a part; in all these things and yet no abstraction but his deepest spirit he a Being. Its work is its subject, a small cell in that tremendous organic mass: his substance is drawn from its substance and by the law sincere living out of its life the law of his life is determined true and governed. From a new view intimate relations between man and knowledge God, relations of the world must proceed his new view and knowledge unity, relations of him selfdifference, relations of his power an illuminated knowledge, an ecstatic love and capacity delight, an absolute surrender and limitationsservice, a casting of every part of his claim on our existence and out of its normal status into an uprush of man towards the high road Divine and a descent of the distant or immediate goal of his individual and social destinyDivine into man. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/the-coming-of-the-subjective-age#p3</ref>
===Religion All this has nothing to do with the realm of reason or its normal activities; its aim, its sphere, its process is suprarational. The knowledge of God is not to be gained by weighing the feeble arguments of reason for or against his existence: it is to be gained only by a self-transcending and absolute consecration, aspiration and experience. rational scientific experiment or rational philosophic thinking. Even in those parts of religious discipline which seem most to resemble scientific experiment, the method is a verification of things which exceed the reason and its timid scope. Even in Ethical Man those parts of religious knowledge which seem most to resemble intellectual operations, the illuminating faculties are not imagination, logic and Aesthetic Man===rational judgment, but revelations, inspirations, intuitions, intuitive discernments that leap down to us from a plane of suprarational light.
There is in our mentality a side The love of will, conduct, character which creates the ethical man; there God is another side of sensibility to the beautiful,—understanding beauty in no narrow or hyper-artistic sense,—which creates the artistic an infinite 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 absolute feeling which must naturally stand opposed does not admit of any rational limitation 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 does not use a barrier to his aesthetic freedom and an oppression on the play language of his artistic sense rational worship and his artistic facultyadoration; he is naturally hedonistic,—for beauty and delight are inseparable powers,—and the ethical rule tramples on pleasure, even very often on quite innocent pleasures, and tries to put a strait waistcoat on the human impulse to delight. He may accept the ethical rule when it makes itself beautiful or even seize on it as one of his instruments for creating beauty, but only when he can subordinate it to the aesthetic principle of his nature,—just as he is often drawn to religion by its side of beauty, pomp, magnificent ritual, emotional satisfaction, repose or poetic ideality and aspiration,—we might almost say, by the hedonistic aspects of religion. Even when fully accepted, it is not for their own sake that he accepts them. The ethical man repays this natural repulsion with interest. He tends to distrust art and the aesthetic sense as something lax and emollient, something in its nature undisciplined and by its attractive appeals to the passions and emotions destructive of a high and strict self-control. He sees that it God is hedonistic and he finds that the hedonistic impulse is non-moral peace 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 puritanbliss which passes all understanding. The misunderstanding between these two sides of our nature is an inevitable circumstance of our human growth which must try them surrender to their fullest separate possibilities and experiment in extremes in order that it may understand the whole range of its capacities.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/aesthetic-and-ethical-culture#p4</ref><center>~</center>What is farther needed God is the awakening surrender of a certain vision, an insight and an intuitive response in the soul. Reason which studies always from outside, cannot give this inner and more intimate contact; it has whole being to aid itself by a more direct insight springing from the soul itself and to call at every step on the intuitive mind to fill up the gap of its own deficiencies. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/the-suprarational-beauty#p7</ref><center>~</center>It is in truth seekinglight, as in religion, for the Divine, the All-Beautiful in man, in nature, in life, in thought, in art; for God is Beauty and Delight hidden in the variation of his masks and forms. Whenwill, fulfilled in our growing sense and knowledge of beauty and delight in beauty and our power for beauty, we are able to identify ourselves in soul with this Absolute and Divine in all the forms and activities of the world and shape an image of our inner and our outer life in 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 love and risen to his divine consummation. To find highest beauty is to find God; to reveal, to embody, to create, as we say, highest beauty is to bring out service takes no account of our souls the living image and power of God. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/the-suprarational-beauty#p11</ref><center>~</center>In 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 compromises with life in tune with the Infinite reveals itself in these parts of his nature as his concealed aim and his destiny. He sets out to arrive at his highest and largest and most perfect self, and the moment he at all touches upon it, this self in him appears to be one with some great Soul and Self of Truth and Good and Beauty in the world to which we give the name practical reason of God. To get at this man uses as a spiritual presence is the aim best part of religion, to grow into harmony with its eternal nature of right, love, strength and purity is method in the aim ordinary conduct of ethics, to enjoy and mould ourselves into the harmony of its eternal beauty and delight is the aim and consummation of our aesthetic need and nature, to know and to be according to its eternal principles of truth is the end of science and philosophy and of all our insistent drive towards knowledgemundane existence.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/thereason-suprarationaland-ultimate-of-lifereligion#p1p9</ref>
===Society and Life==How to Ascend Beyond Religions?=
But all this seems The attitude to be something above our normal and usual being; it is something into which we strive to grow, but it does not seem to be the normal stuff, the natural being or atmosphere of the individual and the society in their ordinary consciousness and their daily lifetaken towards religionsA benevolent goodwill towards all worshippers. That life is practical and not idealistic; it is concerned not with good, beauty, spiritual experience, the higher truth, but with interests, physical needs, desires, vital necessitiesAn enlightened indifference towards all religions. This is real to it, all the rest is a little shadowy; It accepts ethics as a bond and an influence, but it does not live for ethical good; its real gods All religions are vital need and utility and the desires partial approximations of the body. If it governs its life partly by ethical laws because otherwise vital need, desire, utility in seeking their own satisfaction through many egoistic individuals would clash among themselves and destroy their own aims, it does not feel called upon to make its life entirely ethical. It concerns itself still less with beauty; even if it admits things beautiful as an embellishment and an amusement, a satisfaction and pastime of the eye and ear and mind, nothing moves it imperatively to make its life a thing of beauty. It allows religion a fixed place and portion, on holy days, in the church or temple, at the end of life when age and the approach of death call the attention forcibly away from this life to other life, at fixed times in the week or the day when it thinks it right for a moment to pause in the affairs of the world and remember God: but to make the whole of life a religion, a remembering of God and a seeking after him, is a thing one sole Truth 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 vital desires, needs and interests: but it does not turn to seek after an entirely scientific life any more than after an entirely ethical life. A more complete effort in any one of these directions it leaves to the individual, to the few, and to individuals of a special type, the saint, the ethical man, the artist, the thinker, the man of religion; it gives far above 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>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/2515/the-suprarational-ultimate-of-lifereligion#p2p21,p22,p23,p24</ref>
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Religion too by putting God far above If you want to appraise the real value of the religion in distant heavens made man too much which you are born or brought up or to have a correct perspective of the country or society to which you belong by birth, if you want to find out how relative a worm of thing the particular environment is into which you happened to be thrown and confined, you have only to go round the earth little and vile before his Creator see that what you think good is looked upon as bad elsewhere and admitted only by a caprice of his favour to a doubtful salvation what is considered as bad in one place is welcomed as good in superhuman worlds.<ref>https://incarnatewordanother.in/cwsa/25/the-unseen-power#p10</ref>
== Practice Things have an inner value and become real to you only when you have acquired them by the exercise of Ideal 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."
It was necessary at one time to insist even exclusively on the idea of individual salvation so If we go a little way within ourselves, we shall discover that the sense there is in each of us a Beyond might be driven into man's mentality, as it was necessary at one time to insist on a heaven of joys for the virtuous and pious so consciousness that man might be drawn by that shining bait towards has been living throughout the practice of religion ages and the suppression manifesting in a multitude of his unbridled animalityforms. But as the lures Each of earth have us has been born in many different countries, belonged to be conqueredmany different nations, so also have followed many different religions. Why must we accept the last one as the lures of heaven. best? The lure of a pleasant Paradise of the rewards of virtue has been rejected experiences gathered by man; the Upanishads belittled it ages ago us in all these many lives in India different countries and it is now no longer dominant varying religions, are stored up in the mind that inner continuity of the people; the similar lure in popular Christianity and popular Islam has no meaning for the conscience of modern humanityour consciousness which persists through all births. The lure of a release from birth and death and withdrawal from the cosmic labour must also be rejectedThere are multiple personalities there created by these past experiences, as it was rejected by Mahayanist Buddhism which held compassion and helpfulness to be greater than Nirvana. As the virtues when we practise must be done without demand become aware of earthly or heavenly rewardthis multitude within us, so the salvation we seek must be purely internal and impersonal; it must be becomes impossible to speak of one particular form of truth as the release from egoismonly truth, one country as our only country, one religion as the union with the Divineonly true religion. There are people who have been born into one country, although the realisation leading elements of our universality their consciousness obviously belong to another. I have met some born in Europe who were evidently Indians; I have met others born in Indian bodies who were as well as our transcendenceevidently Europeans. In Japan I have met some who were Indian, and no salvation should be valued which takes us away from others who were European. And if any of them goes to the love of God in humanity and country or enters into the help we can give civilisation to the world. If need bewhich he has affinity, it must be taught, "Better hell with the rest of our suffering brothers than a solitary salvationhe finds himself there perfectly at home. <ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/1803/a9-lastjune-word1929#p9,p10,p11</ref>
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Thou shalt not be negligent of thy works unto the Gods or thy works unto the Fathers. Let thy father be unto thee as thy God us take an altogether ordinary example which is very partial and thy mother as thy Goddess whom thou adorestvery superficial. You are born in India. Serve the Master as Being born in India you are born with a God certain religious and as a God philosophic attitude. But if for some reason or other you want to free yourself from this atavism and influence, if you begin to follow, study, practise the religion or philosophy of another country, you can change the stranger within thy dwellingconditions of your inner development. The works It is a little more difficult, that is, it asks for a greater effort for liberation, but it is very far from being impossible. In fact there are without blame before the many peoplewho do it, thou shalt do these with diligence and no otherswho love to free themselves from what comes to them from their present birth; by some sort of special taste they like to seek elsewhere what they think they won't be able to find at home. The deeds we have done that are good and righteous, thou shalt practise these as a religion and no othersAnd in this way you change the consequences of your birth completely. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/1807/taittiriya16-november-upanishad1955#p92p69</ref>
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For although the determination to live by the best light we have is important, it is equally important to know what that light is and how we came by it, whether by the inspiration of the heart & the satisfaction of the emotional being, as in ordinary religion, or by the working of the observation and the logical faculties as in ordinary Science or by intellectual revelation as Newton discovered gravitation or by spiritual intuition as in the methods of the great founders of religion or by a higher principle in us which sums up and yet transcends all these mighty channels of the Jnanam Brahma. It is such a higher undivided principle from which Vedanta professes to derive its knowledge. man dwelling in the lower mind but using matter & vitality from above and from below taking possession of reason and imagination, seems, of all beings on earth, to be at the top. But above man's present position, above the heart in which he dwells & the imagination & reason to which he rises there opens out a wider atmosphere of life, there shoots down on him a more full & burning splendour of strength & knowledge, a more nectarous lustre of joy & beauty. For man in his heart is awake; in his reason & imagination, half awake, not yet buddha, but in that higher principle he is asleep. It is to him a state of sushupti. Yet secretly, subliminally, unknown to the egoistic mind he takes from this slumber his waking thought & knowledge, though he is compelled by the limitations of mind to mistake & misuse it. For that slumber is the real waking and our waking is a state of dream and delusion in which we use a distorted truth & establish a world of false relations.Gita says, ''Yasyam jagrati bhutani sa nisha pashyato muneh''Q.In that which is night to all creatures, he who has mastered his own being is awake; that in which these creatures are awake, is night to the eye of the awakened seer. The Vedantists call this principle by the nameMother, vijnanam, an entire & pervading principle of knowledge which puts everything in its true light & its right relations. It is from vijnanam that Veda descends to us; the movement of this higher principle is the source of all internal revelation. It is the drishti of which the Veda is the result, it is the sruti which in its expression the Veda is, it is the smriti of the Rishi which gives to the intelligent part, the manishi in him a perfect account of the vision & inspired hearing of the seer in him, the Kavi. <ref>httphere Sri Aurobindo writes://incarnateword.in/cwsa/17/part-ii-the-field-and-instruments-of-vedanta-1#p4</ref><center>~</center>For mankind although evolving towards vijnana yet dwells in the mind. He has to A great thing would be fulfilled in mind before he can rise taking up mind with him into the vijnanamaya self,—the mahan atma,—just as, in his animal state, he had to be fulfilled in body & vitality before he could develop freely in mind. Thus it comes about that even when Veda manifests in the mental world, it has although the higher & truer, to give an account of itself to the lower & more fallible, to Science, to Philosophy & to Religion. It must answer their doubts & questions, it must satisfy done if all their right and permissible demands. For although from the ideal point of view it is an anomaly that the higher should be crossthese God-questioned by the lower, the source of truth by the propagators of half-truth visions could embrace and error, yet from the evolutionary point of view an anomaly is often the one right cast themselves into each other; but intellectual dogma and indispensable process. For if we act otherwise, if we deny for instance the claims of the reason in order to serve revelation only & exclusively—though we ought to serve her first and chiefly—we are in danger of defeating man's evolution, which consists in self-fulfilment and not, except as a temporary means to an end, in selfcult-mortification. Otherwise, we are egoism stand in danger of becoming by a one-sided exaggeration self-injurers, self-slayers, atmaha, and incurring that condemnation to the sunless & gloomy states beyond of which the Isha Upanishad speaksway.''
For God has expressed us in many principles & not one. He has ranged them one over the other & commanded us not to destroy one in order to satisfy another, not to sanction internal civil war and perpetrate spiritual suicide, but to rise from one principle to the other, taking it up with us as we go, fulfilling the lower first in itself and then in the higher. We have to dissociate our sense of being from body & vitality and become mind, to dissociate it from mind and become vijnanam, to dissociate it from vijnanam and become divine bliss, awareness & being, Sachchidanandam manifest in phenomenal existence, to dissociate ''How is 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, possible to become through them yet beyond them infinite, divine & universal. Destroy them we cannot without blotting out ourselves and entering fuse 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 nanyathetoone all these views?''sti. "Thus is it in thee and it is not otherwise." Purnata, fullness is the true law of our progression.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/17/part-ii-the-field-and-instruments-of-vedanta-1#p5</ref>
===How ''A:'' It is not in the mental consciousness that these things can be harmonised and synthesised. For this it is necessary to Interpret Religion?===rise above and find the idea behind the thought. Sri Aurobindo shows here, for example, what each of these religions represents in human effort, aspiration and realisation. Instead of taking these religions in their outward forms which are precisely dogmas and intellectual conceptions, if we take them in their spirit, in the principle they represent, there is no difficulty in unifying them. They are simply different aspects of human progress which complete each other perfectly well and should be united with many others yet to form a more total and more complete progress, a more perfect understanding of life, a more integral approach to the Divine. And even this unification which already demands a return to the Spirit behind things, is not enough; there must be added to it a vision of the future, the goal towards which humanity is moving, the future realisation of the world, that last "spiritual revolution" Sri Aurobindo speaks about, which will open a new age, that is, the supramental revolution.
...if you seek In the interpretation of your religion from Christians, atheists and agnostics, you will hear more wonderful supramental consciousness all these things than thatare no longer contradictory or exclusive. What do you think of Charvak's interpretation of Vedic religion as neither pantheistic nor polytheistic but a plutotheistic invention of the Brahmins? An European or his disciple in scholarship can no more enter into the spirit of the Veda than the wind can blow freely in a closed roomThey all become complementary. And pedants especially can never go beyond It is only the manipulation of wordsmental form which divides. Men like Max Muller presume What this mental form represents should be united to lecture us on our Veda & Vedanta because they know something of Sanscrit grammar; but when we come to them for light, we find them playing marbles on what all the doorsteps of the outer court of the temple. They had not the adhikar other mental forms represent in order to enter, because they came in make a spirit of arrogance with preconceived ideas to teach & not to learn; and their learning was therefore not helpful towards truth, but only towards grammarharmonious whole. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/17/And that is the-ishavasyopanishad-with-essential difference between a-commentary-in-english#p139</ref><center>~</center>Each religion has helped mankind. Paganism increased in man the light of beauty, the largeness and height of his life, his aim at a many-sided perfection; Christianity gave him some vision of divine love and charity; Buddhism has shown him a noble way to be 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 true spiritual possibilitieslife. A great thing would be done if all these God-visions could embrace and cast themselves into each other; but intellectual dogma and cult-egoism stand in the way. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/09/3-april-1957#p5</ref>
===Religion Now===exists almost exclusively in its forms, its cults, in a certain set of ideas, and it becomes great only through the spirituality of a few exceptional individuals, whereas true spiritual life, and above all what the supramental realisation will be, is independent of every precise, intellectual form, every limited form of life. It embraces all possibilities and manifestations and makes them the expression, the vehicle of a higher and more universal truth.
Now Religion A new religion would not only be useless but very harmful. It is sattwic with a natural impulse towards light, new life which must be created; it cannot is a new consciousness which must be expressed. This is something beyond intellectual limits and mental formulae. It is a living truth which must manifest.Everything in its essence and its truth should be tamasicincluded in this realisation. This realisation must be an expression as total, it as complete, as universal as possible of the divine reality. Only that can have no dealings with save humanity and the world. That is the enemies great spiritual revolution of the Devas; and if something calling itself religion, attempts which Sri Aurobindo speaks. And this is what he wanted us to suppress light, you may be sure it is not religion but an impostor masquerading in her namerealise. ..<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/17/the-ishavasyopanishad-with-a-commentary-in-english#p197</ref>
===Religion ...the key of the entire problem not only for the individual but also for the collectivity:"All would change if man could once consent to be spiritualised; but his nature, mental and Old Nations===vital and physical, 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>All A revolutionary reconstruction of religion, philosophy, science, art and society is the old nations perished because in last inevitable outcome. It proceeds at first by the pride light of intellect they abandoned their dharmathe individual mind and reason, their religionby its demand on life and its experience of life; but it must go from the individual to the universal. India, China still liveFor the effort of the individual soon shows him that he cannot securely discover the truth and law of his own being without discovering some universal law and truth to which he can relate it. What was Of the force universe he is a part; in all but his deepest spirit he is its subject, a small cell in that enabled India beaten down & trampled tremendous organic mass: his substance is drawn from its substance and by mailed fist & iron hoof ever to survive immortallythe 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, ever to resistof his power and capacity and limitations, ever to crush down 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 conqueror -coming-of -the hour at last beneath her gigantic foot-subjective-age#p3</ref><center>~</center>The sense-obscured, ever to limited and desire-driven individual self must raise her mighty head again itself out of the dark pit of sense-obsession into the clear air of the spirit, must disembarrass itself of servile bondage to bodily, emotional & intellectual selfishness and assume the freedom & royalty of universal love and beneficence, must expand itself from the narrow, petty, inefficient ego till it becomes commensurate with the infinite, all-powerful, omnipresent Self of All; then is its aim of existence attained, then is its pilgrimage ended. This may be done by realising the Eternal in oneself by knowledge, by realising oneself in Him by Love as God the Beloved, or by realising Him as the Lord of all in His universe and all its creatures by works. This realisation is the stars? true crown of any ethical system. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/18/an-incomplete-work-of-vedantic-exegesis#p6</ref><center>~</center>It would seem at first sight that since man is because she never lost hold 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, never gave 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 faith 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 spiritlaw and nature of the terrestrial evolution, but from his own past and present history. Therefore And there comes from the promise observation of these conditions and of Srikrishna ever holds good; therefore his highest aspirations and impulses the Adyashaktiquestion 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 mighty Chandidivine 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, ever descends when the people turn widest life and the highest life possible to her 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 tramples the Asura to piecesperfect aim and norm of his society.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/1725/thecivilisation-ishavasyopanishad-with-a-commentary-inand-englishculture#p217p2</ref>
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For me religions are ...it is true that religion when it identifies itself only with a creed, a cult, a Church, a system of ceremonial forms, much too may well become a retarding force and there may therefore arise a necessity for the human, spirit to reject its control over the varied activities of spiritual life. Each one expresses one aspect 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 single higher light and eternal Truthlaw of the spirit. Religionism, but on the contrary, entrenches itself in expressing it some narrow pietistic exaltation of the lower members or lays exclusive stress on intellectual dogmas, forms and ceremonies, on some fixed and rigid moral code, on some religio-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 raised before they can be fully spiritualised, before they can directly feel the spirit and obey its law. An intellectual formula is often needed by the thinking and reasoning mind, a form or ceremony by the aesthetic temperament or other aspectsparts of the infrarational being, it deforms a set moral code by man’s vital nature in their turn towards the inner life. But these things are aids and diminishes it. None has supports, not the right essence; precisely because they belong to call itself the only true onerational and infrarational parts, any they can be nothing more than it has and, if too blindly insisted on, may even hamper the right suprarational light. Such as they are, they have to be offered to deny man and used by him, but not to be imposed on him as his sole law by a forced and inflexible domination. In the truth contained in the others. And all use of them together would not suffice to express toleration and free permission of variation is the Supreme Truth first rule which should be observed. The spiritual essence of religion is beyond all expressionalone the one thing supremely needful, even whilst being present in each onethe thing to which we have always to hold and subordinate to it every other element or motive."<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/1525/religion-as-the-law-of-life#p10p6</ref>
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A spiritual religion of humanity is the hope of the future. By this is not meant what is ordinarily called a universal religion, a system, a thing of creed and intellectual belief and dogma and outward rite. Mankind has tried unity by that means; it has failed and deserved to fail, because there can be no universal religious system, one in mental creed and vital form. The truth 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 Sri Aurobindo humanity means the growing realisation that there is a truth 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 love unity and light equality and mercya common life. He There must be the realisation by the individual that only in the life of his fellow-men is good his own life complete. There must be the realisation by the race that only on the free and great full life of the individual can its own perfection and compassionate permanent happiness be founded. There must be too a discipline and Divinea way of salvation in accordance with this religion, that is to say, a means by which it can be developed by each man within himself, so that it may be developed in the life of the race. And … But if it is He who will have at all a truth of our being, then it must be the truth to which all is moving and in it must be found the means of a fundamental, an inner, a complete, a real human unity which would be the one secure base of a unification of human life. A spiritual oneness which would create a psychological oneness not dependent upon any intellectual or outward uniformity and compel a oneness of life not bound up with its mechanical means of unification, but ready always to enrich its secure unity by a free inner variation and a freely varied outer self-expression, this would be the final victorybasis for a higher type of human existence.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/1525/3summary-apriland-1962conclusion#p4p11</ref>
===Religion and Spirituality===
''Q. Sweet Mother, what is the 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 a religion.
<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/23-may-1956#p1,p2,p4,p5</ref>
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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>
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For me religions are forms, much too human, of spiritual life.Each one expresses one aspect of the single and eternal Truth, but in expressing it exclusive of the other aspects, it deforms and diminishes it..None has the right to call itself the only true one, any more than it will be has the right to deny the truth contained in the age others. And all of God" (God them together would not suffice to express the Supreme Truth which is still too religious) I beyond all expression, even whilst being present in each one.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/15/religion#p10</ref><center>~</center>Those who carry within themselves a spiritual destiny and are born to realise the Divine, to become conscious in Him and live Him, will arrive, no matter what path, what way they follow. That is to say, even in religion there are people who have put "had the spiritual experience and found the Divine―not because of the ONE"—because religion, usually in spite of it will truly be , notwithstanding it―because they had the inner urge and this urge led them there despite all obstacles and through them. Everything served their purpose.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/23-may-1956#p7</ref><center>~</center>The widest spirituality does not exclude or discourage any essential human activity or faculty, but works rather to lift all of them up out of their imperfection and groping ignorance, transforms them by its touch and makes them the instruments of the age light, power and joy of Unitythe divine being and the divine nature.<ref>httpshttp://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/1525/reason-and-religion#p33,p34p13</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.
==Principal Means The world knows three kinds of Intellectual Knowledge==revolution. The material has strong results, the moral and intellectual are infinitely larger in their scope and richer in their fruits, but the spiritual are the great sowings.
The three principal means If the triple change could coincide in a perfect correspondence, a faultless work would be done; but the mind and body of mankind cannot hold perfectly a strong spiritual inrush: most is spilt, much of the rest is corrupted. Many intellectual knowledge and physical upturnings of our soil are anumananeeded to work out a little result from a large spiritual sowing. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/13/thoughts-and-glimpses#p17, pratyaksha p18,p19</ref><center>~</center>For it is into the Divine within them that men and aptavakyamankind have to grow; it is not an external idea or rule that has to be imposed on them from without. Therefore the law of a growing inner freedom is that which will be most honoured in the spiritual age of mankind. AnumanaTrue it is that so long as man has not come within measurable distance of self-knowledge and has not set his face towards it, inference he cannot escape from datathe law of external compulsion and all his efforts 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, depends for its value on his Church, his society, his nation. We must feel and obey the possession compulsion of the Spirit if we would establish our inner right datato escape other compulsion. Therefore even in the unregenerated state we find that the healthiest, on the right observation 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 data including the drawing law of a gradual atrophy or a tyranny varied or cured by outbreaks of rabid disorder. And as soon as man comes to know his spiritual self, he does by that discovery, often even by the right analogiesvery seeking for it, as ancient thought and religion saw, escape from the outer law and enter into the unerring perception law of true identity & rejection freedom.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/conditions-for-the-coming-of false identity-a-spiritual-age#p15</ref><center>~</center>In spirituality... we must seek for the directing light and the harmonising law, the just estimate and in religion only in proportion as it identifies itself with this spirituality. So long as it falls short of difference & contrastthis, it is one human activity and power among others, and, even if it be considered the most important and finally on the power most powerful, it cannot wholly guide the others. If it seeks always to fix them into the limits of right reasoning 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 time and greatly profit by it, in the right dataend they must move by the law of their being towards a freer activity and an untrammelled movement. Pratyaksha Spirituality respects the freedom of the human soul, because it is itself fulfilled by freedom; and the process 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 fundamental parts of our being. It will give that freedom to philosophy and science which ancient Indian religion gave,—freedom even to deny the things spirit, if they will,—as a result of which philosophy and science never felt in ancient India any necessity of divorcing themselves about which we gather data 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 aspirations. Only it will be vigilant to illuminate them so that they may grow into the light and law of the spirit, not by suppression and restriction, but by a self-searching, self-controlled expansion and a many-sided finding of their greatest, highest and deepest potentialities. For all these are brought into potentialities of the spirit.<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/25/religion-as-the-law-of-life#p9</ref><center>~</center>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 kenbeing 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; aptavakya the body is evidencein the soul, not the soul in the body. Yet for the testimony convenience of men language and our finite understanding we are compelled to say that the soul is in the body and that God is within the man; for that is how it naturally presents itself to us who have themselves been in possession 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 knowledge we seekreal self of all His creatures. My self and yourself are not really two but one.<ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsa/17/part-ii-the-instruments-and-fieldlaw-of-vedantarenunciation#p1p12</ref>
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But "Foster by sacrifice the end of evolution is to liberate gods," says the permanent from the impermanentGita, "and let those gods foster you; fostering each other ye shall attain the spiritual from the materialsupreme good, —param sreyah." Attaining the Self from its bondage to supreme good we pass beyond the three gunas gods and the false conceptions which that bondage createscome to God; we leave Veda to arrive at Vedanta or, rather, fulfil Veda in Vedanta. This liberation Then we are no longer content to sacrifice this or release must therefore be that possession, giving a share, making reservations, but offer unreservedly & unconditionally the final aim of religion and ethicssupreme sacrifice, otherwise religion and ethics will be out of harmony with yielding up on the truth highest of things all altars all that we are and therefore false possess; we give no longer to Agni, Indra, Varuna or imperfectMitra, but to the supreme & universal Lord, ''bhoktáram yajnatapasám'. Religion and ethics must train the individual self Then, too, we receive in a man to discover its universalityreturn not wealth, nor cattle nor horses nor lands nor empire, not joys'nor powers nor brilliances nor capacities, to see himself in but God Himself & the world with all creatures and all creatures these things in himself, them as trifles and playthings for the ideal or ethically perfect man is the one who has attained soul to this vision enjoy as God enjoys, possessing them and observes it habitually in his thoughts and actions as the one law of his lifeyet not possessing, wholly unbound by possession. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/17/bookchapter-ii-the-golden-rule-of-living-enjoyment-and-iiirenunciation#p3p10</ref>
===Ego and Drawbacks of Religion===
Throughout the human ages we seek an escape or All religions have saved a remedynumber of souls, 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 egonone yet has been able to spiritualise mankind. "Accept your limitations, work For that there is needed not cult 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 sustained and strains out towards its elementall-comprehending effort at spiritual self-evolution. "Recognise that you The changes we see in the world today are yourselfintellectual, others not yourselfmoral, physical in their ideal and make a rule of life out of intention: 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 spiritual revolution waits for its fulfilment; he breaks back towards sin hour and unregulated desire or forwards towards something beyond vice throws up meanwhile its waves here and virtuethere. "Desire what you please, enjoy what you can, but without violating my laws and conventions," is Until it comes the dyke raised by society; but man is a universal as well as a social unit and sense of 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 others cannot limit himself by his supports. "Desire is sinful; observe duty be understood and the Shastra, discourage & punish enjoyment," is the Puritan's law till then all interpretation of self-repression.Asceticism digs deeper into the truth present happening and forecast of man’s future are vain 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 escapeFor its nature, not a solution; God in man may admit escape for the fewpower, but He denies it to the many, for He event are that which will not allow His purpose in life and world to be frustratedTruth is imperative and demands inexorably its satisfaction. And determine 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 placenext cycle of our humanity.<ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsa/1713/chapter-iii-the-golden-rule-of-life-desire-egoismthoughts-and-possessionglimpses#p20p21,p22</ref>
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The Hindus perceived that it was all these at once but ... religions are always mistaken—always—because they discovered that the law with which the soul must put itself in relation was want to standardise the law expression of an experience and impose it on everyone as an irrefutable truth. …That is why all the Eternal Selfreligions, however beautiful they may be, that have always led man's nature must seek its fulfilment in that which is permanent & eternal in to the Universe and that it is to which his evolution movesworst excesses. They discovered that his higher self was All the Self of his Universe and that by a certain manner of actioncrimes, by a certain spirit the horrors perpetrated in actionthe name of religion are among the darkest stains on human history, man escaped from his limitations and realised his higher Self. This way simply because of Works this little initial error: wanting what is Karmayoga and Karmayoga therefore depends on the Hindu conception of Brahman, the Transcendent Self and its relations true for one individual to be true for the Universemass or collectivity. From this all Hindu ethics proceeds.<ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwsacwm/1709/the-eternal-in24-hisseptember-universe1958#p6p15,p16</ref>
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The heathen who worships stocks and stones has come nearer to For as there is the truth of thingssuprarational life in which religious aspiration finds entirely what it seeks, than so too there is also the enlightened professor infrarational life of "rational" religionthe instincts, impulses, sensations, crude emotions, who declares God to be omnipresent and yet in the next breath pronounces the objects in vital activities from which He is present to be void of anything that can command religious reverenceall human aspiration takes its beginning.There is no error in "idolatry"; the error is in These too feel the mind touch of the idolater who worships the stone as stone religious sense in man, share its needs and the stock as stockexperience, thinking that is Goddesire its satisfactions. Religion includes this satisfaction also in its scope, and forgets or does not realise that it is the Divine Presence in them which what is alone worship-worthy.usually called religion it is seems even to be the greater part, sometimes to an imperfect religion which thus yields to external view almost the whole; for the domination supreme purity of the mind and senses and allows them to determine what is spiritual experience does not appear or is not Godglimpsed only through this mixed and turbid current. Good is a mask and evil is a mask; both are eidolaMuch impurity, valid for the purposes of life in phenomenaignorance, but when we seek that which is beyond phenomenasuperstition, we many doubtful elements must resolutely remove form as the mask result of this contact and see only the face union of God behind our highest tendencies with our lower ignorant nature. Here it. To the Karmayogin there should be nothing common or unclean. There is nothing from which he would seem that reason has the right to shrinkits legitimate part; there is none whom he here surely it can dare intervene to loathe. For God is within us all; as the Self pureenlighten, calm and eternalpurify, and as rationalise the Antaryamin or Watcher within, the Knower with all thought, action and existence for His field play of observation, the Will behind every movement, every emotion, every deed, the Enjoyer whose presence makes the pain instincts and pleasure of the worldimpulses. MindIt would seem that a religious reformation, Life a movement to substitute a “pure” and all our subjective consciousness and the elements of our personal existence and activity, depend on His presence rational religion 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 one that which is within us, is the Divine Presence, largely infrarational and that which is in others, is the same Divine Presence. To remember this is worth all the moral teachings and ethical doctrines in the world. Vedanta has been declared by those who have not chosen to understand itimpure, would be a non-moral or even immoral philosophy. But the central truth of Vedanta enfolds distinct advance in a single phrase all the highest ethics religious development of the world. Courage, magnanimity, purity, justice, charity, mercy, beneficence, loving kindness, forgiveness, tolerance, all the highest demands that the most exalted ethical teacher can make on humanity are contained in that single doctrine; and find in it their one adequate philosophical justification and sole natural basis.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/1725/thereason-eternaland-in-his-universereligion#p74p12</ref>
===The Law of RenunciationDependence on Outer Forms===
Divisibility The spiritual spirit is not contrary to a religious feeling of adoration, devotion and consecration. But what is wrong in the Indivisible religions is one the fixity of those profound paradoxes of Vedantic thought which increasing Knowledge will show the mind clinging to be deep and far-reaching truthsone formula as an exclusive truth. It used to be implicitly believed One must always remember that human personality was formulas are only a single and indivisible thing; yet recently a school mental expression of psychologists has grown up who consider man as a bundle of various personalities rather than a single, homogeneous the truth and indivisible consciousness. For it has been found that a single man this truth can divide himself or always be divided into several personalities, each living its own life and unconscious of the expressed in many other, while yet again another personality may emerge ways. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/15/religion#p3</ref><center>~</center>Religion itself had become fixed in him which is conscious of the others dogmas and yet separate from all of them. This is true; neverthelessceremonies, the man all through remains one sects and churches and had lost for the samemost part, not only in body but in his psychical existence; except 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 manfew individuals, not direct contact with the realliving founts of spirituality. Personality is the creation A period of memory, for memory is its basis and pedestalnegation was necessary. If the pedestal, then, They had to be divided driven back and put apartin upon themselves, the superstructure also must be in the same act divided and put apartnearer to their own eternal sources. But Now that the waking memory stress of negation is only a partpast and they are raising their heads, we see them seeking for their own truth, reviving by virtue of a selection of return upon themselves and a wider latent memory which has faithfully recorded all that happens not new self-discovery.<ref>http://incarnateword.in the man's present life only/cwsa/25/civilisation-and-barbarism#p8</ref><center>~</center>As for example, but with all people brought up in all his past. The personality which corresponds with a certain religion their experiences will always be coloured by this latent unerring memory is the true personality of the manreligion; it is his soul, one infinite and indivisiblein fact, and its apparent divisions are merely the result of Avidya, false knowledge, due to defective action of the waking memory. So reach the apparent division very source of the divine Self into many human selves, of thing one must free oneself from the indivisible Paramatman into many Jivatmansexternal formation.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/07/22-june-1955#p14</ref><center>~</center>Religion, is simply the result of Avidya due which ought to have led the action of the Maya or self-imposed illusion of Ishaway, the great Force who has willed that the One by this force of Maya should become phenomenally manifold. In reality, there is no division but owing to its greater dependence on its external parts 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 its infrarational rather than its spiritual existence is the basis of all true religion and true morality. We know indeed that impulses has been as God is not contained in His universemuch, but the universe is in Himor even more, so also God is not contained within a man. When the Sruti says elsewhere that the Purusha lies hidden in the heart sower of our being and is no larger than the size discord as a teacher of a man's thumbunity, it simply means that —religion is beginning to the mind of man under the dominion of Avidya his bodyrealise, vitality, mind, reason bulk so largely, the Spirit seems a small little dimly and indistinguishable thing indeed inside so many and bulky sheaths and coverings. But in realityineffectively as yet, it that spirituality is body, vitality, mind & reason forming the apparent man that are small after all its own chief business and trifling true aim and that it is also the Spirit or real man that is large, grandiose & mighty. The apparent man exists in & by common element and the real, not the real in the apparent; the body is in the soul, not the soul in the bodycommon bond of all religions. Yet for the convenience of language As these influences grow and come more and our finite understanding we are compelled more consciously to say cooperate with each other, it might be hoped that the soul is in the body necessary psychological modification will quietly, gradually, but still irresistibly and that God is within the man; for that is how it naturally presents itself to us who use the mental standpoint and the language at last with an increasing force of rapidity take place which can prepare a finite intelligence. The Lord, from our standpoint, is within all His creatures real and He is fundamental change in the real self life 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 holdhumanity. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/1725/the-law-of-renunciationinternationalism#p14p5</ref><center>~</center>It saddled upon the religious life of man a Church, a priesthood and a mass of ceremonies and set over it a pack of watchdogs under the name of creeds and dogmas, dogmas which one had to accept and obey under pain of condemnation to eternal hell by an eternal judge beyond, just as one had to accept and to obey the laws of society on pain of condemnation to temporal imprisonment or death by a mortal judge below. This false socialisation of religion has been always the chief cause of its failure to regenerate mankind.
==Rule 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 forms and machinery. The falsehood of the old social use of Living=="Foster religion is shown by sacrifice its effects. History has exhibited more than once the gods," says coincidence of the Gitagreatest religious fervour and piety with darkest ignorance, "with an obscure squalor and let those gods foster you; fostering each other ye shall attain long vegetative stagnancy of the supreme goodmass of human life,—param sreyah." Attaining with the supreme good we pass beyond unquestioned reign of cruelty, injustice and oppression, or with an organisation of the gods most ordinary, unaspiring and come to God; we leave Veda to arrive at Vedanta unraised existence hardly relieved by some touches of intellectual orhalfspiritual light on the surface, rather, fulfil Veda in Vedanta. Then we are no longer content to sacrifice —the end of all this or a widespread revolt that possessionturned first of all against the established religion as the key-stone of a regnant falsehood, giving evil and ignorance. It is another sign when the too scrupulously exact observation of a sharesocio-religious system and its rites and forms, making reservations, but offer unreservedly & unconditionally which by the supreme sacrificevery fact of this misplaced importance begin to lose their sense and true religious value, yielding up on becomes the highest law and most prominent aim of all altars all that we are religion rather than any spiritual growth of the individual and possessthe 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; we give no longer when, finding human life given over to Agnithe unregenerated mind, Indralife and body and the place of spiritual freedom occupied by the bonds of form, Varuna or Mitraby Church and Shastra, by some law of the Ignorance, but he is obliged to break away from all these to seek for growth into the supreme & universal Lordspirit in the monastery, bhoktáram yajnatapasám. Thenon the mountain-top, tooin the cavern, we receive in return not wealththe desert and the forest. When there is that division between life and the spirit, nor cattle nor horses nor lands nor empiresentence of condemnation is passed upon human life. Either it is left to circle in its routine or it is decried as worthless and unreal, not joys nor powers nor brilliances nor capacitiesa vanity of vanities, but God Himself & the world with all these things and loses that confidence in them as trifles itself and playthings for inner faith in the soul value of its terrestrial aims, ''śraddhā'', without which it cannot come to enjoy as God enjoysanything. For the spirit of man must strain towards the heights; when it loses its tension of endeavour, possessing them the race must become immobile and stagnant or even sink towards darkness and yet not possessing, wholly unbound by possessionthe dust.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/1725/chapter-ii-the-golden-rule-of-livingspiritual-enjoymentaim-and-renunciationlife#p10p5,p6</ref> ===Curtails Spirit’s Freedom===
===What is ''Q.If someone follows a religion and has a good capacity, can he go farther and reach identification with the Difference Between Yoga and ReligionDivine?===''
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''A: 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 ''It is doing yogaimpossible.
Now, if this person has noted down all the processes he has used and constructs Religion is always 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 limitation for the only right one, the only one which exists"― if all that is written down, organised, arranged into fixed laws and ceremonies, it becomes a religion.<ref>https://incarnatewordspirit.in/cwm/08/23-may-1956#p1,p2,p4,p5</ref>
===Vijnana===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>
The evolution of vijnana out of mind is inevitable for the same reason that the evolution of life out of matter was inevitable or the evolution of mind out of life, because the vijnana or pure Idea, already involved in matter, life and mind, demands & will procure, perhaps by the pull from a higher world where the Idea would be the dominant power & basic principle, its own release out of the limitations of sensational mentality. Just as we found matter to be a formation out of life-energy, & life=Integral Yoga -energy to be a formation out of mind, so mind is Not a formation out of vijnana. That which has constituted & governs stone or tree, animal or man, is not matter, nor life, nor mind, but the Idea involved in these three masks of conscious being.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/17/chapter-v-the-soul-causality-and-law-of-nature#p44</ref>Religion=
==Dangers of Religion Creation==
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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Here we do not have religion. We replace religion by the spiritual life, which is truer, deeper and higher at the same time, that is to say, closer to the Divine. For the Divine is in everything, but we are not conscious of it. This is the immense progress that man must make. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/13/sri-aurobindo-ashram#p48</ref>
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...the children of Auroville should replace the exclusiveness of one religion by the wide faith of knowledge.
<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/13/aims-and-principles#p421</ref>
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''Q. Many people say that the teaching of Sri Aurobindo is a new religion. Would you say that it is a religion?''
''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 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. …
I repeat that when we speak of Sri Aurobindo there can be no question of a teaching nor even of a revelation, but of an action from the Supreme; no religion can be founded on that.
But men are so foolish that they can change anything into a religion, so great is their need of a fixed framework for their narrow thought and limited action. They do not feel secure unless they can assert this is true and that is not; but such an assertion becomes impossible for anyone who has read and understood what Sri Aurobindo has written. Religion and Yoga do not belong to the same plane of being and spiritual life can exist in all its purity only when it is free from all mental dogma. [Based on Aphorism 59 - One of the greatest comforts of religion is that you can get hold of God sometimes and give him a satisfactory beating. People mock at the folly of savages who beat their gods when their prayers are not answered; but it is the mockers who are the fools and the savages.]<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/10/aphorism-59#p7,p8,p10,p11</ref>
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The performance of the racial religion will make it easier to serve the spirit of the age. This is an age of energy, ''śakti'', and love. At the beginning of the Age of Iron (''Kali''), the human tendencies try to fulfil themselves by subordinating knowledge and action to devotion, and with the support of love, truth and energy try and succeed in spreading the message of love. The friendliness and charity of Buddhism, the teaching of love in Christianity, the equality and brotherhood of Islam, the devotion and sentiment of love in the Puranic religion is a result of these attempts. In the Age of Iron the eternal religion, helped by the spirit of friendliness, action, devotion, love, equality and brotherhood, does good to humanity. Entering into and manifesting in the Aryan religion, composed of knowledge, devotion and non-attached action, these same powers are seeking for expansion and self-fulfilment. The signs of that energy of expression are severe austerity, high ideals, and noble action. When this race becomes once more a seeker after austere perfection, full of high ideals and undertaker of noble efforts, it should be understood that the world’s progress is under way and the withdrawal of anti-religious titanic forces and the rise of divine forces is inevitable once again. Hence this type of education too is needed at the present time.
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 Indians are rising, that is why this fresh awakening of Aryan ideas.<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/09/our-religion#p6,p7</ref>
=More on Religion=
=Religion at Sri Aurobindo Ashram=and philosophy seek to rescue man from his ego; then the kingdom of heaven within will be spontaneously reflected in an external divine city. [Aphorism 200]<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/10/aphorism-199-200#p2</ref><center>~</center>Here we do not have religionAphorism 242—How much hatred and stupidity men succeed in packing up decorously and labelling "Religion"!] <ref>https://incarnateword. We replace religion in/cwm/10/aphorism-241-242#p2</ref><center>~</center>Religion too by putting God far above in distant heavens made man too much of a worm of the spiritual life, which is truer, deeper earth little and higher at the same time, that is to say, closer vile before his Creator and admitted only by a caprice of his favour to the Divine. For the Divine is a doubtful salvation in everything, but we are not conscious of it. This is the immense progress that man must makesuperhuman worlds. <ref>httphttps://incarnateword.in/cwmcwsa/1325/srithe-aurobindounseen-ashrampower#p44p10</ref>
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… they have been clinging to a religion, it is because that religion has 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 responsible (''Mother laughs'') and it goes on like that...the children It is a lack of Auroville should replace the exclusiveness compassion to want to pull them out of one religion by the wide that—it is better to leave them where they are. I never dispute with someone who has a faith—let him keep his faith! I take care not to tell him anything that might shake his faith , because it would not be good—they are not capable of knowledgehaving another.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/1315/aims7-andseptember-principles1963#p412p19</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. ...
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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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