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NO.6 CHAPTER VI MAN IN THE UNIVERSE The Soul of man, a traveler, wanders in this cycle of Brahman, huge, a totality of lives, a totality of states , thinking itself different from the Impeller of the journey. Accepted by Him, it attains its goal of Immortality. Swetacwatarea Upanishad. The progressive revelation of a great, a transcendent, a luminous Reality with the multitudinous relativities of this world that we see and those other worlds that we do not see as means and material, condition and field, this would seem then to be the meaning of the universe,—since meaning and aim it has and is neither a purposeless illusion nor a fortuitous accident. For the same reasoning which leads us to conclude that world-existence is not a deceptive trick of Mind, just fees equally the certainty that it is no blindly and helplessly self-existent mass of separate phenomenal existences clinging together and struggling together as best they can-in their orbit through eternity, no tremendous self-creation and self-impulsion of an ignorant Force without any secret Intelligence within aware of its starting-point and its goal and guiding its process and its motion. An existence, wholly self-aware and therefore entirely master of itself, possesses the phenomenal being in which it is involved, realists itself in form, unfolds itself in the individual.
That luminous Emergence is the dawn which the Aryan forefathers worshipped. Its fulfilled perfection is that highest step of the world-pervading Vishnu which
Page-321 they beheld as if an eye of vision extended in the purest heavens of the Mind. For it exists already as an all revealing and all-guiding Truth of things which watches over the world and attracts mortal man, first without the knowledge of his conscious mind, by the general match of Nature, but at last consciously by a progressive awakening and self-enlargement, to his divine ascension. The ascent to the divine Life is the human journey, the Work of works, the acceptable Sacrifice. This alone is man’s real business in the world and the justification of his existence, without which he would be only an insect crawling among other ephemeral insects on a speck of mud and water which has managed to form itself amid the appalling immensities of the physical universe. This Truth of things that has to emerge out of the phenomenal world’s contradictions is declared to be an infinite Bliss of self-conscious existence, the same everywhere, in all things, in all times and beyond Time, and aware of itself behind all these phenomena by whose in-tensest vibrations of activity or by whose largest totality it can never be entirely expressed or in any way limited; for it is self-existent and does not depend for its being upon its manifestations. They represent it, but do not exhibits it; point to it, but do not reveal it. It is revealed only to itself within their forms. The conscious existence involved in the form comes, as it evolves, to know itself by intuition, by self-vision, by self-experience. It becomes itself in the world by knowing itself ; it knows itself by becoming itself. Thus possessed of itself inwardly, it imparts also to its forms and modes the conscious delight of Sachchidananda. This becoming of the infinite Bliss-Existence-Consciousness in mind and life and body,—for independent of them it exists eternally,—is the transfiguration intended, and the utility of individual existence. Through the individual it manifests in relation even as of itself it exists in identity.
The Unknowable knowing itself as Sachchidananda is the one supreme affirmation of Vedanta; it contains all the others or on it they depend. This is the one veritable
Page-322 experience that remains when all appearances have been accounted for negatively by the elimination of their shapes and coverings or positively by the reduction of their names and forms to the constant truth that they contain. For fulfilment of life or for transcendence of life, and whether purity, calm and freedom in the spirit be our aim or puissance, joy and perfection, Sachchidananda is the unknown, omnipresent, indispensable term for which the human consciousness, whether in knowledge and sentiment or in sensation and action, is eternally seeking.
The universe and the individual are the two essential appearances into which the Unknowable descends and through which it has to be approached ; for other intermediate collectivities are born only of their interaction. This descent of the supreme Reality is in its nature a self-concealing; and in the descent there are successive levels, in the concealing successive veils. Necessarily, the revelation takes the form of an assent ; and necessarily also the ascent and the revelation are both progressive. For each successive level of descent to the Divine is to man a stage in an ascension ; each veil that hides the unknown God becomes for the God-lover and God-seeker an instrument of His unveiling. Out of the rhythmic slumber of material Nature unconscious of the Soul and the Idea that maintain the ordered activities of her energy even in her dumb and mighty material trance, the world struggles into the more quick, varied and disordered rhythm of Life labouring on the verges of self-consciousness. Out of Life it struggles upward into Mind in which the unit becomes awake to itself and its world, and in that awakening the universe gains the leverage it required for its supreme work,—it gains self-conscious individuality. But Mind takes up the work to continue, not to complete it. It is a labourer of acute but limited intelligence who takes the confused material offered by Life and having improved, adapted, varied, classified according to its power hands them over to the supreme Artist of our divine manhood. That Artist dwells in supermind; for supermind is superman. Therefore our world has yet to
Page-323 climb beyond Mind to a higher principle, a higher status, a higher dynamism in which universe and individual become aware of and possess that which they both are and therefore stand explained to each other, in harmony with each other, unified. The disorders of life and mind cease by discerning the secret of a more perfect order than the physical. Matter below life and mind contains in itself the balance between a perfect poise of tranquillity and the action of an immeasurable energy, but does not possess that which it contains. Its peace wears the dull mask of an obscure inertia, a sleep of unconsciousness or rather of a drugged and imprisoned consciousness. Driven by a force which is its real self but whose sense it cannot yet seize nor share, it has not the awakened joy of its own harmonious energies. Life and mind awaken to the sense of this want in the form of a striving and seeking ignorance and a troubled and baffled desire which are the first steps towards self-knowledge and self-fulfilment. But where then is the kingdom of their self-fulfilling ? It comes to them by the exceeding of themselves. Beyond life and mind we recover consciously in its divine truth that which the balance of material Nature grossly represented,—a tranquillity which is neither inertia nor a sealed trance of consciousness, but the concentration of an absolute force and an absolute self-awareness, and an action of immeasurable energy which is at the same time an out-thrilling of in effectible bliss because its every act is the expression, not of a want and an ignorant straining, but of an absolute peace and self-mastery. In that attainment our ignorance realises the light of which it was a darkened or a partial reflection; our desires cease in the plenitude and fulfilment towards which even in their most brute material forms they were an obscure and fallen aspiration.
The universe and the individual are necessary to each other in their ascent. Always indeed they exist for each other and profit by each other. Universe is a diffusion of the divine All in infinite Space and Time, the individual its concentration within limits of Space and Time.
Page-324 Universe seeks in infinite extension the divine totality it feels itself to he but cannot entirely realise; for in extension existence drives at a pluralistic sum of itself which can neither be the primal nor the final unit, but only a recurring decimal without end or beginning. Therefore it creates in itself a self conscious concentration of the All through which it can aspire. In the conscious individual Prakriti turns back to perceive Purusha, World seeks after Self; God having entirely become Nature, Nature seeks to become progressively God. On the other hand it is by means of the universe that the individual is impelled to realise himself. Not only is it his foundation, his means, his field, the stuff of the divine Work; but also, since the concentration of the universal Life which he is takes place within limits and is not like the intensive unity of Brahman free from all conception of bound and term, he must necessarily universalise and impersonalise himself in order to manifest the divine All which is his reality. Yet is he called upon to preserve, even when he most extends himself in universality of consciousness, a mysterious transcendent something of which his sense of personality gives him an obscure and egoistic representation. Otherwise he has missed his goal, the problem set to him has not been solved, the divine work for which he accepted birth has not been done.
The universe comes to the individual as Life, — a dynamism the entire secret of which he has to master and a mass of colliding results, a whirl of potential energies out of which he has to disengage some supreme order and some yet unrealised harmony. This is after all the real sense of man’s progress. It is not merely a restatement in slightly different terms of what physical Nature has already accomplished. Nor can the ideal of human life be simply the animal repeated on a higher scale of mentality. Otherwise, any system or order which assured a tolerable well-being and a moderate mental satisfaction would have stayed our advance. The animal is satisfied with a modicum of necessity ; the gods are content with their splendours. But man cannot rest permanently until he reaches
Page-325 some highest good. He is the greatest of living beings because he is the most discontented, because he feels most the pressure of limitations. He alone, perhaps, is capable of being seized by the divine frenzy for a remote ideal. To the Life-Spirit, therefore, the individual in whom its potentialities centre is preeminently Man, the Purusha. It is the Son of Man who is supremely capable of incarnating God. This Man is the Manu, the thinker, the manomaya Purusha, mental person or soul in mind of the ancient sages. No mere superior mammal is he, but a conceptive soul basing itself on the animal body in Matter. He is conscious Name or Numen accepting and utilising form as a medium through which Person can deal with substance. The animal life emerging out of Matter is only the inferior term of his existence. The life of thought feeling, will, conscious impulsion, that which we name in its totality Mind, that which strives to seize upon Matter and its vital energies and subject them to the law of its own progressive transformation, is the middle term in which he takes his effectual station. But there is equally a supreme term which Mind in man searches after so that having found he may affirm it in his mental and bodily existence. This practical affirmation of something essentially superior to his present self is the basis of the divine life in the human being.
Awakened to a profounder self-knowledge than his first mental idea of himself, Man begins to conceive some formula and to perceive some appearance of the thing that he has to affirm. But it appears to him as if poised between two negations of itself. If, beyond his present attainment, he perceives
ores touched by the power, light, bliss of a self-conscious infinite existence and translates his thought or his experience of it into terms convenient for his mentality,—Infinity, Omniscience, Omnipotence,
Immortality’, Freedom, Love, Beatitude, God,—yet does this sun of his seeing appear to shine between a double Night,—a darkness below, a mightier darkness beyond. For when he strives to know it utterly, it seems to pass into something which neither any one of these terms
north’s
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sum of them can at all represent. His mind at last negates God for a Beyond, or at least it seems to find God transcending Himself, denying Himself to the conception. Here also, in the world, in himself, and around himself, he is met always by the opposites of his affirmation. Death is ever with him, limitation invests his being and his experience, error, inconscience, weakness, inertia, grief, pain, evil are constant oppressors of his effort. Here also he is driven to deny God, or at least the Divine seems to negate or to hide itself in some appearance or outcome which is other than its true and eternal reality.
And the terms of this denial are not, like that other and remoter negation, inconceivable and therefore naturally mysterious, unknowable to his mind, but appear to be knowable, known, definite,—and still mysterious. He knows not what they are, why they exist, how they came into being. He sees their processes as they affect and appear to him ; he cannot fathom their essential reality.
Perhaps they are unfathomable, perhaps they also are really, unknowable in their essence ? Or, it may be, they have no essential reality,—are an illusion, Asat, non-being. The superior Negation appears to us sometimes as a Nihil, a Non-Existence; this inferior negation may also be, in its essence, a Nihil, a non-existence. But as we have already put away from us this evasion of the difficulty with regard to that higher, so also we discard it for this inferior Asat. To deny entirely its reality or to seek an escape from it as a mere disastrous illusion is to put away from us the problem and to shun our Work. For Life, these things that seem to deny God, to be the opposites of Sachchidananda, are real, even if they turn out to be temporary. They and their opposites, good, knowledge, joy, pleasure, life, survival, strength, power, increase, are the very material of her workings.
It is probable indeed that they are the result or rather the inseparable accompaniments, not of an illusion, but of a wrong relation, wrong because it is founded on a false view of what the individual is in the universe and therefore a false attitude both towards God and Nature, Page-327 towards self and environment. Because that which he has become is out of harmony both with what the world of his habitation is and what he himself should be and is to be, there of man is subject to these contradictions of the secret Truth of things. In that case they are not the punishment of a fall, but the conditions of a progress. They are the first elements of the work he has to fulfil, the price he has to pay for the crown, which he hopes to win, the narrow way by which Nature escapes out of Matter into consciousness; they are at once her ransom and her stock. For out of these false relations and by their aid the true have to be found. By the Ignorance we have to cross over death. So too the Veda speaks cryptically of energies that are like women evil in impulse, wandering from the path, doing hurt to their Lord, which yet, though themselves false and unhappy, build up in the end "this vast Truth," the Truth that is the Bliss. It would be, then, not when he has excised the evil in Nature out of himself by an act of moral surgery or parted with life by an abhorrent recoil, but when he has turned Death into a more perfect life, lifted the small things of the human limitation into the great things of the divine vastness, transformed suffering into beatitude, converted evil into its proper good, translated error and falsehood into their secret truth that the sacrifice will be accomplished, the journey done and Heaven and Earth equalised join hands in the bliss of the Supreme. Yet how can such contraries pass into each other ? By what alchemy shall this lead of mortality be turned into that gold of divine Being ? But if they are not in their essence contraries? If they are manifestations of one Reality, identical in substance ? Then indeed a divine transmutation becomes conceivable.
We have seen that the Non-Being beyond may well be an inconceivable existence and perhaps an ineffable Bliss. At least the Nirvana of Buddhism which formulated the one luminous effort of man to reach and to rest in this highest Non-existence, represents itself in the psy-
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chology of the liberated yet upon earth as an unspeakable peace and gladness; its practical effect is the extinction of all suffering through the disappearance of all egoistic idea or sensation and the nearest we can get to a positive conception of it is that it is some inexpressible Beatitude ( if the name or any name can be applied to a peace so void of contents), into which even the notion of self-existence seems to be swallowed up and disappear. It is a Sachchidananda to which we dare no longer apply even the supreme terms of Sat, of Chit and of Ananda. For all terms are annulled and all cognitive experience is over passed.
On the other hand, we have hazarded the suggestion that since all is one Reality, this inferior negation also, this other contradiction or non-existence of Sachchidananda is none other than Sachchidananda itself. It is capable of being conceived by the intellect, perceived in the vision, even received though the sensations as verily that which it seems to deny, and such would it always be to our conscious experience if things were not falsified by some great fundamental error, some possessing and compelling Ignorance, Maya or Avidya. In this sense a solution might be sought, not perhaps a satisfying metaphysical solution for. the logical mind,—for we are standing on the border-line of the unknowable, the ineffable and straining our eyes beyond,—but a sufficient Dasis in experience for the practice of the divine life.
To do this we must dare to go below the clear surfaces of things on which the mind loves to dwell, to tempt the vast and obscure, to penetrate the unfathomable depths of consciousness and identify ourselves? it
is states of being that are not our own. Human language is a poor help in such a search, but at least we may find in it some symbols and figures, return with some just expressible hints which will help the light of the soul and throw upon the mind some reflection of the ineffable design. Page-329 of the Worlds THE DESIRE TO BE. If the secret of the being is concealed at once in his absolute containment and in his relative affirmation, it is in the latter first that he must seek for it. It is by scrutinising its primary data that we shall succeed, perhaps, in perceiving through and behind them the final reason of his existence, the cause of his cause. It is by reaching down to his roots that we shall discover the profundities of that antecedent, not previous in time but permanent, to which Knowledge gives the name of Unknowable. For the secret of the being is within him. Whatever be the postulate that we posit at the base of his existence, the first fact we have to recognise is the fact of that existence itself. Whatever concept of the Absolute we may form for ourselves, whether it be pure liberty or eternal determination, whatever state may exist anterior to all that we can call being, in that state the being already is. For if it were not, who could draw it out of its nothingness? And who could create, if it had not the power to create itself ?
Now, for the being, to create himself means to appear. And to appear means to define himself, to become distinct, to affirm himself in the relativity. But what name are we to give to the principle of this distinctive affirmation and exclusive delimitation of the ego which is the foundation of all manifestation, of all relative creation?
Page-330 The word. Thought, says too much and too little,— too much if that conscient thought is meant which appears at the term of progressive evolution, and too little if it. means a pure abstraction of the being previous to its coming into existence. This abstraction may very well define the essence of all its possibilities, but not its power to act and to become. To become implies not only pine thought, but tendency, effort, or, to express all in a single word, if that be possible—desire. For desire represents in the being that first active form of Thought in which we must seek for the initial spring conscient or inconscient of its energies, the obscure genesis of its will and that first spontaneity of fundamental egoism by which the ** I " of the relativity manifests. Thought and Desire are for the inner universe what extension and movement are for the universe without. And if all the phenomena of the objective world can be reduced to the simple notion of movement, does not movement itself render sensible this first conceptual principle of the being,—desire ? * * * The universe is a field for all possible desires realised by the movement. And among all these desires the one which renders the others possible, the one which is in the depths of the being, at its roots, before every other, is the desire to be. But what is this desire ? We can know only its ultimate forms, its manifestations in ourselves. For desire as it expresses itself in whatever being, cannot tell us what desire was before any being existed. And yet nothing expresses so well as this word, desire, the principle of all beginnings. Desire is more than force, for it is force directed towards an end, it is the unconscious will that no reason governs, the primary, spontaneous, formidable affirmation of that which wills to be. It dwells in all that lives and its power is already active in all that seems not to be alive.
From the obscurest affinity to the supreme aspiration
Page-331 of the spirit, in the apparent inertia of bodies as in the irresistible impulsion of the thoughts, desire is the principle, the hidden spring, the essence of all that is and even of all that is not yet but will be. But where is the lurking-place, before things are, of this Desire, creator of the worlds ? Whence and how is it born? There can be no issue to such a question if we cannot conceive that it is part of the very essence of certain possibilities to translate themselves spontaneously into concrete realisations, the spontaneity of the fact realised being inherent in their nature itself and indistinguishable in them from the law of necessity. And which among these possibilities could better than the desire to be bear in itself its own affectivity ? The desire to be being possible, the being came into existence and with him the movement by whose transformations were generated, along with the successions of Time, states of increasing materiality. For desire is tendency, abstract, subjective movement! outside Space, in pure duration of Time. And the progressive passage of this conditional and virtual form of movement to its concrete, objective, material form; defines the succession of the states of being from the first transcendences to the last realisations of the physical order of things. In the domain of our comprehension the first desire was the first being ; in the world of forms the first being was the first movement. But this beginning is renewed at every moment; every movement renews it, every desire. For what we call the beginning is not and cannot be the moment at which the relative arose out of the Absolute under the form of
No relative reality can have an absolute beginning. The illusion of the beginning presents itself to the mind when it reaches the limit of the conceivable. It is the fortress which mind erects arbitrarily as a refuge at the very extremity of its own frontiers and represents only its
Page-332 inability to advance farther into the depths of the unknown. When we speak, then, of the first possibility, we are only indicating the first stage conceivable to us of the progressive realisation. We resume in the word, without knowing it, all the successive series of diminishing potentialities and of antecedent transcendences in an indefinite continuity. And when we reach the utmost limit of all the steps which our thought can take, we should thus formulate the supreme causes of existence ; " The universe is but the sum of the manifestations by which all affirms and objectivists itself,—all that having the power to be, wills to be." * * * Is there anything that does not exist ? In the Absolute, outside the manifested world, all is; but all is indivisible, all is one. In the infinite nothing can be defined. None of the terms, then, by which we designate and define being can be applied to the domain of the Absolute. And so too none of the characteristics of the Absolute can be applied to the cognizable universe. To be in the cognizable universe is to be distinct, limited, finite. It follows that the universe is itself finite. Therefore it is capable of being a field for the pluralities of Time, Space and Number. However indefinitely number may increase, there is no infinite number; there is no number in the Infinite. But this Finite, itself must necessarily be relative. And it is only by an abstraction of the mind that we can conceive thus of the world at each moment of its progressive evolution. None of these moments exists in itself, no number is the last of numbers. Between the absolute Infinite and the perfect Finite, universal relativity defines itself progressively in the course of an indefinite manifestation. If follows that at no moment does the world contain the total manifestation of the numberless vitalities of the Absolute, but at each moment it is the field of realisation for a new series of possibilities.
At each moment something that was not becomes;
Page-333 from what appears to us as non-existence rises some new mode of existence and from the inexhaustible mystery issues the indefinite succession of Time, and therefore the possibility of eternal progress. But whatever be the number of the progressive manifestations of the Unknowable, in relation to manifested being the manifested will always remain infinite. The fact of manifestation has, then, this characterising feature that it renders distinct and multiple, discernable to us, what was lost in indivisible and indissoluble unity. On the surface of the motionless depths of the Absolute, being appears like a wave moving, changing, always the same in its principle and its movement and always new in its forms and its elements. In the invisible Identity something becomes illuminated by a radiating activity; by the light of the being relativities, ephemeral and successive, are distinguished in the Absolute, and this point in the Infinite which becomes visible forms the universe. In the eternal present is the fugitive moment when what was not becomes, the unseizable instant in which there arises out of the inexhaustible mystery what never yet had been, while already that which was is returning to the immobility of that which no longer is. It is the indefinite repetition of this illusory movement that we call Time. To our consciousness, which is that of manifested beings, the actual alone is perceptible, and if the past appears to us better discernable than the future, it is because there subsists in the present actuality the sense of the relation which links it to what no longer is, while ‘the new relation which already links it to what is not yet, is for it, like everything unmanifested, a pure spontaneity and a mysterious creation.
And yet if every present resumes in itself all the past, we must perforce suppose that an identical bond of continuity links us to what will be as to what was. That is why around the unseizable present, that luminous point of existence, there forms itself the halo of memories and previsions which permits us to follow back to a greater or
Page-334 less distance of past time the track of what was and to perceive already with more or less precision what will be. There is, then, in the apparent simplicity of each single moment a simultaneity of different elements which renders possible the phenomenon of consciousness. Each individual consciousness is but an incessantly new polarisation of the eternal and the infinite. * * * If we consider the term in which the cosmic evolution culminates, we find that it is essentially the desire of conscious individualisation, the desire to be manifested, to take form, to be differentiated, separated from all, the desire to be oneself and exclusive of everything else which explains and sums up all that was before. The principle of all relative manifestation is a principle of distinction, of division, of egoistic limitation. Egoism is at the root of the universe. And if it is said sometimes that it is love which created the worlds, we can say also that it was first egoism, love personal and passionate of the being for himself, which created the chaos out of which the worlds arose. For true love, impersonal and disinterested, creates harmony, not division. Love, as we conceive it, presupposes the appearance of the being. Before the distinction of beings from one another no other love existed except the ineffable beatitude of the identical One centred in eternal silence and absolute repose. That self-regarding desire which is preeminently the egoistic principle was the first cause of the world, appears clearly if we consider the fact that it is the fundamental law of all individual life, the very root of the living existence. Strip man of his visible and conscious egoisms and under the ashes of his consumed desires you will discover the fire of ego smoldering still; under the transfigured forms you will find always that attachment to the " I " without which the being would no longer exist.
From whence could be born the burning heats of love, the very flames of sacrifice if there were not some brand of egoism to serve for their nourishment ?
Page-335 Love is the soul of the Infinite; the finite can only rise out of it by opposing to it the contrary principle. But this opposition, however absolute it be, has for its point of support the principle of the Absolute itself and only conceals it under the veil of imperfect relativities. And however gross may be the forms of the partial manifestation, they bear in themselves an essential necessity of perfection. If there is no love that does not contain and consume for its fuel some kind of egoism, equally there is no worst egoism which is not a deformation of love to be transfigured by a progressive evolution into love that is perfect. The universe is in the Infinite an immense brasier of love imprisoned and burning its way to liberty. In the exclusive affirmation of the personal ego there resides at the same time as the principle of egoism its natural corollary, the principle of ignorance. For consciousness of self is necessarily the result of an inconscience or at least of an imperfect consciousness of all that becomes alien to self. In order to enter into the relative the being renounces all the Absolute. The personal ego is formed by a narrow concentration which loses sight of the impersonal Infinity; and the more intense this concentration, the more complete becomes the ignorance, the oblivion of all that is not the ego. Whence proceeds this brilliant life of the ego which we call consciousness, if not from an ever narrower and more precise obstruction of the immense horizon of the subconscient with its indistinct, unseizable and indefinite contours ? And, similarly, is not this individual subconscient itself a reduction of the universal to the limits of the potential ego?
The ego, once formed, may by its very contraction constitute itself as a mirror reflective of the universal. And it is in proportion as it affirms and distinguishes itself from all that is not itself that it can acquire an objective knowledge of the universal. The process by which its entry into relative existence is effected, conditions its new modes of reflective knowledge.
Page-336 The principle of identical unity being that all is in all, distinctive being can always recover in itself by an act oi oblivion contrary to that which renders it distinctive, by an impersonal contemplation, the momentary illumination of its ignorance. The law of formation of the being may thus find its symbolic equivalent in that of the formation of Matter; it is by a sort of condensation of universal forces imprisoning themselves in ever narrower limits of forms always more and more concrete that the elements of Matter are constructed as well as those of conscious individuality. And the primordial nebula whose condensation around centres of etheric revolution will form one day material worlds, is our image and translation in space of that progressive condensation of the formidable desire to be around more and more distinct and multiple centres of conscious polarisation and individual affirmation. So, being in its origin can be conceived as the immense desire, global and nebular, whose virtual elements, obeying the same law of mutual exclusion, are to form the indefinitely differentiated elements, the conflicting forces of the manifested world. And in relation to each other individual beings resemble in their principle obscure and blind tendencies, primary forces which are ignorant of all that is not their own direction and have no cause of existence except their own impulsion, no consciousness except that of their rectilinear move ment. For the consciouness of the universal to awaken in them, the slow progress of objective sensibility is needed, effected by the opposing violence of their brutal affirmations, by the incessant shock of their mutual action and reaction. By conilict the being shall learn that he is not unique and that other desires similar to his own, exclusive of his own, form this universe of which he is a part.
And this experience of which suffering is only another name, shall become the grand condition of his progress towards perfection.
Page-337 That this desire, creator of conflict, is a desire preeminently blind becomes evident when we remember that the being goes straight towards suffering without having desired it or even foreseen. For though all in the universe is tendency and finality, its individual affirmations are multiple and contradictory and each of them finds itself incessantly thwarted and in collision with all the rest. Thus from their conflict unforeseen results are born, realisations alien to the desire of the being. For this reason it would be puerile to explain all the effects of Nature by conscious and preconceived movement of will. Things are neither fortuitous nor intentional. And if their end responds to any predetermination, it can be only to that which is identical with the absolute liberty of the Unknowable. Desire creates what it knows not; the being is not what it wish id to be, but what it has been made by the spontaneities of the universe within it and without, conformable to its own or contrary to them. Thus, wishing to be sole, he loses him self in a multitude ; striving towards duration he fixes himself in the impermanent; seeking to taste exclusively the joy of being, he enters into the great struggle and creates a "When this soul instead of being divided into innumerable blind and exclusive desires resumes in each of them the consciousness of its own unity, then every being in all beings and all worlds and even beyond being and the worlds will live the same eternal and ineffable life of the Infinite.
But meanwhile it is enough that one of these desires should arrive at self-renunciation to discover in this soul of all
Page-338 of the Veda CHAPTER V THE PHILOLOGICAL METHOD OF THE VEDA. ; No interpretation of the Veda can be sound which does not rest on a sound and secure philological basis; and yet this scripture with its obscure and antique tongue of which it is the sole remaining document offers unique philological difficulties. To rely entirely on the traditional and often imaginative renderings of the Indian scholars is impossible for any critical mind. Modern philology strives after a more secure and scientific basis, but has not yet found it. In the psychological interpretation of the Veda there are, especially, two difficulties which can only be met by a satisfactory philological justification. This interpretation necessitates the acceptance of several new senses for a fair number of fixed technical terms of the Veda,—terms, for example like uti, avas, vayas. These new renderings satisfy one test we may fairly demand; they fit in to every context, clarify the sense and free us from the necessity of attributing quite different significances to the same term in a work of so fixed a form as the Veda. But this test is not sufficient. We must have, besides, a philological basis which will not only account for the new sense, but also explain how a single word came to be capable of so many different meanings, the sense attached to it by the psychological interpretation, those given to it by the old gram- Page-339 marinas and those, if any, which are attached to it in later Sanscrit. But this is not easily possible unless we find a more scientific basis for our philological deductions than our present knowledge affords. Secondly, the theory of the psychological interpretation depends very often on the use of a double meaning for important words,—the key-words of the secret teaching. The figure is one that is traditional in Sanscrit literature and sometimes employed with an excess of
artifice in the later classical works ; it is the
slash or rhetorical figure of double entendre. But its very artificiality predisposes us to believe that this poetical device must belong necessarily to a later and more sophisticated culture. How are we to account for its constant presence in a work of the remotest antiquity? Moreover, there is a peculiar extension of it in the Vedic use, a deliberate employment of the "multi-significance " of Sanscrit roots in order to pack as much meaning as possible into a single word, which at first sight enhances the difficulty of the problem to an extraordinary degree. For instance, the word,
Asian, usually signifying a horse, is used as a figure of the Prana, the nervous energy, the vital breath, the half-mental, half-material dynamism which links mind and matter. Its root is capable, among other senses, of the ideas of impulsion, force, possession, enjoyment, and we find all these meanings united in this figure of the Steed of Life to indicate the essential tendencies of the Pranic energy. Such a use of language would not be possible if the tongue of the Aryan forefathers obeyed the same conventions as our modern speech or were in the same stage of development. But if we can suppose that there was some peculiarity in the old Aryan tongue as it was used by the Vedic Rishis by which words were felt to be more alive, less merely conventional symbols of ideas, more free in their transitions of meaning than in our later use of speech, then we shall find that these devices were not at all artificial or far-fetched to their employers, but were rather the first natural means which would suggest themselves to men anxious at once to find new, brief and adequate formulae of speech for psycho- Page-340 logical conceptions not understood by the vulgar and to conceal the ideas contained in their formulae from a pro–fane intelligence. I believe that this is the true explanation; it can be established, I think, by a study of the development of Aryan speech that language did pass through a plain, precise and physical significance. I have already indicated that my first study of Tamil words had brought me to what seemed-a clue to the very origins and structure of the ancient Sanscrit tongue ; and so far did this clue lead that I lost sight entirely of my original subject of interest, the connections between Aryan and Dravidian speech, and plunged into the far more interesting research of the origins and laws of development of human language itself. It seems to me that this great inquiry and not the ordinary preoccupations of linguistic scholars should be the first and central aim of any true science of Philology.
Owing to the failure of the first hopes which attended the birth of modern Philology, its
meager results, its crystallisation into the character of a petty conjectural science ", the idea of a Science of Language is now discredited and its very possibility, on quite insufficient reason-ning, entirely denied. It seems to me impossible to acquiesce in such a final negation. If there is one thing that Modern Science has triumphantly established, it is
the reign of law and process of evolution in the history of all earthly things. Whatever may be the deeper nature of Speech, in its outward manifestation as human language it is an organism, a growth, a terrestrial evolution. It contains indeed a constant psychological element and is therefore more free, flexible, consciously self-adaptive than purely physical organisms; its secret is more difficult to seize, its constituents yield themselves only to more subtle and less trenchant methods of analysis. But law and process exist in mental no less than in material phenomena in spite of their more volatile And variable appearances. Law and process must have, governed the origins and developments
Page-341 of language. Given the necessary clue and sufficient data, they must be discoverable. It seems to me that in the Sanscrit language the clue can be found, the data lie ready for investigation. The error of Philology which prevented it from arriving at a more satisfactory result in this direction, was its preoccupation in the physical parts of speech with the exterior morphology of language and in its psychological parts with the equally external connections of formed vocables and of grammatical inflexions in kindred languages. But the true method of Science is to go back to the origins, the embryology, the elements and more obscure processes of things. From the obvious only the obvious and superficial results. The profundities of things, their real truth, can best be discovered by penetration into the hidden things that the surface of phenomena conceal, into that past development of which the finished forms present only secret and dispersed indications or into the possibilities from which the actualities we see are only a narrow selection. A similar method applied to the earlier forms of human speech can alone give us a real Science of Language. It is not in a short chapter of a treatise itself brief and devoted to another subject that it is at all possible to present the results of the work that I have attempted on these lines. * I can only briefly indicate the one or two features which bear directly on the subject of Vedic interpretation. And I mention them here solely to avoid any supposition in the minds of my readers that in departing from the received senses of certain Vedic words I have simply taken advantage of that freedom of ingenious conjecture which is at once one of the great attractions and one of the most serious weaknesses of modern Philology. My researches first convinced me that words, like plants, like animals, are in no sense artificial products, but growths,—living growths of sound with certain seed-sounds as their basis. Out of these seed-sounds develop a small
* I propose to deal with them in a separate work on " the Origins of Aryan Speech."
Page-342 number of primitive root-words with an immense progeny which have their successive generations and arrange themselves in tribes, clans, families, selective groups each having a common stock and a common psychological history. For the factor which presided over the development of language was the association, by the nervous mind of primitive man, of certain general significances or rather of certain general utilities and sense-values with articulate sounds. The process of this association was also in no sense artificial but natural, governed by simple and definite psychological laws. ; In their" beginnings language-sounds were not used to express what we should call ideas; they were rather the vocal equivalents of certain general sensations and emotion-values. It was the nerves and not the intellect which created speech. To use Vedic symbols, Agni and Vayu, not Indra, were the original artificers of human language. Mind has emerged out of vital and sensational activities; intellect in man has built itself upon a basis of sense-associations and sense-reactions. By a similar process the intellectual use of language has developed by a natural law out of the sensational and emotional. Words, which were originally vital ejections full of a vague sense-potentiality, have evolved into fixed symbols. of precise intellectual significances.
In consequence, the word originally was not fixed to any precise idea. It had a general character or quality
(guna), which was capable of a great number of applications and therefore of a great number of possible significances. And this guna
and its results it shared with many kindred sounds. At first, therefore,
word-clans, word-families started life on the communal system with a common
stock of possible and realised significances and a common right to all of them;
their individuality lay rather in shades of expression of the same ideas than in
any exclusive right to the expression of a single idea. The early history of
language was a development from this communal life of words to a system of
individual property in one or more intellectual significances. The principle of
partition
Page-343 was at first fluid, then increased in rigidity, until word-families and finally single words were able to start life on their own account. The last stage of the entirely natural growth of language comes when the life of the word is entirely subjected to the life of the idea which it represents. For in the first state of language the word is as living or even a more living force than its idea; sound determines sense. In its last state the positions have been reversed; the idea becomes all-important, the sound secondary. Another feature of the early history of language is that it expresses at first a remarkably small stock of ideas and these are the most general notions possible and generally the most concrete, such as light, motion, touch, substance, extension, force, speed, etc. Afterwards there is a gradual increase in variety of idea and precision of idea. The progression is from the general to the particular, from the vague to the precise, from the physical to the mental, from the concrete to the abstract, from the express-on of an abundant variety of sensations about similar things to the expression of precise difference between similar things, feelings and actions. This progression is worked out by processes of association in ideas which are always the same, always recurrent and, although no doubt due to the environments and actual. experiences of the men who spoke the language, wear the appearance of fixed natural laws of development. And after all what is a law but a process which has been worked out by the nature of things in response to the necessities of their environment and has become the fixed habit of their action ?
From this past history of language certain consequences derive which are of considerable importance in Vedic interpretation. In the first place by a knowledge of the laws under which the relations of sound and sense formed themselves in the Sanscrit tongue and by a careful and minute study _of its word-families it is possible to a great extent to restore the past history of individual words. It is possible to account for the meanings actually possessed by them, to show how they were worked out though the various stages of language-development, .to establish the
Page-344 mutml relations of different significances and to explain how they came to be attached to the same word in spite of the wide difference and sometimes even the direct contrariety of their sense-values. It is possible also to restore lost senses of words on a sure and scientific basis and to justify them by an appeal to the observed laws of association which governed the development of the old Ar3′an tongues, to the secret evidence of the word itself and to the corroborative evidence of its immediate kindred. Thus instead of having a purely floating and conjectural basis for our dealings with the vocables of the Vedic language, we can work with confidence upon a solid and reliable foundation. Naturally, it does not follow that because a Vedic word may or must have had at one time a particular significance, that significance can be safely applied to the actual text of the Veda. But we do establish a sound sense and a clear possibility of its being the right sense for the Veda. Th : rest is a matter of comparative study of the passages in which the word .occurs and of constant fitness in the context. I have continually found that a sense thus restored illumines always the context wherever it is applied and on the other hand that a sense demanded always by the context is precisely that to which we are led by the history of the word. This is a sufficient basis for a moral, if not for an absolute certainty.
Secondly, one remarkable feature of language in its inception is the enormous number of different meanings of which a single word was capable and also the enormous number of words which could be used to represent a single idea. Afterwards this tropical luxuriance came to be cut down. The intellect intervened with its growing need of precision, its growing sense of economy. The bearing capacity of words progressively diminished; and it became less arid less tolerable to be burdened with a superfluous number of words for the same idea, a redundant variety of ideas for the same word. A considerable, though not too rigid economy in these respects, modified by a demand for a temperate richness of variation, became the final law of language. But the Sanskrit tongue never quite reached the
Page-345 final stages of this development; it dissolved too early into the Prakrit dialects. Even in its latest and most literary form it is lavish of varieties of meanings for the same word; it overflows with a redundant wealth of synonyms. Hence its extraordinary capacity for rhetorical devices which in any other language would be difficult, forced and hopelessly artificial, and especially for the figure of double sense, of slash. The Vedic Sanskrit represents a still earlier stratum in the development of language. Even in its outward features it is less fixed than any classical tongue ; it abounds in variety of forms and inflexions ; it is fluid and vague, yet richly subtle in its use of cases and tenses. And on its psychological side it has not yet crystallised, is not entirely hardened into the rigid forms of intellectual precision. The word for the Vedic Rishi is still a living thing, a thing of power, creative, formative. It is not yet a conventional symbol for an idea, but itself the parent and former of ideas. It carries within it the memory of its roots, is still conscient of its own history.
The Rishis ‘ use of language was governed by this ancient psychology of the Word. When in English we use the word "wolf" or ”cow," we mean by it simply the animal designated; we are not conscious of any reason why we should use that particular sound for the idea except the immemorial custom of the language ; and we cannot use it for any other sense or purpose except by an artificial device of style. But for the Vedic Rishi "vrika" meant the tearer and therefore, among other applications of the sense, a wolf; "dhenu" meant the fosterer,
nourished, and therefore a cow. But the original and general sense predominates, the derived and particular is secondary. Therefore, it was possible for the fashioner of the hymn to use these common words with a great pliability, sometimes putting forward the image of the wolf or the cow, sometimes using it
Page-346 the light of this psychology of the old language that we have to understand the peculiar figures of Vedic symbolism as handled by the Rishis, even to the most apparently common and concrete. It is so that words like " ghritam ", the clarified butter, "soma" the sacred wine, and a host of others are used. Moreover, the partitions made by the thought between different senses of the same word were much less separative than in modern speech. In English "fleet" meaning a number of ships and "fleet " meaning swift are two different words; when we use " fleet " in the first sense we do not think of the swiftness of the ship’s motion, nor when we use it in the second, do we recall the image of ships gliding rapidly over the ocean. But this was precisely what was apt to occur in the Vedic use of Language. "Bhaga" enjoyment, and " Bhaga," share were for the Vedic mind not different words, but one word which had developed two different uses Therefore it was easy for the Rishis to employ it in one of the two senses with the other at the back of the mind colouring its overt connotation or even to use it equally in both senses at a time by a sort of figure of cumulative significance. " Chanas " meant food but also it meant "enjoyment, pleasure;" therefore it could be used by the Rishi to suggest to the profane mind only the food given at the sacrifice to the gods, but for the initiated it meant the Ananda, the joy of the divine bliss entering into the physical consciousness and at the same time suggested the image of the Soma wine, at once the food of the gods and the Vedic symbol of the Ananda.
We see everywhere this use of language dominating the Word of the Vedic hymns. It was the great device by which the ancient Mystics overcame the difficulty of their task. Agni for the ordinary worshipper may have meant simply the god of the Vedic fire, or it may have meant the principle of Heat and Light in physical Nature, or to the most ignorant it may have meant simply a superhuman personage, one of the many "givers of wealth," satisfiers of human desire. How suggest to those capable of a deeper .conception the psychological functions of the
Page-347 God ? The word itself fulfilled that service. For Agni meant the Strong, it meant the Bright, or even Force, Brilliance. So it could easily recall to the initiated, where-ever it occurred, the idea of the illumined Energy which builds up the worlds and which exalts man to the Highest, the doer of the great work, the Purohits of the human sacrifice. Or how keep it in the mind of the hearer that all these gods are personalities of the one universal Deva ? The names of the gods in their very meaning focal that they are only epithets, significant names, descriptions, not personal appellations. Mitra is the Deva as the Lord of love and harmony, Bhaga as the lord of enjoyment, Surya as the Lord of illumination, Varuna as the all-pervading Vastness and purity of the Divine supporting and perfecting the world. "The Existent is One, " says the Rishi Dirghatamas, "but the sages express It variously; they say Indra, Varuna, Mitra, Agni ; they call It Agni, Yama, Matariswan. " The initiate in the earlier days of the Vedic knowledge had no need of this express statement. The names of the gods carried to him their own significance and recalled the great fundamental truth which remained with him always.
But in the later ages the very device used by the Rishis turned against the preservation of the knowledge. For language changed its character, rejected its earlier pliability, shed off old familiar senses ; the word contracted and shrank into its outer and concrete significance. The ambrosial wine of the Ananda was forgotten in the physical offering; the image of the clarified butter recalled only the gross libation to mythological deities, lords of the fire and the cloud and the storm-blast, godheads void of any but a material energy and an external
luster. The letter lived on when the spirit was forgotten-; the symbol, the body of the doctrine, remained, but the soul of knowledge had fled from its coverings.
Page-348 TO BHAGA SAVITRI, THE ENJOYER. RIG VEDA V. 82 1. Of Savitri divine we embrace that enjoying, that which is the best, rightly disposes all, reaches the goal, even Bhaga’s, we hold by the thought. 2. For of him no pleasure in things can they diminish, for too self-victorious is it, nor the self-empire of this Enjoyer. 3.’ This he that sends forth the delights on the giver, the gods who is the bringer forth of things ; that varied richness of his enjoyment we seek: 4. Xo-day, O divine Producer, send forth on us fruitful felicity, dismiss what belongs to the evil dream. 5. All evils, O divine Producer, dismiss ; what is good, that send forth on us. 6. Blameless for infinite being in the outpouring of the divine Producer, we hold by the thought all things of delight. 7. The universal godhead and master of being we accept into ourselves by perfect words to day, the Producer whose production is of the truth—
8. He who goes in front of both this day and night never faltering, placing rightly his thought, the divine Producer—
Page-349 9. He who by the rhythm makes heard of the knowledge all births and produces them, the divine Producer. COMMENTARY Four great deities constantly appear in the Veda as closely allied in their nature and in their action, Varuna, Mitra, Bhaga, Aryaman. Varuna and Mitra are continually coupled together in the thoughts of the Rishis; sometimes a trio appears together, Varuna, Mitra and Bhaga or Varuna, Mitra and Aryaman. Separate sutras These four deities are, according to Sayana, solar powers, Varuna negatively as lord of the night, Mitra positively as lord of the day, Bhaga and Aryaman as names of the Sun. We need not attach mufti importance to these particular identifications, but it is certain that a solar character attaches to all the four. In them that peculiar feature of the Vedic gods, their essential oneness even in the play of their different personalities and functions, comes prominently to light. Not only are the four closely associated among themselves, but they seem to partake of each other’s nature and attributes, and all are evidently emanations of Surya Savitri, the divine being in his creative and illuminative solar form.
Surya Savitri is the Creator. According to the Truth of things, in the terms of the Ritam, the worlds are brought forth from the divine consciousness, from Aditi, goddess of infinite being, mother of the gods, the indivisible consciousness, the Light that can not be impaired imaged by the mystic Cow that cannot be slain. In that creation, Varuna and Mitra, Aryaman and Bhaga are four effective Puissances. Varuna represents the principle of pure and wide being, Sat in Sachchidananda / Aryaman represents the light of the divine consciousness working as Force ; Mitra representing light and
Page-350 knowledge, using the principle of Ananda for creation, is Love maintaining the law of harmony; Bhaga represents Ananda as the-creative enjoyment; he takes the delight of the creation, takes the delight of all that is created. It is the Maya, the formative wisdom of Varuna, of Mitra that disposes multitudinously the light of Aditi brought by the Dawn to manifest the worlds. In their psychological function these four gods represent the same principles working in the human mind, in the human temperament. They build up in man the different planes of his being and mould them ultimately into the terms and the forms of the divine Truth. Especially Mitra and Varuna are continually described as holding firm the law of their action, increasing the Truth, touching the Truth and by the Truth enjoying its vastness of divine will or its great and subcontracted sacrificial action. Varuna represents largeness, right and purity ; everything that deviates from the right, from the purity recoils from his being and strikes the offender as the punishment of sin. So long as man does not attain to the largeness of Varuna’s Truth, he is bound to the posts of the world-sacrifice by the triple bonds of mind, life and body as a victim and is not free as a possessor and enjoyer. Therefore we have frequently the prayer to be delivered from the noose of Varuna, from the wrath of his offended purity. Mitra is on the other hand the most beloved of the gods ; he binds all together by the fixities of his harmony, by the successive lustrous seats of Love fulfilling itself in the order of things, Mitrasya dhamabhih.
In this hymn of Syavaswa to Savitri we see both the functions of Bhaga and his oneness with Surya Savitri ; for it is to the creative Lord of Truth that the hymn is addressed, to Surya, but to Surya specifically in his form as Bhaga, as the Lord of Enjoyment. The word
bhaga
Page-351 use of bhojanam, bhaga, saubhagam in the verses of the hymn. Savitri, we have seen, means Creator, but especially in the sense of producing, emitting from the unmanifest and bringing out into the manifest. Throughout the hymn there is a constant dwelling upon this root-sense of the word which it is impossible to render adequately in a translation. In the very first verse there is a covert play of the kind ; for bhojanam means both enjoyment and food and it is intended to be conveyed that the "enjoyment of Savitri" is Soma, from the same routs, to produce, press out, distil, Soma, the food of divine beings, the supreme distilling, highest production of the great Producer. What the Rishi seeks is the enjoyment in all created things of the immortal and immortalising Ananda. It is this Ananda which is that enjoyment of the divine Producer, of Surya Savitri, the supreme result of the Truth; for Truth is followed as the path to the divine beatitude. This Ananda is the highest, the best enjoyment. It disposes all aright ; for once the Ananda, the divine delight in all things is attained, it sets right all the distortions, all the evil of the world. It carries man through to the goal. If by the truth and right of things we arrive at the Ananda, by the Ananda also we can arrive at the right and truth of things. It is to the divine Creator in the name and form of Bhaga that this human capacity for the divine and right enjoyment of all things belongs. When he is embraced by the human mind and heart and vital forces and physical being, when this divine form is received into himself by man, then the Ananda of the world manifests itself. Nothing can limit, nothing can diminish, neither god nor demon, friend nor enemy, event nor sensation, whatever pleasure this divine Enjoyer takes in things, in whatever vessel or object of his enjoyment. For nothing can diminish or hedge in or hurt his luminous self-empire, swarajyam, his perfect possession of himself in infinity being, infinite delight and the vastnesses of the order of the Truth.
Therefore it is he that brings the seven delights, sapta ratna,
to the giver of the sacrifice. He looses them forth on us ; for they are all there in the world as in the divine being, in ourselves also, and have only to be loosed forth on our outer consciousness. The rich and varied amplitude of this sevenfold delight, perfect on ail the planes of our being, is the Page-352 bhdga, enjoyment or portion of Bhaga Savitri in the completed sacrifice, and it is that varied wealth which the Rishi seeks for himself and his fellows in the sacrifice by the acceptance of the divine Enjoyer. Shyavasva then calls on Bhaga Savitri to vouchsafe to him even today a felicity not barren, but full of the fruits of activity, rich in the offspring of the soul, prajavat sauihagam. Ananda is creative, it is jana, the delight that gives birth to life and world ; only let the things looked forth on us be of the creation conceived in the terms of the truth and let all that belongs to the falsehood, to the evil dream created by the ignorance of the divine Truth, duhswapnyam, be dismissed, dispelled away from our conscious being. In the next verse he makes clearer the sense of duhswapnyam. What he desires to be dispelled is all evil, visva duritani. Suvitam and duritam in the Veda mean literally right going and wrong going. Suvitam is truth of thought and action, duritam error or stumbling, sin and perversion. Suvitam is happy going, felicity, the path of Ananda; duritam is calamity, suffering, all ill result of error and ill doing. All that is evil, visva duvitani, belongs to the evil dream that has to be turned away from us. Bhaga sends to us instead all that is good,—bhadram, good in the sense of felicity, the auspicious things of the divine enjoying, the happiness of the right activity, the right creation. For, in the creation of Bhaga Savitri, in his perfect and faultless sacrifice,—-there is a double sense in the word sava, "loosing forth", used of the creation, and the sacrifice, the libation of the Soma,—men stand absolved from sin and blame by the Ananda, anagaso, blameless in the sight of Aditi, fit for the undivided and infinite consciousness of the liberated soul. The Ananda owing to that freedom is capable of being in them universal. They are able to hold by their thought all things of the delight, visva vamani ; for in the dhi, the understanding that holds and arranges, there is right arrangement of the world, perception of right relation, right purpose, right use, right fulfilment, the divine and blissful intention in all things. It is the universal Divine, the master of the Sat, from whom all things are created in the terms of the truth, satyam, that the sacrificers today by means of the sacred mantras seek to accept into themselves under the name of Bhaga Savitri. Page-353 It is the creator whose creation is the Truth, whose sacrifice is the outpouring of the truth through the outpouring of his own Ananda, his divine and unerring joy of being, into the human soul. He as Surya Savitri, master of the Truth, goes in front of both this Night and this Dawn, of the manifest consciousness and the unmanifest, the waking being and the subconscient and superconscient whose interaction creates all our experiences; and in his motion he neglects nothing, is never unheeding, never falters. He goes in front of both bringing out of the night of the subconscient the divine Light, turning into the beams of that Light the uncertain or distorted reflections of the conscient, and always the thought is rightly placed. The source of all error is misapplication, wrong placing of truth, wrong arrangement, wrong relation, wrong positing in time and place, object and order. But in the Master of Truth there is no such error, no such stumbling, no such wrong placing.
Surya Savitri, who is Bhaga, stands between the Infinite and the created worlds within us and without. All things that have to be born in the creative consciousness he receives into the Vijnana ; there he puts it into its right place in the divine rhythm by the knowledge that listens and receives the
Word as it descends and so he looses it forth into the movement of things-, asravayati slokena pro. cha
sumati. When in us each creation of the active Ananda, the prajavat saubkagam, comes thus out of the unmanifest, received and heard rightly of the knowledge in the faultless rhythm of things, then is our creation that of Bhaga Savitri, and all the births of that creation, our children, our offspring, praja, apatyam, are things of the delight, visva
vamani This is the accomplishment of Bhaga in man, his full portion of the world-sacrifice. Page-354 ANALYSIS V THIRD MOVEMENT (Verses 9-11 *) VIDYA AND AVIDYA All manifestation proceeds by the two terms, Vidya and Avidya, the consciousness of Unity and the consciousness of Multiplicity. They are the two aspects of the Maya, the formative self-conception of the Eternal Unity is the eternal and fundamental fact, without which all multiplicity would be unreal and an impossible illusion. The consciousness of Unity is therefore called Vidya, the knowledge. Multiplicity is the play or varied self-expansion of the One, shifting in its terms, divisible in its view of itself, by force of which the One occupies many centres of consciousness, inhabits many formations of energy in the universal Movement. Multiplicity is implicit or explicit in unity. ‘Without it the Unity would be either a void of non-existence or a But the consciousness of multiplicity separated from
* 9. Into a blind darkness they enter who follow after the Ignorance, they as if into a greater darkness who devote themselves to the Knowledge alone. 10*.Other, * verily, this said is that which comes by the Knowledge, other that which worries by the Ignorance; this is this
11. He who knows That as both in one, the Knowledge and the Ignorance, by the Ignorance crosses beyond death and by the Knowledge enjoys Immortality.
Page-355 the true knowledge in the many of their own essential oneness,—the view-point of the separate ego identifying itself with the divided form and the limited action,—=is a state of error and delusion. In man this is the form taken by the consciousness of multiplicity. Therefore it is given the name of Avidya, the Ignorance. Brahman, the Lord, is one and all-blissful, but free from limitation by His unity; all powerful, He is able to conceive Himself from multiple centres in multiple forms from which and upon which flow multiple currents of energy, seen by us as actions or play of forces. When He is thus multiple, His not bound by His multiplicity, but amid all variations dwells eternally in His own oneness. He is Lord of Vidya and Avidya. They are the two sides of His self-conception, (Maya), the twin powers of His Energy ( Chit-Shakti). ; Brahman exceeding as well as dwelling in the play of His Maya, is Ish, lord of it and free. Man, dwelling in the play, is Amish, not lord, not free, subject to Avidya. But this subjection is itself a play of the Ignorance, unreal in essential fact (paramdrtha), real only in practical relation (vyavahara), in the working out of the actions of the divine Energy, the Chit-Shakti. To get back to the essential fact of his freedom he must recover the sense of Oneness, the consciousness of Brahman, of the Lord, realise his oneness in Brahman and with the Lord. Recovering his freedom, realising his oneness with all existences as becomings of the One Being who is always himself, (So’ ham aims, He am I), he is able to carry out divine actions in the world, no longer subject to the Ignorance, because free in the knowledge. The perfection of man, therefore, is the full manifestation of the Divine in the individual through the supreme accord between Vidya and Avidya. Multiplicity must become conscious of its oneness, Oneness embrace its multiplicity. THE EXTREME PATHS
The purpose of the Lord in the world cannot be fulfilled by following Vidya alone or Avidya alone.
Page-356 Those who are devoted entirely to the principle of multiplicity and division and take their orientation away from oneness enter into a blind darkness of Ignorance. For this tendency is one of increasing contraction and limitation, desegregation of the gains of knowledge, and greater and greater subjection to the mechanical necessities of Prakriti and finally to her separative and self-destructive forces. To turn away from the progression towards Oneness is to turn away from existence and from light. Those who are devoted entirely to the principle of indiscriminate Unity and seek to put away from them the integrality of the Brahman, also put away from them knowledge and completeness and enter as if into a greater darkness. They enter into some special state and accept it for the whole, mistaking exclusion in consciousness for transcendence in consciousness. They ignore by choice of knowledge, as the others are ignorant by compulsion of error. Knowing all to transcend all is the right path of Vidya. Although a higher state than the other, this supreme Night is termed a greater darkness, because the lower is one of chaos from which reconstitution is always possible, the higher is a conception’ of Void or Asat, an attachment to non-existence of Self from which it is more difficult to return to fulfilment of Self. THE GAINS IN EITHER PATH Pursued with a less entire attachment the paths of Vidya and Avidya have each their legitimate gains for the human soul, but neither of these are the full and perfect thing undertaken by the individual in the manifestation. By Vidya one may attain to the state of the silent Brahman or the Akshara Purusha regarding the universe without actively participating in it or to His self-absorbed state of Chit in Sat from which the universe proceeds and towards which it returns. Both these states are conditions of serenity, plenitude, freedom from the confusions and sufferings of the world.
But the highest goal of man is neither fulfilment in
Page-357 the movement as a separate individual nor in the Silence separated from the movement, but in the Uttama Purusha, the Lord, He who went abroad and upholds in Himself both the Kshara and the Akshara as modes of His being. The self of man, the Jivatman, is here in order to realise in the individual and for the universe that one highest Self of all. The ego created by Avidya is a necessary mechanism for affirming individuality in the universal as a starting-point for this supreme achievement. By Avidya one may attain to a sort of fullness of power, joy, world-knowledge, largeness of being, which is that of the Titans or of the Gods, of Indra, of Prajavat. This is gained in the path of self-enlargement by an ample acceptance of the multiplicity in all its possibilities and a constant enrichment of the individual by all the materials that the universe can pour into him. But this also is not the goal of man ; for though it brings transcendence of the ordinary human limits, its does not bring the divine transcendence of the universe in the Lord of the universe. One transcends confusion of Ignorance, but not limitation of Knowledge,—transcends death of the body, but not limitation of being,—transcends subjection to sorrow, but not subjection to joy,—transcends the lower Prakriti but not the higher. To gain the real freedom and the perfect Immortality one would have to descend again to all that had been rejected and make the right use of death, sorrow and ignorance.
The real knowledge is that which perceives Brahman in His integrality and does not follow eagerly after one consciousness rather than another, is no more attached to Vidya than to Avidya. This was the knowledge of the ancient sages who were
dhi ra, steadfast in the gaze of their thought, not drawn away from the completeness of knowledge by one light or by another and whose perception of Brahman was consequently entire and comprehensive and their teaching founded on that perception equally entire and comprehensive (vyachachakshire). It is the knowledge handed down from these Ancients that is being set forth in the Upanishad, Page-358 THE COMPLETE PATH Brahman embraces in His manifestation both Vidya and Avidya and if they are both present in the manifestation, it is because they are both necessary to its existence and its accomplishment. Avidya subsists because Vidya supports and embraces it; Vidya depends upon Avidya for the preparation and the advance of the soul towards the great Unity. Neither could exist without the other; for if either were abolished, they would both pass away into something which would be neither the one nor the other, something inconceivable and ineffable beyond all manifestation. In the worst Ignorance there is some point of the knowledge which constitutes that form of Ignorance and some support of Unity which prevents it in its most extreme division, limitation, obscurity from ceasing to exist by dissolving into nothingness. The destiny of the Ignorance is not that it should be dissolved out of existence, but that its elements should be enlightened, united, that which they strive to express delivered, fulfilled and in the fulfilment transmuted and transfigured. In the uttermost unity pf which knowledge is capable the contents of the Multiplicity are inherent and implicit and can any moment be released into activity. The office of Vidya is not to destroy Avidya as a thing that ought never to have been manifested but to draw it continually towards itself, supporting it the while and helping it to deliver itself" progressively from that character of Ignorance, of the oblivion of its essential Oneness, which gives it its name. Avidya fulfilled by turning more and more to Vidya enables the individual and the universal to become what the Lord is in Himself, conscious of His manifestation, conscious of His non-manifestation, free in birth, free in non-birth.
Man represents the point at which the multiplicity in the universe becomes consciously capable of this turning and fulfilment. His own natural fulfilment comes by
Page-359 following the complete path of Avidya surrendering itself to Vidya, the Multiplicity to the Unity, the Ego to the One in all and beyond all and of Vidya accepting Avidya into itself, the Unity fulfilling the Multiplicity, the One manifesting Himself unveiled in the individual and in the universe. MORTALITY AND IMMORTALITY MORTALITY By Avidya fulfilled man passes beyond death, by Vidya accepting Avidya into itself he enjoys immortality. By death is meant the state of mortality which is a subjection to the process of constant birth and dying as a limited ego bound to the dualities of joy and sorrow, good and evil, truth and error, love and hatred, pleasure and suffering. This state comes by limitation and self-division from the One who is all and in all and beyond all and by attachment of the idea of self to a single formation in Time and Space of body, life and mind, by which the Self excludes from its view all that it verily is with the exception of a mass of experiences flowing out from and in upon a particular centre and limited by the capacities of a particular mental, vital and bodily frame. This mass of experiences it organises around the ego-centre in the mind and linking them together in Time by a double action of memory, passive in state, active in work, says continually, "This is". The result is that the soul attributes to itself a certain portion only of the play of Prakriti or Chit-Shakti and consequently a certain limited capacity of force of consciousness which has to bear all the impact of what the soul does not regard as itself but as a rush of alien forces ; against them it defends its separate formation of individuality from dissolution into Nature or mastery by Nature. It seeks to assert in the individual form and by its means its innate character of Ish or Lord and so to possess and enjoy its world.
But by the very definition of the ego its capacity is limited. It accepts as itself a form made of the movement
Page-360 of Nature which cannot endure in the general flux of things. It has to form it by the process of the movement and this is birth, it dissolves it by the process of the movement and this is death. It can master by the understanding only so much of its experiences as assimilate with its own view-point and in a way which must always be imperfect and subject to error because it is not the view of all or the view-point of the All. Its knowledge is partly error and all the rest it ignores. It can only accept and harmonise itself with a certain number of its experiences, precisely because these are the only ones it can understand sufficiently to assimilate. This is its joy; the rest is sorrow or indifference. It is only capable of harmonising with the force in its body, nerves and mind a certain number of impacts of-alien forces. In these it takes pleasure. The rest it receives with insensibility or pain. Death therefore is the constant denial by the All of the ego’s false self-limitation in the individual frame of mind, life and body. Error is the constant denial by the All of the ego’s false sufficiency in a limited knowledge. Suffering of mind and body is the constant denial by the All of the ego’s attempt to confine the universal Ananda to a false and self-regarding formation of limited and exclusive enjoyments. It is only by accepting the oneness of the All that the individual can escape from this constant and necessary denial and attain beyond. Then All-being, All-force, All-consciousness, All-truth, All-delight take possession of the individual soul. It changes mortality for immortality. MORTALITY AND AVIDYA.
But the way of attaining to immortality is not by the self-dissolution of the individual formation into the flux of Prakriti, neither is it by prematurely dissolving it into the All-soul which Prakriti expresses. Man moves towards something which fulfils the universe by transcending it. He has to prepare his individual soul for the transcendence and for the fulfilment.
Page-361 If Avidya is the cause of mortality, it is also the path out of mortality. The limitation has been created precisely in order that the individual may affirm himself against the flux of Prakriti in order eventually to transcend, possess and transform it. The first necessity is therefore for man continually to enlarge himself in being, knowledge, joy, power in the limits of the ego so that he may arrive at the conception of something which progressively manifests itself in him in these terms and becomes more and more powerful to deal with the oppositions of Prakriti and to change, individually, more and more the terms of ignorance, suffering and weakness into the terms of knowledge, joy and power and even death into a means of wider life. This self-enlargement has then to awaken to the perception of something exceeding itself, exceeding the personal main festation. Man has so to enlarge his conception of self as to see all in himself and himself in all (verse6.) He has to see that this "I" which contains all and is contained in all, is the One, is universal and not his personal ego. To That he has to subject his ego, That he has to reproduce in his nature and become, That is what he has to possess and enjoy with an equal soul in all its forms and movements. He has, also to see, that this universal One is something entirely transcendent, sole Being, and that the universe an 1 all its forms, actions, egos are only becomings of that Being (verse 7.) World is a becoming which seeks always to express in motion of Time and Space, by progression in mind, life and body what is beyond all becoming, beyond I Time and Space, beyond mind, life and body. Thus Avidya becomes one with Vidya. By Avidya man passes beyond that death, suffering, ignorance, weakness which were the first terms he had to deal with, the first assertions of the One in the birth affirming Himself amid the limitations an J divisions of the Multiplicity. By Vidya he enjoys even in the birth the Immortality. IMMORTALITY
Immortality does not mean survival of the self or the ego after dissolution of the body. The Self always survives
Page-362 the dissolution of the body, because it always preexisted before the birth of the body. The Self is unborn and undying. The survival of the ego is only the first condition by which the individual soul is able to continue and link together its experiences in Avidya so as to pursue with an increasing self-possession and mastery that process of self-enlargement which culminates in Vidya. By immortality is meant the consciousness which is beyond birth and death, beyond the chain of cause and effect, beyond all bondage and limitation, free, blissful, self-existent in conscious-being, the consciousness of the Lord, of the supreme Purusha, of Sachchidananda. IMMORTALITY AND BIRTH On this realisation man can base his free activity in the universe. But having so far attained what further utility has the soul for birth or for works? None for itself, everything for God and the universe. Immortality beyond the universe is not the object of manifestation in the universe, for that the Self always possessed. Man exists in order that through him the Self may enjoy Immortality in the birth as well as in the non-becoming. Nor is individual salvation the end; for that would only be the sublime of the ego, not its self-realisation through the Lord in all. Having realised his own immortality, the individual has yet to fulfil God’s work in the universe. He has to help the life, the mind and the body in all beings to express progressively Immortality and not mortality.
This he may do by the becoming in the material body which we ordinarily call birth, or from some status in another world or even, it is possible, from beyond world. But birth in the body is the most close, divine and effective form of help which the liberated can give to those who are themselves still bound to the progression of birth in the lowest world of the Ignorance.
Page-363 CHAPTER I THE FOUR AIDS. Yoga siddhi, the perfection in the practice of Yoga, may be best attained by the combined working of four great instruments. They are the knowledge of the principles which govern the realisation ; the force of personal effort; the direct suggestion, example and influence of the Teacher ; and the instrumentality of Time ;—Shastra, Tatiana, Guru, Kala. ***
The supreme Shastra of the integral Yoga is the eternal Veda secret in the heart of every human being. The lotus of the eternal knowledge and, the eternal perfection is a bud closed and folded up within us. It opens swiftly or gradually, petal by petal, through successive realisations, once the mind of man begins to turn towards the Eternal, once his heart no longer shut up and confined by attachment to finite appearances becomes enamoured, in whatever degree, of the Infinite. All life, all thought, all energising of the faculties, all experiences passive or active become thenceforward so many shocks which disintegrate the teguments of the soul and remove the obstacles to the inevitable efflorescence. He who chooses the Infinite, has been chosen by the Infinite. He has received the divine touch without which there is no awakening, no opening of the soul; but once it is received, attainment is sure, whether conquered swiftly in the course of one human life or pursued patiently through many stadia of the soul’s existence in the manifested universe.
Page-364 Nothing can be taught to the mind which is not already concealed as potential knowledge in the soul. So also all perfection of which the outer man is capable, is only a realising of the eternal perfection of the Spirit within. We know the Divine and become the Divine, because we are That already in our secret nature. All teaching is a revealing, all becoming an unfolding. Self-attainment is the secret ; self-knowledge is the means. The usual agency of this revealing is the Word, the thing heard (sruta). The Word may come to us from within ; it may come to us from without. But in either case it is only an agency for setting the hidden knowledge to work. The word within may be that of the secret and universal Teacher who is seated in the hearts of all and there are rare cases in which none other is needed, for all the rest of the Yoga is an unfolding under that constant touch and guidance ; the lotus of the knowledge discloses itself from within by the power of irradiating effulgence which proceeds from the Dweller in the lotus of the heart. Great indeed, but few are those to whom self-knowledge from within is thus sufficient and who do not need to pass under the influence of written book or living teacher. Ordinarily, the Word from without representative of the Divine is needed as an aid in the work of self-unfolding ; and it may be either a word from the past or the living word of the human Guru. In some cases this representative word is only taken as a sort of excuse for the inner power to awaken and manifest; it is, as it were, a concession of the omnipotent and omniscient Divine to the generality of a law that governs Nature. Thus it is said in the Upanishads of Krishna, son of Devaki, that he received a word of the Rishi Ghora and had the knowledge. So Ramakrishna, having attained by his own internal effort the central illumination, accepted several teachers in the different paths of Yoga but always showed in the manner and the swiftness of his realisation that this acceptance was a concession to the general rule by which effective knowledge must be received as by a disciple from a Guru.
Ordinarily, however, the representative influence occupies
Page-365 a much larger place in the life of the sadhaka. If the Yoga is guided by a received or written Shastra,—the Word from the past embodying the experience of former Yogins,—it may be practised either by personal effort or with the aid of a Guru. In either case it is through meditation on the truths that are taught and their realisation in the personal experience or by the results of prescribed methods that the Yoga proceeds. This is a narrower practice, but safe and effective within its limits because it follows a well-beaten track. For the sadhaka of the integral Yoga it is necessary to remember that no written Shastra, however great its authority or however large its spirit, can be more than a partial expression of the eternal knowledge. He will use, but never bind himself even by the greatest Scripture. Where the Scripture is profound, wide, catholic, it may exercise upon him an influence for the highest good and of incalculable importance. It may be associated in his experience with his awakening to crowning verities and his realisation of the highest experiences. His Yoga may be governed for a long time by one or by several successively,—if it is in the line of the great Hindu tradition, by the Gita, for example, the Upanishads, the Veda. Or it may be part of his development to include in its material the experience of the truths of many Scriptures, enriching the future by all that is best in the past. But in the end he must pass, or better, always he must live in his own soul beyond the limitations of the word that he uses. The Gita itself thus declares that the Yogin in his progress must pass beyond the written Truth,—shabda brahmativartate,— beyond all that he has heard and all that he has yet to hear,—crotavyasya srutasya cha. For he is not the sadhaka of a book or of many books; he is a sadhaka of the Infinite.
Another kind of Shastra is not Scripture but a statement of the science and methods, the effective principles and working of the path of Yoga which the sadhaka elects to follow. Each path has its Shastra either written or traditional. In India a great authority, a high reverence even is ordinarily attached to the written or traditional
Page-366 t: aching. All the lines of the Yoga are supposed to be fixed and the Teacher having received the Shastra by tradition and realised it in practice guides the disciple along the immemorial tracks. One often even hears the objection urged against a new practice, a new Yogic teaching, the adoption of new formulae, ** It is not according to the Shastra." But neither in fact nor in the actual practice of the Yogins is there really any such entire rigidity. The written or traditional teaching expresses the knowledge and experiences of many centuries systematised, organised, made attainable to the beginner. Its importance and utility ate therefore immense. But a great freedom of variation and development is always practicable. Even so highly scientific a system as Rajayoga can be practised on other lines than the organised method of Patanjali. Each of the three paths of the Trimarga* breaks into many bypaths which meet again at the goal. The general knowledge on which the Yoga depends is fixed, but the order, the succession, the devices, the forms must be allowed to vary; for the needs and particular impulsions of the individual nature have to be satisfied even while the general truths remain firm. An integral and synthetic Yoga needs especially not to be bound by any written or traditional Shastra; for while it embraces the knowledge received from the past, it seeks to organise anew for the present and the future. An absolute liberty of experience and of the restatement of knowledge in new terms and new combinations is the condition of its self-formation. Seeking to embrace all life in itself, it is in the position not of a pilgrim following the high-road to his destination, but, to that extent at least, of a pathfinder hewing his way through a virgin forest. For Yoga has long diverged from life and the ancient systems which sought to embrace it, such as those of our Vedic forefathers, are far away from us, expressed in terms which are no longer accessible, thrown into forms which are no longer applicable. Since then mankind has moved
*The triple path of Knowledge, Devoyion and works. Page-367 forwards on the current of eternal Time and the same problem has to be approached from a new starting-point. By this Yoga we not only seek the Infinite, but we call upon the Infinite to unfold Himself in human life. Therefore the Shastra of our Yoga must provide for an infinite liberty in the receptive human soul. A free adaptability in the manner and the type of the individual’s acceptance of the universal and Transcendent into himself is the right condition of the full spiritual life in man. Vivekananda, pointing out that the unity of all religions must necessarily express itself by an increasing richness of variety in its forms, said once that the perfect state of that essential unity would come when each man had his own religion,—when not bound by sect or traditional form he followed the free self-adaptation of his nature in its relations with the Supreme. So also one may say that the perfection of the integral Yoga will come when each man is able to follow his own path of Yoga, pursuing the development of his own nature in its up surging towards that which transcends the nature. For freedom is the final law and the last consummation. Meanwhile certain general lines have to be formed which may help to guide the thought and practice of the Sadhaka. But these must take as much as possible the form of general truths, general statements of principle, the most powerful broad directions of effort and development rather than a fixed- system which has to be followed as The rest depends on personal effort and experience and upon the power of the Teacher. * * *
The development of the experience in its rapidity, its amplitude, the intensity and power of its results, of its
Page-368 results depends primarily and in the beginning on the aspiration and personal effort of the sadhaka. The process of Yoga is a turning of the human soul from the egoistic state of consciousness absorbed in the outward appearances and attractions of things to a higher state in which the Transcendent and Universal can pour itself into the individual mould and transform it. The first determining element of the siddhi is, therefore, the intensity of the turning, the force which directs the soul inward. The power of aspiration of the heart, the force of the Will, the concentration of the mind, the perseverance and determination of the applied energy are the measure of that intensity. The ideal sadhaka should be able to say in Biblical phrase, " My zed for the Lord has eaten me up." It is this zed for the Lord,— Utahan,
But this is only one side of the force that works for perfection. The process of the integral Yoga has three stages, not indeed sharply distinguished or separate, but in a certain measure successive,—the effort towards self-transcendence and attainment of the Divine, the reception of that which transcends into ourselves for the transformation of our conscious being and the utilisation of our transformed humanity as a divine centre in the world. So long as the contact with the Divine is not in some degree established, so long as there is not some measure of sustained
Sayuja,
Page-369 with an impartial wisdom and provident affectivity of which the eager and interested ego is not capable. It is when this identification and self-mergence are complete that the divine centre in the world is ready to serve as a means for the direct action of the supreme Power in the larger Yoga of humanity. Always indeed it is the higher Power that acts. Out sense of personal effort and aspiration comes from the attempt of the egoistic mind to identify itself with the workings of the divine Force in the ordinary terms of mentality which it applies to its normal experiences in the world. For in the world we act with the sense of egoism claiming the universal forces that work in us as our own, claiming as the effect of our personal will, wisdom, force, virtue the selective, formative, progressive action of the Transcendent in this frame of mind, life and body. Enlightenment brings to us the knowledge that the ego is only an instrument and these things are our own in the sense that they belong to our supreme and integral self, one with the Transcendent, not to the instrumental ego. When the ego realises that its will is a
But in the practical development each of the three stages has its necessity and utility. For even if from the beginning we recognise in mind and heart the Supreme, there are elements of the nature which prevent the recognition from becoming realisation. There is a
Page-370 have to be compelled into the right attitude or trained to admit and answer to the right influences. It is only then that the surrender of the lower to the higher can be effected, because the sacrifice has become acceptable. The personal Will of the sadhaka has first to seize on the egoistic energies and turn them towards the light and the right or train them by certain means to accept it. Progressing, he still uses the personal will, personal effort, personal energies but as representatives of the higher Power and in conscious obedience to the higher Influence. Progressing yet farther, they become no longer personal and separate, but activities of that Power and Influence at work in the individual; still there is a sort of gulf or obscure process of transit between the source and the current. At the end of the progress this last separation is removed and all in the individual becomes the divine working. * * * As the supreme Shastra of the integral Yoga is the eternal Veda secret in the heart of every man, so its supreme Teacher is the World-Teacher, the Jagad Guru, secret within us. It is He who destroys our darkness by the resplendent light of His knowledge which is also the increasing glory of His own self-revelation. It is He who disclosing progressively his own nature of freedom, bliss, love, power, immortal being, sets above us a divine example or ideal and transforms the lower existence into a reflection of that which it contemplates. By the in pouring of His own influence and presence into us He enables our individual being to attain to identity with the universal and transcendent.
What is His method and His system ? He has no method and every method. His system is a natural organisation of the highest processes and movements of which the nature is capable, applying themselves even to the pettiest details and most insignificant actions. For in His yoga there is nothing too small to be used and nothing too great to be attempted. As the servant and disciple of the Master has no business with pride or egoism because all
Page-371 is done for him from above, so also he has no right to despond because of his personal deficiencies. For the Force that works in him is impersonal and infinite. The full recognition of this inner Guide, Master of the Yoga, lord, light, enjoyer and goal of all sacrifice and effort is of the utmost importance in the path of integral perfection. It is immaterial whether He is first seen as an impersonal Wisdom, Love and Power behind all things, as an Absolute manifesting in they relative and attracting it, as one’s highest Self and the highest Self of all, as a
This inner Guide is often veiled at first by the very intensity of our personal effort and of the ego’s preoccupation with itself and its aims. As we gain in clarity and the turmoil of egoistic effort gives place to a calmer self-knowledge, we recognise the source of the growing light within. We recognise it retrospectively as we realise how all our obscure and conflicting movements have been determined towards an end that we begin to perceive and even before our entrance into the path of the Yoga the evolution of our life led towards its turning-point,—as we understand the sense of our struggles and efforts, successes and failures, seize the meaning of our ordeals and sufferings, appreciate the help that was given us by all that hurt and resisted and the utility of our very falls and stumblings. We recognise it afterwards, not retrospectively but immediately, in the moulding of our thoughts by a transcendent Seer, of our will and actions by an all-embracing Power, of our emotional life by an all-attracting and all-assimilating Bliss and Love. We recognise it in a
supreme Master, Friend, Lover, Teacher. We recognise it in the essence of our
being as that develops into likeness and oneness with a greater and wider
existence which is not Page-372 the result of our efforts but an eternal Perfection which moulds us into its own image. We recognise the Lord or Ishwara of the Yogic philosophies, the Guide in the conscious being, (chatty a guru To see, know, become, fulfil this One in our inner selves and in all our outer existence, is the secret goal of our terrestrial existence ; to be conscious of Him in all parts of our being and in all that we now see as outside our being is the consummation of the individual consciousness ; to be possessed by and possess Him in ourselves and in all things is the term of all empire and mastery; possessing, to enjoy Him in all experience of passivity and activity, of peace and of power, of unity and of difference is the happiness which the ego in the world is obscurely seeking. This is the entire definition of the aim of integral Yoga. For it is the rendering in personal experience of the truth which universal Nature has hidden in herself and which she travails to discover. It is the conversion of the human soul into the divine soul and of natural life into divine living.
The surest way towards this integral fulfilment is to find the Master of the secret who dwells within us, open ourselves to the divine Power which is also the divine Wisdom and Love and trust to it to effect the conversion. But it is difficult for the egoistic consciousness to do this at all at the beginning and, if done at all, it is difficult to do it perfectly. It is difficult at first because the egoistic habits of thought, of sensation, of feeling block up the avenues by which we can arrive at the perception that is needed. It is difficult afterwards because the faith, the surrender, the courage requisite in this path are not easy to the ego-clouded soul. The divine working is not the working which the egoistic mind desires or approves ; for it uses error in order to arrive at truth, suffering in order to arrive at bliss, imperfection in order to arrive at perfection. The ego cannot see where it is being led ; it
Page-373 revolts against the leading, loses confidence, loses courage. These failings would not matter; for the divine Guide within is not offended by our revolt, discouraged by our want of faith or repelled by our weakness; He has the entire love of the mother and the entire patience of the teacher. But by withdrawing our assent from the guidance we lose the consciousness, though not the actuality of its benefit. And we withdraw our assent because we fail to distinguish our higher Self from the lower through which He is preparing His self-revelation. As in the world, so in ourselves we cannot see God because of His workings and especially because He works in us through our nature and not by a succession of arbitrary miracles. Man demands miracles that he may have faith ; he wishes to be dazzled in order that he may see. But while it is difficult for man to believe in something unseen within himself, it is easy for him to believe in something which he can image as extraneous to himself. The spiritual progress of most human beings demands an extraneous support and object of faith. It needs an external image of God ; or it needs a human representative,—Incarnation, prophet or guru; or it demands both and receives them. For according to the need of the human soul the Divine manifests Himself as deity, as human divine or in simple humanity.
The Hindu discipline of spirituality provides for this need of the soul by the conceptions of the
Isha Devata, the Avatar and the Guru. By the Isha Devata, the chosen deity, is meant not some inferior Power, but a name and form of the transcendent and universal Godhead. Almost all religions are either based upon or make use of some such name and form of the Divine. Its necessity for the human soul is evident. God is the All and more than the All. But that which is more than the All, how shall man conceive ? And even the All is at first too hard for him, for he himself in his active consciousness is a limited and selective formation and can open himself only to that which is in harmony with his limited nature. There are things in the All which are too hard for his comprehension or seem
Page-374 too terrible to his sensitive emotions and cowering sensations ; or, simply, he cannot1 conceive as the Divine something too much out of the circle of his conceptions. Therefore it is necessary that he should conceive God in his own image or in some form beyond himself but consonant with his highest tendencies in order that he may come into contact and communion with the Divine. Even then his nature calls for a human intermediary so that he may feel the Divine in something entirely close to his own humanity and sensible in a human influence and example. This call is satisfied by the Divine manifesting in the Incarnation, the Avatar—Krishna, Christ, Buddha. Or if this is too hard for the conception, the Divine represents Himself through an intermediary,—Prophet or Teacher. Thus those who cannot conceive the divine Man, can accept the supreme man, terming him not incarnation but world-teacher or divine representative. This also is not enough; a living influence, a living example, a present instruction is needed, for it is only the few who can make the past Teacher and his teaching, the past Incarnation and his example and influence a living force in their lives. For this need also the Hindu discipline provides in the relation of the Guru and the disciple. The Guru may sometimes be the Incarnation or World-Teacher, but it is sufficient that he should represent to the disciple the divine wisdom, convey to him something of the divine ideal or make him feel the realised relation of the human soul with the Eternal. The sadhaka of the integral Yoga will make use of all these aids according to his nature; but it is necessary that he should shun their limitations and cast from himself that exclusive tendency of egoistic mind which cries "My God, my Incarnation, my Prophet, my Guru" and opposes it to all other realisation in a sectarian or a fanatical spirit. All sectarianism and fanaticism is inconsistent with the integrity of the divine realisation.
On the contrary the sadhaka of the integral Yoga will not be satisfied until he has included all other names and forms of Deity in his own conception, seen his own
Page-375 Ishta Devata in all others, unified all Avatars in the unity of Him who descends in the Avatar, welded all teachings into the harmony of the Eternal Wisdom. Nor should he forget the aim of these external aids which is to awaken him to the Divine within. Nothing has been finally accomplished if that has not been accomplished. It is not sufficient to worship Krishna, Christ or Buddha without, if there is not the revealing and formation of the Buddha, the Christ or Krishna in ourselves. And all the other aids equally have no other purpose than as a bridge between man’s unconverted state and the revelation of the Divine within him. *** The Teacher of the integral Yoga will follow as far as he may the method of the Teacher within. He will lead the disciple through the nature of the disciple. Teaching, example, influence,—these are the three instruments of the Guru. But the wise Teacher will not seek to impose himself or his opinions on the passive acceptance of the receptive mind; he will throw in only what is productive and sure as a seed which will grow under the divine fostering within ; he will seek to awaken much more than to instruct; he will aim at the growth of the faculties and the experiences by natural process and free expansion. He will give a method as an aid, as an utilisable device, not as an imperative formula or a fixed routine; and he will be on his guard against its being turned into a limitation, against the mechanising of .process. His whole business is to awaken the divine light and set the divine force working of which he himself is only a means and an aid.
The example is more important than the instruction, but not the example of the outward acts nor that of the personal character,—though these have their place and their utility,—tout of the central fact of the divine realisation within governing the whole life and state and activity. This is the universal and essential element; the rest belongs to individual person and circumstance. It is this that the sadhaka must feel and reproduce in himself and not strive after an imitation from outside which may
Page-376 well be sterilising rather than productive of right and natural fruits. Influence is more important than example. Influence is not the outward authority of the Teacher over his disciple, but the power of his contact, of his presence, of the nearness of his soul to the soul of another infusing into it even though in silence that which he himself is and possesses. This is the supreme sign of the Master. And it shall also be a sign of the fit teacher of the integral Yoga that he does not arrogate to himself Guru hood. He is a man helping his brothers or, better still, a child leading children. *** The sadhaka who has all these aids, is sure of his goal. Even a fall will be for him only a means of rising and death a passage towards fulfilment. For once on this path, birth and death become only processes of a development of being and the stages of a journey. Time is the remaining aid. Time presents itself to human effort as an enemy or a friend, as a resistance, a medium or an instrument. But always it is really the instrument of the soul. Time is a field of circumstances and forces meeting and working out a resultant progression which it measures. To the ego it is a tyrant or a resistance, to the Divine an instrument. Therefore, while our effort is personal, Time appears as a resistance, for it presents to us all the obstruction of the forces that conflict with our own. When the divine working and the personal are combined in our consciousness, it appears as a medium and a condition. When the two become one, it appears as a servant and instrument.
The ideal attitude of the sadhaka towards Time is to have patience as if he had all eternity for his fulfilment and yet to develop the energy that shall realise now and with an ever-increasing mastery and rapidity.
Page-377 BOOK II THE DISCOVERY AND CONQUEST OF THE DIVINE IN ONESELF. I THE CONQUEST OP TRUTH THE ASPIRATION TOWARDS TRUTH.* 1 When darkness envelops you, do you not seek for a lamp ? 2 Man finds himself a centre of Nature, his fragment of Time surrounded by Eternity, his span of Space surrounded by Infinity. How can he help asking himself, "What am I ? and whence have I come and 3 whither do I go?"—This world after all our sciences remains still a miracle, marvellous, inscrutable, magi- 4 cal and more, for whoever thinks.—One beholds it as a mystery, another speaks of it as a mystery, another learns of it as a mystery and even when one has learned of it, there is none that knows it. 5 And yet, O the happiness of being ban and of 6 following it to attain the goal.—The supreme gift is the gift of Truth, the supreme savours is the savours of Truth, the supreme delight is the delight of Truth. •1) Dhammapada 143.—2) Carlyle.—3) id__4) Bhagavad Gita II 23.— 6) Gita that.—6) Dhammapada 364 —7) Buddhist Text. —8) Farid-ud-din- attar, "Mantic uttair."__9) Angelus Silesius II. 22. 10) Matthew VII. 7.—11) Said, Gulistan VII–12) Isaiah L V. 13. — Vivekananda.—14) Paste ur.—15) Psalms CXXI.l -16)Rig Veda..—17) Zend-Avesta.—18)id.— l) Sutra in 42 articles.—20) id. —21) Socrates.- 22) Angelus Silesius 1.16 — 24) Farid-ud-din-attar "MamieUttair."—25) Psalms XXVII.8 — 26; Isaiah XXVI. 9.—27) Swetacwatarea Upanishad VI. 18.—28) Song of Songs III. 2.—29) Ramakrishna.—30; id.—31; Baha-ullah, ."The Hidden Words in Persian."—32J Maharaja. Page-378 7 Awake, arise; strive incessantly towards the know- 8 ledge so that thou mayst attain unto the peace.—True loyalty consists in spiritual knowledge ; turn thy 9 efforts to its attainment.—The man who does not try to raise his spirit above itself, is not worthy to live in 10 the condition of a man.—Seek and ye-shall find. 11 To the eyes of men athirst the whole world seems 12 in dream as a spring of water.—Ho, every one that this stet, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money,…come, buy wine and milk without money and without price…Incline your ear and come, hear 13 and your soul shall live.—O children of immortality, you who live on the highest summits, the road is found, there is a way to escape out of the shadow ; and this means, the sole,—for there are no others,—is to 14 perceive Him who is beyond all darkness.—To look on high, to learn what is beyond, to seek to raise oneself always. * * * 15 I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help ! 16 Heaven is my father and begot me; I have for my family all this heavenly circle. My mother is the boundless earth. But I-know not to what all this mysterious universe is like, my eyes are troubled and I 17 move as if enchained in my own thought.—I invoke the excellent people of the stars of pure knowledge, pure greatness and beneficent light. 18 I desire and love nothing that is not of the light.— 19 To my eyes the majesty of lords and princes is only a 20 little smoke that floats in a ray of sunlight.—To my eyes treasures, diamonds and precious stones are as mere charcoal and coarseness; to my eyes cloth of silk 21 and brocades of price are but rags and tatters.—I renounce the honors to which the world aspires and 22-23 desire only to know the Truth -Always higher must I mount, higher must I see-What has been said about God, is still not enough for me ; the supra-divine 24 is my life and my light.—O Thou who hast hidden thyself behind a veil, withdraw that veil at last, so that my soul may not consume itself in the search for 25 Thee.—When thou sadist, Seek ye my face, my heart 26 said unto Thee, Thy face, Lord, will I seek.—With my soul have I desired thee in the night; with my
27 spirit within me will I seek thee early.—In that God
Page-379 who illumines the reason, desiring liberation I seek 28 my refuge.—I will rise now and go about the city in the streets and the broadways, I will seek him whom 29 my soul loveth.—Verily, I say to thee ; he who seeks 30 the Eternal, finds Hun.—He who seeks him, finds him; he who yearns intensely after the Ineffable, has 31 found the Ineffable.—O son of earth, be blind and thou shalt see My beauty; be deaf and thou shalt hear My sweet song, My pleasant melody; be ignorant and thou shalt partake My knowledge ; be in distress and thou shalt have an eternal portion of the infinite ocean of My riches :—blind to all that is not My beauty, deaf to all that is not My word, ignorant of all that is not My knowledge. Thus with a gaze that is pure, a spirit without stain, an understanding refined, thou 32 shalt enter into my sacred presence.—Wide open to all beings be the gates of the Everlasting. THE QUEST WITHIN 1 The sage’s quest is for himself, the quest of the ignorant for other than himself. 2 Nobility is for each man within him ; only he never 3 thinks of seeking for it within.—If any one asks what is the shortest and surest way of disposing oar-selves to advance continually in the spiritual life, I shall reply that it is to remain carefully selfgatheied-within, for it is there properly that one sees the gleam of the true light. 4 To retire from the world, that is to retire into one- 5 self, is to aid in the dispersion of all doubts.—If the soul would give itself leisure to take breath and return into itself, it would be easy for it to draw from its 6 own depths the seeds of the true.—Assuredly, whoever
**X) Confucius, " Lun-Yu, " II 15.20.—2) Meng-Tse II Tauler, "Institutions," 37–4) Tolstoi. —6) Seneca. — 6) J. Tauler, "Institutions."— 7) Farid-ud-din-attar, "Mantic-uttair." —8) II Corinthians. XIII. 5 — 9) Seneca.—10) Meng-Tse II. 7.3.—11) Seneca.—12)
Novalis, The Disciples at Sais".—13) Seneca.—14) Novalis, "Fragrant."_ 15)Ryonen.—16) Emerson.—17) Deuteronomy XXX. 12-14.—18) St. Basil.
—19) Dhammapada. 236.—20J Farid-ud-din-attar, "Mantic uttair"__ 21) Marcus Aurelius VII. 59.—22)
Said, "Bostan"__23) Ahmed Halif, "Mystic Odes". – 24) Farid-ud-din-attar-—26) J. Tauler.—26) Cicero, "De
Radius. I. 22. — 27) Farid-ud-din-attar, "Mantic-uttair," 13__28) Buddhist Writings in the Japanese.— 29) Baha-Utah, "The Seven Valleys".—• 30)Hermes.—31) Kathopanishad 1.3.12, 13.—) J.Tauler, "Institutions." 27. —33)
Vivekanananda.-34) Marcus Aurelius.X.I. Page-380 wishes to discover the universal truth must sound the 7 depths of his own heart.—Only from his own soul can he demand the secret of eternal beauty. * * * 8-9 Examine yourselves.—Your greatness is within and only in yourselves can you find a spectacle worthy of 10 your regard.—Seek and you shall find. … It is when we seek for the things which are within us that 11 quest leads to discovery.—Our true glory and true 12 riches are within.—Of what use is it to run painfully about tote troubled world of visible things when there 13 is a purer world within ourselves ?—The soul will enjoy veritable felicity when, separating itself from the darkness which surrounds it, it is able to contemplate with a sure gaze the divine light at its source. 14 Each descent of the gaze on oneself is at the same time an ascension, an assumption, a gaze on the true objectivity. 15 I looked into my own heart and I saw reflected there in its entirety the vast world with all its passions,—pride, hope, fear and the conflagration of the desires. So gazing I understood the word of the ancient sage, " Man is a mirror in which there appears the-image of the world. " * * * 16 The day of days, the great feast-day of the life, is that in which the eye within opens on the unity of 17 things, the omnipresence of a law.—The law is not in heaven, that thou shouldst say, " Who shall go up for us to heaven and bring it into us that we may hear it and do it ? " Neither is it beyond the sea, that thou shouldst say ”Who shall go over the sea and bring it into us that we may hear it and do it ? " But the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth and in thy heart, that thou mayst do it. 18 Observe thyself, not that which is thine, nor that 19 which is around thee, but thyself alone.—Retire into thyself as into an island and set thyself to the work.— 20 Gather thyself into thyself crouched like an infant 21 in the bosom of its mother.—Look within thee ; within thee is the source of all good and a source inexhaustible provided thou dig in it unceasingly.—
22 Contemplate the mirror of thy heart and thou shalt taste little by little a pure joy and unmixed peace.
Page-381 23 Open the eye of the heart that thou mayst see thy soul; thou shalt see what was not made to be seen.— 24 The soul is veiled by the body ; God is veiled by the 25 soul.—If a man could by the body ; God is veiled by the 26 God.—Every man who returns into himself, will find 27 there traces .of the Divinity.—Look into thy heart 28 and thou shalt see there His image.—An attentive scrutiny of thy being will reveal to thee that it is one with the very essence of absolute perfection. 29 O my friend, hearken to the melody of the Spirit in thy heart and in thy soul and guard it as the apple 30 of thy eyes.—But how can that be manifested to thy eyes if what is within thee is to thyself invisible ?— 31 This Self hidden in all existences shines not out, but it is seen with the supreme and subtle vision by those who see the subtle. The wise man should draw speech into the mind, mind into the Self that is knowledge; knowledge he should contain in the Great Self and that in the Self that is still. 32 Let not him then who cannot enter into the chamber of hidden treasure complain that he is poor and 33 has no part in these riches.—"What right has a man to say he has a soul if he has not felt it or that there is a God, if he has not seen Him ? If we have a soul, we must penetrate to it; otherwise it is better not to believe, to be frankly an atheist rather than a hypocrite.
34 O my soul, wilt thou be one day simple, one, bare, more visible than the body which envelops thee ?
Page-382 One of our subscribers in Europe puts to us the following difficulty :— " I have encountered in my life several examples of people living or trying to live in the universal consciousness and it seemed to me that it rendered them less compassionate, less humane, less tender to the sufferings of others. It seems to me that if it is necessary not to remain in the individual consciousness when it is a question of our own sufferings, it is otherwise when it is a question of sympathising with the sufferings of others. In my opinion we feel more keenly the troubles of our brothers in humanity if we remain in the individual consciotisness. But I may be mistaken and ask only to be enlightened by you on this point." Is it certain that such people are living in the universal consciousness? or, if they are, is it certain that they are really less humane and compassionate? May they not be exercising their humanity in another fashion than the obvious and external signs of sympathy and tenderness ? If a man is really insensible to the experiences of others in the world, he is not living in the full universal consciousness. Either he has shut himself up in an experience of an individual peace and self-content, or he is absorbed by his contact with some universal principle in its abstract form without regard to its universal action, or he is living inwardly apart from the universe" in touch with something transcendent or world-experience. All these states are useful to the soul in its progress, but they are not the universal consciousness.
When a man lives in the cosmic self, he necessarily embraces the life of the world and his attitude towards that world struggling upward from the egoistic state must be one of compassion, of love or of helpfulness. The Buddhists held that immersion in the infinite non-ego was in itself an immersion in a sea of infinite compassion. The liberated Sannyasin is described in the Gita and in other Hindu books as one whose occupation is beneficence to all creatures. But this vast spirit of beneficence does not necessarily exercise itself by the outward forms of emotional sympathy or active charity. We must not bind down all natures or all states of the divine consciousness Page-383 in man to the one form of helpfulness which seems to us the most attractive, the most beautiful or the most beneficent. There is a higher sympathy than that of the easily touched, emotions, a greater beneficence than that of an obvious utility to particular individuals in their particular sufferings. The egoistic consciousness passes through many stages in its emotional expansion. At first it is bound within itself, callous therefore to the experiences of others. Afterwards it is sympathetic only with those who are identified in some measure with itself, indifferent to the indifferent, malignant to the hostile. When it overcomes this respect for persons, it is ready for the reception of the altruistic principle. But even charity and altruism are often essentially egoistic in their immediate motive. They are stirred by the discomfort of the sight of suffering to the nervous system or by the pleasurable ness of others’ appreciation of our kindliness or by the egoistic self-appreciation of our own benevolence or by the need of indulgence in sympathy. There are philanthropists who would be troubled if the poor were not always with us, for they would then have no field for their charity. We begin to enter into the universal consciousness when apart from all individual motive and necessity, by the mere fact of unity of our being with all others, their joy becomes our joy, their suffering our suffering. But we must not mistake this for the highest condition. After a time we are no longer overcome by any suffering, our own or others, but are merely touched and respond in helpfulness. And there is yet anther state in which the subjection to suffering is impossible to us because we live in the Beatitude, but this does not deter us from love and beneficence,— any more than it is necessary for a mother to weep or be overcome by the little childish grief’s and troubles of her children in order to love, understand and soothe.
Nor is detailed sympathy and alleviation of particular sufferings the only help that can be given to men. To cut down branches of a man’s tree of suffering is good, but they grow again ; to aid him to remove its roots is a still more divine helpfulness. The gift of joy, peace or perfection is a greater giving than the effusion of an individual benevolence and sympathy and it is the most royal outcome of unity with others in the universal consciousness.
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