A total spiritual direction given to the whole life and the whole nature can alone lift humanity beyond itself. . . It is only the full emergence of the soul, the full descent of the native light and power of the Spirit and the consequent replacement or transformation and uplifting of our insufficient mental and vital nature by a spiritual and supramental Supernature that can effect this evolutionary miracle.
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.
Life was a sorrowful throb of this Matter teaching it anguish, Teaching it hope and desire trod out too soon in the mire, Life the frail joy that regrets its briefness, life the long sorrow.
The experiences of your past life which are stored within come up to the surface to be rejected. By rejecting all these by and by the inside will have to be cleansed.
Many of us, utterly overcome by Tamas, the dark and heavy demon of inertia, are saying nowadays that it is impossible, that India is decayed, bloodless and lifeless, too weak ever to recover; that our race is doomed to extinction. It is a foolish and idle saying. No man or nation need be weak unless he chooses, no man or nation need perish unless he deliberately chooses extinction.
Each religion has helped mankind. Paganism increased in man the light of beauty, the largeness and height of his life, his aim at a many-sided perfection; Christianity gave him some vision of divine love and charity; Buddhism has shown him a noble way to be wiser, gentler, purer, Judaism and Islam how to be religiously faithful in action and zealously devoted to God; Hinduism has opened to him the largest and profoundest spiritual possibilities.
Those who have advanced rise to the mind which is in the head, - they have the play of their mental movements in the head itself. But all these are inside the body; man is, as it were, shut up in a box, his entire consciousness is confined within the organism. This imprisonment has to be undone.