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<b><FONT size="4">The
Basis of Social Reconstruction </FONT></b></p>
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<span style="font-size:12pt;">&nbsp;</span></P>
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<FONT STYLE="font-size: 11pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;">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 shastras. He
violates the shastras, modifies them, utilises them according to the
greater imperative of his Swabhava. </span></FONT></P>
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&nbsp;</P>
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<FONT STYLE="font-size: 11pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;">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? </span></FONT><span style="font-size:12pt;">&nbsp;</span></P>
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<FONT STYLE="font-size: 8pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;">Page – 32
</span></FONT></P>
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<FONT STYLE="font-size: 11pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;">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. </span></FONT></P>
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&nbsp;</P>
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<FONT STYLE="font-size: 11pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;">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? </span></FONT></P>
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&nbsp;</P>
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<FONT STYLE="font-size: 11pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;">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. </span></FONT></P>
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<FONT STYLE="font-size: 8pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;">Page – 33
</span></FONT></P>
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<FONT STYLE="font-size: 11pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;">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 – Weltanschauung. </span></FONT></P>
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&nbsp;</P>
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<FONT STYLE="font-size: 11pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;">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 adhara, 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 tl1.e 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. </span></FONT></P>
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&nbsp;</P>
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<FONT STYLE="font-size: 11pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;">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 irredeem-ability 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 </span></FONT>
<span style="font-size:12pt;">&nbsp;</span></P>
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<FONT STYLE="font-size: 8pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;">Page – 34
</span></FONT></P>
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<FONT STYLE="font-size: 11pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;">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. </span></FONT></P>
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&nbsp;</P>
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<FONT STYLE="font-size: 11pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;">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. </span></FONT></P>
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&nbsp;</P>
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<FONT STYLE="font-size: 11pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;">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.  </span></FONT><span style="font-size:12pt;">&nbsp;</span></P>
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<FONT STYLE="font-size: 8pt"><span style="font-size:12pt;">Page – 35
</span></FONT></P>
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