THE SPIRITUAL AIM IN SOCIETY       The true and full spiritual aim in society will regard man not as a mind, a life and a body, but as a soul incarnated for a divine fulfilment up-on earth, not only in heavens beyond, which after all it need not have left if it had no divine business here in the world of physical, vital and mental nature. It will therefore regard the life, mind and body neither as ends in themselves, sufficient for their own satisfaction, nor as mortal members full of disease which have only to be dropped off for the rescued spirit to flee away into its own pure regions, but as first instruments of the soul, the yet imperfect instruments of an unseized diviner purpo

* NATURE OF PHYSICAL SCIENCE*        This preoccupation with life and matter is at the beginning right and necessary because the first step that man has to take is to know and possess this physical existence as well as he can by applying his thought and intelligence to such experience of it as his sense-mind can give to him; but this is only a preliminary step and, if we stop there, we have made no real progress: we are where we were and have gained only more physical elbow-room to move about in and more power for our mind to establish a relative knowledge and an insufficient and precarious mastery and for our life-desire to push things about and jostle and hustle aro

* SOME REMEDIES * A life of unity, mutuality and harmony born of a deeper and wider truth of our being is the only truth of life that can successfully replace the imperfect mental constructions of the past which were a combination of association and regulated conflict, an accommodation of egos and interests grouped or dovetailed into each other to form a society, a consolidation by common general life-motives, a unification by need and the pressure of struggle with outside forces. It is such a change and such a reshaping of life for which humanity is blindly beginning to seek, now more and more with a sense that its very existence depends upon finding the way. The evolution of mind wor

THE SYNTHESIS OF YOGA I LIFE AND YOGA     In the right view both of life and of Yoga all life is either consciously or subconsiously a Yoga. For we mean by this term a methodised effort towards self-perfection by the expression of the potentialities latent in the being and a union of the human individual with the universl and transcendent Existence we see partially expressed in man and in the Commos. But all life, when we look behind its appearances, is a vast Yoga of Nature attempting to realise her perfection in an ever increasing experssion of her potentialities and to unite herself with her own divine reality. In man, her thinker, she for the first time

* THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY*      The question then ares, how out of this purely formal unity a real psychological unity can be created and whether it can be made a living ineness. For a mere formal, mechanical, administrative, political and economic union does not necessarily create a psychological unity. None of the great empires have yet succeeded in doing that, and even in tha Roman where some sense of unity did come into being, it was nothing very close and living; it could not withstand all shocks from within and withoutm, it could not prevent what was much more dangerous, the peril of decay and devitalisation which the diminution of the natural elements of fre

WORLD-UNION OR WORLD-STATE*   this then in principle is the history of the growth of the State. It is a history of strict unification by the development of a central authority and of growing uniformity in administration, legislation, social and economic life and culture and the chief means of culture, education and language. In all the central authority becomes more and more the determining and regulating power. The process culminates by the transformation of this governing sole authority or soveregn power from the rule of the central executive man or the capable class into that of a body whose proposed function is to represent the thought and will of the whole

* SPIRITUAL PHILOSOPHY*       An intellectual approach to the highest knowledge, the mind's possession of it, is an indispensable aid to this movement of Nature in the human being. Ordinarily, on our surface, man's chief instrument of thought and action is the reason, the observing, understanding and arranging intellect. In any total advance or evolution of the spirit, not only the intuition, insight, inner sense, the heart's devotion, a deep and direct life-experience of the things of the spirit have to be developed, but the intellect also must be enlightened and satisfied; our thinking and reflecting mind must be helped to understand, to form a reasoned and systematis

    Section One   SRI AUROBINDO - HIS LIFE AND TEACHING     SRI AUROBINDO : HIS LIFE   SriAurobindo was born in Calcutta on August 15,1872. In 1879, at the age of seven, he was taken with his two elder brothers to England for education and lived there for fourteen years. Brought up at first in an English family at Manchester, he joined St. Paul's School in London in 1885 and in 1890 went from it with a senior classical scholarship to King's College, Cambridge, where he studied for two years. In 1890 he passed also the open competition for the Indian Civil Service, but at the end of two years of probation failed to present himself at the ridi