VII - OUR IDEAL
THE problem of thought, therefore, is to find out the right idea and
the right way of harmony; to restate the ancient and eternal spiritual truth of
the Self so that it shall re-embrace, permeate, dominate the mental and
physical life; to develop the most profound and vital methods of psychological
self-discipline and self-development so that the mental and psychical life of
man may express the spiritual life through the utmost possible expansion of its
own richness, power and complexity; and to seek for the means and motives by
which his external life, his society and his institutions may remould
themselves progressively in the truth of the spirit and develop towards the
utmost possible harmony of individual freedom and social unity.
This is our ideal and our search. Throughout the world there are
plenty of movements inspired by the same drift but there is room for an effort
of thought which shall frankly acknowledge the problem in its integral
complexity and not be restrained in the flexibility of its search by attachment
to any cult, creed or extant system of philosophy.
The
effort involves a quest for Truth that underlies existence and the fundamental
Law of its self -expression in the universe-the work of metaphysical philosophy
and religious thought; the sounding and harmonising of the psychological
methods of discipline by which man purifies and perfects himself,-the work of
psychology, not as it is understood in Europe, but the deeper practical
psychology called in India Yoga ; and the application of our ideas to the
problems of man's social and collective life.
Philosophy and religious thought must be the beginning and the
foundation of any such attempt; for they alone behind appearances and processes
to the truth of things. The attempt to get rid of their supremacy must always
be vain. Man will always think and generalise and try to penetrate behind the
apparent fact, for that is the imperative law of his awakened consciousness;
man will always turn his generalisation into a religion even though it be only
religion of positivism or of material Law. Philosophy is the intellectual
search for the fundamental truth of things, religion is the attempt to make the
truth dynamic in the soul of man. They are essential to each other; a religion
that is not the expression of philosophic truth, degenerates into superstition
and obscurantism, and a philosophy which does not dynamise itself with,
religious spirit is a barren light, for it cannot get itself practised. Unity
for the human race by an inner oneness and not only by an external association of interests; the
resurgence of man out of the merely animal and economic life or the merely
intellectual and aesthetic into the glories of e spiritual existence; the
pouring of the power of the spirit into the physical mould and mental
instrument so that man may develop his manhood into that true superman hood
which shall exceed our present state as much as this exceeds the animal state
from which science tells us that we have issued. These three are one for man's
unity and
man's self-transcendence can come only by living in
the Spirit.1
1
Arya, 'Our Ideal', Vol. II, pp. 7-9. 1915-16.