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.