THE BASIS OF HUMAN EVOLUTION
The whole science of yoga and meditation is just to find God. To find out the truth about God and about one’s own soul and thus attain to liberation. God is Spirit and should be worshipped in spirit with faith. Man is spirit. It is the first fundamental belief one must never give up: I am a spiritual being.
If man is spirit then God, the Spirit of all spirits, must be in man’s soul. Seers of old knowing this fact turned their vision inwards and discovered the Spirit of all spirits in their own spirit. This is the purpose of meditation.
‘As within, so without’. We are the universal and the individual at the same time. In truth the unity is never broken. Matter, mind, spirit are all one. These are but various names. There is but one fact in the universe. We view it from different standpoints. From one perspective it becomes matter. From another perspective it becomes mind. However, there are not two things. When the spirit becomes manifest, everything else vanishes. When the spirit is perceived, matter disappears, since that which is called matter is verily the spirit.
All these variations are superimposed by our senses. By the power of meditation, stage by stage man is able to resolve all these differentiations, spirit, mind, matter. They have no real separate reality. Whatever exists is One. There cannot be many. The external world is but the gross form of the internal or subtle. The internal is the cause, the external or grosser is the effect. Similarly the external forces are simply the grosser parts of which the internal forces are the finer.
Meditation consists of the practice of dissolving everything that exists into the ultimate reality, spirit. All is spirit. There are no such things as the five elements, earth, water, air, light and ether. In meditation, the solid melts into liquid, the liquid changes into gas, gas into ether, ether into mind and the mind will melt away.
Mind is neither force nor matter. The sum total of all minds is the Universal mind. Everyone is creating and in the sum total of all these creations we have the universe. Unity in diversity. It is one and it is the many at the same time. The whole universe is a tremendous instance of unity in multiplicity. It is only one mass of mind. Different states of that mind have different names.
Man is always running after life external while there is something much superior to life. Man’s spirit is higher than this material life. The awful tendency of allowing the mind to identify with external objects always creates bondage. To every action there is a reaction. So long as man keeps fixing his mind on external things he will be a slave of the senses and the body. The mind gets easily identified with its object of observation and loses itself. That is the tragedy.
Man takes himself for a body and has forgotten his real identity. This is the greatest blunder of humanity: to think we are bodies. We have become bodies, just bodies, nothing else. All our trials and tribulations result from this erroneous belief. Anxieties, fear, worry, trouble, assail the average man because he takes himself for a body.
Meditation shows us the way out, teaches us what we really are. It helps us make use of the powers and forces in the body to produce certain mental states to make the mind stronger and stronger until it regains its lost glory.
Ultimately he who has discovered the internal forces and learnt how to wield them will have the whole of nature under his control. A point will be reached where the so-called natural laws will hold no influence over him; he will be able to go beyond them all. He will be the master of the whole nature, internal and external.
Evolution of the human race lies in controlling this nature.