VIII 

The Origin of Religion

The quest for the Immanent and All-Powerful Entity began when self-consciousness dawned on living creatures. The endless limitations with which the Spirit finds itself surrounded, the insufficiency and incompleteness on all sides, the utter helplessness in the face of death, and in illness and suffering, all combine to stir up in man a longing to find out the source of all life, all light, all happiness and all Bliss. He seeks a power with which to combat all evil, fight the dark forces of the negative power, chase away pain and misery, and be established with unchangeable permanence in this ever-changing universe. He wants to find the central permanent point, around which the eternal dance of creation and destruction goes on ceaselessly.

The roots of all religions are to be found in the attempt of man, from age to age, to solve this mystery of duality: life and death, light and darkness, Truth and untruth, opulence and poverty. Dissatisfied with his surroundings, he begins the eternal search anew and turns to the why and wherefore of things.

He now tries to find the substratum of life itself, the source from which the creative life-principle springs, which enlivens the body and the bodily adjuncts and activates everything around him. Once this question takes hold of a person, it never leaves him, and he plunges himself headlong into the problem and seeks to solve the mystery in whatever way he can. He begins his search first of all in the creeds and beliefs of the age and the surroundings in which he lives. But when all these fail to satisfy him and he discovers himself in the wilderness of different ideologies, conflicting theories, heterogeneous postulates and conclusions, he feels bewildered and helpless to chalk out for himself the Way-out. Next, he turns to the scriptures and religious texts for the solace of his mind, but here, too, he is confronted with insurmountable difficulties: want of knowledge of the archaic languages in which they are written, the subtlety of the subject, lack of practical men of realisation to give him their correct and true import.

The momentous quest now takes another turn. He breaks through all the barriers of age-old traditions and customs, social and ritualistic observances and accepted codes of conduct, so that he may discover the hidden light and the Power of God – the lost Word – something greater and more powerful than what he has experienced hitherto in the outer world. From the search without, he gradually withdraws his attention and begins to concentrate on the thought of self within. In this way he comes to distinguish between Religion and religiosity, or religious beliefs and practices, all of which are connected with the sensory plane only. The seeds of life lie in the depths of life itself – the spirit or the soul – in every living thing, even plants and flowers.

Spirituality is concerned with the most vital problems of the Spirit alone – what it is, where it dwells, how it works, how it can be concentrated to dwell upon itself, how it can be separated from the folds of the body and mind, where it goes after death, how it can voluntarily be withdrawn from the sensory plane of the body, the specific journey that lies ahead, the various spiritual planes that it has to traverse, its ultimate goal, and many other topics of an allied nature connected with its well-being. This, then, is the religion of the soul, quite distinct and apart from the social and moral well-being of an individual, both of which depend on his spiritual well-being.

A sound mind in a sound body,

is a well-known aphorism, but a sound soul at the back of them both is of paramount importance, because mind and body live by the soul, the great dynamo or motor power, in the life and light of which both these adjuncts work.

This search for the true self, though full of mysteries, and with untold possibilities and immense spiritual treasures within (of which the Saints sing in glorious terms), now attracts the attention of the seeker. It is purely a subjective matter and lies beyond the pale of reasoning and imagination. It is a Wisdom of the Beyond, Para Vidya, and can be experienced by the soul in its pure nakedness, released from all the enshrouding sheaths.

We cannot but repeat the memorable words of Guru Nanak, in this context:

One cannot comprehend Him through reason, even if one reasoned for ages. One cannot achieve Inner Peace by outward silence, though one sat dumb for ages; one cannot buy contentment with all the riches of the world, nor reach Him with all mental ingenuity: How may one know the Truth and break through the cloud of falsehood? There is a Way, oh Nanak! To make His Will our own, His Will which is already wrought in our existence.

Jap Ji, Stanza 1

Once convinced of the futility of all outer knowledge and wisdom, performances and observances, the search within becomes a passion with the sincere seeker after Truth, for self-realization is a key to God-Realization. 

St Augustine, once sitting on the seashore with his great work 'De Trinitate,' saw a child taking the sea-water into a shell and pouring it into a hole he had made in the sand. Asked what he was doing, the child naively replied that he was trying to empty the ocean. The great Sage explained to him the futility of all his endeavours, since it was an impossibility. 

Exactly the same is the position in the case of God-Knowledge, for He, the Infinite, cannot be known by the finite individual trying to grasp Him at the level of the intellect. How can a part know the whole? Self, the basis of all conscious life, cannot be cognised by the conscious mind or intellect. A thing not based on Realities, cannot be real and cannot know the real. Even of the yogic methods as means to still the mind for self-realisation, Gaudpada, the famous forerunner of Patanjali (author of the yoga systems, thousands of years before), spoke about such efforts as strivings of a person to empty the ocean drop by drop with the tip of a blade of grass.

From the above, it would be abundantly clear that the germs of all religions are located in self-questionings and self-communings of the great souls. Here all religious philosophies end and True Religion begins. By degrees this Inner Search proceeds, and, one by one, the koshas or the coverings of the spirit are analysed, pierced through and discarded. They are peeled off layer by layer in the deep Inner Silence of the mind, until the mental apparatus itself also drops off like a tattered garment, leaving the soul free and resplendent in its pristine luminosity, more lustrous than the light of several suns put together. This is called evolution of the Spirit or unfoldment of the Reality, shrouded as it is in innumerable coverings to start with. Self-knowledge or Atma Sidhi precedes God-Knowledge or Paramatma Sidhi.

It is only when the spirit comes into its own and is freed from all the earthly ties and the bodily trappings, physical, astral and causal, that it is in a position to apprehend, appreciate or feel the presence of God or Reality. The senses, the mind and the intellect, in their gross nature, ever fail to know and understand the Reality by means of logic, philosophy and metaphysics. It is the spirit in its original purity, when disengaged and disentangled from the various trappings, that can contact Godhood. Spirituality in its true sense, as described above, can neither be bought, nor taught, but may be caught, as if it were an infection, from some Godman. All learning through books, lectures or philosophic disputations cannot make a person spiritual.

The love of God may be seen in the love laden eyes of the Son of God. His liquid eyes betray the Divine intoxication within them. They are cups bubbling over with God's life, love and light. Herein lies the hiatus between sectarianism, the great scriptures of the world, the so-called religions, as confined and cramped in the pages of sacred and monumental works of the ancients, in languages too ancient, too archaic and too technical to be understood, on the one hand – and spirituality, the science of the Soul or True Religion of the Spirit, on the other. The latter is the common heritage of the entire humanity, catholic in its approach, unlimited in its scope and unfettered by anyone´s professed belief, faith and religious notions. It is an Inner Process of the spirit; and all saints preach of nothing but spirituality in its pure, undiluted and unalloyed form.

God is the Divine Ground on which life, mind and matter make their play, and all these cannot possibly know the very Life of their life. Saints, therefore, emphasise that this Divine Ground can only be felt by intuition when directly experienced by realisation, which is possible only by the sixth sense or the Inner Eye. That centre is also known as Nukta-i-Sweda, the Third Eye, the Divine Vision, the Single Eye. 

Christ says that it shall fill the whole body with Light – Light uncreated, perennial and everlasting, Light which is self-existent and shadowless, Light that never is on land or sea. 

This is why Jesus, the Prophet, asks us to beware lest the Light in the body turn into darkness:

The Light shineth in the darkness and the darkness comprehendeth it not.

The outer symbol of this we see nowadays in the lighted candles at church altars, the earthen lamps in temples and gurdawaras (now of course replaced by electric light), and the ever-burning fires in Zoroastrian homes.

Akin to the Single Eye is also the Voice of God, (the Kalma of the Muslims, the Word of Christ, the Sruti of the Vedas, Udgit of the Upanishads, Sraosha of the Zoroastrians, Élan Vital or the Life Current of the Western philosophers, and Voice of the Silence of the Theosophists) within the body which we cannot hear, as our spiritual ears have been waxed and sealed. 

This great Truth is symbolized in outer life by the conches in the temples, the gongs in the Gurdwaras and Buddhist temples, the bells in Church belfries and Jaras (Big bell) of the Sufis. The Saints in all climes and in all times have made frequent references to this phenomenon in all their teachings and writings.

The True Religion or Spirituality consists in linking the soul with Oversoul in its manifested play of Light and Sound in the God-made temple of the human body. The more the spirit withdraws from without and transcends its limitations – physical, astral, and causal – the more experience it gets of the spiritual phenomena, with the Grace of the Master. Such is vouchsafed to one who has prepared for death in life at will – for unless one learns to die daily, one cannot have life ever-lasting. Bergson, the great philosopher, calls it open religion as contra-distinguished from closed religions, that is, religions sealed down in ancient and 'immutable' scriptures, spoken of and taken to be the last word.

Religions have now been reduced to the mere performance of charitable deeds, observance of rites, rituals and ceremonies like fasts and pilgrimages; wearing of particular apparel; white, yellow, blue, flame-coloured or ochre robes; keeping peculiar marks on the body like a tuft of hair on the head, sacred thread across the shoulder, circumcision or the five Kakas; all of which have no substantial bearing, however remote, on the advancement of the soul towards self-realisation and God-Realization.

The prime need of the age is a living Reality, a dip in the ocean of life, a sip of the elixir of life, a vision of the Divine Light that may bestow immortality and lead to efflorescence of the spirit into Godhood. 

This is what Sri Aurobindo says: 

Contact the Super-mind and draw it down to make divine all life, mind and matter. It is the common birthright of all created beings and not the monopoly of any nation or class of individuals professing this or that faith or belief.

Man by nature is a composite being – the component parts being body, mind and soul. God made man after His own image and so the Saints ordain:

Be thou as perfect as thy Father in Heaven is perfect.

Thrice blessed is man on account of the immense and immeasurable possibilities that have been lodged in him by the Maker. The very Divinity, with Holy Light, Life and Love, is the very soul of his soul. But alas, what man has made of man – and worse still, of himself – no better than a beast, or even worse than that.

It behoves man as man to be rich, abundantly rich, in all the three aspects of his life – as distinguished from the mutilated, maimed and moth-eaten existence that he now has through ignorance of self-knowledge. This creation is a double process: involution with evolution. The Divinity involved in the very nature of the spirit, mind and matter has to be evolved, enlarged and developed, until it completely and fully coincides with the Divine ground, the substratum on which, in sheer ignorance, it now plays its limited and restricted part unmindful of its Godhood.

*The physical self of the soul is endowed with ten instruments: five karam indriyas or motor powers, and five jnana indriyas or powers of perception, all of which help the body in its worldly dealings. The mind has been gifted with four facets: mana – mind-stuff; chit – consciousness; buddhi – intellect; and ahankar – ego; all of which operate in the world of senses and help the psyche in thinking and discrimination in the light of reason. (* This section is adjusted to the First Edition of 1959; Editor’s Note 2012.) Next in the ascending scale comes soul, the great rider in the vehicle of the mind-driven body. Its instrument of action is surat, self-consciousness or attention born of the great consciousness. This attention, if properly helped and guided, brings about singleness of purpose and fixity in aim; it collects and gathers up the wandering faculties of the mind from the sense as identified with objects and immersed in their enjoyment.

While the body works, the mind discriminates and the psyche craves happiness. Should the three component parts, body, mind and attention (soul), be brought into harmony at one common centre, the life on earth of the poor, limited and bound psyche, becomes a real blessing, eternal and everlasting, possessing all the attributes of the supramental consciousness: namely, Sat, Chit, Ananda – existence, consciousness and bliss.

A person who devotes his attention to the body-building process grows in physical strength with muscles fully developed and well knit; he is looked upon as an embodiment of radiant health, and is admired by hundreds of people who see him. 

A person who devotes his attention to the development of his mental powers acquires a keen and sharp intellect, grows into an intellectual giant and inspires thousands of persons by his powerful speeches and writings. 

Again, one who takes to the development of the self or spirit in him, becomes divine and in course of time becomes a Godman and Godhood shines in Him through and through. He sheds heavenly lustre among great gatherings and audiences that come into his fold, and, as a Tower of Spirituality, He serves as a beacon light to all and sundry in the stormy sea of life. 

This is the yoga of hand, heart and head combined into one, and makes a person an integrated whole, perfect as the Father in Heaven is. All this and still more comes to him by communion with and practice of the Word (the Music of the Soul or Song of the Pranva), which reverberates ceaselessly in and around him. This is the True Religion, a religion of the living spirit (Truth), the Open Religion of Bergson. There is, in fact, no religion higher than this, giving life and light alike to one and all, and making man thrice blessed – blessed in body, mind and soul – fit to be worshipped and adored not only by his fellow beings but even by the angels, as ordained by God, when He makes man after His own image.

This human body is a veritable temple of God, wherein the spirit or the soul can be attuned to listen to the Divine Music within. It can be made to witness and enjoy the Divine Light, and enabled to get Divine revelations like the prophets of old. When once it experiences the Supreme Bliss, all attachments of the world fall off by themselves, lose their glamour and charm. The psyche, freed from oblivion, blossoms forth into a new life – the life of the spirit as distinguished from the life of the senses. This is spirituality, this is the true religion, into the mysteries of which only a Saint or a Master-Soul initiates a true seeker and aspirant by unlocking the door leading to the Kingdom of God, which is right within us. 

About this door Christ says:

Knock and it shall be opened unto thee.