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CHAPTER XXIII THE DOUBLE SOUL IN MAN Wince shall he have grief, how shall have deluded who sees everywhere the Oneness ? Isha Upanishad He who knows this self who is the eater of the honey of existence and the lord of what is and shall be, has thence forward no shrinking. Hatha Upanishad ARGUMENT
[The ascent of Life is in its nature the ascent of the divine Delight in things from its dumb conception in Matter to its luminous consummation in Spirit. Like the other original divine principles, this Delight also must be represented in us by a cosmic principle corresponding to it in the apparent existence. It is the soul or psychic being.—As there is a subliminal luminous mind behind our surface mind, a subliminal life behind our mortal life, a subliminal wider corporeality behind our gross body, so we have a double soul, the superficial desire-soul and the true psychic entity.—The superficial in us is the small and egoistic, the subliminal is in touch with the universal. So our subliminal or true psychic being is open to the universal delight of things, the superficial
Page-641 desire-soul is shut off from it. It feels the outward touches of things, not their essence and therefore not their resort true touch; and because it cannot reach the universal world-soul, it cannot find its own true soul which is one with the world-soul.—The desire-soul returns the triple response of pleasure, pain and indifference, but the psychic being behind it has the equal delight of all its experiences; it compels the desire-soul to more and more experience and to a change of its values. By bringing this soul to the surface we can overcome the duality of pleasure and pain, as is actually done in certain directions of experience by the artist. Nature-lover, God-lover, etc. each in his own fashion. But the difficulty is to do it in the desire-soul at its centre where it comes into contact with practical living; for here the human mind shrinks from the application of the principle of equality.—To bring this subliminal soul to the surface is not enough; for it is open passively to the world-soul but cannot possess the. world. Those who thus arrive, become close to the universal delight, but not masters of life. For there are two principles of order and mastery, one false, the ego-sense, the other true, the Lord who is one in the man v. By merely suppressing the ego-sense in the impersonal delight we gain the centre less Impersonal and are fulfilled in our static being but not in our active being. We must therefore gain the other centre in the Supermind by which we shall conscious-lv posse? s and not merely undergo the delight of the One in His universal existence. ]
The first status of Life we found to be characterise by a dumb inconscient will in the material or atomic existence not free and possessor of itself or its works or their results but entirely possessed by the universal movement in which it arises as the seed of individuality. The stamp of the second status was desire eager to possess but limited in capacity ; the bud of the third Love which seeks both to possess and be possessed, to receive and to give itself; the flower of the fourth we conceive as the fulfilment of the original will, fulfilment of the intermediate dc-ire, fulfilment of the conscious interchange of Love by the
unification
Page-642 of the state of the possessor and possessed in the divine unity of souls which is the foundation of the supra-mental existence. If we scrutinise these terms carefully we shall see that they are shapes and stages of the soul’s seeking for the individual and universal delight of things; the ascent of Life is in its nature the ascent of the divine Delight in things from its dumb conception in Matter to its luminous consummation in Spirit. The world being what is, it could not be otherwise. For the world is a masked from of Sachchidananda and the nature of the consciousness’ of Sachchidananda and therefore the thing in which His force must always find and achieve itself is-divine Bliss, an omnipresent self-delight. Life being a movement of His conscious-force, the secret of all its movements must be a hidden delight inherent in all things which is at once cause, motive and object of its activities; and if by reason of egoistic division that delight is missed, if it is held back behind a veil, if it is represented as its own opposite, even as being is masked in death, consciousness figures as the inconscient and force mocks itself with the guise of incapacity, then that which lives cannot be satisfied, cannot either rest from the movement or fulfil the movement except by laying hold on this universal delight which is at once the secret total delight of its own being and the original, all-encompassing, all-informing, all-upholding delight of the transcendent and immanent Sachchidananda. To seek for delight is therefore the fundamental impulse and sense of Life ; to find and possess and fulfil it is its whole motive.
But where in us is this principle of Delight ? through what term of our being does it manifest and fulfil itself in the action of the cosmos as the principle of Conscious-Force manifests and uses Life for its cosmic term and the principle of Supermind manifests and uses mind? We have distinguished a fourfold principle of divine Being creative of the universe,—Existence, Conscious-Force, Bliss and Supermind. Supermind, we have seen, is omnipresent in the material cosmos but veiled; it is behind the actual
Page-643 phenomenon of things and expresses itself there effectively-through its own subordinate term, Mind. This divine Conscious-Force is omnipresent in the material cosmos, but veiled, operative secretly behind the actual phenomenon of things and expresses itself there characteristically through its own subordinate term Life. And, though we have not yet examined separately the principle of Matter, yet we can already see that. the divine All-existence also is omnipresent in the material cosmos, but veiled, hidden behind the actual phenomenon of things, and manifests itself there initially through its own subordinate term, Substance, Form of being or Matter. Then, equally, the principle of divine Bliss must be omnipresent in the cosmos, veiled indeed and possessing itself behind the actual phenomenon of things, but still manifested in us through some subordinate principle of its own in which it is hidden and by which it must be found and achieved.
That term is something in us which we sometimes call in a special sense the soul,—that is so say, the psychic principle which is not precisely the life or the mind, much less the body, but is the opening and flowering of the essence of all these to their own peculiar delight of self, to light, to love, to joy and to a refined purity of being. In reality, however, there is a double soul or psychic term in us, as every other cosmic principle in us is also double. For we have two minds, one the surface mind of our expressed evolutionary ego, the superficial mentality created by us in our emergence out of Matter, another a subliminal mind which is not hampered by our actual mental life and its strict limitations, something large, powerful and luminous, the true mental being behind that superficial form of mental personality which we mistake for ourselves. So also we have two lives, one outer, involved in the physical body, bound by its past evolution in Matter, which lives and was born and will die, the other a subliminal force of life which is not cabined between the narrow boundaries of our physical birth and death but is our true vital being behind the form of living which we ignorantly take for our real
Page-644 existence. Even in the matter of our being the, is this duality ; for behind our body we have a subtler material existence which provides the substance not only of our physical but of our vital and mental sheaths and is therefore our real substance supporting this physical form which we erroneously imagine to be the whole body of our spirit. So too we have our double psychic" entity in us, the surface desire-soul which works in our vital cravings, our emotions, aesthetic faculty and mental seeking for power, knowledge and happiness and a subliminal psychic entity, a pure power of light, love, joy and refined essence of being which is our true soul behind the outer form of psychic existence we so often dignify by the name. It is when some reflection of this larger and purer psychic entity comes to the surface that we say of a man, he has a soul), and when it is absent in his outward psychic life that we say of him, he has no soul.
The external forms are those of our small
egoistic existence ; the subliminal are those of our true individuality.
Therefore these latter are that concealed part of our being in which our
individuality is close to our universality, touches it, is in constant relation
and commerce with it. The subliminal mind in us is open to the universal
knowledge of the cosmic Mind, the subliminal life in us to the universal force
of the cosmic Life, the subliminal physicality in us to the universal force-formation of cosmic Matter ; the thick walls which divide from these things our surface mind, life, body and which Nature has to pierce with so much trouble, so imperfectly and by so many skilful-clumsy physical devices, are there only a rarefied medium at once of separation and communication. So too is the subliminal soul in us open to the universal delight which the cosmic soul takes in its own existence and in the existence of the myriad souls that represent it and in the operations of mind, life and matter by which Nature lends herself to their play and development ; but from this cosmic delight the surface soul is shut off by egoistic walls of great thickness which have indeed gates
Page-645 of penetration, but in their entry through them the touches of the divine cosmic Delight become dwarfed, distorted or have to come in masked as their own opposites. It follows that in this surface or desire-soul there is no true soul-life, but a psychic deformation and wrong reception of the touch of things. The malady of the world is that the individual cannot rind his real soul and the root-cause of this malady is again that he cannot meet in his embrace of things outward the real soul of the world in which he lives. He seeks to find there the essence of being, the essence of power, the essence of conscious-existence, the essence of delight, but receives instead a crowd of contradictory touches and impressions. If he could find that essence, he would find also the one universal being, power, conscious existence and delight even in this throng of touches and impressions ,the contradictions of what seems would be reconciled in the unity and harmony of the Truth that reaches out to us in them. At the same time he would find his own true soul and self, because his soul and the soul of the world are one. But this he cannot do because of the egoistic ignorance in the mind of thought, the heart of emotion, the sense which responds to the touch of things not by a courageous and whole-hearted me. brace of the world, but by a tux of reaching and shrink-ings, eager rushes and panic or angry recoils according as the touch pleases or displeases, satisfies or dissatisfies. It is the desire-soul that by its wrong reception of life becomes the cause of a triple misinterpretation of the rasa, the delight in things rendered unequally into the three terms of pleasure, pain and indifference.
We have seen, when we considered the Delight of Existence in its relations to the world, that there is no absoluteness or essential validity in our standards of pleasure and pain and indifference, that they are entirely determined by the subjectivity of the receiving soul and that the degree of either pleasure and pain can be heightened to a
maximum or depressed 10 a minimum or even effaced entirely in its apparent nature. Pleasure can become
pain Page-646 or pain pleasure because really they are the same thing differently reproduced in the sensations and emotions. Indifference is really either the inattention of the surface desire-soul in its mind, sensations, emotions, and cravings to the rasa of things, or its refusal to give any surface response or, again, its driving and crushing down of the pleasure or t1"e pain by the will into the neutral tint of unacceptance. In all three cases what happens is that either there is a positive refusal or a negative uneasiness or incapacity to render or in any way represent positively on the surface something that is yet active subliminally. For, as we now know by psychological observation and experiment that the subliminal mind receives and remembers all those touches of things which the surface mind ignores, so also we shall find that the subliminal soul responds to the rasa of these things which the surface desire-soul rejects or ignores. Self-knowledge is in possible unless we go behind our surface existence which is a mere result of selective outer" experiences, an imperfect sounding-board or a hasty, incompetent and fragmentary translation of a little out of the much that we are,—unless we go behind this and send down our plummet into the subconscient and open our self to the superconscient so as to know their relation to our surface being. For between these three things our existence moves. The superconscient in us is one with the self and soul of the world and is not governed by any phenomenal diversity; it possesses therefore the truth of things and the delight of things in their plenitude. The subconscient, in that luminous head of itself which we call the subliminal, is on the contrary not in possession but an instrument of experience, it is not practically one with the soul and self of the world but is open to it through its experience of the world. The subliminal soul is conscious, therefore, inwardly of the rasa of things and has an equal delight in all contacts; it is conscious also of the values and standards of the surface desire-soul and receives on its own surface corresponding touches of pleasure, pain and indifference but takes an equal delight in Page-647 all. In other words, our real soul within takes joy of all its experiences, gathers from them strength, pleasure and knowledge, grows by them in its store and its plenty. It is this real soul in us which compels the shrinking desire, mind to bear and even to seek and find a pleasure in what is painful to it, to reject what is pleasant to it. to modify or even reverse its values, to equalise things in indifference or to equalise them in joy. And this it does because it is impelled by the universal to grow. Otherwise, if we lived only by the surface desire-soul we could no more change or advance than the plant or stone in whose immobility or in whose routine of existence, because life is not superficially conscious, the secret soul of things has as yet no instrument by which it can rescue the life out of the fixed and narrow gamut into which it is born.
In the view of old philosophies pleasure and pain are inseparable like intellectual truth and falsehood and power and incapacity and birth and death; therefore the only possible escape from them would be a total indifference, a blank response to the excitations of the world-self. But a
subtler psychological knowledge shows us that this view which is based on the surface facts of existence only, does not really exhaust the possibilities of the problem. It is possible by
bringers the real soul to the surface to replace the egoistic standards of pleasure and pain by an equal, an all-embracing personal-impersonal delight. The lover of Nature does this when he takes joy in all the things of
Nitro
universally without admitting repulsion or fear or mere liking and
disliking, perceiving beauty in that which seem to others mean and insignificant, bare and savage, ten
bile and repellent. The artist and poet do it when they seek the rasa of the universal from the aesthetic emotion or from the physical line or from the mental form of
beauty or from the inner sense and power alike of that from which the ordinary
man turns away and of that to which he is etched. The seeker of knowledge, the God-lover who finds the object of his love everywhere, the spiritual man, the intellectual, the sensuous, the aesthetic all do Page-648 this in their own fashion and must do it if they would find embracing the Knowledge, the Beauty, the Joy or the Divinity which they seek. It is only where the ego is usually too strong for us, it is only in our emotional or physical joy and suffering, our pleasure and pain of life, before which the desire-soul in us is utterly weak and cowardly, that the application of the divine principle becomes supremely difficult and seems to many impossible or even monstrous and repellent. Here the Ignorance of the ego shrinks from the principle of impersonality which it yet applies without too much difficulty in Science, Art and a certain kind of spiritual living because there the rule of impersonality does not attack those desires cherished in the surface soul and those values of desire fixed by the surface mind in which our outward life is most vitally interested. In one case there is only a limited and specialised equality and impersonality while the egoistic basis of our practical life remains to us; in the other the whole foundation of our life has to be changed.
But is it then only by bringing this real soul to the surface that we shall gain all the fulfilment we seek ? If so there is no need to evolve upward, to ascend towards the Supermind or to open ourselves to the superconscient. But this subliminal soul is only an instrument of experience and, being that and being also our individual self only, it cannot really possess the world or fulfil us by the perfect unity of the transcendent, the universal and the individual. On the contrary, the more it comes to the surface, the more we are likely to become passively subject to the world-self, a mirror of the universal existence, consciousness, power, delight but not in possession of these things. Therefore those who thus arrive tend to become incompetent for the life of this world in action although more nearly and thrillingly united to it by knowledge, emotion and the appreciation of the senses. And those who fulfil themselves spiritually through this emergence become one with the self
and the universe in a way which enforces separation from the world-movement at the same time that
Page-649 it favours union with the self of the world behind phenomena. For there are open to us only two principles of order, possession and mastery, the Ego-sense and the Supermind. The Ego-sense is a principle of false or imperfect mastery because it works for the individual and ignores the real and only Master, the Lord of all; but in the Supermind there is the true principle of possession and mastery because there we are one with the Lord both in the universal and at the same time in our activity as its individual centre of knowledge, works and joy. But if we simply impersonalize our individuality here, we lose in that individuality its centre of order which was the ego-sense in the desire-mind and gain no other. Therefore we are entirely subject in our outward action and experience to the centre-less Impersonal; we become outwardly even as the stone and the plant although inwardly we have a fulfilled consciousness, or as the child though inwardly we have the plenary knowledge or as the inconsequent in thought and impulse though inwardly we have the divine reason or as the wild and disordered soul * though inwardly we have the utter peace and serenity within. Fulfilled in the static inner self of the mental being that is man we are not fulfilled in the evolution of his active being of which the surface self is the field. And if we seek to attain entirely the Self without the fulfilment of our active being we can only do it by abandoning life, mind and body and departing into the Silence leaving the man in us unfulfilled and the race to its labour. Here also, in the fulfilment of our psychic being as in that of the mind and the life, we have to open our self to the Supermind ; then Sachchidananda by the governing and creative Supermind harmonises progressively his conscious knowledge, will, action and delight of things in the ordered truth of our personality with his infinite knowledge, power, action and delight of things in the truth of the
* Balajadonmatta pisâchavat.
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All. By the consequent transformation of the values of our lower existence into the right and truth of that higher being which is at present superconscient to it, we shall be able eventually to rise from the mental to the supramental level ; we shall realise progressively in ourselves and the world the fourth status of life. It is this conscious fulfilment of the One in the Many which is the natural goal of our evolution because it brings out in the human being the perfect all-possessing delight of the One in the Many which is the purpose and sense of
Sachchidananda manifestation in the universe.
Page-651 CHAPTER XIX the release from subjection to the body
Our first step in this path of knowledge, having once determined in our intellect that what seems is not the Truth, that the self is not the body or life or mind, since these are only its forms, must be to set right our mind in its practical relation with the life and the body so that it may arrive at its own right relation with the Self. This it is easiest to do by a device with which we are
already familiar, since it played a great part in our view of the Yoga of Works; it is to create a separation between the Prakriti and the Purusha. The Purusha, the soul that knows and commands has got himself involved in the workings of his executive conscious force, so that he mistakes this physical working of it which we call the body for Himself; he forgets his own nature as the soul that knows and commands; he believes his mind and soul to be subject to the law and working of the body; he forgets that he is so much else besides that is greater than the physical form; he forgets that the mind is really greater than Matter and ought not to submit to its obscurations, reactions, habit of inertia, habit of incapacity; he forgets that he is more even than *he mind, a Power which can raise the mental being above itself; that he is the Master, the
Transcendent and it is pot fit the Master should be enslaved to his own workings*
Page-652 the Transcendent imprisoned in a form which exists only, as a trifle in its own being. All this for gleefulness has to be cured by the Purusha remembering his own true nature and first by his remembering that the body is only a working and only one working of Prakriti.
We say then to the mind This is a working of Prakriti, this is neither thyself nor myself; stand back from it." We shall find, if we
try, that the mind has this power of detachment and can stand back from the body not only in idea, but in act and as it were physically or rather vitally. This detachment of the mind must be strengthened by a certain attitude of indifference to the things of the body ; we must not care essentially about its sleep or its waking, its
movement
or its rest, its pain or its pleasure, its health or ill-health, its vigour or its fatigue, its comfort or its discomfort, or what it eats or drinks. This does not mean that we shall not keep the body in right order so far as we can; we have not to fall into violent
asterisms or a positive neglect of the physical frame. But we have not either to be affected in mind by hunger or thirst or discomfort or ill-health or attach the importance which the physical and vital man attaches to the things of the body, or indeed any but a quite subordinate and purely instrumental importance. Nor must this instrumental importance be allowed to assume the proportions of a necessity; we must not for instance imagine that the purity of the mind depends on the things we eat or drink, although during a Certain stage restrictions in eating and drinking are useful to our inner progress; nor on the other band must we continue to think that the dependence of the mind or even of the life on food and drink is anything more than a habit, a customary relation which Nature has set up between these principles. As a matter of fact the food we take can be reduced by contrary habit and new relation to a minimum without the mental or vital
vigour being in any way reduced; even on the contrary with a judicious development they can be trained to a greater potentiality of vigour by learning to rely on the secret fountains of mental and Page-653 vital energy with which they are connected more than upon the minor aid of physical aliments. This aspect of self-discipline is however more important in the Yoga of self-perfection than here; for our present purpose the important point is the renunciation by the mind of attachment to or dependence on the things of the body. Thus disciplined the mind will gradually learn to take up towards the body the true attitude of the Purusha. First of all, it will know the mental Purusha as the upholder of the body and not in any way the body itself; for it is quite other-than the physical existence which it upholds by the mind through the agency of the vital force. This will come to be so much the normal attitude of the whole being to the physical frame that the latter will feel to us as if something external and detachable like the dress we wear or an instrument we happen to be carrying in our hand. We may even come to feel that the body is in a certain sense non-existent except as a sort of partial expression of our vital force and of our mentality. These experiences are signs that the mind is coming to a right poise regarding the body, that it is exchanging the false view-point of the mentality obsessed and captured by physical sensation for the view-point of the true truth of things.
Secondly, with regard to the movements and experiences of the body the mind will come to know the Purusha seated within it as, first, the witness or observer of the movements and, secondly, the knower or perceiver of the experiences. It will cease to consider in thought or feel in sensation these movements and experiences as its own but rather consider and feel them as not its own, as operations of Nature governed by the qualities of Nature and their interaction upon each other. This detachment can be made so normal and carried so far that there will be a kind of division between the mind and the body and the former will observe and experience the hunger, thirst, pain, fatigue, depression, etc. of the physical being as if they were experiences of some other person with whom it has so close a rapport as to be aware of all that is going Page-654 on within him. This division is a great means, a great means, a great step towards mastery ; for the mind comes to observe these things first without being overpowered and finally without being at all affected by them, dispassionately, with clear understanding but with perfect detachment. This is the initial liberation of the mental being from servitude to the body ; for by right knowledge put steadily into practice liberation comes inevitably. Finally, the mind will come to know the Purusha in the mind as the master of Nature whose sanction is necessary to her movements. It will find that as the giver of the sanction he can withdraw the original fiat from the previous habits of Nature and that eventually the habit will cease or change in the direction indicated by the will of the Purusha ; not at once, for the old sanction persists as an obstinate consequence of the past Karma of Nature until that is exhausted, and a good deal also depends on the force of the habit and the idea of fundamental necessity which the mind had previously attached to it; but if it is not one of the fundamental habits Nature has established for the relation of the mind, life and body and if the old sanction is not renewed by the mind or the habit willingly indulged, then eventually the change will come. Even the habit of hunger and thirst can be minimised, inhabited, put away ; the habit of disease can be similarly minimised and gradually eliminated and in the meantime the power of the mind to set right the disorders of the body whether by conscious manipulation of vital force or by simple mental fiat will immensely increase. By a similar process the habit by which the bodily nature associates certain forms and degrees of activity with strain, fatigue, incapacity can be rectified and the power, freedom, swiftness, effectiveness of the work whether physical or mental which can be done with this bodily instrument marvellously increased, doubled, tripled, decupled.
This side of the method belongs properly to the Yoga of self-perfection ; but it is as well to
speak briefly of these things here both because we thereby lay a basis for what
Page-655 we shall have to say of self-perfection, which is a part of the integral Yoga, and because we have to correct the false notions popularised by materialistic Science. According to this Science the normal mental and physical states and the relations between mind and body actually established by our past evolution are the right, natural and healthy conditions and anything other, anything opposite to them is either morbid and wrong or a hallucination, self-deception and insanity. Needless to say, this conservative principle is entirely ignored by Science itself when it so diligently and successfully improves on the normal operations of physical Nature for the greater mastery of Nature by man. Suffice it to say here once for all that a change of mental and physical state and of relations between the mind and body which increases the purity and freedom of the being, brings a clear joy and peace and multiplies the power of the mind over itself and over the physical functions, brings about in a word man’s greater mastery of his own nature, is obviously not morbid and cannot be considered a hallucination or self-deception since its effects are patent and positive. In fact, it is simply a willed advance of Nature in her evolution of the individual, an evolution which she will carry out in any case but in which she chooses to utilise the human will as her chief agent, because her essential aim is to lead the Purusha to conscious mastery over herself. This being said, we must add that in the movement of the path of knowledge perfection of the mind and body are no consideration at all or only secondary considerations. The one thing necessary is to rise out of Nature to the Self by cither the most swift or the most thorough and effective method possible; and the method we are describing, though not the swiftest, is the most thorough-going in its affectivity. And here there arises the question of physical action or inaction. It is ordinarily considered that the Yogin should draw away from action as much as possible and especially that too much action is a hindrance because it draws off the energies outward. To a certain Page-656 extent this is true; and we must note farther that when the mental Purusha takes up the attitude of mere witness and observer, a tendency to silence, solitude, physical calm and bodily inaction grows upon the being. So long as this is not associated with inertia, incapacity or unwillingness to act, in a word, with the growth of the tamasi quality, all this is to the good. The power to do nothing, which is quite different from indolence, incapacity or aversion to action and attachment to inaction, is a great power and a great mastery; the power to rest absolutely from action is as necessary for the Janna yogin as the power to cease absolutely from thought, as the power to remain indefinitely in sheer solitude and silence and as the power of immovable calm. Whoever is not willing to embrace these states is not yet fit for the path that leads towards the highest knowledge; whoever is unable to draw towards them, is as yet unfit for its acquisition.
At the same time it must be added that the power is enough; the abstention from all physical action is not indispensable, the aversion to action mental or corporeal is not desirable. The seeker of the integral state of knowledge must be free from attachment to action and equally free from attachment to inaction. Especially must any tendency to mere inertia of mind or vitality or body be surmounted, and if that habit is found growing on the nature, the will of the Purusha must be used to dismiss it. Eventually, a state arrives when the life and the body perform as mere instruments the will of the Purusha in the mind without any strain or attachment, without their putting themselves into the action with that inferior, eager and often feverish energy which is the nature of their ordinary working; they
come to work as forces of Nature work without the fret and toil and reaction characteristic of life in the body when it is not yet master of the physical. When we attain to this perfection, then action and inaction become immaterial, since neither interferes with the freedom of the soul or draws it away from its urge towards the Self or its poise in the Self. But this state of
perfect-
Page-657 tion arrives later- in the Yoga and till then the law of moderation laid down by the Gita is the best for us; too much mental or physical action then is not good since excess draws away too much energy and reacts un favourably upon the spiritual condition; too little also is not good since defect leads to a habit of inaction and even to an incapacity which has afterwards to be surmounted with difficulty. Still, periods of absolute calm, solitude and cessation from works are highly desirable and should be secured as often as possible for that recession of the soul into itself which is indispensable to knowledge. While dealing thus with the body we have necessarily to deal also with the Prana or life-energy. For practical purposes we have to make a distinction between the life-energy as it acts in the body, the physical Prana, and the life-energy as it acts in support of the mental activities, the psychical Prana. For we lead always a double life, mental and physical, and the same life-energy acts differently and assumes a different aspect according as it lends itself to one or the other. In the body it produces those reactions of hunger, thirst, fatigue, health, disease, physical vigour, etc. which are the vital experiences of the physical frame. For the gross body of man is not like the stone or the earth ; it is a combination of two sheaths, the vital and the " food " sheath and its life is a constant interaction of these two. Still the life-energy and the physical frame are two different things and in the withdrawal of the mind from the absorbing sense of the body we become increasingly sensible of the Prana and its action in the corporeal instrument and can observe and more and more control its operations. Practically, in drawing back from the body we draw back from the physical life-energy also, even while we distinguish the two and feel the latter nearer to us than the mere physical instrument. The entire conquest of the body comes in fact by the conquest of the physical life-energy.
Along with the attachment to the body and its works the attachment to life in the body is overcome. For when
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we feel the physical being to be not ourselves, but only a dress or an instrument, the repulsion to the death of the body which is so strong and vehement an instinct of the vital man must necessarily weaken and can be thrown away. Thrown away it must be and entirely. The fear of death and the aversion to bodily cessation are the stigma left by his animal
origin on the human being. That brand must be utterly effaced. Page-659 COMMENTARY XIV
The means of the knowledge of Brahman are, we have seen, to get back behind the forms of the universe to that which is essential in the cosmos—and that which is essential is twofold, the gods in Nature and the self in the individual,—and then to get behind these to the
Beyond which they represent. The practical relation of the gods to Brahman in this process of divine knowledge has been already determined. The cosmic functionings through which the gods act, mind, life, speech, senses, body, must become aware of something beyond them which governs them, by which they are and move, by whose force they
evolve, enlarge themselves and arrive at power and joy and capacity; to that they must turn from their ordinary operations; leaving these, leaving the false idea of independent action and self-ordering which is an egoism of mind and life and sense they must become consciously passive to the power, light and joy of something which is beyond themselves. What happens then is that this divine
Unnameable reflects Himself openly in the gods. His light takes possession of the thinking mind, His power and joy of the life, His light and rapture of the emotional mind and the
Page-660 senses. Something of the supreme image of Brahman falls upon the world-nature and changes it into divine nature. All this is not done by a sudden miracle. It comes by Hashes, revelations, sudden touches and glimpses; there is as if a leap of the lightning of revelation flaming out from those heavens for a moment and then returning into its secret source ; as if the lifting of the eyelid of an inner-vision and its falling again because the eye cannot look long and steadily on the utter light. The repetition of these touches and visiting from the Beyond fixes the gods in their upward gaze and expectation, constant repetition lexes them in a constant passivity ; not moving out any longer to grasp at the forms of the universe mind, life and senses will more and more be fixed in the memory, in the understanding, in the joy of the touch and vision of that transcendent glory which they have now resolved to make their sole object ; to that only they will learn to respond and not to the touches of outward things. The silence which has fallen on them and which is now their foundation and status will become their knowledge of the eternal silence which is Brahman ; the response of their functioning to a supernal light, power, joy will become their knowledge of the eternal activity which is Brahman. Other status, other response and activity they will not know. The mind will know nothing but the Brahman, think of nothing but the Brahman, the Life will move to, embrace, enjoy nothing but the Brahman, the eye will see, the ear hear, the other senses sense nothing but the Brahman.
But is then a complete oblivion of the external the" goal ? Must the mind and senses recede inward and fall into an unending trance and the life be for ever stilled ? This is possible, if the soul so wills, but it is not inevitable and indispensable. The Mind is cosmic, one in all the universe ; so too are the Life, and the Sense, so too is Matter of the body ; and when they exist in and for the Brahman only, they will not only know this but will sense, feel and live in that
universe unity. Therefore to whatever
Page-661 thing they turn which to the individual sense and mind and life seems now external to them, there also it is not the form of things which they will know, think of, sense, embrace and enjoy, but always and only the Brahman. Moreover, the external will cease to exist for them, because nothing will be external but all things internal to us, even the whole world and all that is in it. For the limit of ego, the wall of individuality will break ; the individual Mind will cease to know itself as individual, it will be conscious only of universal Mind one everywhere in which individuals are only knots of the one mentality ; so the individual life will lose its sense of separateness and live only in and as the one life in which all individuals are simply whorls of the indivisible Hood of Pranic activity ; the very body and senses will be no longer conscious of a separated existence, but the real body which the man will feel himself to be physically will be the whole Hearth and the whole universe and the whole indivisible form of things where so ever existent, and the senses also will be converted to this principle of sensation so that even in what we call the external, the eye will see Brahman only in every sight, the ear will hear Brahman only in every sound, the inner and outer body will feel Brahman only in every touch and the touch itself as if internal in the greater body. The soul whose gods are thus converted to this supreme law and religion, will realise in the cosmos itself and in all its multiplicity the truth of the One besides whom there is no other or second. Moreover, becoming one with the formless and infinite, it will exceed the universe itself and see all the worlds not as external, not even as commensurate with itself, but as if within it.
And in fact, in the higher realisation it will not be Mind, Life, Sense of which even the mind, life and sense themselves will be originally aware, but rather that which constitutes them. By this process of constant visiting and divine touch and influence the Mind of the mind, that is to say, the superconscient Knowledge will take possession of the mental understanding and begin to turn all its vision,
Page-662 and thinking into luminous stuff and vibration of light of the Supermind. So too the sense will be changed by the visiting of the Sense behind the sense and the whole sense-view of the universe itself will be altered so that the vital, mental and supramental will become visible to the sense with the physical only as their last, outermost and smallest result. So too the Life will become a conscious movement of the infinite Conscious-Force ; it will be impersonal, unlimited by any particular acts and enjoyment, unbound to their results, untroubled by the dualities or the touch of sin and suffering, grandiose, boundless, immortal. The material world itself will become for these gods a figure of the infinite, luminous and blissful Superconscient. This will be the transfiguration of the gods, but what of the self ? For we have seen that there are two fundamental entities, the gods and the self, and the self in us is greater than the cosmic Powers, its God-ward destination more vital to our perfection and self-fulfilment than any transfiguration of these lesser deities. Therefore not only must the gods find their one Godhead and resolve themselves into it; that is to say, not only must the cosmic principles working in us resolve themselves into the working of the One, the Principle of all principles, so that they shall become only a unified existence and single action of That in spite of all play of differentiation, but also and with a more fundamental necessity the self in us which supports the action of the gods must find and enter into the one Self of all individual existences, the indivisible Spirit to whom all souls are no more than dark or luminous centres of its consciousness.
This the self of man, since it is the essentiality of a mental being, will do through the mind. In the gods the transfiguration is effected by the Superconscient itself visiting their substance and opening their vision with its flashes until it has transformed them ; but the mind is capable of another action which is only apparently movement of mind, but really the movement of the self towards
Page-663 its own reality. The mind seems to go to That, to attain to it ; it is lifted out of itself into something beyond and although it falls back, still by the mind the will of knowledge in the mental thought continually and at last continuously remembers that into which it has entered. On this the Self through the mind seizes and repeatedly dwells and so doing it is finally caught up into it and at last able to dwell securely in that transcendence. It transcends the mind, it transcends its own mental individualisation of the being, that which it now knows as itself; it ascends and takes foundation in the Self of all and in the status of self-joyous infinity which is the supreme manifestation of the Self. This is the transcendent immortality, this is the spiritual existence which the Upanishads declare to be the goal of man and by which we pass out of the mortal state into the heaven of the Spirit.
What then happens to the gods and the cosmos and all that the Lord develops in His being? Does it not all disappear ? Is not the transfiguration of the gods even a mere secondary state through which we pass towards that culmination and which drops away from us as soon as we reach it ? And with the disappearance of the gods and the cosmos does not the Lord too, the Master-Consciousness, disappear so that nothing is left but the one pure indeterminate Existence self-blissful in an eternal inaction and non-creation ? Such was the conclusion of the later Vedanta in its extreme monistic form and such was the sense which it tried to read into all the Upanishads; but it must be recognised that in the language whether of the Isha or the Kena Upanishad there is absolutely nothing, not
seen a shade or a nuance pointing to it. If we want to find it there, we have to put it in by force, for the actual language used
favours instead the conclusion of other Vedantic systems, which considered the goal to be the
eater ilea joy of the soul in a Brahma loka or world of the Brahman in which it is one with the infinite existence and yet in a sense still a soul able to enjoy differentiation in the oneness,
Page-664 In the next verse we have the culmination of the teaching of the Upanishad, the result of the great transcendence which it has been setting forth and afterwards the description of the immortality to which the souls of knowledge attain when they pass beyond the mortal status. It declares that Brahman is in its nature " That Delight," Tadvanam. " Vane " is the Vedic word for delight or delightful, and "Tadvanam" means therefore the transcendent Delight, the all-blissful Ananda of which the Taittiriya Upanishad speaks as the highest Brahman from which all existences are born, by which all existences live and increase and into which all existences arrive in their passing out of death and birth. It is as this transcendent Delight that the Brahman must be worshipped and sought. It is this beatitude therefore which is meant by the immortality of the Upanishads. And what will be the result of ‘knowing and possessing Brahman as the supreme Ananda ? It is that towards the knower and possessor of the Brahman is directed the desire of all creatures. In other words, he becomes a centre of the divine Delight shedding it on all the world and attracting all to it as to a fountain of joy and love and self-fulfilment in the universe. This is the culmination of the teaching of the Upanishad ; there was a demand for the secret teaching that enters into the ultimate truth, the Upanishad, and in response this doctrine has been given. It has been uttered, the Upanishad of the Brahman, the hidden ultimate truth of the supreme Existence ; its beginning was the search for the Lord, Master of mind, life, speech and senses in whom is the absolute of mind, the absolute of life, the absolute of speech and senses and its close is the finding of Him as the transcendent Beatitude and the elevation of the soul that finds and possesses it into a living centre of that Delight towards which all creatures in the universe shall turn as to a fountain of its ecstasies. * * *
The Upanishad closes with two verses which seem to review and characterise the whole work in the manner of
Page-665 the ancient writings when they have drawn to their close. This Upanishad or gospel of the inmost Truth of things has for its foundation, it is said, the practice of self-mastery, action and the sub dual of the sense-life to the power of the Spirit. In other words, life and works are to be used as a means of arriving out of the state of subjection proper to the soul in the ignorance into a state of mastery which brings it nearer to the absolute self-mastery and all-mastery of the supreme Soul seated in the knowledge. The Vedas, that is to say, the utterances of the inspired seers and the truths they hold, are described as all the limbs of the Upanishad; in other words, all the convergent lines and aspects, all the necessary elements of this great practice this profound psychological self-training and spiritual aspiration are set forth in these great Scriptures, channels of supreme knowledge and indicators of a supreme discipline. Truth is its home ; and this Truth is not merely intellectual verity,—for that is not the sense of the word in the Vedic writings,—but man’s ultimate human state of true being, true consciousness, right knowledge, right works, right joy of existence, all indeed that is contrary to the falsehood of egoism and ignorance. it is by these means, by using works and self-discipline for mastery of oneself and for the generation of spiritual energy, by fathoming in all its parts the knowledge and repeating the high example of the great Vedic seers and by living in the Truth that one becomes capable of the great ascent which the Upanishad opens to us.
The goal of the ascent is the world of the true and vast existence of which the Veda speaks as the Truth that is the final goal and home of man. It is described here as the greater infinite
heavenly world, (Swargaloka, Swarloka of the Veda), which is not the lesser Swarga of the Puranas or the lesser Brahmaloka of the Mundaka Upanishad, its world of the sun’s rays to which the soul arrives by works of virtue and piety, but falls from them by the exhaustion of their merit ; it is the higher Swarga or Brahman-world of the Katha which is beyond the dual symbols of birth and death, the higher Brahman-
Page-666 worlds of the Mundaka which the soul enters by knowledge and renunciation. It is there free a state not belonging to the Ignorance, but to Knowledge. It is in fact, the infinite existence and beatitude of the soul in the being of the all-blissful existence; it is too the higher status, the light of the Mind beyond the mind, the joy and eternal mastery of the Life beyond the life, the riches of the Sense beyond the senses. And the soul finds in it not only its own largeness but finds and possesses the infinity of the One and it has firm foundation in that immortal state because there a supreme Silence and eternal Peace are the secure foundation of eternal Knowledge and absolute joy. Page-667 THE TWENTY-FIRST HYMN TO AGNI A HUMAN OF THE DIVINE FLAME TO AGNI [The Rishi invokes the divine Flame to burn as the divine Man in humanity and to raise us to our perfection in the seats of the Truth and the Bliss.] 1. As the human 1 we set thee within us, as the human we kindle thee ; O Flame, O Seer-Puissance, as the human offer sacrifice to the gods for the seeker of the godheads. 2. O Flame, thou burr. est. in the human creature when thou art satisfied with his offerings; his ladles go to thee unceasingly, O perfect in thy birth, O presser out of the running richness. 1. The godhead descending into man assumes the veil of humanity. The god is eternally perfect, unborn, fixed in the Truth and Joy ; descending, he is born in man, grows, gradually manifests his completeness, attains as if by battle and difficult progress to the Truth and Joy. Man is the thinker, the god is the eternal seer; but the Divine veils his seer hood in the forms of thought and life to as sits the development of the mortal into immortality. Page-668 3. Thee all the gods with one heart of love made their envoy ; O seer, men serve and adore thee in their sacrifices as the godhead. 4. Let mortal man adore the Will, the divine, by sacrifice to the powers divine ; but thou, O Brightness, shine out high-kindled ; enter into the home of the Truth, enter into the home of the Bliss. THE TWENTY-SECOND HYMN TO AGNI A HYMN OF THE JOURNEY TO THE PERFECT JOY [Man, the eater of things, seeks a fulfilment of his desires in a final equality of delight. To this end he have to be purified by the divine Flame, the Seer-Will who holds in himself the conscious vision and the utter rapture. By increasing him in us we shall journey forward with our progressing sacrifice and the gods will utterly manifest themselves. We must entertain this divine Force as the master of our house, our physical and mental body, and give it all the objects of our enjoyment as its food.] 1. Man who sleekest thy equal fulfilment in all, sing as the enjoyer of things the word of illumination to him of the bright purifying flame, to the object of our adoration in the march of our sacrifices, to the priest of the offering most rapturous in the creature. 2. Set within thee Will that knows all the births, the divine sacrifice in the seasons; to day let thy sacrifice march forward unceasingly, thy sacrifice shall open to thee the whole epiphany of the godheads
3, Mortals,
We have set our mind on thee the Page-669 divine, for thou hast the mind of conscious vision } we meditate on thee as we journey, that we may increase and for the increase too of thee, the supremely desirable. 4. Awake then, O Will, to the vision of this within us; this is our word to thee, O Lord of Force. Strong-jawed enjoyer, master of our house, the eaters of things increase thee by their affirmations and by their words they make thee a thing of bright gladness. A HYMN OF THE RICH AND CONQUERING SOUL [ The Rishi desires through Agni that opulence of the divine Light against which the armies of darkness cannot stand ; for it overpowers them by its plenitude and force. This it does on all the successive planes of the soul's labour and in each of them man gets, by this divine Force that is the true and transcendent Being, all the objects of his desire that they contain.] 1. Bring to us, O Strength most forcefully prevailing, that forceful opulence of the Light which in all the fields of our labour shall by force prevail with thy mouth of flame to enter into the plenitudes.
2. O Flame, O Might, that rich felicity bring which shall violently overpower the armies that are embattled against us ; for thou art the true in being, the transcendent and wonderful, who gives to mart the luminous plenitude.
Page-670 3. All these peoples who with one heart of love have made clear their seat of sacrifice, find in the dwelling-places 1 of the soul thee, the priest of sacrifice, the beloved, and they reach in them their many objects of desire. 4. This is the labourer in all man’s works and he holds in himself an all-besieging force. O pure-brilliant Flame, shine out full of joy and opulence in these our habitations; shine out full of light, O our purifier. 1. The ” seats ‘or homes of the soul, which progresses from plane to plane and makes of each a habitation. They are sometimes called the cities. There are seven such planes each with its seven provinces and one additional above. Usually we hear of a hundred cities, the double number perhaps representing the downward gaze in each of the Soul upon Nature and the upward aspiration of Nature to the Soul.
THE TWENTY-FOURTH HYMN TO AGNI A HYMN TO THE DELIVERER AND PROTECTOR [ The Rishi invokes the Divine Will for protection from evil and for the fullness of the divine light and substance.]
1-2 O Will, become our inmost inmate, become auspicious to us, become our deliverer and our
amour of protection. Thou who art the lord of substance and who of that substance hast the divine knowledge, come towards us, give us its most luminous opulence.
Page-671 3-t. Awake ! hear our call! keep us far from all that seeks to turn us to evil. O shining One, O flame of purest Light, thee for our comrades we desire that even now they may have the bliss and peace. A HYMN TO THE LORD OF LIGHT AND CREATOR OF GODHEAD [The Rishi hymns Agni as the Seer-Will whose whole being is the light and the truth and the lavishing of the substance of divinity. He is the son born to the thought of the seers and he gives himself as the godhead born in man who is the son of our works opulent with the divine Truth and the divine Power and as the conquering steed of the journey and the battle. The whole movement of the Seer-Will is upward to the light and vastness of the superconscient ; his voice is as if the thunder-chant of those heavens. He shall carry us by his perfect working beyond the siege of darkness and limitation.] 1. Raise thy song towards the Will, towards the divine for thy increasing, for he is our lord of substance and he lavishes ; he is the son of the seekers of knowledge; he is the keeper of the Truth who ferries us beyond the surge of our destroyers. 2. This is the true in his being whom the seers of old kindled, yea, the gods too kindled him with perfect out shining into his wide substance of the light, the priest of the oblation with his tongue of ecstasy.
3. O Flame supremely desirable, so by our supreme thinking, by our brightest perfected mentality, by its utter cleaving way of all evil let thy light give unto us the bliss.
Page-672 4. The Will is that which shines out in the gods, the Will is that which enters with its light into mortals, the Will is the carrier of our oblation ; the Will seek and serve in all your thoughts. 5. The Will gives to the giver of sacrifice the Son 6. Yea, ’tis the Will gives to us the Lord of existences who conquers in the battle by his souls of power ; Will gives to us our swift-galloping steed of battle ever conquering , never conquered. 7. That which is strongest in us to up bear, we give it to the Will. Sing out the Vast, O thou whose wide substance is its light. Thy opulence is as if the largeness of the Goddess 8. Luminous are thy flaming radiances ; there rises from thee a vast utterance like the voice of the pressing-stone of delight j yea, thy cry of itself rises up like a thunder-chant from the heavens. 9. Thus, desiring substance, we adore the Will who is forceful to conquer. May he who has the perfect power of his workings, carry us beyond all the forces that seek to destroy us, like a ship over the waters. 1. The Son of the sacrifice is a constant image in the Veda. Here it is the godhead himself, Agni who gives himself as a son to man, a Son who delivers his father. Agni is also the War-Horse and the steed of the journey, the White Horse, the mystic galloping Dadhikravan who 2, Aditi, the vast Mother. Page-673 THE PRACTICE OF TRUTH THE TRUE CULT THE RELIGION OF THE SPIRIT 1 If you have art and science, you have religion; if you have neither art nor science, then have religion. 2 Why do you amass stones and construct great temples? Why do you vex yourselves thus when God 3 dwells within you ?—Temples cannot imprison within their walls the divine Substance. 4 The soul of each man contains the potential divinity. Our aim must be to make apparent this divinity within us by subduing our inner and outer nature. Attain to- him by works or by adoration, by physical mastery, by philosophy, by one, by several or by all of these methods and be free. That is the whole of religion. Doctrines, dogmas, rituals, books, temples, forms are only secondary details. 5 Although there is a difference of procedure between a Shaman of the Tungas and a Catholic prelate of Europe or between a coarse and sensual Vogel and a Puritan Independent of Connecticut, there is no difference in the principle of their creeds; for they all belong to the same category of people whose religion consists not in becoming better, but in believing in and carrying out certain arbitrary regulations. Only those who believe that the worship of God consists in aspiring to a better life differ from the first because they recognize quite another and certainly a loftier prince- 1) Goethe.— 2) Vemana -3) Euripides.-) Vivekananda.-5) Kant. Page-674 pie uniting all men of good faith in an invisible temple which alone can be the universal temple. 6 Everywhere something hinders me from meeting God in my brother because he has shut the doors of his inmost temple and recites the fables of his brother’s god or the god of his brother’s brother. 7 How astonishing is this that of all the supreme revelations of the truth the world admits and tolerates only the more ancient, those which answer least to the needs of our epoch, while it holds each direct revelation, each original thought for null and some- 8 times hates them.—One should not think that a religion is true because it is old. On the contrary the more mankind lives, the more the true law of life becomes clear to it. To suppose that in our epoch one must continue to believe what our grandfathers and ancestors believed is to think that an adult can continue 9 to wear the garments of children.—That is why the superior man or he who is identified with the straight path watches attentively in his heart for the principles which have not been discerned by all and meditates with care on that which is not yet proclaimed and recognised as doctrine. 10 Note this well that from whencesoever it may come, a teaching which leads to passion and not to peace, to pride and not to modesty, to the extension of desire and not to its moderation, to the love of worldliness and not to the love. of solitude, to a violent and not to a peaceful spirit, is not the Law, is not the 11 Discipline, is not the teaching of the Master.—The Church does not consist a great number of persons. He who possesses the Truth at his side is the church, though he be alone. 12 Let us not fear to reject from our religion all that is useless, material, tangible as well as all that is vague and indefinite; the more we purify its spiritual
6) Emerson.— 7) Thoreau.— 8) Tsen-tse-tsung-yung. — 10) Vineyard Pataki.—11) Page-675 kernel, the more we shall understand the true law of 13 life.—It is useless to grow pale ever the holy Scriptures and the sacred Shastras without a spirit of discrimination exempt from all passions. No spiritual progress can be made without discrimination and renunciation. 14 —For the letter killeth, but the spirit grivet life. 15 Beware of the scribes who desire to walk in long robes and love greetings in the markets and the highest seats in the synagogues and the chief places at feasts, who devour widow’s houses and for a show 16 make long prayers.—And there are others who wallow in their bogs and squatting among the rushes set themselves to cry, " This is virtue, to remain quiet in a bog." Their knees are ever bent and their hands joined in praise of virtue, but their hearts know it not.— 17 Men never commit bad actions with more coolness and assurance in their rectitude than when they do them by virtue of a false belief. 18 Visit not the doers of miracles. They have wandered from the path of the truth; they have allowed their minds to be caught in the snare of psychical powers which are so many temptations on the path of the pilgrims to the Brahman. Beware of such powers 19 and do not desire them.—He whose heart longs 20 after the Deity, has no time for anything else.—He is a stranger to the magical arts and divination and necromancy, to exorcisms and other analogous practices. He takes no part in the accomplishment of any prayer or religious ceremony. 21 He whose thought is always fixed on the Eternal his no need of any devotional practice or spiritual exercise. 22 — After having abandoned every kind of pious practice, directing his mind towards the sole object of his thoughts, the contemplation of the divine Being, free from all desire…he attains the supreme goal.
13) Ramakrishna.— 14) ii. Corinthians.— 15) Luke–16) Nietzsche: .Zarathustra.— 17) Pascal.— 18) Ramakrishna. – 19) id–20)
Digha
Nikaya.
Page-676 CHAPTER XIX THE CONQUEST OVER THE DASYUS
The Dasyus stand in opposition to both the Aryan gods and the Aryan seers. The Gods are born from Aditi in the supreme Truth of things, the Dasyus or Danavas from Diti in the nether darkness; they are the Lords of Light and the Lords of Night fronting each other across the triple world of earth, heaven and mid-air, body, mind and the connecting breath of life. Sarama in I. 109 descends from the supreme realm, parâkât; she has to cross the waters of the Rasa, she meets the night which gives place to her for fear of her overleaping it, atishkado bhiyasâ ; she arrives at the home of the Dasyus,
dasyure ore na sadanam, which they themselves describe as the reku padam
alakam, the world of falsehood beyond the bound of things. The supreme world also surpasses the bound of things by exceeding or transcending it; it is reku padam, but satyam not alakam, the world of the Truth, not the world of the falsehood. The latter is the darkness without knowledge, tamo avayunam tatanvat; Indra when his largeness exceeds (
rarities ) heaven and earth and mid-world creates for the Aryan the opposite world of truth and knowledge,
vayunavach, which exceeds these three domains and is therefore reku padam. This darkness, this lower world of Night and the Inconscient in the formed existence of things symbolised in the image of the mountain which rises from the Page-677 bowels of earth to the back of heaven, is represented by the secret cave at the base of the hill, the cave of the darkness. But the cave is only the home of the Panis, their field of action is earth and heaven and the mid-world. They are the sons of the In conscience, but themselves are not precisely inconscient in their action ; they have forms 0f apparent knowledge, mâyâh but these are forms of ignorance the truth of which is concealed in the darkness of the inconscient and their surface or front is falsehood, not truth. For the world as we see it has come out of the darkness concealed in darkness, the deep and abysmal flood that covered all things, the inconscient ocean, apraketam salilam (X.129.3); in that non-existence the seers have found by desire in the heart and thought in the mind that which builds up the true existence. This non-existence of the truth of things, asat, is the first aspect of them that emerges from the inconscient ocean; and its great darkness is the Vedic Night, rat rim jânatî niveçanîm which holds the world and all its unravelled potentialities in her obscure bosom. Night extends her realm over this triple world of ours and out of her in heaven, in the mental being. Dawn is born who delivers the Sun out of the darkness where it was lying concealed and eclipsed and creates the vision of the supreme Day in the non-existence, in the Night, asati ketum. It is therefore in these three realms that the battle between the Lords of Light and the Lords of the Ignorance proceeds through its continual vicissitudes. The word pan’s means dealer, trafficker, from pan ( also pan, * cf. Tamil pan, Greek pones, labour ) and we may perhaps regard the Panis as the. powers that preside over those ordinary unlimited sense-activities of life whose immediate root is in the dark subconscient physical being and not in the divine mind. The whole struggle of man is
* Sayana takes pan in Veda —to praise, but in one place \e admits the sense of vyavahâra, dealing. Action seems to me to be its sense in most passages. Froir pan’ in the sense of action we have the earlier names of the organs of action, pân’i, hand , foot or hoof, Lat penis, of also pâya. Page-678
to replace this action by the luminous working of mind and life which comes from above through the mental existence. Whoever thus aspires,
labour, battles, travels, ascends the hill of being is the Aryan (
âray, arya, ari with the various senses, to toil, to fight, to climb or rise, to travel, to prepare the sacrifice); for the work of
the Aryan is a sacrifice which is at once a battle and an ascent and a journey, a battle against the powers of darkness, an ascent to the highest peaks of the mountain beyond earth and heaven into Swar, a journey to the other shore of the rivers and the ocean into the farthest Infinity of things. The Aryan has the will to the work, he is the doer of the work (kâru, kîri, etc.), the gods who put their force into his work are
sukratu, perfect in power for the sacrifice; the Dasyu or Pani is the opposite of both, he is akratu. The Aryan is the
sacrifice, yajamâna, yajyu; the gods who receive, uphold, impel his sacrifice are
yatate, yajatra, powers of the sacrifice; the Dasyu is the opposite of both, he is
acajou. The Aryan in the sacrifice finds the divine word, gin, mantra, brahma, uktha, he is the brahmâ or singer of the word; the gods delight in and uphold the word, gîrvâhas, girvanas, the Dasyus are haters and destroyers of the Word, brahmadvishah, spoilers of speech, mr’idhravâchah. They have no force of the divine breath or no mouth to speak it, they are anâsah; and they have no power to think and mentalise the word and the truth it contains, they are
manyamânâh : but the Aryans are the thinkers of the word, manyamânâh, holders of the thought, the thought-mind and the seer-knowledge,
dhîra, manishî, kavi ; the gods are also the supreme thinkers of the Thought, prathamo monotâ dhiyah, kavayah. The Aryans are desirers of the godheads, devayu, uçij; they seek to increase their own being and the godheads in them by the sacrifice, the word, the thought; the Dasyus are god-haters devadvishah, obstructors of the godhead, devanidah, who desire no increase, av’ridhah. The gods lavish wealth on the Aryan, the Aryan gives,
his wealth to the gods; the Dasyu withholds his wealth from the Aryan until it is taken from him by force, and does not press out the immortal Soma wine for the deities
Page-679 who seek its rapture in man; although he is revân, ail-though his cave is packed with cows and horses and treasures, gobhir açvebhir vasubhir nyr’ishtam, still he is arâthah, because his wealth gives no prosperity or felicity to man or himself,—the Pani is the miser of existence. And in the struggle between the Aryan and the Dasyu he seeks always to plunder and destroy, to steal the luminous cows of the latter and hide them again in the darkness of the cave. " Slay the devourer, the Pani; for he is the wolf ( the tearer, varîyah )". * It is evident that these descriptions could easily be applied to human enemies who hate the cult and the gods of the Aryan, but we shall see that such an interpretation is entirely impossible because in the hymn I. 33. in which these distinctions are most clearly drawn and the battle of Indra and his human allies with the Dasyus most elaborately described, these Dasyus, Panis and Vitas, cannot possibly t>e human fighters, tribes or robbers. In this hymn of Hiranyastupa Angirasa the first ten verses clearly refer to the battle for the Cows and therefore to the Panis. ”Come, let us go seeking the cows to Indra; for it is he that increases the thought in us; invincible is he and complete are his felicities, he releases for us (separates from the darkness) the supreme knowledge-vision of the luminous cows, gavâm ketam parama âvarjate nah. I fly to the unassailable giver of riches like a bird to its beloved nest, bowing down to Indra with the supreme words of light, to him to whom his affirmers must call in their journey. He comes with all his armies and has fastened firmly his quivers ; he is the fighter (the Aryan) who brings the cows to whomsoever he desires. O Indra who hast increased (by our word), hold not back for thyself thy much delight, become not in us the Pani, choskûyamân’o bhûri vâmam mâ pan’ir bhûr asmad adhi pravr’iddha. " The last phrase is a striking one and in the current interpretation its real force is avoided by rendering "do not become a miser with regard to us." But this is to ignore the fact that the Panis are
• VI. 61. 14. Page-680 the withholders of the wealth who keep it for themselves and give it neither to god nor man. The sense obviously is " Having thy much wealth of the delight, do not be a Pani, one who holds his possessions only for himself and keeps them from man ; do not hold the delight away from us in thy superconscient as the Panis do in their subconscient secrecy." Then the hymn describes the Pani, the Dasyu and Indra’s battle with him for the possession of earth and heaven. "Nay, thou slyest with thy weapon the wealthy Dasyu, ranging alone with thy powers that serve thee, O Indra ; they on thy bow (the powers as arrows) sped diversely in all directions and they who keep possession and sacrifice not went unto their death. Their heads were scattered far from them, they who do not sacrifice yet strove with the sacrileges, when, O lord of the shining steeds, O strong stander in heaven, thou didst cast out from Heaven and Earth those who observe not the law of thy working (avratân). They fought against the army of the blameless one ; the Navagwas set him on his march ; like bullocks who faith against the bull they were cast out, they came to know what was Indra and fled from him down the slopes. O Indra, thou foughtest them who laughed and wept on the other side of the mid-world ( rajasah pâre, i. e. on the borders of heaven); thou didst burn down the Dasyu out of heaven from on high, thou didst foster the expression of him who affirms thee and gives the Soma. Making the circle of the earth, they shone in the light of the golden gem (an image for the Sun); but for all their rushing they could not pass beyond Indra, for he set spies all around by the Sun. When thou possessed earth and heaven all around with thy vastness; O Indra, by the speakers of the word (brahmabhir) thou didst cast out the Dasyu, attacking those who can think not ( the Truth ) by those who think, amanyamânâh abhi manyamânaih. They attained not to the end of heaven and earth; Indra, the bull, made the lightning his helper, by the Light he milked the shining cows out of the darkness." The battle takes place not on earth but on the other Page-681 shore of the Antariksha, the Dasyus are driven out of heaven by the flames of the thunder bolt, they circle round the earth and are cast out of both heaven and earth; for they can find no place in either heaven or earth, all being now full of the greatness of Indra, nor can conceal them» selves anywhere from his lightnings because the Sun with its rays gives him spies whom he sets all round and in the brightness of those rays the Panis are discovered. This can be no description of an earthly battle between Aryan and Dravidian tribes; neither can the lightning be the physical lightning since that has nothing to do with the destruction of the powers of Night and the milking of the cows of the Dawn out of the darkness. It is clear then that these non-sacrifices, these haters of the word who are incompetent even to think it are not any human enemies of the Aryan cult. They are the powers that strive for possession of heaven and earth in man himself; they are demons and not Dravidians.
It is noteworthy that they strive, but fail to attain the limit of earth and heaven"; we may suppose that these powers seek without the word or the sacrifice to attain to the higher world beyond earth and heaven which can be conquered only by the word and the sacrifice. They seek to possess the Truth under the law of the Ignorance; but they are unable to attain to the limit of earth or heaven; only Indra and the Gods can so exceed the formula of mind, life and body after filling all three with their greatness. Sarama (X. 108. 6) seems to hint at this ambition of the Panis ; ” May your words be unable to attain, may your embodiments be evil and inauspicious; may you not violate the path to travel upon it; may
Brihaspati it not give you happiness of the two worlds ( divine and human )." The Panis indeed offer insolently to be friendly with Indra if he will stay in their cave and be the keeper of their cows, to which S nama answers that India is the over comer of all and cannot be himself overcome and oppressed, and again they offer brotherhood to Sarama if she will dwell with them and not return to the far world whence she has come by the force of the gods against all obstacles,
prabâdhitâ Page-682 sahasâ daivyena. Sarama replies, "I know not brotherhood and sisterhood, Indra knows and the dread Angirases; d« siring the Cows they protected me so that I came; depart hence, O Panis, to a better place. Depart hence, O Panis, to a better place, let the Cows ye confine go upward by the Truth, the hidden Cows whom Brihaspati finds and Soma and the pressing-stones and the illumined seers." We have the idea also of a voluntary yielding up of their store by the Panis in VI. 53, a hymn addressed to the Sun as the Increaser Pushan. " O Pushan, Lord of the Path, we yoke thee like a chariot for the winning of the plenitude, for the Thought.. O shining Pushan, impel to giving the Pani, even him who grivet not; soften the mind even of the Pani. Distinguish the paths that lead to the winning of the plenitude, slay the aggressors, let our thoughts be perfected. Smite the hearts of the Panis with thy goad, O seer; so make them subject to us. Smite them, O Pushan, with thy goad and desire in the heart of the Pani our delight; so make him subject to us…Thy goad thou bearest that impels the word to rise, O shining sort, with that write thy line on the heats of all and sever them, (so make them subject to us). Thy goad of which thy ray is the point and which perfects the herds (of thought-vision, paçusâdhanîm, of. sdâhantâm dhiyah in verse 4), the delight of that we desire. Create for us the thought that wins the cow, that wins the horse, that wins the plenitude of the wealth."
If we are right in our interpretation of this symbol of the Panis, these ideas are sufficiently intelligible without depriving the word of its ordinary sense, as does Sayana, and making it mean only a miserly, greedy human being whom the hunger-stricken poet is thus piteously importuning the Sun-God to turn to softness and charity. The Vedic idea was that the subconscient darkness and the ordinary life of ignorance held concealed in it all that belongs to the divine life and that these secret riches must be
recovered first by destroying the impendent powers of ignorance and than by possessing the lower life subjects Page-683 to the higher. Of Indra it has been said, as we have seen, that he either slays or conquers the Dasyu and transfers his wealth to the Aryan. So also Sarama refuses peace with alliance to the Panis, but suggests their submission to the gods and the Aryans by the surrender and ascent of the imprisoned cows and their own departure from the darkness to a better place (d varîyah.) And it is by the strenuous touch of the goad of the luminous seer, Push an, lord of the Truth, the goad that rives open the closed heart and makes the sacred word to arise from its depths, it is by this luminous-pointed goad which perfects the radiant cows, accomplishes the luminous thoughts, that the conversion of the Pani is effected; then the Truth-god in his darkened heart also desires that which the Aryan desires. Therefore by this penetrating action of the Light and the Truth the powers of the ordinary ignorant sense-activity become subject to the Aryan.
But, normally, they are his enemies, not dâsa in the sense of submission and service (dâsa, servant, from das the work), but in the sense of destruction and injury (dâsa,
Dasyu, an enemy, plunderer, from Das to divide, hurt, injure ). The Pani is the robber who snatches away the cows of light, the horses of the swiftness and the treasures of the divine plenitude, he is the wolf, the eater, atri,
r’itam; he is the obstructors, nid, and spoiler of the word. He is the enemy, the thief, the false or evil thinker who makes difficult the Path by his robberies and obstructions; " Cast away utterly far from us the enemy, the thief, the crooked one who places falsely the thought ; O master of existence, make our path easy to travel. Slay the Pani for he is the wolf, that devours." (VI. 51. 13). His rising to the attack must be checked by the gods. " This god (Soma) in his birth with India for helper held back by force the Pani " and won Swar and the sun and all the riches, (VI. 4).4.) The Panis have to be slain or routed so that their riches may be ravished from them and devoted to the higher life. " Thou who didst sever this Pani in his continuous ranks,
thane are these strong
giving, O Saraswati. O Saraswati, crush the obstructors, of the gods (Vi, Page-684 61)." " O Agni and Soma, then was your strength awakened when you robbed the Pani of the cows and found the one Light for many ‘ (1. 93. 4). When the gods awake in the Dawn for the sacrifice, the Panis must not awake also to interfere with its successful progress; let them sleep in their cavern darkness. *’ O Dawn, queen of the plenitudes, awaken those who fill u-3 ( the gods ), but let the Panis sleep unawakening. Richly dawn for the lords of the plenitude, O queen of the Plenitude, richly for him who affirms thee, O Dawn that art Truth. Young she shines out before us, she has created her host of the ruddy cows; in the non-existent vision has dawned out wide " ( I. 124. 10). Or again in IV. 51, ‘* Lo, in front of us that supreme light full of the knowledge has arisen out of the darkness; daughters of heaven shining wide, the Dawns have created the path for the human being. The Dawns stand in front of us like pillars in the sacrifices ; breaking out pure and purifying they have opened the doors of the pen, the darkness. Breaking forth today the dawns awaken to knowledge the enjoyers for the giving of the rich felicity; within where there is no play of light let the Panis sleep un waking in the heart of the darkness." Into this nether darkness they have to be cast down from the higher planes while the Dawns imprisoned by them in that night have to be lifted to the highest planes. " Panis who make the knot of the crookedness, who have not the will to works, spoilers of speech, who have not faith, who increase not, who do not sacrifice, them has Agni driven farther and farther; supreme, he has made them nethermost who will not sacrifice. And ( the Cows, the Dawns ) who rejoiced in the nether darkness, by his power he has made to move to the highest…He has broken down by his blows the walls that limit, he has given the Dawns to be possessed by the Aryan ", aryapatnîr ushasaç chakâra. The Rivers and Dawns when in the possession of Vritra or Vala are described as dâsapatnîh; by the action of the gods they become aryapatnih, they become the helpmates of the Aryan.
The lords of the ignorance have to be
slain or ends Page-685
laved to the Truth and its seekers, but their wealth is indispensable to the
human fulfilment; it is as if "on the most wealth abounding head of the Panis"
(VI. 45) that Indra takes his stand, pan înam varshisthe murdhann asthât; he becomes himself the Cow of Light and the Horse of Swiftness and lavishes an ever-increasing thousand fold wealth. The fullness of that luminous wealth of the Panis and its ascent heavenward is, as we know already, the Path and the birth of the Immortality. " The Angiras held the supreme manifestation ( of the Truth ), they who had lit the fire, by perfect accomplishment of the work; they gained the whole enjoyment of the Pani, its herds of the cows and the horses.
Atharvans first formed the Path, thereafter Surya was born as the protector of the Law and the Blissful One,
titah sûryo vratapâ vena
âjain. Ushanas Kavya drove upward the Cows. With them may we win by the sacrifice the immortality that is born as a child to the Lord of the Law,"
yamasya
játam amr’itam yajâmahe. Angire is the Rishi who represents the Seer-Will,
Atharvan is the Rishi of the journeying on the Path, Ushanas Kavya is the Rishi of the heavenward desire that is born from the seer-knowledge . The Angiras win the wealth of
illuminations and powers of the Truth concealed behind the lower life and its
crooked nesses; Atharvan forms in their strength the Path and Surya the Lord of Light is then born as the guardian of the divine Law and the Yama-power; Ushanas drives the herded illuminations of our thought up that path of the Truth to the Bliss which Surya possesses; so is born from the law of the Truth the immortality to which the Aryan soul by its sacrifice aspires. Page-686 X
We have had to dwell so long upon the possibilities of the Empire-group because the evolution of the imperial State is the dominating phenomenon of the modern world; it governs the tendencies of the later part of the nineteenth and earlier part of the twentieth centuries very much as the evolution of the free democratized nation governed the age which preceded ours. The dominant idea of the French Revolution was the free and sovereign people, and by the force of circumstances and in spite of the cosmopolitan element introduced into the revolutionary formula by the ideal of fraternity this idea became in fact the assertion of the free, independent, democratically self-governed nation. That ideal has not wholly worked itself out throughout the Occidental world ; for central Europe is only
partly democratized and Russia has only just began to turn its face towards the common goal ; and there are still subject European
peoples or fragments of peoples. Nevertheless, with whatever imperfections, the democratic idea has practically triumphed in all America and Europe, since even in Germany and Russia the complete liberation of the people is only a question of time. Equally it seems
certain that eventually the remaining subject peoples in Europe will either be liberated or acquire at least a modified autonomy. The Asiatic nations have equally accepted this governing idea of the nineteenth century and though the movements of democratic
Page-687 nationalism in the eastern countries, Turkey, Persia, India, China, have not been fortunate in their first attempts at self-realisation, the profound and wide-spread working of the idea cannot be doubted by any careful observer. Whatever modifications may arrive, whatever new tendencies intervene, whatever reactions oppose, it can hardly be doubted that the principal gifts of the French Revolution must remain and be universalised as permanent acquisitions, indispensable elements in the future order of the world,—national self-consciousness and self-government, the freedom and enlightenment of the people and so much social equality and justice at least as is indispensable to political liberty ; for with any form of fixed and rigid inequality democratic self-government is incompatible.
But before the
great nineteenth century impulse could work itself out everywhere, before even it could realise itself entirely in Europe, a new tendency has intervened and a new idea seized on the progressive mind of humanity. This is the idea of the perfectly organised State. Fundamentally the ideal of the perfectly organised State is socialistic and it is based on the second word of the great revolutionary formula, equality, just as the movement of the nineteenth century
centered round the first, liberty. The first impulse given by the great European upheaval attained only to a certain political equality and an incomplete social levelling which still left the one inequality and the one form of
political preponderance which no competitive society can eliminate, the
preponderance of the haves over the have-nots, the inequality between the more
successful in the struggle of life and the less successful which is rendered
inevitable by difference of capacity, unequal opportunity, the handicap of
circumstance, an 1 environment. Socialism seeks therefore to get rid of this inequality by destroying the competitive form of society and substituting the cooperative. The cooperative form of human society existed formerly in the shape of the commune, but the restoration of the commune as the unit would imply practically the return to the old city state Page-688 and as this is not now possible with the larger groupings and greater complexities of modern life, the Socialistic idea could only be realised through the rigorously organised national State. To eliminate poverty, not by the old crude method of equal distribution but by the holding of all property in common and its management through the organised State, to equalise opportunity and capacity as far as possible through universal education and training, again by means of the organised State, is the fundamental idea of modern Socialism. It implies the abrogation of all individual liberty. Socialism still clings indeed to the nineteenth century ideal of political freedom ; it insists on the equal right of all in the State to choose, judge and change their own governors, but all other liberty it is ready to sacrifice to its own central idea.
The progress of the Socialistic idea would seem therefore to lead to the evolution of the perfectly organised national State providing for and controlling the education and training, managing and governing all the economic activities and for that purpose as well as for the assurance of perfect efficiency, morality, well-being and social justice ordering the whole life external and internal of the individuals composing it,—doing in fact by organised State control what earlier societies attempted by social pressure, rigorous rule of custom, minute code and
Shastras. This was always an inherently inevitable development of the revolutionary ideal. It started to the surface at first under pressure of external danger in the government of France by the Jacobins during the Reign of Terror; it has b :en emerging and tending to realise itself under pressure of an inner necessity throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century; it has emerged not completely but with an astonishing approach to completeness by the combination of the inner and the outer necessity during the present War. What was before only an ideal towards which some imperfect initial steps alone were immediately possible, has now become a realisable
programmed with its entire feasibility established by a convincing though necessarily hasty and imperfect practical
Page-689 demonstration. It is true that in order to realise it even political liberty has had to be temporarily abolished; but this, it may be argued, is only an accident of the moment, a concession to temporary necessity; and what is now being done by governments which the people have consented to invest with an absolute and temporarily irresponsible authority, may be done, when there is no pressure of war, by the self-governing democratic State. In that case the near future of the human group would seem to be the nation self-governing, politically free, but aiming at perfect social and economic organisation and for that purpose giving up all individual liberty into the hands of the organised-national State. As France was in the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century the great propagandist and the experimental workshop of political liberty and equality, so Germany has been in the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century the great propagandist and the experimental workshop of the idea of the organised State. There the theory of Socialism has taken its rise and there its propaganda has been most effective so that now a full third of the nation has committed itself to the new gospel; there also the great socialistic measures and those which have developed the control of the individual by the State for the common good and efficiency of the nation have been most thoroughly and admirably conceived and executed. It matters little that this has been done by an anti-socialistic, militarist and aristocratic government; the very fact is a proof of the irresistible strength of the new tendency, and the inevitable transference of the administrative, power from its present holders to the people is all that is needed to complete its triumph. Throughout the recent decades we have seen the growth of German ideas and the increasing tendency to follow German methods of State interference and State control in other countries, even in England, the home of individualism. It is a mistake to think that the defeat of Germany in the present European war will mean the defeat of all her ideals anymore than the defeat of ,evolutional v and Napoleonic Fiancé by the European Page-690 coalition and even the temporary triumph of the monarchic and aristocratic system prevented the spread of her new ideas over all Europe. German militarism and Junkers may be destroyed, but the collapse of her anti-socialistic Government will only hasten instead of delaying the more thorough development and victory of that which has been working behind them and forcing them to minister to it, the great modern tendency of the perfectly organised socialistic State, while the evident result of the war in the nations opposed to her has been to force them more rapidly towards the same ideal.
If this were all,
the natural development of things aided by the frustration of the German form of
imperialism would lead logically to a new ordering of the world on the basis of
a system of free organised nations associating together more or less closely for
international purposes while preserving their independent existence. Such is the
ideal which has attracted the human mind as a yet distant possibility since the
great revolutionary ferment set in ; it is the idea of a federation of free
nations, the parliament of man, the federation of the world. But the actual
circumstances forbid any hope of such an ideal consummation in the near future.
For the nationalistic, democratic and socialistic ideas are not alone at work in
the world ; imperialism is equally in the ascendant. No European people at the
present moment except Switzerland and the three Scandinavian kingdoms is a
nation confined to itself. Each is a nation free in itself but dominating over
other human groupings who are not free or only partially free. Even little
Belgium has its Congo, little Portugal its Colonies, little Holland its
dependencies in the eastern Archipelago ; even the little Balkan states aspire
to revive an ‘ empire " and to rule over others not of their own nationality
while each undoubtedly cherishes the idea of becoming supreme in the peninsula.
Mizzen’s Italy has now its imperialistic ventures and ambitions in Tripoli,
Abyssinia, Albania, the Greek islands. This imperialistic tendency is likely to
grow stronger b}’ the present war mother than weaken. The idea of a remodelling even of’
Page-691 Europe itself on the strict principle of nationality which captivated liberal minds in England at the beginning of the war is hardly practicable and, even if it were effected, there would still remain the whole of Asia and Africa as a field for the imperialistic ambitions of the Western nations and Japan. The disinterestedness which has led a majority in America to decree the liberation of the Philippines and restrained the desire to take advantage of the troubles of Mexico is not possible to the mentality of the Old World, and it is doubtful how long it can stand even in America against the rising tide of imperialistic sentiment. National egoism, the pride of domination and the desire of expansion still govern the mind of humanity, however modified they may now be in their methods by the first weak beginnings of higher motives and a better national morality, and until this spirit is radically changed the union of the human race by a federation of free nations must remain a noble chimera.
Undoubtedly, a free association and unity must be the ultimate goal of our development and until it is realised the world must be subject to constant changes and revolutions; every established order, because it is imperfect, because it insists on arrangements which come to be recognised as involving injustice or which stand in the way of new tendencies and forces, because it outlasts its utility and justification, must end in malaise,
resistance and upheaval, must change itself or be changed, or else lead to cataclysms such as periodically trouble our human advance. But the time has not come when the true principle of order can replace those which are artificial and imperfect. It is idle, to hope for a federation of free nations until either the present inequalities between nation and nation are removed or else the whole world rises to a common culture based upon a higher moral and spiritual status than now obtains. The imperial instinct, being alive and dominant and stronger at present than the principle of nationalism, the evolution of great Empires can hardly fad to overshadow for a time at least the tendency to the development of free nationalities. All that can be hoped Page-692 is that the old artificial, merely political empire may be replaced by a truer and more moral type and that the existing empires driven by the necessity of strengthening themselves and by an enlightened self-interest may come to see that the recognition of national autonomy is a wise and necessary concession to the still vital instinct of nationalism and can be used so as to strengthen instead of weakening their imperial strength and unity. In this way while a federation of free nations is for the present impossible, a system of federated empires and free nations drawn together in a closer association than the world has yet seen, is not altogether impossible ; and through this and other steps some form of political unity for mankind may at a more or less distant date be realised.
The present war
has brought up many suggestions for such a closer association, but as a rule they have been limited to a better ordering of the international relations of Europe. One of these is the elimination of war by a stricter international law administered by an international court and supported by the sanction of the nations which shall by enforced by all of them against any offender. Such a solution is chimerical unless it is immediately followed by farther and far-reaching developments. For the law given by the Court must be
enforced either by an alliance of some of the stronger Powers, as for instance the present coalition of France, England and Russia dominating the rest of Europe, or by a concert of all the
European Powers or else by a United States of Europe or some other form of European federation. A dominating alliance of great Powers would be simply a repetition in principle of the system of Metternich and would inevitably break down after some lapse of time, while a Conceit of Europe must mean, as experience has shown, the uneasy attempt of rival groupings to maintain a precarious understanding which may postpone but cannot eventually prevent fresh struggles and collisions. With such imperfect systems the law would only be obeyed so long as it was expedient, so long only as the Powers who desired new changes and readjust!). ents not admitted by the others did not
consider. Page-693 der the moment opportune for resistance. The Law within a nation is only secure because there is a recognised authority empowered to determine it and to make the necessary changes and possessed of a sufficient force to punish all violation of its statutes. An international or an inter-European law must have the same advantages if it is to exercise anything more than a merely moral force which can be set at naught by those who are strong enough to defy it and who find an advantage in the violation. Some form of European federation, however loose, is therefore essential if the idea behind these suggestions of a new order is to be made practically effective, and once commenced such a federation must necessarily be tightened and draw more and more towards the form of a United States of Europe.
Whether such a European unity can be formed or whether, if formed, it can be maintained and perfected against the many forces of dissolution, the many causes of quarrel which would for long try it to the breaking-point, only experience can show. But it is evident that in the present state of human egoism it would, if formed, become a tremendously powerful instrument for the domination and exploitation of the rest of the world by the group of nations which are at present in the forefront of human progress. It would inevitably awaken in antagonism to it an idea of Asiatic unity and an idea of American unity, and while such continental groupings replacing the present smaller national unities might well be an advance towards the final union of all mankind, yet their realisation would mean cataclysms of a kind and scope which would dwarf the present catastrophe and in which the hopes of mankind might founder and fatally collapse rather than progress nearer to fulfilment. But the chief objection to the idea of a United States of Europe is that the general sense of humanity is already seeking to travel beyond the continental distinctions and make them subordinate to a larger human idea and that a division on that basis would therefore be a reactionary step of the gravest kind and likely to be attended with the most serious consequences Page-694 to human progress. Europe indeed is in the anomalous position of being at once ripe for the Pan-European idea and at the same time under the necessity of over passing it. Recently the conflict of the two tendencies was curiously exemplified by the speculations of a leading English journal on the nature of the present European struggle. It was suggested that the sin of Germany in this war was due to its exaggerated egoistic idea of the nation and its disregard of the larger idea of Europe to which the nation-idea must now be subjected and subordinated ; the total life of Europe must now be. the all-engrossing unity, its good the paramount consideration and the egoism of the nation must consent to exist only as an organic part of this larger egoism. In effect this is the acceptance after so many decades of the idea of Nietzsche who insisted that nationalism and war were anachronisms and the ideal of all enlightened minds must be nit to be good patriots but good Europeans. But immediately the question arose, what then of the increasing importance of America in world-politics, what of Japan and China, what of the renewed stirrings of life in Asia ? The writer had therefore to draw back from his first formula and to explain that by Europe he meant not Europe but all nations that had accepted the principles of European civilisation as the basis of their polity and social organisation . This more philosophical formula has the advantage both of bringing in America and Japan and thus recognizing all the actually free or dominant nations in the circle of the proposed solidarity and of holding out the hope of admission to others whenever they can prove, after the forceful manner of Japan or otherwise, that they too have come up to this European standard.
Indeed, though Europe is still strongly separate in its own conception from the rest of the world,—as is shown by the often expressed resentment of the continual existence of Turkey in Europe and the desire to put an and to this government of Europeans by
Asiatic,—yet as a matter of fact it is inextricably tangled up with America and Asia. Some of the European nations have colonies in America, Page-695 all have possessions and ambitions in Asia, where Japan alone is outside the shadow cast by Europe, or in Northern Africa which is culturally one with Asia. The United States of Europe would therefore mean a federation of free European nations dominating a half-subject Asia and holding parts of America and standing there in uneasy proximity to nations still free and necessarily troubled, alarmed and overshadowed by this giant immiscence. The in viable result would be in America to bring together more closely the Latin Centre and South and the English-speaking North and to emphasise immensely the Munro doctrine with consequences which cannot easily be foreseen, while in Asia there could be only one of two final endings to the situation, either the disappearance of the remaining free Asiatic States or a vast Asiatic resurgence and the recoil of Europe from Asia. Such movements would be a prolongation of the old line of human development and set at naught the now cosmopolitan conditions created by modern culture and Science ; but they are inevitable if the nation-idea in the West is to merge into the Europe-idea, that is to say into the continental, rather than into the wider consciousness off a common humanity.
If therefore any naive supra-national order is to evolve sooner or later as a result of the present upheaval, it must be an association embracing Asia, Africa and
America as well as Europe and it must be in its nature an organisation of international life including in itself a
number of free nations such as Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the United States, the Latin republics and a number of imperial and colonizing nations such as are most of the peoples of Europe. Either the latter would remain as they now are free in themselves but masters of subject peoples who with the advance of time would become more and more intolerant of the yoke imposed on them or else they would be, by an ethical advance which is as yet very far from being accomplished, partly
centres of free federal Empire, partly nations holding in trust races yet backward and undeveloped until they arrived at the capacity of se
Administration, as the United States now hold the Philippines. In the former case Page-696
the unity,
the order, the common law established would perpetuate and be partly founded on an enormous system of injustice and exposed to the revolts and revolutions of Nature and the great revenges by which she finally vindicates the human spirit against wrongs which she tolerates for a time as necessary incidents of human development. In the latter there would be some chance of the new order, however far in its beginnings from the ultimate ideal of a free association of free human aggregates, leading peacefully and by a natural unfolding of the spiritual and ethical progress of the race to such a secure, just and healthy political, social and economic foundation as might enable mankind to turn from its preoccupation with these lower cares to that
development of its higher self which is the nobler part of its destiny. Page-697 Ideals are truths that have not yet effected themselves for man, the realities of a higher plane of existence which have yet to fulfil themselves on this lower plane of life and matter, our present field of operation. To the pragmatical intellect which takes its stand upon the eve.-changing present, ideals are not truths, not realities, they are at most potentialities of future truth and only become real when they are visible in the external fact as work of force accomplished. But to the mind which is able to draw back from the flux of force in the material universe, to the consciousness which is not imprisoned in its own workings or carried along in their Hood but is able to envelop, hold and comprehend them, to the soul that is not merely the subject and instrument of the world-force but can reflect something of that Master-Consciousness which controls and uses it, the ideal present to its inner vision is a greater reality than the changing fact obvious to its outer senses. The Idea is not a reflection of the external fact which it so much exceeds ; rather the fact is only a partial reflection of the Idea which has created it.
Certainly, ideals are not the ultimate Reality, for that is too high and vast for any ideal to envisage ; they are aspects of it thrown out in the world-consciousness as a basis for the workings of the world-power. But they are primary, the actual workings secondary. They are nearer to the Reality and therefore always more real, forcible and complete than the facts which are their partial reflection. Reflections themselves of the R’ al, they again are reflected in the more concrete workings of our existence. The human intellect in proportion as it limits itself by the phenomena of self-realising Force fails to catch the creative Id. a until after we have seen the external fact it has created ; but this order of our sense enslaved consciousness is
Page-698 not the real older of the universe. God preexists before the world can come into being, but to our experience in which the senses act first and only then the finer workings of consciousness, the world seems to come first and God to emerge out of it, so much so that it costs us an effort to rise out of the mechanical; pluralistic and pantheistic conceptions of Him to a truer and higher idea of the Divine Reality. That which to us is the ultimate, is in truth the primary reality. So too the Idea which seems to us to rise out of the fact, really precedes it and out of it the fact has arisen. Our vulgar contrast of the ideal and the real is therefore a sensuous error, for that which we call real is only a phenomenon of force working out something that stands behind the phenomenon and that is preexistent and greater than it. The Real, the Idea, the phenomenon, this is the true order of the creative Divinity. The pragmatic intellect is only sure of a thing when it finds it realised in Power ; therefore it has a certain contempt for the ideal, for the vision because it drives always at execution and material realisation. But Power is not the only term of the Godhead ; Knowledge is the elder sister of Power ; Force and Consciousness are twin aspects of being both in the eternal foundation of things and in their evolutionary realisation. The idea is the realisation of a truth in Consciousness as the fact is its realisation in Power, both indispensable, both justified in themselves and in each other, neither warranted in ignoring or despising its complement. For the idealist and visionary to despise the pragmatist or for the pragmatist to depreciate the idealist and visionary is a deplorable result of out intellectual limitations and the mutual misunderstandings by which the arrogance of our imperfect temperament and mentality shuts itself out from perfection. It is as if we were to think that God the Seer and Knower must despise God the Master of works and energies or the Lord of action and sacrifice ignore the divine Witness and Originator. But these two are one and the division in us a limitation that mankind has yet to conquer.
The human being advances in proportion as he becomes more and more capable of knowing before he realises in action. This is indeed the order of evolution. It begins with a material working, in which the Prakriti, the executive Power is veiled by its works, by the facts it produces and itself veils the consciousness which originates and
supports all
Page-699 comes vibrant in the very surface of its works ; last, in Mind the underlying consciousness reveals itself. So too man is at first subject in his mentality to the facts which his senses envisage, cannot go behind and beyond them, knows only the impressions they make on his receptive mind. The animal is executive, not creative; a passive tool of Matter and Life he does not seek in his thought and will to react upon and use them : the human being too in his less developed state is executive rather than creative; he limits his view to the present and to his environment, works so as to live from day to day, accepts what he is without reaching forward in thought to what he may be, has no ideals. In proportion as he goes beyond the fact and seeks to anticipate Nature, to catch the ideas and principles behind her workings and finally to seize the idea that is not yet realised in fact and himself preside over its execution, he becomes originative and creative and no longer merely executive. He begins thus his passage from subjection to mastery. In thus progressing humanity falls apart after its fashion into classes ; it divides itself between the practical man and the idealist and makes numerous compromises between the two extremes. In reality the division is artificial ; for every man who does anything in the world, works by virtue of an idea and in the force given to him by ideals either his own or others’ ideals which he may or may not recognise but in whose absence nevertheless he would be impotent to move a single step. The smaller the ideals, the fewer they are and the less recognised and insisted on, the less also is the work done and the progress realised ; on the other hand, when ideals enlarge themselves, when they become forceful, widely recognised , when different ideals enter into the field, clash and communicate their thought and force to each other, then the race rises to its great periods of activity and creation. And it is when the Ideal arisen, vehement, energetic, refuses to be debarred from possession and throws itself with all the gigantic force of the higher planes of existence on this reluctant and rebellious stuff of life and matter to conquer it that we have the great eras which change the world by carrying out the potentialities of several centuries in the action of a few decades.
Therefore wherever and whenever the mere practical man abounds and excludes or discourages by his domination the idealist, there is the least work and the least valuable
Page-700 work done in that age or country for humanity ; at most some preliminary spade-work, some labour of conservation and hardly perceptible motion, some repression of creative energies preparing for a great future outburst. On the other hand, when the idealist is liberated, when the visionary abounds, the executive worker also is uplifted, finds at once an 01 dentition and tenfold energy and accomplishes things which he would otherwise have rejected, as a dream and chimera, which t – his ordinary capacity would be impossible and which often have the world wondering how work so great could hive been done by men who were in themselves so little. The union of the great idealist with the great executive personality who receives and obeys the idea is always the sign of a coming realisation which will be more or less deep and extensive in proportion as they are united or as the executive man seizes more or less profoundly and completely the idea he serves and is able to make permanent in force what the other has impressed upon the consciousness of his age.
Often enough, even when these two different types of men work in the same cause and one more or less fulfils the other, they are widely Separated in their
accessory ideas, distrust, dislike and repudiate each other. For ordinarily the idealist is full of anticipations which reach beyond the actual possibilities or exceed the work that is destined to be immediately fulfilled ; the executive man on the other hand is unable to grasp either all the meaning of the work he does or all its diviner possibilities which to him are illusion and vanity while to the other they are all that is supremely valuable in his
great endeavor. To the practical worker limiting himself by patent forces and actual possibilities the idealist who made his work
possible seems an
idle dreamer or a troublesome fanatic ; to the idealist the practical man who realises the first steps towards his idea seems a
coarse spoiler of the divine work and almost its enemy ; for by attaching too much importance to what is immediately possible he removes the greater possibilities which he does not see , seems to prevent and often does prevent a larger and nobler realisation. It is the gulf between a Cavour and a
Mizzen, between the prophet of an ideal and the statesman of a realisable idea. The latter seems always to be justified by the event, but the former has a deeper justification in the shortcomings of the event. The successes of the executive man hiding away the ideal under the accomplished fact are often the tragedies of the Page-701 human spirit and are responsible for the great reactions and disappointments it undergoes when it finds how poor and soulless is the accomplished fact compared with the glory of the vision and the and our of the effort. It cannot be doubted which of these two opposites and complementariness is the most essential to success. Not only is the upheaval and fertilising of the general consciousness by the thinker and the idealist essential to the practical realisation of great changes, but in the realisation itself the idealist who will not compromise is an indispensable clement. Show me a movement without a force of uncompromising idealism working somewhere in its sum of energies and you have shown me a movement which is doomed to failure and abortion or to petty and inconsiderable results. The age or the country which is entirely composed of reasonable , statesmanlike workers ever ready for concession and compromise is a country which will never b: great until it has added to us ell what is lacking to it and bathed itself in pure and divine fountains and an age which will accomplish nothing of supreme importance for the progress of humanity. There is a difference however between the fanatic of an idea and the true idealist : the former is simply the materialistic, executive man possessed by the idea of another, not himself the possessor of it ; he is haunted in his will and divine by the force of the idea, not really illumined by its light. He does harm as well as good and his chief use is to pi event the man of compromise from pausing at a paltry or abortive result; but his excesses also bring about great reactions. Incapable of taking his stand on the ideal itself, he puts all his emphasis on particular means and forms and overstrains the springs of action till they become dulled and incapable of responding to farther excitation. But the true idealist is not the servant of the letter or the form ; it is the idea which he loves and the spirit behind the idea which he serves. Man approaches nearer his perfection when he combines in himself the idealist and the pragmatist, the originative soul and the executive power. Great executive personalities have usually been men of a considerable idealism. Some indeed have served a purpose rather than an ideal ; even n the idea that guided or moved them they have leaned toils executive rather than its inspiring and originative aspect ; they have sought their diving force in the interest; passion and emotion attached to it rather than in the idea itself. Others have served consciously a great Page-702 single thought or moral aim which they have laboured to execute in their lives. But the greatest men of action who were endowed by Nature with the most extraordinary force of accomplishment,’ have owed it to the combination in them of active power with an immense drift of originative thought devoted to practical realisation. They have been great executive thinkers, great practical dreamers. Such were Napoleon and Alexander. Napoleon with his violent prejudice against ideologues and dreamers was himself a colossal dreamer, an incurable if unconscious ideologist ; his teeming brain as the cause of his gigantic force and accomplishment. The immense if shapeless ideas of Alexander threw themselves into the form of conquests, cities, cultures ; they broke down the barriers of Greek and Asiatic prejudice and narrow self-imprisonment and created an age of civilisation and soul-interchange. But these great personalities do not contain in themselves the combination which humanity most needs ; not the man of action driven by ideas, the pragmatist stirred by a half-conscious; exaltation from the idealistic, almost the mystic side of his nature, but the seer who is able to execute his vision is the higher term of human power and knowledge. The one takes his stand in the Prakriti, the executive Force, and is therefore rather driven than leads himself even when he most successfully leads others ; the other takes his stand in the Purusah, the Knower who controls executive force, and ‘he possesses the power that he uses. He draws nearer to the type of the divine Seer-Will that has created and governs the universe. But such a combination is rare and difficult; for in order to grasp the Ideal the human soul has to draw back so far from the limitations, pitilessness, denials of the world of phenomenal fact that the temperament and mentality become inapt for executive action upon the concrete phenomena of life and matter. The mastery of the fact is usually possible to the idealist mind only when its idealism is of no great depth or power and can therefore accommodate itself more easily to the actual life environment.
Until this difficulty is overcome and the seer-will becomes more common in man and more the master of life, the ideal works at a disadvantage, by a silent pressure upon the. reluctant world, by occasional attacks and sudden upheavals ; a little is accomplished in a long time or by a great sudden effort, a little that is poor enough, coarse enough, material enough compared with the thing seen and
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attempted, but which still makes a farther advance possible though often after a period of quiescence and reaction. And times there are, ages of stupendous
effort and initiative when the gods seem no longer satisfied with this tardy and fragmentary working, when the ideal breaks constantly through the dull walls of the material practical life, incalculable forces clash in its field, innumerable ideas meet and wrestle in the arena of the world and through the constant storm and flash, agitation of force and agitation of light the possibility of the victoriously fulfilled ideal, the hope of the Messiah, the expectation of the Avatar takes possession of the hearts and thoughts of men. Such an age seems now to be coming upon the world. But whether that hope and expectation and possibility are to come to anything depends upon whether men prepare their souls for the advent and rise in the effort of their faith, life and thought to the height and purity of a clearly-grasped ideal. The Messiah or Avatar is nothing but this, the divine Seer-Will descending upon the human consciousness to reveal to it t he divine meaning behind our half-blind action and to give along
with the vision the exalted will that is faithful and performs and the ideal force that executes according to the vision.
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