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The "Arya" having completed its first year and survived the first perils of infancy, now offers itself a second time to the decisions of Time and the mind of the hour. We think it necessary to open our new year with a succinct statement of the idea this Review is intended to serve and the aim which it holds before it. For our Review has been conceived neither as a mirror of the fleeting interests and surface thoughts of the period we live in, nor as the mouthpiece of a sect, school or already organised way of thinking. Its object is to foci out for the thought of the future, to help in shaping its foundations and to link it to the best and most vital thought of the past.
We believe in the constant progression of humanity and we hold that that progression is the working out of a Thought in Life which sometimes manifests itself on the surface and sometimes sinks below and works behind the mask of external forces’ and interests. When there is this lapse below the surface, humanity has its periods of apparent retrogression or tardy evolution, its long hours of darkness or twilight during which the secret Thought behind works out one of its phases by the pressure mainly of economic, political and personal interests ignorant of any deeper aim within. When the thought returns to the surface, humanity has its periods of light and of rapid efflorescence, its dawns and splendid springtides ; and according to the depth, vitality, truth and self-effective energy of the form of Thought that emerges is the importance of the stride forward that it makes during these Hours of the Gods in our terrestrial manifestation.
Page-1 There is no greater error than to suppose, as the "practical" man is wont to do, that thought is only a fine flower and ornament of life and that political, economic and personal interests are the important and effective motors of human action. We recognise that this is a world of life and action and developing organism; but the life that seeks to guide itself onl3′ by vital and material forces is a slow, dark and blundering growth. It is an attempt to approximate man to the method of vegetable and animal existence. The earth is a world of Life and Matter, but man is not a vegetable nor an animal; he is a spiritual and a thinking being who is set here to shape and use-the animal mould for higher purposes, by higher motives, with a more divine instrumentation. Therefore b}’ his very nature he serves the working of a Thought within him even when he is ignorant of it in his surface self. The practical man who ignores or despises the deeper life of the Idea, is yet sieving that which he ignores or despises. Charlemagne hewing a chaotic Europe into shape with his sword was preparing the reign of the feudal and Catholic interpretation of human life with all that that great though obscure period of humanity has meant for the thought and spiritual development of mankind. But it is when the Thought emerges and guides life that man grows towards his full humanity, strides forward on his path and begins to control the development of Nature in his destiny or at least to collaborate as a conscious mind and spirit with That which controls and directs it.
The progress of humanity has therefore been a constant revolution with its rhythm of alternative darkness and light, but both the day and the night have helped to foster that which is evolving. The periods have not been the same for all parts of the globe. In the historic ages of the present cycle of
civilizations the movement has been almost entirely centered in the twin continents of Asia and Europe. And there it has been often seen that when Asia was moving through the light, Europe was passing through one of her epochs of obscurity and on the other hand the nights of Asia’s repose or stagnation have corresponded
Page-2 with the days of Europe’s mental vigour and vital activity. But the fundamental difference has been that Asia has served predominantly (not exclusively) as a field for man’s spiritual experience and progression, Europe has been rather a workshop for his mental and vital activities. As the cycle progressed; the Eastern continent has more and more converted itself into a storehouse of spiritual energy sometimes active and reaching forward to new development, sometimes conservative and quiescent. Three or four times in history a stream of this energy has poured out upon Europe, but each time Europe has rejected wholly or partially the spiritual substance of the afflatus and used it rather as an impulse to fresh intellectual and material activity and progress. The first attempt was the filtering of Egyptian, Chilean and Indian wisdom through the thought of the Greek philosophers from Pythagoras to Plato and the neo-Platonists ; the result was the brilliantly intellectual and unspiritual civilizations of Greece and Rome. But it prepared the way for the second attempt when Buddhism and Vaishnavism filtered through the Semitic temperament entered Europe in the form of Christianity. Christianity came within an ace of spiritualising and even of ascetic sing the mind of Europe; it was baffled by its own theological deformation in the minds of the Greek fathers of the Church and by the sudden flooding of Europe with a German barbarism whose temperament in its merits no less than in its defects was the very antitype both of the Christian spirit and the Greco-Roman intellect.
The Islamic invasion of Spain and the southern coast of the Mediterranean—curious as the sole noteworthy example of Asiatic culture using the European method of material and political irruption as opposed to the peaceful invasion by ideas—may be regarded as a third attempt. The result of its meeting with
Graecized Christianity was the reawakening of the European mind in feudal and Catholic Europe and the obscure beginnings of modern thought and science.
Page-3 The fourth and last attempt which is as yet only in its slow initial stage is the quiet entry of Eastern and chiefly of Indian thought into Europe first through the veil of German metaphysics, more latterly by its subtle influence in reawakening the Celtic, Scandinavian and Slavonic idealism, mysticism, religionist, and the direct and open penetration of Buddhism, Theosophy, Vedanta’s, Bauhaus and other Oriental influences in both Europe and America. On the other hand, there have been two reactions of Europe upon Asia; first, the invasion of Alexander with his aggressive Hellenism which for a time held Western Asia, created echoes and reactions in India and returned through Islamic culture upon mediaeval Europe; secondly, the modern onslaught of commercial, political, scientific Europe upon the moral, autistic and spiritual cultures of the East. The new features of this mutual interpenetration are, first, that the two attacks have synchronised and, secondly, that they have encountered in each case the extreme exaggeration of their opposites. Intellectual and materialistic Europe found India, the Asia of Asia, the heart of the world’s spiritual life, in the last throes of an enormous experiment, the thought of a whole nation concentrated for centuries upon the pure spiritual existence to the exclusion of all real progress in the practical and mental life of the race. The entering stream of Eastern thought found in Europe the beginning of an era which rejected religion, philosophy and psychology,—religion as an emotional delusion, philosophy, the pure essence of the mind, as a barren thought-weaving,—and resolved to devote the whole intellectual faculty of man to a study of the laws of material Nature and of man’s bodily, social, economic and political existence and to build thereon a superior civilizations.
That stupendous effort is over; it has not yet frankly declared its bankruptcy, but it is bankrupt. It is sinking in a cataclysm as gigantic and as unnatural as the attempt which gave it birth. On the other hand, the exaggerated Page-4 spirituality of the Indian effort has also registered a bankruptcy; we have seen how high individuals can rise by it, but we have seen also how low a race can fall which in its eagerness to seek after God ignores His intention in humanity. Both the European and the Indian attempt were admirable, the Indian by its absolute spiritual sincerity, the European by its severe intellectual honesty and ardours for the truth ; both have accomplished miracles ; but in the end God and Nature have been too strong for the Titanium of the human spirit and for the Titanium of the human intellect. The salvation of the human lace lies in a more sane and integral development of the Possibilities is of mankind in the individual and in the community. The safety of Europe has to be sought in the recognition of the spiritual aim of human existence, otherwise she will because ed by the weight of her own unlimited knowledge and soulless organisations. The safety of Asia lies in the recognition of the material mould and mental conditions in which that aim has to be worked out, otherwise she will sink deeper into the slough to despond of a mental and physical incompetence to deal with the facts of life and the shocks of a rapidly changing movement. It is not any exchange of forms that is required, but an interchange of regenerating impulses and a happy fusion and harmonising.
The synchronism and mutual interpenetration of the two great currents of human effort at such a crisis in the history of the race is full of hope for the future of humanity, but full also of possible dangers. The hope is the emergence of a new and better human life founded on a greater knowledge, a
pursuit of the new faculties and possibilities opening out before us and a just view of the problem which the individual, the society, the race have to solve. Mankind has been drawn together by the developments of material science and for good or evil its external future is henceforth one; its different part; no longer develop separately and in independence of each other. There-opens out at the same time tin: possibility that by the development and practice of the science and the life of the Page-5 soul it may be made one in reality and by an internal unity. The idea by which the enlightenment of Europe has been governed is the passion for the discovery of the Truth and Law that constitutes existence and governs the process of the world, the attempt to develop the life and potentialities of man, his ideals, institutions, organisations by the knowledge of that Law and Truth and the confidence that along this line lies the road of human progress and perfection. The idea is absolutely just and we accept it entirely; but its application has been erroneous. For the Law and Truth that has to be discovered is not that of the material world—though this is required,. nor even of the mental and physical—though this is indispensable, but the Law and Truth of the Spirit on which all the rest depends. For it is the power of the Self of things that expresses itself in their forms and processes. The message of the East to the West is a true message, "Only by finding himself can man be saved," and " what shall it profit a man though he gain the whole world, if he lose his own soul." The West has heard the message and is seeking out the law and truth of the soul and the evidences of an inner reality greater than the material. The danger is that with her passion for mechanism and her exaggerated intellectuality she may fog herself in an external and false psychism, such as we see arising in England and America, the homes of the mechanical genius, or in intellectual, unspiritual and therefore erroneous theories of the Absolute, such as have run their course in critical and metaphysical Germany.
The idea by which the illumination of Asia has been governed is the firm knowledge that truth of the Spirit is the sole real truth, the belief that the psychological life of man is an instrument for attaining to the truth of the Spirit and that its laws must be known and
practiced with that aim paramount, and the attempt to form the external life of man and the institutions of society into a suitable mould for the great
endeavor.
Page-6 This idea, too, is absolutely just and we accept it entirely. But in its application, and in India most, it has deviated into a divorce between the Spirit and its instruments and a disparagement and narrowing of the mental and external life of the race. For it is only on the widest and richest efflorescence of this instrumental life that the fullest and most absolute attainment of the spiritual can be securely based. This knowledge the ancients of the East possessed and practiced ; it has been dimmed in knowledge and lost in practice by their descendants. The message the West brings to the East is a time message. Man also is God and it is through his developing manhood that he approaches the godhead ; Life also is the Divine, its progressive expansion is the self-expression of the Brahman, and to deny Life is to diminish the Godhead within us. This is the truth that returns to the East from the West translated into the language of the higher truth the East already possesses ; and it is an ancient knowledge. The East also is awaking to the message. The danger is that Asia may accept it in the European form, forget for a time her own law and nature and either copy blindly the West or make a disastrous amalgam of that which she has in its most inferior forms and the crude nesses which are invading her. The problem of thought therefore is to find out the right idea and the right way of harmony ; to restate the ancient and eternal spiritual truth of the Self so that it shall remembrance, permeate and dominate the mental and physical life; to develop the most profound and vital methods of psychological self-discipline and self-development so that the mental and psychical life of man may express the spiritual life through the utmost possible expansion of its own richness, power and complexity ; and to seek for the means and motives by which his external life, his society and his institutions may remould the Melvin s progressively in the truth of the spirit and develop towards the utmost possible harmony of individual freedom and social unity.
This is our ideal and our search in the "Arya."
Page-7 Throughout the world there are plenty of movements inspired by the same drift, but there is room for an effort of thought which shall frankly ask knowledge the problem in its integral complexity and not be restrained in the flexibility of its search by attachment to any cult, creed or extant system of philosophy. The effort involves a quest for the Truth that underlies existence and the fundamental Law of its self-expression in the universe—the work of metaphysical philosophy and religious thought; the sounding and harmonising of the psychological methods of discipline by which man purifies and perfects himself,—the work of psychology, not as it is understood in Europe, but the deeper practical psychology called in India Yoga ; and the application of our ideas to the problems of man’s social and collective life. Philosophy and religious thought must be the beginning and the foundation of any such attempt; for they alone go behind appearances and processes to the truth of things. The attempt to get rid of their supremacy must always. be vain. Man will always think and generalist and try to penetrate behind the apparent fact, for that is the imperative law of his awakened consciousness ; man will always turn his generalisations into a religion, even though it be only a religion of positivism or of material Law. Philosophy is the intellectual search for the fundamental truth of things, religion is the attempt to make the truth dynamic in the soul of man. They are essential-to each other; a religion that is not the expression of philosophic truth, degenerates into superstition and obscurantism, and a philosophy which does not dynamite itself with the religious sprit is a barren light, for it cannot get itself practiced.
Our first preoccupation in the " Arya " has therefore been with the deepest thought that we could command on the philosophical foundations of the problem ; and we have been so profoundly convinced that without this basis nothing we could say would have any real, solid and permanent value that we have perhaps given too great a space
Page-8 to difficult and abstruse thought whether in the shaping of our own ideas or in the study and restatement of the ancient Eastern knowledge. Our excuse is that we come forward as ourselves learners and students and must begin at the roots to proceed forward safely. Our second preoccupation has been with the psychological disciplines of Yoga ; but here also we have been obliged to concern ourselves with a deep study of the principles underlying the methods rather than with a popular statement of methods and disciplines. But without this previous study of principles the statement of methods would have been unsound and not really helpful. There are no short cuts to an integral perfection. Other and more popular sides of our work we have advanced a little in the more difficult part of it, we hope to turn increasingly to these more obvious and general subjects of interest. And if our readers are still willing to follow us, their recompense will be a more clear, sound and solid thought on these subjects than we could otherwise have given them.
We shall develop our general thought in later numbers; at present we content ourselves with restating our ideal. Unity for the human race by an inner oneness and not only by an external association of interests; the resurgence of man out of the merely animal and economic life or the merely intellectual and aesthetic into the glories of the spiritual existence ; the pouring of the power of the spirit into the physical mould and mental instrument so that man may develop his manhood into that true superman hood which shall exceed our present state as much as this exceeds the animal state from which science tells us that we have issued. These three are one; for man’s unity and man’s self-transcendence can come only by living in the Spirit.
Page-9 CHAPTER XIII. THE DIVINE MAYA. By His Names they shaped and measured the power of the Supreme Consciousness ; wearing might after might of Force as a robe the lords of Maya shaped out Form in this Being. Rig Veda. The Masters of forming Knowledge made a shape of Him by His Knowledge that comprehends and forms ; the Fathers set Him within as a child that is to be born. id
Existence that acts and en
ayes by the power and from the pure delight of its conscious being is the reality that we are, the self of all our modes and moods, the cause, object and goal of all our doing, becoming and creating. As the poet, artist or musician when he creates does really nothing but develop some potentiality in his unmanifested self into a form of manifestation and as the thinker, statesman, mechanist only bring out into a shape of things that which lay hidden in themselves, was themselves, is still themselves when it is cast into form, so is it with the world and the Eternal. All creation or becoming is nothing but this self-manifestation. Out of the seed there evolves that which is already in the seed, pre-existent in being, predestined in its will to become, prearranged in the delight of becoming. The original
plasma held in itself in force of being the resultant organism. For it is always that secret, burdened, self-knowing force which
lab ours under its own irresistible impulse to manifest the form of Page-10 itself with which it is charged. Only, the individual who creates or develops out of himself, makes a distinction between himself, the force that, works in him and the material in which he works. In reality the force is himself, the individualized consciousness which it instrumentalists is himself, the material which it uses is himself, the resultant form is himself. In other words it is one existence, one force, one delight of being which concentrates itself at various points, says of each " This is I " and works in it by a various play of self-force for a various play of self-formation. What it produces is itself and can be nothing other than itself ; it is working out a play, a rhythm, a development of its own existence, force of consciousness and delight of being. Therefore whatever comes into the world, seeks nothing but this, to be, to arrive at the intended form, to enlarge its self-existence in that form, to develop, manifest, increase, realise infinitely the consciousness and the power that is in it, to have the delight of coming into manifestation, the delight of the form of being, the delight of the rhythm of consciousness, the delight of the play of force and to aggrandizes and perfect that delight by whatever means is possible, in whatever direction, through whatever idea of itself may be suggested to it by the Existence, the Conscious-Force, the Delight active within its deepest being.
And if there is any goal, any completeness towards which things tend, it can only be the completeness—in the individual and in the whole which the individuals constitute—of its self-existence, of its power and consciousness and of its delight of being. But such completeness is not possible in the individual consciousness concentrated within the limits of the individual formation; absolute completeness is not feasible in the finite because it is alien to the self-conception of the finite. Therefore the only final goal possible is the emergence of the infinite consciousness in the individual ; it is his recovery of the truth of himself by self-knowledge and by self-realisation, the truth of the Infinite in being, the Infinite in conscious-
Page-11 ness, the Infinite in delight repossessed as his own Self and Reality of which the finite is only a mask and an instrument for-various expression. Thus by the very nature of the world-play as it has been conceived by Sachchidananda in the vastness of His existence extended as Space and Time, we have to conceive first of an involution and a self-absorption of conscious being into the density and infinite divisibility of substance, for otherwise there can be no finite variation ; next, an emergence of the self-imprisoned force into formal being, living being, thinking being ; and finally a release of the formed thinking being into the free realisation of itself as the One and the infinite at play in the world and by the release its recovery of the boundless existence-consciousness-bliss that even now it is secretly, really and eternally. This triple movement is the whole key of the world-enigma. It is so that the ancient and eternal truth of Vedanta receives into itself and illumines, justifies and shows us all the meaning of the modern and phenomenal truth of evolution in the universe. And it is so only that this modern truth of evolution which is the old truth of the Universal developing itself successively in Time, seen opaquely through the study of Force and Matter, can find its own full meaning and justification,—by illuminating itself with the Light of the ancient and eternal truth still preserved for us in the Vedantic Scriptures. To this mutual self-discovery and self-illumination by the fusion of the old Eastern and the new Western knowledge the thought of the world is already turning.
Still, when we have found that all things are Sachchidananda, all has not yet been explained. We know the Reality of the universe, we do not yet know the process by which that Reality has turned itself into this phenomenon. We have the key of the riddle, we have still to find the lock in which it will turn. For this Existence, Conscious-Force, Delight does not work directly or with a sovereign irresponsibility like a magician building up worlds and universes by the mere fiat of its word. We
Page-12 perceive a process, we are aware of a Law. It is true that this Law when we analyse it, seems to resolve itself into an equilibrium of the play of forces and a determination of that play into fixed lines of working by the accident of development and the habit of past realise energy. But this apparent and secondary truth is final to us only so long as we conceive of Force solely. When we perceive that Force is a self-expression of Existence, we arc bound to perceive also that this line which Force has taken corresponds to some self-truth of that Existence which governs and determines its constant curve and destination. And since consciousness is the nature of the original Existence and the essence of its Force. this truth must be a self-perception in Conscious-Being and this determination of the line taken by Force must result from a power of self-directive knowledge inherent in Consciousness which enables it to guide its own Force inevitably along the logical line of the original self-perception. It is then a self-determining power in universal consciousness, a capacity in self-awareness of infinite existence to perceive a certain Truth in itself and direct its force of creation along the line of that Truth, which has presided over the cosmic manifestation.
But why should we interpose any special power or faculty between the infinite Consciousness itself and the result of its workings ? May not this Self-awareness of the Infinite range freely creating forms which afterwards remain in play so long as there is not the fiat that bids them cease,—even as the old Semitic Revelation tells us " God said, Let there be Light, and there was Light ?" But when we say, "God said, Let there be Light," we assume the act of a power of consciousness which determines light out of everything else that is not light ; and when we say " and there was Light " we presume a directing faculty, an active power corresponding to the original perceptive power, which brings out the phenomenon and, working out Light according to the line of the original perception, prevents it from being overpowered by all the infinite possibilities that are other than itself. Infinite
Page-13 consciousness in its infinite action can produce only infinite results; to settle upon a fixed Truth or order of truths and build a two Id in conformity with that which is fixed demands a selective faculty of knowledge commissioned to shape finite appearance out of the infinite Reality. This power was known to the Vedic seers by the name of May – Maya meant .for thorn the power of infinite consciousness to comprehend, contain in itself and " measure out ", that is to say to form—for form is delimitation—Name and Shape out of the vast illimitable Truth of infinite existence. It is by Maya that static truth of essential being becomes ordered truth of active being—or, to put it in more metaphysical language, out of the supreme being in which all is all without barrier of reparative consciousness emerges the phenomenal-being in which all is in each and each is in call for the play of existence with existence, consciousness with consciousness, force with force, delight with delight. This play of all in each and each in all is concealed at first from us by the mental play or the illusion of Maya which persuades each that he is in all but not all in him and that he is in all as a separated being not as a being always inseparably one with the rest of existence. Afterwards we have to emerge from this error into the Supramental play or the truth of Maya where the " each " and the " all" coexist in the inseparable unity of the one truth and the multiple symbol. The lower, present and deluding mental Maya has first to be embraced, then to be overcome; for it is God’s play with division and darkness and limitation, desire and strife and suffering in which He subjects Himself to the Force that has come out of Himself and by her obscure suffers Himself to be obscured. That other Maya concealed by this mental has to be over passed, then embraced ; for it is God’s play of the infinities of existence, the splendours of knowledge, the glories of force mastered and the ecstasies of love illimitable where He emerge:"; out of the hold of Force, holds her instead and fulfils in her illumined that for which she went out from Him at the first.
This distinction between the lower and the higher
Page-14 Maya is the link in thought and in cosmic Fact which the pessimistic and illusionist philosophies miss or neglect. To them the mental Maya is the creature of the world and a world created by mental Maya would indeed be an inexplicable paradox and a fixed yet floating nightmare of conscious existence which could neither be classed as an illusion nor as a reality. We have to see that the mind is only an intermediate term between the creative governing knowledge and the soul imprisoned in its works. Sachchidananda, involved by one of His lower movements in the self-oblivious absorption of Force that is lost in the form of her own workings, returns towards Himself out of the self-oblivion ; Mind is only one of His instruments in the descent and. the ascent. It is an instrument of the descending creation, not the secret creature,—a transitional stage in the ascent, not our high original source and the consummate term of comic existence.
The philosophies which recognise Mind alone as the creator of the worlds or accept an original principle with Mind as the only mediator between it and the forms of the universe, may be divided into the
numeral and the idealistic. The numeral recognise in the cosmos only the work of a Thought or Idea which may be purely arbitrary and have no essential relation to any real Truth of existence; such Truth if it exists must be regarded as a mere Absolute aloof from all relations and irreconcilable with a world
of relations. The idealistic suppose a relation between the Truth behind and the
conceptive phenomenon in front, a relation which is not merely that of an
antinomy and opposition. The ancient view I am presenting goes farther in
idealism ; it sees the creative Idea as Real-Idea, that is to say a power of
conscious Force expressive of real being, born out of real being and partaking
of its nature and neither a child of the Void or. a weaver of fictions. It is conscious Reality throwing
itself into mutable forms of its own imperishable and immutable substance. The word is therefore not a figment of conception in the universal Mind, but a conscious hi ft a of that which is beyond Mind into forms of itself. A Truth of conscious
Page-15 being supports these forms and expresses itself in them, and the knowledge corresponding to the truth thus expressed reigns as a Supramental Truth-consciousness * organising real ideas in a perfect harmony before they are cast into the mental-vital-material mould. Mind, Life and Body are an inferior consciousness and a partial expression which strives to arrive m the mould of a various evolution at that superior expression of itself already existent to the Beyond-Mind. That which is in the Beyond-Mind is the ideal which in its own conditions it is labouring to realise. From our ascending point of view we may say that the Real is behind all that exists ; it expresses itself intermediately in an Ideal which is a harmonised truth of itself ; the Ideal throws out a phenomenal reality of variable conscious-being which, inevitably drawn towards its own essential Reality, tries at last to recover it entirely whether by a violent leap or normally through the Ideal which put it fort 11. It is this that explains the imperfect reality of human existence as seen by the Mind, the instinctive aspiration in the mental being towards a perfectibility ever beyond itself, towards the concealed harmony of the Ideal, and the supreme surge of the spirit beyond the ideal to the transcendental. The very facts of our consciousness, its constitution and its necessity presuppose such a triple order ; they negate the dual and irreconcilable antithesis of a mere Absolute to a mere relativity. Mind is not sufficient to explain existence in the universe. Infinite Consciousness must first translate itself into infinite faculty of Knowledge or, as we call it from our point of view, omniscience. But Mind is not a faculty of knowledge nor an instrument of omniscience; it is a faculty for the seeking of knowledge, for expressing as much as it can gain of it in certain forms of a relative
* I take the phrase from the Rig Veda,— Rita-chit, which means the consciousness of essential truth of being (satyam), of ordered truth of active being
(Ritam) and the vast self-awareness (brihat) in which alone this consciousness is possible.
Page-16 thought and for using it towards certain capacities of action. Even when it finds, it does not possess ; it only keeps a certain fund of current coin of Truth—not Truth itself—in the bank of Memory to draw upon according to its needs. For Mind is that which does not know, which tries to know and which never knows except as in a glass darkly. It is the power which interprets truth of universal existence for the practical uses of a certain order of things; it is not the power which knows and guides that existence and therefore it cannot be the power which created or manifested it. But if we suppose an infinite Mind that would be free from our limitations, that at least might well be the creator of the universe ? But such a Mind would be something quite different from the definition of mind as we know it; it would be something beyond mentality; it would be the Supramental Truth. An infinite Mind constituted in the terms of mentality as we know it could only create an infinite chaos, a vast clash of chance, accident, vicissitude wandering towards an indeterminate end after which it would be always tentatively groping and aspiring. An infinite, omniscient, omnipotent Mind would not be mind at all, but Supramental knowledge.
Mind is essentially a reflective mirror which receives presentations or images of a preexistent Truth or Fact, either external to or at least vaster than itself. It represents to itself from moment to moment the phenomenon that has been. It possesses also the faculty of constructing in itself possible images other than those of the actual fact presented to it; that is to say, it represents to itself not only phenomenon that has been but also phenomenon that may be : it cannot, be it noted, represent to itself phenomenon that assuredly will be, except when it is an assured repetition of what has been. It has, finally, the faculty of forecasting new modifications which it seeks to construct out of the meeting of what has been and what may be, out of the fulfilled possibility and the unfulfilled, something that it sometimes succeeds in constructing more or less exactly, sometimes fails to realise, but usually finds cast into other forms than it forecasted and turned to
Page-17 other ends than it desired or intended. An infinite Mind of this character might possibly construct an accidental cosmos of conflicting possibilities and it might shape it into something shifting, something always transient, something ever uncertain in its drift, neither real nor unreal, possessed of no definite end or aim but only an endless succession of momentary aims leading—since there is no superior directing power of knowledge—eventually nowhither. Nihilism or Illusionism or some kindred philosophy is the only logical conclusion of pure communalism. The cosmos so constructed would be a presentation or reflection of something not itself, but always and to the end a lapse presentation, a distorted reflection; all cosmic existence would be a Mind struggling to work out its imaginations, but not succeeding because overpowered and carried forward by the stream of its own past energies, carried onward indeterminately for ever and ever unless or until it can either : slay itself or fall into an eternal stillness. That traced to its roots is Nihilism and Illusionism and it is the only wisdom if we suppose that our human mentality represents the highest cosmic force and the original conception at work in the universe.
But the moment we find in the original power of knowledge a higher force than that which is represented by our human mentality, this conception of the universe becomes insufficient and therefore invalid. It, has its truth but it is not the whole truth. It is law of the immediate appearance of the universe, but not of its original truth and ultimate fact. For we perceive behind the action of Mind, Life and Body, something that is not embraced in the stream of Force but embraces and controls it; something that is not born into a world which it seeks to interpret, but that has created in its being a world of which it has the omniscience; something that does not
lab our perpetually to form something else out of itself while it drifts in the overmastering surge of past energies it can no longer control, but has already in its consciousness a perfect Form of itself and is here gradually unfolding it. The world expresses a foreseen Truth, obeys a predetermining Will,
realise an original formative self-vision,—it is the Page-18 growing image of a divine creation. So long as we work only through the mentality governed by appearances this something beyond and behind and yet always immanent can be only an inference or a presence vaguely felt. We perceive a law of cyclic progress and infer an ever-increasing perfection of somewhat that is . somewhere foreknown. For everywhere we see Law founded in self-being and, when we penetrate within into the rationale of its process, we find that Law is the expression of an innate knowledge., a knowledge inherent in the existence which is expressing itself and implied in the force that expresses it; and Law developed by Knowledge so as to allow of progression implies a divinely seen goal towards which the motion is directed. We see too that our reason seeks to emerge out of and dominate the helpless drift of our mentality and we arrive at the perception that Reason is only a messenger, a representative or a shadow of a greater consciousness beyond itself which does not need to reason because it is all and knows all that it is. And we can then pass to the inference that this source of Reason is identical with the Knowledge that acts as Law Imp the world. Thi3 Knowledge determines its own law sovereignty because it knows what has been, is and will be and it knows because it is eternally and infinitely consciousness itself. Being that is infinite consciousness, infinite consciousness that is omnipotent force, when it makes a world, that is to say a harmony of itself its object of consciousness becomes sizable by our thought as a cosmic existence that knows its own truth and realise in forms that which it knows.
But it is only when we cease to reason and go deep into ourselves, into that secrecy where the activity of mind is stilled , that this other consciousness becomes really manifest to us—however imperfectly owing to our long habit of mental reaction and mental limitation. Then we can know surely in an increasing illumination that which we had uncertainly conceived by the pale and flickering light of Reason. Knowledge waits seated beyond mind and intellectual reasoning
thronged in the luminous vast of illimitable self-vision.
Page-19 CHAPTER XII. THE HERDS OP THE DAWN. The Seven Rivers of the Veda, the Waters, apah, are usually designated in the figured Vedic language as the seven Mothers or the seven fostering Cows, sapta dhenavah. The word apah itself has, covertly, a double significance; for the root ape meant originally not only to move from which in all probability is derived the sense of waters, but to be or bring into being, as in apathy, a child, and the Southern Indian apah, father. The seven Waters are the waters of being; they are the Mothers from whom all forms of existence are born. But we meet also another expression, sapta gâvah, the seven Cows or the seven Lights, and the epithet sapsago, that which has seven rays. Gau (gavah) and Gau (gâvah) bear throughout me Vedic hymns this double sense of cows and radiances. In the ancient Indian system of thought being and consciousness were aspects of each other, and Aditi, infinite existence from whom the gods are born, described as the Mother with her seven names and seven seats (dhâmâni), is also conceived as the infinite consciousness, the Cow, the primal Light manifest in seven Radiances, sapta gâvah. The sevenfold principle of existence is therefore imaged from the one point of view in the figure of the Rivers that arise from the ocean, spate dhenavah, from the other in the figure of the Rays of the all-creating Father, Surya Savitri, spate gâvah.
The image of the Cow is the most important of all the Vedic
symbols. For the rituality the word Gau means simply a physical cow and
nothing else, just as its companion Page-20 word, Açva, means simply a physical horse and has no other sense, or as ghr’ita means only water or clarified butter, vîra only a son or a retainer or servant. When the Rishi prays to the Dawn, gomad vîravad dhehi ratnam usho açvâvat,, the ritualistic commentator sees in the invocation only an entreaty for "pleasant wealth to which are attached cows, men (or sons) and horses". If on the other hand these words are symbolic, the sense will run, ‘* Confirm in us a state of bliss full of light, of conquering energy and of force of vitality." It is therefore necessary to decide once for all the significance of the word Gau in the Vedic hymns. If it proves to be symbolic, then these other words,— açva horse, vîra, man or hero, apatya or praja, offspring, hiran’ya, gold, vâja, plenty (food, according to Saying),—by which it is continually accompanied, must perforce assume also a symbolic and a kindred significance. The image of the Cow is constantly associated in Veda with the Dawn and the Sun; it also recurs in the legend of the recovery of the lost cows from the cave of the Pains by Indra and Brihaspati with the aid of the hound Sarama and the Angirasa Rishis. The conception of the Dawn and the legend of the Angirasas are at the very heart of the Vedic cult and may almost be considered as the key to the secret of the significance of Veda. It is therefore these two that we must examine in order to find firm ground for our inquiry. Now even the most superficial examination of the Vedic hymns to the Dawn makes it perfectly clear that the cows of the Dawn, the cows of the Sun arc a symbol for Light and cannot be anything, else. Sayana himself is obliged in these hymns to interpret the word sometimes as cows, sometimes as rays,—careless, as usual of consistency; sometimes he will even tell us that gau like r’itam, the word for truth, means water. As a matter of fact it is evident that we are meant to take the word in a double sense, "light" as the true significance, "cow" as the concrete image and verbal figure.
The sense of " rays" is quite indisputable in such passages as the third verse of
Madhuchchhandas’ hymn
Page-21 to Indra, I. 7, " India for far vision made the Sun to ascend in heaven: he sped him all over the hill by his rays", vi gobhir adrim airayat."* But at the same time, the rays of Surya are the herds of the Sun, the kina of Helios slain by the companions of Odysseus in the Odyssey, stolen by Hermes from his brother Apollo in the Homeric hymn to Hermes. They are the cows concealed by the enemy Vala, by the Pains; when Madhuchchhandas says to Indra, " Thou didst uncover the hole of Vala of the Cows", he means that Vala is the concealed, the withholder of the Light and it is the concealed Light that Indra restores to the sacrifice. The recovery of the lost or stolen cows is constantly spoken of in the Vedic hymns and its sense will be clear enough when we come to examine the legend of the Pains and of the Angirasas. Once this sense is established, the material explanation of the Vedic prayer for "cows" is at once shaken; for if the lost cows for whose restoration the Rishis invoke Indra, are not physical herds stolen by the Dravidians but the shining herds of the Sun, of the Light, then we are justified in considering whether the same figure does not apply when there is the simple prayer for "cows" without any reference to any hostile interception. For instance in I. 4.2 it is said of Indra, the maker of perfect forms who is as a good milkier in the milking of the cows, that his ecstasy of the Soma-Wine is verily "cow-giving", goad id rebate madam. It is the height of absurdity and irrationality to understand by this phrase that Indra is a very wealthy god and, when he gets drunk, exceedingly liberal in the matter of cow-giving. It is obvious that as the cow-milking in the first verse is a figure, so the cow-giving in the second verse is a figure. And if we know from other passages of the Veda that the Cow is the symbol of Light, we must understand here also that Indra, when full of the Soma-ecstasy, is sure to give us the Light. In the hymns to the Dawn the symbolic sense of the
* We may also translate " He sent abroad the thunderbolt with its lights"; but this does not make as good and coherent a sense ; even if we take it, gobhir must mean "radiances" not "cows". Page-22 cows of light is equally clear. Dawn is described always as gomati, which must mean, obviously, luminous or radiant; for it would be nonsense to use "cupful" in a literal sense as the fixed epithet of the Dawn. But the image of the cows is there in the epithet ; for Usha is not only gomati, she is gomati avadavat; she has always with her her cows and her horses. She creates light for all the world and opens out the darkness as the pen of the Cow, where we have without any possibility of mistake the cow as the symbol of light, (I. 92. 4.) We may note also that in this hymn I. 92, the Açwins are asked to drive downward their chariot on a path that is radiant and golden, gomad hiran’yavad. Moreover Dawn is said to be drawn in her chariot sometimes by ruddy cows, sometimes by ruddy horses. "She yokes her host of the ruddy cows"; yunkte gavâm arunânâm anîkam (I. 191.5),—where the second meaning "her host of the ruddy rays" stands clear behind the concrete image. She is described as the mother of the cows or radiances; gavâm janitrî akr’ita pra ketum (I. 124. 5.), "the Mother of the cows ( radiances) has created vision," and it is said elsewhere of her action, "vision" or "perception has dawned now where nought was"; and again it is clear that the cows ate the shining herds of the Light. She is also praised as "the leader of the shining herds", netri gavâm, VII. 76. 6; and there is an illuminating verse in which the two ideas are combined, ”the Mother of the Herds, the guide of the days," gavâm mâtâ netrî ahnâm. Finally, as if to remove the veil of the image entirely, the Veda itself tells us that the herds are a figure for the rays of the Light, "her happy rays come into sight like cows released into movement."—prati bhadrâ adr’ikshata gavâm sargâ an raçmayah. And we have the still more conclusive verse, VII. 79.2 " Thy cows (rays) remove the darkness and extend the Light; Sam to gâvas tama â vartayanti, jyotir yachchhanti.
* It cannot of course be disputed that gnu means light in the Veda e.g. when it is said that Virtual is slain gave, by light, there is no question of the cow; the question is of the use of the double sense and of the cow as a symbol. Page-23 But Dawn is not only drawn by these shining herds; she brings them as a gift to the sacrifice; she is, like Indra in his Soma-ecstasy, a giver of the Light. In a hymn of Vasishtha (VII. "75) she is described as sharing in the action of the gods by which the strong places where the herds are concealed are broken open and they are given to men; "True with the gods who are true, great with the gods who are great, she breaks open the strong places and gives of the shining herds; the cows low towards the dawn,"—rujad dr’idhâni dadad usriyânâm, prati gâvah ushasam vâvaçanta. And in the very next verse she is asked to confirm or establish for the sacrifices gomad ratnam açvâvat purubhojah, astute of bliss full of the light (cows), of the horses (vital force) and of many enjoyments. The herds which Usha gives are therefore the shining troops of the Light recovered by the gods and the Angirasa Rishis from the strong places of Vala and the Pains and the wealth of cows (Ana horses) for which the Rishis constantly pray can be no other than a wealth of this same Light ; for it is impossible to suppose that the cows which Usha is said to give in the 7th verse of the hymn are different from the cows which are prayed for in the 8th,—that the word in the former verse means light and in the next physical cows and that the Rishi has forgotten the image he was using the very moment it has fallen from his tongue.
Sometimes the prayer is not for luminous delight or luminous plenitude, but for a luminous impulsion or force; "Bring to us, O daughter of Heaven, luminous impulsions along with the rays of the Sun," gomatîr isha
â vaha duhitar divah, sâkam sûryasya rashmibhih, V. 49. 4. Sayana explains that this means " shining foods," but it is obviously nonsense to talk of radiant foods being brought by Dawn with the rays of the Sun. II is h means food, then we have to understand by the phrase " food of cow’s flesh", but, although the eating of cow’s flesh was not forbidden in the early times, as is apparent from the
Brahmans, still that this sense which Sayana avoids as shocking to the later Hindu sentiment, is not intended—it would be quite as absurd as the other,—is proved by another verse of the Rig Veda in which the A9wins are invoked to give the Page-24 luminous impulsion that carries us through to the other side of the darkness, yâ nah pîparad açvina jyotishmatî tamas tirah, tam same râsâthâm isham. We can perceive from these typical examples how pervading is this image of the Cow of Light and how inevitably it points to a psychological sense for the Veda. A doubt, however, intervenes. Why should we not, even accepting this inevitable conclusion that the cow is an image for Light, understand it to mean simply the light of day as the language of the Veda seems to intend ? Why suppose a symbol where there is only an image ? Why invite the difficulty of a double figure in which "cow’ means light of dawn and light of dawn is the symbol of an inner illumination ? Why not take it that the Rishis were praying not for spiritual illumination, but for daylight ?
The objections arc manifold and some of them overwhelming. If we assume that the Vedic hymns were composed in India and the dawn is the Indian dawn and the night the brief Indian night of ten or twelve hours, we have to start with the concession that the Vedic Rishis were savages overpowered by a terror of the darkness which they peopled with goblins, ignorant of the natural law of the succession of night and day—which is yet beautifully hymned in many of the Suktas,—and believed that it was only by their prayers and sacrifices that the Sun rose in the heavens and the Dawn emerged from the embrace of her sister Night. Yet they speak of the undeviating rule of the action of the Gods, and of Dawn following always the path of the eternal Law or Truth ! We have to suppose that when the Rishi gives vent to the joyous cry " We have crossed over to the other shore of this darkness !", it was only the normal awakening to the daily sunrise that he thus eagerly hymned. We have to suppose that the Vedic peoples sat down to the sacrifice at dawn and prayed for the light when it had already come. And if we accept all these improbabilities, we are met by the clear statement that it was only after they had sat for nine or for ten months that the lost light and the lost sun were recovered by the Angirasa Rishis. And what arc we to make of the
Page-25 constant assertion of the discovery of the Light by the Fathers;—" Our fathers found out the hidden light, by the truth in their thoughts they brought to birth the Dawn, " gûdh’am jyotih pitaro anvavindan, satyamantrâ ajanayann ushâsam. If, however, we are to give a naturalistic explanation and no other to the Vedic hymns, it is quite clear that the Vedic Dawn and Night cannot be the Night and Dawn of India ; it is only in the Arctic regions that the attitude of the Rishis towards these natural circumstances and the statements about the Angirasas become at all intelligible. But though it is extremely probable that the memories of the Arctic home enter into the external sense of the Veda, the Arctic theory does not exclude an inner sense behind the ancient images drawn from Nature nor does it dispense with the necessity for a more coherent and straightforward explanation of the hymns to the Dawn. ; We have, for instance, the hymn of Praskanwa Kânwa to the Açwins ( I. 46 ) in which there is the reference to the luminous impulsion that carries us through to the other shore of the darkness. This hymn is intimately connected with the Vedic idea of the Dawn and the Night. It contains references to many of the fixed Vedic images, to the path of the Truth, the crossing of the rivers, the rising of the Sun, the connection between the Dawn and the Açwins, the mystic effect and oceanic essence of the Soma Wine.
" Lo, the Dawn than which there is none higher, opens out full of delight in the Heavens ; O
Açwins, the Vast of you I affirm ; ye of whom the Ocean is the mother, accomplishers of the work who pass beyond through the mind to the felicities and, divine, find that substance by the thought.— O Lords of the Voyage, who
mentalist the word, this is the dissolver of your thinking,—drink ye of the Soma violently ; give to us that impulsion, O
Açwins which, luminous, carries us through beyond the darkness. Travel for us in Page-26 your ship to reach the other shore beyond the thoughts of the mind . Yoke, O Açwins, your car,—your car that becomes the vast oared ship in Heaven, in the crossing of its rivers. By the thought the powers of Delight have been yoked. The Soma-powers of delight in heaven are that substance in the place of the Waters. But where shall you cast aside the veil you have made to conceal you ? Nay, Light has been born for the joy of the Soma;—the Sun that was dark has shot out its tongue towards the Gold. The path of the Truth has come into being by which we shall travel to that other shore ; seen is all the wide way through Heaven. The seeker grows in his being towards increasing manifestation after manifestation of the Açwins when they find satisfaction in the ecstasy of the Soma. Do ye, dwelling (or, shining) in the all-luminous Sun, by the drinking of the Soma, by the Word come as creators of the bliss into our humanity. Dawn comes to us according to your glory when you pervade all our worlds and you win the Truths out of the Nights. Both together drink, O Açwins, both together extend to us the peace by expanding whose wholeness remains untorn".
This is the straightforward and natural sense of the hymn and its intention is not difficult to follow if we remember the main ideas and images of the Vedic doctrine. The Night is clearly the image of an inner darkness; by the coming of the Dawn the Truths are won out of the Nights. This is the rising of the Sun which was lost in the obscurity—the familiar figure of the lost sun recovered by the Gods and the Angirasa Rishis—the sun of Truth, and it now shoots out its tongue of fire towards the golden Light: —for hiran’ya, gold is the concrete symbol of the higher light, the gold of the Truth, and it is this treasure not golden coin for which the Vedic Rishis pray to the Gods. This great change from the inner obscuration to the illumination is effected by the Açwins, lore’s of the joyous upward action of the mind and the vital powers, through the immortal wine of the Ananda poured into mind and body and there drunk by them. They
mentalist the expressive Word, they lead us into the heaven of pure mind Page-27 beyond this darkness and there by the Thought they set the powers of the Delight to work. But even over the heavenly waters they cross, for the power of the Soma helps them to dissolve all mental constructions, and they cast aside even this veil; they go beyond Mind and the last attaining is described as the crossing of the rivers, the passage through the heaven of the pure mind, the journey by the path of the Truth to the other side. Not till we reach the highest supreme, paramâ parâvat, do we rest at last from the great human journey.
We shall see that not only in this hymn, but everywhere Dawn comes as a bringer of the Truth, is herself the outshining of the Truth. She is the divine Dawn and the physical dawning is only her shadow and symbol in the material universe.
Page-28 CHAPTER IX. THE FULLNESS OF RENUNCIATION. We can now determine in their ordered succession the steps by which the surrender to the Divine Will may be entirely and integrally effected. The first step is self-consecration in our works ; it is the habit of doing all action as a sacrifice to the Supreme who is present in us and in all beings and in all the workings of the universe. Life is the altar, works are our offering, the transcendental Will is the Deity. This sacrifice, this self-consecration has two sides to it,—the work itself and the spirit in which it is done and the worship of the Master of all that we see, think and experience,
The work itself is at first determined by the best light we can command ; it is that which we conceive as the thing that should be done, whether it be shaped by our sense of duty, b}- out feeling for our fellow-creatures, by our idea of what is for the good of others or the good of the world or by the direction of one whom we accept as a human Master, wiser than ourselves and for us the representative of that Lord of all works in whom we believe but whom we do not yet know. The essential of the sacrifice of works is the surrender of all desire for the fruit of our works, of all attachment to the result for which yet we
labors ; for so long as we work with attachment to the result, the sacrifice is offered to our ego and not to the Divine. We may think otherwise, but we are deceiving ourselves ; we are making our idea of the Divine, our sense of duty, our feeling for our fellow-creatures, our idea of
Page-29 what is good for the world or others, even our obedience to the Master a mask for our egoistic desire and a shield against the demand made on us to root desire out of our being. At this stage of the Yoga this is the enemy against whom we have to be always on our guard. We need not be discouraged when we find him lurking within us and assuming all sorts of disguises, but we should be vigilant to detect him and inexorable in expelling. The illumining Word of this movement is the decisive line of the Gita, " To action thou hast a right but never under any circumstances to its fruit." The fruit belongs solely to the Lord of all works. The worship of the Master of works consists for the. Karma yogin in the clear and glad acknowledgement of Him in ourselves, in all things and in all happenings. The sign of this adoration is equality of the soul. The Lord is in all beings equally; therefore we have to make no essential distinctions between ourselves and others, the wise and the ignorant, the saint and the sinner, the friend and the enemy, man and the animal. We have to hate none, despise none, be repelled by none ; in all we have to see the One disguised or manifested; a little revealed or more revealed according to His will and His knowledge of what is best for that which He intends to become in form and to do in works. All is our self, one. self that has taken many shapes; hatred, scorn and repulsion are the arrogance of the ignorant soul; and if they are natural, necessary, inevitable at a certain stage, yet to the Karma yogin they are a survival, a foolishness, a stumbling block and are finally, as he progresses , remembered only as an obsolete barbarism of the child-soul when it was not yet adult in the divine culture.
Equally, since all things are the one Self in its manifestation, we shall have equality of soul towards the ugly and the beautiful, the maimed and the perfect, the noble and the vulgar, the good and the evil, the pleasant and the unpleasant. Here also there will be no hatred. no scorn, no repulsion. For we shall know that all things express as best they can, under the circumstances intended for
Page-30 them, in the way possible to them some truth or fact of the Divine necessary by its presence in the progressive manifestation both to the whole of the present sum of things and for the perfection of the ultimate result. We shall seek that Truth behind the transitory expression and undeterred by appearances we shall worship the Divine-for ever unsullied, pure, beautiful and perfect behind His masks. Equality of soul does not mean a fresh ignorance or blindness, a grayness of vision and a blotting out of all hues. Difference is there, variation of expression is there and this variation we shall appreciate,—far more justly than we could when the eye was clouded by a partial love and hate, sympathy and antipathy, attraction and repulsion, admiration and scorn. But behind the variation we shall always see the Complete and Immutable who dwells within and we shall feel, know or at least trust in, if it is hidden from us, the wise purpose and divine necessity of the particular manifestation, whether it appear to our human standards harmonious and perfect or crude and unfinished.
Finally, we shall have equality of soul towards all happenings, painful or pleasurable, towards defeat and success,
honors and disgrace, good repute and ill-repute, good fortune and evil fortune. Pleasure and suffering we shall accept with the same embrace. For in all happenings we shall see the will of the Master of all works and results and the expression of the Divine. So too He manifests Himself, in events as well as in things and in creatures. All things move towards a divine event and each experience, suffering and want no less than joy and satisfaction, is a necessary step in the carrying out of
a universal conception which it is our business to understand and second. To revolt, to condemn, to cry out is the impulse of our
unchaste Ned and ignorant spirits. Revolt is necessary, helpful, decreed for the divine development in its own time and stage ;but this too belongs to the stage of the soul’s childhood or of its raw adolescence. The ripened soul does not condemn but seeks to understand, does not cry out but accepts and toils to improve and perfect, does not revolt inwardly but labours to obey and
fulfill. Page-31 Certainly, this equality cannot come except by a protracted ordeal and by patient self-discipline. So long as desire is strong, it cannot come at all except in periods of quiescence and of the fatigue of desire. And in itself it has its necessary periods. Ordinarily we begin with a period of endurance, of the fronting, suffering and assimilation of all contacts. We have to learn not to wince away from that which pains and repels, not to run eagerly towards that which pleases and attracts, but rather to accept, to face, to bear, to conquer. This is the stoical period of the preparation of equality. But it is well if this endurance can be reinforced by the sense of submission to a divine Will,— if the living clay can yield with knowledge or with resignation, even in suffering, to the touch of the divine Hand which is preparing its perfection. For a devout and even a tender stoicism is possible and it is better than the merely pagan endurance which may lend itself to a too great hardening of the vessel of God; it prepares more surely the strength that is capable of love and the calm that passes on into bliss. The gain of this period is the soul’s strength, equal to all shocks and contacts. The second period is that of a high-seated indifference or impartiality,* in which the soul becomes free from exultation and depression, from the eagerness of joy and the pang of grief and suffering. This is the philosophic period of the preparation of equality. But the indifference must not be that of an inert turning away from action and experience nor the indifference of weariness, disgust and distaste which is only the recoil of disappointed or satiated desire and of a baffled or dissatisfied egoism. These recoils come inevitably in the unripe soul and may even help the progress, but they are not the perfection towards which we labour. The indifference or rather the impartiality we seek is that of the soul high-seated, udâsîna, above the contacts of things, regarding and accepting them but not moved or subjected. The gain of this period is the soul’s peace unshaken
* Udâsinata Page-32
whether by the rippling or by the waves and billows of the world’s movement.
The third period is that of the advent of a rapturous equality of the soul, when peace and the possession of the divine calm is completed by bliss and the possession of the divine movement. And that this greater perfection may come, it is well that the impartial high-seated ness of the soul should be modified by a new sense of submission, not now resigned but glad,—for there is no suffering,—not now merely to a divine Will which we perceive, but to a divine Love in the Will which we feel and rapturously suffer. A lonely power, peace and stillness is the last word of the philosophic equality ; but the soul in its integrality liberates and surrenders itself from this self-created status into the sea of the supreme and all-embracing ecstasy. We become capable of receiving all contacts with a blissful equality, because we feel in them the touch of the imperishable Love and Delight that is for ever in the heart of things. The gain of this greater finality is the soul’s delight and the opening gates of the beatitude divine that passes all understanding.
But that this movement of the abolition of desire and the conquest of the soul’s equality may come to such an absolute perfection, another movement is necessary. The second step we have to take when tin first has been a little firmly set in its place, is the abolition of the egoism of action. For by giving up the fruits and the desire of the limits to the Master of the Sacrifice we part with the egoism of desire, but we keep the egoism of the worker. We are still subject to the sense of being ourselves the doer of the act, ourselves its source and giver of the. sanction. It is still the "I" that chooses and determines, it is still the " I " that feels the merit and undertakes the responsibility.
But the removal of the
reparative ego-sense is the aim of Yoga. If any ego is to remain in us it is only the form of it which knows itself to be a form and can act as a luminous centre of the one Consciousness and a pure reflection of the one Existence—a mere support for the individual action of tin Universal Being. Page-33 In this supreme movement of the way of works by which the soul divests itself gradually of the obscure robe of the ego, there is also a progressive gradation. We have first to realise that as the fruit of works belongs to the Lord alone, so in reality our works also are His. He is lord of our actions no less than of our results. This then is the second attitude that the sadhaka has to take with regard to his works, that they are not his at all, but proceed from the Supreme Existence expressing itself through us in the terms of our individual nature. But in taking this attitude there is always the peril of confusing our own ego with the Lord and distorting our surrender to a higher Will into an excuse for the indulgence of our self-will and even of our desires and passions. Before he can take securely this step in his self-culture the sadhaka must have advanced far in the elimination of desire and in the firm equality of his soul towards all workings and all happenings. Or he must do it with a strict adherence to the true knowledge of his own nature and a vigilant eye upon the deceits of the ego. Immediately therefore he must take the further step of relegating himself to the position of the Witness. He must watch the executive force of nature at work within him and understand its action. This Nature works in him, says the Gita, through the triple quality of Prakriti, the quality of light and good, the quality of passion and desire and the quality of obscurity and inertia. He must learn to distinguish, as witness of all that proceeds within this kingdom of his nature, the separate and the combined action of these qualities, so that as the giver of the sanction he may induce the nature to subdue the working of the two lower qualities into subjection to the quality of light and good. This done, he is ready to make the final renunciation of his works to the Supreme Will acting through a higher or divine Nature in which a purer and vaster light works in a wide calm and illuminates with its undisturbed and unhardened Truth the glad and desire less action of the liberated soul.
Then is possible the final step in which the veil of
Page-34
Nature is withdrawn and face to face with the Master of all existence and renouncing to Him his works as well as the fruits of his works he acts only as the conscious instrument, no longer giving the sanction, but receiving and following it, no longer doing works, but accepting their execution through him, no longer willing the
fulfillment of his own mental constructions and the satisfaction of his own emotional desires but obeying and participating in a Divine Will that is also a Divine Knowledge and a Divine Love.
Page-35 COMMENTARY III The eternal question has been put which turns man’s eyes away from the visible and the outward to that which is utterly within, away from the little known that he has become to the vast unknown he must yet grow into and be because that is his Reality and out of all masquerade of phenomenon and becoming the Real Being must eventually deliver itself. The human soul once seized by this compelling direction can no longer be satisfied with looking forth at mortalities and seeming through those doors of the mind and sense which the Self-existent has made to open outward upon a world of forms; it is driven to gaze inward into a new world of realities.
Here in the world that man knows, he possesses something which, however imperfect and insecure, he yet values. For he aims at and to some extent he procures enlarged being, increasing knowledge, more and more joy and satisfaction and these things are so precious to him that for what he can get of them he is read to pay the price of continual suffering from the shock of their opposites. If then he has to abandon what he here pursues and clasps, there must be a far more powerful attraction drawing him to the Beyond, a secret offer of something so great as to be a full reward for all possible renunciation that can be demanded of him here. This is offered,—not an enlarged becoming, but infinite being ; not always relative
piecing of knowledge mistaken in their hour for the whole of knowledge, but the possession of our essential consciousness and
Page-36 the flood of its luminous realities ; not partial satisfactions, but the delight. in a word, Immortality. The language of the Upanishad makes it strikingly clear that it is no metaphysical abstraction, no void Silence, no indeterminate Absolute which is offered to the soul that aspires, but rather the absolute of all that is possessed by it here in the relative world of its sojourning. All herein the mental is a growing light, consciousness and life ; all there in the supramental is an infinite life, light and consciousness. That which is here shadowed, is there found ; the incomplete here is there the fulfilled. The Beyond is not an annulations, but a transfiguration of all that we are here in our world of forms; it is Sovran Mind of this mind, secret L4fe of this life, the absolute Sense which supports and justifies our limited senses. We renounce ourselves in order to find ourselves ; for in the mental life there is only a seeking, but never an ultimate finding till mind is over passed. Therefore there is behind all our mentality a perfection of ourselves which appears to us as an antinomy and contrast to what we are. For here we are a constant becoming; there we possess our eternal being. Here we conceive of ourselves as a changeful consciousness developed and always developing by a hampered effort in the drive of Time; there we are an immutable consciousness of which Time is not the master but the instrument as well as the field of all that it creates and watches. Here we live in an organisations of mortal consciousness which takes the form of a transient world; there we are liberated into the harmonies of an infinite self-seeing which knows all world in the light of the eternal and immortal. The Beyond is our reality ; that is our plenitude ; that is the absolute satisfaction of our self-existence. It is immortality and it is " That Delight. "
Here in our imprisoned mentality the ego strives to be master and possessor of its inner field and its outer environment, yet cannot hold anything to enjoy it, because it is not possible really to possess what is not-self to us. But there in the freedom of the eternal our self-existence possesses without strife by the sufficient fact that all things are it-
Page-37 self. Here is the apparent man, there the real man, the Purusha: here are gods, there is the Divine : here is the attempt to exist, Life flowering out of an all-devouring death, there Existence itself and a dateless immortality. The answer that is thus given is involved in the very form of the original question. The Truth behind Mind, Life, Sense must be that which controls by exceeding it ; it is the Lord, the all-possessing Deva. This was the conclusion at which the Isha Upanishad arrived by the synthesis of all existences ; the Kena arrives at it by the antithesis of one governing self-existence to all this that exists variously by another power of being than its own. Each follows its own method for the resolution of all things into the one Reality, but the conclusion is identical. It is the All-possessing and All-enjoying, who is reached by the renunciation of separate being, separate possession and separate delight. But the Isha addresses itself to the awakened seeker ; it begins therefore with the all-inhabiting Lord, proceeds to the all-becoming Self and returns to the Lord as the Self of the cosmic movement, because it has to justify works to the seeker of the Uncreated and to institute a divine life founded on the joy of immortality and on the unified consciousness of the individual made one with the universal. The Kena addresses itself to the soul still attracted by the external life, not yet wholly awakened nor wholly a seeker ; it begins therefore with the Brahman as the Self beyond Mind and proceeds to the Brahman as the hidden Lord of all our mental and vital activities, because it has to point this soul upward beyond its apparent and outward existence. But the two opening chapters of the Kena only state less widely from this other view-point the Isha’s doctrine of the Self and its be comings; the last two repeat in other terms of thought the Isha’s doctrine of the Lord and His movement. IV
The Upanishad first affirms the existence of this pro-founder, vaster, more puissant consciousness behind our
Page-38 mental being. That, it affirms, is Brahman. Mind, Life, Sense, Speech are not the utter Brahman ; they are only inferior modes and external instruments. Brahman-consciousness is our real self and our true existence. Mind and body are not our real self; they are mutable formations or images which we go on constructing in the drive of Time as a result of the mass of our past energies-For although those energies seem to us to lie dead in the past because their history is behind us, yet are they still existent in their mass and always active in the present and the future. Neither is the ego-function our real self. Ego is only a faculty put forward by the discriminative mind to centralist round itself the experiences of the sense-mind and to serve as a sort of lynch-pin in the wheel which keeps together the movement. It is no more than an instrument, although it is true that so long as we are limited by one normal mentality, we are compelled by the nature of that mentality and the purpose of the instrument to mistake our ego-function for our very self. Neither is it the memory that constitutes our real self. Memory is another instrument, a selective instrument for the practical management of our conscious activities. The ego-function uses it as a rest and support so as to preserve the sense of continuity without which our mental and vital activities could not be organised for a spacious enjoyment by the individual. But even our mental self comprises and is influenced in its being by a host of things which are not present to our memory, are subconscious and hardly grasped at all by our surface existence. Memory is essential to the continuity of the ego-sense, but it is not the constituent of the ego-sense, still less of the being. Neither is moral personality our real self. It is only a changing formation, a pliable mould framed and used by our subjective life in order to give some appearance of fixity to the constantly mutable becoming which our mental limitations successfully tempt us to call ourselves.
Neither is the totality of that mutable conscious becoming, although enriched by all that subconsciously underlies
Page-39 it, our real self. What we become is a fluent mass of life, a stream. of experience pouring through time, a flux of Nature-upon the crest of which our mentality rides. What we are is the eternal essence of that life, the immutable consciousness that bears the experience, the immortal substance of Nature and mentality. For behind all and dominating all that we become and experience, there is something that originates, uses, determines, enjoys, yet is not changed by its origination, not affected by its instruments, not determined by its determinations, not worked upon by its enjoying. What that is, we cannot know unless we go behind the veil of our mental being which knows only what is affected, what is determined, what is worked upon, what is changed. The mind can only be aware of that as something which we indefinably are, not as something which it definably knows. For the moment our mentality tries to fix this something, it loses itself in the flux and the movement, grasps at parts, functions, fictions, appearances which it uses as planks of safety in the welter or tries to cut out a form from the infinite and say "This is I." In the words of the Veda, " when the mind approaches That and studies it, That vanishes." But behind the Mind is this other or Brahman-consciousness, Mind of our mind, Sense of our senses, Speech of our speech, Life of our life. Arriving at that, we arrive at Self; we can draw back from mind the image into Brahman the Reality. But what differentiates that real from this apparent self ? Or — since we can say no more than we have said already in the way of definition, since we can only indicate that "That" is not what "this" is, but is the mentally inexpressible absolute of all that is here, — what is the relation of this phenomenon to that reality ? For it is the question of the relation that the Upanishad makes its starting-point; its opening question assumes that there is a relation and that the reality originates and governs the phenomenon.
Obviously, Brahman is not a thing subject to our
Page-40 mind, senses, speech or life-force ; it is no object seen, heard, expressed, sensed, formed by thought, nor any state of body or mind that we become in the changing movement of the life. But the thought of the Upanishad attempts to awaken deeper echoes from our gulfs than this obvious denial of the mental and sensuous objectivity of the Brahman. It affirms that not only is it not an object of mind or a formation of life, but it is not even dependent on our mind, life and senses for the exercise of its lordship and activity. It is that which does not think by the mind, does not live by the life, does not sense by the senses, does not find expression in the speech, but rather makes these things themselves the object of its superior, all-comprehending, all-knowing consciousness. Brahman thinks out the mind by that which is beyond mind ; it sees the sight and hears the hearing by that absolute vision and audition which are not phenomenal and instrumental but direct and inherent ; it forms our expressive speech out of its creative word ; it speeds out this life we cling to from that eternal movement of its energy which is not parceled out into forms but has always the freedom of its own inexhaustible infinity. Thus the Upanishad begins its reply to its own question. It first describes Brahman as Mind of the mind, Sight of the sight, Hearing of the hearing, Speech of the speech, Life of the life. It then takes up each of these expressions and throws them successively into a more expanded form so as to suggest a more definite and ample idea of their meaning, so far as that can be done by words. To the expression " Mind of the mind " corresponds the expanded phrase " That which thinks not with the mind, that by which mind is thought " and so on with each of the original descriptive expressions to the closing definition of the Life behind this life as " That which breathes not with the life-breath, that by which the life-power is brought forward into its movement."
And each of these exegetic lines is emphasised by the reiterated admonition, " That Brahman seek to know and not this which men follow after here." Neither Mind, Life,
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Sense and Speech nor their objects and expressions are the Reality which we have to know and pursue. True knowledge is of That which forms these instruments for us but is itself independent of their utilities. True possession and enjoyment is of that which, while it creates these objects of our pursuit, itself makes nothing the object of its pursuit and passion, but is eternally satisfied with all things in the joy of its immortal being.
Page-42 THE CONQUEST OF THE TRUTH MORAL INDEPENDENCE. 1 Often man is preoccupied with human rules and for- 2 gets the inner law.—The superior type of man is in all the circumstances of his life exempt from prejudices and obstinacy ; he regulates himself by justice alone. 3 -4 The just man is himself his own law.—It is better to follow one’s own law even though imperfect than5 the better law of another.—A soul full of wisdom, however excellent it be, cannot be compared with right 6 and straightforward Thought.—A man’s heart show-eth to him what he should do better than seven sentinels on the summit of a rock. 7 Often men take for their conscience not the manifestation of the spiritual being but simply what is considered good or bad by the people in their environ- 8 ment.—What human voice is capable of telling me, " This is good and that is bad ? " 9 Do what thou knowest to be good without expecting from it any glory. Forget not that the vulgar are 10 a bad judge of good actions.—It is better to be good and to be called wicked by men than to be wicked and 11 esteemed good.—Whoever wishes to be truly a man, must abandon all preoccupation by the wish to please
1) Antoine the Healer; Revelations.—2) Confucius.—3) Inscription on the Catacombs.—4) Bhagavad Gita–5) Fo-sho-hing-tsau-king.— 6)Ecclesiasticus.—7)Tolstoi.—8) Kobo Daishi.—9) Demophilus-—10)Sadi:
Glistens II.—11) Emerson.
Page-43 the world. There is nothing more sacred or more fecund than the curiosity of an independent spirit. 12 Only one who has surmounted by wisdom that which the world calls good and evil and who lives in 13 a clear light, can be truly called an ascetic.—-When you raise yourself beyond praise and blame and your will, the will of 14 But the higher you raise yourself, the smaller you will seem to the eyes that are envious. He who ranges on the heights is the one whom men most detest.— 15 If a man is detested by the crowd, you must examine, before you judge him, why they condemn, and if 16 Let us take care above all not to walk like a flock of sheep each in the other’s traces; let us inform ourselves rather of the place where we ought to go than 17 of that where others are going.—They will renounce even the treading in the tracks of their fathers and ancestors. They will shut the doors of friendship and 18 hatred on all the dwellers in the world.—Break, break the old Tables, ye who seek after the knowledge.— 19 Neither, do men put new wine into old bottles. 20 I love the great scorners because they are the great worshippers, arrows shot by desire towards that other shore.
12) Dhammapada.—13) Nietzsche.—14) id—15) Confucius.—19) Seneca.— 17) Baha-ullah j The Seven Valleys. —18) Nietzsche.—19) Matthew IX. 17.—20) Nietzsche. Page-44 foreword. To translate the Veda is to border upon an attempt at the impossible. For while a literal English rendering of the hymns of the ancient Illuminates would be a falsification of their sense and spirit, a version which aimed at bringing all the real thought to the surface would be an interpretation rather than a translation. I have essayed as ort of middle path, — a free and plastic form which shall follow the turns of the original and yet admit a certain number of interpretative devices sufficient for the light of the Vedic truth to gleam out from its veil of symbol and mage.
The Veda is a book of esoteric symbols, almost of spiritual formulae, which masks itself as a collection of ritual poems. The inner sense is psychological, universal, impersonal ; the ostensible significance and the figures which were meant to reveal to the initiates what they concealed from the ignorant, are to all appearance crudely concrete, intimately personal, loosely occasional and allusive. To this lax outer garb the Vedic poets are sometimes careful to give a clear and coherent form quite other than the strenuous inner soul of their meaning ; their language then becomes a cunningly woven mask for hidden truths. More often they are negligent of the disguise which they use, and when they thus rise above their instrument, a literal and external translation gives either a bizarre, unconnected sequence of sentences or a form of thought and speech strange and remote to the uninitiated intelligence. It is only when the figures and symbols are made to suggest their concealed equivalents that there
Page-45 emerges out of the obscurity a transparent and well-linked though close and subtle sequence of spiritual, psychological and religious ideas. It is this method of suggestion that I have attempted. It would have been possible to present a literal version on condition of following it up by pages of commentary charged with the real sense of the words and the hidden message of the thought. But this would be a cumbrous method useful only to the scholar and the careful student. Some form of the sense was needed which would compel only so much pause of the intelligence over its object as would be required by any mystic and figurative poetry. To bring about such a form it is not enough to translate the Sanskrit word into the English ; the significant name, the conventional figure, the symbolic image have also frequently to be rendered.
If the images preferred by the ancient sages had been such as the modern mind could easily grasp, if the symbols of the sacrifice were still familiar to us and the names of the Vedic gods still carried their old psychological significance,— as the Greek or
Eaten names of classical deities, Aphrodite or Ares, Venus or Minerva, still bear their sense for a cultured European,— the device of an interpretative translation could have been avoided. But India followed another curve of literary and religious development than the culture of the West. Other names of Gods have replaced the Vedic names or else these have remained but with only an external and diminished significance; the Vedic ritual, well-nigh obsolete, has lost its profound symbolic meaning; the pastoral, martial and rural images of the early Aryan poets sound remote, inappropriate, or, if natural and beautiful, yet void of the old deeper significance to the imagination of their descendants. Confronted with the stately hymns of the ancient dawn, we are conscious of a blank incomprehension. And we leave them as a prey to the ingenuity of the scholar who gropes for forced meanings amid obscurities and incongruities where the ancients bathed their souls in harmony and light.
Page-46 A few examples will show what the gulf is and how it was created. When we write in a recognised and conventional imagery, " Laxmi and Saraswati refuse to dwell under one roof ", the European reader may need a note or a translation of the phrase into its plain un figured thought, "Wealth and Learning seldom go together", before he can understand, but every Indian already possesses the sense of the phrase. But if another culture and religion had replaced the Puranic and Brahminical and the old books and the Sanscrit language had ceased to be read and understood, this now familiar phrase would have been as meaningless in India as in Europe. Some infallible commentator or ingenious scholar might have been proving to our entire satisfaction that Laxmi was the Dawn and Saraswati the Night or that they were two irreconcilable chemical substances— or one knows not what else! It is something of this kind that has overtaken the ancient clarities of the Veda ; the sense is dead and only the obscurity of a forgotten poetic form remains. Therefore when we read " Sarama by the path of the Truth discovers the herds ", the mind is stooped and baffled by an unfamiliar language. It has to be translated to us, like the phrase about Saraswati to the European, into a plainer and less figured thought, "Intuition by the way of the Truth arrives at the hidden illuminations." Lacking the clue, we wander into ingenuities about the Dawn and the Sun or even imagine in Sarama, the hound of heaven, a mythological personification of some prehistoric embassy)’ to Dravidian nations for the recovery of plundered cattle !
And the whole of the Veda is conceived in such images. The resultant obscurity and confusion for our intelligence is appalling and it will be at once evident how useless would be any translation of the hymns which did not strive at the same time to be an interpretation. Dawn and Night," runs an impressive Vedic verse, "two sisters of different forms but of one mind, suckle the same divine Child." We understand nothing. Dawn and Night are of different forms, but why of one mind? And who is the child? If it is Agni, the fire, what are we to understand by Dawn
Page-47 and Night suckling alternately an infant fire ? But the Vedic poet is not thinking of the physical night, the physical dawn or the physical fire. He is thinking of the alternations in his own spiritual experience, its constant rhythm of periods of a sublime and golden illumination and other periods of obscuration or relapse into normal unlimited consciousness and he confesses the growth of the infant strength of the divine life within him through all these alternations and even by the very force of their regular vicissitude. For in both states there works, hidden or manifest, the same divine intention and the same high-reaching labour. Thus an image which to the Vedic mind was clear, luminous, subtle, profound, striking, comes to us void of sense or poor and incoherent in sense and therefore affects us as inflated and pretentious, the ornament of an inapt and bungling literary craftsmanship. So too when the seer of the house of Atria cries high to Agni, " O Agni, O Priest of the offering, loose from us the cords," he is using not only a natural, but a richly-laden image. He is thinking of the triple cord of mind, nerves and body by which the soul is bound as a victim in the great world-sacrifice, the sacrifice of the Purusha; he is thinking of the force of the divine Will already awakened and at work within him, a fiery and irresistible godhead that shall uplift his oppressed divinity and cleave asunder the cords of its bondage ; he is thinking of the might of that growing Strength and inner Flame which receiving all that he has to offer carries it to its own distant and difficult home, to the high-seated Truth, to the Far, to the Secret, to the Supreme. All these a 3sociations are lost to us ; our minds are obsessed by ideas of a ritual sacrifice and a material cord. We imagine perhaps the son of Atria bound as a victim in an ancient barbaric sacrifice, crying to the god of Fire for a physical deliverance!
A little later the seer sings of the increasing Flame, " Agni shines wide with vast Light and makes all things manifest by his greatness." What are we to understand ? Shall we suppose that the singer released from his bonds, one knows not how, is admiring tranquilly the great blaze Page-48 of the sacrificial fire which was to have devoured him and wonder at the rapid transitions of the primitive mind ? It is only when we discover that the "vast Light" was a fixed phrase in the language of the Mystics for a wide, free and luminous consciousness beyond mind, that we seize the true burden of the Rik. The seer is hymning his release from the triple cord of mind, nerves and body and the uprising of the knowledge and will within him to a plane of consciousness where the real truth of all things transcendent of their apparent truth becomes at length manifest in a vast illumination. But how are we to bring home this profound, natural and inner sense to the minds of others in a translation ? It cannot be done unless we translate interpretatively, " O Will, O Priest of our sacrifice, loose from us the cords of our bondage " and " this Flame shines out with the vast Light of the Truth and makes all things manifest by its greatness." The reader will then at least be able to seize the spiritual nature of the cord, the light, the flame ; he will feel something of the sense and spirit of this ancient chant.
The method I have employed will be clear from these instances. I have sometimes thrown aside the image, but not so as to demolish the whole structure of the outer symbol or to substitute a commentary for a translation. It would have been an undesirable violence to strip from the richly
jeweled garb of the Vedic thought its splendid ornaments or to replace it by a coarse garment of common speech. But I have
endeavored to make it everywhere as transparent as possible. I have rendered the significant names of the Gods, Kings, Rishis by their half-concealed significances,—otherwise the mask would have remained impenetrable ; where the image was unessential, I have sometimes sacrificed it for its psychological equivalent j where it influenced the colour of the surrounding words, I have sought for some phrase which would keep the figure and yet bring out its whole complexity of sense. Sometimes I have even used a double translation. Thus for the Vedic word which means at once light or ray and cow, I have
Page-49 given according to the circumstances " Light," "the radiances", " the shining herds", " the radiant Kino"," Light, mother of the lairds." Soma, the ambrosial wine of the Veda, has been rendered " vine of delight " or " wine of immortality." The Vedic language as a whole is a powerful and remarkable instrument, terse, knotted, virile, packed, and in its turns careful rather to follow the natural flight of the thought in the mind than to achieve the smooth and careful constructions and the clear transitions of a logical and rhetorical syntax But translated without modification into English, such a language would become harsh, abrupt and obscure, a dead and heavy movement with nothing in it of the morning vigor and puissant stride of the original. I have therefore preferred to throw it in translation into a mould more plastic and natural to the English tongue, using the constructions and devices of transition which best suit a modern speech while preserving the logic of the original thought ; and I have never hesitated to reject the bald dictionary equivalent of the Vedic word for an ampler phrase in the English where that was necessary to bring out the full sense and associations. Throughout 1 have kept my eye fixed on my primary object—to make the inner sense of the Veda sizeable by the cultured intelligence of today. When all has been done, the aid of some amount of annotation remained still indispensable ; but I have tried not to overburden the translation with notes or to indulge in overlong explanations. I have excluded everything scholastic. In the Veda there are numbers of words of a doubtful meaning, many locutions whose sense can only be speculatively or provisionally fixed, not a few verses capable of two or more different interpretations. But a translation of this kind is not the place for any record of the scholar’s difficulties and hesitations. I have also prefixed a brief outline of the main Vedic thought indispensable to the reader who wishes to understand.
He will expect only to seize the general trend and surface suggestions of the Vedic hymns. More would be
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hardly possible. To enter into the very heart of the mystic doctrine, we must ourselves have trod the ancient paths and renewed the lost discipline, the forgotten experience. And which of us can hope to do that with any depth or living power ? Who in this Age of Iron shall have the strength to recover the light of the Forefathers or soar above the two enclosing firmaments of mind and body into their luminous empyrean of the infinite Truth ? The Rishis sought to conceal their knowledge from the unfit, believing perhaps that the corruption of the best might lead to the worst and fearing to give the potent wine of the Soma to the child and the weakling. But whether their spirits still move among us looking for the rare Aryan soul in a mortality that is content to leave the radiant herds of the Sun for ever imprisoned in the darkling cave of the Lords of the sense-life or whether they await in their luminous world the hour when the Maruts shall again drive abroad and the Hound of Heaven shall once again speed down to us from beyond the rivers of Paradise and the seals of the heavenly waters shall be broken and the caverns shall be rent and the
immortalizing wine shall be pressed out in the body of man by the electric thunderstones, their secret remains safe to them. Small is the chance that in an age which blinds our eyes with the transient glories of the outward life and deafens our ears with the victorious trumpets of a material and mechanical knowledge many shall" cast more than the eye of an intellectual and imaginative curiosity on the passwords of their ancient discipline or seek to penetrate into the heart of their radiant mysteries. The secret of the Veda, even when it has been unveiled, remains still a secret.
Page-51 In thy works there are always these three, the Master, the Worker and the Instrument. To define them in oneself rightly and rightly to possess them is the secret of works and of the delight of works. Learn thou first to be the instrument of God and to accept thy Master. The instrument is this outward thing thou calmest thyself; it is a mould of mind, a driving-force of power, a machinery of form, a tiling full of springs and cogs and clamps and devices. Call not this the Worker or the Master ; it can never be the Worker or the Master. Accept thyself humbly, yet proudly, devotedly, submissively and joyfully as a divine instrument. There is no greater pride and glory than to be a perfect instrument of the Master. Learn thou first absolutely to obey. The sword does not choose where it shall strike, the arrow does not ask whither it shall be driven, the springs of the machine do not insist on the product that shall be turned out from its labour. These things are settled by the intention and working of Nature and the more the conscious instrument learns to feel and obey the pure and essential law of its nature, the sooner shall the work turned out become perfect and flawless. Self-choice by the nervous motive-power, revolt of the physical and mental tool can only mar the working. Let thyself drive in the breath of God and be as a leaf in the tempest; put thyself in His hand and be as the sword that strikes and the arrow that leaps to its target. Let thy mind be as the spring of the machine, let thy Page-52 force be is the shooting of a piston, let thy work be as the grinding and shaping descent of the steel on its object. Let thy speech be the clang of the hammer on the anvil and the moan of the engine in its labour and the cry of the trumpet that proclaims the force of God to the regions. In whatsoever way do as an instrument the work that is natural to thee and appointed. The sword has a joy in the battle-play, the arrow has a mirth in its hiss and it’s leaping, the earth has a rapture in its dizzy whirl through space, the sun has the royal ecstasy of its blazing spend ours and its eternal motion. O thou self-conscious instrument, take thou too the delight of thy own appointed workings. The sword did not ask to be made, nor does it resist its user, nor lament when it is broken. There is a joy of being made and a joy of being used and a joy of being put aside and a joy too of being broken. That equal joy discover. Because thou hast mistaken the instrument for the worker and the master and because thou sleekest to choose by the ignorance of thy desire thy own state and thy own profit and thy own utility, therefore thou hast suffering and anguish and hast many times to be thrust into the red hell of the furnace and hast many times to be reborn and reshaped and remembered until thou shalt have learned thy human lesson. And all these things are because they are in thy unfinished nature. For Nature is the worker and what is it "that she works at ? She shapes out of her crude mind and life and matter a fully conscious being. * * * Know thyself next as the Worker. Understand thy nature to be the worker and thy own nature and All-Nature to be thyself.
This nature-self is not proper to thee nor limited. Thy nature has made the sun and the systems, the earth and her creatures, thyself and
thin and all thou art and perceives. It is thy friend and thane enemy, thy mother and thy devourer, thy lover and thy torturer, the sister of thy soul and an alien and a stranger, thy joy and thy
Page-53 sorrow, thy sin and thy virtue, thy strength and thy weakness, thy knowledge and thy ignorance. And yet it is none of these things, but something of which they are attempts and imperfect images. For beyond all these it is an original self-knowledge and an infinite force and innumerable quality. But in thee there is a special movement, a proper nature and an individual energ3′. Follow that like a widening river till it leads thee to its infinite source and origin. Know therefore thy body to be a knot in Matter and thy mind to be a whirl in universal Mind and thy life to be an eddy. Know thy force to be every other being’s force and thy knowledge to be a glimmer from the light that belongs to no man and thy works to be made for thee and be delivered from the error of thy personality. When that is done, thou shalt take thy free delight in the truth of thy individual being and in thy strength and in thy glory and in thy beauty and in thy knowledge; and in the denial of these things thou shalt take delight also. For all this is the dramatic mask of the Person and the self-image of the self-Sculptor. Why shouldst thou limit thyself ? Feel thyself also in the sword that strikes thee and the arms that embrace, in the blazing of the sun and the dance of the earth, in the flight of the eagle and the song of the nightingale, in all that is past and all that is now and all that is pressing forward to become. For thou art infinite and all this joy is possible to thee. The Worker has the joy of her works and the joy of her Lover for whom she works. She knows herself to be his consciousness and’ his force, his knowledge and his reserving of knowledge, his unity and his self-division, his infinity and the finite of his being. Know thyself also to be these things ; take thou also the delight of thy Lover.
There are those who know themselves as a workshop or an instrument or the thing worked, but they mistake the Worker for the Master ; this too is an error. Those who fall into it can hardly arrive at her high, pure and perfect workings.
Page-54 The instrument is finite in a personal image, the worker is universal with a personal trend, but neither of these is the Master , for neither are the true Person. * * * Know last the Mater to be thyself ; but to this self put no form and seek for it no definition of quality. Be one with That in thy being, commune with That in thy consciousness, obey That in thy force, be subject to That and clasped by it in thy delight, fulfill That in thy life and body and mentality. Then before an opening eye within thee there shall emerge that true and only Person, thyself and not thyself, all others and more than all others, the Director and Enjoyer of thy works, the Master of the worker and the instrument, the Reveler and Trample in the dance of the universe and yet hushed and alone with thee in thy soul’s silent and inner chamber The joy of the Master possessed, there is nothing else for thee to conquer. For lie shall give thee Himself and all things and all creatures’ getting and having and doings and enjoying for thy own proper portion, and He shall give thee that also which cannot be portioned.
Thou shalt contain in thy being thyself and all others and be that which is neither thyself nor all others. Of works this is the consummation and the summit.
Page-55 What in its principle and scope is the force of evolution and how does it work out in the world ? The theory of evolution has been the key-note of the thought of the nineteenth century. It has not only affected all its science and its thought-attitude, but powerfully influenced its moral temperament, its politics and its society. Without it there could not have been that entire victory of the materialistic notion of life and the universe which has been the general characteristic of the age that is now passing,—a victory which for a time even claimed to be definitive,—nor such important corollary effects of this great change as the failure of the religious spirit and the breaking-up of religious beliefs. In society and politics it has led to the substitution of the evolutionary for the moral idea of progress and the consequent materialisation of social ideas and social progress, the victory of the economic man over the idealist. The scientific dogma of heredity, the theory of the recent emergence of the thinking human animal, the popular notion of the all-pervading struggle for life and the aid it has given to an exaggerated development of the competitive instinct, the idea of the social organism and the aid it has given to the contrary development of economic socialism and the increasing victory of the organised state or community over the free individual,— all these are out followings from the same source.
The materialistic view of the world is now rapidly collapsing and with it the materialistic statement of the evolution theory must disappear. Modern European thought progresses with a vertiginous rapidity. If it is Teutonic in its fidelity of observation and its tendency to laborious
systematizations, it has also another side, Celtic-Hellenic, a side of suppleness, mobility, readiness for rapid change, insatiable curiosity. It does not allow the same thought, the same system to exercise for very long a secure empire;
Page-56 it is in haste to question, to challenge, to reject, to remould, to discover new and opposite truths, to venture upon other experiments. At present this spirit of questioning ‘has not attacked the evolution theory at its centre, but it is visibly preparing to give it a new form and meaning. The general idea of evolution was the filiations of each successive form or state of things to that which preceded it, its appearance by a process of out bringing or deploying of some possibility prepared and even necessitated by previous states and previous tendencies. Not only does a form contain the seed of the form that reproduces it, but also the seed of the possible new form that varies from it. By successive progression a world-system evolves out of the nebula, a habitable planet appears in an uninhabitable system, protoplasmic life emerges by some yet’ unknown process out of Matter, the more developed grows out of the less developed organism. The fish is the descendant of the insect, the biped and quadruped trace back to the fish, man is a quadruped of the genus Ape who has learned to walk erect on two legs and has divested himself of characteristics unsuited to his new mode of life and progression. Force on Matter is the unconscious Goddess who has worked these miracles by her inherent principle of natural adaptation and in the organism by the additional machinery of heredity; by natural selection those species which reproduce new characteristics developed by adaptation to the environment and favorable to survival, tend to propagate themselves and remain; others fall back in the race of life and disappear.
Such were once the salient ideas ; but some of them and not the least important are now questioned. The idea of the struggle for life tends to be modified and even denied; it is asserted that, at least as popularly understood, it formed no real part of Darwinism. This modification is a concession to reviving moralistic and idealistic tendencies which seek for a principle of love as well as a principle of egoism in the roots of life. Equally important are the conclusion arrived at by investigators into the phenomena of heredity that acquired characteristics are not
Page-57 handed down to the posterity and the theory that it is chiefly predispositions that are inherited; for by this modification the process of evolution begins to wear a less material and mechanical aspect; its source and the seat of its motive power are shifted to that which is least material, most psychical in Matter. Finally, the first idea of a slow and gradual evolution is being challenged by a new theory of evolution through sudden and rapid outbursts; and again we pass from the sense of an obvious superficial machinery and all-sufficient material necessity to profundities whose mystery his yet to be fathomed. In themselves, indeed, these modifications would not be radical. Their importance lies in their synchronism with a great resurgence, in new forms, of old ideas that had been submerged by the materialistic wave. Theories of vitalism, idealistic tendencies of thought, which were supposed to have been slain by the march of physical Science, now arise, dispute the field and find their account in every change of scientific generalisation which at all opens the way to their own expansion and reassertion. In what respects then is it likely that the evolution theory will be found deficient by the wider and more complex thought of the future and compelled to undergo essential changes? In the first place, the materialistic theory of evolution starts from the Sankhya position that all world is a development out of indeterminate Matter by Nature-Force, but it excludes the Silent Cause of the Sankhya, the Purusha or observant and reflective Soul. Hence it conceives the world as a sort of automatic machine which has somehow happened. No intelligent cause, no aim, no raison deter,
Again, Force in indeterminate Matter without any Conscious Soul being all the beginning and all the material of things, Mind, Life and Consciousness can only be developments out of Matter and even only operations of Page-58 Matter. They cannot be at all things in themselves, different from Matter or in the last degree independent of it. This is the second paradox and the point at which the theory has eventually failed to establish itself. More and more the march of knowledge leads towards the view that the three are different forms of Force, each with its own characteristics and proper method of action, each reacting upon the other and enriching its forms by the contact. An idea has even begun to dawn that there is not a single creation but a triple, material, vital and mental; it may be regarded as a composite of three worlds, as it were, interpenetrating each other. We are led back to the old Vedic idea of the triple world in which we live. And we may reasonably forecast that when its operations are ex. If this be the truth, then the action of evolution must be other than has been supposed. For example the evolution of Life in Matter must have been produced and governed not by a material principle, but by a Life-Principle working in and upon the conditions of Matter and applying to it its own laws, impulses, necessities. This idea of a mighty Life, other than the material Principle, working in it and upon it has begun to dominate the advanced thought of Europe. The other idea of a still mightier Mind working in Life and upon it has not yet made sufficient way because the investigation of the laws of Mind is still in its groping infancy.
Again, the materialist theory supposes a rigid chain of material necessity; each previous condition is a co-ordination of so many manifest forces and conditions ; each resulting condition is its manifest result. All mystery, all element of the incalculable disappears. If we can completely analyse the previous conditions and discover their general
Page-59 law, we can be sure of the subsequent result, as in the case of an eclipse or an earthquake. For all is manifestation which is the logical result of a previous manifestation. Once more the conclusion is too simple and trenchant; the world is more complex. Besides the manifest causes there are those that are unmanifested or latent and not subject to our analysis. This element increases as we climb the ladder of existence ; its scope is greater in Life than in Matter, freer in Mind than in Life. European thought already tends to posit behind all manifest activity an Unmanifest called according to intellectual predilection either the Inconscient or the Subconscient which contains more and in a way unsuitable to us knows more and can more than the surface existence. Out of this Unmanifest the manifest constantly emerges. Again we return towards an ancient truth already known to the Vedic sages,—the idea of an inconscient or subconscient ocean of being, the ocean of the heart of things out of which the worlds form themselves. But the Veda posits also a governing and originating Super-conscient which accounts for the appearance of a hidden consciousness and knowledge pervading the operations of Evolution and which constitutes the self-acting Law and Truth behind them.
The theory of materialistic evolution led naturally to the idea of a slow and gradual progression in a straight line. It admits reversions, atavisms, loops and zigzags of reaction deflecting the straight line, but these must necessarily be subordinate, hardly visible if we calculate by ages rather than by shorter periods of time. Here too, fuller knowledge disturbs the received notions. In the history of man everything seems now to point to alternations of a serious character, ages of progression, ages of recoil, the whole constituting an evolution that is cyclic rather than in one straight line. A theory of cycles of human civilisation has been advanced, we may yet arrive at the theory of cycles of human evolution, the Kalpa and Manvantaras of the Hindu theory. If its affirmation of cycles of
Page-60 world-existence is farther off from affirmation, it is because they must be so vast in their periods as to escape not only all our means of observation, but all our means of deduction or definite inference. Instead of slow, steady, minute gradations it is now suggested that new steps in evolution are rather effected by rapid and sudden outbursts, outbreaks, as it were, of manifestation from the Unmanifest. Shall we say that Nature preparing slowly behind the veil, working a little backwards, working a little forwards, one day arrives at the combination of outward things which makes it possible for her to throw her new idea into a realise formation, suddenly, with violence, with a glorious dawning, with a grandiose stride ? And that would explain the economy of her relapses and her reappearances of things long dead. She aims at a certain immediate result and to arrive at it more quickly and entirely she sacrifices many of her manifestations and throws them back into the latent, the Unmanifest, the Subconscient. But she has not finished with them; she will need them at another stage for a farther result. Therefore she brings them forward again and they reappear in new forms and other combinations and art towards new ends. So evolution advances. And her material means? Not the struggle for life only. The real law, it is now suggested, is rather mutual help or at least mutual accommodation. Struggle exists, mutual destruction exists, but as a subordinate movement, a red minor chord, and only becomes acute when the movement of mutual accommodation fails and elbow-room has to be made for a fresh attempt, a new combination.
The propagation of ‘acquired characteristics by heredity was too hastily and completely asserted ; it is now perhaps in danger of being too summarily denied. Not Matter alone, but Life and Mind working upon Matter help to determine evolution. Heredity is only a material shadow of soul-reproduction, of the rebirth of Life and Mind into new forms. Ordinarily, as a constant factor or basis, there is the reproduction of that which was already evolved ; for new characteristics to be propagated in the species they must
Page-61 have been accepted, received, sanctioned in the vital and mental world ; then only can they be automatically self-reproduced from the material seed. Otherwise they are private and personal acquisitions and are returned into the State exchequer, the treasury of the Subconscient, and do not go to the family estate. When the mind-world and life-world are ready, they are poured out freely on fit recipients. This is the reason why it is predisposition that is chiefly inherited. The psychical and vital force in the material principle is first impressed ; when that has been done on a sufficient scale, it is ready for a general new departure and an altered heredity appears.
Thus the whole view of Evolution begins to change. Instead of a mechanical, gradual, rigid evolution out of indeterminate- Matter by Nature-Force we move towards the perception of a conscious, supple, flexible, intensely surprising and constantly dramatic evolution by a super-conscient Knowledge which reveals things in Matter, Life and Mind out of the unfathomable Inconscient from which they rise.
Page-62 O Sun, O Light, because to-day blameless in thy rising thou hast declared the Truth to the Lord of Love and the Lord of Purity, so may we abide in the godhead, dear to thee, O Mother infinite, dear to thee, O Lord of Strength, in all our speaking. O Mitra, O Varuna, this is he that seethe for the soul, the Sun that rises over earth and heaven in the pervading wideness, and he guards all that is in motion and all that is stable ; for he beholds the straight things and the crooked in mortals. Seven shining energies has this Bright One yoked to-day in the world of our achievement and they bear him on in their clarity, and he beholds the homes of the soul and the places of its birth like a herdsman who watches over his herds.
Upward rise your honed satisfactions; for
our sun has climbed into the ocean of pure Light and for him the Children of the
Infinite hew out his paths, even the Lord of Love and the Lord of Strength and
the Lord of Purity in one harmony .These are they that discern and separate all
the much falsehood in us; they are the Lords of Love and Strength and Purity.
These grow in the house of Truth, puissant and unvanquished Sons of the
Infinite. These are the Love and the Purity hard to repress who by their
discerning give knowledge to him who has no knowledge ; they bring to him their impulses of a will that has right vision and they lead him by the good path beyond the evil. These with sleepless eyes see and know in his earth for man that is ignorant and lead him : in his forward faring he comes to the fathomless pit in the river, yet shall they bear him across to the other shore of this wideness. The peace and the protection and the happiness which the infinite Mother
Page-63 and the Lords of Love and Parity give to the servant of the sacrifice, in that let us found all our creation and building, let us do no violence to the godhead, O ye swift Wayfarers.
He whom the Lord of Purity upholds, puts away from his altar by the powers of sacrifice whatsoever hurters : cut away, O Lord of Strength, from the servant of the sacrifice the hurt and the division, form in him that vast other world, O givers of the abundance. A blazing strength and a world of illumination is the coming together of these Godheads and they overcome by their near and approaching force. Lo, we quiver with the fear of you; set us at ease by the greatness of your discerning. For when a man by sacrifice wins right-mindedness in the getting of the plenitude, in the conquest of the supreme Felicity, the strong Warriors, the Lords of the Treasure cleave to his heart of emotion and they form there the Vast for his dwelling-place making it of a perfect temper. For you we have made in front this work of the divine representative in our sacrifices; lead us safe through all difficult places. Keep us always with constant felicities.
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