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    Is it impossible to conceive between the pure absolute and the state of manifestation some middle term which will enable us to discern the origin of the desire to be?

    If from the pure Absolute unseizable by our thought the relative cannot originate, yet may that relative appear to us, beyond our experimental concepts, in forms more and more remote from those in which it is clothed by the concrete reality, more and more approximating to the Indiscernable. In other words, it is in the Absolute itself, at the limits of our concepts, that we may attempt to imagine what the relative may have been before it became the relative.

    For if -the principle of the relative, such as it is known to us in the manifested world, is an exclusive affirmation, a desire to be, that is to say, to preserve the fixed form of an ego, are we not led thereby logically to postulate a state anterior to this desire in which all the numberless possible forms of the absolute " I " affirmed themselves, not exclusively ?

    The antecedent of the manifested world would be, then, not the state of pure and indiscernable unity, but, on the contrary, a state of perfect solidarity, of constant reciprocity of all the possibles, a state of impersonal manifestation, as it were, foreign to all desire of individual existence.

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    It is difficult indeed for us to form and still more to express any idea of such a condition of things. In order to understand, we should need to have the power of representing to ourselves what would be our actual world if each of its elements, each of the consciousnesses which compose it instead of being an exclusive consciousness which possesses only a limited and arbitrary mental representation of all the others, were able at each moment to reflect all in itself and to reflect itself in all by a perfect exchange by a reciprocal interpenetration incessantly repeated and renewed.

    That is indeed what happens in the internal life of an ego as between all the different elements which constitute it. It is this which allows the construction of ever higher syntheses of individuality by the coordination and concentration of innumerable elementary consciousnesses into a single sheaf.

    At each moment there is thus accomplished in the consciousness of the individual being the same wonderful mystery of perfect reciprocity, of incessant participation which identifies in one conscious individuality the whole sum of mutually interested relativities of consciousness, internal persons, of which each human personality is composed. The result is an absolute ego, and this absolute is the same in the com countess of the individual and in the consciousness of the unknowable Existence.

    We can postulate, then, in the Unknowable the entire perfection of that of which the manifestation born of the egoistic desire to be for oneself will be only an obscure deformation.

    If this desire to be were to cease in the world, nothing else would cease except the fixity of individual manifestation and, consequently, of the forms of Matter; all relative movements would absorb themselves together into that which we have conceived as absolute movement.

    We have said that this condition of absolute movement is to the mind ordinarily indistinguishable from absolute repose. It is nevertheless possible to discover an acceptation for these terms which would permit us to differentiate them by completing the notion we are able to form

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of that which exists at the extreme limit of our relative conceptions.

    It is possible, in fact, to conceive, as it were, two mutually symmetrical and complementary aspects of That which we cannot name, two aspects which are anterior to the desire to be or, indeed, to being and non-being. These two aspects of the Absolute may be represented by two alternatives, one of absolute repose, that is to say of concentration and the total absorption of all principles into a single principle of identity and indiscernable unity, the other of absolute movement and the integral deployment of the whole infinity of possible relations.

    These two states are equally unthinkable in the terms of our mentality, but from two different points of view. If the second seems at first sight less rebellious to all rational definition, it is because we introduce into it the primary notions of relativity which constitute manifestation in Time and Space.

    But it is outside Time that we must place the movement, at once eternal and instantaneous, of the absolute activity, and it is outside Space that we must place its deployment, its expansion of the infinite, its objectivist-tion of the numberless in the One.

    All the terms that we can muster for our use, are impotent to express this manifestation of the All in the One otherwise than by a sort of transposition of the state of the Absolute, to us unthinkable, into that of the relativities with which we are familiar. The one use of our efforts at definition is to trace roads for the mind by which it can travel through its own categories towards the inaccessible reality; inaccessible not for the very essence of cur spirit,—for that is identical with the essence of the Absolute,—but for its forms of expressible knowledge which belong to the domain of the relative.

    This is the reason of that truth, so often repeated, that he who by a conscious self-identification knows the Absolute cannot speak of what he knows. ‘* He who knows It_s" says the Tao " does not speak of it; he who speaks of It„ does not know it."

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    Nevertheless, it is in the power of the human word to prepare in the depths of the intelligence the inexpressible experience of the supreme knowledge and self-identification with the Absolute.

    From the point of view of pure speculation, this effort in its result leads us by a roundabout way to postulate in the Absolute itself the two initial and mutually complementary principles of passivity and activity, the conception of which has seemed to us to be the mind’s first steps towards the Identical and Unknowable.

    But here these two principles must be considered, not as we then considered them, as generating by their progressive union the indefinite series of relative manifestations, but as representing on the contrary in alternative phases the pure contradictories, being and non-being. All and Nothing, which meet and harmonise in the Absolute.

    We have said that there is one question which remains unanswered, Why should there be something rather than nothing ? We find now the reply; it is towards the Nothing that the All tends in its absolute non-manifestation. When all that was possible no longer is, when the Absolute has drawn back into the absolute annulment of the being, then it is to That which in this non-being still Is, that we must give the name of Absolute. And when what no longer existed is again new-born, it is from That, it is out of the non-being that unknowable Being arises.*

    And after the eternal repose, or rather not after but beyond, the infinite manifestation begins again. Not the relative manifestation , accidental, born of an egoistic desire, of which our universe makes itself the theatre, but the absolute manifestation of ineffable Love in the All which is One and the One which is All.

    There is one word more expressive than any other by which we can define this second condition of the Absolute’s

* Cf Taittiriya Upanishad: "In the beginning was Non-being one and indivisible ; from that Being arose ".

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pure activity and objectification of the Impersonal; it is the word, Play. A child at play,—that is the most adequate, the most profound word that can be said of this mystery of the Absolute manifesting itself to itself.

    How shall we conceive, how describe this play, this infinite transfiguration of the elements of the Infinite, this radiating of all in each, this reflection of each in all, this perpetual exchange and incessant and mutual transcribing of endless possibilities, numberless conditions in the One and Identical?

    The many million relations which constitute our worlds are only one formula of the infinite algebra and all th_e harmony that we can celebrate in the laws of our universe is hull in its perfection compared with this child’s play of the Absolute.

    Everywhere full consciousness, full light, full joy are born from the full union of love between things or beings, thoughts and souls and bodies.

    But what can we say of this union, this communion, infinite without duration, limit or proportion, between all that is, was and shall be ?

    Yet from this consummation, because there all possibilities are contained and all that can be is found, are born the’ seeds of the worlds of disorder, of egos in conflict, of ignorance and of death.

    It is enough that in the love of the all for the all a desires hold awake, that one of the formulas of the Infinite should be the object of a choice, a preference for the equation of the universe to arise out of the eternal equation, the numbers of the relative to start out of the absolute number.

    Then the play of the child changes its form, it becomes a play of exclusive wills, of forces in conflict, and something of the eternal manifestation enters into Time and Space.

    We have seen how out of desire, the movement is born, that first matter of forms, and how Love creates from this matter the worlds of progressive evolution.

    Thus by this projection towards successive geneses of

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principles which seem to exclude each other while in truth they affirm themselves simultaneously, we can conciliate and co-ordinate the contradictory opinions with regard to the commencement of things.

    All possible doctrines and theories of creation refer in fact to one of four successive aspects through which the riddle of the relation between the Absolute and the relative and the inconceivable passage from non-being to being translates itself for our conceptions into the symbolic form of distinct phases succeeding each other in a process of evolution.

* * *

    However great may be the synthetic value of such a view of things, it amounts nevertheless to nothing more than a new effort of the mind to understand the origins of things by placing them in the Absolute itself. A vain tentative, for with this idea of an origin is necessarily associated the notion of Time which by its very definition the concept of the Absolute excludes.

    To speak of phases of repose and activity, consciousness and unconsciousness in the Impersonal is to subject to the category of Time That of which the very essence is to be not temporal.

    There can be no alternatives in the Absolute, and it is an unprofitable attempt for the understanding when it seeks under cover of this subterfuge to transgress its proper limit by fastening its own primary data on That which escapes its thought.

    If then we wish to conceive the Absolute in its two opposite aspects, we must postulate them, not successively, but simultaneously. It is at one and the same time absolute repose and absolute movement, integral extinction and integral plenitude, being and non-being.

    Thus we find ourselves back again at the postulate of two principles, two co-eternal poles of in cognoscible activity and incognoscible passivity, whose union generates the world not at the beginning, not at the starting-point of a duration of Time, but at each instant in an indivisible eternity.

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    One could as well say that the being between these two absolute poles ascends from an impossible Nothingness towards an inaccessible Infinite. Or rather that from either of these poles proceed two opposite currents, one tending from being towards non-being, the other from non-being towards being. At every point where they meet, their conflict generates all the possible forms of the relative in all its states of substance.

    The point at which these two dreams of the Infinite are in equilibrium or identify themselves in a sole reality, is the point of the eternal consciousness.

    And this meeting-point between all that being the past travels towards the non-being and all that being of the future tends towards the being;—is it not that which we call the present ? It is in the present alone that there is the absolute of the being and nothing better distinguishes the consciousness of the being from the consciousness of the Absolute than the fact that it lives in a successive present and not in the eternal moment.

    To transform into an eternal present the transitory moment, the illusory instant of Time, such is the end every being pursues in its inseparable double effort of progress towards becoming and of return towards its unfathomable origin. It is by these two paths at once opposed and identical that it advances towards the Absolute.

    Meanwhile, all the symbols that the mind can create in order to represent to itself the Absolute in the terms of the relative can in no way lessen the mystery in which it has enveloped itself. It is by thinking and willing itself as the relative that it formulates the enigma of its own existence, and it is by becoming again what it truly is, the Absolute itself beyond all possible forms of being and non-being, that it solves the riddle.

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    The third hymn of Madhuchchhandas is again a hymn of the Soma sacrifice. It is composed like, the second before it, in movements of three stanzas, the first addressed to the Acwins, the second to Indra, the third to the Vicvadevas, the fourth to the goddess Saraswati. In this hymn also we have in the closing movement, in the invocation to Saraswati, a passage of clear psychological significance, of a far greater clarity indeed than those that have already helped us to understand the secret thought of the Veda.

    But this whole hymn is full of psychological suggestions and we find in it the close connection and even identity which the Vedic Rishis sought to establish and perfect between the three main interests of the hum in soul, Thought and its final victorious illuminations, Action and its last supreme all-achieving Puissances, enjoyment and its highest spiritual ecstasies. The Soma wine symbolises* the replacing of our ordinary sense-enjoyment by the divine Ananda. That substitution is brought about by divinising our thought-action, and as it progresses it helps in its turn the consummation of the movement which has brought it about. The Cow, the Horse, the Soma-Wine are the figures of this triple sacrifice. The offering of Ghrita, the clarified butter which is the yield of the cow, the offering of the horse, acwamedha, the offering of the wine of Soma

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are its three principal forms or elements. We have also, less prominent, the offering of the cake which is possibly symbolic of the body, of Matter.

    We commence with an invocation of the two Acwins, the two Riders on the Horse, Castor and Polydeuces of the old Mediterranean mythology. They are supposed by the comparative mythologists to represent twin stars in the heavens which for some reason had a better fortune than the rest of the celestial host and attracted the special adoration of the Aryans. Let us, however, see how they are described in the hymn we are studying. They are first described as "Acwins, swift-footed lords of bliss, much-enjoying,—dravalpdni gubhaspati purubhujd ". The word gush, like the words ratna and Chandra, is capable of signifying either light or enjoyment; but in this passage it occurs in connection with the adjective purubhujd, "much-enjoying ", and the verb chanasyatam, " take delight ",and must therefore be taken in the sense of weal or bliss.

    Next, these twin gods are described as "Acwins, divine souls many captioned, thought-holding" who accept and rejoice in the words of the Mantra " with an energetic thought ",—" purudansasd nard graveyard dhiyd dhishn’yd. Nr’i in the Veda is applicable both to gods and men and does not mean simply a man; it meant originally, I think, strong or active and then a male and is applied to the male gods, active divine souls or powers, Purushas, opposed to the female deities, Gandhi, who are their energies. It still preserved in the minds of the Rishis much of its original sense, as we see from the word nr’imn’a, strength, and the phrase nr’itama nv’indm, strongest of the divine powers. Qravas and its adjective gavira give the idea of energy, but always with an association of the farther idea of flame or light; gavira is therefore a very appropriate epithet for dhi, thought full of a shining or flashing energy. Dhishn’yd is connected with dhishan’d, intellect or understanding and is rendered by Sayana *’ intellectual ", buddhimantau.

.    Again the Acwins are described as "effectual in action, powers of the movement, fierce-moving in their paths," dasrd ndsatyd rudravartani. The Vedic epithets

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dasra and dasma are rendered by Sayana indifferently "destroying " or "beautiful" or "bountiful" according to his caprice or convenience. I connect it with the root das not in the sense of cutting, dividing, from which it gets the two significances of destroying and giving, not in the sense of *’ discerning, seeing "from which it gets Sayana’s significance " beautiful," darshaniya, but in the sense of doing, acting, shaping, accomplishing, as in purudansasd in the second Rik. Ndsatyd is supposed by some to be a patronymic; the old grammarians ingeniously fabricated for it the sense of " true, not false"; but I take it from " nas " to move. We must remember that the Aswins are riders on the horse, that they are described often by epithets of motion, " swift-footed", " fierce-moving in their paths;" that Castor and Pollex in Graeco-Latin mythology protect sailors in their voyages and save them in storm and shipwreck and that in the Rigveda also they are represented as powers that carry over the Rishis as in a ship or save them from drowning in the ocean. Ndsatyd may therefore very well mean lords of the voyage, journey, or powers of the movement. Rudravartani is rendered by modern scholars " reputed ", an epithet supposed to be well-suited to stars and they instance the parellel phrase, hiranyavariani, having a golden or shining path. Certainly, Rudra must have meant at one time, " shining, deep-coloured, red" like the roots rush and rug, rehire, "blood’* "red", the Latin ruber, rutilus, rufus, all meaning red. Roads, the dual Vedic word for heaven and earth, meant probably, like rajas and rochana, other Vedic words for the heavenly and earthly worlds, " the shining." On the other hand the sense of injury and violence is equally inherent in this family of words and is almost universal in the various roots which form it. " Fierce ", or " violent " is therefore likely table as good a sense for Rudra as "red". The Acwins are both hiranyavariani and rudravartani, because they are both powers of Light and of nervous force ; in the former aspect they have a bright gold movement, in the latter they are violent in their movement. In one hymn (V 3) we have. the combination rudrd hiranyavariani, vio-

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lent and moving in the paths of light; we can hardly with any respect for coherence of sense understand it to mean that the stars are red but their movement or their path is golden.

Here then, in these three verses, are an extraordinary series of psychological functions to apply to two stars of a heavenly constellation ! It is evident that if this was the physical origin of the Aswins, they have as in Greek mythology long lost their purely stellar nature; they have acquired like Athena, goddess of dawn, a psychological character and functions. They are riders on the horse, the A? way, symbolic of force and especially of life-energy and nervous force, the Prana. Their common character is that they are gods of enjoyment, seekers of honey; they are physicians, they bring back youth to the old, health to the sick, wholeness to the maimed. Another characteristic is movement, swift, violent, irresistible; their rapid and in demit able chariot is a constant object of celebration and they are described here as swift-footed and violent in their paths. They are like birds in their swiftness, like the mind, like the wind (V 3, and 78-1). They bring in their chariot ripe or perfected satisfactions to man, they are creators of bliss, Mayas. These indications are perfectly clear. They show that the Acwins are twin divine powers whose special function is to perfect the nervous or vital being in man in the sense of action and enjoyment. But they are also powers of Truth, of intelligent action, of right enjoyment. They are powers that appear with the Dawn, effective powers of action born out of the ocean of being who, because they are divine, are able to mentalised securely the felicities of the higher existence by a thought-faculty which finds or comes to know that true substance and true wealth:—

Ya dasra sindhumatara, manotara rayinam ;

Dhiya Deva vasuvida..

I. 46. 2.

They give that impelling energy for the great work which, having for its nature and substance the light of the Truth, carries man beyond the darkness :—.

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Ya nah papered acwina, jyotih mati tamas tirah;

Tarn asme rasatham isham.

I. 4-6. 6.

They carry man in their ship to the other shore beyond the thoughts and states of the human mind, that is to say, to the supramental consciousness,—ndvd matinam pdrdyct ( V.4£. 7) Surya, daughter of the Sun, Lord of the Truth, mounts their car as their bride.

    In the present hymn the Acwins are invoked, as swift-moving lords of bliss who carry with them many enjoyments, to take delight in the impelling energies of the sacrifice,—yajwarir isho…chanasyatam. These impelling forces are born evidently of the drinking of the Soma wine that is to say, of the inflow of the divine Ananda. For the expressive words, girah, that are to make new formations in the consciousness are already rising, the seat of the sacrifice has been piled, the vigorous juices of the Soma-wino are pressed out.* The Acwins, are to come as effective powers of action, purudansasd nard, to take delight in the Words and to accept them into the intellect where they shall’ be retained for the action by a thought full of luminous energy. They are to come to the offering of the Soma wine, in order to effect the action of the sacrifice, dasrd, as fulfillers of action, by giving to the delight of the action that violent movement of theirs, rudravartani, which carries them irresistibly on their path and overcomes all opposition. They come as powers of the Aryan journey, lords of the great human movement, Nasatyd. We see throughout that it is energy which these Riders on the Horse are to give ; they are to take delight in the sacrificial energies, to take up the word into an energetic thought, to bring to the sacrifice their own violent movement on the path. And it is effectiveness of action and swiftness in the great journey that is the object of this demand for energy. I would call the attention of the reader continually to the consistency of conception and coherence of structure, the

    * Yuvakavah suta vr’iktabarkishah. + calisaya Dhiya dhishn’ya Danatam girah..

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easy clearness and precision of outline which the thought of the Rishis assumes by a psychological interpretation, so different from the tangled confusion and incoherent abruptness of the interpretations which ignore the supreme tradition of the Veda as a book of wisdom and deepest knowledge.

     We have then this rendering for the first three verses :

    "O Riders of the Steed, swift-footed, much-enjoying lords of bliss, take delight in the energies of the sacrifice.

    " O Riders of the Steed, male souls effecting a manifold action, take joy of the words, O holders in the intellect, by a luminously energetic thought.

    ” I have piled the seat of sacrifice, I have pressed out the vigorous Soma juices; fulfillers of action, powers of the movement, come to them with your fierce speed on the path ".

    As in the second hymn, so in the third the Rishi begins by invoking deities who act in the nervous or vital forces. But there he called Vayu who supplies the vital forces, brings his steeds of life ; here he calls the Aswins who use the vital forces, ride on the steed. As in the second hymn he proceeds from the vital or nervous action to the mental, he invokes in his second movement the might of Indra. The out-pressings of the wine of delight desire him, stud time twdyavah ; they desire the luminous mind to take possession of them for its activities; they are purified, anvibhis tans, " by the fingers and the body " as Sayana explains it, by the subtle thought-powers of the pure mind and by extension in the physical consciousness as it seems to me to mean. For these " ten fingers", if they are fingers at all, are the ten fingers of Surya, daughter of the Sun, bride of the Aswins. In the first hymn of the ninth Mandala this same Rishi Madhuchchhandas expands the idea which here he passes over so succinctly. He says, addressing the deity Soma ” The daughter of the Sun purifies thy Soma as it flows abroad in her straining-vessel by a continuous extension ", vdren’a fagwatd tend. And immediately he adds, " The subtle ones seize it in their labour ( or, in the great work, struggle, aspiration, Sama- 

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rye ), the ten Brides, sisters in the heaven that has to be crossed", a phrase that recalls at once the ship of the Aswins that carries us over beyond the thoughts ; for Heaven is the symbol of the pure mental consciouness in the Veda as is Earth of the physical consciousness. These sisters who dwell in the pure mind, the subtle ones, anvil, the ten brides, dag a yoshan’ah, are elsewhere called the ten Castfirs, dag a kshipah, because they seize the Soma and speed it on its way. They are probably identical with the ten Rays, daga gdvah, sometimes spoken of in the Veda. They seem to be described as the grandchildren or descendants of the Sun, naptibhir vivasvatah (VII. 14.5). They arc aided in the task of purification by the seven forms of Thought-consciousness, sapia dhttayah. Again we arc told that " Soma advances, heroic with his" swift chariots, by the force of the subtle thought, dhiyd an’vyd, to the perfected activity (or perfected field) of Indra and takes many forms of thought to arrive at that vast extension (or, formation) of the godhead where the Immortals are" (IX. 15. 1. 2.)

     Esha puru. dhiyayate, brihate devatataye, Yatramr’it4sa asate.

     I have dwelt on this point in order to show how entirely symbolical is the Soma wine of the Vedic Rishisand how richly surrounded with psychological conceptions,— as anyone will find who cares to go through the ninth Mandala with its almost overcharged splendour of symbolic imagery and overflowing psychological suggestions.

    However that may be, the important point here is not the Soma and its purification but the psychological function of Indra. He is addressed as Indra of the richly-various lustres, indra chitrabhdno. The Soma-juices desire him. He comes impelled by the thought, driven forward by the illumined thinker within, dhiyeshito viprajiltah, to the soul-thoughts of the Rishi who has pressed out the wine of delight and seeks to manifest them in speech, in the inspired mantras ; sutdvata upa brahmdn’i vdghatah. He comes with the speed and force of the illumined mind-power, in possession of his brilliant horses to those thoughts, tutujdna

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upa brahmdn’i harivah, and the Rishi prays to him to confirm or hold the delight in the Soma offering, sute dadhi-shva nag chanah. The Acwins have, brought and energised the pleasure of the vital system in the action of the Anan-da. Indra is necessary to hold that pleasure firmly in the illuminated mind so that it may not fall away from the consciousness.

    " Come, O Indra, with thy rich lustres, these Soma-juices desire thee ; they are purified by the subtle powers and by extension in body.

    ” Come, O Indra, impelled by the mind, driven forward by the illumined thinker, to my soul-thoughts, I who have poured out the Soma juice and seek to express them in speech.

    " Come, O Indra, with forceful speed to my soul-thoughts, O lo.-d of the bright horses; hold firm the de» light in the Soma-juice ".

    The Rishi next passes to the Vicvadevas, all the gods or the all-gods. It has been disputed whether these Visvadevas form a class by themselves or are simply the gods in their generality. I take it that the phrase means the universal collectivity of the divine powers; for this sense seems to me best to correspond to the actual expressions of the hymns in which they are invoked. In this hymn they are called for a general action which supports and completes the functions of the Aswins and Indra. They are to come to the sacrifice in their collectivity and divide among themselves, each evidently for the divine and joyous working of his proper activity, the Soma which the giver of the sacrifice distributes to them; vigve devdsa dgata, ddgvdnso ddgusho sutam. In the next Rik the call is repeated with greater insistence; they are to arrive swiftly, turn’ayali, to the Soma offering or, it may mean, making their way through all the planes of consciousness, " waters ", which divide the physical nature of man from their godhead and are full of obstacles to communication between earth and heaven ; apturah sutam d ganta turn’ayah. They are to come like cattle hastening to the stalls of their rest at evening-tide, usrd iva swasardni. Thus gladly arriving, they are

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gladly to¹ accept and cleave to the sacrifice and support it, bearing it up in its journey to its goal, in its ascent to the gods or to the home of the gods, the Truth, the Vast; med-ham jushanta vahnayah.

    And the epithets of the Visvadevas, qualifying their character and the functions for which they are invited to the Soma-offering, have the same generality; they are common to all the gods and applied indifferently to any or all of them throughout the Veda. They are fosterers or in-creasers of man and upholders of his labour and effort in the work, the sacrifice,—omdsag charshan’idhrito. Sayana renders these words protectors and sustainers of men. I need not enter here into a full justification of the significances which I prefer to give them; for I have already indicated the philological method which I follow. Sayana himself finds it impossible to attribute always the sense of protection to the words derived from the root av, avas, uti, Uma, etc which are so common in the hymns, and is obliged to give to the same word in different passages the most diverse and unconnected significances. Similarly, while it is easy to attribute the sens^e of "man" to the two kindred words Charshan’i and Krishti when they stand by themselves, this meaning seems unaccountably to disappear in compound forms like vicharshan’i, vigvacharshani, vigvakr’ishti. Sayana himself is obliged to render viscvacharsha’ni "all seeing " and not " all man " or " all-human ". I do not admit the possibility of such abysmal variations in fixed Vedic terms. Av can mean to be, have, keep; contain, protect; become, create; foster, increase, thrive, prosper; gladden. be glad; but it is the sense of increasing or fostering which seems to me to prevail in the Veda. Charsh and krish were originally derivate roots from char and kri, both meaning to do, and the sense of laborious action or movement still remains in krish, to drag, to plough . Charshan’i and kri’shti, mean therefore effort, laborious action or work or else the doers of such action. They are two among the many words, (karma, apas, kdra, kiri, duvas etc.) which are used to indicate the Vedic work, the sacrifice, the toil of aspiring humanity, the arati of the Aryan.

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    The fostering or increasing of man in all his substance and possessions, his continual enlargement towards the fullness and richness of the vast Truth-consciousness, the upholding of him in his great struggle and labour, this is the common preoccupation of the Vedic gods. Then, they are apturah, they who cross the waters, or as Sayana takes it, they who give the waters. This he understands in the sense of " rain-givers " and it is perfectly true that all the Vedic gods are givers of the rain, the abundance ( for drishti, rain, has both senses) of heaven, sometimes described as the solar waters, swarvaiir apah, or waters which carry in them the light of the luminous heaven, Swar. But the ocean and the waters in the Veda, as this phrase itself indicates, are the symbol of conscient being in its mass and in its movements. The gods pour the fullness of these waters, especial ally the upper waters, the waters of heaven, the streams of the Truth, r’itasya dhdrah, across all obstacles into the human consciousness. In this sense they are all apturah. But man is also described as crossing the waters over to his home in the Truth-consciousness and the gods as carrying him over; it is doubtful whether this may not be the true sense here, especially as we have the two words apturah…tilrnayah close to each other in a connection that may well be significant.

    Again the gods are all free from effective assailants, free from the harm of the hurtful or opposing powers and therefore the creative formations of their conscious knowledge, their Maya, move freely, pervasively, attain their right goal,—asridha ehimdydso adruhah. If we take into account the numerous passages of the Veda which indicate the general object of the sacrifice, of the work, of the journey, of the increase of the light and the abundance of the waters to be the attainment of the Truth-consciousness, Ritam, with the resultant Bliss, Mayas, and that these epithets commonly apply to powers of the infinite, integral Truth-consciousness we can see that it is this attainment of the Truth which is indicated in these three verses. The all-gods increase man, they uphold him in the great work, they bring him the abundance of the waters of Swar, the

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streams of the Truth, they communicate the unassailably integral and pervading action of the Truth-consciousness with its wide formations of knowledge, mdydh.

    I have translated the phrase, usrd iva swasatdni, in the most external sense possible; but in the Veda even poetical similes are seldom or never employed for mere decoration ; they too are utilised to deepen the psychological sense and with a figure of symbolic or double meaning. The word usra is always used in the Veda, like go, with the double sense of the concrete figure or symbol, the Bull or Cow, and at the same time the psychological indication of the bright or luminous ones, the illumined powers of the Truth in man. It is as such illumined powers that the all-gods have to come and they come to the Soma-juice, swasardni, as if to seats or forms of peace or of bliss ; for the root swas, like sas and many others, means both to rest and to enjoy. They are the powers of Truth entering into the outpourings of the Ananda in man as soon as that movement has been prepared by the vital and mental activity of the A9wins and the pure mental activity of Indra.

    " O fosterers who uphold the doer in his work, O all. gods, come and divide the Soma-wine that I distribute.

    "O all-gods who bring over to us the Waters, come passing through to my Soma-offerings as illumined powers to your places of bliss.

    " O all-gods, you who are not assailed nor come to hurt, free-moving in your forms of knowledge, cleave to my sacrifice as its cupbearers."

    And, finally, in the last movement of the hymn we have the clear and unmistakable indication of the Truth-consciousness as the goal of the sacrifice, the object of the Soma-offering, the culmination of the work of the Aswins, Indra and the All-gods in the vitality and in the mind. For these are the three Riks devoted to Saraswati, the divine Word, who represents the stream of inspiration that descends from the Truth-consciousness, and thus limpidly runs their sense:

    "May purifying Saraswati with all the plenitude of her forms of plenty, rich in substance by the thought, desire our sacrifice.

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    " She, the impeller to happy truths, the awakener in consciousness to right mentalisings, Saraswati, upholds the sacrifice.

    " Saraswati by the perception awakens in consciousness the great flood (the vast movement of the Ritam) and illumines entirely all the thoughts."

    This clear and luminous finale throws back its light on all that has preceded it. It shows the intimate connection between the Vedic sacrifice and a certain state of mind and soul, the interdependence between the offering of the clarified butter and the Soma juice and luminous thought, richness of psychological content, right states of the mind and its awaking and impulsion to truth and light. It reveals the figure of Saraswati as the goddess of the inspiration, of sruti And it establishes the connection between the Vedic rivers and psychological states of mind. The passage is one of those luminous hints which the Rishis have left scattered amidst the deliberate ambiguities of their symbolic style to guide us towards their secret.

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Selected Hymns

THE ACWINS, LORD OF BLISS.

RIGVEDA IV .45.

1. Lo, that Light is rising up and the all-pervading car is being yoked on the high level of this Heaven; there are placed satisfying delights in their triple pairs and the fourth skin of honey overflows.

2. Full of honey upward rise the delights; upward horses and cars in the wide shining of the Dawn and they roll aside the veil of darkness that encompassed on every side and they extend the lower world into a shining form like that of the luminous heaven.

3. Drink of the honey with your honey-drinking mouths, for the honey yoke your car beloved. With the honey you gladden the movements and its paths ; full of honey, O Acwins, is the skin that you bear.

4. Full of the honey are the swans that bear you, golden-winged, waking with the Dawn, and they come not to hurt ; they rain forth the waters, they are full of rapture and touch that which holds the Rapture. Like bees to pourings of honey you come to the Soma-offerings.

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    5. Full of the honey the fires lead well the sacrifice and they woo your brightness, O Acwins, day by day, when one with purified hands, with a perfect vision, with power to go through to the goal has pressed out with the pressing-stones the honeyed Soma, wine.

    6. Drinking the wine near them, the fires ride and run and extend the lower world into a shining form like that of the luminous heaven. The Sun too goes yoking his steeds; by force of Nature’s self-ar ranging you move, consciously along all paths. *

    7. I have declared, O Acwins, holding the Thought in me, your car that is undeceiving and drawn by perfect steeds,—your car by which you move at once over all the worlds towards the enjoyment rich in offerings that makes through to the goal.

   * Or, you take knowledge of all the paths in their order.

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COMMENTARY

    The hymns of the Rigveda addressed to the two shining Twins, like those addressed to the Ribhus, are full of symbolic expressions and unintelligible without a firm clue to their symbolism. The three leading features of these hymns to the A fins are the praise of their chariot, their horses and their rapid all-pervading movement; their seeking of honey and their joy in the honey, madhu, and the satisfying delights that they carry in their car; and their close association with the Sun, with Surya the daughter of the Sun and with the Dawn.

    The Acwins like the other gods descend from the Truth-consciousness, the Ritam ; they are born or manifested from Heaven, from Dyaus, the pure Mind ; their movement pervades all the worlds,—the effect of their action ranges from the body through the vital being and the thought to the super-conscient Truth. It commences indeed from the ocean, from the vague of the being as it emerges out of the subconscient and they conduct the soul over the flood of these waters and prevent its foundering on its voyage. They are therefore Na. Satya, lords of the movement, leaders of the journey or voyage.

    They help man with the Truth which comes to them especially by association with the Dawn, with Surya, lord of the Truth, and with Surya, his daughter, but they help him more characteristically with the delight of being. They are lords of bliss, gubhaspati; their car or movement is loaded with the satisfactions of the delight of being in all its planes; they bear the skin full of the overflowing honey; they seek the honey, the sweetness, and fill all things with it. They are therefore effective powers of the Ananda which proceeds out of the Truth-consciousness and which manifesting itself variously in all the three worlds maintains man in his journey. Hence their action is in all the worlds. They are especially riders or drivers of the Horse, Acwins, as their name indicates, they use the vitality of the human being as the motive-force of the journey : but also they work in the thought and lead it to the Truth. They give health, beauty, wholeness to the body; they are the divine physicians. Of all the gods

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they are the most ready to come to man and to create for him ease and joy, dgamishthd, qubhaspatt. For this is their peculiar and perfect function. They are essentially lords of weal, of bliss, qubhaspatt.

    This character of the Agwins is brought out with a continual emphasis by Vamadeva in the present hymn In almost every verse occurs with a constant iteration the words madhu, madhumdn, honey, honed. It is a hymn to the sweetness of existence; it is a chant of the delight of being.

    The great Light of lights, the Sun of Truth, the illumination of the Truth-consciousness is rising up out of the movement of life to create the illumined Mind, Swar, which completes the evolution of the lower triple world . Esha sya bhdnur udiyarti . By this rising of the Sun in man, the full movement of the Agwins becomes possible; for by the Truth comes the realised Delight, the heavenly beatitude. Therefore, the chariot of the Agwins is being yoked upon the height of this Dyaus, the high level or plane of the resplendent mind. That chariot is’ all-pervading; its motion goes everywhere; its speed runs freely on all planes of our consciousness. Yujyate rathah parijmd divo asya sdnavi.

    The full all- pervading movement of the Agwins brings with it the fullness of all the possible satisfactions of the delight of being. This is expressed symbolically in the language of the Veda by saying that in their car are found the satisfactions, prikshdsah, in three pairs, prikshdsa cumin tnithund ad hi trayah. The word prihsha is rendered food in the ritual interpretation like the kindred word prayas. The root means pleasure, fullness, satisfaction, and may have the material sense of a "delicacy" or satisfying food and the psychological sense of a delight, pleasure or satisfaction . The satisfactions or delicacies which are carried in the car of the Agwins are, then, in three pairs ; or the phrase may simply mean, they are three bat closely associated together. In any case, the reference is to the three kinds of satisfaction or pleasure which correspond to the three movements or worlds of our progressive consciousness,—satisfactions of the body, satisfactions of the vitality, satisfactions of the mind . If they are in three pairs, then we must understand that on each plane there is a double action of the delight corresponding to the double and united twin hood of the Agwins. It is difficult in the Veda itself to distinguish between these brilliant and

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happy Twins or to discover what each severally represents. We have no such indication as is given us in the case of the three Ribhus. But perhaps the Greek names of these two Dioskouroi , Divo napdtd, sons of Heaven, contain a clue. Kastor, the name of the elder, seems to be Kashtri, the Shining One ; Poludeukes*. may possibly be Purudansas, a name which occurs in the Veda as an epithet of the Agwins, the Manifold in activity. If so, the twin birth of the Agwins recalls the constant Vedic dualism of Power and Light, Knowledge and Will, Consciousness and Energy, Go and Agwa. In all the satisfactions brought to us by the Agwins these two elements are inseparably united; where the form is that of the Light, or consciousness, there Power and Energy are contained; where the form is that of the Power or Energy, there Light and Consciousness are contained.

    But these three forms of satisfaction are not all that their chariot holds for us; there is something else, a fourth, a skin full of honey and out of this skin the honey breaks and overflows on every side. Dr’itis turiyo madhuno vi rapqate. Mind, life and body, these are three ; turiya, the fourth plane of our consciousness, is the superconscient, the Truth-consciousness. The Agwins bring with them a skin, dr’iti, literally a thing cut or torn, a partial formation out of the Truth-consciousness to. contain the honey of the superconscient Beatitude ; but it cannot contain it; that unconquerably abundant and infinite sweetness breaks out and overflows everywhere drenching with delight the whole of our existence.

    With that honey the three pairs of satisfactions, mental, vital, bodily are impregnated by this all-pervasive overflowing plenty and they become full of its sweetness, madhuman-tah. And so becoming, at once they begin to move upward. Touched by the divine delight all our satisfactions in this lower world soar upward irresistibly attracted towards the superconscient, towards the Truth, towards the Beatitude. And with them,—for, secretly or openly, consciously or subconsciously it is the delight of being that is the leader of our activities—all the chariots and horses of these gods take

* The K of Polydeuces points to an original 9; the name would then be Purudansasd ; but such fluctuations between the various sibilants were common enough in the early fluid state of the Aryan tongues.

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the same soaring upward movement. All the various movements of our being, all the forms of Force that give them their impulsion, all follow the ascending light of Truth towards its home. Ud vam parishes madhuman-tah irate, ratdh aqwdsa ushaso vyushtisku.

    "In the wide-shining of the Dawn " they rise ; for Dawn is the illumination of the Truth rising upon the mentality to bring the day of full consciousness into the darkness or half-lit night of our being. She comes as Dakshina, the pure intuitive discernment on which Agni the God-force in us feeds when he aspires towards the Truth or as Sarama, the discovering intuition, who penetrates into the cave of the subconscient where the niggard lords of sense-action have hidden the radiant herds of the Sun and gives information to Indra. Then comes the lord of luminous Mind and breaks open the cave and drives upward the herds, udajat, upwards towards the vast Truth-consciousness, the own home of the gods. Our conscious existence is a hill (adri) with many successive levels and elevations, sdnavi ; the cave of the subconscient is below ; we climb upwards towards the godhead of the Truth and Bliss where are the seats of Importability, yatrdmritdsa dsate.*

    By this upward movement of the chariot of the Agwins with its burden of uplifted and transformed satisfactions the veil of Night that encompasses the worlds of being in us is rolled away. All these worlds, mind, life, body, are opened to the rays of the Sun of Truth. This lower world in us, rajas, is extended and shaped by this ascending movement of all its powers and satisfactions into the very brightness of the luminous intuitive mind, Swar, which receives directly the higher Light. The mind, the act, the vital, emotional, substantial existence, all becomes full of the glory and the intuition, the power and the light of the divine Sun,— tat savitnr raven ‘yam bhargo devasya.\ The lower mental existence is transformed into an image and reflection of the higher Divine. Aporriuvantas tama d prakr’itim, "jwar n’a qukram tan-vanta d rajah.

    This verse closes the general description of the perfect and final movement of the Agwins. In the fourth the, Rishi Vamadeva turns to his own ascension, his own offering of the

* R. V. IX. 15.

f The great phrase of the Gayatri, R. V. III. 62. 10.

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Soma, his voyage and sacrifice; he claims for it their beatific and glorifying action. The mouths of the Acwins are made to drink of the Sweetness ; in his sacrifice, then, let them drink of it. Madhwah pivatam madhupebhir dtabhih. Let them yoke their chariot for the honey, their chariot beloved of men ; uta pr’iyam madhune yunjdthdm ratkam. For man’s movement, his progressive activity, is made by them glad in all its paths with that very honey and sweetness of the Anan-da. A vartanim madhund jlnvathai pathah. For they bear the skin full and overflowing with its honey. Dr’itim vahethe madhumantam aqwind. By the action of the Acwins man’s progress towards the beatitude becomes itself beatific ; all his travail and struggle and labour grows full of a divine delight. As it is said in the Veda that by Truth is the progress towards the Truth, that is to say by the growing law of the Truth in the mental and physical consciousness we arrive finally beyond mind and body to the superconscient Truth, so here it is indicated that by Ananda is the progress towards the Ananda,—by a divine delight growing in all our members, in all our activities we arrive at the superconscious beatitude.

    In the upward movement the horses that draw the chariot of the Acwins change into birds, into swans, hansdsah. The Bird in the Veda is the symbol, very frequently, of the soul liberated and upsoaring, at other times of energies so liberated and upsoaring, winging upwards towards the heights of our being, winging widely with a free flight, no longer involved in the ordinary limited movement or labouring gallop of the Life-energy, the Horse, Acwa. Such are the energies that draw the free car of the Lords of Delight, when there dawns on us the Sun of the Truth. These winged movements are full of the honey showered from the overflowing skin, madhumantah. They are unassailable, asr’idhah, they come to no hurt in their flight; or, the sense may be, they make no false or hurtful movement. And they are golden-winged, hiran’yaparnah. Gold is the symbolic colour of the light of Surya. The wings of these energies are the full, satisfied, attaining movement, parna, of his luminous knowledge. For these are the birds that awake with the Dawn ; these are the winged energies that come forth from their nests when the feet of the daughter of Heaven press the levels our human mentality, divo asya sanavi. Such are the swans\hat bear the

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swift-riding Twins. Hansdsah ye vdm madhumanta asr’idho, hira-n’yaparnd uvula usharbudhah.

    Full of the honey these winged energies shower on us as they rise the abundance of the waters of heaven, the full outpouring of the high mental consciousness; they are instinct with ecstasy, with rapture, with the intoxication of the immortal wine; and they touch, they come into conscious contact with that superconscient being which is eternally in possession of the ecstasy, rapturous for ever with its divine intoxication. Udapruto manioc mandinispr’iqai. Drawn by them the Lords of delight come to the Rishis Soma-offerings like bees to trick lings of honey ; madhvah na maktah savanna gachchhathah. Makers themselves of the sweetness, they like the bees seek whatever sweetness can serve them as their material for more delight.

    In the sacrifice the same movement of general illumination already. described as the result of the ascending flight of the Agwins is now described as being effected by the aid of the fires of Agni. For the flames of the Will, the divine Force burning up in the soul, are also drenched with the overflowing sweetness and therefore they perform perfectly from day to day their great office of leading the sacrifice"⁵ progressively to its goal. For that progress, they woo with their flaming tongues the daily visitation of the brilliant Agwins who are bright with the light of the intuitive illuminations and uphold them with their thought of flashing energy. + Svadhvardso madhumanta agnaya used jayante prate veto awing.

    This aspiration of Agni happens when the Sacrificer with pure hands, with a perfectly discerning vision , with power in his soul to travel to the end of its pilgrimage, to the the goal of the sacrifice through all obstacles, breaking all opposes, has pressed out the immortalising wine with the pressing-stones and that too becomes full of the honey of the Agwins. Yan niktahastas taranim vichakshan’o, samam aubhdva madhumanta adr’ibih. For the individual’s delight in things is met by the Agwins.’ triple satisfactions and by the

* Adhwara, the word for sacrifice, is really an adjective and the full phrase is Adhwara yajna, sacrificial action traveling on the path, the sacrifice that is of the nature of a progression or journey. Agni, the Will, is the leader of the sacrifice.

t Caviraya ahiya R.. V. I. 3. 2.

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fourth, the delight pouring from the Truth. The cleansed hands of the Sacrificer, niktahastah, are possibly symbolic + of the purified physical being; the power comes from a fulfilled life-energy; the force of clear mental vision, vichahashan a, is the sign of the truth-illumined mind. These are the conditions in mind, life and body for the overflowing of the honey over the triple satisfactions of the Acwins.

    When the sacrificer has thus pressed out the honey-filled delight of things in his sacrifice, the flames of the Will are able to drink them from near; they are not compelled to bring them meagerly or with pain from a distant and hardly accessible plane of consciousness . Therefore, drinking immediately and freely, they become full of an exultant force and swiftness and run and race about over the whole field of our being to extend and build up the lower consciousness into the shining image of the world of free and luminous Mind. A. henipdso ahabhih davidhwatah, swarm’s quorum tanvan ta d rajah. The formula used is repeated without variation from the second Rik; but here it is the flames of the Will full of the fourfold satisfaction that do the work. There the free up soaring of the gods by the mere touch of the Light and without effort; here the firm labour and aspiration of man in his sacrifice. For then it is by Time, by the days, that the work is perfected, ahabhih, by successive dawns of the Truth each with its victory over the night, by the unbroken succession of the sisters of which we have had mention in the hymn to the divine Dawn. Man cannot seize or hold at once all that the illumination brings to him; it has to be repeated constantly so that he may grow in the light.

    But not only the fires of the Will are at work to transform the lower consciousness. The Sun of Truth yokes also his lustrous coursers and is in movement; silage chide aqwdsa yuyajdna tyate. The Agwins too take knowledge for the human consciousness of all the paths of its progress so that it may effect a complete, harmonious and many-sided movement. This movement advancing in many paths is combined in the light of the divine knowledge by the spontaneous self-arranging action of -Nature which she assumes when the

+ The hand or arm is often, however, otherwise symbolic, especial-when it is the two hands or arms of Indra that are in question.

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will and the knowledge are wedded in the perfect harmony of a fully self-conscious, an intuitively guided action. Viqvdn Anu swathed chetathah pantha.

    Vamadeva closes his hymn. He has been able to hold firmly the shining Thought with its high illumination and has expressed in himself by the shaping and fixing power of the Word the chariot, that is to say, the immortal movement of the delight of the Acwins; the movement of a bliss that does not fade or grow old or exhaust itself,—it is ageless and undeceiving, ajarah,—because it is drawn by perfect and liberated energies and not by the limited and soon exhausted, soon recalcitrant horses of the human vitality. Pra vdm avocham awing dhiyandhdh, ratha svaqvo ajaro yo asti. In this movement they traverse in a moment all the worlds of the lower consciousness, covering it with their speeding delights, and so arrive to that universal enjoyment in man full of his offering of the Soma-wine by which they can lead him, puissant entering into it, through all opposes and to the great goal. Yean sadyah pari rajdnsi ydtho, havishmantant taranim bhojam achehha.

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lsha Upanishad

ANALYSIS VIII

FOURTH MOVEMENT

Verses 17-18 *

THE SIDE OF ACTION

     Through Surya then, through the growth of the illumination in the mind which enables it eventually to pass beyond itself, we have the first principle of progress from mortality to immortality. It is by the Sun as a door or gate t that the individual, the limited consciousness attains to the full consciousness and life in the one, supreme and all-embracing Soul.

    Both consciousness and life are included in the formula of Immortality; Knowledge is incomplete without action. Chit fulfils itself by Tapas, Consciousness by energy. And as Surya represents the divine Light, so Agni to the ancient Rishis represented divine Force, Power or Will-in-Consciousness. The prayer to Agni completes the prayer to Surya.

THE INDIVIDUAL WILL

    As in knowledge, so in action, unity is the true foundation. The individual, accepting division as his law, iso-

     * 17. The Breath of things is an immortal life, but of this body ashes are the end. OM ! O Will, remember, that which was done remember. O Will, remember, that which was done remember.

    18. O god Agni, knowing all things that are manifested, lead us by the good path to the felicity; remove from us the devious attraction of sin. To thee completest speech of submission we address.

     + Saryadwartn’a

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lasting himself in his own egoistic limits, is necessarily mortal, obscure and ignorant in his workings. He follows in his aims and in his methods a knowledge that is personal, governed by desire, habits of thought, obscure subconscious impulses or, at best, a broken partial and shifting light. He lives by rays and not in the full blaze of the Sun. His knowledge is narrow in its objectivity, narrow in its subjectivity, in neither one with the integral knowledge and the total working and total will in the universe. His action, therefore, is crooked, many-branching, hesitating and fluctuating in its impulsion and direction; it beats a-bout among falsehoods to find the Truth, tosses or scrapes fragments together to piece out the whole, stumbles among errors and sins to find the right. Being neither one-versioned nor whole-versioned, having neither the totality of the universal Will nor the concentrated oneness of the transcendent, the individual will cannot walk straight on the right or good path towards the Truth and the Immortality. Governed by desire, exposed to the shock of the forces around it with which its egoism and ignorance forbid it to put itself in harmony, it is subject to the twin children of the Ignorance, suffering and falsehood. Not having the divine Truth and Right, it cannot have the divine Felicity.

AGNI, THE DIVINE WILL

    But as there is in and behind all the falsehoods of our material mind and reason a Light that prepares by this twilight the full dawn of the Truth in man, so there is in and behind all our errors, sins and stumblings a secret Will, tending towards Love and Harmony, which knows where it is going and prepares and combines our crooked brunching towards the straight path which will be the final result of their toil and seeking. The emergence of this Will and that Light are the conditions of immortality.

    This Will is Agni. Agni is in the Rig Veda, from which the closing verse of the Upanishad is taken, the flame of the Divine Will or Force of Consciousness working in the

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worlds. He is described as the immortal in mortals, the leader of the journey, the divine Horse that bears us on the road, the " son of crookedness’s " who himself knows and is the straightness and the Truth. Concealed and hard to seize in the workings of this world because they are all falsified by desire and egoism, he uses them to transcend them and emerges as the universal Man or universal Power, Agni Vaisvanara, who contains in himself all the gods and all the worlds, upholds all the universal workings and finally fulfils the godhead, the Immortality. He is the worker of the divine Work. It is these symbols which govern the sense of the two final verses of the Upanishad.

THE IMMORTAL LIFE-PRINCIPLE

    Life is the condition from which the Will and the Light emerge. It is said in the Veda that Vayu or Matarisvan, the Life-Principle, is he who brings down Agni from Surya in the high and far-off supreme world. Life calls down the divine Will from the Truth-consciousness into the realm of mind and body to prepare here, in Life, its own manifestation. Agni, enjoying and devouring the things of Life, generates the Maruts, nervous forces of Life that become forces of thought; they upheld by Agni prepare the action of Indra, the luminous Mind, who is for our thought-powers their Rishi or finder of the Truth and Right. Indra slays Vritra, the Coverer, dispels the darkness, causes Surya to rise upon our being and go a-broad over its whole field with the rays of the Truth. Surya is the Creator or manifested, Savitri, who manifests in this mortal world the world or state of immortality, dispels the evil dream of egoism, sin and suffering and transforms Life into the Immortality, the good, the beatitude. The Vedic gods are a parable of human life emerging, mounting, lifting itself towards the Godhead.

    Life, body, action, will, these are our first materials. Matter supplies us with the body; but it is only a temporary knot of the movement, a dwelling-place of the Purusha in which he presides over the activities generated out of the Life-principle. Once it is thrown aside by the

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    Life-principle it is dissolved; ashes are its end. Therefore the body is not ourselves, but only an outer tool and instrument. For Matter is the principle of obscurity and division, of birth and death, of formation and dissolution. It is the assertion of death. Immortal man must not identify himself with the body.

    The Life-principle in us survives. It is the immortal Breath * or, as the phrase really means, the subtle force of existence which is superior to the principle of birth and death. At first sight it may appear that birth and death are attributes of the Life, but it is not really so : birth and death are processes/ of Matter, of the body. The Life-principle is not formalin and dissolved in the formulation and dissolution of the body; if that were so, there could be no continuity of the individual existence and all would go back at death into the formless. Life forms body, it is not formed by it. It is the thread upon which the continuity of our successive bodily lives is arranged, precisely because it is itself immortal. It associates itself with the perishable body and carries forward the mental being, the Purusha in the mind,, upon his journey.

WILL AND MEMORY

    This journey consists in a series of activities continued from life to life in this world with intervals of life in other states. The Life-Principle maintains them; it supplies their material in the formative energy which takes shape in them. But their presiding god is not the Life Principle; it is the Will. Will is Kratu, the effective power behind the act. It is of the nature of consciousness; it is energy of consciousness, and although present in all forms, conscious, subconscious or superconscious, vital, physical or mental, yet comes into its. kingdom only when it emerges in Mind. It uses the mental faculty of memory to link together and direct consciously the activities towards the goal of the individual.

* Anilam amritam*

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    In man the use of consciousness by the mental will is imperfect, because memory is limited. Our action is both dispersed and circumscribed because mentally we live from hour to hour in the current of Time, holding only to that which attracts or seems immediately useful to our egoistic mind. We live in what we are doing, we do not control what has been done, but are rather controlled by our past works which we have forgotten. This is because we dwell in the action and its fruits instead of living in the soul and viewing the stream of action from behind it. The Lord, the true Will, stands back from the actions and therefore is their lord and not bound by them.

    The Upanishad solemnly invokes the Will to remember the thing that has been done, so as to contain and be conscious of the becoming, so as to become a power of knowledge and self-possession and not only a power of impulsion and self-formulation. It will thus more and more approximate itself to the true Will and preside over the co-ordination of the successive lives with a conscious control. Instead of being carried from life to life in a crooked path, as by winds, it will be able to proceed more and more straight in an ordered series, linking life to life with an increasing force of knowledge and direction until it becomes the fully conscious Will moving with illumination on the straight path towards the immortal felicity. The mental will, Kratu, becomes what it at present only represents, the divine Will, Agni.

WILL AND KNOWLEDGE

    The essentiality of the divine Will is that in it Consciousness and Energy, Knowledge and Force are one. It knows all manifestations, all things that take birth in the worlds. It is Jatavedas, that which has right knowledge of all births. It knows them in the law of their being, in their relation to other births, in their aim- and method, in their process and goal, in their unity with all and their difference from

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each other. What it is, it knows ; what it knows, that it does and becomes.

    But as soon as egoistic consciousness emerges and interferes, there is a disturbance, a division, a false action. Will becomes an impulsion ignorant of its secret motive and aim, knowledge becomes a dubious and partial ray not in possession of the will, the act and the result, but only striving to possess and inform them. This is because we are not in possession of our self,* our true being, but only of the ego. What we are, we know not; what we know, we cannot effect, For knowledge is real and action in harmony with true knowledge only when they proceed naturally out of the conscious, illumined and self-possessing soul, in which being, knowledge and action are one movement.

SURRENDER TO THE DIVINE WILL

    This is the change that happens when, the mental will approximating more and more to the divine, Agni burns out in us. It is that increasing knowledge and force which carries us finally into the straight or good path out of the crookedness. It is the divine will, one with the divine knowledge, which leads us towards felicity, towards the state of Immortality. All that belongs to the deviations of the ego, all that obscures and drives or draws us into this or that false path with its false lures and stumblings are put away from us by it. These things fall away from the divinised "Will and cease to find lodging in our consciousness.

    Therefore the sign of right action is the increasing and finally the complete submission of the individual to the divine Will which the illumination of Surya reveals in him. Although manifested in his consciousness, this Will is not individual. It is the will of the Purusha who is in all things and transcends them. It is the will of the Lord.

    Knowledge of the Lord as the One in the fully self-conscious being, submission to the Lord as the universal

Atmaiva.

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and transcendent in the fully self-conscious action, are the two keys of the divine gates, the gates of Immortality.

And the nature of the two united is an illuminated Devotion which accepts, aspires to and fulfils God in the human existence.

CONCLUSION*

Thus the fourth movement indicates psychologically the double process of that attainment of Immortality which is the subject of the third movement, the state of bliss and truth within and the worlds of Light after death culminating in the identity of the self-luminous One. At the same time it particularisms under the cover of Vedic symbols the process of that self-knowledge and identification with the Self and all its becomings which is the subject of the second movement and of that liberated action in the assertion of which the first culminates. It is thus a fitting close and consummation to the Upanishad.

* a brief summary of the main argument of the Upanishad will be given next month and close this commentary.

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The Synthesis of Yoga

CHAPTER V

SACRIFICE AND THE TRIUNE PATH.

    The law of sacrifice, the giving of oneself or of what one envisages as belonging to oneself in a spirit of love and devotion to that which is other than oneself, is the common divine action thrown out into the world from the beginning in order to limit, correct and gradually eliminate the errors of its egoistic starting-point. " With sacrifice as their companion " says the Gita " the All-Father created these peoples." Sacrifice is the practical recognition by the ego that it is neither alone in the world nor chief in the world and that in that which is not its egoistic self there is something greater, completer which demands from it subordination and service. Sacrifice is compelled by Nature even from those who do not consciously recognise the law ; and inevitably, because it is the in effuggable nature of things, because the ego is not and cannot be alone nor separate nor live to itself even if it would. It is continually giving out of its stock physical, vital, mental to all that is around it and receiving back in return. And by this giving and receiving it effects its own growth at the same time that it helps the sum of things.

    But if the sacrifice is done unconsciously, egoistically, without knowledge or acceptance of the true meaning of the great world-rite, it produces only mechanical effects or a painful progress for the individual. It is only when the heart, the will and the knowledge associate themselves with the law that there comes the real joy and fruitfulness of sacrifice. And the knowledge culminates

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where there is the perception that it is our own self and the one self of all to whom we give, whether the giving be to our fellow-creatures or to Powers and Principles or to that which is Supreme. *’ Not for the sake of the wife is the wife dear to us" says Yajnavalkya in the Upanishad, but for the sake of the Self." And while this is true in a lower sense of egoistic love, it is equally true in a higher sense of the love which is not egoistic. All love and all sacrifice are in their essence , Nature’s contradiction of the primary egoism, a declaration of her trend towards a recovered unity ; and all unity is in its essence self-finding. True unity is not merely an association and agglomeration like that of physical cells in a life of common interests, not even a mutual understanding, sympathy and solidarity ; when we find our self in others, then are we really unified with them. Association is a physical unity and its sacrifice is that of mutual concessions; sympathy and solidarity create an emotional unity and their sacrifice is that of mutual gratifications ; but the complete unity is spiritual and its sacrifice is that of a mutual self-giving and interfusing. Sacrifice, then, travels in Nature towards the culmination of a complete mutual self-giving which is either based upon or leads to the consciousness of one common self in the giver and the object of the sacrifice. This culmination of sacrifice is also the culmination of human love and devotion ; for there too the highest is a complete mutual self-giving and the fusing of two souls into one.

    This profound idea of sacrifice is the basis of the teaching in the Gita. We can see at once that it differs from the ordinary idea in as much as its essence is not self-immolation and its tendency is to discourage self-mortification, self-torture, self-mutilation and self-effacement. These things may be temporarily necessary when the egoism is violent and obstinate and has to be met by a sort of answering internal violence and repression. But the Gita discourages this path; the self within is really the God himself, it is Krishna, it is the Divine and it has not to be troubled and tortured as the Titans of the world trouble and torture themselves, but to be fostered and cherished.

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What has to be discouraged, expelled, slain is the band of its enemies, desire, wrath, inequality, the attachment to outward pleasures and pains, which are the cause of its errors a id sufferings. The nature of sacrifice is self-giving, nor. self-immolation; its object is not self-effacement but self-fulfilment by the merging of the incomplete ego and its discovery of its own real completeness in others, in all things, in God. In consequence, sacrifice is not a giving without any return, but a mutual fostering; for even though no return is demanded or insisted upon, yet there is the knowledge that a return is inevitable. The soul knows that it does not give itself to God in vain.

    There remain the recipient and the manner of the sacrifice. We may offer the sacrifice to others, to divine Powers or to the All and the Transcendent himself; the thing given may be anything from a leaf or a flower, a cup of water, a handful of rice, a loaf of bread, to all that we are and all that we possess. Whoever the recipient, whatever the gift, it is the Supreme, who is seated in all, that receives ‘and accepts the gift, even if it be rejected or ignored by the immediate recipient. For the Supreme in us and in the world is the secret Master of all works. All our actions, all our efforts are, obscurely or consciously, known to us or unknown, directed towards One in His numberless’ forms. In the form and in the spirit in which we approach Him, in that form and spirit He receives the offering. The fruit also is according to the work, according to the intention in the work and according to the spirit which governs the intention. But all other sacrifices are partial, egoistic, limited and temporal, even those offered to the highest Powers and Principles, and their result is also partial, limited, temporal, mixed in its reactions. The one entirely acceptable sacrifice is that made with devotion and knowledge, freely and without reserves, to the Self, the Supreme, the All. And to the soul that thus gives itself, God also gives Himself. We find the Self, we attain to the Supreme, we enjoy the All.

    What is demanded of us in fact by the Gita is to turn our whole life into a conscious sacrifice or continual devoted

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self-giving to the Divine. All our actions, the smallest and most ordinary as well as the greatest and most uncommon, we are to perform with the consciousness of consecration and of a giving to That which is beyond our ego. When we give, no matter what the gift or to whom offered, we must have the consciousness that we are giving to God, to the one and divine Being in all. When we eat, we must be equally conscious that we are offering to That and the sense of mere physical self-gratification must pass from us. When we undertake any great labour, high discipline or difficult or noble enterprise for ourselves, for others or for humanity, we must go beyond the idea of ourselves, of others or of humanity and we must realise the thing that we are doing as a sacrifice of works offered to the One and Divine in all, to the Infinite and Most High by whom alone all labour and aspiration are possible, in whose being all labour and aspiration take place and for whom all labour and aspiration are taken from us by Nature and offered on His altar. And even in those things in which Nature herself is obviously the worker and we ourselves only witness and support her works, there should be the same constant memory and consciousness ; our very inspiration and respiration, our very heart-beats we must regard as also such a sacrifice.

    It is obvious that in such a conception and practice three results are involved which are of the utmost importance to our ideal. First, even if such a discipline be begun without devotion, it must lead inevitably to devotion the highest, completest and most profound. The sense of the Divine in all things, the communion with the Divine in all our thought and actions and at every moment, the consecration to the Divine in the totality of our being are implied in the full practice of this Yoga. Out of this con-tant representation in practice of the very spirit of self-devotion, the most engrossing love and adoration for That which is divine and highest must necessarily emerge and form and fix itself, and with it the universal love for all men, all beings, all forms and creatures of the Divine. Thus this path is a path of Devotion complete and integral.

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    At the same time it involves a constant remembering, a constant meditation on the central knowledge that all is oneself, that the Divine is in all find all is in the Divine and all is the Divine. And th^;s constant memory and meditation must with equal inevitability lead in the end to the most profound, uninterrupted and all-embracing realisation of the One who is All and therefore exceeds all particular forms and appearances,—the universal, the Transcendent. Whatever we see, hear, are conscious of, we shall know and realise that it is That alone which we see, hear and receive in our consciousness. Therefore this path is a path of Knowledge complete and integral.

    Finally, the practice of this Yoga of sacrifice implies the elimination of egoism out of all our actions, since all is done for the Divine and towards the Divine and nothing for our separate self as a separate self, nothing for others whether neighbours, friends, family, country, mankind or other creatures merely because they are connected with our personal life and thought and therefore the ego takes an interest in them. We cannot fail to arrive finally at the constant conception and realisation in practice of all works and all life as a divine offering to the Divine in His own being—or as it is expressed in the Gita, the sacrifice of Brahman to Brahman by

* * *

    At the same time a greater precision is needed to bring out the integral possibilities of each line so that we may have a rich and complex self-realisation. The Divine Being is complex in its manifestation and our true perfection in that being depends upon the unification of many different strands of divine experience. This is indeed the whole purpose and utility of a synthesis.

    Thus in the knowledge of the Divine the Gita takes successively different attitudes. The first essential is to realise the Divine in

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its primary relations with the universe, for without this realisation there can be no true knowledge. That truth and relation may be expressed in the formula of the uncreated self and created existences, Being and its becomings. But as a formula this is only an intellectual and metaphysical notion ; the object of Yoga is not thought but experience. We have therefore to come to the actual experience, the actual perception, feeling and communion with a real Infinite Presence in which all things exist and move and act and which inhabits all things as their real infinite self. To see, not merely to conceive the Self in all existences and all existences in the Self is the Gita’s first rule of divine knowledge.

    This self of things is one existence, a single unifying presence and not different in different creatures. I may realise it in myself, extending myself afterwards to all creatures, seeing the world in myself and one with me,—not. be it well noted, with the error of the Asura, the Titan who mistakes ego for the self and tries to impose his own ego as the sole true existence upon all his surroundings, but understanding that the self is the non-ego, the Impersonal. I seek it first in the creature I call myself rather than in others only because there it is easiest to find and realise; but if the ego does not begin to merge in this Self as soon as it is seen, then my realisation is not genuine or is radically imperfect. There is somewhere in me an egoistic obstacle and denial. Or else I may see That first in the world and in others or as a Presence all-containing yet having no necessary relation to others, but pure and self-existent, and may so lose my sense of separate self in That. One may begin at any point, the essential is to proceed afterwards both to the utter Reality and to the whole Reality,— the Self in itself, the Self in all creatures.

    But the realisation of the Self is not all. If we regard the Divine as an abstraction or only a vague ineffable Presence, if we divest it of all element of personality and all possibility of personal relation with us, we may develop knowledge, and satisfy the mind, but we shall leave the Heart either atrophied or poorly and imperfectly satisfied;

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we shall miss all those immense potentialities for our perfection which devotion and divine love open ‘to us. And our knowledge will remain imperfect. We shall have the clear knowledge of the self to which the mind aspires, we shall not have the rich knowledge of God to which the heart is the key. The true knowledge beyond both mind and heart comprises in itself both of these perfected and unified. By neglecting either heart or mind we fail to arrive at that perfection. Therefore the Gita enjoins not only the realisation of the Self, but the realisation of the Lord, the personality of God as well as His impersonality.

    The essence of the divine Personality is for us the experience of a Presence not merely vague, abstract, without contents, but a living Presence exceeding indeed all possible definite experiences, because it is infinite, but not excluding them,—rather containing in itself all possible relations and experiences and especially, as we are human beings, all human relations. God does not exclude Man, but contains Man in Himself. Therefore we do not wander from the Truth of things when we conceive God humanly and enter into human relations with the Divine, but only when we confine ourself to the anthropomorphic conception and exclude all the rest of the Infinite. Indian Yoga therefore admits the experience of all human relations with God, especially those of friend with friend, of servant and master, of the child to the father or the mother or of the parent to the child, and as a supreme experience, the intense relation of the lover. For through all these things we attain to something of the divine Mystery which escapes the search of the reasoning intellect. The Gita even prefers these divine, relations to the pursuit of the indefinable, unseizable and merely ineffable. And at any rate for our perfection they are absolutely essential.

    The Divine must, therefore, be conceived, approached and experienced as the Lord of all beings, the Friend, the Adorable. This in Himself, but also we must find Him out concealed in the human form, in our fellow-creatures, in all that is ; for the Inhabitant in all, though masked to us, is one and the same. Thus we shall realise oneness

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in difference; we shall not only have the experience of a transcendental unity , but embrace the world in a unity of the heart perfectly consistent with the varied relations without which life on earth is impossible. Those relations will find their true base and perfection in that unity.

    But also there is knowledge of God in His relations with the world and with action; and this is the knowledge most appropriate to the path of Works. Here again there is the personal and the impersonal. The impersonal knowledge is that of the Purusha and the Prakriti , Conscious-Soul and Nature-Soul, that which knows, wills, enjoys and experiences and that which executes and provides th_e knowledge, enjoyment and experience . The personal knowledge is that of the one Purusha as the Lord of whom each creature is only a representative or partial manifestation and of Prakriti as His manifesting energy. The first is attained in experience by the drawing back of the soul from its works and activities so as to seat it in the free consciousness of the Purusha not bound by its works and becomings; the second, after realisation of the Divine through knowledge and devotion, by returning upon works as a representative and channel of the Divine Being, accepting them for Him and not for ourselves, doing them always in obedience toa higher impulsion and not in obedience to egoistic interest and desire.

    Thus the complete and integral knowledge develops, embracing devotion and works in its scope, fulfilling them and itself fulfilled by them. By that knowledge we are able to enter into a perfect relation with life and the universe, ourselves anchored in That of which life and the universe are only an expression.

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The Eternal Wisdom

BOOK, II

THE DISCOVERY AND CONQUEST OF THE DIVINE IN ONESELF

I

THE CONQUEST OF TRUTH

THE TRUE SCIENCE

1 The knowledge which purifies the intelligence is

2 true knowledge. All the rest is ignorance.—He alone is truly a man who is illumined by the light of the

3 true knowledge. Others are only men in name.—Hu-

4 man opinions are playthings.—Those, on the contrary, who contemplate the immutable essence of things, have knowledge and not opinions.

5 To know is not to be well informed ; it is our own effort that must reveal all to us and we can owe no-

6 thing to other than ourselves.—It is difficult, even after having learned much, to arrive at the desired

7 term of science.—Whoever has perfected himself by the spiritual union, finds in time the true science in himself.

8 Just discernment is of two kinds. The first conducts us towards the phenomenon, while the second knows how the Absolute appears in the universe.—

9 The experimental sciences, when one occupies oneself with them for their own sake, studying them without any philosophical aim, are like a face without eyes.

1) Ramakrishna.—2) id.—3) Heraclitus 88. —4) Plato: Republic__ S) Antoine the Healer: " Revelations".— 6) Sutra in 42 Articles. XI. 2.— 7) Bhagarad Gita IV. 88.—8) Ramakrishna.—9) Schopenhauer.

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They then represent one of those occupations suitable to middling capacities devoid of the supreme gifts which would only be obstacles to their minute researches.

10 When a man has studied all sciences and learned what men know and have known, he will find that all these sciences taken as a whole are so in significant-that they bring with them no possibility of under-

11 standing the world.—The observations and reckonings of astronomers have taught us many surprising- things, but the most important result of their studies is, undoubtedly, that they reveal to us the abyss of our ignor-

12 ance.—There is no fact in Science which may not tomorrow be turned into ridicule…The very hopes of man, the thoughts of his heart, the religions of the peoples, the customs and ethics of humanity are all at the mercy of a new generalisation. The generalisation is always a new current of the divine in the spirit.

13 We must distinguish between the knowledge which is due to the study and analysis of Matter and that Which results from contact with life and a benevolent

14 activity in the midst of humanity.—The young generations study numberless subjects, the constitution of the stars, of the earth, the origin of organisms etc. They omit only one thing and that is to know what is the sense of human life, how one ought to live, what the great sages of all times have thought of this ques-

15 tion and how they have resolved it.—For life cannot subsist without science and science exposes us to this peril that it does not walk towards the light of the true life.

16 Save the world that is. within us, O Life.

17 Whoever, without having the true science to which Life offers witness, fancies he knows something, knows, I repeat, nothing.

18 Let no man deceive himself; if any man among you seemeth to be wise in this world, let him become

10) Tolstoi.—11) Kant.—12) Emerson. —13) Antoine the Healer: "Revelations." — 14) Tolstoi.—16) Epistle to Diognetus.—16)Hermes: "On the Rebirth".—17) Epistle to Diognetus. —18) I. Corinthians III. 18—

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19 a fool that he may be wise.—If thou wouldst make progress, be resigned to passing for an idiot or an imbecile in external things ; consent to pass for one who under-

20 stands nothing of them at all.—The sage is not a sa-

21 want nor the savant a sage.—Out of academies there come more fools than from any other class in society.

22 The knowledge of a great number of trivialities is an insurmountable obstacle to knowing what is really necessary.

23 Take care that the reading of numerous writers and books of all kinds does not confuse and trouble thy

24 reason.—It would be better not to have books than to

25 believe all that is found in them.—If a man does not read with an intense desire to know the truth renouncing for its sake all that is vain and frivolous and even that which is essential if needs be, mere reading will only inspire him with pedantry, presumption and

26 egoism.—To read too much is bad for thought. The greatest thinkers I have met among the savants whom I have studied were precisely those who were the least learned.

27 Having studied books, the sage uniquely consecrated to knowledge and wisdom, should leave books completely aside as a man who wants the rice abandons the husk.

28 We begin to know really when we succeed in forget -

29 ting completely what we have learned.—One arrives at such a condition only by renouncing all that one has

30 seen, heard, understood.—So long as one has not become as simple as a child, one cannot expect the divine illumination. Forget all the knowledge of the world that you have acquired and become as ignorant as a child; then you shall attain to the divine wisdom.—

31 The great man is he who has not lost the child’s heart

32 within him.—The end of our study consists merely in recovering our heart that we have lost.

23 The seeker who would travel in the paths of the teaching of the King of the Ancients, should purify his heart of the dark dust of human science,…for it is in his heart that the divine and invisible mysteries appear transfigured.

19) Epictetus: Manual. 13.—20) 23) Seneca.—24) Meng Tse. VII. II. III. 1.—25) Ramakrishna__26) Lie. temberg.—27) Upanishad.—28) Thoreau. —29) Baha-ullah: "The Seven Valleys."—30) Ramakrishna.—31) Meng-Tse.l V. II. XII.—32) id. VI. I. JCI.—83) Baha-ullah: ‘Kitab-el-ikon."

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34 Learn then, in brief, matter and its nature, qualities and modifications and also what the Spirit is and

35 what its power.—Scrutinise the heavens, sound the earth and they will reveal to thee always their impermanence, consider the world all around thee and it will reveal to thee always its impermanence : but when thou shalt have acquired spiritual illumination, thou shalt find wisdom and the intelligence that thou shalt have so attained will guide thee at once on the path.

3^d The true royalty is spiritual knowledge ; put forth

37 thy efforts to attain it.— The knowledge of the soul is the highest knowledge and truth has nothing for us beyond it.

38 To be enlightened is to know that which is eter-

39 nal.—To know the One and Supreme, the supreme Lord, the immense Space, the superior Rule, that is

40 the summit of knowledge.—When thou possessest knowledge, thou shalt attain soon to peace.

4¹ Which then is the cultivated and instructed soul ? The one which knows the principle, end and reason diffused in all being and through all eternity and governing the whole by regular revolutions.

4² Such is the science of the Intelligence, to contem-

43 plate things divine and comprehend God.—For those in whom self-knowledge has destroyed their ignorance, knowledge illumines sunlike that highest existence.

44 He who has plunged himself into a pure knowledge of the profoundest secrets of the Spirit, is no longer either a terrestrial or a celestial being. He is the supreme Spirit enveloped in perishable flesh, the sublime

45 divinity itself.—He who suffers himself to be transported by the love of things on high, who drinks at the sources of eternal beauty, who lives by the Infinite and combats for the ideal of all virtue and all knowledge, who shows for that cult an enthusiasm pushed to a very fury,—he is the hero.

46 Holy Knowledge, by thee illumined, I hymn by thee the ideal light; I rejoice with the joy of the Intelligence.

84) Bhagavad Gita XIII. 3.-35) Sutra in 42 Articles.—36) Fa.id-ud-din-attar, "Mantic uttair".—37) Mahabharata.—38) Lao-Tse : Tao-Te-King" XVI.—39)Tsuang-Tse III.— 40) Bhagavad Gita. V. 16.—41) Marcus Aurelia’s. V. 32.-42) Hermes 1. "The Character".—43) Bhagavad Gita V. 16.

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The Type of the Superman.

    The ideal of the Superman has been brought recently into much notice, some not very fruitful discussion and a good deal of obloquy. It is apt to be resented by average humanity because men are told or have a lurking consciousness that here is a claim of the few to ascend to heights of which the many are not capable, to concentrate moral and spiritual privileges and enjoy a domination, powers and immunities hurtful to a diffused dignity and freedom in mankind. So considered, superman hood is nothing more important than a deification of the rare or solitary ego that has out-topped others in the force of our common human qualities. But this presentation is narrow and a travesty. The gospel of true superman hood gives us a generous ideal for the progressive human race and should not be turned into an arrogant claim for a class or individuals. It is a call to man to do what no species has yet done or aspired to do in terrestrial history, evolve itself consciously into the next superior type already half foreseen by the continual cyclic development of the world-idea in Nature’s fruitful musings. And when we so envisage it, this conception ranks surely as one of the most potent seeds that can be cast by thought into the soil of our human growth.

    Nietzsche first cast it, the mystic of Will-worship, the troubled, profound, half-luminous Hellenizing Slav with his strange clarities, his violent half-ideas^ his rare gleaming intuitions that came marked with the stamp of an absolute truth and sovereignty of light. But Nietzsche was an apostle who never entirely understood his own message.

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His’ prophetic style was like that of the Delphic oracles which spoke constantly the word of the Truth but turned it into untruth in the mind of the hearer. Not always indeed ; for sometimes he rose beyond his personal temperament and individual mind, his European inheritance and environment, his revolt against the Christ-idea, his war against current moral values and spoke out the Word as he had heard it, the Truth as he had seen it, bare, luminous, impersonal and therefore flawless and imperishable. But for the most part this message that had come to his inner hearing vibrating out of a distant Infinite like a strain caught from the lyre of far-off Gods, did get , in his effort to appropriate and make it nearer to him, mixed up with a somewhat turbulent surge of collateral ideas that drowned much of the pure original note.

    Especially, in his concept of the Superman he never cleared his mind of a preliminary confusion. For if a sort of human godhead is the goal to which the race must advance, the first difficulty is that we have ‘to decide to which of two very different types of divinity the idea in us should owe allegiance. For the deity within may confront us either with the clear, joyous and radiant countenance of the God or the stern convulsed visage of the Titan. Nietzsche hymned the Olympian but presented him with the aspect of the Asura. His hostile preoccupation with the Christ-idea of’ the crucified God and its consequences was perhaps responsible for this distortion, as much as his subjection to the imperfect ideas of the Greeks. He presents to us a superman who fiercely and arrogantly repels the burden of sorrow and service, not one who arises victorious over mortality and suffering, his ascension vibrant with the triumph-song of a liberated humanity. To lose the link of Nature’s moral evolution is a capital fault in the apostle of superman hood; for only out of the unavoidable line of the evolution can that emerge in the bosom of a humanity long tested, ripened and purified by the fire of egoistic and altruistic suffering.

    God and Titan, Deva and Asura, are indeed close kin in their differences ; nor could either have been spared in

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the evolution. Yet do they inhabit opposite poles of a common existence and common nature. The one descends from the light and the infinity, satisfied, to the play ; the other ascends from the obscurity and the vagueness, angry, to the struggle. All the acts of the God derive from the universal and tend to the universal. He was born out of a victorious harmony. His qualities join pure and gracious hands and link themselves together naturally and with delight as in the pastoral round of Brindavan with divine Krishna dominating and holding together its perfect circles. To evolve in the sense of the God is to grow in intuition, in light, in joy, in love, in happy mastery; to serve by rule and to rule by service; to be able to be bold and swift and even violent without hurt or wickedness and mild and kindly and even self-indulgent without laxity or vice or weakness; to make a bright and happy whole in oneself and, by sympathy, with mankind and all creatures. And in the end it is to evolve a large impersonal personality and to heighten sympathy into constant experience of world-oneness. For such are the Gods, conscious always of their universality and the before divine.

     Certainly, power is included. To be the divine man is to be self-ruler and world-ruler ; but in another than the external sense. This is a rule that depends upon a secret sympathy and oneness which knows the law of another’s being and of the world’s being and helps or, if need be, compels it to realise its own greatest possibilities, but by a divine and essentially an inner compulsion. It is to take all qualities, energies, joys, sorrows, thoughts, knowledge, hopes, aims of the world around us into ourselves and return them enriched and transmuted in a sublime commerce and exploitation. Such an empire asks for no vulgar ostentation or golden trappings. The gods work oftenest veiled by light or by the storm-drift; they do not disdain to live among men even in the garb of the herdsman or the artisan ; they do not shrink, from the cross and the crown of thorns either in their inner evolution or their outward fortunes. For they know that the ego must be crucified and how shall men consent to this if God and the

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gods have not. shown them the way? To take all that is essential in the human being and uplift it to its most absolute term so, that it may become an element of light, joy, power for oneself and others, this is divinity. This, too, should be the drift of superman hood.

    But the Titan will have nothing of all this ; it is too great and subtle for his comprehension. His instincts call for a visible, tangible mastery and a sensational domination. How shall he feel sure of his empire unless he can feel something writhing helpless under his heel,—if in agony, so much the better ? What is exploitation to him, unless it diminishes the exploited ? To be able to coerce, exact, slay, overtly, irresistibly,—it is this that fills him with the sense of glory and dominion. For he is the son of division and the strong flowering of the Ego . To feel the comparative limitation of others is necessary to him that he may imagine himself immeasurable; for he has not the real, self-existent sense of infinity which no outward circumstance can abrogate. Contrast, division, negation of the wills and lives of others are essential to his self-development and self-assertion. The Titan would unify by devouring, not by harmonising; he must conquer and trample what is not himself either out of existence or into subservience so that his own image may stand out stamped upon all things and dominating all his environment.

    In Nature, since it started from division and egoism, the Titan had to come first; he is here in us as the elder god, the first ruler of man’s heaven and earth. Then arrives the God and delivers and harmonises. Thus the old legend tells us that the Deva and the Asura laboured together to churn the ocean of life for the supreme draught of immortality, but, once it had been won, Vishnu kept it for the God and defrauded the fiercer and more violent worker. And this seems unjust; for the Asura has the heavier and less grateful portion of the burden. He begins and leads; he goes his way hewing, shaping, planting: the God follows, amends, concludes, reaps. He prepares fiercely and with anguish against a thousand obstacles the force that we shall use : the other enjoys the victory

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and the delight. And therefore to the great God Shiva the stained and stormy Titan is very dear,—Shiva who took for himself the fierce, dark and bitter poison first churned up from the sea of life and left to others the nectar. But the choice that Shiva made with knowledge and from love, the Titans made from darkness and passion,— desirous really of something very different and deceived by their stormy egoism. Therefore the award of Vishnu stands; to the God shall fall the crown and the immortality and not, unless he divinise himself, to the proud and strenuous Asura.

     For what is superman hood but a certain divine and harmonious absolute of all that is essential in man ? He is made in God’s image, but there is this difference between the divine Reality and its human representative that every thing which in the one is unlimited, spontaneous, absolute, harmonious, self-possessed becomes in the other limited, relative, laboured, discordant, deformed, possessed by struggle, kept by subservience to one’s possessions, lost by the transience and insecurity which come from wrong holding. But in this constant imperfection, there is always a craving and an aspiration towards perfection. Man, limited, yearns to the Infinite; relative, is attracted in all things towards their absolute; artificial in Nature, drives towards a higher ease, mastery and naturalness that must for ever be denied to her inconscient forces and half-conscient animals; full of discords, he insists upon harmony; possessed by Nature and to her enslaved, is yet con evinced of his mission to possess and master her. What he aspires to, is the sign of what he may be. He has to pass by a sort of transmutation of the earthly metal he now is out of flawed manhood into some higher symbol. For Man is Nature’s great term of transition in which she grows conscious of her aim; in him she looks up from the animal with open eyes towards her divine ideal.

    But God is complex, not simple; and the temptation of the human intellect is to make a short cut to the divine nature by the exclusive worship of one of its principles. Knowledge, Love whose secret word is Delight, Power and

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Unity are some of the Names of God. But though they are all divine yet to follow any of them exclusively is to invite, after the first energy is over, His departure from us and denial; for even unity, exclusively pursued, ceases to be a true oneness. Yet this error we perpetually commit. Is it Love in whose temple we adore ? Then we shut its gates upon Power as a child of the world and the devil and bid Knowledge carry elsewhere her lack of sweetness and remoteness from the heart’s fervour. We erect an idol of Power and would pass all else through the fire of Moloch before its somber and formidable image, expelling Love with scorn as a nurse of weaklings and degrading Knowledge to the position of a squire or even a groom of Force. Or we cultivate knowledge with a severe aloofness and austerity to find at last the lotus of the heart dulled and fading —happy if its more divine faculties are not already atrophied,—and ourselves standing impotent with our science while the thunders of Rudra crash through and devastate the world we have organised so well by our victorious and clear-minded efficiency. Or we run after a vague and mechanical zero we call unity and when we have sterilise our secret roots and dried up the wells of Life within us, discover, unwise unifiers, that we have achieved death and not existence. And all this happens because we will not recognise the complexity of the riddle we are set here to solve. It is a great and divine riddle ; but it is no knot of Gordian, nor is its all-wise Author a dead king that he should suffer us to mock his intention and cut through to our will with the fierce impatience of the hasty mortal conqueror.

    None of these oppositions is more constant than that of Power and Love : yet neither of these deities can be safely neglected. What can be more divine than Love ? But followed exclusively it is impotent to solve the world’s discords. The worshipped Avatar of love and the tender saint of saints leave behind them a divine but unflawed example, a luminous and imperishable but ineffective memory. They have added an element to the potentialities of the heart, but the race cannot utilise it effectively for life

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because it has not been harmonised with the rest of the-qualities that are essential to our fullness. Shall we therefore turn round and give ourselves to Power with its iron hands of action and its hard and clear practical intellect? The men of power may say that they have done a more tangible work for their race than the souls of Love, but it is a vain advantage. For they have not even tried to raise us beyond our imperfect humanity. They have erected a temporary form or given a secular impetus. An empire has been created, an age or a century organised, but the level of humanity has not been raised nearer to the secret of a Caesar or a Napoleon. Love fails because it hastily rejects the material of the world’s discords or only tramples them underfoot in an unusual ecstasy; Power because it seeks only to organise an external arrangement. The world’s discords have to be understood, seized, transmuted. Love must call Power and Knowledge into the temple and seat them beside her in a unified equality; Power must bow its neck to the yoke of Light and Love before it can do any real good to the race.

    Unity is the secret, a complex, understanding and embracing unity. When the full heart of Love is tranquillized by knowledge into a calm ecstasy and vibrates with strength, when the strong hands of Power labour for the world in a radiant fullness of joy and light, when the luminous brain of knowledge accepts and transforms the heart’s obscure inspirations and lends itself to the workings of the high-seated Will, when all these gods are founded together on a soul of sacrifice that lives in unity with all the world and accepts all things to transmute them, then is the condition of man’s integral self-transcendence. This and not a haughty, strong and brilliant egoistic self-culture enthroning itself upon an enslaved humanity is the divine way of superman hood.

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