Thus, is life. Thus is human experience and human nature. Thus is the meaning of all activity in life, whether social, personal, or psychological. This is the great sorrow of the individual, and the only panacea for this malady is to find ways and means of restoring the true universality independent of space and time with their concomitant externality and exclusiveness of things and of all existence—all objects, all persons, all things and all events. Universality is reached not by sense-contact but by an identification of consciousness with the selfhood of all things and the being of all things with the selfhood of consciousness. This is the great philosophy of yoga, the foundation of its psychology as well as the principle of its practice.

And how is all this done? What is the actual method of redeeming humanity from this grievous state of life on earth, which has come about in the manner described? The method is precisely the simple one of the reversal of the process of manifestation, the recession of the effects to their causes, step by step, and very gradually—without missing even a single link in the chain of this return process of consciousness to its ultimate universality. For this purpose, it is essential for every person to carefully scrutinise and investigate into the causes of every experience which one passes through in one’s life, and trace the effects of these experiences to their causes. The recognition of the causes will enable one to merge the effects in the causes, so that the effects cease to be and the cause alone exists. In the end, there would be no effects at all but only the final cause, namely, the Absolute Universal, the realisation of which is the Goal of life.

At the very outset, it is to be pointed out that one should learn the art of the discovery of an aim in one’s life—in all activities and motives. Most people in the world live without an aim or purpose in life and drift helplessly hither and thither driven by the wind of circumstances and impelled by the stimulant of pleasure temporarily appearing to manifest itself when there is a titillation of the senses and the nerves, when the ego is scratched or the senses are stirred into stimulation. This is, truly, a pitiable state of affairs, and this condition of human life, which man regards as the height of civilisation and culture, is really the pit of downfall. Strange; man wants to rule even in hell rather than serve in heaven, but is it not high time that mankind ought to realise its mistakes, both in thought and action, and gird up its loins to find out the only remedy for the illness of mortal existence, the travail of temporal life?

Personal and social relationships are only the projection of the human mind by externalisation in space and time in respect of persons and things whom it is obliged to regard as distinct or separate from itself. The modern scientist is prone to get convinced that there is an advancement in the process of evolution from matter to life, from life to mind and from mind to intellect. This is, indeed, an advancement, but in the same way as there is an advancement from plus one to minus one, from minus one to minus two, from minus two to minus three and from minus three to minus four, etc. Truly, minus four is far superior to plus one, richer indeed, because the figure four is there, looking bigger than one! But this gross error in the evaluation of life is not detected by the human mind and it hurries headlong into the pit of doom and suffering, not knowing that its pursuit of what is good, meaningful and valuable is really its pursuit of the ways of its own final destruction. It is surprising that even in this age of the astounding discoveries of the Theory of Relativity and its breathtaking conclusions, man should continue to be so ignorant of the nature of the physical world, of human relations and of life in general, and take appearance for reality. If, according to the findings of modern physics, the three-dimensional phenomenon of a world is an erroneous abstraction, falsely made, by the defect-ridden mind from an integrated four-dimensional or, perhaps, a multidimensional organism of the cosmos, how would it stand to reason that there can be desire for objects of sense or even any sort of dependence on the so-called external objects of the three-dimensional world of space and time, while there is only a space-time-continuum, in which no individual can ever exist as isolated from other individuals, in any manner whatsoever?

Here we are in a strange and unexpected commingling of science and metaphysics. Knowledge, after all, seems to have once again found its way to an integral intuition that it really is, rather than sensory perception or mental cognition of a spatio-temporal externality of persons and things and relations. The seeker of Truth has to reverse his process of learning, knowing and experiencing from the effects to their respective causes, in an ascending order of graduated movement.

What is the Aim of Life? It should be obvious that the answer is, now, clear. The Aim, then, is a rising of consciousness from the external to the internal, and from the internal to the Universal. First of all, it would be necessary to withdraw consciousness from ‘externality’ and any kind of ‘relationship’ with externals, with the power of that understanding that recognises once, for all, that an externalised relation is impossible in a world where a three-dimensional depth or distance cannot be a reality. From this stage of the withdrawal of consciousness from the feigned externality of relations, the next step is to go deeper into the essential necessities—not luxuries—of one’s life, and live in an atmosphere and condition of the minimum necessities of life, without adding to them even a single extra item, because that extra item would not be a necessity but a luxury. While Nature would permit a necessity, it would not tolerate luxuries even in the smallest percentage. Nature provides necessities but not luxuries, and luxury is nothing but an exploitation of circumstances in which the individual ego wrongly indulges at the expense of other such egos in the world around it. The minimum needs of human nature, in the form of food, clothing, shelter and education, as well as contact with persons and things in the world around, should be well calculated and assessed, and one should try to live only in those disciplined conditions of minimum necessity in the maintenance of the body-mind complex and human relations. This is, perhaps, the most difficult thing for anyone to do, for man is not accustomed to think logically, he always works on the basis of sentiments and emotions, the spur of feelings and the incitations of the senses. Now the time has come to turn the tables round and lead an absolutely new way of life with a thoroughly reoriented system of intellectual, moral, social and spiritual education.

There would be little need to expatiate on the further processes of the ascent of consciousness, for the whole thing would be clear from an understanding of the process of evolution described above. What is called for is merely a retracing of the steps of consciousness backwards from effects to causes, stage by stage, without missing even a single rung in the ladder of the ascent. From social relations, one comes to personal needs and from personal needs to an adjustment of one’s individuality with the laws of the universe. These laws, known as ‘rita’ in the Vedas, are nothing but the operational procedures and the working methodology of the Supreme Universal. The aim of life may look manifold, and it may really be so for the purpose of practical action at the lower levels, but its forms are all organically related to the Central System of the Supreme Integration that is the Absolute. Every thought, every speech, every action and every way of relationship with persons and things in life has, thus, to be judged and worked out in the light of this constitution of the Great Reality.