India is the meeting-place of the religions and among these Hinduism alone is by itself a vast and complex thing, not so much a religion as a great diversified and yet subtly unified mass of spiritual thought, realization and aspiration.
The seers of ancient India had, in their experiments and efforts at spiritual training and the conquest of the body, perfected a discovery which in its importance to the future of human knowledge dwarfs the divinations of Newton and Galileo , even the discovery of the inductive and experimental method in Science was not more momentous.
The psychic being and the mental being, Manomaya Purusha, are not the same. The psychic being is behind the mind, it is what the Westerners call the soul. It takes interest in the movements of the mind and the vital only when there is a harmony between these movements and the truth above. The knowledge of the psychic being is deeper.
Not only a truer knowledge, but a greater power comes to one in the quietude and silence of a mind that, instead of bubbling on the surface, can go to its own depths and listen.
What is required is faith. Man has body, life and mind but that is not all that constitutes man. He has risen to the mind as a result of evolution. Now a higher consciousness will be evolved - this I call Supermind. It is the instrument of the Divine Consciousness, the Truth-Consciousness.
The Force which has to be called down from above must be pure and quiet because there are all kinds of forces - it will not do to call them all. And one must have sincerity.
She saw too that man has the power of exceeding himself, of becoming himself more entirely and profoundly than he is, - truths which have only recently begun to be seen in Europe and seem even now too great for its common intelligence.
We can arrive at a point of view where the preservation of the individual activities is no longer inconsistent with our comprehension of the cosmic consciousness or our attainment to the transcendent and supracosmic.
The navel region is the centre of the vital. It is from here that the movements of the vital rise upward. Above the navel and behind the chest is the centre of the play of emotions and below this takes place the play of the physical. Mulādhāra is the base of the physical. In between the Mulādhāra and the navel, there is another centre of the vital.
Live according to Nature, runs the maxim of the West; but according to what nature, the nature of the body or the nature which exceeds the body? This first we ought to determine.
The yoga we practice is not for ourselves alone, but for the Divine; its aim is to work out the will of the Divine in the world, to effect a spiritual transformation and to bring down a divine nature and a divine life into the mental, vital and physical nature and life of humanity. Its object is not personal Mukti, although Mukti is a necessary condition of the yoga, but the liberation and transformation of the human being. It is not personal Ananda, but the bringing down of the divine Ananda - Christ's kingdom of heaven, our Satyayuga - upon the earth.
The consciousness of the supreme Purusha remains above, but in the mind there may be a Purusha consciousness which they call the cosmic consciousness - it is wide, all-pervading, one. Outside this goes on the play of Prakriti.