Spiritual Evolution: A Conspectus of Human Life

Human perception causes the kind of knowledge which takes things in their isolated and disconnected capacity, on account of which there is attraction and repulsion for them.

The philosophy of this sort of perception is given in the Bhagavadgita: Yat tu kṛtsnavad ekasmin kārye saktam ahaitukam, atattvārthavad alpaṁ ca tat tāmasam udāhṛtam (Gita 18.22).

The Bhagavadgita regards this sort of knowledge as the lowest type of knowledge.

That kind of knowledge which regards things in their individual capacity alone and takes the part for the whole, mistaking each entity for a complete substantiality and truth and thus giving rise to likes and dislikes in the mind, is the minimum of knowledge, the grossest of perceptions and the crudest type of understanding.

But unfortunately, we think that this is the only kind of knowledge available to us. For us, every person is complete by himself or herself. Everything is individually a whole, on account of which there is a like for the possession of certain things and a dislike towards other things we wish to avoid.

This means to say, the philosophy itself is unfounded, basically erroneous, and as psychology is based on philosophy, our ideas and values regarding things are founded upon this fundamental mistake which we take for a correct perception. It is taken for the whole of truth.

When a mother loves a child, the child is the entire truth for her. It is not a partial truth. When a miser loves his money, it is a whole truth for him. When a vainglorious egoist loves his position, that is the entire thing for him. Everything becomes entire.

The character of entirety is foisted upon a particularity. The attribute of completeness is superimposed on an individual which is really incomplete. Everything in the world is incomplete, whether it is a person or a thing.

It is the incompleteness of a thing that is responsible for the evolution of that thing into higher forms of existence. Organic and inorganic evolution is the tendency of an incomplete something to grow into a more complete version of its own existence. Every finite thing grows higher and higher in its tendency to become wider and wider.

Restlessness is the character of the finite object. Change is inseparable from finitude. All individuality is incompleteness. Nothing that is seen as an isolated object can rest in itself for more than a single moment of time.

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