Editor’s Note: We feature a long essay by Jugal Kishore Mukherji, in several parts. This was first published in the special issue of Mother India (1968, Vol. XX, No. 10-11) which commemorated the 25th anniversary of Sri Aurobindo International Center of Education (SAICE). The issue featured several important articles by SAICE teachers.
In part 1 of the essay featured here, the author points out that it is not so much spirituality and Yoga as the accredited credal religions that historically clashed with the spirit and findings of Science. He also briefly discusses the difference between spirituality and religion.
We shall be serialising this long, important essay in the subsequent issues.
“Earth is the Mother and Heaven the Father.”
~ Rigveda
“All problems of existence are essentially problems of harmony.”
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, p. 4
Why Reconciliation?
Because of the complexity of his nature and being, man has always felt a double attraction apparently involving some sort of mutual contradiction: the lure of Earth and the call of Heaven. As a result, the human race has ever oscillated between two extreme and opposite ideals.
On one side is the Hellenic ideal as taken up by Western civilisation and characterised by the cult of a critical and constructive rationality of which Science is the last outcome and which hopes to make individual men perfected social beings in a perfected economic society. On the other is the Eastern ideal imbued with a spiritual preoccupation, a mystic elan towards the Beyond and Unknown, a search for the self and the inmost truth of being, to which “every passing thing is nothing but a symbol”.
An undue overstress on any one of these ideals to the detriment of the others can only lead to a reductivist-omissive fallacy that misses their essential and harmonious compatibility and instead makes of them irreconcilable antagonists. But try as they may, the materialist and the ascetic can still none of the aforesaid fundamental urges of man for all time, because they correspond to some essential elements of his being. […]
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It is well to remember that this confrontation between Science and Spirituality will brook no eclectic compromise nor an uneasy marriage de convenance. What is called for… is a deep and true and luminous reconciliation arising out of a mutual comprehension that will give to both “their due portion in Life and their due Justification in Thought”, thus relating the eternal aspiration of man upward and inward towards the Divine to his equally abiding drive towards the fullness of life and the triumphant mastery of this world’s powers and possessions.
In our day this sought-after reconciliation has become all the more urgent, for the history of the race… has made us poignantly aware that
- a sole stress on the economic and material existence of man leads inexorably to the rise in our midst of civilised barbarians so dangerous to the welfare of humanity itself;
- an exclusively rational-scientific secular-material culture creates a dangerous void and imbalance in the subjective sphere of man’s existence, so much so that the man of our epoch, in spite of all possible material comforts and conveniences, has fallen a prey to an all-pervading sense of anxiety with its background of frustration, maladjustment and inner disintegration;
- although Science has brought to man an increasing mastery over his physical surroundings and along with it a growing material power, it has brought, alas, no adequate self-knowledge or self-mastery m the user of that power, the inevitable result being a horrible subjective chaos and the universalized confusion and discord that we witness everywhere;
- Science and technology have made the life of humanity materially one, but have miserably failed to provide with a harmonising light of the spirit that would create in this physical drawing together of the human world a true life-unity, a mental unity or a spiritual oneness.
“All that is there is a chaos of clashing mental ideas, urges of individual and collective physical want and need, vital claims and desires, impulses of an ignorant life-push, hungers and calls for life satisfaction of individuals, classes, nations, a rich fungus of political and social and economic nostrums and notions, a hustling medley of slogans and panaceas for which men are ready to oppress and be oppressed, to kill and be killed, to impose them somehow or other by the immense and too formidable means placed at his disposal, in the belief that this is his way out to something ideal.”
~ Sri Aurobindo, CWSA 22: 1091
The dark doom to which humanity is hurtling headlong down under the impact of its external opulence and inner penury can be averted only if there dawns in man a greater spiritual consciousness adequate to meet and master the increasing potentialities of existence and harmonise them. “A greater whole-being whole-knowledge, whole-power is needed to weld all into a greater unity of whole-life.” (ibid.)
It is in the fitness of things that in India a conscious attempt is being made to harmonise modern science and technology with the age-old spiritual tradition of the land. And if India can find this basis of abiding collaboration between Science and Spirituality, she will not only do service to herself but show the necessary way to the bewildered world at large.
The present essay purports to prove that such a harmonious and fruitful reconciliation is not merely possible but natural and inevitable if only Science and Spirituality, in their extraneous and inessential fortuitous accretions, consent to shed the dead weight of their inhibitions and presumptions. So the Mother has said, anything “that keeps to its proper place and plays its appointed role is helpful, but directly it steps beyond its sphere, it becomes twisted and perverted and therefore false” (CWM, 3: 33)
Indeed, as we shall see in the course of our essay, much of the conflict between Science and Religion is solely due to this overstepping of respective spheres and is therefore devoid of any veritable raison d’etre. But before we may arrive at the reconciling solution, we propose first to analyse the reasons, historical as well as metaphysical, that have tended to put Science and Spirituality in two opposite camps; for a problem clearly put and squarely faced often brings its own solution.
Confrontation of Science and Religion
It is not so much spirituality and Yoga as the accredited credal religions that historically clashed with the spirit and findings of Science. For what characterises a truly spiritual life is a direct contact with the spiritual Reality, a union with the Divine and a living in the Divine Consciousness. Spirituality represents thus an essentially catholic mood, a programme of inner regeneration and finally a realised goal.
The spiritual life, as distinguished from a religious life, “proceeds directly by a change of consciousness, a change from the ordinary consciousness, ignorant and separated from its true self and from God, to a greater consciousness in which one finds one’s true being and comes first into direct and living contact and then into union with the Divine. For the spiritual seeker this change of consciousness is the one thing he seeks and nothing else matters”. (Sri Aurobindo, CWSA, 28: 419)
***
Now, the only and true function of a religion is, or should be, to prepare man’s mind and life up to the point — and that in as catholic a manner as possible — where spiritual consciousness can directly take them up and illumine and govern their movements with the all-reconciling light of the spirit.
But forgetting this central role and its essentially spiritual core, the religious attitude very soon degenerates in practice into some irrational and superstitious exoteric religionism that vaunts with dogmatic insistence an arbitrary array of theological dogmas, fixed beliefs and creeds, hollow ceremonies and lifeless ritual. And who can deny that, historically and as a matter of fact, religious traditions and orthodox reactions have stood violently in the way of science, burned a Bruno at the stake, imprisoned a sixty-seven years old Galileo, heaped abuses on a Darwin and often represented a force for retardation, superstition and oppressive ignorance.
And all this simply because “men in the passion and darkness of their vital nature had chosen to think that religion was bound up with certain fixed intellectual conceptions about God and the world which could not stand scrutiny, and therefore scrutiny had to be put down by fire and sword; scientific and philosophic truth had to be denied in order that religious error might survive” (Sri Aurobindo, CWSA, 25: 176).
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It is no wonder that Science with its spirit of free enquiry had to rise in revolt, as a reaction of sheer survival and self-defence, against the silly tenets and crude and inadequate dogmatic notions of popular religions. Science could not but recoil with a sense of estranged indifference, contempt and scepticism from what claims to determine truths even in Science’s own domain by some so-called sacrosanct and infallible divine authority.
This explains the historical hostility of Science and Religion, especially in Europe, which has led to the growth of the modern rationalistic attitude that seeks to make the earthly life our preoccupation and labours “to fulfil man by the law of the lower members divorced from all spiritual seeking.” (ibid., p. 179)
To be continued in the next issue…
~ Design: Akshay Sonakiya & Beloo Mehra
