Page 34 - Complete Works of Dr. KCV Volume 1

philosophies will be sufficient and personal experience is merely a lure and a mirage. With such thinkers we of course do not agree and man has never agreed. True indeed this personal experience should be of the highest and not merely a hallucinatory product of one's wishes and constructions - mental projections so to speak and not reality. Hallucination is the projection of one set of illusions in the place of those it is said to replace, namely the experience of Nature.
The evolution of man into a higher consciousness or reality is indeed our endeavour, and this evolution can no longer be achieved through the old patterns suitable to lower species and forms of life including man. The growth of a cosmic consciousness, or an intuition that can grasp all in one sweep of consciousness rather than in fragments, or that which will integrate all knowledge and perceive the integral reality is a divine gift and cannot be expected to be attained through natural means of mere aspiration. Science expects this to happen in natural evolution through man's infinite capacity to adapt the environment to his needs, and also to rouse within himself powers and capacities latent in a sense (such as he had already done) such as rationality, intelligence, instinct, will, consciousness itself and creative imagination, co-operative activity and social unity. However the ascent of life is marked by breaks and one wonders whether these breaks or leaps are due to an innate force or elan, or an upward force that has leaned towards it to pull it up. Religious experience in man reveals this leaning of the cosmic consciousness or divine and transcendent grace consciousness towards it. Thus in man this conjunction of the divine and the human is made possible for the first time in evolution. But a jump to the Ultimate consciousness or Being is a long way off. And the natural evolution of man will reveal that in his life the incidence of a force much vaster and superior to himself takes its hand. This is the beginning of spirituality. The self confronts its own deepest urge to be this urge towards the ultimate reality without which its own future is impossible and untenable.
This is the call to knowledge of the self, to fulfilment, to perfection, to ultimate happiness and bliss, and above all to the feeling and realisation of reality of oneself which seems to be slipping away in its own original nature.