Religion must organize itself on a more intellectual basis to meet modern needs. It must present a fuller system, which will intelligibly explain the inner meaning of man, God, and the Universe. It must not contradict the verified knowledge of modern science. It ought no longer to attempt to outrage reason, but should go out of the way to convince it. It must be so timely and reasonable that it will give satisfying intelligent answers to the most disconcerting questions.
On the second point, it is a lesson of history that if religion is to be more rational it will have to be less ritualistic. The tendency of all external rites is to become empty and hollow. Nobody is worse off and everybody is better off when religious practices or rites which have become merely mechanical and utterly hypocritical are abandoned, whether in disbelief or in disgust. As a religion becomes less inspired, it becomes ritualistic. What it is no longer able to give men through inward power, it pretends to give them through outward forms. When the means of worship becomes an actual hindrance to communion with the Worshipped, when the worshipper is deceived by pretense of the act into belief that he has performed the act itself, it is time to call a halt. Nevertheless, ritual is useful if it helps the mind to think of diviner things and it therefore has a proper place in religion. If a religious ceremony acts as a springboard whence a man can enter more easily into a reverential mood, it has justified its value for him. This is usually the case with the peasant mentality among the lower classes and with the aesthetic temperament among the higher ones, although it is much less true of artisan town workers and city intellectuals who indeed may find it a hindrance to worship rather than a help. Religion will always be, by its nature, something of an allegory; but it need not always stick to the same set of symbols. Why should not this era find a new religious symbolism? In the end, religion will find its truer expression in the public acts and private thoughts of a man than in its own public rites. Those who would propagate it will best do so by their living example. It will then become less formal and more vital, less institutional and more free, less devoted to public parades in church, temple, or synagogue and more devoted to personal righteousness in home, factory, and field.
The practical question arises: What is to be done with orthodox religious institutions as they exist today? Much needs to be done with them. If mankind's religious leaders could broaden their vision, could recognize these truths, there would then be some hope for their institutions. If they cannot put themselves at the head of this movement, then they will have to become stragglers in its rear. The choice cannot be evaded. But first it may be said that unless the State dis-establishes religion, it will continue to get not religion in its purity but religion in its degeneration. To worship an institution merely because it is an established one, is to worship an idol. The new religious teaching must be a vocation, not a profession. Hence, teachers may receive voluntary contributions towards their expenses, but they must not be paid a prescribed salary.
If rites and ceremonies will be less needed, then the services of priests to perform them will also be less needed. The coming faith will not only be a rational and riteless one, but may also be a priestless one. It will tolerate no paid professionals to exploit it in their own interests, but will substitute direct, silent, inward communion instead. It will not mock at itself with ostentatious, theatrical ceremonies nor at truth with hollow clamour, but will substitute the remembrances of moral law in everyday conduct instead. The services of a professional priestly class were needed when the intellect of the race was still undeveloped and the masses still uneducated. But today, when men are becoming mentally individualized and when illiteracy is becoming rapidly eliminated, people can read and reflect over sacred scriptures for themselves and with their own understanding. Not only will there be no religious ceremonials, no paid clergy, but there will be no public prayers. For these, sooner or later, tend to degenerate into hollow, meaningless formalities. Here, indeed, "Familiarity breeds contempt."
Its very newness would be an attractive feature to many because it would not have had time to develop the maladies of stiffened arteries and congealed blood, but would possess an aura of hope and helpfulness, of enthusiasm and energy. The religion of the new era must be alive. It must be so radiant with inspiration that it will have something to give man, instead of weakly begging for its own support and sustenance from him. It must be effective because so long as young people are given an uninspired religion and a mistaken education, so long will they be badly equipped for the hard business of living. We say "uninspired" because not a few even of institutionalized religion's own ministers have raised their hands in helplessness as they watched the melancholy spectacle of a deserting flock and the inevitable results of an antiquated creed dwindling daily in its authority over the lives and hearts of men. In the early part of 1939, for example, it was noted that only 5 percent of the people of London thought it worthwhile to attend any place of worship. And we say "mistaken" because, to take a particularly glaring example, the German people were one of the best-educated in the whole world and yet the Nazi doctrines were able to impose successfully on the German mind.
On the third point, the postwar situation of society will depend, eventually, less upon its political arrangements and more upon its ethical decisions. If it fails to maintain enough of the idealism born during the war, then like a rudderless, propellerless ship it will be helplessly tossed about upon a stormy sea. The old values have miserably collapsed where they deserved to do so. And, unfortunately, in their fall they have dragged down some sound, ethical ones, which have not deserved to suffer in the same way but which selfish exploitation and stupid traditionalism have unfortunately associated with them. Consequently, many men have become morally perplexed and mentally hurt. Only so far as the religious faith into which he was born coincides with the reasoned faith which he has unconsciously worked out for himself, does anyone live practically by its ethics.
On the fourth requirement of the new faith, let it be noted that we need a technique which will be workable under twentieth-century conditions and understandable by the twentieth-century mind. Otherwise, we shall end up by becoming living anachronisms, human relics of an obsolete past, and consequently ineffectual dreamers. The mold into which the religious faith and mystical ideology of the postwar world will flow will not be shaped by the desires of the spiritual guides who cling closely to the half-moribund institutions and obsolete dogmas of the prewar world. If the representatives of dying and failing traditions have seen the writing on the wall, they will have seen that the future will not conform to their selfish hopes, much less obey their selfish dictates. New and different forces are inserting themselves into men's hearts. New and different ideas are rising vitally in their minds. And new guides and new institutions will perforce come into existence to assist this process where the old ones might merely suffocate it.
The universal religion, when it comes--as it will at an appropriately advanced stage of human evolution--will not be a melange of outgrown faiths which have already fulfilled their mission, but a perfectly new and timely one. That stage, however, is far off.
The fifth requirement is that a religious teaching, today, must contain these two elements: the spiritual and the social. It must develop the individual and yet regenerate society. It must kindle solitary, personal experience and promote general, public welfare. The postwar period, with all the moral confusion, economic disorders, and political complications legated to it, will open a period of great opportunity for starting a new faith which has the wisdom to combine mystical meditation with social renovation. This is evidenced by what happened in Japan, to take a single example, after the last war. In 1921, the Japanese government outlawed, in fear of its swift-rising influence, a new hybrid cult called Omoto-Kyo, which combined socialism, millenarianism and mysticism and which gathered a million followers in a few years and published its own daily newspaper and magazines.
There is a profound reason why the new faith must possess such an integral character. In ancient civilizations, the spiritual formulation preceded the social one. But in twentieth-century civilization, the social must precede the spiritual. For men and circumstances have so changed that today we can give a new significance to human life only by first giving it new economic and political creations.
It has elsewhere been explained that the evolution of the human ego is about to undergo its most momentous historic change. Hitherto, it has wandered farther and farther in its own thought from its divine source on an outgoing orbit, but henceforth it must return nearer and nearer on an ingoing one. Hitherto, it has followed an increasingly separative movement leading to selfishness, but henceforth it will have to follow an increasingly unitive one leading to balanced altruism. Therefore, the keynote of the coming age will not be individualistic competition but co-operation, not the brutal struggle of creatures with each other for mere existence but the nobler union of all for each, each for all. If the old idea was that man must struggle against man, class against class, nation against nation, race against race, the new idea will be that they must co-operate together for their common welfare. Thus, the immense significance of such a spiritual change is that it will first have a pathway cleared for it by social-economic changes. The creation of new structural forms in the social sphere will thus be part of a higher movement whose later unfoldment will operate in the religious, mystical, and philosophic spheres.
The evolution of each ego, of each entity conscious of a personal "I," passes through three stages through immense periods of time. In the first and earliest stage, it unfolds its distinct physical selfhood, acquires more and more consciousness of the personal "I," and hence divides and isolates itself from other egos. It seeks to differentiate itself from them. It feels the need to assert itself and its interests. This leads inevitably to antagonism towards them. Its movement is towards externality, a movement which must inevitably end in its taking the surface or appearance of things for reality, that is, in materialism. Here it is acquisitive. In its second and intermediate stage, it unfolds its mental selfhood and hence adds cunning to its separative and grasping tendencies, with intellect expanding to its extremest point. Here it is inquisitive. But midway in this stage, its descent comes to an end with a turning point where it halts, turns around, and begins to travel backward to its original source. In the third and last stage, the return towards its divine source continues. Its movement is now toward internality and--through meditation, investigation, and reflection--it ultimately achieves knowledge of its true being: its source, the Overself. And as all egos arise out of the Overself, the end of such a movement is one and the same for all--a common centre. Conflicts between them cease; mutual understanding, co-operation, and compassion spread. Hence, this stage is unitive.
The central point of the entire evolution is about where we now stand. Human attitudes and relations have reached their extreme degree of selfishness, separateness, struggle, and division, have experienced the resulting exhaustion of an unheard-of world crisis, but are beginning to reorientate themselves towards an acknowledgment of the fundamental unity of the whole race. Thus, war reaches its most violent and terrible phase in the second stage and then abruptly begins to vanish from human life altogether. The separatist outlook must cease. Most of our troubles have arisen because we have continued it beyond the point where it was either useful or needful.
The unequal state of evolution of all these egos, when thrown together into a conglomerate group on a single planet, is also responsible for the conflicts which have marked mankind's own history. They stand on different steps of the ladder all the way from savagery to maturity. The backward ego naturally attacks or preys on the advanced one. Thus, the purely self-regarding ego, which was once an essential pattern of the evolutionary scheme--a necessary goal in the movement of life--becomes with time a discordant ingredient of that scheme, an obstructive impediment to that movement. If humanity is to travel upward and fulfil its higher destiny, it can do so only by enlarging its area of interest and extending its field of consciousness. It must, in short, seek to realize the Overself on the one hand, to feel its oneness on the other.
We should preserve intact what is useful to us in the old systems, but at the same time we should create what is essential to our altered times. This is what present-day philosophy is trying to do. There are sincere religious prophets and teachers, ardent mystical swamis and monks eager to guide mankind in old dusty ways and well-trodden paths. But the special importance of the philosopher's work is that he is trying to hew out a new way, to cut a new path. For he perceives what these others fail to perceive--the vital necessity of re-adjustment to the unique evolutionary change which is now taking place. The philosophic seer knows how important to the race are the future purposes and distant goals hidden in the present confused tangle of events. He knows that the evolutionary twist, which is now appearing inside the human soul, is momentous in its ultimate significance. If the war did not change human nature generally, it did change a certain number of individual human beings. Everyone knows this. But not everyone knows that the war marked a moment of profound importance in human history--the change-over from a solely egoistic extroverted and materialistic basis to a deeper one.
At an earlier stage, the evolutionary path proceeded through an increased turning outward to the senses, a growing egotism, and a developing intellect. But now it is destined that human character and endeavour must strike out new paths for themselves--must reverse these trends. This evolutionary development represents what is virtually a new beginning in the history of the present race of mankind. Cosmic forces are communicating themselves to the human mind. The most tremendous changeover of its evolution is at hand. And the same forces which are working at it from within by prompting, are also compelling it to submit itself from without by events. The great inner evolutionary changeover will be responsible for increasing tension and conflict within the individual human being, his lower self beckoning one way and his higher self beckoning another way.
All the world-shaking events of our times are compelling men and women to rise out of their habitual thoughtlessness about life. Whoever thinks that these people will be permitted to relapse into torpor again with the conclusion of the war is mistaken. For the situation today is unique. New forces have entered the planet's atmosphere which will increasingly bring powerful inner and outer pressure to bear on its inhabitants, because the ego is destined to evolve in a different direction. Hitherto it has, in most human beings, travelled farther and farther away from its hidden centre, the Overself, as it expanded its own circumference. Henceforth it will, while holding whatever is of worth in its previous gains, return closer and closer to that centre. And it will do this partly because planetary evolution has reached a point where it will enforce it and partly because it is itself so constituted that it cannot escape time by a return to the source of its own life. With the subsidence of present turmoils, the human ego will resist the realization of its spiritual possibilities less fiercely, if more subtly, than in the past. This will be a distinct and definite advance. It will show in many different phases and aspects. There is a real basis for the hope that we have seen the worst in man's conduct and that he will begin to reflect some better qualities and nobler attitudes. In this faith, we may work for a more spiritual future, sure that our efforts will not be in vain or futile. It may sustain us amid present crises when personal misfortunes bid us despair. It may enlighten us during contemporary darknesses when world events bid us fall into helpless inertia.
It would be easy to misunderstand this tenet. The assertion of such a tremendous modification in the spiritual make-up of mankind as the disappearance of human egoism from human history is certainly not made here. Such an assertion is wildly fantastic and would be and could be made with any hope of acceptance only if made to wild enthusiasts. The clinging to the "I," or the aggressive assertion of it, is something which will yield only to the intermittent batterings of constant frustrations, repeated disappointments, and frequent misfortunes--that is to say, to the experience of hundreds, if not thousands, of earthly incarnations. What is really asserted here is that:
(a) The universal crisis is a sign that we have reached a point in the process of the ego's development where the more violent and hence more extreme aspects of its inevitable struggles with other egos must be curbed in its own interest or self-destruction will ensue.
(b) The very intensity and extensity of this struggle during the war have brought about a widespread recognition of this fact.
(c) We are only at the very beginning of it now, although in a half-dozen centuries this result will have been achieved to such an extent all over the world as to be quite unmistakable. The forces which are now beginning to release themselves in mankind's character will by then increase in intensity quite rapidly. And although this has been happening on all the continents, their quickest, strongest, and fullest manifestation will occur on the North American continent. Such a development will be closely connected with the birth of a new ethnological race, which is maturing out of the American melting pot.
(d) This spiritual overturn in the ego's evolutionary life refers not to all the egos here but to the largest wave of human egos travelling our planetary path, not to all entities but only to the human ones, and not to the entire history of this earth but only to its present evolutionary cycle.
(e) At any given time, this planet will not be inhabited by more than a small number of spiritually advanced persons. Nature maintains the balance between them and the unevolved masses by constant re-adjustment. This evolutionary overturn will not, however, directly involve the entire race, but only a part of it. Those who can accept such a higher world-view are and will be heavily outnumbered by those who cannot. Small groups and scattered individuals in every part of the world will continue to respond immediately, directly, and consciously to this urge; but the response of the masses will come mainly, vaguely, and indirectly through their leaders and rulers.
(f) It does not matter, at first, that this great change in human outlook is taking place without a parallel consciousness of the inner evolutionary development, which is its real motivator. Such a deeper understanding is sure to come later. The ideology may be imperfect, but the impulsion is being felt just the same.
The new spiritual impulse which inspires all these forward movements embodying this social principle is God-sent. The old interests may struggle fiercely against it, but they cannot win against it. Forces are today entering this planet's atmosphere and pouring themselves into the humanity it bears which, owing to our having reached this unique turning point in evolution, are themselves of a unique and special character. Shadows signify the presence of light, anti-Christ the presence of Christ, and the evil forces of materialistic Nazism signify the presence of sacred powers of spiritual regeneration. If we deplore the great darkness which has fallen over this planet, we should know that it speaks of a coming dawn, as the unparalleled destructive violence of this war speaks of an unparalleled constructive peace. In other words, tremendous unreckoned spiritual energies are now in our midst and only await the ripened opportunity to manifest themselves.
Such is the coming faith, a faith suited to the requirements of men of intelligence and goodwill, capable of bringing together those whom the old religions keep divided and even hostile. No sincere well-wisher of mankind can object to the introduction of a new, genuinely inspired faith. At the very worst, it cannot harm mankind, while at the very best it may save mankind. Only the selfish guardians of uninspired, unserviceable vested interests can object to such results. But it cannot come of itself--it must come through some Man. In short, the times require a new Prophet.
There are being put forward, as religions divinely preordained for and practically suited to our times, the Ramakrishna Mission form of Hinduism and the Iranian-born faith of Bahaism. Of the the first, it need only be said that Sri Ramakrishna himself warned his disciples against forming an organized cult and that none of the old religions, however polished up they may be, really suits us today. Of the second, it is needful only to examine a few of its leading tenets to show their insufficiency. The present-day version of Bahaism, which is markedly different from its original version, rejects mysticism. But we have already seen that the needed faith must have some mystical touch about it. This rejection is all the more curious and ironical because the founder of the Bahai faith was himself a mystic and a psychic. Next, divine claims are made on his behalf. The time when reason could receive such claims is vanishing. No one man can incarnate the ineffable, unbounded Absolute Spirit. Thirdly, the Bahai faith holds that there is a progressive revelation in time and that, because it is the latest one, it is consequently the best one. Against this claim, the informed observer may well smile and match the claim of Hinduism, which holds that the oldest and primal revelation is the best one and that time only brings deterioration. Incidentally, philosophy shares neither of these views and considers them both to be self-deceptions. Nor is the Bahai claim to be the latest religion tenable today. A hundred years have passed since the first Bahai prophet appeared. Several new religions and dozens of sects have been born during that time. That only a few achieved fame has nothing to do with the argument.
The totality of Bahai mystical, self-deification claims are equally irrational in their literal form. And the Bahai religious-unification predictions have psychological roots which are unsound. Its expectations of an imminent attainment of religious unity is as groundless as its claims to possess the only divine manifestation for our age.
When they descend from piety to practice, the Bahais embrace impracticable schemes. If a certain mystically advanced ashram could not live as a harmonious, peaceable united family, how will it be possible for a merely religious Bahai world to do so? It is useless to ask humanity to outrun its present capacity, to live in a visionary's dreams or a fool's paradise. If nowhere on earth, not even amongst the most religious, most mystical, and most spiritual assemblies, fraternities, societies, or hermitages, men can live as a loving, self-sacrificing family, how can they do so when still constrained by lower outlooks? The ideal of a single human family is not immediately realizable, for it cannot be formed out of the present defective human material. To demand its instant enforcement is to label oneself an impracticable dreamer.
Considering these predictions on the level of philosophy leads to quite a different result. In both cases, we find that they arise out of emotional complexes and unphilosophic outlooks.
Hence, mystics should not hesitate to invent new and better methods suited to our times and to combine them with the best of the old ones. We know more than well that in suggesting an innovation of this kind, we lay ourselves open to become a favourable target for the critical shots of the orthodox yogis. But the twentieth century is not called upon to subscribe slavishly to the methods, disciplines, and systems of the tenth. Intelligent persons know that we cannot limit ourselves entirely to the life of the past. They have to be synthetic and to mold such elements only as they can profitably use into a fusion with present ones. So the old Indian yogas, however admirably worked out they be, are to be regarded with critical yet appreciative eyes and not simply with mute acceptance. Men of today must build up their own methods out of the needs of their own natures.
-- Notebooks Category 17: The Religious Urge > Chapter 7 : Beyond Religion As We Know It > # 3
