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CHAPTER XXII
THE PROBLEM OF LIFE
ARGUMENT.
[Life being a divided movement of consciousness a though really an undivided force becomes a clash of opposing truths each striving to
fulfil itself. Mind has to solve the thousand and one problems resulting but in Life itself, not merely in thought. The difficulty lies in its ignorance of itself and the world. Man knows only the surface of his own being and does not know the universality of the Force of which he is a part ; therefore he can master neither himself nor the world. He has to know and solve the problem or else give place to some higher evolutionary being.—The
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poise of Life is determined by the relation of the Force to the Consciousness which drives it. Accordingly we have, besides the Infinite Existence, first the life of material Nature ruled by the infallible Inconscient ; secondly the life of conscious being in material Nature emerging out of the Inconscient, fallible, bewildered, only half-potent, which is our own ; and thirdly the life of the real Man to which we are moving where Consciousness and Force are fulfilled and in harmony and the One at unison with the many. That life will be founded on the awareness of one Consciousness in many minds, one Force working in many lives, one Delight of being in many hearts and bodies.—Man’s difficulties ; first, he only knows and governs a part of himself, the greater part of himself is subconscient and it is this greater cosmic part that really governs his surface being. This is What is meant by his being governed by his Nature and by the Lord seated within through the Maya or apparent denial of Sachchidananda by Himself. It is only by becoming one with the Lord that man can be master of himself, but this union must be in the Divine Maya, in the superconscient and not only or chiefly in this lower Maya of the mental existence.— Secondly, he is separated by his individuality from the universal and does not know his fellow-beings. He must be not only in sympathy with them, but arrive at a conscious unity with all and this conscious unity exists only in what is now superconscient to us.—-Thirdly, Life i9 at war with body, Mind at war with the life and the body, each trying to subject the others to its own law. Only the supramental can find the law of immortal harmony which shall reconcile this discord of our mortality. Each of these principles has besides a soul in it which
seeks self-fulfilment beyond what the present force of life, mindor body can give. There is a conflict between opposing instincts of the body, opposing desires and impulses of the life, opposing ideas of the mind. The principle of unity is above in the
Supermind.—Man as he develops becomes acutely aware of all these discords and seeks a reconciliation with himself and with his fellow-beings. This can only come by the perfection of his own existence through the principle in himself to which he has not yet attained and by embracing consciously the life of others in his own through an universal consciousness which Page-578 must also be gained by the superconscient becoming conscient in us through an upward evolution. ] Life is, we have seen, the putting forth, under certain cosmic circumstances, of a Conscious-Force which is in its own nature infinite, absolute, untrammelled, inalienably possessed of its own unity and bliss, the Conscious-Force of Sachchidananda. The central circumstance of this cosmic process, in so far as it differs in its appearances from the purity of the infinite Existence and the self-possession of the undivided Energy, is the dividing faculty of the Mind obscured by ignorance. There results from this divided action of an undivided Force the apparition of dualities, oppositions, seeming denials of the nature of Sachchidananda which exist as the reality for the mind, but only as a phenomenon for the divine cosmic consciousness concealed behind the veil of mind. Hence the world takes the appearance of a clash of opposing truths each seeking to fulfil itself, each having the right to fulfilment and there fore of a mass of problems and mysteries which have to be solved because behind all this confusion there is the concealed Truth and unity pressing for the solution and by the solution for its own unveiled manifestation in the world.
This solution has to be made by the mind, but not by the mind alone ; it has to be a solution in Life, in act of being as well as in consciousness of being. Consciousness as Force has created the world-movement and its problems ; consciousness as Force has to solve the problems it has created and carry the world-movement to the inevitable fulfilment of its secret sense and evolving Truth. But this Life has taken successively three appearances ; first, material, submerged consciousness concealed in its own superficial
expressive action and its representative forms of force, where the consciousness disappears from view in the act and is lost in the form ; secondly, vital, emerging consciousness half-apparent as power of life and process of the
growth, activity and decay of form, where the consciousness, hall-delivered out of it; original
Page-579 as vital craving and satisfaction of repulsion, but at first not at all and then only imperfectly vibrant in light as knowledge of its own self-existence and its environment; thirdly, mental, emerged consciousness reflecting fact of life as mental sense while as new idea it tries to become fact of life, modifies the internal and attempts to modify conformably the external existence of the being. Here, in mind, consciousness is delivered out of its imprisonment in the act and form of its own force, but it is not yet master of the act and form because it has emerged as an individual consciousness and is aware therefore only of a fragmentary movement of its own total activities.
The whole crux and difficulty of human life lies here. Man is this mental being, this mental consciousness working as mental force, aware in a way of the universal force and life of which he is part but, because he has not knowledge of its universality or even of the totality of his own being, unable to deal either with life in general or with his own life in a really effective and victorious movement of mastery. He seeks to know Matter in order to be master of the material environment, to know Life in order to be master of the vital existence, to know Mind in order to be master of the great obscure movement of mentality in which he is not only a jet of light of self-consciousness like the animal but also more and more a flame of growing self-knowledge. Thus he seeks to know himself in order to be master of himself ; to know the world in order to be master of the world. This is the impulse of Existence in him, the impulse of the Consciousness he is, of the Force that is his life, the impulse of Sachchidananda appearing as the individual in a world in which He expresses and yet seems to deny Himself. To find the conditions under which this impulse is satisfied is the problem man must strive always to resolve and to that he is compelled by the very nature of his own existence and of the Deity seated within him ; and until the problem is solved, the impulse satisfied, the human race cannot rest from its labour. Either man must
fulfil himself by satisfying the Divine within him or ha must produce out of
Page-580 will be more capable of satisfying it. He must either himself become a divine humanity or give place to Superman. This simply means that the mental consciousness of man not being the completely illumined consciousness entirely emerged out of the obscuration of Matter but only a progressive term in the great emergence, the line of evolutionary creation hi which he has appeared cannot stop where he now is, but must go either beyond its present term in him or else beyond him if he himself has not the force to go forward. Mental idea trying to become fact of life must pass on till it becomes the whole Truth of existence delivering itself out of its successive wrappings and becoming progressively fulfilled in consciousness and joyously fulfilled in power ; for in and through these two terms of power and light Existence manifests itself, because existence is in its nature Consciousness and Force ; but the third term in which these, its two constituents, meet, become one and are fulfilled, is satisfied Delight of self-existence. For an evolving life like ours this inevitable fulfilment must necessarily mean the finding of the self that was contained in the seed of its own birth and with that self-finding the fulfilment of the potentialities deposited in the movement of conscious-force from which this life took its rise. The potentiality thus contained in our human existence is Sachchidananda realising Himself in a certain harmony and unification of the individual life and the universal so that mankind shall express in a common consciousness, common movement of power, common delight the transcendent Something which has cast itself into this form of things.
All life depends for its nature on the fundamental poise of its own constituting consciousness; for as the Consciousness is, so will the Force be. Where the Consciousness is infinite, one, transcendent of its acts and forms even while embracing and informing and executing them as is the consciousness of Sachchidananda, so will be the Force, infinite in its scope, one in its works, transcendent in its power and self-knowledge. Where the Consciousness is like that of material Nature submerged, self-oblivious, driving
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along in the drift of its own Force without seeming to know it even though by the very nature of the eternal relation between the two terms it really determines the drift which drives it, so will be the Force; it will be a monstrous movement of the Inert and Inconscient, unaware of what it contains, seeming mechanically to fulfil itself by a sort of inexorable accident, an inevitably happy chance, even while all the while it really obeys faultlessly the law of the Right and Truth fixed for it by the will of the supernal Conscious-Being concealed within its movement. Where the Consciousness is divided in itself, as in Mind, limiting itself in various
centres, setting each to fulfil itself without knowledge of what is in other
centres and of its relation to others, aware of things and forces in their apparent division and opposition to each other but not in their real unity, such will be the Force; it will be a life like that we are and see around us; it will be a clash of individual lives seeking each its own fulfilment without knowing its relation to others, a conflict of divided and opposing forces and, in the mentality, a shock and wrestle of divided and opposing ideas which cannot arrive at the simple knowledge of their necessity to each other or grasp their place as elements of that Unity behind which is expressing itself through them and in which their discords must cease. But where the Consciousness is in possession of both the diversity and the unity and the latter contains and governs the former, where it is aware at once of the Law, Truth and Right of the All and the Law, Truth and Right of the individual and the two become consciously harmonised in a mutual unity, where the whole nature of the consciousness is the One knowing itself as the Many and the Many knowing themselves as the One, there the Force also will be of the same nature; it will be a Life that consciously obeys the law of Unity and yet fulfils each thing in the diversity according to its proper rule and function; it will be a life in which all the individuals live at once in themselves and in each other as one conscious Being in many souls, one power of Consciousness in many minds, one joy pf Force working in ma.
joy loves, one reality of Delight fulfilling Page-582 itself in many hearts and bodies.
The first of these four positions, the source of all this progressive relation between Consciousness and Force, is their poise in the being of Sachchidananda where they are one; for the Force is simply consciousness of being working itself out without ever ceasing to be consciousness and the Consciousness is simply luminous Force of being eternally aware of itself and of its own Delight and never ceasing to be this power of utter light and self-possession. The second relation is that of material Nature, it is the poise of being in the material universe which is the great denial of Sachchidananda by Himself ; for here there is the utter apparent separation of Force from Consciousness, the specious miracle of the all-governing and infallible
Inconscient which is only the mask but which modern knowledge has mistaken for the real face of the cosmic Deity. The third relation is the poise of being in Mind and in the Life which we see emerging out of this denial, bewildered by it, struggling—without any possibility of cessation by submission but also without any clear knowledge or instinct of a victorious solution—against the thousand and one problems involved in this perplexing apparition of man the half-potent conscient being out of the omnipotent
In conscience of the material universe. The fourth relation is the poise of being in Supermind; it is the fulfilled existence which will eventually solve all this complex problem created by the partial affirmation emerging out of the total denial; and it must needs solve it in the only possible way’, by the complete affirmation fulfilling all that was secretly there contained in potentiality and intended in fact of evolution behind the mask of the great denial. That is the real life of the real Man towards which this partial life and partial unfulfilled manhood is striving forward with a perfect knowledge and guidance in the so-called In
conscient within us, but in
our conscient parts with only a dim and struggling prevision, with fragments of realisation, with glimpses of the ideal, with flashes of revelation and inspiration in the poet and prophet, the seer and the transcendentalist, the mystic and the thinker.
Page-583 the great intellects and the great souls of humanity. From the data we have now before us we can see that the difficulties which arise from the imperfect poise of Consciousness and Force in man in his present status of mind and life are principally three. First, he is aware only of a small part of his own being; his surface mentality, his surface life, his surface physical being is all that he knows and he does not know even all of that; below is the huge surge of his subconscient mind, his subconscious life-impulses, his subconscious corporeality which he does not know and which he cannot govern, but which rather know and govern him. For existence and consciousness and force being one we can only have real power over so much of our existence as we are identified with by self-awareness, the rest must be governed by its own consciousness which is subliminal to our surface mind and life and body. And yet the two being one movement and not two separate movements the larger and more potent part of ourselves must govern and determine in the mass the smaller and less powerful; therefore we are governed by the subconscient even in our conscious existence and in our very self-mastery and self-direction we are only instruments of what seems to us the Inconscient within us.
This is what the old wisdom meant when it said that man imagines himself to be the doer of the work by his free will, but in reality Nature determines all his works and even the wise are compelled to follow their own Nature. But since Nature is the creative force of consciousness of the Being within us who is masked by His own inverse movement and apparent denial of Himself, they called that inverse creative movement of His consciousness the Maya or Illusion-power of the Lord and said that all existences are turned as upon a machine through His Maya by the Lord seated within the heart of all existences. It is evident then that only by man so far exceeding mind as to become one in self-awareness with the Lord can he become master of his own being. And since this is not possible in the
in conscience or subconscient itself, since profit cannot come by plunging down into" our depths back
Page-584 towards the In conscient, it can only be by ascending into that which is still superconscient to us, into the Super-mind, that this unity can be wholly established. For there in the higher and divine Maya is the conscious knowledge, in its law and truth, of that which works in the subconscient by the lower Maya under the conditions of the Denial which seeks to become the Affirmation. For this lower Nature works out what is willed and known in that higher Nature. The Illusion-Power of the divine knowledge in the world which creates appearances is governed by the Truth-Power of the same knowledge which knows the truth behind the appearances and keeps ready for us the Affirmation towards which they are working. The partial and apparent Man here will find there the perfect and real Man capable of an entirely self-aware being by his full unity with that Self-existent who is the omniscient lord of His own cosmic evolution and procession.
The second difficulty is that man is separated in his mind, his life, his body from the
universal and therefore, even as he does not know himself, is equally and even more incapable of knowing his fellow-creatures. He forms by inferences, theories, observations and a certain imperfect capacity of sympathy a rough mental construction about them -, but this is not knowledge. Knowledge can only come by conscious identity, for that is the only true knowledge,—existence aware of itself. We know what we are so far as we are consciously aware of
yourself, the rest is hidden ; so also we can come really to know that with which we become one in our consciousness, but only so far as we can become one with it. If the means of knowledge are indirect and imperfect, the knowledge attained will also be indirect and imperfect. It will enable us to work out with a certain precarious clumsiness but still perfectly enough from our mental standpoint certain limited practical aims, necessities, conveniences, a certain imperfect and insecure harmony of our relations with that which we know, but only by a conscious unity with it can we arrive at a
perfect relation .Therefore we must arrive at a conscious Page-585 unity with our fellow-beings and not merely at the sympathy created by love or the understanding created by mental knowledge, which will always be the knowledge of their superficial existence and therefore imperfect in itself and subject to denial and frustration by the up rush of the unknown and understand from the subconscient in them and us. But this conscious oneness can only be established by entering into that in which we are one with them, the universal ; and the fullness of the universal exists conscient only in that which is superconscient to us, in the Supermind 5 for here in our normal being the greater part of it is subconscient and therefore in this normal poise of mind, life and body it cannot be possessed. The lower nature is bound down to be in all its activities, chained triply to the slake of differentiated individuality. The Supermind alone commands unity in diversity. The third difficulty is the division between force and consciousness in the evolutionary existence. There is, first, the division which has been created by the evolution itself in its three successive formations of Matter, Life and Mind each with its own law of wording. The Life is at war with the body; it attempts to force it to satisfy life’s desires, impulses, satisfactions and demands of its limited capacity what could only be possible to an immortal and divine body ; and the body, enslaved and tyrannised over, suffers and is in constant dumb revolt against the demands made upon it by the Life. The Mind is at war with both ; sometimes it helps the Life against the Body, sometime restrains the vital urge and seeks to protect the corporeal frame from life’s desires, passions and over-driving energies ; it seeks also to possess the Life and turn its energy to the mind’s own ends, to the utmost joys of the mind’s own activity, to the satisfaction of mental, aesthetic, emotional aims and their fulfilment in human existence ; and the Life too finds itself enslaved and misused and is in frequent insurrection against the ignorant, half-wise tyrant seated above it. This is the war of our members which the mind cannot satisfactorily resolve because it has to deal with a problem insoluble to it, the aspiration of an immortal Page-586 being in a mortal life and body. It can only arrive-either at a succession of compromises or end in an abandonment of the problem either by submission with the materialist to the mortality of our apparent being or with the ascetic and the religionist by the rejection and condemnation of the earthly life and withdrawal to happier and easier fields of existence. But the true solution lies in finding the principle beyond Mind of which Immortality is the law and conquering by it the mortality of our existence.
But there is also that fundamental division between the force and the consciousness which is the original cause of this incapacity. Not only is there a division between the mental, the vital and the physical being, but each of them is also divided against itself. The capacity of the body is less than the capacity of the instinctive soul within it, the capacity of the vital force less than the capacity of the impulsive soul within it, the capacity of the mental energy less than the capacity of the intellectual and emotional soul within it. For the soul is the inner consciousness which aspires to its own complete self-realisation and therefore always exceeds the individual formation of the moment, and the Force which has taken its poise in the formation is always pushed by its soul to that which is abnormal to the poise, transcendent of it; thus constantly pushed it has much trouble in answering, more in evolving from the present to a greater capacity. In trying to fulfil the demands of this triple soul it is distracted and driven to set instinct against instinct, impulse against impulse, emotion against emotion, idea against idea, satisfying this, denying that, then repenting and returning on what it has done, adjusting, compensating, readjusting ad infinitum, but not arriving at any principle of unity. And in the mind again the conscious-power that should
harmonies and unite is not only limited in its knowledge and in its will, but the knowledge and the will are disparate and often at discord. The principle of unity is above in the
Supermind ; for there alone is the conscious unity of all diversities ; there alone will and knowledge are equal and In perfect Page-587 harmony ; there alone Consciousness and Force arrive at their divine equation. Man, in proportion as he becomes self-conscious and a truly thinking being, becomes acutely aware of all this discord and disparateness in the members of his being and he seeks to arrive at a harmony of his mind, life and body, a harmony of his knowledge and will and emotion, a harmony of all his members. Sometimes this desire stops short at the attainment of a workable compromise which will bring with it a relative peace ; but compromise can only be a halt on the way, since the Deity within will not be satisfied eventually with less than a perfect harmony combining in itself the integral development of our man3r-sided potentialities. Less than this would be an evasion of the problem, not its solution, or else only a temporary solution provided as a resting-place for the soul in its continual self-enlargement and ascension. Such a perfect harmony would demand as essential terms a perfect mentality, a perfect play of vital force, a perfect physical existence. But where in the radically imperfect shall we find the principle and power of perfection? Mind rooted in division and limitation cannot provide it to us nor can life and the body which are the energy and the frame of dividing and limiting mind. The principle and power of perfection are there in the subconscient wrapped up in the tegument or veil of the lower Maya and in the superconscient open and eternally realised but separated from us by the veil of our self-ignorance. It is above, then, and not either in our present poise nor below it that we must seek for the reconciling power and knowledge.
Equally, man as he develops, becomes acutely aware of the discord and ignorance that governs his relations with the world, acutely intolerant of it, more and more set upon finding a principle of harmony, peace, joy and unity. This too can only come to him from above. For only by developing a mind which shall have knowledge of the mind of others as of itself, free from our mutual ignorance and misunderstanding, a will that feels and makes itself one with the will of others, an emotional heart that contains
Page-588 the emotions of others as its own, a life-force that feels the energies of others and accepts them for its own and seeks to fulfil them as its own And a body that is not a wall of imprisonment and Defence against the world, and all this under the law of a Light and Truth that shall transcend the aberrations and errors, the much sin and falsehood of our minds, wills, emotions, life-energies,—only so can the life of man practically become one with that of his fellow-beings and the individual recover his own universal self. The subconscient has this life of the All and the superconscient has it, but under conditions which necessitate our motion upwards. For not towards the Godhead concealed in the " inconscient ocean where darkness is wrapped within darkness",* but towards the Godhead seated in the sea of eternal light, in the highest ether of our being, is the original impetus which has carried upward the evolving soul to the type of our humanity.
Unless therefore the race is to fall by the wayside and leave the victory to other and new creations of the eager travailing Mother, it must aspire to this ascent, conducted indeed through love, mental illumination and the vital urge to possession and self-giving but leading beyond to the
supramental unity which transcends and fulfils them; in the founding of human life upon the supramental realisation of conscious unity with all in our being and in all its members humanity must seek its final good and salvation. And this is what we have described as the fourth status of Life in its ascent towards the Godhead.
Page-589 CHAPTER XVIII THE SYNTHESIS OF THE DISCIPLINE OF KNOWLEDGE In the last chapter we have spoken of renunciation in its most general scope, even as we spoke of concentration in all its possibilities; what has been said, applies therefore equally to the path of Works and the path of Devotion as to the path of Knowledge; for on all three concentration and renunciation are needed, though the way and spirit in which they are applied may vary. But we must now turn more particularly to the actual steps of the Path of Knowledge on which the double force of concentration and renunciation must aid us to advance. Practically, this path is a renascent up the great ladder of being down which the soul has descended into the material existence.
The central aim of Knowledge is the recovery of the Self, of our true self-existence, and this aim presupposes the admission that our present mode of being is not our true self-existence. No doubt, we have rejected the trenchant solutions which cut the knot of the riddle of the universe ; we recognise it neither as a fiction of material appearance created by Force, nor as an unreality set up by the Mind, nor as a bundle of sensations, ideas and results of idea and sensation with a great Void or a great blissful Zero behind it to strive towards as our true truth of eternal non-existence. We accept the Self as a reality and the universe as a reality of the Self, a reality of its consciousness and not of mere material force and formation, but none the less or rather all the more for that reason a reality.
Page-590 Still, though the universe is a fact and not a fiction, a fact of the divine and universal and not a fiction of the individual self, our state of existence here is a state of ignorance, not the true truth of our being. We conceive of ourselves falsely, we see ourselves as we are not; we live in a false relation with our environment, because we know neither the universe nor ourselves for what they really are but with an imperfect view founded on a temporary fiction which the Soul and Nature have established between themselves for the convenience of the evolving ego. And this falsity is the root of a general perversion , confusion and suffering which besiege at every step both our internal life and our relations with our environment. Our personal life and our communal life, our commerce with ourselves and our commerce with our fellows are founded on a falsity and are therefore false in their recognised principles and methods, although through all this error a growing truth continually seeks to express itself. Hence the supreme importance to man of Knowledge, not what is called the practical knowledge of life, but of the profoundest knowledge of the Self and Nature* on which alone a true practice of life can be founded. The error proceeds from a false identification. Nature has created within her material unity separate seeming bodies which the Soul manifested in material Nature enfolds, inhabits, possesses, uses ; the Soul forgetting itself experiences only this single knot in Matter and saying " I am this body." It thinks of itself as the body, suffers with the body, enjoys with the body, is born with the body, is dissolved with the body ; or so at least it views its self-existence. Again, Nature has created within her unity of universal life separate-seeming currents of life which form themselves into a whorl of vitality around and in each body, and the Soul manifested in vital Nature seizes on and is seized by that current, is imprisoned momentarily in that little whirling vortex of life. The Soul, still forgetting itself, says " I am this life "; it thinks of itself as the life,
* Atmajnâna Ana and tattwajnâna. Page-591 craves with its cravings or desires, wallows in its pleasures, bleeds with its wounds, rushes or stumbles with its movements. If it is still mainly governed by the body-sense, it identifies its own existence with that of the whorl and thinks " When this whorl is dissipated by the dissolution of the body round which it has formed itself, then shall be no more’." If it has been able to sense the current of life which has formed the vortex, it thinks of itself as that current and says " I am this stream of life; I have entered upon the possession of this body, I shall leave it and enter upon the possession of other bodies:. I am an immortal life revolving in a cycle of constant rebirth ." But again Nature has created within her mental unity, formed in the universal Mind separate-seeming dynamos as it were of mentality , constant centres for the generation, distribution and reassertion of mental force and mental activities, stations as it were in a system of mental telegraphy where messages are conceived, written, sent, received, deciphered, and these messages and these activities are of many kinds, sensational, emotional, perceptual, conceptual, intuitional , all of which the Soul manifested in mental Nature accepts, uses for its outlook on the world and seems to itself to project and to receive their shocks, to suffer or to master their consequences. Nature in stalls the base of these dynamos in the material bodies she has formed, makes these bodies the ground for her stations and connects the mental with the material by a nerve-system full of the movement of vital currents through which the mind becomes conscious of the material world and, so far as it chooses, of the vital world of Nature. Otherwise the mind would be conscious of the mental world first and chiefly and would only indirectly glimpse the material. As it is, its attention is fixed on the body and the material world in which it has been installed and it is aware of the rest of existence only dimly, indirectly or subconsciously in that vast remainder of itself with regard to which superficially it has become irresponsive and oblivious.
The Soul identifies itself with this mental dynamo or
Page-592 station and says ". I am this mind.” And since the mind is absorbed in the bodily life, it thinks ” 1 am a mind in a living body " or, still more commonly, *’ I am a body which lives and thinks." It identifies itself with the thoughts, emotions, sensations of the embodied mind and imagines that because when the body is dissolved all this will dissolve, itself also will cease to exist. Or if it becomes conscious of the current of persistence of mental personality, it thinks of itself as a mental soul occupying the body whether once or repeatedly and returning from earthly living to mental worlds beyond ; the persistence of this mental being mentally enjoying or suffering sometimes in the body, sometimes on the mental or vital plane of Nature it calls its immortal existence. Or else, because the mind is a principle of light and knowledge, however imperfect, and can have some notion of what is beyond it, it sees the possibility of a dissolution of the mental being into that which is beyond, some Void or some eternal Existence, and it says, " There I, the mental soul, cease to be." Such dissolution it dreads or desires, denies or affirms according to its measure of attachment to or repulsion from this present play of embodied mind and vitality.
Now, all this is a
mixture of truth and falsehood. Mind, Life, Matter exist and mental, vital,
physical individualisation exists as facts in Nature, but the identification of the soul with these things is a false identification. Mind, Life and Matter are ourselves only in this sense that they are principles of being which the true self has evolved by the meeting and interaction of Soul and Nature in order to express a form of its one existence as the Cosmos. Individual mind, life and body are a play of these principles which is set up in the commerce of Soul and Nature as a means for the expression of that multiplicity of itself of which the one Existence is eternally capable and which it holds eternally involved in its unity. Individual mind, life and body are forms of ourselves in so far as we are
centres of the multiplicity of the One ; universal Mind, Life and Body are also form of our self, because we are that One in our being. But the self is more than universal Page-593 or individual mind, life and body and when we limit our-selves by identification with these things, we found our knowledge on a falsehood, we falsify our determining view and our practical experience not only of our self, being but of our cosmic existence and of our individual activities.
The Self is an eternal utter Being and pure existence of which all these things are
be comings. From this knowledge we have to proceed ; this knowledge we have to realise and make it the foundation of the inner and the outer life of the individual. The Yoga of Knowledge, starting from this primary truth, has conceived a negative and positive method of discipline by which we shall get rid of these false identifications and recoil back from them into true self-knowledge. The negative method is to say always " I am not the body " so as to contradict and root out the false idea " I am the body," to concentrate on this knowledge and by renunciation of the attachment of the soul to the physical get rid of the body-sense. We say again I am not the life " and by concentration on this knowledge and renunciation of attachment to the vital movements and desires, get rid of the life-sense. We say, finally, ‘* I am not the mind, the motion, the sense, the thought" and by concentration on this knowledge and renunciation of the mental activities, get rid of the mind-sense. When we thus constantly create a gulf between ourselves and the things with which we identified ourselves, their veils progressively fall away from us and the Self begins to be visible to our experience. Of that then we say " I am That, the pure, the eternal, the self-blissful " and by concentrating our thought and
been„’ upon it we become That and are able finally to renounce the individual existence and the Cosmos. Another positive method belonging rather to the Rajayoga is to concentrate on the thought of the Brahman and shut out from us all other ideas, so that this dynamo of mind shall
because to work upon our external or varied internal existence : by mental cessation the vital and physical play also shall fall to rest in an eternal samadhi, some inexpressible deepest trance of the being
Page-594 in which we shall pass into the absolute Existence. This discipline is evidently a self-centered and exclusive inner movement which gets rid of the world by denying it in thought and shutting the eyes of the soul to it in vision. But the universe is there as a truth in God even though the individual soul may have shut its eyes to it and the Self is there in the Universe really and not falsely, supporting all that we have rejected, truly immanent in all things, really embracing the individual in the universal as well as embracing the universe in that which exceeds and transcends it. What shall we do with this eternal Self in this persistent universe which we see encompassing us every time we come out of the trance of inner meditation ? The ascetic Path of Knowledge has its solution and its discipline for the soul that looks out on the universe. It is to regard the immanent and all-encompassing and all-constituting Self in the image of the ether in which all forms are, which is in all forms, of which all forms are made. In that ether cosmic Life and Mind move as the Breath of things, an atmospheric sea in the ethereal, and constitute from it all these forms ; but what they constitute are merely name and form and not realities ; the form of the pot we see is a form of earth only and goes back into the earth, earth a form resolvable into the cosmic Life, the cosmic Life a movement that falls to rest in that silent immutable Ether. Concentrating on this knowledge, rejecting all phenomenon and appearance, we come to see the whole as an illusion of name and form in the ether that is Brahman ; it becomes unreal to us ; and the universe becoming unreal the immanence becomes unreal and there is only the Self upon which our mind has falsely imposed the name and form of the universe. Thus are we just if lad in the withdrawal of the individual self into the Absolute.
Still, the Self goes on with its imperishable aspect of immanence, its immutable aspect of divine envelopment, its endless trick of becoming each thing and all things; our
detection of the cheat and our withdrawal do not seem to effect one title either the Self or the universe, Must we not then know also what it is that thus persists Page-595 superior to our acceptance and rejection and too great, too eternal to be affected by it ? Here too there must be some invincible reality at work and the integrality of Knowledge demands that we shall see and realise it ; otherwise it may prove that our own knowledge and not the Lord in the universe was the cheat and the illusion. Therefore we must concentrate again and see and realise also this which persists so sovereignty and must know the Self as no other than the Supreme Soul which is the Lord of Nature, the upholder of cosmic existence by whose sanction it proceeds, whose will compels its multitudinous actions and determines its perpetual cycles. And we must yet concentrate once again and see and realise and must know the Self as the one Existence who is both the Soul of all and the Nature of all, at once Purusha and Prakriti and so able both to express himself in all these forms of things and to be all these formations. Otherwise we have excluded what the Self does not exclude and made a wilful choice in our knowledge.
The old ascetic Path of Knowledge admitted the unit} of things and the concentration on all these aspects of the one Existence, but it made a
distinction and a hierarchy. The Sell that becomes all these forms of thing is the Virat or universal Soul ; the Self that creates all these forms is Hiranyagarbha, the luminous or creatively perceptive Soul: the Self that contains all these things involved in it is Prajna, the
conscious Cause or originally determining Soul ; beyond all these is the Absolute who permits all this unreality, but has no dealings with it. Into That we must withdraw and have no farther dealings with the universe, since
Knowledge*and the final Knowledge, and therefore these lesser realisation must fall away from us or be lost in That. But evidently
from our point of view these are practical distinctions made by the mind which have a value for certain purposes, but no ultimate value. Our view of the world insists on unity; the universal Self is not different from the perceptive and creative, nor the
percept, live from the causal, nor the causal from the Absolute, put it is one" Self-being which ha become all
be comings,"
Page-596 and which is not any other than the Lord who manifests Himself as all these individual existences nor the Lord any other than the sole-existing Brahman who verily is all this that we can see, sense, live or mentalise. That Self, Lord, Brahman we would know that we may realise our unity with it and with all that it manifests and in that unity we would live. For we demand of knowledge that it shall unite; the knowledge that divides must always be a partial knowing good for certain practical purposes ; the knowledge that unites is the knowledge. Therefore our integral Yoga will take up these various disciplines and concentrations, but harmonies and if possible fuse them by a synthesis which removes their mutual exclusions. Not realising the Lord and the All only to reject them for silent Sell or unknowable Absolute as would an exclusively transcendental, nor living for the Lord alone or in the All alone as would an exclusively Theistic or an exclusively Pantheistic Yoga, the seeker of integral knowledge will limit himself neither in his thought nor in his practice nor in his realisation by any religious creed or philosophical dogma. He will seek the Truth of existence in its completeness. The ancient disciplines he will not reject, for they rest upon eternal truths, but he will give them an orientation In conformity with has aim.
We must recognise that our primary aim in knowledge must be to realise our own supreme Self more than that Self in others or as the Lord of Nature or as the All; for that is the pressing need of the individual, to arrive at the highest truth of his own being, to set right its disorders, confusions, false identifications, to arrive at its right concentration and purity and to know and mount to Us source. But we do this not in order to disappear into its source, but so that our whole existence and all the members of this inner kingdom may find their right basis, may live in our highest self, live for our highest self
oily and obey-no other law than that which proceeds from our highest self and is given to our purified being without any falsification in the transmitting mentality. And if we do this rightly we
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found the one Self in all, the one Lord of our nature and of all Nature, the All of ourselves who is the All of the universe. For this that we see in ourselves we must necessarily see everywhere, since that is the truth of His unity. By discovering and using rightly the Truth of our being the barrier between our individuality and the universe will necessarily be forced open and cast away and the Truth that we realise in our own being cannot fail to realise itself to us in the universality which will then be our self. Realising in ourselves the " I am He " of the Vedanta, we cannot but realise in looking upon all around us the identical knowledge on its other side, " Thou art That." We have only to see how practically the discipline must be conducted in order that we may arrive successfully at this great unification.
Page-598 COMMENTARY XIII From its assertion of the relative knowableness of the unknowable Brahman and the justification of the soul’s aspiration towards that which is beyond its present capacity and status the Upanishad turns to the question of the means by which that high-reaching aspiration can put itself into relation with the object of its search. How is the veil to be penetrated and the subject consciousness of man to enter into the master-consciousness of the Lord ? What bridge is there over this gulf? Knowledge has already been pointed out as the supreme means open to us, a knowledge which begins by a sort of reflection of the true existence in the awakened mental understanding. But Mind is one of the gods; the Light behind it is indeed the greatest of the gods, Indra. Then, an awakening of all the gods through their greatest to the essence of that which they are, the one Godhead which they represent . By the mentality opening itself to the Mind of our mind, the sense and speech also will open themselves to the Sense of our sense and to the Word behind our speech and the life to the Life of our life. The Upanishad proceeds to develop this consequence of its central suggestion by a striking parable or apologue.
The gods, the powers that affirm the Good, the Light, the Joy and Beauty, the Strength and Mastery have found
Page-599 themselves victorious in their eternal battle with the powers that deny. It is Brahman that has stood behind the gods and conquered for them; the Master of all who guides all has thrown His deciding will into the balance, put down his darkened children and exalted the children of Light. In this victory of the Master of all the gods are conscious of a mighty development of themselves, a splendid efflorescence of their greatness in man, their joy, their light, their glory, their power and pleasure. But their vision is as yet sealed to their own deeper truth; they know of themselves, they know not the Eternal ; they know the godheads, they do not know God. Therefore they see the victory as their own, the greatness as their own. This opulent efflorescence of the gods and uplifting of their greatness and light is the advance of man to his ordinary ideal of a perfectly enlightened mentality, a strong and sane vitality, a well-ordered body and senses, a harmonious, rich, active and happy life, the Hellenic ideal which the modern world holds to be our ultimate potentiality. When such an efflorescence takes place whether in the individual or the kind, the gods in man grow luminous, strong, happy; they feel they have conquered the world and they proceed to divide it among themselves and enjoy it.
But such is not the full intention of Brahman in the universe or in the creature. The greatness of the gods is His own victory and greatness, but it is only given in order that man may grow nearer to the point at which his faculties will be strong enough to go beyond themselves and realise the Transcendent. Therefore Brahman manifests Himself before the exultant gods in their well-ordered world and puts to them by His silence the heart-shaking, the world-shaking question, " If ye are all, then what am I ? for see, I am and I am here." Though He manifests, He does not reveal Himself, but is seen and felt by them as a vague and tremendous presence, the
Yaksha, the Daemon, the Spirit, the unknown Power, the Terrible beyond good and evil for whom good and evil are in
students towards His final self-expression. Then there is alarm and confusion in
the divine assembly; they feel a demand and a menace,
Page-600 on the side of the evil the possibility of monstrous and appalling powers yet unknown and unaltered which may wreck the fair world they have built, up heave and shatter to pieces the brilliant harmony of the intellect, the aesthetic mind, the moral nature, the vital desires, the body and senses which they have with such labour established, on the side of the good the demand of things unknown which are beyond all these and therefore are equally a menace, since the little which is realised cannot stand against the much that is unrealised, cannot shut out the vast, the infinite that presses against the fragile walls we have erected to define and shelter our limited being and pleasure. Brahman presents itself to them as the Unknown; the gods knew not what was this Daemon. Therefore Agni first arises at their bidding to discover its nature, limits, identity. The gods of the Upanishad differ in one all-important respect from the gods of the Rig Veda; for the latter are not only powers of the One, but conscious of their source and true identity; they know the Brahman, they dwell in the supreme Godhead, their origin, home and proper plane is the superconscient Truth. It is true they manifest themselves in man in the form of human faculties and assume the appearance of human limitations, manifest themselves in the lower cosmos and assume the mould of its cosmic operations; but this is only their lesser and lower movement and beyond it they are for ever the One, the Transcendent and Wonderful, the Master of Force and Delight and Knowledge and Being. But in the Upanishads the Brahman idea has grown and cast down the gods from this high preeminence so that they appear only in their lesser human and cosmic workings. Much of their other Vedic aspects they keep. Here the three gods Indra, Vayu, Agni represent the cosmic Divine on each of its three planes, Indra on the mental, Vayu on the vital, Agni on the material. In that order, therefore, beginning from the material they approach the Brahman.
Agni is
the heat and flame of the conceivers; it is he who has Page-601 made life and mind possible and developed them in the material universe where he is the greatest deity. Especially he is the primary impeller of speech of which Vayu is the medium and India the lord. This heat of conscious force in Matter is Agni Jatavedas, the knower of all births; of all things born, of every cosmic phenomenon he knows the law, the process, the limit, the relation. If then it is some mighty Birth of the cosmos that stands before them, some new indeterminate developed in the cosmic struggle and process, who shall know him, determine his limits, strength, potentialities if not Agni Jatavedas ? Full of confidence he rushes towards the object of his search and is met by the challenge *’ Who art thou ? What is the force in thee ? " His name is Agni Jatavedas, the Power that is at the basis of all birth and process in the material universe and embraces and knows their workings and the force in him is this that all that is thus born, he as the flame of Time and Death can devour. All things are his food which he assimilates and turns into material of new birth and formation. But this all-devourer cannot devour with all his force a fragile blade of grass so long as it has behind it the power of the Eternal. Agni is compelled to return, not having discovered, die thing only is settled that this Daemon is no Birth of the material cosmos, no transient thing that is subject to the flame and breath of Time ; it is too great for Agni. Another god rises to the call. It is Vayu Matari-5
There is the same confident advance upon the object,
the same formidable challenge ”Who art thou? what is Page-602 the force in thee?" This is Vayu Mâtariçwan and the power in him is this that he, the Life, can take all things in his stride and growth and seize on them for his mastery and enjoyment. But even the veriest frailest trifle he cannot seize and master so long as it is protected against him by the shield of the Omnipotent. Vayu too returns, not having discovered. One thing only is settled that this is no form or force of cosmic Life which operates within the limits of the all-grasping vital impulse ; it is too great for Vayu. Indra next arises, the Puissant, the Opulent. Indra is the power of the Mind ; the senses which the Life uses for enjoyment, are operations of Indra which he conducts for knowledge and all things that Agni has up built and supports and destroys in the universe are Indri’s field and the subject of his functioning. If then this unknown Existence is something that the senses can grasp or, if it is something that the mind can envisage, Indra shall know it and make it part of his opulent possessions. But it is nothing that the senses can grasp or the mind envisage, for as soon as Indra approaches it, it vanishes. The mind can only envisage what is limited by Time and Space and this Brahman is that which, as the Rig Veda has said, is neither today nor tomorrow and though it moves and can be approached in the conscious being of all conscious existences, yet when the mind tries to approach it and study it in itself, it vanishes from the view of the mind. The Omnipresent cannot be seized by the senses, the Omniscient cannot be known by the mentality.
But Indra does not turn back from the quest like Agni and Vayu; he pursues his way through the highest ether of the pure mentality and there he approaches the Woman , the many-shining, Uma Haimavati ; from her he learns that this Daemon is the Brahman by whom alone the gods of mind and life and body conquer and affirm themselves, and in whom alone they are great. Uma is the supreme Nature from whom the whole cosmic action takes its birth ; she is the pure summit and highest power of the One who here shines out in many forms. From this
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supreme Nature which is also the supreme Consciousness the gods must learn their own truth ; they must proceed by reflecting it in themselves instead of limiting themselves to their own lower movement. For she has the knowledge and consciousness of the One, while the lower nature of mind, life and body can only envisage the many. Although therefore Indra, Vayu and Agni are the greatest of the gods, the first coming to know the existence of the Brahman, the others approaching and feeling the touch of it, yet it is only by coming into contact with the supreme consciousness and reflecting its nature and by the elimination of the vital, mental, physical egoism so that their whole function shall be to reflect the One and Supreme that Brahman can be known by the gods in us and possessed. The conscious force that supports our embodied life must become simply and purely a reflector of at supreme Consciousness and Power of which its highest ordinary action is only a twilight figure; the Life must become a passively potent reflection and pure image of that supreme Life which is greater than all our utmost actual and potential vitality; the Mind must resign itself to be no more than a faithful mirror of the image of the superconscient Existence. By this conscious surrender of mind, life and senses to the Master of our senses, life and mind who alone really governs their action, by this turning of the cosmic existence into a passive reflection of the eternal being and a faithful
reproduction of the nature of the Eternal we may hope to know and through knowledge to rise into that which is superconscient to us ; we shall enter into the Silence that is master of an eternal, infinite, free and all-blissful activity.
Page-604 THE SIXTEENTH HYMN TO AGNI a HYMN TO THE BRINGER OF ALL DESIRABLE GOOD [The Rishi affirms the Divine Will in man as the offering and representative priest who brings light and strength and inspired knowledge and every desirable good; for he is the aspirer by works in whom is the puissance of all the gods and the full plenitude of their force.] 1. Sing thou out by the word a vast manifestation for the shining Light, for the divine, for the Will whom mortals by their expressions of his godhead as the Friend I put in their front. 2. The Will is the priest of offering of the peoples; by the illuminations of the discerning mind he bears abroad in both his arms the continuous or-
1. Mitra. Agni contains and is all the gods. Mortals have to discover in the action of the divine Will the light, love and harmony of the true knowledge and true existence, the Mitra-power; it is in this aspect that he has to be set in front of the human consciousness as the representative priest in the sacrifice.
Page-605 der 2 of their and as the divine enjoyer a he moves to his good. 3. In the affirmation of him and in his comradeship when he has increased his flame of purity are all the lords of the plenitude ; 4. Even now, O Will, may there be the full plenitude of their utter force. Around this mighty Will earth and heaven have become as if one voice of inspired knowledge. 5. Even now come to us, O Will, hymned by our words and bring to us our desirable good. May we who are here and those luminous masters of knowledge together found that blissful state of our being. March with us in our battles that we may grow.
2. As the Purohit, the representative priest in the sacrifice and the leader in the van of its march. He stands in front of our consciousness, leader of all our powers, to guide and carry on our God ward work, so that there shall be no interruption, no gap in the order of the sacrifice, the right stages of its march to the gods, the right placing of its works according to the times and seasons of the Truth.
3. The Divine Will becomes the Enjoyer Bhaga, brother power of Mitra, who enjoys all delight of existence but by
Mira’s power of pure discernment and according to the light, truth and harmony of the divine living. 4. The gods; the Divine Force contains and sustains all the other divine powers in their working; in him resides therefore the power of all the other godheads. 5. The whole physical and the whole mental consciousness become full of the knowledge which streams into them from the supra-mental plane and they, as it were, turn into the supramental light and action around the divine Seer-Will as he moves about in them at his work of transfiguration.
Page-606 A HYMN OF ENLARGEMENT AND ULTIMATE ASPIRATION [A state arrives ill which man goes beyond the mere subtlety and fineness of the intelligence and reaches to a rich and manifold largeness of soul. Even then though he has now the wide law of his being which, is our right foundation, he needs a force greater than his to lead him; for largeness and multiplicity of soul-force and knowledge are not enough, there must be the divine truth in thought, word and act. For we have to attain beyond the enlarged mental being to the beatitude of a state beyond mind. Agni has the light and the force, the Word and the true impulsion, the embracing knowledge and the achieving power. He shall bring the divine wealth in his chariot and carry us towards the blissful state and the supreme good.] 1. I am mortal who call thee, O godhead, for thy strength is greater than mine and it is righteous in its acts. Let the man of multiple soul when he has made perfect his sacrifice, adore the Will for his increasing. 2. Man, thou who hast won to the wide law of thy being, 1 by the mouth of this flame thou shalt be self-mightier to attain and shalt mentalise the paradise of his richest flamingos, the paradise of rapture beyond the thought of the mind. 2
1. The larger working of consciousness and power in the being by which the rigid limitations of the ordinary mind and life and physical being are broken and man is able to experience a full inner life and open himself to communication with all the planes of his own and of the cosmic existence. 2. The state of bliss of which Swar, the
supramental plane of existence, is the basis.
Page-607 3. For by the mouth and radiance of his flame he has yoked himself with the impelling force and the word, and vast as if with the seed of heaven blazes out the purity of his rays. 4. Because by the force of his workings he has the embracing knowledge and the achieving power, his chariot carries a divine wealth ; therefore in all creatures he is the godhead to be expressed and the helper to whom men call. 5. Even now and even for us may the luminous masters of knowledge be firm by the mouth of the flame to our supreme good.
3, The luminous gods in us must keep our consciousness firmly attached to the light and truth that is brought by the workings of the Will so that we may not fall away from the right movement and its divine joy. A HYMN OP THE LORDS OF THE PLENITUDE
[The Divine Will is invoked to complete the manifestation of the divine powers after the second state of the soul when it has passed beyond the mere physical being and is full of the, perfect energy of the vital plane; for the gods have given all the life’s fifty steeds of swiftness, Agni is there as the light and flame of its far-extended existence which has broken the limitations of the mated.
Page-608 al being and he is full of the joys of this new and rich supra-physical life. Now the third state, the free mental being, is to be perfected by a richly varied and luminous play of thought and word ending in the manifestation of the highest reach of the mental realms, the power of the supramental Light in the mentality; there begins the manifestation of the intuitive and inspired mind. Agni has to create that vastness and high and divinity of the Truth-knowledge and so crown with it the already attained free swiftness of force and wide range of life and enjoyment proper to the perfected and god-filled vitality. ] 1. Let the Will be affirmed in the dawning, 1 guest of the creature with his many delights who, immortal in mortals, takes joy in all their offerings. 2. He is the plenitude of his own discerning mind for the second soul 2 when it bears the purified intelligence ; then it holds in itself the continual wine of delight and affirms thee, O Immortal. 3. Such art thou I call, the pure flame of this far-extending existence for the lords of the plenitude whose chariot inviolate ranges wide, 3 O giver of the steeds of swiftness 4. The lords of the plenitude in whom is rich light of the thought and they keep the words of our
1. The dawning of the divine Dawn of the higher knowledge in the mind. 2. Dwita, the god or Rishi of the second plane of the human ascent. It is that of the Life-force, the plane of fulfilled force, desire, free range of the vital powers which are no longer limited by the strict limitations of this mould of Matter. We become conscious of and conscious in new realms, immense ranges of life, the " far-extending existence " of the next verse, which are screened off from our ordinary physical consciousness. Trita is the god or Rishi of the third plane, full of luminous mental kingdoms unknown to the physical mind.
3. In these new worlds of life the divine movement 13 now fulfilled there and ranges
unpaired by the "harms.’ of the powers of Death and Darkness. Page-609 utterance in their mouth ; * the fullness of the soul has been spread as a seat of sacrifice in thepower5of 5. They who have given me fifty steeds of swiftness 4. This verse describes the farther ascent of the movement from the realms of Dwita to the realms of Trita. 5. Swarnara, often spoken of as if it were a country; it is not Swar itself, the utter superconscient plane, but the power of itself which the light of that world forms in the pure mentality. Here its inspirations and illuminations descend and take their place round the seat of the sacrifice. These are elsewhere called the scouts, " eclaireurs ", of the solar Deity, Varuna. 6 The Açwa or Horse is the symbol of the Life-Force as the Cow is the symbol of the Light. Fifty, hundred, a thousand are numbers symbolic of completeness. A HYMN THE REVEALING RAY AND CONQUERING WILL
[That epiphany of the soul is sung in which all the coverings of its higher states are penetrated and open to the divine light. It is the opening of the whole third plane of our existence which was before as a fortified city with its gates closed to the soul embodied in Matter. By this new action of the Divine Force the mental and physical consciousness arc wedded to the high supramental which
Page-610 was till now separated from them and the life-force blazing in its works with the heat of the divine Sun 1. State upon state is born, covering upon covering opens to consciousness of knowledge ; in the lap of its Mother 2. Awakened to an embracing knowledge men cast in thee the offering, they guard a sleepless manhood, they enter into the fortified city. 3. Men who are born in the world and labour at the work "increase the luminous state of the son of the white-shining Mother, 4. He is as the delightful and desirable yield of the Mother, 5 he is that which being without a fellow 6 yet dwells with the two companions, he is the heat of the Light and the belly of the plenitude, he is the eternal unconquerable who tramples all things under his feet. 5. O Ray, be born in us and dwell there at play harmonising thy knowledge with the blazing
1, Aditi, the infinite consciousness, Mother of all things. 2. With the all-embracing vision of the supramental infinite consciousness. 3. Aditi; her dark state or black form is Diti , mother of the powers of Darkness. 4. Of the rays of the divine Sun of Truth.
5. The milk of the Cow, Aditi. 6.
The all creating and self-sufficing Supermind high and remote and separated in our consciousness from the mental and physical planes; yet it is really there behind their action and reaction upon each other and in the liberated state of man the separation is abolished.
Page-611 life-god . "7 May these flames of the will that bear our works be violent and keen and sharpened to a perfect intensity and firmly founded in the Bearer of all things. 7. Vayu. A HYMN OF THE WORK AND THE ATTAINMENT [The Rishi desires a state of spiritual wealth full of the divine working in which nothing shall fall away to the division and the crookedness. So, increasing by our works the divine Force in us daily, we shall attain to the Bliss and the Truth, the rapture of the Light and the rapture of the Force. ] 1. O Will, O conqueror of our plenitude, the felicity which thou alone canst conceive in the mind, that make full of inspiration by our words and set it to labour in the gods as our helper. 2. They who are powers increased of thee in the fierceness of thy flame and strength, yet impel us not on the path, they fall away to the divisions they cleave to the crookedness of a law that is other than thine.
3. Thee, O Will, we take to us as the priest of the offering and the accomplisher of a discerning knowledge ; holding for thee all our delights we call
Page-612 thee the ancient and supreme to our sacrifices by the word ; 4. Rightly and in such wise that, O forceful god, O perfect power of works, we may increase thee day by day, that we may have the Bliss, that we may have the Truth, that we may have perfect rapture by the Rays of the knowledge, that we may have perfect rapture by the Heroes of the Force. Page-613 THE PRACTICE OF TRUTH TO PRACTISE 1 If you live one sixth of what is taught you, you will surely attain the goal. 2 Since the important thing is to practise, it is in vain that one is near the master, if one does not practise 3 oneself; no profit of any kind comes out of it.—The mind may be compared to a precious stone which is pure and brilliant in itself, but hidden in a coarse coating of foulness. There is no reason to suppose that anyone will be able to clean and purify it simply by 4 gazing at it without any process of cleansing.—It is not difficult to know the good, but it is difficult to put it in practice 5 The man who knows the principles of right reason is less than the man who loves them and he less than the man who makes of them his delight and practises 6 them.—Better are those who have read than those who have studied little; preferable those who possess what they have read to those who have read and forgotten; more meritorious those who understand than those who know by heart; those to be more highly valued who do their duty than those who merely know it. 7 Hindu almanachs contain predictions about the annual rains foretelling how many centimetres will fall in the country; but by pressing the book which is so full of predictions of rain, you will extract not a drop of water. So also many good words are to be found in pious books, but the mere reading of them does not give spirituality.
1) Ramakrishna.— 2) Sutra in 42 articles.— 3) Açwaghosha.— 4} Tse King.— 5) Confucius: Un’yu: —0) Laws of Manu. — 7) Rarnakrishna. Page-614 8 There are two persons who have given themselves useless trouble and made efforts without profit. One is he who has amassed wealth and has not spent it and the other is he who has acquired knowledge and 9 has made no use of it.—The man of knowledge with- 10 out a good heart is like the bee without honey.—The 11 knowledge one does not practise is a poison.—Intelligence divorced from virtue is no longer intelligence.— 12 All good thoughts, good words, good actions are works of intelligence; all bad thoughts, bad words, bad actions 13 are works of unintelligence.—Freedom from pride and arrogance, harmlessness, patience, sincerity, purity, constancy, self-control, indifference to the objects of sense, absence of egoism,…freedom from attachment to son and wife and house, constant equality of heart towards desirable or undesirable events, love of solitude and withdrawal from the crowd, perpetual knowledge of the Supreme and study of the principles of thing Si this is knowledge ; what is contrary in nature to this, is ignorance. 14 One may say boldly that no man has a just perception of any truth, if that truth has not reacted on him so intensely that he is ready to be its martyr. * * * 15 Speak well, act better. 16 Apply thyself to think what is good, speak what is 17 good, do what is good. —— Let your words correspond with your actions and your actions with your 18-19 words.—Act as you speak.— As the perfect man speaks so he acts ; as he acts, so the perfect man speaks. It is because he speaks as he acts and acts as he speaks 20 that he is called the perfect,—Who is the superior man ? It is he who first puts his words in practice 21 and then speaks in agreement with his acts.—Ordinary men pronounce a wakeful of discourses on religion.
8) Sadi: Glisten.— 9) id.— 10) _ 12) Avesta.— 16) Avesta.— 17) Confucius.— 18) Lalita-Vistara*.— 19) Buddhist Scripture. — 20) Confucius.— 81) Ramakrishna. Page-615 but do not put a grain into practice, while the sage speaks little, but his whole life is religion put in- 22 to action.—Fine language not followed by acts in harmony with it is like a splendid flower brilliant in cob. our but without perfume. 23 To conform one’s conduct to one’s talk is an eminent virtue ; attain to that virtue and then you may 24 speak of the duties of others.—Thou wouldst exhort men to good ? but hast thou exhorted thyself ? Thou wouldst be useful to them ? Show by thy own example what men philosophy can make and do not prate 25 uselessly.—Improve others not by reasoning but by example. Let your existence, not your words be your preaching. 26 Make yourself loved by the example of your life.— 27 Bad example is a spiritual poisoning of men. * * * 28-29 The tree is known by its fruit.—Gold is tested by the fire, the good man by his acts, heroes by perils, the prudent man by difficult circumstances, friends and enemies by great needs. 30 Virtue shows itself in the lowest as well as in the 31 sublimes things.—Now that you have learned to know the truth, let your hearts henceforth enlightened take 32 pleasure in a conduct in conformity with it.—Be holy 33 in every kind of action.—Be unshakeable in the accomplishment of your duties great and small j lead a life proof against censure in accordance with the pre. cepts and let your words likewise be above reproach. 34 —The man who doeth these things shall live by 35 them.—Happy is his portion who knows and performs and has knowledge of the ways.
22) Dhammapada.— 23) Li-Ki .— 24) Epiclesis. — i5) Amyl. — 26) St. Vincent de Paul.— i8) Matthew.— 29) Mahabharata. — 30) Confucius.— 31) .Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king Page-616 CHAPTER XVIII THE SONS OF DARKNESS
We have seen, not once but repeatedly, that it is impossible to read into the story of the Angirases, Indra and Sarama, the cave of the Panis and the conquest of the Dawn, the Sun and the Cows an account of a political and military struggle between Aryan invaders and Dravidian cave-dwellers. It is a struggle between the severs of Light and the powers of Darkness; the cows are the illuminations of the Sun and the Dawn, they cannot be physical cows; the wide fear-free field of the Cows won by Indra
for the Aryans is the wide world of Swar, the world of the solar Illumination, the threefold luminous regions of Heaven. Therefore equally the Panis must be taken as powers of the cave of Darkness. It is quite true that the Panis are Dasyus or Das as; they are spoken of constantly by that name, they are described as the Dâsa Varna as opposed to the Arya Varna, and varna, colour, is the word used for caste or class in the
Brahmanas and later writings, although it does not therefore follow that it has that sense in the Rig Veda. The Dasyus are the haters of the sacred word; they are those who give not to the gods the gift or the holy wine, who keep their wealth of cows and horses and other treasure for themselves and do not give them to the seers; they are those who do not the sacrifice. We may, if we like, suppose that there, was a struggle between two different cults in India and that the Rishis took their Page-617 images from the physical struggle between the human representatives of these cults and applied them to the spiritual conflict, just as they employed the other details of their physical life to symbolise the spiritual sacrifice, the spiritual wealth, the spiritual battle and journey. But it is perfectly certain that in the Rig Veda at least it is the spiritual conflict and victory, not the physical battle and plunder of which they are speaking. It is either an uncritical or a disingenuous method to take isolated passages and give them a particular sense which will do well enough there only while ignoring the numerous other passages in which that sense is patently inapplicable. we must take as a whole all the references in the Veda to the Panis, their wealth, their characteristics, the victory of the Gods, the seers and the Aryans over them and adopt uniformly that conclusion which arises from all the passages thus taken together. When we follow this method we find that in many of these passages the idea of the Panis as human beings is absolutely impossible and that they are powers either of physical or of spiritual darkness ; in others that they cannot at all be powers of physical darkness, but may well be either human enemies of the god-seekers and sacrifices or else enemies of the spiritual Light ; in yet others that they cannot be either human enemies or enemies of the physical Light, but are certainly the enemies of the spiritual Light, the Truth and the Thought. From these data there can be only one conclusion, that they are always and only enemies of the spiritual Light,
We may take as the master-clue to the general character of these Dasyus the
Rik V. l 4.4, " Agni born shone out slaying the Dasyus, the darkness by the Light ; he found the Cows, the Waters, Swar," agnir jâto
arochata, ghnan dasyûn jyotishâ tamah, avindad gâ apah svah. There are two great divisions of the Dasyus, the Panis who intercept both the cows and the waters but are especially associated with the refusal of the cows, the
Vritra who intercept the waters and the light, but are especially associated with the withholding of the waters ; all Dasyus
Page-618 without exception stand in the way of the ascent to Swar and oppose the acquisition of the wealth by the Aryan seers. The refusal of the light is their opposition to the vision of Swar, svardrig, and the vision of the sun, to the supreme vision of knowledge, upamâ ketuh ; the refusal of the waters is their opposition to the abundant movement of Swar, svarvatîr apah, the movement or streaming of the Truth, r’itasya preshâ, r’itasya dhârâh; the opposition to the wealth-acquisition is their refusal of the abundant substance of Swar, vasu, dhana, vâja, hiran’yam, that great wealth which is found in the sun and in the waters, apsu sûrye mahat dhanam. Still since the whole struggle is between the Light and the Darkness, the Truth and the Falsehood, the divine Maya and the undivine, all the Dasyus alike are here identified with the Darkness ; and it is by the birth and shining of Agni that the Light is created with which he slays the Dasyus and the Darkness. The historical interpretation will not do at all here, though the naturalistic may pass if we isolate the passage and suppose the lighting of the sacrificial fire to be the cause of the daily sunrise 5
The opposition between the Aryans and the Panis or Dasyus is brought out in another hymn of the fifth Mandala and in III. 34 we have the expression Arya Varna. We must remember that the Dasyus have been identified with the Darkness; therefore the Aryans must be connected with the Light and we actually find that the light of the Sun is called in the Veda the Aryan Light in contradistinction evidently to the
Dâsa darkness. Vasishtha also speaks of the three Aryan peoples who are jyotiragrâh, led by the light, having the light in their front. The Aryan-Dasyu question can only be adequately treated by an exhaustive discussion in which all the relevant passages are
scrutinised and the difficulties faced, but for my present purpose this is a sufficient starting-point. We must remember also that we have in the
Page-619 which give us an additional clue. Now these three epithets of the solar light, dray, r’itam, hiran’yam are, I suggest, mutually illuminative and almost equivalent. The Sun is the Lord of Truth, therefore its light is the r’itamjyotih; this light of truth is that which the Aryan, god or mortal, possesses, and which constitutes his Arya-hood; again the epithet golden is constantly applied to the Sun and gold is in Veda probably the symbol of the substance of the truth, for its substance is the light which is the golden wealth found in Surya and in the waters of Swar, apa sûrye,—therefore we have the epithet hiran’yam jyotih. This golden or shining light is the hue, varna, of the truth; it is also the hue of the thoughts full of that illumination won by the Aryan, the cows who are bright in colour, çukra, çveta, the colour of Light; while the Dasyu, being a power of darkness, is black in hue. I suggest that the brightness of the light of the truth, âryam jyotih, is the Arya varna, the hue of these Aryans who are jyotiragrâh; the darkness of the night of the ignorance is the hue of the Panis, the Dâsa varna. In this way varna would come to mean almost the nature or else all those of that particular nature, the colour being the symbol of the nature; and that this idea was a current notion among the ancient Aryans seems to me to be shown by the later use of different coolers to distinguish the four castes, white, red, yellow and black.
The passage in V. 34. runs as follows. *’ He (Indra) desires not to ascend by the five and by the ten; he cleaves not to him who gives not the Soma even though he grow and increase; he overcomes him or else he slays in his impetuous movement; he gives to the god-seeker for his enjoyment the pen full of the Cows. Cleaver ( of the foe ) in the battle-shock, firm holder of the discus (or the wheel), averse from him who gives not the Soma but increaser of the Soma-giver, terrible is Indra and the tamer of all; Aryan, he brings into utter subjection the
Dâsa. He comes driving this enjoyment of the Pani, robbing him of it, and he
apportions entirely to the giver for his enjoyment the wealth rich in hero-powers (lit, in men, sûnaratn vasu,
Page-620 vira and nr’i being often used synonymously); that man who makes wroth the strength of Indra is held back manifold in a difficult journeying, (Durge * chana dhr’iyate a puru). When Maghavan has known in the shining cows the Two who are rich in wealth and have all forces, he growing in knowledge makes a third his helper and rushing impetuously looses upward the multitude of the cows (gavyam) by the help of his fighters." And the last Rik of the Sukta speaks of the Aryan ( god or man ) arriving at the highest knowledge-vision (upamâm ketum aryah), the waters in their meeting nourishing him and his housing a strong and brilliant force of battle, kshatram amavat tvesham. From what we already know of these symbols we can easily grasp the inner sense of the hymn. Indra, the Divine Mind-Power takes their secret wealth from the powers of the Ignorance with whom he refuses to ally himself even when they are rich and prosper; he gives the imprisoned ;reds of the illumined Dawn to the man of the sacrifice who desires the godheads. He is himself the Aryan who brings the life of the ignorance into complete subjection to the higher life so that it yields up to it all the wealth it holds. The use of the words dray and arya to signify the gods, not only in this but in other passages, tends to show in itself that the opposition of Arya and Dasyu is not at all a national or tribal or merely human distinction, but has a deeper significance. The fighters are certainly the seven Angirases; for they and not the Maruts, which is Sayana’s interpretation of satvaâhih, are Indra’s helpers in the release of the Cows. But the three persons whom Indra finds or comes to know by entering among the bright cows, by possessing the trooping illuminations of the Thought, are more difficult to fix. In all probability it is these three by whom the seven rays of the Angiras-know ledge are raised to ten so that they pass successfully through
* The Rishis pray always to the gods to make their path to the highest bliss easy of going and thorn less, sugar; durga is the opposite of this easy going, it is the path beset by manifold (puru ) dangers und suffering* and difficulties. Page-621 the ten months and release the sun and the cows; for it is after finding or knowing the two and getting, the help of the third that Indra releases the cows of the Panis. They may also be connected with the symbolism of the three Aryan peoples led by the light and the three luminous worlds of Swar; for the attainment of the supreme knowledge-vision, upamâ ketuh, is the final result of their action and this supreme knowledge is that which has the vision of Swar and stands in its three luminous worlds, rochanâni, as we find in III.2.14, svardriçam ketum divo rochanasthâm usharbudham, " the knowledge-vision that sees Swar, that stands in the shining worlds, that awakes in the dawn." In III. 34 Viçwamitra gives us the expression âray varna and at the same time the key to its psychological significance. Three verses of the hymn ( 8-10) run as follows ; " ( They hymn )the supremely desirable, the ever overcoming, the giver of strength who wins possession of Swar and the divine waters; the thinkers have joy in the wake of Indra who takes possession of the earth and the heaven. Indra wins possession of the Steeds, wins the Sun, wins the Cow of the many enjoyments; he wins the golden enjoyment, having slain the Dasyus he fosters (or protects) the Aryan varna; Indra wins the herbs and the days, the trees and the mid-world; he pierces Vala and impels forward the speaker of the words ; so he becomes the tamer of those who set against him their will in works, (abhikra-tun im)." We have here the symbolic elements of all the wealth won by Indra for the Aryan, and it includes the Sun, the days, the earth, the heavens, the middle world, the hordes, the growths of earth, herbs and trees ( vanaspatîn in the double sense lords of the forest and lords of enjoyment ); and we have as against Vala and his Dasyus the Aryan varna.
But in the verses that
precede ( 4-6 ) we have already the word varna as the hue of the Aryan thoughts, the thoughts that are true and full of light. " Indra, Swar-conquering, bringing to birth the days assailed and conquered by the desirers (the Angirases) these armies (of the
Dasyus); he made to shine for man the knowledge-vision Page-622 of the days ( ketum ahnâm), he found the Light for the vast enjoyment;…he made conscious in knowledge these thoughts for his adorer, he carried forward ( beyond the obstruction of the Dasyus) this bright varna of these ( thoughts ), achetayad dhiya imâ jaritre, pra imam varn’am atirach chhukram âsam. They set in action ( or, praise ) many great and perfect work* of the great Indra; by his strength he crushes, in his overwhelming energy, by his workings of knowledge ( mâyâbhih ) the crooked Dasyus."
We find here the Vedic phrase ketum ahnâm, the knowledge-vision of the days, by which is meant the light of the Sun of Truth that leads to the vast beatitude; for the " days " are those produced through Indra’s conquest of Swar for man following as we know upon his destruction of the Pani armies with the help of the Angirases and the ascent of the Sun and the shining Cows. It is for man and as powers of man that all this is done by the gods, not on their own account since they possess already;—for him that as the Nri, the divine Man or Purusha, Indra holds many strengths of that manhood, nr’ivad…naryâ
purûni; him he awakes to the knowledge of these thoughts which are symbolised as the shining cows released from the Pani; and the shining hue of these thoughts
çukram varn’am âsâm,
is evidently the same as that çukra or
great Aryan hue which is mentioned in verse 9.
Indra carries forwarder increases the " colour " of these thoughts beyond the opposition of the Panis, pra varn’am atirach
chhukram; in doing so he slays the Dasyus and protects or fosters and increases the Aryan colour ",
hatvî dasyûn pra âryam varn’am âvat. Moreover these Dasyus are the crooked ones, vr’ijin’ân and are conquered by Indra’s works or forms of knowledge, his "maya"s by which, as we are elsewhere told, he overcomes the opposing " maya"s
of the Dasyus, Vritra or Vala. The straight and the crooked are constantly synonymous in Veda with the truth and the falsehood. Therefore it is clear that these Pani Dasyus are crooked powers of the falsehood and ignorance who set their false-knowledge, their false strength, will and works against the true knowledge, the true strength, will and works
of Page-623 the gods and the Aryans. The triumph of the Light is the triumph of the divine knowledge of the Truth against the darkness of this false or demoniac knowledge; that victory is the ascent of the Sun, the birth of the Days, the advent of the Dawn, the release of the herds of the shining Rays and their mounting to the world of Light. That the cows are the thoughts of the Truth we are told clearly enough in IX. Ill, a hymn to Soma. " By this brilliant light he, purifying himself, breaks through all hostile powers by his self-yoked horses, as if by the self-yoked horses of the Sun. He shines, a stream of the out-pressed Soma, purifying himself, luminous, the brilliant One, when he encompasses all forms ( of things ) with the speakers of the Rik, with the seven-mouthed speakers of the Rik (the Angiras powers). Thou, O Soma findest that wealth of the Panis; thou by the Mothers (the cows of the Panis, frequently so designed in other hymns) makest thyself bright in thy own home ( Swar ), by the thoughts of the Truth in thy home, sam mâtribhih marjayase sva â dama r’itasya dhîtibir dame. As if the Sâma (equal fulfilment, samâne ûrve, in the level wideness) of the higher world (parâvatah), is that (Swar) where the thoughts (of the Truth) take their delight. By those shining ones of the triple world (or triple elemental nature) he holds the wide manifestation (of knowledge), shining he holds the wide manifestation." We see that these cows of the Panis by whom Soma becomes clear and bright in his own home, the hone of Agni and the other gods, which we know to be the vast Truth of Swar, r’itam br’ihat, these shining cows who have in them the triple nature of the supreme world, tridhâtubhir arushînbhir, and by whom Soma holds the birth or wide manifestation of that Truth*, are the thoughts which realise the Truth. This Swar with its three shining worlds in whose wideness there is the equal fulfilment
* Vuyah. cf. VI. 21 4, whore it is said that Inlay who has the knowledge and who upholds our words and is by the words increased in the sacrifice, indram yovidâno ‘gîrvânasam gîrbhir yajanv’iddham, forms by the Sun into that which has manifestation of knowledge the darkness which had extended itself and in which there was no knowledge, sa it tamo avayunam tatanvat sûryen’a vayunavach chakâra. Page-624 of the tridhâtu, a phrase often used for the supreme triple principle forming the triune highest world, tisrah parâvatah, is elsewhere described as the wide and fear force pasture in which the Cows range at will and take their delight (ran’yanti) and here too it is that region where the thoughts of the Truth take their delight, yatra ran’anti dhîtayah. And it is said in the next verse that the divine chariot of Soma follows, getting knowledge, the supreme direction and labours forward, having vision, by the rays, purve any paradigm yeti chekitat, sam raçmibhir yatate darçato ratho divyo darçato rathah. This supreme direction is evidently that of the divine or vast Truth; these rays are evidently the rays of the Dawn or Sun of Truth; they are the cows concealed by the Panis, the illumined thought: dhiyah of the bright hue, r’itasya dhîtayah.
All the internal evidence of the Veda wherever this image of the Panis, the Cows, the
Angirases occur establishes invariably the same conclusion. The Panis are the withholders of the thoughts of the Truth, dwellers in the darkness without knowledge ( tamo avayunam ) which
Tundra and the Angirases by the Word, by the Sun replace with Light to manifest in its stead the wideness of the Truth. It is not with physical weapons but with words that Indra fights the Panis ( VI. 39-2 ), panînr vachobhir abhi yodhad indrah. It will be enough to translate without comment the hymn in which this phrase occurs so as to show finally the nature of this symbolism. " Of this divine and rapturous seer (
Soma ), bearer of the sacrifice, this honeyed speaker with the illumined thought, O god, join to us, to the speaker of the word the impulsions that are led by the cows of light (
isho goagrah ). He it was who desired the shining ones ( the cows, usrâh) all about the hill, truth-yoked, yoking his car with the thoughts of the Troth, r’itadhîtibhir r’itayug yujânah; ( then ) Indra broke the unbroken hill-level of Vala, by the words he fought
against the Panis. He it was (
Soma ) who as the Moon-Power (Indu) day and night and through the years made the lightless nights to shine out, and they held the vision of the days; he
crested the dawns
puma in their birth,
Page-625 He it was becoming luminous who made full of light the lightless ones ; he made the many (dawns ) shine by the Truth, he went with horses yoked by the Truth, with the wheel that finds Swar, satisfying ( with the wealth ) the doer of works." It is always the thought, the Truth, the word that is associated with the Cows of the Panis; by the words of Indra the Divine Mind-Power those who withhold the cows are conquered; that which was dark becomes light; the chariot drawn by the horses yoked by the Truth finds ( by knowledge, svarvidâ nâbhinâ )the luminous vast-nesses of being and consciousness and delight now concealed from our vision. " By the brahma Indra pierces Vala, conceals the darkness, makes Swar visible ( II. 24. 3 )," ud gâ âjad abhinad brahman’â valam agûhat tamo vyachakshayat svah.
The whole Rig-Veda is a triumph-chant of the powers of Light, and their ascent by the force and vision of the Truth to its possession in its source and seat where it is free from the
attack of the falsehood. ‘By Truth the cows ( illumined thoughts) enter into the Truth; labouring towards the Truth the Truth one conquers; the aggressive force of the Truth seeks the cows of Light and goes breaking through (the enemy); for Truth the two wide ones ( Heaven and Earth ) become multitudinous and deep, for Truth the two supreme Mothers give their yield," r’itena gâva
r’itam â viveçuh; r’itam yemâna r’itam id
vanoti, r’i_ tasya çushman turayâ u gavyah; ritâya pritvî bahule
gabhîre, r’itâya dhenû parame duhâte.
Page-626 IX But the progress of the imperial idea from the artificial and constructive stage to the position of a realised psychological truth controlling the human mind with the same force and vitality which now distinguish the national idea above all other group-*natives, is a possibility, not a certainty. It is even no more than a vaguely nascent possibility and so long as lf Chas not emerged from this inchoate condition in which it is at the mercy of the much folly of statesmen, the formidable pa scions of great human masses, the obstinate self-interest of established egoisms, we can have no surety that it will not even now die still-born. And if so, what other possibility can there be of the unification of mankind by political and administrative means ? That can only come about if either the old ideal of a single world-empire be by developments not now apparently possible converted into an accomplished fact or if the opposite ideal of a free association of free nations overcome the hundred and one powerful obstacles which stand in the way of its practical realisation.
The idea of a world-empire imposed by sheer force is in direct opposition, as we have seen, to the new conditions which the progressive nature of things has introduced into the modern world. Nevertheless let us isolate these new conditions from the problem and admit the theoretical possibility of a single great nation imposing its political rule and its predominant culture on the whole earth as Rome
Page-627 and on Gaul and Britain. Or let us even suppose that one of-the great nations might possibly succeed in overcoming all its rivals by force and diplomacy and afterwards, respecting the culture and separate internal life of its subject nations, secure its sway by the attraction of a world-peace, of beneficent administration and of an unparalleled organisation of human knowledge and human resources for the amelioration of the present state of mankind. We have to see whether this theoretical possibility is at all likely to encounter the conditions by which it can conceit itself into a practical possibility, and if we consider, we shall find that no such conditions exist, on the contrary all are against the realisation of such a colossal dream.
It is commonly supposed that the impulse which brought Germany to her present struggle with the world was rooted in even such a dream of empire. How far there was any such conscious intention in her
denting minds, is a question open to some doubt ; but it is certain that if she had prevailed in the war as she had first expected, the situation created would inevitably have led her to the greater attempt; for she would have enjoyed a dominant position such as no nation has yet possessed during the known period of the world’s history; and the ideas which have recently governed the German intellect, the idea of her mission, her race superiority, the immeasurable excellence of her culture, her science, her organisation of life and her divine right to lead the earth and to impose on it her will and her ideals, these with the all-grasping spirit of modern commercialism would have inevitably impelled her to undertake universal domination as a divinely given task. The fact that a modern nation and indeed the nation most advanced in that efficiency, that scientific
utilizations of science, that spirit of organisation, State-help and intelligent dealing with national and social problems and ordering of economic well-being which Europe understands by the word civilisation,—the fact that such a nation should be possessed and driven by such ideas and impulses is certainly a proof that the old gods are not dead, the old ideal of dominant Force conquering, governing and
Page-628 perfecting the world is still a vital reality and has not let go its hold on the psychology of the human race. Nor is there any certainty that the present War will kill these forces and this ideal ; for the war will be decided by force meeting force, by organisation triumphing over organisation, by the superior or at any rate the more fortunate utilizations of those very weapons which have constituted the real strength of this great aggressive Power. The defeat of Germany by her own weapons would not of itself kill the spirit now incarnate in Germany ; it might well lead merely to a new incarnation of it in some other race or empire and the whole battle would then have to be fought over again. So long as the old gods are alive, the breaking or depression of the body which they animate is a small matter; they know well how to transmigrate. Germany overthrew the Napoleonic spirit in France in 1813 and broke the remnants of her European supremacy in 1870; the same Germany became the incarnation of that which it had overthrown. The phenomenon is easily capable of renewal on a more formidable scale.
Nor is the present failure of Germany any more a
proof of the impossibility of this imperial dream than the previous failure of Napoleon. For the Teutonic combination lacked all the necessary conditions except one for the success of so vast an aim. It had the strongest military, scientific and national organisation which any people has yet developed, but it lacked the gigantic driving impulse which could alone bring an attempt so colossal to fruition, the impulse which France possessed in a much greater degree in the Napoleonic era; it lacked the successful diplomatic genius which creates the indispensable conditions of success ; it lacked the companion force of sea-power which is even more necessary than military superiority to the
endeavor of world-domination and by its geographical position and the encircling position of its enemies it was especially open to all the disadvantages which must accompany the mastery of the seas by its natural adversary. The combination of overwhelming sea-power with overwhelming land-power can alone bring so vast Page-629 an enterprise into the domain of real possibility; Rome itself could only hope for something like a world-empire when it had destroyed the superior maritime force of Carthage. Yet so entirely did German statesmanship miscalculate the problem that it entered into the struggle with the predominant maritime power of the world already ranked in the coalition of its enemies. Instead of concentrating its efforts against this one natural adversary, instead of utilising the old enmity of Russia and France against England, its maladroit and brutal diplomacy had already leagued these old enemies against itself ; instead of isolating England, it had succeeded only in isolating itself and the manner in which it began and conducted the war still farther separated it morally and gave an add. ed force to the physical isolation effected by the British blockade. In its one-sided pursuit of a great military con" castration op central Europe and Turkey it bad even wantonly alienated the one maritime Power which might have been on its side.
It is conceivable that the imperial enterprise may be renewed at some future date in the world’s history by a nation better situated, better equipped, gifted with a subtler diplomatic genius, a
nation as much favoured by circumstances, temperament and fortune as was Rome in the ancient world. What then would be the necessary conditions for Its success ? In the first place its aim would have small chances of prospering if it could not repeat that extraordinary good luck by which Rome was enabled to meet its possible rivals and enemies one by one and avoid a successful coalition of hostile forces. What possibility is there of such a fortunate progress in a world so alert and instructed as the modern where everything is known, spied on; watched by jealous eyes and active minds under the conditions of modern publicity and swift world-wide communication ? The mere possession of a dominant position is enough to set the whole world on Its guard and concentrate Its hostility against the power whose secret ambitions it instinctively feels. Therefore such a fortunate succession would only seem to be possible if in the first place it Page-630 were carried out half unconsciously without any fixed and visible ambition on the part of the advancing power to awaken the general jealousy and. secondly, by a series of favour ing occurrences which would lead so near to the decried end that it would be within the grasp before those who could still prevent it had awakened to its possibility. If for instance there were a series of struggles between the four or five great powers now dominating the world each of which left the aggressor broken without hope of recovery and without any new power arising to take its place, it is conceivable that at the end one of them would be left in a position of such natural predominance gained without any deliberate aggression, gained in resisting the aggression of others as to put world-empire naturally into its grasp. But with the present conditions of life, especially with the ruinous nature of modern war, such a succession of struggles, quite natural and possible in former times, seems to be beyond the range of actual possibilities.
We must then assume that the power moving towards world-domination would at some time find inevitably a coalition formed against it by almost all the powers capable of opposing it and this with the sympathy of the world at their back. Given even the happiest diplomacy such a moment seems inevitable. It
must then possess such a combined and perfectly organised military and naval predominance as to succeed in this otherwise unequal
struggle. But where is the modern empire that can hope to arrive at such a predominance ? Of those that already exist Russia might well arrive one day at an overwhelming military power to which the present force of Germany would be a trifle ; but that it should combine with this force by land a corresponding
sea power is unthinkable. England has an overwhelming naval predominance which it might so increase under certain conditions as to defy the world in arms ; but it could not even with conscription and the aid of all its Colonies compass anything like a similar force by land,— unless indeed it created Conditions under which it could
tu’ life all the military possibilities of India and Egypt. Even then we have only to think of the form id- Page-631 able masses and powerful empires that it must be prepared to meet and we shall see that the creation of this double predominance is a contingency which the facts themselves show to be chimerical. Given even inferior numbers a nation might conceivably prevail over the coalition of its opponents by a superior science and a more skilful use of its resources. Germany relied on its superior science for the successful issue of its enterprise; and the principle on which it proceeded was sound. But in the modern world Science is a common possession and even if one nation steals such a march on the others as to leave them in a position of great inferiority at the beginning, yet experience has shown that given a little time,—and a powerful coalition is not likely to be crushed at the first blow,—the lost ground can be rapidly made up or at least methods of Defence developed which will largely neutralist the advantage gained. For success, therefore, we should have to suppose the development by the ambitious nation or empire of a new science or new discoveries not shared by the rest which would place it in something like the position of superiority over greater numbers which Cortes and Pizarro enjoyed over the Aztecs and Peruvians. The superiority of discipline and organisation which gave the advantage to the ancient Romans or to the Europeans in India is no longer sufficient.
We see, therefore, that the conditions for
the successful pursuit of world-empire are such that we need hardly take this
mode of unification as within the bounds of practical possibility. That it may
again be attempted, is possible; that it will fail, may almost be prophesied.
Certainly we have to take into account the surprises of Nature, the large field
we have to allow to the unexpected in her dealings with us. Therefore we cannot
pronounce this consummation an absolute impossibility. On the contrary, if that
be her intention, she will suddenly or gradually create the necessary means and
conditions. But even if it were to come about, the empire so created would have’
so many forces to contend with it that its maintenance would be more difficult
than its creation and either its early collapse Page-632
would bring the whole problem again into the field for a better solution or else it would have, by stripping itself of the elements of force and domination which inspired its attempt, to contradict the essential aim of its great effort. That however belongs to another side of our subject which we must postpone for the moment. At present we may say that if the gradual unification of the world by the growth of great heterogeneous empires forming true psychological unities is only a vague and nascent
possibility, its unification by a single forceful, imperial domination has passed or is passing out of the range of possibilities and can only come about by a new development of the unexpected out of the infinite surprises of Nature.
Page-633 Mankind thinks naturally in extremes or else reconciles by a patchwork and compromise. Whether he makes a fetish of moderation or surrenders himself to the enthusiasm of the single idea, the human being misses always truth of vision and the right pitch of action because instead of seeing, feeling and becoming in obedience to his nature like other animate existences he tries always to measure things by a standard he has set up in his intelligence. But it is the character of his intelligence that it finds it an easy task to distinguish and separate but is clumsy in combining. When it combines, it tends to artificially and falsify. It feels at ease in pursuing a single idea to its logical consequences and in viewing things from a single standpoint ; but to harmonies different ideas in action and to view the facts from different standpoints is contrary to its native impulse ; therefore it does that badly, with an ill grace and without mastery. Oftenest it makes an incongruous patchwork rather than a harmony. The human mind is strong and swift in analysis ; it synthesizes with labour and imperfectly and does not feel at home in its syntheses. It divides, opposes and placed between the oppositions it creates becomes an eager partisan of one side or another ; but to think wisely and impartially and with a certain totality is irksome and disgusting to the normal human being.
All human action as all human thought suffers from these disabilities. For it is seduced by a trenchant idea which it follows without proper attention to collateral
Page-634 issues, to necessary companion ideas, to the contrary forces in operation or else it regards these merely as enemies, brands them as pure falsehood and evil and strives with more or less violence to crush them out of existence. Then it sees other ideas which it attempts to realise in turn either adding them to its past notions and possessions or else rejecting these entirely for the new light ; it makes a fresh war and a new clearance and denies its past work in the interest of a future attainment. But it has also its repentances, its returns, its recall and enthroning of banished gods and even of lifeless ghosts and phantoms to which it gives a temporary and false appearance of life. And on the way it has continually its doubts, scruples, hesitations, its portentous assumptions of a sage moderation and a gradual and cautious advance. But human moderation is usually a wiseacre and a botcher ; it sews a patch of new velvet on old fustian or of new fustian on old velvet and admires its deplorable handiwork. And its cautious advance means an accumulation of shams, fictions and dead conventions till the burden of falsehood becomes too great for life to bear and a violent revolution is necessary to deliver the soul of humanity out of the immobilizing cerements of the past. Such is the type of our progress; it is the advance of an ignorant and purblind but always light-attracted spirit, half-animal, half-god, stumbling forward through the bewildering jungle of its own errors.
This characteristic of human mentality shows itself in the opposition we create between conservation and progress. Nothing in the universe can really stand still because everything there is a mould of Time and the very essence of Time is change by a
movement forward. It is true that the world’s movement is not in a straight line ; there are cycles, there are spirals; but still it circles, not round the same point always, but round an ever advancing centre and therefore it never returns exactly upon its old path and never goes really backward. As for standing still it is an impossibility, a delusion, a fiction. Only the spirit is stable; the soul and body of things are in eternal Page-635 motion. And in this motion there are the three determining powers of the past, future and present,—the present a horizontal and constantly shifting line without breadth between a vast realised infinity that both holds back and impels and a vast unrealised infinity that both repels and attracts. The past is a both a drag and a force for progress. It is all that has created the present and a great part of the force that is creating the future. For the past is not dead; its forms are gone and had to go, otherwise the present would not have come into being; but its soul, its power, its essence lives veiled in the present and ever-accumulating, growing, deepening will live on in the future. Every human being is in himself all the past of his own race, of humanity and of himself ; these three things determine his starting-point and pursue him through his life’s progress. It is in the force of this past, in the strength which its huge conservations give to him that he confronts the un-illumined abysses of the future and plunges forward into the depths of its unrealised infinities. But also it is a drag, partly because man afraid of the unknown clings to the old forms of which he is sure, the old foundations which feel so safe under his feet, the old props round which so many of his attachments and associations cast their tenacious tendrils, but also partly because the forces of the past keep their careful hold on him so as to restrain him in his uncertain course and prevent the progress from becoming a precipitation.
The future, repels us even while it irresistibly attracts. The repulsion lies partly in our own natural recoil from the unknown, because every step into this unknown is a wager between life and death; every decision we make may mean either the destruction or the greater fulfilment of what we now are, of the name and form to which we are attached. But also it lies in the future itself; for there, governing that future, there are not only powers which call us to fulfil them and attract us with an irresistible force but other powers which have to be
conjured and do not desire to yield themselves. The future is a sphinx with two minis, an
Page-636 energy which offers itself and denies, gives itself and resists, seeks to enthrone us and seeks to slay. But the conquest has to be attempted, the wager has to be accepted. We have to face the future’s offer of death as well as its offer of life, and it need not alarm us, for it is by constant death to our old names and forms that we shall live most vitally in greater and newer forms and names. Go on we must; for if we do not, Time itself will force us forward in spite of our fancied immobility. And this is the most pitiable and dangerous movement of all. For what can be more pitiable than to be borne helplessly forward clinging to the old that disintegrates in spite of our efforts and shrieking frantically to the dead ghosts and dissolving fragments of the past to save us alive ? And what can be more dangerous than to impose immobility on that which is in its nature mobile ? This means an increasing and horrible rottenness; it means an attempt to persist on as a rotten and stinking corpse instead of a living and self-renewing energetic creature. The greatest spirits are therefore those who have no fear of the future, who accept its challenge and its wager; they have that sublime trust in the God or Power that guides the world, that high audacity of the human soul to wrestle with the infinite and realise the impossible, that wise and warrior confidence in its ultimate destiny which mark the Avatars and prophets and great innovators and renovators. If we consider carefully we shall se3 that the past is indeed a huge force of conservation, but of conservation that is not immobile, that on the contrary offers itself as material for change and new realisation; that the present is the constant change and new actual realisation which the past desires and compels; and that the future is that force of new realisation not yet actual towards which the past was moving and for the sake of which it lived. The" we perceive that there is no real opposition between these three; we see that they are parts of a single movement, a sort of Trinity of Vishnu-Brahma-Maheshwara fulfilling by an inseparable action the one Deity. Yet the human mind in its mania of division and opposition seeks to set Page-637 them at strife and ranges humanity into various camps, the partisans of the past, the partisans of the present, the partisans of the future, the partisans of all sorts of compromises between the three forces. Nature makes good use of the struggle between these partisans and her method is necessary in our present state of passionate ignorance and egoistic obstinacy; but none the less is it from the point of view of a higher knowledge a pitiably ignorant struggle.
The partisans of the future call themselves the party of progress, the children of light and denounce the past as ignorant, evil, a mass of errors and abuses; their view alone has the monopoly of the light, the truth, the good— a light, good and truth which will equally be denounced as error and evil by succeeding generations. The partisans of the present look with horror upon all progress as an impious and abominable plunge into error and evil and degeneration and ruin; for them the present is the culmination of humanity,—as previous " present "times were for all the preceding generations and as the future which they abhor will be
for these unprogressive souls if they should then reincarnate; they will then
defend it with the same passion and asperity against another future as they now attack it in the interests of the present. The partisans of the past are of two kinds, The first admit the defects of the present but still support it in so far as it still cherishes the principles of the high, perfect, faultless, adorable past, that golden age of the race or community, and because even if somewhat degenerate, its
forms are a bulwark against the impiety of progress; if they admit any change, it is in the direction of the past that they seek it. A second kind condemn the present root and
branch as degenerate, hateful, horrible, vicious, accursed ; they erect a
past form a s the hope of a humanity returning to the wisdom of its
forefathers. And to such quarrels of children the intellectuals and the leaders
of thought and faith lend the power o f the specious or moving word and
the striking idea and the emotional fervour or religious ardour which t hey
conceive to be the very voice and light and force of Truth itself in its
utter self-revelation , Page-638
The true thinker can dispense with the éclat which attaches to the leader of partisans. He will strive to see this great divine movement as a whole, to know in its large lines the divine intention and goal in it without seeking to fix arbitrarily its details; he will strive to understand the greatness and profound meaning if the past without attaching himself to its forms, for he knows that forms must change and only the formless endures and that the past can never be repeated, but only its essence, its power, its soul of good and its massed impulse towards a greater self-fulfilment preserved; he will accept the actual
realisation of the present as a stage and nothing more, keenly appreciating its defects, self-satisfied errors, presumptuous
pretensions because these are the chief enemies of progress, but not ignoring the truth and good that it has gained; and he will sound the future to understand what the Divine in it is seeking to realise not only at the present moment, not only in the next generation but beyond, and for that he will speak, strive, if need be battle, since battle is the method still used by Nature in humanity, even while all the while he knows that there is more yet beyond beside which, when it comes to light, the truth he has seized will seem erroneous and
limited. Therefore he will act without presumption and egoism, knowing that his own errors and those which he combats are alike necessary forces in that labour and movement of human life towards the growing Truth and Good by which there increases
shadowy the figure of a far-off divine Ideal. Page-639 Some think it presumption to believe in a Providence is not only that which saves me from the shipwreck in which everybody else has foundered. Providence is also that which while all others are saved snatches away my last plank of safety and drowns me in the solitary ocean. The delight of victory is sometimes less than the attraction of struggle and suffering; nevertheless the laurel and not the cross should be the aim of the conquering human soul. Souls that do not aspire are God’s failures; but Nature is pleased and loves to multiply them because they assure her of stability and prolong her empire. Those who are poor, ignorant, ill-born or ill-bred are not the common herd ; the common herd are all who are satisfied with pettiness and an average humanity. Help men but do not pauperize them of their energy; lead and instruct men, but see that their initiative and originality remain intact; take others into thyself but give them in return the full godhead of their nature. He who can do this is the leader and the guru. God has made the world a field of battle and filled it with the trampling of combatants and the cries of a great wrestle and struggle. Would you filch His peace without paying the price He has fixed for it ? Distrust a perfect-seeming success, but when having succeeded thou findest still much to do, rejoice and go forward; for the labour is long before the real perfection.
There is no more benumbing error than to mistake a
stage for the goal or to linger too long in a resting-place. Page-640 |