Sadhana | Page 4

that India has tried to ignore differences of value in different things, for she
knows that would make life impossible. The sense of the superiority of man in the scale
of creation has not been absent from her mind. But she has had her own idea as to that in
which his superiority really consists. It is not in the power of possession but in the power
of union. Therefore India chose her places of pilgrimage wherever there was in nature
some special grandeur or beauty, so that her mind could come out of its world of narrow
necessities and realise its place in the infinite. This was the reason why in India a whole
people who once were meat-eaters gave up taking animal food to cultivate the sentiment
of universal sympathy for life, an event unique in the history of mankind.
India knew that when by physical and mental barriers we violently detach ourselves from
the inexhaustible life of nature; when we become merely man, but not
man-in-the-universe, we create bewildering problems, and having shut off the source of
their solution, we try all kinds of artificial methods each of which brings its own crop of
interminable difficulties. When man leaves his resting-place in universal nature, when he
walks on the single rope of humanity, it means either a dance or a fall for him, he has
ceaselessly to strain every nerve and muscle to keep his balance at each step, and then, in
the intervals of his weariness, he fulminates against Providence and feels a secret pride
and satisfaction in thinking that he has been unfairly dealt with by the whole scheme of
things.
But this cannot go on for ever. Man must realise the wholeness of his existence, his place
in the infinite; he must know that hard as he may strive he can never create his honey
within the cells of his hive; for the perennial supply of his life food is outside their walls.
He must know that when man shuts himself out from the vitalising and purifying touch of

the infinite, and falls back upon himself for his sustenance and his healing, then he goads
himself into madness, tears himself into shreds, and eats his own substance. Deprived of
the background of the whole, his poverty loses its one great quality, which is simplicity,
and becomes squalid and shamefaced. His wealth is no longer magnanimous; it grows
merely extravagant. His appetites do not minister to his life, keeping to the limits of their
purpose; they become an end in themselves and set fire to his life and play the fiddle in
the lurid light of the conflagration. Then it is that in our self-expression we try to startle
and not to attract; in art we strive for originality and lose sight of truth which is old and
yet ever new; in literature we miss the complete view of man which is simple and yet
great, but he appears as a psychological problem or the embodiment of a passion that is
intense because abnormal and because exhibited in the glare of a fiercely emphatic light
which is artificial. When man's consciousness is restricted only to the immediate vicinity
of his human self, the deeper roots of his nature do not find their permanent soil, his spirit
is ever on the brink of starvation, and in the place of healthful strength he substitutes
rounds of stimulation. Then it is that man misses his inner perspective and measures his
greatness by its bulk and not by its vital link with the infinite, judges his activity by its
movement and not by the repose of perfection--the repose which is in the starry heavens,
in the ever-flowing rhythmic dance of creation.
The first invasion of India has its exact parallel in the invasion of America by the
European settlers. They also were confronted with primeval forests and a fierce struggle
with aboriginal races. But this struggle between man and man, and man and nature lasted
till the very end; they never came to any terms. In India the forests which were the
habitation of the barbarians became the sanctuary of sages, but in America these great
living cathedrals of nature had no deeper significance to man. The brought wealth and
power to him, and perhaps at times they ministered to his enjoyment of beauty, and
inspired a solitary poet. They never acquired a sacred association in the hearts of men as
the site of some great spiritual reconcilement where man's soul has its meeting-place with
the soul of the world.
I do not for a moment wish to suggest that these things should have been otherwise. It
would be an utter waste of opportunities if history were to repeat itself exactly in the
same manner in every place. It is