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NO.2.
THE LIFE DIVINE
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THE TWO NEGATIONS
I
The Materialist Denial
He energized conscious-force (in the
austerity of thought) and came to the knowledge that Matter is the Brahman. For
from Matter all existences are born; born, by Matter they increase and enter
into Matter in their passing hence. Then he went to Varuna, his father and said
" Lord, teach me of the Brahman." But he said to him : " Energies (again) the
conscious-energy in thee ; for the Energy is Brahman."
Taittiriya Upanishad.
The affirmation of a divine life upon earth and an immortal sense in mortal existence can have no base unless we recognise not only eternal Spirit as the inhabitant of this bodily mansion, the wearer of this mutable robe, but accept Matter of which it is made, as a fit and noble material out of which He weaves constantly His garbs, builds recurrently the unending series of His mansions.
Nor is this, even, enough to guard us against a recoil from life in the body unless, with the Upanishads, perceiving behind their appearances the identity in essence of these two extreme terms of existence, we are able to say in the very language of those ancient writings, " Matter also is Brahman," and to give its full value to the vigorous figure by which the physical universe is described as the external body of the Divine Being. Nor,—so far divided
Page-3 apparently are these two extreme terms,— is that identification convincing to the rational intellect if we refuse to recognise a series of ascending terms between Spirit and Matter. Otherwise the two must appear as irreconcilable opponents bound together in an unhappy wedlock and their divorce the one reasonable solution. To identify them, to represent each in the terms of the other, becomes an artificial creation of Thought opposed to the logic of facts and possible only by an irrational mysticism. If we assert only pure Spirit and a mechanical unintelligent substance or energy, calling one God or Soul and the other Nature, the inevitable end will be that we shall either deny God or else turn from Nature. For both Thought and Life, a choice then becomes imperative. Thought comes to deny the one as an illusion of the imagination or the other as an illusion of the senses; Life comes to fix on the immaterial and flee from itself in a disgust or a self-forgetting ecstasy, or else to deny its own immortality and take its orientation away from God and towards the animal. Purusha and Prakriti, the passively luminous Soul of the Sankhyas and their mechanically active Energy, have nothing in common, not even their opposite modes of inertia; their antinomies can only be resolved by the cessation of the inertly driven Activity into the immutable Repose upon which it has been casting in vain the sterile procession of its images. Shan-Kara’s wordless, inactive Self and his Maya of many names and forms are equally disparate and irreconcilable entities; their rigid antagonism can terminate only by the dissolution of the multitudinous illusion into the sole Truth of an eternal Silence. The materialist has an easier field; it is possible for him by denying Spirit to arrive at a more readily convincing simplicity of statement, a real Monism, the Monism of Matter or else of Force. But in this rigidity of statement it is impossible for him to persist permanently. He too ends by positing an unknowable as inert, as remote from the known universe as the passive Purusha or the silent Atman. It serves no purpose but to put off by a vague Page-4 concession the inexorable demands of Thought or to stand as an excuse for refusing to extend the limits of enquiry. Therefore, in these barren contradictions the human mind cannot rest satisfied. It must seek always a complete affirmation; it can find it only by a luminous reconciliation. To reach that reconciliation it must traverse the degrees which our inner consciousness imposes on us and, whether by objective method of analysis applied to Life and Mind as to Matter or by subjective synthesis and illumination, arrive at the repose of the ultimate unity without denying the energy of the expressive multiplicity. Only in such a complete and catholic affirmation can all the multiform and apparently contradictory data of existence be harmonised and the manifold conflicting forces which govern our thought and life discover the central Truth which they are here to symbolise and variously fulfill. Then only can our Thought, having attained a true centre, ceasing to wander in circles, work like the Brahman of the Upanishad, fixed and stable even in its play and its worldwide coursing, and our life, knowing its aim, serve it with a serene and settled joy and light as well as with a rhythmically discursive energy. But when that rhythm has once been disturbed, it is necessary and helpful that man should test separately, in their extreme assertion, each of the two great opposites-It is the mind’s natural way of returning more perfectly to the affirmation it has lost. On the road it may attempt to rest in the intervening digress, reducing all things into the terms of an original Life-Energy or of sensation or of Ideas ; but these exclusive solutions have always an air of unreality. They may satisfy for a time the logical reason which deals only with pure ideas but they cannot satisfy the mind’s sense of actuality. For the mind knows that there is something behind itself which is not the Idea; it knows, on the other hand, that there is something within itself which is more than this vital Breath. Either Spirit or Matter can give it for a time some sense of ultimate reality; not so any of the principles that intervene. It Page-5 must, therefore, go to the two extremes before it can return fruitfully upon the whole. For by its very nature, served by a sense that can perceive with distinctness only the parts of existence and by a speech that, also, can achieve distinctness only when it carefully divides and limits, the intellect is driven, having before it this multiplicity of elemental principles, to seek unity by reducing all ruthlessly to the terms of one. It attempts practically, in order to assert this one, to get rid of the others. To perceive the real source of their identity without this exclusive process, it must either have overleaped itself or must have completed the circuit only to find that all equally reduce themselves to That which escapes definition or description and is yet not only real but attainable. By whatever road we may 1 ravel. That is always the end at which we arrive and we can only escape it by refusing to complete the journey. ’ It is therefore of good augury that after many experiments and verbal solutions we should now find ourselves standing today in the presence of the two that have alone borne for long the most rigorous tests of experience, the two extremes, and that at the end of the experience both should have come to a result which the universal instinct in mankind, that veiled judge, sentinel and representative of the universal Spirit of Truth, refuses to accept as right or as satisfying. In Europe and in India, respectively, the negation of the materialist and the refusal of the ascetic have sought to assert themselves as the sole truth and to dominate the conception of Life. In India, if the result has been a great heaping up of the treasures of the Spirit,—or of some of them,—it has also been a great bankruptcy of Life;’ in Europe, the fullness of riches and the triumphant mastery of this world’s powers and possessions have progressed towards an equal bankruptcy in the things of the Spirit. Nor has the intellect, which sought the solution of all problems in the one term of Matter, found satisfaction in the answer that it has received.
Therefore the time grows ripe and the tendency of the world moves towards a new and comprehensive affirmation
Page-6 in thought and in inner and outer experience and to its corollary, a new and rich self-fulfillment in an integral human existence for the individual and for the race. From the difference in the relations of Spirit and Matter to, the Unknowable which they both represent, there arises also a difference of effectiveness in the material and the spiritual negations. The denial of the materialist although more insistent and immediately successful, more facile in its appeal to the generality of mankind, is yet less enduring, less effective finally than the absorbing and perilous refusal of the ascetic. For it carries within itself its own cure. Its most powerful element is the Agnosticism which, admitting, the Unknowable behind all manifestation, extends the limits of the unknowable until it comprehends all that is merely unknown. Its premise is that the physical senses are our sole means of Knowledge and that Reason, therefore, even in its most extended and vigorous flights, cannot escape beyond their domain; it must deal always and solely with the facts which they provide or suggest; and the suggestions themselves must always be kept tied to their origins; we cannot go beyond, we cannot use them as a ‘bridge leading us into a domain where more powerful and less limited faculties come into play and another kind of inquiry has to be instituted.
A premise so arbitrary pronounces on itself its own sentence of insufficiency. It can only be maintained by ignoring or explaining away all that vast field of evidence and experience which contradicts it, denying or disparaging noble and useful faculties, active consciously or obscurely or at worst latent in all human beings, and refusing to investigate supra-physical phenomena except as manifested in relation to matter and its movements and conceived as a subordinate activity of material forces. As soon as we begin to investigate the operations of mind and of super-mind in themselves and without the prejudgment that is determined from the beginning to see in them only a subordinate term of Matter, we come into contact with a mass of phenomena which escape entirely from the rigid hold, the limiting dogmatism of the materialist formula. And the
Page-7 moment we recognise, as our enlarging experience compels If to recognise, that there are in the universe knowable realities beyond d the range of the senses and in man powers and faculties which determine rather than are determined by the material organs through which they hold themselves in touch with the world of the senses,—that outer shell of our true and complete existence,—the premise of materialistic Agnosticism disappears. We are ready for a larger statement and an ever-developing enquiry. But, first, it is well that we should recognise the enormous, the indispensable utility of the very brief period of rationalistic Materialism through which humanity has been passing. For that vast field of evidence and experience which now begins to reopen its gates to us, can only be safely entered when the intellect has been severely trained to a clear austerity ; seized on by unripe minds, it lends itself to the most perilous distortions and misleading imaginations and actually in the past encrusted a real nucleus of truth with such an accretion of perverting superstitions and irrationalizing dogmas that all advance in true knowledge was rendered impossible. It became necessary for a time to make a clean sweep at once of the truth and its disguise in order that the road might be clear for a new departure and a surer advance. The rationalistic tendency of Materialism has done mankind this great service.
For the faculties that transcend the senses, by the very fact of their being
enmeshed in Matter, missioner to work in a physical body, put in harness to draw one car along with the emotional desires and nervous impulses, are exposed to a mixed functioning in which they are in danger of illuminating confusion rather than clarifying truth. Especially is this mixed functioning dangerous when men with unchastened minds and unpurified sensibilities attempt to rise into the higher domains of spiritual experience. In what regions of unsubstantial cloud and semi-brilliant fog or a murk visited by flashes which blind more than they enlighten, do they not lose themselves by that rash and
Page-8 premature adventure ? An adventure necessary indeed in the way in which Nature chooses to effect her advance,— for she amuses herself as she works,—but still, for the Reason, rash and premature. It is necessary, therefore, that advancing Knowledge should base herself on a clear, pure and disciplined intellect. It is necessary, too, that she should correct her errors sometimes by a return to the restraint of sensible fact, the concrete realities of the physical world. The touch of Earth is always reinvigorating to the son of Earth, even when he seeks a supra-physical Knowledge. It may even be said that the supra-physical can only be really mastered in its fullness—to its heights we can always reach,—when we keep our feat firmly on the physical. "Earth is His footing," says the Upanishad whenever it images the Self that manifests in the universe.1 And it is certainly the fact that the wider we extend and the surer we make our knowledge of the physical world, the wider and surer becomes our foundation for the higher knowledge, even for the highest, even for the Brahma Vidya. In emerging, therefore, out of the materialistic period of human Knowledge we must be careful that we do not rashly condemn what we are leaving or throw away even one little of its gains, before we can summon perceptions and powers that are well grasped and secure, to occupy their place. Rather we shall observe with respect and wonder the work that Atheism has done for the Divine and admire the services that Agnosticism has rendered in preparing the illimitable increase of knowledge. In our world error is continually the handmaid and pathfinder of Truth ; for error is really a half-truth that stumbles because of its limitations; often it is Truth that wears a disguise in order to arrive unobserved near to its goal. Well, if it could always be, as it has been in the great period we are leaving, the faithful handmaid, severe, conscientious, clean-handed, luminous within its limits, a half-truth and not a reckless and presumptuous aberration.
1—Padbhyam Prithivl (Mundaka Upanishad). Prithivi Pojasyam
(Brihadaranyaka Upanishad). Page-9 A certain kind of Agnosticism is the final truth of all knowledge. For when we come to the end of whatever path, the universe appears as only a symbol or an appearance of an unknowable Reality which translates itself here into different systems of values, physical values, vital and sensational values, intellectual, ideal and spiritual values. The more That becomes real to us, the more it is seen to be always beyond defining thought and beyond formulating expression. "Mind attains not there, nor speech." 1 And yet as it is possible to exaggerate, with the Illusionists, the unreality of the appearance, so it is possible to exaggerate the unknowable ness of the Unknowable. When we speak of It as unknowable, we mean, really, that It escapes the grasp of our thought and speech, instruments which proceed always by the sense of difference and express by the way of definition ; but if not knowable by thought, It is attainable by a supreme effort of consciousness. There is even a kind of Knowledge which is one with Identity and by which, in a sense, It can be known. Certainly, that Knowledge cannot be reproduced successfully in the terms of thought and speech, but when we have attained to it, the result is a revaluation of That in the symbols of our cosmic consciousness, not only in one but in all the ranges of symbols, which results in a revolution of our internal being and, through the internal, of our external life. Moreover, there is also a kind of Knowledge through which That does reveal itself by all these names and forms of phenomenal existence which to the ordinary intelligence only conceal It. It is this higher but not highest process of Knowledge to which we can attain by passing the limits of the materialistic formula and scrutinising Life, Mind and Supermind in the phenomena that are characteristic of them and not merely in those subordinate movements by which they link themselves to Matter. The Unknown is not the Unknowable; 2 it need not remain the unknown for us, unless we choose ignorance or
1-Kena Upanishad II. 3.
2-0ther is That than the Known ; also it is above the unknown. K. U. II.
4.
Page-10 persist in our first limitations. For to all things that are not unknowable, all things in the universe, there correspond in that universe faculties which can take cognizance of them and in man, the microcosm, these faculties are always existent and at a certain stage capable of development. We may choose not to develop them; where they are partially developed, we may discourage and impose on them a kind of atrophy. But, fundamentally, all possible knowledge is knowledge within the power of humanity. And since in man there is the inalienable impulse of Nature towards self-realisation, no struggle of the intellect to limit the action of our capacities within a determined area, can for ever prevail. When we have proved Matter and realised its secret capacities, the very knowledge which has found its convenience in that temporary limitation, must cry to us, like the Vedic Restrainers, "Forth now and push forward also in other fields." 1 If modern Materialism were simply an unintelligent acquiescence in the material life, the advance might be indefinitely delayed. But since its very soul is the search for Knowledge, it will be unable to cry a halt; as it reaches the barriers of sense-knowledge and of the reasoning from sense-knowledge, its very rush will carry it beyond and the rapidity and sureness with which it has embraced the visible universe is only an earnest of the energy and success which we may hope to see repeated in the conquest of what lies beyond, once the stride is taken that crosses the barrier. We see already that advance in its obscure beginnings. Not only in the one final conception, but in the great line of its general results Knowledge, by whatever path it is followed, tends to become one. Nothing can be more remarkable and suggestive than the extent to which modern Science confirms in the domain of Matter the conceptions and even the very formulae of language which were arrived at, by a very different method, in the l—R. V. I. 4. Page-11 Vedanta,—the original Vedanta, not of the schools of metaphysical philosophy, but of the Upanishads. And these, on the other hand, often reveal their full significance, their richer contents only when they are viewed in the hew light shed by the discoveries of modern Science,— for instance, that Vedantic expression which describes things in the Cosmos as one seed arranged by the universal Energy in multitudinous forms 1 Significant, especially, is the drive of Science towards a Monism which is consistent with multiplicity; towards the Vedic idea of the one essence with its many becomings. Even if the dualistic appearance of Matter and Force be insisted on, it does not really stand in the way of this Monism. For it will be evident that essential Matter is a thing nonexistent to the senses and only, like the Pradhdna of the Sankhyas, a conceptual form of substance; and in fact the point is increasingly reached where only an arbitrary distinction in thought divides form of substance from form of energy. Matter expresses itself eventually as a formulation of some unknown Force. Life, too, that yet unfathomed mystery, begins to reveal itself as an obscure energy of sensibility imprisoned in its material formulation; and when the dividing ignorance is cured which gives us the sense of a gulf between Life and Matter, it is difficult to suppose that Mind, Life and Matter will be found to be anything else than one Energy triply formulated, the triple world of the Vedic seers. Nor will the conception then be able to endure of a brute material Force as the mother of Mind. The Energy that creates the world can be nothing else than a Will and Will is only consciousness applying itself to a work and a result. What is that work and result, if not a self-involution of Consciousness in form and a self-evolution out of form so as to actualise some mighty possibility in the universe which it has created ? And what is its will in Man if not a will to unending Life, to unbounded Knowledge, to un-
1—Swetashwatara Upanishad VI. 12.
Page-12 fettered Power ? Science itself begins to dream of the physical conquest of death, expresses an insatiable thirst for knowledge, is working out something like a terrestrial omnipotence for humanity. Space and Time are contracting to the vanishing-point in its works, and it strives in a hundred ways to make man the master of circumstance and so lighten the fetters of causality. The idea of limit, of the impossible begins to grow a little shadowy and it appears instead that whatever man constantly wills, he must in the end be able to do; for the consciousness in the race eventually finds the means. It is not in the individual that this omnipotence expresses itself, but the collective Will of mankind that works out with the individual as a means. And yet when we look more deeply, it is not any conscious Will of the collectivity, but a super-conscious Might that uses the individual as a centre and means, the collectivity as a condition and field. What is this but the God in man, the infinite Identity, the multitudinous Unity, the Omniscient, the Omnipotent, who having made man in His own image, with the ego as a centre of working, with the race, the collective Narayana, the visvamanava2 as the mould and circumscription, seeks to express in them some image of the unity, omniscience, omnipotence which are the self-conception of the Divine? "That which is immortal in mortals is a God and established inwardly as an energy working out in our divine powers." It is this vast cosmic impulse which the modern world, without quite knowing its own aim, yet serves in all its activities and labours subconsciously to fulfil. But there is always a limit and an encumbrance, the limit of the material field in the knowledge, the encumbrance, of the material machinery in the Power. But here also the latest trend is highly significant of a freer future. As the outposts of scientific Knowledge come more and more to be set on the borders that divide the material from the immaterial, so also the highest achievements of
1—A name of Vishnu, who, as the God in man,. lives constantly associated in a dual unity with Nata, the human being. 2-The universal man Page-13 practical Science are those which tend to simplify and reduce to the vanishing-point the machinery by which the greatest effects are produced. Wireless telegraphy is Nature’s exterior sign and pretext for a new orientation. The sensible physical means for the intermediate transmission of the physical force is removed; it is only preserved at the points of impulsion and reception. Eventually even these must disappear; for when the laws and forces of the supra-physical are studied with the right starting-point, the means will infallibly be found for Mind directly to seize on the physical energy and speed it accurately upon its errand. There, once we bring ourselves to recognize it, lie the gates that open upon the enormous vistas of the future. Yet even if we had full knowledge and control of the worlds immediately above Matter, there would still be a limitation and still a beyond. The last knot of our bondage is at that point where the external draws into oneness with the internal, the machinery of ego itself becomes subtilised to the vanishing-point and the law of our action is at last unity embracing and possessing multiplicity and no longer, as now, multiplicity struggling towards some figure of unity. There is the central throne of cosmic Knowledge looking out on her widest dominion ; there the empire of oneself with the empire of one’s world;! there the life 2 in the eternally consummate Bing and the realisation of His divine nature 3 in our human existence. 1 — Swarajya and Samrajya, the double aim proposed to itself by the positive Yoga of the ancients. 2—Salokya-mukti, liberation by conscious existence in one world of being with the Divine.
3—Sudharmya-muhti, liberation by assumption of the Divine Nature
Page-14
The Wherefore
of the Worlds
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IN THE BEGINNING In the beginning God. So runs the first word of all our occidental theology, using the formulas of the traditional conception which it has borrowed from the Hebrew Genesis. And by God when it emerges at all from its puerile anthropomorphic notions, that theology understands the first Unity, the pure Essence which is preexistent of all multiplicity. But by this conception it erects before it, in its very first affirmation, the most insoluble of problems. For out of absolute unity nothing at all can issue. One can conceive such a unity, it is true, as an existence without cause, but it is only by totally ignoring the conditions of thought and the fundamental demands of Reason that one can see in it the cause of existences. Mere unity is by its very definition entire sterility; it is multiplicity alone that can produce multiplicity. The notion of cause is exclusive of the notion of unity; for the essence of unity is an indivisible, indiscernable, immobile identity.
If then we give the name of God to the primordial existence which produces the universe, we postulate the Whole of universal multiplicity in this essential cause and
Page-15 all the possibilities of the world are totalised in the first Being, creator of the world. But then this total sum of the possibilities is not a being; it is the universe itself before manifestation; and it is no longer in the unity, in God, that we can place the first origin of things. Things bear in themselves their own origin. The antecedent of the manifested universe is the non-manifested universe. And if it is that which is called God, God does not create the world, He becomes the world. If then a necessity in the human mind compels it to postulate behind all plurality a simple principle of unicity, that unicity, containing in itself all possibilities, has nothing in common with our mathematical concept of unity; it is an absolute unknowable by our thought. From the point of view of this Absolute, one can with equally good reason affirm that God is or that He is not, that He is the unique or that He is beyond number, that He is inseparable from the universe or that He is without relation to the universe. He is being if all outside Him is non-being, He is non-being if universe exists. So is He defined in certain sacred books of the Fast. * * * When we speak of a beginning we are only determining arbitrarily the limit at which the unique becomes thinkable for us, the point at which it passes for our thought, by a progressive realisation, out of pure potentiality into the concrete actuality. But this point cannot be the mathematical and indivisible point of Unity ; it can only be the first dynamical point, the simple system of generative forces, the meeting-point, for production, of at least two original principles.
This is why certain systems of theology, in order to escape from the contradictory postulate of unity as a cause, have sought in a less unproductive dualism the ex-
Page-16 planation of the beginning of things. And although they have by a misdirected mysticism, falsified the term and distorted the idea, it is in them that we recover the tendencies most in harmony with the very data on which the belief in a divine Creator is founded. Let us take, for example, the Bereshit. If, restoring to the Hebrew characters their numerical value and hidden sense, we analyse the text, then we must thus read the first word of Genesis, "The primary duality was in the beginning." For the sign B which corresponds to the second figure in our numerical system, represents a double original principle which the succeeding letter " Resh " characterises as the very " head " and supreme Cause of formation. And by a remarkable, though fortuitous coincidence, we find that the sacred book of Islam, like the sacred book of Judaism commences, in the initial of its first word, with the sign of duality. The first word " B-Sem-Lillah " (Bismillah) placed at the head of the Koran can, when its elements are decomposed, be interpreted, "Two is the name of Allah." And this name, Allah, itself contains the symbol of that union between the two complementary poles of being out of which the Universe is generated. Formed of twin syllables of which the first has for its initial letter " Alif," the characteristic sign of the Masculine, and the second for its final letter " He," the constant symbol of the Feminine, it seems to be merely the inversion in combination of one and the same essential article and can be mystically translated, as indeed it is translated by some of the Sufis,—by the two pronouns He and She. * * *
Before anything can exist, there was the Indiscernable, and the first entities that we can discriminate as the cause of all that is, can be summed up at the farthest limit of our concepts in these two supreme principles. Their equilibrium is the goal towards which tends a world born of their eternal union.
Page-17 They have been differently interpreted from varying points of view. But it is not with impunity that the true notion of the great Duality has been corrupted by so many religions and philosophies. Some of these, the better to exalt one of its two Puissance’s, have robbed the other of all character of divinity, and transforming complementary into contradictory principles have personified them sometimes as the two eternally active and eternally antagonistic powers of Good and Evil, or, again, have deified the Pure Spirit in opposition to the vileness of Matter, which is yet capable of being a field for the Spirit’s creative activity. And wherever Philosophy has made itself, according to the ecclesiastical formula, the handmaid of Theology, it has ended by arriving at the entire negation of the Principle which Religion has abased. Thus the rigid cult of the male Principle, formulated in the adoration of a masculine and celibate God, has given birth to an exaggerated dogma of spirituality which translates its contempt for nature and for life into an ascetic mysticism. In the social order this tendency of thought has had for its corollary the institution of an autocratic regime and the despotic domination of man over woman and of the Sovereign over the State. For so great is the influence of religious and philosophical ideas on the life of a people and the practical forms in which it is embodied that on the rectitude of its notions about God depends its respect or its contempt for the rights of the masses and the rights of women. And, on the other hand, it is on this respect or contempt that by a projection of life into the domain of thought, depends the formulation of its notions about the origin of things and its concept of the Godhead.
But there is always a tendency towards equilibrium in thin as and all excess brings as its result a contrary excess. Therefore we see this extreme spiritualising trend in human thought bring about by reaction against itself its own opposite in the form of a strait and exclusive materialism.
Page-18 And it is in the countries where the masculine Principle has been most singly adored that it comes to be denied with equal exaggeration to the sole enthronement of its antithesis. One da}’, under the name of Nature, the Feminine takes its revenge. Art aids Science to restore her cult, on the ruins of the supernatural there is erected a positivist Revelation and God vanishes from view in the ideas of Force, Substance and Movement. It is as a result of the meeting of these two tendencies and in those points in which the great opponents have at present succeeded in neutralising each other that the religions of the West, in order better to adapt themselves to the needs of life and the demands of Reason, have toned down their dogma and softened the rigidity of their iconoclasm. The periods of renascence have always been those centuries in which the longing for the Beautiful has awakened along with the need for the True; they are the epochs in which crucified sensibility and Reason have been restored to life. Catholicism itself was modified for the better under the influence of the feminine Principle from the day when the Virgin Mother took her place close to the masculine Trinity, and it is the cult of Mary, more than any thing else, that has saved the Faith from the fanatical aberrations of the Middle Ages and the Church from the reprisals with which she was threatened. If this feminine symbol had been the object of interpretations less gross, the Church might have found in it the means by which she could have succeeded in wedding together the two contrary tendencies of the human mind, unifying the discoveries of Science with the intuitions of faith and transforming her ignorant spiritual dogmatism into a spirituality worthy of the name. She would then have understood that the true Mater Dolorosa is no other than this suffering Matter whose progressive evolution is indeed a perpetual Assumption.
But it is not merely in the realm of the intellect that we see today the rehabilitation of the misunderstood
Page-19 feminine Principle. In the social order also the emancipation of thought has for its sequel the emancipation of the peoples and after the Rights of Man have been affirmed, the Rights of Woman begin to assert themselves. And it is by a perfectly logical consequence that the feminist movement coincides everywhere with the materialistic; for they are, in sum, two corollary aspects of the same original reaction. The excess of the reaction would consist in the establishment of equality of powers between the two sexes to the detriment of the diversity in their duties. That would be another way of misunderstanding Nature and would bring woman again under the dominion of the arbitrary masculine principle by identifying her with man under pretence of liberating her. We shall find the truth of Nature not by a double use in the same sense but by an equilibrium of the two complementary Principles. It is true that these human complements, however dissimilar in their functions, are identical in their deeper essence. But the identity is of a purely spiritual character and represents the identity of the two principles which form the world, two in their work, one in their unknowable origin. It brings us back to the primary unity of the Indiscernible, beyond all differentiation, outside the manifested world.
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The Secret
of the Veda
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CHAPTER II
Veda, then, is the creation of an age anterior to our intellectual philosophies. In that original epoch thought proceeded by other methods than those of our logical reasoning and speech accepted modes of expression which in our modern habits would be inadmissible. The wisest then depended on inner experience and the suggestions of the intuitive mind for all knowledge that ranged beyond mankind’s ordinary perceptions and daily activities. Their aim was illumination, not logical conviction, their ideal the inspired seer, not the accurate reasoned. Indian tradition has faithfully preserved this account of the origin of the Vedas. The Rishi was not the individual composer of the hymn, but the seer (drashtà) of an eternal truth and an impersonal knowledge. The language of Veda itself is Sruti, a rhythm not composed by the intellect but heard, a divine Word that came vibrating out of the Infinite to the inner audience of the man who had previously made himself fit for the impersonal knowledge. The words themselves, drashta and Sruti, sight and hearing, are Vedic expressions ; these and cognate words signify, in the esoteric terminology of the hymns, revelatory knowledge and the contents of inspiration. In the Vedic idea of the revelation there is no suggestion of the miraculous or the supernatural. The Rishi Page-21
who employed these faculties, had acquired them by a progressive self-culture. Knowledge itself was a traveling and a reaching, or a finding and a winning; the revelation came only at the end, the light was the prize of a final victory. There is continually in the Veda this image of the journey, the soul’s march on the path of Truth. On that path, as it advances, it also ascends ; new vistas of power and light open to its aspiration ; it wins by a heroic effort its enlarged spiritual possessions.
From the historical point of view the Rig Veda may be regarded as a record of a great advance made by humanity by special means at a certain period of its collective progress. In its esoteric, as well as its exoteric significance, it is the Book of Works, of the inner and the outer sacrifice; it is the spirit’s hymn of battle and victory as it discovers and climbs to planes of thought and experience inaccessible to the natural or animal man, man’s praise of the divine Light, Power and Grace at work in the mortal. It is far, therefore, from being an attempt to set down the results of intellectual or imaginative speculation, nor does it consist of the dogmas of a primitive religion. Only, out of the sameness of experience and out of the impersonality of the knowledge received, there arise a fixed body of conceptions constantly repeated and a fixed symbolic language which, perhaps, in that early human speech, was the inevitable form of these conceptions because alone capable by its combined concreteness and power of mystic suggestion of expressing that which for the ordinary mind of the race was inexpressible. We have, at any rate, the same notions repeated from hymn to hymn with the same constant terms and figures and frequently in the same phrases with an entire indifference to any search for poetical originality or any demand for novelty of thought and freshness of language. No pursuit of aesthetic grace, richness or beauty induces these mystic poets to vary the consecrated form which had become for them a sort of divine algebra transmitting the eternal formulae of the Knowledge to the continuous succession of the initiates, Page-22 The hymns possess indeed a finished metrical form, a constant subtlety and skill in their technique, great variations of style and poetical personality ; they are not the work of rude, barbarous and primitive craftsmen, but the living breath of a supreme and conscious Art forming its creations in the puissant but well-governed movement of a self-observing inspiration. Still, all these high gifts have deliberately been exercised within one unvarying framework and always with the same materials. For the art of expression was to the Rishis only a me ins, not an aim; their principal preoccupation was strenuously practical, almost utilitarian, in the highest sense of utility. The hymn was to the Rishi who composed it a means of spiritual progress for himself and for others. It rose out of his soul, it became a power of his mind, it was the vehicle of his self-expression in some important or even critical moment of his life’s inner history. It helped him to express the god in him, to destroy the devourer, the expresser of evil; it became a weapon in the hands of the Aryan strive.- after perfection, it flashed forth like Indra’s lightning against the Coverer on the slopes, the "Wolf on the path, the Robber by the streams. The invariable fixity of Vedic thought when taken in conjunction with its depth, richness and subtlety, gives rise to some interesting speculations. For we may reasonably argue that such a fixed form and substance would not easily be possible in the beginnings of thought and psychological experience or even during their early progress and unfolding. We may therefore surmise that our actual Sanhita represents the close of a period, not its commencement, nor even some of its successive stages. It is even possible that its mast ancient hymns are a comparatively modern development or version of a more ancient 1
1—The Veda itself speaks constantly of " ancient " and " modern " Rishis, (puvah…nutanah ), the former remote enough to be regarded as a kind of demigods, the first founders of knowledge.
Page-23 Veda Vyasa out of a more richly vocal Aryan past. Made, according to the common belief, by Krishna of the Isle, the great traditional sage, the colossal compiler (Vyasa), with his face turned towards the commencement of the Iron Age, towards the centuries of increasing twilight and final darkness, it is perhaps only the last testament of the Ages of Intuition, the luminous Dawns of the Forefathers, to their descendants, to a human race already turning in spirit towards the lower levels and the more easy and secure gains—secure perhaps only in appearance—of the physical life and of the intellect and the logical reason. But these are only speculations and inferences. Certain it is that the old tradition of a progressive obscuration and loss of the Veda as the law of the human cycle has been fully justified by the event. The obscuration had already proceeded far before the opening of the next great age of Indian spirituality, the Vedantic, which struggled to preserve or recover what it 3-et could of the ancient knowledge. It could hardly have been otherwise. For the system of the Vedic mystics was founded upon experiences difficult to ordinary mankind and proceeded by the aid of faculties which in most of us are rudimentary and imperfectly developed and, when-active at all, are mixed and irregular in their operation. Once the first intensity of the search after truth had passed, periods of fatigue and relaxation ware bound to intervene in which the old truths would be partially lost. Nor once lost, could they easily be recovered by scrutinising the sense of the, ancient hymns; for those hymns were couched in a language that was deliberately ambiguous.
A tongue unintelligible to us may be correctly understood once a clue has been found; a diction that is deliberately ambiguous, holds its secret much more obstinately and successfully, for it is full of lures and of indications that mislead. Therefore when the Indian mind turned again to review the sense of Veda, the task was difficult and the success only partial. One source of light still existed, the traditional knowledge handed down among those who memorised and explained the Vedic text or had charge of
Page-24 the Vedic ritual,—two functions that had originally been one ; for in the early days the priest was also the teacher and seer. But the clearness of this light was already obscured. Even Purohits of repute performed the rites with a very imperfect knowledge of the power and the sense of the sacred words which they repeated. For the material aspects of Vedic worship had grown like a thick crust over the inner knowledge and were stifling what they had once served to protect. The Veda was already a mass of myth and ritual. The power had begun to disappear out of the symbolic ceremony ; the light had departed from the mystic parable and left only a surface of apparent grotesqueness and naivetc. The Brahmanas and the Upanishads are the record of a powerful revival which took the sacred text and ritual as a starting-point for a new statement of spiritual thought and experience. This movement had two complementary aspects, one, the conservation of the forms, another the revelation of the soul of Veda,—the first represented by the Brahmanas,1 the second by the Upanishads. The Brahmanas labour to fix and preserve the minutiae of the Vedic ceremony, the conditions of their material effectuality, the symbolic sense and purpose of their different parts, movements, implements, the significance of texts important in the ritual, the drift of obscure allusions, the memory of ancient myths and traditions. Many of their legends are evidently posterior to the hymns, invented to explain passages which were no longer understood; others may have been part of the apparatus of original myth and parable employed by the ancient symbolists or memories of the actual historical circumstances surrounding the composition of the hymns. Oral tradition is always a light that obscures; a new symbolism working upon an old that is half lost, is likely to overgrow rather
1—Necessarily, these and other appreciations-in the chapter are brief and summary views of certain main tendencies. The Brahmanas for instance have their philosophical passages.
Page-25 than reveal it; therefore the Brahmanas, though full of interesting hints, help us very little in our research ; nor are they a safe guide to the meaning of separate texts when they attempt an exact and verbal interpretation. The Rishis of the Upanishads followed another method. They sought to recover the lost or waning knowledge by meditation and spiritual experience and they used the text of the ancient mantras as a prop or an authority for their own intuitions and perceptions; or else the Vedic Word was a seed of ‘thought and vision by which they recovered old truths in new forms. What they found, they expressed in other terms more intelligible to the age in which they lived. In a certain sense their handling of the texts was not disinterested ; it was not governed by the scholar’s scrupulous desire to arrive at the exact intention of the words and the precise thought of the sentences in their actual framing. They were seekers of a higher than verbal truth and used words merely as suggestions for the illumination towards which they were striving. They knew not or they neglected the etymological sense and employed often a method of symbolic interpretation of component sounds in which it is very difficult to follow them. For this reason, while the Upanishads are invaluable for the light they shed on the principal ideas and on the psychological system of the ancient Rishis, they help us as little as the Brahmanas in determining the accurate sense of the texts which they quote. Their real work was to found Vedanta rather than to interpret Veda.
For this great movement resulted in a new and more permanently powerful statement of thought and spirituality, Veda culminating in Vedanta. And it held in itself two strong tendencies which worked towards the disintegration of the old Vedic thought and culture. First, it tended to subordinate more and more completely the outward ritual, the material utility of the mantra and the sacrifice to a more purely spiritual aim and intention. The balance, the synthesis preserved by the old Mystics between the external and the internal, the material and the spiritual
Page-26 life was displaced and disorganised. A new balance, a new synthesis was established, leaning finally towards asceticism "and renunciation, and maintained itself until it was in its turn displaced and disorganised by the exaggeration .of its own tendencies in Buddhism. The sacrifice, the symbolic ritual became more and more a useless survival and even an encumbrance ; yet, as so often happens, by the very fact of becoming mechanical and ineffective the importance of everything that was most external in them came to be exaggerated and their minutiae irrationally enforced by that part of the national mind which still clung to them. A sharp practical division came into being, effective though never entirely recognised in theory, between Veda and Vedanta, a distinction which might be expressed in the formula, "the Veda for the priests, the Vedanta for the sages." The second tendency of Vedantic movement was to disencumber itself progressively of the symbolic language, the veil of concrete myth and poetic figure, in which the Mystics had shrouded their thought and to substitute a clearer statement and more philosophical language. The complete evolution of this tendency rendered obsolete the utility not only of the Vedic ritual but of the Vedic text. Upanishads, increasingly clear and direct in their language, became the fountainhead of the highest Indian thought and replaced the inspired verses of Vasistha and Viswamit.a.1 The Vedas, becoming less and less the indispensable basis of education, were no longer studied with the same zeal and intelligence; their symbolic language, ceasing to be used, lost the remnant of its inner sense to new generation? whose whole manner of thought was different from that of the Vedic forefathers. The Ages of Intuition were passing away into the first dawn of the Age of Reason.
1 —
Again this expresses the main tendency and is subject to qualification. The Vedas are also quoted as authorities; but as a whole it is the Upanishads that become the Book of Knowledge, the Veda being rather the Book of Works.
Page-27 Buddhism completed the revolution and left of the externalities of the ancient world only some venerable pomps and some mechanical usages. It sought to abolish the Vedic sacrifice and to bring into use the popular vernacular in place of the literary tongue. And although the consummation of its work was delayed for several centuries by the revival of’ Hinduism in the Puranic religions, the Veda itself benefited little by this respite. In order to combat the popularity of the new religion it was necessary to put forward instead of venerable but unintelligible texts Scriptures written in an easy form of a mere modem Sanskrit. For the mass of the nation the Puranas pushed aside the Veda and the forms of new religious systems took the place of the ancient ceremonies. As the Veda had passed from the sage to the prkst, so now it began to pass from the hands of the priest into the hands of the scholar. And in that keeping it suffered the last mutilation of its sense and the last diminution of its true dignity and sanctity. Not that the dealings of Indian scholarship with the hymns, beginning from the pre-Christian centuries, have been altogether a record of loss. Rather it is to the scrupulous diligence and conservative tradition of the Pandits that we owe the preservation of Veda at all after its secret had been lost and the hymns themselves had ceased in practice to be a living Scripture. And even for the recovery of the lost secret the two milleniums of scholastic orthodoxy have left us some invaluable aids, a text determined scrupulously to its very accentuation, the important lexicon of Yaska and Sayana’s great commentary which in spite of its many and often startling imperfections remains still for the scholar an indispensable first step towards the formation of a sound Vedic learning.
____________ Page-28 _________ INDRA AND THE THOUGHT-FORCES RIG VEDA I. 171. 1. To you I come with this obeisance, by the perfect Word I seek right mentality from the swift in the passage. Take delight, O Maruts, in the things of knowledge, lay aside your wrath, unyoke your steeds. 2. Lo, the hymn of your affirmation, O Maruts; it is fraught with my obeisance, it was framed by the heart, it was established by the mind, O ye gods. Approach these my words and embrace them with the mind; for of submission1 are you the increasers. 3. Affirmed let the Maruts be benign to us, affirmed the lord of plenitude has become wholly creative of felicity. Upward may our desirable delights 2 be uplifted, O Maruts, upward all our days by the will towards victory. 4. I, mastered by this mighty one, trembling with the fear of Indra, O Maruts, put far away the 1. Namas. Sayana takes namas throughout in his favourite sense, food; for " increasers of salutation " is obviously impossible. It is evident from this and other passages that behind the physical sense of obeisance the word carries with it a psychological significance which here disengages itself clearly from the concrete figure.
2. Vanani. The word means both " forests, " and " enjoyments :or as an adjective, "enjoyable". It has commonly the double sense in the Veda, the ”pleasant growths" of our physical existence, romani pritkivyah.
Page-29 offerings that for you had been made in tense. Let your grace be upon us. 5. Thou by whom the movements of the mind grow conscient and brilliant1 in our mornings through the bright power2 of the continuous Dawns, O Bull of the herd 6. Do thou, O Indra, protect the Powers in their increased might; put a way thy wrath against the Maruts, by them in thy forcefulness upheld, who have right perceptions. May we find the strong impulsion that shall break swiftly through.
___________
1 Us rah. In the feminine th? word is used as a synonym for the Vedic go, meaning at once Cow and ray of light. Usha, the Dawn, also, is gomuti, girt with rays or accompanied by the herds of the Sun. There is in the text a significant assonance, sure vyushtisku, one of the common devices used by the Vedic Rishis to suggest a thought or a connection which they do not consider it essential to bring out expressly.
2. Shavas. There are a host of words in the Veda for strength, force, power and each of them carries with it its own peculiar shade of significance. Shavas usually conveys the idea of light as well as force.
3. Vrishabha. Bull, Male, Lord or Puissant. Indra is constantly spoken of as Vrishabha or Vrishnis. The word is sometimes used by itself, as here, sometimes with another word governed by it to bring Out the idea of the herds, e. g. Vrishabha matinam, Lord of the thoughts, where the image of the bull and this herd is plainly intended.
4. Nrin. The word nary seems to have meant originally active, swift or strong. We have nrimna, strength, and nritama nrimna, most puissant of the Powers. It came afterwards to mean male or man and in the Veda is oftenest applied to the gods as the male powers or Purushas presiding over the energies of Nature as opposed to the female powers, who are called gnat or gana. Page-30 COMMENTARY A sequel to the colloquy of Indra and Agastya, this Sutra is Agastya’s hymn of propitiation to the Maruts whose sacrifice he had interrupted at the bidding of the mightier deity. Less directly, it is connected in thought with the 165th hymn of the Mandala, the colloquy of Indra and the Maruts, in which the supremacy of the Lord of Heaven is declared and these lesser shining hosts are admitted as subordinate powers who impart to men their impulsion towards the high truths which belong to Indra. " Giving the energy of your breath to their thoughts of varied light, become in them impellers to the knowledge of my truths. When sever the doer becomes active for the work and the intelligence of the thinker creates us in him, O Maruts, move surely towards that illumined seer,"—such is the closing word of the colloquy, the final injunction of Indra to the inferior deities.
These verses fix clearly enough the psychological function of the Maruts. They are not properly gods of thought, rather gods of energy ; still, it is in the mind that their energies become effective. To the uninstructed Aryan worshipper, the Maruts were powers of wind, storm and rain ; it is the images of the tempest that are most commonly applied to them and they are spoken of as the Rudras, the fierce, impetuous ones,—a name that they share with the god of Force, Agni. Although Indra is described sometimes as the eldest of the Maruts,— Indrajyestho Martidgatiah,—yet they would seem at first to belong rather to the domain of Vayu, the Wind-God, who in the Vedic system is the-Master of Life, inspirer of that Breath or dynamic energy, called the Prana, which is represented in man by the vital and nervous activities. But this is only a part of their physiognomy, Brilliance, no less than impetuosity, is their characteristic. Everything about them is lustrous, themselves, their shining weapons, their golden ornaments, their resplendent cars. Not only do they send down the rain, the waters, the
Page-31 abundance of heaven, and break down the things best established to make way for new movements and new forma-ton;,—functions which, for the rest, they share with other gods, Indra, Mitra, Varuna,—but, like them, they also are friends of Truth, creators of Light. It is so that the Rishi, Gotama Rahugana, prays to them, " O ye who have the flashing strength of the Truth, manifest that by your might; pierce with your lightning the Rakshasi. Conceal the concealing darkness, repel every devourer, create the Light for which we long." And in another hymn, Agastya says to them, " They carry with them the sweetness (of the Ananda) as their eternal offspring and play out their play, brilliant in the activities of knowledge." The Maruts, therefore, are energies of the mentality, energies which make for knowledge. Theirs is not the settled truth, the diffused light, but the movement, the search, the lightning-flash, and, when Truth is found, the many-sided play of its separate illuminations.
We have seen that Agastya in his colloquy with Indra speaks more than once of the Maruts. They are Indra’s brothers, and therefore the god should not strike at Agastya in his struggle towards perfection. They are his instruments for that
perfection. and as such Indra should use them. And in the closing formula of submission and reconciliation, he prays to the god to parley again with the Maruts and to agree with them so that the sacrifice may proceed in the order and movement of the divine Truth towards which it is directed. The crisis, then, that left so powerful an impression on the mind of the seer, was in ‘the nature of a violent struggle in which the higher divine Power confronted Agastya and the Maruts and opposed their impetuous advance. There has been wrath and strife between the divine Intelligence that-governs the world and the vehement aspiring powers of Agastya’s mind. Both would have the human being reach his goal; but not as the inferior divine powers choose must that march be directed,—rather as it has been firmly willed and settled above by the secret Intelligence that always possesses for the manifested intelligence that still seeks.
Page-32 Therefore the mind of the human being has been turned into a battle-field for greater Powers and is still quivering with the awe and alarm of that experience. The submission to Indra has been made; Agastya now appeals to the Maruts to accept the terms of the reconciliation, so that the full harmony of his inner being may be restored. He approaches them with the submission he has rendered to the greater god and extends it to their brilliant legions. The" perfection of the mental state and its powers which he desires, their clearness, rectitude, truth-observing energy, is not possible without the swift coursing of the Thought-Forces in their movement towards the higher knowledge. But that movement, mistakenly directed, not rightly illumined, has been checked by the formidable opposition of Indra and has departed for a time out of Agastya’s mentality. Thus repelled, the Maruts have left him for other sacrificer ; elsewhere shine their resplendent chariots, in other fields thunder the hooves of their wind-footed steeds. The Seer prays to them to put aside their wrath, to take pleasure once more in the pursuit of knowledge and in its activities; not passing him by any more, let them unyoke their steeds, descend and take their place on the seat of the sacrifice, assume their share of the offerings.
For he would confirm again in himself these splendid energies, and it is a hymn of affirmation that he offers them, the stoma of the Vedic sages. In the system of the Mystics, which has partially survived in the schools of Indian Yoga, the Word is a power, the Word creates. For all creation is expression, everything exists already in the secret abode of the Infinite, guha hi tarn, and has only to be brought out here in apparent form by the active consciousness. Certain schools of Vedic thought even suppose the worlds to have been created by the goddess Word and sound as first etheric vibration to have preceded formation. In the Veda itself there are passages which treat the poetic measures of the sacred mantras, —anustubh, tristubh, jagati, gayatri,—as symbolic of the rhythmsin which the universal movement of things is cast.
Page-33 By expression then we create and men are even said to create the gods in themselves by the mantra. Again, that which we have created in our consciousness by the Word, we can fix there by the Word to become part of ourselves and effective not only in our inner life but upon the outer physical world. By expression we form, by affirmation we establish. As a power of expression the word is termed gih or vachas; as a power of affirmation, stoma. In either aspect it is named manma or mantra, expression of thought in mind, and brahman, expression of the heart or the soul,—for this seems to have been the earlier sense of the word brahmin)- afterwards applied to the Supreme Soul or universal Being. The process of formation of the mantra is described in the second verse along with the conditions of its effec-tivity. Agastya presents the stoma, hymn at once of affirmation and of submission, to the Maruts. Fashioned by the heart, it receives its just place in the mentality through confirmation by the mind. The mantra, though it expresses thought in mind, is not in its essential part a creation of the intellect. To be the sacred and effective word, it must have come as an inspiration from the supra-mental plane, termed in Veda, Ritam, the Truth, and have been received into the superficial consciousness either through the heart or by the luminous intelligence, manisha. The heart in Vedic psychology is not restricted to the seat of the emotions; it includes all that large tract of. spontaneous mentality, nearest to the sub-conscient in us, out of which rise the sensations, emotions, instincts, impulses and all those intuitions and inspirations that travel through these agencies before they arrive at form in the intelligence. This is the " heart " of Veda and Vedanta, hridaya, hrid, or brahman. There in the present state-of mankind the Purusha is-supposed to be seated centrally. Nearer to the vastness of the subconscient, it is
1—Also found in the form brih (Brihaspati, Brahmanaspati); and there seem to have been older forms, brihan and braktui. It is fiora brahan (gen
brahuas) that, in all probability, we have the Greek phren, phreno signifying mind. Page-34 there that, in ordinary mankind,—man not yet exalted to a higher plane where the contact with the Infinite is luminous, intimate and direct,—the inspirations of the Universal Soul can most easily enter in and most swiftly take possession of the individual soul. It is therefore by the power of the heart that the mantra takes form. But it has to be received and held in the thought of the intelligence as well as in the perceptions of the heart; for not till the intelligence has accepted and even brooded upon it, can that truth of thought which the truth of the Word expresses be firmly possessed or normally effective. Fashioned by the heart, it is confirmed by the mind. But another approval is also needed. The individual mind has accepted; the effective powers of the Cosmos must also accept. The words of the hymn retained by the mind form a basis for the new mental posture from which the future thought-energies have to proceed. The Maruts must approach them and take their stand upon them, the mind of these universal Powers approve and unite itself with the formations in the mind of the individual. So only can our inner or our outer action have its supreme effectivity. Nor have the Maruts any reason to refuse their assent or to persist in the prolongation of discord. Divine powers who themselves obey a higher law than the personal impulse, it should be their function, as it is their essential nature, to assist the moital in his surrender to the Immortal and increase obedience to the Truth, the Vast towards which his human faculties aspire. Indra, affirmed and accepted, is no longer in his contict with the mortal a cause of suffering; the divine touch is now utterly creative of peace and felicity. The Maruts too, affirmed and accepted, must put aside their violence. Assuming their gentler forms, benignant in their action, not leading the soul through strife and disturbance, they too must become purely beneficent as well as puissant agencies.
This complete harmony established, Agastya’s Yoga will proceed triumphantly on the new and straight path
Page-35 prescribed to it. It is always the elevation to a higher plane that is the end,—higher than the ordinary life of divided and egoistic sensation, emotion, thought and action. And it is to be pursued always with the same puissant will towards victory over all that resists and hampers. But it must-be an integral exaltation. All the joys that the human being seeks with his desire, all the active energies of his waking consciousness,—his days, as it is expressed in the brief symbolic language of the Veda,—must be uplifted to that higher .plane. By Vanani are meant the receptive sensations seeking in all objectivities the Ananda whose quest is their reason for existence. These, too, are not excluded. Nothing has to be rejected, all has to be raised to the pure levels of the divine consciousness. Formerly Agastya had prepared the sacrifice for the Maruts under other conditions. He had put their full potentiality of force into all in him that he sought to place in the hands of the Thought-Powers ; but because of the defect in his sacrifice he had been met midway by the Mighty One as by an enemy and only after fear and strong suffering had his eyes been opened and his soul surrendered Still vibrating with the emotions of that experience, he has been compelled to renounce the activities which he had so puissant prepared. Now he offers the sacrifice again to the Maruts, but couples with that brilliant Name the more puissant godhead of Indra. Let the Maruts then bear no wrath for the interrupted sacrifice but accept this new’ and more justly guided action.
Agastya turns, in the two closing verses, from the Maruts to Indra. The Maruts represent the progressive illumination of human mentality, until from the first obscure movements of mind which only just emerge out of the darkness of the subconscient, they are transformed into an image of the luminous consciousness of which Indra is the Purusha, the representative Being. Obscure, they become conscient ; twilit, half-lit or turned into misleading reflections, they surmount these deficiencies and put on the divine brilliance. This great evolution is effect-
Page-36 ed in Time gradually, in the mornings of the human spirit, by the unbroken succession of the Dawns. For Dawn in the Veda is the goddess symbolic of new openings of divine illumination on man’s physical consciousness. She alternates with her sister Night ; but that darkness itself is a mother of light and alwa3’3 Dawn comes to reveal what the black-browed Mother has prepared. Here, however, the seer seems to speak of continuous dawns, not bookend by these intervals of apparent rest and obscurity. By the brilliant force of that continuity of successive illuminations the mentality of man ascends swiftly into fullest light. But always the force which has governed and made possible the transformation, is the puissance of Indra. It is that supreme Intelligence which through the Dawns, through the Maruts, has been pouring itself into the human being. Indra is the Bull of the radiant herd, the Master of the thought-energies, the Lord of the luminous dawns. Now also let Indra use the Maruts as his instruments for the illumination. By them let him establish the supra-mental knowledge of the seer. By their energy his energy will be supported in the human nature and he will give that nature his divine firmness, his divine force , so that it may not stumble under the shock or fail to contain the vaster play of puissant activities too great for our ordinary capacity.
The Maruts, thus reinforced in strength, will always need the guidance and protection of the superior Power. They are the Purushas of the separate thought-energies, Indra the one Purusha of all thought-energy. In him they find their fullness and their harmony. Let there then be no longer strife and disagreement between this whole and these parts. The Maruts, accepting Indra, will receive from him the right perception of the things that have to be known. They will not be misled by the brilliance of a partial light or carried too far by the absorption of a limited energy. They will be able to sustain the action of Indra as he puts forth his force against all that may yet stand between the soul and its consummation.
Page-37 So in the harmony of these divine Powers and their aspirations may humanity find that impulsion which shall be strong enough to break through the myriad oppositions of this world and, in the individual with his composite personality or in the race, pass rapidly on towards the goal so constantly glimpsed but so distant even to him who seems to himself almost to have attained. Page-38 lsha Upanishad II The Upanishads, being vehicles of illumination and not of instruction, composed for seekers who had already a general familiarity with the ideas of the Vedic and Vedantic sears and even some personal experience of the truths on which they were founded, dispense in their style with expressed transitions of thought and the development of implied or subordinate notions. Every verse in the lsha Upanishad reposes on a number of ideas implicit in the text but nowhere set forth explicitly; the reasoning also that supports its conclusions is suggested by the words, not expressly conveyed to the intelligence. The reader, or rather the hearer, was supposed to proceed from light to light, confirming his intuitions and verifying by his experience, not submitting the ideas to the judgment of the logical reason. To the modern mind this method is invalid and inapplicable; it is necessary to present the ideas of the Upanishad in their completeness, underline the suggestions, supply the necessary transitions and bring out the suppressed but always implicit reasoning. PLAN OF THE UPANISHAD
The central idea of the Upanishad, which is a reconciliation and harmony of fundamental opposites, is worked out symmetrically in four successive movements of thought.
Page-39 FIRST MOVEMENT In the first, a basis is laid down by |the idea of the one and stable Spirit inhabiting and governing a universe of movement and of the forms of movement. (verse 1, line 1). On this conception the rule of a divine life for man is founded,—enjoyment of all by renunciation of all through the exclusion of desire. (Verse 1, lint 2). There is then declared the justification of works and of the physical life on the basis of an inalienable freedom of the soul, one with the Lord, amidst all the activity of the multiple movement. {Verse 2). Finally, the result of an ignorant interference with the right manifestation of the One in the multiplicity, is declared to be an involution in states of blind obscurity after death. (Verse 3). SECOND MOVEMENT In the second movement the ideas of the first verse are resumed and amplified. The one stable Lord and the multiple movement are identified as one Brahman of whom, however, the unity and stability are the higher truth and who contains all as well as inhabits all. (Verses 4, 5). The basis and fulfilment of the rule of life are found in the experience of unity by which man identifies himself with the cosmic and transcendental Self and, by the Self, in entire fre3dom from grief and illusion, with all its becomings. (Verses 6, 7). THIRD MOVEMENT In the third movement there is a return to the justification of life and works and an indication of their divine fulfilment.
The degrees of the Lord’s self-manifestation in the universe of motion and in the becomings of the one Being are set forth and the inner law of all existences declared to be by His conception and determination. (Verse 8).
Page-40 Vidya and Avidya, Becoming and Non-becoming are reconciled by their mutual utility to the progressive self-realisation which proceeds from the state of mortality to the state of Immortality. (Verses 9 to 14). FOURTH MOVEMENT The fourth movement returns to the idea of the worlds and under the figures of Surya and Agni the relations of the Supreme Truth and Immortality (Verses 15, 16), the activities of this life (Verse, 17), and the state after death (Verse 18) are symbolically indicated. FIRST MOVEMENT VERSES 1 — 3* THE BASIS OF COSMIC EXISTENCE God and the world, Spirit and formative Nature are confronted and their relations fixed. COSMOS All world is a movement of the Spirit in Itself and is mutable and transient in all its formations and appearances ; its only eternity is an eternity of recurrence, its only stability a semblance caused by certain apparent fixities of relation and grouping. Every separate object in the universe is, in truth, itself the whole universe presenting a certain front or outward appearance of its movement. The microcosm is one with the macrocosm. Yet in their "relation of principle of movement and result of movement they are continent and contained, world in world, movement in movement. The individual therefore partakes of the nature of the universal, refers
* -1. All this is for habitation by the Lord, whatsoever is individual universe of movement in the universal motion. By that renounced thou shouldst enjoy; lust not after any man’s possession. 2. Doing verily works in this world one should wish to live a hundred years. Thus it is in thee and not otherwise than this. Action cleaves not to a man.
3. Sunless are those worlds and enveloped in blind gloom whereto all they in their passing hence resort who are slayers of their souls.
Page-41 back to it for its source of activity, is, as we say, subject to its laws and part of cosmic Nature. SPIRIT Spirit is lord of its movement, one, immutable, free, stable and eternal. The Movement with all its formed objects has been created in order to provide a habitation for the Spirit who, being One, yet dwells, multitudinously in the multiplicity jf His mansions. It is the same Lord who dwells in the sum and the part, in the Cosmos as a whole and in each being, force or object in the Cosmos. Since He is one and indivisible, the Spirit in all is one and their multiplicity is a play of His cosmic consciousness. Therefore each human being is in his essence one with all others, free, eternal, immutable, load of Nature. TRANSITIONAL THOUGHT AVIDYA The object of habitation is enjoyment and possession ; the object of the Spirit in Cosmos is, therefore, the possession and enjoyment of the universe. Yet, being thus in his essence one, divine and free, man se^ms to be limited, divided from others, subject to Nature an J even its creation and sport, enslaved to death, ignorance and sorrow. His object in manifestation, being possession and enjoyment of his world, he is unable to enjoy because of his limitation. This contrary result comes about by Avidya, the Ignorance of oneness: and the knot of the Ignorance is egoism. EGO
The cause of ego is that while by Its double power of Vida and Avidya the Spirit dwells at once in the consciousness of multiplicity and relativity and in the consciousness of unity and identity and is therefore not bound by the Ignorance, yet It can, in mind, identify Itself with the object in the movement, absorbingly, to the apparent exclusion of the Knowledge which remains behind,
Page-42 veiled, at the back of the mentality. The movement of Mind in Nature is thus able to conceive of the object as the reality and the Inhabitant as limited and determined by the appearances of the object. It conceives of the object, not as the universe in one of its frontal appearances, but as itself a separate existence standing out from the Cosmos and different in being from all the rest of it. It conceives similarly of the Inhabitant. This is the illusion of. ignorance which falsifies all realities. The illusion is called Ahankara, the separative ego-sense which makes each being conceive of itself as an independent personality. The result of the separation is the inability to enter into harmony and oneness with the universe and a consequent inability to possess and enjoy it. But the desire to possess an 1 enjoy is the master-impulse of the Ego which knows itself obscurely to be the Lord, although owing to the limitations of its relativity, it is unable to realise its true existence. The result is discord with others and oneself, mental and physical suffering, the sense of weakness and inability, the sense of obscuration, the straining of energy in passion and in desire towards self-fulfilment, the recoil of en3rgy exhausted or disappointed towards death and disintegration. Desire is the badge of subjection with its attendant discord and suffering. That which is free, one and lord, does not desire, but inalienably contains, possesses and enjoys. TUB ROLE OF THE DIVINE LIFE Enjoyment of the universe and all it contains is the object of world-existence, but renunciation of all in desire is the condition of the free enjoyment of all. The renunciation demanded is not a moral constraint of self-denial or a physical rejection, but an entire liberation of the spirit from any craving after the forms of things.
The terms of this liberation are freedom from egoism and, consequently, freedom from personal desire. Practically,
Page-43 this renunciation implies that one should not regard anything in the universe as a necessary object of possession, nor as possessed by another and not by oneself, nor as an object of greed in the heart or the senses. This attitude is founded on the perception of unity. For it has already been said that all souls are one possessing Self, the Lord ; and although the Lord inhabits each object as if separately, yet all objects exist in that Self and not outside it. Therefore by transcending Ego and realising the one Self, we possess the whole universe in the one cosmic consciousness and do not need to possess physically. Having by oneness with the Lord, the possibility of an infinite free delight in all things, we do not need to desire. Being one with all beings, we possess in their enjoyment, in ours and in the cosmic Being’s delight of universal self-expression. It is only by this Ananda at once transcendent and universal that man can be free in his soul and yet live in the world with the full active Life of the Lord in His universe of movement. THIS JUSTIFICATION OF WORKS This freedom does not depend upon inaction, nor is this possession limited to the enjoyment of the inactive Soul that only witnesses without taking part in the movement. On the contrary the doing of works in this material world and a full acceptance of the term of physical life are part of its completeness.
For the active Brahman fulfils Itself in the world by works and man also is in the body for self-fulfilment by action. He cannot do otherwise, for even his inertia acts and produces effects in the cosmic movement. Being in this body or any kind of body, it is idle to think of refraining from action or escaping the physical life. The idea that this in itself can be a means af liberation, is part of the Ignorance which supposes the soul to be a separate entity in the Brahman.
Page-44 Action is shunned, because it is thought to be inconsistent with freedom. The man when he acts, is supposed to be necessarily entangled in the desire behind the action, in subjection to the formal energy that drives the action and in the results of the action. These things are true in appearance, not in reality. Desire is only a mode of the emotional mind which by ignorance seeks its delight in the object of desire and not in the Brahman who expresses Himself in the object. By destroying that ignorance one can do action without entanglement in desire. The Energy that drives is itself subject to the Lord, who expresses Himself in it with perfect freedom. By getting behind Nature to the Lord of Nature, merging the individual in the Cosmic Will, one can act with the divine freedom. Our actions are given up to the Lord and our personal responsibility ceases in His liberty. The chain of Karma only binds the movement of Nature and not the soul which, by knowing itself, ceases even to appear to be bound by the results of its works. Therefore the way of freedom is not inaction, but to cease from identifying oneself with the movement and recover instead our true identity in the Self of things who is their Lord. THE OTHER WORLDS By departing the physical life one does not disappear out of the Movement, but only passes into some other general state of consciousness than the material universe. These states are either obscure or illuminated, dark or sunless.
By persisting in gross forms of ignorance, by coercing perversely the soul in its self-fulfilment or by a wrong dissolution of its becoming in the Movement, one enters into states of blind darkness, not into the worlds of light and of liberated and blissful being.
Page-45 INTRODUCTION II THE THREE STEPS OF NATURE
We recognise then, in the past developments of Yoga, a specialising and separative tendency which, like all things in Nature, had its justifying and even imperative utility and we seek a synthesis of the specialised aims and methods which have, in consequence, come into being. But in order that we
may be wisely guided in our effort, we must know, first, the general principle
and purpose underlying this separative impulse and, next, the particular
utilities upon which the method of each school of Yoga is founded. For the
general principle we must interrogate the universal workings of Nature herself, recognising in her no merely specious and illusive activity of a distorting Maya, but the cosmic energy and working of God Himself in His universal being formulating and inspired by a vast, an infinite and yet a minutely selective Wisdom, Prajna prasrila purani
of the Gita, Wisdom that went forth from the Eternal since the beginning. For the particular utilities we must cast a penetrative eye on the different methods of Yoga and distinguish among the mass of their details the governing idea which they serve and the radical force which gives birth and energy to their processes of effectuation. Afterwards we may more easily find the one common principle and the one common power from which all derive their being and tendency, towards which all subconsciously move and in which, therefore, it is possible for all consciously to unite.
Page-46 The progressive self-manifestation of Nature in man, termed in modern language his evolution, must necessarily depend upon three successive elements, that which is already evolved, that which is persistently in the stage of conscious evolution and that which is to be evolved and may perhaps be already displayed, if not constantly, then occasionally or with some regularity of recurrence, in primary formations or in others more developed and, it may well b-e, even in some, however rare, that are near to the ‘highest possible realisation of our present humanity. For the march of Nature is not drilled to a regular and mechanical forward stepping. She reaches constantly beyond hers-If even at the cost of subsequent deplorable retreats. She has rushes ; she has splendid and mighty outbursts; she has immense realisations. She storms sometimes passionately forward hoping to take the kingdom of heaven by violence. And these self-exceeding are the revelation of that in her which is most divine or else most diabolical, but in either case the most puissant to bring her rapidly forward towards her goal.
That which Nature has evolved for us and has firmly founded is the bodily life. She has effected a certain combination and harmony of the two inferior but most fundamentally necessary elements of our action and progress upon earth,—Matter, which, however the too ethereally spiritual may despise it, is our foundation and the first condition of all our energies and realisations, and the Lite Energy which is our means of existence in a mat ‘rail body and the basis there even of our mental and spiritual activities. She has successfully achieved a
captain stability of her constant material movement which is at once sufficiently steady and durable and sufficiently pliable and mutable to provide a fit dwelling-place and instrument for the progressively manifesting god in humanity. This is what is meant by the fable in the Aitareya Upanishad which tells us that the gods rejected the animal forms successively offered to them by the Divine Self and only when man was produced, cried out, "This indeed is perfectly made," and consented to enter in.
Page-47 She has effected also a working compromise between the inertia of matter and the active Life that lives in and feeds on it, by which not only is vital existence sustained, but the fullest developments of mentality are rendered possible. This equilibrium constitutes the basic status of Nature in man and is termed in the language of Yoga his gross body composed of the material or food sheath and the nervous system or vital vehicle.1 If, then, this inferior equilibrium is the basis and first means of the higher movements which the universal Power contemplates and if it constitutes the vehicle in which the Divine here seeks to reveal Itself, if the Indian saying is true that the body is the instrument provided for the fulfilment of the right law of our nature, then any final recoil from the physical life must be a turning away from the completeness of the divine Wisdom and a renunciation of its aim in earthly manifestation. Such a refusal may be, owing to some secret law of their development, the right attitude for certain individuals, but never the aim intended for mankind. It can be, therefore, no integral. Yoga which ignores the body or makes its annulment or its rejection indispensable to a perfect, spirituality. Rather, the perfecting of the body also should be the last triumph of the Spirit and to make the bodily life also divine must be God’s final seal upon His work in the universe. The obstacle which the physical presents to the spiritual is no argument for the rejection of the physical; for in the unseen providence of things our greatest difficulties are our best opportunities. 1A supreme difficulty is Nature’s indication to us of a supreme conquest to be won and an ultimate problem to be solved ; it is not a warning of an inextricable snare to be shunned or of an enemy too strong for us from whom we must flee. Equally, the vital and nervous energies in us are there— far a. .great utility; they too demand the divine realisation of their possibilities in our ultimate fulfilment.
1 Annakosha and Pranakosha. Page-48 The great part assigned to this element in the universal scheme is powerfully emphasised by the catholic wisdom of the Upanishads. " As the spokes of a wheel in its nave, so in the Life-energy is all established, the triple knowledge and the Sacrifice and the power of the strong and the purity of the wise. Under the control of the Life-Energy is all this that is established in the triple heaven." 1 It is therefore no integral Yoga that kills these nervous energies, forces them into a nerveless quiescence or roots them out as the source of noxious activities. Their purification, not their destruction,—their transformation, control and utilisation is the aim in view with which they have been created and developed in us. If the bodily life is what Nature has firmly evolved for us as her base and first instrument, it is our mental life that she is evolving as her immediate next aim and superior instrument. This in her ordinary exaltations is the lofty preoccupying thought in her ; this, except in her periods of exhaustion and recoil into a reposeful and recuperating obscurity, is her constant pursuit wherever she can get free from the trammels of her first vital and physical realisations. For here in man we have a distinction which is of the utmost importance. He has in him not a single mentality, but a double and a triple, the mind material and nervous, the pure intellectual mind which liberates itself from the illusions of the body and the senses and a divine mind above intellect which in its turn liberates itself from the imperfect modes of the logically discriminative and imaginative reason. Mind in man is first enmeshed in the life of the body, where in the plant it is entirely involved and in animals always imprisoned. It accepts this life as not only the first but the whole condition of its activities and sieves its needs as if they were the entire aim of existence. But the bodily life in man is a base, not the aim, his first condition and not his last determinant. In the just idea of the ancients man is essentially the thinker, the
1 Prasna Upanishad II. 0 and 13.
Page-49 Manu, the mental being who leads the life and the body, 1 not the animal who is led by them. The true human existence, therefore, only begins when the intellectual mentality emerges out of the material and we begin more and more to live in the mind independent of the nervous and physical obsession and in the measure of that liberty are able to accept rightly and rightly to use the life of the body. For freedom and. not a skilful subjectidn is the true means of mastery. A free, not a compulsory acceptance of the conditions, the enlarged and sublimated conditions of our physical being, is the high human ideal. The mental life thus evolving in man is not, indeed, a common possession. In actual appearance it would seem as if it were only developed to the fullest in individuals and as if there were great numbers and even the majority in whom it is either a small and ill-organised part of their normal nature or not evolved at all or latent and not easily made active. Certainly, the mental life is not a finished evolution of Nature ; it is not yet firmly founded in the human animal. The sign is that the fine and full equilibrium of vitality and matter, the sane, robust, long-lived human body is ordinarily found only in races or classes of men who reject the effort of thought, its disturbances, its tensions, or think only with the material mind. Civilised man has yet to establish an equilibrium between the fully active mind and the body; he does not yet normally possess it. Indeed, the increasing effort towards a more intense mental life seems to create, frequently, an increasing disequilibrium of the human elements, so that it is possible for eminent scientists to describe genius as a form of insanity, a result of degeneration, a pathological morbidity of Nature. The phenomena which are used to justify this exaggeration, when taken not separately, but in connection with all other relevant data, point to a different truth. Genius is one attempt of the universal Energy to so quicken and intensify our intellectual powers that they shall be prepared for those
1 Manomayak pranashariranetb,. Mundaka Upanishad II 2. 40.
Page-50 mere puissant, direct and rapid faculties which constitute the play of the supra-intellectual or divine mind. It is not, then, a freak, an inexplicable phenomenon, but a perfectly natural next step in the right line of her evolution. She has harmonised the bodily life with the material mind, she is harmonising it with the play of the intellectual mentality ; for that, although it tends to a depression of the full animal and vital vigour, does not or need not produce active disturbances. And she is shooting yet beyond in the attempt to reach a still higher level. Nor are the disturbances created by her process as great as is often represented. Some of them are the crude beginnings of new manifestations; others are an easily corrected movement of disintegration, often fruitful of fresh activities and always a small price to pay for the far-reaching results that she has in view.
We may perhaps. if we consider all the circumstances, come to this conclusion that mental life, far from being a recent appearance in man, is the swift repetition in him of a previous achievement from which the Energy in the race had undergone one of her deplorable recoils. The savage is perhaps not so much the first forefather of civilised man as the degenerate descendant of a previous civilisation. For if the actuality of intellectual achievement is unevenly distributed, the capacity is spread everywhere. It has been seen that in individual cases even the racial type considered by us the lowest, the negro fresh from the perennial barbarism of Central Africa, is capable, without
admixture of blood, without waiting for future generations, of the intellectual culture, if not yet of the intellectual accomplishment of the dominant European. Even in the mass men seem to need, in
favorable circumstances, only a few generations to cover ground that ought apparently to be measured in the terms of millenniums. Either, then, man by his privilege as a mental being is exempt from the full burden of the tardy laws of evolution or else he already represents and with helpful conditions and in the right stimulating atmosphere can always display a high level of material
Page-51 capacity for the activities of the intellectual life. It is not mental incapacity, but the long rejection or seclusion from opportunity and withdrawal of the awakening impulse that creates the savage. Barbarism is an intermediate sleep, not an original darkness. Moreover the whole trend of modern thought and modern endeavour reveals itself to the observant eye as a large conscious effort of Nature in man to effect a general level of intellectual equipment, capacity and farther possibility by universalising the opportunities which modern civilisation affords for the mental life. Even the preoccupation of the European intellect, the protagonist of this tendency, with material Nature and the externalities of existence is a necessary part of their effort. It seeks to prepare a sufficient basis in man’s physical being and vital energies and in his material environment for his full mental possibilities. By the spread of education, by the advance of the backward races, by the elevation of depressed classes, by the multiplication of labour-saving appliances, by the movement toward ideal, social and economic conditions, by the labour of Science towards an improved health, longevity and sound physique in civilised humanity, the sense and drift of this vast movement translates itself in easily intelligible signs. The right or at least the ultimate means may not always be employed, but their aim is the right preliminary aim,—a sound individual and social body and the satisfaction of the legitimate needs and demands of the material mind, sufficient ease, leisure, equal opportunity, so that the whole of mankind and no longer only the favored race, class or individual may be free to develop the emotional and intellectual being to its full capacity. At present the material and economic aim may predominate, but always, behind, there works or there waits in reserve the higher and major impulse.
And when the preliminary conditions are satisfied, when the great endeavour has found its base, what will be the nature of that farther possibility which the activities of the intellectual life must serve ? If Mind is indeed
Page-52 Nature’s highest term, then the entire development of the rational and imaginative intellect and the harmonious satisfaction of the emotions and sensibilities must be to themselves sufficient. But if, on the contrary, man is more than a reasoning and emotional animal, if beyond that which is being evolved, there is something that has to be evolved, then it may well be that the fullness of the mental life, the suppleness, flexibility and wide capacity of the intellect, the ordered richness of emotion and sensibility may be only a passage towards the development of a higher life and of more powerful faculties which are yet to manifest and to take possession of the lower instrument, just as mind itself has so taken possession of the body that the physical being no longer lives only for its own satisfaction but provides the foundation and the materials for a superior activity. The assertion of a higher than the mental life is the whole foundation of Indian philosophy and its acquisition and organisation is the veritable object served by the methods of Yoga. Mind is not the last term of evolution, not an ultimate aim, but, like body, an instrument. It is even so termed in the language of Yoga, the inner instrument.1 And Indian tradition asserts that this which is to be manifested is not a new term in human experience, but has been developed before and has even governed humanity in certain periods of its development. In any case, in order to be known it must at one time have been partly developed. And if since then Nature has sunk back from her achievement, the reason must always be found in some unrealised harmony, some insufficiency of the intellectual and material basis to which she has now returned, some over-specialisation of the higher to the detriment of the lower existence. But what then constitutes this higher or highest existence to which our evolution is tending ? In order to answer the question we have to deal with a class of supreme experiences, a class of unusual conceptions which
1 Antahkarana.
Page-53 it is difficult to represent accurately in any other language than the ancient Sanscrit tongue in which alone they have been to some extent systematised. The only approximate terms in the English language have other associations and their use may lead to many and even serious inaccuracies. The terminology of Yoga recognises besides the status of our physical and vital being, termed the gross body and doubly composed of the food-sheath and the vital vehicle, besides the status of our mental being, termed the subtle body and singly composed of the mind sheath or mental vehicle,1 a third, supreme and divine status of supra-mental being, termed the causal body and composed of a fourth and a fifth vehicle 2 which are described as those of knowledge and bliss. But this knowledge is not a systematised result of mental questionings and reasoning, not a temporary arrangement of conclusions and opinions in the terms of the highest probability, but rather a pure self-existent and self-luminous Truth. And this bliss is not a supreme pleasure of the heart and sensations with the experience of pain and sorrow as its background, but a delight also self-existent and independent of objects and particular experiences, a self-delight which is the very nature, the very stuff, as it were, of a transcendent and infinite existence. Do such psychological conceptions correspond to anything real and possible ? All Yoga asserts them as its ultimate experience and supreme aim. They form the governing principles of our highest possible state of consciousness, our widest possible range of existence. There is, we say, a harmony of supreme faculties, corresponding roughly to the psychological faculties of revelation, inspiration and intuition, yet acting not in the intuitive reason or the divine mind, but on a still higher plane, which see Truth directly face to face, or rather live in the truth of things both universal and transcendent and are
1 Manah-hosha.
2 Vijnanakosha and Anandahosha
Page-54 its formulation and luminous activity. And these faculties are the light of a conscious existence superseding the egoistic and itself both cosmic and transcendent, the nature of which is Bliss. These are obviously divine and, as man is at present apparently constituted, superhuman states of consciousness and activity. A trinity of transcendent existence, self-awareness and self-delight1 is, indeed, the metaphysical description of the supreme Atman, the self-formulation, to our awakened knowledge, of the Unknowable whether conceived as a pure Impersonality or as a cosmic Personality manifesting the universe. But in Yoga they are regarded also in their psychological aspects as states of subjective existence to which our waking consciousness is now alien, but which dwell in us in a superconscious plane and to which, therefore, we may always ascend. For, as is indicated by the name, causal body (karana as opposed to the two others which arc instruments (karana), this crowning manifestation is also the source and effective power of all that in the actual evolution has preceded it. Our mental activities are, indeed, a derivation, selection and, so long as they are divided from the truth that is secretly their source, a deformation of the divine knowledge. Our sensations and emotions have the same relation to the Bliss, our nervous forces and actions to the aspect of Will or Force assumed by the divine consciousness, our physical being to the pure essence of that Bliss and Consciousness. The evolution which we observe and of which we are the terrestrial summit may be considered, in a sense, as an inverse manifestation, by which these Powers in their unity and their diversity use, develop and perfect the imperfect substance and activities of Matter, of Life and of Mind so that they may express in mutable relativity an increasing harmony of the divine and eternal states from which they are born. If this be the truth of the universe, then the goal of evolution is also its cause, it is
1 Sachchidananda Page-55 that which is immanent in its elements and out of them is liberated. But the liberation is surely imperfect if it is only an escape and there is no return upon the containing substance and activities to exalt and transform them. The immanence itself would have no credible reason for being if it did not end in such a transfiguration. But if human mind can become capable of the glories of the divine Light, human emotion and sensibility can be transformed into the mould and assume the measure and movement of the supreme Bliss, human action not only represent but feel itself to be the motion of a divine and non-egoistic Force and the physical substance of our being sufficiently partake of the purity of the supernal essence, sufficiently unify plasticity and durable constancy to support and prolong these highest experiences and agencies, then all the long labour of Nature will end in a crowning justification and her evolution; reveal their profound significance.
So dazzling is even a glimpse of this supreme existence and so absorbing -its attraction that, once seen, we feel readily justified in neglecting all else for its pursuit. Even, by an opposite exaggeration to that which sees all things in Mind and the mental life as an exclusive ideal. Mind comes to be regarded as an
unworthy deformation and a supreme obstacle, the source of an illusory universe, a negation of the Truth and itself to be denied and all its works and results annulled if we desire the final liberation. But this is a half-truth which errs by regarding only the actual limitations of Mind and ignores its divine intention. The ultimate knowledge is that which perceives and
accepts God in the universe as well as beyond the universe and the integral Yoga is that which, having found the Transcendent, can return upon the universe and possess it, retaining the power freely to descend as well as ascend the great stair of existence. For if the eternal Wisdom exists at all, the faculty of Mind also must have some high use and destiny. That use must depend on its place in the ascent and in the return and that destiny must be a fulfilment and transfiguration, not a rooting out or an annulling.
Page-56
We perceive then, these three steps in Nature, a bodily life which is the basis of our existence here in the material world, a mental life into which we emerge and by which we raise the bodily to higher uses and enlarge it into a greater completeness, and a divine existence which is at once the goal of the other two and returns upon them to liberate them into their highest possibilities. Regarding none of them as either beyond our reach or below our nature and the destruction of none of them as essential to the ultimate attainment, we accept this liberation and fulfilment as part at least and a large and important part of the aim of Yoga.
Page-57 BOOK I THE COD OF ALL; THE COD WHO IS IN ALL THE SOLE ESSENCE *
1 The Universe is a unity. 2 All is in the One in power and the One is in all in 3 act.—The Essence of all things is one and identical. 4 I looked on high and I beheld in all the spaces That which is One; below, in all the foam of the waters that which is One ; I looked into the heart, it was a sea, a space for worlds peopled with thousands of dreams; I saw in all the dreams That which is One. 5 All that exists is but- the transformation of one and the same Matter and is therefore one and the 6 same thing.—All souls are merely determinations of the universal Soul. Bodies taken separately are only varied and transient forms of material sub- 7 stance.—The infinite variety of particular objects constitutes one sole and identical Being. To know that unity is the aim of all philosophy and of all know- 8 ledge of Nature.—True knowledge leads to unity, 9 ignorance to diversity.—The rays of the divine sun, the infinite Orient, shine equally on all that exists and the illumination of Unity repeats itself everywhere. 10 The Universe is a unity.
* * *
11 In the world of the Unity heaven and earth are 12 one.—We share one Intelligence with heaven and
Page-58 13 the stars.—When we speak of the efficient cause of the universe, we mean, obviously the active Being,— the Being active and effective everywhere; we mean, then, that universal Intelligence which appears to be the principal faculty of the World-Soul and, as it were,
14 the general form of the universe.—There is in the 15 universe one power of infinite Thought.—The Idea 16 is cause and end of things.—As one sun illumines all this world, so the conscious Idea illumines all the 17 physical field.—Matter and Spirit are one since the 13 first beginning.—In the true nature of Matter is the fundamental law of the Spirit. In the true nature 19 of Spirit is the fundamental law of Matter.—He who 20 abases Matter, abases himself and all creation.—The physical world is only a reflection of the spiritual.— 21 Wherever you find movement, there you find life and 22 a soul.—Life pervades and animates everything; it gives its movement to Nature and subjects her to 23—24; itself.—All is living.—The universe is a living 25 thing and all lives in it.—The whole universe is life, 26 force and action.—Each separate movement is produced by the same energy that moves the sum of things. 27 Will is the soul of the universe.
• 1) Philolaus. – 2) Abraham-ibn-Ezra.— Aswaghosha.—4) Jelal- uddin Rumi__6) Diogenes of Apollonia.—6) Kapila.— 7) Giordano Bruno.—8 ) Ramakrishna.—9) Baha-ullah.—10) Anaxagoras.—11) Baha-ultah.— 12 ) Macrobtus.—13 ) Giordano Bruno. —14 ) Leibnitz.—15 ) Giordano Bruno.—10) Bhagavad-Gita.— 17 ) Aswaghosha—18) id.— 19) Ersted. – 20) Antoine the Healer.—21 ) Thales.—22 ) GiordanoBruno.—23) Hermes.—24) Giordano Bruno__26) id. — 28) Hermes.—27 ) Schopenhauer. Page-59 IN THE BEGINNING** 1 Whence come these beings ? What is this creation ? 2 From the immobile stone to the supreme principle creation consists in the differentiation of existences. 3 Then Non-being was not, nor Being. What was that ocean profound and impenetrable ? Then death was not, nor immortality…That was one and lived without the breath by Its own permanence. There was nothing else beyond It. Darkness concealed in darkness in the beginning was all this ocean…When chaos atomic coveied it, then That which is One was born by the vastness of Its energy. Desire in the beginning became active,—desire, the first seed… Who knoweth of this? who here can declare it, whence this creation was born, whence was this loosing forth of things? The gods exist below by the creation ; who then can know whence it was born ? Whence this creation came into being, whether He established it or did not establish it, He who regards it from above in the supreme ether, He knows,—or perhaps He knows it not. 4 That which was before all individual existence, and which was without action although capable of action, is that which preceded heaven and earth. 5 Essence without form divided itself; then a movement took place and life was produced. 6 In the beginning all this was Non-being. From it Being appeared. Itself created itself. 7 Seek out that from which, all existences are born, by which being born they live and to which they return…From Delight all these existences were born, by Delight they live, towards Delight they return.
• • 1 ) Rig Veda.— 2) Sankhya Pravachana.—3 ) Rig Veda.- 4) Hoei Nan-Tse. – 5 ) Tchuang-Tse 6 ) Taittiria Upanishad.—7 ) id. Page-60 WHAT IS THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE NAME, " ARYA " ? The question has been put from more than one point of view. To most European readers the name figuring on our cover is a hieroglyph which attracts or alarms according to the temperament. Indians know the word, but it has lost for them the significance which it bore to their forefathers. Western Philology has converted it into a racial term, an unknown ethnological quantity on which different speculations fix different values. Now, even among the philologists, some arc beginning to recognise that the word in its original use expressed not a difference of race, but a difference of culture. For in the Veda the Aryan peoples are those who had accepted a particular type of self-culture, of inward and outward practice, of ideality, of aspiration. The Aryan gods were the supraphysical powers who assisted the mortal in his struggle towards the nature of the godhead. All the highest aspirations of the early human race, its noblest religious temper, its most idealistic velleities of thought are summed up in this single vocable.
In later times, the word Arya expressed a particular ethical and social ideal, an ideal of well-governed life, candour, courtesy, nobility, straight dealing, courage, gentleness, purity, humanity, compassion, protection of the weak, liberality, observance of social duty, eagerness for .knowledge, respect for the wise and learned, the. social accomplishments. It was the combined ideal of the Brahmana and the Kshatriya. Everything that departed from this ideal, everything that tended towards the ignoble, mean, obscure, rude, cruel or false, was termed un-Aryan. There is no word in human speech that has a nobler history.
Page-61 In the early days of comparative Philology, when the scholars sought in the history of words for the prehistoric history of peoples, it was supposed that the word Arya came from the root Ar, to plough and that the Vedic Aryans were so called when they separated from their kin in the north-west who despised the pursuits of agriculture and remained shepherds and hunters. This ingenious speculation has little or nothing to support it. But in a sense we may accept the derivation. Whoever cultivates the field that the Supreme Spirit has made for him, his earth of plenty within and without, does not leave it If Arya were a purely racial term, a more probable derivation would be Ay, meaning strength or valour, from ar, to fight, whence we have the name of the Greek war-god Ares, areios, brave or warlike, perhaps even arete, virtue, signifying, like the Latin virtus, first, physical strength and courage and then moral force and elevation. This sense of the word also we may accept. " We fight to win sublime Wisdom, therefore men call us warriors. " For Wisdom implies the choice as well as the knowledge of that which is best, noblest, most luminous, most divine. Certainly, it means also the knowledge of all things and charity and reverence for all things, even the most apparently mean, ugly or dark, for the sake of the universal Deity who chooses to dwell equally in all. But, also, the law of right action is a choice, the preference of that which express ;s the godhead to that which conceals it. And the choice entails a battle, a struggle. It is Whoever makes that choice, whoever seeks to climb from level to level up the hill of the divine, fearing nothing, deterred by no retardation or defeat, shrinking from no vastness because it is too vast for his intelligence, no height because it is too high for his spirit, no greatness because it is too great for his force and courage, he is the Aryan, the divine fighter and victor, the noble man, aristos, best, the sreshtha of the Gita. Page-62 Intrinsically, in its most fundamental sense, Arya means an effort, uprising and overcoming. The Aryan is he who strives and overcomes all outside him and within him that stands opposed to the human advance. Self-conquest is the first law of his nature. He overcomes earth and the body and does not consent like ordinary men to their dullness, inertia, dead routine and tamasic limitations. He overcomes life and its energies and refuses to be dominated by their hungers and cravings or enslaved by their rajasic passions. He overcomes the mind and its habits, he does net live in a shell of ignorance, inherited prejudices, customary ideas, pleasant opinions, but knows how to seek and choose, to he large and flexible in intelligence, even as he is firm and strong in his will. For in everything he seeks truth, in everything right, in everything height and freedom. Self-perfection is the aim of his self-conquest. Therefore what he conquers, he does not destroy, but ennobles and fulfils. He knows that the body, life and mind are given him in order to attain to something higher than they; therefore they must be transcended and overcome, their limitations denied, the absorption of their gratifications rejected. But he knows also that the Highest is something which is no nullity in the world, but increasingly expresses itself here,—a divine Will, Consciousness, Love, Beatitude which pours itself out, when found, through the terms of the lower life on the finder and on all in his environment that is capable of receiving it. Of that he is the servant, lover and seeker. When it is attained, he pours it forth in work, love, joy and knowledge upon mankind. For always the Aryan is a worker and warrior. He spares himself no labour of mind or body whether to seek the Highest or to serve it. He avoids no difficulty, he accepts no cessation from fatigue. Always he fights for the coming of that kingdom within himself and in the world.
The Aryan perfected is the Arhat. There is a transcendent Consciousness which surpasses the universe and of which all these worlds are only a side-issue and a byplay. To that consciousness he aspires and attains. There
Page-63 is a Consciousness which being transcendent, is yet the universe and all that the universe contains. Into that consciousness he enlarges his limited ego ; he becomes one with all beings and all inanimate objects in a single self-awareness, love, delight, all-embracing energy. There is a consciousness which being both transcendental and universal, yet accepts the apparent limitations of individuality for work, for various standpoint of knowledge, for the pixy of the Lord with His creations ; for the ego is there that it may finally convert itself into a free centre of the divine work and the divine play. That consciousness too he has sufficient love, joy and knowledge to accept; he is puissant enough to effect that conversion. To embrace individuality after transcending it, is the last and divine sacrifice. The perfect Arhat is he who is able to live simultaneously in all these three apparent states of existence, elevate the lower into the higher, receive the higher into the lower, so that he may represent perfectly in the symbols of the world that with which he is identified in all parts of his being,-—the triple and triune Brahman. THE WAR
The "Arya" a Review of pure Philosophy, has no direct concern with
political passions and interests and their results. But neither can it ignore
the enormous convulsion which is at present in progress, nor at such a time can
it affect to deal only with the pettier happenings of the intellectual world as
if men were not dying in thousands daily, the existence of great empires
threatened and the fate of the world hanging in the balance. The War has its
aspects, of supreme importance to a synthetic Philosophy, with which we would
have the right to deal. But now is not the hour, now in this moment of supreme
tension and wide-spread agony. Therefore, for the time, we suppress this heading
in our Review and shall replace it by brief notes on subjects of philosophical
interest, whether general or of the day. Meanwhile, with the rest of the world,
we await in silence the predestined result.
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