True Spirituality Is the Ultimate Hope for Perfection of Human Individuals and the Society : Sri Aurobindo

19/03/2018

Spirituality, not religion, can provide direction and answers for human evolution and the increasing perfection of society.  Religion tends almost invariably to focus on a particular creed, cult, ritual, or way of life, and tends to create opposition to other forms of understanding or worship than the specific mode followed by that religion.  This narrowness implies that religion is not able to create the true harmony and oneness that must be the basis of social relationships for all of humanity.  Spirituality, on the other hand, in its truest sense, is an opening to the Divine in life, and is free of the limitations of a particular way of relationship; rather, it accepts all paths and all ways as means of advance and encourages people to follow whichever practices are best suited to the individual nature and the times within which those individuals live and grow.

Sri Aurobindo observes:  “In spirituality then would lie our ultimate, our only hope for the perfection whether of the individual or of the communal man; not the spirit which for its separate satisfaction turns away from the earth and her works, but that greater spirit which surpasses and yet accepts and fulfils them.  A spirituality that would take up into itself man’s rationalism, aestheticism, ethicism, vitalism, corporeality, his aspiration towards knowledge, his attraction towards beauty, his need of love, his urge towards perfection, his demand for power and fullness of life and being, a spirituality that would reveal to these ill-accorded forces their divine sense and the conditions of their godhead, reconcile them all to each other, illumine to the vision of each the way which they now tread in half-lights and shadows, in blindness or with a deflected sight, is a power which even man’s too self-sufficient reason can accept or may at least be brought one day to accept as sovereign and to see in it its own supreme light, its own infinite source.”

“A satisfying evolution of the nascent spirituality still raw and inchoate in the race is the possibility to which an age of subjectivism is a first glimmer of awakening or towards which it shows a first profound potentiality of return.  A deeper, wider, greater, more spiritualised subjective understanding of the individual and communal self and its life and a growing reliance on the spiritual light and the spiritual means for the final solution of its problems are the only way to a true social perfection.  The free rule, that is to say, the predominant lead, control and influence of the developed spiritual man — not the half-spiritualised priest, saint or prophet or the raw religionist — is our hope for a divine guidance of the race.  A spiritualised society can alone bring about a reign of individual harmony and communal happiness; or, in words which, though liable to abuse by the reason and the passions, are still the most expressive we can find, a new kind of theocracy, the kingdom of God upon earth, a theocracy which shall be the government of mankind by the Divine in the hearts and minds of men.”

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