[Prev][Next][Index][Thread]
ARTICLE : Sri Aurobindo on Religion in India
"India can best develop herself and serve herself and serve humanity
by being herself and following the law of her own nature. This does not mean
as some narrowly and blindly suppose, the rejection of everything new
that comes to us in the stream of Time or happens to have been first
developed or powerfully expressed by the West. Such an attitude would be
intellectually absurd, physically impossible and above all unspiritual; true
spirituality rejects no new light, no added means or materials of our
human self-development. It means simply to keep our center, our essential
way of being, our inborn nature and assimilate to it all we receive, and
evolve out of it all we do and create. Religion has been a central
preoccupation of the Indian mind; some have told us that too much religion
ruined India, precisely because we have made the whole of life religion
or religion the whole of life, we have failed in life and gone under.
... If the majority of Indians had indeed made the whole of their lives
religion, in the true sense of the word, we should not be where we are now;
it was because their public life became most irreligious, egoistic,
self-seeking, materialistic that they fell. It is possible that on one
side we deviated too much into an excessive religiosity, that is to say, an
excessive externalism of ceremony, rule, routine, mechanical worship,
on the other hand into a too world-shunning asceticism which drew away
the best minds who were thus lost to society instead of standing like
the ancient Rishis as its spiritual support and its illuminating life-givers.
But the root of the matter was dwindling of the spiritual impulse
in its generality and broadness, the declining of intellectual activity
and freedom, the waning of great ideals, the loss of the gust of life."
- Sri Aurobindo
