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No. 4
CHAPTER IV REALITY OMNIPRESENT If one know Him as Brahman the Non-Being, he becomes merely the non-existent. H one knows that Brahman Is, then is he known as the real in existence. Taittiriya Upanishad.
Since, then, we admit both the claim of the pure Spirit to manifest in us its absolute freedom and the claim of universal Matter to be the mould and condition of our manifestation, we have to find a truth that can entirely reconcile these antagonists and can give to both their due portion in Life and their due justification in Thought, amercing neither of its rights, denying in neither the sovereign truth from which even its errors, even theexclusi-veness of its exaggerations draws so constant a strength. For wherever there is an extreme statement that makes such a powerful appeal to the human mind, we may be
sours that we are standing in the presence of no mere error, superstition or hallucination, but of some sovereign fact disguised which demands our fealty and will avenge itself if denied or excluded. Herein lies the difficulty of a satisfying solution and the source of that lack of finality which pursues all mere compromises between Spirit and Matter. A compromise is a bargain, a transaction of interests between two conflicting powers ; it is not a true reconciliation. True reconciliation proceeds always by a mutual comprehension leading to some sort of intimate
Page-193 oneness. It is therefore through the utmost possible unification of Spirit and Matter that we shall best arrive at their reconciling truth and so at some strongest foundation for a reconciling practice in the inner life of the individual and his outer existence. We have found already in the cosmic consciousness a meeting-place where Matter becomes real to Spirit, Spirit becomes real to Matter. For in the cosmic consciousness Mind and Life are intermediaries and no longer, as they seem to the ordinary egoistic mentality, agents of separation, fomenters of an artificial quarrel between the positive and negative principles of the same unknowable Reality. Attaining to the cosmic consciousness Mind, illuminated by a knowledge that perceives at once the truth of Unity and the truth of Multiplicity and seizes on the formulae of their interaction, finds its own discords at once explained and reconciled by the divine Harmony ; satisfied, it consents to become the agent of that supreme union between God and Life towards which we tend. Matter-reveals itself to the realising thought and to the subtilised senses as the figure and body of Spirit,—Spirit in its self-formative extension. Spirit reveals itself through the same consenting agents as the soul, the truth, the essence of Matter. Both admit and confess each other as divine, real and essentially one. Mind and Life are disclosed in that illumination as at once figures and instruments of the supreme Conscious Being by which It extends and houses Itself in material form and in that form unveils Itself to Its multiple centres of consciousness. Mind attains its self-fulfilment when it becomes a pure mirror of the Truth of Being which expresses itself in the symbols of the universe; Life, when it consciously lends its energies to the perfect self-figuration of the Divine in ever new forms and activities of the universal existence.
In the light of this conception we can perceive the possibility of a divine life for man in the world which will at once justify Science by disclosing a living sense and intelligible aim for the cosmic and the terrestrial evolution and realise by the transfiguration of the human
Page-194 soul into the divine the great ideal dream of all high religions. But what then of that silent Self, inactive, pure, self-existent, self-enjoying, which presented itself to us as the abiding justification of the ascetic ? Here also harmony and not irreconcilable opposition must be the illuminative truth. The silent and the active Brahman are not different, opposite and irreconcilable entities, the one denying, the other affirming a cosmic illusion ; they are one Brahman in two aspects, positive and negative, and each is necessary to the other. It is out of this Silence that the Word which creates the worlds for ever proceeds; for the Word expresses that which is self-hidden in the Silence. It is an eternal passivity which makes possible the perfect freedom and omnipotence of an eternal divine activity in innumerable cosmic systems. For the becoming of that activity derive their energies and their illimitable potency of variation and harmony from the impartial support and the infinite fecundity of the immutable Being.
Man, too, becomes perfect only when he has found within himself that absolute calm and passivity of the Brahman and supports by it with the same divine tolerance and the same divine bliss a free and inexhaustible activity. Those who have thus possessed the Calm within can perceive always welling out from its silence the perennial supply of the energies that work in the universe. It is not, therefore, the; truth of the Silence to say that it is in its nature a rejection of the cosmic activity. The apparent incompatibility of the two states is an error of the limited Mind which, accustomed to trenchant oppositions of affirmation and denial and passing suddenly from one pole to the other, is unable to conceive of a comprehensive consciousness vast and strong enough to include both in a simultaneous embrace. The Silence does not reject the world ; it sustains it. Or rather it supports with an equal impartiality the activity and the withdrawal from the activity and approves also the reconciliation by which the soul remains free and still even while it lends itself to all action.
Page-195 But, still, there is the absolute withdrawal, there is the Non-Being. Out of the Non-Being, says the ancient Scripture, Being appeared.* Then into the Non-Being it must surely sink again. If the infinite indiscriminate Existence permits all possibilities of discrimination and multiple realisation, does not the Non-Being at least, as primal state and sole constant reality, negate and reject all possibility of a real universe? The Nihil of certain Buddhist schools would then be the true ascetic solution the Self, like the ego, would be only an ideative formation by an illusory phenomenal consciousness. But again we find that we are being misled by words, deceived by the trenchant oppositions of our limited mentality with its fond reliance on verbal distinctions as if they perfectly represented ultimate truths and its rendering of our supra-mental experiences in the sense of those intolerant distinctions. Non-Being is only a word. When we examine the fact it represents, we can no longer be sure that absolute non-existence has any better chance than the infinite Self of being more than an ideative formation of the mind. We really mean by this Nothing something beyond the last term to which we can reduce our purest conception and our most abstract or subtle experience of actual being as we know or conceive it while in this universe. This Nothing then is merely a something beyond positive conception. We erect a fiction of nothingness in order to overpass, by the method of total exclusion, all that we can know and consciously are. And when we say that out of Non-Being Being appeared, we perceive that we are speaking in terms of Time about that which is beyond Time. For what was that portentous date in the history of eternal Nothing on which Being was born out of it or when will come that other date equally formidable on which an unreal all will relapse into the perpetual void? Sat and Asat, if they
• In the beginning all this was the Non-Being. It was thence that
Being was born. Taittiriya Upanishad II. 7
Page-196 have both to be affirmed, must be conceived as if they obtained simultaneously. They permit each other even though they refuse to mingle. Both, since we must speak in terms of Time, are eternal. And who shall persuade eternal Being that it does not really exist and only eternal non-Being is ? In such a negation of all experience how shall we find the solution that explains all experience? Pure Being is the affirmation by the Unknowable of Itself as the base of all cosmic existence. We give the name of Non-Being to a contrary affirmation of Its freedom from all cosmic existence,—freedom, that is to say, from all positive terms of actual existence which consciousness in the universe can formulate to itself, even from the most abstract, even from the most transcendent. It does not deny them as a real expression of Itself, but It denies Its limitation by any expression whatsoever. The Non-Being permits the Being, even as the Silence permits the Activity. By this simultaneous negation and affirmation, not mutually destructive, but complementary to each other like all contraries, the simultaneous awareness of conscious Self-being as a reality and the Unknowable beyond as the same Reality becomes realisable to the awakened human soul. Thus was it possible for the Buddha to attain the state of Nirvana and yet act puissant in the world, impersonal in his inner consciousness, in his action the most powerful personality that we know of as having lived and produced results upon earth.
When we ponder on these things, we begin to perceive how feeble in their self-assertive violence and how confusing in their misleading distinctness are the words that we use. We begin also to perceive that the limitations we impose on the Brahman arise from a narrowness of experience in the individual soul which concentrates itself on one aspect of the Unknowable and proceeds forthwith to deny or disparage all the rest. We tend always to translate too rigidly what we can conceive or know of the Absolute into the terms of our own particular relativity. We affirm the One and Identical by passionately discriminating and asserting the egoism of our own opinions
Page-197 and partial experiences against the opinions and partial experiences of others. It is wiser to wait, to learn, to grow, and, since we are obliged for the sake of our self-perfection to speak of these things which no human speech can express, to search for the widest, the most flexible, the most catholic affirmation possible and found on it the largest and most comprehensive harmony. We recognise, then, that it is possible for the consciousness in the individual to enter into a state in which relative existence appears to be dissolved and even Self seems to be an inadequate conception. It is possible to pass into a Silence beyond the Silence. But this is not the whole of our ultimate experience, nor the single and all-excluding truth. For we find that this Nirvana, this self-extinction, while it gives an absolute peace and freedom to the soul within is yet consistent in practice with a desireless, but effective action without. This possibility of an entire motionless impersonality and void Calm within doing outwardly the works of the eternal verities, Love, Truth and Righteousness, was perhaps the real gist of the Buddha’s teaching,—this superiority to ego and to the chain of personal workings and to the identification with mutable form and idea, not the petty ideal of an escape from the trouble and suffering of the physical birth. In any case, as the perfect man would combine in himself the silence and the activity, so also would the completely conscious soul reach back to the absolute freedom of the Non-Being without therefore losing its hold on Existence and the universe. It would thus reproduce in itself perpetually the eternal miracle of the divine Existence, in the universe, yet always beyond it and even, as it were, beyond itself. The opposite experience could only be a concentration of mentality in the individual upon Non-existence with the result of an oblivion and personal withdrawal from a cosmic activity still and always proceeding in the consciousness of the Eternal Being.
Thus, after reconciling Spirit and Matter in the cosmic consciousness, we perceive the reconciliation, in
Page-198 the transcendental consciousness, of the final assertion of all and its negation. We discover that all affirmations are assertions of status or activity in the Unknowable; all the corresponding negations are assertions of Its freedom both from and in that status or activity. The Unknowable is Something to us supreme, wonderful and ineffable which continually formulates Itself to our consciousness and continually escapes from the formulation It has made. This it docs not as some malicious spirit or freakish magician leading us from falsehood to greater falsehood and so to a final negation of all things, but as even here the Wise beyond our wisdom guiding us from reality to ever profounder and vaster reality until we find the profoundest and vastest of which we are capable. An omnipresent reality is the Brahman, not an omnipresent cause of persistent illusions.
If we thus accept a positive basis for our harmony— and on what other can harmony be founded?—the various conceptual formulations of the Unknowable, each of them
repenting a truth beyond conception, must be understood as far as
possible in their relation to each other and in their effect upon life, not
separately, not exclusively, not so affirmed as to destroy or unduly diminish
all other affirmation The real Monism, the true Adwaita, is that which admits
all things as the one Brahman and does not seek to bisect Its existence into two
incompatible entities, an eternal Truth and an eternal Falsehood, Brahman and
not Brahman, Self and not Self, a real Self and an unreal, yet perpetual Maya.
If it be true that the Self alone exists, it must be also true that all is the
Self. And it this Self, God or Brahman is no helpless state, no bounded power,
no limited personality, but the self conscient All, there must be some good and inherent reason in it for the manifestation, to discover which we must proceed on the hypothesis of some potency, some wisdom, some truth of being in all that is manifested. The discord and apparent evil of the world must in their sphere be admitted, but not accepted as our conquerors. The deepest instinct of humanity seeks always and seeks wisely wisdom
Page-199 as the last word of the universal manifestation, not an eternal mockery and illusion,—a secret and finally triumphant good, not an all-creative and invincible evil,—an ultimate victory and fulfilment, not the disappointed recoil of the soul from its great adventure. For we cannot suppose that the sole Entity is compelled by something outside or other than Itself; since no such thing exists. Nor can we suppose that It submits unwillingly to something partial within Itself which is hostile to its whole Being, denied by It and yet too strong for It; for this would be only to erect in other language the same contradiction of an All and something other than the All. Even if we say that the universe exists merely because the Self in its absolute impartiality tolerates all things alike, viewing with indifference all actualities and all possibilities, yet is there something that wills the manifestation and supports it, and this cannot be something other than the All. Brahman is indivisible in all things and whatever is willed in the world has been willed by the Brahman. It is only our relative consciousness, alarmed or baffled by the phenomena of evil, ignorance and pain in the cosmos, that seeks to deliver the Brahman from responsibility for Itself and its workings by erecting some opposite principle, Maya or Mara, conscious Devil or self-existent principle of evil. There is one Lord and Self and the many are only His representations and becomings.
If then the world is a dream or an illusion or a mistake, it is a dream originated and willed by the Self in its totality and not only originated and willed, but supported and perpetually entertained. Moreover, it is a dream existing in a Reality and the stuff of which it is made is that Reality, for Brahman is the material of the world as well as its base and continent. If the gold of which the vessel is made is real, how shall we suppose that the vessel itself is a mirage ? We see that these words, dream, illusion, are tricks of speech, habits of our relative consciousness; they represent a certain truth, even a great truth, but they also misrepresent it. Just as
Page-200 Non-Being turns out to be other than mere nullity, so the cosmic Dream turns out to be other than mere phantasm and hallucination of the mind. Phenomenon is not phantasm; phenomenon is the substantial form of a Truth.
We start, then, with the conception of an omnipresent Reality of which neither the Non-Being at the one end nor the universe at the other are negations that annul; they arc rather different states of the Reality, obverse and reverse affirmations. The highest experience of this Reality in the universe shows it to be not only a conscious Existence, but a supreme Intelligence and Force, and a self-existent Bliss; and beyond the universe it is still some other unknowable existence, some utter and ineffable Bliss. Therefore we are justified in supposing that even the dualities of the universe, when interpreted not as now by our sensational and partial conceptions, but by our liberated intelligence and experience, will be also resolved into those highest terms. While we still labour under the stress of the dualities, this perception must no doubt constantly support itself on an act of faith, but a faith which the highest Reason, the widest and most patient reflection do not deny, but rather affirm. This creed is given, indeed, to humanity to support it on its journey, until it arrives at a stage of development when faith will be turned into knowledge and perfect experience and Wisdom will be justified of her works.
Page-201
The Wherefore
bop; of the Worlds WHEREFORE THE WORLD ? But if there is no first cause, are there at least first reasons which can explain the wherefore of the worlds ? But why any reasons ? Is it not possible that the world may have no reason for existence outside itself ? Is it really necessary that what is, should justify its existence ? Is not the simple fact of existence sufficient to itself ? There can be no doubt of it, once we perceive that the tact of existence contains in itself all its own reasons for existence. Only they are so deeply hidden and profound that they escape the vision of the mind. And therefore, because it cannot see, it replaces contemplation by reasoning, vision by intellectual search. The various hypotheses constructed by the reasoning mind about that which is beyond its knowledge, would undoubtedly have shed light 0:1 the riddle of the world but for our regrettable habit of opposing them to each other instead of harmonising them Harmonised, their number would have increased our knowledge. As things stand, their diversity rather increases the perplexity" of our minds. The reason pays in this loss and bewilderment the penalty of its lack of respect
for the numerous forms which it^ effort has assumed at different times and in varying environments. However imperfect these forms Page-202 may be, we should prize in them the fruit of the labour accomplished by the thought of man and have no right to despise what was and still is for so many minds the means of expressing the mystery of things and entering into contact with the inexpressible reality. Is there a single conception or a single belief, even though puerile, which does not contain a portion, a soul of truth ? And if we love and seek the truth, how shall we refuse to receive, listen to and understand these different tongues into which it is translated or to gather instruction from them all ? For all the forms of language that the mind employs, are equally necessary to it and it would be impoverished by the pretension of any one of them to exclude the rest and so deprive it of the means of comprehension which they represent ; while, on the contrary, by lending their assistance to each other and completing each other, they add to its riches. Therefore, all teachings about the riddle of the world, however seemingly different, should be considered with the same sympathy ; for they are all of them perceptions, distinct and sometimes opposite, of one and the same integral truth and may become, with advantage to that truth and to each other, elements in a comprehensive synthesis in which Philosophy may at length find its highest thought and its truest conception. However numerous the different hypotheses relating to the first reasons of things, they can be reduced to two principal standpoints. Is the world necessary or is it contingent or accidental ? Might what is, not have been ? For one can conceive that nothing might exist or at least that nothing might exist in the way that things now exist. Many philosophies and religions arrive at a regret that things have not been ordered otherwise than they arc and some even affirm that it would have been better if nothing at all had been. But after all whether one will or no, the world is what Page-203 it is, and, whether it is a necessity or a contingent accident, we have first to admit that what is, was possible and next that there was a sufficient reason for its existing. To speak of the accidental or contingent existence of the world is to say only that other worlds or rather other modes of being of the world were possible ;—and that is very certain, since it is just those other possibilities which, by realising themselves in their turn, are continually modifying the order of the universe. Its evolution consists in the addition to the first accidents of others that succeed them. To say on the other hand that this world was a necessity, is simply to affirm that the reason for which it exists, so prevailed over all others as to determine the realisation of this possibility and postpone to it the realisation of others,—a self-evident proposition. Whether this be the best or the worst of all possible worlds, it is the necessary manifestation of a given sum of contingencies. That which is, is at once accident in relation to what might have been and necessity in relation to what has not succeeded in being. And it will be the same for each new accident until there is a consummation of all the possibilities. But this conclusion does not carry us very far. For what is that sufficient reason which will explain the possibilities actually realised ?
According as we adopt the mechanical or the psychological standpoint in regard to the universe, our hypotheses touching the wherefore of the world become the theory of a conscient or of an inconscient necessity, of a fortuitous accident or of an arbitrary act ; and this arbitrary act proceeding from a pure freedom of will may in its turn be differently interpreted according to the motives we attribute to it,—thought of transcendental love or thought of transcendental egoism.
Page-204 But if we look more closely at these opposite ideas of a mechanism or of a psychological working, we shall see that they are only a double device which the mind adopts to interpret the riddle and^veil its own ignorance. For each of the two theses seems to deny what the other affirms and, nevertheless, they only reveal severally, without knowing it, two aspects of one reality. All their oppositions resolve themselves into the dilemma of the consciousness or unconsciousness of the first reasons of things, that is to say, into two conceptions, according to our intellectual preference, of the universal dynamism which the one calls force, the other will. But what is meant by consciousness or unconsciousness ? The distinction which we express by these words, has reference to our own modes of activity and to our own special conditions. And, certainly, it is no less erroneous to refuse than to attribute what we call consciousness to the principle of the universe. For, perhaps, what for us would be a supreme unconsciousness, is indistinguishable from an entire super consciousness in the All; and a single term cannot be applied to the manner of thought in the individual and the way in which the universe reflects. Two opposite terms would both be justified, if they could be used as simultaneous affirmations. The terms, Force and Will, which are often opposed to each other by the materialistic and the spiritual conceptions of the universe, are such affirmations and we have only to complete one by the other in the domain proper to each by conceiving Will as a force seen from within in its subjective principle and Force as a will seen from without in its objective manifestations. Thus these contradictory hypotheses and exclusive doctrines appear insufficient and too exiguous in their simplicity, if they are considered separately, but reconcilable, if more deeply regarded, and capable of completing each other by their reconciliation.
Here, as elsewhere, contradictories prove to be only complementariness ill-adjusted and inconscient of each other.
Page-205 When we speak of first reasons, we affirm by implication that there is a principle of Reason in the very essence if things. We admit, in other words, that the fundamental law of the universe responds to the rule and need of order and arrangement in our own mentality)’. Even if we suppose at the beginning of things a chaos such as sometimes confuses our own ideas, we cannot refuse to this melancholy condition the power to assume progressive form, that is to say, to realise the principle of order which it holds in itself. Otherwise there would be no possibility of anything more rational issuing out of that chaos. It would be vain to mass together indefinitely a heap of letters of the alphabet ; they would never of themselves arrange words and phrases, if the idea of those phrases and those words did not intervene and preside over the arrangement. Nor, any more, would the elements constituting Matter have organised themselves as they have done if previous affinities, that is to say, first reasons had not determined and rendered possible their combinations. Thus in the chaos, which can be nothing but an inferior order, an order yet unrealised, existed already the spirit, force or law—the word we use matters little—of the order to come. And this chaos was already an admirable harmony in comparison with the greater chaos which preceded it, just as the actual existing order hymned by the poets of Nature is an impossible chaos compared with the more perfect order that is yet to be born. Thus all that is in actuality must first be in potentiality. All that is, virtually was. Nothing can be in effect and result which was not in some way and some form in the origin of things. The phenomenon only manifests what was before concealed. By self-manifestation the universe stands revealed to us and the things of Nature discover to our minds the nature of things.
How could we understand anything at all if there were not some relation of harmony and some link of
Page-206 identity between the inner reason of phenomena and the inner phenomena of our reason ? * * * No doubt, the reality "assumes a new character when it translates, itself into concrete forms. In those forms the universal becomes the particular. When it appears, it clothes itself in appearances and they veil even while they reveal it. It is for this reason that the mind finds it as difficult to admit as to deny the principle which underlies the phenomenon. If we examine, for instance, the phenomenon of thought, we have to observe that it is inseparable from the functioning of the material organs, while on the other hand it seems in its principle to have nothing in common with the matter of the organ which manifests it. And we cannot help opposing Mind and Matter to each other, ‘although we do not see tin in anywhere apart from each other. Thought, even though in its apparent form a concrete effect of a purely physic-chemical order, is also, independently of its special conditions, outside of the apparatus which manifests it, a principle- o! activity in itself, . a mode of the universal energy. To speak of Thought independently of the mechanism of the brain is not, then, less legitimate than to speak of Light independently of our different means of illumination. The only difference is that we have found a formula for the swiftness of Light, while we have not yet succeeded in finding in motion any such equation for Thought. But just as the vibratory motion from which Light is born, can give rise in Nature to many and diverse phenomena without any relation to our visual perceptions, so also the principle of Thought may be at work under different forms and lend itself to manifestations that have no relation to the phenomena of our intellectuality.
And inversely, if there are different processes capable of producing the effect of luminosity, why should there not be also other means for the manifestation of Intel-
Page-207 ligence than that which we employ? The forms which thought assumes outside the mechanism of the brain, are to us unknown. But since one principle of Intelligence fills the whole universe, who can say whether worlds do not, like beings, think ? Before Mind became active in being, its principle existed in the worlds; before it existed in the worlds, it was, in itself, an eternal principle of Mind. But before this principle could translate itself into the forms that thought takes in us, Matter was; and the principle existed as a force in Matter. Similarly, before Matter was, before its forms were manifested, there was in the possibility of these forms an eternal principle of Matter. And there where all form disappears and leaves only abstractions of pure Mind, does not this principle of Matter still subsist ? Is it not the very substance and, so to speak, the matter of that Mind ? It is therefore beyond Matter and Mind, Force and Will, Consciousness and Unconsciousness and in all these that we must seek a cause for the existence of the worlds. * * * Still, the mind is justified in translating its first data into its own language in preference to another. And, even, this preference is forced upon it. For what has more than anything else hampered its attempt to discover the cause of the world, is the search for it in a domain alien to the mind’s own activities. The problem of the initial movement will always remain insoluble to it, if the data are not first translated into psychological terms. It is in its own fundamental dynamism that it must discover the primary energy, in its own secret that it must seek for the secret of the universe.
But there is another thing which prevents it from resolving the riddle of the world, and that is the arbitrary reduction of the whole formula of being into the terms of mental knowledge. For the domain of mind, intelligence, thought, is only one domain of the universal; its reality
Page-208 represents only one of the forms, one of the aspects of existence. The fact of existence is not exhausted by the idea ; therefore its principle cannot be denned from the sole point of view of Mind. Pure thought, which Idealism regards as the first essence, may well constitute the abstract and conceptual foundation of being; it is not sufficient to explain the living and concrete reality. And Will itself cannot be presented as ultimate cause of the world. For Will is a power of action, realisation, emotion, productive of movement, only in the domain of the subjective energies. But the universe is not only an internal dynamism; it is a substantial activity. It is, therefore, only an integral experience that can enable us to attain, beyond the multiple forms and successive depths of the reality, its ultimate sources. The discovery cannot be effected by the sole aid of the logical reason. The data of sensation must enter into it no less than those of the understanding, no less than those of the still more transcendent faculties of intuitive consciousness and of knowledge that is lived.
When the mind, then, assembles these data and makes its language sufficiently supple to translate them synthetically, it perceives that each of them justifies from its own point of view one or other of the reasons which philosophies and religions have assigned for the existence of beings and of the world. And as the being within proceeds to resume them and make an integral whole of them all, it learns to discover by them the being itself and by the being the wherefore of the worlds.
Page-209
The Secret
of the Veda CHAPTER III It was the curiosity of a foreign culture that broke after many centuries the seal of final authoritativeness which Sayana had fixed on the ritualistic interpretation of the Veda. The ancient Scripture was delivered over to a scholarship laborious, bold in speculation, ingenious in its flights of fancy, conscientious according to its own lights, but ill-fitted to understand the method of the old mystic poets ; for it was void of any sympathy with that ancient temperament, unprovoked with any clue in its own intellectual or spiritual environment to the ideas hidden in the Vedic figures and parables. The result has been of a double character, on the one side the beginnings of a more minute, thorough and careful as well as a freer handling of the problems of Vedic interpretation, on the other hand a final exaggeration of its apparent material sense and the complete obscuration of its true and inner secret.
In spite of the hardiness of its speculations and its freedom in discovery or invention the Vedic scholarship of Europe has really founded itself throughout on the traditional elements preserved in Sayana’s commentary and has not attempted an entirely independent handling of the problem. What it found in Sayana and in the Brahmanas it has developed in the light of modern theories and modern knowledge ; by ingenious deductions
Page-210 from the comparative method applied to philology, mythology and history, by 1irgeamplications of the existing data with the aid of ingenious speculation, by unification of the scattered indications available it has built up a complete theory of Vedic mythology, Vedic history, Vedic civilisation which fascinates by its detail and thoroughness and conceals by its apparent sureness of method the fact that this imposing edifice has been founded, for the most part, on the sands of conjecture.
The modern theory of the Veda starts with
the conception, for which Sayana is responsible, of the Vedas as the hymnal of
an early, primitive and largely barbaric society crude in its moral and
religious conceptions, rude in its social structure and entirely childlike in
its outlook upon the world that environed it. The ritualism which Sayana
accepted as part of a divine knowledge and as endowed with a mysterious
efficacy, European scholarship accepted as an elaboration of the old savage
propitiatory sacrifices offered to imaginary superhuman personalities who might
be benevolent or malevolent according as they were worshipped or neglected. The
historical element admitted by Sayana was readily seized on and enlarged by new
renderings and new explanations of the allusions in the hymns developed in an
eager hunt for clues to the primitive history, manners and institutions of those
barbarous races. The naturalistic element played a still more important role.
The obvious identification of the Vedic gods in their external aspects with
certain Nature-Powers was used as the starting-point for a comparative study of
Aryan mythologies; the hesitating identification of certain of the less
prominent deities as Sun-Powers was taken as a general clue to the system of
primitive myth-making and elaborate sun-myth and star-myth theories of
comparative mythology were founded. In this new light the Vedic hymnology has come to be interpreted as a half-superstitious, half-poetic allegory of Nature with an important astronomical element. There
rest is partly contemporary history, partly the formulae and practices of a sacrificial ritualism, not mystic, but merely primitive and superstitious.
Page-211 This interpretation is in entire harmony with the scientific theories of early human culture and of the recent emergence from the mere savage which were in vogue th rough out the nineteenth century and are even now dominant. But the increase of our knowledge has considerably shaken this first and too hasty generalisation. We now know that remarkable civilizations existed in China, Egypt, Chilean, Assyria many thousands of years ago, and it is now coming generally to be agreed that Greece and India were no exceptions to the general high culture of Asia and the Mediterranean races. If the Vedic Indians do not get the benefit of this revised knowledge, it is due to the survival of the theory with which European erudition started, that they belonged to the so-called Aryan race and were on the same level of culture with the early Aryan Greeks, Celts, Germans as they are represented to us in the Homeric poems, the old Norse Sagas and the Roman accounts of the ancient Gaul and Teuton. Hence has arisen the theory that these Aryan races were northern barbarians who broke in from their colder climes on the old and rich civilisation of Mediterranean Europe and Dravidian India. But the indications in the Veda on which this theory of a recent Aryan invasion is built, are very scanty in quantity and uncertain in their significance. There is no actual mention of any such invasion. The distinction between Aryan and un Aryan on which so much has been built, seems on the mass of the evidence to indicate a cultural rather than a racial difference.* The language of the hymns clearly points to a particular worship or spiritual culture as the distinguishing sign of the Aryan, —a worship of Light and of the powers of Light and a self-discipline based on the culture of the " Truth ” and * It is urged that the Dasyus are described as black of skin and noiseless in opposition to the fair and’ high-nosed Aryans. But the former distinction is certainly applied to the Aryan Gods and the Dasa Powers in the sense of light and darkness, and the word anasa does not mean nose less. Even if it did, it would be wholly inapplicable to the Dravidian races; for the southern nose can give as good an account of itself as any " Aryan" proboscis in the North. Page-212 the aspiration to Immortality,—Ritam and Amritam. There is no reliable indication of any racial difference. It is always possible that the bulk of the peoples now inhabiting India may have been the descendants of a new race from more northern latitudes, even perhaps, as argued by Mr. Tilak, from the Arctic regions ; but there is nothing in the Veda, as there is nothing in the present ethnological features* of the country to prove that this descent took place near to the time of the Vedic hymns or was the slow penetration of a small body of fair-skinned barbarians into a civilised Dravidian peninsula. Nor is it a certain conclusion from the data we possess that the early Aryan cultures—supposing the Celt, Teuton, Greek and Indian to represent one common cultural origin,—were really undeveloped and barbarous. A certain pure and high simplicity in their outward life and its organisation, a certain concreteness and vivid human familiarity in their conception of and relations with the gods they worshipped, distinguish the Aryan type from the more sumptuous and materialistic Egypto Chaldean civilisation and its solemn and occult religions. But those characteristics are not inconsistent with a high internal culture. On the contrary, indications of a great spiritual tradition meet us at many points and negate the ordinary theory. The old Celtic races certainly possessed some of the highest philosophical conceptions and they preserve stamped upon them even to the present day the result of an early mystic and intuitional development which must have been long of standing and highly evolved to have produced such enduring results. In Greece it is probable that the Hellenic type was moulded in the same way by Orphic and Eleusinian influences and that Greek mythology, as it has come down to us, full of delicate psychological suggestions, is a legacy of the
* In India we are chiefly familiar with the old philological divisions of the Indian xaces and with the speculations of Mr.
Ripley which are founded upon these earlier generalisations. But a more advanced ethnology rejects all linguistic tests and leans to the idea of a single homogeneous race inhabiting the Indian peninsula.
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Orphic teaching. It would be only consonant with the general tradition if it turned out that Indian civilisation has throughout been the prolongation of tendencies and ideas sown in us by the Vedic forefathers. The extraordinary vitality of these early cultures which still determine us for us the principal types of modern man, the main elements of his temperament, the chief tendencies of his thought, art and. religion, can have proceeded from no primitive savagery. They arc the result of a deep and puissant prehistoric development.
Comparative Mythology has deformed the sense of man’s early traditions by ignoring this important stage in human progress. It has founded its interpretation on a theory which saw nothing between the early savage and Plato or the Upanishads. It has supposed the early religions to have been founded on the wonder of barbarians waking up suddenly to the astonishing fact that such strange things as Dawn and Night and the Sun existed and attempting in a crude, barbaric, imaginative way to explain their existence. And from this childlike wonder we stride at one step to the profound theories of the Greek philosophers and the Vedantic sages. Comparative Mythology is the Great ion of Hellenists interpreting un Hellenic data from a standpoint which is itself founded on a misunderstanding of the Greek mind. Its method has been an ingenious play of the poetic imagination rather than a patient scientific research.
If we look at the results of the method, we find an extraordinary confusion of images and of their interpretations in which there is nowhere any coherence or consistency. It is a mass of details running into each other, getting confusedly into each other’s way, disagreeing yet entangled, dependent for their validity on the license of imaginative conjecture as our sole means of knowledge. This incoherence has even been exalted into a standard of truth ; for it is seriously argued by eminent scholars that a method arriving at a more logical and well-ordered result would be disproved and discredited by its very coherency, since confusion must be supposed to be the Page-214 very essence of the early mythopoeia faculty. But in that case there can be nothing binding in the results of Comparative Mythology and one theory will be as good as another; for there is no reason why one particular mass of incoherence should be held to be more valid than another mass of incoherence differently composed. There is much that is useful in the speculations of Comparative Mythology; but in order that the bulk of its results should be sound and acceptable, it must use a more patient and consistent method and organise itself as part of a well-founded Science of Religion. We must recognise that the old religions were organic systems founded on ideas which were at least as coherent as those which constitute our modern systems of belief. We must recognise also that there has been a perfectly intelligible progressive development from the earlier to the later systems of religious creeds and of philosophical thought. It is by studying our data widely and profoundly in this spirit and discovering the tru 3 evolution of human thought and belief that we shall arrive at real knowledge. The mere identification of Greek and Sanscrit names and the ingenious discovery that Heracles’ pyre is an image of the setting sun or that Paris and Helen are Greek corruptions of the Vedic Sarama and the Pains make an interesting diversion for an imaginative mind, but can by themselves lead to no serious result, even if they should prove to be correct. Nor is their correctness beyond serious doubt, for it is the vice of the fragmentary and imaginative method by which the sun and star myth interpretations are built up that they can be applied with equal ease and convincingness to any and every human tradition, belief or even actual event of history.* With this method we can never be sure where we have hit on a truth or where we are listening to a mere ingenuity.Comparative Philology can indeed be called to our aid, but, in the present state of that Science, with very
* E .g. Cheri st and his twelve apostles are. a great scholar assures us, the sun and the twelve months. The career of Napoleon is the most perfect Sun*myth in all legend or history.
Page-215 little conclusiveness. Modern Philology is an immense advance on anything we have had before the nineteenth century. It has introduced a spirit of order and method in place of mere phantasy ; it has given us more correct ideas of the morphology of language and of what is or is not possible in etymology. It has established a few rules which govern the phenomena of the detritions of language and guide us in the identification of the same word or of related words as they appear in the changes of different but kindred tongues. Here, however, its achievements cease. The high hoops which attended its birth, have not been fulfilled by its maturity. It has failed to create a Science of Language and we are still compelled to apply to it the apologetic description given by a great philologist after some decades of earnest labour when he was obliged to speak of his favourite pursuits as "our petty conjectural sciences.”’ But a conjectural Science is no Science at all. Therefore the followers of more exact and scrupulous forms of knowledge refuse that name altogether to Comparative Philology and deny even the possibility of a linguistic science.
There is, in fact, no real certainty as yet in the obtained results of Philology; for beyond one or two laws of a limited application there is nowhere a sure basis. Yesterday we were all convinced that Varuna was identical with Ouranos, the Greek heaven ; today this identity is denounced to us as a philological error; tomorrow it may be rehabilitated. Parame vyoman is a Vedic phrase which most of us would translate "in the highest heaven ", but Mr. T. Paramasiva
Adyar in his brilliant and astonishing work, The Riks, tells us that it means "in the lowest hollow;" for vyoman "means break, fissure, being literally absence of protection, (urea)"; and the reasoning which he uses is so entirely after the fashion of the modern scholar that the philologist is debarred from answering that " absence of protection " cannot possibly mean a fissure and that human language was not constructed on these principles. For Philology has failed to discover the principles on
Page-216 which language was constructed or rather was organically developed, and on the other hand it has preserved a sufficient amount of the old spirit of mere phantasy and ingenuity and is full of precisely such brilliances of hazardous inference. But then we arrive at this result that there is nothing to help us in deciding whether parame vyoman in the Veda refers to the highest heaven or to the lowest abyss. It is obvious that a philology so imperfect may be a brilliant aid, but can never be a sure guide to the sense of Veda. We have to recognise in fact that European scholarship in its dealings with the Veda has derived an excessive prestige from its association in the popular mind with tire march of European Science. The truth is that there is an enormous gulf between the patient, scrupulous and ex ret physical sciences and these other brilliant, but immature branches of learning upon which Vedic scholarship relies. Those are careful of their foundation, slow to generalise, solid in their conclusions; these are compelled to build upon scanty data large and sweeping theories and supply the deficiency of sure indications by an excess of conjecture and hypothesis. They are full of brilliant beginnings, but can come to no secure conclusion. They arc the first tough scaffolding for a Science, but they are not as yet Sciences.
It follows that the whole problem of the interpretation of Veda still remains an open field in which any contribution that can throw light upon the problem should be welcome. Three such contributions have proceeded from Indian scholars. Two of them follow the lines or the methods of European research, while opening up new theories which if established, would considerably alter our view of the external sense of the hymns. Mr. Tilak in his "Arctic Home in the Vedas " has accepted the general conclusions of European scholarship, but by a fresh examination of the Vedic Dawn, the figure of the Vedic cows and the astronomical data of the hymns, has established at least a strong probability that the Aryan races descended
formally from the Arctic regions in the
Page-217 glacial period. Mr. T. Parama iva Adyar by a still bolder departure has attempted to prove that the whole of the Rig Veda is a figurative representation of the geological phenomena belonging to the new birth of our planet after its long-continued glacial death in the same period of terrestrial evolution. It is difficult to accept in their mass Mr. Aiyar’s reasonings and conclusions, but he has at least thrown a new light on the great Vedic my thus of AhiVritra and the release of the seven rivers. His interpretation is far more consistent and probable than the current theory which is not borne out by the language of the hymns. Taken in conjunction with Mr. Talk’s work it may serve as the starting-point for a new external interpretation of the old Scripture which will explain much that is now inexplicable and recreate for us the physical origins if not the actual physical environment of the old Aryan world. The third Indian contribution is older in date, but nearer to my present purpose. It is the remarkable attempt by Swami Dayananda, the founder of the Arya Samaj, to re-establish the Veda as a living religious Scripture. Dayananda took as his basis a free use of the old Indian philology which he found in the Nirukta. Himself a great Sanskrit scholar, he handled his materials with remarkable power and independence. Especially creative was his use of that peculiar feature of the old Sanskrit tongue which is best expressed by a phrase of Sayana’s, the " multi-significance of roots." We shall see that the right following of this clue is of capital importance for understanding the peculiar method of the Vedic Rishis.
Dayananda interpretation of the hymns is governed by the idea that the Vedas are a plenary revelation of religious, ethical and scientific truth. Its religious teaching is monotheistic and the Vedic gods are different descriptive names of the one Deity; they are at the same time indications of His powers as we see them working in Nature and by a true understanding of the sense of the Vedas we could arrive at all the scientific truths which have been discovered by modern research.
Page-218 Such a theory is, obviously, difficult to establish. The Rig Veda itself, indeed, asserts* that the gods are only different names and expressions of one universal Being who in His own reality transcends the universe; but from the language of the hymns we are compelled to perceive in the gods not only different names, but also different forms, powers and personalities of the one Deva. The monotheism of the Veda includes in itself also the monistic, pantheistic and even polytheistic views of the cosmos and is by no means the trenchant and simple creed of modern Theism. It is only by a violent struggle with the text that we can force on it a less complex aspect. That the ancient races were far more advanced in the physical sciences than is as yet recognised, may also be admitted. The Egyptians and Chaldean, we now know, had discovered much that has since been rediscovered by modern Science and much also that has not been rediscovered. The ancient Indians were, at least, no mean astronomers and were always skilful physicians ; nor do Hindu medicine and chemistry seem to have been of a foreign origin. It is possible that in other branches also of physical knowledge they were advanced even in early times. But the absolute completeness of scientific revelation asserted by Swami Dayananda will take a great deal of proving. The hypothesis on which I shall conduct my own enquiry is that the Veda has a double aspect and that the two, though closely related, must be kept apart. The Rishis arranged the substance of their thought in a system of parallelism by which the same deities were at once internal and external Powers of universal Nature, and they managed its expression through a system of double values by which the same language served for their worship in both aspects. But the psychological sense predominates and is more pervading, close-knit and
R. V. I- 164. 43 and 170-1.
Page-219 coherent than the physical. The Veda is primarily intended to serve for spiritual enlightenment and self-culture. It is, therefore, this sense which has first to be restored". To this task each of the ancient and modern systems of interpretation brings an indispensable assistance. Sayana and Yaska supply the ritualistic framework of outward symbols and their large store of traditional significances and explanations. The Upanishads give their clue to the psychological and philosophical ideas of the earlier Rishis and hand down to us their method of spiritual experience and intuition. European Scholarship supplies a critical method of comparative research, yet to be perfected, but capable of immensely increasing the materials available and sure eventually to give a scientific certainty and firm intellectual basis which has hitherto been lacking. Dayananda has given the clue to the linguistic secret of the Rishis and reemphasised one central idea of the Vedic religion, the idea of the One Being with the Devas expressing in numerous names and forms the many-sidedness of His unity.
With so much help from the intermediate past we may yet succeed in reconstituting this remoter antiquity and enter by the gate of the Veda into the thoughts and realities of a prehistoric wisdom.
Page-220 SURYA SAVITRI, CREATOR AND INCREASER RIG VEDA. V. 81. 1. Men illumined yoke their mind and they yoke their thoughts to him who is illumination and largeness and clear perceiving. Knowing all phenomena he orders, sole, the Energies of the sacrifice. Vast is the affirmation in all things of Savitri, the divine Creator 2 All forms he takes unto himself, the Seer, and he creates from them good for the twofold existence and the fourfold. The Creator, the supreme Good, manifests Heaven wholly and his light pervades all as he follows the march of the Dawn. 3. In the wake of his march the other gods also reach by his force to the greatness of the Divinity He has mapped out the realms of earthly light by his mightiness,-the brilliant one, the divine Creator. 4. And thou reaches, O Savitri, to the three luminous heavens; and thou art utterly expressed by the rays of the Sun; and thou encompasses the Night upon either side; and thou becamest by the law of thy actions the lord of Love, O God.
5. And thou art powerful for every creation;
Page-221 and thou becamest the Increaser, O God, by thy movings; and thou illuminist utterly all this world of becomings. Shyavaswa has attained to the affirmation of thee, O Savitri.* COMMENTARY Indra with his shining hosts, the Maruts, Agni, the divine force, fulfiller of the Aryan sacrifice, are the most important deities of the Vedic system. Agni is the beginning and the end. This Will that is knowledge is the initiator of the upward effort of the mortal towards Immortality ; to this divine consciousness that is ons with divine power we arrive as the foundation of immortal existence. Indra, lord of Swar, the luminous intelligence into which we have to convert our obscure material mentality in order to become capable of the divine consciousness, is our chief helper. It is by the aid of Indra and the Maruts that the conversion is effected. The Maruts take our animal consciousness made up of the impulses of the nervous mentality, possess these impulses with their illuminations and drive them up the hill of being towards the world of Swar and *the truths of Indra. Our mental evolution begins with these animal troops, these " Pashas"; they become, as we progress in the ascension, the brilliant herds of the Sun, Gavan, rays, the divine cows of the Veda. Such is the psychological sense of the Vedic symbol. But who, then, is Surya, the Sun, from whom these rays proceed ? He is the Master of Truth, Surya the Illuminator, Savitri the Creator, Push an the Increaser. His rays in their own nature are supramental activities of
* For a good idiomatic and literary translation, rendering the sense and rhythm of the original, a certain freedom in turning the Sanscrit is necessary. I have .therefore given a more literal version of its phrases in the body of the Commentary.
Page-222 revelation, inspiration, intuition, luminous discernment, and they constitute the action of that transcendent principle which the Vedanta calls Vijnana, the perfect knowledge, the Veda Ritam, the Truth. But these rays descend also into the human mentality and form at its summit the world of luminous intelligence, Swar, of which Indra is the lord. For this Vijnana is a divine and not a human faculty. Man’s mini is not constituted of the self-luminous truth, like the divine mind; it is a sense-mentality, Manas, which can receive and understand 1 Truth, but is not one with it. The light of knowledge has to present itself in this human understanding tempered so as to suit its forms to the capacities and limitations of the physical consciousness. And it has to lead up progressively to its own true nature, to manifest successive evolutionary stages for our mental development. Therefore the rays of Surya, as they labour to form our mental existence, create three successive worlds of mentality one superimposed on the other,—the sensational, aesthetic and emotional mind, the pure intellect and the divine intelligence. The fullness and perfection of these triple worlds of mind exists only in the pure mental plane of being,2 where they shine above the three heavens, torso divah, as their three luminosities, trini rocha-nani. But their light descends upon the physical consciousness and effects the corresponding formations in its realms, the Vedic parthivani rajansi, earthly realms of light. They also are triple, tisro prithivih, the three earths. And of all these worlds Surya Savitri is the creator. We have in this figure of various psychological levels> each considered as a world in itself, a key to the conceptions of the Vedic Rishis. The human individual is an organised unit of existence which reflects the constitution of the universe. It repeats in itself the same
1. The Vedic word for the understanding is dhi, that which receives and holds in place.
2. Our natural plane of being is obviously the physical consciousness, but the others also are open to us since part of our being lives in each of them.
Page-223 arrangement of states and play of forces. Man, subjectively, contains in himself all the worlds in which, objectively, he is contained. Preferring ordinarily a concrete to an abstract language, the Rishis speak of the physical consciousness a; the physical world, earth, Bhu, Prithivi. They describe the pure mental consciousness as heaven, Dyads, of which Swar, the luminous mind, is the summit. To the intermediate dynamic, vital or nervous consciousness they give the name either of Autarkical, the intermediate vision, or of Bhuvar,—multiple dynamic worlds formative of the Earth. For in the idea of the Rishis a world is primarily a formation of consciousness and only secondarily a physical formation of things. A world is a loka, a way in which conscious being images itself. And it is the causal Truth, represented in the person of Surya Savitri, that is the creator of all its forms. For it is the causal Idea in the infinite being,—the idea, not abstract, but real and dynamic,—that originates the law, the energies, the formations of things and the working out of their potentialities in determined forms by determined processes. Because the causal Idea, is a real force of existence, it is called Satyam, the True in being; because it is the determining truth of all activity and formation, it is called Ritam, the True in movement; because it is broad and infinite in its self-view, in its scope and in its operation, it is called Brihat, the Large or Vast. Savitri by the Truth is the Creator, but not in the sense of a fabrication or mechanical forming of things. The root of the word means an impulsion, a loosing forth or sending out,—the sense also of the ordinary word for creation, srishti,—and so a production. The action of the causal Idea does not fabricate, but brings out by Tapas, by the pressure of consciousness on its own being, that which is concealed in it, latent in potentiality and in truth already existent in the Beyond.
Now the forces and processes of the physical world repeat, as in a symbol, the truths of the supraphysical action which produced it. And since it is by the same
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forces and the same processes, one in the physical worlds and the supra-physical, that our inner life and its development are governed, the Rishis adopted the phenomena of physical Nature as just symbols for those functionings of the inner life which it was their difficult task to indicate in the concrete language of a sacred poetry that must at the same time serve for the external worship of the Gods as powers of the visible universe. The solar energy is the physical form of Surya, Lord of Light and Truth; it is through the Truth that we arrive at Immortality, final aim of the Vedic discipline. It is therefore under the images of the Sun and its rays, of Dawn and day and night and the life of man between the two poles of light and darkness that the Aryan seers represent the progressive illumination of the human soul. It is so that Shyavaswa of the house of Atria hymns Savitri, Creator, Increaser, Revealer.
Surya enlightens the mind and the thoughts with the illuminations of the Truth. He is vipra, the illumined. It is he who delivers the individual human mind from the circumscribed consciousness of self and environment and enlarges the limited movement which is imposed on it by its preoccupation with its own individuality. Therefore he is brihat, the Large. But his illumination is not a vague light, nor does his largeness come by a confused and dissolved view of self and object; it holds in itself a clear discernment of things in their totality, their parts and their relations. Therefore He is
vipafchitd, the clear in perception. Men as soon as they begin to receive something of this solar illumination, strive to yoke their whole mentality and its thought-contents to the conscious existence of the divine Surya within them. That is to say, they apply, as it were, all their obscure mental state and all their erring thoughts to this Light manifested in them so that it may turn the obscurity of the mind into clearness and convert the errors of thought into those truths which they distortedly
represent. This yoking (yunjate) becomes their Yoga. "They yoke the mind, and they yoke their thoughts, the enlightened, of Page-225 (i.e. to, or so that they may be part of or belong to) the Enlightened, the Large, the Clear-perceptioned." Then the Lord of Truth orders all the human energies offered up to him in the terms of the Truth ; for he becomes in man a sole and sovereign Power governing all knowledge and action. Not interfered with by conflicting agencies, he governs perfectly ; for he knows all manifestations, comprehends their causes, contains their law and process, compels their right result. There are seven of these sacrificial energies (Hotras) in the human being, one corresponding to each of the seven constituents of his psychological existence,—body, life, mind, super-mind, bliss, will and essential being. Their irregular action or wrong relation, caused and maintained by the obscuration of knowledge in Mind is the source of all stumbling and unhappiness, of all evil act and evil state. Surya, Lord of Knowledge, puts each of them to its right place in the Sacrifice. " Knower of phenomena sole he arranges the sacrificial energies. " Man thus arrives at a vast and all-embracing affirmation in himself of this divine Creator. It is implied in this passage and indicated more clearly in the next verse that the result is a right and happy creation—for all our existence is a constant creation—of the universe of man’s whole being. "Vast is the comprehensive affirmation of the god Savitri."
Surya is the seer, the revealer. His Truth takes into its illumination all forms of things, all the phenomenal objects and experiences which constitute our world, all the figures of the universal Consciousness within and without us. It reveals the truth in them, their sense, their purpose, their justification and right use. Ordering rightly the energies of the sacrifice it creates or produces good as the law of our whole existence. For all things have their justifiable cause of being, their good use and their right enjoyment. When this truth in them is found and utilised, all things produce good for the soul, increase its welfare, enlarge its felicity. And this divine revolution is effected both in the lower physical existence and in the more complete inner life which uses the physical
Page-226 for its manifestation.* "The Sear takes to himself all forms, he brings out (creates or manifests) good for the twofold (two-footed), for the four-fold (four-footed)" The process of this new creation is described in the rest of the hymn. Surya, as the creator, as the supreme good, manifests in our human consciousness its concealed heavenly summit on the levels of the pure mind, and we are able to look up above from the earth of our physical existence and are delivered from the obscurities of the night of Ignorance. He follows, sun like, the march of the Dawn, illuminating all the regions of our being on which falls its light; for there is always needed the precursory mental illumination before the Truth itself, the supramental principle, can take possession of this lower existence. " The creator, the supremely desirable, manifests all heaven and shines pervading following (after or according to) the movement forward of the Dawn. " All the other gods follow in this march of Surya and they attain to his vastness by the force of his illumination. That is to say, all the other divine faculties or potentialities in man expand with the expansion of the Truth and Light in him ; in the strength of the ideal super-mind they attain to the same infinite amplitude of right becoming, right action and right knowledge. The Truth in its largeness moulds all into the terms of the infinite and universal Life, replaces with it the limited individual existence, maps out in the terms of their real being the realms of the physical consciousness which, as Savitri, it has created. This also is in us a creation, although in reality it only manifests what already exists but was concealed by the darkness of our ignorance,— just as the realms of the physical earth are concealed from our eyes by the darkness, but reveal themselves as the sun in his march follows the Dawn and measures them out one by one to the vision. "Following whose
* The symbolism of the words " dwipade " and chatushpade " may be differently interpreted. The discussion of it here would occupy too large a space. Page-227 march the other gods too reach the vastness of the divinity by his strength, he who maps out entirely—that brilliant one—the earthly realms of" light, the god Savitri, by his greatness. " But it is not only. the full capacity of our physical or earthly consciousness that this divine Truth illuminates and forms for a perfect action. It pervades the three luminous realms of the pure mind (trini rocha-nani ); it puts us in contact with all the divine possibilities of the sensations and emotions, of the intellect, of the intuitive reason and liberating the superior faculties from their limitation and constant reference to the material world fulfils our entire mental being. Its activities receive their completest manifestation; they are gathered up into the life of the complete Truth by the rays of the sun, that is to say, by the full splendour of the divine Super-Mind manifested in us. *’ And thou goes, O Savitri, to the three luminous nesses, and thou art perfectly expressed by the rays of the Sun ( or, art gathered together by means of the rays )." Then it is that the higher kingdom of the Immortality, Sachchidananda revealed, shines out perfectly in this world. The higher and lower are reconciled in the light of the supra-mental revelation. The Ignorance, the Night, is illumined upon both sides of our complete being, not only as in our present state upon one. This higher kingdom stands confessed in the principle of Beatitude which is for us the principle of Love and Light, represented by the god Mitra. The Lord of .Truth, when he reveals himself in the full godhead, becomes the Lord of Bliss. The law of his being, the principle regulating his activities is seen to be Love ; for in the right arrangement of knowledge and action everything here comes to be translated into terms of good, felicity, bliss. " And thou encompasses Night upon both sides, and thou becamest, O God, Mitra by the laws of they action. "
The Truth of the divine existence becomes eventually the sole Lord of all creation in ourselves ; and by his constant visitations or by his continual progressions the
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Creator becomes the Increaser, Savitri becomes Push an. He aggrandizes us by a constantly progressive creation until he has illumined the whole world of our becoming. We grow into the complete, the universal, the infinite. So has
Shyavaswa, of the sons of Atri, succeeded in affirming Savitri in his own being as the illuminative Truth, the creative, the progressive, the increaser of man—he who brings him out of egoistic limitation into universality, out of the finite into the infinite. " And thou hast power alone for creation ; and thou
becamest the Increaser, O God, by the goings; and thou illuminist entirely all this world (literally, becoming). Shyavaswa has attained to the affirmation of thee, O Savitri."
Page-229 ANALYSIS III SECOND MOVEMENT Verses G -7* SELF-REALISATION Brahman is, subjectively, Atman, the Self or immutable existence of all that is in the universe. livery thing that changes in us, mind, life, body, character, temperament, action, is not our real and unchanging self, but becomings of the Self in the movement, Jagati. In Nature, therefore, all things that exist, animate or inanimate, are becomings of the one Self of all. All these different creatures are one indivisible existence. This is the truth each being has to realise. When this unity has been realised by the individual in every port of his being, he becomes perfect, pure, liberated from ego and the dualities, possessed of the entire divine felicity. ATMAN Atman, our true self, is Brahman ; it is pure indivisible Being, self-luminous, self-concentrated in consciousness, self-delighted. Its existence is light and bliss. It is timeless, spaceless and free. * 6. But he who seas everywhere the Self in all existences and all existences in the Self, shrinks not thereafter from aught.
7. He in whom it is the Self-Being that has become all existences that are Becomings, for he has the perfect knowledge, how shall he be deluded, whence shall he have grief who sees everywhere oneness ?
Page-230 THE THREEFOLD PURUSHA* Atman represents itself to the consciousness of the creature in three states, dependent on the relations between Purusha and Prakriti, the Soul and Nature. These three states are Akshara, unmoving or immutable ; Kshara, moving or mutable; and Para or Uttama, Supreme or Highest. Kshara Purusha is the Self reflecting the changes and movements of Akshara Purusha .is the Self, standing back from the changes and movements of Nature, calm, pure, impartial, indifferent, watching them and not participating, above them as on a summit, not immersed in these Waters. This calm Self is the sky that never moves and changes looking down upon the waters that are never at rest. The Akshara is the hidden freedom of the Kshara. Para Purusha or Purushottama is the Self containing and enjoying both the stillness and the movement, but conditioned and limited by neither of them. It is the Lord, Brahman, the All, the Indefinable and Unknowable. It is this supreme Self that has to be realised in both the unmoving and the mutable. PURUSHA IN PRAKRITI** Atman, the Self, represents itself differently in the sevenfold movement of Nature according to the dominant
* Gita XV. 16.17. See also XIII passim.
** Taittiriya Upanishad II. 1—6.
Page-231 principle of the consciousness in the individual being. In the physical consciousness Atman becomes the material being, Annamaya Purusha. In the vital or nervous consciousness Atman becomes the vital or dynamic being, Pranamaya Purusha. In the mental consciousness Atman becomes the mental being, Manomayak Purusha. In the supra-intellectual consciousness, dominated by the Truth or causal Idea (called in Veda Satyam Ritam Brihat, the True, the Right, the Vast), Atman becomes the ideal being or great Soul, Vijnanamaya Purusha or Mahat Atman.* In the consciousness proper to the universal Beatitude Atman becomes the all-blissful being or all-enjoying and all-productive soul, Anandamaya Purusha. In the consciousness proper to the infinite divine self-awareness which is also the infinite all-effective Will (Chit-Tapas), Atman is the all-conscious Soul that is source and lord of the verse, Chaitanya Purusha. In the consciousness proper to the state of pure divine existence Atman is Sat Purusha, the pure divine self. Man, being one in his true Self with the Lord who inhabits, all forms, can live in any of these states of the Self in the world and partake of its experiences. He can be anything he wills from the material to the all-blissful being. Through the Anandamaya he can enter into the Chaitanya and Sat Purusha. 5 Sachchidananda is the manifestation of the higher Purusha; its nature of infinite being, consciousness, power and bliss is the higher Nature, Para Prakriti. Mind, life and body are the lower nature, Apata Prakriti. The state of . Sachchidananda is the higher half of universal existence, parardha, the nature of which is Immortality,
* The Mahat Atman or Vast Self is frequently refered to in the Upanishads. It is also called Bhuma, the Large.
Page-232 Amritam. The state of mental existence in Matter is the lower half, aparardha, the nature of which is Death, Mrityu. Mind and life in the body are in the state of Death because by Ignorance they fail to realise Sachchidananda. Realising perfectly Sachchidananda, they can convert themselves, Mind into the nature of the Truth, Vijnana, Life into the nature of Chaitanya, Body into the nature of Sat, that is, into the pure essence. When this cannot be done perfectly in the body, the soul realises its true state in other forms of existence or worlds, the " sunlit " worlds and states of felicity, and returns’ upon material existence to complete its evolution in the body. A progressively perfect realisation in the body is the aim of the human evolution. It is also possible for the soul to withdraw for an indefinable period into the pure state of Sachchidananda. The realisation of the Self as Sachchidananda is the Self as Sachchidananda is the aim of human existence. THE CONDITION OF SELF-REALISATION.’ Sachchidananda is always the pure state of Atman; it-may either remain self-contained as if apart from the universe or overlook, embrace and possess it as the Lord. In fact, it does both simultaneously, (v. 8) The Lord pervades the universe as the Virat Purusha, the Cosmic Soul (paribhu of the eighth veise, the One who becomes everywhere ); He enters into each object in the movement, to the Knowledge as Brahman supporting individual consciousness and individual form, to the Ignorance as an individualised and limited being. He * I have collected under this and the preceding headings the principal ideas of the Upanishads with regard to the Self, although not expressly mentioned or alluded to in our text, because they are indispensable to an understanding of the complete philosophy of these Scriptures and to the relations of the thought which is developed in the Isha. Page-233 manifests as the Jivatman or individual self in the living creature. From the standpoint of our lower state in the kingdom of death and limitation Atman is Sachchidananda, supra-mental, but reflected in the mind. If the mind is pure, bright and still, there is the right reflection; if it is unpurified, troubled and obscured, the reflection is distorted and subjected to the crooked action of the Ignorance. According to the state of the reflecting mind we may have either purity of self-knowledge or an obscuration and distortion of knowledge in the dualities of truth and error, a pure activity of unegoistic Will or an obscuration and deflection of Will in the dualities of right and wrong action, sin and virtue; a pure state and unmixed play of beatitude or an obscuration and perversion of it in the dualities of right and wrong enjoyment, pleasure and pain, joy and grief. It is the mental ego-sense that creates this distortion by division and limitation of the Self. The limitation is brought about through the Kshara Purusha identifying itself with the changeable formations of Nature in the separate body, the individual life and the egoistic mind, to the exclusion of the sense of unity with all existence and with all existences. This exclusion is a fixed habit of the understanding due to our past evolution in the movement, not an Indefinable law of human consciousness. Its diminution and final disappearance are the condition of self-realisation. The beginning of wisdom, perfection and beatitude is the vision of the One. THE STAGES OF SELF-REALISATION. THE VISION OF THE ALL.
The first movement of self-realisation is the sense of unity with other existences in the universe. Its early or crude form is the attempt to understand or
sympathies with others, the tendency of a widening love or compassion or fellow-feeling for others, the impulsion of work for the sake of others.
Page-234 The oneness so realised is a pluralistic unity, the drawing together of similar units resulting in a collectivity or solidarity rather than in real oneness. The Many remain to the consciousness as the real existences ; the One is only their result. Real knowledge begins with the perception of essential oneness,—one Matter, one Life, one Mind, one Soul playing in many forms. When this Soul of things is seen to be Sachchidananda, then knowledge is perfected. For we see Matter to be only a play of Life, Life of Mind energising itself in substance, Mind of Truth or causal Idea representing truth of being variously in all possible mental forms, Truth of Sachchidananda, Sachchidananda the self-manifestation of a supreme Unknowable, Para-Brahman or Para-Purusha. We perceive the soul in all bodies to be this one Self or Sachchidananda multiplying itself in individual consciousness. We see also all minds, lives, bodies to be active formations of the same existence in the extended being of the Self. This is the vision of all existences in the Self and of the Self in all existences which is the foundation of perfect internal liberty and perfect joy and peace. For by this vision, in proportion as it increases in intensity and completeness, there disappears from the individual mentality all jugupsa, that is to say, all repulsion, shrinking, dislike, fear, hatred and other perversions of feeling which arise from division and personal opposition to other beings or to the objectivities that surround us. Perfect equality* of soul is established. THE VISION OF THE SELF IN ITS BECOMINGS Vision is not sufficient ; one must become what inwardly one sees. The whole inner life must be changed * The state deseribed in the Gita as samatvam. Jugupsa is the feeling of repulsion caused by the sense of a want of harmony between one’s own limited self-formation and the contacts of the external with a consequent recoil of grief, fear, hatred, discomfit, suffering. It is the opposite of attraction which is the source of desire and attachment. Repulsion and attraction removed, we have samatvam. Page-235 so as to represent perfectly in all parts of the being what is understood by the intellect and seen by the inner perception. In the individual soul extending itself to the All by the vision of unity ( ekcitwam anupashyatah, seeing everywhere oneness), arranging its thoughts, emotions and sensations according to the perfect knowledge of the right relation of things which comes by the realisation of the Truth (vijnanatah, having the perfect knowledge), there must be repeated the divine act of consciousness by which the one Being, eternally self-existent, manifests in Itself the multiplicity of the world (sarvani bhutani atmaiva abhut, the Self-Being became all Becomings). That is to say, the human or egoistic view is that of a world of innumerable separate creatures each self-existent and different from the others, each trying to get its utmost possible profit out of the others and the world, but the divine view, the way in which God sees the world, is Himself, as the sole Being, living in innumerable existences that are Himself, supporting all, helping all impartially, working out to a divine fulfilment and under terms fixed from the beginning, from years sempiternal, a great progressive harmony of Becoming whose last term is Sachchidananda or Immortality. This is the viewpoint of the Self as Lord inhabiting the whole movement. The individual soul has to change the human or egoistic for the divine, supreme and universal view and live in that realisation. It is necessary, therefore, to have the knowledge of the transcendent Self, the sole unity, in the equation So ‘ham, I am He, and in that, knowledge to extend one’s conscious existence so as to embrace the whole Multiplicity.
This is the double or synthetic ideal of the Isha Upanishad; to embrace simultaneously Vidya and Avidya, the One and the Many ; to exist in the world, but change the terms of the Death into the terms of the Immortality; to have the freedom and peace of the Non-Birth simultaneously with the activity of the Birth—( vs-9-14? ).
Page-236 All parts of the lower being must consent to this realisation; to perceive with the intellect is not enough. The heart must consent in a universal love and delight, the sense-mind in a sensation of God and self everywhere, the life in the comprehension of all aims and energies in the world as part of its own being. THE ACTIVE BEATITUDE This realisation is the perfect and complete Beatitude, embracing action, but delivered from sorrow and self-delusion. There is no possibility of self-delusion (molia); for the soul, having attained to the perception of the Unknowable behind all existence, is no longer attached to the Becoming and no longer attributes an absolute value to any particularity in the universe, as if that were an object in itself and desirable in itself. All is enjoyable and has a value as the manifestation of the Self and for the sake of the Self which is manifested in it, but none for its own.* Desire and illusion are removed ; illusion is replaced by knowledge, desire by the active beatitude of universal possession. There is no possibility of sorrow; for all is seen as Sachchidananda and therefore in the terms of the infinite conscious existence, the infinite will, the infinite felicity. Even pain and grief are seen to be perverse terms of Ananda, and that Ananda which they veil here and for which they prepare the lower existence ( for all suffering in the evolution is a preparation of strength and bliss) is already seized, known and enjoyed by the soul thus liberated and perfected. For it possesses the eternal Reality of which they are the appearances. Thus it is possible, by the realisation of the unity of God and the world (Ish and jagati ) in the complete knowledge of .the Brahman, to renounce desire and illusion through the ascent to the pure Self and the Non-Becoming and yet to enjoy by means of all things in the manifestation
* Bribadaranyaka Upanishad. Page-237 God in the universe through a free and illuminated self-identification with Sachchidananda in all existences. CONCLUSION
We have, therefore, in the second movement the explanation of the first verse of the Upanishad. The first line, asserting that all souls are the one Lord inhabiting every object in the universe and that every object is universe in universe, movement in the general movement, has been explained in the terms of complete oneness by the Brahman transcendental and universal even in the individual, One in the Many, Many in the One, Stable and Motional, exceeding and reconciling all opposites. The second line, fixing as the rule of divine life universal renunciation in desire as the condition of universal enjoyment in the spirit, has been explained by the state of self-realisation, the realisation of the free and transcendent Self as one’s own tru3
Page-238 INTRODUCTION IV THE SYSTEMS OF YOGA These relations between the different psychological divisions of the human being and these various utilities and objects of effort founded on them, such as we have seen them in our brief survey of the natural evolution, we shall find repeated in the fundamental principles and methods of the different schools of Yoga. And if we seek to combine and harmonise their central practices and their predominant aims, we shall find that the basis provided by Nature is still our natural basis and the condition of their synthesis. In one respect Yoga exceeds the normal operation of cosmic Nature and climbs beyond her. For the aim of the Universal Mother is to embrace the Divine in her own play and creations and there to realise It. But in the highest flights of Yoga she reaches beyond herself and realises the Divine in Itself exceeding the universe and even standing apart from the cosmic play. Therefore by some it is supposed that this is not only the highest but also the one true or exclusively preferable object of Yoga.
Yet it is always through something which she has formed in her evolution that Nature thus overpasses her evolution. It is the individual heart that by sublimating its highest and purest emotions attains to the transcendent
Page-239 Bliss or the ineffable Nirvana, the individual mind that by converting its ordinary functionings into a knowledge beyond mentality knows its oneness with the Ineffable and merges its separate existence in that transcendent unity. And always it is the individual, the Self conditioned in its experience by Nature and working through her formations that attains to the Self unconditioned, free and transcendent. In practice three conceptions are necessary before there can be any possibility of Yoga ; there must be, as it were, three consenting parties to the effort,—God, Nature and the human soul or, in more abstract language, the Transcendental, the Universal and the Individual. If the individual and Nature are left to themselves, the one is bound to the other and unable to exceed appreciably her lingering march. Something transcendent is needed, free from her and greater, which will act upon us and her, attracting us upward to Itself and securing from her by good grace or by force her consent to the individual ascension. It is this truth which makes necessary to every philosophy of Yoga the conception of the Ishwara, Lord, supreme soul or supreme Self, towards whom the effort is directed and who gives the illuminating touch and the strength to attain. Equally true is the complementary idea so often enforced by the Yoga of devotion that as the Transcendent is necessary to the individual and sought after by him so also the individual is necessary in a sense to the Transcendent and sought after by It. If the Bhakta seeks and yearns after Bhagavan, Bhagavan also seeks and yearns after the Bhakta*. There can be no Yoga of knowledge without a human seeker of the knowledge, the supreme subject of knowledge and the divine use by the individual of the universal faculties of knowledge; no Yoga of devotion without the human God-
* Bhakta, the devotee or lover of God ; Bhagavan, God, the Lord of Love and Delight. The third term of the trinity is Bhagavat, the divine revelation of Love.
Page-240 lover, the supreme object of love and delight and the divine use by the individual of the universal faculties of spiritual, emotional and aesthetic enjoyment ; no Yoga of works without the human worker, the supreme Will, Master of all works and sacrifices, and the divine use by the individual of the universal faculties of power and action. However Monistic may be our intellectual conception of the highest truth of things, in practice we arc compelled to accept this omnipresent Trinity. For the contact of the human and individual consciousness with the divine is the very essence of Yoga. Yoga is the union of that which has become separated in the play of the universe with its own true self, origin and universality. The contact may take place at any point of the complex and intricately organised consciousness which we call our personality. It may be effected in the physical through the body; in the vital through the action of those functionings which determine the state and the experiences of our nervous being ; through the mentality, whether by means of the emotional heart, the active will or the understanding mind, or more largely by a general conversion of the mental consciousness in all its activities. It may equally be accomplished through a direct awakening to the universal or transcendent Truth and Bliss by the conversion of the central ego in the mind. And according to the point of contact that we choose will be the type of the Yoga that we practise.
For if, leaving aside the complexities of their particular processes, we fix our regard on the central principle of the chief schools of Yoga still prevalent in India, we find that they arrange themselves in an ascending order which starts from the lowest rung of the ladder, the body, and ascends to the direct contact between the individual soul and the transcendent and universal Self. Hathayoga selects the body and the vital functionings as its instruments of perfection and realisation; its concern is with the gross body. Rajayoga selects the mental being in its different parts as its lever-power; it concentrates on the subtle body. The triple Path of Works, of Love and
Page-241 of Knowledge uses some part of the mental being, will, heart or intellect as a starting-point and seeks by its conversion to arrive at the liberating Truth, Beatitude and Infinity which are the nature of the spiritual life. Its method is a direct commerce between the human Purusha in the individual body and the divine Purusha who dwells in every body and yet transcends all form and name. Hathayoga aims at the conquest of the life and the body whose combination in the food sheath and the vital vehicle constitutes, as we have seen, the gross body and whose equilibrium is the foundation of all Nature’s workings in the human being. The equilibrium established by Nature is sufficient for the normal egoistic life ; it is insufficient for the purpose of the Hatha Yogin. For it is calculated on .the amount of vital or dynamic force necessary to drive the physical engines during the normal span of human life and to perform more or less adequately the various workings demanded of it by the individual life inhabiting this frame and the world-environment by which it is conditioned. Hathayoga therefore seeks to rectify Nature and establish another equilibrium by which the physical frame will be able to sustain the inrush of an increasing vital or dynamic force of Prana indefinite, almost infinite in its quantity or intensity. In Nature the equilibrium is based upon the individualisation of a limited quantity and force of the Prana; more than that the individual is by personal and hereditary habit unable to bear, use or control. In Hathayoga, the equilibrium opens a door to the universalisation of the individual vitality by admitting into the body, containing, using and controlling a much less fixed and limited action of the universal energy.
The chief processes of Hathayoga arc asana and pranayami. By its numerous asanas or fixed postures it first cures the body of that restlessness which is a sign of its inability to contain without working them off in action and movement the vital forces poured into it from the universal Life-Ocean, gives to it an extraordinary health, force and suppleness and seeks to liberate it from the
Page-242 habits by which it is subjected to ordinary physical Nature and kept within the narrow bounds of her normal operations. In the ancient tradition of Hathayoga it has always been supposed that this conquest could be pushed so far even as to conquer to a great extent the force of gravitation. By various subsidiary but elaborate processes the Hathayogin next contrives to keep the body free from all impurities and the nervous system unclogged for those exercises of respiration which are his most important instruments. These are called pranayama, the control of the breath or vital power ; for breathing is the chief physical functioning of the vital forces. Pranayama, for the Hathoyogin, serves a double-purpose. First, it completes the perfection of the body. The vitality is liberated from many of the ordinary necessities of physical Nature ; robust health, prolonged youth, often an extraordinary longevity are attained. On the other hand, Pranayama awakens the coiled-up serpent of the Prana dynamism in the vital sheath and opens to the Yogin fields of consciousness, ranges of experience, abnormal faculties denied to the ordinary human life while it puissantly intensifies such normal powers and faculties as he already possesses. These advantages can be farther secured and emphasised by other subsidiary processes open to the Hathayogin.
The results of Hathayoga are thus striking to the eye and impose easily on the vulgar or physical mind. And yet at the end we may ask what we have gained at the end of all this stupendous labour. The object of physical Nature, the preservation of the mere physical life, its highest perfection, even in a certain sense the capacity of a greater enjoyment of physical living have been carried out on an abnormal scale. But the weakness of Hathayoga is that its laborious and difficult processes make so .great a demand on the time and energy and impose so complete a severance from the ordinary life of men that the utilisation of its results for the life of the world becomes either impracticable or is extraordinarily restricted. If in return for this loss we gain another life in another world within, the mental, the dynamic, these results could have Page-243 been acquired through other systems, through Rajayoga, though Tantra, by much less laborious methods and held on much less exacting terms. On the other hand the physical results, increased vitality, prolonged youtht health, longevity are of small avail if they must be held by us as misers of ourselves, apart from the common life, for their own sake, not utilised, not thrown into the common sum of the world’s activities. Hathayoga attains large results, but at an exorbitant price and to very little purpose. Rajayoga takes a higher flight. It aims at the liberation and perfection not of the bodily, but of the mental being, the control of the emotional and sensational life, the mastery of the whole apparatus of thought and consciousness. It fixes its eyes on the chitta, that stuff of mental consciousness in which all these activities arise, and it seeks, even as Hathayoga with its physical material, first to purify and to tranquillise. The normal state of man is a condition of trouble and disorder, a kingdom either at war with itself or badly governed ; for the lord, the Purusha, is subjected to his ministers the faculties, subjected even to his subjects, the instruments of sensation, emotion, action, enjoyment. Swarajya, self-rule, must be substituted for this subjection. First, therefore, the powers of order must be helped to overcome the powers of disorder. The preliminary movement of Rajayoga is a careful self-discipline by which good habits of mind are substituted for the lawless movements that indulge the lower nervous being. By the practice of truth, by renunciation of all forms of egoistic seeking, by abstention from injury to others, by purity, by constant meditation and inclination to the divine Purusha who is the true lord of the mental kingdom, a pure, glad, clear state of mind and heart is established.
This is the first step only. Afterwards, the ordinary activities of the mind and sense must be entirely quieted in older that the soul may be free to ascend to higher states of consciousness and acquire the foundation for a perfect freedom and self-mastery. But Rajayoga docs
Page-244 forget that the disabilities of the ordinary mind proceed largely from its subjection to the reactions of the nervous system and the body. It adopts therefore from the Hathayogic system its devices of asana and pranayama, but reduces their multiple and elaborate forms in ‘.ach case to one simplest and most directly effective process sufficient for its own immediate object. Thus it gets rid of the Hathayogic complexity and cumbrousncss while it utilises the swift and powerful efficacy of its methods for the control of the body and the vital functions and for the awakening of that internal dynamism, full of a latent supernormal faculty, type field in Yogic terminology by the kundalini, the coiled and sleeping serpent of Energy within. This done, the system proceeds to the perfect quieting of the restless mind and its elevation to a higher plane through concentration of mental force by the successive stages which lead to Samadhi.
By Samadhi, in which the mind acquires the capacity of withdrawing from its limited waking activities into freer and higher states of consciousness, Rajayoga serves a double purpose. It compasses a pure mental action liberated from the confusions of the outer consciousness and passes thence to the higher supra-mental planes on which the individual soul enters into its true spiritual existence. But also it
acquires the capacity of that free and concentrated energising of consciousness on its object which our philosophy asserts as the primary cosmic energy and the method of divine action upon the world. By this capacity the Yogin, already possessed of the highest supra-cosmic knowledge and experience in the state of trance, is able in the waking state to
acquire directly whatever knowledge and exercise whatever mastery may be useful or necessary to his activities in the objective world. For the ancient system of Rajayoga aimed not only at Swarajya, self-rule or subjective empire, the entire control by the subjective consciousness of all the states and activities proper to its own domain, but included Samrajya as well, outward empire, the control by the subjective consciousness of its outer activities and environment.
Page-245 We perceive that as Hathayoga, dealing with the life and body, aims at the supernormal perfection of the physical life and its capacities and goes beyond it into the domain of the mental life, so Rajayoga, operating with the mind, aims at a supernormal perfection and enlargement of the capacities of the mental life and goes beyond it into the domain of the spiritual existence. But the weakness of the system lies in its excessive reliance on abnormal states of trance. This limitation leads first to a certain aloofness from the physical life which is our foundation and the sphere into which we have to bring our mental and spiritual gains. Especially is the spiritual life, in this system, too much associated with the state of Samadhi. Our object is to make the spiritual life and its experiences fully active and fully utilisable in the waking state and even in the normal uses of the functions. But in Raga yoga it tends to withdraw into a The triple Path of devotion, knowledge and works attempts the province which Rajayoga leaves unoccupied. It differs from Rajayoga in that it does not occupy itself with the elaborate training of the whole mental system as the condition of perfection, but seizes on certain central principles, the intellect, the heart, the will, and seeks to convert their normal operations by turning them away from their ordinary and external preoccupations and activities and concentrating them on the divine. It differs also in this,—-and hare from the point of view of an integral Yoga there seems to be a defect,—that it is in different to mental and bodily perfection and aims only at purity as a condition of the divine realisation. A second defect is that as actually practised it chooses on; of the three parallel paths exclusively and almost in antagonism to the others instead of effecting a synthetic harmony of the intellect, the heart and the will in an integra1 divine realisation.
The Path of Knowledge aims at the realisation of the unique and supreme Self. It proceeds by the method
Page-246 of intellectual reflection, vichara, to right discrimination, viveka. It observes and distinguishes the different elements of our apparent or phenomenal being and rejecting identification with each of them arrives at their exclusion and separation in one common term as constituents of Prakriti, of phenomenal Nature, creations of Maya, the phenomenal consciousness. So it is able to arrive at its right identification with the pure and unique Self which is not mutable or perishable, not determinable by any phenomenon or combination of phenomena. From this point the path, as ordinarily followed, leads to the rejection of the phenomenal worlds from the consciousness as an illusion and the final immergence without return of the individual soul in the Supreme. But this exclusive consummation is not the sole or inevitable result of the Path of Knowledge. For, followed more largely and with a less individual aim, the method of Knowledge may lead to an active conquest of the cosmic existence for the Divine no less than to a transcendence. The point of this departure is the realisation of the supreme Sell not only in one’s own being but in all beings and, finally, the realisation of even the phenomenal aspects of the world as a play of the divine consciousness and not something entirely alien to its true nature. And on the basis of this realisation a yet further enlargement is possible, the conversion of all forms of knowledge, however mundane, into activities of the divine consciousness utilisable for the perception of the one and unique Object of knowledge both in itself and through the play of its forms and symbols. Such a method might well lead to the elevation of the whole range of human intellect and perception to the divine level, to its spiritualisation and to the justification of the cosmic travail of knowledge in humanity.
The Path of Devotion aims at the enjoyment of the supreme Love and Bliss and
utilizes normally the conception of the supreme Lord in His personality as the divine Lover and enjoyer of the universe. The world is then realised as a play of the Lord, with our human life as its final stage,
Page-247 pursued through the different phases of self-concealment and self-revelation. The principle of 13hakti Yoga is to utilise all the normal relations of human life into which emotion enters and apply them no longer to transient worldly relations, but to the joy of the All-Loving, the All-Beautiful and the All-Blissful. Worship and meditation are used only for the preparation and increase of intensity of the divine relationship. And this Yoga is catholic in its use of all emotional relations, so that even enmity and opposition to God, considered as an intense, impatient and perverse form of Love, is conceived as a possible means of realisation and salvation. This path, too, as ordinarily practised, leads away from world-existence to an absorption, of another kind than the Monist’s, in the Transcendent and Supra-cosmic. But, here too, the exclusive result is not inevitable. The Yoga itself provides a first corrective by not confining the play of divine love to the relation between the supreme Soul and the individual, but extending it to a common feeling and mutual worship between the devotees themselves united in the same realisation of the supreme Love and Bliss. It provides a yet more general corrective in the realisation of the divine object of Love in all beings not only human but animal, easily extended to all forms whatsoever. We can see how this larger application of the Yoga of Devotion may be so used as to lead to the elevation of the whole range of human emotion, sensation and aesthetic perception to the divine level, its spiritualisatiori and the justification of the cosmic labour towards love and joy in our humanity.
The Path of Works aims at the dedication of every human activity to the supreme Will.- It begins by the renunciation of all egoistic aim for our works, all pursuit of action for an interested aim or for the sake of a worldly result. By this renunciation it so purifies the mind and the will that we become easily conscious of the great universal Energy as the true doer of all our actions and the Lord of that Energy as their ruler and director with the individual as only a mask, an excuse, an instrument
Page-248 or, more positively, a conscious centre of action and phenomenal relation. The choice and direction of the act is more and more consciously left to this supreme Will and this universal Energy. Xo That our works as well as the results of our works are finally abandoned. The object is the release of the soul from its bondage to appearances and to the reaction of phenomenal activities. Karmayoga is used, like the other paths, to lead to liberation from phenomenal existence and a departure into the Supreme. But here too the exclusive result is not inevitable. The end of the path may be, equally, a perception of the Divine in all energies, in all happenings, in all activities, and a free and unegoistic participation of the soul in the cosmic action. So followed it will lead to the elevation of all human will and activity to the divine level, its spiritualisation and the justification of the cosmic labour towards freedom, power and perfection in the human being.
We can see also that in the integral view of things these three paths are one. Divine Love should normally lead to the perfect knowledge of the Beloved by perfect intimacy, thus becoming a path of Knowledge, and to divine service, thus becoming a path of Works. So also should perfect Knowledge lead to perfect Love and Joy and a full acceptance of the works of That which is known ; dedicated Works to the entire love of the Master of the Sacrifice and the deepest knowledge of His ways and His being. It is in this triple path that we come most readily to the absolute knowledge, love and service of the One in all beings and in Its entire manifestation.
Page-249 GOD IN ALL BEINGS * 1 The Being whom I declare, is no isolated existence. 2 The whole world is the Being.— It is one and the 3 same Being who manifests in all that lives.—Individual existences are merely modifications of the divine qualities. 4 Every man whose heart is free from the perturbations of doubt, knows with certitude that there is no being save One alone. The word " I " belongs rightly 5 to none but God.-There is one self in all existences 6 which appears as if different in different creatures.— The one God hidden in all beings who pervades all things and is the inner Self of all creatures, who presides over all actions and dwells in all existences. 7 He who abiding in the mind is inward to mind, whom the mind knows not, of whom mind is the body, who within governs the mind, He is thy Self and inward guide and immortal. 8 Without being divided in creatures It dwells in them as if divided. * * * 9 He sees rightly who beholds the supreme Lord dwelling equally in all existences and not perishing when they perish. 10 Things in their fundamental nature are subject neither to transformation nor to destruction. They are
11 all one single soul.-It is not the individual visible to
us who are modified, it is the universal substance
Page-250 which is modified in each of them. And to that substance what other name shall we give but first substance ? It is this which is and becomes. It is the eternal God, and we err when we forget His name and form and see only the names and forms of each 12 individual.—And these bodies that end are of an eternal soul, indestructible and immeasurable, unborn, everlasting, ancient, all-pervading, stable, immobile, not manifest, beyond thought, immutable-as such it 13 should be known.—Since it is without beginning or quality, this supreme Self, imperishable though residing in a body, is situated everywhere and remains in the body untouched and unstained. * * * 14 One soul is distributed among all unreasoning existences, one intelligent soul is shared by all beings 15 that have reason.—For there is one world formed of all, one God pervading all, one substance, one Law, one Reason common to all intelligent beings. 16 What is Reason? It is a portion of the divine Spirit 17 that is diffused in our bodies.-It is the Spirit that is in men, it is the breath of the Almighty that gives 18 them understanding.—He is the intelligence in every living creature. GOD IN ALL ** 1 I am the Self who abides in the heart of all beings.— 2 I am the beginning, the middle and the end of all 3 existences.—Turn thy regard on thyself that thou 4 mayst find Me erect within thee.—Who is so low that one can see all His aspects ? Who is so high that one cannot attain to Him ? The One concealed whose name is unknown ! He is among men and
*1) Farid-ud-din-attar.— 2) Schopenhauer–3) Spinoza— 4)Gulschen- Raz.— 6) Upanishad–6)
Swetacwatarea Upanishad.—7) Brihadaranyaka Upanishad.— 8) Bhagavad Gita__9) id.— IO) As wag hosha__11 Apollonius.— 12)
Bhagavad Gita.—13) id__14) Marcus Aurelius__15) id.— 16) Seneca. – 17) Job.—18) Upanishad.
Page-251 close to the gods, when the3′ live and when they die. Without cessation He holds their existence in His hand. They are in Him eternally. 5 He who is here in man and He who is there in the 6 Sun, is the same.—The Lord who is established in the secret place of every soul, pervades the whole 7 universe.—He is the Light of all lights that is beyond the darkness ; He is the knowledge and the object of knowledge and its goal and dwells in the heart of 8 all.—The Lord dwells in the heart of all beings and He turns all of them as upon a machine by His 9 Maya.—The jewel of the perfect nature clear and luminous as the sun dwells in every being. 10 This is that truth and immortality in which all the worlds and their creatures are established ; this know 11 for the supreme aim.—In all hearts dwells the shining One, so have the sages declared. 12 Now life has this sense, that as our consciousness becomes more and more clear, it discloses in us God.— 13 Yes, we need a new revelation, not about Hell and 14 Heaven, but the spirit which lives in us.—Let man then learn the revelation of all Nature and all thought to his heart; this, namely, that the Highest dwells with him, that the sources cf Nature are in his own 15 mind.—The Light that shines most high of all, higher than every other thing, in the highest world beyond which there is no other, is the same light 16 that is in man.—Its name is the God in man. 17 The soul of every man contains God in potentiality.— 18 The seed of the Divinity is planted in our bodies.— 19 He is called the supreme self in this body and the supreme Soul. 20 21 A holy spirit dwells in our soul.—The soul and self within established in the heart of man. 22 God is not where we believe Him to be; He is in 23 ourselves.—The Kingdom of Heaven is within us.— 24 For the throne of God is in our hearts, His kingdom is within us.
25 He himself is within us, so that we are His vessels,
Page-252 26 His living temples, His incarnations.—We arc the temple of the living God. 27 Know you not that you are the temple of God and 28 the Spirit of God dwelled in you?—Know you not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which 29 is in you ?—God is not remote from you, He is with 30 you and in you.—You are yourselves He whom you seek- HE IS THYSELF 1 Why should man go about seeking God ? He is in thy heart-beats and thou knowest it not; thou wert 2 in error in seeking Him outside thyself.—He who finds not the Eternal in himself, will never find it outside; but he who sees Him in the temple of his own soul, sees Him also in the temple of the universe.— 3 Where wouldst thou seek God ? Seek Him in thy soul which is eternal in its nature and contains the 4 divine birth.—Heaven is within thee.—If thou seek 5 God elsewhere, thou wilt never find Him.—God cannot be recognised except in oneself. So long as thon fondest Him not in thee, thou wilt not find Him anywhere. There is no God for the man who does not 6 feel Him in himself.—Thou shouldst not cry after 7 God: the Source is in thyself.—While thou art saying "I am alone with myself", in thy heart there is dwelling uninterruptedly that supreme Spirit, silent 8 observer of all good and all evil.—Thou seest Him, yet thou knowest not that thou seest. 9 10 Thou art not, but only He.—Thou art He and He II is thou,-This supreme Brahman, the self of all, the great abode of the universe, more subtle then the subtle, eternal, That is thyself and thou art that.
" 1) Bhagavad Gita.—2) id.—3) Baha-ullah.—4) Fragment of a hymn to Ptah__5) Taittiriya Upanishad.— 6)
Swetacwatarea Upanishad.—7) Bhagavad Gita.— 8) id.—9)Buddhist Meditations from the Japanese.— It)) Mundaka Upanishad —11) Sikh Granth. —12) Tolstoi.—13) Channing__ 14) Emerson.—15) Chhandogya Upanishad.—16) Lao-tse.—17) Viveka-nanda.—18)Seneca. —19) Bhagavad Gita.—20) Seneca. — 21)
Swetacwatarea Upanishad.—22) Antoine the Healer. — 23) Luke. — 24) J Tauler —25)
Epictetus. — 26) Corinthians.—27) id. -28) id —29) Seneca. —30) Vive-kanania.
Page-253 12 Thou art That…not a part, not a mode of It, but 13 identically That, the absolute Spirit.—All the attributes of Allah are thy attributes. 14 The essence of our being, the mystery in us which calls itself " I,"—what words have we to express things like these? It is a breath of Heaven; the Highest reveals itself in man. This body, these faculties, this life that we live, is it not all a robe for 15 Him who is nameless ?—The doctrine of this supreme Presence is a cry of joy and exultation. What man seeing this can lose it from his thought or enter- 16 tain a meaner subject ?—The greatest joy man can conceive is the joy of recognising in himself a being free, intelligent, loving and in consequence happy, of feeling God in himself. * * * 17 Man in order to be really a man must conceive the idea of God in himself. 18 The individual " I " and the supreme Spirit are one and the same. The difference is in degree: the one is finite, the other infinite ; the one is dependent, 19 the other independent.—Man ought always to say in his thought, I am God Himself. 20 God is my inmost self, the reality of my being.— 21 God is myself; we are one in consciousness and His 22 knowing is my knowing.—The Purusha who is there 23 and there, He am I.—If I were not, God would not 24 be.—I know that I have in me something without which nothing could be. It is that I call God. 25 They regarded the divine Being and grew assured that it was no other than themselves…that they were themselves that Being…that they and that Being made but one. *** 1) Vivekananda.—2) Ramakrishna.—3) Bohme.—4) Angelus Silesius. — 6) Tolstoi.—6) Angelus Silesius. — 7) Laws of Manu. — 8) Mohyddinibn Arabi. —9) id.—IO) id. —11) Upanishad. – 12) Chhan-dogya Upanishad.—13) Mohyddin-ibn-Arabi.—14) Carlylc;.—15) Emerson.—16) Tolstoi—-17) id.—18,) Ramakrishna. —19) Upanishad.— 20) Vivekananda.—21) Maitre Eckhart.—22) Isha Upanishad.—23) Maitre Eckhart.—24) Angelus Silesius.—25) Farid-ud-din-attar. Page-254 What is the origin of the different methods of writing,— from right to left, from left to right or, like the Chinese, vertically ? The question is one of great interest but impossible to solve definitely for lack of substantial data. All one can do is to speculate on the most probable and satisfying explanation. In the first place, it is evident that these differences are no mere accident nor the result of some trivial and local cause ; for they coincide with great cultural divisions of humanity belonging to prehistoric times. It is the races called Aryan from their common original culture whose script is directed from left to right; the Mesopotamian races deriving their culture from the Chaldean proceed from right to left ; the Mongolians write vertically. In the second place no explanation is possible if we adopt the view that writing is a comparatively recent invention in the history of the human race and borrowed by all the ancient nations from a common source,—a derivation, let us say, from Egyptian hieroglyphs popularised and spread broadcast over earth by the commercial activities of Phoenician traders. We must suppose on the contrary that these differences were developed at a very early time while the great cultures were in their formation and before the dispersal of the races representing them. Undoubtedly, the general use of writing is a late development in the history of the present cycle of civilisation. And to this retardation two causes contributed, at first, the absence of a simple and easy system and, afterwards, the absence of a simple, common, but handy and durable material. While this state of things endured, writing would not be used for daily and ordinary purposes, but only in connection with great religious ceremonies or, where culture was materially more advanced, for the preservation of important records or of treasured and sacred knowledge.
It is, therefore, in some circumstance intimately connected with religious ideas and practices that we must look for the explanation we are seeking ; and it should be
Page-255 a circumstance common to all these cultures, yet capable of leading to so striking a difference. The one important circumstance common, one might almost say central, to the ideas and practices of the ancient nations was the reverence for the sun and its supreme importance in religious ceremonies. Might not the direction adopted for their writing be determined by some difference in their attitude towards the direction of the sue in its daily movement from east to west ? The difference of attitude can only be explained if we suppose that for some reason the Aryan forefathers had their faces turned southwards, the Mesopotamian northwards and, the Mongolian eastwards. In that case, the sun for the Aryans would move from their left to their right, for the Mesopotamians from their right to their left, for the Mongolians straight towards them, and this difference would be represented by the movement of the hand tracing the sacred symbols on some hard flat surface, of stone or other material used for these early scripts. But what circumstance, again, could lead to this difference ? We can only think of one,—that this tendency might have been formed during the constant migration of these races from their original habitat. If we accept Mr. Tilak’s theory of an Aryan migration from the Arctic regions southwards towards India, Persia and the Mediterranean countries; if we can suppose that the fathers of the Mesopotamian culture came from the south northwards and that the first Mongolian movement was from Central Asia to the east, we shall have the necessary conditions. We may thus explain also the Sanskrit terms for the four directions; for entering India from the west and following this line in their early colonisation, the east would be in front of the Aryans, pray, the West behind, passim, the South on their right, dashing, while the name for the north, titter, higher, might possibly indicate a memory of their old northern home in that supreme point of the earth where they still placed the sacred mountain of their gods.
Necessarily, this explanation is in the highest degree conjectural and depends on pure intellectual reasoning which is an unsafe guide in the absence of solid and sufficient data. Nevertheless, it is the one positive explanation that suggests itself to us and, as a hypothesis, is well worth taking into consideration.
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