A life of spiritual freedom and happiness is now realised to be beyond the scope of the ordinary man. The training which one is called upon to undergo to traverse this stage of understanding needs such dispassion of self-observation that the education with which the modern man is acquainted will be found to be of not much value when he begins to attack the problem of the crux of human experience. Our ideas of other people and of the world outside would require a radical transformation before we embark upon this supreme endeavour to probe the mystery of life. Here, our learning will be of no help to us, for much of our learning has concern with persons and things, but this task that is now on our hand has nothing whatsoever to do with persons and things. The standpoint of the universal judge of all phenomena cannot easily be contained within the mind of the human individual. Here, at this stage, the seeker usually falls back upon his routine practices of observances and austerities, taking them for Yoga, not knowing that he is yet too unprepared for the secret which eludes his grasp every time he tries to grapple with it. 'Not by logic and argumentation is this wisdom to be attained', says the Kathopanishad. Human understanding is inapplicable in the realm of the universal.

But, when the piercing intelligence succeeds in battling with this borderland of the universal hidden in individual experience, certain other difficulties begin to show their heads. The mutual interaction of consciousness and matter produces such vehement reactions as the feelings of heat and cold, hunger and thirst, sleep and the fear of death. These natural pressures, which often assume atrocious forms of intensity, prevent further effort for progress onward. Even heroes of saintliness cannot wholly combat these demands from the bodily nature. The questions, 'to do or not to do', 'to be or not to be', are raised by these physico-vital urges in the individual, and dreads of an unknown nature surround the seeking Yogi, some of which we are given to understand from the records of experience of such masters as Gautama, the Buddha, of Jesus, the Christ. These are the stages through which every one has to pass, and there appears to be no exception to this rule. Here, again, comes up another problem. One's growth towards perfection remains always undiscovered and unpalpable. The growth is from within, as with a fruit, and it is not easily seen. Even a minute before we actually wake up from sleep, we cannot know that we are anywhere near wakefulness. The awakening, when it comes, is always sudden, and it takes us by surprise. It rarely comes with previous notice. The psycho-physical urges which stand on the way of the attainment are impetuous enough to threaten the greatest among the seekers on the path. It becomes a question of life and death. One will not know whether it is life or death that is ahead. It is a fierce battle between the known and the unknown, on the border between the finite and the infinite.

This experience gets further accentuated by additional factors which weigh heavily on one's experience in the form of the principles of space, time and gravitation, which have a say in everything, in all creation. Space, time and cause are the final judges of all experience. Nothing can be thought except in terms of these determining principles. Even our concept of perfection or of the Absolute is not free from their interference. In fact, the organic involvement of consciousness and its objects is due to the operation of space-time in experience. The push of consciousness towards objects and the push of objects towards consciousness in a kind of mutual agreement between them is on account of the fact that space and time, working together, act equally upon consciousness on one side and on objects on the other. Though, logically, space and time are objects of consciousness and cannot be said to be inherent in it in a sense of organic inseparableness, there is a sort of inseparable unity of the two as between a crystal and the colour that is reflected in its whole body. The entire situation seems to be a huge muddle and mess of an organic tie of relationship between consciousness and the principle of externality, which is the space-time-cause continuum. This stage of realisation is, however, different from the usual experience of man that space and time are outside as objects of observation, which is a far earlier condition, now stepped over in an environment of the universal recognised as the single content in the various vehicles of individuality spread out through the cosmos.

The understanding working through the media of space and time is the mathematical intellect and the logical reason. Mathematics and logic seem to be exact sciences incapable of reversal of rule in any period of time, due to a permanent fixation of the space-time laws in one's consciousness. The physical sciences which work on the basis of the law of causality are again offshoots of the laws of the space-time continuum. Our consciousness cannot go beyond phenomena. The concepts of the beyond, such as of an Absolute God, a unified world and an immortal soul, are also tarnished by their involvement in the network of space-time-cause relations. The science of physics has attempted to dive into the secrets of Nature and grasp the mystery of the space-time world. But this effort has not led science to lasting success. From matter in the form of the five gross elements of earth, water, fire, air and ether, scientific enquiry moved along the discovery of electromagnetic fields behind the molecular and atomic structures of matter, and landed itself in the doctrines of quantum particles and wave mechanics, ending finally in the theory of relativity of the universe. This is wonderful knowledge, indeed, which science has acquired at the present day, useful for constructive as well as destructive purposes, taking man's breath away, beyond the limitations of crass materialistic thinking, to the realms of a cosmic relativity of all phenomena. But, nevertheless, this relativistic discovery, though it appeared to plant human knowledge in a state of absoluteness, never really did so, for the wisdom of physical science is not outside the ultimate reaches of the space-time, cause continuum. At this stage, modern physics and profound metaphysics coalesce and come to almost common conclusions in regard to the mystery of creation. And, yet, there is a beyond.

It is difficult for the logical understanding to explain what is really behind this acme which has, up to now, been reached. It looks that man is not given to know it or have an access into it. One does not know what is on the other side of this screen that hangs heavily before one's consciousness at this level of experience. Great philosophers, saints and sages have warned us not to be too inquisitive about it. The Buddha declined to say anything on the question. The Bhagavadgita sings of its epic grandeur, and the Upanishads revel in ecstasies over its majesty and glory. Mystics have cried out that it is a ravishing experience which bursts one's soul with everlasting joy. But, apart from these awe-inspiring intimations, making one's hair stand on end, humanity knows next to nothing about it. In moments of unselfish contemplation, dispassionate spirits do get a glimpse of what this marvel is. The Upanishads and the Bhagavadgita, particularly, give us some suggestions and techniques of adjusting our thoughts and feelings in such a way that we can set ourselves en rapport with Universal Existence, which is the Truth of all truths, and the goal towards which all beings tend in their wholeness and togetherness, in every stage of their evolution.

It is this knowledge which becomes our guide in the directing of conduct in daily life. It is the ethics of determining and judging the particular in terms of the universal, in the different stages of its manifestation. The higher we go, the greater is the expanse of the universal, and the lesser the cramping influence of the gross particulars or individualities in the world of sense-experience. From the above analysis it will be observed that the base and structure of political administration through the circles of family, community, nationality and the international system of law is a proof of there being a need for higher and higher integrations of environment into a unity of selfhood which is falsely attempted through legal disciplines and outward rules of behaviour in the medium of the space-time manifold. Politics cannot achieve what it simply points to as a signpost in the space-time mechanism which acts as a screen through which we faintly locate what is behind. The march of history shows that life is restless and tends to a more synthesised purpose of rest by means of more integrated organisations of life. The study of history without an insight into the why of its processes through the ages would be like dissecting a corpse to know the working of the human organism, or, worse still, an effort to catch the moon visible in the ripples of a river. Sociology, civics, economics and aesthetics are indications of the impossibility to rest merely in one's individuality, personality, body, senses and the legalistic intellect. These limitations are pointed out by the need for organisation, sympathetic behaviour, dependence on material goods, harmony of perception in art and wholeness of sublime thinking in literature, all which are like ambassadors who represent, but are themselves not, the power for which they stand. The urges for food, accumulation of wealth, sexual gratification, exercising power over others and proclaiming one's name by popularisation are pressures felt within to immortalise one's being, to universalise it, to be supreme above all externality of being and to behold oneself in the objects and unite oneself with them in spatio-temporal self-perpetuation, all which again are futile attempts to implant the infinite in the reflected medium of the finite realm of entities isolated by the laws of space, time and cause. The longing for knowledge is an expression of the basic infinitude of consciousness and an indication of its restlessness until this realisation is reached in being, and not mere learning. The freshness and energy gained from sleep indicates that here one enters, though unconsciously, a wholeness of reality, characterised by absence of space, time and externality. Sleep is, thus, an indicator through structural similarity of an experience which totally differs from it in kind. The fear of death proves the immortality of one's essential nature. One cannot cease to exist in one's core; hence, there is dread of the very idea of cessation of being. As the notion of the finite proves the possibility of the infinite, the notion of change a changeless substratum, and the notion of difference the fact of oneness, the abhorrence of the phenomenon of dying is demonstration enough of the potential eternity of the soul. Perception through the senses and cognition through the mind of objects apparently located in space and time show by the fact of the 'compresence' of awareneness in perception and cognition that the objects are in tune with the subject in their essence. The stages of the development of modern physics show that the universe, inclusive of the body of the subject observing, is a uniform energy-continuum, a space-time continuum of relativity of 'prehension' and 'apprehension' in differing orders of interpenetrating systems and experience, that there is an all-round 'ingression' of mutually determining situations of cosmic significance, which are mistaken for persons and things, and that the knower of all these phenomena has to be a single consciousness, universal in its nature, which knows itself alone, and knows no other, there being nothing outside it. The outcome of all efforts at the acquisition of knowledge by way of the educational process in the fields of art, science, technology and the like is an attempt of consciousness to reach out to a qualitative expansion in larger dimensions characterised by more and more inwardness and totality of comprehension. The ethical principle or the moral rule demonstrates the need to recognise a 'kingdom of ends', and urges that things and persons are to be regarded as a sort of selfhood rather than objects, a possibility of achievement when the barrier of the space-time distinction of subjects and objects is lifted. This cannot be done through the codes of ethics and morality, for the rule is only a hint at the existence of a more expanded selfhood as the true being of everything, and is not itself a solution to the problem. The formal religion of the populace is an indication of the necessity to look for, adore and love the whole, rather than a part of the universe. This tendency is manifest in the desire of the mind to give itself up completely in concentration of a thing, an object, a fetish, a portrait, a symbol, a diagram, an image, or a concept conjured up within itself in greater and greater degrees of comprehensiveness. The entire being of man asks for the entirety of existence in all forms of religious enthusiasm, prayer, worship and meditation. But this type of formality in religion does not mean contact with reality, which plays hide and seek through the forms.

The duty of man is what he is obliged to perform in recompense for the services he receives from the world. He depends on other human beings for his food, clothing, shelter and education. He depends on the five elements for water, heat, light, air, and his very existence. He depends on the presiding subtler forces behind Nature for the integration of his personality and society, forces which regulate even the orbital motion of the planets and the stellar systems.

The lesser the help we take from outside, the lesser is also our obligation and responsibility in the form of duty, and the greater is our freedom, which is attained gradually by stages of overstepping the lower and the grosser in terms of the higher and the subtler, so that when we need nothing at all from outside, we attain supreme liberation.

First, there is a gradual independence gained over our needs from other people. Then comes the independence over the forces of Nature, the limitations of one's individuality. When this is achieved, absolute independence is attained, which is called God-realisation, Reality-Experience, etc., wherein one has nothing to gain or lose, nothing to know or learn, nothing to wish or desire for, and nothing to do as a matter of duty or obligation.

From the political state of consciousness to the Absolute, it is a rise from one totality of being to another, from one wholeness to another with greater fullness. This totality or wholeness is the essential characteristic of selfhood, so that it is a rise from self to self, in higher and higher connotations, and there is nowhere, at any stage of evolution, a love evinced for anything other than some stage of selfhood. A pure object is a sheer externality, which can never become the goal of anyone's liking. This rise, however, is from more mechanised types of self to more organised forms of it, until both these categories are transcended in the Absolute Self. The mechanised and organic types are subject to disintegration and annihilation when their components get separated through change in the evolutionary process. The Absolute, alone, is. Everything else is a movement towards it.

At every stage of the advancement of this 'totality' or 'wholeness' of being towards the Absolute, contact with elements which pull the consciousness towards externality as the respective object-forms of any given stage is to be diligently avoided - the forms of consciousness-entanglement detailed in the above analysis. Students on the path of Yoga have therefore to be extremely vigilant in assessing the correct state of consciousness in which they are at any moment in their life and dexterously endeavour to overstep the limits of consciousness by a healthy growth into the next higher stage of reality, through meditation along the lines indicated in these paragraphs.