Page 40 - All India Magazine Aug-2025

God, seeking after the Highest, the spiritual turn; in social rela-
tions and conduct a strict observance of all the social dharmas,
as father, son, husband, brother, kinsman, friend, ruler or subject,
master or servant, priest or warrior or worker, king or sage, mem-
ber of clan or caste: this was the total ideal of the Arya, the man of
high upbringing and noble nature. The ideal is clearly portrayed in
the written records of ancient India during two millenniums and it
is the very life-breath of Hindu ethics. It was the creation of an at
once ideal and rational mind, spirit-wise and worldly-wise, deeply
religious, nobly ethical, firmly yet flexibly intellectual, scientific
and aesthetic, patient and tolerant of life's difficulties and human
weakness, but arduous in self-discipline. This was the mind that
was at the base of the Indian civilisation and gave its characteris-
tic stamp to all the culture.
CWSA 20: 164

The Law and its observance
But even this was only the foundation and preparation for an-
other highest thing which by its presence exalts human life beyond
itself into something spiritual and divine. Indian culture raised the
crude animal life of desire, self-interest and satisfied propensity
beyond its first intention to a noble self-exceeding and shapeli-
ness by infusing into it the order and high aims of the Dharma.
But its profounder characteristic aim — and in this it was unique
— was to raise this nobler life too of the self-perfecting human
being beyond its own intention to a mightiest self-exceeding and
freedom; it laboured to infuse into it the great aim of spiritual lib-
eration and perfection, mukti, mokIa. The Law and its observance
are neither the beginning nor the end of man; there is beyond the
field of the Law a larger realm of consciousness in which, climbing,
he emerges into a great spiritual freedom. Not a noble but ever
death-bound manhood is the highest height of man's perfection:
immortality, freedom, divinity are within his grasp. Ancient Indian

40 All India Magazine, August 2025