<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2 Final//EN">
<html>
<head>
<title>18 the basis.htm</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=windows-1252">
</head>
<body>

<table border="0" width="100%" cellpadding="6" style="border-collapse: collapse">
	<tr>
		<td>
		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="center">
		<b><font face="Times New Roman"><i>The Basis of Social Reconstruction</i> </font>
		</b></p>
		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">&nbsp;</p>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">ANY real reconstruction of society, any permanent reformation
of the world presupposes a real reconstruction, a permanent
reformation of human nature. Otherwise any amount of casting
and recasting the mere machineries would not bring about any
appreciable result, but leave the thing as it is-. Change the laws
as much as you like, but if you do not change the nature of
man, the world will not change. For it is man that makes laws
and not laws that make man. Laws express at best the demand
which man feels within himself. A truth must realise itself in
human nature before it can be codified. You may certainly
legalise an ideal, but that does not necessarily mean realising it.
The realisation must come first in nature and character, then
it is naturally translated into laws and institutions. A man
lives the laws of his soul and being and not the law given him
by the <i>shastras.</i> He violates the <i>shastras,</i> modifies them, utilises
them according to the greater imperative of his <i>Swabhava.</i></font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The French Revolution wanted to remould human society
and its ideal was liberty, equality and fraternity. It pulled
down the old machinery and set up a new one in its stead. And the result? &quot;Liberty, Equality, Fraternity&quot; remained
always in effect a cry in the wilderness. Another wave of
idealism is now running over the earth and the Bolshevists are
its most fiercely practical exponents. Instead of dealing merely
with the political machinery, the Socialistic Revolution tries to
break and remake, above all, the social machinery. But
judged from the results as yet attained and the tendencies at
work, few are the reasons to hope but many to fear the worst.
Even education does not seem to promise us anything better.
Which nation was better educated—in the sense we understood
and still commonly understand the word—than Germany?</font>
		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="center">
Page 148<hr>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">And yet we have no hesitation today to call them Huns and
Barbarians. That education is not giving us the right thing is
proved further by the fact that we are constantly changing
our programmes and curriculums, everyday remodelling old
institutions and founding new ones. Even a revolution in the
educational system will not bring about the desired millennium, so long as we lay so much stress upon the system and not
upon man himself. And finally, look to all the religions of the
world—we have enough of creeds and dogmas, of sermons and
mantras, of churches and temples—and yet human life and
society do not seem to be any the more worthy for it.</font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Are we then to say that human nature is irrevocably vitiated
by an original sin and that all our efforts at reformation and
regeneration are, as the Indian saying goes, like trying to
straighten out the crooked tail of a dog ?</font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; It is this persuasion which has led many spiritual souls,
siddhas, to declare that theirs is not the kingdom upon this
earth, but that the kingdom of Heaven is within. And it is
why great lovers of humanity have sought not to eradicate
but only to mitigate, as far as possible, the ills of life. Earth and
life, it is said, contain in their last analysis certain ugly and
loathsome realities which are an inevitable and inexorable part
of their substance and to eliminate one means to annihilate
the other. What can be done is to throw a veil over the nether
regions in human nature, to put a ban on their urges and velleities and to create opportunities to make social arrangements so that the higher impulses only find free play while the
lower impulses, for want of scope and indulgence, may fall
down to a harmless level. This is what the Reformists hope and
want and no more. Life is based upon animality, the soul is
encased in an earth-sheath—man needs must procreate, man
needs must seek food. But what human effort can achieve is
to set up barriers and limitations and form channels and
openings, which will restrain these impulses, allow them a
necessary modicum of play and which for the greater part will
serve to encourage and enhance the nobler urges in man. Of
course, there will remain always the possibility of the whole
scaffolding coming down with a crash and the aboriginal in
man running riot in his nudity. But we have to accept the
chance and make the best of what materials we have in hand.</font>
		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="center">
Page 149<hr>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">No doubt this is a most dismal kind of pessimism. But it is
the logical conclusion of all optimism that bases itself upon a
particular view of human nature. If we question that pessimism,
we have to question the very grounds of our optimism also. As a
matter of fact, all our idealism has been so long infructuous
and will be so in the future, if we do not shift our foundation
and start from a different Intuition—<i>Weltanschauung.</i></font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Our ideals have been mental constructions, rather than
spiritual realities—realities of the deepest and highest being.
And the power by which we sought to realise those ideals was
mainly the insistence of our emotional urges, rather than
Nature's Truth-Power. For this must be understood that the
mental, the vital and the physical form a nexus of reality which
works in its own inexorable law and so long as we are within
them we cannot but obey the laws that guide them. Of these
three strata which form the human <i>adhara,</i> it is the vital which
holds the key to man's nature. It is the executive power, the
force that fashions the realities on the physical plane; it is what
creates the character. The power of thought and sentiment is
often much too exaggerated, even so the power of the body,
that of physical and external rules and regulations. The mental
or the physical or both together can mould the vital only to a
limited extent, to the extent which is allowed by the inherent
law of the vital. If the demands of the mental and the physical
are stretched too far and are not suffered by the vital, a crash
and catastrophe is bound to come in the end.</font>&nbsp;

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; This is the meaning of the Reformist's pessimism. So long as
we remain within the domain of the triple nexus, we must
always take account of an original sin, an aboriginal irredeemability in human nature. And it is this fact which a too hasty
optimistic idealism is apt to ignore. The point, however, is that
man need not be necessarily bound to this triple chord of life.
He can go beyond, transcend himself and find a reality which
is the basis of even this lower poise of the mental and vital and
physical. Only in order to get into that higher poise we must
really transcend the lower, that is to say, we must not be
satisfied with experiencing or envisaging it through the mind
and heart but must directly commune with it, be it. There is a
higher law that rules there, a power that is the truth-substance
of even the vital and hence can remould it with a sovereign</font>&nbsp;
		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="center">
Page 150<hr>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">inevitability, according to a pattern which may not and is not
the pattern of mental and emotional idealism, but the pattern
of a supreme spiritual realism.</font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; What then is required is a complete spiritual regeneration
in man, a new structure of his soul and substance—not merely
the realisation of the highest and supreme Truth in mental
and emotional consciousness, but the translation and application of the law of that truth in the power of the vital. It is here
that failed all the great spiritual or rather religious movements
of the past. They were content with evoking the divine in the
mental being, but left the vital becoming to be governed by the
habitual un-divine or at the most to be just illumined by a
distant and faint glow which served, however, more to distort
than express the Divine.</font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The Divine Nature only can permanently reform the vital
nature that is ours. Neither laws and institutions, which are the
results of that vital nature, nor ideas and ideals which are
often a mere revolt from and more often an auxiliary to it, can
command the power to regenerate society. If it is thought
improbable for any group of men to attain to that God Nature,
then there is hardly any hope for mankind. But improbable
or probable, that is the only way which man has to try and
test, and there is none other.</font>
		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="center">Page 151<hr>
		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="right"><b><font size="2"><a href="-00_Contents">
			<span style="text-decoration: none">HOME</span></a></font></b></td>
	</tr>
	</table>
<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
&nbsp;
</body>
</html>