INDIAN SPIRITUALITY & LIFE

Chapter-2(summary)

THE TASK of religion and spirituality is to mediate

between God and man, between the Eternal and Infinite
and this transient, yet persistent finite, between a
luminous Truth-consciousness not expressed or not yet
expressed here and the Mind’s ignorance.

But nothing is more difficult than to bring home the

greatness and uplifting power of the spiritual
consciousness to the natural man forming the vast
majority of the race; for his mind and senses are turned
outward towards the external calls of life and its objects
and never inwards to the Truth which lies behind them.
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Our life moves between two worlds, the depths upon
depths of our inward being and the surface field of
our outward nature. The majority of men put the
whole emphasis of life on the outward and live very
strongly in their surface consciousness and very little
in the inward existence.

But the West persistently mistakes for spirituality —

is a preference for living in the mind and emotions
more than in the gross outward life or else an
attempt to subject this rebellious life-stuff to the law
of intellectual truth or ethical reason and will or
aesthetic beauty or of all three together.
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But spiritual knowledge perceives that there is a greater

thing in us; our inmost self, our real being is not the
intellect, not the aesthetic, ethical or thinking mind, but
the divinity within, the Spirit.

To have made the discovery of our deepest being and

hidden spiritual nature is the first necessity and to have
erected the living of an inmost spiritual life into the aim of
existence is the characteristic sign of a spiritual culture.
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Now the spirit of Indian religion and spiritual culture has been
persistently and immovably the same throughout the long
time of its vigour, but its form has undergone remarkable
changes. In its earliest form, its first Vedic system, it took its
outward foundation on the mind of the physical man whose
natural faith is in things physical, in the sensible and visible
objects, presences, representations and the external pursuits
and aims of this material world.

The means, symbols, rites, figures, by which it sought to

mediate between the spirit and the normal human mentality
were drawn from these most external physical things.
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Man’s first and primitive idea of the Divine can only come
through his vision of external Nature and the sense of a
superior Power or Powers concealed behind her
phenomena, veiled in the heaven and earth, father and
mother of our being, in the sun and moon and stars, its
lights and regulators, in dawn and day and night and rain
and wind and storm, the oceans and the rivers and the
forests, all the forces of her scene of action, all that vast
and mysterious surrounding life of which we are a part.

There is here some divine Multitude or else mighty Infinite,

one, manifold and mysterious, which takes these forms and
manifests itself in these motions.
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The Vedic religion took this natural sense and feeling of
the physical man; it used the conceptions to which they
gave birth, and it sought to lead him through them to the
psychic and spiritual truths of his own being and the being
of the cosmos.

It recognised that he was right when he saw behind the

manifestations of Nature great living powers and
godheads, even though he knew not their inner truth, and
right too in offering to them worship and propitiation and
atonement. For that inevitably must be the initial way in
which his active physical, vital and mental nature is
allowed to approach the Godhead.
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The Vedic religion accepted also the form in which early

man everywhere expressed his sense of the relation
between himself and the godheads of Nature; it
adopted as its central symbol the act and ritual of a
physical sacrifice. However crude the notions attached
to it, this idea of the necessity of sacrifice did express
obscurely a first law of being.

For it was founded on that secret of constant

interchange between the individual and the universal
powers of the cosmos which covertly supports all the
process of life and develops the action of Nature.
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The Vedic Rishis gave a psychic function to the godheads
worshipped by the people; they spoke to them of a higher Truth,
Right, Law of which the gods were the guardians, of the necessity
of a truer knowledge and a larger inner living according to this
Truth and Right and of a home of Immortality to which the soul of
man could ascend by the power of Truth and of right doing.

For the Veda is full of words which, as the Rishis themselves

express it, are secret words that give their inner meaning only to
the seer, kavaye nivacananin ¯ .ya vac ¯ a¯msi ˙. This is a feature of
the ancient sacred hymns which grew obscure to later ages; it
became a dead tradition and has been entirely ignored by modern
scholarship in its laborious attempt to read the hieroglyph of the
Vedic symbols.
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The second or post-Vedic age of Indian civilisation was

distinguished by the rise of the great philosophies, by a
copious, vivid, many-thoughted, many-sided epic
literature, by the beginnings of art and science, by the
evolution of a vigorous and complex society, by the
formation of large kingdoms and empires, by manifold
formative activities of all kinds and great systems of living
and thinking.
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Buddhism’s ethical system of the eightfold path taken as

the way to release was an austere sublimation of the
Vedic notion of the Right, Truth and Law followed as the
way to immortality, rtasya panthah¯. The strongest note
of Mahayana Buddhism, its stress on universal
compassion and fellow-feeling, was an ethical
application of the spiritual unity which is the essential
idea of Vedanta.

The most characteristic tenets of the new discipline,

Nirvana and Karma, could have been supported from
the utterances of the Brahmanas and Upanishads.
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The Vedic sacrifice persisted only in broken and

lessening fragments. The house of Fire was replaced by
the temple; the karmic ritual of sacrifice was
transformed into the devotional temple ritual; the vague
and shifting mental images of the Vedic gods figured in
the mantras yielded to more precise conceptual forms of
the two great deities, Vishnu and Shiva, and of their
Shaktis and their offshoots.
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The psychic and spiritual mystic endeavour which was
the inner sense of the Vedic hymns, disappeared into
the less intensely luminous but more wide and rich
and complex psycho-spiritual inner life of Puranic and
Tantric religion and Yoga.

The Purano-Tantric system was a wide, assured and

many-sided endeavour, unparalleled in its power,
insight, amplitude, to provide the race with a basis of
generalised psycho-religious experience from which
man could rise through knowledge, works or love or
through any other fundamental power of his nature to
some established supreme experience and highest
absolute status.
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The Vedic training of the physically-minded man made

the development possible. But in its turn this raising of
the basis of religion to the inner mind and life and
psychic nature, this training and bringing out of the
psychic man ought to make possible a still larger
development and support a greater spiritual movement
as the leading power of life.
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The first stage makes possible the preparation of the

natural external man for spirituality; the second takes
up his outward life into a deeper mental and psychical
living and brings him more directly into contact with
the spirit and divinity within him; the third should
render him capable of taking up his whole mental,
psychical, physical living into a first beginning at least of
a generalised spiritual life.
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If Indian culture is to survive and keep its spiritual basis

and innate character, it is in this direction, and not in a
mere revival or prolongation of the Puranic system, that
its evolution must turn, rising so towards the fulfilment
of that which the Vedic seers saw as the aim of man
and his life thousands of years ago and the Vedantic
sages cast into the clear and immortal forms of their
luminous revelation.
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A widest and highest spiritualising of life on earth is

the last vision of all that vast and unexampled seeking
and experiment in a thousand ways of the soul’s
outermost and innermost experience which is the
unique character of her past; this in the end is the
mission for which she was born and the meaning of her
existence.
(Ref: CWSA VOL-20, Page- 196-213)