The "Arya's" Fourth Year   WE CLOSE this month the fourth year of the "Arya", and bring to a conclusion at the same time the "Psychology of Social Development", the "Ideal of Human Unity" and the first series of the "Essays on the Gita" A few more chapters will complete the "Life Divine" We are therefore well in view of the completion of the first part of the work which we had proposed to ourselves in starting this philosophical monthly, and we take the opportunity to say a few words upon the principle which has governed our writing and which the difficulty of a serial exposition on several lines at a time, scattering and breaking up the total impression, may have preve

Mind of Light   A NEW humanity means for us the appearance, the development of a type or race of mental beings whose principle of mentality would be no longer a mind in the Ignorance seeking for knowledge but even in its knowledge bound to the Ignorance, a seeker after Light but not its natural possessor, open to the Light but not an inhabitant of the Light, not yet a perfected instrument, truth-conscious and delivered out of the Ignorance Instead, it would be possessed already of what could be called a mind of Light, a mind capable of living in the truth, capable of being truth-conscious and manifesting in its life a direct in place of an indirect knowled

Involution and Evolution   THE WESTERN idea of evolution is the statement of a process of formation, not an explanation of our being Limited to the physical and biological data of Nature, it does not attempt except in a summary or a superficial fashion to discover its own meaning, but is content to announce itself as the general law of a quite mysterious and inexplicable energy Evolution becomes a problem in motion which is satisfied to work up with an automatic regularity its own puzzle, but not to work it out, because, since it is only a process, it has no understanding of itself, and, since it is a

Rebirth and Karma   THE ANCIENT idea of Karma was inseparably connected with a belief in the soul's continual rebirth in new bodies And this close association was not a mere accident, but a perfectly intelligible and indeed inevitable union of two related truths which are needed for each other's completeness and can with difficulty exist in separation These two things are the soul side and the nature side of one and the same cosmic sequence Rebirth is meaningless without karma, and karma has no fount of inevitable origin and no rational and no moral justification if it is not an instrumentality for the sequences of the soul's continuous experience If w

Supermind and the Life Divine   A DIVINE life upon earth, the ideal we have placed before us, can only come about by a spiritual change of our being and a radical and fundamental change, an evolution or revolution of our nature The embodied being upon earth would have to rise out of the domination over it of its veils of mind, life and body into the full consciousness and possession of its spiritual reality, and its nature also would have to be lifted out of the consciousness and power of consciousness proper to a mental, vital and physical being into the greater consciousness and greater power of being and the larger and freer life of the

Karma and Justice   WHAT ARE the lines of Karma? What is the intrinsic character and active law of this energy of the soul and its will and development of consequence? To ask that question is to ask what is the form taken here by the dynamic meaning of our existence and what the curves of guidance of its evolving self-creation and action And such a question ought not to be answered in a narrow spirit or under the obsession of some single idea which does not take into account the manysidedness and rich complexity of this subtle world of Nature The law of Karma can be no rigid and mechanical canon or rough practical rule of thumb, but rather its guiding

Yoga and Skill in Works Yoga is skill in works Gita   YOGA, says the Gita, is skill in works, and by this phrase the ancient Scripture meant that the transformation of mind and being to which it gave the name of Yoga brought with it a perfect inner state and faculty out of which the right principle of action and the right spiritual and divine result of works emerged naturally like a tree out of its seed Certainly, it did not mean that the clever general or politician or lawyer or shoemaker deserves the name of a Yogin; it did not mean that any kind of skill in works was Yoga, but by Yoga it signified a sp

Karma   ONE FINDS an unanswerable truth in the theory of Karma, —not necessarily in the form the ancients gave to it, but in the idea at its centre, —which at once strikes the mind and commands the assent of the understanding Nor does the austerer reason, distrustful of first impressions and critical of plausible solutions, find after the severest scrutiny that the more superficial understanding, the porter at the gateways of our mentality, has been deceived into admitting a tinsel guest, a false claimant into our mansion of knowledge There is a solidity at once of philosophic and of practical truth supporting the idea, a bedr

APPENDIX   Explanations of Some Words and Phrases   "Matter itself, you will one day realise, is not material, it is not substance but form of consciousness, guna, the result of  quality of being perceived by sense-knowledge" (p 77)   There is no need to put "the" before "quality" —in English that would alter the sense Matter is not regarded in this passage as a quality of being perceived by sense; I don't think that would have any meaning It is regarded as a result of a certain power and action of consciousness which presents forms of itself to sense perception and it is this quality of sense-perceivedness, so to sp

Meditation   What exactly is meant by meditation in Yoga? And what should be its objects?   The difficulty our correspondent finds is in an apparent conflict of authorities, as sometimes meditation is recommended in the form of a concentrated succession of thoughts on a single subject, sometimes in the exclusive concentration of the mind on a single image, word or idea, a fixed contemplation rather than meditation The choice between these two methods and others, for there are others, depends on the object we have in view in Yoga. The thinking mind is the one instrument we possess at present by which we can arrive at a conscious self-orga