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CHAPTER XVIII MIND AND SUPERMIND He discovered that Mind was the Brahman. Taittiriya Upanishad. Indivisible, but as if divided in beings. Gita.
The conception which we have so far been
striving to form is that of the essence only of the supramental life which the
divine soul possesses securely in the being of Sachchidananda, but which the
human soul has to manifest in this body of Sachchidananda formed here into the
mould of a mental and physical living. But so far as we have been able yet to
envisage it, it does not seem to have any necessary connection with life as we
know it, life active between the two terms of our normal existence, the two
firmaments of mind and body. It seems rather to be a state of being, a state of
consciousness, a state of active relation and’ mutual enjoyment such as
disembodied souls might possess and experience in a world without physical
forms, a world in which differentiation of souls had been accomplished but not
differentiation of bodies, a world of active and joyous infinities, not of
form-imprisoned spirits. Therefore it might reasonably be doubted whether such a
divine living would be possible with this limitation of bodily form and this
limitation of form-imprisoned mind and form-trammelled force which is what we
now know as existence,
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In fact, we have striven to arrive at
some conception of that supreme infinite being, conscious-force and self-delight
of which our world is a creation and our mentality a perverse figure; we have
tried to give ourselves an idea of what this divine Maya may be, this
Truth-consciousness, this Real-Idea by which the conscious force of the
transcendent and universal Existence conceives, forms and governs the universe,
order, cosmos of its self-delight. But we have not studied the connections of
these four great and divine terms with the three others with which our human
experience is alone familiar, — mind, life , and body. We have not scrutinised
this other and apparently undivine Maya which is the root of all our striving
and suffering or seen how precisely it develops out of the divine. And till we
have douse this, till we have woven the missing cords of connection, our world
is still unexplained to us and the doubt of a possible unification between that
higher existence arid this lower life still subsists. We know that our world has
come forth from Sachchidananda and subsists in His being ; we conceive that He
dwells in it as the Enjoyer and Knower, Lord and Self; we have seen that our
dual terms of sensation, mind, force, being can only be representations of His
delight, His conscious force, His divine existence. But it would seem that they
are actually so much the opposite of what He really and supernal is that we
cannot while dwelling in the cause of these opposites, cannot while contained in
the lower triple term of existence attain to the divine living . We must either
exalt this lower being into that higher status or exchange body for that pure
existence , life for that pure condition of conscious-force, sensation and
mentality for that pure delight and knowledge which live in the truth of the
spiritual reality. And must not this mean that we abandon all earthly or limited
mental existence for something which is its opposite — either for some pure
state of the Atman or else for some world of the Truth of things, if such
exists, or other worlds, if such exist, of divine Bliss, divine Energy, divine
Being? In that case the perfection of humanity is elsewhere than
Page-322 in humanity itself; the summit of its earthly evolution can only be a fine apex of dissolving mentality whence it takes the great leap either into formless being or into worlds beyond the reach of embodied Mind. But in reality all that we call undivine can only be an action of the four divine principles themes’. vs., such action of them as was necessary to create this universe of forms-Those forms hover been created not outside but in the divine existence, conscious-force and bliss, not outside but in and as a part of the working of the divine Real-Idea. There is therefore no reason to suppose that there cannot be any real play of the higher divine consciousness in a world of forms or that forms and their immediate supports, mental consciousness, energy of vital force and formal substance, must necessarily distort that which they represent. It is possible, even probable that mind, body and life are to be found in their pure forms in the divine Truth itself, are there in fact as subordinate activities of its consciousness and part of the complete instrumentation by which the supreme Force always works. Mind, life and body must then be capable of divinity and their form and working in that short period out of possibly only one cycle of the terrestrial evolution which Science reveals to us, need not represent all the potential workings of these three principles in the living body. They work as they do because they are by some means separated in consciousness from the divine Truth from which they proceed. Were this separation once abrogated by the expanding energy of the Divine in humanity, their present functioning might well be converted, would indeed naturally be converted by a supreme evolution and progression into that purer working which they have in the Truth-consciousness.
In that case not only would it be possible
to manifest and maintain the divine consciousness in the human mind and body
but, even, that divine consciousness might in the end, increasing its conquests,
remould mind, life and body themselves into a more perfect image of its eternal
Truth and realise not only in soul but in substance its kingdom of heaven upon
earth. The first of these victories, the in-
Page-323 "eternal, has certainly been achieved in a greater or less degree by some, perhaps by many upon earth; the other, the external, even if never more or less realised in past are ones as a first type for future cycles and still held in the subconscious memory of the earth-nature, may yet be intended as a coming victorious achievement of God in humanity. This earthly life need not be necessarily and for ever a wheel of h info yours, half-anguished effort; attainment may also 1 What Mind, Life and Body are in their supreme sources and who it therefore they must be in the integral completeness of the divine manifestation when informed by the Truth and not cut off from it by the separation and the ignorance in which presently we live,—this then is the problem that we have next to consider. For there they must have already their perfection towards which we here are growing,—we who are only the first movement of the Mind which is evolving in Matter and not yet liberated from the conditions and effects of that involution of spirit inform, that plunge of Light into its own shadow by which the darkened material consciousness of physical Nature was created. The type of all perfection towards which we grow, the terms of our highest evolution must already be held in the divine Real-Idea ; they must be there formed and conscious for us to grow towards and into them; for that pre-existence in the divine knowledge is what our human mentality names and seeks as the Ideal. The Ideal is an eternal Reality which we have not yet realised in the conditions of our own being, not a non-existent which the Eternal Divine has not yet grasped and only we imperfect beings have glimpsed and mean to create.
Mind, first, the chained and hampered
sovereign of our human living. Mind in its essence is a consciousness which
measures, limits, cuts out forms of things from the indivisible whole and
contains them as if each were a separate integer. Even with what exists only as
obvious parts and fractions, Mind establishes this fiction of its ordinary
commerce that they are things with which it can
Page-324 deal separately and not merely as aspects of a whole. For even when it knows that they are not things in themselves, it is obliged to deal with them as if they were things in themselves ; otherwise it could not subject them to its own characteristic activity. It is this essential characteristic of Mind which conditions the workings of all its operative powers, whether conception, perception, sensation or the dealings of creative thought. It conceives, perceives, senses things as if rigidly out from a background or a mass and employs them as fixed units of the material given to it for creation or possession. All its action and enjoyment deal thus with wholes that form part of a greater whole, and these subordinate wholes again are broken up into parts which-are also treated as wholes for the particular purposes they serve. Mind may divide, multiply, add, subtract, but it cannot get beyond the limits of this mathematics. If it goes beyond and tries to conceive a real whole, it loses itself in a foreign element ; it falls from its own firm ground into the ocean of the intangible, into the abysms of the infinite where it can neither perceive, conceive, sense nor deal with its subject for creation and enjoyment. For if Mind appears sometimes to conceive, to perceive, to sense or to enjoy with possession the infinite, it is only in seeming and always in a figure of the infinite. What it does thus vaguely possess is simply a formless Vast and not the real space less infinite. The moment it tries to deal with that, to possess it, at once the inalienable tendency to delimitation comes in and the Mind finds itself again handling images, forms and words. Mind cannot possess the infinite, it can only suffer it or be possessed by it ; it can only lie blissfully helpless under the luminous shadow of the Real cast down on it from planes of existence beyond its reach. The possession of the Infinite cannot come except by an ascent to those supramental planes, nor the knowledge of it except by an inert submission of Mind to the descending messages of the Truth-conscious Reality.
This essential faculty and the essential
limitation that accompanies it are the truth of Mind and fix its real
Page-325 nature and action, Swabhava and Swadharma ; here is the mark of the divine fiat assigning it its office n the complete instrumentation of the supreme Maya,— the office determined by that which it is in its very birth from the eternal self-conception of the Self-existent . That office is to translate always infinity into the terms of the finite, to measure off, limit, de-piece. Actually it does this in our consciousness to the exclusion of all true sense of the Infinite ; therefore Mind is the nodes of the great Ignorance, because it is that which originally divides and distributes, and it has even been mistaken for the cause of the universe and for the whole of the divine Maya. But the divine Maya comprehends Vida as well as Avidya, the Knowledge as well as the Ignorance. For it is obvious that since the finite is only an appearance of the Infinite, a remit of its action, a play of its conception and cannot exist except by it, in it, with it as a background, itself form of that stuff and action of that force, there must be an original consciousness which contains and views both at the same time and is intimately conscious of all the relations of the one with the other. In that consciousness there is no ignorance because the infinite is known and the finite is not separated from it as an independent reality; but still there is a subordinate process of delimitation,—otherwise no world could exist,—a process by which the ever dividing and reuniting consciousness of Mind, the ever divergent and convergent action of Life and the infinitely divided and self-aggregating substance of Matter come, all by one principle and original act, into phenomenal being. This subordinate process of the eternal Seer and Thinker, perfectly luminous, perfectly aware of itself, knowing well what He does, conscious of the infinite in the finite which He is creating, may be called the divine Mind. And it is obvious that it must be a subordinate and not really a separate working of the Real-Idea, of the Supermind, and must operate through what we have described as the apprehending movement of the Truth-consciousness.
That apprehending consciousness, the
Prajnana, places, as we have seen, the working of the indivisible All
Page-326 active as a process and object of creative knowledge before the consciousness of the same All originative and cognizant as the possessor and witness of its own working, —somewhat as a poet views the creations of his own consciousness placed before him in it as if they were things other than the creator and his creative force, yet all the time they are really no more than the play of self-formation of his own being in itself and are indivisible from their creator. Thus Prajnana makes the fundamental division which leads to all the rest, the division of the Purusha, the conscious soul who knows and sees and by his vision creates and ordains, and the Prakriti, the Force-Soul or Nature-Soul which is his knowledge and his vision, his creation and his all-ordaining power. Both are one being, one existence and the for is seen and created are multiple forms of that Being which are placed by Him as knowledge before Himself as knower, by Himself as Force before Himself as Creator. The last action of this apprehending consciousness takes place when the Purusha pervading the conscious extension of his being, present at _ every point of himself as well as in his totality, inhabiting every form, regards the whole as if separately from each of the standpoints he has taken ; he views anal governs the relations of each soul-form of himself with oilier soul-forms from the standpoint of will and knowledge appropriate to each particular form.
Thus the elements of division have come
into being. First, the infinity of the One has translated itself into an
extension in conceptual Time and Place ; secondly, the omnipresence of the One
in that self-conscious extension translates itself into a multiplicity of the
conscious soul, the many Purushas of the Sankhya ; thirdly, the multiplicity of
soul-forms has translated itself into a divided habitation of the extended
unity. This divided habitation is inevitable the moment these multiple Purushas
do not each inhabit a separate world of its own, do not each possess a separate
Prakriti building a separate universe but rather all enjoy the same Prakriti,—
as they must do, being only soul lords of the One presiding over the multi-
Page-327 pie creations of His power,—yet have relations with each other in the one world of being created by the one Prakriti. The Purusha in each form actively identifies himself with early ; he delimits himself in that and sets off his other forms against it in his consciousness as containing his other selves which are identical with him in being but different in relation, different in the various extent, various range of movement and various view of the one substance, force, consciousness, delight which each is actually deploying at any given moment of Time or in any given field of Space. Granted that in the divine Existence, perfectly aware of itself, this is not a binding limitation, not an identification to which the soul becomes enslaved and which it cannot exceed as we are enslaved to our sell-identification with the body and unable to exceed the limitation of our conscious ego, unable to escape from a particular movement of our consciousness in Time determining our particular field in Space ; granted all this, still there is a free identification from moment to moment which only the inalienable self-knowledge of the divine soul prevents from fixing itself in an apparently rigid chain of successive energies such as that in which our consciousness seems to be fixed and chained.
Thus the depicting is already there ; the
relation of form with form as if they were separate beings, of will- of-being
with will-of-being as if they were separate forces, of knowledge-of-being with
knowledge-of-being as if they were separate consciousnesses has already been
founded. It is as yet only " as if " ; for the divine soul is not deluded, it is
aware of all as phenomenon of being and keeps hold of its existence in the
reality of being ; it does not forfeit its unity; it uses mind as a subordinate
action of the infinite knowledge, a definition of things subordinate to its
awareness of infinity, a delimitation dependent on its awareness of essential to
utility’—not that apparent and pluralistic totality of sum and collective
aggregation which is only another phenomenon of Mind. Thus there is no real
limitation ; the soul uses its defining power for the play of
Page-328 well-distinguished forms and forces and is not used by that power. A new factor, a new action of conscious force is therefore needed to create the operation of a helplessly limited as opposed to a freely limiting mind,—that is to say, of mind subject to its own play and deceived by it as opposed to mind master of its own play and viewing it in its truth, the creature mind as opposed to the divine. That new factor is Avidya, the self-ignoring faculty which separates the action of mind from the action of the super mind that originated and still governs it from behind the veil. Thus separated, Mind perceives only the particular and not the universal, conceives only the particular in an un possessed universal and no longer both particular and universal as phenomena of the infinite. Thus we have the limited mind which views every phenomenon as a thing-in-itself, separate part of a whole which again exists separately in a greater whole and so on, enlarging always its aggregates without getting back to the sense of a true infinity. Mind, being an action of the Infinite, depieces as well as aggregates ad infinitum. It cuts up being into wholes, into ever smaller wholes, into atoms and those atoms into primal atoms, until it would, if it could, dissolve the primal atom into nothingness. But it cannot, because behind this dividing action is the saving knowledge of the supra-mental which knows every whole, every atom to be only a concentration of all-force, of all-consciousness, of all-being into phenomenal forms of itself. The dissolution of the aggregate into an infinite nothingness at which Mind seems to arrive, is to the Supermind only the return of the self-concentrating conscious-being out of its phenomenon into its infinite existence. Whichever way its consciousness proceeds, by the way of infinite division or by the way of infinite enlargement, it arrives only at itself, at its own infinite unity and eternal being. And when the action of the mind is consciously subordinate to this knowledge of the super mind, the truth of the process is known to it also and not at all ignored; there is no real division but only an infinitely multiple concentration into forms of being and into Page-329 arrangements of the relation of those forms of being to each other in which division is a subordinate appearance of the whole process necessary to their spatial and temporal play. For divide as you will, grit down to the most infinitesimal atom or form the most monstrous possible aggregate of worlds and systems, you cannot get by either process to a thing in itself; all are forms of a Force which alone is real in itself while the rest are real only as self-imagings of the eternal Force-consciousness.
Whence then does the limiting Avidya, the fall of mind
from Supermind and the consequent idea of real division originally proceed ?
exactly from what perversion of the supramental functioning ? It proceeds from
the individualised soul viewing everything from its own standpoint and excluding
all others; it proceeds, that is to say, by an exclusive concentration of
consciousness, an exclusive self-identification of the soul with a particular
temporal and spatial action which is only a part of its own play of being; it
starts from the soul’s ignoring the fact that all others are also itself, all
other action its own action and all other states of being and consciousness
equally its own as well as the action of the one particular moment in Time and
one particular standing-point in Space and the one particular form it presently
occupies. It concentrates on the moment, the field, the form, the movement so as
to lose the rest; it has then to recover the rest by linking together the
succession of moments, the succession of points of Space, the succession of
forms in Time and Space, the succession of movements in Time and Space It has
thus lost the truth of the indivisibility’ of Time, the indivisibility of Force
and Substance. It has lost sight even of the obvious fact that all minds are one
Mind taking many standpoints, all lives one Life developing many currents of
activity, all body and form one substance of Force and Consciousness
concentrating into many apparent stabilities of force and consciousness; but in
truth all these stabilities are really only a constant whorl of movement
repeating a form while it modifies it; they are nothing more. For the Mind tries
to clamp everything into rigidly fixed
Page-330 forms and unchanging external factors, because otherwise it cannot act, and it thinks it has got what it wants; in reality all is a flux of change and renewal and there is no fixed form and no unchanging external factor. Only the eternal Real-Idea is firm and maintains a certain ordered constancy of the relations in the flux of things, a constancy which the Mind vainly attempts to imitate by attributing fixity to that which is always inconstant. These truths Mind h is to rediscover; it knows them all the time, but only in the hidden back of its consciousness, in the secret light of its self-being; and that light is to it a darkness because it has created the ignorance, because it has lapsed from the dividing into the divided mentality, because it has become involved in its own workings and in its own creations.
This ignorance is farther deepened for man
by his self-identification with the Lady. To us mind seems to be determined by
the body, because it is preoccupied with that and devoted to the physical
workings which it uses for its conscious superficial action in this gross
material world. Employing constantly that operation of the brain and nerves
which it has developed in the course of its own development in the body, it is
too absorbed in observing what this physical machinery gives to it to get back
from it to its own pure workings; those are to it mostly subconscious-Still we
can conceive a mentality which has got beyond the evolutionary necessity of this
absorption and is able to see and even experience itself assuming body after
body and not created separately in each body and ending with it; for it is only
the physical impress of mind on matter, only the corporeal mentality that is so
created, not the mental being itself. This corporeal mentality is merely our
surface of mind, merely the front which it presents to physical experience.
Behind, even in our terrestrial being, there is this other, subconscious to us,
which knows itself as more than the body and is capable of a more purely mental
action. To this we owe immediately all the larger, deeper and more forceful
action of our surface physical mind; this, when we become conscious of it or of
its impress on us, is
Page-331 our first idea or our first realisation of the soul. But this mentality also, though it may get free from the error of body, does not get free from the whole error of mind; it is still subject to the original act of ignorance by which the individualised soul regards everything from its own standpoint and can see the truth of things only as they present themselves to it from outside or else as the rise up to its view from its separate temporal and spatial consciousness as the results of its past experience. It is not conscious of its other selves except by the outward indications they give of their existence, indications of physical speech, action, result of actions or subtler indications of vital impact and relation. Equally is it ignorant of itself; for it knows of its self only as a movement in Time and a succession of lives in which it has used its variously embodied energies. As our physical instrumental mind has the illusion of the body, so this subconscious dynamic mind has the illusion of life. In that it is absorbed and concentrated, by that it is limited, with that it identifies its being. Here we do not yet get back to the meeting-place of mind and Supermind and the point at. which they originally separated.
But there is still another clearer
reflective mentality behind this dynamic which is capable of escaping from this
absorption in life and views itself as assuming life and body in order to image
out in active relations of energy that which it perceives in will and thought.
It is the source of the pure thinker in us; it is that which knows
mentality in itself and sees the world not in terms of
life and body but of mind; it is that which, when we get back to it, we
sometimes mistake for the pure spirit as we mistake the dynamic mind for the
soul. This higher mind is able to perceive and deal with other souls as other
forms of its pure self; it is capable of sensing them by pure mental impact and
communication and no longer only by nervous impact and physical indication; it
conceives too a mental figure of unity; and in its activity and its will it can
create and possess directly and not only indirectly as in the ordinary physical
life and in other minds and lives as well as its own. But still even this pure
mentality does not escape from the original
Page-332 error of mind. For it is still its separate mental self which it makes the judge, witness and centre of the universe and through it alone strives to arrive at its own higher self and reality; all others are "others" grouped to it around itself: and i t has therefore to leave life and mind in order to disappear into the real unit)’. For there is still the veil created by Avidya between the mental and supra-mental action; an image of the Truth gets through, not the Truth itself.
It is only when the veil is rent and
the divided mind overpowered, silent and passive to a supramental action that
mind itself gets back to the Truth of things. There we find a luminous mentality
reflective, obedient and instrumental to the divine Real-Idea. There we perceive
what the world really is; we know in every way ourselves in others and as
others, others as ourselves and all as the universal and self-multiplied One. We
lose the rigidly separate individual standpoint which is the source of all
limitation and error. Still, we perceive also that all that the ignore"
acne of
Mind took for the truth was in fact truth, but truth deflected, mistaken and
falsely conceived. We still perceive the division, the individualising, the
atomic creation, but we know them and ourselves for what they and we really are.
And so we perceive that the Mind was really a subordinate action and
instrumentation of the Truth-consciousness. So long as it is not separated in
self-experience from the enveloping Master-consciousness and does not try to set
up house for itself, so long as it serves passively as an instrumentation and
does not attempt to possess for its own benefit, Mind fulfils luminously its
function which is in the Truth to hold forms apart from each other by a
phenomenal, a purely formal delimitation of their activity behind which the
governing universality of the being remains conscious and untouched. It has to
receive the truth of things and distribute it according to the unerring
perception of a supreme and universal Eye and Will. It has to uphold an
individualisation of active consciousness, delight, force, substance which
derives all its power, reality and joy from an inalienable universality behind.
It has to
Page-333 "turn the multiplicity of the One into an apparent division by which relations ate defined and held off against each other so as to meet again and join. It has to establish the delight of separation and contact in the midst of an eternal unity and in tumescence. It has to enable the One to behave as if He were an individual dealing with other individuals but always in His own unity, and this is what the world really is. The mind is the final operation of the apprehending Truth-consciousness which makes all this possible, and what we call the Ignorance does not create a new thing and absolute falsehood but only misrepresents the Truth. The Ignorance is the Mind separated in knowledge from its source of knowledge and giving a false liquidity and a mistaken appearance of opposition and conflict to the harmonious play of the supreme Truth in its universal manifestation.
The fundamental error of the Mind is,
then, this fall from self-knowledge by which the individual soul conceit vs. of
its individuality as a separate fact instead of as a form of Oneness and makes
itself the centre of its own universe instead of knowing itself as one
concentration of the universal. From that original error all its particular
ignorance’s and limitations are contingent results. For viewing the flux of
things only as it flows upon and through itself, it makes a limitation of being
from which proceeds a limitation of consciousness and there lore of knowledge, a
limitation of conscious force and will and therefore of power, a limitation of
self-enjoyment and therefore of delight. It is conscious of things and knows
them only as the present themselves to its individuality and therefore it falls
into an ignorance of the rest and thereby into an erroneous conception even of
that which it seems to know : for since all being is interdependent, the
knowledge either 01
Page-334 things, ignoring the all-bliss and by defect of will and knowledge unable to master its world, must fall into incapacity of possessive delight and therefore into suffering. Self-ignorance is therefore the root of all the perversity of our existence, and that perversity stands fortified in the self-limitation, the egoism which is the form taken by that self-ignorance.
Yet is all ignorance and all
perversity only the distortion of the truth and right of things and not the play
of an absolute falsehood. It is the result of Mind viewing things in the
division it makes, Avidyâyâm antare, instead of viewing itself and its
divisions as instrumentation and phenomenon of the play of the truth of
Sachchidananda nice. If it gets back to the truth from which it fell, it bet cuts
again the final actor of the Truth-conscious in its apprehensive operation
and the relations it helps to create in that light and power will be relations
of the Truth and not of the perversity. They will be the straight things and not
the crooked, to use the expressive distinction of the Vedic Rishis,—Truths, that
is to sa3′, of divine being with its self possessive consciousness, will and
delight moving harmoniously in itself. Now we have rather the warped and zigzag
movement of mind and life, the contortions created by the struggle of the soul
once grown oblivious of its true being to find itself again, to resolve back all
error into the truth which both our truth and our error, our right and our wrong
limit or distort, all incapacity into the strength which both our power and our
weakness are a struggle of force to grasp, all suffering into the delight which
both our joy and our pain are a convulsive effort of sensation to realise, all
death into the immortality to which both our life and our death are a constant
effort of being to return.
Page-335 CHAPTER XIV THE STATUS of knowledge If the-Self, the Divine both in its own pure-being and in its manifestation of that being in the world is to be the object of Yogic knowledge, and not at all or not at least directly and for their own sake our ordinary objects, such as the external appearances of life and matter or the superficial psychology of our thoughts and actions, it is evident that the knowledge for which Yoga strives must be different from what men ordinarily understand by the word. We mean ordinarily by knowledge an intellectual appreciation of the facts of life, mind, matter and the laws that govern them, founded upon our sense-perception and upon reasoning from our sense-perceptions and undertaken partly for the pure satisfaction of the intellect, partly for practical efficiency and the added power which knowledge gives in managing our lives and the lives of others, in utilising for human ends the overt or secret forces of Nature and in helping or hurting, in saving and ennobling or in oppressing and destroying our fellow-men. Yoga, indeed, being commensurate with all life, includes all these subjects and objects; for there is a Yoga * which can be used for self-indulgence as well as for self-conquest, for hurting others as well as for their salvation. But "all life" * Yoga develops power, it develops it even when we do not desire or consciously aim at it; and power is always a double-edged weapon which can be used to hurt or destroy as well as to help and save. Be it also noted that all destruction is no; evil. Page-336 includes not only life as humanity now leads it but also the higher existence which humanity is capable of but does not yet possess and it is this which is the peculiar and appropriate object of Yogic discipline. The higher existence contemplated is not merely an improved mentality, a greater dynamic energy or a purer moral life and character. Its superiority is not merely in degree but in kind ; it consists in a change not merely of the manner of our being but of its very foundation. Yogic knowledge seeks that which is the very basis of all our existence ; it tries to discover and possess, in the words of the Upanishad, that by the right knowledge of which all is rightly known. For it starts from the premises that all this world visible or sensible to us and all too in it that is not visible is merely the phenomenal expression of something beyond the mind and the senses. Only by attaining to that can we know the world aright ; for the knowledge which the senses and intellectual reasoning from the data of the senses can bring us, is not true knowledge, it is only the science of appearances ; and even appearances cannot be properly known unless we know first the reality of which they are images. This reality is their self and there is one self of all.
It is evident that however much we may analyse
the physical and sensible, we cannot by that means arrive at the knowledge of
the Self or of ourselves or of that which we call God. The telescope, the
microscope, the scalpel, the retort and alembic cannot go beyond the physical,
although they may arrive at subtler and subtler truths about the physical. If
then we confine ourselves to what the senses and their physical aids reveal to
us and refuse from the beginning to admit any other reality or any other means
of knowledge, we are obliged to conclude that nothing is real except the
physical and that there is no Self in us or in the universe, no God within and
without, no ourselves even except this aggregate of brain, nerves and body. But
this we are only obliged to conclude because we have assumed it firmly from the
beginning and there-
Page-337 fore cannot but circle round to our original assumption. If, then, there is a Self, a reality not obvious to the senses, it must be by other means than those of physical Science that it is to be sought and known. The intellect is not that means. Undoubtedly there are a number of supra-sensuous truths at which the intellect is able to arrive, which it is able to perceive and state as intellectual conceptions. The very idea of Force for instance on which Science so much insists, is a conception, a truth at which the intellect alone can arrive by going beyond its data ; for we do not sense this universal force but only its results, and the force itself we infer as a necessary cause of these results. So also the intellect by following a certain line of rigorous analysis can arrive at the intellectual conception and the intellectual conviction of the Self and this conviction can be very real, very luminous, very potent as the beginning of other things. Still, in itself intellectual analysis can only lead to an arrangement of clear conceptions, perhaps to a right arrangement of true conceptions; but this is not the knowledge at which Yoga aims. For it is not in itself an effective knowledge. A man may be perfect in it and yet be precisely what he was before except in the mere fact of the greater intellectual illumination. The change of our being at which Yoga aims, may not at all take place.
It is true that intellectual deliberation
and right discrimination are an important part of the Yoga of knowledge ; but
their object is rather to remove a difficulty than to arrive at the final and
positive result of this path. Our ordinary intellectual notions are a
stumbling-block in the way of knowledge ; for they are governed by the error of
the senses and they found themselves on the notion that matter and body are the
reality, that life and force are the reality, that passion and emotion, thought
and sense are the reality ; and with these things we identify ourselves, and
because we identify ourselves with these things we cannot get back to the real
self. Therefore, it is necessary for the seeker of knowledge to remove this
stumbling
Page-338 block and to get right notions about himself and the world ; for how shall we pursue by knowledge the real self if we have no notion of what it is and are on the con tarry burdened with quite opposite ideas to the truth ? Therefore right thought is a necessary preliminary, and once the habit of rated thought is established, free from sense-error and desire and old association and intellectual prejudgment, the understanding becomes purified and offers no serious obstacle to the farther process of knowledge. Still, right thought only becomes effective when in the purified understanding it is followed by other operations, by vision, by experience, by realisation.
What are these operations ? They are not
mere psychological self-analysis and self-observation. Such analysis, such
observation are, like the process of right thought, of immense value and
practically indispensable. They may even, if rightly pursued, lead to a right
thought of considerable power and affectivity. Like intellectual discrimination
by the process of meditative thought they will have an effect of purification;
they will lead to self-knowledge of a certain kind and to the setting right of
the disorders of the soul and the heart and even of the disorders of the
understanding. Self-knowledge of all kinds is on the straight path to the
knowledge of the Leal Self. The Upanishad tells us that the Self-existent has so
set the doors of the soul that they turn outwards and most men look outward into
the appearances of things ; only the rare soul that is ripe for a calm thought
and stead wisdom turns its eye inward, sees the Self and attains to immortality.
To this turning of the eye inward psychological self-observation and analysis is
a great and effective introduction. We can look into the inward of ourselves
more easily than we can look into the inward of things external to us because
there, in things outside us, we are in the first place embarrassed by the form
and secondly we have no natural previous experience of that in them which is
other than their physical substance. A purified or tranquillised mind may
reflect or a powerful
Page-339 concentration may discover God in the world, the Self in Nature even before it is realised in ourselves, but this is rare and difficult. * And it is only in ourselves that we can observe and know the process of the Self in its becoming and follow the process by which it draws back into sell-being. Therefore the ancient counsel, know thyself, will always stand as the first word that directs us towards the knowledge. Still, psychological self-knowledge is only the experience of the modes of the Self, it is not the realisation of the Self in its pure being. The status of knowledge, then, which Yoga envisages is not merely an intellectual conception or clear discredit station of the truth, nor is it an enlightened psycholological experience of the modes of our being. It is a" realisation," in the full sense of the word; :t is the making real to ourselves and in ourselves of the Self, the transcendent and universal Divine, and it is the subsequent impossibility of viewing the modes of being except in the light of that Self and in their true aspect as its flux of becoming under the psychical and physical conditions of our world-existence. This realisation consists of three successive movements, internal vision, complete internal experience and identity. This internal vision, drastic, the power so highly valued by the ancient sages, the power which made a man a Rishi or Kavi and no longer a mere thinker, is a sort of light in the soul by which things unseen become as evident and real to it—to the soul and not merely to the intellect —as do things seen to the physical eye. In the physical world there are always two forms of knowledge, the direct and the indirect, pratyaksha, of that which is present to the eyes, and parish, of that which is remote from and beyond our vision. When the object is beyond our vision, we are necessarily obliged to arrive at an idea of it by inference, imagination, analogy, by hearing the descriptions
* In one respect, however, it is easier, because in external things we are not so tuition hampered by the so. is of the limited ego as in ourselves one obstacle to the realisation of God is therefore removed. Page-340 of others who have seen it or by studying pictorial or other representations of it if these are available. By putting together all these aids we can indeed arrive at a more or less adequate idea or suggestive image of the object, but we do not realise the thing itself; it is not yet to us the grasped reality, but only our conceptual representation of a reality. But once we have seen it with the eyes,—for no other sense is adequate,—we possess, we realise; it is there secure in our satisfied being, part of ourselves in knowledge. Precisely the same rule holds good of psychical things and of the Self. We may hear clear and luminous teachings about the Self from philosophers or teachers or from ancient writings; we may by thought, inference, imagination, analogy or by any other available means attempt to form a mental figure or conception of it; we may hold firmly that conception in our mind and fix it by an entire and exclusive concentration; * but we have not yet realised it, we have not seen God. It is only when after long and persistent concentration or by other means the veil of the mind is rent or swept aside, only when a flood of light breaks over the awakened mentality, jyotirmaya Brahman, and conception gives place to a knowledge-vision in which the Self is as present, real, concrete as a physical object to the physical eye, that we possess in knowledge; for we have seen. After that revelation, whatever fading of the light, whatever periods of darkness may afflict the soul, it can never irretrievably lose what it has once held. The experience is inevitably renewed and must become more frequent till it is constant; when and how soon depends on the devotion and persistence with which we insist on the path and besiege by our will or our love the hidden Deity. This inner vision is one form of psychological experience; but the inner experience is not confined to that seeing; vision only opens, it does not embrace. Just as the
* This is the idea of the triple operation of Jnanayoga, çravana, manana, nididhyasana, hearing, thinking or neutralizing and fixing in concentration Page-341 eye, though it is alone adequate to being the first sense of realisation, has to call in the aid of experience by the touch and other organs of sense before there is an embracing knowledge, so the vision of the self ought to be completed by an experience of it in all our members. Our whole being ought to demand God and not only our illumined eye of knowledge. For since each principle in us is only a manifestation of the Self, each can get back to its reality and have the experience of it. We can have a mental experience of the Self and seize as realities all those apparently abstract things that to the mind constitute existence —consciousness, force, delight and their manifold forms and workings: thus the mind is satisfied of God. We can have an emotional experience of the Self through Love and through emotional delight, love and delight of the Self in us, of the Self in the universal and of the Self in all with whom we have relations: thus the heart is satisfied of God. We can have an aesthetic experience of the Self in beauty, a delight-perception and taste of the absolute reality all-beautiful in everything whether created by ourselves or Nature in. its appeal to the aesthetic mind and the senses; thus the sense is satisfied of God. We can have even the vital, nervous experience and practically the physical sense of the Self in all life and formation and in all workings of powers, forces, energies that operate through us or others or in the world: thus the life and the body are satisfied of God.
All this knowledge and experience are primary
means of arriving at and of possessing identity. It is our self that we see and
experience and therefore vision and experience are incomplete unless they
culminate in identity, unless we are able to live in all our being the supreme
Vedantic knowledge, He am I. We must not only see God and embrace Him, but
become that Reality. We must become one with the Self in its transcendence of
all form and manifestation by the resolution, the sublimation, the escape from
itself of ego and all its belongings into That from which they proceed, as well
as become the Self in all its manifasted Page-342 existences and becoming, one with it in the infinite existence, consciousness, peace, delight by which it reveals itself in us and one with it in the action, formation, play of self-conception with which it garbs itself in the world. It is difficult for the modern mind to understand how we can do more than conceive intellectually of the Sell or of God; but it may borrow some shadow of this vision, experience and becoming from that inner awakening to Nature which a great English poet has made a reality to the European imagination. If we read the poems in which Wordsworth expressed his realisation of Nature, we may acquire some distant idea of what realising is. For, first, we see that he had the vision of something in the world which is the very Self of all things that it contains, a conscious force and presence other than its forms, yet cause of its forms and manifested in them. We perceive that he had not only ^the vision of this and the joy and peace and universality which it presence brings, but the very sense of it, mental, aesthetic, vital, physical; not only this sense and vision of it in its own being but in the nearest flower and simplest man and the immobile rock; and, finally, that he even occasionally attained to that unity, that becoming the object of his meditation, one phase of which is powerfully and profoundly expressed in the poem " A slumber did my spirit seal," where he describes himself as become one in his being with earth, " rolled round in its diurnal course with stocks and stones and trees." Exalt this realisation to a profounder Self than physical Nature and we have the elements of the Yogic knowledge. But all this experience is only the vestibule to that suprasensuous, supramental realisation of the Transcendent who is beyond all His aspects, and the final summit of knowledge can only be attained by entering into the superconscient and there merging all other experience into a supernal unity with the Ineffable. That is the culmination of all divine knowing; that also is the source of all divine delight and divine living.
That status of knowledge is then the aim of
this path
Page-343
and indeed of all paths when pursued to their end, to which intellectual
discrimination and conception and all concentration and psychological
self-knowledge and all seeking by the heart through love and by the senses
through beauty and Dry the will through power and works and by the soul through
peace and joy are only keys, avenues, first approaches and beginnings of the as
ant which we have to use and to follow till .the wide and infinite levels are
attained and the divine doors swing open into the infinite Light.
Page-344 COMMENTARY IX Mind was called by Indian psychologists the eleventh and ranks as the supreme sense. In the ancient arrangement of the senses, five of knowledge and five of action, it was the sixth of the organs of knowledge and at the same time the sixth of the organs of action. It is a commonplace of psychology that the effective functioning of the senses of knowledge is inoperative without the assistance of the mind; the eye may see, the ear may hear, all the senses may act, but it the mind pays no attention, the man has not heard, seen, felt, touched or tasted. Similarly, according to psychology, the organs of action act only by the force of the mind operating as will or, physiologically, by the reactive nervous force from the brain which must be according to materialistic notions the true self and essence of all will. In any case, the senses or all senses, if there are other than the ten,—according to a text in the Upanishad there should be at least fourteen, seven and seven,— all senses appear to be only organisations, functionings, instrumentations of the mind-consciousness, devices which it has formed in the course of its evolution in living Matter.
Modern psychology has extended our
knowledge and has admitted us to a truth which the ancients already knew but
expressed in other language. We know now or we rediscover the truth that the
conscious operation of mind is only a surface action. There is a much vaster and
more potent subconscious mind which loses nothing of what the senses bring to
it; it keeps all its wealth in an in-
Page-345 exhaustible store of memory, akshitram çravah. The surface mind may pay no attention, still the subconscious mind attends, receives, treasures up with an infallible accuracy. The illiterate servant-girl hears daily her master reciting Hebrew in his study; the surface mind pays no attention to the unintelligible gibberish, but the subconscious mind hears, remembers and, when in an abnormal condition it comes up to the surface, reproduces those learned recitations with a portentous accuracy which the most correct and retentive scholar might envy. The man or mind has not heard because he did not attend; the greater man or mind within has heard because he always attends, or rather sub-tends, with an infinite capacity. So too a man put under an anaesthetic and operated upon has felt nothing; but release his subconscious mind by hypnosis and he will relate accurately every detail of the operation and its appropriate sufferings; for the stupor of the physical sense-organ could not prevent the larger mind within from observing and leering. Similarly we know that a large part of our physical action is instinctive and directed not by the surface but by the subconscious mind. And we know now that it is a mind that acts and not merely an ignorant nervous reaction from the brute physical brain. The subconscious mind in the catering insect knows the anatomy of the beetle it intends to immobilise and make food for its young and it directs the sting accordingly, as unerringly as the most skilful surgeon, provided the mere limited surface mind with its groping and faltering nervous action does not get in the way and falsify the inner knowledge or the inner will-force.
These examples point us to truths which western
psychology, hampered by past ignorance posing as scientific orthodoxy;- still
ignores or refuses to acknowledge. The Upanishads declare that the Mind in us is
infinite; it knows not only what has been seen but what has not been seen, not
only what has been heard but what has not been heard, not only what has been
discriminated by the thought but what has not been discriminated by the thought.
Let us
Page-346 say, then, in the tongue of our modern knowledge that the surface man in us is limited by his physical experiences! he knows only what his nervous life in the body brings to his embodied mind; and even of those bringing he knows, he can retain and utilise only so much as his surface mind-sense attends to and consciously remembers; but there is a larger subliminal consciousness within him which is not thus limited. That consciousness senses what has not been sensed by the surface mind and its organs and knows what the surface mind has not learned by its acquisitive thought. That in the insect knows the anatomy of its victim; that in the man outwardly insensible not only feels and remembers the action of the surgeon’s knife, but knows the appropriate reactions of suffering which were in the physical body inhibited by the anesthetic and therefore non-existent; that in the illiterate servant-girl heard and retained accurately the words of an unknown language and could, as Yogic experience knows, by a higher action of itself understand those superficially unintelligible sounds.
To return to the Vedantic words we have been
using, there is a vaster action of the Sanjnana which is not limited by
the action of the physical sense-organs; it was this which sensed perfectly and
made its own through the ear the words of the unknown language, through the
touch the movements of the unfelt surgeon’s knife, through the sense-mind or
sixth sense the exact location of the centres of locomotion in the beetle. There
is also associated with it a corresponding vaster action of Prajnana, Ajnana and
Vim* nana not limited by the smaller apprehensive and comprehensive faculties
of the external mind. It is this vaster Prajnana which perceived the proper
relation of the words to each other, of the movement of the knife to the unfelt
suffering of the nerves and of the successive relation in space of the
articulations in the beetle’s body. Such perception was inherent in the right
reproduction of the words, the right narration of the sufferings, the right
successive action of the sting. The Ajnana or Knowledge-Will originating all
these actions was also vaster, hot limited by
Page-347 the faltering force that governs the operations directed by the surface mind. And although in these examples the action of the vaster Vijnana is not so apparent, yet it was evidently there working through them and ensuring their coordination. But at present it is with the Sanjnana that we are concerned. Here we should note, first of all, that there is an action of the sense-mind which is superior to the particular action of the senses and is aware of things even without imaging them in forms of sight, sound, contact, but which also as a sort of subordinate operation, subordinate but necessary to completeness of presentation, does image in these forms. This is evident in psychical phenomena. Those who have carried the study and experimentation of them to a certain extend, have found that we can sense things known only to the minds of others, things that exist only at a great distance, things that belong to another plane than the terrestrial but have here their effects; we can both sense them in their images and also feel, as it were, all that they are without any definite image proper to the five senses.
This shows, in the first place, that sight and the
other senses are not mere results of the development of our physical organs in
the terrestrial evolution. Mind, subconscious in all Matter and evolving in
Matter, has developed these physical organs in order to apply its inherent
capacities of sight, hearing etc, on the physical plane by physical means for a
physical life; but they are inherent capacities and not dependent on the
circumstance of terrestrial evolution and they can be employed without the use
of the physical eye, ear, skin, palate. Supposing that there are psychical
senses which act through a psychical body and we thus explain these psychical
phenomena, still that action also is only an organisation of the inherent
functioning of the essential sense, the Sanjnana, which in itself can operate
without bodily organs. This essential sense is the original capacity of
consciousness to feel in itself all that consciousness has formed and to feel it
in all the essential properties and operations of that which has form,
Page-348 whether represented materially by vibration of sound or images of light or any other physical symbol. The trend of knowledge leads more and more to the conclusion that not only are the properties of form, even the most obvious such as colour, light etc, merely operations of Force, but form itself is only an operation of Force. This Force again proves to be self-power of conscious-being* in a state of energy and activity. Practically, therefore, all form is only an operation of consciousness impressing itself with presentations of its own workings. We see colour because that is the presentation which consciousness makes to itself of one of its own operations; but colour is only an operation of Force working in the form of Light, and Light again is only a movement, that is to say an operation of Force. The question is what is essential to this operation of Force taking on itself the presentation of form? For it is this that must determine the working of Sanjnana or Sense on whatever plane it may operate. Everything begins with vibration or movement, the original kshobha or disturbance. If there is no movement of the conscious being, it can only know its own pitied static existence. Without vibration * or movement of being in consciousness there can be no act of knowledge and therefore no sense; without vibration or movement of being in force there can be no object of sense. Movement of conscious being as knowledge becoming sensible of itself as movement of force, in other words the knowledge separating itself from its own working to watch that and take it into itself again by feeling,—this is the basis of universal Sanjnana. This is true both of our internal and external operations. I become anger b)’ a vibration of conscious force acting as nervous emotion and I feel the anger that I have become by another movement of conscious force acting as light of knowledge. I am conscious of my body
* Devatm askakti m s’vagunâir nigûdham;. self-power of the divine Existent hidden by its own modes. Swetaçvatara Upanishad.
* The term is used not because it is entirely adequate or accurate, no physical
term can be, but because it is most suggestive of the original outgoing of
consciousness to seek itself.
Page-349 because I have myself become the body; that same force of conscious being which has made this form of itself, this presentation of its workings knows it in that form, in that presentation. I can know nothing except what I myself am; if I know others, it is because they also are myself, because my self has assumed these apparently alien presentations as well as that which his nearest to my own mental centre. All sensation, all action of sense is thus the same in essence whether external, or internal, physical or ps5′chical.
But this vibration of conscious being
is presented to itself by various forms of sense which answer to the successive
operations of movement in its assumption of form. For first we have intensity of
vibe. ation creating regular rhythm which is the basis or constituent of all
creative formation; secondly, contact or in tumescence of the movements of
conscious being which constitute the rhythm ; thirdly, definition of the
grouping of movements which are in contact, their shape; fourthly, the constant
welling up of the essential force to support in its continuity the movement that
has been thus denned; fifthly, the actual enforcement and compression of the
force in its own movement which maintains the form that has been assumed. In
Matter these five constituent operations are said by the Sankhya to represent
themselves as five elemental conditions of substance, the etheric, atmospheric,
igneous, liquid and solid; and the rhythm of vibration is seen by them as çabda,
sound, the basis of hearing, the in tumescence as contact, the basis
of touch, the definition as shape, the basis of sight, the up flow of force as
rasa, sap, the basis of taste, and the discharge of the atomic compression
as Gandha, odour, the basis of smell. It is true that this is only
predicated of pure or subtle matter; the physical matter of our world being a
mixed operation of force, these five elemental states are not found there
separately except in a very modified form. But all these are only the physical
workings or symbols. Essentially all formation, to the most subtle and most
beyond our senses such as form of mind, form of character, form of soul, amount
when scrutiniest Page-350 to this five-fold operation of conscious-force in movement. All these operations, then, the Sanjnana or essential sense must be able to seize, to make its own by that union in knowledge of knower and object which is peculiar to itself. Its sense of the rhythm or intensity of the vibrations which contain in themselves all the meaning of the form, will be the basis of the essential hearing of which our apprehension of physical sound or the spoken word is only the most outward result; so also its sense of the contact or in tumescence of conscious force with conscious force must be the basis of the essential touch ; its sense of the definition or form of force must be the basis of the essential sight ; its sense" of the up flow of essential being in the form, that which is the secret of its self-delight, must be the basis of the essential taste; its sense of the compression of force and the self-discharge of its essence of being must be the basis of the essential inhalation grossly represented in physical substance by the sense of smell. On whatever plane, to whatever kind of formation these essentialities of sense will apply themselves and on each they will seek an appropriate organisation, an appropriate functioning.
This various sense will, it is obvious, be in the
highest consciousness a complex unity, just as we have seen that there the
various operation of knowledge is also a complex unity. Even if we examine the
physical senses, say, the sense of hearing, if we observe how the underlying
mind receives their action, we sail see that in their essence all the senses are
in each other. That mind is not only aware of the vibration which we call sound
; it is aware also of the contact and interchange between the force in the sound
and the nervous force in us with which that intermixes; it is aware of the
definition or form of the sound and of the complex contacts or relations which
make up the sound; it is aware of the essence or out wailing conscious force
which constitutes and maintains the sound and prolongs its vibrations in our
nervous being ; it is a-ware of our own nervous inhalation of the vibratory
discharge proceeding from the compression of force which Page-351 makes, so to speak, the solidity of the sound. All these sensations enter into the sensitive reception and joy of music which is the highest physical form of this operation of force,—they constitute our physical sensitiveness to it and the joy of our nervous Lying in it ; diminish one of them and the joy and the sensitiveness are to that extent dulled. Much more must there be this complex unity in a higher than the physical consciousness and most of all must there be unity in the highest. But the essential sense must be capable also of seizing the secret essence of all conscious being in action, in itself and not only through the results of the operation; its appreciation of these results can be nothing more than itself an outcome of this deeper sense which it has of the Thing behind its appearances. If we consider these things thus subtly in the light of our own deeper psychology and pursue them beyond the physical appearances by which they are covered, we shall get to some intellectual conception of the sense behind our senses or rather the Sense of our senses, the Sight of our sight and the Hearing of our hearing. The Brahman-consciousness of which the Upanishad speaks is not the Absolute withdrawn into itself, but that Absolute in its outlook on the relative; it is the Lord, the Master-Soul, the governing Transcendent and All, He who constitutes and controls the action of the gods on the diff rent planes of our being. Since it constitutes them, all our workings can be no more than psychical and physical results and representations of something essential proper to its supreme creative outlook, our sense a shadow of the divine Sense our sight of the divine Sight, our hearing of the divine Hearing. Nor is that divine sight and hearing limited to things physical, but extend themselves to all forms and operations of conscious being.
The supreme Consciousness does not depend on what
we call sight and hearing for its own essential seeing and audition. It operates
by a supreme Sense, creative and comprehensive, of which our physical and
psychical sight and hearing are external results and partial operations. Neither
is it ignorant of these, nor excludes them ; for
Page-352 since it constitutes and controls, it must be aware of them but from a supreme plane, param, dhama, which includes all in its view; for its original action is that highest movement of Vishnu which, the Veda, tells us, the seers behold like an eye extended in heaven. It is that by which the soul sees its seeing and hears its hearings ; but all sense only assumes its true value and attains to its absolute, its immortal reality when we cease to pursue the satisfactions of the mere external and physical senses and go beyond even the psychical being to this spiritual or essential which is the source and fountain, the knower, constituent and true valour of all the rest.
This spiritual sense of things, secret and
superconscient in us, alone gives their being, worth and reality to the
psychical and physical sense; in themselves they have none. When we attain to
it, these inferior operations are as it were taken up into it and the whole
world and everything in it changes to us and takes on a different and a
non-material value. That Master-consciousness in us senses our sensations of
objects, sees our seeing, hears our hearings no longer for the benefit of the
senses and their desires, but with the embrace of the self-existent Bliss which
has no cause, beginning or end, eternal in its own immortality.
Page-353 THE SIXTH HYMN TO AGNI THE GALLOPING FLAME-POWERS OF THE JOURNEY [The flames of Agni the divine Will, home and meeting-place of all our increasing and advancing Lila powers, are imaged as galloping on our human journey to the supreme good. Divine Will creates in us the divine strength of impulsion, an illumined and undeceiving force and flame described as the steed of the plenitude, which brings us that good and carries us to that goal. His flames are coursers on the path who increase by the sacrifice; they hasten uninterruptedly, and race always more swiftly; they bring in the penned-up illuminations of the hidden knowledge. Their entire force and rapidity are accorded when the divine Strength is filled and satisfied with the sacrificial offerings. ] 1. On Strength I meditate who is the dweller in substance and to him as their home go our fostering herds, to him as their home our swift war-steeds, I to him as their home our powers of the plenitude. Being to those who affirm thee thy force of the impulsion. 2
1. The Horse is the symbol of Force in the Veda, especially of vital lore. It is variously the Arvat or war-steed in the battle and the Vainer, the steed of the journey which brings us in the plenty of our spiritual wealth. 2. The power that enables us to make the journey through the night of per being to the divine Light. Page-354 2. He is that Strength who is the dweller in substance ; him I express in whom come together 3 our fostering herds, in whom meet our swiftly galloping war-steeds, in whom our luminous seers that come to perfect birth in us. Bring to those who affirm thee thy force of the impulsion. 3. Will, the universal toiler, gives to the creature his steed of the plenitude, Will gives that which comes into entire being in us for the felicity and, satisfied, it journeys to the desirable good. Bring to those who affirm thee thy force of the impulsion. 4. That fire of thee we kindle O God, O Flame, luminous, nagging, when that more effective force of thy labour blazes in our heavens. Bring to those who affirm thee thy force of the impulsion. 5. Will, master of the pure-bright flame, thane is the offering cast by the illumining word ; bearer of the oblation, to thee it is cast, O master of the creature, achiever of works, perfect in delight. Bring to those who affirm thee thy force of the impulsion. 6. Those are thy flames that in these thy other flames nourish and advance every desirable good ; they, they race! they, they run ! they drive on in their impulsions without a break. Bring to those who affirm thee thy force of the impulsion-
3. All our growing powers of force and knowledge move towards the manifestation
of the divine Knowledge-Force and in it combine and are harmonised.
Page-355 7. Those are thy fiery rays, O Will, steeds of the plenitude, and they increase into the largeness and with trampling of their hooves they bring in the pens of the luminous kine. 4? Bring to those who affirm thee thy force of the impulsion. 8. Bring, O Will, to those who affirm thee new strengths of impulsion that find aright their dwelling-place Bring to those who affirm thee thy force of the impulsion. 9. Both 6 ladles of the running richness thou approaches to thy mouth, O perfect in delight ; Mayst thou in our speaking utterly fill thyself, O master of shining strength. Bring to those who affirm thee thy force of the impulsion. 10. So by our words and our sacrifices they without any break drive and control the Strength. May he establish in us an utter energy V and that swift galloping force. 8 Bring to those who affirm thee thy force of the impulsion.
4. The illuminations of the divine Truth penned up in the cavern of the Subconscient by the lords of sense-action. 5. That is, they take us to our home in the world of Truth, the superconscient phone, own home of Agni, in which all these impulsions advancing find their rest and dwelling-place. It is reached by an ascent from plane to plane opened in succession by the power of the divine illumining Word. 6. Perhaps, the divine and the human delight. Page-356 THE DIVINE WILL, DESIRER, ENJOYER, PROGRESSIVE FROM THE ANIMAL TO BLISS AND KNOWLEDGE [Agni is hymned as the divine Force that brings the bliss and the ray of the truth into the human being and light into the night of our darkness. He leads men in their labour to his own infinite levels; he enjoys and tears up the objects of earthly enjoyment, but all his multitude of desires are for the building of an universality, an all-embracing enjoyment in the divine home of the human being. He is the animal moving as the enjoyer by the progressive movement of Nature, as with an axe through the forest, to the achievement and the bliss. This passionate, emotional, animal being of man is given by him to be purified into the peace and bliss; in it he establishes a divine light and knowledge and the awakened state of the soul. ] 1. O comrades, in you an absolute force of impulsion and an utter affirming for the Strength that lavishes all his abundance on the worlds of our dwelling 1, for the master of Force, for the son of Energy. 2. Whosesoever man’s soul comes to the utter meeting with him, it becomes full of delight in its dwelling-place. Even they who are adepts in the strength continue to kindle the flame of him and all creatures born work to bring him to perfect birth.
1. Or, on the dwellers in the world. Page-357 3. When wholly we possess and enjoy our strengths of impulsion, wholly all that men offer as a sacrifice, then I receive the ray of the Turfs in its illumination and shining energy. 2 4. Verily he creates the light of perception even for one who sits far off in the night, when himself undeceiving the purifier compresses the lords 3, of the woodland of delight. 5. When in his circling men cast the sweat 4, of their toil as an offering on the paths, then they ascend to him where he sits self-joyous 5 like climbers who arrive upon large levels. 6 6. Him shall mortal man come to know as the godhead who has this multitude of his desires that
2. Or, "of the light, the luminous force, the truth."
3. Vanaspatîn, in its double sense, the trees,
the lords of the forest, growths of the earth, our material existence, and lords
of delight. Soma, producer of the immortalising wine, is the typical
Vanaspatîn. 4. An equivoque on the double sense of the word, sweat and the
rich droppings of the food-offering. 5. Or, self-victorious.
6. These are the wide free infinite planes of existence founded on the Truth,
the open levels opposed elsewhere to the uneven Crookednesses which shut in men
limiting their vision and obstructing their journey. 7. The home of man, the
higher divine world of his existence which is being formed by the gods in his
being through the sacrifice. This home is the complete Beatitude into which all
human desires and enjoying have to be transformed and lose themselves.
Therefore Agni, the purifier, devours all the forms of material existence and
enjoyment in order to reduce them to their divine equivalent. 8. The material
existence not watered by the streams or rivers which descend from the
superconscient Bliss and Truth,
Page-358 he may establish in us the all ; for he reaches forward to the sweet taste of all foods and he builds a home for this human being. 7. Yea, he teareth to pieces this desert 8 in which we dwell as the Animal that teareth its food; the beard of this Beast is of the golden light, his fang is a purity and the force in him is not afflicted by his heats. 8. Pure indeed is he for whom as for the eater of things there is the flowing progression by Nature 9, as by an axe, and with a happy travail she, his Mother, brought him forth that he may accomplish her works and taste of the enjoyment. 10 9. O strength, O presser out on us of the running richness, when thou fondest one who is a glad peace 11 for the establishing of thy works, in such mortals illumination establish and inspired knowledge and the conscious soul.
9. Again an equivoque on the double sense of svadhiti, an axe or other cleaving instrument and the self-ordering power of Nature, Swadha. The image is of the progress of the divine Force through the forests of the material existence as with an axe. But the axe is the natural self-arranging progression of Nature, the World-Energy, the Mother from whom this divine Force, son of Energy, is born. 10. The divine enjoyment, bhaga, typified by the, god Bhaga, the Enjoyer in the power of the Truth. 11. Çualm and çarma in the Veda express the idea of peace and joy, the joy that comes of the accomplished labour, garn, or work of the sacrifice: the toil of the battle and the journey find their rest, a foundation of beatitude is acquired which is already free from the pain of strife and effort. Page-359 10. For to this end born in the material existence receive as thy gift the emotional mind and the animal being 12. Yea, O Will, may the eater of things overpower the Dividers 13 who minister not to his fullness; these souls that rush upon him with their impulsions may he overcome.
12. Literally, passion-mind and the animal; but the word page may also mean, as it does oftenest in the Veda, the symbolic Cow of light; in that case the sense will be the emotional mind and the illumined mind. But the first rendering agrees better with the general sense of the hymn and with its previous use of the word. 13. The Dasyus who hack and cut up the growth and unity of the soul and seek to assail and destroy its divine strength, joy and knowledge. They are powers of Darkness, the sons of Dânu or Diti the divided being. Page-360 THE CONQUEST OF TRUTH THE MASTERY OF THE MIND 1 They had attained to the supreme perfection of be- 2 ing completely masters of their thought.—Be master of thy thoughts, O thru who wrestles for perfection.— 3 Be master of thy soul, O seeker of the eternal truths, 4 if thou wouldst attain the goal.—The soul not being mistress of itself, one looks but sees not, listens but hears not. 5 The self is master of the self; what other master can it have? The sage who has made himself master of 6 himself, rends his bonds and breaks his chains.—The self is master of itself, what other master can it have? A self well controlled is a master difficult to procure. 7 To be master of one’s mind ! how difficult that is ! it has been compared, not without reason, to a mad 8 monkey.—The mind is difficult to restrain, light, running whither it pleases; to control it is a helpful thing; 9 controlled, it secures happiness.—The mind is restless, violent, powerful, obstinate; its control seems to me as difficult a task as to control the wind, to Just as the fly settles now on an unclean sore and now on the sweetmeats of feed to the gods, so a worldly man’s thoughts stop for a moment on religious subjects and the next stray into the pleasures of luxury
1) The Lotus of Bliss.— 2) Book of Golden Precepts.— 3) id.— 4) Tseng-tsen-ta-hio VII. 2.— 5) Udanavarga.— 6) Dhan mapada. 160. — 7) Vivekananda.— 8) Dhammapada. 86.-— 9) Bhagavad Gita VI. 84.— 10) Ramakrishna.—(11) id. Page-361 11 and lust.—So long as the mentality is inconstant and inconsequent, it is worthless, though one have a 12 good teacher and the company of holy men.—On his mind vacillating, mobile, difficult to hold in, difficult to master the intelligent man should impose the same straightness as an arrow-maker gives to an arrow.— 13 Abandoning without exception all desires born of the will, controlling by the mind the senses in all directions, a man should gradually cease from mental action by the force of an understanding held in the grasp of a constant will; he should fix his mind in the self and think of nothing at all, and whenever the restless and mobile mentality ranges forth he should draw it back from whatever direction it takes and bring it again under control in the self alone: for when the mind has thus been quieted, there comes to man the 14 highest peace.—The wise man should rein in intently this mental action like a chariot drawn by untrained horses. 15 A half-attention prepares the way for fresh errors, fresh illusions and allows the old to increase. Prevent by a sustained attend’ on the birth of new errors and destroy the old. 16 Under all circumstances be vigilant. * * * 17 Let us watch over our thoughts. 18 A bad thought is the most dangerous of thieves._ 19 Let not worldly thoughts and anxieties trouble your 22 the inferior worlds.—When the disciple considering an idea sees rise in him bad or unhealthy thoughts, thoughts of covetousness, hatred or error, he should
12) Dhammapada-33.— 13) Bhagavad Girl a. VI. 24-26.— 14) Sweat;- water Upanishad.— IE) Majjhima Nikaya.— 16) Baha-ullah._ 17) Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king.— 18) Buddhist scriptures from the Chinese._ 19) Ramakrishna.— 20) Confucius. — 21) Antoine the Healer: Revelations.— 22) Mahayana; the Book of the Faith. Page-362 either turn his mind away from that idea or concentrate it upon a or concentrate it upon a healthy thought, or else examine the fatal nature of the idea, or analyse it and decompose it into its different elements, or, making appeal to all his strength and applying the greatest energy, suppress it from his mind; thus are removed and disappear these bad and unhealthy ideas and the mind becomes firm, calm, unified, full of vigour. 23 By dominating the senses one increases the intelligence. * * * 24 The mind is a clear and polished mirror and our continual duty is to keep it pure and never allow dust to 25 accumulate upon it.—When a mirror is covered with dust it cannot reflect images; it can only do so when it is clear of stain. So is it with beings. If their minds are not pure of soil, the Absolute cannot reveal itself in them. But if they free themselves from soil, then of itself it will be revealed. 26 Action like inaction may find its place in thee; if thy body is in movement, let thy mind be calm, let 27 thy soul be as limpid as a mountain lake.—When water is still, it reflects objects like 28 heaven and all existences.—Even as the troubled surface of rolling waters cannot properly reflect the full moon, but only gives broken images of it, so 29 The .Eternal is seen when the mind is at rest. When the sea of the mind is troubled by the winds of desire, it cannot1 reflect the Eternal and all divine vision is impossible.
23) Mahabharata.— 24) Hindu Saying.— 26) A, waghosha a— 26) Book of Golden Precepts.— a7) Chwang-tse — 28) Ramakrishna.— 29) Page-363 CHAPTER XIV THE SEVEN-HEADED THOUGHT, SWAR AND THE DAÇAGWAS
The language of the
hymns establishes, then, a double aspect for the Angiras Rishis. One belongs to
the external garb of the Veda ; it weaves together its naturalistic imagery of
the Sun, the Flame, the Dawn, the Cow, the Horse, the Wine, the sacrificial Hymn
; the other extricates from that imagery the internal sense. The Angirasas are
sons of the Flame, lustres of the Dawn, givers and drinkers of the Wine, singers
of the Hymn, eternal youths and heroes who wrest for us the Sun, the Cows, the
Horses and all treasures from the grasp of the sons of darkness. But they are
also seers of the Truth, finders and speakers of the word of the Truth and by
the power of the Truth they win for us the wide world of Light and Immortality
which is described in the Veda as the Vast, the True, the Right and as the own
home of" this Flame of which they are the children. This physical imagery and
these psychological indications are closely interwoven and they cannot be
separated from each other. Therefore we are obliged by ordinary common sense to
conclude that the Flame of which the Right and the Truth is the own home is
itself a Flame of that Right and Truth, that the Light which is won by the Truth
and by the force of true thought is not merely a physical light, the cows which
Sarama finds on the path of the Truth not merely physical herds, the Horses not
merely the wealth of the Dravidians conquered by invading Aryan tribes, nor even
merely images of the physical
Page-364 Dawn, its light and its swiftly moving rays and the darkness of which the Panis and Vritra are the defenders not merely the darkness of the Indian or the Arctic night. We have even been able to hazard a reasonable hypothesis by which we can disentangle the real sense of this imagery and discover the true godhead of these shining gods and these divine, luminous sages. The Angiras Rishis are at once divine and human seers. This double character is not in itself an extraordinary feature or peculiar in the Veda to these sages. The Vedic gods also have a double action ; divine and pre-existent in themselves, they are. human in their working upon the mortal plane when they grow in man to the great ascension. This has been strikingly expressed in the allocution to Usha, the Dawn, " goddess human in mortals ", devi martyeshu mânushi. But in the imagery of the. Angiras Rishis this double character is farther complicated by the tradition which makes them the human fathers, discoverers of the Light, the Path and the Goal. We must see how this complication affects our theory of the Vedic creed and the Vedic symbolism. The Angiras Rishis are ordinarily described as seven in number : they are sapta viprâh, the seven sages who have come down to use the Puranic tradition* and are enthroned by Indian astronomy in the constellation of the Great Bear. But they are also described as Navagwas and Daçagwas, and if in VI. 22 we are told of the ancient fathers, the seven seers who were Navagwas, pûrve pitaro navagvâh sapta viprâso, yet in III. 39. 5 we have mention of two different classes, Navagwas, and Daçagwas, the latter ten in number, the former presumably, though it is not expressly stated, nine. Sakhâ ha yatra sakhibhir navagvair, abhijnvâ satvabhir gâ anugman; satyam tad indro daçabhir daçagvair, sûryam viveda tamasi kshîyantam ; " where, a friend with his friends the Navagwas, following the cows Indra with the ten Daçagwas found that truth, even the Sun dwelling
" Not that the names given them by the
Purina need be
those which the Vedic tradition would have given.
Page-365 in the darkness ." On the other hand we have in IV.51 a collective description of the Angiras seven-faced or seven mouthed, nine-rayed, ten-rayed, navagve angire daçagve saptâsye. In X. 108.2 Tradition asserts the separate existence of two classes of Angiras Rishis, the one Navagwas who sacrificed for nine months, the other Daçagwas whose sessions of sacrifice endured for ten. According to this interpretation we must take Navagwas and Daçagwas as " nine-cowed” and " ten-cowed", each cow representing collectively the thirty Dawns which constitute one month of the sacrificial year. But there is at least one passage of the Rig-Veda which on its surface is in direct conflict with the traditional interpretation. For in the seventh verse of V. 45 and again in the eleventh we are told that it was the Navagwas, not the Daçagwas, who sacrificed or chanted the hymn for ten months. This seventh verse runs, Anûnod atra hastayuto adrir, archan yena daçamâso navagvâh ; r’itam yati saramâ gâ avindad, viçvani satyâ angirâç cakâra, " Here cried ( or, moved ) the stone impelled by the hand, whereby the Navagwas chanted for ten months the hymn ; Sarama travelling to the Truth found the cows; all things the Angiras made true." And in verse 11 we have the assertion repeated; Dhiyam vo apsu dadhishe svarshâm, yayâtaran daço mâsa navagvah; ayâ dhiyâ syâma devagopâ, ayâ dhiyâ tuturyâma ati anhah. "I hold for you in the waters (i.e. the seven- Rivers ) the thought that wins possession of heaven * (this is once more the seven headed thought born from the Truth and found by Ayasya ), by which the Navagwas
* Sayana takes it to mean, " I recite the hymn for water " i.e. in order to get rain ; the case however is the locative plural, and dadhishe means 14 I place or hold " Or, with the psychological sense, " think" or "hold in thought, meditate." Dhishanâ like dhî means thought; dhiyam dadhishe would thus mean " I think or meditate the thought." Page-366 passed through the ten months ; by this thought may we have the gods for protectors, by this thought may we pass through beyond the evil ". The statement is explicit. Sayana indeed makes a faint-hearted attempt to take daça mâso in v. 7, ten months, as if it were an epithet daça-mâso, the ten-month ones *. e. the Daçagwas; but he offers this improbable rendering only as an alternatives and abandons it in the eleventh rik.
Must we then suppose that the poet of this
hymn had forgotten the tradition and was confusing the Daçagwas and Navagwas ?
Such a supposition is inadmissible. The difficulty arises because we suppose the
Navagwas and Daçagwas to have been in the minds of the Vedic Rishis two
different classes of Angiras Rishis; rather these seem to have been two
different powers of Angiras hood and in that case the Navagwas themselves might
well become Daçagwas by extending the period of the sacrifice to ten months
instead of nine. The expression in the hymn, daça mâso ataran, indicates
that there was some difficulty in getting throwing the full period of ten
months. It is during this period apparently that the sons of darkness had the
power to assail the sacrifice ; for it is indicated that it is only by the
confirming of the thought which conquers Swar, the solar world, that the Rishis
are able to get through the ten months, but this thought once found they become
assured of the protection of the gods and pass beyond the assault of the evil,
the harms of the Panis and Vritra. This Swar-conquering thought is certainly
the same as that seven-headed thought which was born from the Truth and
discovered by Ayasya the companion of the Navagwas; for by it, we are told,
Ayasya becoming universal, embracing the births in all the worlds, brought into
being a fourth world or fourfold world, which must be the supramental beyond the
three lower sessions, Dyaus, Antariksha and Prohibit, that which, according to
Kanwa son of Ghora, men reach by crossing beyond the two Rodasi after killing
Vritra. This fourth world must be therefore Swar. The seven-headed thought of
Ayasya enables him to become viçvajanya, which means probably that he
occupies or possesses
Page-367 all the worlds or births of the soul, and to manifest or give being to a certain fourth world (Swar), turîyam svij janayad viçvajanya ; and the thought established in the seven rivers which enables the Navagwa Rishis to pass though the ten months, is also svarshâ, that which brings about the possession of Swar. The two are evidently the same. Must we not then conclude that it is the addition of Ayasya to the Navagwas which raises the nine Navagwas to the number of ten and enables them by his discovery of the seven-headed Swar-conquering thought to prolong their nine-months’ sacrifice through the tenth month? Thus they become the ten Daçagwas. We may note in this connection that the intoxication of the Soma by which Indra manifests or increases the Might of Swar (Svarnara) is described as ten-rayed and illuminating (daçagvam vepayantam.) This conclusion is entirely confirmed by the passage in III.39.5 which we have already cited. For there we find that it is with the help of the Navagwas that Indra pursues the trace of the lost kine, but it is only with the aid of the ten Daçagwas that he is able to bring the pursuit to a successful issue and find that Truth, satyam tat, the Sun that was lying in the darkness. In other words, it is when the nine-months’ sacrifice is prolonged through the tenth, it is when the Navagwas become the ten Daçagwas by the seven-headed thought of Ayasya, the tenth Rishi, that the Sun is found and the luminous world of Swar is disclosed and conquered. This conquest of Swar is the aim of the sacrifice and the great work accomplished by the Angiras Rishis. But what is meant by the figure of the months ? for it now becomes clear that it is a figure, a parable ; the year is symbolic, the months are symbolic. * It is in the revolution of the year that the recovery of the lost Sun and the lost cows is effected, for we have the explicit statement in X.62.2, r’itenâ bhindan parivatsare valam, " by the truth, in the revolution of the year, they broke
* Observe that in the Purina’s the Yugas, moments, months, etc. are all symbolic and it is stated that the body of man is the year. Page-368 Vala," or, as Sayana interprets it, "by sacrifice lasting for a year." This passage certainly goes far to support the Arctic theory, for it speaks of a yearly and not a daily return of the Sun. But we are not concerned with the external figure, nor does its validity in any way affect our own theory; for it may very well be that the striking Arctic experience of the long night, the annual sunrise and the continuous dawns was made by the Mystics the figure of the spiritual night and its difficult illumination. But that this idea of Time, of the months and years is used as a symbol seems to be clear from other passages of the Veda, notably from Gritsamada’s hymn to Brihaspati, 11.24. In this hymn Brihaspati is described driving up the cows, breaking Vala by the divine word brahmanâ, concealing the darkkness and making Swar visible. The first result is the breaking open by force of the well which has the rock for its face and whose streams are of the honey, madhu, the Soma sweetness, açmâsyam avatam madhudhâram. This well of honey covered by the rock must be the Ananda or divine beatitude of the supreme three fold world of bliss, the Satya, Tapas and Jana worlds of the Puranic system based upon the three supreme principles, Sat, Chit-Tapas and Ananda ; their base is Swar of the Veda, Maher of the Upanishads and Puranas, the world of Truth. * These four together make the fourfold fourth world and are described in the Rig Veda as the four supreme and secret seats, the source of the " four upper rivers." Sometimes, however, this upper world seems to be divided into two, Swar the base, Mayas or the divine beatitude the summit, so that there are five worlds or births of the ascending soul. The three other rivers are the three lower powers of being, supply the principles of the three lower worlds.
* In the Upanishads and Puranas there is no distinction between Swar and Dyaus; therefore a fount name had o be fecund for the world of Truth, and this is the Maher dl8ccvercd according to the Taittiriya Upanishad by the Rishi Mahachamasya as the fourth vyahriti, the other three being Swar, Bhuvar and 1 Lure, i e. Dyaus, Astatines and Prithivi of the Veda. Page-369 This secret well of honey is drunk by all those who are able to see Swar and they pour out its billowing fountain of sweetness in manifold streams together, tarn eva viçve papire svardriço bahu sâkam sisichur utsam udrin’am. These many streams poured out together are the seven rivers poured down the bill by Indra after slaying Vritra, the rivers or streams of the Truth, r’itasya dhârâh ; and they represent, according to our theory, the seven principles of conscious being in their divine fulfilment in the Truth and Bliss. This is why the seven-headed thought,— that is to say, the knowledge of the divine existence with its seven heads or powers, the seven-rayed knowledge of Brihaspati, saptagum, has to be confirmed .or held in thought in the waters, the seven rivers, that is to say the seven forms of divine consciousness arc to be held in the seven forms or movements of divine being ; dhiyam vo apsu dadhishe svarsham, I hold the Swar conquering thought in the waters. That the making visible of the eyes of the Swar-jeers, svardriçah, and their drinking of the honeyed well and the outpouring of the divine waters amounts to the revelation of new worlds or new states of existence is clearly told us in the next verse, II. 24. 5 , sanâ tâ kâ chid bhuvanâ bhavîtvâ, mâdbhih saradbhih duro varanta vah; ayatantâ charato anyad anyad id, yâ chakâra vayunâ brahmanaspatih "certain eternal world Ids (states of existence) are these which have to come into being, their doors are shut * to you (or, opened) by the months and the years ; without effort one (world) moves in the other, and it is these that Brahmanaspati i has made manifest to knowledge." These are the four (or two) eternal worlds hidden in the guha, the secret, unmanifest or superconscient parts of being which although in themselves eternally present states of existence (sanâ bhuvanâ) are for us non-existent and in
* Sayana says varanta is here * opened," which is quite possible, but vr’i means ordinarily it shut, close up, cover, especially when applied to the doors of the hill whence flow the rivers and the cows come forth; Vritra is the closer of the doors. Vi vr’i and apa vr’i mean to open. Nevertheless, if the word means hero to open, that only makes for case all the stronger. Page-370 the future ; they have to be brought into being, created. Therefore the Veda sometimes speaks of Swar being made visible, as here (vyachakshayat svah,) or discovered and taken possession of, avidat, asanat, sometimes of its being created or made (bhû, kr’i.) These secret eternal worlds have been closed to us, says the Rishi, by the movement of Time, by the months and years ; therefore naturally they have to be discovered, revealed, conquered, created in us by the movement of Time, yet in a sense against it. This development in an inner or paychological Time is, it seems to me, that which is symbolised by the sacrificial year and by the ten months that have to be spent before the revealing hymn of the soul (brahma) is able to discover the seven-headed, heaven-conquering thought which finally carries us beyond the harms of Vritra and the Panis. We get the connection of the rives and the worlds very clearly in 1.62. where India is described as breaking the hill by the aid of the Navagwas and breaking’ Vala by the aid of the Daçagwas. Hymned by the Angiras Rishis India opens up the darkness by the Dawn and the Sun and the Cows, he spreads out the high plateau of the earthly hill into wideness and upholds the higher world of heaven. For the result of the opening up of the higher planes of consciousness is to increase the wideness of the physical, to raise the height of the mental. " This, indeed " says the Rishi Nodal, is his mightiest work, the fairest achievement of the achiever " dasmasya chârutamam asti dansah, "that the four upper rivers streaming honey nourish the two worlds of the crookedness," upahvare yad uparâ apinvan madhvam’aso nadyaç chatasrah. This is again the honey-streaming well pouring down its many streams together ; the four higher rivers of the divine being, divine conscious force, divine delight, divine truth nourishing the two worlds of the mind and body into which they descend with their floods of sweetness. These two, the Rodasi, are normally worlds of crookedness, that is to say of the falsehood,—the r’itam or Truth being the straight, the anr’itam or Falsehood the crooked,—because they are exposed to the harms of the undivine powers, Vritra Page-371 and Panis, sons of darkness and division. The Rishi then proceeds to define the result of the work of Ayasya, which is to reveal the true eternal and unified form of earth and heaven. " In their twofold (divine and human ?) Ayasya uncovered by his hymns the two, eternal and in one net ; perfectly achieving he upheld earth and heaven in the highest ether (of the revealed superconscient, para-mam gudham) as the Enjoyer his two wives." The soul’s enjoyment of its divinised mental and bodily existence in the eternal joy of the spirited being could not be more clearly and beautifully imaged. These ideas and many of the expressions are the same as those of the hymn of Gritsamada. Nodha says of the Night and Dawn, the dark physical and the illumined mental consciousness that they new-born (punarbhavâ) about heaven and earth move into each other with their own proper movements, svebhir evair …charanto anyânyâ, in the eternal friendship that is worked out by the high achievement of their son who thus upholds them, sanemi sakhyam svapasyamânah, sûnur dadhâra çavasâ sadansâh. In Gritsamada hymn as in Nodha’s the Angirasas attain to Swar,—the Truth from which they originally came, the own home " of all divine Purushas,—by the attainment of the truth and by the detection of the falsehood. "They who travel towards the goal and attain that treasure of the Panis, the supreme treasure hidden in the secret cave, they, having the knowledge and perceiving the falsehoods, rise up again thither whence they came and enter into that world. Possessed of the truth, beholding the falsehoods they? seers, rise up again into the great path," mahas pathah, the path-of the Truth, or the great and wide realm, Mahas of the Upanishads.
We begin now to unravel the knot of the Vedic imagery. Brihaspati is the seven-rayed Thinker, saptaguh, saptaraçmih, he is the seven-faced or seven-mouthed Angiras, born in many forms, saptâsyas tuvijâtah, nine-rayed, ten-rayed. The
suavity mouths are the seven Angirasas who repeat the divine word (brahma) which comes from the seat of the Truth, Swar, and of which he is the lord (brahman ‘aspatih.) Page-372 Each also corresponds to one of the seven rays of Brihaspati; therefore they are the seven seers, sapta viprdh, sapta r’ishayah, who severally personify these seven rays of the knowledge. These rays are, again, the seven brilliant horses of the sun, sapta haritah, and their full union constitutes the seven-headed Thought of Ayasya by which the lost sun of Truth is recovered. That thought again is established in the seven rivers, the seven principles of being divine and human, the totality of which founds the perfect spiritual existence. The winning of these seven rivers of our being withheld by Vritra and these seven rays withheld by Vala, the possession of our complete divine consciousness delivered from all falsehood by the free descent of the truth, gives us the secure possession of the world of Swar and the enjoyment of mental and physical being lifted into the godhead above darkness, falsehood and death by the in-streaming of our divine elements. This victory is won in twelve periods of the upward journey, represented by the revolution of the twelve months of the sacrificial year, the periods corresponding to the successive dawns of a wider and wider truth, until the tenth secures the victory. What may be the precise significance of the nine ia3′s and the ten, is a more difficult question which we are not yet in a position to solve ; but the light we already have is sufficient to illuminate all the main imagery of the Rig Veda.
The symbolism of the Veda depends upon the
image of the life of man as a sacrifice, a journey and a battle. The ancient
Mystics took for their theme the spiritual life of man, but, in order both to
make it concrete to themselves and to veil its secrets from the unfit, they
expressed it in poetical images drawn fro 11 the outward life of their age. That life was largely an existence of herdsmen and tillers of the soil for the mass of the people varied by the wars and migrations of the clans under their kings, and in all this activity the worship of the gods by sacrifice had become the most
salon and magnificent element, the knot of all the rest. For by the sacrifice were won the rain which fertilised the soil, the herds of cattle and horses Page-373 necessary for their existence in peace and war, the wealth of gold, land (kshetra), retainers, fighting-men which constituted greatness and lordship, the victory in the battle, safety in the journey by land and water which was so difficult and dangerous in those times of poor means of communication and loosely organised inter-tribal existence. All the principal features of that outward life which they saw around them the mystic poets took and turned into significant images of the inner life. The life of man is represented as a sacrifice to the gods, a journey sometimes figured as a crossing of dangerous waters, sometimes as an ascent from level to level of the hill of being, and, thirdly, as a battle against hostile nations. Bu! these three images are not kept separate. The sacrifice is all a journey ; indeed the sacrifice itself is described as travelling, as journeying to a divine goal ; and the journey and the sacrifice are both continually spoken of as a battle against the dark powers.
The legend of the Angirasas
takes up and combines all these three essential features of the Vedic imagery.
The Angirases are pilgrims of the light. The phrase nakshantah or
abhinakshantah is constantly used to describe their characteristic action.
They are those who travel towards the goal and attain to the highest,
abhinakshanto abhi ye tam ânaçur nidhim paramam (11.24. 6). Their action is
invoked for carrying forward the life of man farther towards its goal,
sahasrasâve pra tiranta âyuh (III. 53. 7). But this journey, if principally
of the nature of a quest, the quest of the hidden light, becomes also by the
opposition of the powers of darkness an expedition and a battle. The Angirasas
are heroes and fighters of that battle, goshu yodhah. Indra marches with
them saran’ yubhih, as travellers on the path, sakhibhih,
comrades, r’itvabhih and kavibhih, seers and singers of the sacred
she. not, but also satvabhih, fighters in the battle. They are frequently
spoken of by the appellation nr’i or vîra. as when Indra is said
to win the luminous herds asmakebhih nr’ibhih, *’ by our men ".
Strengthened by them he conquers in the journey and reaches the goal, nakshad
dâbham taturim. This journey or march pro-
Page-374 cedes along the posh discovered by Same, the hound of heaven, the path of the Truth, r’itasya pantha, the great path, mafias pathah, which leads to the realms of the Truth. It is also the sacrificial journey; for its stages correspond to the periods of the sacrifice of the Navagwas and it is effected by the force of the Soma-wine and the sacred Word. The drinking of the Soma-wine as the means of strength, victory and attainment is one of the pervading figures of the Veda. India and the Açwins are the great Soma-drinkers, but all the gods have their share of the immortalising draught. The Angirases also conquer in the strength of the Soma. Sarama threatens the Panis with the coming of Ayasya and the Navagwa Angirases in the keen intensity of their Soma rapture, eha gamann r’ishayah somaçitâ ayâsyo angiraso navagvâh. It is the great force by which men have the power to follow the path of the Truth. "That rapture of the Soma we desire by which thou, O India, didst make to thrive the Might of Swar (or the Swar-soul, svarnaram), that rapture ten-rayed and making alight of knowledge (daçagvam vepayantam) by which thou didst foster the ocean; that Soma-intoxication by which thou didst drive forward the great waters ( the seven rivers ) like chariots to the r sea,— that we desire that we may travel on the path of the truth", panthâm r’itasya yâtave tarn îmahe. It is in the power of the Soma that the hill is broken open, the sons of darkness overthrown. This Soma-wine is the sweetness that comes flowing from the streams of the upper hidden world, it is that which flows in the seven waters, it is that with which the ghr’ita, the clarified butter of the. mystic sacrifice, is instinct; it is the honeyed wave which rises out of the ocean of life. Such images can have only one meaning; it is the divine delight hidden in all existence which, once manifest, supports all life’s crowning activities and is the force that finally immortalizes the mortal, the amr’itam, ambrosia of the gods.
But it is especially the Word that the Angirases
possess; their seer hood is their most distinguishing characteristic. They are
brâhmanâso pitarah somyâsah…r’itâvr’idhah
Page-375
(VI. 75. 10;, the fathers who are full of the Soma and have the word and are
therefore increasers of the Truth. Indra in order to impel them on the path
joins himself to the chanted expressions of their thought and gives fullness and
force to the words of their soul, angirasâm uchathâ jujush-vân brahma
tûtod gâtum is Hunan (II. 20. 5 ). It is when enriched in light and force of
thought by the Angirases that Indra completes his victorious journey and reaches
the goal on the mountain; " In him our primal fathers, the seven seers, the
Navagwas, increase their plenty, him victorious on his march and breaking
through (to the goal), standing on the mountain, inviolate in speech, most
luminous-forceful by his thinking," nakshad dâbham taturim par-vâtesthâm,
adroghavâcham matibhih çavistham. It is by singing the Rik, the hymn of
illumination, that they find the solar illuminations in the cave of our being,
archanto gd avindan. It is by the stubh, the all-supporting rhythm of
the hymn of the seven seers, by the vibrating voice of the Navagwas that Indra
becomes full of the power of Swar, svaren’a svarydh and by the cry of the
Dacagwas that he rends Vala in pieces ( I. 62. 4). For this cry is the voice of
the higher heaven, the thunder that cries in the lightning-flash of Indra, and
the advance of the Angirases on their path is the forward movement of this cry
of the heavens, pro, brahmâno angiraso nakshantah, pra krandanur nabhanyas-ya
vetu (VII. 42. 1. ); the voice of Brihaspati the Angirasa discovering the
sun and the Dawn and the Cow and the light of the Word is the thunder of Heaven,
br’ihaspatir ushasam suryam gdm, arkam viveda svanayann iva dyauh. It is by
the satyamantrâ, the true thought expressed in the rhythm of the truth,
that the hidden light is found and the Dawn brought to birth, gudham jyotih
pitaro avindan, satyamantrâ ajanayann ushâsam. For these are the Angirases
who speak a.rgh.t,itthâ-vadadbhih angirobhih (VI.18.5.), masters of the
Ray who place perfectly their thought, svâ-dhîbhir r’ikvabhih (VI. 32.
2.); they are the sons of heaven, heroes of the Mighty Lord who speak the truth
and think the straightness and therefore they are able to hold the seat of
illumined knowledge, to mentalise the supreme a-
Page-376 bode of the sacrifice, r’itam çansanta r’iju dîdhâna divas putrâso âsurasya virâh; vipram padam angiraso dadhânâ, yajnasya dhâma prathamam mananta ( X. 67. 1 ) It is impossible that such expressions should convey nothing more than the recovery of stolen cows from Dravidian cave-dwellers by some Aryan seers led by a god and his dog or else the return of the Dawn after the darkness of the night. The wonders of the Arctic dawn themselves are insufficient to explain the association of images and the persistent stress on the idea of the Word, the Thought, the Truth, the journey and the conquest of the falsehood which meets us always in these hymns. Only the theory we are enouncing, a theory not brought in from outside but arising straight from the language and the suggestions of the hymns themselves, can unite this varied imagery and bring an easy lucidity and coherence into this apparent tangle of incongruities. In fact, once the central idea is grasped and the mentality of the Vedic Rishis and the principle of their symbolism are understood, no incongruity and no disorder remain. There is a fixed system of symbols which, except in some of the later hymns, does not admit of any important variations and in the light of which the inner sense of the Veda everywhere yields itself up readily enough. There is indeed a certain restricted freedom in the combination of the symbols, as in those of any fixed poetical imagery,—for instance, the sacred poems of the Vaishnavas but the substance of thought behind is constant, coherent and does not vary. Page-377 V The problem of the unification of mankind resolves itself into two distinct difficulties ; first, whether the collective egoisms already created in the nature evolution of humanity can at this time be so modified or abolished that even an external unity in some effective form can now in the present stage of our moral and social progress be securely established ; secondly, whether, even if any such external unity can be established, it will not be at the price of crushing both the free life of the individual and the free play of the various collective units already crated in which there is a real and active life and substituting a State organisation which will mach anise human existence. And apart from these two uncertainties, there is a third question whether a really living unity can be achieved by the mere economical, political, administrative unification, whether it ought not to be preceded by at least the strong beginnings of a moral and spiritual oneness. It is the first question that we shall now consider.
At the present stage of human progress the
nation is the leally living collective unit of humanity. Empires exist, but they
areas yet only political and not real units; they have no life from within and
owe their continuance to a force imposed on’ their constituent elements or else
to a political convenience felt or acquiesced in by the constituents and
favoured by the world outside. Austria is the standing example of such an empire
; it was anal to some extent still is a political convenience favoured by the
world outside, acquiesced in until recently by its constituent elements and
maintained by the force of the central Germanic element in canted in the
Hapsburg dynasty with the active aid of its Magyar partner. If
Page-378 to acquiesce and arc drawn more powerfully by a centrifugal for cue, as- is now actually the case, if at the same time the world outside ceases to favour the combination, then force alone remains as the one agent of an artificial unity. There is indeed a new political convenience which the existence of Austria serves, but that is the convenience of the Germanic idea which makes it an inconvenience to the rest of Europe and deprives it of the acquiescence of important constituent elements which are drawn towards other combinations outside the Austrian formula. From that moment the existence of the Austrian empire is in jeopardy and depends, not on any inner necessity, but first on the power of the imperial form of unity is singularly conspicuous and its conditions, as it were, exaggerated, still those conditions are the same for all Empires which arc not at the same the national units. It was not so long ago that most political thinkers perceived at least the strong possibility of an automatic dissolution of the British Empire by the self-detachment of the colonies, in spite of the close links of race, language and origin that should have bound them to the mother country. This was because the political convenience of imperial unity, though enjoyed by the colonies, was not sufficiently appreciated by them and, on the other hand, there was no living principle of national unity, the Australian and Canadian regarding themselves as belonging to new separate nations rather than as limbs of an extended British nationality. Things are now changed in both respects and the British Empire proportionately stronger.
Nevertheless, why should this distinction
be made of the political and the real unit ? It must be made because it is of
the greatest utility to a true and profound political science and involves the
most important consequences. Supposing an empire like Austria, a non-national
empire, to be broken up as it threatens to break, it will perish for good ;
there will be no innate tendency to recover the outward unity, because there is
no real unity, only a politically manufactured aggregation. On the other hand a
real national unity broken up by circumstances will always preserve a tendency
to recover and reassert its oneness. The Greek Empire has gone the way of all
empires, but the Greek nation after many centuries of political non- Page-379 existence again possesses its separate body, because it has preserved its separate ego and therefore really existed under the covering cuie of the Turk. So has it been with all the races under the Turkish yoke, because that powerful suzerainty, stern as it was in many respects, never attempted to obliterate their national characteristics or substitute an Ottoman nationality. And these nations have revived and are naturally attempting to reconstitute themselves in the measure in which they have preserved their real national sense ; the Serbian national idea attempts to recover all territory in which the Serb exists or predominates ; Grace’ cue attempts to reconstitute herself in her mainland, islands and Asiatic colonies, but cannot now reconstitute the old Greece
So strong is this truth of a real unity,
that even nations which have never legalised an outward unification, to which
Fate and circumstance and their own selves have been adverse, which have been
full of centrifugal forces and easily over powered by foreign intrusions, have
yet always developed centripetal force as well and arrive inevitably at
organised oneness. Ancient Greece clung to her separatist tendencies, turn
self-sufficient city or regional states, her little mutually repellent
autonomies, but the centripetal force was always there manifested in leagues,
associations of States, suzerainties Ike the Spartan and Athenian, and finally
realised itself, first, imperfectly and temporarily by the Macedonian virile,
then, by a strange enough development, through the evolution of the Eastern
Roman world into a Greek and Byzantine Empire. So also, we have seen in our own
day Germany, constantly disunited since ancient times, develop at last to
portentous issues its innate sense of oneness formidably embodied in the Empire of the Hohenzollerns. Nor sound it at all be surprising to those who study the
workings of forces and not merely the trend of outward circumstances, if one
result of the present war, near or more remote, were to be the fusion of the one
Germanic element still left outside, the Austro-German, into the Germanic
whole,—although possibly in some other embodiment than a Hohenzollern empire or
a Prussian hegemony. in both these historic instances, as in so many others, the
unification of Saxon England, mediaeval France, the formation of the United
States of America, it was a real unity, a psychologically
Page-380 distinct unit which, first, tended ignorantly by the subconscious necessity of its Deign and afterwards with a sudden or gradual awakening to the sense of political oneness, towards an inevitable external unification. It is a distinct group-soul which is driven by onward necessity and uses out wade circumstances to constitute for itself an organised body.
But the most striking example in history is the
evolution of India. Nowhere else have, the centrifugal forces been so strong,
numerous, complex, obstinate ; the mere time taken by the evolution has been
prodigious ; the disastrous vicissitudes through which it has had to work itself
out have been appalling ; and y t through all the inevitable tendency has worked
constantly’, pertinacious, with the dull, obscure, indomitable, relentless
obstinacy of Nature when she is opposed in her instinctive purposes by man, and
finally, after a struggle enduring through millenniums, has triumphed. And, as
usually happens when she is thus opposed by her own mental and human material,
it is the most adverse circumstances which the subconscious worker has turned
into her most successful instruments. The beginnings of the centripetal tendency
in India go back to the earliest times of which we have recode and are typified
in the ideal of the Sam rat or Chakravarti Raja and the military and political
use of the Açwamedha sacrifice. The two great national epics might almost have
been written to illustrate it, for the one recounts the establishment of the
unifying dharmarajya or imperial reign of justice, the other starts with
an idealised description of such a rule pictured as existing in the ancient and
sacred past of the country. And the political history of India is that of a
succession of empires indigenous and foreign, each of them destroyed by
centrifugal forces, but each of them bringing the centripetal tendency nearer to
its triumphant emergence. And it is a significant circumstance that the more
foreign the rule, the greater has been its force for the unification of the
subject people. This is always a sure sign that the essential nation-unit is are
day there and that there is an indissoluble national vitality necessitating the
inevitable emergence of the organised nation. In this instance we see that the
conversion of the psychological unity on which nationhood is based into the
external organised unity by which it perfectly realises itself, has taken a
period of more than two thousand years and
Page-381 even the most persistent incapacity for union in the people, not even the most disintegrating shocks from outside have prevailed against the obstinate subconscious necessity. And this is only the extreme illustration of a general law.
It will be useful to dwell a little upon
this aid lent by foreign rule to the process of nation-making and see how it
works. History abounds with illustrations. But in some cases the phenomenon of
foreign domination is momentary and imperfect, in others long-enduring and
complete, in others often repeated in various forms; in some instances the
foreign element is rejected, its use once-over, in others it is absorbed, in
others accepted with more or less assimilation for a longer or briefer period as
a ruling caste. The principle is the same, but worked variously, as always, by
Nature according to the needs of the particular case. There is no modern nation
in Europe except the Swedish which has not had to pass through a phase more or
less prolonged, more or less complete, of foreign domination in order to realise
its nationality. In Russia and England it was the domination of a foreign
conjuring race which rapidly became a ruling caste and was in the end
assimilated and absorbed, in Spain the succession of the Roman, Goth and Moor,
in Italy the over lordship of the Austrian, in the But in all cases the long
suzerainty of the Turk, in Germany the transient yoke of Napoleon. But in all
cases the essential has been a shock or a pressure which would either waken a
loose psychological unity to the necessity of organising itself from within or
would crush out, dispirit or deprive of power, vitality and reality the more
obstinate factors of disunion. In some cases even an entire change of name,
culture and civilisation has been necessary, as well as a more or less profound
modification of the race. Notably has this been so in the formation of French
nationality. The ancient Gallic nation, in spite of or perhaps because of their
Druidic civilisation and early greatness, were more incapable of organising a
firm political unity than even the ancient Greeks or the old Indian kingdoms and
republics. It needed the Roman rule and Latin culture, the superimposition of a
Teutonic ruling caste and finally the shock of the temporary and partial English
conquest to found the unequalled unity of modern France. Yet though, name,
civilisation and all else seem to have changed, the French nation of today is
still and has always remained the old Gallic nation, with its Basque, Gaelic and
American elements modified by the French and Latin admixture,
Page-382 Thus the nation is a persistent psychological unit which Nature has been developing throughout the world in the most various forms and educating into physical and political unity. The political unity is not the essential; it may not yet be realised, but the nation persists and moves inevitably towards its realisation; it may be destroyed, but the nation persists and travails and suffers but refuses to be annihilated. In former times the nation was not always a real and vital unit, the tribe, the clan, the commune, the leg ional people were the living groups Therefore those unities which in the attempt at national evolution deployed these living groups without arriving at a vital nationhood, disappeared once the artificial or political unit was
And then the question arises whether the empire
is not precisely that destined unit in course of evolution. The mere fact that
at present not the empire, but the nation is the vital unity can be no bar to a
future reversal of the relations. Obviously, in order that they may be reversed
the empire must cease to be a mere political and become rather a psychological
entity. But there have been instances in the evolution of the nation in which
the political unity preceded and became a basis for the psychological as in the
union of Scotch, English and Welsh to form the British nation. There is
therefore no insurmountable reason
Page-383
why a similar evolution should not take place and the imperial unity be
substituted for the national. Nature has long been in travail of the imperial
grouping, long casting about to give it a greater force of permanence, and the
emergence of the conscious imperial ideal all over the earth and its attempts,
though still rude, violent and blundering, to substitute itself for the
national, may not irrationally be taken as the precursory sign of one 01
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