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    Again if we look at World-Existence rather in its relation to the self-delight of eternally existent being, we may regard, describe and realise it as Lila, the play, the child’s joy, the poet’s joy, the actor’s joy, the mechanic Ian’s joy of the Soul of things eternally young, perpetually inexhaustible, creating and recreating Himself in Himself for the sheer bliss of that self-creation, of that self-representation,—Himself the play, Himself the player, Himself the playground. These three generalisations of the play of existence in its relation to the eternal and stable, the immutable Sachchidananda, starting from the three conceptions of Maya, Prakriti and Lila and representing themselves in our philosophical systems as mutually contradictory philosophies, are in reality perfectly consistent with each other, complementary and necessary in their totality to an integral view of life and the world. The world of which we are a part is in its most obvious view a movement of Force ; but that Force, when we penetrate its appearances, proves to be a constant and yet always mutable rhythm of creative consciousness casting up, projecting in itself phenomenal truths of its own infinite and eternal being ; and this rhythm is in its essence, cause and purpose a play of the infinite delight of being ever busy with its own innumerable self-representations. This triple or triune view must be the starting-point for all our understanding of the universe.

    Since_? then, eternal and immutable delight of being

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moving out into infinite and variable delight of becoming is the root of the whole matter, we have to conceive one indivisible conscious Being behind all our experiences supporting them by its inalienable delight and effecting by its movement the variations of pleasure, pain and neutral indifference in our sensational existence. That is our real self; the mental being subject to the triple vibration can only be a representation of our real self put in front for the purposes of that sensational experience of things which is the first rhythm of our divided consciousness in its response and reaction to the multiple contacts of the universe. It is an imperfect response, a tangled and discordant rhythm preparing and precluding the full and unified play of the conscious Being in us ; it is not the true and perfect symphony that may be ours if we can once enter into sympathy with the One in all variations and attune ourselves to the absolute and universal diapason.

    If this view be right, then certain consequences inevitably impose themselves. In the first place, since in our depths we ourselves are that One, since in the reality of our being we are the indivisible All-Consciousness and therefore the inalienable All-Bliss, the disposition of our sensational experience in the three vibrations of pain, pleasure and indifference can only be a superficial arrangement created by that limited part of ourselves which is uppermost in our waking consciousness. Behind there must be something in us—much vaster, profounder, truer than the superficial consciousness,—which takes delight impartially in all experiences ; it is that delight which secretly supports the superficial mental being and enables it to persevere through all labours, sufferings and ordeals in the agitated movement of the Becoming. That which we call ourselves is only a trembling ray on the surface ; behind is all the vast subconscient, the vast superconscient profiting by all these surface experiences and imposing them on its external self which it exposes as a sort of sensitive covering to the contacts of the world ; itself veiled, it receives these contacts and assimilates them into the values of a truer, a profounder, a mastering and creative experience.

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    Out of its depths it returns them to the surface in forms of strength, character, knowledge, impulsion whose roots are mysterious to us because our mind moves and quivers on the surface and has not learned to concentrate itself and live in the depths.

    In our ordinary life this truth is hidden from us or only dimly glimpsed at times or imperfectly held and conceived. But if we learn to live within, we infallibly awaken to this presence within us which is our more real self, a presence profound, calm, joyous and puissant of which the world is not the master—a presence which, if it is not the Lord Himself, is the radiation of the Lord within. We are aware of it within supporting and helping the apparent and superficial self and smiling at its pleasures and pains as at the error and passion of a little child. And if we can go back into ourselves and identify ourselves, not with our superficial experience, but with that radiant penumbra of the Divine, we can live in that attitude towards the contacts of the world and, standing back in our entire consciousness from the pleasures and pains of the body, vital being and mind, possess them as experiences whose nature being superficial does not touch or impose itself on our core and real being. In the entirely expressive Sanskrit terms, there is an Anandamaya behind the Manomaya, a vast Bliss-self behind the limited mental self, and the latter is only a shadowy image and disturbed reflection of the former. The truth of ourselves lies within and not on the surface.

    Again this triple vibration of pleasure, pain, indifference, being superficial, being an arrangement and result of our imperfect evolution, can have in it no absoluteness, no necessity. There is no real obligation on us to return to a particular contact a particular response of pleasure, pain or neutral reaction, there is only an obligation of habit. We feel pleasure or pain in a particular contact because that is the habit our nature has formed, because that is the constant relation the recipient has established with the contact. It is within our competence to return quite the opposite response, pleasure where we used to

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have pain, pain where we used to have pleasure. It is equally within our competence to accustom the superficial being to return instead of the mechanical reactions of pleasure, pain and indifference that free reply of inalienable delight which is the constant experience of the true and vast Bliss-Self within us. And this is a greater conquest, a still deeper and more complete self-possession than a glad and detached reception in the depths of the habitual reactions on the surface. For it is no longer a mere acceptance without subjection, a free acquiescence in imperfect values of experience, but enables us to convert imperfect into perfect, false into true values,—the constant but veritable delight of the Spirit in things taking the place of the dualities experienced by the mental being.

    In the things of the mind this pure habitual relativity of the reactions of pleasure and pain is not difficult to perceive. The nervous being in us, indeed, is accustomed to a certain fixedness, a false impression of absoluteness in these things. To it victory, success, honour, good fortune of all kinds are pleasant things in themselves, absolutely, and must produce joy as sugar must taste sweet; defeat failure, disappointment, disgrace, evil fortune of all kinds are unpleasant things in themselves, absolutely, and must produce grief as wormwood must taste bitter. To vary these responses is to it a departure from fact, abnormal and morbid ; for the nervous being is a thing enslaved to habit and in itself the means devised by Nature for fixing constancy of reaction, sameness of experience, the settled scheme of man’s relations to life. The mental being on the other hand is free, for it is the means she has devised for flexibility and variation, for change and progress ; it is subject only so long as it chooses to remain subject, to dwell in one mental habit rather than in another or so long as it allows itself to be dominated by its nervous instrument. It is not bound to be grieved by defeat, disgrace, loss ; it can meet these things and all things with a perfect indifference ; it can even meet them with a perfect gladness. Therefore man finds that the

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more he refuses to be dominated by his nerves and body, the more he draws back from implication of himself in his physical and vital parts, the greater is his freedom. He becomes the master of his own responses to the world’s contacts, no longer the slave of external touches.

    In regard to physical pleasure and pain, it is more difficult to apply the universal truth ; for this is the very domain of the nerves and the body, the centre and seat of that in us whose nature is to be dominated by external contact and external pressure. Even here, however, we have glimpses of the truth. We see it in the fact that according to the habit the same physical contact can be either pleasurable or painful not only to different individuals but to the same individual under different conditions or at different stages of his development. We see it in the fact that men in periods of great excitement or high exaltation remain physically indifferent to pain or unconscious of pain under contacts which ordinarily would inflict severe torture or suffering. In many cases it is only when the nerves are able to reassert themselves and remind the mentality of its habitual obligation to suffer, that the sense of suffering returns. But this return to the habitual obligation is not inevitable; it is only habitual. We see that in the phenomena of hypnosis not only can the hypnotised subject be successfully forbidden to feel the pain of a wound or puncture when in the abnormal state but can be prevented with equal success from returning to his habitual reaction of suffering when he is awakened. The reason of this phenomenon is perfectly simple ; it is because the hypnotizer suspends the habitual waking consciousness which is the slave of nervous habits and is able to appeal to the subconscient mental being in its depths, the mental being who is master, if he will a of the nerves and the body. But this freedom which is affected by hypnosis abnormally, rapidly, without true possession, by an alien will may equally be won normally, gradually, with true possession, by one’s own will so as to effect partially or completely a victory of the mental being over the habitual nervous reactions of the body.

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    Pain of mind and body is a device of Nature, that is to say of Force in her works, meant to sub serve a definite transitional end in her upward evolution. The world is from the point of view of the individual a play and complex shock of multitudinous forces. In the midst of this complex play the individual stands as a limited constructed being with a limited amount of force exposed to numberless shocks which may wound, maim, break up or disintegrate the construction which he calls himself. Pain is in the nature of a nervous and physical recoil from a dangerous or harmful contact ; it is a part of what the Upanishad calls jugupsa, the shrinking of the limited being from that which is not himself and not sympathetic or in harmony with himself, its impulse of self-defence against "others." It is from this point of view, an indication by Nature of that which has to be avoided or, if not successfully avoided, has to be remedied. It dots not come into being in the purely physical world so long as life does not enter into it; for till then mechanical methods are sufficient. Its office begins when life with its frailty and imperfect possession of Matter enters on the scene; it grows with the growth of Mind in life. Its office continues so long as Mind is bound in the life and body which it is using, dependent upon them for its knowledge and means of action, subjected to their limitations and to the egoistic impulses and aims which are born of those limitations. But if and when Mind in man becomes capable of being free, unegoistic, in harmony with all other beings and with the play of the universal forces, the use and office of pain diminishes, its raison deter must finally cease to be and it can only continue as an atavism of Nature, a habit that has survived its use, a persistence of the lower in the as yet imperfect organisation of the higher. Its eventual elimination must be an essential point hi the destined conquest of the soul over subjection to Matter and egoistic limitation in Mind.

    This elimination is possible because pain and pleasure themselves are currents, one imperfect, the other perverse, but still currents of the delight of existence. The reason

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    for this imperfection and this perversion is the self-division of the being in his consciousness by measuring and limiting Maya and in consequence an egoistic and piecemeal instead of a universal reception of contacts by the individual. For the universal soul all things and all contacts of things carry in them an essence of delight best described by the Sanskrit aesthetic term, Rasa; which means at once sap or essence of a thing and its taste. It is because we do not seek the essence of the thing in its contact with us but look only to the manner in which it affects our desires and fears, our cravings and shin kings that grief and pain, imperfect and transient pleasure or indifference, that is to say blank inability to seize the essence, are the forms taken by the Rasa. If we could be entirely disinterested in mind and heart and impose that detachment on the nervous being, the progressive elimination of these imperfect and perverse forms of Rasa would be possible and the true essential taste of the inalienable delight of existence in all its variations would be within our reach. We attain to something of this capacity for variable but universal delight in the aesthetic reception of things as represented by Art and Poetry, so that we enjoy there the rasa or taste of the sorrowful, the terrible, even the horrible or repellent;* and the reason is because we are detached, disinterested, not thinking of ourselves or of self-defence (jugupsa ), but only of the thing and its essence. Certainly, this aesthetic reception of contacts is not a precise image or reflection of the pure delight which is supra-mental and supra-aesthetic; for the latter would eliminate, sorrow, terror, horror and disgust with their cause while the former admits them; but it represents partially and imperfectly one stage of the progressive delight of the universal Soul in .things in its manifestation and it admits us in one part of our nature to that detachment from egoistic sensation and that universal attitude through which the one Soul sees harmony and beauty where we divided beings experience rather chaos

" So termed in Sanskrit Rhetoric, the karana, bhayanaha and btth-atsa rasa.

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and discord. The full liberation can come to us only by a similar liberation in all our parts, the universal aesthesis, the universal standpoint of knowledge, the universal detachment from all things and yet sympathy with all in our nervous and emotional being.

    Since the nature of suffering is a failure of the conscious-force in us to meet the shocks of existence and a consequent shrinking and contraction and its root is an inequality of that receptive and possessing force due to our self-limitation by egoism consequent on the ignorance of our true Self, of Sachchidananda, the elimination of suffering must first proceed by the substitution of Titiksha, the facing, enduring and conquest of all shocks of existence for jugupsa, the shrinking and contraction; by this endurance and conquest we proceed to an equality which may be either an equal indifference to all contacts or an equal gladness in all contacts; and this equality again must find a firm foundation in the substitution of the Sachchidananda consciousness which is All-Bliss for the ego-consciousness which enjoys and suffers. The Sachchidananda consciousness may be transcendent of the universe and aloof from it, and to this state of distant Bliss the path is equal indifference ; it is the path of the ascetic. Or the Sachchidananda consciousness may be at once transcendent and universal; and to this state of present and all-embracing Bliss the path is surrender and loss of the ego in the universal and possession of an all-pervading equal delight; it is the path of the ancient Vedic sages. But neutrality to the imperfect touches of pleasure and the perverse touches of pain is the first direct and natural result of the soul’s self-discipline and the conversion to equal delight can, usually, come only afterwards. The direct transformation of the triple vibration into Ananda is possible, but less easy to the human being.

    Such then is the view of the universe which arises out of the integral Vedantic affirmation. An infinite, indivisible existence all-blissful in its pure self-consciousness moves out of its fundamental purity into the varied play of Force that is consciousness, into the movement of Prakriti which

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is the play of Maya. The delight of its existence is at first self-gathered, absorbed, subconscious in ,the basis of the physical universe ; then emergent in a great mass of neutral movement which is not yet what we call sensation ; then further emergent with the growth of mind and ego in the triple vibration of pain, pleasure and indifference originating from the limitation of the force of consciousness in the form and from its exposure to shocks of the universal Force which it finds alien to it and out of harmony with its own measure and standard ; finally, the conscious emergence of the full Sachchidananda in its creations by universality, by equality, by self-possession and conquest of Nature. This is the course and movement of the world.

    If it then be asked why the One Existence should take delight in such a movement, the answer lies in the fact that all possibilities are inherent in Its infinity and that the delight of existence,—in its mutable becoming, not in its immutable being,—lies precisely in the variable realisation of its possibilities. And the possibility worked out here in the universe of which we are a part, begins from the concealment of Sachchidananda in that which seems to be it own opposite and its self-finding even amid the terms of that opposite. Infinite being loses itself in the appearance of non-being and emerges in the appearance of a finite Soul; infinite consciousness loses itself in the appearance of a vast indeterminate in conscience and emerges in the appearance of a superficial limited consciousness ; infinite self-sustaining Force loses itself in the appearance of a chaos of atoms and emerges in the appearance of the insecure balance of a world; infinite Delight loses itself in the appearance of an insensible Matter and emerges in the appearance of a discordant rhythm of varied pain, pleasure and neutral feeling, love, hatred and indifference , infinite unity loses itself in the appearance of a chaos of multiplicity and emerges in a discord of forces and beings which seek to recover unity by possessing, dissolving and devouring each other. In this creation the real Sachchidananda has to emerge. Man, the individual, has to become

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and to live as an universal being; his limited mental consciousness has to widen to the superconscient unity in which each embraces all ; his narrow heart has to learn the infinite embrace and replace its lusts and discords by universal love and his restricted vital being to become equal to the whole shock of the universe upon it and capable of universal delight ; his very physical being has to know itself as no separate entity but as one with and sustaining in itself the whole flow of the indivisible Force that is all things ; his whole nature has to reproduce in the individual the unity, the harmony, the oneness-in-all of the supreme Existence-Consciousness-Bliss.

    Through all this play the secret reality is always one and the same delight of existence,—the same in the delight of the subconscious sleep before the emergence of the individual, in the delight of the struggle and all the varieties, vicissitudes, perversions, conversions, reversions of the effort to find itself amid the mazes of the half-conscious dream of which the individual is the centre, and in the delight of the eternal super-conscient self-possession into which the individual must wake and there become one with the indivisible Sachchidananda. This is the play of the One, the Lord, the All as it reveals itself to our liberated and enlighten knowledge from the conceptive standpoint of this material universe.

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The Wherefore

of the Worlds

CHAPTER XI

LOVE THE CREATOR.

    What we call love is most often in this world of relativity and for the individual consciousness only an enlarged egoism. And if we are to understand that this larger egoism is not merely a more absolute egoism, we must admit that in its new form something appears and manifests itself which did not before exist and that under this cover, behind this mask another-principle different from it and not yet in evidence is coming to the light.

    Love and egoism, in distrainable in the Absolute, remain for a long time ill-distinguished from each other in the relative; love, in general, is but an egoism ignorant of itself, egoism a love which cannot recognise its own real nature. And if it is difficult to fix and define the essence of this first principle of being , the principle of desire, it is no less difficult to understand what may be, before anything exists, the essence of its opposite principle, love.

    With these two abstractions, as with all those by which the mind tries to cross the abyss between the absolute reality and the facts of the relative, it is only in their opposition to each other that we can form any clear idea of them and they have no meaning except in regard to each other. In relation to desire love is all that has not

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egoistic desire, that does not resolve to be separated, distinct, individual, that does not manifest itself for its own sake, that does not tend towards exclusive consciousness, that does not know any other self than the Self universal and unique. It is therefore all that in the being appears and affirms itself least, that remains most invisible, most hidden, that does not know itself ; everything that in this world of blindness, division, conflict, pain tends towards the light of unity and the joy of harmony. Or rather it is the principle in which all that egoism transforms into suffering, is changed back into joy.

    Therefore the suffering of the creature is a witness to the fact that the desire which formed it is only a deformation of love, and that from the beginning in the heart of immense desire there lived already, yet more immense, the aspiration of love. Certainly it was not love that took the initiative of that beginning, but without love that beginning would never have come to an end.

    Rightly then is Love adored under the name of that Creator if the true creation consists not in the distinction of individual beings but in their ascension towards the universal being, not in the one single act of an arbitrary decree of existence but in the permanent action of a sovereign law of progress.

    This love then is, in the very depth of all things, the secret and mysterious guest who sustains and contains all, supports and receives all, repairs and prepares all, encourages, transforms and purifies all; it is the power of beatitude which draws out of each thing its potential good and makes the best issue out of the worst, which orders the world according to its highest law and causes it to be at every moment the nearest to the divine that the moment will permit.

    This love has not waited to act until the experience of pain called it in; for it was there in that pain, ready to change it into effort, into a possibility of progress for the desire of being and into supreme joy for the being liberated from desire.

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    And before it was in the pain, it was already a divine force of coherence and of organisation in the Matter in which life was germinating ; it was the soul in unconscious forms before it became the soul in sensible forms; and it was love’s power of attraction that, before it existed in the heart of mankind, was in the heart of the worlds, before it took the shape of tenderness, brotherhood and compassion, was affinity in atoms and force of gravitation in the spheres. Without it how could any unity have been born in the infinite divisibility of substances ? Whilst desire dispersed through space the ashes of its fires, was it not love that in that comic dust delighted the fires of life ?

    But in order that it might fertilise the germs of death, was it not inevitable that love should bury itself alive therein ? Before anything could be, love had to make a holocaust of itself. Together with desire there was in the beginning sacrifice; and desire contained in its germ all the sorrows of the world, sacrifice all the joys of infinity.

All religions under different symbols speak of this sacrifice ; but those that proclaim it the most highly are the religions whose teaching is joy.

***

    No doubt, for this absolute love to be manifested it is necessary that the being should enlarge its own boundaries and become conscious of the deeper and vaster realities which it bears in itself, that its desire should thus grow less narrow, less ignorant, less selfish ; then the veils are lifted which covered more divine possibilities and out of apparent chaos arise more and more the perfections of the eternal order.

    But if this were all it did, it would only give a greater scope to its egoism ; the egoism itself must yield and at every point where this is done, the being, whatever be its limits, touches the absolute. However petty, obscure, inconscient it be, ir so enters into contact with the divine ; if egoism opens even one of its doors, that is enough for a power of love to arise out of the Absolute. For this love which is so patient and passive in the being is yet the very activity of the Eternal.

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    If it were not so. the being could abolish all its limits and become conscious of the Absolute within it and yet in the world of relativities nothing more divine would appear.

    In that case there would be a resorption of the spontaneities of desire into the bottomless ocean of the Non-manifest, a return of the being into its origins but no intervention of new forces, no creation of more perfect forms and activities.

    Perhaps this mystic issue, this escape out of the manifested world, is the last step, the transcendental end of egoism. But to this evasion love opposes the invasion of redeeming activities. And if evolution in a general sense means progress, it is because the world’s history only transforms into visible results the hidden work of an actual involution. That which becomes does not evolve, does not come out of that which was, but arises out of that which is neither Being nor Non-Being and so by a permanent creation comes into existence.

    If all desire renews the mystery of beginning, all progress reproduces the miracle of the second Genesis.

* * *

    Since all in the Absolute that is blind desire or disinterested love manifests in the world of form, must we consider as an indifference, a supreme inertness, a lack of all egoistic power as well as of all generous spontaneity That of the Divine which is not manifested ?

    A childlike question, surely, but one that must be put, for the questions of children often strike at the root of profound secrets. Where we see only pure and simple facts, their simplicity shows us the mystery and the enigma. All of the Absolute that has no relation to our manifested relativities is brought into our ken by that question.

    What are the mysteries formulated by being and by the world in comparison with the mystery of that which, never coming into form, sets at defiance -all the formulae of our ignorance ? Here how shall we speak of indifference or a divine inertia ? We might just as well say the contrary and one statement would not be more valid than the other .

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    The Non-manifest is all that was not egoism and all that cannot be love. For if egoism is but a veil of love, love itself is but a veil of something still deeper, more divine, more fecund than itself.

    As love succeeding to desire has become creator of the worlds so there are, beyond all conscious or unconscious causes of the being, other causes unthinkable for the ordinary mind which the evolution of consciousness will bring into light one after the other as so many final causes. But since that evolution has no other term than the Absolute towards which it tends indefinitely, each new principle unveiled is only the herald of others not yet discovered. What we call love is in relation to the geneses of the future just such a secondary thing as was in relation to itself the desire of being.

    In love, beyond all expression, is the secret, the hope, the treasure of an infinite becoming. In every epoch of the world’s life, as in every moment of the being’s existence, something of this secret is revealed, something of this hope becomes a potential reality, something of this treasure descends upon the earth and is for man a new riches, a higher perfection and a deeper source of joy.

    Therefore, now as ever, on earth and in other worlds, the child’s question we ask is the question of the marvellous and approaching birth of that which is yet to be born.

    After having built up out of the cosmic dust the harmonious forms of the worlds and coordinated in the infinitesimal universe of the atoms, as in the infinite atom which is the universe, all conflicting forces and chaotic energies, after having perfected life and its forms, the forms by the progress of life, life by the progress of forms this Love is now at work in the human being. After having drawn him forth out of the divine possibilities of Nature it would now draw out of his nature the possibilities of the Divine.

    This supreme aspiration of love explains and justifies the universal desire and transfigures it : therein the being discovers the secret of his goal shedding light on the mystery of his beginning.

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The Secret

of the Veda

CHAPTER XI

THE SEVEN RIVERS.

    The Veda speaks constantly of the waters or the rivers, especially of the divine waters, dpo devi or dpo divide, and occasionally of the waters which carry in them the light of the luminous solar world or the light of the Sun, sarvatia apah. The passage of the waters effected by the Gods or by man with the aid of the Gods is a constant symbol. The three great conquests to which the human being aspires, which the Gods are in constant battle with the Vritras and Panis to give to man are the herds, the waters and the Sun or the solar world, god apas swath. The question is whether these references are to the rains of heaven, the rivers of Northern India possessed or assailed by the Dravidians—the Vritras being sometimes the Dravidians and sometimes their Gods, the herds possessed or robbed from the Aryan settlers by the indigenous "robbers,"—the Panis who hold or steal the herds being again sometimes the Dravidians and sometimes their gods ; or is there a deeper, a spiritual meaning ? Is the winning of Svar simply the recovery of the sun from its shadowing by the storm-cloud or its seizure by eclipse or its concealment by the darkness of Night ? For here at least there can be no withholding of the sun from the Aryans by human ‘black-skinned" and "noiseless" enemies. Or does the con-

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quest of Swar mean simply the winning of heaven by sacrifice ? And in either case what is the sense of this curious collocation of cows, waters and the sun or cows, waters and the sky ? Is it not rather a system of symbolic meanings in which the herds, indicated by the word gih in the sense both of cows and rays of light, are the illuminations from the higher consciousness which have their origin in the Sun of Light, the Sun of Truth r Is not Swar itself the world or plane of immortality governed by that Light or Truth of the all-illumining Sun called in Veda the vast Truth, r’itam br’ihat, and the true Light? and are not the divine waters, dpo devih, divydh or svarvalih, the floods of this higher consciousness pouring on the mortal mind from that plane of immortality ?

    It is, no doubt, easy to point to passages or hymns in which on the surface there seems to be no need of any such interpretation and the sukta can be understood as a prayer or praise for the giving of rain or an account of a battle on the rivers of the Panjab. But the Veda cannot be interpreted by separate passages or hymns. If it is to have any coherent or consistent meaning, we must interpret it as a whole. We may escape our difficulties by assigning to svar or gdh entirely different senses in different passages —just as Sayana sometimes finds in gdh the sense of cows, sometimes rays and sometimes, with an admirable light-heartedness, compels it to mean waters.* But such a system of interpretation is not rational merely because it leads to a " rationalistic " or " common-sense " result. It rather flouts both reason and common sense. We can indeed arrive by it at any result we please, but no reasonable and unbiased mind can feel convinced that that result was the original sense of the Vedic hymns.

    But if we adopt a more consistent method, insuperable difficulties oppose themselves to the purely material sense. We have for instance a hymn (VII. 49) of Vasishtha

* So also he interprets the all-important Vedic word r’itam sometimes as sacrifice, sometimes as truth, sometimes as water,

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to the divine waters, dpo devih, dpo divydh, in which the second verse runs The divine waters that flow whether in channels dug or self-born, they whose movement is towards the ocean, pure, purifying,—may those waters foster me." Here, it will be said, the sense is quite clear; it is to material waters, earthly rivers, canals,—or, if the word khanitrimdh means simply "dug, "then wells,—that Vasish-tha addresses his hymn and divydh, divine , is only an ornamental epithet of praise; or even perhaps we may render the verse differently and suppose that three kinds of water are described,—the waters of heaven, that is to say the rain, the water of wells, the water of rivers. But when we study the hymn as a whole this sense can no longer stand. For thus it runs :

    " May those divine waters foster me, the eldest ( or greatest) of the ocean from the midst of the moving flood that go purifying, not settling down, which Indra of the thunderbolt, the Bull, clove out. The divine waters that flow whether in channels dug or self-born, whose movement is towards the Ocean,—may those divine waters foster me. In the midst of whom King Varuna moves looking down on the truth and the falsehood of creatures, they that stream honey and are pure and purifying,—may those divine waters foster me. In whom Varuna the king, in whom Soma, in whom all the Gods have the intoxication of the energy, into whom Agni Vaiswanara has entered, may those divine waters foster me."

    It is evident that Vasishtha is speaking here of the same waters, the same streams that Vamadeva hymns, the waters that rise from the ocean and flow into the ocean, the honeyed wave that rises upward from the sea, from the flood that is the heart of things, streams of the clarity, ghr’itasya dhdrah. They are the floods of the supreme and universal conscious existence in which Varuna moves looking down on the truth and the falsehood of mortals,—a phrase that can apply neither to the descending rains nor to the physical ocean. Varuna in the Veda is not an Indian Neptune, neither is he precisely, as the European scholars at first imagined, the Greek Ouranos, the sky. He is

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the master of an ethereal wideness, an upper ocean, of the vastness of being, of its purity ; in that vastness, it is elsewhere said, he has made paths in the pathless infinite along which Surya, the Sun, the Lord of Truth and the Light can move. Thence he looks down on the mingled truths and falsehoods of the mortal consciousness…And we have farther to note that these divine waters are those which Indra has cloven out and made to flow upon the earth,—a description which throughout the Veda is applied to the seven rivers.

    If there were any doubt whether these waters of Vasishtha’s prayer are the same as the waters of Vamadeva great hymn, madhumdn urmir, ghr’itasya dhdrdh, it is entirely removed by another Sukta of the sage Vasistha, VII. 4;7. In the forty-ninth hymn he refers briefly to the divine waters as honey-streaming, madhugchutah and speaks of the Gods enjoying in them the intoxication of the energy, urjam madanti ; from this we can gather that the honey or sweetness is the madhu, the Soma, the wine of the Ananda, of which the Gods have the ecstasy. But in the forty-seventh hymn he makes his meaning unmistakably clear.

    " O Waters, that supreme wave of yours, the drink of Indra, which the seekers of the Godhead have made for themselves, that pure, inviolate, clarity-streaming, most honeyed (ghr’itaprusham madhumattamam) -wave of you may we today enjoy. O Waters, may the son of the waters (Agni), he of the’ swift rushing, foster that most honeyed wave of you ; that wave of yours in which Indra with the Vasus is intoxicated with ecstasy, may we who seek the Godhead taste today. Strained through the hundred purifiers, ecstatic by their self-nature, they are divine and move to the goal of the movement of the Gods (the supreme ocean) ; they limit not the workings of Indra : offer to the rivers a food of oblation full of the clarity (ghritam-vat). May the rivers which the sun has formed by his rays, from whom Indra clove out a moving wave, establish for us the supreme good. And do ye, O gods, protect us ever by states of felicity."

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    Here we have Vamadeva madhumdn drmih, the sweet intoxicating wave, and it is plainly said that this honey, this sweetness is the Soma, the drink of Indra. That is farther made clear by the epithet gatapavitrdh which can only refer in the Vedic language to the Soma; and let us note that it is an epithet of the rivers themselves and that the honeyed wave is brought flowing from them by Indra, its passage being cloven out on the mountains by it he. thunderbolt that slew Vritra. Again it is made clear that these waters are the seven rivers released by Indra from the hold of Vritra, the Besieger, the Coverer and sent flowing down upon the earth.

    What can these rivers be whose wave is full of Soma wine, full of the ghr’ita, full of 4vj, the energy? What are these waters that flow to the goal of the god’s movement, that establish for man the supreme good? Not the rivers of the Punjab ; no wildest assumption of barbarous confusion or insane incoherence in the mentality of the Vedic Rishis can induce us to put such a construction upon such expressions. Obviously these are the waters of the Truth and the Bliss that flow from the supreme ocean. These rivers flow not upon earth, but in heaven ; they are prevented by Vritra the Besieger, the Coverer from flowing down upon the earth-consciousness in which we mortals live till Indra, the god-mind, smites the Coverer with his flashing lightning’s and cuts out a passage on the summits of that earth-consciousness down which they can flow. Such is the only rational, coherent and sensible explanation of the thought and language of the Vedic sages. For the rest, Vasishtha’s makes it clear enough to us ; for he says that these are the waters which Surya has formed by his rays and which, unlike earthly movements, do not limit or diminish the workings of Indra, the supreme Mind. They are, in other words, the waters of the Vast Truth, r’itam br’ihat, and, as we have always seen that this Truth crates the Bliss, so here we find that these waters of the Truth, r’itasya dhdrdh, as they are plainly called in other runs (e.g. V. 12. 2 " O perceiver of the Truth, perceive he Truth alone, cleave out many streams of the Truth ),

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establish for men the supreme good and the supreme good* is the felicity, the bliss of the divine existence.

Still, neither in these hymns nor in Vamadeva is there an express mention of the seven rivers. We will turn therefore to the first hymn of Viswamitra, his hymn to Agni, from its second to its fourteenth verse. The passage is a long one, but it is sufficiently important to cite and translate in full.

2 Prancham yajnam chakr’ima vardhatam gih,

samidbhir agnim namasa. duvasyan ;

Divah cacjUsur vidatha kavinam,

gr’itsaya chit tavase gatum fshub.

3 Mayo dadhe medhirah putadaksho,

divah subandhur janusha pr’ithivyah ;

Avindan nu darshatam apsvantar,

dev&so agnim apasi svasr’inam.

4 Avardhayan subhagam sapta yahvlh,

cvetam jajnanam arusham mabitva;

Cicum na jatam abhy&rur acva,

devaso agnim janiman vapushyan.

5 Cukrebhir angai raja atatanvan,

kratum punanah kavibhih pavitraih ;

Cyochir vasanah pari ayur apam,

criyo mimfte brihatfr anunah.

6 Vavraja sim anadatir adabdhah,

divo yahvir avasand anagnah ;

Sand, atra yuvatayo sayonir,

ekam garbham dadhire sapta van’lh.

7 Stirn’a asya sanhato vicvarupa,

ghr’itasya yonau sravathe madhunam:

Asthur atra dhenavah pinvamana,

mahi dasmasya mStara samichf.

8 Babhrdn’ah suno sahaso vyadyaud,

dadhanah cukra rabhasa vapunshi;

Jcotanti dhara madhuno ghr’itasya,

vr’ish& yatra vavr’idhe kavyena.

• The word indeed is usually understood as "felicity."

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9 Pitu? chid udhar janushd viveda,

vyasya dhara asr’ijad vi dhenah ;

Guha charantam sakhibhih 9ivebhir,

divo yahvtbhir na guha. babhuva.

10 Pitu9 cha garbham janitu9 cha babhre,

purvir eko adhayat pipyanah ;

Vr’ishn’e sapatni 9uchaye sabandhu,

ubhe asmai manushye ni pahi.

11 Urau mahan anibhadhe vavardha,

apo agnim ya9asah sam hi purvih ;

R’itasya yonav a9ayad damuna,

jaminam agnir apasi svasrin’am.

12 Akro na babhrih samithe mahinam,

didr’iksheyah sunave bha-r’ijikah;

Ud usriya janita. yo jajana,

ap&m garbho nr’itamo yahvo agnih.

13 Apam garbham dar9atam oshadhinam,

vana jajana subhaga virupam.

Devasa9 chin manasa. sam hi jagmuh,

panishtam jatam tavasam duvasyan.

14, Br’ihanta id bhanavo bha-r’ijikam,

agnim sachanta vidyuto na 9ukrdh ;

Guheva vr’iddham sadasi sve antar,

apara urve amr’itam duhanah.

   " We have made the sacrifice to ascend towards the supreme, let the Word increase. With kindling of his fire, with obeisance of submission they set Agni to his workings _; they have given expression in the heaven to the knowing of the seers and they desire a passage for him in his strength, in his desire of the word. (2)

    " Full of intellect, purified in discernment, the perfect friend (or, perfect builder) from his birth of Heaven and of Earth, he establishes the Bliss ; the gods discovered Agni visible in the Waters, in the working of the sisters. (3)

    " The seven Mighty Ones increased him who utterly enjoys felicity, white in his birth, ruddy when he has grown. They moved and laboured about him, the Mares

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around the newborn child; the gods gave body to Agni in his birth. (4)

    " With his pure bright limbs he extended and formed the middle world purifying the will-to-action by the help of the pure lords of wisdom; wearing light as a robe about all the life of the Waters he formed in himself glories vast and without any deficiency. (5)

    " He moved everywhere about the Mighty Ones of Heaven, and they devoured not, neither were overcome,— they were not clothed, neither were they naked. Here the eternal and ever young goddesses from one womb held the one Child, they the Seven Words. (6)

    " Spread out were the masses of Him in universal forms in the womb of the clarity, in the flowings of the sweet nesses ; here the fostering Rivers stood nourishing themselves; the two Mothers of the accomplishing god became vast and harmonised. (7)

    " Borne by them, O child of Force, thou didst blaze out holding thy bright and rapturous embodiments ; out flow the streams of the sweetness, the clarity, where the Bull of the abundance has grown by the Wisdom. (8)

&    * He discovered at his birth the source of the abundance of the Father and he loosed forth wide His streams and wide His rivers. By his helpful comrades and by the Mighty Ones of Heaven he found Him moving in the secret places of existence, yet himself was not lost in their secrecy. (9)

    "He bore the child of the Father and of him that begot him ; one, he fed upon his many mothers in their increasing. In this pure Male both these powers in man ( Earth and Heaven ) have their conmen lord and lover ; do thou guard them both. (10)

    ”Great in the unobstructed Vast be increased ; yea, many Waters victoriously increased Agni. In the source of the Truth he lay down? there he made his home, Agni in the working of the undivided Sisters. (11)

    "As the mover in things And as their sustainer he in the meeting of the Great Ones, seeking vision, straight in his lustres for the presser-out of the Soma wine, he who

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was the father of the Radiances, gave them now their higher birth,—the child of the Waters, the mighty and most strong Agni. (12)

    "To the visible Birth of the waters and of the growths of Earth the goddess of Delight now gave birth in many forms, she of the utter felicity. The gods united in him by the mind and they set him to his working who was born full of strength and mighty for the labour. (13)

    ”Those vast shillings clove to Agni straight in his luster and were like bright lightning’s ; from him increasing in the secret places of existence in his own seat within the shoeless Vast they milked out Immortality." (l-t)

    Whatever may be the meaning of this passage,—and it is absolutely clear that it has a mystic significance and is no mere sacrificial hymn of ritualistic barbarians,—the seven rivers, the waters, the seven sisters cannot here be the seven rivers of the Punjab. The waters in which the gods discovered the visible Agni cannot be terrestrial and material streams ; this Agni who increases by knowledge and makes his home and rest in the source of the Truth, of whom Heaven and Earth are the wives and lovers, who is increased by the divine waters in the unobstructed Vast, his own seat, and dwelling in that shoeless infinity yields to the illumined gods the supreme Immortality, cannot be the god of physical Fire. In this passage as in so many others the mystical, the spiritual, the psychological character of the burden of the Veda reveals itself not under the surface, not be hand a veil of mere ritualism, but openly, insistently,—in a disguise indeed, but a disguise that is transparent, so that the secret truth of the Veda appears here, like the rivers of Vi9wamitra’s hymn, "neither veiled nor naked ".

    We see that these Waters are the same as those of Vamadeva hymn, of Vasishtha’s, closely connected with the clarity and the honey,—ghr’itasya yonav sarva the ma-dhunam, qchotanti dhdrdh madhuno ghr’itasya-, they lead to the Truth, they are themselves the source of the Truth they flow in the unobstructed and shoeless Vast as well as here upon the earth. They are figured as fostering cows

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(dhenavah), mares (agvdh) they are called sapta vdn’ih, the seven Words of the creative goddess Vak,—Speech, the expressive power of Aditi, of the supreme Prakriti who is spoken of as the Cow just as the Deva or Purusha is described in the Veda as Vrishabha or Vrishan, the Bulb They are therefore the seven strands of all being, the seven streams or currents or forms of movement of the one conscious existence.

    We shall find that in the light of the ideas which we have discovered from the very opening of the Veda in Madhuchchhandas’ hymns and in the light of the symbolic interpretations which are now becoming clear to us, this passage apparently so figured, mysterious, enigmatical becomes perfectly straightforward and coherent, as indeed do all the passages of the Veda which seem now almost unintelligible when once their right clue is found. We have only to fix the psychological function of Agni, the priest, the fighter, the worker, the truth-finder, the winner of beatitude for man ; and that has already been fixed for us in the first hymn of the Rig Veda by Madhuchchhandas’ description of him,—"the Will in works of the Seer true and most rich in varied inspiration." Agni is the Deva, the All-Seer, manifested as conscious-force or, as it would be called in modern language, Divine or Cosmic Will, first hidden and building up the eternal worlds, then manifest, " born," building up in man the Truth and the Immortality.

    Gods and men, says Viswamitra in effect, kindle this divine force by lighting the fires of the inner sacrifice; they enable it to work by their adoration and submission to it ; they express in heaven, that is to say, in the pure mentality which is symbolized by Dyaus, the knowings of the Seers, in other words the illuminations of the Truth-consciousness which exceeds Mind; and they do this in order to make a passage for this divine force which in its strength seeking always to find the word of right self-expression aspires beyond mind. This divine will carrying in all its workings the secret of the divine knowledge, Aavikraluh, befriends or builds up the mental and physical

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consciousness in man, divah prithivih, perfects the intellect, purifies the discernment so that they grow to be capable of the "knowings of the seers" and by the super-conscient Truth thus made conscient in us establishes firmly the Beatitude ( vs 2-3).

    The rest of the passage describes the ascent of this divine conscious-force, Agni, this Immortal in mortals who in the sacrifice takes the place of the ordinary will and knowledge of man, from the mortal and physical consciousness to the immortality of the Truth and the Beatitude. The Vedic Rishis speak of five births for man, five worlds of creatures where works are done, pantha jand, pan-cha Krishti or kshitih. Dyaus and Prithivi represent the pure mental and the physical consciousness; between them is the Antariksha, the intermediate or connecting level of the vital or nervous consciousness. Dyaus and Prithivi are Roads, our two firmaments ; but these have to be over passed, for then we find admission to another heaven than that of the pure mind—to the wide, the Vast which is the basis, the foundation (budhna) of the infinite consciousness, Aditi. This Vast is the Truth which supports the supreme triple world, those highest steps or seats (padding, saddens) of Agni, of Vishnu, those supreme Names of the Mother, the cow, Aditi. The Vast or Truth is declared to be the own or proper seat or home of Agni, swam dam-am, swam sadyah. Agni is described in this hymn ascending from earth to his own seat.

    This divine Power is found by the gods visible in the Waters, in the working of the Sisters. These are the sevenfold waters of the Truth, the divine Waters brought down from the heights of our being by Indra. First it is secret in the earth’s growths, sadhoh, the things that hold her heats, and has to be brought out by a sort of force, by a pressure of the two rain’s, earth and heaven. Therefore it is called the child of the earth’s growths and the child of the earth and heaven ; this immortal Force is produced by man with pain and difficulty from the workings of the pure mind upon the physical being. But in the divine waters Agni is found visible and easily born in all his strength

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and in all his knowledge and in all his enjoyment, entirely white and pure, growing ruddy with his action as he increases (y. 3). From his very birth the Gods give him force and splendour and body ; the seven mighty Rivers increase him in his joy ; they move about this great newborn child and labour over him as the Mares, agvdh (v. 4 ).

    The rivers, usually named dhenavah, fostering cows, are here described as agvdh, Mares, because while the Cow is the symbol of consciousness in the form of knowledge, the Horse is the symbol of consciousness in the form of force. Asva, the Horse, is the dynamic force of Life, and the rivers labouring over Agni on the earth become the waters of Life, of the vital dynamis or kinesis, the Prana, which moves and acts and desires and enjoys. Agni himself begins as material heat and power, manifests secondarily as the Horse and then only becomes the heavenly fire. His first work is to give as the child of the Waters its full form and extension and purity to the middle world, the vital or dynamic plane, raja dtatanvdn. He purines the nervous life in man pervading it with his own pure bright limbs, lifting upward its impulsions and desires, its purified will in works (kratum) by the pure powers of the super-conscient Truth and Wisdom, kavibhih pavitraih. So he wears his vast glories, no longer the broken and limited activity of desires and instincts, all about the life of the Waters (vs. 4.5).

    The sevenfold waters thus rise upward and become the pure mental activity, the Mighty Ones of Heaven. They there reveal themselves as the first eternal eve young energies, separate streams but of one origin—for they have all flowed from the one womb of the super-conscient Truth —the seven Words or fundamental creative expressions of the divine Mind, sapta vdn’ih. This life of the pure mind is not like that of the nervous life which devours its objects in order to sustain its mortal existence ; its waters devour not but they do not fail; they are the eternal truth robed in a transparent veil of mental forms; therefore, it is said, they are neither clothed nor naked (v. 6 ).

    But this is not the last stage. The Force rises into the

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womb or birthplace of this mental clarity (ghr’itasya) where the waters flow as streams of the divine sweetness (sravathe madhtlndm) ; there the forms it assumes are universal forms, masses of the vast and infinite consciousness. As a result, the fostering rivers in the lower world are nourished by this descending higher sweetness and the mental and physical consciousness, the two first mothers of the all-effecting Will, become in their entire largeness perfectly equal and harmonised by this light of the Truth, through this nourishing by the infinite Bliss. They bear the full force of Agni, the blaze of his lightnings, the glory and rapture of his universal forms. For where the Lord, the Male, the Bull of the abundance is increased by the wisdom of the auper conscient Truth, there always flow the streams of the clarity and the streams of the bliss (vs. 7-8).

    The Father of all things is the Lord and Male; he is hidden in the secret source of things, in the super-conscient ; Agni, with his companion gods and with the sevenfold Waters, enters into the super-conscient without therefore disappearing from our conscient existence, finds the source of the honeyed plenty of the Father of things and pours them out on our life. He bears and himself becomes the Son, the pure Kumara, the pure Male, the One, the soul in man revealed in its universality; the mental and physical consciousness in the human being accept him as their lord and lover ; but, though one, he still enjoys the manifold movement of the rivers, the multiple cosmic energies (vs. 9-10).

    Then we are told expressly that this infinite into which he has entered and in which he grows, in which the many Waters victoriously reaching their goal (yac-asah) increase him, is the unobstructed vast where the Truth is born, the shoreless infinite, his own natural seat in which he now takes up his home. There the seven rivers, the sisters, work no longer separated though of one origin as on the earth and in the mortal life, but rather as indivisible companions (jamtndm apasi svasrtn’dm). In that entire meeting of these great ones Agni moves in all things

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and upbeats all things ; the rays of his vision are perfectly straight, no longer affected by the lower crookedness ; he from whom the radiances of knowledge, the brilliant herds, were born, now gives them this high and supreme birth ; he turns them into the divine knowledge, the immortal consciousness (vs. 11-12 ).

    This also is his own new and last birth. He who was born as the Son of Force from the growths of earth, he who was born as the child of the Waters, is now born in many forms to the goddess of bliss, she who has the entire felicity, that is to say to the divine conscious beatitude, in the shore less infinite. The gods or divine powers in man using the mind as an instrument reach him there, unite around him, set him to the great work of the world in this new, mighty and effective birth. They, the out shining of that vast consciousness, cleave to this divine Force as its bright lightning’s and from him in the super-conscient, the shore less vast, his own home, they draw for man the Immortality.

    Such then, profound, coherent, luminous behind the veil of figures is the sense of the Vedic symbol of the seven rivers, of the Waters, of the five worlds, of the birth and ascent of Agni which is also the upward journey of man and the Gods whose image man forms in himself from level to level of the great hill of being (sdnoh sdnum). Once we apply it. and seize the true sense of the symbol of the Cow and the symbol of the Soma with a just conception of the psychological functions of the Gods, all the apparent in coherences and obscurities and far-fetched chaotic confusion of these ancient hymns disappears in a moment. Simply, easily, without straining there disengages itself the profound and luminous doctrine of the ancient Mystics, the secret of the Veda.

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Selected Hymns

SOMA, LORD OF DELIGHT AND IMMORTALITY

Rig Veda IX. 83

1. Wide spread out for thee is the sieve of thy purifying, O Master of the soul; becoming in the creature thou pervades his members all through. He tastes not that delight who is unripe and whose body has not suffered in the heat of the fire; They alone are able to bear that and enjoy it who have been prepared by the flame.

2. The strainer through which the heat of him is purified is spread out in the seat of Heaven ; its threads shine out and stand extended. His swift ecstasies foster the soul that purifies him ; he ascends to -the high level of Heaven by the conscious heart.

3. This is the supreme dappled Bull that makes the Dawns to shine out, the Male that bears the worlds of the becoming and seeks the plenitude; the Fathers who had the forming knowledge made a form of him by that power of knowledge which is his ; strong in vision they set him within as a child to be born.

4„ As the Gandharvas he guards his true seat; as the supreme and wonderful One he keeps the births of the gods; Lord of the inner setting, by the inner setting he seizes the enemy. Those who are utterly

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perfected in works taste the enjoyment of his honey-sweetness.

5. O Thou in whom is the food, thou art that divine food, thou art the vast, the divine home ; wearing heaven as a robe thou encompasses the march of the sacrifice. King with the sieve of thy purifying for thy chariot thou ascendest to the plenitude; with thy thousand burning brilliances thou conquerest the vast knowledge.

COMMENTARY

    It is a marked, an essential feature of the Vedic hymns that, although the Vedic cult was not monotheistic in the modern sense of the word, yet they continually recognise, sometimes quite openly and simply, sometimes in a complex and difficult fashion, always as an underlying thought, that the many godheads whom they invoke are really one Godhead,— One with many names, revealed in many aspects, approaching man in the mask of many divine personalities. Western scholars, puzzled by this religious attitude which presents no difficulty whatever to the Indian mind, have invented, in order to , explain it, a theory of Vedic henotheism. The Rishis, they thought, were polytheists, but to each God at the time of worshipping him they gave preeminence and even regarded him as in a way the sole deity. This invention of henotheism is the attempt of an alien mentality to understand and account for the Indian idea of one Divine Existence who manifests Himself in many names and forms, each of which is for the worshipper of that name and form the one and supreme Deity. That idea of the Divine, fundamental to the Puranic religions, was already possessed by our Vedic forefathers.

    The Veda already contains in the seed the Vedantic conception of the Brahman. It recognises an Unknowable, a timeless Existence, the Supreme which is neither today nor tomorrow, moving in the movement of the Gods, but itself vanishing from the attempt of the .mind to seize it. ( R. V. I. 170.1). It is spoken of in the neuter as That and often identified

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with the Immortality, the supreme triple Principle, the vast Bliss to which the human being aspires. The Brahman is the Unmoving, the Oneness of the Gods. "The Unmoving is born as the Vast in the seat of the Cow ( Aditi ),…the vast, the mightiness of the Gods, ,the One" (III. 55. l). It is the One existent to whom the seers give different names, Indra, Matariswan, Agni, ( I. 164-46).

    This Brahman, the one Existence, thus spoken of impersonally in the neuter, is also conceived as the Deva, the supreme Godhead, the Father of things who appears here as the Son in the human soul. He is the Blissful One to whom the movement of the Gods ascends, manifest as at once the Male and the Female, vr’ishan, dheuu. Each of the Gods is a manifestation, an aspect, a personality of the one Deva. He can be realised through any of his names and aspects, through Indra, through Agni, through Soma ; for each of them being in himself all the Deva and only in his front or aspect to us different from the others contains all the gods in himself.

    Thus Agni is hymned as the supreme and universal Deva. "Thou O Agni, art Varuna when thou art born, thou be-comest Mitra when thou art perfectly kindled, in thee are all the Gods, O Son of Force, thou art Indra to the mortal who gives the sacrifice. Thou becamest Aryaman when thou bearest the secret name of the Virgins. They make thee to shine with the radiances (the cows, gobhih ) as Mitra well-established when thou makest of one mind the Lord of the house and his consort. For the glory of thee, O Rudra, the Maruts brighten by their pressure that which is the brilliant and varied birth of thee. That which is the highest seat of Vishnu, by that thou protects the secret Name of the radiances ( the cows, gondm). By thy glory, O Deva, the gods attain to right vision and holding in themselves all the multiplicity ( of the vast manifestation ) taste Immortality. Men set Agni in them as the priest of the sacrifice when desiring ( the Immortality ) they distribute ( to the Gods) the self-expression of the being… Do thou in thy knowledge extricate the Father and drive away ( sin and darkness), he who is borne in us as thy Son, O Child of Force." (V. 3)

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emerges from his special functions as the supreme Deity.

    Soma is the Lord of the wine of delight, the wine of immortality. Like Agni he is found in the plants, the growths of earth, and in the waters. The Soma-wine used in the external sacrifice is the symbol of this wine of delight. It is pressed out by the pressing-stone ( adri, grdvan ) which has a close symbolic connection with the thunderbolt, the formed electric force of Indra also called adri. The Vedic hymns speak of the luminous thunders of this stone as they speak of the light and sound of Indra’s weapon. Once pressed out as the delight of existence Soma has to be purified through a strainer (pavitra) and through the strainer he streams in his purity into the wine bowl ( chamu ) in which he is brought to the sacrifice, or he is kept in jars ( kalaqa ) for Indra’s drinking. Or, sometimes, the symbol of the bowl or the jar is neglected and Soma is simply described as flowing in a river of delight to the seat of the Gods, to the home of Immortality. That these things are symbols is very clear in most of the hymns of the ninth Mandala which are all devoted to the God Soma. Here, for instance, the physical system of the human being is imaged as the jar of the Soma-wine and the strainer through which it is purified is said to be spread out in the seat of Heaven, divas pade.

    The hymn begins with an imagery which closely follows the physical facts of the purifying of the wine and its pouring into the jar. The strainer or purifying instrument spread out in the seat of Heaven seems to be the mind enlightened by knowledge (chetas) ; the human system is the jar. Pavitram te vitatam brahmanaspate, the strainer is spread wide for thee, O Master of the soul ; prabhur gdtrdni parye-shi viqvatah ; becoming manifest thou pervadest or goest about the limbs everywhere. Soma is addressed here as Brahmanaspati, a word sometimes applied to other gods, but usually reserved for Brihaspati, Master of the creative Word. Brahman in the Veda is the soul or soul-consciousness emerging from the secret heart of things, but more often the thought, inspired, creative, full of the secret truth, which emerges from that consciousness and becomes thought of the mind, manma. Here, however, it seems to mean the soul itself. Soma, Lord of the Ananda, is the true creator who possesses the soul and brings out of it a divine creation. For

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him the mind and heart, enlightened, have been formed into a purifying instrument ; freed from all narrowness and duality the consciousness in it has been extended widely to receive the full flow of the sense-life and mind-life and turn it into pure delight of the true existence, the divine, the immortal Ananda.

    So received, sifted, strained, the Soma-wine of life turned into Ananda comes pouring into all the members of the human system as into a wine-jar and flows through all of them completely in their every part. As the body of a man becomes full of the touch and exultation of strong wine, so all the physical system becomes full of the touch and. exultation of this divine Ananda. The words prabhu and vibhu in the Veda are used not in the later sense, " lord ",but in a fixed psychological significance like prachetas and vichetas or like Prajna na and vijnana in the later language. "Vibhu* means becoming, or coming into existence pervasively, "prabhu" becoming, coming into existence in front of the consciousness, at a particular point as a particular object or experience. Soma comes out like the wine dropping from the strainer and then pervading the jar; it emerges into the consciousness concentrated at some particular point, prabhu, or as some particular experience and then pervades the whole being as Ananda, vibhu.

    But it is not every human system that can hold, sustain and enjoy the potent and often violent ecstasy of that divine delight. . Ataptatanur na tad dmo aqnule, he who is raw and his body not heated does not taste or enjoy that; r’itasya id vahantas tat samdqate, only those who have been baked in the fire bear and entirely enjoy that. The wine of the divine Life poured into the system is a strong, over flooding and violent ecstasy; it cannot be held in the system unprepared for it by strong endurance of the utmost fires of life and suffering and experience. The raw earthen vessel not baked to consistency in the fire of the kiln cannot hold the Soma-wine; it breaks and spills the precious liquid. So the physical system of the man who drinks this strong wine of Ananda must by suffering and conquering all the torturing heats of life have been prepared for the secret and fiery heats of the Soma ; otherwise his conscious being will not be able to

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      it is tasted or it will break down mentally and physically under the touch.

    This strong and fiery wine has to be purified and the strainer for its purifying has been spread out wide to receive it in the seat of heaven, tape pavitram vitatam divas pade; is threads or fibers are all of pure light and standout like rays; qochanto asya tantavo vyasthiran. Through these fibres the wine has to come streaming. The image evidently refers to the purified mental and emotional consciousness, the conscious heart, chetas, whose thoughts and emotions are the threads or fibres. Dyaus or Heaven is the pure mental principle not subjected to the reactions of the nerves and the body. In the seat of Heaven,—the pure mental being as distinguished from the vital and physical consciousness,—the thoughts and emotions become .pure rays of true perception and happy psychical vibration instead of the troubled and obscured mental, emotional and sensational reactions that we now possess. Instead of being contracted and quivering things defending themselves from pain and excess of the shocks of experience they stand out free, strong and bright happily extended to receive and turn into divine ecstasy all possible contacts of universal existence. Therefore it is divas pade, in the seat of Heaven, that the Soma-strainer is spread out to receive the Soma.

    Thus received and purified these keen and violent juices, these swift and intoxicating powers of the Wine no longer disturb the mind or hurt the body, are no longer spilled and lost but foster and increase, avanti, mind and body of their purifier; avantyasya pavltaram dqavo. So increasing him in all delight of his mental, emotional, sensational and physical being they rise with him through the purified and blissful heart to the highest level or surface of heaven, that is, to the luminous world of Swar where the mind capable of intuition, inspiration, revelation is bathed in the splendours of the Truth (r’itam), liberated into the infinity of the Vast (by’ihat). Divas prishtham adhi iisthanti chetasd.

    So far the Rishi has spoken of Soma in his impersonal manifestation, as the Ananda or delight of divine existence in the human being’s conscious experience. He now turns, as is the habit of the Vedic Rishis, from the divine manifestation to the divine Person and at once Soma appears as the

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supreme Personality, the high and universal Deva. Airbrushed ushasah pr’iqnir agriyah ; the supreme dappled One, he makes the dawns to shine: ukshd vibharti bhuvanani Vijaya ; he, the Bull, bears the worlds, seeking the plenitude . The word pr’iqnih, dappled, is used both of the Bull, the supreme Male, and of .the Cow, the female Energy; like all words of colour, qveta, quhra, hart, harit, hr’ishna, hirar Cyaya. in the Veda it is symbolic ; colour, varna, has always denoted quality, temperament, etc., in the language of the Mystics. The dappled Bull is the Deva in the variety of his manifestation, many-hued. Soma is that first supreme dappled Bull, generator of the worlds of the becoming, for from the Ananda, from the all-blissful One they all proceed; delight is the parent of the variety of existences. He is the Bull, fustian, a. word which like its synonym w’fs’iafi, means diffusing, generating, impregnating, the father of abundance, the Bull, the Male; it is he who fertilises Force of consciousness, Nature, the Cow, and produces and bears in his stream of abundance the worlds. He makes the Dawns shine out,—the dawns of illumination, mothers of the radiant herds of the Sun ; and he seeks the plenitude, that is to say the fullness of being, force, consciousness, the plenty of the godhead which is the condition of the divine delight. In other words it is the Lord of the Ananda who gives us the splendours of the Truth and the, plenitudes of the Vast by which we attain to Immortality.

    The fathers who discovered the Truth, received his creative knowledge, his Maya, and by that ideal and ideative consciousness of the supreme Divinity they formed an image of Him in man, they established Him in the race as a child unborn, ,a seed of the godhead in man, a Birth that has to be delivered out of the envelope of the human consciousness. Mdydvino mamire asya mdyayd,nr’ichahshasah pitaro garbham ‘ddadhuh. The fathers are the ancient Rishis who discovered the Way of the Vedic mystics and are supposed to be still spiritually present presiding over the destinies of the race and, like the gods, working in man for his attainment to Immortality. They are the sages who received the strong divine vision, nr’ichakashasah, the Truth-vision by which they were able to find the Cows hidden by the Panis and to pass beyond the bounds of the Rodasi, the mental and physical consciousness, to the Superconscient, the Vast Truth

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Soma is the Gandharvas, the Lord of the hosts of delight, and guards the true seat of the Deva, the level or plane of the Ananda ; Gandharvas it thud padam asya Rakshasi. He is the Supreme, standing out from all other beings and over them, other than they and wonderful, Adbhuta, and as the supreme and transcendent, present in the worlds but exceeding them, he protects in those worlds the births of the gods, ydti devenir janimani adbhutah. The "births of the gods’" is a common phrase in the Veda by which is meant the manifestation of the divine principles in the cosmos and especially the formation of the godhead in its manifold forms in the human being. In the last verse the Rishi spoke of the Deva as the divine child preparing for birth, involved in the world, in the human consciousness. Here he speaks of Him as the transcendent guarding the world of the Ananda formed in man and the forms of the godhead born in him by the divine knowledge against the attacks of the enemies, the powers of division, the powers of unedited (vishah, ardtlh), against the undivine hosts with their formations of a dark and false creative knowledge, Avidya, illusion, (devih mdydh).

    For he seizes these invading enemies in the net of the inner consciousness; he is the master of a profounder and truer setting of world-truth and world-experience than that which is formed by the senses and the superficial mind. It is by this inner setting that he seizes the powers of falsehood, obscurity and division and subjects them to the law of truth, light and unity; gr’ibhn’dti ripum nidhayd nidhdpati. Men therefore protected by the lord of the Ananda governing this inner nature are able to accord their thoughts and actions with the inner truth and light and are no longer made to stumble by the forces of the outer crookedness ; they walk straight, they become entirely perfect in their works and by this truth of inner working and outer action are able to taste the entire sweetness of existence, the honey, the delight that is the food of the soul. Sukr’ittamd madhuno bhaksham dQata.

    Soma manifests here as the offering, the divine food, the wine of delight and immortality, havih, and as the Deva, lord of that divine offering ( havishmah ), above as the vast and divine seat, the superconscient bliss and truth, br’ihat, from which the wine descends to us. As the wine of delight

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he flows about and enters into this great march of the sacrifice which is the pr ogress of man from the physical to the superconscient. He enters into it and encompasses it wearing the cloud of the heavenly ether, nabhas, the mental principle, as his robe and veil. Havir havishmo mahi sadtna dai-vyam, nabho vasdnah pari yasi adhvaram. The divine delight comes to us wearing the luminous-cloudy veil of the forms of mental experience.

    In that march or sacrificial ascent the all-blissful Deva becomes the King of all our activities, master of our divinised nature and its energies and with the enlightened conscious heart as his chariot ascends into the plenitude of the infinite and immortal state. Like a Sun or a fire, as Surya, as Agni, engirt with a thousand blazing energies he conquers the vast regions of the inspired truth, the superconscient knowledge ; rdjd pavitraratho vdjant druhah, sahasrabhr’ishtir jayasi cravo br’ihat. The image is that of a victorious king, sun-like in force and glory, conquering a wide territory. It is the immortality that he wins for man in the vast truth-consciousness qravas, upon which is founded the immortal state. It is his own true seat, it thud padam asya, that the God concealed in man conquers ascending out of the darkness and the twilight through the glories of the Dawn into the solar plenitudes.

*  *  *

    With this hymn I close this series of selected hymns from the Rig Veda. My object has been to show in as brief a compass as possible the real functions of the Vedic gods, the sense of the symbols in which their cult is expressed, the nature of the sacrifice and its goal, explaining by actual examples the secret of the Veda. I have purposely selected a few brief and easy hymns, and avoided these which have a more striking depth, subtlety and complexity of thought and image, —alike those which bear the psychological sense plainly and fully on their surface and those which by their very strangeness and profundity reveal their true character of mystic and sacred poems. It is hoped that these examples will be sufficient to show the reader who caiesto study them with an open mind the real sense of this, our earliest and greatest poetry. By other translations of a more general character it will be shown that these ideas are not merely the highest thought of a few Rishis, but the pervading sense and teach, ing of the Rig Veda.

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The Kena Upanishad

COMMENTARY

I

    The twelve great Upanishads are written round one body of ancient knowledge; but they approach it from different sides. Into the great kingdom of the Brahmavid ya each enters by its own gates, follows its own path or detour, aims at its own point of arrival. The Isha Upanishad and the Kena are both concerned with the same grand problem, the winning of the state of Immortality, the relations of the divine, all-ruling-, all-possessing Brahman to the world and to the human consciousness, the means of passing out of our present state of divided self, ignorance and suffering into the unity, the truth, the divine beatitude. As the Isha closes with the aspiration towards the supreme felicity, so the Kena closes with the definition of Brahman as the Delight and the injunction to worship and seek after That as the Delight. Nevertheless there is a variation in the starting-point, even in the standpoint, a certain sensible divergence in the attitude.

    For the precise subject of the two Upanishads is not identical. The Isha is concerned with the whole problem of the world and life and works and the human destiny in their relation to the supreme truth of the Brahman. It embraces in its brief eighteen verses most of the fundamental problems of Life and scans them swiftly with the idea of the supreme Self and its becomings, the supreme Lord and His workings as the key that shall unlock all gates. The oneness of all existences is its dominating note.

    The Kena Upanishad approaches a more restricted problem, starts with a more precise and narrow inquiry.

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    It concerns itself only with the relation of mind-consciousness to Brahman-consciousness and does not stray outside the strict boundaries of its subject. The material world and the physical life are taken for granted, they are hardly mentioned. But the material world and the physical life exist for us only by virtue of our internal self and our internal life. According as our mental instruments represent to us the external world, according as our vital force in obedience to the mind deals with its impacts and objects, so will be our outward life and existence. The world is for us what our mind and senses declare them to be ; life is what our mentality determines that it shall become. The question is asked by the Upanishad, what then are these mental instruments ? what is this mental life which uses the external ? Are they the last witnesses, the supreme and final power ? Is mind all or is this human existence only a veil of something greater, mightier, more remote and profound than itself?

    The Upanishad replies that there is such a greater existence behind, which is to the mind and its instruments, to the life-force and its workings what they are to the material world. Matter does not know Mind, Mind knows Matter ; it is only when the creature embodied in Matter develops mind, becomes the mental being that he can know his mental self and know by that self Matter also in its reality to Mind. So also Mind does not know That which is behind it, That knows Mind ; and it is only when the being involved in Mind can deliver out of its appearances his true Self that he can become That, know it as himself and by it know also Mind in its reality to that which is more real than Mind. How to rise beyond the mind and its instruments, enter into himself, attain to the Brahman becomes then the supreme aim for the mental being, the all-important problem of his existence.

    For given that there is a more real existence than the mental existence, a greater life than the physical life, it follows that the lower life with its forms, and enjoyments which are all that men here ordinarily worship and pursue, can no longer be an object of desire for the awakened

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spirit. He must aspire beyond; he must free himself from this world of death and mere phenomena to become himself in his true state of immortality beyond them. Then alone he really exists when here in this mortal life itself he can free himself from the mortal consciousness and know and be the immortal and eternal. Otherwise he feels that he has lost himself, has fallen from his true salvation.

    But this Brahman-consciousness is not represented by the Upanishad as something quite alien to the mental and physical world, aloof from it and in no way active or concerned with its activities. On the contrary, it is the Lord and ruler of all the world ; the energies of the gods in the mortal consciousness are its energies ; when they conquer and grow great, it is because Brahman has fought and won. This world therefore is an inferior action, a superficial representation of something infinitely greater, more perfect, more real than itself.

    What is that something ? It is the All-Bliss which is infinite being and immortal force. It is that pure and utter bliss and not the desires and enjoyments of this world which men ought to worship and to seek. How to seek it is the one question that matters; to follow after it with all one’s being is the only truth and the only wisdom.

II

    Mind is the agent of the lower or phenomenal consciousness; vital force or the life-breath, speech and the five senses of knowledge are the instruments of the mind. Prana, the life-force in the nervous system, is indeed the one main instrument of our mental consciousness ; for it is that by which the mind receives the contacts of the physical world through the organs of knowledge, sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste, and reacts upon its object by speech and the other four organs of action ; all these senses are dependent upon the nervous Life-force for their functioning. The Upanishad therefore begins by a query as to the final source or control of the activities of the Mind, Life-Force, Speech, Senses.

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    The question is, kena, by whom or what ? In the ancient conception of the universe our material existence is formed from the five elemental states of Matter, the ethereal, aerial, fiery, liquid and solid ; everything that has to do with our material existence is called the elemental, adhibhauta. In this material-there move non-material powers manifesting through the Mind-Force and Life-Force that work upon Matter, and these are called Gods or devas ; everything that has to do with the working of the non-material in us is called adhidaiva, that which pertains to the Gods. But above the non-material powers, containing them, greater than they is the Self or Spirit, dtman, and everything that has to do with this highest existence in us is called the spritual, adhydtma. For the purpose of the Upanishads the adhidaiva is the subtle in us ; it is that which is represented by Mind and Life as opposed to gross Matter; for in Mind and Life we have the characteristic action of the Gods.

    The Upanishad is not concerned with the elemental, the adhibhauta ; it is concerned with the relation between the subtle existence and the spiritual, the adhidaiva and adhydtma. But the Mind, the Life, the speech, the senses are governed by cosmic powers, by Gods, by Indra, Vayu, Agni. Are these subtle cosmic powers the beginning of existence, the true movers of mind and life, or is there some superior unifying force, one in itself beamed them all?

    By whom or what is the mind missioned and sent on its errand so that it falls on its object like an arrow shot by a skilful archer at its predetermined mark, like a messenger, an envoy sent by his master to a fixed place for a fixed object ? What is it within us or without us that sends forth the mind on its errand ? What guides it to its object ?

    Then there is the Life-force, the Prana, that works in our vital being and nervous system. The Upanishad speaks of it as the first or supreme Breath; elsewhere in the sacred writings it is spoken of as the chief Breath or the Breath of the mouth, mukhya, dsanya; it is that which carries in it the Ward, the creative expression. In the

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body of man there are said to be five workings of the life-force called the five Pranas. One specially termed Prana moves in the upper part of the body and is preeminently the breath of life, because it brings the universal Life-force into the physical system and gives it thereto be distributed. A second in the lower part of the trunk, termed Apana, is the breath of death; for it gives away the vital force out of the body. A third, the Saman, regulates the interchange of these two forces at their meeting-place, equalises them and is the most important agent in maintaining the equilibrium, of the vital forces and their functions. A fourth, the Vyana, pervasive, distributes the vital energies throughout the !body. A fifth, the Tijuana, moves upward from the body to the crown of the head and is a regular channel of communication between the physical life and the greater life of the spirit. None of these are the first or supreme Breath, although the Prana most nearly represents it; the Breath to which so much importance is given in the Upanishads, is the pure life-force itself, —first, because all the others are secondary to it, born from it and only exist as its special functions. It is imaged in the Veda as the Horse ; its various energies are the forces that draw the chariots of the Gods. The Vedic image is recalled by the choice of the terms employed in the Upanishad, yukta, yoked, praiti, goes forward, as a horse driven by the charioteer advances in its path.

    Who then has yoked this Life-force to the many workings of existence or by what power superior to itself does it move forward in its paths? For it is not primal, self-existent or its own agent. We are conscious of a power behind which guides, drives, controls, uses it.

    The force of the vital breath enables us to bring up and speed outward from the body this speech that we use to express, to throw out into a. world of action and new-creation the willings and thought-formations of the mind. It is propelled by Vayu, the life-breath; it is formed by Agni, the secret will-force and fiery shaping energy in the mind and body. But these are the agents. Who or what is the secret Power that is behind them, the master of the

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word that men speak, its real former and the origin of that which expresses itself ?

    The ear hears the sound, the eye sees the form ; but hearing and vision are particular operations of the life-force in us used by the mind in order to put itself into communication with the world in which the mental being dwells and to interpret it in the forms of sense. The life-force shapes them, the mind uses them, but something other than the life-force and the mind enables them to shape and to use their objects and their instruments. What God sets eye and ear to their workings? Not Surya, the God of light, not Ether and his regions; for these are only conditions of vision and hearing.

    The Gods combine, each bringing his contribution, the operations of the physical world that we observe as of the mental world that is our means of observation ; but the whole universal action is one, not a sum of fortuitous atoms ; it is one, arranged in its parts, combined in its multiple functionings by virtue of a single croakiest existence which can never be constructed or put together (akrita) but is, anterior to all these workings. The Gods work only by this Power anterior to themselves, live only by its life, think only by its thought, act only for its purposes. We look into ourselves and all things and become aware of it there, an "I," an "Is", a Self, which is other, firmer, vaster than any separate or individual being.

    But since it is not anything that the mind can make its object or the senses throw into form for the mind, what then is it—or who? What absolute Spirit ? What one, supreme and eternal Godhead ? Kodevah.

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The Synthesis of Yoga.

CHAPTER VIII

THE SUPREME WILL

    The considerations we have passed under a swift review in the last chapter enable us to understand more profoundly the great and crowning injunction of the Gita to the Karmayogin, " Abandoning all rules of conduct take refuge in Me alone." All standards and rules are temporary constructions founded upon th e needs of the ego in its transition from Matter to Spirit; they have a relative imperativeness so long as we rest satisfied in a stage of transition, in the physical and vital life, in the mental, even in the mental touched by the spiritual. If we would enter utterly into the spiritual, we must pass beyond them and have the faith and courage to trust ourselves into the hands of the Lord of all things and the Friend of All, into the ocean of the free, the infinite, the Absolute. After the Law, Liberty; after the personal, general and universal standards, the divine freedom and impersonal pliability ; after the strait path of the ascent the wide plateaus on the summit.

    We have three stages of the ascent,—the bodily life, the mental, the spiritual. In the bodily life desire and need must first rule and then the practical good of the individual and the society. In the mental life ideals must rule, ideals formed by the mind as a result of intuition and experience, and as the mental life prevails over the bodily, must mould in the sense of the ideal the life first of the

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individual and then of the society. In the spiritual life the self or the Lord within must shape freely the final development according to the highest, widest and most integral expression possible of the law of our being until at last it acts in a perfect freedom,—the individual having nothing farther to gain, no desire to fulfil,—with no other object than the maintenance and conduct of the world in its march towards the divine goal.

    Whoever enters the path of works, must have left behind him the stage in which desire is the law of action. Whatever desires still trouble his being, he must, if he accepts this highest aim, put into the hands of the Lord within so that He may deal with them for the good of the sadhaka and for the good of all. In effect, we find that once this is done, egoistic indulgence of desire is for some time allowed but only in order to exhaust itself and to teach the soul in its most unreachable part, the nervous, vital, emotional self, by the reaction of desire, by its grief and unrest contrasted with periods of the higher peace, that egoistic desire is not the law for the soul that seeks liberation. Afterwards the element of desire in those impulsions will be thrown away and only their pure force of action (pravritti) with an equal delight in all work and result will be preserved. To act, to enjoy is the law and right of the nervous being; but to choose by personal desire its action and enjoyment is only its ignorant will, not its right. The supreme and universal Will within must choose.

    The social law, we have seen, is a means by which the ego is subjected for his self-discipline to a wider ego than himself; and it may express either the needs and the practical good of the society or those needs and that good modified by a higher moral or ideal law. It is binding on the individual in the shape of social duty so long as it is not in conflict with his sense of the higher Right. But the sadhaka of the Karmayoga will- abandon this also to the Lord of works. After he has made this surrender, his social impulses and judgments will, like his desires, only be used for their exhaustion and so far as they are still necessary

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for enabling him to identify his lower mental nature with mankind in general or with any grouping of mankind in its works and hopes and aspirations.

    For, even after he is free, the sadhaka will remain in the world; to remain in the world is to remain in works; and to remain in works without desire is to labour for the good of mankind in general and in the framework created either by the environment or the grouping in which he is born or else by one which is chosen for him. Therefore in our perfection there must be nothing left in the mental being which conflicts with or prevents our sympathy and free self-identification with the group or with mankind. But in the end it must become a free self-identification not dominated by any social, national, communal or creedal egoism. If any social law is obeyed, it will not be from physical necessity or the sense of interest or expediency or the pressure of the environment or even from any sense of duty, but for the sake of the Lord of Works and because it is felt or known to be the divine Will that the social law as it stands must for the present be observed and the minds of men must not be disturbed by its infringement. If on the other hand the social law is disregarded, it will be not for the indulgence of desire, self-will or self-opinion, but because it is felt or known that there should be a

    There is still left the moral law or ideal. This also the sadhaka will abandon to Him whom all ideals seek imperfectly and fragmentarily to express. The bondage to sin and evil passes away with the passing of nervous desire, of the quality of passion (rajoguna ) ; but neither must the aspirant remain subject to the golden chain of a

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    Truth and Love will replace human virtue; but this truth will not always be consonant with the petty constructions of the practical reason or even with the larger constructions of the purer ideative reason which men call truth, nor will this love necessarily be consistent with the partial and emotion-ridden movements of human attraction, sympathy and pity. The petty law cannot bind the vaster movement, nor the partial attainment dictate to the supreme fulfilment.

    At first, the higher Love and Truth will fulfil itself in the sadhaka according to the essential law of his nature, according to the aspect of the divine nature out of which his soul has emerged. He will manifest it in the temperament of the sage or of the lion-like fighter or of the lover and enjoyer or of the worker and servant or in any combination of essential attributes (gunas) which constitutes the form of his being. It is this self-nature playing freely in his acts which man will see and not a conduct regulated by any law from outside.

    But there is a yet higher attainment, an infinity ( dnantya ) in which even this last limitation is exceeded and the soul lives without any boundaries, yet using all forms and moulds according to the divine Will in it without being restrained or bound or imprisoned in any of them. This is the summit of the path of works and the utter liberty of the soul in its actions. In reality it has no actions ; for all its activities are a rhythm of the Supreme and proceed from That alone.

*

*  *

    Surrender of actions to the supreme and universal Will, an unconditioned and standard less surrender of all works to the government of something within us which can replace the ordinary working of the ego-nature is the end of Karmayoga. But what is this divine supreme Will and how can it be recognised?

    Ordinarily, we conceive of ourselves as a separate "I" governing a separate body and mental and moral nature and choosing our separate actions, nor is it easy for the

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vulgar mind, the mind that has not thought nor looked deeply into itself, to imagine how there can be anything else in us truer, deeper and more powerful than this apparent " I " and its empire. But the very first step towards self-knowledge as towards the knowledge of things is to get rid of apparent truths and go behind to the real truth.

    As a matter of fact, this ego or " I " is only a formation of our mental Nature in the perceiving and discriminating mind. All that we externally and superficially are and do, is Nature or executive cosmic force shaping us and dictating through our temperament and environment and mentality so shaped our actions and their results. Thought occurs in us, will occurs in us, impulse occurs in us; it is cosmic Force that forms the thought, imposes the will, imparts the impulse . Our body, mind and ego are a wave of that sea of force in action and do not govern it but by it are governed. The sadhaka therefore in his progress towards truth and self-knowledge must come to a point where the soul opens its eyes and recognises this truth about the ego and works. He will give up the idea of the "I "that acts or governs action and recognise that it is Prakriti, Force of cosmic nature in him following her fixed modes, that is the worker.

    But what has fixed the modes, what has originated and governs the movement of Force ? It is Consciousness behind that is the lord, witness, knower, enjoyer, upholder and source of sanction for her works; it is Purusha. Prakriti shapes the action in Us; Purusha witnesses it. Prakriti forms the thought in our minds, Purusha knows the thought and the truth behind it . Prakriti determines the result of the action ; Purusha enjoys it. Prakriti forms mind and body, labours over them, develops them; Purusha upholds the formation and evolution and sanctions each step of it. Prakriti applies the Will-force which works, in things and men; Purusha set’s that Will-force to work by his vision of that which should be done. This Purusha is therefore not the ego, but a Self and a Power and a Knowledge behind the ego. Our " I " is only a false mental reflection of this Self, this Power, this Knowledge.

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    There is however something in us which is not the mental ego ; it is a purer reflection of the one and universal Purusha, it is the Soul or individualised Self, the Self limiting its power and knowledge for the individual play with Nature. This is the Jiva of the Indian philosophies. At present it allows itself to be confused with the idea of the ego; it has to get rid of this and know itself as a reflection of the supreme and universal Self and a centre of its consciousness in the world.

    In order to get back, then, from the egoistic forms of activity, the sadhaka has to get rid of the sense of an " I " that acts. He has to see everything happening in him by his mental and bodily instruments according to the action of Nature. He himself becomes quiescent and realises himself as the individual soul witnessing the acts, accepting tranquilly the results, sanctioning or withholding his sanction from the impulse to the act which nevertheless often takes place as the result of fixed Nature and past storage of energy independent of his sanctions. Finally, he becomes aware of the higher Self within him which is the source of all his seeing and knowing, the source of the sanction, the source of the acceptance and the rejection. This is the Lord. The rest of our progress depends on the knowledge of the ways in which this Lord of works manifests His Will in the system.

    The Lord sees in His omniscience the thing that has to be done ; this seeing is His will, it is a form of creative Power, and that which He sees the executive Force of Nature carries out as the tool and slave of this omnipotent omniscience. But the vision arises out of the being of the Lord, spontaneously, and it is not our mortal attempt to see and our difficult arrival at a truth or fact of being. Therefore, when the individual soul is entirely at one in being and knowledge with the Lord, the supreme Will arises in us as the thing that must be and fulfils itself by the spontaneous action of Nature. There is no desire, no responsibility, no reaction. It may manifest as an imperative impulsion, a God-driven action, knowledge of its meaning and aim arising only afterwards; or it may

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come as an inspiration and intuition rather in the heart and body than in the mind, the full knowledge still being deferred ; or it may come as a luminous command or perception in the will or in the thought spontaneously fulfilled by the lower members. When the Yoga is imperfect, only some actions can be done in this way, or else general action but only in periods of exaltation and illumination. When the Yoga is perfect, all action becomes of this character,—the spontaneous working of Prakriti at the will and for the enjoyment of the supreme Purusha, the absolute and universal Lord of the individual soul and its works.

    But this is only the higher working. There is a lower in which the Lord veils Himself in Nature and suffers her to drive the individual soul either with its complicity as the Ego or largely against its efforts at a purer self-knowledge owing to the force of past actions, past formations, long-rooted associations. It is the period of slow emergence out of this lower working into the higher which is the valley of the shadow of death for the striver after perfection ; it is a passage full of trials, sufferings, sorrows, obscurations, stumblings, errors, pitfalls. To abridge and alleviate this ordeal faith is necessary, an increasing surrender of the mind to the knowledge that imposes itself from within and, above all, right and unfaltering practice of the Yoga.

&    "Practise unfalteringly" says the Gita, "with a heart free from despondency;" for though in this earlier stage of the path we must taste the bitter poison of internal discord and suffering, the last taste of this cup is the sweetness of the nectar of immortality.

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The Eternal Wisdom

THE CONQUEST OF TRUTH

BE THY OWN TORCH

1 By three roads we can reach wisdom : the road of experience and this is the most difficult ; the road of initiative and this is the easiest; and the road of reflection and this is the noblest.

2 One should seek the truth himself while profiting by the directions which have reached us from ancient sages and saints.

3 It is extravagance to ask of others what can be

4 procured by oneself.—The superior soul asks nothing from any but itself. The vulgar and unmeritable man

5 asks everything of others.—I call him a man who recognises no possessions save those he finds in him-

6 self.—He governs his soul and expects nothing from others.

7 Be your own torch and your own refuge. Take truth for your force, take truth for your refuge. Seek refuge in no others but only in yourself.

8 Who can be the Master of another ? The Eternal q alone is the guide and the Master.—There are numerous Masters. But the common Master is the Universal Soul: live in it and let its rays live in you.

• (1) Confucius.—2) Tolstoi.—3) Seneca: Epistles.—4) Confucius : Lin you II XV .20—6) Seneca.— 6) Confucius.—7) Mahaparinibbana and Sutta. 8) Ramakrishna.—9) Book of the Golden Precepts.

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10 It is you who must make the effort ; the sages can

11 only teach.—If you do not meet a sage following the same road as yourself, then walk alone.

* * *

12 Prepare thyself for thou must travel alone. The

13 Master can only indicate to thee the road.—The sage is never alone…he bears in himself the Lord of all

14 things.—Thou hast always a refuge in thyself…There be free and look at all things with a fearless eye.

15 Confidence in help from outside brings with it distress. Only self-confidence gives force and joy.

16 Stimulate thyself, direct thyself ; thus protected by thyself and full of clear-seeing thou shalt live always happy.

17-18 Shine out for thyself as thy own light.—Be thy own torch ; rise up and become wise.

INTELLECTUAL INDEPENDENCE

a Leave out of your mind the quality of him who speaks to you whether great or small, and consider with an open mind whether the words spoken are

3 true or false.—Do not believe in men’s discourses before you have reflected well on them.

4 Do not believe a thing simply upon hearsay. Do not believe on the authority of traditions merely because they have been held in honour by numerous generations. Do not believe a thing because the general opinion holds it for the truth and because men speak much of it. Do not believe a thing because one of the wise men of antiquity bears witness to it. Do not believe a thing because the probabilities are in its favour , or

10) Dhammapada.—11) Dhammapada.—12) Book of the Golden Precepts.—13) Angilius Silesius.—14t) Marcus Aurelius.—15) Fo-shu-hing-tsan-king.—16) Dhammapada.—17) *• (1) Ecclesiasticus XIX. 10.—2) Iamblichus " Book on the Mysteries I

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because long habit has accustomed you to think of it as the truth. Do not believe in things you have imagined, thinking that a superior Power has revealed them to you. Do not believe anything upon the sole authority of your masters or of priests.

What you have tried and experienced yourself and recognised as the Truth, what is in conformity with your own good and the good of others, in that believe and order your conduct accordingly.

5 Beloved, believe not every spirit…because many false prophets are gone out into the world.

6 Even if the whole world should believe in the truth of a doctrine and if it should be very ancient, man ought to control it by his reason and throw it boldly away if it does not agree with the demands of his

V reason.—The more people believe in < ne thing, the more one ought to be careful with regard to that belief and attentive in examining it.

8 Let not the talk of the vulgar make any impression

9 on you.—Nothing is so dangerous as the habit we have of referring to a common opinion. So long as one trusts other people without taking the trouble to judge for oneself, one lives by the faith of others, error is parsed on from hand to hand and example destroys us.

10 To believe blindly is bad. Reason, judge for yourselves, experiment, verify whether what you have

11 been told is true or false.—Use your body and your thought and turn away from anybody who asks you to believe blindly, whatever be his good will or his virtue.

12-13 Be not children in understanding. be men.—Prove