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       Puranic energy is the life of creatures; for that is said to be the universal principle of life.

                                                                                                                            Taittiriya Upanishad

ARGUMENT

       [Mind as a final action of Supermind is a creative and not only a perceptive power; in fact, material force itself being only a Will in things working darkly as the expression of subconscious Mind, Mind is the immediate creator of the material universe. But the real creator is Supermind; for wherever there is Mind conscious or subconscious, there must be Supermind regulating from behind the veil its activities and educing from them their truth of inevitable result. Not a mental Intelligence, but Supermind is the creator of the universe.—Mind manifests itself in the form of Force to which we give the name of Life, and Life in Matter is an energy or power in dynamic movement which builds up forms, energies, maintains, disintegrates and recreates; death itself is only a process of life. It is one all-pervading Life or constant movement of dynamic energy which creates all these forms of the material universe and is not destroyed in the destruction of its forms. — The distinction between animal and plant life is unreal and that between the animate and the inanimate unessential. Plant-life has been found to be identical in organisation with animal life and, although the organisation may differ, life is also present in the metal, the earth, the atom. This life-force pervades the universe and is present in every form of it and there is a constant interchange of it’s

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energies which creates the symptoms and characteristics of vitality recognised by us; but even where these are suspended, Life is present and only withdraws by a process of dispersion which replaces the process of continual reconstitution of the form. The presence of these symptoms and characteristics is not the essential nor is their absence a sign of the absence of Life-force. Even where we do not detect Life, it exists.—Conscious nervous sensation accompanies life in the animal, but much of the action of nervous or life energy is subconscious; in the plant, as in many actions of man, the nervous sensation is present but the mentality of the sensation is subconscious. In the very atom there is a subconscious will and desire which must also be present in all atomic aggregates because they are present in the Force which constitutes the atom. That force is Chit-Shakti, force of conscious being, variously represented in various forms of life. —Life is an energising of conscious being in substance of Matter, which on one side is constantly supplying the malarial of physical formation and on the other labouring to release mind and sense from their subconscious sleep in Matter. It is therefore the dynamic link between Mind and Matter. To create form and evolve consciousness out of its imprisonment in form is the sense of the omnipresent Life in the universe. ] *

        We perceive, then, what Mind is in its divine origin and how it is related to the Truth-consciousness,—Mind, the first of the three lower principles which constitute our human existence. It is a special action of the divine consciousness, or rather it is the final strand of its whole creative action. It enables the Purusha to hold apart the relations of different forms and forces of himself to each other; it creates phenomenal differences which to the individual soul fallen from the Truth-consciousness take the appearance of real differences and is by that original perversion the parent of all the resultant perversions which appear

* In response to ..he desire of some of our subscribers we shall prefix henceforth a brief summary or argument to each chapter of the " Life Divine."

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as the dualities and oppositions proper to the life of the Soul in the Ignorance. But so long as it is not separated from the Supermind it supports not perversions and falsehoods, but the various working of the universal Truth.

     Mind thus appears as a creative agency. This is not the impression which we normally have of our mentality; rather we regard it primarily as a perceptive organ, perceptive of things already created by Force working in Matter and the only origination we allow to it is a secondary creation of new combined forms from those already developed by Force in Matter. But the knowledge we are recovering in modern times by the methods of Science begins to show us that in this Force and in this Matter there is a subconscious Mind at work which is certainly responsible for its own emergence first in the forms of life and secondly in the forms of mind itself, first in the nervous consciousness of plant-life and the primitive animal, secondly in the ever-developing mentality of the evolved animal and of man. And as we have already discovered that Matter is only substance-form of Force, so we shall discover that material Force is only energy-form of Mind. Material force is, in fact, a subconscious operation of Will; Will that works in us in what seems to be light, though it is in truth no more than a half-light, and’ material Force that works in what to us seems to be a darkness of unintelligence, are yet really and in essence the same, as materialistic thought has always instinctively felt from the wrong or lower end of things and as spiritual knowledge working from the summit had long ago discovered. We may say, therefore, that it is a subconscious Mind or Intelligence which, manifesting Force as its driving-power, its executive Nature, its Prakriti, has created this material world.

      But since, as we have now found, Mind is no independent and original entity but only a final operation of the Truth-consciousness or Supermind, therefore wherever Mind is, there Supermind must be. Supermind or the Truth-consciousness is the real creative agency of the universal Existence. Even when Mind is in its own darkened con-

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sciousness separated from its source, yet is that larger movement always there in the workings of Mind; forcing them to preserve their right relation, evolving from them the inevitable results they bear in themselves, producing the right tree from the right seed it compels even the operations of so brute, inert and darkened a thing as material Force to result in a world of Law, of order, of right relation and not, as it would otherwise be, of hurtling chance and chaos. Obviously, this order and right legation can only be relative and not the supreme order and supreme right which would reign if Mind were not in its own consciousness sep irate from Supermind; they arrange the results right and proper to the action of darkened Mind and its creation of false oppositions and its dual perversions of the one Truth. The Divine consciousness having conceived and thrown into operation the Idea of this dual or perverted representation of Itself deduces from it in real-idea and educes practically from it in substance of life, by the governing action of the whole Truth-consciousness behind it, its own inferior truth or inevitable result of various relation. For this is the nature of Law or Truth in the world that it is the just working and bringing out of that which is contained in being, implied in the essence and nature of the thing itself, latent in its self-being and self-law, Swabhava and Swadharma, as seen by the divine Knowledge. To use one of those wonderful formulas of the Upanishad* which contain a world of knowledge in a few revealing words, it is the Self-existent who as the seer and thinker becoming everywhere has arranged in Himself all things rightly from years eternal according to the truth of that which they are.

     Consequently, the triple world that we live in, the world of Mind-Life-Body, is triple only in its actual accomplished evolution. Life involved in Matter has emerged in the form of thinking and mentally conscious life. But

* Kavir manîshî paribhûh svayambhûr yâthtânthyato ‘rthán vyadhadhâch chhasvatîbhyah samâbhyah. Isha Upanishad.

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with Mind, involved in it and therefore in Life and Matter, is the Supermind that is the origin and ruler of the other three and this also must emerge. We seek for an intelligence at the root of the world, because intelligence is the highest principle of which we aware and that which seems to us to govern and explain all our own action and creation and there fore, if there is a Consciousness at all in the universe, we presume that it must be an Intelligence, mantel Consciousness. But intelligence only perceives, reflects and uses within the measure of its capacity the work of a Truth of being superior to itself and the power behind that works must therefore be another and superior form of Consciousness proper to that Truth. We have therefore to mend our conception and affirm that not a subconscious Mind or Intelligence, but an involved Supermind putting Mind in front of it as the immediately active special form of its knowledge-will subconscious in Force and using material Force or Will subconscious in substance of being as its executive Nature or Prakriti has created this material universe.

        But we see that here Mind manifests in a specializations of Force to which we give the name of Life. What then is Life ? and what relation has it to Supermind, to this supreme trinity of Sachchidananda active in creation by means of the Real Idea or Truth-consciousness ? From what principle in the Trinity does it take its birth ? or by what necessity divine or undivine, of the Truth or the illusion does it come into being? Life is an evil, tings down the centuries the ancient cry, a delusion, a delirium, an insanity from which we have to flee into the rest of eternal being. Is it so ? and why then is it so ? Why has the Eternal wantonly inflicted this evil, brought this delirium or insanity upon Himself or else upon the creatures brought into being by His terrify, all-deluding Maya? Or is it rather some divine principle that thus expresses itself, some blissful truth of eternal being that had to express and has thus thrown itself into Time and Space in this constant outburst of the million and million forms of life

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which people the countless worlds of the universe?

      When we study this Life as it manifests itself upon earth with Matter as its basis, we observe that essentially it is a form of energy, a dynamic movement or current positive and negative, a constant act or play of force which builds up forms, energies them by a continual stream of electric stimulation and maintains them by an unceasing; process of disintegration and renewal of their substance. This at once shows us that the natural opposition we make between death and life is an error of our mentality, one of those false oppositions which, deceived by appearances, it is constantly bringing into the universal unity. Death has no reality except as a process of life. Disintegration of substance and renewal of substance, maintenance of form and change of form are the constant process of life; death is merely a rapid disintegration subservient to life’s necessity of change and variation of formal experience. Even in the death of the body there is no cessation of Life, only the material of one form of life is broken up to serve as material for other forms of life. Similarly we may be sure, in the uniform law of Nature, that if there is in the bodily form a mental or psychic energy, that also is not destroyed but only breaks out from one form to assume others by some process of metempsychosis or new ensouling of body. All renews itself, nothing perishes.

       It would seem also to follow that there is one ail-pervading Life or movement of dynamic energy that creates all these forms of the material universe,—Life imperishable and eternal which even if the whole form of the universe were quite abolished would itself still go on existing and be capable of producing a new universe in its place, must indeed, unless it be held back in a state of rest by some higher Power or hold itself back, inevitably go on creating. In that case Life is nothing else than the Force that builds and maintains and destroys forms in the world; it is Life that manifests itself in the form of the earth as much as in the plant that grows upon the earth and the animals that support their existence by devouring the life-

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force of the plant or of each other. All existence is a universal Life that takes form of Matter.

      It will be said, however, that this is not what we mean by life; we mean a particular result of universal force with which we are familiar and which manifests itself only in the animal and the plant, but not in the metal, the stone, the gas, operates in the animal cell but not in the pure physical atom. We must, therefore, in order to be sure of our ground, examine in what precisely consists this particular result of the play of Force which we call life and how it differs from that other result of the play of Force in inanimate things which, we say, is not life. We see at once that there are hereon earth three realms of the play of Force, the animal " kingdom " of the old classification to which we belong, the vegetable, and lastly the mere material void, as we pretend, of life. How does life in ourselves differ from the life of the plant, and the life of the plant from the not-life, say, of the metal, the mi neural kingdom of the old phraseology, or that new chemical kingdom which Science has discovered ?

        Formerly, when we spoke of life, we meant animal life, that which moved, breathed, ate, felt, desired, and, if we spoke of the life of plants, it was rather as a metaphor than a reality. Especially we associated life with breathing; the breath is-life, it was said in every language, and the formula is true if we change our conception of what we mean by the Breath of Life. But it is now evident that spontaneous motion or locomotion, breathing, eating are only processes of life and not life itself; they are means for the generation or release of that constantly stimulating energy which is our vitality and for that process of disintegration and renewal by which it supports our substantial existence; but these processes of our vitality can be maintained in other ways than by our respiration and our means of sustenance. It has been proved that even human life can remain in the body and can remain in full consciousness when breathing and the beating of the heart and other conditions formerly deemed essential to it have been suspended.

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      And it is now also proved that the plant, to which we deny consciousness and desire, has a life identical with our own and even organised essentially like our own though different in its apparent organisation. We must therefore make a clean sweep of our old facile and false conceptions and get beyond symptoms and externalities to the root of the matter.

     The recent discoveries of a great Indian physicist have pointed attention to the response to stimulus as an infallible sign of the existence of life. It is especially the phenomenon of plant-life that has been triumphantly proved and illustrated in all its functionings; but we must not forget that in the essential point the same proof of vitality, the response to stimulus, the positive state of life and its negative state which we call death have been established in metals as in the plant. Not indeed with the same abundance, not indeed so as to show an essentially identical organisation of life; but it is possible that could instruments of the right nature and sufficient delicacy be invented, more points of similarity between metal life and plant life could be discovered; and even if it prove not to be so, this simply means that the organisation is different, but the fact of vitality remains. But if life exists in the metal, it seems absurd to deny it to the earth or other existences akin to the metal. We have to pursue our enquiries farther, not to stop short where our immediate means of investigation fail us, and we may be sure from our unvarying experience of Nature that investigations thus pursued will in the end prove to us that there is no such break, no such rigid line of demarcation between, say, the earth and the metal formed in it any more than between the metal and the plant and, pursuing the synthesis farther, that there is none either between the elements and atoms that constitute the earth or metal and the metal or earth that they constitute. Life is everywhere, universal, all-pervading, imperishable; only its forms and organising differ.

     We must remember that the physical response to stimulus is only a sign of life, even as arc beaching and lo

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emotion in ourselves. An exceptional stimulus is applied by the experimenter and vivid responses are given which we can at once recognise as indices of vitality in the object of the experiment. But during its whole existence the plant is responding constantly to a constant mass of stimulation from its environment; that is to say, there is a constantly maintained foe in it which is capable of responding to the application of force from its surroundings. It is said that the idea of a vital force in the plant or other living organism has been destroyed by these experiments. But what does this mean ? When we say that a stimulus has been applied to the plant, we mean that an energies force, a force in dynamic movement has been directed on that object, and when we say that a response is given, we mean that an energised force capable of dynamic movement moves oat in answer to the shock. The fact would Seem to be then that as there is a constant dynamic force in movement in the universe which takes various material forms more or less subtle or gross, so in each gross living body, plant or animal or metal, there is the same constant dynamic force, and the interchange of these two gives us the phenomena which we associate with the idea of life.

     Even when a form appears to us to be dead, this force still exists in it and only its familiar operations of vitality are suspended. Within certain limits that which is dead can be rave‘. Veda;  the habitual operations, the response, the circulation of active energy can be restored; and this proves that what we call life was still there in the body, latent, that is to say not active in its usual habits, its habits of ordinary physical functioning, its habits of nervous play and response, its habits in the animal of conscious mental espoused. It would be absurd to suppose that there is a distinct entity called life which has gone entirely out of the body and gets into it again when it feels that somebody is stimulating the form. In certain cases, such as catalepsy, we see that the outward physical signs and operations of life are suspended, but the mentality is there self-possessed and conscious although unable,

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to. compel the usual physical responses. Certainly, it is not the fact that the man is physically dead but mentally alive or that life has gone out of the body while mind still inhabits it, but only that the ordinary physical functioning is suspended, while the mental is still active.

      So also, in certain forms of trance, both the physical functionings and the outward mental are suspended, but afterwards resume their operation, in some cases by external stimulation, but more normally by a spontaneous return to activity from within. What has really happened is that the surface mind-force has been withdrawn into subconscious mind and the surface life-force into sub active life and either the whole man has lapsed into the subconscious existence or else he has withdrawn his outer life into the subconscious while his inner being has been lifted into the superconscient. But the main point for us at present is that the Force, whatever it be, that maintains dynamic energy of life in the body has indeed suspended its outer operations, but still informs the organised substance. A point comes, however, at which it is no longer possible to restore the suspended activities ; and this occurs when either such a lesion has been inflicted on the body as makes it useless or incapable of the habitual functionings or in the absence of such lesion when the process of disintegration has begun, that is to say, when the Force that should renew it becomes entirely inert to the pressure of the environing forces with whose mass of stimulation it was wont to keep up a constant interchange. Even then there is Life in the body, but a Life that is busy only with the process of disintegrating the formed substance so that it may escape in its elements and constitute with them new forms. The Will in the universal force that held the form together, now withdraws from constitution and supports instead a process of dispersion. Not till then is there the real death of the body.

      Life then is the dynamic play of a universal Force, a Force in which mental consciousness and nervous vitality are in some form or at least in their principle always

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inherent and there fore they appear and organise themselves in our world in the forms of Matter. The play of this Force manifests itself as an interchange of stimulation and response to stimulation between the different forms it has built up and in which it keeps up its constant dynamic pulsation ; each form is constantly taking into itself arid giving out again the breath and energy of the common Force ; each form feeds upon that and nourishes itself with it by various means whether indirectly by taking in other forms in which the energy is stored or directly by absorbing the dynamic discharges it receives from outside. All this is the play of Life ; but it is chiefly recognizable to us where the organisation of it is sufficient for vies to perceive its more outward and complex movements and especially where it partakes of the nervous type of vital energy which belongs to our own organisation. It is for this reason that we are ready enough to admit life in the plant because it manifests symptoms of nervosas and has a vital system not very different from our own, but are unwilling to recognise it in the metal and tha earth and the chemical atom where these developments can with difficulty be detected or do not apparently at all exist.

        Is there any justification for elevating this distinction into an essential difference ? What, for instance, is the difference between life in ourselves and Lila in the plant? We see  that they differ first, in our possession of the power of locomotion which has evidently nothing to do with the essence of vitality, and, secondly, in our possession of conscious sensation which is, so for as we know, not yet evolved in the plant. Our nervous responses are largely, though by no means always or in their entirety, attended with the mental response of conscious sensation ; they have a value to the mind as well as to the nerve system and the body agitated by the nervous action. In the plant there are all the symptoms of nervous sensation including those which would be in us rendered as pleasure and pain, waking and sleep, exhilaration, dullness and fatigue and the body is agitated by the nervous action, but there is

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no sure sign of the actual presence of mentally conscious sensation. But sensation is sensation whether mentally conscious or no, and sensation is a form of consciousness. When the sensitive plant shrinks from a contact, it is perfectly evident that it is nervously affected, that something in it dislikes the contact and tries to draw away from it ; there is, in a word, a subconscious sensation in the plant, just as there are, as we have  seen, subconscious operations of the same kind in ourselves.. In the human system it is quite possible to bring these subconscious perceptions and seen ;at ions to the surface long alter they have happened and have ceased to affect the nervous system ; and an ever increasing mass of evidence has irrefutably established the existence of a subconscious mentality in us much vaster than the conscious. The mere fact that the plant has no superficially vigilant mind which can be awaked to the valuation of its subconscious sensations, makes no difference to the essential identity of the phenomena. The phenomena being the same, the thing they manifest must be the same and that is a subconscious mind. And it is to be noted in addition that there is a more rudimentary operation of the subconscious sense-mind in the metal, although in the metal there is no bodily agitation corresponding to the nervous response; but the absence of bodily agitation makes no essential difference to the presence of vitality in the metal any more than the absence of bodily locomotion makes an essential difference to the presence of vitality in the plant.

      What happens when that conscious becomes subconscious in the body or the subconscious becomes conscious? The real differ. acne lies in the absorption of the conscious energy in pa. t of its work, its more or less exclusive concentration. In certain turmoil concentration, what we call the mentality, that is to say, the Prajnana or apprehensive consciousness almost or quite ceases to act consciously, y. t the work of the dowdy aid the nerves and the sense mini goes on unnoticed but constant and perfect ; it has all become : sub :omission; and only in on activity

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or chain of activities is the mind luminously active. While I write the act of writing is largely or sometimes entirely done by the subconscious mind, the body makes, unconsciously as we say, certain nervous movements ; the mind is awake only to the thought with which it is occupied. The whole man indeed may sink into the subconscious, yet habitual movements implying the action of mind may continue, as in many phenomena of sleep,* or he may rise into the superconscient and yet be active, with the subconscious mind in the body, as in certain phenomena of samadhi or Yoga trance. It is evident, then, that the difference between plant sensation and our sensation is simply that in the plant the conscious Force manifest ting itself in the universe has not yet fully emerged from the sleep of Matter, from the absorption which entirely, divides the worker from his source of work in the superconscient knowledge and therefore does subconsciously what it will do consciously when it emerges in man from its absorption and begins to wake to its knowledge-self. It does exactly the same thing, but in a different way and with a different value in terms of consciousness.

       Even materialistic philosophy now begins to admit that in the very atom there is a will and a desire, an attraction and repulsion which are essentially the same thing as the will and desire, liking and disliking in ourselves, but are, as it says, in co is client or, as we should say, sub-conscient. This will and desire are evident everywhere in Nature and, what is not yet sufficiently admitted, they are associated with and indeed the expression of a Subconscient or, if you will, inconscient sense and intelligence which are equally pervasive. Present in every atom of Matter all this is necessarily present in every thing which is formed by the aggregation of those atoms ; and they are present in the atom because they are present in the Force which builds up and constitutes the atom. That Force is the Chit-Tapas or Chit-Shakti of the Vedanta, conscious-ness-force, inherent conscious force of conscious-being, which manifests itself as nervous energy full of subconscious sensation 

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in the plant, as desire-sense and desire-will in the primary animal forms, as self-conscious sense and force in the developing animal, as mental will and knowledge topping all the rest in man.

      Life then reveals itself as essentially the same everywhere from the atom to man, the atom containing the subconscious will, sensation, desire which are released into consciousness in the animal, with plant life as a midway stage in the evolution. Life is really a universal operation of Conscious-Force acting subconsciously on and in Matter ; it is the operation that creates, maintains, destroys and recreates forms or bodies and attempts by play of nerve-force, that is to say, by currents of interchange of stimulating energy to awake conscious sensation in those bodies. In this operation there are three stages, the lowest in which the sensation is still in the sleep of Matter, entirely subconscious so as to seem wholly mechanical, the middle stage in which it becomes capable of sensation still subconscious but on the verge of consciousness, and the highest in which life develops conscious mentality in the form of mental sensation, sensation which in the mental world is the basis for the development of mind-sense and intelligence. It is in the middle stage that we catch the idea of Life as distinguished from Matter and Mind, but in reality it is the same in all the stages and always a middle term between Mind and Matter, constituent of the latter and instinct with the former. It is an operation of conscious-force which is neither the mere formation of substance nor the operation of mind with substance and form as its object of apprehension, but rather an energising of conscious being which is cause and support of the formation and source and support of the conscious apprehension. Life is the energising of conscious being so as to liberate on one side a form of the creative ‘.force of existence working absorbed in its own substance and on the other the apprehensive consciousness of existence working on its own forms and to connect and support as a middle term between them the mutual commerce of the two. The

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means of commerce she provides in the continual currents of her pulsating nerve-energy which carry force of the form as a sensation to modify Mind and bring back force of Mind as will to modify Matter. It is therefore this nerve-energy which we usually mean when we talk of Life, it is the Prana or Life-force of the Indian system. But nerve-energy is only the form it takes in the animal being ; the same Puranic energy is present in all forms down to the atom, since everywhere it is the same in essence and everywhere the same operation of conscious Force supporting and modifying the substantial existence of its own forms with sense and mind active but involved in the form and preparing to emerge from their involution. This is the whole sense of the omnipresent Life that has manifested and inhabits the material universe-

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The Synthesis of Yoga

CHAPTER XV

the purified understanding

       The description of the status of knowledge to which we aspire, determines the means of knowledge which we shall use. That status of knowledge may be summed up as a supramental realisation which is prepared by mental representations through various mental principles in us and once attained again reflects itself more perfectly in all the members of the being. It is a re-seeing and therefore a remoulding of our whole existence in the light of the Divine and One and Eternal free from subjection to the appearances of things and the externalities of our superficial being.

       Such a passage from the human to the divine, from the divided and discordant to the One, from the phenomenon to the eternal Truth, such an entire rebirth or new birth of the soul must necessarily involve two stages, one of preparation in which the soul and its instruments must become fit and another of actual illumination and realisation in the prepared soul through its fit instruments. There is indeed no rigid line of demarcation in sequence of Time between these two stages ; rather they are necessary to each other and continue simultaneously. For in proportion as the sold becomes fit it increases in illumination and rises to higher and higher, completer and completer realizations, and in proportion as these illuminations and

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these realisation increase, becomes fit and its instruments more adequate to their task : there are soul-seasons of un-illumined preparation and soul-seasons of illumined growth and culminating soul-moments more or less prolonged of illumined possession, moments that are transient like the flash of the lightning, yet change the whole spiritual future, moments also that extend over many human hours, days, weeks in a constant light or blaze of the Sun of Truth. And through all these the soul once turned God wards grows towards the permanence and perfection of its new birth and real existence.

        The first necessity of preparation is the purifying of all the members of our being ; especially, for the path of knowledge, the purification of the understanding, the key that shall open the door of Truth ; and a purified understanding is hardly possible without the purification of the other members. An unpurified heart, an unpurified sense, an unpurified life confuse the understanding, disturb its data, distort its conclusions, darken its seeing, misapply its knowledge ; an unpurified physical system clogs or chokes up its action. There must be an integral purity. Here also there is an interdependence; for the purification of each member of our being profits by the clarifying of every other, the progressive tram equalisation of the emotional heart helping for instance the purification of the understanding while equally a purified understanding imposes calm and light on the turbid and darkened workings of the yet impure emotions. It may even be said that while each member of our being has its own proper principles of purification, yet it is the purified understanding that in man is the most potent cleanser of his turbid and disordered being and most sovereignty imposes their right working on his other members. Knowledge, says the Gita, is the sovereign purity ; light is the source of all clearness and harmony even as the darkness of ignorance is the cause of all our stumblings. Love, for example, is the purifier of the heart and by reducing all our emotions into terms of divine love the heart is perfected and fulfilled ; yet love itself needs to be clarified by divine knowledge. The heart’s

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love of God may be blind, narrow and ignorant and lead to fanaticism and obscurantism ; it may, even when otherwise pure, limit our perfection by refusing to see Him except in a limited personality and by recoiling from the true and infinite vision. The heart’s love of man may equally lead to distortions and exaggerations in keeling, action and knowledge which have to be corrected and prevented by the purification of the understanding.

        We must, however, consider deeply and clearly what we mean by the understanding and by its purification. We use the word as the nearest equivalent we can get in the English tongue to the Sanskrit philosophical term buddhi ; therefore we exclude from it the action of the sense mind which merely consists of the recording of perceptions of all kinds without distinction whether they be right or wrong, true or mere illusory phenomena, penetrating or superficial. We exclude that mass of contused conception which is merely a rendering of these perceptions and is equally void of the higher principle of judgment and discrimination. Nor can we include that constant leaping current of habitual thought which does duty for understanding in the mind of the average unthinking man, but is only a constant repetition of habitual associations, desires, prejudices, prejudgments, received or inherited preference’s, even though it may constantly enrich itself by a 11 each stock of concepts streaming in from the environment and admitted without the challenge of the sovereign discriminating reason. Undoubtedly this is a sort of understanding which has been very useful in the development of man from the animal; but it is only one remove above the animal mind; it is a half-animal reason subservient to habit, to desire and the senses and is of no avail in the search whether for scientific or philosophical or spiritual knowledge. We have to go beyond it ; its purification can only be effected either by dismissing or silencing it altogether or by transmuting it into the true understanding.

         By the understanding we mean that which at once perceives, judges and discriminates, the true reason of the human being not subservient to the senesces, to desire or to

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the blind force of habit, but working in its own right for mastery, -for knowledge. Certainly, the reason of man as he is at present does not even at its best act entirely in this free and sovereign fashion ; but so far as it fails, it fails because it is still mixed with the lower half-animal action, because it is impure and constantly hampered and pulled down from its characteristic action. In its purity it should not be involved in these lower movements, but stand back from the object, and observe disinterestedly, put it in its right place in the whole by force of comparison, contrast, analogy, reason from its rightly observed data by deduction, induction, inference and holding all its gains in memory and supplementing them by a chastened and rightly-guided imagination view all in the light of a trained and disciplined judgment. Such is the pure intellectual understanding of which disinterested observation, judgment and reasoning are the law and characterising action.

        But the term buddhi is also used in another and pro-founder sense. The intellectual understanding is only the lower buddhi; there is another and a higher buddhi which is not intelligence but vision, is not understanding but rather an over-standing* in knowledge, and does not seek knowledge and attain it in subjection to the data it observes but possesses already the truth and brings it out in the terms of a revelatory and intuitional thought. The nearest the human mind usually gets to this truth-conscious knowledge is that imperfect action of illumined finding which occurs when there is a great stress of thought and the intellect electrified by constant discharges from behind the veil and yielding to a higher enthusiasm admits a considerable in streaming from the intuitive and inspired faculty of knowledge. For there is an intuitive mind in man which serves as a recipient and channel for these in streaming from a supramental faculty. But the action of intuition and inspiration in us is imperfect in kind as well as intermittent in action ; ordinarily, it comes in response

* The Divine Being is described as the adhyaksha, he who seated over all in the supreme ether over-sees things, views and controls them from above.

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 to a claim from the labouring and struggling heart or intellect and, even before its giving enter the conscious mind, they are already affected by the thought or aspiration which went up to meet them, are no longer pure but altered to the needs of the heart or intellect ; and after they enter the conscious mini, they are immediately seized upon by the intellectual understanding and dissipated or broken up so as to fit in with our imperfect intellectual knowledge, or by the heart and remoulded to suit our blind or half-blind emotional longings and preferences, or even by the lower cravings and distorted to the vehement uses of our hungers and passions.

          If this higher buddhi could act pure of the interference of these lower members, it would give pure forms of the truth; observation would be dominated or replaced by a vision which could see without subservient dependence on the testimony of the sense-mind and senses; imagination would give place to the self-assured inspiration of the truth, reasoning to the spontaneous discernment of relations and conclusion from reasoning to an intuition containing in itself those relations and not building laboriously upon them, judgment to a thought-vision in whose light the truth would stand revealed without the mask which it now wears and which our intellectual judgment has to penetrate ; while memory too would take upon itself that larger sense given to it in Greek thought and be no longer a paltry selection from the store gained by the individual in his present life, but rather the all-recording knowledge which secretly holds and constantly gives from itself everything that we now seem

       We see then what we mean precisely by the under-

+ In this sense the power of prophecy has been aptly called a memory of the future.

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standing and by that higher faculty which we may call for the sake of convenience the ideal faculty and which stands to the developed intellect much in the same relation as that intellect stands to the half-animal reason of the undeveloped man. It becomes evident also what is the nature of the purification which is necessary before the understanding can fulfil rightly its part in the attainment of right knowledge. All impurity is a confusion of two king, a departure from the dharma, the just and inherently right action of things which in that right action are pea and helpful to our perfection and this departure is usually the result of an ignorant confusion* of dharma in which the function lends itself to the demand of other tendencies than those which are properly its own.

        The first cause of impurity in the understanding is the in tumescence of desire in the thinking function-, and desire itself is an impurity of the Will involved in the vital and emotional parts of our being. When the vital and emotional desires interfere with the pure will-to-know, the thought-function becomes subservient to them, pursues ends other than those proper to itself and its perceptions are clogged and deranged. The understanding must lift itself beyond the siege of desire and emotion and, in order that it may have perfect immunity, it must get the vital parts and the emotions themselves purified. The Mill to enjoy is proper to the vital being but not the choice or the reaching after the enjoyment which must be determined and acquired by higher functions; therefore the vital being must be trained to accept whatever gain or enjoyment comes to it in the right functioning of the life in obedience to the working of the divine Will and to rid itself of craving and attachment. Similarly the heart must be freed from subjection to the cravings of the life-principle and the senses and thus rid itself of the false emotions of fear, wrath, hatred, lust, etc. which constitute the chief impurity of the heart. The will to love is proper to the heart, but here also the choice and reaching after love

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have to be foregone or tranquillizer! and the heart taught to love with depth and intensity indeed, but with a calm depth and a settled and equal, not a troubled and disordered intensity. The tranquillization and mastery * of these members is a first condition for the immunity of the understanding from error, ignorance and perversion. This purification spells an entire equality of the nervous being and the heart ; equality, therefore, even as it was the first word of the path of works, so also is the first word of the path of knowledge.

        The second cause of impurity in the understanding is the illusion of the senses and the intumescences of the sense-mind in the thinking functions. No knowledge can be true knowledge which subjects itself to the senses or uses them otherwise than as first indices whose data have constantly to be corrected and over passed. The beginning of Science is the examination of the truths of the world-force that underlie its apparent workings such as our senses represent them to be; the beginning of philosophy is the examination of the principles of things which the senses mistranslate to us; the beginning of spiritual knowledge is the refusal to accept the limitations of the sense-life or to take the visible and sensible as anything more than phenomenon of the Reality.

       Equally must the sense-mind be stilled and taught to leave the function of thought to the mind that judges and understands. When the understanding in us stands back from the action of the sense-mind and repels its intumescences, the latter detaches itself from the understanding and can be watched in its separate action. It then reveals itself as a constantly swirling and eddying undercurrent of habitual concepts, associations, perceptions, desires without any real sequence, order or principle of light? It is a constant repetition in a circle unintelligent and unfruitful. Ordinarily the human understanding accepts this undercurrent and tries to reduce it to a partial order and sequence; but by so doing it becomes itself subject

* Camas and dame.

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to it and partakes of that disorder, restlessness, unintelligent subjection to habit and blind purposeless repetition which makes the ordinary human reason a misleading, limited and even frivolous and futile instrument. There is nothing to be done with this fickle, restless, violent and disturbing factor but to get rid of it whether by detaching it and then reducing it to stillness or by giving a concentration and singleness to the thought by which it will of itself reject this alien and confusing element.

        A third cause of impurity has its source in the understanding itself and consists in an improper action of the will to know. That will is proper to the understanding, but here again choice and unequal reaching after knowledge clog and distort. They lead to a partiality and attachment which makes the intellect cling to certain ideas and opinions with a more or less obstinate will to ignore the truth in other ideas and opinions, cling to certain fragments of a truth and shy against the admission of other parts which are yet necessary to its fullness, cling to certain predilections of knowledge and repel all knowledge that does not agree with the personal temperament of thought which has been acquired by the past of the thinker. The remedy lies in a perfect equality of the mind, in the cultivation of an entire intellectual rectitude and in the perfection of mental disinterestedness. The purified understanding as it will not lend itself to any desire or craving, so will not lend itself either to any predilection or distaste for any particular idea or truth, and will refuse to be attached even to those ideas of which it is the most certain or to lay on them such an undue stress as is likely to disturb the balance of truth and depreciate the values of other elements of a complete and perfect knowledge.

        An understanding thus purified would be a perfectly flexible, entire and faultless instrument of intellectual thought and being free from the interior sources of obstruction and distortion would be capable of as true and complete a perception of the truths of the Self and the universe as the intellect can attain. But for real knowledge

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something more is necessary, since real knowledge is by our very definition of it supra-intellectual. In order that the understanding may not interfere with our attainment to real knowledge, we have to reach to that something more and cultivate a power exceedingly difficult for the active intellectual thinker and distasteful to his proclivities, the power of intellectual passivity. The object served is double and therefore two different kinds of passivity have to be acquired.

       In the first place we have seen that intellectual thought is in itself inadequate and is not the highest thinking; the highest is that which comes through the intuitive mind and from the supramental faculty. So long as we are dominated by the intellectual habit and by the lower workings, the intuitive mind can only send its messages to us subconsciously and subject to a distortion more or less entire before it reaches the conscious mind; or if it works consciously, then only with an inadequate rarity and a great imperfection in its functioning. In order to strengthen the higher knowledge-faculty in us we have to effect the same separation between the intuitive and intellectual elements of our thought as we have already effected between the understanding and the sense-mind; and this is no easy-task, for not only do our intuitions come to us incrusted in the intellectual action, but there are a great number of mental workings which masquerade and ape the appearances of the higher faculty. The remedy is to train first the intellect to recognise the true intuition, to distinguish it from the false and then to accustom it, when it arrives at an intellectual perception or conclusion, to attach no final value to it, but rather look upward, refer all to the divine principle and wait in as complete a silence as it can command for the light from above. In this way it is possible to transmute a great part of our intellectual thinking into the luminous truth-conscious vision,—the ideal would be a complete transition,—or at least to increase greatly the frequency, purity and conscious force of the ideal knowledge working behind the intellect. The latter must ‘cam to be subject and passive to the ideal faculty.

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But for the knowledge of the Self it is necessary to have the power of a complete intellectual passivity, the power of dismissing all thought, the power of the mind to think not at all which the Gita in one passage enjoins. This is a hard saying for the occidental mind to which thought is the highest thing and which will be apt to mistake the power of the mind not to think, its complete silence for the incapacity of thought. But this power of silence is a capacity and not an incapacity, a power and not a weakness. It is a profound and pregnant stillness. Only when the mind is thus entirely still, like clear, motionless and level water, in a perfect purity and peace of the whole being and the soul transcends thought, can the Self which exceeds and originates all activities and becoming. the Silence from which all words are born, the Absolute of which all relativities are partial reflections manifest itself in the pure essence of our being. In a complete silence only is the Silence heard; in a pure peace only is its Being revealed. Therefore to us the name of That is the Silence und the Peace.

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The Kena Upanishad

COMMENTARY

X

       But the Brahman-consciousness is not only Mind of our mind, Speech of our speech. Sense of our sense; it is also Life of our life. In other words, it is a supreme and universal energy of existence of which our own material life and its sustaining energy are only an inferior result, a physical symbol, an external and limited functioning. That which governs our existence and its functionings, does not live and act by them, but is their superior cause and the supra-vital principle out of which they are formed and by which they are controlled.

      The English word life does duty for many very different shades of meaning; but the word Prana familiar in the Upanishad and in the language of Yoga is restricted to the life-force whether viewed in itself or in its functionings. The popular sense of  Prana was indeed the breath drawn into and thrown out from the lungs and so, in its most material and common sense, the life or the life-breath; but this is not the philosophic significance of the word as it is used in the Upanishads. The Prana of the Upanishads is the life-energy itself which was supposed to occupy and act in the body with a fivefold movement, each with its characteristic name and each quite as necessary to the functioning of the life of the body as the act of respiration.

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         Respiration in fact is only one action of the chief movement of the life-energy, the first of the five,—the action which is most normally necessary and vital to the maintenance and distribution of the energy in the physical frame, but which can yet be suspended without the life being necessarily destroyed.

        The existence of a vital force or life-energy has been doubted by western Science, because that Science concerns itself only with the most external operations of Nature and has as yet no true knowledge of anything except the physical and outward. This Prana, this life-force is not physical in itself; it is not material energy, but rather a different principle supporting Matter and involved in it. It supports and occupies all forms and without it no physical form could have come into being or could remain in being. It acts in all material forces such as electricity and ^;s nearest to self-manifestation in those that are nearest to pure force; no material force could exist or act without it, for from it they derive their energy and movement and they are its vehicles. But all material aspects are only field and form of the Prana which is in itself a pure energy, their cause and not their result. It cannot therefore be detected by any physical analysis; physical analysis can only resolve for us the combinations of those material happenings which are its results and the external signs and symbols of its presence and operation.

       How then do we become aware of its existence? B}* that purification of our mind and body and that utilisation of our means of sensation and knowledge which become possible through Yoga. We become capable of analysis other than the resolution of forms into their gross physical elements and are able to distinguish the operations of the pure mental principle from those of the material and both of these from the vital or dynamic which forms a link between them and supports them both. We are then able to distinguish the movements of the Puranic currents not only in the physical body which is all that we are normally a wait of, but in that subtle frame of our

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being which Yoga detects underlying and sustaining the physical. This is ordinarily done by the process of Prana Yama, the government and control of the respiration. By Prana Yama the Hatha yogin is able to control, suspend and transcend the ordinary fixed operation of the Puranic energy which is all that Nature needs for the normal functioning of the body and of the physical life and mind, and he becomes aware of the channels in which that energy distributes itself in all its workings and is

        But the Pranic energy supports not only the operations of our physical life, but also those of the mind in the living body. Therefore by the control of the Pranic energy-it is not only possible to control our physical and vital functionings and to transcend their ordinary operation, but to control also the workings of the mind and to transcend its ordinary operations. The human mind in fact depends always on the Pranic force which links it with the body through which it manifests itself, and it is able to deploy its own force only in proportion as it can make that energy available for its own uses and subservient to its own purposes. In proportion, therefore, as the Yogin gets back to the control of the Prana, and by the direction of its batteries opens up those nervous centres (chakras) in which it is now sluggish or only partially operative, he is able to manifest powers of mind, sense and consciousness which transcend our ordinary expedience. The so-called occult powers of Yoga are such faculties which thus open up of them-

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selves as the Yogin advances in the control of the Pranic force and, purifying the channels of its movement, opens up communication between the consciousness of his subtle, subliminal being and the consciousness of his gross, phys -cal and superficial existence.

        Thus the Prana is vital or nervous force which bears the operations of mind and body, is yoked by them as it were like a horse to a chariot and driven by the min<l along the paths on which it wishes to travel to the goal of its desire. Therefore it is described in this Upanishad 1 as yoked and moving forward and again as being led forward, the images recalling the Vedic symbol of the Horse by which the Pranic force is constantly designated in the Rig-Veda. It is in fact that which does all the action at the world in obedience to conscious or subconscious min 1 and in the conditions of material force and material form. While the mind is that movement of Nature in us which represents in the mould of our material and phenomenal existence and within the triple tier of the Ignorance the knowledge aspect of the Brahman, the consciousness of the knower, and body is that which similarly represent ; the being of the existent in the mask of phenomenally divisible substance, so Prana or life-energy represents in the flux of phenomenal things the force, the active dynamism of the Lord who controls and enjoys the manifestation of His own being. It is a universal energy present in every atom and particle of the universe and active in every stirring and current of the constant flux and interchange which constitutes the world.

       But just as mind is only an inferior movement of the supreme Conscious-Being and above mind there is a divine and infinite principle of consciousness, will and knowledge which controls the ignorant action of mind, and it is by this superior principle and not by mind that Brahman cognises His own being whether in itself or in its manifestation, so also it must be with this Life-force. The characteristics of the life-force as it manifests itself in us are desire, hunger, an enjoyment which devours the

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object enjoyed and a movement and activity which gropes after possession and seeks to pervade, embrace, take into itself the object of its desire.* It is not in this breath of desire and mortal enjoyment that the true life can consist or the highest, divine energy act, any more than the supreme knowledge can think in the terms of ignorant, groping, limited and divided mind. As the movements of mind are merely representations in the terms of the duality and the ignorance, reflections of a supreme consciousness and knowledge, so the movements of this life-force can only be similar representations of a supreme energy expressing a higher and truer existence possessed of that consciousness and knowledge and therefore free from desire, hunger, transient enjoyment and hampered activity. What is desire here must there be self-existent Love ; what is hunger here must there be desire less satisfaction; what is here enjoy-ment must there be self-existent delight; what is here a groping action, must be there self-possessing energy, — such must be the Life of our life by which this inferior action is sustained and led to its goal. Brahman does not breathe with the breath, does not live by this Life-force and its dual terms of birth and death.

      What then is this Life of our life ? It is the supreme Energy* which is nothing but the infinite force in action of the supreme conscious Being in His own illumined self. The Self-existent is luminously aware of Himself and full of His own delight ; and that self-awareness is a timeless self-possession which in action reveals itself as a force of infinite consciousness omnipotent as well as omniscient; for it exists between two poles, one of eternal stillness and pure identity, the other of eternal energy and identity of All with itself the stillness eternally supporting the energy. That is the true existence, the Life from which our life proceeds ; that is the immortality, while what we cling-to

* All these significances are intended by the Vedic Rishis in their use of the word Aqua, Horse, for the Prana, the root being capable of all of them as we see from the words hope ; ac and, hunger ; aç to eat ;  enjoy: ;ace, swift ;age, to move, attain, pervade, etc,

* Tapas or Chit-Shakti.

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as life is " hunger that is death ". Therefore the. object of the wise must be to pass in their illumined consciousness beyond the false and phenomenal terms of life and death to this immortality.

      Yet is this Life-force, however inferior its workings, instinct with the being, will, light of that which it represents, of that which transcends it ; by That it is " led forward " on its paths to a goal which its own existence implies by the very imperfection of its movements and renderings. This death called life is not only a dark figure of that light, but it is the. passage by which we pass through transmutation of our being from the death-sleep of Matter into the spirit’s infinite immortality.

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The Hymns of the Arts

THE EIGHTH HYMN TO AGNI

DIVINE WILL, THE UNIVERSAL FULFILLER

        [The Rishi having declared the continuity of the great effort and aspiration from the earliest times hymns divine Will harboured in us, inmate, priest of the sacrifice, master of this-dwelling, who fulfils the universal impulse in all its multiplicity and both stimulates and leads it in act and knowledge. ]

       1. Will who art by force created in us, thee the pristine Power the pristine seekers of the Truth kindled entirely that they might grow in their being, the god in the sacrifice, who because he has the multitude of his delights establishes the all, 1 domiciled in us. master of the dwelling, inmate supremely desirable.

      2. Will, in thee the supreme 2 guest and master of the house with his locks of light the peoples take their foundation because thou hast with thee vast vision and the multitude of thy forms and the extraction of our riches and the perfect peace and perfect being and the destruction of enemies 3 .  

      1. Or, fosters all. 2. "First," both original and supreme. 3. The hostile powers who try to break up the unity and completeness of our being and from whom the riches which tightly belong to us have to be rescued, not human enemies.

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      3. Will, thee the human peoples seek with their adoration who hast knowledge of the powers 4 of the sacrifice and rightly discriminating holdest for us utterly the delight and thou art seated in our secret being, O perfect enjoyer, seeing with a universal vision, pouring the multitude of thy voices, doing aright the sacrifice, agleam with the glory of the clarity.

     4. Will who sustains the law of things in their universality, thee we approach with obeisance of submission and express thee by the words; so do thou, O puissant seer, approve and cleave to us, a godhead set high-blazing by the victory 5 of the mortal, by his right illumining.

     5. Will multiply affirmed, thou takes many forms according to the man and establishes for each his wide manifestation even as of old ; thou illuminist in thy force the many things that are thy food and none can do violence to that blaze of thy light when so thou blazes up.

     6. Will, youngest vigour, thee the gods have kindled high and made their envoy to man and the bearer of his offerings; wide in thy rapidity, born from the clarity, receiver of the oblation, thee they have set in him as a keen and burning eye that urges his mentality.

     7. Will, thee men who seek the bliss kindle high with an entire kindling, fed by their clarities in the front of heaven; 6 so increasing, diffused by its growths that hold its heats, thou interest widely into all the earth-life’s speeding movements.

4. Or,* the process of the oblation. 5. Attainment, or the splendour or glory.  Heaven and earth, the pure mental being and the material consciousness.

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THE NINTH HYMN TO AGNI

DIVINE WILL ASCENDANT FROM THE ANIMAL TO MENTALITY

       [The Rishi speaks of the birth of the divine Will by the working of the pure mental on the material consciousness, its involved action in man’s ordinary state of mortal mind emotional, nervous, passionate marked by crooked activities and perishable enjoyments and its emergence on the third plane of our being where it is forged and sharpened into a clear and effective power for liberation and spiritual conquest. It knows all the births or planes of our existence and leads the sacrifice and its offerings by a successive and continuous progress to the divine goal and home. ]3

      1. Thee the godhead mortals with the oblation seek, O Will ; on thee  I meditate who knowest the births; therefore thou carries to the goal our offerings without a break.

      2. Will is the priest of the oblation for man who gives the offering and forms the seat of sacrifice and attains to his home ; for in him our works of sacrifice converge and in him our plenitudes of the Truth’s inspirations.

      3. True too it is that thou art born from the two Workings 1 like a new-born infant, thou who art the upholder of the human peoples, Will that leads aright the sacrifice.

      4. True too it is that thou art hard to seize as a son of Crookednesses 2 when thou devours the many 

1. The two Aranis or tenders by which the fire is struck out; the word can also mean workings and is related to Arya. Heaven and Earth are the two Aranis which produce Agni ; Heaven his father, Earth his mother. 2. Literally, of the crooked ones, possibly the Seven rivers or movements of our being winding through the obstructions of our mortal existence.

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growths of delight like an Animal that feeds in his pasture.

5. But afterwards thy fiery rays with their smoky passion meet together entirely ; oh then, the third Soul

6. O Will, may I by thy expanding and thy expressing of the Lord of Love,—yea, may we, as men assailed by enemies, so besieged by discords, pass through and beyond these stumblings of mortals.

7. Bring to us human souls that felicity, O Will, thou forceful one! May he shoot us forward on our path, may he nourish and increase us and be in us for the conquest of the plenitude. March with us in our battles that we may grow.

3. Trite Apatya, the Third or Triple, apparently the Purusha of the mental plane. In the tradition he is a Rishi and has two companions significantly named Kaka, one or single, and Dwita, second or double, who must be the Purushas of the material and the vital or dynamic consciousness. In the Veda he seems rather to be a god. 4. The original is very compressed in style and suggestion beyond even the common Vedic pregnancy of structure and phrase, *’ When, oh, him Trite forges in heaven like a smith, sharpens as in the smith "’. In English we have to expand in order to bring out the meaning.

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The Eternal Wisdom

THE CONQUEST OF TRUTH

CONCENTRATION

1 The power of the human intelligence is without bounds; it increases by concentration: that is the secret.

2 The force of attention properly guided and directed towards the inner life allows us to analyse our soul and will shed light on many things. The forces of the mind resemble scattered rays; concentrate them and they illumine everything. That is the sole source of knowledge_; we possess. To conquer this knowledge there3 is only one method, concentration.—Just as the penetrating rays

3 is only one method, concentration.—Just as the penetrating rays of the sun visit the darkest corners, so thought concentrated will master its own deepest secrets.

4 Once the mind has been trained to fix itself on formed images, it can easily accustom itself to fix on form .

5 less realities.—So we should acquire the power of concentration by fixing the mind first on forms and when we have obtained in this a full success, we can easily fix it on the formless.

6 The powers developed arc liable to become obstacles to i perfect concentration by reason of the possibility of wonder and admiration which results from their