Not the question about God, and not the origin and inquiry into the origin and the purpose of the world is religion, but the question about Man. All religious views of life are anthropocentric.
Religion = that activity of the human impulse towards self-preservation by means of which Man seeks to carry his essential vital purposes through against the adverse press of the world by raising himself freely towards the world’s ordering and governing powers when the limits of his own strength are reached.
“When mystical activity is at its height, we find consciousness possessed by the sense of a being at once excessive and identical with the self: great enough to be God, inferior enough to be Me”
All the religions in the world –
(1) Begin with the divided self and the struggle.
(2) They involve the change of personal centre and the surrender of the lower self.
(3) They express the appearance of exteriority of the helping power and yet account for our sense of union with it.
Brain:—
“The body of our thought-consciousness consists of feeling, and only the form constitutes what we distinguish as intelligence. The intellectual element is limited to recognition of the co-existences and sequences among sensations and co-ordination of feelings.
That part which we ordinarily ignore when speaking of mind is its essential part, viz., feelings. The emotions are the masters, the intellect is the servant. Little can be done by improving the servant (intellect), while the master (feelings) remain unimproved. The guidance of acts through perception and reason has for its end the satisfaction of feelings which at once prompt the acts and yield the energy for performance of the acts; for all the exertions daily gone through, whether accompanied by agreeable or disagreeable feelings, are gone through that certain other feelings may be obtained or avoided.” – H. Spencer.
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Belief is great life-giving. The history of a nation becomes fruitful, soul-elevating, great as it believes.
These Arabs, the man Muhammad, and that one century, is it not as if a spark had fallen, one spark, on a world of what seemed black unnoticeable sand; but lo, the sand proves explosive powder, blazes heaven-high from Delhi to Grenada!
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Whoever lives not wholly in this Divine Idea, or living partially in it, struggles not, as for the one good, to live wholly in it, – he is, let him live where else he like, in what pomps and prosperities he like, no Literary Man; he is, says Fitche, a bungler, a non-entity.
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Scepticism means not intellectual Doubt alone, but moral Doubt; all sorts of infidelity, insincerity, spiritual paralysis.
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While an evil is very great, it attracts little or no attention; when from one or other cause it is mitigated, recognition of it brings efforts to decrease it; and when it has much diminished there comes a demand that strong measures shall be taken for its extinction. Natural means having done so much, a peremptory call for artificial means arises – as in darkness. – H. Spencer.
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The Carlylean theory of the Great Man and his achievements is defective as it absolutely ignores the genesis of social structures and functions which has been going on through the ages. It is as though a child seeing for the first time a tree, from which a gardener is here cutting off a branch and there pruning away smaller parts, should regard the gardener, the only visible agent,” as the creator of the whole structure.
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“Augustus was sensible that mankind is governed by names; nor was he deceived in his expectation, that the senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom.” – Gibbons.
I am the SUN, Jagat (world) is mere beam in Me.
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Spiritual study in solitude combined with regular entering into silence, properly conducted, will develop that heroic Truth-Consciousness whereby the sins, sorrows, thought of body, and bodily fears will fall off as a scab when the wound is healed.
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Belief I define to be the healthy act of a man’s mind. We have our mind given to us, not that it may cavil and argue, but that it may see into something, wherein we are then to proceed to act. A man lives by believing something.