According to Hegel, the renowned German philosopher, the lowest level is of brute consciousness, which is inseparable from sheer material existence. The second stage, above this, is nature-reactive self-preservative consciousness, observable is plant life. The third stage is of a crude seeking of oneself in others, expressed in the presence of a psychological want, a need and a love which specifically concentrates itself in the reproductive consciousness. The fourth is the stage of self-consciousness which is the special faculty of man, beyond the level of the mere animal satisfaction of self-preservation and self-reproduction in the form of reaction to external stimuli. Yet, human life here is incipient and not fully developed. Even among human beings we have various grades: there is the animal man, the selfish man, the good man, the saintly man and the God-man. The fourth stage mentioned here may be said to correspond to the lowest type of men. The fifth stage is where one becomes conscious of one’s being independent of objects outside and attributes all change to objects rather than to oneself. This is the stage where one finds fault only with others and not with oneself, so that the object becomes a hindrance to one’s comfortable life and one cannot tolerate the presence of objects non-conducive to one’s satisfaction. The hidden unity of things, however, asserts itself and cannot brook such a selfish attitude of an utter isolation of the subject and the object. Thus, the selfish sense of isolatedness manifest in the fifth stage recoils upon the sense of unity by distorting it in the form of love for others, a craving for exercising authority over others, etc. This is the sixth stage. In the seventh, there is a consciousness of this negative dependence of oneself upon others in the form of love and the need to exercise power, etc., and one seeks to obviate this sense of slavish dependence either by intense attachment or by intense hatred. In attachment there is desire to unite the object with oneself so that oneself may live alone, and in hatred there is a desire to destroy the object, so that, here again, there is a chance of oneself living alone. For, ‘aloneness’, which is the nature of Reality, asserts itself, somehow, by hook or crook, by fair or foul means. In the eighth stage one realises that it is impossible to live with this law of the fish and the law of the jungle, for each one here appears to be a threat to another’s existence, so that no one can be secure. The need for ‘living’, ‘somehow’, and the necessity for security in life compels man to live a life of cooperation and mutual sacrifice, without which he fears that his end would not be very far. This is the consciousness of cooperative living, of humanitarian ideals, of society as one harmonious organisation. This is the eighth stage.

But, this cooperation and mutual sacrifice is ultimately based on selfishness, a desire to maintain oneself, and, hence, even in cooperative life there are seen occasional disruptions and breaches of agreement, which is only a sign that the basis of this apparent humanitarian ideal is really not humanitarian but founded on a lower level of life. The studies in psychology and psychoanalysis will reveal that most of man’s efforts are not above his biological urges such as the pressure of hunger, sex, sleep and fear from external forces, all which get surcharged with a desire to dominate over others and exercise authority, to spread one’s name and fame, by affirmation of one’s superiority, and a greed for wealth, etc.

All this is the result of the empirical approach of human understanding to the problems of life. This is really no solution to the problems, and humanity finds itself today in the same complex and quandary and insecurity as it was centuries back, all because the human approach to things has not changed in its quality and character, though the passage of history has traversed thousands of years during the course of time. The ancient Masters have seen through this vexing situation of life in general and found out the only remedy for it, namely, to develop the Vision Integral, rather than confine oneself to mere perception empirical. This integral approach requires man to conceive life as one whole, inseparable in its parts, and the well-known classification of Human Values or Aims of Life into dharma, the pursuit of moral value; artha, the pursuit of economic value; kama, the pursuit of vital value; and moksha, the pursuit of infinite value, may be said to form the rock-foundation to base one’s right perspective of life. All these four values have to be blended in a proper proportion to constitute a single compound and not merely a mixture of a set of separable ingredients. This means to say that every function one might perform, every thought, word and deed of a person, should manifest this singleness of purpose, namely, a focused blend of dharma, artha, kamaand moksha, all at once. This is indeed a hard job for uninitiated and untrained minds. But spirituality is not a joke and calls for greater education and discipline than one would expect in an ordinary educational academy or institution of the world. It is this blend of the four Aims of Life in a single act that has necessitated the introduction of the cooperative social groups known usually under the name, varna;the classes wielding spiritual power, political power, economic power and man-power, which constitute a complete organisation of human aspiration and function. This view of life has also called for the recognition of four stages in one’s life known as ashrama;a life of continence and study, a life of restrained satisfaction and discharge of duties in accordance with one’s station in life, a life of non-attachment to all perishable, values, and, finally, a life of concentration on the only permanent value discoverable in the end, namely, the Ultimate Reality.

 A life of yoga is the answer. And yoga is union with Reality, in the various stages of its graded intensity of manifestation, internally in one’s own personality and externally in one’s social relations and public life. The range of yoga is a little, complicated for the novice to understand. To obviate the difficulty of a sudden grasp of this truth, adepts in yoga have advised a more restrained approach to the Great Goal, by a recognition of the objective (adhibhuta), the subjective (adhyatma) and the supernormal Deity-aspect of Reality, superintending over both the objective and the subjective sides of experience (adhidaiva). This threefold resort to yoga would facilitate a still higher recourse to the larger realities, known in the language of the technical Vedanta, as Virat, Hiranyagarbha, Isvara and Brahman,connoting the fourfold aspect of the Absolute, conceived as helpful in one’s meditations.