The whole of India at the moment appears a great formless chaos of conflicting influences with a few luminous points of formation here and there but these formations do not seem to have a hold on the general mind of the people.  India finds herself shackled by a multitude of gross and minute bonds, both self-woven by her past and those imposed from outside.  Here and there these bonds are paying and even bursting bout freedom has not yet been attained.  There is no clear vision.

            There is a living continuity of past and present but a great decline took place in India which came to a hear in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  Undoubtedly there was a period for the dwindling of the great fire of life in India, a time of incipient disintegration, marked politically anarchy that gave Europe to chance of adventure in India.  Inwardly there was a torpor of the creative spirit in religion and art.  Science, philosophy and intellectual knowledge did or petrified into a mere scholastic Punditism.  It reached the nadir of setting energy, the evening time from which according to the Indian idea of cycles, a new age has to start.  On this was superimposed the pressure of European culture.

            Three facts need to be taken into consideration – the great past of Indian culture and life with the moment of in adaptive torpor into which it had lapsed, the first period of Western contact in which it seemed for a moment likely to perish by slow decomposition; and the ascending movement which first broke into some clarity of expression.  Indian spirituality maintained itself even in the decline of the national vitality and saved her at critical moments of her destiny./  Any other country would have perished under these pressures.  Certainly while the outward members became gangrened, powers of renovation seemed to be beaten by powers of stagnation and stagnation is death.  If reawakening has to come to India, she will need to keep her essential spirit while the body changes.  The new body of philosophical, artistic, literary, cultural, political, social forms will emerge out of the same soul.  That is, these will not negate the truths of life expressed by the old but restate them cured of the defects.

            European writers have been struck by the metaplupical bent of the Indian mind, its strong religious instincts and idealisms, by its other worldliness and think that this is all to the Indian spirit that it is an abstract, metaplupical, religious mind overpowered by the sense of the infinite, not apt for life, dreamy, unpractical, turning away from life and action as Maya.  For some time, Indians too convinced themselves that this was the truth and no while they spoke with pride about their metaphysics, literature and religion, they became learners and imitators in other spheres.

            Gradually, a realization occurred that this was one sides view while spirituality is the master key of the Indian mind, India has always been alive to the greatness of material laws and forces and has had a keen eye for the importance of phupical sciences .  Of course, she realized that the complexity of the universe cannot be explained in terms of man’s superficial sight aline and that there were other powers behind, powers within man himself of which he is normally unaware being conscious of only a small part of himself.  The invisible always surrounds the visible as infinity surrounds the finite.  India has always accepted that man has the power of exceeding himself that there were ranges of life beyond ours, ranges of mind beyond ours and above these, the splendours of the spirit.  She also declared that all these could be attained by the training of the will and knowledge that man could become the spirit, a god, and then one with God; become the ineffable Brahman.  India set about to find a way.  Hence traveling for long ages on the path of this insight, spirituality got ingrained in her, a great yearning to grapple with the infinite and possess it.

            However, this was not the whole mentality, the entire spirit because spirituality cannot flourish in a void.  Together with spirituality, what is striking about Indian is her stupendous vitality, her inexhaustible power and joy of life, her almost unimaginably prolific creativeness.  For thousands of years, she has been creating abundantly and incessantly, with inexhaustible many-sidedness, republics and kingdoms and empires, philosophies and cosmogonies and sciences and creeds and arts and poems and all kinds of monuments, palaces and temples and public works, communities and societies and religious orders, laws and codes and rituals, physical sciences, psychic sciences, systems of Yoga, politics and administrations, arts both worldly and spiritual, trades, industries fine crafts.  In each sphere there is a plethora of activity.

            Indian expanded outside her borders too. Her ship crossed the oceans to Egypt and Rome.  Her arts, epics and creeds spread to the Archipelago.  Indian influences could be found in Mesopotamia.  Her religions spread to eastward to China and Japan and Westward to Palestine and Alexandria.  Everywhere, whether on her soil or away from it, Indian’s works teemed with superabundant life and energy.

            But this is not all because it is not confused splendour, a luxurious disorder or a wanton lack of measure, balance and design as many European critics would have us believe.  The third power of the ancient Indian spirit was a strong intellectuality, at once austere and rich, robust and minute, powerful and delicate, massive in principle but curious in detail.  The chief impulse is of order and arrangement founded inner law and truth of things with a view to conscientious practice.  India has been land of Dharma and Shastra.  She has searched the inner truth and law of each human of cosmic activity, its dharma.  This she codified into elaborate form and detailed law of arrangement, its practical application and rule of life.  These three elements have been simultaneously present.

            The mass of intellectual production from the period of Ashoka to the Mohamedan epoch has been truly amazing and unparalleled in the world, and what we have is only a fraction of what is still lying extant and what is extant, only a fraction of what was once written and known.  And all this intellectual labour and activity took place before the invention of the printing press and other inventions of modern science.  Nor was all this colossal  literature confined to philosophy and theology, religion and Yoga, logic and theoretic, grammar and linguistics, poetics and drama, medicine, astronomy and the sciences.  It embraced all life, politics and society, all forms of art from painting to dancing, everything then known that could be useful or interesting to the mind.  Even such practical activities like the breeding and training of horses and elephants had their shastras.  This shows that while on the one side there was an insatiable airiosity, a desire to know life in every details, there was on the other hand, the spirit of organization and scrupulous order, the desire of the mind to tread through life with a harmonized knowledge and in the right rhythm and measure.  Thus, an ingrained and dominant spirituality, in inexhaustible vital creativeness and joy of life, and a powerful, penetrating and scrupulous intelligence that combined the rational, ethical and aesthetic created harmony in Indian Culture.

            Spirituality itself could not have flourished but for this opulence.  It is a great error to assume that spirituality grows in an impoverished soil with life half killed and the intellect discouraged and intimidated.  When such spirituality grows in such conditions it becomes morbiel, hectic and exposed to perilous reactions.  It is when a race has lived most richly and thought most profoundly that spirituality finds its heights and its depths and its constant and many-sided friction.

            The present is only a last deposit of the past at a time of ebb but it has to be the starting point for the future.  In the present, all that was in India’s past is dormant but not

Destroyed.  It is waiting to assume new forms.  The decline was only the ebb movement of the fill tide of greatness and has to be  understood as such.  In order to project what was the future will bring we have to first dismiss the idea from our mind that the dominant note of the Indian spirit is metaphysical abstraction and that it inspires all other cadences.  Its real key note is the tendency of spiritual realization, not cast into any white monotone bout many faceted, many coloured as supple in its adaptability as it is intense in its highest pitches.  However, the note of spirituality is dominant, initial, constant, always recurrent.

            The note of spirituality does not only shoot upward to abstract and hidden thought bout also downwards and outward to embrace the multiplicities of thought and richness of life.  Hence, the second long epoch was of the intellect, the ethical sense and as operating in action.  After the age of the spirit came the age of action and social formation when the outward forms of Indian life  and culture were fixed in their broad outlines and the seeds of future development were sown.  The great age of Sanskrit culture was the flavering of this intellectuality into curiosity of detail in the refinements of scholarship, Science, Art, Literature, Politics, sociology and mundane life.  Not only was the aesthetic explored but also the emotional and the sensuous even the vital and the sensual.  But behind it all reigned spirituality.  The post classical period saw the lifting of the while         life and impressing upon it the values of the spirit as can be seen in the Puranic and Tantric systems and the Bhakti movement.  Vaishanivism was the last five flower of the Indian spirit combining the aesthetic, emotional and the sensuous  into the service of the spiritual.

            Then came the decline and it too had three movements.  First, there was a sinking of the superabundant vital energy and a fading of the joy of life and creation.  Second, there is a rapid cessation of the old free intellectual activity and a slumber of the scientific and critical mind as well as of the creative intuition.  In comprehended that knowledge was just repeated leading to the forms which the great intellectual past had created.  Old authority and rule because  regret and despotic and last their real sense and spirit.  Finally, spiritnahty also did not shine in its previous clear huminority in which there was a magnificent synthesis but in intense jets dispersed action and knowledge in which certain spiritual truths were emphasized to the neglect of others.

            It was at this point of deceive that the European were swept was India.  The first effect of this entry of a new and quite opposite civilization was the destruction of much that had not longer any power to the deliquescence of much else and a tendency to the devitalisation of the rest.  A new ativity came in which was at first crudely and confusedly of the foreign culture.  A less vigorous energy of life may hae foundered and perished but it began to reawaken from this very situation.  The impact of European life and culure gave the three needed impulses.  It revived the dormant intellectual and critical impulse.  It rehabilitated life and awakened the desire for a new creation.  It put the reviving Indian spirit face to face with novel conditions and ideals and the urgent necessity of understanding, assimilating and conquering them.  The national mind saw its past culture with a new eye. At the same time it saw it in a relation to modern knowledge and ideas.

            Therefore, one of the most essential tasks is the recovery of the old spiritual knowledge and experience.  The second is the flowing of this spirituality into new forms of philosophy, literature, art, science and critical knowledge.  The third is the original dealing with modern problems in the light of the Indian spirit and endeavours.

            The spirit is a higher infinite of verities.  Life is a lower infinite of possibilities that seek to grow and find their own truth and fulfillment in the light of these verities.  Our intellect, will, ethical and aesthetical being are the reflectors and mediators.  India has always tried to discover the spirit within and the higher hidden intensities of the superior powers and to dominate life in one way or another so as to make it responsive and expressive of the spirit and thus increase the power of life.  Its tendency with the will, intellect, ethical, aesthetic and emotional being is to sound their normal mental possibilities but also to raise them towards greater light and power of their own highest institutions.

            There are three essential steps in the transition period.  The new age has to be the transformation of the old culture; not a clinging on the  old and dead but a rebirth.  The rewception of the European contact created a radical reconsideration of many of the prominent elements and some revolutionary of many of the prominent elements and some revolutionary denial of the principles of the old culture.  The second aspect is the reaction of the Indian spirit upon the European influence sometimes with a total denial of what it offers and a simultaneous glorification of the past.  The third is the process of new creation in which the spiritual power of the Indian mind remains supreme, recovers truths, accepts whatever it finds sound or true, useful or inevitable of the modern idea and form, bout so transmutes and Indianises it, so absorbs and transforms it entirely into itself that it foreign character disappears and it becomes another harmonious element.

            India lives centrally in the spirit with a great intense and brooding depth.  That is why her processes are apt to be deliberate, uncertain and long because she has to take things into that depth and modify and remould the more outward parts of life from that depth and inwardness.  Until that absorption is completed, she cannot easily move forward on the new way that she has to take.  From the complexity of the movement arises all the difficulty of the problems she has to face and the rather chaotic confusion of opinions, standpoints and tendencies that have got entangled in the process which prevents any clear easy and decided development.  Therefore, we seem to be advancing under confused pressure of circumstance or in a series of shifting waves of  impulsion without any clear idea of our future direction.

            The first generations of intellectuals that arose as the result of Western education were impatient of India’s rate of transformation as they wished to see a new India modernized wholesale and radically in spirit, mind and life.  Intensely patriotic in their motive they were denationalized in their mental attitude.  In their subconscious they accepted the occidental view of India’s past as only a half-civilization.  Their govering ideals were borrowed from the West.  But this, too, yielded valuable results.  At least three can be singled out.  One, it reawakened a free activity of the intellect which though at first confined within very narrow bounds and derivative ideals, spread to all subjects of human and national interest, applying itself with increasing curiosity and growing originality to every field it seizes.  This was to bring back the Indian mind to its old unresting thirst of knowledge.  Second, it threw the ferment of modern ideas into the old culture and fixed them before our view in such a way that we are obliged to reckon possible if the old tradition had continued without some such violent break.  Finally, it made us look at our past with new eyes which have not only enabled us to recover something of their ancient sense and spirit, long embedded and lost in the unintelligent practice of received forms, but to bring out of them a new light which gives to the old truths fresh aspects  and, therefore, novel potentialities of creation and evolution.  This is no mere return, bout consciously or unconsciously hastens a restatement.  It has sought to arrive at the spirit of ancient culture and while respecting its forms and often preserving them to revivify, has not hesitated to remould, or reject the outworn an to admit whatever new motive seemed assimilable to the old spirituality or apt to widen the channel of its larger evolution.

            It is difficult to foresee what form the new creation will take but one things seem certain that the spiritual motive will be the dominating strain in the future of India.  By this is not meant a remote metaphysical thinking will always be a strong element in her mentality. All great movements in India have begun with a new spiritual thought and usually a new religious activity.  What more striking and significant fact can there be than this that even the new European influence, which was an influences intelletual, rationalistic, so often anti-religious and which drew so much of its idealism from the increasingly cosmopolitan, mundane and secularistic thought of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, precipitated in India from the very first an attempt at religious reformation and led actually to the creation of new religions.  The instinct of the Indian mind was that, if a reconstruction of ideas and society was to be attempted, it must start from a spiritual basis and take from the first a religious motive and form.

            Indian society is in a chaotic stage for the old forms are crumbling under the pressure of the environment, their spirit and reality are more and more passing out of them but the façade persists by the force of inertia of thought and will and the remaining attachment of a long association, while th enew born is still powerless to be born.  There is much of slow and often hardly perceptible  destruction, a dull preservation effectie only by immobility, no possibility yet of sound reconstruction: we have had a loud proclaiming – only where supported by religion, as in the reforming Samajas, any strong effectuation – of a movement of social change, appealing sometimes crudely to Western exemplars and ideals, sometimes to the genius or the pattern of ancient times; but it has failed to carry the people, because it oculd not get at their spirit and by and large lacked in robust sincerity.  There has been a revival of orthodox conservatism, largely academic or sentimental, but not in touch with the great facts and forces of life.  There is an increasing sense of the necessity of the renovation of social ideas and expressive forms by the spirit of the nation awakening to the deeper yet unexpressed implications of its own culture however up to now with an insufficient will or means of execution.

            The focus on spirituality is liable to be met with misunderstanding or a refusal to understand or a bit of both.  It is to a certain extent justified because of certain ascetic or religionist exaggerations.  This is accentuated by a recoil from the excessive other worldliness that has marked certain developments of the Indian mind and life.  However, it is not justified because it misses the true point.  The question arises what do we mean be spirituality in art and poetry or in political and social life; how can the practical problems of society and politics profit from it.  This is because we have got attuned  to European idea of a split between religion and spirituality on one side and intellectual activity and practical life on the other,  each to be pursued on two entirely separate lines.  Also, it might be said that by encouraging Indian on the metaphysical  path, we are taking her away from the dynamic and pragmatic or inculcating some obscurantist reactionary principle of nuptical or irrational religiosity or diverting her from the path of reason and modernity.

            Therefore we must be very clear on what we mean by the Priniciple of spirituality.  Clearly it eloesint mean that we will regard earthly life as mere vanity and all try and become ascetics and monks as soon as possible.  Nor does it mean trying to fit the entire nation into some limited dogmas, forms, tenets of a particular religion.   All religions can be seen as braches of one universal religion by which we shall understand in the future man’s seeking for the eternal, the divine, the greater self, the source of unity and his attempt to understand that there is an approximation of the values of human life with the eternal and the divine values.

            Spirituality does not excluded anything from its scope, any great aims of human life or problems of modern world or any form of human activity.  There can be no human being with only sport and no mind or body hence spirituality must not belittle the mind, life or body or hold them of small account.  In fact, it should realize their importance because they are the conditions and instruments of the life of the spirit in man.  The ancient Indian culture attached great value to the soundness, growth and strength of mind, life and body.  Hence spirituality takes into its purview all these and gives free play to the activity of reason, to science and philosophy to the satisfaction of the aesthetic being, to the health and strength of the body, to the physical and economical well being, ease, opulence of the race to military, political and social strength and efficiency.  Unlike what has became the prevalent belief, there was no ideal of poverty, bareness or squalor as essential settings of spirituality.  The new idea will also seek the same ends in new ways but she must remember that spirituality is not exclusive but all inconclusive.

            However, there is a difference between the spiritual and the material and mental view of existence.  The spiritual view holds that mind, life and body are man’s means and not his aims and not his last and highest means.  They are the instruments of self and not his whole being.  It sees the infinite behind the finite and judges the finite according to how much of instruments of the infinite they are.  It realizes that there is a greater reality not only behind man and the world but also within man and the world and “this soul, self, divine thing in man it holds to be that in him which is of the highest importance, that which everything else in him must try in whatever way to bring out and express, and this soul, self, divine presence in the world it holds to be that which man has ever to try to see and recognize through all appearances, to unite his thought and life  with it and in it to find his unity with his fellows”.  This view gives a different sense and direction.

            For example, we aim at the health and vigour of the body but to what to end.  The ordinary reply would be either because it is worth having or so that we may have a long life and a sound basis for intellectual vital, emotional satisfaction.  Hoewever, the physical, too, is an expression of the divine and, therefore,  its health is the dharma of the indivudual.  Again, the mental, emotional and aesthetic parts of an individual hae to be developed not only because they are expressions of five nature and through them he feels alive and fulfilled but also because they are expression of the spirit through which we are seeking divine values and come nearer to the divine reality in the world.  Morality in the ordinary view is a well regulated individual and social conduct which is required for the proper functioning of the society but ethics, from the spiritual point of view, is much more. It is a means of developing in our action and still more essentially in the character of our being the divines self in us, a step of our growing into the nature of the Godhead.

            Thus the spiritualization of all our aims and activities makes us arrive at the truth of existence not only by reason and scientific observation but also makes us grow into our divine self and nature.  This applies to all fields of man can seek for and grow into his real self and divinity.  Second, it provides an increasing embodiment of the divine law of being in life.  Thirdly, it provides an opportunity for the collective advance towards the light, power, peace, unity, harmony  of the divines nature of humanity which the race is trying to evolve.  This and nothing more but nothing less, this in all its potentialities, is what we mean by a spiritual culture and its application of spirituality to life.

            We have made mistakes, faltered in the true application of our ideals, been misled into unhealthy exaggerations but that is no reason to discard the basic premise.  India, too, must develop herself and serve humanity by following the law of her own nature.