The multidiciplinary crisis today is in fact an evolutionary crisis

Indian culture,  Evolution of Consciousness and march of the nations

‘Sri Aurobindo sees evolution primarily as an ongoing evolution of consciousness. He holds that the human mind is much too imperfect a type of consciousness to be the final resting point of nature, and that just as life developed out of matter, and mind out of life, a still higher form of consciousness is bound to develop out of the present stage of mind.

The evolutionary march is cyclic and spiral and not linear and logical. It is zig zag and swinging to and fro. It includes ascent and integration both. The ascent also has transformation of the lower. The evolution of human species and the laws of that evolution follow development of faculties of body, life and mind, of physical base and infusion of powers from above.

As soon as lower elements achieve a certain point of maturity, they tend to higher grades of achievements in a gradual manner so as to interweave lower and higher in a complex series of harmony of conflicting claims. Evolution is  a continuous process and humanity is a crucial link in it. Beyond mind are higher, deeper, wider ranges of consciousness which must be attained. As animal is a living laboratory to evolve to man the mental being, similarly, man is living and thinking laboratory for Nature to raise higher than man.  

Sri Aurobindo states:

The animal is a living laboratory in which Nature has, it is said, worked out man. Man himself may well be a thinking and living laboratory in whom and with whose conscious cooperation she wills to work out the superman, the god. Or shall we not say, rather, to manifest God? For if evolution is the progressive manifestation by Nature of that which slept or worked in her, involved, it is also the overt realisation of that which she secretly is. We cannot, then, bid her pause at a given stage of her evolution, nor have we the right to condemn with the religionist as perverse and presumptuous or with the rationalist as a disease or hallucination any intention she may evince or effort she may make to go beyond. If it be true that Spirit is involved in Matter and apparent Nature is secret God, then the manifestation of the divine in himself and the realisation of God within and without are the highest and most legitimate aim possible to man upon earth. 2

Now onwards the evolution is not confined to unconscious progression of Nature. It is conscious effort, aspiration from human being and grace from the Divine which accelerate this process. There is sense of freedom that comes with deviation of Self consciousness, and with process of rational and normative Consciousness. That bring the element of chance or alternate possibilities, some of which can be perilous as well . hence Sri Aurobindo terms this as a great adventure of consciousness. Free will is must in this process and not any sort of determinism. There has been three preoccupations of individual and collective :

1.      Complete development of the individual being

2.      Complete development of the collective being

3.      Perfectability of the society.

4.      Or best possibilities of the individual and collective relations : individual with individual’ individual with collectivity, collectivity with other collectivities.

 

There fore there can be different extremes in this pursuit:

One is individual is all important and collectivity is only filed or structure for individual’s growth.

Other is collective whether society, race, nation is all important and individual is just a instrument, a consumable, a cog for the collective growth. The soul of a collective is in its culture power of life, ideal and institutes and ways of expression.. and individual has to do cast in that mould for its own survival.  

The second one was more common in almost all ancient cultures. However in India there was a special balance in two in the concept of Siddha , Bhagwata or Mukta, which means an individual by the virtue of his will Tapas can raise to the heights of God, can be God. Though the first three stages of life namely student and celibate, householder, recluse were within and with the aid of society and its meticulous structure, the forth was stage of Sanayasi, the liberated who was super social. Thus was given a multilayered multistaged structure of four stages of life, four ashrams, four varnas, and three gunas, with four purusharthas…dharma, Artha, Kaam , Moksh to help every one to grow , to evolve as per his or her swabhava, swadharma, samskara and adhikara…

As per Sri Aurobindo, a stage of acute conflict of standards pushes /presses us to search for unifying and harmonizing knowledge. An individual is key to evolutionary movement. It is only individual which becomes conscious of reality and his relation to collectivity. India’s allegiance is to the truth, the Self, the Spirit, the Divine,..which is in him and in all. He is not to subordinate to mass , rather he has to help and be helped by other individuals and community in this process.

An individual’s allegiance to use Sri Aurobindo’s own words,

must be to the Truth, the Self, the Spirit, the Divine which is in him and in all; not to subordinate or lose himself in the mass, but to find and express that truth of being in himself and help the community and humanity in its seeking for its own truth and fullness of being must be his real object of existence.

India moves upto spiritual freedom, which is also spiritual oneness. And therefore even a Siddha or Mukta or a incaranation also moves and turns back after enlightenment to serve the god in mankind, to raise all who are still in delusion : Shivobhave Jeevseva.

For the awakened individual:

1. Realization of his truth of being and his inner liberation-perfection of realization
2. Perfected community can exist only by perfected individual
3. Perfection is by a) discovery and affirmation in life and by each of his own spiritual being. b) and discovery by all of their spiritual unity and harmony integration..?

There can be no real perfection in us except for our inner self and truth of spiritual existence taking up all truth of the instrument.. existence into itself and giving to it oneness, integration and harmony.

Real freedom : discovery and disengagement of the Spiritual Reality within us.      

Only means of true perfection is the sovereignity and self effectuation of the Spiritual Reality in all the elements of our nature.

In the words of Sri Aurobindo:

For the awakened individual the realisation of his truth of being and his inner liberation and perfection must be his primary seeking, first, because that is the call of the Spirit within him, but also because it is only by liberation and perfection and realisation of the truth of being that man can arrive at truth of living. A perfected community also can exist only by the perfection of its individuals, and perfection can come only by the discovery and affirmation in life by each of his own spiritual being and the discovery by all of their spiritual unity and a resultant life of unity. There can be no real perfection for us except by our inner self and truth of spiritual existence taking up all truth of the instrumental existence into itself and giving to it oneness, integration, harmony. As our only real freedom is the discovery and disengagement of the spiritual Reality within us, so our only means of true perfection is the sovereignty and self-effectuation of the spiritual Reality in all the elements of our nature.

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Life was most richly lived has left behind most precious fruits when human societies  

were organized in small independent centers. In Europe it was three stages : first when tribes in Israel were strong, then in Greek period and finally in artistic Italy. It was more frutiful in Germany, Italy, England and France , not in Roman and Russian empire.  In India also it was Pallavas, Chalukyas, Pandya, Chola, Chera that she was at her best, not in mighty states and empires. When life is diffused in vast spaces it loses its colour richness and variety.

‘As Sri Aurobindo remarks, the organisation was great and admirable, but the individual dwindled and life lost its colour, richness, variety, freedom, and victorious impulse towards creation. Eventually, therefore, the Roman Empire declined and failed; the huge mechanism of centralisation and union brought about smallness and feebleness of the individual; mechanisation prevailed and the Empire lost even its conservative vitality and died of an increasing stagnation.’( Kireet Joshi )

The Problem of Individual and collectivity: centralize and decentralize, freedom and order, unity and diversity are few of the paradoxes which it has to manage. The ideal law of social development needs to be found and followed. Here world must be united but individual should be free to find himself : freedom of self discovery, self realization and self perfection is a must.

 

The law of ideal development for individual can be :

1. Free development from within,
2. respect, aid and get aided by same free development in others
3. To harmonise his life with life of social aggregate
4. To pour himself out as a force for growth and perfection on humanity.

The law for community or nation is :

Similar like above

1.                 Free development from within,

1.                 respect, aid and get aided by same free development in other nations or communities

1.                 To harmonise community or national life with life of greater communities like continent or the world

1.                 To pour self out as a force for growth and perfection on humanity.

Law for humanity is :

Pursue upward evolution to find and express Divine in the type of mankind taking full advantage of free development and gains of all individuals, nations, and groups, realize and dream of a divine family and even then also respect, aid and be aided by growth of all individuals and aggregates.

The law for humanity is to pursue its upward evolution towards the finding and expression of the Divine in the type of mankind, taking full advantage of the free development and gains of all individuals and nations and groupings of men, to work towards the day when mankind may be really and not only ideally one divine family, but even then, when it has succeeded in unifying itself, to respect, aid and be aided by the free growth and activity of its individuals and constituent aggregates.

This ideal never got operative in the imperfect stages through which mankind has travelled so far. However present stage is a time when human beings are trying more and more to know themselves, to find ideal law of his being and his societal existence, to find and to become gradually that which is perfection. This is subjective stage as per Sri Aurobindo when knowledge is increasing and diffusing itself with an unprecedented rapidity and when individuals, societies and nations all are discovering their respective subjective selves.  

He explains that in Human cycle that the society passes through symbolic, Typal, Conventional, Rational and Subjective stages. In rational stage, different ideals like Liberty, Equality and Brotherhood were floated and cherished, each true in itself but contradicting other. Equality is tolerable only with greasing of love and brotherhood. Liberty is possible only when Equality is not imposing and only aiding the growth. Harmony holds the key and at rational stage as mind divides and pursues its reductionist idea as if that is the sole truth, it is difficult to harmonise the apparently contradicting ideals: but in suprarational age: that is turn to true subjectivity it is something which can be achieved.

Sri Aurobindo states:

Yet is 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 be founded on anything else. But brotherhood exists only in the soul and by the soul; it can exist by nothing else. For this brotherhood is not a matter either of physical kinship or of vital association or of intellectual agreement. When the soul claims freedom, it is the freedom of its self-development, the self-development of the divine in man in all his being. When it claims equality, what it is claiming is that freedom equally for all and the recognition of the same soul, the same godhead in all human beings. When it strives for brotherhood, it is founding that equal freedom of self-development on a common aim, a common life, a unity of mind and feeling founded upon the recognition of this inner spiritual unity. These three things are in fact the nature of the soul; for freedom, equality, unity are the eternal attributes of the Spirit. It is the practical recognition of this truth, it is the awakening of the soul in man and the attempt to get him to live from his soul and not from his ego which is the inner meaning of religion, and it is that to which the religion of humanity also must arrive before it can fulfil itself in the life of the race.

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This is the age of acute crisis which appears multidimensional and multidisciplinary, but in its essence it is an evolutionary crisis according to Sri Aurobindo.  

Role of reason is not to govern but to mediate and only the inner freedom or spiritual freedom can create the spiritual order and a spiritual anarchy. Three forces seem to be dominant now: 1.First is asserting Barbarism , 2. second is human reason spinning dreams but not fulfilling them, 3. Human being consents to rise above Reason and get spiritual.

It is a spiritual, an inner freedom that can alone create a perfect human order. It is a spiritual, a greater than the rational enlightenment that can alone illumine the vital nature of man and impose harmony on its self-seekings, antagonisms and discords. A deeper brotherhood, a yet unfound law of love is the only sure foundation possible for a perfect social evolution, no other can replace it. But this brotherhood and love will not proceed by the vital instincts or the reason where they can be met, baffled or deflected by opposite reasonings and other discordant instincts. Nor will it found itself in the natural heart of man where there are plenty of other passions to combat it. It is in the soul that it must find its roots; the love which is founded upon a deeper truth of our being, the brotherhood or, let us say, for this is another feeling than any vital or mental sense of brotherhood, a calmer more durable motive-force, – the spiritual comradeship which is the expression of an inner realisation of oneness. For so only can egoism disappear and the true individualism of the unique godhead in each man found itself on the true communism of the equal godhead in the race; for the Spirit, the inmost Self, the universal Godhead in every being is that whose very nature of diverse oneness it is to realise the perfection of its individual life and nature in the existence of all, in the universal life and nature.

According to Sri Aurobindo : At present Humanity is undergoing an evolutionary crisis….

At present mankind is undergoing an evolutionary crisis in which is concealed a choice of its destiny; for a stage has been reached in which the human mind has achieved in certain directions an enormous development while in others it stands arrested and bewildered and can no longer find its way. A structure of the external life has been raised up by man’s ever-active mind and life-will, a structure of an unmanageable hugeness and complexity, for the service of his mental, vital, physical claims and urges, a complex political, social, administrative, economic, cultural machinery, an organised collective means for his intellectual, aesthetic and material satisfaction. Man has created a system of civilisation which has become too big for his limited mental capacity and understanding and his still more limited spiritual and moral capacity to utilise and manage, a too dangerous servant of his blundering ego and its appetites. …A greater whole-being, whole-knowledge, whole-power is needed to weld all into a grater unity of whole-life.

Two forces which can help are , Internationalism and the religion of humanity. However the force of internationalism may be contradicting another truth and force that is nationalism and this can block the move to internationalism unless nation soul idea and spiritual universal idea of India takes the lead.

Krunvanto Vishwam Aryan,

Ettdeshe prasutasya sakashat …

To awaken soul in man, to make him live by soul and not by ego is the inner meaning of religion. To this religion of humanity is progressing. Here again Sanatana Dharma, the mother of religion to use term by Swami Vivekananda is going to be the religion of humanity as that which is eternal can only be universal and vice versa.

As a part of this crisis, and as an aid to the higher choice that can be made by humanity, Sri Aurobindo perceives two important phenomena of the modern world which present a great sign of hope. These two phenomena are those of internationalism and of religion of humanity. But these two phenomena need to be understood in their inner implications. For internationalism seems to oppose the truth and force of nationalism, and this opposition can be fatal to a harmonious transition to a new world of harmony. There is today a sentiment helped and stimulated by the trend of forces that favours the creation of an international world organisation that may ultimately result in a possible form of unification. This sentiment is a cosmopolitan and international sentiment. At one stage, it came to be presented concretely in the conception of the League of Nations. As Sri Aurobindo points out, this conception was not well inspired in its form or destined to have a considerable longevity or a supremely successful career. But the very fact that this idea was presented and even manifested in a concrete form, even though for a short term, was in itself an event of capital importance and meant the ushering in of a new era in world history. ( Kireet Joshi )

If this is not solution then there is no solution. If this is not the way then there is no other way. The terrestrial evolution must pass beyond man and the form of life must be born that is nearer to the divine.

Sri Aurobindo affirms forcefully:

… if this is not the solution, then there is no solution; if this is not the way, then there is no way for the human kind. Then the terrestrial evolution must pass beyond man as it has passed beyond the animal and a greater race must come that will be capable of the spiritual change, a form of life must be born that is nearer to the divine. After all there is no logical necessity for the conclusion that the change cannot begin at all because its perfection is not immediately possible. A decisive turn of mankind to the spiritual ideal, the beginning of a constant ascent and guidance towards the heights may not be altogether impossible, even if the summits are attainable at first only by the pioneer few and far-off to the tread of the race. And that beginning may mean the descent of an influence that will alter at once the whole life of mankind in its orientation and enlarge for ever as did the development of his reason and more than any development of the reason, its potentialities and all its structure.

A decisive turn, a constant ascent to the heights even if the ascent is possible only for few now and not for race is the inevitable turn to the future and in that process India’s march to her destiny is going to play a key role.

India’s central conception and Her ceaseless pursuit of it

The concept of India on the March has to be seen also from the perspective of the foundations of Indian culture, how through millenium this vast nation clinged to its central idea, the Nation soul and then progressed through the cycles of society. Also how role of India has to be crucial in this march of mankind to the next future through this evolutionary crisis. What is India’s central conception and theme of evolution? India’s central conception is that of Eternal and involution and evolution of Spirit in Matter and how a material man grows and through rebirth raises to be mental man and then above.

In the words of Sri Aurobindo,

“India’s central conception is that of the Eternal, the Spirit here encased in matter, involved and immanent in it and evolving on the material plane by rebirth of the individual up the scale of being till in mental man it enters the world of ideas and realm of conscious morality, dharma.”

India is a living culture. The peculiarity is a living culture with harmony and reconciliation of spiritual and temporal: We need to rediscover key to this harmony and the repair of the key, if needed has to be from within.

“Spiritual and temporal have indeed to be perfectly harmonised, for the spirit works through mind and body. But the purely intellectual or heavily material culture of the kind that Europe now favours bears in its heart the seed of death; for the living aim of culture is the realisation on earth of the kingdom of heaven. India, though its urge is towards the Eternal, since that is always the highest, the entirely real, still contains in her own culture and her own philosophy a supreme reconciliation of the eternal and the temporal and she need not seek it from outside.”

The form of interdependence of mind, body and spirit in a harmonious culture

On the same principle, the form of the interdependence of mind, body and spirit in a harmonious culture is important as well as the pure spirit; for the form is the rhythm of the spirit. It follows that to break up the form is to injure the spirit’s self-expression or at least to put it into grave peril. Change of forms there may and will be, but the novel formation must be a new self-expression or self-creation developed from within; it must be characteristic of the spirit and not servilely borrowed from the embodiments of an alien nature.

Difference is making spirituality leading motive and determining power and being obstinately recalcitrant to it

… Spirituality is not the monopoly of India; however, it may hide submerged in intellectualism or hid in other concealing veils, it is a necessary part of human nature. But the difference is between spirituality made the leading motive and the determining power of both the inner and the outer life and spirituality suppressed, allowed only under disguises or brought in as a minor power, its reign denied or put off in favour of the intellect or of a dominant materialistic vitalism.

India alone, with whatever fall or decline of light and vigour, has remained faithful to the heart of the spiritual motive. India alone is still obstinately recalcitrant; for Turkey and China and Japan, say her critics, have outgrown that foolishness, by which it is meant that they have both grown rationalistic and materialistic. India alone as a nation, whatever individuals or a small class may have done, has till now refused to give up her worshipped Godhead or bow her knee to the strong reigning idols of rationalism, commercialism and economism, the successful iron gods of the West. Affected she has been, but not yet overcome. Her surface mind rather than her deeper intelligence has been obliged to admit many Western ideas, _ liberty, equality, democracy and others, – and to reconcile them with her Vedantic Truth; but she has not been altogether at ease with them in the Western form and she seeks about already in her thought to give to them an Indian which cannot fail to be a spiritualised turn.

India will lead or will be self oblivious

Either India will be rationalised and industrialised out of all recognition and she will be no longer India or else she will be the leader in a new world-phase, aid by her example and cultural infiltration the new tendencies of the West and spiritualise the human race.

The basic difference between European mind and Indian mind:

The tendency of the normal Western mind is to live from below upward and from out inward. A strong foundation is taken in the vital and material nature and higher powers are invoked and admitted only to modify and partially uplift the natural terrestrial life. The inner existence is formed and governed by the external powers. India’s constant aim has been, on the contrary, to find a basis of living in the higher spiritual truth and to live from the inner spirit outwards, to exceed the present way of mind, life and body, to command and dictate to external Nature. As the old Vedic seers put it, "Their divine foundation was above even while they stood below, let its rays be settled deep within us," nicinah sthur upari budhna esam asmen antar nihitah ketavab syuh. Now that difference is no unimportant subtlety but of a great and penetrating practical consequence.

But if the spiritual ideal points the final way to a triumphant harmony of manifested life, then it is all-important for India not to lose hold of the truth, not to give up the highest she knows and barter it away for a perhaps more readily practicable but still lower ideal alien to her true and constant nature.

A new creation is a must..with Shakti within

A new creation of the old Indian svadharma, not a transmutation to some law of the Western nature, is our best way to serve and increase the sum of human progress.          

…the forms of a culture are the right rhythm of its spirit and in breaking the rhythm we may expel the spirit and dissipate the harmony for ever. Yes, but though the Spirit is eternal in its essence and in the fundamental principles of its harmony immutable, the actual rhythm of its self-expression in form is ever mutable. Immutable in its being and in the powers of its being but richly mutable in life, that is the very nature of the Spirit’s manifested existence. And we have to see too whether the actual rhythm of the moment is still a harmony or whether it has not become in the hands of an inferior and ignorant orchestra a discord and no longer expresses rightly or sufficiently the ancient spirit.

…on our capacity of response to the eternal Power and Wisdom and the illumination of the Shakti within us and on our skill in works, the skill that comes by unity with the eternal Spirit we are in the measure of our light labouring to express; yogah karmasu kausalam.

Compensated in later ages by other powers:

If the high spiritualised mind and stupendous force of spiritual will, tapasya, that characterised ancient India were less in evidence, there were new gains of spiritual emotion and sensitiveness to spiritual impulse on the lower planes of consciousness, that had been lacking before. Architecture, literature, painting, sculpture lost the grandeur, power, nobility of old, but evoked other powers and motives full of delicacy, vividness and grace. There was a descent from the heights to the lower levels, but a descent that gathered riches on its way and was needed for the fullness of spiritual discovery and experience.  The greatness of the ideals of the past is a promise of greater ideals for the future. A continual expansion of what stood behind past endeavour and capacity is the one abiding justification of a living culture.

The double principle of persistence and mutation

There are certain fundamental motives or essential idea-forces which cannot be thrown aside, because they are part of the vital principle of our being and of the aim of Nature in us, our svadharma. But these motives, these idea-forces are, whether for nation or for humanity as a whole, few and simple in their essence, and capable of an application always varying and progressive. The rest belongs to the less internal layers of our being and must undergo the changing pressure and satisfy the forward-moving demands of the Time-Spirit. There is this permanent spirit in things and there is this persistent svadharma or law of our nature; but there is too a less binding system of laws of successive formulation, - rhythms of the spirit, forms, turns, habits of the nature, and these endure the mutations of the ages, yugadharma. The race must obey this

double principle of persistence and mutation or bear the penalty a decay and deterioration that may taint even its living centre.

Evolutionary push forward keeping the spirit same and reshaping forms:

Our sense of the greatness of our past must not be made a fatally hypnotising lure to inertia; it should be rather an inspiration to renewed and greater achievement. But in our criticism of the present we must not be one-sided or condemn with a foolish impartiality all that It are or have done. Neither flattering or glossing over our downfall nor fouling our nest to win the applause of the stranger, we have to note our actual weakness and its roots, but to fix too Our eyes with a still firmer attention on our elements of strength, our abiding potentialities, our dynamic impulses of self-renewal.

But far more helpful than any of these necessary comparisons will be the forward look from our past and present towards our own and not any foreign ideal of the future. For it is our evolutionary push towards the future that will give to our past and present their true value and significance. India’s nature, her mission, the work that she has to do, her part in the earth’s destiny, the peculiar power for which she stands is written there in her past history and is the secret purpose behind her present sufferings and ordeals. A reshaping of the forms of our spirit will have to take place; but it is the spirit itself behind past forms that we have to disengage and preserve and to give to it new and powerful thought-significances, culture-values, a new instrumentation, greater figures. And so long as we recognise these essential things and are faithful to their spirit, it will not hurt us to make even the most drastic mental or physical adaptations and the most extreme cultural and social changes.

Political system of its own design

It is true that India never evolved either the scrambling and burdensome industrialism or the parliamentary organisation of freedom and self-styled democracy characteristic of the bourgeois or Vaishya period of the cycle of European progress. But the time is passing when the uncritical praise of these things as the ideal state and the last word of social and political progress

was fashionable, their defects are now visible and the greatness of an oriental civilisation need not be judged by the standard of these western developments. Indian scholars have attempted to read the modem ideas and types of democracy and even a parliamentary system into the past of India, but this seems to me an ill-judged endeavour. There was a strong democratic element, if we must use the western terms, in Indian polity and even institutions that present a certain analogy to the parliamentary form, but in reality these features were of India’s own kind and not at all the same thing as modem parliaments and modern democracy…It was a clan or tribal system, kula, founded upon the equality of all the freemen of the clan or race; this was not at first firmly founded upon the territorial basis, the migratory tendency was still in evidence or recurred under pressure and the land was known by the name of the people who occupied it, the Kuru country or simply the Kurus, the Malava country or the Malavas. After the fixed settlement within determined boundaries the system of the clan or tribe continued, but found a basic unit or constituent atom in the settled village community. The meeting of the people, visah, assembling for communal deliberation, for sacrifice and worship or as the host for war, remained for a long time the power-sign of the mass body and the agent of the active common life with the king as the head and representative,

-- The later development out of this primitive form followed up to a certain point the ordinary line of evolution as we see it in other communities, but at the same time threw up certain very striking peculiarities that owing to the unique mentality of the race fixed themselves, became prominent characteristics and gave a different stamp to the political, economic and social factors of Indian civilisation. The hereditary principle emerged at an early stage and increased constantly its power and hold on the society until it became everywhere the basis of the whole organisation of its activities.

The Democratic ideal:

Almost all the types of political systems viz Anarchy, Socialism, democracy, Capitalism have been tried all across globe and we have our own Indian model of decentralised democracy which is as per Indias mission and swabhava. We mus not

imitate models of others as the fallacy of imitated models is glaring and self destructive.

Sri Aurobindo has detailed writing on the imitattion, failure and right approach to Polity, history on Polity, the examples from the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Puranas, the Shastras and the Smritie, Janapadas, Vishas, Kula, Shreni, Panchyat, Samaj

Chakravartins,  and empire builders as protectors of Dharma, not destroying the local models. The emphasis on the local polity after independence in panchayat raj is thus going back to roots of Indian polity as we see still living polity models surviving even in tribal India since ages. The world is moving on the principles leveraging technologies. The persistent principle of regional autonomy: the grand ideal and backbone of Indian Polity reasserted itself whenever central rule was weak.

A Rishi putting spiritual stamp on all:

A peculiar figure for some time was the Rishi, the man of a higher spiritual experience and knowledge, born in any of the classes, but exercising an authority by his spiritual personality over all, revered and consulted by the king of whom he was sometimes the religious preceptor, and In the then fluid state of social evolution able alone to exercise an important role in evolving new basic ideas and effecting direct and immediate changes of the socio-religious ideas and customs of the people. It was a marked feature of the Indian mind that it sought to attach a spiritual meaning and a religious sanction to all, even to the most external social and political circumstances of its life, imposing on all classes and functions an ideal, not except incidentally of rights and powers, but of duties, a rule of their action and an ideal way and temperament, character, spirit in the action, a dharma with a spiritual significance. It was the work of the Rishi to put this stamp enduringly on the national mind, to prolong and perpetuate it, to discover and interpret the ideal law and its practical meaning, to cast the life of the people into the well-shaped ideals and significant forms of a civilisation founded on the spiritual and religious sense. And in later ages we find the Brahminic schools of legists attributing their codes, though in themselves only formulations of existing rule and custom, to the ancient Rishis. Whatever the developments of the Indian socio-political body in later days, this original character still exercised its influence, even when all tended at last to become traditionalised and conventionalised instead of moving forward constantly in the steps of a free and living practice.” (FOIC)

The cycle of society and the truth of collective being:

“A people, a great human collectivity, is in fact an organic living being with a collective or rather—for the word collective is too mechanical to be true to the inner reality—a common or communal soul, mind and body. The life of the society like the physical life of the individual human being asses through a cycle of birth, growth, youth, ripeness and decline, and if this last stage goes far enough without any arrest of its course towards decadence, it may perish,—even so all the older peoples and nations except India and China perished,—as a man dies of old age. But the collective being has too the capacity of renewing itself, of a recovery and a new cycle. For in each people there is a soul idea or life idea at work, less mortal than its body, and if this idea is itself sufficiently powerful, large and force-giving and the people sufficiently strong, vital and plastic in mind and temperament to combine stability with a constant enlargement or new application of the power of the soul idea or life idea in its being, it may pass through many such cycles before it comes to a final exhaustion. Moreover, the idea is itself only the principle of soul manifestation of the communal being and each communal soul again a manifestation and vehicle of the greater eternal spirit that expresses itself in Time and on earth is seeking, as it were, its own fullness in humanity through the vicissitudes of the human cycles. A people then which learns to live consciously not solely in its physical and outward life, not even only in that and the power of the life idea or soul idea that governs the changes of its development and is the key to its psychology and temperament, but in the soul and spirit behind, may not at all exhaust itself, may not end by disappearance or a dissolution or a fusion into others or have to give place to a new race and people, but having itself fused into its life many original smaller societies and attained to its maximum natural growth pass without death through many renascences. And even if at any time it appears to be on the point of absolute exhaustion and dissolution, it may recover by the force of the spirit and begin another and perhaps a more glorious cycle. The history of India has been that of the life of such a people.

Dharma governs all

The master idea that has governed the life, culture, social ideals of the Indian people has been the seeking of man for his true spiritual self and the use of life—subject to a necessary evolution first of his lower physical, vital and mental nature —as a frame and means for that discovery and for man’s ascent from the ignorant natural into the spiritual existence. This dominant idea India has never quite forgotten even under the stress and material exigences and the externalities of political and social construction. But the difficulty of making the social life an expression of man’s true self and some highest realisation of the spirit within him is immensely greater than that which attends a spiritual self-expression through the things of the mind, religion, thought, art, literature, and while in these India reached extraordinary heights and largenesses, she could not in the outward life go beyond certain very partial realisations, and very imperfect tentatives,—a general spiritualising symbolism, an infiltration of the greater aspiration, a certain cast given to the communal life, the creation of institutions favourable to the spiritual idea. Politics, society, economics are the natural field of the two first and grosser parts of human aim and conduct recognised in the Indian system, interest and hedonistic desire : Dharma, the higher law, has nowhere been brought more than partially into this outer side of life, and in politics to a very minimum extent; for the effort at governing political action by ethics is usually little more than a pretence. The coordination or true union of the collective outward life with moksa, the liberated spiritual existence, has hardly even been conceived or attempted, much less anywhere succeeded in the past history of the yet hardly adult human race. Accordingly, we find that the governance by the Dharma of India’s social, economic and even, though here the attempt broke down earlier than in other spheres, her political rule of life, system, turn of existence, with the adumbration of a spiritual significance behind, —the full attainment of the spiritual life being left as a supreme aim to the effort of the individual,—was as far as her ancient system could advance.

Three stages of evolution of society in India and the next step

Human society has in its growth to pass through three stages of evolution before it can arrive at the completeness of its possibilities. The first is a condition in which the forms and activities of the communal existence are those of the spontaneous play of the powers and principles of its life. All its growth, all its formations, customs, institutions are then a natural organic development,—the motive and constructive power coming mostly from the subconscient principle of the life within it,—expressing, but without deliberate intention, the communal psychology, temperament, vital and physical need, and persisting or altering partly under the pressure of an internal impulse, partly under that of the environment acting on the communal mind and temper. In this stage the people is not yet intelligently self-conscious in the way of the reason, is not yet a thinking collective being, and it does not try to govern its whole communal existence by the reasoning will, but lives according to its vital intuitions or their first mental renderings. The early framework of Indian society and polity grew up in such a period as in most ancient and mediaeval communities, but also in the later age of a growing social self-consciousness they were not rejected but only farther shaped, developed, systematised so as to be always, not a construction of politicians, legislators and social and political thinkers, but a strongly stable vital order natural to the mind, instincts and life intuitions of the Indian people.

A second stage of the society is that in which the communal mind becomes more and more intellectually self-conscious, first in its more cultured minds, then more generally, first broadly, then more and more minutely and in all the parts of its life. It learns to review and deal with its own life, communal ideas, needs, institutions in the light of the developed intelligence and finally by the power of the critical and constructive reason. This is a stage which is fall of great possibilities but attended too by serious characteristic dangers. Its first advantages are those which go always with the increase of a clear and understanding and finally an exact and scientific knowledge and the culminating stage is the strict and armoured efficiency which the critical and constructive, the scientific reason used to the fullest degree offers as its reward and consequence. Another and greater outcome of this stage of social evolution is the emergence of high and luminous ideals which promise to raise man beyond the limits of the vital being, beyond his first social, economic and political needs and desires and out of their customary moulds and inspire an impulse of bold experiment with the communal life which opens a field of possibility for the realisation of a more and more ideal society. This application of the scientific mind to life with the strict, well-finished, armoured efficiency which is its normal highest result, this pursuit of great consciously proposed social and political ideals and the. progress which is the index of the ground covered in the endeavour, have been, with whatever limits and drawbacks, the distinguishing advantages of the political and social effort of Europe.

On the other hand the tendency of the reason when it pretends to deal with the materials of life as its absolute governor, is to look too far away from the reality of the society as, a living growth and to treat it as a mechanism which can be manipulated at will and constructed like so much dead wood or iron according to the arbitrary dictates of the intelligence. The sophisticating, labouring, constructing, efficient, mechanising reason loses hold of the simple principles of a people’s vitality; it cuts it away from the secret roots of its life. The result is an exaggerated dependence on system and institution, on legislation and administration and the deadly tendency to develop, in place of a living people, a mechanical State. An instrument of the communal life tries to take the place of the life itself and there is created a powerful but mechanical and artificial organisation; but, as the price of this exterior gain, there is lost the truth of life of an organically self-developing communal soul in the body of a free and living people. It is this error of the scientific reason stifling the work of the vital and the spiritual intuition under the dead weight of its mechanical method which is the weakness of Europe and has deceived her aspiration and prevented her from arriving at the true realisation of her own higher ideals.

It is only by reaching a third stage of the evolution of the collective social as of the individual human being that the ideals first seized and cherished by the thought of man can discover their own real source and character and their true means and conditions of effectuation or the perfect society be anything more than a vision on a shining cloud constantly run after in a circle and constantly deceiving the hope and escaping the embrace. That will be when man in the collectivity begins to live more deeply and to govern his collective life neither primarily by the needs, instincts, intuitions welling up out of the vital self, nor secondarily by the constructions of the reasoning mind, but first, foremost and always by the power of unity, sympathy, spontaneous liberty, supple and living order of his discovered greater self and spirit in which the individual and the communal existence have their law of freedom, perfection and oneness. That is a rule that has not yet anywhere found its right conditions for even beginning its effort, for it can only come when man’s attempt to reach and abide by the law of the spiritual existence is no longer an exceptional aim for individuals or else degraded in its more general aspiration to the form of a popular religion, but is recognised and followed out as the imperative need of his being and its true and right attainment the necessity of the next step in the evolution of the race.

Preserving smaller aggregates, past forms and the remarkable way of controlling Intellect in its later dominant age :

The small early Indian communities developed like others through the first stage of a vigorous and spontaneous vitality, finding naturally and freely its own norm and line, casting up form of life and social and political institution out of the vital intuition and temperament of the communal being. As they fused with each other into an increasing cultural and social unity and formed larger and larger political bodies, they developed a common spirit and a common basis and general

structure allowing of a great freedom of variation in minor line and figure. There was no need of a rigid uniformity; the common spirit and life impulse were enough to impose on this plasticity a law of general oneness. And even when there grew up the great kingdoms and empires, still the characteristic institutions of the smaller kingdoms, republics, peoples were as much as possible incorporated rather than destroyed or thrown aside in the new cast of the socio-political structure. Whatever could not survive in the natural evolution of the people or was no longer needed, fell away of itself and passed into desuetude; whatever could last by modifying itself to new circumstance and environment was allowed to survive; whatever was in intimate consonance with the psychical and the vital law of being and temperament of the Indian people became universalised and took its place in the enduring  figure of the society and polity.

This spontaneous principle of life was respected by the age of growing intellectual culture. The Indian thinkers on society, economics and politics, Dharma Shastra and Artha Shastra, made it their business not to construct ideals and systems of society and government in the abstract intelligence, but to understand and regulate by the practical reason the institutions and ways of communal living already developed by the communal mind and life and to develop, fix and harmonise without destroying the original elements, and whatever new element or idea was needed was added or introduced as a superstructure or a modifying but not a revolutionary and destructive principle. It was in this way that the transition from the earlier stages to the fully developed monarchical polity v/as managed; it proceeded by an incorporation of the existing institutions under the supreme control of the king or the emperor. The character and status of many of them was modified by the superimposition of the monarchical or imperial system, but, as far as possible, they did not pass out of existence. As a result we do not find in India the element of intellectually idealistic political progress or revolutionary experiment which has been so marked a feature of ancient and of modern Europe. A profound respect for the creations of the past as the natural expression of the Indian mind and life, the sound manifestation of its Dharma or right law of being, was the strongest element in the mental attitude and this preservative instinct was not disturbed but rather yet more firmly settled and fixed by the great millennium of high intellectual culture. A slow evolution of custom and institution conservative of the principle of settled order, of social and political precedent, of established framework and structure was the one way of progress possible or admissible. On the other hand, Indian polity never arrived at that unwholesome substitution of the mechanical for the natural order of the life of the people which has been the disease of European civilisation now culminating in the monstrous artificial organisation of the bureaucratic and industrial State. The advantages of the idealising intellect were absent, but so also were the disadvantages of the mechanising rational intelligence.

The Indian mind has always been profoundly intuitive in habit even when it was the most occupied with the development of the reasoning intelligence, and its political and social thought has therefore been always an attempt to combine the intuitions of life and the intuitions of the spirit with the light of the reason acting as an intermediary and an ordering and regulating factor. It has tried to base itself strongly on the established and persistent actualities of life and to depend for its idealism not on the intellect but on the illuminations, inspirations, higher experiences of the spirit, and it has used the reason as a critical power testing and assuring the steps and aiding but not replacing the life and the spirit—always the true and sound constructors.

From Kali yuga to Satya Yuga : Vasudevam sarvam iti

The spiritual mind of India regarded life as a manifestation of the self: the community was the body of the creator Brahma,

the people was a life body of Brahman in the samas%t%i, the collectivity, it was the collective Narayana, as the individual was Brahman in the vyas%t%i, the separate Jiva, the individual Narayana, the king was the living representative of the Divine and the other orders of the community the natural powers of the collective self, prakr%tayah%. The agreed conventions, institutes, customs, constitution of the body social and politic in all its parts had therefore not only a binding authority but a certain sacrosanct character.

The right order of human life as of the universe is preserved according to the ancient Indian idea by each individual being following faithfully his svadharma, the true law and norm of his nature and the nature of his kind and by the group being, the organic collective life, doing likewise. The  family, clan, caste, class, social, religious, industrial or other community, nation, people are all organic group beings that evolve their own dharma and to follow it is the condition of their preservation, healthy continuity, sound action. There is also the dharma of the position, the function, the particular relation with others, as there is too the dharma imposed by the condition, environment, age, yugadharma, the universal religious or ethical dharma, and all these acting on the natural dharma, the action according to the svabhāva, create the body of the Law. The ancient theory supposed that in an entirely right and sound condition of man, individual and collective, —a condition typified by the legendary Golden Age, Satya Yuga, Age of Truth,—there is no need of any political government or State or artificial construction of society, because all then live freely according to the truth of their enlightened self and God-inhabited being and therefore spontaneously according to the inner divine Dharma. The self-determining individual and self-determining community living according to the right and free law of his and its being is therefore the ideal. But in the actual condition of humanity, its ignorant and devious nature subject to perversions and violations of the true individual and the true social dharma, there has to be superimposed on the natural life of society a State, a sovereign power, a king or governing body, whose business is not to interfere unduly with the life of the society, which must be allowed to function for the most part according to its natural law and custom and spontaneous development, but to superintend and assist its right process and see that the Dharma is observed and in vigour and, negatively, to punish and repress and, as far as may be, prevent offences against the Dharma. A more advanced stage of corruption of the Dharma is marked by the necessity of the appearance of the legislator and the formal government of the whole of life by external or written law and code and rule, but to determine it—apart from external administrative detail—was not the function of the political sovereign, who was only its administrator, but of the socio-religious creator, the Rishi, or the Brahminic recorder and interpreter. And the Law itself written or unwritten was always not a thing to be new created or fabricated by a political and legislative authority, but a thing already existent and only to be interpreted and stated as it was or as it grew naturally out of pre-existing law and principle in the communal life and consciousness. The last and worst state of the society growing out of this increasing artificiality and convention must be a period of anarchy and conflict and dissolution of the Dharma,—Kali Yuga,—which must precede through a red-grey evening of cataclysm and struggle a recovery and a new self-expression of the spirit in the human being.

Three aspects of culture:

India, the ancient possessor of the truth of the spirit, must resist It arrogant claim and aggression and affirm her own deeper truths in spite of heavy odds and against all comers. For in its preservation lies the only hope that mankind instead of marching to a new cataclysm and primitive beginning with a constant repetition of the old blind cycles will at last emerge into the light ..d accomplish the drive forward which will bring the terrestrial evolution to its next step of ascent in the progressive manifestation of the Spirit.

The culture of a people may be roughly described as a consciousness of life which formulates itself in three aspects.

There is a side of thought, of ideal, of upward will and the soul’s aspiration;                                           there is a side of creative self-expression and appreciative aesthesis, intelligence and imagination; and there is a side of practical and outward formulation. P51

The three powers and the innermost sense of Indian culture:

There are three powers that we must grasp in order to judge the life value of a culture. There is first, the power of its original concept of life; there is, next, the power of the forms, types and rhythms it has given to life, there is last the inspiration, the vigor, the force of vital execution of its motives manifested in the actual lives of men and of the community that flourished under its influence… The peculiarity of the Indian will in life is that it feels itself to be unfulfilled, not in touch with perfection, not permanently justified in any intermediate satisfaction if it has not found and does not live in the truth of the spirit. The Indian idea of the world, of Nature and of existence is not physical but psychological and spiritual. Spirit, soul, consciousness are not only greater than inert matter and inconscient force, but they precede and originate these lesser things. All force is a power or means of a secret spirit; the force that sustains the world is a conscious Will, and Nature is its machinery of executive power. Matter is a body or field of consciousness hidden within it, the material universe a form or a movement of the Spirit. Man himself is not a life and mind born of Matter and eternally subject to physical Nature, but a spirit that uses life and body.

P97 It is an understanding faith in this conception of existence, it is an attempt to live it out, it is the science and practice of this high endeavor, and it is the aspiration to break out in the end from this mind bound to life and matter into a greater spiritual consciousness that is the innermost sense of Indian culture. It is this that constitutes the much talked of Indian spirituality.

The spiritual idea governed, enlightened and gathered towards itself all the other life motives of a great civilized people.

In the history of all great cultures there is passage through three stages: there is large and loose formation, in second there is fixing of forms, moulds and rhythms, and there is third period of superannuation, decay, disintegration. If it cannot transform itself, it moves to death and decay. It has to take rebirth and renaissance. India passed through these stages in own leisurely way. From Vedas to the last centuries. To shastras, arts, sculptures..at this point it stopped short of its full flowering and developing of the true spirit . And now is the still confused movement…. This is only the substructure : it is of a pressing importance indeed, but still not the last and greatest thing. When you have paid your debt to society, filled well and admirably your place in its life, helped its maintenance and continuity and taken from it your legitimate and desired satisfactions, -there still remains the greatest thing of all. There is still your own self, the inner you, the soul which is a spiritual portion of the Infinite, one in its essence with the Eternal

The trained minds by centuries of culture

The ordinary materialised souls, the external minds are the majority in India as every where. How easy it is for the superior European critic to forget this common fact of our humanity and treat this turn as a peculiar sign of the Indian mentality ! But at least the people of India, even the "ignorant masses" have this distinction that they are by centuries of training nearer to the inner realities, are divided from them by a less thick veil of the universal ignorance and are more easily led back to a vital glimpse of God and Spirit, self and eternity than the mass of men or even the cultured elite anywhere else. Where else could the lofty, austere and difficult teaching of a Buddha have seized so rapidly on the popular mind? Where else could the songs of a Tukaram, a Ramprasad, a Kabir, the Sikh Gurus and the chants of the Tamil saints with their fervid devotion but also their profound spiritual thinking have found so speedy an echo and formed a popular religious literature? This strong permeation or close nearness of the spiritual turn, this readiness of the mind of a whole nation to turn to the highest realities is the sign and fruit of an agelong, a real and a still living and supremely spiritual culture.