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NO.10
CHAPTER X CONSCIOUS FORCE They beheld the self-force of the Divine Being deep hidden by its own conscious modes of working. Swetacwatarea Upanishad. This is he that is awake in those who sleep.
All phenomenal existence resolves itself into Force, into a movement of energy that assumes more or less material, more or less gross or subtle forms for self-presentation to its own experience. In the ancient images by which human thought attempted to make this origin and law of being intelligible and real to itself, this infinite existence of Force was figured as a sea, initially at rest and therefore free from forms, but the first disturbance, the first initiation of movement necessitates the creation of forms and is the seed of a universe.
Matter is the presentation of force which is most easily intelligible to our intelligence, moulded as it is by contacts in Matter to which a mind involved in material brain gives the response. The elementary state of material Force is, in the view of the old Indian physicists, a condition of pure material extension in Space of which the peculiar property is vibration typified to us by the phenomenon of sound. But vibration in this state of ether is not sufficient to create forms. There must first be some obstruction in the flow of the Force ocean, some contraction and expansion,
Page-577 some interplay of vibrations, some impinging of force upon force so as to create a beginning of fixed relations and mutual effects. Material Force modifying its first ethereal state assumes a second, called in the old language the aerial, of which the special property is contact between force and force, contact that is the basis of all material relations. Still we have not as yet real forms but only varying forces. A sustaining principle is needed. This is provided By a third self-modification of the primitive Force of which the principle of light and heat is for us the characteristic manifestation. Even then, we can have forms of force preserving their own character and peculiar action, but not stable forms of Matter. A fourth state characterised by diffusion and the beginnings of permanent attraction and repulsion, termed picturesquely water or the liquid state and a fourth of cohesion, termed earth or the solid state, complete the necessary elements. All forms of Matter of which we are aware, all physical things even to the most subtle, are built up by the combination of these five elements. Upon them also depends all our sensible experience ; for by reception of vibration comes the sense of sound; by contact of things in a world of vibrations of Force the sense of touch ; by the action of light in the forms hatched, outlined, sustained by the force of light and heat the sense of sight; by the fourth element the sense of taste ; by the fifth the sense of smell. All is essentially response to vibratory contacts between force and force. In this way the ancient thinkers bridged the gulf between pure Force and its final modifications and satisfied the difficulty which prevents the ordinary human mind from understanding how all these forms which are to his senses so real, solid and durable can be in truth only temporary phenomena and a thing like pure energy, to the senses non-existent, intangible and almost incredible, can be the one permanent cosmic reality.
The problem of consciousness is not solved by this theory; for it does not explain how the contact of vibrations of Force should give rise to conscious sensations. The Sankhyas or analytic thinkers posited therefore
behind
Page-578 these five elements two principles which they called Mahat and Ahankara, principles which are really non-material; for the first is nothing but the vast cosmic principle of Force and the other the divisional principle of Ego-formation. Nevertheless, these two principles become active in consciousness not by virtue of Force herself, but by virtue of an inactive Conscious-Soul or souls in which its activities are reflected and by that reflection assume the hue of consciousness. Such is the explanation of things offered by the school of Indian philosophy which comes nearest to the modern materialistic ideas and which carried the idea of a material or unconscious Force in Nature as far as was possible to a seriously reflective Indian mind. Whatever its defects, its main idea was so indisputable that it came to be generally accepted. However the phenomenon of consciousness may be explained, whether Nature be an inert impulse or a conscious principle, it is certainly Force; the principle of things is a formative movement of energies, all forms are born of meeting and mutual adaptation between unshaped forces, all sensation and action is a response of something in a form of Force to the contacts of other forms of Force. This is the world as we experience it and from this experience we must always start.
Physical analysis of Matter by modern Science has come to the same general conclusion, even if a few last doubts still linger. Intuition and experience confirm this concord of Science and Philosophy. Pure reason finds in it the satisfaction of its own essential conceptions. For even in the view of the world as essentially an act of consciousness, an act is implied and in the act movement of Force, play of Energy. This also, when we examine our own experience, proves to be the fundamental nature of the world. All our activities are the play of the triple force of the old philosophies, knowledge-force, desire-force, action-force, and all these prove to be really three streams of one original and identical Power,
Adyar-shakti. Even our states of rest are only equable state or equilibrium of the play of her movement.
Page-579 Movement of Force being admitted as the whole nature of the Cosmos, two questions arise. And first, how did this movement come to take place at all in the bosom of existence ? If we suppose it to be not only eternal but the very essence of all existence, the question does not arise. But we have negative this theory. We are aware of an existence which is not compelled by the movement. How then does this movement alien to its eternal repose come to take place in it? by what cause? by what possibility? by what mysterious impulsion ? The answer most approved by the ancient Indian mind was that Force is inherent in Existence. Shiva and Kali, Brahman and Shakti are one and not two who are separable. Force inherent in existence may be at rest or it may be in motion, but when it is at rest, it exists none the less and is not abolished, diminished or in any way essentially altered. This reply is so entirely rational and in accordance with the nature of things that we need not hesitate to accept it. For it is impossible, because contradictory of reason, to suppose that Force is a thing alien to the one and infinite existence and entered into it from outside or was non-existent and arose in it at some point in Time. Even the Illusionist theory must admit that Maya, the power of self-illusion in Brahman, is potentially eternal in eternal Being and then the sole question is its manifestation or non-manifestation. The Sankhya also asserts the eternal co-existence of Prakriti and Purusha, Nature and Conscious-Soul, and the alternative states of rest or equilibrium of Prakriti and movement or disturbance of equilibrium.
But since Force is thus inherent in existence and it is the nature of Force to have this double or alternative potentiality of rest and movement, that is to say, of self-concentration in Force and self-diffusion in Force, the question of the how of the movement, its possibility, initiating impulsion or impelling cause does not arise. For we can easily, then, conceive that this potentiality must translate itself either as an alternative rhythm of rest and movement succeeding each other in Time or else as an eternal self-concentration of Force in immutable existence with a
Page-580 superficial play of movement, change and formation like the rising and falling of waves on the surface of the ocean. And this superficial play—we are necessarily speaking in inadequate images— may be either coeval with the self-concentration, and itself also eternal or it may begin and end in Time and be resumed by a sort of constant rhythm ; it is then not eternal in continuity but eternal in recurrence. The problem of the how thus eliminated, there presents itself the question of the why. Why should this possibility of a play of movement of Force translate itself at all? why should not Force of existence remain eternally concentrated in itself, infinite, free from all variation and formation ? This question also does not arise if we assume Existence to be non-conscious and consciousness only a development of material energy which we wrongly suppose to be immaterial. For then we can say simply that this rhythm is the nature of Force in existence and there is absolutely no reason to seek for a why, a cause, an initial motive or a final purpose for that which is in its nature eternally self-existent. We cannot put that question to eternal self-existence and ask it either why it exists or how it came into existence; neither can we put it to self-force of existence and its inherent nature of impulsion to movement. All that we can then inquire into is its manner of self-manifestation, its principles of movement and formation, its process of evolution. Both Existence and Force being inert,—inert status and inert impulsion,—both of them unconscious and unintelligent, there cannot be any purpose or final goal in evolution or any original cause or intention.
But if we suppose or find Existence to be conscious Being, the problem arises. We may indeed suppose a conscious Being which is subject to its nature of Force, compelled by it and without option as to whether it shall manifest in the universe or remain unmanifest. Such is the cosmic God of the
Tantrics and the Mayavadins who is subject to Shakti or Maya, a Purusha involved in Maya or controlled by Shakti. But it is obvious that such a God is not the supreme infinite Existence with which we have started. Admittedly, it is only a formulation of Brahman in the
Page-581 cosmos by the Brahman which is itself logically anterior to Shakti or Maya and takes her back into its transcendental being when she ceases from her works. In a conscious existence which is absolute, independent of its formations, not determined by its works, we must suppose an inherent freedom to manifest or not to manifest the potentiality of movement. A Brahman compelled by Prakriti is not Brahman, but an inert Infinite with an active content in it more powerful than the continent, a conscious holder of Force of whom his Force is master. If we say that it is compelled by itself as Force, by its own nature, we do not get rid of the contradiction, the evasion of our first postulate. "We have got back to an Existence which is really nothing but Force, Force at rest or in movement , absolute Force perhaps, but not absolute Being.
It is then necessary to examine into the
relation between Force and Consciousness. But what do we mean by the latter
term? Ordinarily we mean by it our first obvious idea of a mental waking
consciousness such as is possessed by the human being during the major part of
his bodily exist thence, when he is not asleep, stunned or otherwise deprived of his physical and superficial methods of sensation. In this sense it is plain enough that consciousness is the exception and not the rule in the order of the material universe. We ourselves do not always possess it. But this vulgar and shallow idea of the nature of consciousness, though it still colours our ordinary thought and associations, must now definitely disappear out of philosophical thinking. For we know that there is something in us which is conscious when we sleep, when we are stunned or drugged or in a swoon, in all apparently unconscious states of our physical being. Not only so, but we may now be sure that the old thinkers were right when they declared that even in our waking state what we call then our consciousness is only a small selection from our entire conscious being. It is a superficies, it is not even the whole of our mentality. Behind it, much vaster than it, there is a subliminal or subconscient mind which is the greater part of ourselves and contains heights and profundities which no
Page-582 man has yet measured or fathomed. This knowledge gives us a starting-point for the true science of Force and its workings ; it delivers us definitely from circumscription by the material and from the illusion of the obvious. Materialism indeed insists that, whatever the extension of consciousness, it is a material phenomenon inseparable from our physical organs and not their utilise but their result. This orthodox contention, however, is no longer able to hold the field against the tide of increasing knowledge. Its explanations are becoming more and more inadequate and strained. It is becoming always clearer that not only does the capacity of our total consciousness far exceed that of our organs, the senses, the nerves, the brain, but that even for our ordinary thought and consciousness these organs are only their habitual instruments and not their generators. Consciousness uses the brain which its upward strivings have produced, brain has not produced nor does it use the consciousness. There are even abnormal instances which go to prove that our organs are not entirely indispensable instruments,—that the heartbeats are not absolutely essential to life, any more than is breathing, nor the organised brain-cells to thought. Our physical organism no more causes or explains thought and consciousness than the construction of an engine causes or explains the motive power of steam or electricity. The force is anterior, not the physical instrument.
Momentous logical consequences follow. In the first place we may ask whether, since even mental consciousness exists where we see
in animation and inertia, it is not possible that even in material objects a universal subconscient mind is present although unable to act or communicate itself to its surfaces for want of organs ? Is the material state an emptiness of consciousness, or is it not rather only a sleep of consciousness—even though from the point of view of evolution an original and not an intermediate sleep ? And by sleep the human example teaches us that we mean not a suspension of consciousness, but its gathering inward away from conscious physical response to the impacts of external things. And is not this what all existence Page-583 is that has not yet developed means of outward communication with the external physical world ? Is there not a Conscious Soul, a Purusha who wakes for ever even in all that sleeps ? We may go farther. When we speak of subconscious mind, we should mean by the phrase a thing not different-from the outer mentality, but only acting below the surface, unknown to the waking man, in the same sense if perhaps with a deeper plunge and a larger scope. But the phenomena of the subliminal self far exceed the limits of any such definition. It includes an action not only immensely superior in capacity, but quite different in kind from what we know as mentality in our waking self. We have therefore a right to suppose that there is a superconscient in us as well as a subconscient, a range of conscious faculties and therefore an organisation of consciousness which rise high above that psychological stratum to which we give the name of mentality. And since the subliminal self in us thus rises in superconscious above mentality, may it not also sink in subcons-cience below mentality ? Are there not in us and in the world forms of consciousness which are submental, to which we can give the name of vital and physical consciousness ? If so, we must suppose in the plant and the metal also a force to which we can give the name of consciousness although it is not the human or animal mentality for which we have hitherto preserved the monopoly of that description.
Not only is this probable but, if we will consider things dispassionately, it is certain. In ourselves there is such a vital consciousness which acts in the cells of the body and the automatic vital functions so that we go through purposeful movements and obey attractions and repulsions to which our mind is a stranger. In animals this vital consciousness is an even more important factor. In plants it is perfectly evident. The
seeking and shrinking of the plant, its pleasure and pain, its sleep and its wakefulness and all that strange life whose truth aft Indian scientist has brought to light by rigidly scientific methods, are all movements of consciousness,, but, as far as we can see, not of
Page-584 mentality. There is then a sub-mental, vital consciousness which has precisely the same reactions as the mental, but is different in the constitution of its self-experience, even as that which is superconscient is in the constitution of its self-experience different from the mental being. Does the range of what we can call consciousness cease with the plant, with that in which we recognise the existence of a sub-animal life ? If so, we must then suppose that there is a force of life and consciousness originally alien to Matter which has yet entered into and occupied Matter,—perhaps from another world.* For whence, otherwise, can it have come ? The ancient thinkers believed in. the existence of such other worlds, which perhaps sustain life and consciousness in ours or even call it out by their pressure, but do not create it by their entry. Nothing can evolve out of Matter which is not therein already contained. But there is no reason to suppose that the gamut of life and consciousness fails and stops short in that which seems to us purely material. The development of scientific research seems to point obscurely to a sort of life and therefore a sort of consciousness in the metal and in the earth and in other "inanimate " forms. Only while in the plant we can dimly recognise and conceive the thing that I have called vital consciousness, the consciousness of Matter, of the inert form, is difficult indeed for us to understand or imagine, and what we find it difficult to understand or imagine we consider it our right to deny. Nevertheless, it is incredible that there should be this sudden gulf in Nature. Thought has a right to suppose a unity where that unity is confessed by all other classes of phenomena and in one class only not denied, but merely more concealed than in others. And if we suppose the unity to be unbroken, we then arrive at the existence of consciousness in all forms of the Force which is at work in the world. Even if there be no
* The curious speculation is now current that Life entered earth not from another world, but from another planet. To the thinker that would explain nothing. The essential question is how Life comes into Matter at all and not how it enters into the matter of a particular planet.
Page-585 conscient or superconscient Purusha inhabiting all forms, yet is there in those forms a conscious-force of being of which even their outer parts overtly or inertly partake. Necessarily, in such a view, the word consciousness changes its meaning. It is no longer synonymous with mentality but indicates a self-luminous force of existence of which mentality is a middle term ; below mentality it sinks into vital and material movements which are forussubconscient; above, it rises into the supra-mental which is for us the superconscient. But in all it is one and the same thing organising itself differently. This is, once more, the Indian conception of Chit which, as energy, creates the worlds. Essentially, we arrive at that unity which materialistic Science perceives from the other end when it asserts that Mind cannot be another force than Matter, but must be merely development and outcome of material energy. Indian thought affirms on the other hand that Mind and Matter are rather different grades of the same energy, different organisation of one conscious Force of Existence.
But what right have we to assume consciousness as the just description for this Force? For consciousness implies some kind of intelligence, purposefulness, self-knowledge, even though they may not take the forms habitual to our mentality. Even from this point of view everything supports rather than contradicts the idea of a universal conscious Force. We see, for instance in the animal operations of a perfect purposefulness and an exact, indeed a scientifically minute knowledge which are quite beyond the capacities of the animal mentality and which man himself can only acquire by long culture and education and even then uses with a much less sure rapidity. We are entitled to see in this general fact the proof of a conscious Force at work in the animal and the insect which is more intelligent, more purposeful, more aware of its intention, its ends, its means, its conditions than the highest mentality yet manifested in any individual form on earth. And in the operations of inanimate Nature we find the same pervading characteristic of a supreme hidden intelligence, " hidden in the modes of its own workings".
Page-586 The only argument against a conscious and intelligent source for this purposeful work, this work of intelligence, of selection, adaptation and seeking is that large element in Nature’s operations to which we give the name of waste. But obviously this is an objection based on the limitations of our human intellect which seeks to impose its own particular rationality, good enough for limited human ends, on the general operations of the World-Force. We see only part of Nature’s purpose and all that does not sub serve that part we call waste. Yet even our own human action is full of an apparent waste, so appearing from the individual point of view, which yet, we may be sure, sub serves well enough the large and universal purpose of things. That part of her intention which we can detect, Nature gets done surely enough in spite of, perhaps really by virtue of her apparent waste. We may well trust to her in the rest which we do not yet detect.
For the rest, it is impossible to ignore the drive of set purpose, the guidance of apparent blind tendency, the sure eventual or immediate coming to the target sought which characterise the operations of World-Force in the animal, in the plant, in inanimate things. So long as Matter was Alpha and Omega to the scientific mind, the reluctance to admit intelligence as
tie mother of intelligence was an honest scruple. But now it is no more than an outworn paradox to affirm the emergence of human consciousness, intelligence and mastery out of an unintelligent, blindly driving unconsciousness in which no form or substance of them previously existed. Man’s consciousness can be nothing else than a form of Nature’s consciousness. It is there in other involved forms below mind, it emerges in Mind, it shall ascend into 3
Page-587 of the Worlds CHAPTER IX THE ABSOLUTE OF THE BEING If we take care to remember that the idea of the Absolute cannot be anything more for us than an intellectual image, a more or less abstract symbol of the Unknowable, there may be some profit for the mind in the attempt to discover in itself those multiple aspects and different points of view by whose aid it can conceive what it calls the Absolute.
We have defined this Unknowable as the point of identity of all contraries and resolution of all antinomies; it has appeared to us under two different aspects, being and non-being, absolute repose and absolute movement and we have been obliged to consider as if they were alternative, although they cannot in truth be so, its phases of infinite expansion and infinite concentration. In truth, the term infinite seems to apply better to the former than to the latter of these two representations; for the word wakes in us the idea of expansion rather than of concentration ; we find it difficult not to introduce into it the notion of Space. The mind would indeed be quite ready to oppose the concept of unity to that of infinity, although from the point of view of the Absolute they are identical. For while we are unable to draw any intellectual image from this idea of unity, akin to that of the absolute concentration, any more than from the idea of the absolute repose and total absorption of being into non-being, the notion of infinity, on the contrary, being
Page-588 associated with that of the absolute manifestation and the absolute movement, offers itself to the mind as rich in such images. It would seem, indeed, as if the mind found in it something of which it can become conscious in itself. It applies more easily to this positive Absolute the characteristics of its own manifested existence. It is this facility which permits, for example, some Indian schemes to distinguish three modes of being in the supreme manifestation, three divine worlds, those of pure existence, of the being’s infinite conscious energy and of the beatitudes of its infinite consciousness. These three worlds or degrees of the absolute activity are for the intellectual thought only abstract symbols by which the mind attempts t" translate. the absolute Reality at the very limit indeed of its relative categories, but still by their aid. Yet the attempt has its utility, for if it cannot procure for the mind any direct vision of the Unknowable, it has at least this result that it gives it certain indirect perceptions of That by permitting it to descend in its own depths to its principles. * * * The concept of the infinite manifestation enables us to understand and so to justify one of the fundamental tendencies of the being, one of the essential characteristics of desire. If the being is entirely an exclusive will towards self-affirmation, towards individual fixity, it is also by a sort of self-contradiction the field of the most constantly changing desires. This contradiction carries in it the mark of the being’s origin and essence. It wishes at one and the same time for the unity and the infinity of being of the Absolute because, itself one of the possibilities of the Absolute. it implies and desires all the others. But desiring itself more than the others it leaves the eternal plenitude to enter into the limitation, into the privation, into the inconstant state of the relative.
In each of its infinite desires is the reminiscence and, as it were, the regret of the infinite. In each of them it is
Page-589 all the divine that it seeks. It is divine by its nostalgia for the Absolute. If it has a thirst for so many things and so many beings, it is because these things and itself are one in the supreme Identity. In that supreme existence there is nothing which does not belong to all and in that ultimate infinity nothing desired that is not possible and nothing possible that is not realised. Outside Time nothing can change, therefore all is, and nothing can endure, therefore all is eternally new. Outside Space nothing can be either near or far and therefore all is in each. Outside Number nothing divides and that is why the whole and all are one. And in this one there is the absolute multiplicity and diversity. If in the poverty and limitation, in the monotony of the relative worlds, there are yet no two things which are entirely alike, it is because in the plenitude of the One and Identical there are no two relations which are identical. But the being imprisoned in his desire of exclusive existence can project on the obscure screen of his narrow categories only those multiple and fugitive images of the Absolute which he bears in himself. He casts upon the successions of Time, upon the fragmentations of Space broken portions of the infinite desire. He is in the relative a mendicant for morsels of the Absolute and his thirst for things that pass is an aspiration towards that which is eternal. Even from his most ignorant coveting there arises something of an appeal and a prayer to the ineffable Unity. * * *
Therefore desire contains at once the principle of the Absolute’s relative manifestations and that of the relative’s possibilities of return towards the Absolute. In desire is the infinite road which comes from the origin of things and returns to the origin, conducting the being from eternity a-cross Time back to eternity. It is at once the evil and the
Page-590 remedy of the evil. In its ignorance, narrowness, egoism is the evil, in its progress, enlargement, illumination the remedy. Those who saw in it the cause of all suffering, thought that our sole safety lay in its extinction. But how extinguish, once it is lit, this conflagration of desire from which leap the sparkling seeds of so many worlds ? Is it not from the very hearth of the absolute manifestation that their blaze is fed ? Undoubtedly, it is not, like that manifestation, eternal. The refusal of the absolute concentration to manifest must also find its translation in the relative world by phases in which all activities are drawn inward, all the desires of the being converted into a universal desire of extinction and of return towards the non-being. It is this return to which the religions of India have given the name of the great Pralaya, the night of Brahma, during which all ceases to be. But for the being- in the course of its cycles of relative manifestation it is not the way of extinction but the way of extension by which it should identify itself with the Absolute. It is, without doubt, always permissible for it to seek the union with the One in a sort of individual Pralaya. But it is not its sole and, especially, it is not its most direct road of return. Since the One is at once absolute being and absolute non-being, wherefore should the being seek to regain this One by the gate of the non-being ? It is not by the extinction of desire, by the escape out of existence, but by the progressive destruction of the limits in which the ignorance and egoism of desire imprison this existence that it can attain the supreme goal. It is not by renouncing all " I ", but by renouncing the illusions and obscurities of the ego, that it can assume consciousness of the eternal "I." The contrary method may certainly have its advantages and this other may have dangers which in certain epochs caused the preference to be given to its opposite. They become one to the view of the soul that knows Page-591 the death to oneself and the expanding of life, renunciation and the assumption of our true being to be one and the same thing. Our expansion is also a renunciation, not of our love for what we can aspire to be, but of our exclusive self-love which separates us from all that we really sire. Hot our possibilities of infinite joy, but our actualities of suffer ing should be the object of our renunciation.
In each of its sufferings the being should recognise the error of its egoistic desire, but in each of its desires it should discover the will of an Absolute in itself which it ignores.
Page-592 of the Veda CHAPTER IX SARASWATI AND HER CONSORTS. The symbolism of the Veda betrays itself with the greatest clearness in the figure of the goddess Saraswati. In many of the other gods the balance of the internal sense and the external figure is carefully preserved. The veil sometimes becomes transparent or its corners are lifted even for the ordinary hearer of the Word; but it is never entirely removed. One may doubt whether Agni is anything more than the personification of the sacrificial Fire or of the physical principle of Light and Heat in things, or Indra anything more than the god of the sky and the rain or of physical Light, or Vayu anything more than the divinity in the Wind and Air or at most of the physical Life-breath. In the lesser gods the naturalistic interpretation has less ground for confidence ; for it is obvious that Varuna is not merely a Vedic Uranus or Neptune, but a god with great and important moral functions ; Mitra and Bhaga have the same psychological aspect; the Ribhus who form things by the mind and build up immortality by works can with difficulty be crushed into the Procrustean measure of a naturalistic mythology. Still by imputing a chaotic confusion of ideas to the poets of the Vedic hymns the difficulty can be trampled upon, if not overcome. But Saraswati will submit to no such treatment. She is, plainly and clearly, the goddess of the Word, the goddess of a divine Inspiration.
If that were all, this would not carry us much farther than the obvious fact that the Vedic Rishis were not mere
Page-593 naturalistic barbarians, but had their psychological ideas and were capable of creating mythological symbols which represent not only those obvious operations of physical Nature that interested their agricultural, pastoral and open-air life, but also the inner operations of the mind and soul. If we have to conceive the history of ancient religious thought as a progression from the physical to the spiritual, from a purely naturalistic to an increasingly ethical and psychological view of Nature and the world and the gods—and this, though by no means certain, is for the present the accepted view, *—we must suppose that the Vedic poets were at least already advancing from the physical and naturalistic conception of the Gods to the ethical and the spiritual. But Saraswati is not only the goddess of Inspiration, she is at one and the same time one of the seven rivers of the early Aryan world. The question at once arises, whence came this extraordinary identification ? And how does the connection of the two ideas present itself in the Vedic hymns ? And there is more; for Saraswati is important not only in herself but by her connections. Before proceeding farther let us cast a rapid and cursory glance at them to see what the}’ can teach us. The association of a river with the poetical inspiration occurs also in the Greek mythology; but there the Muses are not conceived of as rivers ; they are only connected in a not very intelligible fashion with a particular earthly stream. This stream is the river Hippocrates, the fountain of the Horse, and to account for its name we have a legend that it sprang from the hoof of the divine horse Pegasus; for he smote the rock with his hoof and the waters of inspiration gushed out where the mountain had been thus smitten. Was this legend merely a Greek fairy tale or had it any special meaning? And it is evident that if it had any meaning, it must, since it obviously refers to * I do not think we have any real materials for determining the first origin and primitive history of religious ideas. What the facts really point to is an early teaching at once psychological and naturalistic, that is to say with two faces, of which the first came to be more or less obscured, but never entirely effaced even in the barbarous races, even in races like the tribes of North America. But this teaching, though prehistoric, was anything but primitive. Page-594 a psychological phenomenon, the birth of the waters of inspiration, have had a psychological meaning; it must have been an attempt to put into concrete figures certain psychological facts. We may note that the word Pegasus, if we transliterate it into the original Aryan phonetics, becomes Pajasa and is obviously’ connected with the Sanskrit padas, which meant originally force, movement, or some-times footing. In Greek itself it is connected with pegc.stream. The re is, therefore, in the terms of this legend a constant association with the image of a forceful movement of inspiration. If we turn to Vedic symbols we see that the Acwa or Horse is an image of the great dynamic i.e. of Lie, of the vital and nervous energy, and is constantly coupled with other images that symbolise the consciousness. Adri, the hill or rock, is a symbol of formal existence and especially of the physical nature and it is out of this hill or rock that the herds of the Sun are released and the waters flow. The streams of the madhu, the honey, the Soma, are said also to be milked out of this Hill or Rock. The stroke of the Horse’s hoof on the rock leaking the wateis of inspiration would thus become a very obvious psychological image. Nor is there any reason to suppose that the old Greeks and Indians were incapable either of such psychological observation or of putting it into the poetical and mystic imagery which was the very body of the ancient Mysteries.
We might indeed go lather and inquire whether there was not some original connection between the hero Bellero-phon, slayer of
Bailers, who rides on the divine Horse, and India Valahan, the Vedic slayer of Vala, the enemy who keeps for himself the Light. But this would take us beyond the limits of our subject. Nor does this interpretation of the Pegasus legend carry us any farther than to indicate the natural turn of imagination of the Ancients and the way in which they came to figure the stream of inspiration as an actual stream of flowing water. Saraswati means, "she of the stream, the flowing movement," and is therefore a natural name both for a river and for the goddess of inspiration. But by what process of thought or
association does the general idea of the river of inspiration
Page-595 come to be associated with a particular earthly stream? And in the Veda it is not a question of one river which by its surroundings, natural and legendary, might seem more fitly associated with the idea of sacred inspiration than any other. For here it is a question not of one, but of seven rivers always associated together in the minds of the Rishis and all of them released together by the stroke of the God India when he smote the Python who coiled across their fountains and sealed up their outflow. It seems impossible to suppose that one river only in all this sevenfold out flowing acquired a psychological significance while the rest were associated only with the annual coming of the rains in the Punjab. The psychological significance of Saraswati carries with it a psychological significance for the whole symbol of the Vedic waters.* Saraswati is not only connected with other rivers but with other goddesses who are plainly psychological symbols and especially with Bharati and Ha. In the later Puranic forms of worship Saraswati is the goddess of speech, of learning and of poetry and Bharati is one of her names, but in the Veda Bharati and Saraswati are different deities. Bharati is also called Mahi, the Large, Great or Vast. The three, Ha, Mahi or Bharati and Saraswati are associated together in a constant formula in those hymns of invocation in which the gods are called by Agni to the Sacrifice. Ha Saraswati mahi, tisro devoir mayobhuvah, Barhih sidantvasr ‘idea. May Ilea, Saraswati and Mahi, three goddesses who give birth to the bliss, take their place on the sacrificial seat, they who stumble not, " or " who come not to hurt " or " do no hurt" The epithet means, I think, they in whom there is no false movement with its evil consequences, duritam, no stumbling into pitfalls of sin and error The formula is expanded in Hymn 110 of the tenth Mandala :
* The rivers have a symbolic sense in later Indian thought; as {or Instance Ganges,
Yamane and Saraswati and their confluence are in the Tan
tire imagery Yogic symbols, and they are used, though in a differ, net way, in Yogic symbolism generally.
Page-596
A no yajnam bharati tiiyam etu, ila manushwad iha chetayanti, Tisro devfr barhir edam syonam Saraswati svapasah sadantu. " May Bharati come speeding to our sacrifice and Ilea hither awakening our consciousness (or, knowledge of perceptions ) in human wise, and Saraswati,—three goddesses sit on this blissful seat, doing well the Work." It is clear and will become yet clearer that these three goddesses have closely connected functions akin to the inspirational power of Saraswati. Saraswati is the Word, the inspiration, as I suggest, that comes from the Ritam, the Truth-consciousness. Bharati and Ilea must also be different forms of the same Word or knowledge. In the eighth hymn of Madhuchchhandas we have a Rik in which Bharati is mentioned under the name of Mahi. Eva hyasya spirit a, verance gomati mahi, pave cache na dacushe. ‘Thus Mahi for Indra full of the rays, overflowing in her abundance, in her nature a happy truth, becomes as if a ripe branch for the giver of the sacrifice. " The rays in the Veda are the rays of Surya, the Sun. Are we to suppose that the goddess is a deity of the physical Light or are we to translate " go " by cow and suppose that Mahi is full of cows for the sacrificer? The psychological character of Saraswati comes to our rescue against the last absurd supposition, but it negatives equally the naturalistic interpretation. This characterizations of Mahi, Saraswati companion in the sacrifice, the sister of the goddess of inspiration, entirely identified with her in the later mythology, is one proof among a hundred others that light in the Veda is a symbol of knowledge, of spiritual illumination. Surya is the Lord of the supreme Sight, the vast Light, br’ihat jyotih, or, as it is sometimes called, the true Light, r’itam jyotih. And the connection between the words r’itam and br’ihat is constant in the Veda. It seems to me impossible to see in these expressions anything else than the indication of a state of illumined consciousness the nature of which is that is wide or large, brihat, full of the truth of being, satyam, and of the truth Page-597 of knowledge and action, r’itam. The gods have this consciousness. Agni for instance, is termed r’itachit, he who has the truth-consciousness. Mahi is full of the rays of this Surya; she carries in her this illumination. Moreover she is sunritd, she is the word of a blissful Truth, even as it has been said of Saraswati that she is the impeller of happy truths, chodayilri sunr’itdndm. Finally, she is virapci, large or breaking out into abundance, a word which recalls to us that the Truth is also a Largeness, r’itam brihat. And in another hymn, ( I. 22 Ilea is also the word of the truth ; her name has become identical in a later confusion with the idea of speech. As Saraswati is an awakener of the consciousness to right thinkings or right states of mind, chetanti sumatindm, so also Ila comes to the sacrifice awakening the consciousness to knowledge, chetayanti. She is full of energy, suvird, and brings knowledge. She also is connected with Surya, the Sun, as when Agni, the Will is invoked (v. 4. 4.) to labour by the rays of the Sun, Lord of the true Light, being of one mind with 11a, ilayd sajosha yatatndno rashniibhih sur yasya. She is the mother oi the Rays, the herds of the Sun, Her name means she who seeks and attains and it contains the same association of ideas as the words Ritam and Rishi. Ilea may there fore well be the vision of the seer which attains the truth.
As Saraswati represents the truth-audition, cruti, which gives the inspired word, so Ila represents drishti, the truth-vision. If so, since drishti and cruti are the two powers of the Rishi, the Kavi, the Seer of the Truth, we can understand the close connection of
Ilea and Saraswati. Bharati or Mahi is the largeness of the Truth-consciousness which, dawning on man’s limited mind, brings with it the two sister Puissances. We can also understand how these fine and living distinctions came afterwards to be neglected as the Vedic knowledge declined and Bharati,
Page-598 Saraswati, Ilea melted into one. We may note also that these three goddesses are said to bring to birth for man the Bliss, Mayas. I have already insisted on the constant relation, as conceived by the Vedic seers, between the Truth and the Bliss or Anan-da. It is by the dawning of the true or infinite consciousness in man that he arrives out of this evil dream of pain and suffering, this divided creation into the Bliss, the happy state variously described in Veda by the words bha dram, mayas (love and bliss), swasti, (the good state of existence, right being) and by others less technically used such as vdryam, rayih, rdyah. For the Vedic Rishi Truth is the passage and the antechamber, the Bliss of the divine existence is the goal, or else Truth is the foundation, Bliss the supreme result. Such, then, is the character of Saraswati as a psychological principle, her peculiar function and her relation to her most immediate connections among the gods. How far do these shed any light on her relations as the Vedic river to her six sister streams ? The number seven plays an exceedingly important part in the Vedic system, as in most very ancient schools of thought. We find it recurring constantly,—the seven delights, sapta ratnani ; the seven flames, tongues or rays of Agni, sapta archishah, sapta jvdldh ; the seven forms of the Thought-principle, sapta dhitayah, the seven Rays or Cows, forms of the Cow unslayable, Aditi, mother of the gods, sapta gdvah, the seven rivers, the seven mothers or fostering cows, sapta mdtarah, sapta dhenavah, term applied indifferently to the Rays and to the Rivers. All these sets of seven depend, it seems to me, upon the Vedic classification of the fundamental principles, the tattva, of existence. The enquiry into the number of these tattva greatly interested the speculative mind of the ancients and in Indian philosophy we find various answers ranging from the One upward and running into the twenties. In Vedic thought the basis chosen was the number of the psychological principles, because all existence was conceived by the Rishis as a movement of conscious being. However merely curious or barren these speculations and classifications may seem to Page-599 the modern mind, they were no mere dry metaphysical distinctions, but closely connected with a living psychological practice of which they were to a great extent the thought-basis, and in any case we must understand them clearly if we wish to form with any accuracy an idea of this ancient and far-off system. In the Veda, then, we find the number of the principles variously stated. The One was recognised as the basis and continent ; in this One there were the two principles divine and human, mortal and immortal. The dual number is also otherwise applied in the two principles, Heaven and Earth, Mind and Body, Soul and Nature, who are regarded as the father and mother of all beings. It is significant, however, that Heaven and Earth, when they symbolise two forms of natural energy, the mental and the physical consciousness, are no longer the father and mother, but the two mothers. The triple principle was doubly recognised, first in the threefold divine principle answering to the later Sachchidananda, the divine existence, consciousness and bliss, and secondly in the threefold mundane principle, Mind, Life, Body, upon which is built the triple world of the Veda and Puranas. But the full number ordinarily recognised is seven. This figure was arrived at by adding the three divine principles to the three mundane and interpolating a seventh or link-principle which is precisely that of the Truth-consciousness, Ritam Brihat, afterwards known as Vijnana or Mahas. The latter term means the Large and is therefore an equivalent of Brihat. There are other classifications of five, eight, nine and ten and even, as it would seem, twelve; but these do not immediately concern us.
All these principles, be it noted, are supposed to be really inseparable and omnipresent and therefore apply themselves to each separate formation of Nature. The seven Thoughts, for instance, are Mind applying itself to each of the seven planes as we would now call them and formulating Matter-mind, if we may so call it, nervous mind, pure mind, truth-mind and so on to the highest summit, paramo, pardvat. The seven rays or cows are Aditi the infinite Mother, the Cow
unswayable, supreme Nature or
Page-600 infinite Consciousness, pristine source of the later idea of Prakriti or Shakti,—the Purusha is in this early pastoral imagery the Bull, Vrishabha,—the Mother of things taking form on the seven planes of her world-action as energy of conscious being. So also, the seven rivers are conscious currents corresponding to the
Should this imagery be admitted, and it is evident that if once such conceptions are supposed to exist, this would be the natural imagery for a people living the life and placed in the surroundings of the ancient Aryans,—quite as natural for them and inevitable as for us the image of the "planes" with which theosophical thought has
familiarized us,—the place of Saraswati as one of the seven rivers becomes clear. She is the current which comes from the Truth-principle, from the Ritam or Mahas, and we actually find this principle spoken of in the Veda,—in the closing passage of our third hymn for instance, —as the Great Water, maho arnas,—an expression which gives us at once the origin of the later term, Mahas,—or sometimes mahan amavah.
We see in the third hymn the close connection between Saraswati and this great water. Let us examine a little more closely this connection before we proceed to the consideration of the Vedic cows and their relation to the god India and
Saraswati close cousin, the goddess Sarama. For it is necessary to define these relations before we can progress with the scrutiny of Madhuchchhandas’ other hymns addressed without exception to the great Vedic deity, King of Heaven, who, according to our hypothesis, symbolises the Power of Mind and especially the divine or self-luminous Mind in the human being.
Page-601 THE RIBHUS, ARTISANS OF IMMORTALITY Rigveda. I. 20. 1. Lo, the affirmation made for the divine Birth with the breath of the mouth by illumined minds, that gives perfectly the bliss; 2. Even they who fashioned by the mind for Indra his two bright steeds that are yoked by Speech, and they enjoy the sacrifice by their accomplishing of the work. 8 They fashioned for the twin lords of the voyage their happy car of the all-pervading movement, they fashioned the fostering cow that yields the sweet milk. 4 O Ribhus, in your pervasion you made young again the Parents, you who seek the straight path and have the Truth in your mental sings. 5. The raptures of the wine come to you entirely, to you with Indra companioned by the Maruts and with the Kings, the sons of Aditi. 6. And this bowl of Twashtri new and perfected you made again into four. 7. So establish for us the thrice seven ecstasies, each separately by perfect expressing of them.
8. They sustained and held in them, they divided by perfection in their works the sacrificial share of the enjoyment among the Gods.
Page-602 COMMENTARY The Ribhus, it has been suggested, are rays of the Sun. And it is true that like Varuna, Mitra, Bhaga and Aryaman they are powers of the solar Light, the Truth. But their special character in the Veda is that they are artisans of Immortality. They are represented as human beings who have attained to the condition of godhead by power of knowledge and perfection in their works. Their function is to aid Indra in raising man towards the same state of divine light and bliss which they themselves have earned as their own divine privilege. The hymns addressed to them in the Veda are few and to the first glance exceedingly enigmatical ; for they are full of certain figures and symbols always repeated. But once the principal clues of the Veda are known, they become on the contrary exceedingly clear and simple and present a coherent and interesting idea which sheds a clear light on the Vedic gospel of immortality. The Ribhus are powers of the Light who have descended into Matter and are there born as human faculties aspiring to become divine and immortal. In this character they are called children of Sudan wan,* a patronymic which is merely a parable of their birth from the full capacities of Matter touched by the luminous energy. But in their real nature they are descended from this luminous Energy and are sometimes so addressed, "Offspring of India, grandsons of luminous Force." For Indra, the divine Mind in man, is born out of luminous Force as is Agni out of pure Force, and from Indra the divine Mind spring the human aspirations after Immortality. The names of the three Ribhus are, in the order of their birth, Richer Ribhukshan, the skilful Knower or the Shaper in knowledge, Vibhwa or Vibhu, the Pervading, the self-diffusing, and V9.ja, the Plenitude. Their names indicate their special nature and function, but they are really a trinity, and therefore, although usually termed the Ribhus, they are also called the Vibhu and the Veers. Ribhus, the eldest is the
* "Dhanani" in this name does not mean does not mean ”bow” " but the solid or desert field of Matter otherwise typified as the hill or rock out of which the waters and the rays are delivered. Page-603 first in man who begins to shape by his thoughts and works the forms of immortality; Vibhwa gives pervasiveness to this working; Vàja, the youngest, supplies the plenitude of the divine light and substance by which the complete work can be done. These works and formations of immortality they effect, it is continually repeated, by the force of Thought, with the mind for field and material ; they are done with power ; they are attended by a perfection in the creative and effective act, szvapasyayd suhr’ityayd, The hymn opens with an indication of its objective. It is an affirmation of the power of the Ribhus made for the divine Birth, made by men whose minds have attained to illumination and possess that energy of the Light from which the Ribhus were born. It is made by the breath of the mouth, the life-power in the word. Its object is to confirm in the human soul the entire delight of the Beatitude, the thrice seven ecstasies of the divine Life. * This divine Birth is represented by the Ribhus who, once human, have become immortal. By their accomplishing of the work—the great work of upward human evolution which is the summit of the world-sacrifice,—they have gained in that sacrifice their divine share and privilege along with the divine powers. They are the sublimated human energies of formation and upward progress who assist the gods in the divinising of man. And of all their accomplishing that which is central is the formation of the two brilliant horses of Indra, the horses yoked by speech to their movements, yoked by the Word and fashioned by the mind. For the free movement of the luminous mind, the divine mind in man, is the condition of all other immortalising works. +
* Ayam devaya jasmine, stoma viprebhir asya.; akari ratnadhata- mah.
+ Ya in draya vachayujfl, tatakshur manasa. hart; cam Sbhir yajnam Acata.
Page-604 The second work of the Ribhus is to fashion the chariot of the Aswins, lords of the human journey,—the happy-movement of the Ananda in man which pervades with its action all his worlds or planes of being, bringing health, youth, strength, wholeness to the physical man, capacity of enjoyment and action to the vital, glad energy of the light to the mental being,—in a word, the force of the pure delight of being in all his members. + + The third work of the Ribhus is to fashion the cow who gives the sweet milk. It is said elsewhere that this cow has been delivered out of its covering skin,—-the veil of Nature’s outward movement and action,—by the Ribhus. The fostering cow herself is she of the universal forms and universal impetus of movement, vicvajnvam vicvarilpdm, Another great work of the Ribhus is in the strength of their previous deeds, of the light of Indra, the movement of the Aswins, the full yield of the fostering Cow to restore youth to the aged Parents of the world, Heaven and Earth. Heaven is the mental consciousness, Earth the physical. These in their union are represented as lying long-old and prostrate like fallen sacrificial posts, worn-out and suffering. The Ribhus, it is said, ascend to the house of the Sun where he lives in the unconcealed splendour of his Truth and there slumbering for twelve days afterwards traverse the heaven and the earth, filling them with abundant rain of the streams of Truth, nourishing them, restoring them to youth and vigour.! They pervade heaven with their workings, they bring divine increase to the mentality ;it they give to it and the
++ Takshan nasatyAbhyitm, parijmanam sukham ratha. * Takshan dhenum sabardughaxn. For the other details see R. V. IV 33. 4 and 8, 36. 4 etc. + R. V. IV. 33. 2, 3, 7 ; 36. 1, 3; I. 161. 7.
+ + R. V. IV. 32-2.
Page-605 physical being a fresh and young and immortal movement.* For from the home of the Truth they bring with them the perfection of that which is the condition of their work, the movement in the straight path of the Truth and the Truth itself with its absolute affectivity in all the thoughts and words of the mentality. Carrying this power with them in their pervading entry into the lower world, they pour into it the immortal essence. + It is the wine of that immortal essence with its ecstasies which they win by their works and bring with them to man in his sacrifice. And with them come and sit Indra and the Maruts, the divine Mind and its Thought-forces, and the four great Kings, sons of Aditi, children of the Infinite, Varuna, Mitra, Aryaman, Bhaga, the purity and vastness of the Truth-consciousness, its law of love and light and harmony, its power and aspiration, its pure and happy enjoyment of things.+ + And there at the sacrifice the gods drink in the fourfold bowl, chamasam chaturvayam, Because they have made this fourfold cup of bliss and enabled him thereby to live on the plane of the Truth-consciousness they are able to establish in the perfected human being the thrice seven ecstasies of the supreme existence poured into the mind, vitality and body. Each of these they can give perfectly by the full expression of its separate absolute ecstasy even in the combination of the whole.* +
* R. V. V. 36. 3. + Yuvina pitara punah, satamantra r’ijuyavah, r’ibhavo vishtya-krata. +-+ Sam vo madasa agmata, indren’a cha marutwat H; adityabhie charajabhih. ** Uttamam chamasam navam, twashtur devasya nishkr’itam ; a-karta chaturah punah. *+ Te no ratnani dhattana, trir a sftptani sunvace; ekam ekam surastibhih. Page-606 The Ribhus have power to support and contain all these floods of the delight of being in the human consciousness ; and they are able to divide it in the perfection of their works among the manifested gods, to each god his sacrificial share. For such perfect division is the whole condition of the effective sacrifice, the perfect work.+ Such are the Ribhus and they are called to the human sacrifice to fashion for man the things of immortality even as they fashioned them for themselves. "He becomes full of plenitude and strength for the labour, he becomes a Rishi by power of self-expression, he becomes a hero and a smite hard to pierce in the battles, he holds in himself increase of bliss and entire energy whom Vàja and Vibhwa, the Ribhus foster…For you are seers and thinkers clear-discerning; as such with this thought of our soul we declare to you our knowledge. Do you in your-knowledge moving about our thoughts fashion for us all human enjoying,—luminous plenitude and fertilising force and supreme felicity. Here issue, here felicity, here a great energy of inspiration fashion for us in your delight. Give to us, O Ribhus, that richly-varied plenitude by which we shall awaken in our consciousness to things beyond ordinary men." *
+ Adherent vahnayo, bhajate sukr’ityaya; bhaga vedeshu yajniyam.
* R. V.1V. 36. 6-9.
Page-607 CONCLUSION AND SUMMARY The Isha Upanishad is one of the more ancient of the Vedantic writings in. style, substance and versification, subsequent certainly to the Chhandogya, Brihadaranyaka and perhaps to the Taittiriya and Aitareya, but certainly the most antique of the extant metrical Upanishads. Upanishad thought falls naturally into two great periods ; in one, the earlier, it still kept close to its Vedic roots, reflected the old psychological system of the Vedic Rishis and preserved what may be called their spiritual pragmatism; in the other and later, in which the form and thought became more modern and independent of early symbols and origins, some of the principal elements of Vedic thought and psychology begin to be omitted or to lose their previous connotation and the foundations of the later ascetic and anti-pragmatic Vedanta begin to appear. The Isha belongs to the earlier or Vedic group. It is already face to face with the problem of reconciling human life and activity with the Monistic standpoint and its large solution of the difficulty is one of the most interesting passages of Vedantic literature. It is the sole Upanishad which offered almost insuperable difficulties to the extreme illusionism and antipragmatism of Shankaracharya and it was even, for this reason, excised from the list of authoritative Upanishads by one of his greatest followers. THE PRINCIPLE OF THE UPANISHAD
The principle it follows throughout is the uncompromising reconciliation of
uncompromising extremes. Later thought took one series of terms,—the World,
Enjoyment
Page-608 Action, the Many, Birth, the Ignorance,—and gave them a more and more secondary position, exalting the opposite series, God, Renunciation, Quietism, the One, Cessation of Birth, the Knowledge, until this trend of thought culminated in Illusionism and the idea of existence in the world as a snare and a meaningless burden, imposed inexplicably on the soul by itself, which must be cast aside as soon as possible. It ended in a violent cutting of the knot of the great enigma. This Upanishad tries instead to get hold of the extreme ends of the knots, disengage and place them alongside of each other in a release that will be at the same time a right placing and relation. It will not qualify or subordinate unduly any of the extremes, although it recognises a dependence of one on the other. Renunciation is to go to the extreme, but also enjoyment is to be equally integral; Action has to be complete and ungrudging, but also freedom of the soul from its works must be absolute ; Unity utter and absolute is the goal, but this absoluteness has to be brought to its highest term by including in it the whole infinite multiplicity of things.
So great is this scruple in the Upanishad that having so expressed itself in the lorrnula " By the Ignorance having crossed over death by the Knowledge one enjoys Immortality" that Life in the world might be interpreted as only a preliminary to an existence beyond, it at once rights the balance by reversing the order in the parallel formula " By dissolution having crossed over death by birth one enjoys Immortality," and thus makes life itself the field of the immortal existence which is the goal and aspiration of all life. In this conclusion it agrees with the early Vedic thought which believed all the worlds and existence and non-existence and death and life and immortality to be hire in the embodied human being, there evoluent, there realisable and to be possessed and enjoyed, not dependent either for acquisition or enjoyment on the renunciation of life and bodily existence. This thought has never entirely passed out of Indian philosophy, but has become secondary and a side admission not strong enough to qualify seriously the increasing assertion of the extinction
Page-609 of mundane existence as the condition of our freedom and our sole wise and worthy aim. THE OPPOSITES The pairs of opposites successively taken up by the Upanishad and resolved are, in the order of their succession:
1.) The Conscious Lord and phenomenal Nature. 2.) 5.) Being and Becoming. 6.) The Active Lord and the indifferent Akshara Brahman. 7.) Vidya and Avidya. These discords are thus successively resolved: GOD AND NATURE 1.) Phenomenal Nature is a movement of the conscious Lord. The object of the movement is to create forms of His consciousness in motion in which He as the one Soul in many bodies can take up his habitation and enjoy the multiplicity and the movement with all their relations.* ENJOYMENT AND RENUNCIATION 2.) Real integral enjoyment of all this movement and multiplicity in its truth and in its infinity depends upon an absolute renunciation; but the renunciation intended is an absolute renunciation of the principle of desire founded on the principle of egoism and not a renunciation of world-existence, "f This solution depends on * This is also the view of the Gita and generally accepted.
•+ This again is the central standpoint of the Gita, which however admits also the renunciation of world-existence. The general trend of Vedantic thought would accept the renunciation of desire and egoism as the essential but would hold that renunciation of egoism means the the renunciation of all world-existence, for it sees desire and not Ananda as the cause of world-existence.
Page-610 the idea that desire is only an egoistic and vital deformation of the divine Ananda or delight of being from which the world is born; by extirpation of ego and desire Ananda again becomes the conscious principle of existence. This substitution is the essence of the change from life in death to life in immortality. The enjoyment of the infinite delight of existence free from ego, founded on oneness of all in the Lord, is what is meant -by the enjoyment of Immortality. ACTION AND FREEDOM 3.) Actions are not inconsistent with the soul’s freedom. Man is not bound by works, but only seems to be bound. He has to recover the consciousness of his inalienable freedom by recovering the consciousness of unity in the Lord, unity in himself, unity with all existences.* This done, life and works can and should be accepted in their fullness; for the manifestation of the Lord in life and works is the law of our being and the object of our world-existence. THE QUIESCENCE AND THE MOVEMENT 4 ) What then of the Quiescence of the Supreme Being and how is persistence in the Movement compatible with that Quiescence which is generally recognised as an essential condition of the supreme Bliss ? The Quiescence and the Movement are equally one Brahman and the distinction drawn between them is only a phenomenon of our consciousness. So it is with the idea of space and time, the far and the near, the subjective and the objective, internal and external, myself and others, one and many. Brahman, the real existence, is all these things to our consciousness, but in itself ineffably superior to all such practical distinctions. The Movement is a phenomenon of Quiescence, the Quiescence itself may be conceived as a Movement too rapid for the gods, that is to say, for our various functions of conscious
* This truth would, again, be generally admitted, but not the conclusion that is drawn from it.
Page-611 ness to follow in its real nature. But it is no formal, material, spatial, temporal movement, only a movement in consciousness. Knowledge sees it all as one, Ignorance divides and creates oppositions where there is no opposition but simply relations of one consciousness in itself. The ego in the body says, " I am within, all else is outside ; and in what is outside, this is near to me in Time and Space, that is far." All this is true in present relation; but in essence it is all one indivisible movement of Brahman which is not material movement but a way of seeing things in the one consciousness. BEING AND BECOMING 5.) Everything depends on what we see, how we look at existence in our soul’s view of things. Being and Becoming, One and Many are both true and are both the same thing : Being is one, Becomings are many ; but this simply means that all Becomings are one Being who places Himself variously in the phenomenal movement of His consciousness. We have to see the One Being, but we have not to cease to see the many Becomings, for they exist and are included in Brahman’s view of Himself. Only, we must see with knowledge and not with ignorance. We have to realise our true self as the one unchangeable indivisible Brahman. We have to see all becomings as developments of the movement in our true self and this self as one inhabiting all bodies and not our body only. We have to be consciously,, in our relations with this world, what we really are,—this one self becoming everything that we observe. All the movement, all energies, all forms, all happenings we must see as those of our one and real self in many existences, as the play of the Will and Knowledge and Delight of the Lord in His world-existence. We shall then be delivered from egoism and desire and the sense of separate existence and therefore from all grief and delusion and shrinking; for all grief is born of the shrinking of the ego from the contacts of existence, its sense of fear, weakness, want, dislike, etc.; and this is Page-612 born from the delusion of separate existence, the sense of being my separate ego exposed to all these contacts of so much that is not myself. Get rid of this, see oneness everywhere, be the One manifesting Himself in all creatures ; ego will disappear ; desire born of the sense of not being this, not having that, will disappear ; the free inalienable delight of the, One in His own existence will take the place of desire and its satisfactions and dissatisfactions. * Immortality will be yours, death born of division will be overcome. THE ACTIVE AND INACTIVE BRAHMAN 6.) The Inactive and the Active Brahman are simply two aspects of the one Self, the one Brahman, who is the Lord. It is He who has gone abroad in the movement. He maintains Himself free from all modifications in His inactive existence. The inaction is the basis of the action and exists in the action; it is His freedom from all He does and becomes and in all He does and becomes. These are the positive and negative poles of one indivisible consciousness. We embrace both in one quiescence and one movement, inseparable from each other, dependent on each other. The quiescence exists relatively to the movement, the movement to the quiescence. He is beyond both. This is a different point of view from that of the identity of the Movement and Quiescence which are one in reality; it expresses rather their relation in our consciousness once they are admitted as a practical necessity of that consciousness. It is obvious that we also by becoming one with the Lord would share in this biune conscious existence. * VIDYA AND AVIDYA 7.) The knowledge of the One and the knowledge of
* In the ordinary view all this would be admitted, but the practical possibility of maintaining this state of consciousness and birth in the world together would be doubted.
* In the ordinary view the Jiva cannot exist in both at the same time; his dissolution is into the Quiescence and not into unity with the Lord in the action and inaction.
Page-613 the Many are a result of the movement of the one consciousness, which sees all things as One in their truth-Idea but differentiates them in their mentality and formal becoming. If the mind (Manishi) absorbs itself in God as the formal becoming (Paribhu) and separates itself from God in the true Idea (Kavi), then it loses Vidya, the knowledge of the One, and has only the knowledge of the Many which becomes no longer knowledge at all but ignorance, Avidya. This is the cause of the separate ego-sense. Avidya is accepted by the Lord in the Mind (Manishi) in order to develop individual ^relations to their utmost in all the possibilities of division and its consequences and then through these individual relations to come back individually to the knowledge of the One in all. That knowledge has remained all along untargeted in the consciousness of the true seer or Kavi. This seer in ourselves stands back from the mental thinker ; the latter, thus separated, has to conquer death and division by a developing experience as the individual Inhabitant and finally to recover by the reunited know ledge of the One and the Many the state of Immortality. This is our proper course and not either to devote ourselves exclusively to the life of Avidya or to reject it entirely for motionless absorption in the One. BIRTH AND NON-BIRTH
8.) The reason for this double movement of the Thinker is that we are intended to realise immortality in the Birth. The self is uniform and undying and in itself always possesses immortality. It does not need to descend into Avidya and Birth to get that immortality of Non-Birth ; for it possesses it always. It descends in order to realise and possess it as the individual Brahman in the play of world-existence. It accepts Birth and Death, assumes the ego and then dissolving the ego by the recovery of unity realises itself as the Lord, the One, and Birth as only a becoming of the Lord in mental and formal being ; this becoming is now governed by the true sight of the Seer and, once this is done, becoming is no longer
Page-614 inconsistent with Being, birth becomes a means and not an obstacle to the enjoyment of immortality by the lord of this formal habitation. * This is our proper course and not to remain for ever in the chain of birth and death, nor to flee from birth into a pure non-becoming. The bondage does not consist in the physical act of becoming, but in the persistence of the ignorant sense of the separate ego. The Mind creates the chain and not the body. WORKS AND KNOWLEDGE 9). The opposition between works and knowledge exists as long as works and knowledge are only of the egoistic mental character. Mental knowledge is not true knowledge ; true knowledge is that which is based on the true sight, the sight of the Seer, of Surya, of the Kavi. Mental thought is not knowledge, it is a golden lid placed over the face of the Truth, the Sight, the divine Ideation, the Truth-Consciousness. When that is removed, sight replaces mental thought, the all-embracing truth-ideation, Mahas, Veda, Drishti, replaces the fragmentary mental activity. True Buddhi (vijnana) emerges from the dissipated action of the Buddhi which is all that is possible on the basis of the sense-mind, the Manas. Vijnana lead us to pure knowledge (Jnana), pure consciousness, (Chit). There we realise our entire identity with the Lord in all at the very roots of our being. But in Chit Will and Seeing are one. Therefore in Vijnana or truth-ideation also which comes luminously out of Chit, Will and Sight are combined and no longer as in the mind separated from each other. Therefore when we have the sight and live in the truth consciousness, our will becomes the spontaneous law of the truth in us and knowing all its acts and their sense and objective leads straight to the human goal, which was always the enjoyment of the Ananda, the Lord’s delight in self-being, the
* This is the stumbling-block to the ordinary philosophies which are impregnated with the idea of the illusoriness of the world, even when they do not go the whole way with the Mayavada. Birth, they would say, is a play of ignorance, it cannot subsist along with entire knowledge.
Page-615
state of Immortality. In our acts also we become one with all beings and our life grows into a representation of oneness, truth and divine joy and no longer proceeds on the crooked path of egoism full of division, error and stumbling. In a word, we attain to the object of our existence which is to manifest in itself whether on earth in a terrestrial body and against the resistance of Matter or in the worlds beyond or enter beyond all world the glory of the divine Life and the divine Being.
Page-616 CHAPTER VI. THE TRIPLE OFFERING. Such, then, is the integral knowledge of That to which we offer the sacrifice. "We offer to it the sacrifice of knowledge, the sacrifice of love and adoration, the sacrifice of works; and the sacrifice of works embraces both the external doings and the internal activities. This internal work is that of self-discipline and self-perfection so that we may become by identity one in our inmost being with the Master of the sacrifice—the supreme objective proposed by the ancient Vedanta,—and one in our becoming by resemblance in our nature which has to enter into immortal being, assume illumined knowledge, lose itself in universal love and delight, find itself in supreme self-mastery and all-mastery,—the great work or sacrifice hymned by the seers of the Veda.
The sacrifice of knowledge is of a double nature, for its field may be the supreme science which concentrates itself into the knowledge of the One in its transcendence or the lower science which diffuses itself in the knowledge of the One in its world-manifestation. These two are usually divided with some sharpness. Religion and Philosophy take the first as their province and tend to look down from their heights with some scorn or a total indifference on all knowledge that belongs to the world and the pursuit of ephemeral objects. Science, Art and Life devote themselves to the other and they in their turn tend to recoil with impatience, contempt or scepticism from what they term the nebulous, cold or barren heights of unreality to which their sisters aspire. But is it necessary that there Page-617 should be always this opposition between two complements, this division of the One and Indivisible? The supreme knowledge is indeed the essential and without it the lower sciences and pursuits become an ignorance, an imprisonment, a sacrifice offered without disordered to false gods. But an integral Yoga and an all-embracing adoration of the Supreme will not therefore despise His works or even His dreams, if dreams they are, or shrink from the splendid toil and many-sided victory which He has assigned to Himself in the human being. Only, our works in the world must be offered to him in the right spirit and with the right knowledge, by the free soul and not by the hypnotised bond-slave of material Nature.
All the sciences and all activities of knowledge, the mental and physical sciences which examine into the laws and forms of things, those which concern the life of man and animals, the social, political, linguistic, historical, those which seek to know and control the labours and activities by which man subdues and
utilise the world he lives in and those noble and beautiful Arts which are at once work and knowledge,—for every poem, picture, statue, building is an act of knowledge, a
loran of mental self-expression or world-expression,—are legitimate materials for a complete offering
any ought not to be excluded from the divine life of humanity realising itself in God. But they must all be achieved as a. sacrifice, with the Divine for their object and the heat of their meaning. Our conscious aim in the mental and physical sciences should be to discover and understand God in man and creatures and things. Our conscious aim in the practical sciences should be to enter into His ways and know the materials and means for the work given to us so that we may use that knowledge for increasing man’s mastery, joy and self-fulfilment. Our conscious aim in the Arts should be no mere aesthetic gratification, but to express God in ideal forms, God in His principles, God in man, God in creatures and objects. The theory that sees an intimate
connection between religious aspiration and the truest and greatest Art is in essence right; only, the wider and more generally
comprehensive the creed, the more
Page-618 it contains in itself the religion of God in humanity and in all things, the more luminous, flexible, deep and powerful is the Art also likely to be that springs from that high motive. And the same truth applies to the sciences and the great crafts of individual and collective living. In a word, the man who knows the Supreme is not indeed subject to any need or compulsion in all these activities, but he will not abandon them if he has the integral knowledge; he will do them as the Supreme Himself does them for the holding together and right control and leading of this world of God’s workings. For so too the Gita teaches,—that the man of knowledge shall by his example give to those who have not yet the knowledge the love and habit of all works so that the world may proceed in its great’ upward aspiring, so that men and nations mry not fall away into the worse ignorance of inaction and sink down into that miserable disintegration and tendency of dissolution which comes from the predominance of the tamasic principle, the principle of obscure error and inertia. "For I too" says the Lord in the Gita, "have no need to do works, since there is nothing I have not or must yet gain for myself; yet I do works in the world; for if I did not works, all laws would fall into confusion, the worlds would sink towards chaos and I should be the destroyer of these my peoples." The principle of the ancient Vedantic teaching rightly understood does not destroy interest in all things except the Inexpressible or cut at the roots of the Sciences, the Arts and Life, but rather gives them their right place and proportion, substitutes for an ignorant and limited pleasure in them a free and all-embracing delight and supplies a power and illumination by which they can be carried more swiftly and comprehensibly towards their full light in knowledge and their full energy in practice. The one thing needful must be pursued first and always, but all these things also have not so much to be added to us as included in It. * * *
And into all of them should be brought the spirit of divine joy and an engrossing adoration of the Supreme
Page-619 who is also the All. For the sacrifice of Love also attains its utter perfection only when it is integral, catholic and free from all bounds. All love and adoration is good, even that which is offered ignorantly and to a limited object. For this love to° is at once an aspiration and a preparation, it is even within its limits a more or less blind and partial realisation. The worship of the god, the idol, the human magnet or ideal are not to be despised; for without them the human race cannot arrive at that which they represent. We must admit the stages of our progress; nor will the man who knows be hasty to shatter the image unless he can replace it in the heart of the worshipper by the Reality. Moreover these things are necessary to prepare an element in the last supreme and utter adoration; for neither knowledge nor love is1 complete unless even when we know That which surpasses all forms and manifestations, we can still bow down to the Divine in creature and object, in man, in the community, in the animal, in the tree, in the flower, in the work of our hands, in the nature-force which is then no longer to us the blind action of a material machinery but a face of the Universal Himself. The .ultimate adoration is offered to the supreme being of God, to the Highest*; but it is not a complete worship unless it is offered to Him wherever He manifests and wherever He hides Himself, in rant and object and every creature. Ignorance obscures, distorts, imprisons ; therefore all partial worship, all religion which erects a mental or a physical idol veils and protects the truth in it by a certain cloak of ignorance and tends in the end to lose the truth in the image. But the pride of exclusive knowledge is also a limitation and a barrier. Adoration is fulfilled in love and delight. A surpass ing love and delight in the Transcendent awaits us at the goal of the path of Devotion ; but also a universal love for all beings, perceiving and embracing behind every veil the
* Param bhavam. + Manushim tanum asritam. Page-620 Divine, the All-blissful and All-beautiful, and consequently a universal delight in all His endless manifestation. The discord of forms and appearances ceases to affect the heart that has felt the one Truth behind them all. Thus, the impartial equality of soul of the selfless worker and knower is transformed by the magic touch of divine Love into an all-embrangle ecstasy; for all things become bodies and playing of the divine Beloved. The manner of the worship has also its differences and its stages " He who gives to me with a heart of adoration a leaf, a flower, a fruit or water, I take and taste that offering of his devotion". The act or form is not the essential, but the spirit of which it is the expression. There is a symbolic worship, a practical worship, an inner adoration. The symbol, the ceremony are physical means by which the human being defines and confirms the aspiration of his heart. Without it they are meaningless and it is unhappily the fate of all forms to become crystallised, purely formal and therefore effete. They preserve always their power for the man who can still enter into their meaning, but the majority come to use ceremony and symbol as a mechanical rite which kills the soul of religion and therefore they have in the end to be changed and thrown aside. Yet there are few who can dispense with the stage of outward symbols and a certain element of human nature demands them always for the completeness of its satisfaction. Therefore to the last the symbol remains legitimate in so far as it is true, sincere, delightful and beautiful. Nevertheless, the adoration of the act is a greater and higher sacrifice. Here the path of Devotion becomes one with the path of Works, but it brings into it at once the element of joy and love which in the mere way of Works is often absent at the beginning and only evolves as a later result of the inner progress. All actions done in the love of mankind, the love of the world as God manifested belong to this Yoga and the fullness of such actions helps its tallness.
And behind the symbol and the act is the inner offering, the offering of all our emotions to the Divine, which
Page-621 gives to the symbol and the act their whole value. This offering is the in tensest force of purification for the human being, since all emotions merge into forms of love and divine delight. Extended to God in man and all creatures it becomes the basis of an absolute equality which is deeper, more potent and more real than the idea of brotherhood and founds a harmony with the world and all its beings which is higher than any system of ethics. The culmination of this inner adoration is entire union with the Divine. Here the path of Love becomes one with the path of knowledge, but it brings into it an active ecstasy in addition to the pure passive peace and stillness which is the heaven of the liberated Mind. Moreover, this unity is able to include in itself all differences without being diminished or abrogated by them. A unity with all creatures founded on unity of the soul with the divine is the play of its perfection. We have seen that the path of Devotion uses all human relations and turns them God wards. And even when it has culminated, it can still enjoy the play of difference which they imply without forfeiting the divine union. It can equally embrace all relations with men and the world by perceiving in the object of the relation the divine object of love and using the relation itself for the possession of Him in all things. * * * It is in this knowledge,—towards its acquisition and completion so long as it is incomplete,—and by this heart of devotion that the sacrifice of works becomes itself perfect and flawless. We see indeed that the moment we leave exclusive aims and quietistic ideals, knowledge, love and works become inextricably one. For we recover life for Yoga, life which is always a triple thread and an indivisible trinity. We start with an ideal of a selfless action without egoistic desire for the fruits; for this is the very heart of the Yoga of Works. We replace the incentive of desire by the principle of works done as a sacrifice to the Divine Page-622 in us and in all beings; so we unite the path of Works to the path of Devotion. We must end by the complete union of the worker in us with the supreme Will and Master of works in us all; then the path becomes one also with the path of Knowledge. Selfless action without desire is founded, we have seen, on equality of soul towards all results and all experiences ; for without that equality personal preference and desire must persist. But when we see the Divine in all things, the field of this equality extends itself to all objects and all beings. The Gita insists not only on equality of soul towards joy and sorrow, pain and pleasure, success and failure, fortunate happening and unfortunate happening, but towards man and animal, high and low, saint and sinner, friend and enemy. This does not mean that our eyes will be blind or our reason irresponsive to the differences of the manifestation, but that behind all differences the soul will know the One and the Divine and that what the soul sees the heart and the nature shall follow. That oneness and not the apparent difference shall determine the core of our sense, our feeling, our knowing and our working. Otherwise we are still slaves of the phenomenon and cannot enter into the freedom of the divine and the universal.
In practice this leads, for the soul accustomed to egoistic workings, to a difficulty of which the solution is not immediately apparent. For it removes at once all incentive of personal preference. We can no longer follow the law of work for our own interests or for friends, family, country, creed, opinion because they are ours. For we are freed from the exclusiveness of egoism. In all that is not ours we see God equally and not only in all that is ours. Even the choice between the good and the evil seems to betaken from us,—the clue which might present itself in help and service to the men, the creed, the community, the country which seems to us to embody the Right as against all that seems to us to embody the Wrong. For we look upon saint and sinner with an impartial regard and, if we would serve, it would seem that we
Page-623 must serve God in all equally and not the Divine in some as opposed to the Divine in others. The solution of love and philanthropy offers itself,— to ignore human distinctions, to do the works of love only and not the works of strife, to seek the good of the world impartially as between man and man, creature and creature, regardless of any minor relation. This is, at their highest, Christianity, Buddhism, humanitarianism, and it is a high, a beautiful, a shining ideal; but it does not seem to be the solution of the Gita, for the whole of that profound scripture is written around the injunction upon Arjuna to engage in a battle, to fight foremost in a terrible, a devastating, an internecine struggle. It is obvious indeed that the humanitarian solution, the solution of the apparent works of Love, while it may be sufficient for personal salvation and ethical or spiritual satisfaction, does not sub serve adequately the sole general object which the Gita proposes for the liberated worker, the upholding of the world in its great struggle and labour forward in the actual conditions of that labour and struggle. The works we do in obedience to Love and philanthropy help on one side and palliate suffering; we do not find that they can actually remove the causes of that suffering. Indeed all action, the Gita declares, has if we look at its outer aspects, a surrounding cloud of defect like the smoke that rises from a burning fire. The renunciation of the human battle, of the works of the warrior in the largest sense of that word, to do only ambulance service does not escape from this general perplexity; for if by entering in to the strife we do hurt to that which has to be destroyed, by refusing it we may be refusing the cry of the world for succour at the very core of its labour where it most needs its strongest souls in that which is most necessary for its preservation. Complex is the world that God has made for us, difficult is the problem that He has set us and the pursuit of a single divine principle cannot be its solution.
It would seem, therefore, that the law of works done as a sacrifice, while it supplies an incentive for action in the place of desire, does not provide a clue to the personal
Page-624 choice of action. The reason is that no personal choice is intended. All forms of personal choice, even the highest, belong to the realm of that which we are striving to leave; they proceed from the idea of the independent ego as a starting-point. But the solution towards which we are working rises to a higher plane of being. The Gita, therefore, points us to a step beyond. When we have banished personal desire from our actions, when we have trained ourselves to do all works as a sacrifice, we have next to renounce not only the fruit of our works, but the works themselves into the hands of the Master of all works. In other words, we have to call into ourselves the divine Light, the divine Will, the divine Power which will choose the work in the place of the ego and will carry it out while our mind, heart and body become the passive and obedient instruments of that omnipotent Power and eternal Illumination.. Meanwhile we have to continue to do works as a sacrifice guided by whatever is highest in us at the present stage of our progress. It may be conscience, it may be the exact performance of our human duties, it may be the injunctions of the faith in which we live, it may be a divine principle or ideal, it may be the supreme law of our nature. If these should lead us to wrong choice,—wrong in men’s eyes, wrong to the human reason,—it matters little. For whatever "we do, so long as we do it with faith and sincerity, as a sacrifice, living as much as possible in the divine and universal being, discouraging continually by detection and disapproval the subtle and elusive ego in us, hearkening, if we can hear it or to the measure of our power, to the highest voice within, we do well and are in our right path of progress.
And afterwards there is the condition of entire liberation from the ego in which all that we now call ourselves becomes merely an instrument for the Highest in us, that which we really and eternally are. But this is an idea so important as the culmination of the Yoga of Works and so foreign to ordinary notions that we must devote to it a separate and more minute study.
Page-625 BOOK II THE DISCOVERY AND CONQUEST OF THE DIVINE IN ONESELF. I THE CONQUEST OF TRUTH THE WAY OF LOVE 1 Some say that knowledge is the road that leads towards love ; others, that love and knowledge are interdependent. 2 Love is an easier method than the others ; because it is self-evident and docs not depend on other truths 3 and its nature is peace and supreme felicity.—Love is greater than knowledge.. .because it is its own end. 4 Love is an invisible, a sacred and ineffable spirit which traverses the whole world with its rapid 5 thoughts.—All the knowledge one can require email- 6 ates from this love—The knowledge of the Eternal and the love of the Eternal are in the end one and the same thing. There is no difference between pure knowledge and pure love. 7 Knowledge of God can be compared to a man while Love of God is like a woman. The one has his right of entry to the outer chambers of the Eternal, but only love can penetrate into the inner chambers, she who has access to the mysteries of the Almighty. 8 Cross even beyond the light which illumines thee and cast thyself upon the bosom of God. 9 He who goes from this world without knowing that Imperishable is poor in soul, but he who goes from this world having known that Imperishable, he is the sage. 10 Practise with all thy strength love for that being who is the One in order that it maybe made manifest to thy sight that He is one j and alone and there is no other God than He. 11 Still it is not impossible to raise oneself even higher than that, for love itself is a veil between the lover and the Beloved.
1 Narada Sutra 18-13.—2) id. 58. 60. —3) id. 26. 26.-4)
Emperor- cles__5)
Antoine the Healer: " Revelations ".—6>Ramakrishna.—7) id.—8)Maitre Eckhart.—9) Brihadaranyaka Upanishad III. 8. 10.—10) Ahmed Halif "Mystic Odes".—11) Baha-ullah "The Seven Valleys."
Page-626 THE VAISHNAVA POETESS Preoccupied from the earliest times with divine knowledge and religious aspiration the Indian mind has turned all forms of human life and emotion and all the phenomena of the universe into symbols and means by which the embodied soul may strive after and grasp the Supreme. Indian devotion has especially seized upon the most intimate human relations and made them stepping-stones to the supra-human. God the Guru, God the Master, God the Friend, God the Mother, God the Child, God the Self, each of these experiences—for to us there are more than merely ideas,—it has carried to its extreme possibilities. But none of them has it pursued, embraced, sung with a more exultant passion of intimate realisation than the yearning for God the Lover, God the Beloved. It would seem as if this passionate human symbol were the natural culminating-point for the mounting flame of the soul’s devotion: for it is found wherever that devotion has entered into the most secret shrine of the inner temple. We meet it in Islamic poetry; certain experiences of the Christian mystics repeat the forms and images with which we are familiar in the Hast, but usually with a certain timor-ousnessforeign to the Eastern temperament. For the devotee who has once had this intense experience it is that which admits to the most profound and hidden mystery of the universe; for him the heart has the key of the last secret.
The work of a great Bengali poet has recently reintroduced this idea to the
European mind, which has so much lost o "he memory of its old religious traditions as to welcome and wonder at it as a novel form of mystic self-expression. On the contrary it is ancient enough, like all things natural and eternal in the human soul. In Bengal a whole period of national poetry has been dominated by this single strain and it has inspired a religion and a philosophy. And in the Vaishnavism of the far South, in the Page-627 songs of the Tamil Alwar we find it again in another form, giving a powerful and original turn to the images of our old classic poetry; for there it has been sung out by the rapt heart of a woman to the Heart of the Universe. The Tamil word, Alwar, means one who has drowned, lost himself in the sea of the divine being. Among these canonised saints of Southern Vaishnavism ranks Vishnu-chitta, Yogin and poet, of Villipattan in the land of the Pandyas. He is termed Perialwar, the great Alwar. A tradition, which we need not believe, places him in the ninety-eighth year of the Kaliyuga. But these divine singers are ancient enough, since they precede the great saint and philosopher Ramanuja whose personality and teaching were the last flower of the long-growing Vaishnava tradition. Since his time Southern Vaishnavism has been a fixed creed and a system rather than a creator of new spiritual greatnesses. The poetess Andal was the foster-daughter of Vishnu-chitta, found by him, it is said, a new-born child under the sacred tulsi-plant. We know little of Andal except what we can gather from a few legends, some of them richly beautiful and symbolic. Most of Vishnuchitta’s poems have the infancy and boyhood of Krishna for their subject. Andal, brought up in that atmosphere, cast into the mould of her life what heir foster-father had sung in inspired hymns. Her own poetry—we may suppose that she passed early into the Light towards which she yearned, for it is small in bulk,—is entirely occupied with her passion for the divine Being. It is said that she went through a symbolic marriage with Sri Ranganatha, Vishnu in his temple at Srirangam, and disappeared into the image of her Lord. This tradition probably conceals some actual fact, for Andal’s marriage with the Lord, is still celebrated annually with considerable pomp and ceremony. We give below a translation of three of Andale’s poems. TO THE CUCKOO.
O Cuckoo that peckest at the blossomed flower of honey-dripping champaka and, inebriate, pipest forth the melodious notes, be seated in thy ease and with thy babblings, which are yet no babblings, call out for the coming of my Lord of the
Vanuatu hill. For He, the pure one, bearing in his left hand the white summoning conch shows me not
his form. But He has invaded my heart ; Page-628 and while I pine and sigh for his love, He looks on indifferent as if it were all a play. I feel as if my bones had melted away and my long javelin eyes have not closed their lids for these many days. I am tossed on the waves of the sea of pain without finding the boat that is named the Lord of the highest realm. Even thou must know, O Cuckoo, the pain we feel when we are parted from those whom we love. He whose pennon bears the emblem of the golden eagle, call out for his coming, O bird. I am a slave of Him whose stride has measured the worlds. And now because He is harsh to me, how strange that this south-wind and these moonbeams should tear my flesh, enfeebling me. But thou, O Cuckoo, that ever livest in this garden of mine, it is not meet that thou shouldst pain me also. Indeed I shall drive thee out if He who reposes on the waters of life come not to me by thy songs today. I DREAMED A DREAM. I dreamed a dream, O friend. The wedding was fixed for the morrow. And He, the Lion, Madhava, the young Bull whom they call the master of radiances, He came into the hall of wedding decorated with luxuriant palms. I dreamed a dream, O friend. And the throng of the Gods was therewith Indra, the Mind Divine, at their head. And in the shrine they declared me bride and clad me in a new robe of affirmation. And Inner Force is the name of the goddess who adorned me with the garland of the wedding. I dreamed a dream, O friend. There were beatings of the drum and blowing of the conch; and under the canopy hung heavily with strings of pearls He came, my lover and my lord, the vanquisher of the demon Madhu and grasped me by the hand. I dreamed a dream, O friend.
Those whose voices are blest, they sang the Vedic songs. The holy grass was laid. The sun was established. And He who was puissant like a war-elephant in its rage, He seized my hand and we paced round the Flame.
Page-629 YE OTHERS. Ye others cannot conceive of the love that I bear to Krishna. And your warnings to me are vain like the pleadings of the deaf and mute. The Hoy Of no further avail is modesty. For all the neighbours have known of this fully. Would ye really heal me of this ailing and restore me to my pristine state ? Then know ye this illness will go if 1 see The rum our is already spread over the land that I fled with Him and went the lonely way, leaving all of you behind—my parents, relations and friends. The tongue of scandal ye can hardly silence now. And He, the deceiver, is haunting me with his forms. Oh, take me forth at midnight to the door of the Cowherd named Bliss who owns this son, the maker of havoc, this mocker, this. pitiless player ; and leave me there. Oh, grieve not ye, my mothers. Others know little of this strange malady of mine. He whose hue is that of the blue sea, a certain youth called Krishna—the gentle caress of his hand can heal me, for his Yoga is sure and proved. On the bank of the waters he ascended the kadamba tree and he leaped to his dance on the hood of the snake, the dance that killed the snake. Oh take me forth to the bank of that lake and leave me there.
There is a parrot here in this cage of mine that ever calls out his name, saying ‘ Govinda, Govinda’. In anger I chide it and refuse to feed it. ‘ O Thou’ it then cries, in its highest pitch, ‘ O Thou who hast measured the worlds.’ I tell you, my people, if ye really would avoid the top of scandal in all this wide country, if still ye would guard your weal and your good fame, then take me forth to his city of Dwaraka of high mansions and decorated turrets ; and leave me there.
Page-630 THE DELIGHT OF BEING. If Brahman were only an impersonal abstraction eternally contradicting the apparent fact of our concrete existence, cessation would be the right end of the matter; but love and delight and self-awareness have also to be reckoned. The universe is not merely a mathematical formula for working out the relation of certain mental abstractions called numbers and principles to arrive in the end at a zero or a void unit ; neither is it merely a physical operation embodying certain equations of forces. It is the delight of a Self-lover, the play of a Child, the endless self-multiplication of a Poet intoxicated with the rapture of His own power of endless creation. We may speak of the Supreme as if He were a mathematician working out a cosmic sum in numbers or a thinker resolving by experiment a problem in relations of principles and balance of forces: but also we should speak of Him as if He were a lover, a musician of universal and particular harmonies, a child, a poet. The side of thought is not enough ; the side of delight too must be entirely grasped : Ideas, Forces, Existences, Principles are hollow moulds unless they are filled with the breath of God’s delight. These things are images, but all is an image. Abstractions give us the pure conception of God’s truths; images give us their living reality. If Idea embracing Force begot the worlds, Delight of Being begot the Idea. Because the Infinite conceived an innumerable delight in itself, therefore worlds and universes came into existence.
Consciousness of being and Delight of being are the first parents. Also, they are the last transcendences. Unconsciousness is only an intermediate swoon of the conscious or its obscure sleep ; pain and self-extinction are only delight of being running away from itself in order to find itself elsewhere or otherwise.
Page-631 Delight of being is not limited in Time ; it is without end or beginning. God comes out from one form of things only to enter into another. What is God after all ? An eternal child playing an eternal game in an eternal garden. MAN. THE PURUSHA. God cannot cease from leaning down towards Nature, nor man from aspiring towards the Godhead. It is the eternal relation of the finite to the infinite. When they seem to turn from each other, it is to recoil for a more intimate meeting. In man nature of the world becomes again self-conscious so that it may take the great leap towards its Enjoyer. This is the Enjoyer whom unknowingly it possesses, whom life and sensation possessing deny and denying seek. Nature of the world knows not God only because it knows not itself ; when it knows itself, it shall know unalloyed delight of being. Possession in oneness and not loss in oneness is the secret. God and Man, World and Beyond-world become one when they know each other. Their division is the cause of ignorance as ignorance is the cause of suffering. Man seeks at first blindly and does not even know that he is seeking his divine self; for he starts from the obscurity of material Nature and even when he begins to see, he is long blinded by the light that is increasing in him. God too answers obscurely to his search ; He seeks and enjoys man’s blindness like the hands of a little child that grope after its mother. God and Nature are like a boy and girl at play and in love. They hide and run from each other when glimpsed so that they may be sought after and chased and captured. Man is God hiding himself from Nature so that he may possess her by struggle, insistence, violence and surprise. God is universal and transcendent Man hiding himself from his own individuality in the human being.
The animal is Man disguised, in a hairy skin and, up-
Page-632 on four legs; the worm is Man writhing and crawling towards the evolution of his Manhood. Even crude forms of Matter are Man in his inchoate body. All things are Man, the Purusha. For what do we mean by Man ? An uncreated and indestructible soul that has housed itself in a mind and body made of its own elements. THE END The meeting of man and God must always mean a penetration and entry of the divine into the human and a self-immergence of man in the Divinity. But that immergence is not in the nature of an annihilation. Extinction is not the fulfilment of all this search and passion, suffering and rapture. The game would never have been begun if that were to be Delight is the secret. Learn of pure delight and thou shalt learn of God. What then was the commencement of the whole matter ? Existence that multiplied itself for sheer delight of being and plunged into numberless trillions of forms so that it might find itself innumerably. And what is the middle ? Division that strives towards a multiple unity, ignorance that labours towards a flood of varied light, pain that travail And what is the end of the whole matter? As if honey could taste itself and all its drops together and all its drops could taste each other and each the whole honeycomb as itself, so should the end be
Love is the keynote, Joy is the music, Power is the strain, Knowledge is the performer, the infinite All is the composer and audience. We know only the preliminary discords which are as fierce as the harmony shall be great; but we shall arrive surely at the fugue of the divine Beatitudes.
Page-633 Hymns to the Goddess, translated from the Sanskrit by Arthur and Ellen Avalon. (London Lusaka and Co.) This is one of a series of publications* by Mr. Arthur Avalon consisting of texts and translations of the Tantras. The hymns collected and translated in this volume are, however, taken from other sources besides the Tantras. Many of The work of translation has been admirably done. The one slight defect is the preservation untranslated of Sanskrit words other than names which might well have been rendered into English. The translation is at once faithful, simple and graceful in style and rhythm. No English version can reproduce the majesty of the Sanskrit rhythms and the colour and power of the original, but within the limits of The translation is accompanied by brief but numerous
* We propose to deal hereafter with the most Important of these publications, the translation of the Mahanirvana Tantra. Page-634 study of the Tantra. He writes, " It is is necessary to study the Hindu commentators and" to seek the oral aid of those who possess the traditional interpretation of the Shastra. Without this and an understanding of what Hindu worship is and means, absurd mistakes are likely to be made. I have thus, in addition to such oral aid, availed myself of the Commentaries of Nilakantha on the Mahabharata, of Gopala Chakravarti and Nagoji lihatta on Chandi, and of I Silakantha on the Devibhagavata. As regards the Tantra, the great Sadhana Shastra, nothing which is both of an understanding and accurate character can be achieved without a study of the original texts undertaken with the assistance of the Tantric gurus and pundits who are the authorized custodians of its traditions." This careful scrupulousness is undoubtedly the right attitude for the work which Mr. Avalon has set himself,—to present to the English-reading public the philosophy and worship of the Tantra and the way of the Shaktas as they have been traditionally practised and understood in mediaeval and modern India. The method followed assures a sound basis free from the vagaries of learned ignorance and unfettered ingenuity which render so much of the work of European scholarship on Indian subjects fantastic, unsound and ephemeral. It cannot, we think, be the final attitude ; an independent scrutiny of the ancient scriptures and forms of philosophy and religion is needed through the whole range of Indian thought and devotion both to recover their more ancient and original forms and principles often concealed by later accretions and crystal listings and to separate from them whatever is of imperishable worth and utility for the spiritual future of mankind. But meanwhile, and especially when a great and difficult subject is being for the first time brought forward in an adequate manner to general notice, the conservative method is undoubtedly the most desirable.
Commentators however, even the most learned, are subject to error, as Mr. Avalon has had to recognise in his translation of the verse which declares that all women without exception are forms of the Great Mother, The Page-635 commentator would have us believe that the phrase striyah samastdh sakald jaguars means all women who possess the sixty-four aits and are devoted to their husbands, are modest etc. The translator rightly rejects this conventional distortion of a great and profound philosophical truth ; he translates ‘* all women without exception throughout the world." We wonder whether the phrase does not admit of a different shade cutting deeper into the heart of things. The lines are Vidyah samastas tava devi bhedah Striyah samastas sakald jagatsu. Is there not a hint of a distinction between the simple bhcddh and sakaldh ? " All sciences, O goddesses, are divided parts of thee, all women are entirely thee in the worlds." The sense would then be that wherever the feminine principle is found in the living personality, we have the entire presence of the world-supporting maternal soul of the Divinity. The Devi with all her aspects, kalas, is there in the Woman; in the Woman we have to see Durga, Anna-puma, Tara, the Mahavidyas, and therefore it is said in the Tantra in a line quoted by Mr. Avalon in his preface Wherever one sees the feet of women, one should give worship in one’s soul even as to one’s guru." Thus this thought of the Shakta side of Hinduism becomes an uncompromising declaration of the divinity of woman completing the Vedantic declaration of the concealed divinity in man which we are too apt to treat in practice as if it applied only in the masculine. We put away in silence, even when we do not actually deny it, the perfect equality in difference of the double manifestation.
There are other instances in which the translators seem to us not to have escaped the misleading wiles of the commentator. We may instance the passage in the Hymn to
Mabadeva in which the Goddess is described as being " both black and grey". "Smoke-coloured" would be a closer rendering of the epithet dhumrd. We are told in the note that it means " that which is with smoke, the sacrificial rite, here the knowledge of the rites." This is a scholastic interpretation which we cannot accept. The
Page-636 different hues of the Goddess are always psychologically symbolic and Mr. Avalon has himself an excellent passage to that effect in his Introduction. But although occasionally provoking dissent the notes are throughout interesting and instructive and often throw a new light on the implications of the text. Mr. Avalon in his publications insists upon the greatness of the Tantra and seeks to clear away by a dispassionate statement of the real facts the cloud of misconceptions which have obscured our view of this profound and powerful system. We shall have occasion to deal with this aspect of his work when we come to speak of the Mahanirvana Tantra. In this volume he justifies against European prejudice the attribution of the feminine form and quality to God and against modern ignorance generally the image-worship which the Tantra in common with other Hindu forms makes part of the first stage in religious progress. On both points we are in general agreement with his standpoint, though we do not hold that religious evolution must necessarily follow the line laid down by the Tantra.
Human conceptions of the Divine divide themselves
first into the worship of the formed and the aspiration towards the formless,
secondly, into the adoration of the Qualified and the urge of the rarest spirits
towards the Unqualified, the Absolute. For all these stages the Tantric worship
and discipline provides. How can the Formless invest Himself with form, asks the
religious rationalist. The universe is there to reply. Hinduism worships Narayan in the stone, the tree, the animal, the human being. That which the intellectual and spiritual pride or severity of other religions scorns, it makes its pride and turns into its own form of logical severity. Stocks and stones, and the quadruped and the human being, all these are equals in God, our brothers in the Divine, forms that the Omnipresent has not disdained to assume. But beyond the material forms there are others that are ideal and symbolic, but not less, if anything more real, more full of divine power than any actual, physical manifestation. These are Page-637 the mental images in which we worship God. The Hindu believes to that whatever form he brings his devotion, the Love of God is bound to assume and vivify it, and we cannot say that the belief is irrational. For if there is a Consciousness in the universe and transcending it which answers to the yearning of all these creatures and perhaps Itself yearns towards them with the love of the Father, the Mother, the Friend, the Lover, and a love surpassing all these, then it is idle to suppose that It would assume or create for its own pleasure and glory the forms of the universe, but would disdain as an offence to Its dignity or purity those which the love of the worshipper offers to It and which after all Itself has formed in his heart or his imagination. To these mental forms mental worship may be offered, and this is the higher way; or we may give the material foundation, the pratisthd, of a statue or pictured image to form a physical nodes for a physical act of worship.
In the formless also we worship God, in His qualities, in His Love, Power, Bliss, Wisdom, in the great cosmic Principles by which He manifests Himself to the eye of knowledge. We worship Him as the Impersonality manifested in these things or the Personality containing them. And we rise at the apex of the pinnacle into that which is not only formless, arupa, but nirguna, qualityless, the indefinable, anirdeshyam,
of the Gita. In our human ignorance, with our mental passion for degrees and
distinctions, for superiorities and exclusions, we thus grade these things and
say that this is superior, that is for ignorant and inferior souls. Do we know?
The Theist looks down with reprobation on the form-adoring, manworhipping
idolater and polytheist.; the Adwaitin looks down with a calm and tolerant indulgence on the ignorance of the quality-adoring, personality-bemused Theist. But it seems it us that God scorns nothing, that the Soul of all things may take as much delight in the prayer of a little child or the offering of a flower or a leaf before a pictured image as in the philosopher’s leap from the summit of thought into the indefinable and unknowable and that he does best who
Page-638 can rise and widen into the shoeless realisation and yet keep the heart of the little child and the capacity of the seer of forms. . At any rate, this is an attitude towards which these Hymns to the Goddess bring us very near. They are full of the glories of her form, her visible body; full of the thinker’s perception of her in all the shapes of the universe; full of the power of her psychological aspects; pervaded too by a sense behind and often expressed of her final unity and transcendence. Mr. Avalon brings this out with great force and vividness in his Introduction. But it should be manifest even to a careless reader of the Hymns. Take the following passage :— Reverence to her who is eternal, Raudra, To Gauri and Dhatri, reverence and again reverence, To Her who is moonlight and in the form of the moon, To Her who is supreme bliss, reverence for ever. That is from the famous hymn in the Chandi-Mahatmya, deservedly one of the best-known in sacred literature; but everywhere we find the same crowding of different aspects. A hymn of which the eleventh verse is a sensuous description of the physical Goddess,— O Gauri ! with all my heart 1 contemplate Thy form, Beauteous of face, With its weight of hanging hair, With full breasts and rounded slender waist, Holding in three hands a rosary, a pitcher and book And with thy fourth hand making the jnanamudra,— ( mark how the close passes naturally in to the psychological symbolism of the form), the ninth is a remarkable piece of Yogic imagery,— O Mother ! like the sleeping King of serpents Residing in the centre of the first lotus, Thou didst create the universe. Thou dost ascend like a streak of lightning, And attainest the ethereal region;—
and the opening is the highest philosophy expressed with
Page-639 a high poetical force and interspersed with passages of the richest poetical colour—
The cause and Mother of the world, She whose forms is that of the shabdabrahma, And whose substance is bliss. Thou art the primordial One, Mother of countless creatures, Creature of the bodies of the lotus-born, Vishnu and Shiva, Who creates, preserves and destroys the worlds…
Although thou art the primordial cause of the world, Yet art thou ever youthful. Although thou art the Daughter of the Mountain- King, Yet art thou full of tenderness. Although thou art the Mother of the Vedas, Y et they cannot describe Thee. Although men must meditate upon Thee, Yet cannot their mind comprehend Thee. This hymn is quoted as culled from a Tantric compilation, the Tantras ra. Its opening is full of the supreme meaning of the great Devi symbol, its close is an entire self-abandonment to the adoration of the body of the Mother. This catholicity is typical of the whole Tantric system, which is in its aspiration one of the greatest attempts yet made to embrace the whole of God manifested and unmanifested in the adoration, self-discipline and knowledge of a single human soul. Page-640 FOR THAT FATIGUED FEELING’ You Must Use Our "ASVAN." EVERY DOSE TELLS. Once Used Always Appreciated.
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