In the chapter on Ethics we came to the conclusion that moral action, based as it must be on correct moral judgments, is not possible without a high degree of self-consciousness and a high degree of self-consciousness cannot be achieved without continued moral action for some time. This state of things creates a problem for life which life must solve if it is to continue the process of evolution and it solves the problem by creating men who are known as “prophets”. This state of things, moreover, is not unusual or peculiar to the psychological level of life. We have its analogy on the biological plane of life as well. It is like saying that a man cannot resist disease unless he is totally healthy and he cannot be totally healthy unless he resists disease continuously for sometime. As in this latter case both good health and resistance to disease can be assured by the regular use of nourishing, vitalizing food, so in the former case, both a healthy self or (which is the same thing) a high stage of self-consciousness and moral action (resistance to immorality) can be assured by feeding the self regularly on the life-giving knowledge of a “prophet”, that is, by offering strict obedience to him.

 

The term “prophet” is sometimes used to imply a man having a foresight. In the above paragraph, however, it is used in the sense of a man who rises to a very high stage of self-consciousness by a special favour of Nature and becomes an inspired teacher and revealer of the will of the Creator. But how is it that Nature favours some men to reach a very high standard of self-consciousness and become prophets and not the others?

 

The psychological phenomenon of prophethood is a continuation, in a different shape appropriate to the human stage of evolution, of the well-known biological phenomenon of mutations or sudden variations of species which Nature manifested earlier at the animal stage of evolution. It is a characteristic of consciousness that resistance stimulates its activity. Whenever it feels that its movement is being retarded too much on account of these obstacles, it makes an extraordinary push forward and takes a sudden leap. Such efforts of consciousness resulted, in the animal world, in the sudden variations of species, i.e. the sudden appearance, as if by miracle, of a type of species entirely different from and registering a considerable improvement upon the previous type. In the human world these efforts gave rise to the sudden appearance of highly self-conscious men whom we call prophets and who brought into existence, at various times in our history, some highly advanced and cultured societies in the world.

 

In the animal world the phenomenon of sudden variations of species came to an end with the appearance of the first man, that is, the first animal that was biologically complete enough to make possible the continuation of the process of evolution without the creation of any more species. One can assume that in the human world the corresponding phenomenon of prophethood must similarly come to an end with the appearance of the first prophet who is psychologically complete enough to make possible the continuation of the process of evolution without the creation of any more prophets, that is, with the appearance of the first prophet whose practical life is an application of the Right Ideal to all the fundamental aspects (e.g. to the social, ethical, economic, legal, military and political aspects) of natural human activity. Indeed the life-example of such a prophet will embody all the essentials of that process by means of which life will be actually able to unfold and evolve itself and to realise its aspirations and actualise its potentialities in the future.

 

The extraordinary efforts of life, whether they manifest themselves in the animal world as sudden variations of species or in the human world as prophethood, are due to a feeling of restraint and constriction and the consequent necessity of a more vigorous self-expression on the part of life. In the animal world every such effort pushed forward the process of evolution by several stages but every effort failed to realise those highest possibilities of life which could be realised in the animal stage, except the effort that came last of all and resulted in the appearance of man, the perfect animal. When man had thus appeared, it took him a considerable time before he could dominate completely over the earth. In the human world every extraordinary effort of consciousness similarly carries forward the process of evolution by several steps but fails to realise all the highest aspirations of life possible to be realised in man except the effort that comes last of all. The first such effort that succeeds makes unnecessary, and puts a stop to, all future efforts of this kind. If the effort were not to fail each time, there would be no cause for it to be repeated. As soon as there is an effort which succeeds completely, it results in the appearance of a prophet who is a practical teacher of the Right Ideal in all its fundamental aspects, i.e. whose life offers him full opportunities to set an example of how the human society of the future will act, struggle and expand in the actual course of evolution. The career of such a prophet represents a full expression of the latent possibilities of life. Such a prophet must, therefore, be the last link in the chain of prophetbood, the last embodiment of the exceptional drives of consciousness in the human stage of evolution, as man was the last embodiment of the extraordinary leaps of consciousness in the animal stage. He is the complete as well as the last prophet. The reason is that in him life achieves a complete victory which it can never lose in future and can never have to win again by creating another prophet. This victory is maintained and protected by life throughout in the form of a community of the prophet’s followers which endures and keeps alive by its existence his fundamental teachings till the end of the world. Such a community may be visited by terrible vicissitudes of fortune but Nature can never allow it to perish, since it embodies an expression of the future hopes of life, a model of its future destination, rough in details, but complete and perfect in all its fundamentals.

 

Such a community can never disappear from the face of the earth because it represents what life wants to create and evolve and not what it wants to demolish and destroy. It upholds those principles of action which are in the very nature of life and by means of which life is bound to reach in actual fact its goal of evolution in future. Having taken refuge with life itself once for all, it becomes safe from death. Life sustains the community because the community sustains life, and the community sustains life because life has realised itself completely in that community. Life, on the one hand, and the selves of the individuals forming the community, on the other, respond to each other so completely that none likes to be separated from the other. Each has discovered itself in the other and, therefore, each has an unending charm for the other. In case one of them withdraws from the other, the other advances automatically and irresistibly to meet it. Such meetings of the two, following temporary separations, result in the appearance of highly self conscious men within the community who maintain the general level of their self-consciousness, whenever it tends to lower.

 

This community is a complete victory of life, and life, having once achieved a complete victory, maintains it throughout. It builds more and more upon previous victories of this kind and never loses them, since it has to go forward and not to come back. With such a community extant in the world, life never feels the constraint or the constriction which necessitates another extraordinary drive resulting in another prophet. In case there is another prophet after the last and the complete prophet, Nature does not require to favour him, as a moral and spiritual leader of men, with opportunities to emphasise by his example all the aspects of human activity which the process of evolution must reveal, because life has already succeeded in creating such opportunities in the case of one prophet in the past. His teachings as a practical leader of men, therefore, remain imperfect, one-sided and incomplete, and the community created by him also lives for but a short time unlike the community of the last and the complete prophet, which has the capacity to endure as long as the world lasts. Such a prophet can be only partially true, and partial truth is no truth, as we know.

 

The attempt of life to bring prophethood to a finality or completeness is not an extraordinary phenomenon peculiar to prophethood. It is the result of a general tendency of life. Life brings every creative process of its own to a finality and completeness. When one finality or completeness is reached, the creative process changes in character and starts on a fresh career, of which this completeness becomes the foundation. Then the process advances by a series of steps for the achievement of the next higher finality or completeness. The creative process by which the next higher finality is reached has a course of evolution like the preceding process by which the previous finality was reached. The important point is that a finality or completeness that is once achieved is not dispensed with but is maintained and perpetuated as a necessary foundation of all subsequent evolution.

 

To take an example, the human embryo in the womb of the mother develops from state to state till it achieves a completeness or finality when it becomes fit to be born as a baby. The baby cannot live or grow after birth, if it does not achieve this finality before birth. In other words, Nature makes this finality the foundation or the “first step” of the next process of growth, which starts as soon as the child is born, and which takes an entirely new shape. The embryo is supplied with blood directly out of the blood of the mother through the placental cord. It is a total parasite on the mother and depends for its life entirely on the healthy functioning of her bodily system. The baby, on the other hand, can live independently of the mother by virtue of that completeness of its growth and development which it was able to achieve during its embryonic stage in the womb of the mother. Its respiratory and digestive organs come into action and their activity imparts a new character to the process of its future growth. This process develops again step by step till, when the child attains to the prime of his youth, his teeth, his stature, his brain and other vital organs reach their perfection. The biological growth comes to a stop or continues only in minor details. This is a second finality or completeness which is built on the foundations of the first. This second completeness with all the powers (physical or mental) that it brings to the individual is utilised again as the basis of future evolution and becomes an essential and foundational material for that psychological growth which we understand as conscious and responsible action and effort for the achievement of the ideal. The process of evolution that was biological now changes in character and becomes psychological. It now aims at a third finality or completeness of a different nature which consists of the highest evolution of the self. But here again it cannot proceed on its way unless it makes use of the second biological completeness as a foundation.

 

When we turn from the growth of the human individual to the growth of the Universe itself, we find the same principle at work.

 

The evolution of matter reaches a finality or completeness when matter becomes ripe for the production of, and therefore actually produces, the first living cell. The evolutionary process, which was of a physico-chemical nature so far, changes in character and becomes vital or biological. It makes the initial physical completeness as its foundation and keeps on till it achieves another finality or completeness when the first complete animal or the first man with a fully developed brain and the capacity to love ideals makes his appearance. The first completeness achieved in the form of the living cell figures as an indispensable part of this second completeness, since the human body is nothing but a huge conglomeration of living cells.

 

On the appearance of man the process of evolution again changes in character and shifts from the biological to the psychological or ideological plane where we find innumerable prophets emerging one after the other. Making this second finality or completeness its starting point, it continues its course for the achievement of a third finality or completeness in the form of the first complete prophet. This finality must form, as usual, an indispensable foundation of the next finality which will be, of course, a complete or perfect Universe.

 

Thus we see that in the creative processes of Nature there are series of finalities, wholes or completeness. Every finality, whole or completeness is the culminating point of all the previous achievements of life. It is not merely their aggregate but an indivisible whole or a structure in which alone all these achievements can exist in their perfection, although some of them may be no longer recognisable in their new setting. Every completeness is, moreover, an indispensable foundation of the next and can be distinguished by its capacity to ensure the continuation of the altered process of future evolution. It alone, in exclusion to any of its constituents secured in the past, or their mere sum total, has the potentialities of future growth. It alone is the passage or the channel of future evolution. We, therefore, come to the conclusion, not only that prophethood comes to an ultimate completeness in some one prophet, but also that the ideology and the life-example of that prophet form an indispensable foundation of all the subsequent evolution of the human race. He alone is the gateway of all future evolution – a gateway of evolution which, in the last resort, it is impossible for the human race to avoid – and that is why life must exert itself incessantly and untiringly through the ages to make him appear.

 

When Nature creates the first animal, that is, the first living cell, its real object is to create a complete animal or man and, when it creates the first complete animal or man, its object is to create a group or a community of hundreds of millions of animals like him, so that they may fill the whole earth and dominate it completely as the highest form of animal life. But when Nature decides to do a thing, it is never in a hurry about it. It never fails in its ends and designs but it achieves them by a slow, gradual and systematic process.

 

When Nature creates the first animal, it is confident that by exercising its instincts of self-preservation it will evolve itself further into higher and higher species, till man, the complete animal, will make his appearance. Whenever such evolution is retarded or stopped, life aids it by means of sudden drives resulting in the phenomenon which is known as “mutations” or sudden variations of species. Finally, when man comes into existence as a result of one of these drives, Nature achieves its object that is implied in the creation of the first animal and, therefore, the creation of new species comes to a stop. Having brought the most perfect type of animal, man, into existence in this way, Nature relies on the instincts of procreation in him and in his offspring as well as on their powers as the highest type of animal life to do for it the rest of its job, that is, to multiply their numbers and to spread them throughout the earth.

 

Similarly, when Nature creates the first prophet, its real object is to create a complete prophet and, when it creates a complete prophet, its object is to create not only a complete prophet but also a group or a community of hundreds of millions of his self-conscious followers in order that they may fill the whole earth. But here again Nature proceeds to achieve its ends by a slow process. When the first prophet is created, Nature is confident that the urge of consciousness in his followers will continue to evolve them further till one day the first complete prophet with a complete ideology will make his appearance among them. Whenever such evolution is retarded or stopped, life helps it by sudden drives which result in the appearance of new prophets. Each drive of life results in a success but each success, like the one preceding it, is incomplete and, therefore, incapable of maintaining itself permanently or, what is the same thing, of evolving itself continuously. Nature preserves, perpetuates or evolves only a complete success or the steps leading to it. In other words, the ideology of none of the prophets that appear as a result of such drives has the capacity to satisfy the requirements of future evolution and, therefore, to endure forever; none of these ideologies is complete and, therefore, none of them is capable of becoming the instrument or foundation of future evolution.

 

The next drive takes place as often as the achievements of the last drive, instead of evolving themselves or adding to themselves continuously, begin to give way, proving themselves unfit to cope with ever fresh obstacles in the way of life as manifested in them. Because they are incomplete, their ultimate decline or dissipation is inherent in their very nature. The occasion for the next drive (which, of course, aims once again at producing a complete prophet) becomes ripe every time that the ideology of the prophet who comes into existence as a result of the last drive, proves itself to be incomplete and unfit to hold its own and evolve itself further for its very life in the midst of ever-changing hostile circumstances. Finally, when the complete prophet comes into the world as a result of one of these drives, Nature achieves its object that is implied in the creation of the first prophet and the creation of new prophets, as leaders of new communities, comes to a stop. Having brought the most perfect type of prophet into existence in this way, Nature relies upon the urge of leadership in him and in his followers as well as upon their powers as the embodiment of the highest expression of life, to do for it the rest of its job, that is, to multiply their numbers and to spread them throughout the earth.

 

To say that every prophet who comes before the last prophet is necessarily incomplete, does not mean that his knowledge of the self is incomplete with that of the last prophet. It only means that the conditions of the society in which he appears and the circumstances which he has to face are such that only a small portion of his knowledge of the self, which is, in fact, always as complete as that of any other prophet, before him or after him, is able to have expression in his precept as well as in the personal example of his life in which it is ultimately embodied. The circumstances in which he appears are such that he is able to give us only an incomplete view of life. A prophet’s knowledge becomes manifest and actual only in the course of his reaction to circumstances. It is like two men having each a sum of Rs. 1,000 at his credit in the bank, of whom one spends only Rs. 100 during a month and the other spends the whole amount. The latter will appear to us to be richer than the former, although, as a matter of fact, both are equally rich. It is when and because a prophet is unable to give us a perfect view of life that Nature requires to repeat the experiment of prophethood. Although the knowledge of no prophet preceding the last prophet is incomplete, yet the ideology of each one of them, as embodied in the example of his own practical life, is incomplete on account of the circumstances in which he comes to live his life. Of all the prophets the last prophet alone gives a complete ideology to the world, an ideology, which, as reflected in his practical life, embraces all aspects of human nature, and that is why he becomes the last prophet.

 

This does not mean that of the series of efforts that consciousness makes in order to produce a complete prophet only one—the last of all—succeeds and all others go waste or fail completely. The results of every effort that comes next are higher in some way than those of the previous one because every effort aims, not only at compensating for the loss of the achievements of the previous effort, but also at adding to those achievements in such a way that their total result is a complete prophethood. In other words, it wants to compensate for the lack of that progress which would have been possible if the ideology of the previous prophet had had the capacity to and had continued to evolve itself into a full-blown ideology. The result of every effort is what it is because the previous effort had taken place. These drives of consciousness, therefore, assume the shape of a process of building on the past successes for the achievement of a final complete success. The last effort secures results which include all the previous successes plus something more to make a complete systematic whole or a configuration, a pattern or a structure in which the past successes exist in their perfection, whether or not it is possible for us to recognise them in this structure. This whole may be different from its constituents, as they display themselves in the past, in certain things, but it is their creative continuation and not their denial. The last effort of life, as a result of which this whole comes into existence, subtracts nothing from the previous results but rather adds to them and their apparently altered character in the final whole is due to this addition rather than to any subtraction. Thus the teachings of the last prophet, the final whole of prophethood, which Nature creates by its repeated efforts includes the teachings of all the previous prophets, whether it may be possible for us to recognise them in his teachings or not.

 

Every incomplete ideology, that is, the ideology of every prophet preceding the last prophet, succumbs to the forces of evolution and is effaced by them completely in the long run because Nature does not care for the parts of a whole, however good and beautiful they may be in themselves, unless they are in the whole in which they are meant to exist. Nature wants to create wholes and, when it succeeds in creating them, it preserves them and uses them as the basis of future evolution, or rather they preserve themselves and persist and evolve because as wholes they acquire powers, properties or potentialities which enable them to persist and evolve. When a product of creation which was intended by Nature to be a whole fails to be one, it is allowed to perish with everything good and beautiful that may be there in it, not because Nature wants to destroy what is good and beautiful, but because it wants to preserve it where alone it can be best preserved, that is, in its complete setting within a complete whole. In other words, after discarding the incomplete product Nature makes a fresh attempt to create the intended complete whole, where the discarded product comes to live again, and permanently. In one sense, therefore, none of the ideologies of the old prophets is swept away completely. Each lives in its perfectly developed condition in the form of the complete ideology of the last prophet. Each finds its full expression and realises its destiny in the ideology of the last prophet. The ideology of the complete prophet, of course, as reflected in his actual practical life, embraces all aspects of human nature and thus, being a complete whole, is in favour with the forces of evolution and has the powers and the potentialities to endure for ever.

 

A prophet was defined above as a person who is gifted with a high standard of self-consciousness by a special favour of Nature. But Nature’s gift of prophethood is not a favour to one man; it is meant to be, and it is, a favour to those innumerable men in every generation who attain to a high standard of self-consciousness by accepting his guidance and leadership. Although the essential quality in prophethood is a high degree of self-consciousness which the follower of a prophet may also nearly achieve, yet the difference between a prophet and his highly self-conscious follower is great and fundamental. It is similar to the difference between a man who has visited a city and seen every nook and corner of it himself and a man who has only listened to its description from him and visualised every nook and corner of it. Or, it is similar to the difference between the inventor of a highly complicated machine and a man who has been only trained to use it efficiently. The latter can never attain to the high standard of the knowledge and skill of the former. The self-consciousness of the prophet is of a standard and quality which can never be achieved by any of his followers and which remains for them an ideal to be realised till the end of the world. The reason is that the follower of a prophet, however much he may evolve his self-consciousness, can yet never become a prophet.

 

A prophet is blessed with a high level of self-consciousness independently of all external guidance while his follower acquires it by virtue of his absolute obedience to him. The leader creates values which are unknown to the follower and which the follower realises and acquires by means of only his absolute obedience to the leader. The prophet leads other men on behalf of consciousness. The follower leads other men on behalf of the prophet and creates not his own followers but the followers of his leader. The leader achieves a high standard of self-consciousness as the sole result of a sudden drive of consciousness aided by his own urge for Beauty. The follower achieves it by a long, difficult and laborious process which is not free from temporary and occasional slips and errors, at least in the beginning. The former can appear only when circumstances favouring a special drive of consciousness are present, while the latter can acquire self-consciousness under all circumstances, provided he can avail himself of the life-example of his prophet. The former may be compared to a man who is raised to the top floor of a high building suddenly by an electric lift and the latter to a man who struggles towards it step by step along a staircase.

 

Self-consciousness is in the nature of man which is permanent and which man will know how to express more and more in future. Every man is potentially self-conscious and waits to become actually self-conscious sooner or later. Self-consciousness, therefore, does not come to an end with the appearance of the complete prophet; it rather blossoms forth more and more abundantly and self-conscious men appear more and more numerously after he has come into the world. Only, no one of these men is, by the very nature of things, able to discover himself in a position to become a new centre of a partial or total spiritual authority or to create an independent society of his followers by assuming the title of a prophet. The reason is that, with the community of the complete prophet extant in the world, the cause of the sudden drives of consciousness outside the prophet’s community disappears and the drives come to a stop, having become both unnecessary and impossible. The result is that no man, who is not a follower of the complete prophet, is able to rise to the higher stages of self-consciousness. The title of a prophet, in all its varieties, implying a wholly or partially authoritative and independent spiritual leader, becomes, therefore, the prerogative of the complete prophet which neither anyone of his innumerable and ever-increasing self-conscious followers nor anyone besides them ever has reason to share. What comes to an end most naturally and necessarily after the appearance of the complete prophet is not the principle or the quality of self-consciousness, which exists enfolded in the nature of man and which must be unfolded increasingly in the future, but rather the formation of new communities under new prophets. This provision of Nature is extremely important, since it makes possible that permanent unity of the human race, essential for their continued evolution, which only the leadership of a single man can assure.

 

Every prophet who comes into the world leaves behind him a community of his followers who, in spite of their pretensions to an all-embracing love and cosmopolitanism, quite naturally, believe in him and nobody else. This process highly subversive of human unity cannot continue for ever. Consciousness cannot go on always dividing humanity into an increasing number of highly prejudiced, narrow-minded and dissenting communities. Its real and ultimate intention in creating one prophet after another is not to divide mankind more and more, as this is contrary to its very nature, but it is rather to provide for its ultimate unity on the basis of a single complete ideology taught by a single prophet; and, like all its other intentions, consciousness does not fail to realise this intention of its own sooner or later. That the ultimate unity of the human race is essential and inevitable follows from the very nature of consciousness which, in spite of the diversity of its creation, is one and seeks oneness.

 

Every extraordinary effort of consciousness which results in the appearance of a new prophet aims at creating, through him, a community which is able to exemplify, as perfectly at least as essential, how the future, actual, conscious evolution of humanity, that is, the future practical and conscious achievement of the Right Ideal by the whole of the human race, can and will proceed. In other words, very far from aiming at subdividing humanity, consciousness aims at creating, through one of its sudden efforts, a community which enjoys a standard of life and a stage of evolution, by virtue of which it is best fitted, not only to rise to higher and higher levels of evolution itself but also to absorb gradually all the other communities and thereby to unite the whole of humanity within its body. The ideology of this community provides for the unlimited evolution of mankind and endures for ever, since it embraces all the fundamental aspects of human nature. Consciousness is in search of such a community and repeats its effort only when such a community has failed to appear, that is, when the ideology of the last community created by it has failed to hold its own on account of its inherent shortcomings. When consciousness repeats its effort, a new prophet and a new community come into existence. But whether or not the new effort results in the last prophet and the last community depends on the fact whether or not the circumstances in which the prophet comes to live his life are, this time, such as to favour the basic intention of consciousness involved in the effort. If they prove favourable, he and his community are able to exemplify completely the process of future evolution; consciousness succeeds in its purpose and does not require and ceases to create new prophets and new communities for the future. It, then, rather waits for this final community (since the community continues to live for ever), not only to rise to higher and higher levels of evolution itself, but also to absorb all the other communities into itself, and thereby to fulfil its purpose of uniting the whole of the human race on the basis of the Right Ideal. In this way, all the ideologies of the past disappear visibly, but, as a matter of fact, they do not disappear; they continue to live, having reached their perfection and their ultimate goal in the Final Ideology.

 

Man, as a self-evolving being, must be left at some stage of his evolution to make further discoveries about himself without fresh assistance from outside and that stage is reached as soon as the complete prophet has come into the world, that is, as soon as all the assistance that is essential as the foundation or the seed of such a progress becomes available to him for the first time. Then is man able to rely upon such assistance permanently without prejudice to the possibilities of his continued evolution of the future.

 

Supposing the ideology of one of the prophets is so complete that it has the potentialities of uniting the whole of the human race on the basis of the Right Ideal and actually succeeds in uniting them into a single family. Then, if the coming of prophets as the propagators of new ideologies and the founders of new communities, with new names and designations, should never come to a stop, as a principle, consciousness will create another prophet who will again slice off a portion of humanity to be his followers and then another one and another one ad infinitum with similar consequences in each case. In this way, consciousness will do no more than tear to pieces a unity which mankind was able to win after thousands of years of hard and bloody struggle. In this way, it will not only lose entirely its accumulated victories of the past but will also act contrary to the urge of its own nature. This is evidently an absurd conclusion! We must, therefore, infer that the finality of prophethood, in the sense in which we should understand it, is a fact and is indispensable to the ultimate unity as well as to the continued evolution of the human race.

 

The last of the prophets, whenever he comes into the world, is the first as well as the last of them. He is the first because he is the first to satisfy completely the requirements of life as a specimen to be followed by humanity for the sake of their continuous evolution of the future. All the prophets of the past live in him again. And he is the last of the prophets because he is that last type of life on the psychological plane which Nature intends to spread to the whole world and after which no fresh types on that plane are needed or created. He is the prophet of the past as well as the prophet of the future. The first complete prophet is the final prophet in the sense in which the first complete animal (man) is the final animal, that is, as a type of life and not as an individual of a type. In other words, he is the last prophet who really needs to found a community of his followers and whose community is really needed by life. For these reasons we shall refer to him in the pages that follow as the Complete or the Last Prophet or only as the Prophet and to his revelation as the Prophet’s Book or only as the Book.

 

When man came into the world, he procreated and spread throughout the earth gradually on account of his superiority over the lower animals till, in the course of millions of years, the whole of the earth was filled with his offspring. Since the first human being was a type of life that represented a complete animal, life favored it and helped it to prosper, to multiply and to dominate the earth. As, after the appearance of man, the first complete animal, the world is gradually filled with a race of men, so, after the appearance of the first Complete Prophet, the world is gradually filled with a race of his self-conscious followers. The ideology of the Complete Prophet obtains a victory over all the other ideologies gradually on account of its superiority over them as a higher type of life.

 

The complete animal, man, spread throughout the earth because he procreated. The procreation of the complete animal is biological. The procreation of the Complete Prophet, as a prophet, is psychological. On the biological level the achievements of life are disseminated and spread from one organism to another by means of the urge of sex. On the psychological level they are transmitted and spread from one man to another by means of the urge of leadership, which includes the urge to obey. Leading and obeying, although opposite in character, are (like the urge of sex in the opposite sexes) two aspects of the same urge to transmit the wave of life. This urge is a part of the urge of consciousness and the instinct of sex is only a lower expression of it. Leading and obeying on the psychological level of life is similar to the union of the opposite sexes on the biological plane of life. As an organism begets an organism, so an idea begets an idea. Men who will be inspired by the Prophet will make his ideal their own and will thereby constitute his psychological offspring which will go on multiplying and spreading throughout the earth. As the biological offspring of man enjoys a superiority over the other animals on account of which it is able to dominate the earth completely at last, so the psychological offspring of the Complete Prophet enjoys a superiority over the rest of mankind by means of which it is able to dominate them completely in the long run. As the present race of men required a first man to be their progenitor, so the future race of highly self-conscious men needs a first self-conscious man of the same type, i.e. a prophet, to be their spiritual grandfather.

 

To be the psychological offspring of the Last and the Perfect Prophet will be a dignity, a privilege, a pride as well as a promise to rule the world. But it will be necessary for those who wish to share this dignity, this privilege, this pride and promise, to place their utter reliance on the Prophet and to obey him totally and without a question. Obedience, faith and loyalty are aspects of love. They will have to love him, therefore, with all the love of which they are capable, better than they love the parents of their physical body. They will have to depend upon him completely as an embryo depends upon the mother in her womb. It is only in this way that they will be born of him psychologically and will come to deserve the privileges that will belong to his psychological “offspring”. Their love of the Prophet will not be unnatural or artificial. The Prophet’s love is already a part of the nature of every man, since our urge for Beauty demands a human leader or teacher to guide its satisfaction. By loving the Prophet, therefore, they will be only giving expression to an urge of their own nature. Whenever we love a human leader, whether he is a king or a dictator or a prophet or any other person, we use or misuse this love according as the leader is a true or a false, a complete or an incomplete representative of Consciousness. Everybody has a leader whom he loves and, therefore, everybody is making use of the love which is meant really and ultimately for the only human leader of men, that is, for the First as well as the Last of the prophets.

 

There is no doubt that the fundamental urge of human consciousness is to love the Creator and nobody else. But a love is always a system of loves; we love every object that brings us nearer to the Beloved. The love of the Creator must manifest itself in the form of innumerable subservient loves and the most immediate and obvious form of subservient love in which it can manifest itself is the love of the Prophet which is an indispensable condition for the birth and growth of the love of the Creator. The Prophet, as the parent of the higher life of man, has a greater right to his love and obedience than the mother, the person to whom an individual owes the birth and growth of his physical body. In fact, the Prophet has not merely a right to our love but our nature, provided it is correctly guided, compels us to love him more than we love our parents. Moreover, if we love and obey him, we shall do so only in our own interests. By loving the Prophet we shall grow our love for the Creator, give expression to the urge of our consciousness and evolve ourselves and, as our love for the Creator will grow in this way, it will add further to our love for the Prophet. The growth of the Prophet’s love will be at once the cause and the result of the growth of the love of the Creator. Since the love of the Prophet will arise in the service of the love of the Creator, as a part of human nature, the two loves will grow simultaneously; by growing the one we shall grow the other.

 

Those who will submit themselves completely to the orders of the Prophet in accordance with the demand of their nature will, so to say, take a new birth, and will start a new career of growth. By their complete submission to him they will feed themselves on the vitalizing milk of his knowledge and will grow and evolve their self, as a baby feeds on the nourishing milk of the mother and grows and evolves his body.

 

When a child sucks the nipples of his mother’s breasts he simply acquires a support, a stimulus or a spur for that urge to grow and evolve which is already latent in his nature. This urge is strengthened as the child grows so that he is able to look after himself more and more and requires less and less assistance from the mother. Before long the child comes to know that his own body, strengthened by the milk of the mother, can manage to supply him with the nourishment that he got from her body. He becomes independent of the mother. The mother is happy that the child has grown and has learnt to grow further, and the child is happy that he is satisfying more and more of those hopes and desires which the mother entertained when she fed him and which were implied in her act of feeding. A time comes when the child feels that he has grown as strong and healthy as his parent. But, although the child becomes independent of the mother in one way, he is not at all independent of her in another way. The nourishment that he got from the milk of the mother enters into all his future nourishment. It is the seed from which all his future nourishment is growing. Thus even the biological relation between the mother and the son, the mother as the nourisher and the son as the recipient of nourishment is a permanent one. In the same way, though the follower of the Prophet may become nearly as self- conscious as his master in due course of time on account of his unqualified and utter obedience to him, the psychological relationship between the two, one as the leader and the other as the follower, can never come to an end.

 

The Book of the Prophet, of which the Prophet himself, that is, his practical life, becomes the explanation or the commentary, is a simple, easily digestible mental food, as the milk of the mother is for a baby, because it is required primarily to feed and nourish men at a very low level of self-consciousness, men who are mere babies as regards their self-knowledge. But as a spiritual food, it has the potentialities of rearing giants of spiritual power, as the milk of the mother, in spite of its simplicity as a diet, has the potentialities of rearing giants of physical power. It possesses all the spiritual “vitamins” essential for the growth of the self and it is, therefore, equally suitable and adequate as a food for a man who is a “child” and a man who is a “full-grown youth” as regards his self-consciousness; in other words, it is suitable and adequate as a spiritual food at all stages of the growth of the self. The man who submits himself completely to the orders of the Prophet at once puts himself in a position to drink from his knowledge and thereby to grow and evolve his self indefinitely.

 

If the end of an individual’s progress is the achievement of the highest self-consciousness, it must have a beginning, and the beginning is made as soon as the individual surrenders himself totally to the authority of the Prophet. Birth and growth, on the psychological level of life, are very much similar to birth and growth on the biological level. Every grown-up man must begin as a child and every child must have a father. He who gives himself up to the unqualified obedience of the Prophet takes a new birth which is the birth of his self-consciousness and, as his physical body has a course of growth from his birth to the prime of his youth, so his self-consciousness too has a course of growth from the moment it takes its birth till the end of his life. It continues to evolve bit by bit till it reaches the stage of its highest evolution, where the man discovers at last that the commands of the Prophet which he was carrying out with absolute submission and humility are not external to him but they are his real, internal desires which he, at his best, cannot but love to follow of his own free choice.

 

Having discovered his nature in this way, he finds as if he can go the rest of his path himself almost without depending upon the Prophet any longer. But, in spite of it, there is nothing in his life to show that he has become independent of the Prophet. The reason is that the path of life which has become visible to him now and which he is impelled to follow by the urge of his own nature is no other than the path of the Prophet himself. He still follows in the footsteps of the Prophet, but now he does so without effort, automatically and even irresistibly. His complete dependence upon the Prophet has awakened and given a spur or a stimulus to that urge to grow and evolve his self-consciousness which was latent in his nature. Although he can never attain to that standard of self-consciousness which is enjoyed by the Prophet, yet there is a stage in his development when he feels that he is drawing very close to that standard. But even at this stage he does not abandon the path of the Prophet, not only because he obeys him in spite of himself, but also because he knows that the road to the highest stages of self-consciousness which he now follows out of his own irresistible desire is, even in the minutest of details, no other than the way prescribed by the Prophet. Such a man is the true “descendant” of the Prophet. He is similar to him psychologically in belief and action as the son is similar to the father in form and features. He is the Prophet’s offspring by a psychological “birth”.

 

A prophet is the progenitor of a psychological type of life just as the first individual of every species, whenever he comes into existence, is the progenitor of a biological type of life. The biological types continue to evolve till they end with the appearance of the first complete animal, i.e. the first human individual. The psychological types, similarly, continue to evolve till they end with the appearance of the first Complete Prophet. As there was the last and the most perfect of species or the biological types of life, so there is the last and the most perfect of prophets or the psychological types of life.

 

This means not only that the ideology of the Last Prophet alone will bring about and perpetuate the unity of the human race but also that it alone will carry them forward to the stage of their highest evolution. This means further that evolution to the highest levels of self-consciousness by means of worship and moral action will be possible only for the followers of the Last Prophet and not for those of any other prophet. At the animal stage evolution took place along one line alone and it was that which was leading to the emergence and earth domination of the last of the natural species, i.e. man. Similarly, at the human stage, evolution continues along one route alone and it is that which leads to the emergence and world-domination of the last of the natural ideological communities, i.e. the community of the Last Prophet.

 

We have already known that evolution depends, not only on the efforts of the creatures to evolve themselves, but also on the response of Reality to these efforts in view of the general scheme of things inherent in the Universe, that is to say, on the latent possibilities or potentialities of life. This is what happened at the animal stage of evolution. That is why all the species, in spite of their best efforts to exist and, therefore, to evolve themselves into higher and more complicated forms by their struggle for existence, could not continue their evolution and could not turn into the human form of life. This is what must happen at the human stage of evolution. People belonging to an ideological community other than that of the Last Prophet may also resort to worship and moral action. Yet Reality will never bless their efforts with good results and will not evolve them towards higher stages of evolution so long as they do not enter the community of the Last Prophet and do not offer strict obedience to him. Nature helps and favours only those species and those ideological communities which help and favour its own objectives and aspirations.

 

Some thinkers have proposed the creation of a new religion by combining all the religions as a device for the unification of mankind. But, apart from the fact that it is impossible to put such a scheme into practice, humanity can never be convinced and therefore, inspired and evolved to the highest stages of love by any eclectic, artificial or man-made religion. It is only a natural religion infused with life and vigour by the personal example of a prophet-founder and claimed and believed to be the direct revelation of the Creator which can create a genuine faith or a sincere love in their hearts. Even if a consciously planned eclectic religion comes into existence and succeeds in creating a community of its followers, the community must lack the capacity to endure. After some time it must begin to shrink in numbers till it is wiped out entirely. As a crossbred animal cannot continue its race for long, so a crossbred ideology cannot continue to have its followers beyond a certain limit. Every unnatural non-prophetic ideology, whether religious, political or intellectual, created by a spiritual man, a political leader or a thinker, in disregard of the prophetic ideology in force at the time, belongs to the same category. It is an unconscious, eclectical fusion of the founder’s own ideas with some of the ideas of the prophets. Such are, for example, the ideologies of Communism, Fascism and National Socialism and, in fact, all wrong ideologies.

 

Unless we submit totally to the guidance of a particular prophet who should be the prophet of the age, we cannot evolve our self-consciousness as individuals and as a society. As heat flows from one body to another that may be in contact with it and as a candle lights another candle held close to its flame, so the light of love or self-consciousness is kindled in a person who establishes by virtue of his beliefs and actions, a psychological contact with another person who is at a high stage of self-consciousness. The light of love concentrates itself first of all at one point and from there its rays spread far and wide over the earth. That point is always the personality of a prophet. As we cannot have a child without a father, so we cannot have a self-conscious man without a prophet.

 

Although the outward form of natural ideologies has been changing from time to time, it will be wrong to suppose that the eternal or essential part of any of them is only its moral essence or the principles of Universal Ethics that underlie its teachings or that, for this reason, the outward form of the last of these ideologies will, after some time, be ignored in favour of its essence or subjected to endless alterations at the discretion of its followers. Such a view can be due only to a misunderstanding that the forms of natural ideologies have been only changing and not evolving towards a stage of perfection or to a misunderstanding that a definite external form is not indispensable to the existence of a natural ideology and that, in any case, a natural ideology remains the same, no matter how its form may be changed. These misunderstandings are, in their turn, due to an erroneous view of the qualities and characteristics of life as they manifest themselves at the biological and psychological planes of evolution.

 

As a matter of fact, a definite external form is as essential to the existence of an ideology as a definite physical form is essential to the life of an organism. As a human being consists of the spirit plus the physical body, so an ideology consists of its moral or spiritual essence plus its external form. A type of life, whether biological or psychological, can exist, act and function in this external, objective world only as a whole consisting of the form plus the essence, or it cannot exist, act or function at all.

 

All evolution, whether it takes place at the biological or the psychological level, is essentially the evolution of forms and the forms are as unalterable at the psychological level as they are at the biological level. The essence of all organisms at the biological stage of evolution is the same, viz, consciousness as an urge to live a life of the highest efficiency, yet the urge to live achieved its most perfect expression in a particular biological form which is man. Similarly, the essence of all ideologies at the psychological stage of evolution is the same, viz, consciousness as an urge to love an ideal of the highest beauty. Yet, the urge to love achieves its most perfect expression in a particular ideological form which is the Ideology of the Last Prophet. This form is unchangeable like the physical form of the human being. An ideology without a definite and permanent external form is as dead and lifeless as an organism without its physical body.

 

As every natural species has a set of inherited physical features which characterise it and distinguish it from other species, so every natural ideological community (i.e. a community following a natural or prophetic ideology) has a set of inherited ideological features which characterise it and distinguish it from other such communities. These ideological features consist of the particular forms of worship and religious institutions practised by the Prophet and his immediate followers. As there is a biological heredity operating at the animal level of evolution, so there is a psychological heredity working at the human level of evolution. Biological heredity stamps a particular physical form upon a species, separates it from all other species and gives it a continuity in time and thus makes possible the final emergence of a species of the most perfect physical form. Similarly, psychological heredity imparts a particular ideological form to a community, isolates it from all other ideological communities and gives it a continuity in time and thus makes possible the ultimate emergence of a community of the most perfect ideological form. A species cannot alter its physical features radically without changing into a new species. In the same way an ideological community cannot change its ideological features without becoming a new ideological community. A species outgrows its physical features only when, by a sudden drive of consciousness there occurs a mutation and a new species comes into existence. This process, we know, has ended with the emergence of man. Hence man will continue to have his present physical form and features till the end of the world and there will be no higher species to replace him. Similarly, a natural ideological community outgrows its ideological form and features only when a sudden drive of consciousness gives rise to a new prophet and a new community. This process comes to an end with the emergence of the Last Prophet and his community. Hence the original forms of worship and religious institutions of the ideology of the Last Prophet must continue to be a part and parcel of it till the end of the world. These forms and institutions cannot hinder but must rather safeguard and guarantee the continued evolution of mankind in view of their perfect harmony with the creative urge of the Universe and their being in special favour with the forces of evolution.

 

These facts point to the conclusion that no alteration of any of the institutions of a natural ideology, even with the intention of improving it, is possible, simply because the altered or improved ideology, however wisely it may have been improved or altered, will be worthless for the purposes of evolution. It is neither accidental nor meaningless that a natural ideology (i.e. a prophetic religion) has an unconquerable tendency to persist in the form in which it was left by its founder. It is due to a tendency which is in the very nature of life. Whatever form life takes in its nascent condition—whatever the apparent causes and conditions that may have enabled it to take that form—becomes fixed for ever. This is true as much of the forms and institutions of a newly-emerging natural ideology at the psychological stage of evolution as it is of the form and features of a newly-born organism or a newly-emerging natural species at the biological stage of evolution. As long as a religion lives, its followers resist heresy and innovation with all the power that they command. It may be totally abandoned by its followers, in case it is unable to satisfy the requirements of evolution at any stage of the life of the community, but it is never allowed by them to get mixed up or associated with any beliefs and actions which did not form a part of it in the beginning. Such a demand is in the very nature of man and is a part of his urge for Beauty. It is the individual’s response to the desire for Reality within him. That is why Reality responds to and evolves only an individual who follows a religion created and enforced at the time by Reality itself. It is this aspect of human nature which guarantees the continued preservation of the last of the natural ideologies and thereby the creation and maintenance of a permanent unity of the human race on its basis.

 

In case we decide not to follow a particular prophet and to follow only the general principles of the teachings of all the prophets, we shall not be able to follow the teachings of any of them. We shall leave religious principles to the judgment of the individual who may put upon them any interpretation he likes and may choose any combination of them, making freely his own additions and subtractions. As such judgments of individuals, who have necessarily to remain at the earliest stages of self-consciousness under such conditions, are bound to be extremely faulty, they give rise to an infinite variety of wrong and conflicting views of the needs and requirements of the Right Ideal which means a large number of conflicting religions. Such individuals can never constitute a homogeneous society and can never organise themselves into a state founded on the Right Ideal. In other words, in their case, the Right Ideal is not able to acquire a political realisation and thus ceases to be the Right Ideal. A society of such individuals can never expand to unify the whole of mankind as a World-State based on the Right Ideal. Even if we have an eclectic religion planned to be the political ideal of a society by a council of wise men―supposing such a difficult planning is carried to a successful conclusion—it will be unable to inspire but will, on the other hand, be highly suspected and inwardly despised. It will not be able to play the role for which religion is really intended.

 

Obedience to general ethical principles taught by all the prophets is not possible for any human individual without his direct and personal contact with Reality which should be deep and intimate enough to inspire, control and determine all his activities, and this contact can become deep or intimate only by offering strict obedience to the Prophet of the age. This is the greatest and the most fundamental of all the laws of human nature and moral principles which constitute the common factor of the teachings of the prophets. In the absence of it all the other principles taught by them are, in practice, reduced to nothing.

 

With the community of the Last Prophet extant in the world, the need for the sudden drives of consciousness outside the community disappears, but it continues to exist within the community itself. Having succeeded once in creating a Complete Prophet, consciousness counts upon the community of his followers to pass on the wave of life gradually to the whole of mankind, as the Prophet himself had passed it on to them. Consciousness makes every complete success achieved by it a stepping stone or an instrument for the next higher success. The community of the Last Prophet is, therefore, an indispensable instrument for the evolution of the whole of mankind. Consciousness makes this community a channel or a passage through which alone life flows down to the whole of the human race. This community is, therefore, the centre of the hopes of consciousness for the achievement of all the rest of the objectives of evolution. Consciousness tries to maintain the community’s level of self-consciousness not only because it is impelled by its nature to preserve a hard-won and full-fledged victory of the past but also because it is a necessary condition of the future evolution of the whole of humanity. The highest level of self-consciousness in the community is also the highest level of self-consciousness in the whole of humanity and, therefore, by maintaining the former it also maintains the latter.

 

The community of the Prophet expands like every other ideal group. It encroaches more and more upon the world of wrong ideals beyond itself, not only by absorbing men who are willing to enter it, but also by exerting an unconscious and indirect influence in favour of certain aspects of the Prophet’s ideology on the rest of humanity, that is, on men who are unwilling to enter it. Influences of the Prophet’s ideology, in the form of ideas, continue to pour slowly and imperceptibly into the mental world of humanity at large, shifting their ideals more and more towards the Right Ideal. These influences are accepted and absorbed by the human race gradually and increasingly because they are such as to respond readily to the inner urge of human consciousness. They manifest themselves frequently in the form of cultural movements of various types in various parts of the world, based on ideas taken consciously or unconsciously from the ideology of the Prophet. On account of these influences the wrong ideals appear and disappear sooner than otherwise and the newly emerging wrong ideals are nearer to the Right Ideal than they would be in their absence. They thus quicken the process of evolution going on in the direction of the Right Ideal among people outside the community of the Prophet.

 

But while the ideology of the Prophet sends out its influences to the wrong ideals and thereby weakens them more and more, the wrong ideals too send out their own influences, in the form of ideas, to the ideology of the Prophet, influences of an opposite character which tend to weaken the ideology. These influences act as an impediment on the urge of consciousness in the community and on account of them the level of self-consciousness in the community tends to go down considerably very often. But whenever there arises an occasion of this kind, the urge of consciousness in the Universe comes to the help of the community. It makes an extraordinary effort or a sudden push or drive which results in the appearance of a highly self-conscious individual or a number of highly self-conscious individuals in the community who quicken the progress of the community and restore its level of self-consciousness. Evidently, this push or drive of consciousness must achieve its success and, therefore, manifest itself in men who are already in a position to favour it by reason of their growing self-consciousness, on account of their absolute obedience to the Prophet. These men are, therefore, the followers of the Last Prophet and they remain true to themselves, to their real nature and to the Consciousness of the Universe only to the extent to which they follow him and no more.

 

As a generally strong, healthy and growing organism has occasional periods of disease, so the community of the Prophet must now and then have a period when its self-consciousness suffers a set-back. It is the period when the social organism of the community suffers from “moral” disease in a larger sense of the word. As physical disease is caused by germs which enter the body and sap its vitality, so moral disease is caused by ideas which enter the mind and sap the love of the Perfect Ideal. As the organism or, rather, the vital force that creates, maintains and grows the organism, reacts towards disease automatically and creates anti-bodies or anti-toxins which cope with the danger and destroy or make ineffective and harmless the germs of the disease, so the social organism of the community or, rather, the vital force that creates and evolves the social organism of the community, that is to say, the Consciousness of the Universe, reacts automatically towards the moral lapse of the community and creates new right ideas to cope with the danger and destroy or make ineffective and harmless the wrong ideas that had caused the moral disease of the community. In other words, whenever the self-consciousness of the community shows signs of dwindling, an automatic, sudden drive of consciousness must take place within the community and result in the appearance of a highly self-conscious man or a number of highly self-conscious men who have an inner experience which enables them to acquire an extraordinary realisation and conviction of the truth of the Prophet’s teachings and especially that aspect of them which is being ignored by the community for the time being. By virtue of this inner experience they go a step deeper into the meaning of the Prophet’s Book and explain it in a way that dispels the gloom of ignorance that has come to prevail at the time and thus assure the protection of the community from the evil effects of the invading wrong ideas.

 

This process can have nothing to do with the stretching or the twisting of the text with a view to meeting new situations and satisfying new requirements. It is entirely different from it because the ideas are already there in the Book and are simply unfolded or uncovered. It is similar to the process by which a plant brings on new leaves and branches. When a plant grows, it does not alter but simply comes out with itself. The new leaves and branches are, in a sense, new but really they are as old as the seed itself. They were already in the plant and they come out, not because the plant has altered, but because it has grown. Just as a strong, healthy organism can always oppose an effective cure (lying potentially in its nature) to every disease that comes from outside so the ideology of the Prophet is able to oppose, an effective remedy (lying potentially in its nature) to all wrong ideals that appear from time to time (in the world outside the Prophet’s community) and encroach upon the love of the ideology which its believers entertain for it. The cure in each case, in the case of the organism as well as in the case of the community, comes from within because each is a complete whole and each has the potentiality to live continuously.

 

When an individual overcomes successfully the attack of a disease, he developed an immunity which is either complete and permanent or which at least makes the second attack of the disease, occurring within a specific period, less dangerous than the first. Medical science has made this principle the basis of measures, like injections and inoculations of certain kinds, by which it seeks the prevention of certain diseases. It is, indeed, striking that in the case of very many diseases we do not know, so far, of a more certain way of protecting the body from disease than creating the disease in the body. The disease that comes and goes away safely is a blessing in the long run because it leaves the body stronger and better fitted for a long and healthy life afterwards. The person who has suffered from many diseases and recovered completely from each has evolved and brought into full play all the latent forces of his body for defence against illness. He is, therefore, better qualified than others to enjoy a long life.

 

Similarly, the influences of wrong ideals, the wrong ideas that spread from wrong ideals, sometimes slowly like the infections of ordinary diseases and sometimes suddenly like epidemics, are sources of danger to the life of the Prophet’s ideology and a hindrance to its growth and expansion. Yet, since the ideology is a complete whole, it is always able to overcome every such danger and turn it into a blessing for itself. By offering successful resistance to wrong ideas continuously, the Prophet’s ideology becomes more and more immune from further attacks of moral diseases and still better fitted for a long and successful career. In other words, through the efforts of self-conscious individuals to defend the ideology from the influence of wrong ideas by evolving new right ideas capable of opposing them and existing potentially in the nature of the ideology, the ideology evolves itself in such a way that it develops more and more into a systematic philosophy which it becomes increasingly difficult to assail or call into question. Finally, a time comes when no wrong ideology is able to compete with it as a rational explanation of the Universe or as a systematic and intelligible philosophy of life. At this stage the ideology becomes perfectly immune from all possible attacks of wrong ideas.

 

To evolve itself continuously, to outgrow ceaselessly every condition in which it can be attacked or adversely influenced by wrong ideas emerging from time to time, is a special feature, an exclusive characteristic of the Prophet’s ideology which no other ideology shares with it. The ideologies of all the previous prophets fall short of the expectations of consciousness and are required to yield place to the ideology of the Last Prophet just because they are lacking in this quality or characteristic.

 

All knowledge is the knowledge of the self. We wish to know what is other than the self in order to know the self in relation to it. To know what is other than the self is really to know the self. The knowing subject and the known object, although distinguishable, are not really separate from each other. The knower and the known are one and the same. This is evident from the nature of self-consciousness in which the same mind is at once the knower and the known. The subject and the object are, again, not separate compartments of the same mind but each of them is the whole mind. The aim of all cognition is to know the self. The advancement of knowledge means the development of human self-knowledge. Therefore, all advancements of knowledge, all progress of science and philosophy, must lead to a greater elucidation of an ideology that is based on the nature of sell. The Book of the Last Prophet, as a description of the true nature of the self is the seed of all the knowledge that the human race evolves till the end of the world. Every fresh advancement of knowledge is already present in it as the leaves, the branches and the flowers of a  tree are already present in the seed. The evolution of the Prophet’s ideology, i.e. the evolution of its knowledge as a rational, coherent and systematic world-view is, therefore, helped by the growth of knowledge in the world. In fact, all advancements of knowledge are tantamount to the evolution of the Prophet’s ideology itself. The ideology grows through the efforts of self-conscious men within the community as well as through the efforts of scientists and philosophers outside the community. As scientific and philosophical knowledge accumulates, self-conscious men within the community employ it to interpret and elaborate the ideology further. All such knowledge enters their minds, not only to emerge as a new effulgence of light on the Prophet’s ideology, but also to be itself purified and purged of its errors. In their minds truth meets and compares itself with truth and thereby loses its admixture of untruth. In this way, while advancing, human knowledge frequently throws light on the ideology, the ideology too often gives a lead to human knowledge which in its developed form it employs again for its own further elucidation and exposition.

 

All knowledge purged of errors and misconceptions, all real knowledge, that has been written so far in all the books of the world and that will be written in books from time to time in future, forms a part of the Prophet’s ideology and sooner or later all knowledge has to be written in the light of it or as throwing light upon it. The ideology, therefore, grows without a limit. It continues to grow long after the need to defend it against wrong ideals has ceased to exist. All search of knowledge has been in the past, and will be in the future, no more than an attempt to disclose a bit more of the latent splendour of the ideology of the Last Prophet. It is impossible to exhaust in writing all the knowledge that the ideology contains even if the water in all the oceans of the world were to be turned into ink and used for the purpose. The ideology of the Prophet begins to grow with the emergence of the first prophet, the first self-conscious human being. It reaches its first completeness in the life-example of the Last and Complete Prophet, and it continues to grow further on the secure foundations of this completeness till the end of the world. It is like a tree which is rooted deeply in the ground and has the capacity to grow to such enormous dimensions as to fill the whole world. All the other ideologies are like rank, unnecessary growth under this tree which tends to obstruct the growth of the tree by using away some of the water and manure meant for it but which the gardener must uproot sooner or later.

 

The self-conscious men who appear in the Prophet’s community as a result of the extraordinary drives of consciousness reach a high stage of self-consciousness and have a mystic experience on account of which they feel that the Prophet’s message (which is, of course, a true interpretation of the nature of every human being) is growing independently and automatically out of their own consciousness and is not only his message but also their own. They are favoured by a drive of consciousness and rise to a high stage of self-knowledge because of their intense love and absolute obedience to the Prophet; yet they do not get a new “revelation” in the usual sense of the word because it is no longer possible or necessary. They only acquire a standard of self-consciousness which enables them to understand the revelation of the Prophet as thoroughly as it is essential in order to combat and crush the wrong ideas that happen to be attacking the consciousness of the community at the time. For these reasons they have no choice but to merge their own authority into the authority of the Prophet and to reaffirm and reiterate his message without altering it in the least. Whenever anyone of these self-conscious men, being deceived by the independent character of his own mystic experience, arrogates to himself the title of a prophet or any other similar or equivalent title which makes him a new centre of spiritual authority or the founder of a new community, he mars rather than makes the picture of prophethood. The reason is that Nature does not require to favour him, as an independent spiritual leader, claiming to offer a complete ideology to the world, with opportunities to exemplify by his practical life the expression of all the fundamental aspects of human nature. He, therefore, not only misunderstands a part of his nature which he cannot express, but also misinterprets and misrepresents that part of the teachings of the Last Prophet which he himself cannot exemplify. He, therefore, harms rather than helps the process of evolution. He not only creates another needless, nay, harmful, split in the human society but also turns the wheel of human progress in the opposite direction. He brings back his followers to the days when prophethood had not yet reached its climax in the Last Prophet. His followers have to ignore a considerable portion of the urge of human consciousness and to leave out a good deal of the requirements of human nature. They have to neglect some fundamental and important part of the teachings of the Complete Prophet— that part of it which their leader is unable to support by the practical example of his life. They are, therefore, as regards the stage of their evolution and the principles for which they stand, similar to the communities of the old prophets lingering on beyond the climax of prophethood to be absorbed by the community of the Last Prophet. They, in other words, live for a short time only.

 

But these mistaken and misguided self-conscious men are not without their use. They serve to raise the level of self-consciousness in the community of the Last Prophet (in that part of it, of course, which does not join the new claimant of prophethood) directly as well as indirectly. They raise it directly because they stress and propagate vigorously (and thereby draw a closer attention of the Prophet’s followers to) certain aspects of the Right Ideal. They raise it indirectly because they create among the followers of the Last Prophet a vigorous reaction in favour of that part of the fundamentals of his teachings (e.g. his teachings as regards the true nature or attributes of the Creator or as regards the need of action in the service of the Perfect Ideal or the importance of the ideal’s worship and adoration or of war or political independence or collective and social life as means for the evolution of consciousness in the individual and the society) which these pseudo-prophets ignore. The result is that the followers of the Prophet are led to understand and emphasise this portion of his teachings in a way which would have been otherwise impossible. This reaction reveals itself again in the appearance of self-conscious men in the Prophet’s community who lead suitable counter-movements for the proper exposition and defence of such fundamentals of his teachings. While the community of the Prophet thus gains much on account of these men, it loses little because the men who leave the Prophet’s fold to join the new claimants of prophethood are mostly those whose love for the Prophet’s ideology has already waned and fallen a victim to the influence of wrong ideals.

 

The natural conservatism of the followers of the Prophet is not a check on, but rather a guarantee of, their own future evolution as well as the evolution of the knowledge of the Prophet’s ideology. Just because they adhere to the Prophet’s Book through thick and thin, they are able to evolve a higher and higher understanding of it as time goes on. The tree grows because the seed remains intact. On account of their conservatism they preserve the seed of the ideology, the meaning of the Book, from the misguiding effects of wrong ideals. How little it is realised that there is a kind of conservatism which can, not only exist side by side with unlimited progress, but which is also an indispensable condition of such progress!

 

Since the Prophet’s Book is a replica of the real nature of every human being, with every advancement of their self-knowledge, the followers of the Prophet go a little deeper into its meaning. As a facsimile of human nature it is fully intelligible only to those who have discovered its original in their own hearts, that is, to men who are highly self-conscious. We understand only as much of a prophet’s teachings as we understand our own nature.

 

It does not mean that as time goes on the letter of the Book will be discarded more and more in favour of its spirit or meaning. The meaning lives in the letter and the letter is nothing without the meaning. Letter and meaning are inseparable from each other. Since neither of them can exist without the other, they form an indivisible unity, a single whole. We see the whole dimly first of all but, as our knowledge grows, it becomes clearer and clearer till it is completely exposed to our view, both letter and meaning having evolved in significance. A sea has a surface and a depth. The letter of the Book as the surface of the ocean of its meaning must go with the meaning always, no matter how deep we discover the meaning to be. If we attempt to discard the letter of the Book and preserve its meaning, we shall be only giving it a new letter and along with it most certainly a new meaning. Although the Book is the same for everybody in letter, it is different for everybody in meaning which everybody understands to the extent of his own self-knowledge. Evolution leads man towards a better and better understanding of his nature and must, therefore, lead him towards a better and better understanding of the Book. Thus, although new prophets, the founders of new communities, cease to appear, the Book itself (i.e. its knowledge) has a course of evolution and grows and expands with the growing self-knowledge of men. We have already compared the Book to a seed. A seed has the whole of the tree in itself and, therefore, the more it grows into a tree, the more it remains exactly the same. Quite in the same way all the knowledge of all times will be already present in the Book and, although the knowledge of the Book will evolve ceaselessly, the Book itself will remain the same always.

 

The revelation of a prophet is the result of an exceptional achievement of his urge for Beauty made possible by the manifestation of a special drive of consciousness in his person. It is an outcome of the feeling of Beauty in the state of its extraordinary development due to a special favour of Nature. The human urge for Beauty is able to know and its knowledge is generally described as intuition. The cause of intuition is no other than the urge of consciousness for Beauty. Intuition is the love or the desire for Beauty. It is the voice of consciousness as we understand it. It is revelation of a low or a high standard depending upon the strength and quality of the love of which it is a product. Intuition develops with the growth of love or with the development of self-consciousness. It has a voice which speaks and becomes clearer and clearer as we progress in self-consciousness till in some gifted persons known as prophets the stage of what is commonly understood as revelation is reached. We follow this voice when we appreciate Beauty or produce works of art of all kinds or make discoveries of science and philosophy. When this voice pronounces moral judgments, it is known as the voice of conscience. When we act morally, we understand this voice correctly and obey it, we obey, that is, our own revelation. All our decisions and conclusions for all our beliefs and actions are dictated by the voice of intuition or the voice of revelation. Revelation is the voice of love; it is the voice of consciousness as we understand it and love it; it is the voice of our ideal whether the ideal is right or wrong. Therefore, like our love, our revelation can be either right or wrong. To the extent to which our love or our ideal is right our revelation is right and to the extent to which our love is wrong our revelation too is wrong. Revelation, understood in this sense, can never come to an end. Revelation is the speech of consciousness and speech, as a quality of consciousness, is permanent like all its other qualities.

 

Different persons have different capacities for love. When a person is capable of loving strongly and succeeds in developing his love, there are moments when his consciousness becomes deeply absorbed in love and when, therefore, love takes full control of his consciousness. In this state of a deep and concentrated love, which has a tendency to recur like our moods, the voice of his consciousness, of his love, which is usually inaudible, becomes strong enough to induce the activity of brain centres that hear and thus becomes audible and automatic as if it is a message whispered into his mind by an agency outside himself. This voice is above time and has the capacity to predict, vaguely or clearly (like some of our dreams), future events, as the person himself would take them to be at the time of their occurrence. It is the voice of consciousness, but whether or not it will be pure and free from error (not as a basis of prophesies but as a guide to the Right Ideal) will depend upon the fact whether the person’s love is pure and free from error or not. To the extent to which it is impure, the voice will be impure and coloured with error. As all revelation is the voice of love, whether the love is right or wrong, so revelation that is automatic and audible is the voice of a strong concentrated love and not necessarily of a right or pure love. To the extent to which a person’s love is mixed with error, to that extent the automatic and audible voice of his revelation is also mixed with error. The mere existence of an automatic and audible voice is, therefore, not a proof of its dependability or of its being free from error. A wrong love distorts, stiffles or suppresses the voice of the Right Love and muddles it with its own voice. As there are standards of moral and aesthetic judgments, so there are standards of revelation whether it is audible or inaudible.

 

Revelation is no doubt the voice of the Creator, since its source is the urge of self which is the common urge of the human and the divine consciousness. The love of the Creator or the urge of self is the privilege of every human being. In fact, it is the cause of all our activities. The voice of the Creator, therefore, speaks in the heart of every man every moment of his life, but it is familiar to a man only to the extent to which the Creator is familiar to him. To the extent to which a man fails to understand his Creator he fails to understand His voice and commits errors in his beliefs and actions. Revelation is guiding the life of every man every moment of his life. Sometimes it errs and sometimes it does not. Revelation, in the sense of an intuitive grasp of a truth, is not an exclusive gift of a prophet. A prophet shares the capacity to receive divine revelation with every other human being. But while the revelation with ordinary men becomes mixed up with error, revelation of a great prophet is perfectly free from error, since his love too is perfectly free from error, and his love becomes free from error because his self-consciousness is raised to the highest level by a sudden, strong drive of consciousness. Men love and think of their Creator differently. So the voice of the Creator too speaks differently to them.

 

The pronouncements of revelation or the judgments of intuition become more and more valid as our love becomes purer and stronger or as our self-consciousness grows. The higher the standard of self-consciousness that a man has acquired, the more powerful his intuition and the more valid his moral and aesthetic judgments. At the highest stage of self-consciousness revelation becomes perfectly free from error because at that stage it is not the intuition of man but the intuition of the Creator that speaks in man. At this stage revelation is above human criticism and valuation.

 

There can be no distinction between revealed and unrevealed religions as all religions are revealed. In fact, all knowledge is revelation. But a distinction must be made between a revelation that is and a revelation that is not free from error. There are some religions which are based on a comparatively low standard of revelation—a revelation that is mixed up with human philosophy or human judgments. Such religions are indeed open to human criticism and valuation.

 

The human self is not a hindrance to the passage of divine light. Rather, it is the only passage through which divine light can come. It is made and adapted by Nature for that purpose. But the condition is that it should be free from obstacles, and obstacles are created by wrong loves of which a man may not be conscious sometimes but which, all the same, continue to flourish at the expense of the Right Love.

 

Revelation, as the voice of Consciousness, is never so pure and free from error as it is when it is the result of a sudden drive of consciousness. Then it is able to steer itself clear of all hindrances and distorting effects of wrong loves. The drive of consciousness pushes it above the level of wrong loves and so it escapes being coloured or distorted by them. Revelation will, of course, be the result of a sudden drive of consciousness only when conditions for such a drive are present, that is, when no revelation capable of serving the purpose and satisfying the aspirations of consciousness exists already in the world.

 

As the Right Love grows, it clears the consciousness more and more of wrong loves and takes a greater and greater control of it till finally it dominates it and fills it completely. The human consciousness becomes absorbed in the Divine Consciousness. Man loses touch with space and time and passes into a state which may be apparently a state of complete self-obliviousness but which is, in fact, a state of complete self-consciousness. This state passes away after a short time, but, once achieved, it has a tendency to recur as a mood recurs whenever circumstances favourable to the mood come to exist. If conditions, favouring a sudden drive of consciousness, are present, it will not only aid the development of self-consciousness in some one man (who is prepared and fitted for it and, therefore, deserves to receive it best of all his contemporaries) so that he is able to attain the stage of self-consciousness described above quickly and with less than normal effort but it will also have another extraordinary result. In the effort to compensate for the lack of its progress in the human society, consciousness will take full control of the speech faculties of the man in the state of his complete self-consciousness (apparently a state of complete self-obliviousness) and make use of his conscious and unconscious memories of the immediate and distant past in order to speak out its own purposes and desires of the past, present, and future. Its object is to guide human activities, through this man, in the direction of evolution. Consciousness in its drive, thus, forces a passage for itself, for its quality of speech, through the speech faculties of the man and manifests itself as a voice over which the man has no control. It is a characteristic of this voice (since it is the voice of intuition or love and not of reason) that it mentions facts as wholes and does not subject them to a detailed, logical analysis. This state of the human self, favourable for the reception of pure revelation has, when once achieved, a tendency to recur as often as it is possible and necessary. The voice of Divine Consciousness, latent in the nature of every man, becomes audible and automatic in this man in such a way that it leaves him no doubt that it is the pure voice of Consciousness, speaking for the guidance of mankind. This conviction is engendered, sustained and strengthened by the voice itself and becomes so strong that the man cannot afford to disobey the voice or to suppress it or mix it with the desires of his lower nature. But if any self-conscious man comes to have such a conviction after the appearance of the Last Prophet on the ground that he hears an automatic voice, his conviction will be unfounded for reasons already explained. The drive of consciousness will not require to manifest itself in a new automatic and audible revelation of the pure type in any person after the Last Prophet.

 

A part of the revelation of a man who has been raised to the status of a prophet by a drive of consciousness may be entirely pure and free from error, being in the form of an automatic voice that is beyond his control. Even the rest of his revelation is of a very high standard, being the outcome of an exceptionally high degree of self-consciousness, which is difficult to achieve under ordinary circumstances and which the Prophet is able to achieve only as a result of a sudden powerful drive of consciousness. But, in any case, the latter kind of revelation must be of a lower kind than the former. It cannot be free from error and there must be occasions when his revelation of the former type will criticise and reject his revelation of the latter quality. If such occasions of self-reproach and self-criticism arise, they will, of course, be an indication that the automatic and audible revelation of the man has a level of its own and is perfectly pure and free from his revelation of the lower type and, therefore, free from all admixture of his own human philosophy and wisdom.

 

When consciousness makes a drive, it chooses the man who deserves it best of all his contemporaries. The choice is not the cause of the drive. It is made in the course of the drive and is rather the result of the drive, which can reach its maximum only in a man who is best fitted for it. The drive does not take place in the man because he is most suitable for it but the man proves himself to be most suitable for it because the drive is able to achieve its maximum success only in his person. Thus the drive may begin in a number of persons at the same time and wait to see who gives it the fullest scope or the greatest facilities. For this reason a drive of consciousness, whether it is intended to create the founder of a new community or to raise the level of self-consciousness in the community of the Last Prophet, directly or indirectly, by emphasising a part or the whole of the Right Ideology, may be attended by a sort of a general awakening in a part of the human race or a part of the Prophet’s community. Sometimes it may be accompanied by a more or less simultaneous appearance of a number of men who may imagine themselves to be the recipients of a light which is meant to pass on to other human beings. It is possible, therefore, that some of these men, unable to understand their correct position, may claim to be the founders of new communities, in opposition to the justified claims of a man in whom the drive has achieved its biggest success and who is, therefore, meant to be their leader, or at a time when the community of the Last Prophet has already come into existence and when, therefore, the drive aims at no more than raising and restoring the level of self-consciousness in this community, directly or indirectly. But in case the drive manifests itself in a number of men in the community of the Last Prophet, everyone of them may be useful in his own way. The reason is that everyone of them will be a follower of the Prophet and not the founder of a new community, and his message will be subject to evaluation and criticism in the light of the practical life of the Prophet.

 

The success of the drive is not entirely a one-sided affair. When the drive of consciousness begins in a man, it waits for him to give it facilities to push forward. If it is able to get the facilities that it requires, it is enabled to extend its foothold in the man and thereby to aid him to give it further facilities. In this way not only does it make use of the facilities that the man is able to offer but also creates more facilities for itself through him. This mutual co-operation of the human consciousness and the consciousness of the Universe reaches its maximum in one man in whom, therefore, the drive achieves its greatest success. The man who is entrusted with the mission of a prophet leads a good life and resorts to prayers and devotions frequently even before he receives the mission. This preparation for the mission on the part of a would-be prophet is at once the cause and the result of the drive of consciousness manifesting itself in his person.

 

The man in whom the drive of consciousness achieves its highest results must be a perfect specimen of humanity from a physiological point of view, more particularly as regards the structure of his brain which is the passage and the immediate instrument of consciousness. If he is not such a type of humanity, the limitations of his physical constitution will stand in the way of the drive achieving the full measure of its success in his person and the drive will have to favour another man with a more suitable structure of the brain.

 

The nature of every human being is fundamentally the same. All human beings possess the same instincts and the same urge of consciousness. Yet the mental dispositions of all of them are not identical. Human beings have various temperaments and capacities. They are peevish or jovial, obstinate or accommodating, proud or humble, patient or restless, talkative or thoughtful, stern or mild, prudent or reckless, malicious or forbearing, cruel or kind, brave or timid and so on. Education and discipline can alter such characteristics of men to a considerable extent but never completely in every case. Some persons have to put in a greater effort than others in order to behave well. The same environment, training, education and discipline do not produce the same results and do not create the same temperament in every individual. The differences of human temperaments or moral constitutions are created by differences in the structures of human brains. On account of these differences, consciousness has greater or lesser facilities of expression with regard to certain of its qualities in the case of different individuals. As all apples in a tree are not perfectly round and symmetrical, so all human brains are not of a perfectly harmonious and symmetrical development. Different centres of the brain are differently developed in different persons. Majority of human beings have more or less abnormal brains and, therefore, somewhat abnormal mental and moral dispositions. A perfectly harmonious and balanced structure of the brain must result in a perfectly normal and balanced temperament—a temperament in which all the qualities of consciousness are able to have their correct and harmonious expression. Such a temperament will, therefore, give the greatest facilities and the fullest scope for a drive of consciousness. In such a temperament alone can the qualities of consciousness achieve their most harmonious and, therefore, their fullest expression. Since the brain is the passage of consciousness, its harmonious structure must be a condition for a big stride of consciousness.

 

When an individual wants to submit himself to the discipline of the Right Ideal, his idiosyncrasies or the peculiarities of his mental and moral dispositions interfere with this discipline and, therefore, with the evolution of this consciousness to the highest levels. This is one reason why it is not easy for every man to approach the level of evolution which can be achieved by a great prophet, who is, of course, physiologically a perfect specimen of humanity. It is difficult to tell how much of a person’s character is due to the physiology of his brain and how much to his mental outlook or to the nature of his ideal. But in a healthy person the psychological factor is ultimately stronger than the physiological one and is capable of overruling it. The rigorous discipline of the Right Ideal, which of course becomes easier to obey with the growth of the self-consciousness, compensates for the lack of physiological symmetry of the brain. It tends to create a harmonious character even when the structure of the brain is lacking in harmony and thereby tends to reduce or limit the activity of the brain centres that are developed too much and to stimulate and increase the activity of the centres that are developed too little. If this discipline continues uninterrupted for a long time from generation to generation, it must mould the structure of the human brain and make it more and more harmonious and symmetrical. Thus we conclude that the common individual will have a far more symmetrical and harmoniously developed brain in future than he has today, and it will, therefore, be possible for him to reach a far higher level of self-consciousness in future than it is possible for him today. The forces of evolution tend to minimise the mental abnormalities of individuals and to develop them more and more into perfect biological specimens.

 

Although a prophet has periods when his self is deeply absorbed in Consciousness, he never loses touch with himself and one reason why he is able to do so is that the structure of his brain is adapted for a big drive of Consciousness. If a wooden disc of a regular shape and a uniform density is made to float on water, it will remain perfectly balanced, one of its flat surfaces being completely above the level of water. But if its density is greater on one side than on the other, it will be unable to maintain its equilibrium and the heavier side will sink below the surface of water. Some such thing (I confess the example is rather a crude one) happens in the case of a prophet. As he has a perfectly proportionate and symmetrical brain and a perfectly balanced mental constitution, therefore, when his self dives into Consciousness, he does not lose his mental equilibrium. He remains perfectly sane and perfectly healthy mentally, during and after the periods when he gets deeply absorbed in Consciousness. He is, therefore, able to distinguish between himself and the Divine Consciousness even at the moment of his highest self-realisation. But even an ordinary individual may be able to retain his mental health at a very high stage of self-consciousness provided he is a true follower of the Prophet of the age and offers a strict obedience to him. The reason is that such a person traverses his path leading into the highest and the most unknown regions of self-consciousness not alone but in the company of a leader who is most thoroughly familiar with that path. But in the absence of this condition of absolute obedience to his prophet the individual will either never reach a high stage of self-consciousness or, if he does so, he will lose his mental balance and, as a consequence, fail to distinguish between his own self and the self of the Creator. His utterances during periods of absorption are insane and his insanity takes many forms. But, for the reason just explained, a faithful follower of a prophet is always in a position to understand and guard himself against such errors in case they should arise and thereby to protect his individuality for a conscious progress of self-consciousness.

 

A prophet is strongly impelled to lead other people and to create a community of his followers and his followers too are impelled strongly to lead other people and thereby to enlarge their own numbers by adding new members to the community. The Prophet’s urge to lead is not peculiar to the Prophet. This urge is a part of the urge of Consciousness which is common to all human beings but which, like every other aspect of this urge, attains to its maximum force and its clearest manifestation in the case of a prophet. The aim of this impulsion is to aid and complete the growth of life as a whole. The urge of consciousness is not only to live in a group but also to create a group by leading and commanding as well as by following and obeying other men. As a source of water at a higher level has the impulsion to flow down to lower levels, so life at higher levels transmits itself to lower levels in order to aid and complete its own highest development as a whole. An individual is an inseparable part of a group as a living cell is an inseparable part of an organism. The man who is all alone with his views and opinions feels like a piece broken from a whole. He feels restless and has no satisfaction unless he gathers together by his side a number of human beings with similar views and opinions, that is, men who believe in his own ideal. He must find followers or follow others in order to satisfy the urge of his Consciousness to create and live in a group. People who give their knowledge to others satisfy their own urge of Consciousness and do a duty to themselves.

 

Whenever a man feels that he knows better than others, he is impelled to impart his knowledge to others or to lead others, and whenever he feels that he knows less than others, he is impelled to acquire knowledge from others or to follow others. In other words, when a man feels that he is nearer to Consciousness than his fellow men, he is urged to assist them to approach Consciousness and, whenever he feels that he is farther away from Consciousness than some of his fellowmen, he is urged to approach Consciousness through them. Since every person knows better than some men and less than some other men, every person is a leader as well as a follower and by satisfying our urge to lead and the urge to obey we are all helping the process of evolution and bringing each other nearer and nearer the source of consciousness every moment. The urge to lead and obey in the human consciousness is a manifestation of the urge of Consciousness in the Universe to pass on the wave of life gradually from a point where it is the highest to the whole of humanity with a view to evolving it continuously. It is Nature’s provision for aiding and bringing to a completeness the process of evolution through the agency of human beings. On account of this urge the ideal spreads from one man to a constantly increasing group of men and life goes on feeding one part of it after the other in order that the whole of it may reach its fullest growth. This urge enables life to grow and procreate on the psychological level of evolution as the sex urge enables life to grow and procreate on the biological level. On the biological level of life it expresses itself in the process by which one cell grows another in a living organism or by which one organism procreates another. But on the psychological plane it manifests itself in the process by which the ideal of one man becomes the ideal of another.

 

Every part of life has the urge, not only to evolve itself, but also to share its evolution with other parts in order that the whole of it, and not merely a part of it, may reach its highest evolution. The reason is that life is one; it is a single whole and must evolve itself as a whole or not at all. A man who does not give his knowledge to other men fails to satisfy an urge of his Consciousness and harms his own continued evolution. He can reach his highest evolution only in the whole of which he is a part and, if he does not aid the evolution of this whole, he does not aid his own evolution and denies the urge of his consciousness its complete and continuous satisfaction.

 

The urge to lead and follow is a characteristic of all Consciousness. It characterises the human as well as the Divine Consciousness. The real and the ultimate leader of all life is the Consciousness of the Universe and every other leader at every level of life is a representative of Consciousness as it appears to the leader and his followers and as it manifests itself at that level of life. A prophet too, like every other leader, is a representative of Consciousness and creates a group on behalf of Consciousness. But, unlike other leaders, he is a true representative of Consciousness and in him the voice of Consciousness is pure and free from error.

 

Every self, whether human or divine, is at once a leader and a follower. The Divine Self leads as well as follows Itself. Ultimately, every self leads itself and follows itself because, whenever it is leading or following another self, it is only reaching itself, advancing towards itself. Every self obeys its ideal which is a part of itself. Therefore, every self is at once obeying itself and leading itself for the sake of its own self-realisation. This is true also of the Divine Consciousness. The Divine Self too has an ideal and is, therefore, following and leading Itself for the sake of Its own self-realisation.

 

No ideal, whether wrong or right, can have more than one group or one leader. A group may be scattered geographically and may have several parts but it is one as long as it has one leader. When an ideal has two leaders and two groups, it is not one ideal but two ideals. Men’s ideals may remain the same in theory but they will be different in fact if their actions differ, and their actions will differ if their groups differ. Ultimately, the ideal takes the form of the practical life of the individual. But the practical life of the individual is his practical social life which he leads in company with other men of the same ideal and under the guidance of their common leader. The urge of love for the ideal includes the urge of love for men of the same ideal. It can, therefore, find an adequate satisfaction only in a group.

 

No individual is meant to be alone. Every man is a part of a group. His ideal makes him responsible towards itself as well as towards the group in its capacity as a community of human beings striving collectively for the same ideal. His responsibility towards the ideal includes his responsibility towards such a community. Every individual in the group can satisfy both these responsibilities, which are really inclusive of each other and which require his simultaneous attention, only if he offers absolute obedience to one man, a leader who, on account of his superior devotion to the ideal, must be taken to be the representative of the group as well as of the ideal. The leader’s responsibility towards the ideal too will include his responsibility towards the group and, therefore, absolute obedience to his orders (which will be, of course, the outcome of a love superior to that of any other individual in the group) will enable his follower to satisfy his own responsibility of the same kind in the best of the ways possible. Action in obedience to such a leader alone will be conducive to the complete satisfaction of the self as it alone will satisfy the individual’s desires for group life led in accordance with the needs of the ideal. We see, therefore, that moral action of the highest standard resolves itself ultimately into action in obedience to the implied or explicit orders of the leader of the group of the Right Ideal.

 

A superior love is an intense love but it is not to be identified with a mad and reckless passion. The best love should always be able to take care of itself and to guide itself correctly and successfully to its end. A superior love should manifest itself in a harmonious expression of all the qualities of Consciousness which are known collectively as the qualities of the head and heart. The leader should be a man who has proved himself to be capable of giving the right expression to these qualities at the right time, better than anybody else in the group.

 

The leader of the group of the Right Ideal cannot be a despot. As a highly self-conscious individual, he is bound to be extremely sensitive of his responsibilities towards the ideal and towards the group and these responsibilities must compel him to consult the best among his followers for his own guidance, although their advice cannot bind him. Such a leader can never act except in good faith and can, therefore, never create a situation in which the interests of the ideal require his followers to shake off his authority. The reason is that, even when he appears to his followers to be wrong, they will not disobey him, on account of their faith in his good intentions and his loyalty to the ideal. Unless there is a perfectly clear evidence to show that such loyalty has been abandoned in favour of another ideal, absolute obedience to the leader will be essential for the individual in the interests of his ideal and will be in accordance with the urge of his nature. There are bound to be occasions when the judgment of the leader will appear to him to be wrong because it will differ from his own. If on such occasions, the individual obeys the leader rather than himself, it will not amount to a suppression of his own freedom but it will be a free and willing subordination of his own judgment to the judgment of the leader in the best interests of his ideal. Our action is free action whenever we judge it freely to be in the best interests of our ideal. The individual’s faith in the leader will be strengthened and will become ultimately unshakable, when events will show his judgment to be more valid than his own. But even when events have shown conclusively that his judgment was wrong, the individual will have served the ideal better by obeying the leader than by disobeying him.

 

It is a far greater service to the ideal to maintain the unity of the ideal group on an error than to shatter it for the sake of a correction. When the unity and, therefore, the power of the ideal are shattered, no correction of errors is possible. Errors made by a perfectly harmonious and disciplined group of men rectify themselves far more easily than to justify any breach of discipline on the part of men who want to put it on the right track. A group is meant to function as a single individual. Like an individual, it must be sometimes wrong and sometimes right and, like an individual, it must learn by experience. An individual who is too impatient of the errors of his leader wants (whether he knows it or not) to rebel against his ideal itself. He wants to hamper the free expression of the urge of his own nature. It may look strange and yet it is a fact that an individual can give a perfectly free expression to his individuality only by losing it in the individuality of the group. He has to be right or wrong with the group because he is an inseparable part of the group. To obey, and not to disobey, the leader is the urge of our nature.

 

Except at the very last stages of the evolution of humanity, of which it is difficult to give a detailed forecast at present, it will be impossible for men to serve their ideal without acknowledging the authority of a living human leader. We cannot do without a leader because we cannot do without group life. The future man will have, from time to time, his leaders who will be the representatives of the Last Prophet in his capacity as the first representative of Consciousness to lay before men their Final Ideal complete in all its fundamentals.

 

The Perfect Prophet must come at the end of a long chain of prophets for reasons already explained. He cannot, therefore, appear during the earliest stages of human history. Again, his ideology is to evolve itself from simple principles and programme of life into a completely rational and systematic philosophy of the Universe capable of ousting all other philosophies only by reacting continuously towards all sorts of wrong ideas emanating from all possible wrong ideals. As such he cannot appear during the last stages of human evolution. We have to come to the conclusion, therefore, that he must come sometime in the middle of the history of human civilisation.

 

The career of the ideology of the Last Prophet divides itself automatically into four natural periods.

 

During the First Period the community of its believers spreads from one man to a considerable section of humanity. Their general level of self-consciousness is very high and their actions exemplify the process of actual, conscious evolution of humanity. During this period the ideology eclipses almost all the contemporary wrong ideals and succeeds in getting a greater and greater number of converts from them. But as time goes on, new wrong ideals continue to appear.

 

The Second Period in the career of the ideology begins when the wrong ideals have gained in power and superficial attractiveness sufficiently to be able to exert a harmful influence on the ideology of the Prophet, to overshadow its beauty and to encroach imperceptibly in a thousand and one ways upon that love which its believers entertain for it. This is a period of a hard struggle between life as expressed in the Prophet’s community and its obstacles arising from the adverse effects of the surrounding wrong ideals. But, in spite of overwhelming dangers, the ideology is able to resist a total disintegration. It persists and holds its own in a considerable part of the community because it represents a high standard of life which Consciousness seeks to maintain at all costs. The struggle that the ideology undergoes during this period is extremely beneficial to it, since on account of it the ideology befits itself all the more for its future life and expansion. In due course of time, on account of this struggle, it is able to evolve itself gradually into a systematic philosophy and thus succeeds in attracting greater and greater attention from people outside the community.

 

While the Prophet’s ideology struggles for its life in this way, the wrong ideals continue to emerge, expand, reach the apex of their glory and then decline and ultimately dissolve and disappear, giving place to new wrong ideals which in their turn have a similar fate. This process of the evolution of wrong ideals is hastened by their mutual wars and struggles in all their phases and varieties. The end of this process begins when the adherents of one of the wrong ideals become disappointed with their ideal in such a way that it is impossible for them to be duped by another wrong ideal again and nothing but the Right Ideal appears to them to be capable of giving the fullest satisfaction to their nature. The ideal, therefore, dissolves and yields place to the Right Ideal. This comes about also because, in the meantime, the understanding of the Prophet’s ideology has grown inside and outside the Prophet’s community in such a way that it is acknowledged as the most accurate and the most perfect philosophy of man and Universe. As a philosophy of life it comes into comparison with other ideologies and succeeds in winning over, first of all, the best and the most sensitive of minds, and later on the common man, to the conviction that it is the most satisfactory explanation of existence. As a philosophy it begins to acquire adherents in every country in the world and slowly their numbers increase.

 

Two factors contribute to the gradual development of the Prophet’s Ideology into a philosophy during this period. Firstly, the growth of scientific and philosophical knowledge throughout the world and, secondly, the efforts of self-conscious thinkers within the Prophet’s community to interpret the Ideology in the light of this knowledge so as to make it more and more comprehensible to the world. As a result of these efforts the Ideology absorbs more and more of scientific knowledge and thus develops more and more into a science. In short, the Ideology is pressing itself already on the attention of scholars as the only rational and scientific explanation of the Universe when the believers of some wrong ideals have reason to become thoroughly dissatisfied with their ideals. As a consequence, they are attracted by the Ideology, they adopt it and become completely satisfied with it. In this way the Ideology gets a large influx of devoted converts from one of the most advanced sections of humanity. These men set the stage for a second rise of the Prophet’s Ideology, not merely as one of the religions this time but also as the only complete and convincing rational or scientific explanation of man and Universe. Thus the emergence of the Final Ideology, as a result of the mutual struggle and consequent disruption of wrong ideals one after the other, is only the re-emergence of the religious ideology of the Last Prophet in the form of a complete and systematic philosophy of life.

 

Here the Prophet’s Ideology enters the Third Period of its career. During this period the Ideology grows once again (mainly through the efforts of its new devotees) into an important political power in the world. It fights and conquers wrong ideals for its self-defence and thus, incidentally, delivers people from their obstinacy and unreasonable persistence in the love of wrong ideals. By shattering the organisations of wrong ideals one after the other it enables their believers to see the superiority of its own philosophy as the most convincing and the most satisfactory explanation of existence. In short, it takes an active part in the war of ideals and brings it to an end by conquering all wrong ideals throughout the world. During this period too, the old community of the Prophet gets a new life since it is relieved of its struggle against the adverse effects of wrong ideals which have been long undermining its love insidiously. The spell of wrong ideals having broken, their unrecognised, mysterious attraction having disappeared, the community regains bit by bit their love for the Right Ideal which they had lost. As their self-consciousness grows, they gain in strength and courage and become ardent supporters and helpers of the new community of converts struggling for the supremacy of the Right Ideal in the world.

 

The Fourth Period in the career of the Prophet’s Ideology begins when it has conquered all wrong ideals and united the whole of the human race by establishing its own rule all over the earth. Since, during this period, the human race is free to worship and adore their own ideal, the Perfect Ideal, as well as to act and struggle for its realisation, their love for the ideal grows to the fullest extent and as their love for the ideal grows their unity also grows till they are able to function as a single individual.

 

The love of man for man, we know, is a part of the urge of self, a part of love of the Creator. We are disunited because we misunderstand our nature. Since we lack self-consciousness, we give different interpretations to our desire for the Perfect Ideal which is one. What is really one desire is divided by us, in our ignorance, into several desires and the result is our discord and disunity. To the extent to which we understand our nature, we are united and to the extent to which we fail to understand it, we are disunited. To the extent to which accurate understanding of human nature is the common property of all mankind, there is, even now, a unity among the human race side by side with their acute differences. At present we are struggling to know more and more of ourselves. As time will go on, we shall understand our nature more and more and hence our unity will grow more and more and our disunity will become less and less. When the Right Ideology will establish itself as the only political power in the world, it will not only unite the human race under one government but will also create conditions in which their love for the Right Ideal and, therefore, their self-knowledge and their real unity will increase to the highest limits. It is difficult to imagine the immense powers, mental, material, and moral, which the human race (united as a single individual) will command at this time.

 

As the human race will evolve their self-consciousness through their absolute reliance on the Prophet, they will enrich themselves more and more with his spiritual knowledge, with the result that they will begin to feel more and more independent of him. But, in spite of it, there will be, owing to a constant growth of their own self-consciousness, their own inner light, an ever greater and greater conformity to the external form as well as to the innermost meaning and spirit of the Prophet’s teachings in every action of the individual and the society till they become what the Prophet, nay, the Creator, would have finally made them Himself. At this stage man will be giving a perfectly free and full expression to the urge of his nature.

 

With the emergence of man, the driving force of evolution ceased to operate in the biological world and instead applied itself wholeheartedly to the task of ideological evolution in the world of human beings. Hence as soon as man came into existence biological mutations came to an end, but since the process of biological evolution cannot be repeated now we have no means of observing how they actually occurred in the past. Experiments such as those carried out by De Vries, Tower, Morgan and Johannsen cannot but produce artificial mutations which are due to the plasticity allowed by Nature to the individuals of each species to vary within certain limits which cannot be overstepped. As some species have more of this plasticity than others, the characters of their offspring produced under certain artificial conditions, e.g. crossbreeding or selecting of mates, etc, can be made to look like a natural mutation. Artificial mutations are mostly of a negative character, registering the loss of some quality found in the parent individuals. Even if their results are positive their occurrence is so rare and their scope is so limited that they can give us no idea of the degree of wealth and abundance in which mutations must have occurred during the biological ages. In any case they are very important, since they indicate that biological mutations are possible and must have occurred in the past. But for those who doubt their occurrence a convincing proof will be found in the nature of consciousness itself as it stands revealed in the history of the human society or the course of ideological evolution which is known to us far more definitely than the  course of biological evolution. We know that the emergence of every new ideological community in the past was due to a psychological mutation giving rise to a man of an exceptional psychological efficiency and superiority, whose followers or ideological descendants formed the new community. Since Consciousness is one and its essential tendencies remain the same at each stage of evolution, we have reason to believe that the emergence of every new species in the past must be due to a biological mutation giving rise to an individual of an exceptional biological efficiency and superiority, whose descendants constituted the new species.

 

The tendency of Consciousness to compensate for a continued slackness of its movement by a sudden big effort, which is the cause of mutations and prophets at the animal and the human stages of evolution respectively, is a very general one and mutations and prophethood are not the only results of its operation. Obstacles always stimulate the activity of Consciousness, wherever it may be and whatever may be the stage of its evolution and the sphere of its action. The sudden automatic appearance of a prophet in a deteriorating society is like the sudden automatic appearance of a storm in an area where the pressure of atmosphere has lowered or like the sudden automatic reaction of an organism towards disease which results in the restoration of its health. Psychology is only a higher kind of Biology, and we see the evidence of this tendency of Consciousness on the psychological plane of life in the activity of our own consciousness. Whenever we constantly fail to act up to our sincere convictions, we experience a mental reaction and make an extraordinary effort to prove worthy of ourselves. It is on account of this that we find some men and women becoming social and political workers, recluses, fakirs or monks after having lived for some time a life which they considered below themselves. And it is on account of this that sometimes, when we feel we have been too lazy, we start working with a sudden burst of enthusiasm and then go on working for hours at a stretch. Our creative activity of the highest order expresses itself by fits and starts. A poet has the capacity to create and write, but he does not write always. He waits for inspiration which comes to him suddenly when his creativeness is at its lowest ebb. Then it operates almost irresistibly and in spite of him. Life remains long almost at a standstill and then suddenly gathers itself for an effort in the creation of something new, something hitherto unknown, and we have a “mutation”.

 

Every organism in Nature looks to its own maintenance and growth and contains within itself the principle by which it overcomes its own defects and compensates for its own lapses. Such is the case with societies, communities or social organisms too. Prophethood is the reaction of the human social organisms towards diseases of wrong ideas and is as natural and essential for its continued evolution as the reaction of an individual organism towards disease is essential for its health and growth.