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No. 1 1 CHAPTER XI DELIGHT OF EXISTENCE: THE PROBLEM For who could live or breathe if there were not this delight of exist-e nee as the ether in which we dwell. Taittiriya Upanishad. From Delight all these becomings are born, by Delight they exist and grow, to Delight they return. Ibid. But even if we accept this pure existence, this Brahman, this Sat as the absolute beginning, end and continent of things and in Brahman an inherent self-consciousness inseparable from its being, throwing itself out as a force of movement of consciousness which is creative of forces, forms and worlds, we have yet no answer to the question "Why should Brahman, perfect, absolute, infinite, needing nothing, desiring nothing, at all throw out force of consciousness to create in itself these worlds of forms?" For we have put aside the solution that it is compelled by its own nature of Force to create, by its own potentiality of movement and formation to move into forms. It is true that it has this potentiality, but it is not limited, bound or compelled by it; it is free. If, then, being free to move or remain eternally still, to throw itself into forms or retain the potentiality of form in itself, it indulges its power of movement and formation, it can be only for one reason, for delight.
This primary, ultimate and eternal existence, as seen by the Vedantins, is not merely bare existence, or a conscious
Page-641 existence whose consciousness is crude force or power; it is a conscious existence the very term of whose being, the very term of whose consciousness is bliss. As _in absolute existence there can be no nothingness, no night of incon-science, no deficiency, that is to say, no failure of Force,— for if there were any of these things, it would not be absolute,—so also there can be no suffering, no negation of delight. Absoluteness of conscious existence is illimitable bliss of conscious existence; the two are only4 different phrases for the same thing. All illimitableness, all infinity, all absoluteness is pure delight. Even our relative humanity has this experience that all dissatisfaction means a limit, an obstacle,—satisfaction comes by realisation of something withheld, by the surpassing of the limit, the overcoming of the obstacle. This is because our original being is the absolute in full possession of its infinite and illimitable self-consciousness and self-power; a self-possession whose other name is self-delight. And in proportion as the relative touches upon that self-possession, it moves towards satisfaction, touches delight. The self-delight of Brahman is not limited, however, by the still and motionless possession of its absolute self-being. Just as its force of consciousness is capable of throwing itself into forms infinitely and with an endless variation, so also its self-delight is capable of movement, of variation, of reveling in that infinite flux and mutability of itself represented by numberless. teeming universes. To loose forth and enjoy this infinite movement and variation of its self-delight is the object of its extensive or creative play of Force.
In other words, that which has thrown itself out into form is a triune Existence-Consciousness-Bliss,
Sachchid-ananda, whose consciousness is in its nature a creative or rather a self-expressive Force capable of infinite variation in phenomenon and form of its self-conscious being and endlessly enjoying the delight of that variation. It follows that all things that exist, are what they are as terms of that existence, terms of that conscious force. terms of that delight of being. Just as we find all things to
be Page-642 mutable forms of one immutable being, finite results of one infinite force, so we shall find that all things are variable self-expression of one invariable and all-embracing delight of self-existence. In everything that is, dwells the conscious force and it exists and is what it is by virtue of that conscious force ; so also in everything that is, there is the delight of existence and it exists and is what it is by virtue of that delight.
This ancient Vedantic theory of cosmic origin is immediately confronted in the human mind by two powerful contradictions, the emotional and sensational consciousness of pain and the ethical problem of evil. For if the world be an expression of Sachchidananda, not only of existence that is conscious-force,—for that can easily be admitted,—but of existence that is also infinite self-delight, how are we to account for the universal presence of grief, of suffering, of pain? For this world appears to us rather as a world of suffering than as a world of the delight of existence. Certainly, that view of the world is an exaggeration, an error of perspective. If we regard it dispassionately and with a sole view to accurate and unemotional appreciation, we shall find that the sum of the pleasure of existence far exceeds the sum of the pain of existence,—appearances and individual cases to the contrary notwithstanding,—and that the pleasure of existence is the normal state of nature, pain a contrary occurrence temporarily suspending or overlaying that normal state. But for that very reason the lesser sum of pain affects us more intensely and often looms larger than the greater sum of pleasure; precisely because the latter is normal, we do not treasure it, hardly even observe it unless it intensifies into some acuter form of itself, into a wave of happiness, a crest of joy or ecstasy. It is these things that we call delight and seek and the normal satisfaction of existence which is always there regardless of event and particular cause or object, affects us as something neutral which is neither pleasure nor pain. It is there, a great practical fact. for without it there would not be the universal and overpowering instinct of self-preservation, but it is not what we
Page-643 seek and therefore we do not enter it into our balance of emotional and sensational profit and loss. In that balance we enter only positive pleasures on one side and discomfort and pain on the other; pain affects us more intensely because it is abnormal to our being. contrary to our natural tendency and is experienced as an outrage on our existence, an offence and external attack on what we are and seek to be. Nevertheless the abnormality of pain or its greater or lesser sum do not affect the philosophical issue; greater or less, its mere presence constitutes the whole problem. All being Sachchidananda, how can pain and suffering at all exist ? This, the real problem, is often farther confused by a false issue starting from the idea of a personal extra-cosmic God and a partial issue, the ethical difficulty.
Sachchidananda, it may be reasoned, is God, is a conscious Being who is the author of existence; how then can God have created a world in which He inflicts suffering on His creatures, sanctions pain, permits evil ? God being All-Good, who created pain and evil ? If we say that pain is a trial and an ordeal, we do not solve the moral problem, we arrive at an immoral or non-moral God,—an excellent world-mechanist perhaps, a cunning psychologist, but not a God of Good and of Love whom we can worship, only a God of Might to whose law we must submit or whose caprice we may hope to propitiate. For one who invents torture as a means of test or ordeal, stands convicted either of deliberate cruelty or of moral insensibility and, if a moral being at all, is inferior to the highest instinct of his own creatures. And if to escape this moral difficulty, we say that pain is an inevitable result and natural punishment of moral evil,— an explanation which will not even square with the facts of life unless we admit the theory of Karma and rebirth by which the soul suffers now for antenatal sins in other bodies,—we, still do not escape the very root of the ethical problem,—who created or ,why or whence was created that moral evil which entails the punishment of pain and suffering ? And seeing that moral evil is in reality a form of mental disease or ignorance, who or what created this
Page-644 law or inevitable connection which punishes a mental disease or act of ignorance by a recoil so terrible, by tortures often so extreme and monstrous ? The inexorable law of Karma is irreconcilable with a supreme moral and personal Deity, and therefore the clear logic of Buddha denied the existence of any free and all-governing personal God ; all personality he declared to be a creation of ignorance and subject to Karma. In truth, the difficulty thus sharply presented arises only if we assume the existence of an extra-cosmic personal God, not Himself the universe, one who has created good and evil, pain and suffering for His creatures, but Himself stands above and unaffected by them, watching, ruling, doing His will with a suffering and struggling world or, if not doing His will, if allowing the world to be driven by an inexorable law, unhealed by Him or inefficiently helped, then not God, not omnipotent, not all-good and all-loving. On no theory of an extra-cosmic moral God, can evil and suffering be explained,—the creation of evil and suffering,— except by an unsatisfactory subterfuge which avoids the question at issue instead of answering it or a plain or implied Manichaeism which practically annuls the Godhead in attempting to justify its ways or excuse its works. But such a God is not the Vedantic Sachchidananda. Sachchidananda of the Vedanta is one existence without a second ; all that is, is He. If then evil and suffering exist, it is He that bears the evil and suffering in the creature in whom He has embodied Himself. The problem then changes entirely. The question is no longer how came God to create for His creatures a suffering and evil of which He is himself incapable and therefore immune, but how came the sole and infinite Existence-Conscious-ness-Bliss to admit into itself that which is not bliss, that which seems to be its positive negation.
Half of the moral difficulty—that difficulty in its one unanswerable form disappears. It no longer arises. can no longer be put. Cruelty to others, I remaining immune or even participating in their sufferings by subsequent repentance or belated pity, is one thing; self-infliction of suffering, I being
Page-645 the sole existence, is quite another. Still the ethical difficulty may be brought back in a modified form; All-Delight being necessarily all-good and all-love, how can evil and suffering exist in Sachchidananda, since he is not mechanical existence, but free and conscious being, free to condemn and reject evil and suffering ? We have to recognise that the issue so stated is also a false issue because it applies the terms of a partial statement as if they were applicable to the whole. For the ideas of good and of love which we thus bring into the concept of the All-Delight spring from a dualistic and divisional conception of things ; they are based entirely on the relations between creature and creature, yet we persist in applying them to a problem which starts on the contrary from the assumption of One who is all. We have to see first how the problem appears or how it can be solved in its original purity, on the basis of unity in difference; only then can we safely deal with its parts and its developments, such as the relations between creature and creature on the basis of division and duality.
We have to recognise, if we thus view the whole, not limiting ourselves to the human difficulty and the human standpoint, that we do not live in an ethical world. The attempt of human thought to force an ethical meaning into the whole of Nature is one of those acts of
willful and obstinate self-confusion, one of those pathetic attempts of the human being to read himself, his limited habitual human self into all things and judge them from the standpoint he has personally evolved, which the most effectively prevent him from arriving at real knowledge and complete sight. Material Nature is not ethical ; the law which governs it, is a coordination of fixed habits which take no cognizance of good and evil, but only of force that creates, force that arranges and preserves, force that disturbs and destroys impartially, non-ethically, according to the secret Will in it, according to the mute satisfaction of that Will in its own self-formations and self-dissolutions. Animal or vital Nature is also non-ethical, although as it progresses it manifests the crude
Page-646 material out of which the higher animal evolves the ethical impulse. We do not blame the tiger because it slays and devours its prey any more than we blame the storm because it destroys or the fire because it tortures and kills ; neither does the conscious-force in the storm, the fire or the tiger blame or condemn itself. Blame and condemnation, or rather self-blame and self-condemnation, are the beginning of true ethics. When we blame others without applying the same law to ;ourselves, we are not speaking with a true ethical judgment, but only applying the language ethics has evolved for us to an emotional impulse of recoil from or dislike of that which displeases or hurts us. This recoil or dislike is the primary origin of ethics, but is not itself ethical. The fear of the deer for the tiger, the rage of the strong creature against its assailant is a vital recoil of the individual delight of existence from that which threatens it. In the progress of the mentality it refines itself into repugnance, dislike, disapproval. Disapproval of that which threatens and hurts us, approval of that which flatters and satisfies refines into the conception of good and evil to oneself, to the community, toot hers than ourselves, to other communities than ours, and finally into the general approval of good, the general approval of evil. But, throughout, the fundamental nature of the thing remains the same. Man desires self-expression, self-development, in other words, the progressing play in himself of the conscious-force of existence; that is his fundamental delight. Whatever hurts that self-expression, self-development, satisfaction of his progressing self, is for him evil; whatever helps, confirms, raises, aggrandise, ennobles it is his good. Only, his conception of the self-development changes, becomes higher and wider, begins to exceed his limited personality, to embrace others, to embrace all in its scope.
In other words, ethics is a stage in evolution. That which is common to all stages is the urge of
Sachchidananda towards self-expression. This urge is at first non-ethical, then infra-ethical in the animal, then in the intelligent animal even anti-ethical for it permits us to approve hurt done to others which we disapprove when done to our selves
.
Page-647 In this respect man even now is only half-ethical. And just as all below us is infra-ethical, so there may be that above us whither we shall eventually arrive , which is supra-ethical, has no need of ethics. The ethical impulse and attitude, so all-important to humanity, is a means by which it struggles out of the lower harmony and universality based upon inconscience and broken up by Life into individual discords towards a higher harmony and universality based upon conscient oneness with all existences. Arriving at that goal, this means will no longer be necessary or even possible, since the qualities and oppositions on which it depends will naturally dissolve and disappear in the final reconciliation. If, then, the ethical stand-point applies only to a temporary though all-important passage from one universality to another, we cannot apply it to the total solution of the problem of the universe, but can only .admit it as one element in that solution. To do otherwise is to run into the peril of falsifying all the facts of the universe, all the meaning of the evolution behind and beyond us in order to suit a temporary outlook and a half-evolved view of the utility of things. The World has three layers, infra-ethical, ethical and supra-ethical. We have to find that which is common to all; for only so can we resolve the problem. That which is common to all is, we have seen, the satisfaction of. conscious-force of existence developing itself into forms and seeking in that development its delight. From that satisfaction or delight of self-existence it evidently began; for it is that which is normal to it, to which it clings, which it makes its base ; but it seeks new forms of itself and in the passage to higher forms there intervenes the phenomenon of pain and suffering which seems to’ con-tradict the fundamental nature of its being. This and this alone is the root-problem.
How shall we solve it ? Shall we say that Sachchidananda is not the beginning and end of things, but the beginning and end is Nihil, an impartial void, itself nothing but containing all potentialities of existence or non-existence, consciousness or non-consciousness, delight or
unedited ?
Page-648 We may accept this answer if we choose; but although we seek thereby to explain everything, we have really explained nothing, we have only included everything. A Nothing which is full of all potentialities is the most complete opposition of teems and things possible and we have therefore only explained a minor contradiction by a major, by driving the self-contradiction of things to their maximum. Nihil is the void, where there can be no potentialities ; an impartial indeterminate of all potentialities is Chaos and all that we have done is to put Chaos into the Void without explaining how it got there. Let us return, then, to our original conception of Sachchidananda and see whether on that foundation a completer solution is not possible.
We must first make it clear to ourselves that just as when we speak of universal consciousness we meant something different from. more essential and wider than the waking mental consciousness of the human being, so also when we speak of universal delight of existence we mean something different from, more essential and wider than the ordinary emotional and sensational pleasure of the individual human creature. Pleasure, joy and delight, as man uses the words, are limited and occasional movements which depend on certain habitual causes and emerge, like their opposites pain and grief which are equally limited and occasional movements, from a background other than themselves. Delight of being is universal, illimitable and self-existent, not dependent on particular causes, the background of all backgrounds, from which pleasure, pain and other more neutral experiences emerge. When delight of being seeks to realise itself as delight of becoming, it moves in the movement of force and itself takes different forms of movement of which pleasure and pain are positive and negative currents. Subconscient in Matter, super-conscient beyond Mind this delight seeks in Mind and Life to realise itself by emergence in the becoming, in the increasing self-consciousness of the movement. Its first phenomena are dual and impure, move between the poles of pleasure and pain, but it aims at its self-revelation in
Page-649 the purity of a supreme delight of being which is self-existent and independent of object and causes. Just as Sachchidananda moves towards the realisation of the universal existence in the individual and of the form-exceeding consciousness in the form of body and mind, so it moves towards the realisation of universal. self existent and objectless delight in the flux of particular experiences and objects. Those objects we now seek as stimulating causes of a transient pleasure and satisfaction ; free, possessed of self, we shall not seek but shall possess them as reflectors rather than causes of a delight which eternally exists.
In the egoistic human being, the mental person emergent out of the dim shell of matter, delight of existence is neutral, semi-latent, still in the shadow of the subconscious, hardly more than a concealed soil of plenty covered by desire with a luxuriant growth of poisonous weeds and hardly less poisonous flowers, the pains and pleasures of our egoistic existence. When the divine conscious-force working secretly in us has devoured these growths of desire, when in the image of the Rig Veda the fire of God has burnt up the shoots of earth, that which is concealed at the roots of these pains and pleasures, their cause and secret being, the sap of delight in them, will emerge in new forms not of desire, but of self-existent satisfaction which will replace mortal pleasure by the Immortal’s ecstasy. And this transformation is possible because these growths of sensation and emotion are in their essential being, the pains no less than the pleasures, that delight of existence which they seek but fail to reveal,—fail because of division, ignorance of self and egoism.
Page-650 of the Worlds CHAPTER X THE SECOND GENESIS. If the deepest analysis brings us to the desire to be as the supreme reason for the existence of the worlds, if all is reduced at its origin to the preference of each being and each thing for itself and its own way of existing, does that not give some depth and truth to the simplest of all reasons that each being gives spontaneously and without reflection for the least of his actions? Why does the child or the ignorant man do this rather than that ? Because such is his desire and his preference. The understanding motives, the intellectual reasons come afterwards. Intelligence cultivates a cleverness in adorning every action with pretexts of good sense and education teaches everyone to justify in the name of principles called rational by our generally admitted conventions of thought what is at bottom nothing more than desire and preference. All the true reasons and transcendent motives a man can assign for the way in which he acts, can be reduced to this simple formula, "In that was my pleasure." So it is too with the wherefore of the worlds. The highest philosophy brings us no other reply; beings and worlds are because it was their pleasure to be.
But while it thus reveals to us the value of the most naive explanations, this fact should perhaps at the same time be a warning to us that all our philosophy, if it
Page-651 limited itself to such trenchantly simple data, would be only an ignorance concealed under a pomp of reasonings, ignorance unaware of itself. Certainly, it is from a central standpoint that we discover the primary reason of existence to have been an original fact of desire. But this point of view can only be central if it succeeds in grouping around itself others that complete it. If it were exclusive of other standpoints, it would no longer be true. Truth is a mutual relation of things which at once becomes falsified if even one of them misunderstands the rest. The desire to be, to exist distinct and separate from all that is not oneself, is evidently the essential cause of the world of forms and distinctions. If it is asked, "What was the cause of the universe ?’* we must reply, Itself. "Who was the creator of the being ?" "Itself: itself is its own object, itself alone its reason for existence." The universal manifestation is only the theatre on which all that wills to be affirms itself and advertises its existence. To be, to live, to exist for oneself, to take on individual consciousness, to play one’s own play of will, to exercise and increase one’s powers of personal action and reaction, to become something which is no longer the All and is yet the centre of all, to oppose and impose oneself on all, to be in oneself apart and alone the Absolute, such is the first creative desire. And in this creation to take place, to come to light, to be born, that is to say, to appear and substitute itself for what was before it and hold henceforth its place in the environment at the expense of others on the great scene of the world, to occupy that stage the most largely and for the longest time possible, to enjoy the sport of its lights and to play among its decorations, to be in the face of the universe a distinct, original and willing ego whose image shall be reflected as in innumerable mirrors by other egos,—such is the desire of all that is.
But if nothing but the spontaneity of desire can explain the principle and characteristics of the actual manifestation we observe, if, as we shall see, the very spectacle
Page-652 of its progressive evolution, the history of the cosmic epos, the memory of the dark abysses and brutal origins whence life was born, bear witness to and unceasingly confirm the truth that the first law was that of a blind and violent impulsion, yet can it not be affirmed that other laws and other principles have not combined with it and even been present in it to help in forming the worlds. *** If th: whole universe is needed to create a single grain of sand, the whole Absolute is needed to explain the smallest relativity and to allow of the existence of that grain of sand which is itself a universe,—all the Absolute, for the very reason that the Absolute is the All, the One, the identical and indivisible whole. Something of that Absolute may well think itself relative, that is to say, separated from the whole, something may well exclude itself from the whole in its desire to be for its own sake, in its will of individual affirmation, but the whole excludes nothing and everywhere where this relative something manifests itself , the entire Absolute is present along with it. No doubt, in its form of egoistic manifestation nothing is manifest except that egoism. But the indissoluble unity which renders inseparable and identical in being all the principles of the identical One, creates even in that egoistic form all the possibilities of the integral manifestation ; and as these possibilities come to be deployed in the progress of the becoming , each of those principles in its own turn comes also to be revealed .
That which leads most philosophies to recoil from the recognition of the egoism of desire as the one sufficient reason for the existence of the worlds, is the progress which the being has made from the point of its origin. The evolution of consciousness has long ago brought into sight the goal of the first impulsion. The being by the progressive elevation of his desire has, so to speak, put far from him his own origin. As it grows and bears fairer flowers and better fruits, the tree of Life has plunged its roots also
Page-653 more deeply towards the Unknown Divine. And because Love has to-day become a possible conscious reason for man’s actions and seems as if it were the final cause of the worlds, it is in Love that the religions think to find its first efficient cause. Thus they have provided themselves with reasons which otherwise they would not have had for their adoration of the creative act. But it is not in the beginning of things, it is before the beginning and outside of it, in the secret being of the Eternal that we can place what appears here only in the end. The birth to Love was for the being and is even to-day not its first but its second birth ; its principle was foreign to the first act of creation, foreign at least for our distinctive categories; for in the Absolute all is one and it is by reason of that unity that in the relative the manifestation of any principle conditions that of all the rest and makes them enter into the becoming. Desire by affirming itself egoistically obliges Love to participate in its creations. And in this obligation upon Love to manifest we find the pre-creative justification of the being’s coming into existence. Moreover, however egoistic this desire itself may be, is it not made of the very stuff of love ? Is it not a relative form of the absolute love of Being for itself, a love which retires into itself voluntarily limiting and rendering itself alien to all the possibles of the Infinite in order to concentrate on one of them ? And whence does it draw this power of exclusive concentration, this right to absolute self-conscience if not from the power and the right of the Absolute itself ? Is not this withdrawal of the being upon itself, this egoism a sort of individualistic equivalent to the withdrawal of the infinite Existence into that state of total concentration which we have called the absolute repose? Is it not a means for the individual being to proceed by the way of egoism towards the non-being ?
What a profound view opens to us here ! It is in the state of infinite manifestation, in the absolute movement that are found the condition and the occasion for the relative
Page-654 to appear and for the individual being to enter into the contrary state-of concentration. It is from the absolute activity that is born the possibility of individual limitation and the extinction of the being in the inertia of Matter, while on the contrary from the withdrawal of the eternal existence into itself is born the possibility of resurrection for the ephemeral being out of the broken tomb of relative forms into the infinite consciousness. The relative and the Absolute appear then like two poles of the Infinite which turn by turn become immerged in Being and in Non-being. * * * If the Absolute is there in all relativities, yet does each of them exclude it from its limited manifestation ; if in egoism itself Love is there, yet does each individual abolish the consciousness of it in himself. Thus every being puts on a double character ; he is a latent Absolute and he is a desire to be struggling to impose itself and maintain its limits in the All. Each ego is in a constant state of resistance to the Infinite, as is each grain of a sandbank to the assault of the Ocean. And although the Absolute is present in it, the effort after the conservation of form and limit, the refusal to be transformed which the resistance of Matter represents, opposes to the Absolute the obstacle of the individual consciousness and the barrier of its categories of Space and Time. But these barriers and obstacles exist only for the individual and in him . It is he alone who, in order to exist, refuses to see in the very obscurity of all these successive and ephemeral forms the ever-present splendour of the Eternal . For the absolute consciousness the relative universe is not distinct from the infinite modes of existence. As the desire which creates it is only one of the numberless possibilities of the infinite, so is it itself in the bosom of the infinite only one of the forms, only one of the movements of the eternal activity.
Nothing, then, can break the bond of unity which attaches the possibilities of the manifested world in spite
Page-655 of their desire of exclusion to all unmanifested possibilities. And it is precisely because each ego, although in dissoluble bound to all other egos, yet wishes to be isolated and thinks itself distinct, that the law of struggle becomes the law of existence ; for in this world of desire their very tie of interdependence creates the causes of their hostility. In their attempt at exclusive affirmation inseparable forms become antagonistic, common and mutual needs become rivals and that which is called love takes the form of strife. How could this love which in its primary forms is only a more passionate egoistic desire and in its origin appears no other than the need of a prey, change one day into the supreme gift, into self-sacrifice and self-forgetfulness, if the desire to be had alone formed the being and alone reigned over his becoming ? If desire had been the sole creator, it could only have created a chaos. And from this chaos how could anything better than itself have issued ? From the disorder of blind forces how, without the intervention of another principle, could there have ever arisen the harmony of a world ? How could light have been born out of the darkness and out of egoism love ? Desire could, by blinding itself, break the first unity; it could tear to pieces, not the Absolute, but the consciousness of the Absolute in each being; it could, by shutting up that consciousness in the narrow limits of its categories, create Number, Time, Space, the very stuff of the relative; from it are born the inertia and the resistance out of which form has been carved, but it could not be the sole formative power; it could create the dust from which the worlds were born, but it has not created the worlds themselves. In order that its Matter might be fertilises, all that it has excluded must first be present in that Matter and over the chaos of its creation there must brood that which was other than it.
When That which had not desired to affirm itself in this Matter, manifested there, when That which was pure, eternal and unconditioned liberty voluntarily, bound itself in
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the chains of Necessity, in the determinism of the becoming in order to break their constraints, when the Absolute entered, not out of desire, but by a sacrifice into the obscure forms of the relative, then indeed the being was born and the universe was engendered. That was the second genesis, the birth by Love.
Page-657 of the Veda CHAPTER X THE IMAGE OF THE OCEANS AND THE RIVERS. The three riks of the third hymn of Madhuchchhandas in which Saraswati has been invoked, run as follows, in the Sanskrit: — Pavaka nah saraswati, vajebhir vajinivati; yajnam vashtu dhiyavasuh. ChetantI sumatinam, chodayitri sunrttan’am; yajnam dadhe saraswati. Maho arnah saraswati, prachetayati ketuna; vicva dliiyo vi rajati.
The sense of the first two verses is clear enough when we know Saraswati to be that power of the Truth which we call inspiration. Inspiration from the Truth purifies by getting rid of all falsehood, for all sin according to the Indian idea is merely falsehood, wrongly inspired emotion, wrongly directed will and action. The central idea of life and ourselves from which we start is a falsehood and all else is falsified by it. Truth comes to us as a light, a voice, compelling a change of thought, imposing a new discernment of ourselves and all around us. Truth of thought creates truth of vision and truth of vision forms in us truth of being, and out of truth of being (salyatn) flows naturally truth of emotion, will and action. This is indeed the central notion of the Veda.
Page-658 Saraswati, the inspiration, is full of her luminous plenitudes, rich in substance of thought. She upholds the Sacrifice, the offering of the mortal being’s activities to the divine by awakening his consciousness so that it assumes right states of emotion and right movements of thought in accordance with the Truth from which she pours her illuminations and by impelling in it the rise of those truths which, according to the Vedic Rishis, liberate the life and being from falsehood, weakness and limitation and open to it the doors of the supreme felicity. By this constant awakening and impulsion, summed up in the word , perception , ketn , often called the divine perception , daivya ketu, to distinguish it from the false mortal vision of things, — Saraswati brings into active consciousness in the human being the great flood or great movement, the Truth-consciousness itself, and illumines with it all our thoughts . We must remember that this truth-consciousness of the Vedic Rishis is a supra-mental plane, a level of the hill of being (adreh sanu ) which is beyond our ordinary reach and to which we have to climb with difficulty . It is not part of our waking being, it is hidden from us in the sleep of the superconscient. We can then understand what Madhuchchhandas means when he says that Saraswati by the constant action of the inspiration awakens the Truth to consciousness in our thoughts.
But this line may, so far as the mere grammatical form of it goes, be quite otherwise translated; we may take maho amas in apposition to Saraswati and render the verse " Saraswati, the great ri- ir, awakens us to knowledge by the perception and shines in all our thoughts " . If we understand by this expression, "the great river," as Sayana seems to understand , the physical river in the
Punjab, we get an incoherence of thought and expression which is impossible except in a nightmare or a lunatic asylum. But it is possible to suppose that it means the great flood of inspiration and that there is no reference to the great ocean of the Truth-Consciousness. Elsewhere, however, there is repeated reference to the gods working by the vast power of the great flood (mahn4
Page-659 mahato arnavasya) where there is no reference to Saraswati and it is improbable that she should be meant. It is true that in the Vedic writings Saraswati is spoken of as the secret self of Indra,—an expression, we may observe, that is void of sense if Saraswati is only a northern river and Indra the god of the sky, but has a very profound and striking significance if Indra be the illumined Mind and Saraswati the inspiration that proceeds from the hidden plane of the supra-mental Truth. But it is impossible to give Saraswati so important a place with regard to the other gods as would be implied by interpreting the phrase mahtta mahato arnavasya in the sense by the greatness of Saraswati ". The gods act, it is continually stated, by the power of the Truth, r’iten’a, but Saraswati is only one of the deities of the Truth and not even the most important or universal of them. The sense I have given is, therefore, the only rendering consistent with the general thought of the Veda and with the use of the phrase in other passages. Let us then start from this decisive fact put beyond doubt by this passage—whether we take the great stream to be Saraswati itself or the Truth-ocean—that the Vedic Rishis used the image of water, a river or an ocean, in a figurative sense and as a psychological symbol, and let us see how far it takes us. We notice first that existence itself is constantly spoken of in the Hindu writings, in Veda, Purana, and even philosophical reasoning and illustration as an ocean. The Veda speaks of two oceans, the upper and the lower waters. These are the ocean of the subconscient, dark and inexpressive, and the ocean of the superconscient , luminous and eternal expression but beyond the human mind. Vamadeva in the last hymn of the fourth Mandala speaks of these two oceans. He says that a honeyed wave climbs up from the ocean and by means of this mounting wave which is the Soma, (ansha) one attains entirely to immortality; that wave or that Soma is the secret name of the clarity (ghr’itasya, the symbol of the clarified butter ) ; it is the tongue of the gods ; it is the nodes (nabhi) of immortality.
Samudra urmir madhumdn udardh,
Page-660
upslnshuna sam amritatvam eti ; Ghr’itasya name guhyam Yad asti, jive devanam amr’itasya nabhi. I presume there can be no doubt that the sea, the honey, the Soma, the clarified butter are in this passage at least psychological symbols. Certainly, Vamadeva does not mean that a wave or flood of wine came mounting up out of the salt water of the Indian Ocean or of the Bay of Bengal or even from the fresh water of the river Indus or the Ganges and that this wine is a secret name for clarified butter. What he means to say is clearly that out of the subconscient depths in us arises a honeyed wave of Ananda or pure delight of existence, that it is by this Ananda that we can arrive at immortality ; this Ananda is the secret being, the secret reality behind the action of the mind in its shining clarities. Soma, the god of the Ananda, the Vedanta also tells us, is that which has become mind or sensational perception ; in other words, all mental sensation carries in it a hidden delight of existence and strives to express that secret of its own being. Therefore Ananda is the tongue of the gods with which they taste the delight of existence; it is the nodes in which all the activities of the immortal state or divine existence are bound together. Vamadeva goes on to say " Let us give expression to this secret name of the clarity, —that is to say, let us bring out this Soma wine, this hidden delight of existence; let us hold it in this world-sacrifice by our surrenderings or submissions to Agni, the divine Will or Conscious-Power which is the Master of being. He is the four-horned Bull of the worlds and when he listens to the soul-thought of man in its self-expression, he ejects this secret name of delight from its hiding-place.
Vayam nama pra bravama ghr’itasya, asmin yajne dharayama namobhih; Upa brahma crin’avach chhasyamanam, chatubcr’ingo avamid gaura etat. Let us note, in passing, that since the wine and the clarified butter are symbolic, the sacrifice also must be symbolic.
Page-661 In such hymns as this of Vamadeva the ritualistic veil so elaborately woven by the Vedic mystics vanishes like a dissolving mist before our eyes and there emerges the Vedantic truth, the secret of the Veda. Vamadeva leaves us in no doubt as to the nature of the Ocean of which he speaks; for in the fifth verse he openly describes it as the ocean of the heart, hridd samudrdt, out of which rise the waters of the clarity, ghr’itasya bhdvdh ; they flow, he says, becoming progressively purified by the mind and the inner heart, antare hridd manasd ptiyamdndh. And in the closing verse he speaks of the whole of existence being triply established, first in the seat of Agni—which we know from other risk to be the Truth-Consciousness, Agni’s own home, swam damam r’itam br’ihat,—secondly, in the heart, the sea, which is evidently the same as the heart-ocean,—thirdly, in the life of man. Dharmam te visva bhuvanam adhi r’itam, antah samudra hr’idyantar ayashti. The superconscient, the sea of the subconscient, the life of the living being between the two,—this is the Vedic idea of existence.
The sea of the superconscient is the goal of the rivers of clarity, of the honeyed wave, as the sea of the subconscient in the heart within is their place of rising. This upper sea is spoken of as the Sindhu, a word which may mean either river
to ocean; but in this hymn it clearly means ocean. Let us observe the remarkable language in which Vamadeva speaks of these rivers of the clarity. He says first that the gods sought and found the clarity, the ghritam, triply placed and hidden by the Panis in the cow,
gave. Is is beyond doubt that gait is used in the Veda in the double sense of Cow and Light ; the Cow is the outer symbol, the inner meaning is the Light. The figure of the cows stolen and hidden by the Panis is constant in the Veda. Here it is evident that as the sea is a psychological symbol—the heart-ocean, samudre
hridd,— and the Soma is a psychological symbol and the clarified butter is a psychological symbol, the cow in which the Page-662 gods find the clarified butter hidden by the Panis must also symbolise an inner illumination and not physical light. The cow is really Aditi . the infinite consciousness hidden in the subconscient, and the triple ghritam is the triple clarity of the liberated sensation finding its secret of delight, of the thought-mind attaining to light and intuition and of the truth itself, the ultimate supra-mental vision. This is clear from the second half of the verse in which it is said ” One Indra produced, one Surya, one the gods fashioned by natural development out of Vena;" for Indra is the Master of the thought-mind, Surya of the supra-mental light, Vena is Soma, the master of mental delight of existence, creator of the sense-mind.
We. may observe also in passing that the Panis here must perforce be spiritual enemies, powers of darkness, and not Dravidian gods or Dravidian tribes or
Dravidian merchants. In the next verse Vamadeva says of the streams of the
ghri ‘tian that they move from- the heart-ocean shut up in a hundred prisons (pens) by the enemy so that they are not seen. Certainly, this does not mean that rivers of ghee—or of water, either—rising from the heart-ocean or any ocean were caught on their way by the wicked and unconscionable Dravidians and shut up in a hundred pens so that the Aryans or the Aryan gods could not even catch a glimpse of them. We perceive at once that the enemy,
Pain, Vritra of the hymns is a purely psychological conception and not an attempt of our forefathers to conceal the facts of early Indian history from their posterity in a cloud of tangled and inextricable myths. The Rishi Vamadeva would have stood aghast at such an unforeseen travesty of his ritual images. We are not even helped if we take
ghritam in the sense of water, hridya samudra in the sense of a delightful lake, and suppose that the Dravidians enclosed the water of the rivers with a hundred dams so that the Aryans could not even get a glimpse of them. For even if the rivers of the Punjab all flow out of one heart-pleasing lake, yet their streams of water cannot even so have been triply placed in a cow and the cow hidden in a cave by the cleverest and most inventive Dravidians.
Page-663 " These move" says Vamadeva " from the heart-ocean; penned by the enemy in a hundred enclosures they cannot be seen ; I look towards the streams of the clarity, for in their midst is the Golden Reed. Entirely they stream like flowing rivers becoming purified by the heart within and the mind ; these move, waves of the clarity, like animals under the mastery of their driver. As if on a path in front of the Ocean ( Sindhu, the upper ocean ) the mighty ones move compact of forceful speed but limited by the vital force ( vata,, Vayu), the streams of clarity ; they are like a straining horse which breaks its limits, as it is nourished by the waves." On the very face of it this is the poetry of a mystic concealing his sense from the profane under a veil of images which occasionally he suffers to grow transparent to the eye that chooses to see. What he means is that the divine knowledge is all the time flowing constantly behind our thoughts, but is kept from us by the internal enemies who limit our material of mind to the sense-action and sense-perception so that though the waves of our being beat on banks that border upon the superconscient, the infinite, they are limited by the nervous action of the sense-mind and cannot reveal their secret. They are like horses controlled and reined i n ,only when the waves of the light have nourished their strength to the full does the straining steed break these limits and they flow freely towards That from which the Soma-wine is pressed out and the sacrifice is born.
Yatra somah suyate yatra yajno, ghr’itasya dhara abhi tat pavante. This goal is, again, explained to be that which is all honey,—ghr’itasya dhdrd madhumatpavante; it is the Ananda, the divine Beatitude. And that this goal is the Sindhu, the superconscient ocean, is made clear in the last rik, where Vamadeva says, " May .we taste that honeyed wave of thine"—of Agni. the divine Purusha, the four-horned Bull of the worlds—" which is borne in the force of the Waters where they come together."
Apam antke samithe ya abhritah, tam acyama madhqmantam ta Armim, Page-664 We find this fundamental idea of the Vedic Rishi3 brought out in the Hymn of Creation ( X. 129 ) where the subconscient is thus described. "Darkness hidden by darkness in the beginning was this all, an ocean without mental consciousness…out of it the One was born by the greatness of Its energy. It first moved in it as desire which was the first seed of mind. The Masters of Wisdom found out in the non-existent that which builds up the existent; in the heart they found it by purposeful impulsion and by the thought-mind. Their ray was extended horizontally ; there was something above, there was something below." In this passage the same ideas are brought out as in Vamadeva hymn but without the veil of images. Out of the subconscient ocean the One arises in the heart first as desire; he moves there in the heart-ocean as an unexpressed desire of the delight of existence and this desire is the first seed of what afterwards appears as the sense-mind. The gods thus find out a means of building up the existent, the conscious being, out of the subconscient darkness; they find it in the heart and bring it out by the growth of thought and purposeful impulsion, pratishya, by which is meant mental desire as distinguished from the first vague desire that arises out of the subconscient in the levelly vital movements of nature. The conscious existence which they thus create is stretched out as it were horizontally between two other extensions; below is the dark sleep of the subconscient, above is the luminous secrecy of the superconscient. These are the upper and the lower ocean.
This Vedic imagery throws a clear light on the similar symbolic images of the Puranas, especially on the famous symbol of Vishnu sleeping after the pralaya on the folds of the snake
Anantam upon the ocean of sweet milk. It major perhaps be objected that the Puranas were written by superstitious Hindu priests or poets who believed that eclipses were caused by a dragon eating the sun and moon and could easily believe that during the periods of non-creation the supreme Deity in a physical bod3′ went to sleep on a physical snake upon a material ocean of real milk and that therefore it is a vain ingenuity to seek for
Page-665 a spiritual meaning in these fables. My reply would be that there is in fact no need to seek for such meanings; for these VJry superstitious poets have put them there plainly on the very surface of the fable for everybody to see who does not choose to be blind. For they have given a name to Vishnu’s snake, the name Ananta, and Ananta means the Infinite; therefore they have told us plainly enough that the image is an allegory and that Vishnu, the all-pervading Deity, sleeps in the periods of non-creation on the coils of the Infinite. As for the ocean, the Vedic imagery shows us that it must be the ocean of eternal existence and this ocean of eternal existence is an ocean of absolute sweetness, in other words, of pure Bliss. For the sweet milk ( itself a Vedic image ) has, evidently, a sense not essentially different from the madlm, honey or sweetness, of Vamadeva hymn. Thus we find that both Veda and Purana use the same symbolic images ; the ocean is for them the image of infinite and eternal existence. We find also that the image of the river or flowing current is used to symbolise a stream of conscious being. We find that Saraswati, one of the seven rivers, is the river of inspiration flowing from the Truth-consciousness. We have the right then to suppose that the other six rivers are also psychological symbols.
But we need not depend entirely on hypothesis and inference, however strong and entirely convincing. As in the hymn of Vamadeva we have seen that the rivers, ghr’itasya
dharmah, are there not rivers of clarified butter or rivers of physical water, but psychological symbols, so we find in other hymns the same compelling evidence as to the image of the seven rivers. For this purpose I will examine one more hymn, the first Sukta of the third
Mandala sung by the Rishi
Viswamitra to the god Agni ; for here he speaks of the seven rivers in language as remarkable and
unmistakable as the language of Vamadeva about the rivers of clarity. We shall find precisely the same ideas recurring in quite different contents in the chants of these two sacred singers.
Page-666 VISHNU, THE ALL-PERVADING GODHEAD Rigveda. I. 154. 1. Of Vishnu now I declare the mighty works, who has measured out the earthly worlds and that higher seat of our self-accomplishing he supports, he the wide-moving, in the threefold steps of his universal movement. 2 That Vishnu affirms on high by his mightiness and he is like a terrible lion that ranges in the difficult places, yea, his lair is on the mountain tops, he in whose three wide movements all the worlds find their dwelling-place. b. Let our strength and our thought go forward to Vishnu the all-pervading, the wide-moving Bull whose dwelling-place is on the mountain, he who being One has measured all this long and far-extending seat of our self-accomplishing by only three of his strides. 4. He whose three steps are full of the honey-wine and they perish not but have ecstasy by the self-harmony of their nature ; yea, he being One holds the triple principle and earth and heaven also, even all the worlds.
5. May I attain to and enjoy that goal of his movement, the Delight, where souls that seek the
Page-667 godhead have the rapture ; for there in that highest step of the wide-moving Vishnu is that Friend of men who is the fount of the sweetness. & 6. Those are the dwelling-places of ye twain which we desire as the goal of our journey where the many-horned herds of Light go traveling ; the highest step of wide-moving Vishnu shines down on us here in its manifold vastness. COMMENTARY
The deity of this hymn is Vishnu the all-pervading, who in the Rig Veda has a close but covert connection and almost an identity with the other deity exalted in the later religion, Rudra. Rudra is a
fierce and violent godhead with a beneficent aspect which approaches the supreme blissful reality of Vishnu ; Vishnu’s constant friendliness to man and his helping gods is shadowed by an aspect of formidable violence,—"like a terrible lion ranging in evil and difficult places"—which is spoken of in terms more ordinarily appropriate to Rudra. Rudra is the father of the vehemently-battling Maruts; Vishnu is hymned in the last Sukta of the fifth Mandala under the name of
Eva ya Maruts as the source from which they sprang, that which they become and himself identical with ;he unity Page-668 and totality of their embattled forces. Rudra is the Deva or Deity ascending in the cosmos, Vishnu the same Deva or Deity helping and evoking the powers of the ascent. It was a view long popularised by European scholars that the greatness of Vishnu and Siva in the Puranic the agonies was a later development and that in the Veda these gods have a quite minor position and are inferior to Indra and Agni. It has even become a current opinion among many scholars that Shiva was a later conception borrowed from the Dravidians and represents a partial conquest of the Vedic religion by the indigenous culture it had invaded. These errors arise inevitably as part of the total misunderstanding of Vedic thought for which the old Brahmani ritualism is responsible and to which European scholarship by the exaggeration of a minor and external element in the Vedic mythology has only given a new and yet more misleading form. The importance of the Vedic gods has not to be measured by the number of hymns devoted to them or by the extent to which they are invoked in the thoughts of the Rishis, but by the functions which they perform. Agni and Indra to whom the majority of the Vedic hymns are addressed, are not greater than Vishnu and Rudra, but the functions which they fulfil in the internal and external world were the most active, dominant and directly effective for the psychological discipline of the ancient Mystics ; this alone is the reason of their predominance. The Maruts, children of Rudra, are not divinities superior to their fierce and mighty Father ; but they have many hymns addressed to them and are far more constantly mentioned in connection with other gods, because The function they fulfilled was of a constant and immediate importance in the Vedic discipline. On the other hand, Vishnu, Rudra, Brahmanaspati, the Vedic originals of the later Puranic Triad, Vishnu-Shiva-Brahma, provide the conditions of the Vedic work and, assist it from behind the more present and active gods, but are less close to it and in appearance less continually concerned in its daily movements.
Brahmanaspati is the creator by the Word; he calls light and visible cosmos out of the darkness of the inconscient ocean and speeds the formations of conscious being upward
Page-669 to their supreme goal. It is from this creative aspect of Brahmanaspati that the later conception of Brahma the Creator arose. For the upward movement of Brahmanaspati formations Rudra supplies the force. He is named in the Veda the Mighty One of the Heaven, but he begins his work upon the earth and gives effect to the sacrifice on the five planes of our ascent. He is the Violent One who leads the upward evolution of the conscious being; his force battles against all evil, smites the sinner and the enemy; intolerant of defect and stumbling he is the most terrible of the gods, the one of whom alone the Vedic Rishis have any real fear. Agni, the Kumara, prototype of the Puranic Skanda, is on earth the child of this force of Rudra. The Maruts, vital powers which make light for themselves by violence, are Rudra’s children. Agni and the Maruts are the leaders of the fierce struggle upward from Rudras first earthly, obscure creation to the heavens of thought, the luminous worlds. But this violent and mighty Rudra who breaks down all defective formations and groupings of outward and inward life, has also a beginner aspect. He is the supreme healer. Opposed, he destroys ; called on for aid and propitiated he heals all wounds and all evil and all sufferings. The force that battles is his gift, but also the final peace and joy. In these aspects of the Vedic god are all the primitive materials necessary for the evolution of the Puranic Shiva-Rudra, the destroyer and healer, the auspicious and terrible, the Master of the force that acts in the worlds and the Yogin who enjoys the supreme liberty and peace.
For the formations of Brahmanaspati word, for the actions of Rudra’s force Vishnu supplies the necessary static elements,—Space, the ordered movements of the worlds, the ascending levels, the highest goal. He has taken three strides and in the space created by the three strides has established all the worlds. In these worlds he the all-pervading dwells and give less or greater room to the action and movements of the gods. When Indra would slay Vritra, he first prays to Vishnu, his friend and comrade in the great struggle, " O Vishnu, pace out in thy movement with an utter wideness," and in that wideness he destroys Vritra who limits, Vritra who covers. The supreme step of Vishnu, his highest seat,
Page-670 is the triple world of bliss and light, priyam padam , which the wise ones see extended in heaven like a shining eye of vision ; it is this highest seat of Vishnu that is the goal of the Vedic journey. Here again the Vedic Vishnu is the natural precursor and sufficient origin of the Puranic Narayana, Preserver and Lord of Love. In the Veda indeed its fundamental conception forbids the Puranic arrangement of the supreme Trinity and the leaser prods. To the Vedic Rishis there was only one universal Deva of whom Vishnu, Rudra, Brahmanaspati, Agni, Indra., Vayu, Mitra, Varuna are all alike forms and cosmic aspects. Each of them is in himself the whole Deva and contains all the other gods. It was the full emergence in the Upanishads of the idea of this supreme and only Deva, left in-the Riks vague and undefined and sometimes even spoken of in the neuter as That or the one sole existence, the ritualistic limitation of the other goods and the progressive precision of their human or personal aspects under the stress of a growing mythology that led to their degradation and the enthronement of the less used and more general names and forms, Brahma, Vishnu and Rudra, in the final Puranic formulation of the Hindu theology. In this hymn of Dirghatamas Auchathya to the all-pervading Vishnu it is his significant activity, it is the greatness of Vishnu’s three strides that is celebrated. We must dismiss from our minds the ideas proper to the later mythology. We have nothing to do here with the dwarf Vishnu, the Titan Bali and the three divine strides which took possession of Earth, Heaven and the sunless sub terrestrial worlds of Patella. The three strides of Vishnu in the Veda are clearly defined by Dirghatamas as earth, heaven and the triple principle, tighten. It is this triple principle beyond Heaven or superimposed upon it as its highest level, ndkasya prishthe, which is the supreme stride or supreme seat of the all-pervading deity.
Vishnu is the wide-moving one. He is that which has gone abroad—as it is put in the language of the Isha Upanishad, so paryagat,—triply extending himself as Seer, Thinker and Former, in the superconscient Bliss, in the heaven of mind, in the earth of the physical consciousness, tredhtt vichahra-mrtn’ah. In those three strides he has measured out, he has
Page-671 formed in all their extension the earthly worlds ; for in the Vedic idea the material world which we inhabit is only one of several steps leading to and supporting the vital and mental worlds beyond. In those strides he supports upon the earth and mid-world,—the earth the material, the mid-world the vital realms of Vayu, Lord of the dynamic Life-principle, —the triple heaven and its three luminous summits, tartan’ irochand. These heavens the Rishi describes as the higher seat of the fulfilling. Earth, the mid-world and heaven are the triple place of the conscious being’s progressive self-fulfilling, trishadasthe, earth the lower seat, the vital world the middle, heaven the higher. All these are contained in -:he threefold movement of Vishnu.* But there is more ; there is also the world where the self-fulfilment is accomplished, Vishnu’s highest stride. In the second verse the seer speaks of it simply as " that "; " that " Vishnu, moving yet forward in his third pace affirms or firmly establishes, pra satiate, by his divine might. Vishnu is then described in language which hints at his essential identity with the terrible Rudra, the fierce and dangerous Lion of the worlds who begins in the evolution as the Master of the animal, Peculate, and moves upward on the mountain of being on which he dwells, ranging through more and more difficult and inaccessible places, the stands upon the summits. Thus in these three wide movements of Vishnu all the five worlds and their creatures have their habitation. Earth, heaven and "that" world of bliss are the three strides. Between earth and heaven is the Antariksha , the vital worlds, literally " the intervening habitation ". Between heaven and the world of bliss is another vast Antariksha or intervening habitation, Maharloka, the world of the superconscient Truth of things. + The force and the thought of man, the force that proceeds from Rudra the Mighty and the thought that proceeds from Brahmanaspati, the creative Master of the Word, have to go forward in the great journey for or towards this Vishnu
* Vishn’or nu Kam viryan’i pra avocham, yah parthivani vimame ra— jânsi ; yo askabhayad uttaraam satatam, vichakraman’as tredhoru-gayah. f Pra tad vachah satiate vtryen’a, merino na bhtmah kucharo girish-thfth ; yasyorushu trishu vikraman’eshu, adhikshiyanti bhuvanfcni view.. Page-672 who stands at the goal, on the summit, on the peak of the mountain. His is this wide universal movement; he is the Bull of the world who enjoys and fertilises all the energies of force and all the trooping herds of the thought. This far-flung extended space which appears to us as the world of our self-fulfilment, as the triple altar of the great sacrifice has been so measured out, so formed by only three strides of that almighty Infinite.* All the three are full of the honey-wine of the delight of existence. All of them this Vishnu fills with his divine joy of being. By that they are eternally maintained and they do not waste or perish, but in the self-harmony of their natural movement have always the unfailing ecstasy, the imperishable intoxication of their wide and limitless existence. Vishnu maintains them unfailingly, preserves them imperishably. He is the One, he alone is, the sole-existing Godhead, and he holds in his being the triple divine principle to which we attain in the world of bliss, earth where we have our foundation and heaven also which we touch by the mental person within us. All the five worlds he upholds.! The tredhtt, the triple principle or triple material of existence, is the Sachchidananda of the Vedanta; in the ordinary language of the Veda it is vase, substance, retry, abounding force of our being, priyam, or may as, delight and love in the very essence of our existence. Of these three things all that exists is constituted and we attain to their fullness when we arrive at the goal of our journey. That goal is Delight, the last of Vishnu’s three strides. The Rishi takes up the indefinite word " tat" by which he first vaguely indicated it; it signified the delight that is the goal of Vishnu’s movement. It is the Ananda which for man in his ascent is a world in which he tastes divine delight, possesses the full energy of infinite consciousness, realises his infinite existence. There is that high-placed source of the honey-wine of existence of which the three strides of Vishnu are full. There the souls that seek the godhead live in the utter ecstasy of that wine of sweetness. There in the su-
* Pra Vaishnava usham etu mamma, girikshita Uruguayan vr’ishn’e; Ya Warn dirham pray tam sa drashtum, eko vimame tribhir it padrbhih.
+ Yasya tri purna madhu na paddling, aksMyaman’a swadhayfl. ma-danti j ya u
tredhtt prithivih uta dyam, eko
dad Uara bhuvanani Vicwa Page-673 preme stride, in the highest seat of wide-moving Vishnu is the fountain of the honey wine, the source of the divine sweetness,—for that which dwells there is the Godhead, the Deva, the perfect Friend and Lover of the souls that aspire to him, the unmoving and utter reality of Vishnu to which the wide-moving God in the cosmos ascends.* These are the two, Vishnu of the movement here, the eternally stable, bliss-enjoying Deva there, and it is those supreme dwelling-places of the Twain, it is the triple world of Sachchidananda which we desire as the goal of this long journey, this great upward movement. It is thither that the many-horned herds of the conscious Thought, the conscious Force are moving—that is the goal, that is their resting-place. There in those worlds , gleaming down on us here, is the vast, full, illimitable shining of the supreme stride, the highest seat of the wide-moving Bull, master and leader of all those many-horned herds,—Vishnu the all-pervading, the cosmic Deity, the Lover and Friend of our souls, the Lord of the transcendent existence and the transcendent delight.*
* Tad asya priyam abhi patho a .yam, naro yatra devayavo madanti ; arukramaaya sa hi bandhur ittha, vishn’oh pade parame madhva utsah.
* Ta vim vastany ushmasi gamadhyai, yatra gavo bh6ri(,-r’ing& ayasah, atr&ha tad urugayasya vr’ishn’ah, paramam padam ava bhfttl
Page-674 FIRST PART. 1. By whom missioned falls the mind shot to its mark ? By whom yoked does the first life-breath move forward on its paths ? By whom impelled is this word that men speak ? What god set eye and ear to their workings ? 2. That which is hearing behind the hearing, mind of the mind, the word behind the speech, that too is life of the life-breath, sight behind the sight. The wise find their release beyond and passing forward from this world they become immortal. 3. There sight attains not, nor speech attains, nor the mind. We know not nor can we discern how one should teach of That; for it is other than the known, and it is above beyond the unknown; so have we heard from the men of old who have declared That to our understanding. 4. That which remains unexpressed by the word, that by which the word is expressed, know that indeed to be the Brahman, not this which men follow after here.
5. That which thinks not by the mind*, that by which the mind is thought, know That indeed to be • Or, "that which one thinks not with the mind."
Page-675 the Brahman, not this which men follow after here. 6. That which sees not with the eye, f that by which one sees the eye’s seeing, know That indeed to be the Brahman, not this which men follow after here. 7. That which hears not with the ear*, that by which hearing is heard, know That to be the Brahman, not this which men follow after here. 8. That which breathes not with the breath.+ that by which the life-breath is led forward in its paths, know That indeed to be the Brahman, not this which men follow after here. SECOND PART. 1. If thou thinkest that thou knowest It well, little indeed dost thou know the form of the Brahman. That of it which is thou, that of it which is in the gods, this thou hast to think out. I think It known j 2. I think not that I know 11 well and yet I know that It is not unknown to me. He of us who knows it, knows That ; he knows that It is not unknown to him. 3. He by whom It is not thought out, has the thought of It ; he by whom It is thought out, knows It not. It is unknown to the discernment of those who discern of It, by those who seek not to discern of It, It is discerned. 4. When It is known by perception that reflects it, then one has the thought of It, for one finds im- + Or, "that which one sees not with the eye. " * Or, 41 that which one hears not with the ear."
+ Or, " that which one breathes not (i. e. smells not) with the breath-" Page-676 mortality ; by the self one finds the force to attain and by the knowledge one finds immortality. 5 If here one comes to that knowledge, then one truly is; if here one comes not to the knowledge, then great is the perdition. The wise distinguish That in all kinds of becomings and they pass forward from this world and become immortal. THIRD PART. 1. The Eternal conquered for the gods and in that victory of the Eternal the gods came to greatness. This was what they saw, " Ours is this victory, ours is this greatness." 2. That marked this thought of theirs ; to them That became manifest. They could not discern of That, what was this mighty Daemon. 3. They said to Agni ‘* O Knower of all Births, this discern, what is this mighty Daemon." He said, * So be it." 4. He rushed upon That; It said to him, " Who art thou?" "I am Agni," he said ”and I am the Knower of all Births." 5. " Since such thou art, what is the force in thee?" " Even all this I can burn, all this that is upon the earth." 6. That set before him a blade of grass ; " This burn. " He went towards it with all his speed and he could not burn it. Even there he ceased, even thence he returned ; "I could not discern of That, what is this mighty Daemon." 7. Then they said to Vayu, t; O Vayu, this discern, what is this mighty Daemon." He said, "So be it." Page-677 8. He rushed upon That; It said to him, " Who art thou ? " "I am Vayu," he said " and I am he that expands in the Mother of things. " 9. "Since such thou art, what is the force in thee?" ‘• 4 Even all this I can take for myself, all this that is upon the earth/’ 10. That set before him a blade of grass; "This take." He went towards it with all his speed and he could not take it. Even there he ceased, even thence he returned; " I could not discern of That, what is this mighty Daemon." 11. Then they said to Indra, " Master of plenitudes, get thou the knowledge, who? It is this mighty Daemon." He said, "So be it." He rushed upon That That vanished from before him. 12 He in the same ether came upon the Woman, even upon Her who shines out in many forms, Uma daughter of the snowy summits. To her he said, " What was this mighty Daemon ?" FOURTH PART. 1. She said to him, "It is the Eternal. Of the Eternal is this victory in which ye shall grow to greatness." Then alone he came to know that this was the Brahman. 2. Therefore are these gods as it were beyond all the other gods, even Agni and Vayu and Indra, because they came nearest to the touch of That…* 3. Therefore is Indra as it were beyond all the
* By some mistake of early memorisers Or later copyists the rest of the verse has become hopelessly corrupted. It runs, "They he first cams to know that it was the Brahman," which is neither fact nor sense nor grammar. The close of the third verse has crept into and replaced the
Page-678 other gods because he came nearest to the touch of That, because he first knew that it was the Brahman." 4. Now this is the indication of That,—as is this flash of the lightning upon us or as is this falling of the eyelid, so in that which is of the gods. 5. Then in that which is of the Self,— as the motion of this mind seems to attain to That and by it afterwards the will in the thought continually remembers It. 6. The name of That is "That Delight;" as That Delight one should follow after It. He who so knows That, towards him verily all existences yearn. 7. Thou hast said ;* Speak to me Upanishad";* spoken to thee is Upanishad. Of the Eternal verily is the Upanishad that we have spoken. 8. Of this knowledge austerity and self-conquest and works are the foundation, the Vedas are all its limbs, truth is its dwelling place. 9 He who knows this knowledge, smites evil away from him and in that vaster world and infinite heaven finds his foundation, yea, he finds his foundation.
* Upanishad means inner knowledge, that which hunters into the film Truth and
settles it. Page-679 CHAPTER VII. THE STANDARD OF CONDUCT The knowledge on which the Karmayogin has to found all his action and development is this that all work is part of an indivisible whole, all personal action is no separate movement determined by the egoistic will of individual but part of one indivisible cosmic action and this action itself is the indivisible movement of the One manifesting Himself progressively in the cosmos to a progressive self-consciousness in man. This action, this movement is not confined to the sum of cosmic action of which we ourselves are aware, but is supported by an immense environing existence which to us is subconscious, attracted by an immense transcending existence which to us is superconscious. Every principle of action which ignores this indivisible totality of the cosmic movement is in its very nature an ignorant principle and an imperfect view.
Even when we arrive at this idea, even when we succeed in fixing it in our consciousness as knowledge of the mind and as attitude of the soul, it is still difficult for us to square accounts between the universal standpoint and the claims of our personal opinion, personal will, personal emotion and desire. We cannot help thinking of this indivisible vital movement as if it were a mass of impersonal material out of which we, the ego, the person, have to carve something according to our own will and mental fantasy by a personal struggle and effort. This is Page-680 man’s normal attitude towards his environment, a right attitude so long as he cherishes his individuality and has not yet fully developed it, but an attitude whose hold upon our whole habit of existence is very difficult to shake off when we have no longer need of the individualistic and aggressive stage of development and would proceed forward to unity and universality. We must therefore clearly recognise that this movement, this universal action is not a helpless impersonal wave of being lending itself to the will of any ego according to that ego’s strength and insistence, but the movement of a cosmic Being, who is the Knower of His field, the Master of His own progressive force of action. As the movement is one and indivisible, so He who is expressed in the movement is one sole and indivisible. Not only all result, but all initiation, action and process are His activities and only belong secondarily to the creature.
What then is the position of the personal worker with regard to this one cosmic Being and this one total movement ? He is a centre only—a centre of the one personal consciousness, a centre also of the one total movement. His personality reflects in a wave of persistent individuality the one universal Personality,—a broken reflection because the crest of the wave which is our conscious waking self throws back only an imperfect similitude of the divine self. All our personal opinions, standards, formations, principles are therefore only attempts to represent in this broken movement something of the universal and progressive action and self-revelation of the Divine, to represent it as best we can with a less and less inadequate approximation. The Divine intends to reveal Himself progressively not only in the unity of the cosmos, not only in the collectivity of mankind, but in each individual. Therefore there is in the cosmos, in the collectivity, in the individual a rooted instinct or belief in its own perfectibility, a constant drive towards an ever increasing and more adequate and more harmonious self-development which it seeks to represent by standards of knowledge, feeling, character, aesthesis, action.
Page-681 For this very reason we must discard the idea that there can be anything absolute or eternal in any of our existing standards of conduct. To form higher and higher temporary standards is to help the Divine in its march; to erect rigidly an absolute standard is to attempt the erection of a barrier against the eternal waters in their onward flow. To realise this truth is to be delivered from the duality of good and evil. Good is whatever helps the individual and the world towards their divine fullness, evil is whatever retards or breaks up that increasing perfection. But since the perfection is progressive, evolu tive in Time, good and evil are also shifting quantities, change from time to time in their meaning. This thing which is evil now and in its present shape must be abandoned, was once helpful and necessary to the general and individual progress. That other thing which we now regard as evil, may well become in another form and arrangement an element in some future perfection. To those who can act only on a rigid standard, this truth seems to be a dangerous concession which is likely to destroy the very foundation of morality. Certainly, if the choice must be between an eternal and unchanging ethics and no ethics at all, it would have that result. But if we have light enough and flexibility enough to recognise that a standard of conduct may be temporary and yet necessary for its time and to observe it faithfully until it can be replaced by a better, then we suffer no such loss, but lose only the fanaticism of an imperfect and intolerant virtue and gain instead the power of continual moral progression, charity and the capacity of an understanding sympathy with all this world of struggling and stumbling creatures and by that capacity a better right and a greater strength to help it upon its way.
This, then, stands fixed for us that all standards by which we may seek to govern our conduct, are only temporary, imperfect and
evolu tive attempts to represent the progress of a divine manifestation, a universal self-realisation which is itself bound by no standards. We shall the better be able, having grasped this fact, at first disconcerting enough to the absolutism of our reason, to
Page-682 put in their right place and relation to each other the successive standards that govern the different stages in the growth of our individual and collective humanity* We may as well cast a glance at the most general of them so that we may understand how they are affected by that other standard less, natural and yet in a sense supernatural method of working which Yoga seeks for and which it calls the surrender of the individual and its unity with the divine Will. *** There are four principal standards which the conduct of humanity may follow—personal need and desire, the law and good of the collectivity, an ideal ethic and the highest law of the nature. Man starts with the two first of the four; they con. statute the law of his animal and vital existence. The business of man upon earth is to express in the type of humanity the growing image of the Divine; knowingly or unknowingly it is this which Nature is working out in him. But the material or animal man has necessarily no other guide to what is required of him than his own personal desire and need. To satisfy first his physical and vital needs and then whatever emotional or other cravings rise in him, must be the law of his conduct. The sole balancing law that can modify or contradict it is the satisfaction of the needs and desires of his family or community. If man could live to himself, if the development of the individual were the sole object of the Divine in the world, this second law would not at all come into operation. But all existence depends upon the mutual action and reaction of the whole and the parts, the constituents and the constitute, the group and the individuals of the group. In the language of Indian philosophy the Divine manifests itself always in the double form of the separative and the collective being (vyashti samashti). Therefore man is unable to satisfy even his own personal needs and desires except by conjunction with other men, and 23 Page-683 this obligation englobes his personal law of conduct in a group-law which arises from the formation of a group-entity. In itself this larger and overriding law is only an extension of the vital and animal principle which governs the individual elementary man. It is the law of the pack or herd. The individual identifies himself with a certain number of other individuals and since the existence of the group is necessary for his own existence and satisfaction, its preservation, the fulfilment of its needs and the satisfaction of its collective desires without which it would not hold together came to take a primary place. The satisfaction of personal need and desire had to be subordinated to the satisfaction of the needs and desires of the society. We do not actually know that at any time man lived to himself or with only his mate as do some of the animals. All record of him shows him to us as a social, not an isolated being, the law of the pack overriding his individual law of self-development. But logically, naturally, the law of personal need and desire is primary, the social law secondary. Man has in him two distinct master impulses, the individualistic and the communal, a personal life and a social life, a personal law of conduct and a social law of conduct. The possibility of their opposition and the attempt to find their equation lies at the very roots of human civilisation.
The existence of a social law external to the individual is at once a great advantage and a great disadvantage for the development of the divine in man. It is an advantage because it erects a power other than that of his personal egoism through which that egoism may be induced or compelled to moderate, to discipline, to a certain extent to lose itself in a larger and less personal egoism. It is a disadvantage because it is an external standard which seeks to impose itself on him from outside and the condition of man’s perfection is that he shall grow from within, grow in an increasing freedom, grow not by the suppression but by the transcendence of his perfected individuality.
Page-684 From the point view of society the absolute solution is that the individual should lose himself in the society, the smaller in the larger unit, that he should accept the need of the society as his own need, the desire of the society as his own desire, and live not for himself but for the tribe, clan, commune or nation to which he belongs. From the individual’s standpoint the absolute solution would be a society existing not for itself, but for the good of the individual and his fulfilment, representing his best self, respecting the freedom of each of its members, maintaining itself not by law and force but by the free and spontaneous consent of its constituent persons. Such an ideal society does not exist and would be most difficult to bring about so long as the individual keeps his egoism ; therefore the domination of the society over the individual is the easier method and the one that mankind first instinctively adopts. Therefore we see in early societies the absolute submission of the individual life to a rigorous and usually immobile communal law, the ancient and would-be eternal law of the pack. Nor is the ideal dead in humanity ; on the contrary the most recent trend of human progress is towards an enlarged re-edition of this ancient law of collective living. And herein lies a serious danger for the integral development. For the desires of the individual, however egoistic, however false or perverted in form, contain always the seed of some development necessary to the whole, carry always in them something that has to be kept and transmuted into the image of the divine ideal. Individualism is as necessary to the final perfection as collectivism ; the stifling of the individual is the stifling of God in man. And in the present balance of humanity there is seldom any real danger of exaggerated individualism breaking up the social integer, there is continually a danger of the exaggerated pressure of the social integer suppressing or unduly discouraging free individual development.
Against this danger Nature in the individual reacts. It may react by isolated resistance ranging from the instinctive and brutal revolt of the criminal to the complete pegation of the solitary and the ascetic. It may react by Page-685 asserting an individualistic trend in the society itself and arriving at a compromise between the individual and the social life. But a compromise is not a solution. In order to bring about a solution a new principle has to be called in other and higher than the two conflicting instincts and capable of at once overriding and reconciling them. Therefore above the natural individual law which sets up as the standard the satisfaction of the individual needs and desires and the natural communal law which sets up as a superior standard the satisfaction of the needs and desires of the community there had to arise the notion of an ideal moral law which is not the satisfaction of need and desire, but the controlling of them in the interests of an ideal order which is not animal and vital but mental. And the moment this notion becomes powerful in humanity, it begins to escape from the material life into the mental ; it climbs from the first to the second degree of the threefold ascent of Nature. Its needs and desires themselves become elevated and the mental need, the aesthetic, intellectual and emotional desire begin to predominate over the physical and vital.
The natural law means a conflict and equilibrium of for-ces. desires and impulsions; the moral law means the development of mental and moral qualities towards a standard or ideal of absolute qualities,—justice, righteousness, love, reason, right power, beauty, light. It is therefore essentially an individual standard. The thinker is the individual ; it is he who calls out and throws out into forms that which would otherwise remain subconscious in humanity. The moral striver is also the individual; self-discipline not by the yoke of an eternal law, but in obedience to an internal light is essentially an individual effort. But by positing his personal standard as the translation of an absolute moral ideal the thinker imposes it not only on himself, but on all individuals whom his thought can reach. And as the mass of individuals come to
accept it, society also is compelled to obey the new orientation. It absorbs it and tries to mould its institutions into new forms indicated by
Page-686 law, into custom , into an external social compulsion upon the individual; for long after the individual has become partially free, a moral organism capable of inward life and growth, society continues to be external in its methods, a material and economic organism, mechanical, intent upon status and self-preservation rather than growth and self-perfection. The greatest present triumph of the thinking and progressive individual over the instinctive and static society has been to compel it to open itself to the idea of social justice and righteousness, communal love, mutual compassion, unity, reason rather than custom as the right test of its institutions, mental and moral force as essential to the validity of its laws, light rather than force as its sanction, moral development and not vengeance or restraint as the object even of its penal action. His greatest future triumph will be when he can persuade the individual and society to rest their life and union and stability upon free and harmonious consent and self-adaptation and to govern the external by the internal rather than to constrain the internal by the tyranny of the external. But even such triumph as he has gained is rather in potentiality than in actual accomplishment. We have therefore always with us a struggle and a discord between the moral law in the individual and the law of his needs and desires, between the moral law proposed to society and the physical and vital needs, desires, customs, prejudices, interests and passions of the caste, the clan, the religious community, the society, the nation. The moralist erects in this struggle his absolute standard. To him the needs and desires of the individual are entirely invalid if they conflict with the moral law; the social law has no claims upon him if it conflicts with right and conscience. This is his absolute solution that the individual shall have no desires and claims that are not consistent with love, truth and justice and that the community or nation shall hold all things cheap, even its safety and its most pressing interests, in comparison with truth, justice and humanity.
No society yet created satisfies this ideal; not only so, but in the present state of morality and of human development,
Page-687 none perhaps can or ought to satisfy it. Nature will not allow it, Nature knows that it should not be. The first reason is that our moral ideals are themselves ill-evolved, ignorant and arbitrary. They assert certain absolute standards in theory; in practice every existing system of ethics proves either in application unworkable or is in fact a constant coming short of the absolute standard. If it is a compromise or a makeshift, it gives at once a principle of justification to the farther compromises which society and the individual seek to make with it. If it insists on absolute love , justice, right, it is found to ignore other elements in humanity which equally insist on survival, yet refuse to come within the moral formula. For just as the individual law of desire contains within it invaluable elements of the final perfection which have to be protected against the tyranny of the absorbing social idea, so also the innate impulses of individual and collective man contain in them invaluable elements which escape the limits of any ethical formula yet discovered and are yet necessary to the eventual divine in man. Moreover absolute love, absolute justice, absolute right reason become in their present application by humanity conflicting principles. Justice seems to demand what love abhors; right reason considering the facts of nature and human relations dispassionately in search of a satisfying norm or rule is unable to admit without modification either absolute justice or absolute love All our standards of action become in fact a flux of compromises. Humanity there for wavers from one orientation to another, moves upon a zigzag path led by conflicting claims and, on the whole, works out instinctively what Nature intends, though with much waste and suffering, rather than either what it desires or what it holds to be right.
The truth is that when we have reached the conception of absolute moral qualities constituting a moral law we have not come to the end. We have got something which helps us to rise beyond limitation by the physical and vital man, by the individual and collective needs and desires of humanity and to develop the mental and
moral)
Page-688 being in us ; but beyond the mental and moral being is the spiritual. It is only when we rise to the spiritual plane that we can arrive at the harmony or rather the unification of the conflicting or wavering elements of the moral law itself or at the unification of the vital and physical and the mental man in that which is at once the secret source and goal of both. There alone is there any possibility of absolute justice, love and reason becoming one in the light of divine knowledge or of our body, life and mind agreeing in the right law of our divine being. In other words beyond society’s external law and man’s moral law is a law divine towards which both are progressive steps from the natural law of the animal. And that divine standard, since God in us is our existence moving towards its own concealed perfection, must be the supreme law of our nature. Again, as we are human beings with a common humanity and yet variable individuals, it must be at once in its unity a supreme law of human nature for the collectivity and in its variation a supreme law of our own nature for the individual human expression of the divine.* In experience we find that this supreme law when we follow it to its last expression, is at the same time an absolute liberty. Moralists seek to fix this supreme law in morality itself by selecting a fundamental principle of conduct, whether utility or hedonism or reason or another; but all such efforts fail to justify themselves. They are essentially unsound ; for human nature, the progressive expression of God in man, is too complex a thing to be tied down to a single dominant principle. The later religions seek to fix it by declaring a law of God through the mouth of an Avatar or prophet; but these also, though they are more powerful, turn out to be idealistic glorifications of the moral principle and either, like the Christian or Buddhistic, are rejected by Nature because they insist unworkably on this or that absolute principle or turn out in the end to be evolutionary compromises which become obsolete in the march of Time.
• Therefore the Gita defines "dharma an expression which means more than either religion or morality, as action controlled by our essential manner of self-being. Page-689 The older religions erected their law of the wise, of Mann or Confucius, their Shastra in which they attempted to combine the social rule, the moral law and the declaration of certain eternal principles of our being in some kind of unity. But he.-e also two of the elements are evolutionary and the third by being fixed to certain social and moral formulas has to share the fortunes of its forms. Therefore, either the Shastra grows obsolete and has to be progressively changed or finally cast away or else it becomes a rigid barrier to the self-development of humanity. Moreover, it tends always to erect a collective and external standard and ignore the inner nature of the individual. But the nature of the individual will not be ignored; its demand is inexorable ; its unrestrained indulgence may lead to anarchy and dissolution, but its suppression and coercion by a fixed and mechanical law spells stagnation and death. The truth is that as the moral law is discovered by the individual in himself and then extended to humanity in general, so also the supreme law must be discovered by the individual in himself and then extended to other men not by imposing a rule on them, but by showing them how to discover it equally in themselves. The spiritual life refuses to be mechanised and bound down ; it has its own great lines, but these develop in the man himself according to the standard of his own being and not by a mechanical rule or according to an external norm and standard. The generalisation of the spiritual life can alone lead to individual and social perfection. Only by our coming into constant touch with the absolute can some form of the conscious absolute realise itself in individual and collective man.
The culmination of this constant touch with the Supreme is that which we call surrender to the divine will and immergence of the separated
ego in the One who is all.
Page-690 all the lower discords resolve themselves into a victorious harmony. *** We see then that all conduct is the Divine expressing Himself progressively in the individual and collective man leading him first through his needs and desires, then through enlarged needs and desires modified and enlightened by a mental and moral ideal, finally by a spiritual realisation fulfilling and reconciling both the needs and desires and the mental and moral aspiration. By substituting for the separate straining of the individual as a separate ego the law of his universalised personality which, being universal, necessarily seeks not its separate gratifications but only the expression of its real and divine self which is one with all and in sympathy with each thing and creature and collectivity in existence, yet not bound by the egoism of any creature or collectivity, this final realisation gives the sure promise of a perfect reconciliation and a pure and flawless action. That action will not indeed follow any single principle or recognised rule; it is not likely to satisfy the standard either of the egoist, the practical man of the world. the formal moralist, the patriot, the philanthropist or the ideal philosopher; for it will proceed by a spontaneous out flowing from the totality of the being, the will and the knowledge and not by a selected, calculated and standardized action. Its sole aim will be the keeping together of the worlds in their progress towards the Divine and that will not be so much an aim as a spontaneous law of the being and intuitive determination of the action. Like the action of Nature it will proceed from a total will and knowledge behind, but a will and knowledge enlightened and no longer obscure, full of an impartial joy of existence and not bound by the dualities. It will be the action of a divine Will replacing the perplexities of the ego. If by some miracle of divine intervention all mankind at once could be raised to this level, we should have the golden Age of the traditions^ the Age of Truth or true existence, Satya Yuga, in which the Law is spontaneous and Page-691 conscious in each creature and does its own works in a perfect harmony and freedom. Unity being then the foundation of the consciousness of the race and no longer division, love would be absolute, equality would be perfect in difference, absolute justice would be secured by the spontaneous action of the being freely expressed and recognised .in its right result, right reason would be satisfied by the perception of right relations inevitably fulfilled ; the quarrel between the individual and society or between one community and another could not exist.
But in the actual state of humanity, it is the individual who must climb to this height as a pioneer and precursor and his isolation will necessarily give a determination and
a form to his activities which must be quite other than those of a consciously divine collective action. The inner state, the root of the actions will be the same ; but the actions themselves will be different. It is from this standpoint and not yet from that of the absolute ideal that the sadhaka of the integral Yoga has to consider the practical results of his surrender of all his works to the guidance of the divine Will within him.
Page-692 BOOK II 7HE DISCOVERY AND CONQUEST OF THE DIVINE IN ONESELF. I THE CONQUEST OF TRUTH THE EXAMPLE OF THE SAGE. 1 There are men in the world who labour to attain to spirituality and sages who are pure and perfect and can explain this life and the other of which they have 2 themselves acquired the knowledge.—There are some true and ardent aspirants who travel from place to place in search of this pass-word from a divine and perfect instructor which will open for them the doors of the eternal beatitude, and if in their earnest search one of them is so favored as to meet such a master and receive from him the word so ardently desired which is capable of breaking all chains, he withdraws immediately from society to enter into the profound retreat of his own heart and dwells there till he has succeeded in conquering eternal peace. 3 The company of saints and sages is one of the 4 chief agents of spiritual progress.—He that walketh 5 with the wise, shall be wise.—or in them there is a source of intelligence, a fountain of wisdom and a flood of knowledge. 6 To avoid the company of fools, to be in communion with the sages, to render honour to-that which 7 merits honor, is a great blessedness.—To avoid the company of fools, to take pleasure in being among the intelligent, to venerate those who are worthy of veneration, is a great blessedness.
1) Unknown.— 2) Ramakrishna__3) i d.— 4)Proverbs XIII 20.-5)—Esdras.—6) Mahaparinibbana Sutta.—7)
Mahaparinibbana Sutta. Page-693 8 Let us lend ear to the sages who point out to us 9 the way.—Employ all the leisure you have in listening to the well-informed ; so you shall learn without difficulty what they have learned by long labour.— 10 Question attentively, then meditate at leisure over 11 what you have heard.—Take delight in questioning; 12 hearken in silence to the word of the saints.—Happy is he who nourishes himself with these good words and shuts them up in his heart. He shall always be one of the wise. * * * 13 He who knows how to find instructors for himself, arrives at the supreme mastery…He who loves to ask, extends his knowledge ; but whoever considers only his own personal opinion becomes constantly narrower than he was. 14 Obey them that guide you and submit yourselves ; 15 for they watch over your souls.—And we beseech you to know them which labour among you and are over you and admonish you and to esteem them very highly 16 in love for their work’s sake.—Hold such in repute- 17 tion.—Take the pearl and throw from you the shell; take the instruction which is given you by your Master and put out of your view the human weaknesses of the teacher. 18-19 Alone the sage can recognize the sage.—The sage increases his wisdom by all that he can gather from 20 others.—None is wise enough to guide himself alone. 21 We must choose a virtuous man to be always present to our spirit and must live as if we were continually under his eyes and he were scrutinising all that we do. 22 Whosoever can cry to the All-Powerful with sincerity and an intense passion of the soul has no need
—8) Seneca—9)Isocrates__10)Confucius.—11) Imitation of
Christ—12)— Ecclesiasticus__13) Tsu-King.—14) Hebrews XIII. 17. lonians V.
12.13—16) Philippians II. 29.—17) Ramakrishna.—18) id1T-. 19)
Fenelon.—20) Imitation of Christ.—22)Ramakrishna.
Page-694 of a Master. But so profound an aspiration is very rare; 23 hence the necessity of a Master.—It is impossible to arrive at the summit of the mountain without passing 24 through rough and difficult paths.—To be ignorant of the path one has to take and set out on the way without a guide, is to will to lose oneself and run the 25 risk of perishing.—Seek for a guide to lead you to the gates of knowledge where shines the brilliant light that is pure of all darkness. * * * 26 My son, if thou hear keenest to me with application thou shalt be instructed and if thou appliest thy mind thou shalt get wisdom. If thou lend thine ear, thou shalt receive instruction and if thou love to heark- 27 en thou shalt grow wise.— I will show thee, hear me ; and that which I have seen I will declare, which 28 wise men have told :—All that man does comes to its perfection in knowledge. That do thou learn by prostration to the wise and by questioning and by serving them , they who have the knowledge and see the truths of things shall instruct thee in the knowledge. 29 —Lend thine ear, hear the words of the wise, apply thy 30 heart to knowledge.— Scorn not ‘the discourse of the 31 wise, for thou shalt learn from them wisdom.—Neglect not the conversation of the aged, for they speak that 32 which they have heard from their fathers.—Enquire, I pray thee, of the former age and prepare myself to search aftci the wisdom of their fathers…Shall they not teach thee and tell thee words out of their heart?— 33 Avoid the society of evil friends and men of vulgar minds ; have pleasure in that of the giants of wisdom and take as thy friends those who practice justice.— 34 Beyond all other men make thyself the friend of him
23) Confucius.—24) Hermes.—25) Dhammapada.-—26) Ecclesiasticus__ 27) lob XV.17-18.—28) Bhagavadgita 1 V-33-34__29) Proverbs XXII. 17.—30) Ecclesiasticus.—31) id.—32)Job VIII.8.10.— 38) Dhammapada-ia.— Pythagoras "Golden Verses".8 Page-695 who is distinguished by his virtue. Yield always to his gentle warnings and observe his honorable and 35 useful actions.—If thou meetest on the roads of life an intelligent friend who is following thy path, one full of justice, firmness and wisdom, then overcome all obstacles and walk at his side happy and attentive. 36 —Follow wise and intelligent men possessed of experience, patient and full of spirituality and elevation…Follow just and perfect men faithfully as the moon follows the path of the constellations. 37 If thou remain in isolation, thou shalt never be able to travel the path of the spirit; a guide is needed. Go not alone by thyself, enter not as a blind man into that ocean…Since thou art utterly ignorant what thou shouldst do to issue out of the pit of this world, how shalt thou dispense with a sure guide? 38 Blush not to submit to a sage who knows more 40 good.—Do not listen if one criticises or blames thy Master, 1 eave his presence that very moment. 41 Hearken to the word of the sage with the ear of the soul, even when his conduct has no similitude to his teachings. Men should listen to good counsel even though it be written on a wall. 42 One who thinks that his spiritual guide is merely a 43 man, can. draw no profit from, his contact.—Though my Master should visit the tavern, yet my master shall always be a saint. Though my Master should frequent the impious meeting-place of the drunkards and the sinners, yet shall he be always to me my pure and perfect Master. * * * 44 Opinions on the world and on God are many and conflicting and I know not the truth. Enlighten me, O my Master.
35) Dhammapada. — 36 id. — 37) Farid-ud-din-attar.—38) Democritus.—-89) Ptah-hotep.—40) Ramakrishna.—41) Sadie Gulistan.— 42) Rama* krishna.—43)id.—**) Hermes. Page-696 THE CHAIN. The whole world yearns after freedom, yet each creature is in love with his chains ; this is the first paradox and inextricable knot of our nature. Man is in love with the bonds of birth ; therefore he is caught in the companion bonds of death. In these chains he aspires after freedom of his being and mastery of his self-fulfilment. Man is in love with power ; therefore he is subjected to weakness. For the world is a sea of waves of force that meet and continually fling themselves on each other ; he who would ride on the crest of one wave, must faint under the shock of hundreds. Man is in love with pleasure ; therefore he must undergo the yoke of grief and pain. For unmixed delight is only for the free and passionless soul ; but that which pursues after pleasure in man is a suffering and straining energy. Man hungers after calm, but he thirsts also for the experiences of a restless mind and a troubled heart. Enjoyment is to his mind a fever, calm an inertia and a monotony. Man is in love with the limitations of his physical being, yet he would have also the freedom of his infinite mind and his immortal soul. And in these contrasts something in him finds a curious attraction ; they constitute for his mental being the artistry of life. It is not only the nectar but the poison also that attracts his taste and his curiosity. * * *
In all these things there
is a meaning and for all these contradictions there is a release. Nature has a method in Page-697 every madness of her combining and for her most inextricable knots there is a solution. Death is the question Nature puts continually to Life and her reminder to it that it has not yet found itself. If there were no siege of death, the creature would be bound forever in the form of an imperfect living. Pursued by death he awakes to the idea of perfect life and seeks out its means and its possibility. Weakness puts the same test and question to the strengths and energies and greatnesses in which we glory Power is the play of life, shows its degree, finds the value of its expression; weakness is the play of death pursuing life in its movement and stressing the limit of its acquired energy. Pain and grief are Nature’s reminder to the soul that the pleasure it enjoys is only a feeble hint of the real delight of existence. In each pain and torture of our being is the secret of a flame of rapture compared with’ which our greatest pleasures are only as dim flickering. It is this secret which forms the attraction for the soul of the great ordeals, sufferings and fierce experiences of life which the nervous mind in us shuns and abhors. The restlessness and early exhaustion of our active being and its instruments are Nature’s sign that calm is our true foundation and excitement a disease of the soul; the sterility and monotony of mere calm is her hint that play of the activities on that firm foundation is what she requires of us. God plays for ever and is not troubled. The limitations of the body are a mould ; soul and mind have to-pour themselves into them, break them and constantly remould them in wider limits till the formula of agreement is found between this finite and their own infinity. Freedom is the law of being in its illimitable unity, secret master of all Nature : servitude is the law of love in the being voluntarily giving itself to serve the play of its other selves in the multiplicity.
It is when freedom works in chains and servitude becomes a law of Force, not of Love, that the true nature of things is distorted and a falsehood governs the soul’s dealings with existence.
Page-698 Nature starts with this distortion and plays with all the combinations to which it can lead before she will allow it to be righted. Afterwards she gathers up all the essence of these combinations into a new and rich harmony of love and freedom. Freedom comes by a unity without limits; for that is our real being. We may gain the essence of this unity in ourselves; we may realise the play of it in oneness with all others. The double experience is the complete intention of the soul in Nature. Having realised infinite unity in ourselves, then to give ourselves to the world is utter freedom and absolute empire. Infinite, we are free from death ; for life then becomes a play of our immortal existence. We are free from weakness ; for we are the whole sea enjoying the myriad shock of its waves. We are free from grief and pain ; for we learn how to harmonise our being with all that touches it and to find in all things action and reaction of the delight of existence. We are free from limitation ; for the body becomes a plaything of the infinite mind and learns to obey the will of the immortal soul. We are free from the fever of the nervous mind and the heart, yet are not bound to immobility.
Immortality, unity and freedom are in ourselves and await there our discovery; but for the joy of love God in us will still remain the Many.
Page-699 The ancient, eternal teaching of unity has been cherished from the earliest times in India and. in spite of all obscurations of ignorance, all diminutions and deformations, all trials, challenges, and invading influences she has up to the present day clung faithfully to this supreme and central truth of all which other nations have thrown away in the struggle of existence or put aside, into the study and the cloister. We are therefore apt in India to look upon it as a peculiarity of this country or, if professed by others, then learnt from us. But the Truth has had its witnesses in all lands and in all ages; if it were not so, it would not be the eternal Truth, but a temporary doctrine or an individual or national idiosyncrasy of thought. We translate from a brief, but interesting volume * by a French writer on the schools and teachers of the doctrine of unity from the earliest times to the present days some passages expressing the doctrines of Lao-tse, the great Chinese thinker who lived and taught about six centuries before the Christian era. This account of the Taoism of Lao-tse is taken from a book by another French writer, Wu-Weir (Non-Resistance), t which is written in the form of an imaginary dialogue between a Chinese sage .and a foreign seeker of truth. TAO. "TAO is nothing else in reality, than what you foreigners call God. TAO is the One, the Beginning and the End,—he contains all things and to him all things return. TAO can have no name , precisely because it is the one. Wu, that is to say, Nothing,— behold TAO. Thou understands not ? Listen then. There exists an absolute Reality, without beginning, without end, beyond our comprehension, which therefore appears to us as if it
• The Doctrine of Unity, by A. L. Called. Paris, Ferdinand Dubai. f Wu-Weir, a Fiction based on the philosophy of Lao-tse, by Henri Boreal: translated into French by Pierre Bernard. Page-700 were Nothing. That which we can understand, that which has for us a relative reality, is in truth only an appearance. It is indeed a product of the absolute Reality, since everything emanates from that Reality and returns to it, but the things which are real to our eyes are not real in themselves. What we call Being, is in fact Non-Being, and what we call Non-Being is Being in the true sense. Thus we live in a great darkness. What we imagine to be real, is not real, yet emanates from the reality ; for the Real is all. Therefore both Being and Non-Being are TAO ; but forget not that this word is a sound articulated by a human being and’ that the idea is inexpressible. All things that the senses perceive and all the desires of thy heart are unreal. TAO is the source of Heaven and of Earth. One engendered Two, Two engendered Three, Three engendered the Myriads and the Myriads return into the One… Thou knowest that TAO is the origin of all, of the trees, the flowers, the birds, the sea, the deserts, the rocks, the light, the darkness, heat and cold, day and night, summer and winter and thy own life. The worlds and the oceans melt away into Eternity. Man emerges from the darkness, laughs for a moment in the clarity of the light and disappears; but in all these changing it is the One which manifests itself. TAO is in all, thy soul in its deepest self is TAO… Make no mistake—TAO is in what thou seest but it is not in the thing thou seest. Think not that TAO can be visible to thy eyes. TAO will not awake joy in thy heart; TAO will not extract from thy eyes tears for that which thou sufferers: for all emotions are relative and unreal. WU WEI
I will speak to thee of Wu Wei, of Non-Resistance, of the spontaneous movement directed by the impulsion in thee such as it was born from TAO. Men would be truly men if they allowed their life to flow of itself as the sea swells, as the flower blooms in the simple beauty of TAO. In every man there is the tendency towards the movement which proceeds from TAO and leads him back to
Page-701 TAO; but men are blinded by their senses and by their lusts…They cling to all that is unreal. They desire too many things to desire the One. Sometimes they desire to be wise and good and that is the worst of all. The sole remedy is to return to the source whence they come. TAO is in us; TAO is repose ; and it is solely by renouncing desire—even the desire of goodness and wisdom—that we can attain to the Repose. Those who know what TAO is, do not tell ; those who tell, do not know. I will not tell thee what TAO is ; it is for thee to discover it by liberating thyself from all passion and all craving, by living with an absolute spontaneity, exempt from all effort that is not natural. One must approach TAO without shock or effort, with a movement as calm as the flowing of the vast ocean…It is so that thou shalt return to TAO, and when thou shalt have returned to It, thou shalt not know It, for thou shalt have thyself become TAO. * * * No man can annihilate TAO and the imperishable light of the soul shines out in each of us. Think not that the perversity of man can be so great or so powerful. The eternal TAO inhabits in all of us. in the murderer and the harlot no less than in the thinker and the poet. They are all as alike in their essence as two grains of sand upon this rock, and none shall be banished from TAO for eternity, for all bear TAO in themselves. Their sins are illusory, unreal as a mist… They cannot be bad; no more can they be good; irresistibly they are drawn towards TAO as this drop of water towards the vast sea. It may take more time for some than for others, but that is all… TAO is neither good nor bad ; TAO is Real. J
TAO alone is and the life of unreal things is a’ life of false contrasts, false relations which have no independent existence and which lead into great error. So, above all, desire not to be good and call not thyself evil. Wu Wei —exempt from effort. carried on by the inherent Force in thee, that is what thou shouldest be. Not good or bad, not
Page-702 little nor great, not low nor high; then alone thou shalt really be although in the ordinary sense of the word, thou shalt have ceased to be. When thou shalt be delivered from all appearances, from all lusts and all desires, thou shalt be carried by thy own impulsion without being aware that thou movest, and this—the sole true principle of life, which is to move of one self, free and unhampered towards TAO—will be as easy and as inconscient as the dissolution of this little cloud above us. Speak not of this thirst of for wisdom. Desire not to know too much ; for so alone canst thou little by little become capable of knowing by intuition; the knowledge acquired by effort that is not natural only leads farther away from TAO … Especially desire not happiness too eagerly, nor have any fear of ill-fortune, for neither of them are real… TAO would not be TAO if thou couldst represent It as joy or suffering, good fortune or ill-fortune ; for TAO is a whole and there can be no contrasts in It…. Then for the first time, when thou shalt have become Wu Wei—non-existent in the vulgar sense of the word—all will go well for thee and thou shalt traverse life with a movement as c^lm and natural as that of the vast sea before us. Nothing will trouble thy peace. Thy sleep shall be dreamless and thy waking will bring thee no cares. Thou shalt see TAO in all things, thou shalt be one with all that exists ; thou shalt feel thyself as intimate with all Nature as with thy own self; and traversing with a calm submission the alternations of day and night, summer and winter, life and death, thou shalt enter one day into TAO in which there are no alternations and from which once thou hast issued utterly pure as pure thou shalt return to It. LOVE.
Thou knowest not what is love, nor what it is to love. I will tell thee ; Love is nothing other than the Rhythm Of TAO.
Page-703 I have said it to thee ; it is from TAO that thou comest, it is to TAO that thou shalt return … Woman reveals herself to thy eyes and thou thinkest that she is the end towards which the Rhythm leads thee, but even when this woman is thine and thou hast thrilled with her touch, thou feelest still the Rhythm within thee unappeased and thou learnest that to appease it thou must go beyond. Call it Love, if thou wilt; what matters a name ? I call it TAO… The beauty of woman is only a vague reflection of the formless beauty of TAO. The emotion she awakens in thee, the desire to blot thyself out in her beauty…believe me, it is nothing else than the rhythm of TAO, only thou knowest it not…Seek not thy happiness in a woman. She is the revelation of TAO offering itself to thee, she is the purest form in Nature by which TAO manifests, she is the Force which awakens in thee the Rhythm of TAO—but by herself she is only a poor creature like thyself. And thou art for her the same revelation as she is for thee. It is the expression of TAO who has no limit nor form, and what thy soul desires in the Capture which the vision of it causes thee, this strange and ineffable sentiment, is naught else than union with that Beauty and with the source of that Beauty—with TAO.
Thy soul has lost its beloved—TAO—with whom it was formerly united and it desires reunion with the Beloved. An absolute reunion with TAO—is it not boundless Love ! To be so absolutely one with the Beloved that thou art entirely hers and she entirely thine,—a union so complete and so eternal that neither life nor death can ever separate you, so peaceful and pure that Desire can no longer awake in thee, because the supreme happiness is attained and there
is only peace, peace sacred, calm and luminous. For TAO is the Infinite of the soul, one, eternal and all-pure.
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KARIKAL. Page-705 IV BAR, PLATFORM AND PULPIT A Choice Collection of the Most Stirring and Brilliant Speeches Delivered at the Bar* on the Platform and from the Pulpit by Lawyers of Eminence, Politicians, Statesmen, Publicists of Renown and Clergymen, and a Record of Sensational Trials and Causes Celebes. There have been many collections of ” alleged " oratory ; but " Bar, Platform and Pulpit" is different. The Real Temple of Oratory has at last been invaded. The Greatest Speeches of all time, containing the Choicest Wit, Wisdom, Logic and Philosophy of the World’s Most Famous Orators—the Wittiest Sayings of the Wittiest Men of all ages and of all countries—Most Masterly Orations that moulded Public Opinion and directed the March of Progress—Epoch-making Speeches that moved not only Audiences but Nations : they are all here just as they were Delivered by these Distinguished Speakers. Volumes I, II, III, IV & Y each of 6 Nos. Completed VOLUME VI EXTANT The Price of Each Volume attractively bound in calico is Rs. 3/8/0 and that of each number issued monthly is As. 9. N. B. Full list of the Contents of all the published Volumes can be had on application. Please apply to: " BAB, PLATFORM AND PULPIT ” OFFICE, c/o Dartnell & Co., PONDICHERRY.
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