The Mundane Perfection
 

The Agenda of Mundane Perfection

 

“A gaol is this immense material world:

Across each road stands armed a stone-eyed Law,

At every gate the huge dim sentinels pace.” Savitri-18

​

“He too is a machine amid machines;

A piston brain pumps out the shapes of thought,

A beating heart cuts out emotion’s modes;

An insentient energy fabricates a soul.” Savitri-20

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“A long dim preparation is man's life,
A circle of toil and hope and war and peace
Tracked out by Life on Matter's obscure ground.” Savitri-24

​

“A struggling ignorance is his wisdom’s mate:

He waits to see the consequence of his acts,

He waits to weigh the certitude of his thoughts,

He knows not what he shall achieve or when;

He knows not whether at last he shall survive,

Or end like the mastodon and the sloth

And perish from the earth where he was king.

He is ignorant of the meaning of his life,

He is ignorant of his high and splendid fate.” Savitri-53

​

“Even in his mortal session in body’s house,

An aimless traveller between birth and death,

Ephemeral dreaming of immortality,

To reign she spurs him. He takes up her powers;

He has harnessed her to the yoke of her own law.” Savitri-65

​

“Content to breathe, to feel, to sense, to act,

Life had for them no aim save Nature’s joy

And the stimulus and delight of outer things;

Identified with the spirit’s outward shell,

They worked for the body’s wants, they craved no more.” Savitri-143

​

“There was no thinking self, aim there was none:

All was unorganised stress and seekings vague.” Savitri-147

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“It knew itself a creature of the mud;

It asked no larger law, no loftier aim;

It had no inward look, no upward gaze....

It took appearance for the face of God,...

It knew not the Immortal in its house;

It had no greater deeper cause to live.

In limits only it was powerful;

Acute to capture truth for outward use,

Its knowledge was the body’s instrument;

Absorbed in the little works of its prison house

It turned around the same unchanging points

In the same circle of interest and desire,

But thought itself the master of its jail.” Savitri-149-150

​

“His little hour is spent in little things…

Time has he none to turn his eyes within

And look for his lost self and his dead soul.” Savitri-164-165

​

“In street and house, in councils and in courts

Beings he (King Aswapati) met who looked like living men

And climbed in speech upon high wings of thought

But harboured all that is subhuman, vile

And lower than the lowest reptile’s crawl.” Savitri-215

​

“Our human knowledge is a candle burnt

On a dim altar to a sun-vast Truth;

Man’s virtue, a coarse-spun ill-fitting dress,

Apparels wooden images of Good;

Passionate and blinded, bleeding, stained with mire

His energy stumbles towards a deathless Force.” Savitri-280-281

​

“The world lived on made empty of its Cause,

 Like love when the beloved’s face is gone.” Savitri-305

“Assailed on earth and unassured of heaven,

Descended here unhappy and sublime,

A link between the demigod and the beast,

He knows not his own greatness nor his aim;

He has forgotten why he has come and whence.” Savitri-336-37

​

“Once were my (Satyavan) days like days of other men:

To think and act was all, to enjoy and breathe;

This was the width and height of mortal hope:” Savitri-406-7

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"He is a puppet of the dance of Time;

He is driven by the hours, the moment’s call

Compels him with the thronging of life’s need

And the babel of the voices of the world." Savitri-478

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“But when she (Savitri) came back to her self of thought,

Once more she was a human thing on earth,

A lump of Matter, a house of closed sight,

 A mind compelled to think out ignorance,

 A life-force pressed into a camp of works

And the material world her limiting field.” Savitri-488

​

(Savitri said) “Nay, let me work within my mortal bounds,

Not live beyond life nor think beyond the mind;

Our smallness saves us from the Infinite.” Savitri-520

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"The men who walked beneath an unreal sky

Seemed mobile puppets out of cardboard cut

And pushed by unseen hands across the soil

Or moving pictures upon Fancy’s film:" Savitri-546

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(Death said) “This is the world in which thou mov’st, astray

In the tangled pathways of the human mind,

In the issueless circling of thy human life,

Searching for thy soul and thinking God is here.” Savitri-618

​

“A reasoning animal willed and planned and sought;

 He stood erect among his brute compeers,

He built life new, measured the universe,

Opposed his fate and wrestled with unseen Powers,

Conquered and used the laws that rule the world,

And hoped to ride the heavens and reach the stars,

A master of his huge environment.

Now through Mind’s windows stares the demigod

 Hidden behind the curtains of man’s soul: (Psychic being)

He has seen the Unknown, looked on Truth’s veilless face;

A ray has touched him from the eternal sun;

Motionless, voiceless in foreseeing depths,

He stands awake in Supernature’s light

And sees a glory of arisen wings

And sees the vast descending might of God.” Savitri-622

​

 (Savitri said) “The souls of men have wandered from the Light

And the great Mother turns away her face.

The eyes of the creatrix Bliss are closed

And sorrow’s touch has found her in her dreams.” Savitri-628

​

(Death said) “Vainly thou seekst in Matter’s world an aim;

No aim is there, only a will to be.” Savitri-644

                                                       

            If one’s all action, all thinking process and all emotions are executed comfortably without contact with the Divine, then he is identified as a Mundane. "Those who have given themselves up too entirely to this outward drive of the mentality, fall into the hands of the lower nature, cling to it and make it their foundation."¹¹ In integral Yoga, if one excludes the Divine from his action, thought and association, then that exercise is identified as a waste of time¹² and energy.                                             

                                                                                

            Nature’s first evolutionary basis is material life, and man must first accord due importance to his external fact of material and vital existence; the Nature’s force of conservation is secured by the abundant multiplication of the physical man. His next greater preoccupation in the evolution is to find himself as a mental being in the material life—as much as possible perfected individual and social existence. European civilization moved in this direction through the Hellenic idea and was further reinforced by the Romans through the ideal of organised power, the cult of reason, the interpretation of life by intellectual thought, constructive and utilitarian organisation and the last outcome of this inspiration was the Government of life by Modern Science. The ancient Indian trend was a pursuit of an ideal truth, good and beauty and moulding of mind, life and body into perfection and harmony by this ideal. As soon as the mind is sufficiently developed, there awakens in man the Spiritual preoccupation, the discovery of Self and the inmost truth of Being, perfection of Nature by the Power of the Spirit, the solidarity, unity, mutuality of all beings in the Spirit. This Eastern ideal of love, truth, compassion, altruism, philanthropy and service, carried by Buddhism and other ancient Spiritual disciplines, were carried to the coasts of Asia and Egypt and from there poured by Christianity into Europe. The barbaric flood of tamasic inertia and rajasic vitality created confusion and darkness over Asia and Europe respectively and these religious motives burned for some centuries like dim torch lights and had not succeeded to make this world a little happier, they only gave infinitesimal bits of momentary relief to human suffering till it was abandoned by modern man who has found another light, the light of Science.

 

            In Europe, the negation of the materialist that Matter alone is real and the Spirit is a lie moved towards the fullness of riches and the triumphant mastery of this world’s powers and possessions. It has experienced an enormous and indispensable utility for a very brief period of rationalistic materialism through which the human race was passing. The modern dominant trend pushes Religion aside as an out-of date superstition; Spiritual realisations and experiences are discredited as a shadowy mysticism, fundamentally false because incompatible with the self-evident truth of the material world and a sublimated crudity deviating from true human evolution, which should be solely the evolution of physical strength and life-power of practical physical mind, the reason governing thought, conduct and organising intelligence.                                        

 

            The prevalent mundane existence depends ultimately on the false perception that (1) to cabin ourselves in the acceptation of formula of material life and its experiences as the only reality; (2) outward life and its narrow domain of objective external solidities are alone valid standard knowledge and hence deserves importance; (3) all our pursuit is directed towards an outwardly acquired or learned knowledge and tied the thought to visible things and rely strictly on the wholesome and nourishing outer source and its constructing principle; (4) material energy is ordinarily accepted as the sole cause and mode of things, the sole instrumentation of the World-Force and creator of this universe and to think that the God lives hidden in the clay is a high insanity;⁶ (5) the materialist ideal considers the extrovert¹ attitude as the only safety and to go inward and live inward is a difficult task or opposes the introvert action considering it as age-long superstition, entry into darkness, dull emptiness and become morbid; all other Spiritual experience claiming to be real must be either a hallucination or an imitation or subjective result of superstitious imagination and no evidence could be accepted of such facts unless it is objective truth and physical actuality in its character; (6) the most of the Spiritual experiences of any kind are beyond the perception of ‘tribunal of the common mentality’² and they  consider their own incapacity of experience as a proof of their invalidity or their non-existence and demand physically valid proof of a supraphysical fact and (7) lastly, we conclude that the eternal Becoming is the only truth of our existence and the eternal Being is only a hallucination, fiction of our intelligence, undeserving of inquiry, an idea born out of our words and verbal dialectics and non-existent; through this superficial inner look we do not find the Spiritual self but the unhealthy life-ego and the mind-ego;¹ this inward tendency has not solved the problem of life nor any of the problems with which humanity is at grips and hence all the adventure of the Unseen is discouraged and even prohibited.

 

            The above present appearance or status is accepted as a veiled and partial figure of the Infinite and to limit ourselves to this first figure of imperfect humanity is to exclude our Divine potentiality and deprive ourselves of bringing a wider meaning into our human existence.

 

         The consistent materialist recognises itself as a creature of mud, is ignorant of the larger Spiritual law and loftier inner aim of life that develops an inward look and upward gaze; he is aware only of its needs and its desires, seeks a partial and short-lived power, knowledge and happiness and falls into the illusion of the chain of works. Thus, the aim of the most mundane philosophy is fulfilment, human perfection, satisfaction of the individual but this can be best assured when we deliver ourselves from limiting mental and vital ego and command a wider life, a larger existence, a higher consciousness and a happier Soul state.

                                                                    

            Most of humanity devotes the major part of their energy to life on earth, to the terrestrial needs, interests, desires, and ideals suitable to the individual and the race. The law, condition of growth, the natural impulse of rule imposed upon the general humanity is the care of the body, sufficient development and enjoyment of the vital and mental being, the pursuit of high and large individual and collective ideal of attainable human perfection. Without these things man could not attain his full manhood. Any view, ideology or partial knowledge that neglects, unduly belittles and intolerantly condemns them is unfit to be the general and complete law of human living. Nature takes good care so that the race shall not neglect these fundamental necessities; for they are the part and portion of the Divine plan in us and the first step of maintenance of their material and mental ground and these are also the foundation and body of her structure.                                              

           

            A considerable part of the race had swerved aside to the real call of the Ascetic life;³ they adhered to the normal life but with an underlying belief in its unreality, a greyness and restless dissatisfaction with the life in which they must still continue and the poor inconclusiveness of the greatest results they can achieve. This belief can insist to unnerve the life impulse and an increasing littleness of its motives and an absorption in an ordinary narrow living. Thus, humanity is deprived of a natural response to the Divine Being’s larger joy in cosmic existence and a failure of the great progressive human idealism of collective self-development and a noble embrace of the battle and the labour.

 

              If we push far enough the materialist conclusion that Matter alone is real, then we arrive at the insignificance and unreality of the life of the individual and the race. Thus, man is compelled either towards a transient existence of ‘live a life’ or a dispassionate and objectless service of the race and the individual, with full awareness that the latter is a transient friction of the nervous mentality and the former is only a little more long-lived collective form of same nervous spasm of matter. Thus, he works and enjoys under the impulsion of a material energy which deceives him with a brief delusion of life or with a nobler delusion of an ethical aim and a mental consummation. 

           

            One high and reasonable aim for the individual human being is to study the law of the Becomings and take the best advantage of their secret. His business is to make the most of such actualities as exist and to seize on or to advance towards the highest possibilities that can be developed here or are in making. His highest thought and largest contribution is towards the present intellectual, moral and vital welfare and future progress of the race. Welfare and progress of humanity during its persistence on earth provide the largest field and the natural limits for the terrestrial aim of his being. The superior persistence of the race and the greatness and importance of the collective life should determine the nature and scope of his ideals. But if the progress or welfare of humanity be excluded as not his highest business or as delusion of ego, the individual is there to achieve his greatest possible perfection or make the most of his life in whatever way his nature demands will then be life’s significance. It is a fact that an inward turn and movement in finding the personal self is not an imprisonment but an initial step to discover our universality and true freedom.

           

            Since development is clearly the law of the human Soul, it is most likely to be discovered by giving full and legitimate value to each part of his composite being and many-sided aspiration. This finding must be an integration and evolutionary synthesis.⁴ The synthesis of this kind was attempted in the ancient Indian culture⁹ and did not succeed due to the exaggeration of any of its four intentions. It accepted four legitimate motives for integration and fulfillment of human living, -- (1) man’s basic needs of food, clothing and shelter, (2) satisfaction of his desires and new wants and enjoyment of maximum opportunities of existence, a period of normal living to satisfy human interests and ego; (3) his ethical and religious aspiration, a period of development of moderate Spirituality and (4) his ultimate Spiritual realisation of God, Light, Freedom, Bliss and Immortality and an ultimate release from the ordinary mundane existence. In the ancient culture greatest emphasis was laid on fitting of the individual into the community and the individual had to pass first through the social status of the physical, vital, mental being with his satisfaction of interest, desire, pursuit of knowledge and right living before he could reach fitness for a truer self-realisation and free Spiritual existence.  

 

            It is a fact that it is impossible for all to trace out the whole circle of development in a single short lifetime. So a theory of complete evolution is developed through a long succession of rebirths, or all life, before one could be fit for the ultimate Spiritual realisation. Man’s failure to reconcile the above synthesis gave birth to two schools in opposition to each other and human thought falls apart towards two opposite extremes, (1) first one is the normal mundane and pragmatic life of interests and desires with an ethical and religious colouring and coating which regards the fulfillment and satisfaction of the mental, vital and physical ego-sense as the object of life and looks no farther while the other is (2) an abnormal or supernormal inner life which begins and is founded on Ascetic renunciation, regards the conquest of ego in the interest of Soul, Spirit or whatever the ultimate reality as one thing supremely worth living. In Europe, the affirmation of the Materialist directed life towards the fullness of riches and the triumphant mastery of this world’s powers and possessions. In India,¹⁰ the Ascetic affirmation has resulted in a great heaping up of the treasures of the Spirit. The gulf between the two is to be reconciled through a synthesis of Evolution.

 

            Since life has no Divine significance in the immediate future so the impatience of human intellect searched some shortcut and stumbled on some maimed achievement or recoil towards a past egoistic life and its satisfaction. Life is split between Spiritual and Mundane and there can only be an abrupt transition and not a harmonious reconciliation of integral human existence.

 

            Man has recently advanced considerably in knowledge of the physical world, in the handling of his surroundings, in his purely external and utilitarian use of the secret laws of Nature and Science has succeeded in mechanizing the life of the whole of humanity. He continues to manifest the same capacities and incapacities, the same qualities and defects, the same efforts, blunders, achievements, frustrations as that of the early beginnings of the race. If progress there has been, it is at most perhaps in a wider circle. Man today is not wiser than the ancient Seers and Sages and Thinkers, not more Spiritual than the great Seekers of old, the first mighty Mystics, not having the more courageous and war loving attitude than the ancient Kings; not superior in arts and crafts to the ancient Artists and Craftsmen; the old races that have disappeared showed as potent an intrinsic originality, invention, capacity of dealing with life. If the present modern man in this respect has gone a little farther, it is because he has inherited the achievements of his forerunners. Nothing warrants the idea that he will ever hew his way out of the half-knowledge and half-ignorance which is the stamp of his type. Even if he develops a higher knowledge, he may not be able to break out of the utmost boundary of the mental circle.

 

           Now a stage has been reached in which the human mind has reached in certain direction of enormous growth, while in the other stands arrested and bewildered and may no longer find a safe exit. Man has raised a huge and complex structure, a huge mechanical organisation and scientific knowledge of external life for the service of his mental, vital and physical claims, urges and enjoyments, a complex, political, social, religious, administrative, economic and cultural machinery, an organised collectivity for his intellectual, sensational, aesthetic and material satisfaction and for the multiplication of new wants and an aggressive expansion of the collective ego. He is a dangerous servant of his blundering ego and unlimited appetites. Yet he is searching for a greater seeing mind beyond the sense knowledge, the rapidity and sureness with which it has embraced the visible universe is only an earnest of the energy and success which we may hope to see repeated in the conquest of what lies beyond, an intuitive Soul of knowledge, discovery of higher truth, good and beauty which could provide the basic fullness of life, the discovery⁷ of a greater and diviner Spirit which would intervene and use life for a higher perfection of the being and a condition of free growth that exceeded it. What is necessary now is that there should be a turn in humanity felt by some or many towards the vision of this high change, a feeling of its imperative need, the sense of its possibility, the will to make it possible in themselves and to find the way. Humanity is now at the critical juncture of its world destiny, where he will either escape or resolve the problem through Spiritual ascension.

 

            The surface consciousness of a mundane⁵ is ignorant of mass relations, separated from each other, rooted in a divided ego and mind’s constructed knowledge and must strive for some kind of right relation between their embodied ignorance. His relations formed in groups are constantly marred by imperfect understanding, gross misunderstanding, strife, discord, unhappiness and the superficiality of his mind’s deceptive constructions is the cause of his frustration. For perfect social living he labours to establish unity, mutuality and harmony and what he builds is a constructed unity, an association of interests and egos enforced by law and social custom and imposes an artificial constructed order in which the interests of some prevail over the interests of others. He is a social being and for its perfection he has to improve ethical and social relation with other men and live for its benefit and utility; society is also there for the service of all, to give them their right relation, education, training, economic opportunity, right frame of life. Modern spirit has sought a civilization of material order and comfort and generalised the utilitarian rationality through Reason, Science and Education which will make the individual a perfected social being in a perfected economic society. The Spiritual ideal is substituted by mentalised and moralised humanitarianism, relieved of all religious colouring and a social ethic. Thus, the race is hurried forward by its own momentum into a chaos of its life in which all received values and firm ground of conduct and culture were overthrown and seemed to disappear from its social organisation. These disorders, defects and disharmonies are normal to a status and energy of Ignorance and can only be dissolved by a greater Light than that of mind nature or life nature.

 

            The relation between one mundane community and another mundane community is accommodated with a constant recurrence of strife of collective ego with collective ego and through persistent readjustment of social order one can experience nothing better than an imperfect structure of life, a narrow domain of objective external solidities, a combination of association and regulated conflict, an accommodation of interests grouped or dovetailed into each other to form a society and a consolidation by need and the pressure of struggle with outside forces. An increasing mechanisation, a standardisation, a fixing of all into a common mould in order to ensure harmony is its mental method. The aim which the most mundane philosophy pursues, the fulfillment, perfection, satisfaction of the individual, is best assured not by satisfying the narrow ego but by finding freedom in a higher and larger Self and change by true union of consciousness founded upon a nature of Self-knowledge, entry into inner or subliminal reality, inner realisation of unity, concord of our inner forces of being and inner forces of life; for in that way alone can there come liberation from Ignorance in which our mentality dwells and a release into a complete consciousness, a true and integral self-realisation and self-knowledge.

 

            The outer apparent natural man, the ephemeral being, the son of death, subject to constraint of his material embodiment and imprisoned in a limited mentality, must become the real inner Man; he has to recognise himself as the child of Immortality, son of God. His first business is to evolve his individual separative personality and its perfect disengagement from the lower subconscient urges in which the individual is overpowered by the mass consciousness of the world and entirely subject to the mechanical workings of three modes of Nature; he has to evolve all his human capacities of power, knowledge and enjoyment so that he may turn them upon the world with more and more self-mastery and force and then his next business is to successfully turn his faculties to higher, larger and greater work, to enlarge his partial being into a complete realisation and union of  Supreme Self,⁸ his partial consciousness into an integral Consciousness, his self mastery, swarat, into mastery over environment, samrat, world union and world harmony, transform his obscure, erroneous and ignorant mentality into luminous knowledge, will, feeling and action.

 

OM TAT SAT

References: -

1: CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-1064,

2: CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-677,

3: CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-702,

4: "That equation can only be found if we recognise the purport of our whole complex human nature in its right place in the cos- mic movement; what is needed is to give its full legitimate value to each part of our composite being and many-sided aspiration and find out the key of their unity as well as their difference. The finding must be by a synthesis or an integration and, since development is clearly the law of the human soul, it is most likely to be discovered by an evolutionary synthesis. A synthesis of this kind was attempted in the ancient Indian culture. It accepted four legitimate motives of human living, — (1) man’s vital interests and needs, (2) his desires, (3) his ethical and religious aspiration, (4) his ultimate spiritual aim and destiny, — in other words, the claims of his vital, physical and emotional being, the claims of his ethical and religious being governed by a knowledge of the law of God and Nature and man, and the claims of his spiritual longing for the Beyond for which he seeks satisfaction by an ultimate release from an ignorant mundane existence. It provided for a period of education and preparation based on this idea of life, a period of normal living to satisfy human desires and interests under the moderating rule of the ethical and religious part in us, a period of withdrawal and spiritual preparation, and a last period of renunciation of life and release into the spirit."CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-703,

5: “Our aim becomes quite other; it is to live in the Divine, the Infinite, in God and not in any mere egoism and temporality, but at the same time not apart from Nature, from our fellow-beings, from earth and the mundane existence, any more than the Divine lives aloof from us and the world. He exists also in relation to the world and Nature and all these beings, but with an absolute and inalienable power, freedom and self-knowledge.” CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga-436,

6: “The worst of it is that generally the whole material reality seems to be the only reality, and everything which is not that seems altogether secondary. And the “right” of that material consciousness to rule, guide, organise life, to dominate all the rest, is justified to such an extent that if someone tries to challenge this sacrosanct authority, he is considered half-mad or extremely dangerous. It seems to me one must still go a very long way to consider material life in the way Sri Aurobindo has described it here (CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga-171-172). And I am quite convinced that if one feels it like that, sees it like that, as he has described it, one is very, very close to the remedy.” TMCW-8/Questions and Answers-1956/p-289-290,

7: “Everything can be part of “sadhana”; it depends on the inner attitude. Naturally, if one lets himself be invaded by the Western atmosphere, farewell to the sadhana. But even in the most materialistic milieu, if one retains one’s aspiration and one’s faith in the Divine Life, the sadhana can and should continue.” The Mother/TMCW-14/Words of the Mother-II/p-44, “The average human being even now is in his inward existence as crude and undeveloped as was the bygone primitive man in his outward life. But as soon as we go deep within ourselves, — and Yoga means a plunge into all the multiple profundities of the soul, — we find ourselves subjectively, as man in his growth has found himself objectively, surrounded by a whole complex world which we have to know and to conquer.” CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-75, “The Transcendence of this lower triple being and this lower triple world, to which ordinarily our consciousness and its powers and results are limited, -- a transcendence described by the Vedic seers as an exceeding or breaking beyond two farmaments of heaven and earth, --opens out a hierarchy of infinitudes to which the normal existence of man even in its highest and widest flights is still a stranger. Into that altitude, even to the lowest step of its hierarchy, it is difficult for him to rise.” CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-465

8: “But this exclusive consummation (realisation of Supreme Self) is not the sole or inevitable result of the Path of Knowledge. For, followed more largely and with less individual aim, the method of Knowledge may lead to an active conquest of the cosmic existence for the Divine no less than to a transcendence. The point of this departure is the realisation of the supreme Self not only in one’s own being but in all beings and, finally, the realisation of even the phenomenal aspects of the world as a play of the divine consciousness and not something entirely alien to its true nature. And on the basis of this realisation a yet further enlargement is possible, the conversion of all forms of knowledge, however mundane, into activities of the divine consciousness utilizable for the projection of the one and unique Object of knowledge both in itself and through the play of its forms and symbols. Such a method might well lead to the elevation of the whole range of human intellect and perception to the divine level, to its spiritualization and to the justification of the cosmic travail of knowledge in humanity.” CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-38-39,

9: "The ancient civilisation of India founded itself very expressly upon four human interests; first, desire and enjoyment, next, material, economic and other aims and needs of the mind and body, thirdly, ethical conduct and the right law of individual and social life, and, lastly spiritual liberation; kama, artha, dharma, moksa. The business of culture and social organisation was to lead, to satisfy, to support these things in man and to build some harmony of their forms and motives. Except in very rare cases the satisfaction of the three mundane objects must run before the other; fullness of life must precede the surpassing of life. The debt to the family, the community and the gods could not be scamped; earth must have her due and the relative its play, even if beyond it there was the glory of heaven or the peace of the Absolute. There was no preaching of a general rush to the cave and the hermitage." CWSA-20/The Renaissance in India/125-126,

10:  “The Indian system did not entirely leave this difficult growth to the individual’s unaided inner initiative. It supplied him with a framework; it gave him a scale and gradation for his life which could be made into a kind of ladder rising in that sense. This high convenience was the object of the four Asramas. Life was divided into four natural periods and each of them marked out a stage in the working out of this cultural idea of living. There was the period of the (1) student, (2) the period of the householder, (3) the period of the recluse or forest-dweller, (4) the period of the free supersocial man, parivrajaka. (1) The student life was framed to lay the groundwork of what the man had to know, do and be. It gave a thorough training in the necessary arts, sciences, branches of knowledge, but it was still more insistent on the discipline of the ethical nature and in earlier days contained as an indispensable factor a grounding in the Vedic formula of spiritual knowledge. In these earlier days this training was given in suitable surroundings far away from the life of cities and the teacher was one who had himself passed through the round of this circle of living and, very usually, even, one who had arrived at some remarkable realisation of spiritual knowledge. But subsequently education became more intellectual and mundane; it was imparted in cities and universities and aimed less at an inner preparation of character and knowledge and more at instruction and the training of the intelligence. But in the beginning the Aryan man was really prepared in some degree for the four great objects of his life, artha, kama, dharma, moksa. (2) Entering into the householder stage to live out his knowledge, he was able to serve there the three first human objects; he satisfied his natural being and its interests and desire to take the joy of life, he paid his debt to the society and its demands and by the way he discharged his life functions he prepared himself for the last greatest purpose of his existence. (3) In the third stage he retired to the forest and worked out in a certain seclusion the truth of his spirit. He lived in a broad freedom from the stricter social bonds; but if he so willed, gathering the young around him or receiving the inquirer and seeker, he could leave his knowledge to the new rising generation as an educator or a spiritual teacher. (4) In the last stage of life he was free to throw off every remaining tie and to wander over the world in an extreme spiritual detachment from all the forms of social life, satisfying only the barest necessities, communing with the universal spirit, making his soul ready for eternity. This circle was not obligatory on all. The great majority never went beyond the two first stages; many passed away in the vanaprastha or forest stage. Only the rare few made the last extreme venture and took the life of the wandering recluse. But this profoundly conceived cycle gave a scheme which kept the full course of the human spirit in its view; it could be taken advantage of by all according to their actual growth and in its fullness by those who were sufficiently developed in their present birth to complete the circle. ” CWSA-20/The Renaissance in India/p-174 to 176,

11: CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-326,  

12:  “The importance of Savitri is immense...Its subject is universal. Its revelation is prophetic. The time spent in its atmosphere is not wasted... Take all the time necessary to see this exhibition. It will be a happy compensation for the feverish haste men put now in all they do.” The Mother/TMCW-13/Words of the Mother-I/p-26,

"Whoever is too great must lonely live.

Adored he walks in mighty solitude;

Vain is his labour to create his kind,

His only comrade is the Strength within." Savitri-368,

(Death said) “I lay waste human happiness with my breath

And slay the will to live, the joy to be” Savitri-535

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