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CHAPTER XXIV MATTER He arrived at the knowledge that Matter is Brahman. Taittiriya Upanishad ARGUMENT
[Life and Mind are in the fact of evolution conditioned by the body and therefore by the principle of Matter. The body is the chief difficulty in the way of a spiritual transformation of life ; it has therefore been regarded by spiritual aspiration as an enemy and the escape from the material existence has been made an indispensable condition of the final emancipation.—The quarrel begins with the struggle between Life and Matter with the apparent defeat of life in death as its constant circumstance ; it continues with the struggle of Mind against the life and the body and culminates with the struggle of the spirit against all its instruments ; but the right end and solution of these discords is not an escape and a severance but the complete victory of the higher over the lower.—We have to examine the problem of the reality of Matter. Our present experience of Matter does not give us its truth ; for Matter is only an appearance of the Reality, a form of its force-action presented to the principle of sense in the universal consciousness. As Mind is only a final dividing action of Supermind and Life of Conscious-Force working in the conditions of the
Ignorance,
Page-705 so Matter as we know it is only the final form taken by conscious-being as the result of that same working. Mind precipitating itself into Life to create form gives to the universal principle of Being the appearance of material substance instead of pure substance, that is to say, of substance offering itself to the contact of mind as stable thing or object. This contact of mind with its object is Sense.—In the divine Mind there is a movement which presents to the divine Knower the forms of Himself as objects of His knowledge and this would create a division between the Knower and the object of knowledge if there were not at the same time, inevitably, another movement by which He feels the object as Himself. This movement, in the divided state of existence created by dividing Mind, is represented to us as the contact of sense which becomes a basis for contact through the thought-mind by which we return towards unity.—Since the action of Mind is to divide infinitely the one infinite existence, Matter, the result of that action, becomes in its apparent nature an infinite atomic division and atomic aggregation of infinite substance. But its reality is one and indivisible, even as is the reality of Life and of Mind. Matter is Sachchidananda represented to His own mental experience asa formal basis of objective knowledge, action and delight. ]
We have now the rational assurance that Life is neither an inexplicable dream nor an impossible evil that has yet become a dolorous fact, but a mighty pulsation of the divine All-Existence. We see something of its foundation and its principle, we look upward to its high potentiality and ultimate divine out-flowering. But there is one principle below all the others which we have not yet sufficiently considered, the principle of Matter upon which Life stands as upon a pedestal or out of which it evolves like the form of a many-branching tree out of its encasing seed. The body of man depends upon this physical principle and if the out-flowering of Life is the result of Mind emerging, expanding, elevating itself in search of its own truth in the largeness of the supramental existence, yet it seems also to be conditioned by this case of body and
Page-706 by this foundation of Matter. The importance of the body is obvious ; it is because he has developed or been given a body and brain capable of receiving and serving a progressive mental illumination that man has risen above the animal. Equally, it can only be by developing a body capable of receiving and serving a still higher illumination that he will rise above himself and realise not merely in thought and in his internal being but in Life a perfectly divine manhood. Otherwise either the promise of Life is cancelled, its meaning annulled and earthly being can only realise Sachchidananda by abolishing itself, by shedding from it mind, life and body and returning to the pure Infinite, or else man is not the divine instrument, there is a destined limit to the consciously progressive power which distinguishes him from all other terrestrial existences and as he has replaced them in the front of things, so another must eventually replace him and assume his heritage.
It seems indeed that the body is from the beginning the soul’s great difficulty, its continual stumbling-block and rock of offence. Therefore the eager seeker of spiritual fulfilment has hurled his ban against the body and his world-disgust selects this world-principle above all other things as an especial object of loathing. The body is the obscure burden that he cannot bear ; its obstinate material grossness is the obsession that drives him for deliverance to the life of the ascetic. To get rid of it he has even gone so far as to deny its existence and the reality of the material universe. Most of the religions have put their
cuisse
Page-707 be materialistic or spiritual, would alike cut the Gordian knot of existence with one slashing blow and escape at once to an eternal bliss, an eternal annihilation or an eternal quietude.
The quarrel does not really commence with our a-wakening to our spiritual possibilities ; it begins from the appearance of life itself and its struggle to establish its activities and its permanent aggregations of living form against the force of inertia, against the force of
in conscience, against the force of atomic desegregation which are in the material principle the knot of the
get at Denial. Life is at constant war with Matter and the battle seems always to end in the apparent defeat of Life and in that collapse downward to the material principle winch we call death. The discord deepens with the appearance of Mind; for Mind has its own quarrel with both Life and Matter : it is at constant war with their limitations, in constant subjection to and revolt against the grossness and inertia of the one and the passions and sufferings of the other ; and the battle seems to turn eventually though not very surely towards a partial and costly victory
for the Mind in which it conquers, represses or even slays the vital cravings, impairs the physical force and disturbs the balance of the body in the interests of a greater mental activity and a higher moral being. It is in this struggle that the impatience of Life, the disgust of the body and the recoil from both towards a pure mental and moral existence take their rise. When man awakens to an existence beyond Mind, he carries yet farther this principle of discord. Mind, Body and Life are condemned as the trinity of the world, the flesh and the devil. Mind too is banned as the source of all our malady , war is declared between the spirit and its instruments and the victory of the former is declared to consist in its rejection of mind, life and body and withdrawal into its own infinitudes. The world is a discord and we shall best solve its perplexities by carrying the principle of discord itself to its extreme possibilities,
Page-708 But these defeats and victories are only apparent, this solution is not a solution but an escape from the problem. Life is not really defeated by Matter; it makes a compromise by using death for the continuance of life. Mind is not really victorious over Life and Matter, but has only achieved an imperfect development of some of its potentialities at the cost of others which are bound up with the unrealised or rejected possibilities of its better use of life and body. The individual soul has not conquered the lower triplicate, but only rejected their claim upon it and fled from the work which spirit had undertaken *hen it first cast itself into form of universe. The problem continues because the labour of the Divine in the universe continues, but without any satisfying solution of the problem or any victorious accomplishment of the labour. Therefore, since our own standpoint is that Sachchidananda is the beginning and the middle and the end and that struggle and discord cannot be eternal and fundamental principles in His being but by their very existence imply labour towards a perfect solution and a complete victory, we must seek that solution in a real victory of Life over Matter through the fit e and perfect use of body by Life, in a real victory of Mind over Life and Matter through a free and perfect use of life-force and form. by Mind and in a real victory of Spirit over the triplicate through a free and perfect occupation of mind, life and body by conscious spirit ; and in the view we have worked out this last conquest can alone make the others really possible. To the end, then, that we may see how these conquests can be at all or wholly possible, we must find out the reality of Matter just as, seeking the fundamental knowledge, we have found out the reality of Mind and Soul and Life.
In a certain sense Matter is unreal and non-existent; that is to say, our present knowledge, idea and experience of Matter is not its truth, but merely a phenomenon of particular relation between our senses and the all-existence in which we move, When Science discovers that Matter Page-709 resolves itself into forms of Force , it has hold of a universal and fundamental Truth ; and when philosophy discovers that Matter only exists as substantial appearance to the consciousness and that the one reality is Spirit or pure conscious Being, it has hold of a greater and completer, a still more fundamental truth. But still the question remains why Force should take the form of Matter and not of mere force-currents or why that which is really Spirit should admit the phenomenon of Matter and not rest in states, villainies and joys of the spirit. This, it is said, is the work of Mind or else, since evidently Thought does not directly create or even perceive the material form of things, it is the work of Sense ; the sense-mind creates the forms which it seems to perceive and the thought-mind works upon the forms which the sense mind presents to it. But, evidently the individual embodied mind is not the creator of the phenomenon of Matter ; earth-existence cannot be the result of the human mind which is itself the result of earth-existence. If we say that the world exists only in our own minds, we express a non-fact and a confusion ; for the material world existed before man was upon the earth and it will go on existing if man disappears from the earth or even if our individual mind abolishes itself in the Infinite. We must conclude then that it is universal Mind, subconscious to us in the form of the universe, which has created that form for its habitation. And since the creator must have preceded and must exceed its creation, this really implies a superconscient Mind which by the instrumentality of a universal sense creates in itself the relation of form with form which constitutes the rhythm of the material universe. But this also is no complete solution ; it tells us that Matter is a creation of Consciousness, but it does not explain how Consciousness came to create Matter as the basis of its cosmic workings.
We shall understand better if we go back at once to the original principle of things. Existence is in its activity a conscious-force which presents the workings of it a Page-710 force to its consciousness as forms of its own being. Since Force is only the action of one sole existing Conscious-Being, its results can be nothing else but forms of that Conscious-Being ; Substance or Matter, then, is only a form of Spirit. The appearance which this form of Spirit assumes to our senses is due to that dividing action of Mind from which we have been able to deduce consistently the whole phenomenon of the universe. We know now that Life is an action of Conscious-Force of which material forms are the result; Life involved in those forms, appearing in them first as inconscient force, evolves and brings back into manifestation as Mind the consciousness which is the real self of that force and which never ceased to exist in it even when it was unmanifest. We know also that Mind is an inferior power of conscious Knowledge or Supermind to which Life is the corresponding energy ; for descending through Supermind Consciousness or Chit represents itself in Mind, Force of consciousness or Tapas represents itself in Life. Mind by its separation from its own higher reality in Supermind gives Life the appearance of division and by its farther involution in its own Life-Force becomes subconscious in Life and gives the outward appearance of an inconscient force to its material workings. Therefore, the in conscience, the inertia, the atomic desegregation of Matter must have their source in this all-dividing and self-involving action of Mind by which our universe came into being. As Mind is only a final action of Sup remind in the descent towards creation and Life an action of Conscious-Force working in the conditions of the Ignorance created by this descent of Mind, so Matter as we know it is only the final form taken by conscious-being as the result of that working. Matter is substance of the one conscious-being phenomenally divided within itself by the action of Mind.
But why this division of an indivisible Existence? Because Mind precipitating itself into Life to create form must first give to the universal principle of Being the appearance of material substance instead of, pure substance
Page-711
—-that is say, it must give it the appearance of substance which offers itself to the contact of Mind as stable thing or object and not of substance which offers itself to the contact of pure consciousness as its own eternal pure existence and reality. This contact of mind with its object creates what we call sense. The descent of pure substance into material substance follows inevitably on the descent of Sachchidananda through
Supermind into mind and life. To begin with, substance in its utter purity is pure conscious existence self-aware by identity but not yet turning its consciousness upon itself as object. Supermind preserves this self-awareness by identity as its background of self-knowledge, but yet presents Being to itself as this
object of its own active consciousness, the object of a supreme knowledge which
can by comprehension see the object within itself and as itself and also can
simultaneously by apprehension see it as an object within the circumference of its consciousness but put away from itself, that is to say from the centre of vision in which it concentrates itself as the Knower, Witness or Purusha. We have seen that from this apprehending consciousness arises the movement of Mind, the movement by which the individual knower regards a form of his own universal being as other than he ; but in the divine Mind there is immediately or rather simultaneously another movement or reverse side of the same movement, an act of union in being which heals this
phenomenal division in being and prevents it from becoming even for a moment real to the knower. This act of conscious union in being is that which is otherwise represented in dividing Mind as contact in consciousness and with us this contact in consciousness is primarily represented by the principle of sense. On this basis of sense, on this contact of union subject to division the action of the thought-mind founds itself and prepares for the return to a higher principle of union to which division is made subject and subordinate. Substance, then, as we know it, is the form in which Mind contacts the conscious Being of which it is itself a movement of knowledge. Page-712 But Mind by its very nature tends to know and sense substance of conscious-being, not in its unity or totality but by the principle of division. It sees it, as it were, in infinitesimal points which it associates together in order to arrive at a totality and into these view-points and associations cosmic Mind throws itself and dwells in them. So dwelling, creative by its inherent force as the agent of Real-Idea, bound therefore by it own nature to convert all its perceptions into energy of life as the All-Existent converts all His self-aspectings into various energy of His creative Force of consciousness, cosmic Mind turns these its viewpoints of universal existence into stand-points of universal Life ; it turn them into forms of atomic being instinct with the life that forms them and governed by the mind and will that actuate the formation. At the same time, the atomic existences it thus forms must by the very law of their being tend to associate themselves, to aggregate ; anal each of these aggregates also, instinct with the life that forms and the mind and will that actuate them, bears with it a fiction of individual existence, is supported, according as the mind in it is implicit or explicit, unmanifest or manifest, by its ego of force in which the will to be is dumb and imprisoned but none the less powerful or by its mental ego in which the will to be is liberated and conscious.
Thus not any eternal and original law of eternal and original Matter, but the nature of the action of cosmic Mind is the cause of atomic existence. Subdivide the visible or formal atom "into essential atoms, break it up into the most infinitesimal dust of being, we shall still, because of the nature of the Mind and Life that formed them, arrive at some utmost atomic existence unstable perhaps but always reconstituting itself in the eternal flux of force and not at mere
anatomic extension incapable of contents. Anatomic extension of substance, extension which is not an aggregation, coexistence otherwise than by distribution in space are realities of pure existence, pure substance and are a knowledge of
Supermind, not
Page-713 a concept of the dividing mind. They are the reality underlying Matter, but not the phenomenon which we call Matter. Mind, Life, Matter itself are one with that pure existence and conscious extension in their static reality, but not in their dynamic action, self-perception and self-formation. Therefore we arrive at this truth of Matter that there is a conceptive self-extension of being which works itself out in the universe as substance or object of consciousness and which cosmic Mind and Life in their creative action represent through atomic division and aggregation as the thing we call Matter. But this Matter like Mind and Life is still Being or Brahman in its self-creative action. It is a form of the force of conscious Being, a form given by Mind and realised by Life ; it holds within it as its own reality consciousness concealed from itself, involved and absorbed in the result of its own self-formation and therefore self-oblivious ; and, however brute and void of sense it seems to us, it is yet to the secret experience of the consciousness hidden within it delight of being offering itself to the secret consciousness as object of sensation in order to tempt that hidden godhead out of its secrecy. Being manifest as substance, force of Being cast into form, figured self-representation of the secret self-consciousness, delight offering itself to its own consciousness as an object,— what is this but Sachchidananda ? Matter is Sachchidananda represented to His own mental experience as a formal basis of objective knowledge, action and delight. Page-714 CHAPTER XX THE RELEASE FROM THE HEART AND THE MIND
But the ascending
soul has to separate itself not only from the life in the body but from the action of the life-energy in the mind; it has to make the mind say as the representative of the Purusha " I am not the Life; the Life is not the self of the Purusha, it is only a working and only one working of Prakriti." The characteristics of Life are action and movement, a reaching out to absorb and assimilate what is external to the individual and a principle of satisfaction or dissatisfaction in what it seizes upon or what comes to it, which is associated with the all-pervading phenomenon of attraction and repulsion. These three things are everywhere in Nature because Life is everywhere in Nature. But in us mental beings they are all given a mental value according to the mind which perceives and accepts them. They take the form of action, of desire and of liking and disliking, pleasure and pain. The Prana is everywhere in us supporting not only the action of our body, but of our sense-mind , our emotional mind, our thought-mind; and bringing its own law or dharma into all these, it confuses, it limits, it throws into discord their right action and creates that impurity of misplacement and that tangled confusion which is the whole evil of our psychological existence. In that confusion one law seems to reign, the law of desire. As the universal Divine Being, Page-715 all-embracing and all-possessing, acts, moves, enjoys purely for the satisfaction of divine Delight, so the individual life acts, moves, enjoys and suffers predominantly for the satisfaction of desire. Therefore the psychic life-energy presents itself to our experience as a sort of desire-mind, which we have to conquer if we mean to get back to our true self. Desire is at once the motive of our actions, our lever of accomplishment and the bane of our existence. It our sense-mind, emotional and, thought-mind could act free from the intrusions and importations of the late energy, if that energy could be made to obey their right action instead of imposing its own yoke on our existence, all human problems would move harmoniously to their right solution. The proper function of the life te-energy is to do what it is bidden by the divine principle in us, to reach to and enjoy what is given to it by that indwelling Divine and not to desire at all. The proper function of the sense-mind is to lie open passively, luminously to the contacts of Life and transmit their sensations and the rasa or right taste and principle of delight in them to the higher function; but interfered with by the attractions and repulsions, the acceptances and refusals, the satisfactions and dissatisfactions-, the capacities and incapacities of the life-energy in the body it is, to begin with, limited in its scope and, secondly, forced in these limits to associate itself with all these discords of the life in Matter. It becomes an instrument for pleasure and pain instead of for delight of existence.
Similarly the emotional mind compelled to take note of all these discords and subject itself to their emotional reactions becomes a hurtling field of joy and
gent, love and hatred, wrath, fear, struggle, aspiration, disgust, likes, dislikes, indifferences, content, discontent, hopes, disappointments, gratitude, revenge and all the stupendous play of passion which is the drama of his in the world. Tins chaos we call our soul. Bat the real soul, the real psychic entity which for the most part we
Page-716 only a small minority in mankind has developed, is an instrument of pure love, joy and the luminous reaching out to fusion and unity with God and our fellow-creatures. This psychic entity is covered up by the play of the mentalised Prana or desire-mind which we mistake for the soul ; the emotional mind is unable to mirror the real soul in us, the Divine in our hearts, and is obliged instead to mirror the desire-mind. So too the prop-r function of the thought-mind is to observe, understand, judge with a dispassionate delight in knowledge and open itself to messages and illuminations playing upon all that it observes and upon all that is yet hidden from it but must progressively be revealed, messages and illuminations that secretly flash down to us from the divine Oracle concealed in light above our mentality whether they seem to descend through the intuitive mind or arise from the seeing heart. But this it cannot do rightly because it is pinned to the limitations of the life-energy in the senses, to the discords of sensation and emotion, and to its own limitations of intellectual preference, inertia, training, self-will which are the form taken in it by the interference of this desire-mind, this psychic Prana. As is said in the Upanishads, our whole mind-consciousness is shot through with the threads and currents of this Prana, this Life-energy that strives and limits, grasps and misses, desires and suffers, and only by its purification can we know and possess our real and eternal self.
It is true that the root of all this evil is the ego-seen and that the seat of the conscious ego-sense is the mind itself; but in reality the conscious mind only reflects an ego already created in the subconscious mind in things, the dumb soul in the stone and the plant which is present in all body and life and only finally delivered into void
fullness and wakefulness but not originally created by the conscious mind. And in this upward procession it is the
desire-mind which has become the obstinate knot of the ego, it is the desire-mind which refuses to relax the knot even when the intellect and the heart have discovered the Page-717 cause of their ills and would be glad enough to remove it; for the Prana in them is the Animal who revolts and who obscures and deceives their knowledge and coerces their will by his refusal.
Therefore the mental Purusha has to separate himself from association and self-identification with this desire-mind. He has to say " I am not this thing that struggles and suffers, grieves and rejoices, loves and hates, hopes and is baffled, is angry and afraid and cheerful and depressed, a thing of vital moods and emotional passions. All these are merely workings and habits of Prakriti in the sensational and emotional mind." The mind then draws back from its emotions and becomes with these, as with the bodily movements and experiences, the observer or witness. There is again an inner cleavage. There is this emotional mind in which these moods and passions continue to occur according to the habit of the modes of Nature and there is the observing mind which sees them, studies and understands but is detached from them. It observes them as if in a sort of action and play on a mental stage of personages other than itself, at first with interest and a habit of relapse into identification, than/ with entire calm and detachment, and, finally, attaining not only to calm but to the pure delight of its own silent existence, with a smile at their unreality as at the imaginary joys and sorrows of a child who is playing and loses himself in the play. Secondly, it becomes aware of itself as master of the sanction who by his withdrawal of sanction can make this play to cease. When the sanction is withdrawn, another significant phenomenon takes place ; the emotional^ mind becomes normally calm and pure and free from these reactions, and even when they come, they no longer rise from within but seem to fall on it as impressions from outside to which its
fibres are still able to respond ; but this habit of response dies away and the emotional mind is in time entirely liberated from the passions which it has renounced. Hope and fear, joy and grief, liking and disliking, attraction and
repulsion, content and discontent Page-718 gladness and depression, horror and wrath and fear and disgust and shame and the passions of love and hatred fall away from the liberated psychic being. What takes their place ? It may be, if we will, an entire calm, silence and indifference. But although this is a stage through which the soul has usually to pass, it is not the final aim we have placed before us. Therefore the Purusha becomes also the master who wills and whose will it is to replace wrong by right enjoyment of the psychic existence. What he wills, Nature executes. What was fabric-stuff of desire and passion, is turned into reality of pure, equal and calmly intense love and joy and oneness. The real soul emerges and takes the place left vacant by the desire-mind. The cleansed and emptied cup is filled with the wine of divine love and delight and no longer with the sweet and bitter poison of passion. The passions, even the passion for good, misrepresent the divine nature. The passion of pity with its impure elements of physical repulsion and emotional inability to bear the suffering of others has to be rejected and replaced by the higher divine compassion which sees, understands, accepts the burden of others and is strong to help and heal, not with self-will and revolt against the suffering in the world and with ignorant accusation of the law of things and their source, but with light and knowledge and as an instrument of the Divine in its emergence. So too the love that desires and grasps and is troubled with joy and shaken with grief must be rejected for the equal, all-embracing love that is free from these things and has no dependence upon circumstances and is not modified by response or absence of response. So we shall deal with all the movements of the soul; but of these things we shall speak farther when we consider the Yoga of self-perfection.
As with action and inaction, so it is with this dual possibility of indifference and calm on the one side and active joy and love on the other. Equality, not indifference is the basis. Equal endurance, impartial indifference, calm submission to the causes of joy and grief without any
Page-719 reaction of either grief or joy are the preparation and negative basis of equality; but equality is not fulfilled till it takes its positive form of love and delight. The cense-mind must find the equal rasa of the All Beautiful, the heart the equal love and Ananda for all, the psychic Prana the enjoyment of this rasa, love and Ananda. This, however, is the positive perfection that comes by liberation; our first object on the path of knowledge is rather the liberation that comes by detachment from the desire-mind and by the renunciation of its passions. The desire-mind must also be rejected from the instrument of thought and this is best done by the detachment of the Purusha from thought and opinion itself. Of this we have already had occasion to speak when we considered in what consists the integral purification of the being. For all this movement of knowledge which we are describing is a method of purification and liberation where, by entire and final self-knowledge becomes possible, a progressive self-knowledge being itself the instrument of the purification and liberation. The method with the thought-mind will be the same as with all the rest of the being. The Purusha, having used the thought-mind for release from identification with the life and body and with the mind of desire and sensations and emotions, will turn round upon the thought-mind itself and will say " This too I am not; I am not the thought or the thinker; all these ideas, opinions, speculations, strivings of the intellect, its predilections, preferences, dogmas, doubts, self-corrections are not myself; all this is only a working of Prakriti which takes place in the thought-mind." Thus a division is created between the mind that thinks and wills and the remind that observes and the Purusha becomes the witness only ; he sees, he understands the process and laws of his thought, but detaches himself from it. Then as the master of the sanction he withdraws his past sanction from the tangle of the mental undercurrent and the reasoning intellect and causes both to cease from their importunities. He becomes liberated from subjection Page-720 to the thinking mind and capable of the utter silence.
For perfection there is necessary also the resumption by the Purusha of his position as the lord of his Nature and the will to replace the mere mental undercurrent and intellect by the truth-conscious thought that lightens from above. But the silence is necessary; in the silence and not in the thought we shall find the Self, we shall become aware of it, not merely conceive it, and we shall withdraw out of the mental Purusha into that which is the source of the mind. But for this withdrawal a final liberation is needed, the release from the ego-sense in the mind.
Page-721 COMMENTARY XV We have now completed our review of this Upanishad ; we have considered minutely the bearings of its successive utterances and striven to make as precise as we can to the intelligence the sense of the puissant phrases in which it gives us its leading clues to that which can never be entirely expressed by human speech. We have some idea of what it means by that Brahman, by the Mind of mind, the Life of life, the Sense of sense, the Speech of speech, by the opposition of ourselves and the gods, by the Unknowable who is yet not utterly unknowable to us, by the transcendence of the mortal state and the conquest of immortality.
Fundamentally its teaching reposes on the assertion of three states of existence, the human and mortal, the Brahman-consciousness which is the absolute of our relativities, and the utter Absolute which is unknowable. The first is in a sense a false status of misrepresentation because it is a continual term of apparent opposites and
balancing where the truth of things is a secret unity ; we have here a bright or positive figure and a dark or negative figure and both are figures, neither the Truth ; still in that we now live and through that we have to move to the Beyond. The second is the Lord of all this dual action who is beyond it ; He is the truth of Brahman and not in any way a falsehood or misrepresentation, but the truth
Page-722 of it as attained by us in our eternal supramental being; in Him are the absolutes of all that here we experience in partial figures. The Unknowable is beyond our grasp because though it is the same Reality, yet it exceeds even our highest term of eternal being and is beyond Existence and Non-existence; it is therefore to the Brahman, the Lord who has a relation to what we are that we must direct our search if we would attain beyond what temporal The attainment of the Brahman is our escape from the mortal status into Immortality, by which we understand not the survival of death, but the finding of our true self of eternal being and bliss beyond the dual symbols of birth and death. By immortality we mean the absolute life of the soul as opposed to the transient and mutable life in the body which it assumes by birth and death and rebirth and superior also to its life as the mere mental being who dwells in the world subjected helplessly to this law of death and birth or seems at least by his ignorance to be subjected to this and to other laws of the lower Nature. To know and possess its true nature, free, absolute, master of itself and its embodiments is the soul’s means of transcendence, and to know and possess this is to know and possess the Brahman. It is also to rise out of mortal world into immortal world, out of world of bondage into world of largeness, out of finite world into infinite world. It is to ascend out of earthly joy and sorrow into a transcendent Beatitude.
This must be done by the abandonment of our attachment to the figure of things in the mortal world. We must put from us its death and dualities if we would compass the unity and
immortality. Therefore it follows that we must cease to make the goods of this world or even its right, light and beauty our object of pursuit ; we must go beyond these to a supreme Good, a transcendent Truth, Light and Beauty in which the opposite figures of what we call evil disappear. But still, being in this world, it
is
only through something in this world itself that we
Page-723 transcend it ; it is through its figures that we must find the absolute. Therefore, we scrutinize them and perceive that there are first these forms of mind, life, speech and sense, all of them figures and imperfect suggestions, and then behind them the cosmic principles through which the One acts. It is to these cosmic principles that we must proceed and turn them from their ordinary aim and movement in the world to find their own supreme aim and absolute movement in their own one Godhead, the Lord, the Brahman ; they must be drawn to leave the workings of ordinary mind and find the superconscient Mind, to leave the workings of ordinary speech and sense and find the supra-mental Sense and original Word, to leave the apparent workings of mundane Life and find the transcendent Life. Besides the gods, there is our self, the spirit within who supports all this action of the gods. Our spirit too must turn from its absorption in its figure of itself as it sees it involved in the movement of individual life, mind, body and subject to it and must direct its gaze upward to its own supreme Self who is beyond all this movement and master of it all. Therefore the mind must indeed become passive to the divine Mind, the sense to the divine Sense, the life to the divine Life and by receptivity to constant touches and visiting of the highest be transfigured into a reflection of there transcendences ; but also the-individual self must through the mind’s aspiration up. wards, through up lifting of itself beyond, through con. stint memory of the supreme Reality in which during these divine moments it has lived, ascend finally into that Bliss and Power and Light.
But this will not necessarily mean the immersion into an all-oblivious Being eternally
absorbed in His own inactive self-existence . For
the mind, sense, life going beyond their individual formations find that they are only one centre of the sole Mind, Life, Form of things and therefore they find Brahman in that also and not only in an individual transcendence; they bring down the vision Page-724 of the superconscient into that also and not only into their own individual workings. The mind of the individual escapes from its limits and becomes the one universal mind, his life the one universal life, his bodily sense the sense of the whole universe and even more as his own indivisible Brahman-body. He perceives the universe in himself and he perceives also his self in all existences and knows it to be the one, the omnipresent, the single-multiple all-inhabiting Lord and Reality. Without this realisation he has not fulfilled the conditions of immortality. Therefore it said that what the singes seek is to distinguish and see the Brahman in all existences; by that discovery, realisation and possession of Him everywhere and in all they attain to their immortal existence.
Still although the
victory of the gods, that is to say, the progressive perfection of the mind,
life, body in the positive terms of good, right, joy, knowledge, power is
recognised as a victory of the Brahman and the necessity of using life and human
works in the world as a means of preparation and self-mastery is admitted, yet a
final passing away into the infinite "heavenly world or status of the
Brahman-consciousness is held out as the goal. And this would seem to imply a
rejection of the life of the cosmos. Well then may we ask, we the modern
humanity more and more conscious of the inner warning of that which created us,
be it Nature or God, that there is a work for the race, a divine purpose in its
creation which exceeds the salvation of the individual soul, because the
universal is more real than the individual, we who feel more and more, in the
language of the Koran, that the Lord did not create heaven and earth in a jest,
that Brahman did not begin dreaming this world-dream in a moment of aberration
and delirium, — well may we ask whether this gospel of individual salvation is
all the message even of this purer, earlier, more catholic Vedanta. If so, then
Vedanta at its best is a gospel for the saint, the ascetic, the monk, the
solitary, but it has not a message which the widening consciousness of the world
can joyfully Page-725 accept as the word for which it was waiting. For there is evidently something vital that has escaped it, a profound word of the riddle of existence from which it leas turned its eyes or which it was unable or thought it not worth while to solve. Now certainly there is an emphasis in the Upanishads increasing steadily as time goes on into an over-emphasis, on the salvation of the individual, on his rejection of the lower cosmic life. This note increases in them as they become later in date, it swells afterwards into the rejection of all cosmic life whatever and that become1; finally in later Hinduism almost the one dominant and all-challenging cry. It does not exist in the earlier Vedic revelation where individual salvation is regarded as a means towards a great cosmic victory, the eventual conquest of heaven and earth by the superconscient Truth and Bliss and those who have achieved the victory in the past are the conscious helpers of their yet battling posterity. If this earlier note is missing in the Upanishads, then,—for great as are these Scriptures, luminous, profound, sublime in their unsurpassed truth, beauty and power, yet it is only the ignorant soul that will make itself the slave of a book,—then in using them as an aid to knowledge we must insistently call back that earlier missing note, we must seek elsewhere a solution for the word of the riddle that has been ignored. The Upanishad alone of extant scriptures gives us without veil or stinting, with plenitude and a noble catholicity the truth of the Brahman ; its aid to humanity is therefore indispensable. Only, where anything essential is missing, we must go beyond the Upanishads to seek it,—as for instance when we add to its emphasis on divine knowledge the indispensable ardent emphasis of the later teachings upon divine love and the high emphasis of the Veda upon divine works.
The Vedic gospel of a supreme victory in heaven and on
earth for the divine in man, the Christian gospel of a kingdom of God and divine city upon earth, the
Puranic idea of progressing Avatara ending in the kingdom of the
perfect and the restoration of the golden Age, not only
Page-726 contain behind their forms a profound truth, but they are necessary to the religious sense in mankind. Without it the teaching of the vanity of human life and of a passionate fleeing and renunciation can only be powerful in passing epochs or else on the few strong souls in each age that are really capable of these things. The rest of humanity will either reject the creed which makes that its foundation or ignore it in practice while professing it in precept or else must sink under the weight of its own impotence and the sense of the illusion of life or of the curse of God upon the world as mediaeval Christendom sank into ignorance and obscurantism or later India into stagnant torpor and the pettiness of a life of aimless egoism. The promise for the individual is well but the promise for the race is also needed. Our father Heaven must remain bright with the hope of deliverance, but also our mother Earth must not feel herself for ever accursed.
It was necessary at one time to insist even exclusively on the idea of individual salvation so that the sense of a Beyond might be driven into man’s mentality, as it was necessary at one time to insist on a heaven of joys for the virtuous and pious so that man might be drawn by that shining bait towards the practice of religion and the suppression of his unbridled animality. But as the lures of earth have to be conquered, so also have the lures of heaven. The lure of a pleasant Paradise of the rewards of virtue has been rejected by man ; the Upanishads belittled it ages ago in India and it is now no longer dominant in the mind of the people ; the similar lure in popular Christianity and popular Islam has no meaning for the conscience of modern humanity. The lure of a release from birth and death and withdrawal from the cosmic labour must also be rejected, as it was rejected by Mahayanist Buddhism which held compassion and helpfulness to be greater than Nirvana. As the virtues we practise must be done without demand of earthly or heavenly reward, so the salvation we seek must be purely internal and impersonal; it must be the release from egoism, the union with the Divine, the realisation
of our
Page-727 universality as well as our transcendence, and no salvation should be valued which takes us away from the love of God in humanity and the help we can give to the world. If need be, it must be taught, " Better hell with the rest of our suffering brothers than a solitary salvation." Fortunately, there is no need to go to such lengths and deny one side of the truth in order to establish another. The Upanishad itself suggests the door of escape from any over-emphasis in its own statement of the truth. For the man who knows and possesses the supreme Brahman as he transcendent Beatitude becomes a centre of that delight to which all his fellows shall come, a well from which they can draw the divine waters. Here is the clue that we need. The connection with the universe is preserved for the one reason which supremely justifies that connection ; it must subsist not from the desire of personal earthly joy as with those who are still bound, but for help to all creatures. Two then are the objects of the high-reaching soul, to attain the Supreme and to be for ever for the good of all the world,— even as Brahman Himself ; whether here or elsewhere, does not essentially matter ; still where the struggle is thickest, there should be the hero of the spirit, that is surely the highest choice of the son of Immortality ; the earth calls most, because it has most need of him, to the soul that has become one with the universe.
And the nature of the highest good that can be done is also indicated ,—though other lower forms of help are not therefore excluded. To assist in the lesser victories of the gods which must prepare the supreme victory of the Brahman may well be and must be in some way or other a part of our task; but the greatest helpfulness of all is this, to be a human centre of the Light, the Glory, the Bliss, the Strength, the Knowledge of the Divine Existence through whom it shall communicate itself lavishly to ether men and attract by its magnet of delight their souls to that which is the Highest.
Page-728 THE TWENTY-SIXTH HYMN TO AGNI A HYMN OF THE PRIEST AND SACRIFICIAL FLAME [The Rishi invokes the Divine Flame in all its usual attributes as the sacrificer, the luminous sear who has the vision :f the luminous world, the bringer of the gods, the carrier of the offering, the envoy, conqueror, increaser of the divine workings in man, the knower of the Births, the leader of the march of the sacrifice with its progressive epiphany of the godheads.] 1. O Flame, O purifier, bring to us by thy tongue of rapture, O god, the gods and offer to them sacrifice. 2. Thou who drippiest the clarity, thou of the rich and varied luminousness, we desire thee because thou hast the vision of our world of the Truth. Bring to us the gods for their manifesting, l 3. O Seer, we kindle thee in thy light and thy
1. Or ‘; for the journeying " to the luminous world of the Truth, or " for the eating " of the oblations. Page-729 vastness in the march of our sacrifice who earnest the offerings on their journey. 4. Come, O Will, with all the godheads for the giving of the oblation ; thee we accept as the priest of the offering. 5. For the sacrificer who presses the wine of his delight, bring, O Flame, a perfect energy. Sit with the gods on the seat of the soul’s fullness. 6. O Flame, thou burnets high and increases the divine laws and art the conqueror of a thou sand fold riches ; thou art the messenger of the gods who hast the word. 7. Set within you the Flame who knows the births, bearer of the offering, youngest vigour, divine sacrificer in the seasons of the Truth. 8. To-day let thy sacrifice march forward unceasingly, thy sacrifice that shall bring the whole epiphany of the godheads. Strew the seat of thy soul that there they may sit. 9. There let the Life-powers 2 take their seat and the Riders of the Horse 3 and the Lord of Love 4 and the Lord of Wideness, 5 even the gods with all their nation.
2. The Maruts. Varuna. 3. The twin A 4. Mitra. 5.Varuna. Page-730 THE TWENTY-SEVENTH HYMN TO AGNI A HYMN OF THE STRENGTH AND ILLUMINATION [The Rishi under the figure of the demigod, Traivrishna Tryaruna Trasadasyu, and the seer Açwamedha, symbolizes the fulfilment in the human mentality of the illumination of tile God-Mind Indra, and the power of the God-Will, Agni, in the vitality. The Mind Soul, destroyer of the demons; awakened to knowledge as the human-born Indra, has given to the seer his two cows of light that draw his wain, his two sinning horses that draw his chariot and the ten times twelve cow sol the dawn of knowledge. He has assented to and confirmed the desire with which the Life-Soul has given the sacrifice of the Life-Horse to the gods. The Rishi prays that this Mind-Soul, lord of the triple dawn, may give to the journeying Late that seeks the truth, the mental intelligence and power of possession needed and may itself in return receive from Agni the peace and bliss. The Life-Soul on the other hand has given the hundred powers the vital strength needed for the upward journey; the Rishi prays that this Life-Soul may attain to that vast strength which is the power of the Sun of Truth on the superconscient plane.] 1. O Will, O Universal Power, 1 the mighty One supreme in vision, master of his being, lord of his plenitudes has given me his two cows of the Light that draw his wain. He of the triple dawn, son of the triple Bull, 2 has awakened to knowledge
1. Or, Godhead. 2. The Triple Bull is India, lord of the three luminous realms of Swar, the Divine Mind; Tryaruna Trasadasyu is the halt-god, man turned into the Indra type; therefore he is described by all the usual epithets of Indra, "Asura," ‘"Satiate" "Maghavan." This triple dawn is the dawn of these three realms on the human mentality. Page-731 with the ten thousands 3 of his plenitude. 2. He gives to me the hundred and twenty 4c of the cows of dawn; his two shining 5 horses he gives, yoked to the car5 that bear aright the yoke. O Will, O Universal Power, do thou rightly affirmed and increasing extend peace and bliss to the lord of the triple dawn. 3. For thus has he done desiring thy grace of mind, new-given for him new-manifested,—he, the disperser of the destroyers, 6 the lord of the triple dawn who with attentive mind gives response to the many words of my many births. V
3. Thousand symbolise absolute completeness, but there are ten subtle powers of the illumine mind each of which has to have its entire punitive, 4. The symbolic figure of the illuminations of divine knowledge as the series of dawns (cows) of the twelve months of the year and twelve periods of the sacrifice. There are again ten times twelve to correspond to the ten subtle sisters, powers of the illumined mentality. 5. The two shining horses of Indra. identical probably with the two cows of light of the first verse; they are the two vision-powers of the supramental Truth-consciousness, right-hand and left-hand, probably direct truth-discernment and intuition. As cows symbolising light of knowledge they yoke themselves to the material mind, the wain ; as horses symbolising power of knowledge to the chariot of Indra, the liberated pure mind. 6. Trasadasyu ; in all things he reproduces the characteristics of Indra . 7. The seer by this self-fulfilment on the higher plane is born, as it were, into many realms of consciousness and from each of these there go up its words that express the impulses in it which seek a divine fulfilment. The Mind-Soul answers to these and gives assent, it supplies to the word of expression the answering word of illumination and to the Life that seeks the Truth it gives the power of intelligence that finds and holds the Truth. Page-732 4. May he who answers to me with assent give to the illumined giver of the Horse-sacrifice, 8 by the word of illumination possession of the goal of his journey ; may he give power of intelligence to the seeker of the Truth. 5. A hundred strong bulls of the diffusion 9 raise me up to joy ; the gifts of the sacrificer of the steed are as outpourings of the wine of delight with their triple infusions. 10 6. May the God-Mind and the God-Will uphold in the sacrificer of the Horse: and giver of his hundred a perfect energy and a vast force of battle even as in heaven the Sun of Light in destructible Jed. 11
8. The Horse-sacrifice is the offering of the Life-power with all its impulses, dashes, enjoyments to the Olivine existence. The Life-soul ( Dwita ) is itself the giver of this sacrifice which it performs when by the power of Agni it attains to vision of its own vital plane, when it becomes, in the figure of the hymn, the illumined ser Açwamedha. 9. The complete hundred powers of the Life by whom all the abundance o; the vital plane is showered upon the growing man. The vital forces being the instrument of desire and enjoyment, this diffusion is like the outpouring of the wine of delight that raises the soul to new and intoxicating joys. 10. The delight extracted from existence is liveried by the honey wine of the Soma ; it is mixed with the milk, the cupids and the grain, the milk being that of the luminous cows, the curds the fixation of their yield in the intellectual mind and the grain the formulation of the light in the force of the physical mind. These symbolic senses are indicated by the double meaning of the words used, go, dadhi and yava. 11. Perfect and vast energy in the vital being corresponding to the infinite and immortal light of the Truth in the mental being. Page-733 THE TWENTY-EIGHTH HYMN TO AGNI A HYMN OF THE HIGH-BLAZING FLAME, KING OF IMMORTALITY [The Rishi celebrates the flame of the Will high-blazing in the dawn of knowledge as the King of Immortality the giver to the soul of its spiritual riches and felicity and of a well-governed mastery of Nature. He is the bearer of our oblation, the illumined guide of our sacrifice to its divine and universal goal. ] 1. The Flame of Will burning high rises to his pure light in the heaven of mind ; wide he extends his illumination and fronts the Dawn. She comes moving upward, laden with all desirable things, seeking the gods with the oblation, luminous with the clarity. 2. When thou burnets high thou art king of immortality and thou cleaves to the doer of sacrifice to give him that blissful state ; he to whom thou comets to be his guest, holds in himself all substance and he sets thee within in his front. 3. O Flame, put forth thy battling might for a vast enjoyment 1 of bliss, may there be thy highest illumination ; create a well-governed union of the Lord and his Spouse, set thy foot on the greatness of hostile powers.
1. The Vedic immortality is a vast beatitude, a large enjoyment of the divine and infinite existence reposing on a perfect union between the Soul and Nature; the soul becomes King of itself and its environment, conscious on all its planes, master of them, with Nature for its bride delivered from divisions and discords into an infinite and luminous harmony. Page-734 4- I adore, O Flame, the glory of thy high-blazing mightiness. Thou art the Bull with the illuminations ; thou burnets up in the march of Our sacrifices. 5. O Flame that receives our offerings, perfect guide of the sacrifice, high-kindled offer our oblation to the godheads ; for thou art the bearer of our of firings 6. Cast the offering, serve the Will with your works 2 while your sacrifice moves forward to its goal, accept the carrier of our oblation.
2. Or, set the Will to its workings. * This hymn closes the series addressed to Agni and forming the first twenty-eight hymns of the fifth Mandala of the Rig-Veda. Page-735 THE PRACTICE OF TRUTH THE RELIGION OF LOVE 1 Render to God the sole worship which is fitting 2 towards Him, not to be evil. — True worship does not consist in offering incense, flowers and other material objects, but in striving to follow the same path as the object of our veneration. 3 Not superstitious rites but self-control allied to benevolence and beneficence towards all beings are in truth 4 the rites one should accomplish in all places.—Speak the truth, do not abandon yourself to wrath, give of the little 5 these three steps you shall approach the Gods.—It is much better to observe justice than to pass one’s whole life in the prostrations and genuflexions of an external worship. 6 Though a man should have lived a hundred years consecrating his whole life to the performance of numerous sacrifices to the gods, all this is far from having the same worth as a single act of love which consists 7 in succouring a life. — A hundred years of life passed without the vision of the supreme law are not worth 8 a single day of a life consecrated to that vision.—What is the path that leads to the Eternal ? When a disciple
1) Hermes.— 2) jatakamala.— 8) Asoka.— 4) Dhammapada 6) Farid-ud-dini-attar ; Mantic uttair.— 6) Fa-khen-pi-u.— 7) Dhamaapada.— 8; Auguttara Nikaya. Page-736 pours over the whole world the light of a heart overflowing with love, in all directions, on high, below, to the four quarters, with a thought of love, large, profound, boundless, void of wrath and hate, and when thereafter he pours over the whole world the light of a thought of profound serenity, then the disciple is on the path that leads to the Eternal. * * * 9 In what does religion consist ? It consists in causing as little suffering as possible and in doing good in abundance. It consists in the practice of love, of compassion, of truth, of purity in all domains of life.— 10 There is the Truth where Love and Righteousness 11 are.—Compassion and love, behold the true religion! 12 — Love towards all beings is the true religion. 13 I do not know which of the religious leaders is right, nor is it possible for me to know it with any certainty. But I know pertinently that the best I can do is to develop love in myself and about that it is impossible for me to doubt. I cannot doubt it because in develop- 14 ing my love my happiness increases. — There is no 15 fear in love, but perfect love castes out fear.—Man, if thou wouldst discover in the crowd the friends of God, observe simply those who carry love in their hearts and in their hands. * * * 16 Renounce without hesitation faith and unbelief. 17 Whoever has his footing firm in love, renounces at one and the same time both religion and unbelief.— 18 Light the fire of divine love and destroy all creed and all cult. 19 Believe in the fundamental truth ; it is to meditate with rapture on the Everlasting.
9) Asoka.— 10) Buddhist Text.—11) Asoka.— 12) Jarakamala.— 13) Tolstoi.— 14) 1 John.— 15) Angelus Silesius.— 10) Farid-ud-din-attar.— 17) id.— 18) Baha-ullah : The Seven Valleys.— 19) Açwaghosha. Page-737 CHAPTER XX summary of conclusions
We have now closely scrutinised the Angiras legend in the Rig-Veda from all possible sides and in all its main symbols and are in a position to summarise firmly the conclusions we have drawn from it. As I have already said, the Angiras legend and the Vritra my thus are the two principal parables of the Veda ; they occur and recur everywhere; they run through the hymns as two closely connected threads of symbolic imagery, and around them all the rest of the Vedic symbolism is woven. Not that they are its central ideas, but they are two main pillars of this ancient structure. When we determine their sense, we have determined the sense of the whole Rik
Sanity. If Vritra and the waters symbolise the cloud and the rain and the
gnashing forth of the seven rivers of the Punjab and if the Angirases are the bringers of the physical dawn, then the Veda is a symbolism of natural phenomena personified in the figure of gods and Rishis and maleficent demons. If Vritra and Vala are Dravidian gods and the Panis and
Vritra human enemies, then the Veda is a poetical and legendary account of the invasion of Dravidian India by Nature-worshipping barbarians. If on the other hand this is a symbolism of the struggle between spiritual powers of Light and Darkness, Truth and Falsehood, Know
doge and Ignorance, Death and Immortality, then that is the real sense of the whole Veda,
Page-738 We have concluded that the Angiras Rishis are bringers of the Dawn, rescuers of the Sun out of the darkness, but that this Dawn, Sun, Darkness are figures used with a spiritual significance. The central conception of the Veda is the conquest of the Truth out of the darkness of Ignorance and by the conquest of the Truth the conquest also of Immortality. For the Vedic R’itam is a spiritual as well as a psychological conception. It is the true being, the true consciousness, the true delight of existence beyond this earth of body, this mid-region of vital force, this ordinary sky or he even of mind. We have to cross beyond all these planes in order to arrive at the higher plan:: of that superconscient Truth which is the own home of the gods and the foundation of Immortality. This is the world of Swar, to-which the Angirases have found the path for their posterity. The Angirases are at once the divine seers who assist in the cosmic and human workings of the gods and their earthly representatives, the ancient fathers who first found the wisdom of which the Vedic are a chant and memory and renewal in experience. The seven divine Angirases are sons or powers of Agni, powers of the Seer-Will, the flame of divine Force instinct with divine knowledge which is kindled for the victor3′.The Bhrigus have found this Flame secret in the growths of the earthly existence, but the Angirases kindle it on the altar of sacrifice and maintain the sacrifice through the periods of the sacrificial year symbolising the periods of the divine labour by which the Sun of Truth is recovered out of the darkness. Those who sacrifice for nine months of this year are Navagwas, seers of the nine cows or nine rays, who institute the search for the herds of the Sun and the march of Indra to battle with the Panis. Those who sacrifice for ten months are the Daçagwas, seers of the ten rays who enter with Indra into the cave of the Panis and recover the lost herds.
The sacrifice is the giving by man of what he possesses in his being to the higher or divine nature and its fruit is the farther enrichment of his manhood by the lavish
Page-739 bounty of the gods. The wealth thus gained constitutes a state of spiritual riches, prosperity, felicity which is itself a power for the journey and a force of battle. For the sacrifice is a journey, a progression; the sacrifice itself travels led by Agni up the divine path to the gods and of this journey the ascent of the Angiras fathers to the divine world of Swar is the type. Their journey of the sacrifice is also a battle, for it is opposed by Panis, Vritras and other powers of evil and falsehood, and of this warfare the conflict of Indra and the Angirases with the Panis is a principal episode, The principal features of sacrifice are the kindling of the divine flame, the offering of the ghr’ita and the Soma wine and the chanting of the sacred word. By the hymn and the offering the gods are increased ; they are said to be born, created or manifested in man and by their increase and greatness here they increase the earth and heaven, that is to say, the physical and mental existence to their utmost capacity and, exceeding these, create in their turn the higher worlds or planes. The higher existence is the divine, the infinite of which the shining Cow, the infinite Mother, Aditi, is the symbol ; the lower is subject to her dark form Diti. The object of the sacrifice is to win the higher or divine being and possess with it and make subject to its law and truth the lower or human existence. The ghr’ita of the sacrifice is the yield of the shining Cow; it is the clarity or brightness of the solar light in the hiragana mentality. The Soma is the immortal delight of existence secret in the waters and the plant and pressed out for drinking by gods and men. The word is the inspired speech expressing the thought-illumination of the Truth which rises out of the soul, formed in the heart, shaped by the mind. Agni growing by the ghr’ita, Indra forceful with the luminous strength and joy of the Soma and in creased by the Word, aid the Angirases to recover the herds of the Sun.
Brihaspati is the Master of the creative Word. If
Agni is the supreme Angiras, the flame from whom the Angirases are born, Brihaspati is the one Angiras with the
Page-740 seven mouths, the seven rays of the illuminative thought and the seven words which express it, of whom these seers are the powers of utterance. It is the complete thought of the Truth, the seven-headed, which wins the fourth or divine world for man by winning for him the complete spiritual wealth, object of the sacrifice. Therefore Agni, Indra, Brihaspati, Soma are all described as winners of the herds of the Sun and destroyers of the Dasyus who conceal and withhold them from man. Saraswati, who is the stream of the Word or inspiration of the Truth, is also a Dasyu-slayer and winner of the shining herds ; and they are discovered by Sarama, forerunner of Indra, who is a solar or dawn goddess and seems to symbolise the intuitive power of the Truth. Usha, the Dawn, is at once herself a worker in the great victory and in her full advent its luminous result. Usha is the divine Dawn, for the Sun that arises by her coming is the Sun of the superconscient Truth ; the day he brings is the day of the true life in the true knowledge, the night he dispels is the night of the ignorance which yet conceals the dawn in its bosom. Usha herself is the Truth, sunr’itâ, and the mother of Truths. These truths of the divine Dawn are called her cows, her shining herds; while the forces of the Truth that accompany them and occupy the Life are called her horses. Around this symbol of the cows and horses much of the Vedic symbolism turns ; for these are the chief elements of the riches sought by man from the gods. The cows of the Dawn have been stolen and concealed by the demons, the lords of darkness in their nether cave of the secret subconscient. They are the illuminations of knowledge, the thoughts of the Truth, gâvo matayah, which have to be delivered out of their imprisonment. Their release is the up urgings of the powers of the divine Dawn.
It is also the recovery of the Sun that was lying in the darkness; for it is said that the Sun, that Truth", was the thing found by Indra and the Angirases in the cave of the Panis. By the rending of that cave the herds of the divine dawn which are the rays of the Sun of Truth ascend the bill
Page-741 of being and the Sun itself ascends to the luminous upper ocean of the divine existence, led over it by the thinkers like a ship over the waters, till it reaches its farther shore. The Panis who conceal the herds, the masters of the nether cavern, are a class of Dasyus who are in the Vedic symbolism set in opposition to the Aryan gods and Aryan seers and workers. The Aryan is he who does the work of sacrifice, finds the sacred word of illumination, desires the Gods and increases them and is increased by them into the largeness of the true existence ; he is the warrior of the light and the traveller to the Truth. The Dasyu is the undivine being who does no sacrifice, amasses a wealth he cannot rightly use because he cannot speak the word or mentalise the superconscient Truth, hates the Word, the gods and the sacrifice and gives nothing of himself to the higher existences but robs and withholds his wealth from the Aryan. He is the thief, the enemy, the wolf, the devourer, the divider, the obstructor, the confiner. The Dasyus are powers of darkness and ignorance who oppose the seeker of truth and immortality’. The gods arc the powers of Light, the children of Infinity, forms and personalities of the one Godhead who by their help and by their growth and human workings in man raise him to the truth and the immortality.
Thus the interpretation of the Angiras myth gives us the key to the whole secret of the Veda. For if the cows and horses lost by the Aryans and recovered for them by the gods, the cows and horses o( which Indra is the lord and give and indeed himself the Cow and Horse, are not physical cattle, if these elements of the wealth sought by the sacrifice are symbols of a spiritual riches, so also must be its other elements which are always associated with them, sons, men, gold, treasure, etc. If the Cow of which the ghr’ita is the yield is not a physical cow but the shining Mother, then the ghr’ita itself which is found in the waters and is said to be triply secreted by the Panis in the Cow, is no physical offering, nor the honey-wine of Soma either which is also said to exist in the rivers and to rise in a honeyed wave from the ocean and to flow streaming Page-742 Up to the gods. And if these, then also the other offerings of the sacrifice must be symbolic ; the outer sacrifice itself can be nothing but the symbol of an inner giving. And if the Angiras Rishis are also in part symbolic or are, like the gods, semi-divine workers and helpers in the sacrifice, so also must be the Bhrigus, Atharvans, Ushanas and Kutsa and others who are associated with them in their work. If the Angiras legend and the story of the struggle with the Dasyus is a parable, so also should be the other legendary stories we find in the Rig Veda of the help given by the Gods to the Rishis against the demons ; for these also are related in similar terms and constantly classed by the Vedic poets along with the Angiras story as on the same footing. Similarly if these Dasyus who refuse the gift and the sacrifice, and hate the Word and the gods and with whom the Aryans are constantly at war, these Vritras, Panis and others, are not human enemies but powers of darkness, falsehood and evil. then the whole idea of the Aryan wars and kings and nations begins to take upon itself the aspect of spiritual symbol and apologue. Whether they are entirely so or only partly, cannot be decided except by a more detailed examination which is not our present object. Our object is only to see whether there is a prima facie case for the idea with which we started that the Vedic hymns are the symbolic gospel of the ancient Indian mystics and their sense spiritual and psychological. Such a prima facie case we have established; for there is already sufficient ground for seriously approaching the Veda from this standpoint and interpreting it in detail as such a lyric symbolism.
Still, to make our case entirely firm it will be well to examine the other companion legend of Vritra and the waters which we have seen to be closely connected with that of the Angirases and the Light. In the first place Indra the Vritra-slayer is along with Agni one of the two chief gods of the Vedic Pantheon and if his character and functions can be properly established, we shall have the general type of the Aryans gods fixed firmly. Secondly,
Page-743 the Maruts, his companions, singers of the sacred chant, are the strongest point of the naturalistic theory of Vedic worship ; they are undoubtedly storm-gods and no other of the greater Vedic deities, Agni or the Açwins or Varuna and Mitra or Twashtri and the goddesses or even Surya the Sun or Usha the Dawn have such a pronounced physical character. If then these storm-gods can be shown to have a psychological character and symbolism, then there can be no farther doubt about the profounder sense of the Vedic religion and ritual. Finally, if Vritra and his associated demons, Cushna, Namuchi and the rest appear when closely scrutinised to be Dasyus in the spiritual sense and if the meaning of the heavenly waters he obstructs be more thoroughly investigated, then the consideration of the stories of the Rishis and the gods and demons as parables can be proceeded with from a sure starting-point and the symbolism of the Vedic worlds brought nearer to a satisfactory interpretation. More we cannot at present attempt ; for the Vedic symbolism as worked out in the hymns is too complex in its details, too numerous in its standpoints, presents too many obscurities and difficulties to the interpreter in its shades and side allusions and above all has been too much obscured by ages of oblivion and misunderstanding to be adequately dealt with in a single work, We can only at present seek out the leading clues and lay as securely as may be the right foundations.*
* We propose for the present to discontinue the Secret, of the Veda so as to make room in the third year of the Arya for other matter, but we shall subsequently resume and complete the series. Page-744 We thus see that if we consider the possibilities of a unification of the human race on political, administrative and economic lines, ascertain sort of unity appears not only to be possible, but to be more or less urgently demanded by a growing spirit and sense of need in the race. This spirit has been created largely by increased mutual knowledge and close communication, partly by the development of wider and freer intellectual ideals and emotional sympathies in the progressive mind of the race ; and this sense of need is partly due to the demand for satisfaction of these ideals and sympathies, partly to economic and other material changes which render the results of divided national life, war, commercial rivalry and consequent insecurity and peril to the complex and easily vulnerable modern social organisation more and more irksome both for the economic and political human animal and for the idealistic thinker. Partly also it is due to the desire of the successful nations to possess, enjoy and exploit the rest of the world at ease without the peril incurred by their own formidable rivalries and competitions and rather by some convenient understanding and compromise among themselves. The real strength of this new tendency is in its intellectual, idealistic and emotional pats ; its economic causes are partly permanent and therefore elements of strength and secure fulfilment, partly artificial and temporary and therefore elements of insecurity and weakness ; the political incentives are the baser part which may end by vitiating Page-745 the whole result and lead to a necessary dissolution and reversal of whatever unity may be presently accomplished.
Still a result of some kind is extremely possible in the near or more distant future. We can see on what lines it is likely to work itself out, if at all,—at first by a sort of understanding and initial union for the most pressing common needs, arrangements of commerce, arrangements of peace and war, arrangements for the common arbitration of disputes, arrangements for the policing of the world ; and all these will naturally develop by the pressure of the governing idea and the inherent need into a closer unity and even into a common supreme government which may endure till the defects of the system established and the rise of new ideals and tendencies inconsistent with its maintenance lead either to a new radical change or to its entire dissolution into its natural elements and constituents. We have seen also that such a union is likely to take place upon the basis of the present world somewhat modified by the changes that must now inevitably take place, international changes that are likely to be
adjustments rather than the introduction of a new radical principle and social changes within the nations themselves of a much more far-reaching character. It will take place, that is to say, as between the present free nations and colonising empires, but with an internal arrangement of society and administrative mould progressing rapidly towards a rigorous State socialism and equality by which the woman and the worker will chiefly profit. For these are the master tendencies of the hour. Certainly, no one can confidently predict that the hour will victoriously prevail over the whole future. We know not what surprises of the great human drama, what violent resurgence of the oppressed nation-idea, what collisions, failures, unexpected results in the working out of the new social tendencies, what revolt of the human spirit against a burdensome and mechanical State collectivism, what growth and power of the new gospel of philosophic anarchism reasserting the human yearning for individual liberty and free self-fulfilment, what un- Page-746 foreseen religious and spiritual revolutions may not intervene in the very course of this present movement of mankind and divert it to quite another denouement. The human mind has not yet reached that illumination or that sure science by which it can forecast securely even its morrow. Let us suppose, however, that no such unexpected factor intervenes. The political unity of mankind, of a sort, will then be realised . The question still remains whether it is desirable that it should be realised thus and now and, if so, under what circumstances, with what necessary conditions in the absence of which the result gained can only be temporary as were former partial unifications of mankind. And first, let us remember at what cost humanity has gained the larger unities it has actually achieved in the past. Those unities were in the past the nation and now the natural homogeneous empire of nations kin in race and culture; or united by geographical necessity and mutual attractions and the artificial heterogeneous empire secured by conquest, maintained by force, by yoke of law, by commercial and military colonisation, but not welded into true psychological unities. Each of these principles of aggregation has given some actual gain or some possibility of progress to mankind at large, but each has brought with it its temporary or inherent disadvantages and inflicted some wound on the complete human ideal.
The creation of a new unity, when it proceeds by external and mechanical processes, has usually and indeed almost by a practical necessity to go through a process
of internal contraction before the unit can indulge again in a new and free expansion of its inner life;
for its first need and instinct is to form and secure its own existence. To enforce its unity is its predominant impulse and to that paramount need it has to sacrifice the diversity, harmonious complexity, richness of various material, freedom of inner relations without which the true perfection of life is impossible. In order to enforce a strong and sure unity it
Page-747 has to create a paramount centre, a concentrated state power, whether of king or military aristocracy or plutocratic class, to which the liberty and free life of the individual, the commune, the city, the region or any other lesser unit has to be subordinated and sacrificed. At the same time there is a tendency to create a firmly mechanised and rigid state of society with a hierarchy of classes or orders in which the lower is appointed to an inferior place and duty and bound down to a narrower life than the higher, such as the hierarchy of king, clergy, aristocracy, middle class, peasantry, servile class which replaced in Europe the rich and free existence of the city and the tribe or the rigid caste system which replaced in India the open and natural existence of the vigorous Aryan clans. Moreover, as we have already seen, the active and stimulating participation of all or most in the full vigour of the common life which was the great advantage of the small but free earlier communities, is much more difficult in a larger aggregate and is at first impossible. In its place there is the concentration of the force of life into a dominant centre or at most a governing and directing class or classes while the great mass of the community is left in a elative torpor and enjoys only a minimum and indirect share of that vitality in so far as it is allowed to filter down from above and indirectly affect the grosser, poorer and narrower life below. This at least is the phenomenon we see in the historic period of human development.
The small human community in which all can easily take an active part and in which ideas and movements are
swiftly and vividly felt by all and can be worked out rapidly and thrown into form without the need of a large and difficult organisation, turn naturally towards freedom as soon as they cease to be preoccupied with the first absorbing necessity of self-preservation. Such forms as absolute monarchy or a despotic oligarchy, an infallible Papacy or sacrosanct theocratic class cannot flourish at ease in such an environment j they lack that advantage of distance
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from the mass and that remoteness from exposure to the daily criticism of the individual mind on which their prestige depends and they have not to justify- them the pressing need of uniformity among large multitudes and over vast areas which they elsewhere serve to establish and maintain. Therefore we find in Rome the monarchical regime unable to maintain itself and in Greece looked upon as an unnatural and brief usurpation, while the
oligarchic form of government though more vigorous could not assure to itself, except in a purely military community like Sparta, either a high and exclusive supremacy or a firm duration. The tendency to a democratic freedom in which every man had a natural part in the civic life as well as in the cultural institutions of the State, an equal voice in the determination of law and policy and as much share in their execution as could be assured to him by his right as a citizen and his capacity as an individual,—this democratic tendency was inborn in the spirit and inherent in the form of the city State. In Rome the tendency was equally present but could not develop so rapidly or fulfil itself so entirely as in
Greece because of the necessities of a military and conquering State which needed either an absolute head, an imperator, or a small oligarchic body to direct its
foreign policy- and its military conduct ; but even so the democratic elemi not was always present and the democratic tendency was to strong that it began to work and grow from
almost prehistoric times even in the midst of Rome’s constant struggle for self
preservation and expansion and was only suspended by touch supreme struggles as the great duel with
Cartage for the empire of the Mediterranean. In India the early communities were free societies in which the king was
only a military head or civic chief; we find the democratic element persisting in the days of Buddha and surviving in small States in those of Chandragupta and
Metatheses even when great bureaucratically governed monarchies and empires were finally replacing the free earlier polity. It was only in proportion as
Page-749 whole peninsula or at least the northern part of it made itself increasingly felt that the form of absolute monarchy grew upon the country and the learned and sacerdotal caste imposed its theocratic domination and rigid Shastras as the binding chain of national unity. As in the political and civic, so in the social life. A certain democratic equality is almost inevitable in a small community; the opposite phenomenon of strong class distinctions and superiorities may establish itself during the military period of the clan or tribe, but cannot long be maintained in the close intimacy of a settled city State except by artificial means such as were employed by Sparta and Venice. Even when the distinction remains, its exclusiveness is blunted and cannot deepen and intensify itself into the nature of a fixed hierarchy. The natural social type of the small community is such as we see in Athens, where not only Clean the tanner exercised as strong a political influence as the highborn and wealthy Nicolas and the highest offices and civic functions were open to men of all classes, but in social functions and connections also there was a free association and equality. We see a similar democratic equality though of a different type in the earlier records of Indian civilisation; the rigid hierarchy of castes with the pretensions and arrogance of the caste sport were a later development, in the simpler life of old difference or even superiority of function did not carry with it a sense of personal or class superiority; and at the beginning the most sacred religious and social function, that of the Rishi and sacrificer, seems to have been open to men of all classes and occupations. Theocracy, caste and absolute kingship grew in force pari passu like the Church and the monarchical power in mediaeval Europe under the compulsion of the new circumstances created by the growth of large social and political aggregates. Societies advancing in culture under these conditions of the early Greek, Roman and Indian city States and clan nations were bound to develop a general vividness of life and dynamic force of culture and citation which the Page-750 later national aggregates were obliged to forego and could only recover after a long period of self-formation in which the difficulties attending the development of a new organism have had to be met and overcome. The cultural and civic life of the Greek city of which Athens was the supreme achievement, a life in which living itself was an education, where the poorest as well as the richest sat together in the theatre to see and judge the dramas of Sophocles and Euripides and the Athenian trader and shopkeeper took part in the subtle philosophical conversations of Socrates, created for Europe not only its fundamental political types and ideals but practically all its basic forms of intellectual, philosophical, literary and artistic culture. The equally vivid political, juridical and military life of the single city of Rorer created for Europe its types of political activity, military discipline and science, jurisprudence of law and equity and even its ideals of empire and colonisation. And in India it was that early vivacity of spiritual life of which we catch glimpses in the Vedic, Upanishad and Buddhistic literature which created the religions, philosophies, spiritual disciplines that have since by direct or indirect influence spread something of their spirit and knowledge over Asia and Europe. And everywhere the root of this vitality and dynamic force which the modern world is only now in some sort recovering, was amid all differences the same; it was the complete participation not of a limited class, but of the individual generally in the many-sided life of the community, the sense each had of being full of the energy of all and of his being feet grow, to be himself, to achieve, to think, to create in the undimmed flood of that universal energy It is this condition, this relation between the individual and the aggregate which modern life has to some extent restored in a cumbrous, clumsy and imperfect fashion but with much vaster forces of life and thought at its disposal than early humanity could command.
It is possible that if the old city states and clan-nations could have endured and modified themselves so as to
Page-751 create larger free aggregates without losing their own life in the new mass, many problems might have been solved with a greater simplicity, direct vision and truth to Nature which we have now to settle in very complex and cumbrous fashion and under peril of enormous dangers and wide-spread convulsions. But that was not to be. That early life had vital defects which it could not cure. In the case of the Mediterranean nations two most important deductions have to be made from the general participation of all individuals in the full civic and cultural life of the community; for that participation was denied to the slave and hardly granted at all in the narrow life conceded to the woman. In India the institution of slavery was absent and the woman had at first a freer and more dignified position than in Greece and Rome ; but the sale was soon replaced by the proletariate, called in India the Shard, find the increasing tendency to deny the highest benefits of the common life and culture to the Shudra and the woman brought down Indian society to the level of its Western congeners. It is possible that these two great problems of economic serfdom and the subjection of woman might have been attacked and solved in the early community if it had lived longer, as it is now being attacked and in process of solution in the modern State. But it is doubtful; only in Rome do we glimpse certain initial tendencies which ‘might have turned in that direction and they never went farther than faint hints of a future possibility.
More vital was the entire failure of this early form of human society to solve the question of the inter-relations between community and community. War remained their normal relation. All attempts at free federation failed and military conquest was left as the sole means of unification. The attachment to the small aggregate in which each man felt himself to be most alive had generated a sort of mental and vital insularity which could not accommodate itself to the new and wider ideas which philosophy and political thought moved by the urge of larger needs and tendencies had brought into the field of life. Therefore the old states
Page-752 had to dissolve and disappear, in India into the huge bureaucratic empires of the Gupta and the Maurya to which the Pathans, the Mogul and the Englishman succeeded, in the West into the vast military and commercial expansions achieved by Alexander, by the Carthaginian oligarchy and by the Roman republic and empire. The latter were not national but supra-national unities, premature attempts at such larger unifications of mankind as could not really be accomplished with any finality until the intermediate nation-unit had been fully and healthily developed. The creation of the national aggregate was therefore reserved for the millennium that followed the collapse of the Roman empire and in order to solve this problem left to it the world during that period had to recoil from many and indeed most of the gains which had been achieved for mankind by the city States. Only after it was solved could it return to the effort to develop not only a firmly organised but a progressive and perfected community, net only a strong mould of social life but the free growth and perfection of life itself within that mould. This cycle we must briefly study before we can consider whether the intervention of a new effort at a larger aggregation is likely to be free from the danger of a new recoil in which the inner progress of the race will have at least temporarily to be sacrificed in order to concentrate effort on the development and affirmation of an external unity. Page-753 The Conservative Mind and Eastern Progress The arrival of a new radical idea in the minds of men is the sign of a great coming change in human life and society ; it may be combated, the reaction of the old idea may triumph for a time, but the struggle never leaves either the thoughts and sentiments or the habits and institutions of the society as they were when it commenced. Whether it knows it or not, it has gone forward and the change is irretrievable. Either new forms replace the old institutions or the old while preserving the aspect of continuity have profoundly changed within, or else these have secured for themselves a period of greater rigidity, increasing corruption, progressive deterioration of spirit and waning of real force which only assures them in the future a more complete catastrophe and absolute disappearance. The past can arrive at the most at a partial survival or an euthanasia, provided it knows how to compromise liberally with the future.
The conservative mind is unwilling to recognise this law though it is observable throughout human history and we can easily cull examples with full hands from all ages and all climes ; and it is protected in its refusal to see by the comparative rarity of rapid revolutions and great cataclysmal changes ; it is blinded by the disguise which Nature so often throws over her processes of mutation. If we look casually at European history in this light the attention is only seized by a few conspicuous landmarks, the,
Page-754 evolution and end of Athenian democracy, the transition from the Roman republic to the empire, the emergence of feudal Europe out of the ruins of Rome, the Christianization of Europe, the Reformation and Renascence together preparing a new society’, the French Revolution, the present rapid movement towards a socialistic State and the replacing of competition by organised cooperation. Because our view of European history is chiefly political, we do not see the constant mutation of society and of thought in the same relief; but we can recognise two great cycles of change, one of the ancient races leading from the primitive ages to the cultured society of the Graeco-Roman world, the other from the semi-barbarism of feudal Christendom to the intellectual, materialistic and civilized society of modern times.
In the East, on the contrary, the great revolutions have been spiritual and cultural ; the political and social changes, although they have been real and striking, if less profound than in Europe, fall into the shade and are apt to be overlooked ; besides, this unobtrusiveness is increased by their want of relief, the slow subtlety of their process and the instinctive persistence and reverence with which old names and formulas have been preserved while the thing itself was profoundly modified until its original sense remained only as a
Page-755 change of formula is one of the moat curious phenomena in the social history of mankind and still awaits intelligent study. Our minds are apt to seize things in the rough and to appreciate only what stands out in bold external relief ; we miss the law of Nature’s subtleties and disguises. We can see and fathom to some extent the motives, necessities, process of great revolutions and marked changes and we can consider and put in their right place the brief reactions which only modified without actually preventing the overt realisation of new ideas. We can see for instance that the Sullen restoration of Roman oligarchy, the Stuart restoration in England or the brief return of monarchy in France with the Bourbons were no real restorations, but a momentary damming of the tide attended with insufficient concessions and forced developments which determined, not a return to the past, but the form and pace of the inevitable revolution. It is more difficult but still possible to appreciate the working of an idea against all obstacles through many centuries; we can comprehend now, for instance, that we must seek the beginnings of the French Revolution, not in Rousseau or Mira beau or the blundering of Louis XVI, but in movements which date back to the Capet and the Valois is, while the precise fact which prepared its tremendous outbreak and victory and determined its form was the defeat of the Calvinistic reformation in France and the absolute triumph of the monarchical system over the nobility and the bourgeoisie in the reigns of Louis XIII and Louis XIV. That double victory determined the destruction of the monarchy in France, the downfall of the Church and, by the failure of the nobles to lead faithfully the liberal cause whether in religion or politics, the disappearance of aristocracy.
But Nature has still more subtle and disguised movements in her dealings with men by which she leads them to change without their knowing that they have changed. It is because she has employed chiefly this method in the vast masses of the East that the conservative habit of
Page-756
nourish the illusion that it has not changed, that it is immovably faithful to the ideas of remote forefathers, to their religion, their traditions, their institution-;, their social ideals, that it has preserved either a divine or an animal immobility both in thought and in the routine of
Life and has been free from the human law of mutation by which man and his social organisations must either progress or degenerate but can in no case maintain themselves; unchanged against the attack of Time, Buddhism has come and gone and the Hindu still
processes to belong to the Vedic religion held and practiced by his Aryan forefathers ; he calls his creed the Aryan dharma, the eternal religion. It is only when we look close that we see the magnitude of the illusion. Buddha has gone out of India indeed, but Buddhism remains ; it has stamped its giant impress on that spirit of the national religion, leaving the forms to be determined by the
Tantricism with which itself had made alliance and some sort odious in its middle growth ; what it destroyed no man has been to able restore, what it left no man has been able to destroy. As a matter of fact, the double cycle which India has described from the
easily Vedic times to India of Buddha and the philosophers and again from Buddha to the time of the European irruption was in its own way as
van ,t in change religious, social, cultural, even political and administrative as the double cycle of Europe ; but because it preserved old names for new things, old
limulus for new methods and old coverings lot-new institutions and because the change was always marked in the internal but quiet and unobtrusive in the external, we have been able to create and preserve the fiction of the
unchanging East. There has also been this result that while the European conservative has learned the law of change in human society, knows that he must move and quarrels with the
progresses only over the right pace and the exact direction, the eastern or rather the Indian conservative still imagines that stability may be the true law of mortal being, practises a sort of Yogic asana on the flood of Time and because he does not move himself , thinks — for he keeps his eyes shut and is not in the habit of watch- Page-757 ing the banks, — that he can prevent the stream also from moving on. This conservative principle has its advantages even as rapid progress has its vices and its perils.. It helps towards the preservation of a fundamental continuity which makes for the longevity of civilisation and the persistence of what was valuable in humanity’s past. So, in India, if religion has changed immensely its form and temperament, the religious spirit has been really eternal, the principle of spiritual discipline is the same as in the earliest times, the fundamental spiritual truths have been preserved and even enriched in their contents and the very forms can all be traced back through their mutations to the seed of the Veda. On the other hand this habit of mind leads to the accumulation of a great mass of accretions which were once valuable but have lost their virtue and to the heaping up of dead forms and shibboleths which no longer correspond to any vital truth nor have any understood and helpful significance. All this putrid waste of the past is held to be too sacred to be touched by any profane hand and yet it chokes up the streams of the national life or corrupts its warts And if no successful process of purification takes place, a state of general ill-health in the social body supervenes in which the principle of conservation becomes the cause of dissolution.
The present era of the world is a stage of immense transformations. Not one but many radical ideas are at work in the mind of humanity and agitate its life with a vehement seeking and effort at change ; and although the centre of the agitation is in progressive Europe, yet the East is being rapidly drawn into this churning of the sea of thought and this breaking up of old ideas and old institutions. No nation or community can any longer remain psychologically cloistered and apart in the unity of the modern world. It may even be said that the future of humanity depends most upon the answer that will be given to the modern riddle of the Sphinx by the East and
as. specially by India the hoary guardian of the Asiatic idea and its profound spiritual secrets, For the most vital issue
Page-758 of the age is whether the future progress of humanity is to be governed by the modern economic and materialistic mind of the West or by a nobler pragmatism guided, putted and enlightened by spiritual culture and knowledge. The West never really succeeded in spiritualising itself and latterly it has been habituated almost exclusively to an action in the external governed by political and economic ideals and necessities ; in spite of the reawakening of the religious mind and the growth of a widespread but not yet profound or luminous spiritual and psychical curiosity and seeking, it has to act solely in the things of this world and to solve its problems by mechanical methods and as the thinking political and economic animal, simply because it knows no other standpoint and is accustomed to no other method. On the other hand the East, though it has allowed its spirituality to slumber too much in dead forms, has always been open to profound awakenings and preserves its spiritual capacity intact, even when it is actually inert and uncreative. Therefore the hope of the world lies in the re-arousing in the East of the old spiritual practicality and large and profound vision and power of organisation under the insistent contact of the West and in the flooding out of the light of Asia on the Occident, no longer in forms that are now static, effete, unadaptive, but in new forms stirred, dynamic and effective. India, the heart of the Orient, has to change as the whole West and the whole East is changing, and it cannot avoid changing in the sense of the problems forced upon it by Europe. The new Orient must necessarily be the result either of some balance and fusion or of some ardent struggle between progressive and conservative ideals and tendencies. If therefore the conservative mind in this country opens itself sufficiently to the necessity of transformation, the resulting culture born of a resurgent India may well bring about a profound modification in the future civilisation of Page-759
struggles merely to avoid all but a scanty minimum of change, then, since the new ideas cannot fail to realise themselves, the future India will be formed in the crude mould of the
Westernized social and political reformer whose mind, barren of original thought and unenlightened by vital experience, can
roll nothing but reproduce the forms and ideas of Europe and will turn us all into halting apes of the West. Or else, and that perhaps is the best thing that can happen, a new spiritual awakening must arise from the depths of this vast life that shall this time more successfully include in its scope the great problems of earthly life as well those of the soul and its
Tran mundane destinies, an awakening that shall ally itself closely with the renascent spiritual seeking of the West and with its yearning for the perfection of the human race. This third and as yet unknown quantity is indeed the force needed throughout the East. For at present we have only two extremes of a conservative immobility and incompetence imprisoned in the shell of past conventions and a progressive force hardly less blind and ineffectual because secondhand and merely imitative of nineteenth-century Europe, with a vague floating miss of uncertainty between. The
research is a continual fiasco and inability to evolve any. thing large, powerful, sure and vital, a drifting in the stream of circumstance, a constant grasping at details and
unessential and failure to reach the heart of the great problems of life which the age is bringing to our doors. Something is nee led which tries to be born ; but as yet, in the phrase of the Veda, the Mother holds herself compressed in smallness. keeps the Birth concealed within her being and will not give it forth to the Father. When she becomes great in impulse and conception, then we
shall see it born. Page-760 Yoga is skill in works Gita Yoga, says the Gita, is skill in works and by this phrase the ancient Scripture meant that the transformation of mind and being to which it gave the name of Yoga brought with it a perfect inner state and faculty out of which the right principle of action and the right spiritual and divine result of works emerged naturally like a tree out of its seed. Certainly, it did not mean that the clever general or politician or lawyer or shoemaker deserves the name of a Yogin ; it did not mean that any kind of skill in works was Yoga, but by Yoga it signified a spiritual condition of universal equality and God-union and by the skill of the Yogic worker it intended a perfect adaptation of the soul and its instruments to the rhythm of the divine and universal Prakriti liberated from the shackles of egoism and the limitations of the sense-mind.
Essentially, Yoga is a generic name for the processes and the result of processes by which we transcend or shred off our present modes of being and rise to a new, a higher, a wider mode of consciousness which is not that of the ordinary animal and intellectual man. Yoga is the exchange of an egoistic for a universal or cosmic consciousness lifted towards or informed by the super-cosmic, transcendent
Unnameable who is the source and support of all things. Yoga is the passage of the human thinking animal towards the God-consciousness from which he has descended. In that ascent we find many levels and stages, plateau after plateau of the hill whose summit touches the Truth of Page-761 things; but at every stage the saying of the Gita applies In an ever higher degree. Even a little of this new law and inner order delivers the soul out of the great peril by which it had been overtaken in its world ward descent, the peril of the ignorance by which the unlimited intellect even when it is keenest or sagest must ever be bound and limited, of the sorrow and sin from which the unpurified heart even when it wears the richest purple of aspiration and feeling, must ever suffer soil and wound and poverty, and of the vanity of its works to which the undiminished will of man, even when it is most vehement and powerful or Olympian and victorious, must eternally be subject. It is the utility of Yoga that it opens to us a gate of escape out of the vicious circle of our ordinary human existence. The idea of works, in the thought of the Gita, 13 the widest possible. All action of Nature in man is included, whether it be internal or external, operate in the mind or use the body, seem great or seem little. From the toil of the hero to the toil of the cobbler, from the labour of the sage to the simple physical act of eating, all is included. The seeking of the Self by thought, the adoration of the Highest by the emotions of the heart, the gather, ing of means and material and capacity and the use of them for the service of God and man stand here on an equal footing . Buddha sitting under the Bo-tree and conquering the illumination, the ascetic silent and motionless in his cave, Shankara storming through India, debating with all men and preaching most actively the gospel of inaction are all from this point of view doing great and forceful work. But while the outward action may be the same, there is a great internal difference between the working of the ordinary man and the working of the Yogin,— a difference in the state of the being, a difference in the power and the faculty, a difference in the will and temperament.
What we do, arises out of what we are. The existent is conscious of what he is ; that consciousness formulates itself as knowledge and power ; works are the result of this Page-762 twofold force of being in action. Mind, life and body can only operate out of that which is contained in the being of which they are forces; and this is what we mean when we say that all things act according to their nature. The divine Existence is pure and unlimited being in possession of all itself, it is sat; whatever it puts forth in its limitless purity of self-awareness is truth of itself, satya ; the divine knowledge is knowledge of the Truth, the divine Will is power of the Truth, the divine workings are words and ideas of the Truth realising themselves in manifold forms and through many stages and in infinite relations. But God is not limited or bound by any particular working or any moment of time or any field of space or any law of relation, because He is universal and infinite. Nor is He limited by the universe; for His infinity is not cosmic, but supracosmic.
But the individualised being is or acts as if he were so bound and limited
because he treats the particular working of existence that he is and. the particular moment of time and field of space in which it is actually operating and the particular conditions which reign in the working and in the moment and in the field as if they were self-existent realities and the binding truth of things. Himself, his knowledge, his force and will, his relations with the world and his fellows, his need in it and his desire from them he treats as the sufficient truth and reality, the point of departure of all his works, the central fact and law of his universe. And from this egoistic error arises an all-vitiating falsehood. For the particular, the individual can have no self-existence, no truth, no valid force except in so far as it reflects tightly and relates and conforms itself justly to the universal, to the all-being, the all-knowledge, the all-will and follows its true drift towards self-realisation and vast delight in itself. Therefore the salvation of the individual lies in his
universalizing himself ; and this is the lesson, which life tries always to teach him but the obstinate ego is always unwilling to learn; for the universal is not any group or extended ego, not the family, community, nation or even all mankind, but an
Page-763 far surpassing all these little nesses. Nor is the universalising of himself sufficient for liberation, although certainly it will make him practically more free and in his being nearer to the true freedom. To put himself in tune with the universal is a step, but beyond the universal and directing and determining it is the supracosmic Infinity; for the universe also has no self-existence, truth or validity except as it expresses the divine Being, Knowledge, Will, Power, Delight of Him who surpasses all universe, so much that it can be said figuratively that with a petty fragment of His being and a single ray of His consciousness He has created all these worlds. There fore the universalised mind must look up from its cosmic consciousness to the Supernal and derive from that all its stone of being and movement of works. This is the fundamental truth from which the Yogic consciousness starts ; it helps the individual to universalize himself and then to transcend the cosmic formula. And this transformation acts not only on his status of being but on his active consciousness in works.
The Gita tells us that equality of soul and mind is Yoga and that this equality is the foundation of the Brahman-state, that high infinite consciousness to which the Yogin aspires. Now equality of mind means universality; for without universality o! soul there may be a state of indifference or an impartial self-control or a well-governed equality of temperament, but these are not the thing that is meant. The equality spoken of is not indifference or impartiality or equability, but a fundamental oneness of attitude to all persons and all things and happenings because of the perception of all as the One. Such equality, it is erroneously thought, is incompatible with action. By no means; this is the error of the animal and the intellectual man who thinks that action is solely possible when dictated by his hopes, fears and passions or by the self-willed preferences of the emotion and the in»
telex justifying themselves by the illusions of the reason. That might be the fact if the individual were the real actor Page-764 and not merely an instrument or secondary agent ; but we know well enough, for Science and Philosophy assure us of the same truth, that the universal is the Force which acts through the simulacrum of our individuality. The individual mind, pretending to choose for itself with a sublime ignorance and disregard of the universal, is obviously working on the basis of a falsehood and by mans of an error and not in the knowledge and the will of the Truth. It cannot have any real skill in works ; for to start from a falsehood or half-truth and work by means of blunders and arrive at another falsehood or half-truth which we have immediately to change, and all the while to weep and struggle and suffer and have no sure resting-place, can not surely be called skill in works. But the universal is equal in all and therefore its determinations are not self-willed preferences but are guided by the truth of the divine will and knowledge which is unlimited and not subject to incapacity or error.
Therefore that state of his being by which the Yogin differs from the ordinary man, is that he rises from the foundation of a perfect equality to the consciousness of the one existence in all and embracing all and lives in that existence and not in the walls of his body or personal temperament or limited mind. Mind and life and body he sees as small enough things which happen and change and develop in his being. Nay, the whole universe is seen by him
as happening within himself, not in his small ego or mind, but within this vast and infinite self with which he is now constantly identified. All action in the universe he sees as arising in this being, out of the divine Existence and under the stress of the divine Truth, Knowledge, Will and Power. He begins to participate consciously in its working and to see all things in the light of that divine truth and governance; and even when his own actions move on certain lines rather than others, he is not bound by them or shut to the truth of all the rest by his own passions and preferences,
groupings and sackings and revolts. It is evident how such an increasing wideness of vision must Page-765 mean increasing knowledge. And if it be true that knowledge is power, it must mean an increasing force for works. Certainly, it would not be so, if the Yogin continued to act by the light of his individual reason and imagination and will ; for the intellect and all that depends on it can only work by virtue of rigid limitations and exclusive determinations. Accordingly, the continued activity of the unlimited intellect and its servants conflicts with the new state of consciousness and knowledge which arises out of this larger existence, and so long as they remain active, it cannot be. perfect or assured ; for the consciousness is being continually pulled down to the lower field of ego-habit by the claim of their narrow workings. But the Yogin ceases,-progressively, to act by the choice of his intellectual or emotional nature. Another light dawns, another power and presence intervenes, other faculties awake in the place of the old human-animal combination.
As the state of being changes, the will and temperament must necessarily be modified. Even from an early stage the Yogin begins to subordinate his personal will or it becomes naturally subordinate to the sense of the supreme Will which is attracting him upward. Ignorantly, imperfectly, blunderingly it moves at first, with many recoils and relapses into personal living and personal action, but in time it becomes more in tune with its Source and eventually the personal will merges upward and all ways into the universal and infinite and obeys implicitly the transcendent. Nor does this change and ascension and expanding mean any annihilation of the will-power working in the individual, as the intellectual man might imagine ; but rather it increases it to an immense forcefulness while giving it an infinite calm and an eternal patience. The temperament also is delivered from all leash of straining and desire, from all urge of passion and pain of
wilful self-delusion. Desire, even the best, turns always to limitation and obscuration, to some eager exclusive choice and pressure, to some insistent exclusion of what should not be excluded and impatient revolt against the divine denials and
Page-766 withholdings. It generates anger and grief and passion and obstinacy, and these bring about the soul’s loss of its divine memory or steadfast consciousness of itself and its self-knowledge and its equal vision of the truth of things. Therefore desire and its brood are incompatible with skill in works and their persistence is the sign of an imperfect Yoga. Not only must the will and fundamental knowledge-view of things change, hut a new combination of faculties take the place of the old. For if the intellect is not to do all our rental work for us or to work at-all in its unlimited state and if the will in the form of desires, wishes, intellectual preferences is not to determine and enforce our action, then it is clear that other powers of knowledge and will must awaken and either replace the intellect and the mental preference or illumine and guide the one and transform and dominate the other. Otherwise either the action may be nil or else its impulses mechanical and chaotic, even if the static being is blissfully enlarged ; for they will well up indeed out of the universal and not the personal, but cut of the universal in its lower formula which permits the erratic action of the heart and mind. Such faculties and new combination of faculties can and do emerge and they are illuminations and powers that are in direct touch and harmony with the light and power of the Truth ; therefore in proportion as they manifest and take hold of their functions, they must increase the force, subtlety and perfection of the Yogi’s skill in works.
But the greatest skill in works of Yoga is that which to the animal man seems its greatest ineptitude. For all this difficult attainment, the latter will say, may lead to any thing you phase, but we have to lose our personal life, abandon our personal objects, annul cur personal will and pleasure and without these life cannot be worth living. Nov the object of all skill in work must be evidently to secure the best welfare either of ourselves or of others or of all. The ordinary’ man calls it welfare to secure momentarily so
new transient object, to
wade for it through a sea of grief and suffering and painful labour and to fall from
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it again still deeper into the same distressful element in search of a new transient object. The greatest cunning of Yoga is to have detected this cheat of the mind and its de* sires and dualities and to have found the way to an abiding peace, a universal delight arid an all-embracing satisfaction, which cannot only be enjoyed for* oneself but communicated too there. That too arises out of the change of our being; for the pure truth of existence carries also in it the unalloyed delight of existence, they are inseparable in the status of the infinite. To use the figures of the Vedic 3eers, by Yoga Varuna is born in us, a vast sky of spiritual living, the Divine 1n his wide existence and infinite truth ; into that wideness Mitra rises up, Lord of Light and Love who takes all our activities of thought and feeling and will, links them into a divine harmony, charioteers our movement and dictates our works; called by this wideness and this harmony Aryaman appears in us, the Divine in its illumined power, uplifted force of being and all-judging effective will ; and by the three comes the indwelling Bhaga, the Divine in its pure bliss and all-seizing joy who dispels the evil dream of our jarring and divided existence and possesses all things in the light and glory of
Ryman’s power, Mitre’s love and light, Verona’s unity. This divine Birth shall be the son of our works ; and than creating this what greater skill can there be or what more practical and sovereign cunning ? Page-768
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