"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."
