XVIII. The Cosmic Illusion The Master of Maya creates this world by his Maya and within it is confined another; one should know his Maya as Nature and the Master of Maya as the great Lord of all. Swetaswatara Upanishad' The Eternal is true; the world is a lie. Viveka Chudamani2 It became both truth and falsehood. It became the Truth, even all this that is. Taittiriya Upanishad3 All human thought, all mental man's experience moves between a constant affirmation and negation. At the outset man lives in his physical mind which perceives the actual, the physical, the objective and accepts it as act and this a

XI. Annam Brahmeti Vyajanāt He arrived at the knowledge that Matter is Brahman. Taittiriya Upanishad1 "Matter is Sachchidananda represented to His own mental experience as a formal basis of objective know- ledge, action and delight of existence." The Life Divine2 There is a self that is of the essence of Matter — there is another inner self of Life that fills the other — there is another inner self of Mind — there is inner self of Truth-Knowledge — there is another inner self of Bliss. Taittiriya Upanishad3 The two extremes which philosophy must avoid are materialism ignoring Spirit and spiritu

XXII. Modes of Manifestation As Matter3 is only substance-form of Force, so we shall discover that material Force is only energy-form of Mind. Material force is in fact a subconscious operation of Will. It is a subconscious Mind or Intelligence which, manifesting Force as its driving power, its executive Nature, its Prakriti, has created this material world. But Mind is no independent and original entity but only a final operation of the Truth-Consciousness or Supermind. Therefore Supermind is the real creative agency of the universal Existence. The triple world that we live in, the world of Mind-Life-Body, is triple only in its actual accomplished evolution.

VII. A Critical Retrospect It is a hard thought, but man is an insignificant creature when seen against the background of cosmic immensity, when viewed in relation to the gamut of organic change and upheaval, the profusion of life's struggles and harmonies. He inhabits the earth in company with something like a million other species of animals, to say nothing of a great variety of plants. With these he attempts with varying degrees of success, to live in some sort of concord. There is nothing, the scientist believes, to indicate that nature has a special regard for the human species; mankind is not absolved from the necessity of expending energy in adjusting itself to t

VI. Evolution of Homo Sapiens a ...the course of nature...seems delighted with transmutations. Newton1 "There are words which some turn in the history of thought suddenly overwhelms with a large special meaning. Such a one is evolution."2 The modern man cannot begin to understand his own position until he knows a good deal about it. Not only is evolution vital to the modern man's search for religion, but much elucidation will be found by following the steps by which the idea found entry into the human imagination. "To the modern man," thinks J.L. Davies, "it is difficult to put himself in a frame of mind in which evolution has no place."3 The idea of ev

XVI. The Integral Weltanschauung The characteristic note of Greek philosophy, when it was at the height of its glory, was knowledge of values, not love of facts. Again, Renaissance saw the pursuit of the knowledge of values. Descartes' Cogito ergo sum is man's discovery of his lost soul. It was Kant who helped to place philosophy on its high pedestal by showing that even facts are facts because there are values working in them. His real mistake lay, not in giving knowledge a lower status, but in not recognising any other knowledge than this. Hegel removed this defect of the Kantian philosophy and gave man unlimited possibilities of knowledge. The whole scheme wa

XXIV. Evolution: Individual and Cosmic Evolution means the reversibility of Nature; for it is the backward movement of an involutionary process. The supreme truth and reality — Sat-Chit-Ananda — multiplied and concretised itself gradually through various steps and stages of a diminishing power of expression or an increasing entropy of self-concealment: the main grades being the Super-mind, the Overmind, the Higher Mind, the Mind, Life and lastly the body or Matter. Having arrived at the extreme end that Matter represents — the farthest apparently from the original source — the movement turns round and seeks to go up the ladder through the same gradations it

XIV. The Nisus of Evolution The concept of evolution signifies change of a specified character, change for the higher and the better. It means development, creative advance, continual enrichment of being, progressive manifestation of ever higher and more desirable qualities. The theory of evolution represents the movement of time as an upward curve of development which gradually unfolds unsuspected treasures and brings into existence ever higher values. Time is thus credited with an enormous creative importance; it is indeed regarded as the very principle of creativity. But this conception of time is criticised by Russell on the ground that the apparent importance

TO THE MOTHER "In her the conscious Will took human shape : She only can save herself and save the world..." - Savitri

IX. The Limitations of Science What we need is not a mere concept of evolution struggling to explain a few of the random factors of existence, but it must, in every possibility, in its sweep and scope, be a theory of the universe. If the savage was a sufferer from agoraphobia, frightened of the too vast spaces around him, the picture of the Universe drawn by science in the early twentieth century was the vision of a man suffering from claustrophobia. Our earth and the universe have not always been what they are now. The Universe we now see with our earth stirring in a corner, teeming with living beings of which man is the highest, has been the result of a very l