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All this is the Brahman ; this Self is the Brahman and the Self is fourfold.

Mandukya Upanishad

Beyond relation, featureless, unthinkable, in which all is still.

I did

    And still there is a beyond.

    For on the other side of the cosmic consciousness there is, attainable to us, a consciousness yet more transcendent, —transcendent not only of the ego, but of the Cosmos itself,—against which the universe seems to stand out like a petty picture against an immeasurable background. That supports the universal activity,—or perhaps only tolerates it; It embraces Life with Its vastness,—or else rejects it from Its infinitude.

    If the materialist is justified from his point of view in insisting on Matter as reality, the relative world as the sole thing of which we can in some sort be sure and the Beyond as wholly unknowable, if not indeed nonexistent, a dream of the mind, an abstraction of Thought divorcing itself from reality, so also is the Sannyasin, enamoured of that Beyond, justified from his point of view in insisting on pure Spirit as the reality, the one thing free from change, birth, death, and the relative as a creation of the mind and the senses, a dream, an abstraction

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in the contrary sense of Mentality withdrawing from the pure and eternal Knowledge.

    What justification, of logic or of experience, can be asserted in support of the one extreme which cannot be met by an equally cogent logic and an equally valid experience at the other end ? The world of Matter is affirmed by the experience of the physical senses which, because they are themselves unable to perceive anything immaterial or not organised as gross Matter, would persuade us that the supra-sensible is the unreal. This vulgar or rustic error of our corporeal organs does not gain in validity by being promoted into the domain of philosophical reasoning. Obviously, their pretension is unfounded. Even in the world of Matter there are existences of which the physical senses are incapable of taking cognizance. Yet the denial of the supersensible as necessarily an illusion or a hallucination depends on this constant sensuous association of the real with the materially perceptible, which is itself a hallucination. Assuming throughout what it seeks to establish, it has the vice of the argument in a circle and can have no validity for an impartial reasoning.

    Not only are there physical realities which are supersensible, but, if evidence and experience are at all a test of truth, there are also senses which are supraphysical and can not only take cognizance of the realities of the material world without the aid of the corporeal sense-organs, but can bring us into contact with other realities, supraphysical and belonging to another world,—included, that is to say, in an organisation of conscious experiences that are dependent on some other principle than the gross Matter of which our suns and earths seem to be made.

    Constantly asserted by human experience and belief since the origins of thought, this truth, now that the necessity of an exclusive preoccupation with the secrets of

1. Sukshma indriyas, subtle organs, existing in the subtle body, (suishma deha ), and the mean, of subtle vision an 1 experience ( suhshma drishti ).

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the material world no longer exists, begins to be justified by new-born forms of scientific research. The increasing evidences, of which only the most obvious and outward are established under the name of telepathy with its cognate phenomena, cannot long be resisted except by minds shut up in the brilliant shell of the past, by intellects limited in spite of their acuteness through the limitation of their field of experience and enquiry, or by those who confuse enlightenment and reason with the faithful repetition of the formulas left to us from a bygone century and the jealous conservation of dead or dying intellectual dogmas.

    It is true that the glimpse of supra-physical realities acquired by methodical research has been imperfect and is yet ill-affirmed; for the methods use are still crude and defective. But these rediscovered subtle senses have at least been found to be true witnesses to physical facts beyond the range of the corporeal organs. There is no justification, then, for scouting then as false witnesses when they testify to supra-physical facts beyond the domain of the material organisation of consciousness. Like all evidence, like the evidence of the physical senses themselves, their testimony has to be controlled, scrutinised and arranged by the reason, rightly translated and rightly related, and their field, laws and processes determined. But the truth of great ranges of experience whose objects exist in a more subtle substance and are perceived by more subtle instruments than those of gross physical Mitch, claim in the end the same validity as the truth of the material universe. The worlds beyond exist: they have their universal rhythm, their grand lines and formations, their self-existent laws and mighty energies, their just and luminous means of knowledge. And here on our physical existence and in our physical body they exercise their influences; here also they organise their means of manifestation and commission their messengers and their witnesses.

    But the worlds are only frames for our experience, the senses only instruments of experience and conveniences.

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Consciousness is the great underlying fact, the universal witness for whom the world is a field, the senses instruments. To that witness the worlds and their objects appeal for their reality and for the one world or the many, for the physical equally with the supra-physical we have no other evidence that they exist. It has been argued that this is no relation peculiar to the constitution of humanity and its outlook upon an objective world, but the very nature of existence itself ; all phenomenal existence consists of an observing consciousness and an active objectivity, and the Action cannot proceed without the Witness because the universe exists only in or for the consciousness that observes and has no independent reality. It has been argued in reply that the material universe enjoys an eternal self-existence ; it was here before life and mind made their appearance ; it will survive after they have disappeared and no longer trouble with their transient strivings and limited thoughts the eternal and inconscient rhythm of the suns. The difference, so metaphysical in appearance, is yet of the utmost practical import, for it determines the whole outlook of man upon life, the goal that he shall assign for his efforts and the field in which he shall circumscribe his energies. For it raises the question of the reality of cosmic existence and, more important still, the question of the value of human life.

    If we push the materialist conclusion far enough, we arrive at an insignificance and unreality in the life of the individual and the race which leaves us, logically, the option between either a feverish effort of the individual to snatch what he may from a transient existence, to "live his life," as it is said, or a dispassionate and objectless service of the race and the individual, knowing well that the latter is a transient fiction of the nervous mentality and the former only a little more long-lived collective form of the same regular nervous spasm of Matter. We work or enjoy under the impulsion of a material energy which deceives us with the brief delusion of life or with the nobler delusion of an ethical aim and a mental consummation. Materialism like spiritual Monism arrives at a Maya

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that is and yet is not,—is, for it is present and compelling, is not, for it is phenomenal and transitory in its works. At the other end, if we stress too much the unreality of the objective world, we arrive by a different road at similar but still more trenchant conclusions,—the fictitious character of the individual ego, the unreality and purposelessness of human existence, the return into the Non. Being as the sole rational escape from the meaningless tangle of phenomenal life.

    And yet the question cannot be solved by logic arguing on the data of our ordinary physical existence ; for in those data there is always a hiatus of experience which renders all argument inconclusive. We have, normally, neither any definitive experience of a cosmic mind or supermind not bound up with the life of the individual body, nor, on the other hand, any firm limit of experience which would justify us in supposing that our subjective self really depends upon the physical frame and can neither survive it nor enlarge itself beyond the individual body. Only by an extension of the field of our consciousness or an unhoped-for increase in our instruments of knowledge can the ancient quarrel be decided.

    The extension of our consciousness, to be satisfying, must necessarily be an inner enlargement from the individual into the cosmic existence. For the Witness, if he exists, is not the individual embodied mind born in the world, but that cosmic Consciousness embracing the universe and appearing as an immanent Intelligence in all its works to which either world subsists eternally and really as Its own active existence or else from which it is born and into which it disappears by an act of knowledge or by an act of conscious power. Not organised mind, but that which, calm and eternal, broods equally in the living earth and the living human body and to which mind and senses are dispensable instruments, is the Witness of cosmic existence and its Lord.

    The possibility of a cosmic consciousness in humanity is coming slowly to be admitted in modern Psychology, like the possibility of more elastic instruments of know-

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ledge, although still classified, even when it; value and power are admitted, as a hallucination. In the psychology of the East it has always been recognised as a reality and the aim of our subjective progress. The essence of the passage over to this goal is the exceeding of the limits imposed on us by the ego-sense and at least a partaking, at most an identification with the self-knowledge which broods secret in all life and in all that seems to us inanimate.

    Entering into that Consciousness, we may continue to dwell, like It, upon universal existence. Then we become aware,— for all our terms of consciousness and even our sensational experience begin to change,—of Matter as one existence and of bodies as its formations in which the one existence separates itself physically in the single body from itself in all others and again by physical means establishes communication between these multitudinous points of its being. Mind we experience similarly, and Life also, as the same existence one in its multiplicity, separating and reuniting itself in each domain by means appropriate to that movement. And, if we choose, we can proceed farther and become aware of a super-mind whose universal operation is the key to all lesser activities. Nor do we become merely conscious of this cosmic existence, but likewise conscious in it, receiving it in sensation, but also entering into it in awareness. In it we live as we lived before in the ego-sense, active, more and more in contact, even unified more and more with other minds, other lives, other bodies than the organism we call ourselves, producing effects not only on our own moral and mental being and on the subjective being of others, but even on the physical world and its events by means nearer to the divine than those possible to our egoistic capacity.

    Real then to the man who has had contact with it or lives in it, is this cosmic consciousness, with a greater than the physical reality; real in itself, real in its effects and works. And as it is thus real to the world which is its own total expression, so is the world real to it; but not

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as an independent existence. For in that higher and less hampered experience we perceive that consciousness and being are not different from each other, but all being is a supreme consciousness, all consciousness is self-existence, eternal in itself, real in its works and neither a dream nor an evolution. The world is real precisely because it exists only in consciousness. It is the existence of material form in its own right apart from the self-illumined energy which assumes the form, that would be a contradiction of the truth of things, a phantasmagoria, a nightmare, an impossible falsehood.

    But this conscious Being which is the truth of the infinite supermind, is more than the universe and lives independently in Its own inexpressible infinity as well as in the cosmic harmonies. World lives by That; That does not live by the world. And as we can enter into the cosmic consciousness and be one with all cosmic existence, so we can enter into the world-transcending consciousness and become superior to all cosmic existence. And then arises the question which first occurred to us, whether this transcendence is necessarily also a rejection. What relation has this universe to the Beyond 

    For at the gates of the Transcendent stands that mere and perfect Spirit described in the Upanishads, luminous, pure, sustaining the world but inactive in it, without sinews of energy, without flaw of duality, without scar of division, unique, identical, free from all appearance of relation and of multiplicity,—the pure Self of the Adwaitins,¹ the inactive Brahman, the transcendent Silence. And the mind when it passes those gates suddenly, without intermediate transitions, receives a sense of the unreality of the world and the sole reality of the Silence which is one of the most powerful and convincing experiences of which the human mind is capable. Here, in the perception of this pure Self or of the Non-Being behind it, we have the starting-point for a second negation,—parallel at the other pole to the materialistic, but

1. The Vedantic Monists.

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more complete, more final, more perilous in its effects on the collectivities that hear its potent call to the wilderness,—the refusal of the ascetic.

    It is this revolt of Spirit against Matter that for two thousand years, since Buddhism disturbed the balance of the old Aryan world, has dominated increasingly the Indian mind. Not that the sense of the cosmic illusion is the whole of Indian thought; there are other philosophical statements, other religious aspirations. Nor has some attempt at an adjustment between the two terms been wanting even from the most extreme philosophies. But all have lived in the shadow of the great Refusal and the final end of life for all is the garb of the ascetic. The general conception of existence has been permeated with the Buddhistic theory of the chain of Karma and with the consequent antinomy of bondage and liberation, bondage by birth, liberation by cessation from birth. Therefore all voices are joined in one great consensus that not in this world of the dualities can there be our kingdom of heaven, but beyond, whether in the joys of the eternal Vrindavun 1 or the high beatitude of Brahma-loka 2, beyond all manifestation in some ineffable Nirvana 3 or where all separate experience is lost in the featureless unity of the indefinable Existence. And through many centuries a great army of shining witnesses, saints and teachers, names sacred to Indian memory and dominant in Indian imagination, have boine always the same witness and swelled always the same lofty and distant appeal,—renunciation the sole path of knowledge, acceptation of physical life the act of the ignorant, cessation from birth the right use of human birth, the call of the Spirit, the recoil from Matter.

    For an age out of sympathy with the ascetic spirit— and throughout all the rest of the world the hour of the

     1Goloka, the Vaishnava heaven of eternal Beauty and Bliss.

    2.The highest state of pure existence, consciousness and beatitude attainable by the soul without complete extinction in the Indefinable.

    3.Nirvana, extinction, not necessarily of all being, but of being as we know it; extinction of ego, desire and egoistic action and mentality.

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Anchorite has passed or is passing,—it is easy to attribute this great trend to the failing of vital energy in an ancient race tired out by its burden, its once vast share in the common advance, exhausted by its many-sided contribution to the sum of human effort and human knowledge. But we have seen that it corresponds to a truth of existence, a state of conscious realisation which stands at the very summit of our possibility. In practice also the ascetic spirit is an indispensable element in human perfection and even its separate affirmation cannot be avoided so long as the race has not at the other end liberated its intellect and its vital habits from subjection to an always insistent animalism.

    We seek indeed a larger and completer affirmation. We perceive that in the Indian ascetic ideal the great Vedantic formula "One without a second; has not been read sufficiently in the light of that other formula equally imperative, " All this is the Brahman." The passionate aspiration of man upward to the Divine has not been sufficiently related to the descending movement of the Divine leaning downward to embrace eternally Its manifestation. Its meaning in Matter has not been so well understood as Its truth in the Spirit. The Reality which the Sannyasin seeks has been grasped in its full height, but not, as by the ancient Vedantins, in its full extent and comprehensiveness. But in our completer affirmation we must not minimise the part of the pure spiritual impulse. As we have seen how greatly Materialism has served the ends of the Divine, so we must acknowledge the still greater service rendered by Asceticism to Life. We shall preserve the truths of material Science and its real utilities in the final harmony, even if many or even if all of its existing forms have to be broken or left aside. An even greater scruple of right preservation must guide us in our dealing with the legacy, however actually diminished or depreciated, of the Aryan past.

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The Wherefore

of the Worlds

CHAPTER II

THE UNCREATED.

    We must not suffer ourselves to be caught by the prestige of words or taken in the snare of abstractions.

    If the original unity is beyond our comprehension, not less so is the dual origin.

It is impossible to conceive the two complementary principles except as at once distinct and inseparable,— distinct, since they have to unite, and inseparable because they would be nothing without each other and all is by their union. Nothing could be, if they were not at the same time differentiated and indivisible beyond discrimination.

    Besides, if the first origin of things cannot be sought in the notion of pure unity, neither can it be found in the idea of two co-eternal and co-existent unities; for when unity baffles our thought, two unities can only double the incomprehension.

    Certainly, we may choose unity as the symbol, preeminently, of the Unknowable which is behind the origin of things. Indivisible, it is without relation to Time and Space ; incapable of multiplication, it is the sole number which can represent the Infinite.

    With the second term, 2, begin the mind’s operations; it is the first productive number, the number by which unity enters into the chain of temporal succession and into the pluralities of Space.

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    But how can we conceive the formation of this second term otherwise than by the repetition of unity ? And since this unity represents the infinity of the divine Existence, how is it possible to speak of its repetition ? An infinity must necessarily be incapable of self-addition, just as it is incapable of self-division.

    Need we add that it would be vain to seek in a complication of the same mystery, such as the notion of the Trinity, the cause of the world ?

    This cause cannot at all be found in that domain of Number which is essentially the domain of Time and Space. It is not in the terms of quantity that it should be conceived, but at most, perhaps, in the terms of quality.

    If we approach it with Number as our starting-point, the idea of Causality becomes unintelligible and, wherever we turn, the problem of the origin baffles solution.

    So, when we posit unity of the Essence and duality of the Principles, we are not speaking of them as an efficient cause, but as common conditions and qualities inherent in the very nature of things. They stand only as the most general categories to which our thought can reduce the infinite modes of being.

    When we speak of the One, we are only affirming the fundamental Monism of our thought and indicating the ultimate point from which the mind takes its first step into the universe. This One is the universe in its potentiality; it is the state of indivisibility of the All.

    When the mind, starting from this unity, takes its second step, it arrives at a point where the possibility of differentiation manifests itself by a sort of duplication of the Unique in its two complementary elements. From the realist standpoint this duplication takes the form of an opposition between Force and the resistance to Force,— inverse movements, contrary currents passing between two opposite signs of one and the same essence. From the idealist standpoint it can be regarded as a sort of objectification of the subjective by which universal being takes cognizance of itself.

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    By introducing the third term in Number the mind is able to conceive as possible an indefinite differentiation, the limitation of the two elements and their reciprocal objectivity,—the conditions of individual form and individual consciousness.

    So we can pass by successive steps from the unknowable to the comprehensible and from the indivisible to the visible.

*

* *

    But such metaphysical distinctions cannot lead us very far on the road to the unknown. They are a vain dream of discovery, the illusion of the dreamer recumbent on his bed while he thinks himself erect and on the march. They delude our ignorance and persuade it that it is about to lay its hand on the Reality, when in truth they have only placed one veil the more between it and us, a veil woven by words that are powerful to deceive.

    For what is it that is concealed behind these terms, Absolute, Infinite, Eternal, to which our thought has recourse in order to solve the riddle of the beginning of things?

    They are far from being the affirmations for which we take them; they are only negations which mark the most distant limits of our comprehension, the boundaries of our mental horizon. They are the halting-place of our search, not its point of arrival; they are the subterfuge by which we suppress the problem which we have failed to resolve. Far from elucidating the mystery, they render it yet more profound if we try to give to the words we use a positive significance. For if the notion of an Absolute, an Infinite, an Eternal beyond Time were not in itself negative, it would still be a negation when set against the relativities of Time and Space.

    But it is not in a negation that we shall discover the positive relation of cause, nor is it in the antinomy of opposites that we can find the secret of the Beginning.

    The idea of the relative excludes every antecedent which does not itself contain at least some virtual element

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of relativity. Between the Absolute and the relative there can be no point of origin, kinship or dependence. They affirm each other, no doubt, like all contraries, but they can exist only by a mutual exclusion.

    We can say that something there is beyond all conditioning by origin, causality or concomitance, something absolute, infinite and eternal for which there can be no relativity either of Time or of Space. It is this precisely which, because it is alien to all the categories of mind, constitutes for us the unknowable.

    We can say also that this Unknowable is indispensable to the very existence of all that is and that the relative only is because of the absolute, the finite because of the infinite, the ephemeral because of the eternal, without these unknowable realities being therefore the cause or the origin of the relative.

    That which is unknowable cannot have any knowable relation with that which is real to our thought. That which is absolute cannot be conceived as the cause of the relative. The relative has no origin but itself. When, therefore, we seek to derive the first principles of being from something more absolute, we give to this word, Absolute, no more than a negative significance. It marks for us the limit of thought, where the transcendencies of the relative can no longer be discerned and escape entirely from the grasp of the mind.

*

*  *

    That which is absolute, infinite, eternal, has never ceased to be eternal, infinite and absolute. Behind every relative reality, in it, yet at the same time outside its relativities, we find all the Absolute, all that is infinite, all that is eternal, all that is unknowable.

    There is then an inverse side of the world, a Reality without beginning or end, without change or limit, in relation to which everything other than it is illusory, even as it is itself, for all that is other than it, unthinkable.

    The problem of the origin, so far as it concerns this Reality, can have no meaning ; for in order to conceive it,

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our thought has to exclude the very data which constitute the problem. And, inversely, in the domain of concrete realities where all is a perpetual beginning, it is not merely once that the problem of the origin has to be posed, but as many times as there are objects in space and instants in Time.

    For outside the immobile Immutable duration itself, continuity,—which is an incessant recommencement,— poses the same riddle; outside the Uncreated all is continually being created without cessation, from moment to moment, and the last commencement is no less difficult to understand than this first. All the world’s moments are equally mysterious and if one could explain a single one of them, one would have explained all.

    Religion, then, errs in fearing the disappearance of the miracle which it places at the beginning of things ; for that wondrous miracle is incessantly being accomplished in a fashion the most simple and natural in the world. Because it is so simple and natural, we pay no attention to it, but every thought, every movement repeats the inexplicable prodigy.

    It is not then in the past that we must seek for the key to the mystery. The initial act,—if there was one,— is of no greater importance than the smallest initiative of the present.

    All birth is at the same time a genesis and a prolongation, a passage from one mode of universal being to another, each of these modes having its origin in that which preceded.

    And when we can ascend no farther in the infinite chain of causes, then we confound the last that we reach with the eternal Absolute, although that Absolute can be no nearer to the remotest past than it is to the present hour. That which appears to us, at the extreme limit of all that we can discern, the first cause, is only the last effect of causes even more transcendent than itself.

    Why should we demand from the past what the present equally contains ?

    Nothing is more vain than this seeking after what

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has been ; for what has been is what is. All things carry in themselves their own history. The problem of the beginning is, in fact, only the problem of the perpetual development of things,—the how of each existence.

    The Unique, Impersonal, Immutable being in existence, how can the multiple, individual and transient exist ? And what are they ?

    Otherwise put,—wherefore life ? Wherefore the worlds ?

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The Secret

of the Veda

CHAPTER II

A RETROSPECT OF VEDIC THEORY

THE SCHOLARS

    The text of the Veda which we possess has remained uncorrupted for over two thousand years. It dates, so far as we know, from that great period of Indian intellectual activity, contemporaneous with the Greek efflorescence, but earlier in its beginnings, which founded the culture and civilisation recorded in the classical literature of the land. We cannot say to how much earlier a date our text may be carried. But there are certain considerations which justify us in supposing for it an almost enormous antiquity. An accurate text, accurate in every syllable, accurate in every accent, was a matter of supreme importance to the Vedic ritualists ; for on scrupulous accuracy depended the effectuality of the sacrifice. We are told, for instance, in the Brahmanas the story of Twashtri who, performing a sacrifice to produce an avenger of his son slain by Indra, produced, owing to an error of accentuation, not a slayer of Indra, but one of whom Indra must be the slayer. The prodigious accuracy of the ancient Indian memory is also notorious. And the sanctity of the text prevented such interpolations, alterations, modernising revisions as have replaced by the present form of the Alahabharata the ancient epic of the Kurus. It is not, therefore, at all improbable that we have the Sanhita of Vyasa substantially as it was arranged by the great sage and compiler.

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Substantially, not in its present written form. Vedic prosody differed in many respects from the prosody of classical Sanskrit and, especially, employed a greater freedom in the use of that principle of euphonic combination of separate words (sandhi ) which is so peculiar a feature of the literary tongue. The Vedic Rishis as was natural in a living speech, followed the ear rather than fixed rule ; sometimes they combined the separate words, sometimes they left them uncombined. But when the Veda came to be written down, the law of euphonic combination had assumed a much more despotic authority over the language and the ancient text was written by the grammarians as far as possible in consonance with its regulations. They were careful, however, to accompany it with another text, called the Padapatha, in which all euphonic combinations were again resolved into the original and separate words and even the components of compound words indicated.

    It is a notable tribute to the fidelity of the ancient memorisers that, instead of the confusion to which this system might so easily have given rise, it is always perfectly easy to resolve the formal text into the original harmonies of Vedic prosody. And very few are the instances in which the exactness or the sound judgment of the Padapatha can be called into question.

    We have, then, as our basis a text which we can confidently accept and which, even if we hold it in a few instances doubtful or defective, does not at any rate call for that often licentious labour of emendation to which some of the European classics lend themselves. This is, to start with, a priceless advantage for which we cannot be too grateful to the conscientiousness of the old Indian learning.

    In certain other directions it might not be safe always to follow implicitly the scholastic tradition,—as in the ascription of the Vedic poems to their respective Rishis, wherever older tradition was not firm and sound. But these are details of minor importance. Nor is there, in my view, any good reason to doubt that we have the hymns arrayed, for the most part, in the right order of

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their verses and in their exact entirety. The exceptions, if they exist, are negligible in number and importance. When the hymns seem to us incoherent, it is because we do not understand them. Once the clue is found, we discover that they are perfect wholes as admirable in the structure of their thought as in their language and their rhythms.

  &nbsp It is when we come to the interpretation of the Veda and seek help from ancient Indian scholarship that we feel compelled to make the largest reserves. For even in the earlier days of classical erudition the ritualistic view of the Veda was already dominant^ the original sense of the words, the lines, the allusions, the clue to the structure of the thought had been long lost or obscured ; nor was there in the erudite that intuition or that spiritual experience which might have partly recovered the lost secret. In such a field mere learning, especially when it is accompanied by an ingenious scholastic mind, is as often a snare as a guide.

    In Yaska’s lexicon, our most important help, we have to distinguish between two elements of very disparate value. When Yaska gives as a lexicographer the various meanings of Vedic words, his authority is great and the help he gives is of the first importance. It does not appear that he possessed all the ancient significances, for many had been obliterated by Time and Change and in the absence of a scientific Philology could not be restored. But much also had been preserved by tradition. Wherever Yaska preserves this tradition and does not use a grammarian’s ingenuity, the meanings he assigns to words, although not always applicable to the text to which he refers them, can yet be confirmed as possible senses by a sound Philology. But Yaska the etymologist does not rank with Yaska the lexicographer. Scientific grammar was first developed by Indian learning, but the beginnings of sound philology we owe to modern research. Nothing can be more fanciful and lawless than the methods of mere ingenuity used by the old etymologists down even to the nineteenth century, whether in Europe or India.

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And when Yaska follows these methods, we are obliged to part company with him entirely. Nor in his interpretation of particular texts is he more convincing than the later erudition of Sayana.

    The commentary of Sayana closes the period of original and living scholastic work on the Veda which Yaska’s Nirukta among other important authorities may be said to open. The lexicon was compiled in the earlier vigour of the Indian mind when it was assembling its prehistoric gains as the materials of a fresh outburst of originality; the Commentary is almost the last great work of the kind left to us by the classical tradition in its final refuge and centre in Southern India before the old culture was dislocated and broken into regional fragments by the shock of the Mahomedan conquest. Since then we have had jets of strong and original effort, scattered attempts at new birth and novel combination, but work of quite this general, massive and monumental character has hardly been possible.

    The commanding merits of this great legacy of the past are obvious. Composed by Sayana with the aid of the most learned scholars of his time, it is a work representing an enormous labour of erudition, more perhaps than could have been commanded at that time by a single brain. Yet it bears the stamp of the coordinating mind. It is consistent in the mass in spite of its many inconsistencies of detail, largely planned, yet most simply, composed in a style lucid, terse and possessed of an almost literary grace one would have thought impossible in the traditional form of the Indian commentary. Nowhere is there any display of pedantry; the struggle with the difficulties of the text is skilfully veiled and there is an air of clear acuteness and of assured, yet unassuming authority which imposes even on the dissident. The first Vedic scholars in Europe admired especially the rationality of Sayana’s interpretations.

    Yet, even for the external sense of the Veda, it is not possible to follow either Sayana’s method or his results without the largest reservation. It is not only that he

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admits in his method licenses of language and construction which are unnecessary and sometimes incredible, nor that he arrives at his results, often, by a surprising inconsistency in his interpretation of common Vedic terms and even of fixed Vedic formulae. These are defects of detail, unavoidable perhaps in the state of the materials with which he had to deal. But it is the central defect of Sayana’s system that he is obsessed always by the ritualistic formula and seeks continually to force the sense of the Veda into that narrow mould. So he loses many clues of the greatest suggestiveness and importance for the external sense of the ancient Scripture, —a problem quite as interesting as its internal sense. The outcome is a representation of the Rishis, their thoughts, their culture, their aspirations, so narrow and poverty-stricken that, if accepted, it renders the ancient reverence for the Veda, its sacred authority, its divine reputation quite incomprehensible to the reason or only explicable as a blind and unquestioning tradition of faith starting from an original error.

    There are indeed other aspects and elements in the commentary, but they are subordinate or subservient to the main idea. Sayana and his helpers had to work upon a great mass of often conflicting speculation and tradition which still survived from the past. To some of its elements they had to give a formal adhesion, to others they felt bound to grant minor concessions. It is possible that to Sayana’s skill in evolving out of previous uncertainty or even confusion an interpretation which had firm shape and consistence, is due the great and long-unquestioned authority of his work.

    The first element with which Sayana had to deal, the most interesting to us, was the remnant of the old spiritual, philosophic or psychological interpretations of the Sruti which were the true foundation of its sanctity. So far as these had entered into the current or orthodox*

    * I use the word loosely. The times orthodox and heterodox in the European or sectarian sense have no true application to India where opinion has always been free.

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conception, Sayana admits them ; but they form an exceptional element in his work, insignificant in bulk and in importance. Occasionally he gives a passing mention or concession to less current psychological renderings. He mentions, for instance, but not to admit it, an old interpretation of Vritra as the Coverer who holds back from man the objects of his desire and his aspirations. For Sayana Vritra is either simply the enemy or the physical cloud-demon who holds back the waters and has to be pierced by the Rain-giver.

    A second element is the mythological, or, as it might almost be called, the Puranic,—myths and stories of the gods given in their outward form without that deeper sense and symbolic fact which is the justifying truth of all Purana.*

    A third element is the legendary and historic, the stories of old kings and Rishis, given in the Brahmanas or by later tradition in explanation of the obscure allusions of the Veda. Sayana’s dealings with this element are marked by some hesitation. Often he accepts them as the right interpretation of the hymns; sometimes hegivesan alternative sense with which he has evidently more intellectual sympathy, but wavers between the two authorities.

    More important is the element of naturalistic interpretation. Not only are there the- obvious or the traditional identifications, Indra, the Maruts, the triple Agni, Surya, Usha, but we find that Mitra was identified with the Day, Varuna .with the Night, Aryaman and Bhagawith the Sun, the Ribhus with its rays. We have here the seeds of that naturalistic theory of the Veda to which European learning has given so wide an extension. The old Indian scholars did not use the same freedom or the same systematic minuteness in their speculations. Still this element in Sayana’s commentary is the true parent of the European Science of Comparative Mythology.

• There Is reason to suppose that Purana (legend and apologue) and Itihasa (historical tradition) were part’s of Vedic culture long before the present forms of the Puranas and historical Epics were evolved.

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    But it is the ritualistic conception that pervades; that is the persistent note in which all others lose themselves. In the formula of the philosophic schools, the hymns, even while standing as a supreme authority for knowledge, are yet principally and fundamentally concerned with the Karmakanda, with works,— and by works was understood, preeminently, the ritualistic observation of the Vedic sacrifices. Sayana labours always in the light of this idea. Into this mould he moulds the language of the Veda, turning the mass of its characteristic words into the ritualistic significances,—food, priest, giver, wealth, praise, prayer, rite, sacrifice.

    Wealth and food ;—for it is the most egoistic and materialistic objects that are proposed as the aim of the sacrifice, possessions, strength, power, children, servants, gold, horses, cows, victory, the slaughter and the plunder of enemies, the destruction of rival and malevolent critic As one reads and finds hymn after hymn interpreted in this sense one, begins to understand better the apparent inconsistency in the attitude of the Gita which, regarding always the Veda as divine knowledge \ yet censures severely the champions of an exclusive Vedism², all whose flowery teachings were devoted solely to material wealth, power and enjoyment.

    It is the final and authoritative binding of the Veda to this lowest of all its possible senses that has been the most unfortunate result of Sayana’s commentary. The dominance of the ritualistic interpretation had already deprived India of the living use of its greatest Scripture and of the true clue to the entire sense of the Upanishads. Sayana’s commentary put a seal of finality on the old misunderstanding which could not be broken for many centuries. And its suggestions, when another civilisation discovered and set itself to study the Veda, became in the European mind the parent of fresh errors.

      Nevertheless, if Sayana’s work has been a key turned

      1.Gita XV. 15.

      2.Idid II. 42.

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with double lock on the inner sense of the Veda, it is yet indispensable for opening the antechambers of Vedic learning. All the vast labour of European erudition has not been able to replace its utility. At every step we are obliged to differ from it, but at every step we are obliged to use it. It is a necessary springing-board, or a stair that we have to use for entrance, though we must leave it behind if we wish to pass forwards into the penetralia.

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Selected Hymns

AGNI, THE ILLUMINED WILL

RIG VEDA I. 77.

1.How shall we give to Agni ? For him what Word accepted by the Gods is spoken, for the lord of the brilliant flame ? for him who in mortals, immortal, possessed of the Truth, priest of the oblation strongest for sacrifice, creates the gods ?

2.He who in the sacrifices is the priest of the Offering, full of peace, full of the Truth, him verily form in you by your surrenderings; when Agni manifests ¹ for the mortals the gods, he also has perception of them and by the mind offers to them the sacrifice.

8. For he is the will, he is the strength, he is the effecter of perfection, even as Mitra he becomes the charioteer of the Supreme. To him, the first, in the rich-offerings the people seeking the godhead utter the word, the Aryan people to the fulfiller.

4. May this strongest of the Powers and devourer of the destroyers manifest ² by his presence the Words and their understanding, and may they who in their extension are lords of plenitude brightest

1.Or enters into the gods.”

2.Or enter Into the words and the thinking.”

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in energy pour forth their plenty and give their impulsion to the thought.

    5. Thus has Agni possessed of the Truth been affirmed by the masters of light,³ the knower of the worlds by clarified minds. He shall foster in them the force of illumination, he too the plenty; he shall attain to increase and to harmony by his perceptions.

COMMENTARY

    Gotama Rahugana is the seer of this Hymn, which is a stoma in praise of Agni, the divine Will at work in the universe.

    Agni is the most important, the most universal of the Vedic gods. In the physical world he is the general devourer and enjoyer. He is also the purifier ; when he devours and enjoys, then also he purines. He is the fire that prepares and perfects; he is also the fire that assimilates and the heat of energy that forms. He is the heat of life and creates the sap, the rasa in things, the essence of their substantial being and the essence of their delight.

    He is equally the Will in Prana, the dynamic Life-energy, and in that energy performs the same functions. Devouring and enjoying, purifying, preparing, assimilating, forming, he rises upwards always and transfigures his powers into the Maruts, the energies of Mind. Our passions and obscure emotions are the smoke of Agni’s burning. All our nervous forces, are assured of their action only by his support.

3. Gotamabhih. In its external sense " by the Gotamas" the family of the Rishi, Gotama Rahugana, the seer of the hymn. But the names of the Rishis ar-? constantly used with a covert reference to their meaning. In this passage there is an unmistakable significance in the grouping of the words, gotamebhir ritava, viprebhir jatavedah, as in verse 3 in dasma, arih.

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    If he is the Will in our nervous being and purifies it by action, he is also the Will in the mind and clarifies it by aspiration. When he enters into the intellect, he is drawing near to his divine birth-place and home. He leads the thoughts towards effective power; he leads the active energies towards light.

    His divine birth-place and home,—though he is born everywhere and dwells in all things,—is the Truth, the Infinity, the vast corsair Intelligence in which Knowledge and Force are unified. For there all Will is in harmony with the truth of things and therefore effective; all thought part of Wisdom, which is the divine Law, and therefore perfectly regulative of a divine action. Agni fulfilled becomes mighty in his own home—in the Truth, the Right, the Vast. It is thither that he is leading upward the aspiration in humanity, the soul of the Aryan, the head of the cosmic sacrifice.

    It is at the point where there is the first possibility of the great passage, the transition from mind to supermind, the transfiguration of the intelligence, till now the crowned leader of the mental being, into a divine Light,—it is at this supreme and crucial point in the Vedic Yoga that the Rishi, Gotama Rahugana, seeks in himself for the inspired Word. The Word shall help him to realise for himself and others the Power that must effect the transition and the state of luminous plenitude from which the transfiguration must commence.

    The Vedic sacrifice is, psychologically, a symbol of cosmic and individual activity become self-conscious, enlightened and aware of its goal. The whole process of the universe is in its very nature a sacrifice, voluntary or involuntary. Self-fulfilment by self-immolation, to grow by giving is the universal law. That which refuses to give itself, is still the food of the cosmic Powers.- " The eater eating is eaten " is the formula, pregnant and terrible, in which the Upanishad sums up this aspect of the universe, an I in another passage men are described as the cattle of the gods. It is only when the law is recognised and voluntarily accepted that this kingdom of death can

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be over passed and by the works of sacrifice Immortality made possible and attained. All the powers and potentialities of the human life are offered up, in the symbol of a sacrifice, to the divine Life in the Cosmos.

    Knowledge, Force and Delight are the three powers of the divine Life; thought and its formations, will and its works, love and its harmonising are the corresponding human activities which have to be exalted to the divine level. The dualities of truth and falsehood, light and darkness, concept ional right and wrong are the confusions of knowledge born of egoistic division; the dualities of egoistic love and hatred, joy and grief, pleasure and pain are the confusions of Love, perversities of Ananda; the dualities of strength and weakness, sin and virtue, action and inaction are the confusions of will, dissipaters of the divine Force. And all these confusions arise and even become necessary modes of our action because the triune powers of the divine Life are divorced from each other, Knowledge from Strength, Love from both, by the Ignorance which divides. It is the Ignorance, the dominant Cosmic Falsehood that has to be removed. Through the Truth, then, lies the road to the true harmony, the consummated felicity, the ultimate fulfilment of love in the divine Delight. Therefore, only when the Will in man becomes divine and possessed of the Truth, amrita ritava, can the perfection towards which we move be realised in humanity.

    Agni, then, is the god who has to become conscient in the mortal. Him the inspired Word has to express, to confirm in this gated mansion and on the altar-seat of this sacrifice.

    "How must we give to Agni ?. " asks the Rishi. The word for the sacrificial giving, dashema, means literally distribution ; it has a covert connection with the root dash in the sense of discernment. The sacrifice is essentially an arrangement, a distribution of the human activities and enjoyments among the different cosmic Powers to whose province they by right belong. Therefore the hymns repeatedly speak of the portions of the

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gods. It is the problem of the right arrangement and distribution of his works that presents itself to the sacrificer; for the sacrifice must be always according ;to the Law and the divine ordainment (ritu, the later vidhi). The will to right arrangement is an all-important preparation for the reign of the supreme Law and Truth in the mortal.

    The solution of the problem depends on right realisation, and right realisation starts from the right illuminative Word, expression of the inspired Thought which is sent to the seer out of the Vast. Therefore the Rishi asks farther, What word is uttered to Agni ?" What word of affirmation, what word of realisation? Two conditions have to be satisfied. The Word must be accepted by other divine Powers, that is, it must bring out some potentiality in the nature or bring into it some light of realisation by which the divine Workers maybe induced to manifest in the superficial consciousness of humanity and embrace openly their respective functions. And it must be illuminative of the double nature of Agni, this Lord of the lustrous flame. Bhama means both a light of knowledge and a flame of action. Agni is a Light as well as a Force.

    The Word arrives. Yo martyeshu amrito ritava. Agni is, preeminently, the Immortal in mortals. It is this Agni by whom the other bright sons of Infinity are able to work out the manifestation and self-extension of the Divine (devaviti, devatati) which is at once aim and process of the cosmic and of the human sacrifice. For he is the divine Will^which in all things is always present, is always destroying and constructing, always building and perfecting, supporting always the complex progression of the universe. It is this which persists through all death and change. It is eternally and inalienably possessed of the Truth. In the last obscuration of Nature, in the lowest unintelligence of Matter, it is this Will that is a concealed knowledge and compels all these darkened movements to obey, as if mechanically, the divine Law and adhere to the truth of their Nature. It is this which makes the

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tree grow according to its seed and each action bear its appropriate fruit. In the obscurity of" man’s ignorance,— less than material Nature’s, yet greater,—it is this divine Will that governs and guides, knows the sense of his blindness and the goal of his aberration and out of the crooked workings of the cosmic Falsehood in him evolves the progressive manifestation of the cosmic Truth. Alone of the brilliant Gods, he burns bright and has full vision in the darkness of Night no less than in the splendors of day. The other gods are usharbudhah, warkers with the Dawn.

    Therefore is he the priest of the offering, strongest or most apt for sacrifice, he who, all-powerful, follows always the law of the Truth. We must remember that the oblation (karma) signifies always action (karma ) and each action mind or body is regarded as a giving of our plenty into the cosmic being and the cosmic intention. Agni, the divine Will, is that which stands behind the human will in its works. In the conscient offering, he comes in front; he is the priest set in front ( puro-hita) guides the oblation and determines its effectiveness.

    By this self-guided Truth, by this knowledge that works out as an unerring Will in the Cosmos, he fashions the gods in mortals. Agni manifests divine potentialities in a death-besieged body; Agni brings them to effective actuality and perfection. He creates in us the luminous forms of the Immortals.

    This work he does as a cosmic Power labouring upon the rebellious human material even when in our ignorance we resist the heavenward impulse and, accustomed to offer our actions to the egoistic life, cannot yet or as yet will not make the divine surrender. But it is in proportion as we learn to subjugate the ego and compel it to bow down in every act to the universal Being and to serve consciously in its least movements the supreme Will, that Agni himself takes form in us. The Divine Will becomes present and conscient in a human mind and enlightens it with the divine Knowledge. Thus it is that man can be said to form by his toil the great Gods.

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    The Sanscrit expression is here a krinudhwam. The preposition gives the idea of a drawing upon oneself of something outside and the working or shaping it out in our own consciousness. A kri corresponds to the converse expression, a bhu, used of the gods when they approach the mortal with the contact of Immortality and, divine form of godhead falling on form of humanity, ”become," take, shape, as it were, in him. The cosmic Powers act and exist in the universe ; man takes them upon himself, makes an image of them in his own consciousness and endows that image with the life and power that the Supreme Being has breathed into His own divine forms and world-energies.¹

      It is when thus present and conscient in the mortal, like a " house-lord "2, master in his mansion, that Agni appears in the true nature of his divinity. When we are obscure and revolt against the Truth and the Law, our progress seems to be a stumbling from ignorance to ignorance and is full of pain and disturbance. By constant submission to the Truth, surrenderings, namobhih, we create in ourselves that image of the divine Will which is on the contrary full of peace, because it is assured of the Truth and the Law. Equality of soul 3 created by the surrender to the universal Wisdom gives us a supreme peace and calm. And since that Wisdom guides all our steps in the straight paths of the Truth we are carried by it beyond all stumblings (dnritani).

Moreover, with Agni conscious in our humanity, the creation of the gods in us becomes a veritable manifestation and no longer a veiled growth. The will within grows conscious of the increasing godhead, awakens to the process, perceives the lines of the growth. Human action intelligently directed and devoted to the universal Powers, ceases to be a mechanical, involuntary or imperfect offer-

1 This is the true sense and theory of Hindu image-worship, which is thus a material rendering of the great Vedic symbols.

2. Grihapati; also vishpati, lord or king in the creature.

3. Somata of the Gita.

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ing ; the thinking and observing mind participates and becomes the instrument of the sacrificial will.

    Agni is the power of conscious Being, called by us will, effective behind the workings of mind and body. Agni is the strong God within (maryah, the strong, the masculine) who puts out his strength against all assailing powers, who forbids inertia, who repels every failing of heart and of force, who spurns out all lack of manhood. Agni actualises whit might otherwise remain as an ineffectual thought or aspiration. He is the doer of the Yoga (sadlm ); divine smith labouring at his forge, he hammers out our perfection. Here he is said to become the charioteer of the Supreme. The Supreme and Wonderful that moves and fulfils Itself " in the consciousness of another " i, (we have the same word, Adbhuta, as in the colloquy of Indra and Agastya ), effects that motion with this Power as charioteer holding the reins of the activity. Mitra also, the lord of Love and Light is even such a charioteer. Love illuminated fulfils the harmony which is the goal of the divine movement. But the power of this lord of Will and Light is also-needed. Force and Love united and both illumined by Knowledge fulfil God in the world.

    Will is the first necessity, the chief actualising force. When therefore the race of mortals turn consciously towards the great aim and, offering their enriched capacities to the Sons of Heaven, seek to form the divine in themselves, it is to Agni, first and chief, that they lift the realising thought, frame the creative Word. For they are the Aryans who do the work and accept the effort,—the vastest of all works, the most grandiose of all efforts,—and he is the power that embraces Action and by Action fulfils the work. What is the Aryan without the divine Will that accepts the labour and the battle, works and wins, suffers and triumphs ?

    Therefore it is this Will which annihilates all forces commissioned to destroy the effort, this strongest of all

1. R,V.I.170 translated in our August issne.

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the divine Puissances in which the supreme Purusha has imaged Himself, that must bestow its presence on these human vessels. There it will use the mind as instrument of the sacrifice and by its very presence manifest those inspired and realising Words which are as a chariot framed for the movement of the gods, giving to the Thought that meditates the illuminative comprehension which allows the forms of the divine Powers to outline themselves in our waking consciousness.

    Then may those other mighty Ones who bring with them the plenitudes of the higher life, Indra and the Aswins, Usha and Surya, Varuna and Mitra and Arya-man, assume with that formative extension of themselves in the human being their most brilliant energies. Let them create their plenty in us, pouring it forth from the secret places of our being so as to be utilisable in its daylight tracts and let their impulsions urge upward the divinising thought in Mind, till it transfigures itself in the supreme lustres.

    The hymn closes. Thus, in inspired words, has the divine Will, Agni, been affirmed by the sacred chant of the Gotamas. The Rishi uses his name and that of his house as a symbol-word; we have in it the Vedic go in the sense "luminous," and Gotama means "entirely possessed of light.” For it is only those that have the plenitude of the luminous intelligence by whom the master of divine Truth can be wholly received and affirmed in this world of an inferior Ray,—gotamebhir rildvd. And it is upon those whose minds are pure, clear and open, vipra, that there can dawn the right knowledge of the great Births which are behind the physical world and from which it derives and supports its energies,—viprebhir jatavedah.

    Agni is Jatavedas, knower of the births, the worlds. He knows entirely the five worlds ¹ and is not confined in his consciousness to this limited and dependent physi-

1. The worlds in which, respectively. Matter, Life-Energy, Mind, Truth and Beatitude are the essential energies. They are called res. pectively Bhur, Bhuvar, Swar Mahas and Jana or Mayas.

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cal harmony. He has access even to the three highest states 1 of all, to the udder of the mystic Cow 2, the abundance of the Bull 3 with the four horns. From that abundance he will foster the illumination in these Aryan seekers, swell the plenty of their divine faculties. By that fullness and plenty of his illumined perceptions he will unite thought with thought, word with word, till the human Intelligence is rich and harmonious enough to support and become the divine Idea.

1.Divine Being, Consciousness, Bliss,— Sachchidananda.

2.Aditi, the infinite Consciousness, Mother of the worlds.

8. The divine Purusha, Sachchidananda; the three highest states and Truth are his four horns.

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lsha Upanishad

ANALYSIS

SECOND MOVEMENT

BRAHMAN

Verses 4—5*

BRAHMAN, THE UNITY.—

ONENESS OF GOD AND THE WORLD.

    The Lord and the world, even when they seem to be distinct, are not really different from each other; they are one Brahman.

" ONE UN MOVING "

    God is the one stable and eternal Reality. He is One because there is nothing else, since all existence and non-existence are He. He is stable or unmoving, because motion implies change in Space and change in Time, and He, being beyond Time and Space, is immutable. He possesses eternally in Himself all that is, has been or ever can be, and He therefore does not increase or diminish. He is beyond causality and relativity and therefore there is no change of relations in His being.

"SWIFTER THAN MIND ”

    The world is a cyclic movement (sanitaria) of the divine consciousness in Space and Time. Its law and, in a sense, its object is progression; it exists by movement

4 One unmoving that is swifter than Mind j That the Gods reach not, for It progresses ever in front. That, standing, passes beyond others as they run. In That the Master of Life establishes the Waters.

5 That moves and that moves not ; That is far and the same is near; That is within all this and that also is outside all this.

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and would be dissolved by cessation of movement. But the basis of this movement is not material; it is the energy of active consciousness which, by its motion and multiplication in different principles (different in appearance, the same in essence), creates oppositions of unity and multiplicity, divisions of Time and Space, relations and groupings of circumstance and Causality. All these things are real in consciousness, but only symbolic of the Being, somewhat as the imaginations of a creative Mind are true representations of itself, yet not quite real in comparison with itself, or real with a different kind of reality.

    But mental consciousness is not the Power that creates the universe. That is something infinitely more puissant, swift and unfettered than the mind. It is the pure omnipotent self-awareness of the Absolute unbound by any law of the relativity. The laws of the relativity, upheld by the gods, are Its temporary creations. Their apparent eternity is only the duration, immeasurable to us, of the world which they govern. They are laws regularising motion and change, not laws binding the Lord of the movement. The gods therefore are described as continually running in their course. But the Lord is free and unaffected by His own movement.

"THAT MOVES, THAT MOVES NOT"

    The motion of the world works under the government of a perpetual stability. Change represents the constant shitting of apparent relations in an eternal Immutability.

    It is these truths that are expressed in the formulae of the one Unmoving that is swifter than Mind, That which moves and moves not, the one stable which outstrips in the speed of its effective consciousness the others who run.

TRANSITIONAL THOUGHT

THE MANY

    If the One is preeminently real, " the others," the Many are not unreal. The world is not a figment of the Mind.

* The series of ideas under this heading seem to me to be the indispensable metaphysical basis of the Upanishad. The Isha Upanishad does not teach a pure and exclusive Monism ; it declares the One without

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    Unity is the eternal truth of things, diversity a play of the unity. The sense of unity has therefore been termed Knowledge, Vidya, the sense of diversity Ignorance, Avidya. But diversity is not false except when it is divorced from the sense of its true and eternal unity.

    Brahman is one, not numerically, but in essence. Numerical oneness would either exclude multiplicity or would be a pluralistic and divisible oneness with the Many as its parts. That is not the unity of Brahman, which can neither be diminished, increased, nor divided.

    The Many in the universe are sometimes called parts of the universal Brahman as the waves are parts of the sea. But, in truth, these waves are each of them that sea, their diversities being those of frontal or superficial appearances caused by the sea’s motion. As each object in the universe is really the whole universe in a different frontal appearance, so each individual soul is all Brahman regarding Itself and world from a centre of cosmic consciousness.

    For That is identical, not single. It is identical always and everywhere in Time and Space, as well as identical beyond Time and Space. Numerical oneness and multiplicity are equally valid terms of its essential unity.

    These two terms, ,as we see them, are like all others, representations in Chit, in the free and all-creative self-awareness of the Absolute regarding itself variously, infinitely, innumerably and formulating what it regards. Chit is a power not only of knowledge, but of expressive will, not only of receptive vision, but of formative representation ; the two are indeed one power. For Chit is an action of Being, not of the Void. What it sees, that becomes. It sees itself beyond Space and Time; that becomes in the conditions of Space and Time.

denying the Many and its method is to see the One in the Many. It asserts the simultaneous validity of Vidya and Avidya and upholds as the object of action and knowledge an immortality consistent with Life and Birth in this world. It regards every object as itself the universe and every soul as itself the divine Purusha. The ensemble of these ideas is consistent only with a synthetic or comprehensive as opposed to an illusionist or exclusive Monism.

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    Creation is not a making of something out of "nothing or of one thing out of another, but a self-projection of Brahman into the conditions of Space and Time. Creation is not a making, but a becoming in terms and forms of conscious existence.

    In the becoming each individual is Brahman variously represented and entering into various relations with Itself in the play of the divine consciousness: in being, each individual is all Brahman.

    Brahman as the Absolute or the Universal has the power of standing back from Itself in the relativity. It conceives, by a subordinate movement of consciousness, the individual as other than the universal, the relative as different from the Absolute. Without this separative movement, the individual would always tend to lose itself in the universal, the relative to disappear into the Absolute. Thus, it supports a corresponding reaction in the individual who regards himself as " other " than the transcendent and universal Brahman and " other " than the rest of the Many. He puts identity behind him and enforces the play of Being in the separative Ego.

    The individual may regard himself as eternally different from the One, or as eternally one with It, yet different, or he may go back entirely in his consciousness to the pure Identity. But he can never regard himself as independent of some kind of Unity, for such a view would correspond to no conceivable truth in the universe or beyond it.

    These three attitudes correspond to three truths of the Brahman which are simultaneously valid and none of them entirely true without the others as its complements. Their coexistence, difficult of conception to the logical intellect, can be experienced by identity in consciousness with Brahman. Even in asserting Oneness, we must remember that Brahman is beyond our mental distinctions and is a fact

   * The. positions, in inverse order, of the three principal philosophical schools of Vedanta, Monism, Qualified Monism and Dualism.

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not of Thought that discriminates, but of Being which is absolute. infinite and escapes discrimination. Our consciousness is representative and symbolic; it cannot conceive the thing in itself, the Absolute, except by negation, in a sort of void, by emptying it of all that it seems in the universe to contain. But the Absolute is not a void or negation. It is all that is here in Time and beyond Time.

    Even oneness is a representation and exists in relation to multiplicity. Vidya and Avidya are equally eternal powers of the supreme Chit. Neither Vidya nor Avidya by itself are the absolute knowledge. (See vs. 9-11 ).

    Still, of all relations oneness is the secret base, not multiplicity. Oneness constitutes and upholds the multiplicity, multiplicity docs not constitute and uphold the oneness.

    Therefore we have to conceive of Oneness as our self and the essential nature of Being, multiplicity as a representation of Self and a becoming. We have to conceive of the Brahman as One Self of all and then return upon the Many as becomings of the One Being (bhutani…Atman). But both the Self and the becomings are Brahman; we cannot regard the one as Brahman and the others as unreal and not Brahman. Both are real, the one with a constituent and comprehensive, the others with a derivative or dependent reality.

THE RUNNING OF THE GODS

    Brahman representing Itself in the universe as the Stable, by immutable existence (Sat), is Purusha, God, Spirit; representing itself as the Motional, by Its power of active Consciousness (Chit), is Nature, Force or World-Principle (Prakriti, Shakti, Maya)*. The play of these two principles is the Life of the universe.

* Prakriti, executive Nature as opposed to Purusha, which is the Soul governing, taking cognizance of and enjoying the works of Prakriti. Shakti, t’ e sclfexistent, self-cognitive Power of the Lord (Ishwara, Deva or Purusha), which expresses itself in the workings of Prakriti. Maya, signifying originally in the Veda comprehensive and creative knowledge, Wisidmtnat is from of oil ; afterwards taken in its second and derivative sense, cu .ning. magic, Illusion. In this second significance it can really be appropriate only to this workings of the lower

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    The Gods are Brahman representing Itself in cosmic Personalities expressive of the one Godhead who, in their impersonal action, appear as the various play of the principles of Nature.

    The "others " are " Sarvabhutani " of a later verse, all becomings, Brahman representing itself in the separative consciousness of the Many.

    Everything in the universe, even the Gods, seems to itself to be moving in the general movement towards a goal outside itself or other than its immediate idea of itself. Brahman is the goal; for it is both the beginning and the end, the cause and the result of all movement.

    But the idea of a final goal in the, movement of Nature itself is illusory. For Brahman is Absolute and Infinite. The Gods, labouring to reach him, find, at every goal that they realise, Brahman still moving forward in front to a farther realisation. Nothing in the appearances of the universe can be entirely That to the relative consciousness; all is only a symbolic representation of the Unknowable.

    All things are already realised in Brahman. The running of the Others in the course of Nature is only a working out (Prakriti), by Causality, in Time and Space, of something that Brahman already possesses.

    Even in Its universal being Brahman exceeds the Movement. Exceeding Time, It contains in Itself past, present and future simultaneously and has not to run to the end of conceivable Time. Exceeding Space, It contains all formations in Itself coincidently and has not to run to the end of conceivable Space. Exceeding Causality, It contains freely in Itself all eventualities as well as all potentialities without being bound by the apparent chain of causality by which they are linked in the universe. Everything is already realised by it as the

Nature, Apara Prakriti, which has put behind it the Divine Wisdom and is absorbed in the experiences of the separative Ego. It is in the more ancient sense that the word Maya is used in the Upanishads, where, indeed, it occurs but rarely.

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Lord before it can be accomplished by the separated Personalities in the movement.

THE PRINCIPLE OF LIFE

MATARISWAN AND THE WATERS

    What then is Its intention in the movement?

    The movement is a rhythm, a harmony which That, as the Universal Life, works out by figures of Itself in the terms of conscious Being. It is a formula symbolically expressive of the Unknowable,—so arranged that every level of consciousness really represents something beyond itself, depth of depth, continent of continent. It is a play of the divine Consciousness existing for its own satisfaction and adding nothing to That, which is already complete. It is a fact of conscious being, justified by its own existence, with no purpose ulterior to itself. The idea of purpose, of a goal is born of the progressive self-unfolding by the world of its own true nature to the individual Souls inhabiting its forms ; for the Being is gradually self-revealed within its own becomings, real Unity emerges out of the Multiplicity and changes entirely the values of the latter to our consciousness.

    This self-unfolding is governed by conditions determined by the complexity of consciousness in its cosmic action.

    For consciousness is not simple or homogeneous, it is septuplet. That is to say, it constitutes itself into seven forms or grades of conscious activity descending from pure Being to physical being. Their interplay creates the worlds, determines all activities, constitutes all becomings.

    Brahman is always the continent of this play or this working. Brahman self-extended in Space and Time is the universe.

    In this extension Brahman represents Itself as formative Nature, the universal Mother of things, who

* This is the Vaishnava image of the Lila applied usually to the play of the Personal Deity in the world, but equally applicable to the active impersonal Brahman.

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appears to us, first, as Matter, called Prithivi, the Earth-Principle.

    Brahman in Matter or physical being represents Itself as the universal Life- Power, Matariswan, which moves there as a dynamic energy, Prana, and presides effectively over all arrangement and formation.

    Universal Life establishes, involved in Matter, the septuplet consciousness ; and the action of Prana, the dynamic energy, on the Matrix of things evolves out of it its different forms and serves as a basis for all their evolutions.

TRANSITIONAL THOUGHT

THE WATERS

    There are, then, seven constituents of Chit active in the universe.

    We are habitually aware of three elements in our being, Mind, Life and Body. These constitute for us a divided and mutable existence which is in a condition of unstable harmony and works by a strife of positive and negative forces between the two poles of Birth and Death. For all life is a constant birth or becoming (sambhava, sambhuti of vs. 12—14;) All birth entails a constant death or dissolution of that which becomes, in order that it may change into a new becoming. Therefore this state of existence is called Mrityu, Death, and described as a stage which has to be passed through and transcended. (vs. 11, 14).

    For this is not the whole of our being and, therefore, not our pure being. We have, behind, a superconscious existence which has also three constituents, Sat, Chit-Tapas and Ananda.

    Sat is essence of our being, pure infinite and undivided, as opposed to this divisible being which founds itself on the constant changeableness of physical substance. Sat is the divine counterpart of physical substance.

    Chit-Tapas is pure energy of Consciousness, free in its rest or its action, sovereign in its will, as opposed to the hampered dynamic energies of Prana which, feeding

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upon physical substances, are dependent on and limited by their sustenance.* Tapas is the divine counterpart of this lower nervous or vital energy.

    Ananda is Beatitude, the bliss of pure conscious existence and energy, as opposed to the life of the sensations and emotions which are at the mercy of the outward touches of Life and Matter and their positive and negative reactions, joy and grief, pleasure and pain. Ananda is the divine counterpart of the lower emotional and sensational being.

    This higher existence, proper to the divine Sachchid-ananda, is unified, self-existent, not confused by the figures of Birth and Death. It is called, therefore, Amritam, Immortality, and offered to us as the goal to be aimed at and the felicity to be enjoyed when we have transcended the state of death (vs. 12. 14. 17. 18.).

    The higher divine is linked to the lower mortal existence by the causal Idea or supra-mental knowledge, Vijnana. It is the causal Idea which, by supporting and secretly guiding the confused activities of the Mind, Life and Body, ensures and compels the right arrangement of the universe. It is called in Veda, the Truth because it represents by direct vision the truth of things both inclusive and independent of their appearances; the Right or Law, because, containing in itself the effective power of Chit, it works out all things according to their nature with a perfect knowledge and prevision; the Vast, because it is of the nature of an infinite cosmic Intelligence comprehensive of all particular activities.

    Vijnana, as the Truth, leads the divided consciousness back to the One. It also sees the truth of things in the multiplicity. Vijnana is the divine counterpart of the lower divided intelligence.

    These seven powers of Chit are spoken of by the Vedic Rishis as the Waters, they are imaged as currents

* Therefore physical substance is called in the Upanishads Annam, Food. In its origin, however, the word meant simply being or substance.

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flowing into or rising out of the general sea of consciousness in the human being.*

    They are all coexistent in the universe eternally and inseparably, but capable of being involved and remanifested in each other. They are actually involved in physical Nature and must necessarily evolve out of it. They can be withdrawn into pure infinite Being and can again be manifested out of it.

    The in folding and unfolding of the One in the Many and the Many in the One is therefore the law of the eternally recurrent cosmic cycles.

THE VISION OF THE BRAHMAN

    The Upanishad teaches us how to perceive Brahman in the universe and in our self-existence.

    We have to perceive Brahman comprehensively as both the Stable and the Moving. We must see It in eternal and immutable Spirit and in all the changing manifestations of universe and relativity.

    We have to perceive all things in Space and Time, the far and the near, the immemorial Past, the immediate Present, the infinite Future with all their contents and happenings as the One Brahman.

    We have to perceive Brahman as that which exceeds, contains and supports all individual things as well as all universe, transcendentally of Time and Space and Causality. We have to perceive It also as that which lives in and possesses the universe and all it contains.

    This is the transcendental, universal and individual Brahman Lord, Continent and Indwelling Spirit, which is the object of all knowledge. Its realisation is the condition of perfection and the way of Immortality.

* Hridya Samudra, Ocean of the Heart. R. V. IV. 68. S

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The Synthesis of Yoga

INTRODUCTION

III

THE THREEFOLD LIFE

    Nature, then, being an evolution or progressive self-manifestation of an eternal and secret existence, with three successive forms as her three steps of ascent, we have as the condition of all our activities these three mutually interdependent possibilities, the bodily life, the mental existence and the veiled spiritual being which is in the involution the cause of the others and in the evolution their result. Preserving and perfecting the physical, fulfilling the mental, it is Nature’s aim and it should be ours to unveil in the perfected body and mind the transcendent activities of the Spirit. As the mental life does not abrogate but works for the elevation and better utilisation of the bodily, so too the spiritual should not abrogate but transfigure our intellectual, emotional, aesthetic and vital activities.

    For man, the head of terrestrial Nature, the sole earthly frame in which her full evolution is possible, is a triple birth. He has been given a living frame in which the body is the vessel and life the dynamic means of a divine manifestation. His activity is centred in a progressive mind which aims at perfecting itself as well as the house in which it dwells and the means of life that it uses, and is capable of awaking by a progressive self-realisation to its own true nature as a form of the Spirit. He culminates in what he always really was, the illumined and beatific spirit which is intended at last to irradiate life and mind with its now concealed splendours.

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    Since this is the plan of the divine Energy in humanity, the whole method and aim of our existence must work by the interaction of these three elements in the being. As a result of their separate formulation in Nature, man has open to him a choice between three kinds of life, the ordinary material existence, a life of mental activity and progress and the unchanging spiritual beatitude. But he can, as he progresses, combine these three forms, resolve their discords into a harmonious rhythm and so create in himself the whole godhead, the perfect Man.

    In ordinary Nature they have each their own characteristic and governing impulse.

    The characteristic energy of bodily Life is not so much in progress as in persistence, not so much in individual self-enlargement as in self-repetition. There is, indeed, in physical Nature a progression from type to type, from the vegetable to the animal, from the animal to man; for even in inanimate Matter Mind is at work. But once a type is marked off physically, the chief immediate preoccupation of the terrestrial Mother seems to be to keep it in being by a constant reproduction. For Life always seeks immortality; but since individual form is impermanent and only the idea of a form is permanent in the consciousness that creates the universe,—for there it does not perish,—such constant reproduction is the only possible material immortality. Self-preservation, self-repetition, self-multiplication are necessarily, then, the predominant in tints of all material existence.

    The characteristic energy of pure Mind is change and the more it acquires elevation and organisation, the more this law of Mind assumes the aspect of a continual enlargement, improvement and- better arrangement of its gains and so of a continual passage from a smaller and simpler to a larger and more complex perfection. For Mind, unlike bodily life, is infinite in its field, elastic in its expansion, easily variable in its formations. Change, then, self-enlargement and self-improvement are its proper instincts. Its faith is perfectibility, its watchword is progress.

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    The characteristic law of Spirit is self-existent perfection and immutable infinity. It possesses always and in its own right the immortality which is the aim-of Life and the perfection which is the goal of Mind. The attainment of the eternal and the realisation of that which is the same in all things and beyond all things, equally blissful in universe and outside it, untouched by the imperfections and limitations of the forms and activities in which it dwells, are the glory of the spiritual life.

    In each of these forms Nature acts both individually and collectively; for the Eternal affirms Himself equally in the single form and in the group-existence, whether family, clan and nation or groupings dependent on less physical principles or the supreme group of all, our collective humanity. Man also may seek his own individual good from any or all of these spheres of activity, or identify himself in them with the collectivity and live for it, or, rising to a truer perception of this complex universe, harmonise the individual realisation with the collective aim. For as it is the right relation of the soul with the Supreme, while it is in the universe, neither to assert egoistically its separate being nor to blot itself out in the Indefinable, but to realise its unity with the Divine and the world and unite them in the individual, so the right relation of the individual with the collectivity is neither to pursue egoistically his own material or mental progress or spiritual salvation without regard to his fellows, nor for the sake of the community to suppress or maim his proper development, but to sum up in himself all its best and completest possibilities and pour them out by thought, action and all other means on his surroundings so that the whole race may approach nearer to the attainment of its supreme personalities.

    It follows that the object of the material life must be to fulfil, above all things, the vital aim of Nature. The whole aim of the material man is to live, to pass from birth to death with as much comfort or enjoyment as may be on the way, but anyhow to live. He can subordinate this aim, but only to physical Nature’s other instincts, the

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reproduction of the individual and the conservation of the type in the family, class or community. Self, domesticity, the accustomed order of the society and of the nation are the constituents of the material existence. Its immense importance in the economy of Nature is self-evident, and commensurate is the importance of the human type which represents it. He assures her of the safety of the framework she has made and of the orderly continuance and conservation of her past gains.

    But by that very utility such men and the life they lead are condemned to be limited, irrationally conservative and earth-bound. The customary routine, the customary institutions, the inherited or habitual forms of thought,— these things are the life-breath of their nostrils. They admit and jealously defend the changes compelled by the progressive mind in the past, but combat with equal zeal the changes that are being made by it in the present. For to the material man the living progressive thinker is an ideologue, dreamer or madman. The old Semites who stoned the living prophets, and adored their memories when dead, were the very incarnation of this instinctive and unintelligent principle in Nature. In the ancient Indian distinction between the once born and the twice born, it is to this material man that the former description can be applied. He does Nature’s inferior works; he assures the basis for her higher activities ; but not to him easily are opened the glories of her second birth.

    Yet he admits so much of spirituality as has been enforced on his customary ideas by the great religious outbursts of the past and he makes in his scheme of society a place, venerable though not often effective, for the priest or the learned theologian who can be trusted to provide him with a safe and ordinary spiritual pabulum. But to the man who would assert for himself the liberty of spiritual experience and the spiritual life, he assigns, if he admits him at all, not the vestment of the priest but the robe of the Sannyasin. Outside society let him exercise his dangerous freedom. So he may even serve as a human lightning-rod receiving the electricity of the Spirit and turning it away from the social edifice.

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    Nevertheless it is possible to make the material man and his life moderately progressive by imprinting on the material mind the custom of progress, the habit of conscious change, the fixed idea of progression as a law of life. The creation by this means of progressive societies in Europe is one of the greatest triumphs of Mind over Matter. But the physical Nature has its revenge; for the progress made tends to be of the grosser and more outward kind and its attempts at a higher or a more rapid movement bring about great wear nesses, swift exhaustions, startling recoils.

    It is possible also to give the material man and his life a moderate spirituality by accustoming him to regard in a religious spirit all the institutions of life and its customary activities. The creation of such spiritualised communities in the East has been one of the greatest triumphs of Spirit over Matter. Yet here, too, there is a defect; for this often tends only to the creation of a religious temperament, the most outward form of spirituality. Its higher manifestations, even the most splendid and puissant, either merely increase the number of souls drawn out of social life and so impoverish it or disturb the society for a while by a momentary elevation. The truth is that neither the mental effort nor the spiritual impulse can suffice, divorced from each other, to overcome the immense resistance of material Nature. She demands their alliance in a complete effort before she will suffer a complete change in humanity. But, usually, these two great agents are unwilling to make to each other the necessary concessions.

    The mental life concentrates on the aesthetic, the ethical and the intellectual activities. Essential mentality is idealistic and a seeker after perfection. The subtle self, the brilliant Atman, * is ever a dreamer. A dream of perfect beauty, perfect conduct, perfect Truth, whether seeking new forms of the Eternal or revitalising the old,

* Who dwells in Dream, the inly conscious, the enjoyer of a bstractions, the Brilliant. Mandurya Upanishad. 4.

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is the very soul of pure mentality. But it knows not how to deal with the resistance of Matter. There it is hampered and inefficient, works by bungling experiments and has either to withdraw from the struggle or submit to the grey actuality. Or else, by studying the material life and accepting the conditions of the contest, it may succeed, but only in imposing temporarily some artificial system which infinite Nature either rends and casts aside or disfigures out of recognition or by withdrawing her assent leaves as the corpse of a dead ideal. Few and far between have been those realisations of the dreamer in Man which the world has gladly accepted, looks back to with a fond memory and seeks, in its elements, to cherish.

    When the gulf between actual life and the temperament of the thinker is too great, we see as the result a sort of withdrawing of the Mind from life in order to act with a greater freedom in its own sphere. The poet living among his brilliant visions, the artist absorbed in his art, the philosopher thinking out the problems of the intellect in his solitary chamber, the scientist, the scholar caring only for their studies and their experiments, were often in former days, are even now not unoften the Sannyasins of the intellect. To the work they have done for humanity, all its past bears record.

    But such seclusion is justified only by some special activity. Mind finis fully its force and action only when it casts itself upon life and accepts equally its possibilities and its resistances as the means of a greater self-perfection. In the struggle with the difficulties of the material world the ethical development of the individual is firmly shaped and the great schools of conduct are formed; by contact with the facts of life Art attains to vitality, Thought assures its abstractions, the generalisations, of the philosopher base themselves on a stable foundation of science and experience.

    This mixing with life may, however, be pursued for the sake of the individual mind and with an entire indifference to the forms of the material existence or the uplifting of the race. This indifference is seen at its highest in the

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Epicurean discipline and is not entirely absent from the Stoic ; and even altruism does the works of compassion more often for its own sake than for the sake of the world it helps. But this too is a limited fulfilment. The progressive mind is seen at its noblest when it strives to elevate the whole race to its own level whether by sowing broadcast the image of its own thought and fulfilment or by changing the material life of the race into fresh forms, religious, intellectual, social or political, intended to represent more nearly that ideal of truth, beauty, justice, righteousness with which the man’s own soul is illumined. Failure in such a field matters little; for the mere attempt is dynamic and creative. The struggle of Mind to elevate life is the promise and condition of the conquest of life by that which is higher even than Mind.

    That highest thing, the spiritual existence, is concerned with what is eternal but not therefore entirely aloof from the transient. For the spiritual man the mind’s dream of perfect beauty is realised in an eternal love, beauty and delight that has no dependence and is equal behind all objective appearances; its dream of perfect Truth in the supreme, self-existent, self-apparent and eternal Verity which never varies, but explains and is the secret of all variations and the goal of all progress; its dream of perfect action in the omnipotent and self-guiding Law that is inherent for ever in all things and translates itself here in the rhythm of the worlds. What is fugitive vision or constant effort of creation in the brilliant Self is an eternally existing Reality in the Self that knows* and is the Lord.

    But if it is often difficult for the mental life to accommodate itself to the dully resistant material activity, how much more difficult must it seem for the spiritual existence to live on in a world that appears full not of the Truth but of every lie and illusion, not of Love

* The Unified, in whom conscious thought is concentrated, who is nil delight and enjoyer of delight, the Wise…He is the Lord of all, the Omniscient, the inner Guide. Mandukya Upanishad. 5. 6.

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and Beauty but of an encompassing discord and ugliness, not of the Law of Truth but of victorious selfishness and sin? Therefore the spiritual life tends easily in the saint and Sannyasin to withdraw from the material existence and reject it either wholly and physically or in the spirit. It sees this world as the kingdom of evil or of ignorance and the eternal and divine either in a far-off heaven or beyond world and life. It separates itself from that impurity; it asserts the spiritual reality in a spotless isolation. This withdrawal renders an invaluable service to the material life itself by forcing it to regard and even to bow down to something that is the direct negation of its own petty ideals, sordid cares and egoistic self-content.

    But the work in the world of so supreme a power as spiritual force cannot be thus limited. The spiritual life also can return upon the material and use it as a means of its own greater fullness. Refusing to be blinded by the dualities, the appearances, it can seek in all appearances whatsoever the vision of the same Lord, the same eternal Truth, Beauty, Love, Delight. The Vedantic formula of the Self in all things, all things in the Self and all things as becomings of the Self is the key to this richer and all-embracing Yoga.

    But the spiritual life, like the mental, may thus make use of this outward existence for the benefit of the individual with a perfect indifference to any collective uplifting of the merely symbolic world which it uses. Since the Eternal is for ever the same in all things and all things the same to the Eternal, since the exact mode of action and the result are of no importance compared with the working out in oneself of the one great realisation, this spiritual indifference accepts no matter what environment, no matter what action, dispassionately, prepared to retire as soon as its own supreme end is realised. It is so that many have understood the ideal of the Gita. Or else the inner love and bliss may pour itself out on the world in good deeds, in service, in compassion, the inner Truth in the giving of knowledge, without therefore attempting the transformation

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of a world which must by its inalienable nature remain a battle-field of the dualities, of sin and virtue, of truth and error, of joy and suffering.

    But if Progress also is one of the chief terms of world-existence and a progressive manifestation of the divine the true sense of Nature, this limitation also is invalid. It is possible for the spiritual life in the world, and it is its real mission, to change the material life into its own image, the image of the Divine. Therefore, besides the great solitaries who have sought and attained their self-liberation, we have the great spiritual teachers who have also liberated others and, supreme of all, the great dynamic souls who, feeling themselves stronger in the might of the Spirit than all the forces of the material life banded together, have thrown themselves upon the world, grappled with it in a loving wrestle and striven to compel its consent to its own transfiguration. Ordinarily, the effort is concentrated on a mental and moral change in humanity, but it may extend itself also to the alteration of the forms of our life and its institutions so that they too may be a better mould for the in pouring of the Spirit. These attempts have been the supreme landmarks in the progressive development of human ideals and the divine preparation of the race. Every one of them, whatever its outward results, has left Earth more capable of Heaven and quickened in its tardy movements the evolutionary Yoga of Nature.

    In India, for the last thousand years and more, the spiritual life and the material have existed side by side to the exclusion of the progressive mind. Spirituality has made terms for itself with Matter by renouncing the attempt at general progress. It has obtained from society the right of free spiritual development for all who assume some distinctive symbol, such as the garb of the Sannyasin, the recognition of that life as man’s goal and those who live it as worthy of an absolute reverence, and the casting of society itself into such a religious mould that its most customary acts should be accompanied by a formal reminder of the spiritual symbolism of life and its

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ultimate destination. On the other hand, there was conceded to society the right of inertia and immobile self-conservation. The concession destroyed much of the value of the terms. The religious mould being fixed, the formal reminder tended to become a routine and to lose its living sense. The constant attempts to change the mould by new sects and religions ended only in a new routine or a modification of the old; for the saving element of the free and active mind had been exiled. The material life, handed over to the Ignorance, the purposeless and endless duality, became a leaden and dolorous yoke from which flight was the only escape.

    The schools of Indian Yoga lent themselves to the compromise. Individual perfection or liberation was made the aim, seclusion of some kind from the ordinary activities the condition, the renunciation of life the culmination. The teacher gave his knowledge only to a small circle of disciples. Or if a wider movement was attempted, it was still the release of the individual soul that remained the aim. The pact with an immobile society was, for the most part, observed

    The utility of the compromise in the then actual state of the world cannot be doubted. It secured in India a society which lent itself to the preservation and the worship of spirituality, a country apart in which as in a fortress the highest spiritual ideal could maintain itself in its most absolute purity un over powered by the siege of the forces around it. But it was a compromise, not an absolute victory. The material life lost the divine impulse to growth, the spiritual preserved by isolation its height and purity, but sacrificed its full power and serviceableness to the world. Therefore, in the divine Providence the country of the Yogins and the Sannyasins has been forced into a strict and imperative contact with the very element it had rejected, the element of the progressive Mind, so that it might recover what was now wanting to it.

    We have to recognise once more that the individual exists not in himself alone but in the collectivity and that

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individual perfection and liberation are not the whole sense of God’s intention in the world. The free use of our liberty includes also the liberation of others and of mankind; the perfect utility of our perfection is, having realised in ourselves the divine symbol, to reproduce, multiply and ultimately universalise it in others.

    Therefore from a concrete view of human life in its threefold potentialities we come to the same conclusion that we had drawn from an observation of Nature in her general workings and the three steps of her evolution. And we begin to perceive a complete aim for our synthesis of Yoga.

    Spirit is the crown of universal existence ; Matter is its basis; Mind is the link between the two. Spirit is that which is eternal; Mind and Matter are its workings. Spirit is that which is concealed and has to be revealed : mind and body are the means by which it seeks to reveal itself. Spirit is the image of the Lord of the Yoga ; mind and body are the means He has provided for reproducing that image in phenomenal existence. All Nature is an attempt at a progressive revelation of the concealed Truth, a more and more successful reproduction of the divine image.

    But what Nature aims at for the mass in a slow evolution, Yoga effects for the individual by a rapid revolution. It works by a quickening of all her energies, a sublimation of all her faculties. While she develops the spiritual life with difficulty and has constantly to fall back from it for the sake of her lower realisations, the sublimated force, the concentrated method of Yoga can attain directly and carry with it the perfection of the mind and even, if she will, the perfection of the body. Nature seeks the divine in her own symbols: Yoga goes beyond Nature to the Lord of Nature, beyond universe to the Transcendent and can return with the transcendent light and power, with the fiat of the Omnipotent.

    But their aim is one in the end. The generalisation of Yoga in humanity must be the last victory of Nature over her own delays and concealments. Even as now by

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the progressive mind in Science she seeks to make all mankind fit for the full development of the mental life, so by Yoga must she inevitably seek to make all mankind fit for the higher evolution, the second birth, the spiritual existence. And as the mental life uses and perfects the material, so will the spiritual use and perfect the material and the mental existence as the instruments of a divine self-expression. The ages when that is accomplished, are the legendary Satya or Krita Yugas, the ages of the Truth manifested in the symbol, of the great work done when Nature in mankind, illumined, satisfied and blissful, rests in the culmination of her endeavour.

    It is for man to know her meaning, no longer misunderstanding, vilifying or misusing the universal Mother, and to aspire always by her mightiest means to her highest ideal.

*’Satya means Truth Krita, effected or completed.

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The Eternal Wisdom

BOOK I

THE COD OF ALL: THE COD WHO IS IN ALL

THE UNKNOWABLE DIVINE

1Who knoweth these things ? Who can speak of them ?

2 Things in their fundamental nature can neither be named nor explained. They cannot be expressed adequately in any form of language.

3 Trying to give an idea of the Ineffable by the help of philosophical learning is like trying to give an idea

4 of Banares by the aid of a map or pictures.—All the sacred Scriptures of the world have become corrupted, but the Ineffable or Absolute has never been corrupted, because no one has ever been able to express It in

5 human speech.—Words fail us when we seek, not to express Him who Is, but merely to attain to the ex-

6 pression of the powers that environ Him.—He is pure

7 of all name.—The word "He" diminishes Him.

8 But call Him by what name you will; for to those

9 who know, He is the possessor of all names.—Numerous are the names of the Ineffable and infinite the forms which lead towards Him. Under whatever name or in whatever form you desire to enter into relation with him, it is in that form and under that

10 name that you will see Him.—Would you call Him Destiny? You will not be wrong. Providence? You

11 will say well. Nature? That too you may.—The Being that is one, sages speak of in many terms.—

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12 I do not believe that any name, however complex, is sufficient to designate the principle of all Majesty.—

13 That which is Permanent, possess no attribute by which one can speak of It, but the term Permanent

14 is all that can be expressed by language.—The Permanent is neither existence, nor what is at once existence and non-existence; it is neither unity, nor plurality, nor what is at once unity and plurality.

* * *

15 Something beyond our power of discrimination existed before Heaven and Earth. How profound is its calm ! How absolute its immateriality ! It alone exists and does not change; It penetrates all and It does not perish. It may be regarded as the mother of

16 but to give it a name I call It Tao.—There is no

17 suitable name for the eternal Tao.—The Tao which can be expressed is not the eternal Tao, the name

18 which can be named is not the eternal Name.—The man who knows the Tao, does not speak; he who

19 speaks, knows It not.—The eternal Tao has no name ;

when the Tao divided Itself, then It had a name.

* * *

20 If thou say, ”Who is the Ancient and most Holy ?" come then and see,—it is the supreme head, unknowable, inaccessible, indefinable, and it contains all.—

21 The name of the Ancient and most Holy is unknown

22 able to all and inaccessible.—And it is inaccessible,

23 unknowable and beyond comprehension for all.—It is truly the supreme Light, inaccessible and unknowable, from which all other lamps receive their flame and their splendour.

* * *

24  That which has neither body, nor appearance, nor form, nor matter, nor can be seized by our senses, That which cannot be expressed,-this is god.

25 It is not today nor tomorrow; who knoweth That which is Supreme? When It is approached,

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26 It vanishes.—Is there a single man who can see what

27 the Sage cannot even conceive?—No man hath seen

28 God at any time.—If He were apparent, He would

29 not be.—Yes, His very splendour is the cause of His invisibility.

30 The more thou knowest God, the more thou wilt recognise that thou canst not name Him, nor. say

3t what He is.—To comprehend God is difficult, to

32 speak of Him impossible.—Thinkest thou that thou canst write the name of God on Time ? No more is

33 it pronounced in Eternity.—He who speaks best of God is he who, in the presence of the plenitude of

31 the interior riches, knows best how to be silent.—O Inexpressible, Ineffable, whom silence alone can name !

35 I salute It, this supreme Deity, which is beyond the senses, which mind and speech cannot define and which can be discerned only by the mind of the true sage.

THE DIVINE ESSENCE

L If thou canst comprehend God, thou shaft comprehend the Beautiful and the Good, the pure radiance, the incomparable beauty, the good that has not its

2 like.—The essence of God, if at all God has an essence, is Beauty.

3-4; God is Light.—He is the supreme Light hidden under every veil.

5 His name is conscious spirit, His abode is conscious spirit and He, the Lord, is all conscious spirit.—

6 Knowledge belongs to the very essence of God, if at

7 all God has an essence.—God is not knowledge, but the cause of Knowledge; He is not mind, but the cause of mind; He is not Light, but the cause of

* 1) Rig Veda. — 2) Aswaghosha. -3) Ramakrishna.— 4 ) id.— 6) Philo. —6 ) The Bab —7) Tolstoi.-8) Baha-ullah.—9) Rama- krishna–10) Seneca.—11) Rig Veda. —12) Hermes.—13) Aswaghosha.— 14) id -15) Lao-tse.—16) id.—17) id.- 18 ) id.—19 ) id.—20 ) The Zohar.—21) i, d—22) id.—23) id.—24) Hermes. — 25) Rig Veda.–26 ) Tseu-tse. —27) John.—i.’8 ) Hermes.—29 ) Baha-ullah. 30 ) Ange— lus Silesius. 31 ) Hermes.—32 ) Angelus Silesius. — 83 ) Eckhart.— 34) Hermes.— 35 ) Vishnu Purana.

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8 Light.—He is the principle of supreme Wisdom.—

9 God is spirit, fire, being and light, and yet He is not

10 all this.—He is an eternal silence.

11 No name is applicable to God, only He is called

12 Love,—so great and precious a thing is Love.—God

13 is Love.—Love which overflows on every side, which is found in the centre of the stars, which is in the depths of the Ocean,—Love whose perfume declares itself everywhere, which nourishes all the kingdoms of Nature and which maintains equilibrium and

14 harmony in the whole universe.—Victory to the Essence of all wisdom, to the unmoving, to the Imperishable ! Victory to the Eternal, to the essence of visible and invisible beings, to Him who is at the same time the cause and the effect of the universe.

15 He who contemplates the supreme Truth, contemplates the perfect Essence; only the vision of the spirit can see this nature of ineffable perfection.

THE DIVINE BECOMING 

1 God or the Good, what is it but the existence of

2 that which yet is not ?—The supreme Brahman without beginning cannot be called either Being or

3 Non-being.—It is that which is and that which is

4 not.—It is Itself that which was and that which is

5 yet to be, the Eternal.—It is He who engenders Himself perpetually……the Lord of existences and of non-existences.

6 His creation never had a beginning and will never

7 have an end.—Becoming is the mode of activity of

8 the uncreated God.—In the bosom of Time God without beginning becomes what He has never been

9 in all eternity.—Time is nothing else than the uninterrupted succession of the acts of divine Energy,

* 1) Hermes.—2) id. – 3) John.- 4) The Zohar. – b) Ramakrishna— 6jHeriues__7) id.-8; The Zohar.—9)Angclus Silesius. 10) id.— 11)U.— 12) John. —13) Antoine the Healer.—14) Vishnu Purana. —15) Buddhist Meditations from the Japanese.

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one of the attributes or one of the workings of the Deity. Space is the extension of His soul; it is His unfolding in length, breadth and height; it is the simultaneous existence of His productions and manifestations.

10 As from a fire that is burning brightly sparks of a like nature are produced in their thousands, so from the Unmoving manifold becomings are born and

11 thither also they wend.—The Tao is diffused in the universe. All existences return to It as streams and mountain rivulets return to the rivers and the seas.

12 Even as the sun rises to us and sets, so also for the creation there are alternations of existence and

13 death.—At the close of the great Night…He whom the spirit alone can perceive, who escapes from the organs of sense, who is without visible parts, Eternal, the soul of all existences, whom none can comprehend, outspread His own splendours.

GOD IN ALL *

1 For what is God ? He is the soul of the universe.—

2 He is the soul of all conscious creatures, who constitutes all things in this world, those which are beyond our senses and those which fall within their range.—

3 For of all things He is the Lord and Father and Source, and the life and power and light and Intel-

4; ligence and mind.—He is everywhere in the world and stands with all in His embrace.

5 There is not a body, however small, which docs not

6 enclose a portion of the divine substance.—For all is 7-8 full of God.—All this is full of that Being.—The fire

divine burns indivisible and ineffable and fills all the abysses of the world.

+ 1) Hermes.—2)Bhagavad Gita.—3) Hermes.— 4)Kaivalya Upanishad— 5) Egyptian Funeral Rites. – 6) The I ab.— 7) Hermes.— 8)Angtdus Silesius. — 9) Giordano Bruno. — 10) Mundaka Upanishad.- 11) Las-tsc.— 12) Harivansa. —13) Laws of Manu.

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9 All the aspects of the sea are not different from the sea; nor is there any difference between the universe.

10 and its supreme Principle.—In truth there is no difference between the word of God and the world.

11 12 God and Nature are one.—That which is most

subtle in matter is air, in air the soul, in the soul

13 intelligence, in intelligence God.—Material energy in Matter, physical energy in the body, essential energy in the essence, all that in its entirety is God and in the universe there is nothing which is not God.

14 In the universe there is nothing which God is not. 15-lr5 God is all and all is God.—Heaven and Earth are

only a talisman which conceals the Deity ; without It they are but a vain name. Know then that the visible world and the invisible are God Himself. There is only He and all that is, is He. 17 18 He is all things and all things are one.—Just as unity is in each of the numbers, so God is one in all things.

19 All that is one and one that is all.

* * *

20 He who is alone untreated is then by that very fact unrevealed and invisible, but, manifesting all things, He reveals Himself in them and by them.—

21 All reflects Him in His shining and by His light all this is luminous.

22 As the principle of Fire is one, but having entered this world assumes shapes that correspond to each different form, so the one Self in all existences assumes shapes that correspond to each form of things.

23 —He has a form and He is as if He had no form. He has taken a form in order to be the essence of all.

24 —The devotee who has seen the One in only one of his aspects, knows Him in that aspect alone. But he who has seen Him in numerous aspects is alone in a position to say; " All these forms are those of the One and the One is multiform." He is without form and in form, and numberless are His forms which we do not know.

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23 Such is God, superior to His name, invisible and apparent, who reveals Himself to the spirit, who reveals Himself to the eyes, who has no body and who has many bodies or rather all bodies; for there is nothing which is not He and all is He alone.

* * *

26 God invisible,…say not so; for who is more apparent than He ? That is the goodness of God, that is His virtue, to be apparent in all.

27 If thou comprehend Him, what seems invisible to

28 most, will be for thee utterly apparent.—If thou canst, thou mayst see Him by the eyes of the intelligence, for the Lord is not a miser of Himself; He reveals Himself in the whole universe.

29 Thou shalt meet Him everywhere, thou shalt see Him everywhere, in the place and at the hour when thou least expectant it, in waking and in sleep, on the sea, in thy travels, by day, by night, in thy speaking and in thy keeping of silence. For there is nothing that is not the image of God.

30 Raise thyself above every height, descend below every depth, assemble in thyself all the sensations of created things, of water, of fire, of the dry, of the moist; suppose that thou art at once everywhere, on earth, in the sea, in the heavens, that thou wast never born, that thou art still in the womb, that thou art young, old, dead, beyond death ; comprehend all at once, times, spaces, things, qualities, and thou shalt

31 comprehend God.—Surpass all bodies, traverse all times, become eternity, and thou shalt comprehend God.

* 1) Seneca.—2) Aswaghosha.— 3) Hermes.- 4) Bhagavad Gita.— 5) Giordano larine.—G) llamas. — 7) Swetacwatarea Upanishad.— 9) Iambi ich us.—9) Chhandogya U pa rush ad.— 10) Balia-ulluh tab.—11) Spinoza.— 12) Hermes. – 13) id!- 14) id. —15) lick hurt. 1(5) Farid-ud-din-atria.— 17) The Zohar. 18) Angelus Silesius—19) Harms. — UO ) id. — 21) Katha Upanishad.— 22) id. 23) The Zohar.— 24) Ramakrishna.—15) Hermes.— 26) id.—27) id—28) id. – 29) id.—) id.—Ul ) id.—

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The Question of the Month

What exactly is meant by meditation in Yoga? And what should be its objects ?

    The difficulty our correspondent finds is in an apparent conflict of authorities, as sometimes meditation is recommended in the form of a concentrated succession of thoughts on a single subject, sometimes in the exclusive concentration of the mind on a single image, word or idea, a fixed contemplation rather than meditation. The choice between these two methods and others, for there are others, depends on the object we have in view in Yoga.

    The thinking mind is the one instrument we possess at present by which we can arrive at a conscious self-organisation of our internal existence. But in most men thought is a confused drift of ideas, sensations and impressions which arrange themselves as best they can under the stress of a succession of immediate interests and utilities. In accordance with the general method of Nature much is used as waste material and only a small portion selected for definite and abiding formations. And as in physical Nature, so here the whole process is governed by laws which we rather suffer than use or control.

    The concentration of thought is used by the Rajayogins to gain freedom and control over the workings of mind, just as the processes of governed respiration and fixed posture are used by the Hathayogins to gain freedom and control over the workings of the body and the vital functions.

    By meditation we correct the restless wandering of the mind and train it like an athlete to economies all its energies and fix them on the attainment of some desirable knowledge or self-discipline. This is done normally by men in ordinary life, but Yoga takes this higher working of Nature and carries it to its full possibilities. It takes note of the fact that by fixing the mind luminously on a single object of thought, we awaken a response in general

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Consciousness which proceeds to satisfy the mind by pouring into it knowledge about that object or even reveals to us its central or its essential truth. We awaken also a response of Power which gives us in various ways an increasing mastery over the workings of that on which we meditate or enables us to create it and make it active in ourselves. Thus by fixing the mind on the idea of Divine Love, we can come to the knowledge of that principle and its workings, put ourselves into communion with it, create it in ourselves and impose its law on the heart and the senses.

    In Yoga concentration is used also for another object,—to retire from the waking state, which is a limited and superficial condition of our consciousness, into the depths of our being measured by various states of Samadhi. For this process contemplation of the single object, idea or name is more powerful than the succession of concentrated thoughts. The latter, however, is capable, by bringing us into indirect but waking communion with the deeper states of being, of preparing an integral Samadhi. Its characteristic utility, however, is the luminous activity of formative thought brought under the control of the Purusha by which the rest of the consciousness is governed, filled with higher and wider ideas, changed rapidly into the mould of those ideas and so perfected. Other and greater utilities lie beyond, but they belong to a later stage of self-development.

    In the Yoga of Devotion, both processes are equally used to concentrate the whole being or to saturate the whole nature with thoughts of the object of devotion, its forms, its essence, its attributes and the joys of adoration and union. Thought is then made the servant of Love, a preparer of Beatitude. In the Yoga of knowledge meditation is similarly used for discrimination of the True from the apparent, the Self from its forms, and concentrated contemplation for communion and entry of the individual consciousness into the Brahman.

    An integral Yoga would harmonise all these aims. It would have also at its disposal other processes for the utilisation of thought and the mastery of the mind.

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