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For self-realisation is the only scheme of life which provides for the growth of the soul in its totality, for the harmonious, many-sided development of the soul as such. I have often dwelt on this point. If we have never before realised its importance we must surely do so now.
When the path of self-realisation has been re-entered, when the soul has resumed the interrupted process of its growth, the desire for self-aggrandisement will spontaneously transform itself, first into the desire for further growth, and then into the desire for outgrowth or escape from self, and will cease to minister to the selfish demands of the lower self; and as the lower self is all the while being gradually left behind by the growing soul, and is therefore ceasing to assert itself, and ceasing to clamour, like a spoilt child, for this thing and for that, it will not be long before the antidote to the poison of egoism will have taken due effect, and the health of the soul will have been restored.
But even in the heyday of its material prosperity the heart of India ever looked back with adoration upon the early ideal of strenuous self-realisation, and the dignity of the simple life of the forest hermitage, and drew its best inspiration from the wisdom stored there.
If this is so, the inference is irresistible that self-realisation is the only effective remedy for the immorality of the present age. The comparison between the two schemes of life may be carried a stage further. If egoism and sensuality are the two primary vices, the secondary vices will be the various ways and means by which egoism and sensuality try to compass their respective ends.
At the end of the last section I asked myself what was the ethical ideal of the life of self-realisation, the positive ideal as distinguished from the more negative ideal of emancipating from egoism and sensuality. I will now try to answer this question. Emancipation from egoism and sensuality is effected by the outgrowth of a larger and truer self.
And for final contradiction, the universe is self-balanced, self-conditioned, a perfect sphere; therefore this Necessity is perfect self-realisation, and consequently perfect freedom.
But it is clear that, in every action whatever of a conscious being, self-realisation may be said to be the end: some capacity is being developed, satisfaction is being sought for some desire.
While the path of self-realisation is emancipating us from egoism and sensuality, in what general direction is it leading us? Is its ethical ideal positive or merely negative? And if it is positive, what is its character, and how is it to be realised? The answer to this question will be given in the remaining sections. The Social Aspect of Self-realisation.
But those who walk in the path of self-realisation, and whose unswerving loyalty to Nature is rewarded by some measure of insight into her deeper laws, know that the goal of the path is infinitely far away, and in their heart of hearts they laugh both the current eschatologies to scorn.
For a time the process of moralisation and self-realisation was worked by and through the conception of a beneficent and omnipotent god. That conception was, it would seem, a hypothesis, valuable as long it was a working hypothesis, but to be cast aside now that humanitarianism is found more adequate to the facts and more in harmony with the consistent application of the theory of evolution.
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