"Spirituality is indeed the
master-key of the Indian mind; the sense of the infinite
is native to it. India saw from the beginning, and,
even in her ages of reason and her age of increasing
ignorance, she never lost hold of the insight, -that
life cannot be rightly seen in the sole light, cannot
be perfectly lived in the sole power of its externalities.
She was alive to the greatness of material laws and
forces; she had a keen eye for the importance of the
physical sciences; she knew how to organise the arts
of ordinary life. But she saw that the physical does
not get its full sense until it stands in right relation
to the supra-physical; she saw that the complexity of
the universe could not be explained in the present terms
of man or seen by his superficial sight, that there
were other powers behind, other powers within man himself
of which he is normally unaware, that he is conscious
only of a small part of himself, that the invisible
always surrounds the visible, the supra-sensible the
sensible, even as infinity always surrounds the finite.
She saw too that man has the power
of exceeding himself, of becoming himself more entirely
and profoundly than he is, -truths which have only recently
begun to be seen in Europe and seem even now too great
for its common intelligence. She saw the myriad gods
beyond man, God beyond the gods, and beyond God his
own ineffable eternity; she saw that there were ranges
of life beyond our life, ranges of mind beyond our present
mind and above these she saw the splendours of the spirit.
Then with that calm audacity of her intuition which
knew no fear or littleness and shrank from no act whether
of spiritual or intellectual, ethical or vital courage,
she declared that there was none of these things which
man could not attain if he trained his will and knowledge;
he could conquer these ranges of mind, become the spirit,
become one with God, become the ineffable Brahman. And
with the logical practicality and sense of science and
organised method which distinguished her mentality,
she set forth immediately to find out the way. Hence
from long ages of this insight and practice there was
ingrained in her spirituality, her powerful psychic
tendency, her great yearning to grapple with the infinite
and possess it, her ineradicably religious sense, her
idealism, her Yoga, the constant turn of her art and
her philosophy. But this was not and could not be her
whole mentality, her entire spirit; spirituality itself
does not flourish on earth in the void, even as our
mountain-tops do not rise like those of an enchantment
of dream out of the clouds without a base. When we look
at the past of India, what strikes us next is her stupendous
vitality, her inexhaustible power of life and joy of
life, her almost unimaginably prolific creativeness.
For the third power of the ancient
Indian spirit was a strong intellectuality, at once
austere and rich, robust and minute, powerful and delicate,
massive in principle and curious in detail. Its chief
impulse was that of order and arrangement, but an order
founded upon a seeking for the inner Law and truth of
things and having in view always the possibility of
conscientious practice… Indeed without this opulent
vitality and opulent intellectuality India could never
have done so much as she did with her spiritual tendencies.
It is a great error to suppose that spirituality flourishes
best in an impoverished soil with the life half-killed
and the intellect discouraged and intimidated. The spirituality
that so flourishes is something morbid, hectic and exposed
to perilous reactions. It is when the race has lived
most richly and thought most profoundly that spirituality
finds its heights and its depths and its constant and
many-sided fruition."
India can best develop herself and
serve humanity by being herself and following the law
of her own nature. This does not mean, as some narrowly
and blindly suppose, the rejection of everything new
that comes to us in the stream of Time or happens to
have been first developed or powerfully expressed by
the West. Such an attitude would be intellectually absurd,
physically impossible and, above all, un-spiritual;
true spiritual; true spirituality rejects no new light,
no added means or materials of our human self-development."
