Passages from Yoga and the Spiritual Life

Freedom, absolute freedom, must be given each individual soul to discover its own path. Mistakes along the path of spirituality are not at all deplorable, for mistakes are simply lesser truths. We are not proceeding from falsehood to truth. We are proceeding from the least revealed truth to the most revealed truth.

The aim of life is to live a divine life. We are living in this world. We know that man does not live by bread alone. He needs the soul in order to live in the world of God's Reality. The soul alone has the capacity to see and feel the known and the Unknown, the existent and the non-existent, the dream of the past, the achievement of the present and the hope of the future.

Let us accept the inner life, the spiritual life. Mistakes in our journey are inevitable. Success without endeavour is impossibility itself. No work, no progress. Experience we must welcome. The experience may be either encouraging or discouraging. But it is experience that makes us a real being, that shows us the true meaning of our existence.

The world has ever been charmed by movement, here, there and everywhere. The waning of enthusiastic movement is the downfall of human life. Each movement has to undergo ups and downs before it reaches its goal. Movement is the outer expression of an inner urge. This inner urge is the representative of God's Will in a human body seeking to play with the Beyond and to awaken the Infinite in the finite.

The ordinary human ego gives us a sense of separate identity, separate consciousness. No doubt, a sense of individuality and self-importance is necessary at a certain stage in man's development. But the ego separates our individual consciousness from the Universal Consciousness. The very function of the ego is separation. It cannot feel satisfaction in viewing two things at a time on the same level. It always feels that one must be superior to the others.

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