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NOTES ON IMAGES SEEN IN MARCH 1914
The Evolutionary Scale.
We shall see how the thought of God works itself out in Life. The material world is first formed with the Sun as centre, the Sun [ ]1 being itself only a subordinate star of the great Agni, Mahavishnu, in whom is centred the Bhu. Mahavishnu is the Virat Purusha who as Agni pours Himself out into the forms of sun and star. He is Agni Twashtá, Visvakarman, he is also Prajápati and Matariswan. These are the three primal Purushas of the earth life,—Agni Twashta, Prajapáti & Matariswan, all of them soul bodies of Mahavishnu. Agni Twashta having made the Sun out of the Apas or waters of being, Prajapati as Surya Savitri enters into the Sun and takes possession of it. He multiplies himself in the Suris or Solar Gods who are the souls of the flames of Surya, the Purushas of the female solar energies. Then he creates out of this solar body of Vishnu the planets each of which successively becomes the Bhumi or place of manifestation for Manu, the mental being, who is the nodus of manifest life-existence and the link between the life and the spirit. The present earth in its turn appears as the scene of life, Mars being its last theatre. In the Bhumi Agni Twashta is again the first principle, Matariswan the second, finally, Prajapati appears in the form of the four Manus, chatváro manavah. Not in the physical world at first, but in the mental world which stands behind the earth-life; for earth has seven planes of being, the material of which the scenes and events are alone normally visible to the material senses, the vital of which man’s pranakosha is built and to which it is responsive, the mental to which his manahkosha is attached, the ideal governing his vijnanakosha, the beatific which supports his anandakosha, & the dynamic and essential to which he has not
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1324 yet developed corresponding koshas, but only unformed nimbuses of concrete being. All the gods throw out their linga-rupas into these worlds of earth and through them carry on her affairs; for these lingas repeat there in the proper terms of life upon earth the conscious movements of the gods in their higher existences in the worlds above Bhu. The Manus manifested in the Manoloka of Bhu bring pressure to bear upon the earth for the manifestation of life and mind. Prajapati as Rudra then begins to form life upon earth, first in vegetable, then in animal forms. Man already exists but as a god or demigod in Bhuvarloka of Bhu, not as a man upon earth. There he is Deva, Asura, Rakshasa, Pramatha, Pisacha, Pashu or as Deva he is either Gandharva[,] Yaksha, Vidyadhara or any of the Karmadevas. For Man is a son of the Manu and is assigned his place in Div & Pradiv, in Heaven & in the Swargabhumis. Thence he descends to earth and thither from earth he returns. All that will be explained afterwards. When the human body is ready, then he descends upon earth and occupies it. He is not a native of earth, nor does he evolve out of the animal. His manifestation in animal form is always a partial incarnation, as will be seen hereafter. The animal proper is a lower type. Certain devas of the manasic plane in the Bhuvarloka descend in the higher type of animal. They are not mental beings proper, but only half-mental vital beings. They live in packs, tribes etc with a communal existence. They are individual souls, but the individuality is less vigorous than the type soul. If they were not individual, they would not be able to incarnate in individual forms. The body is only the physical type of the soul. The soul, if it were only a communal soul, would manifest in some complex body of which the conglomeration of the different parts would be the sole unity; say, a life like that of the human brain. The animal develops the tribe life, the pack or clan life, the family life. He develops chitta, manas, the rudiments of reason. Then only man appears. How does he appear? Prajapati manifests as Vishnu Upendra incarnate in the animal or Pashu in whom the four Manus have already manifested themselves, and the first human creature who appears is, in this Kalpa, the Vanara, not the animal Ape, but man with the Ape nature. His satya yuga is the first Paradise, for man
1325 begins with the Satya Yuga, begins with a perfected type, not a rudimentary type. The animal forms a perfect type for the human Pashu and then only a Manuputra or Manu, a human, a true mental soul, enters into existence upon earth, with the full blaze of a perfect animal-human mentality in the animal form. These are man’s beginnings. He rises by the descent of ever higher types of Manu from the Bhuvarloka,—first he is Pashu, then Pishacha, then Pramatha, then Rakshasa, then Asura, then Deva, then Siddha. So he ascends the ladder of his own being towards the Sat Purusha. Manu, the first Prajapati, is a part of Mahavishnu Himself descended into the mental plane in order to conduct the destinies of the human race. He is different from the four Manus who are more than Prajapatis, they being the four Type-Souls from whom all human Purushas are born; they are Manus only for the purpose of humanity & in themselves are beyond this manifest universe & dwell for ever in the being of the Para Purushas. They are not true Manomaya Purushas. But Manu Prajapati is a true manomaya Purusha. He by mental generation begets on his female Energies men in the mental & vital planes above earth, whence they descend into the material or rather the terrestrial body. On earth Manu incarnates fourteen times in each Kalpa & each of these fourteen incarnations is called a Manu. These fourteen Manus govern human destinies during the hundred chaturyugas of the Prati-Kalpa, each in turn taking charge of a particular stage of the human advance. While that stage lasts he directs it both from the mental world and by repeated incarnations upon earth. When Manu Prajapati wishes to incarnate in a fresh form, he has a mental body prepared for him by evolution of births by a human vibhuti, Suratha or another & takes possession of it at the beginning of his manvantara. Each manvantara is composed of a varying number of chaturyugas according to the importance & difficulty of the stage with which it is concerned. Once at least in each chaturyuga the Manu of the Manvantara incarnates as a man upon earth, but this never happens in the Kali Yuga. The seventh & eighth Manus are the most important in each Prati Kalpa & have the longest reigns, for in their Manvantaras the critical change is finally made from the
1326 type which was completed in the last Prati Kalpa to the type which is to be perfected in the present Kalpa. For each of the ten PratiKalpas has its type. Man in the ten Prati-Kalpas progresses through the ten types which have been fixed for his evolution in the Kalpa. In this Kalpa the types, dashagu, are the ten forms of consciousness, called the Pashu, Vanara, Pishacha, Pramatha, Rakshasa, Asura, Deva, Sadhyadeva, Siddhadeva and the Satyadeva. The last three are known by other names which need not be written at present. The Pashu is mind concentrated entirely on the annam, the Vanara mind concentrated on the Prana, the Pishacha mind concentrated on the senses & the knowledge part of the chitta, the Pramatha mind concentrated on the heart & the emotional & aesthetic part of the chitta, the Rakshasa is mind concentrated on the thinking manas proper & taking up all the others into the manas itself; the Asura is mind concentrated on the buddhi & in the Asura Rakshasa making it serve the manas & chitta; the Deva is mind concentrated in vijnanam, exceeding itself, but in the Asura Deva or Devasura it makes the vijnana serve the buddhi. The others raise mind successively to the Ananda, Tapas & Sat & are, respectively, the supreme Rakshasa, the supreme Asura, the supreme Deva. We have here the complete scale by which Mind ascends its own ladder from Matter to pure Being evolved by Man in the various types of which each of the ten principles is in its turn capable. To take the joy of these various types in their multifold play is the object of the Supreme Purusha in the human Lila.
[II] A series of images and a number of intimations have been given yesterday in the chitra-drishti to illustrate the history of the first two Manwantaras & the vicissitudes through which the human idea has gone in the course of these unnumbered ages. It is not at all surprising that there should be no relics of those vicissitudes in the strata of the present earth; for the present earth is not the soil of the planet as it was in the earliest Manwantaras. The detritions, the upheavals, the convulsions, the changes that it has undergone cannot be estimated by the imaginative & summary methods of the modern geologists,—men who think themselves advanced &
1327 masters of knowledge, but are only infants & babblers in their own sciences. It is unnecessary to go at present into the scene or habitat of the incidents & peoples shown in the drishti. The facts are sufficient.2 The first image was that of a young & beautiful woman fleeing, holding two children by either hand, preceded by a third—though this was not clearly seen—and followed by a little child, a girl with her cloth in her hand. All are of the female sex. In their flight they have upset a handsome & well-dressed young man, who was also fleeing across the line of their flight and now lies sprawling on his back. Behind the woman & her girls an elderly & bearded savage, naked & armed with some kind of weapon, runs at a distance of not many yards and but for the accident of the upset would soon overtake the fugitives. The second image showed the young man still supine with the savage upon him threatening him fiercely with his weapon, but the bhava shows that not slaughter, but prisoners & slaves are the object of the raid. The young man is evidently taken prisoner by the pursuer who has turned aside from the women to this, possibly, more valuable booty. In the third image the little girl of the first is seen captured by a young & handsome barbarian who has managed to comfort and soothe her & is persuading her to lead him to the secret refuge of the fugitives. By this device, it is now indicated, he is able to discover this refuge & capture the whole colony of the civilised people. The success raises him to the rank of a great chief among his people, for it is his section of the raiders who make the victory really profitable. The chitra-lipi Indigenous just given shows that these barbarians are the original inhabitants of the country, the others colonists & conquerors. It is intimated by the vijnana that both assailants & assailed are in the Pashu stage & people of the first or second Manu, but the civilised have reached a kind of Devahood of the Gandharva type, the savages are a reappearance of the Asura Rakshasa type of Pashu brought back into a more advanced age in order to re-invigorate the over-refined type that has been evolved. The young chief of the image is a sort
2 The three images that follow are mentioned in the Record of 22 March 1914; see page 395.—Ed.
1328 of Caesar-Augustus or Alaric of the barbarians. He takes the lead of their revolt which is at first a disordered movement of indignation (lipi Indignation alternating with indigenous)[,] systematises it, conquers & enslaves the Gandharvas, learns from them their civilisation and modifies it by the barbarian manners. The new race evolved finally dominates the then world & fixes the next type of the Pashu evolution. But who are these Pashus? For this is not the first pratikalpa of the Pashus, but the sixth of the Asuras, and it is indicated that none of these visions belong to any other pratikalpa than the present. It follows that even these savages cannot be pure Pashus, but Asuras or Asura Rakshasas starting from the Pashu stage, so far as the Asura can go back to that stage, and fulfilling the possibilities of a sort of Pashu-Asura before evolving his Asurahood in the higher types & arriving & shooting beyond the pure Asura. This is an important modification. It follows that each type of the Dasha-gavas goes, within the mould of his own type, through all the ten gávas from the Pashu to the Siddhadeva. The Pashu-Asura will be different from the pure Pashu or the Pashu Deva, because he will always be first & characteristically an Asura, but he will weigh from the buddhi on the bodily experiences as Pashu, on the vijnana experiences as Deva & so in each type according to its particular field of activity. The Deva will do it, instead, from the vijnana, & the difference of leverage & point of action will make an immense difference both to the character of the activity and its results in the field. Moreover it is clear that the Pashu Asura goes also through the various types within his mixed Pashuhood & Asurahood before he passes to the Pisacha-Asura, who has to undergo a similar development. The great variety of types that will result from this evolutionary system, is evident. The farther images seen3 in connection with this Pashu-Asura episode are three in number. First the plain & desolate country with a hill in the distance, about which it is indicated by the vijnana that this was the appearance of the country not actually occupied by the
3 These three images (along with a fourth) are mentioned in the Record of 23 March 1914; see page 397.—Ed.
1329 barbarians before the colonists came in (by sea, it is suggested & then by movement from the coasts occupied to the inland tracts,) & peopled it sparsely. The catastrophe came because of their haste to conquer the whole small continent before they were able to people all the unoccupied land & build themselves into a strong & irresistible power organised in great cities & populous nations. This haste was due to the superior fertility & attractiveness of the soil actually occupied by the barbarians who, being poor agriculturalists, had settled only on rich soil not demanding a skilful labour & left the rest untilled. The contrast between the waterless soil first seen & the banks of the great river on which was the barbarian settlement, is typical of the contrast between the two kinds of soil, utilised & unutilised. The premature attempts at conquest began with aggressions on the nearest barbarian villages & the raid seen was the first effective retaliation carried out in the absence of the fighting men of the colony, so that on the side of the attacked only women, children & peaceful unarmed men are seen fleeing to a habitual & secret place of refuge. For this colony was on the very borders of the barbarian country & always exposed to incursions. It is not clear why the colonist fighters were absent, whether on a raid on the barbarians or in a civil quarrel among themselves. The second image, the fortified city on the plateau, shown by the terraces cut in the slope of the plateau & the subsequent separate chitra of one of the city domes, to be a civilised & magnificent metropolis, shows the final result of the amalgamation of barbarians & colonists. The original barbarian settlement was on the bank of the great river seen with one of its ghauts not far from the foot of the plateau, but after the raid, in order to safeguard themselves & their booty, the savages retreated at the instance of the young victorious chief, now by common consent their leader, to the plateau, then steep in its slope & difficult of access. Afterwards a great city was built on the site of this barbarian stronghold. The construction on the river in appearance like a house, but apparently standing on the water can have been nothing but a houseboat or rather a house-raft, & it is moored to a char in the river, a fact which suggested the first erroneous idea that it was a house on an island in the river.
1330 The third image, the large, high & spacious hut, built almost with elegance & with the great wide open door, was that of the chief and shows that the savages, in spite of their nakedness, were not on the lowest scale either of human immaturity or of human degeneration. The figure in clerical dress & hat is that not of a priest, but of an envoy, one of the elders of the colony come to negotiate for the restoration of the captives; the girl with whom he converses & from whom he turns in shocked despair, is one of the daughters of the woman seen in the earliest of this series of images, now a slave & concubine of the chief. At first, the colonists were unwilling to use violence lest the captives should be maltreated. The fact that one of the most important of them has already been subjected to irremediable indignity, has just come to the knowledge of the elder along with other facts, eg the unwillingness of the chiefs to make any reparation, & accounts for the action which indicates despair of peace or any fruitful negotiation. The series is not yet complete, but awaits the unfolding of farther events already very vaguely indicated by the vijnana. The other image has no connection with these events but belongs to a later Manvantara, that of the Pramatha-Rakshasa, of the sixth Manu in one of its most perfect & brilliant stages. It has to be kept vivid in the mind for future interpretation.
III The disposition of the Manwantaras may now be described. It will be remembered that there are fourteen Manus and ten gavas of the Dashagava. How are these divided among the Manus? In this Kalpa or rather Pratikalpa the type Pashu is the Vanara, but as in all Nature’s movements, even in manifesting the Vanara, the others first make their appearance rapidly before the type “arrives”; those most germane to the matter are the lion, tiger, elephant, dog, wolf, cat, bull & cow, bear, fox, ass, horse, bee, ant, butterfly, fish, eagle (also kite, hawk & vulture), songbird, crow & cuckoo etc. In all these human egos readily incarnate & the human type absorbs them all. The first Manu takes all these totems & applies them to the general type of the Asura, driving at the evolution of a giant VanaraAsura who has in him all these elements & combines them into an
1331 animal harmony dominated by curiosity, humour, adaptability & adaptiveness, the Ape virtues which bring that type nearest to man. This Vanara Asura the first Manu hands on to the second, who takes the type, fulfils it and evolves it into the Pishacha-Asura. This he does by bringing the Ape curiosity uppermost and applying it to all the experiences of man’s animal life, to play, work, domesticity, battle, pleasure, pain, laughter, grief, relations, arrangements etc. All the higher qualities—imagination, reflection, invention, thought, spirituality even are turned towards these experiences & their possibilities,—cognitional not aesthetic exhausted so far as the human animal can exhaust them. This however, is done only in the third Manwantara. In the second it is the Vanara who satisfies his humour, curiosity & adaptiveness in a far more elementary & summary fashion, but as he does so, he begins to refine & evolve in search of new sensations until the full Pisacha Asura is born. This type is handed over to the third Manu to fulfil, & to it two Manvantaras are devoted,—in the third the Pisacho-Pramatha of the Asura type evolves; in the fourth the Pisacha Pramatha evolves into the full Pramatha-Asura. The curiosity ceases to be merely cognitional & practically scientific, it becomes aesthetic with an animal & vital aestheticism; the Pramatha seeks to extract their full emotional & aesthetic values, their full rasa out of everything in life, out of torture equally with ecstasy, death equally with life, grief equally with joy. That type is evolved by the fifth Manu into the Pramatha-Rakshasa of the Asura type, & by the sixth into the full Rakshasa-Asura. The Rakshasa it is who first begins really to think, but his thought is also egoistic & turned towards sensation. What he seeks is a gross egoistic satisfaction in all the life of the mind, prana & body, in all the experiences of the Pashu, Pisacha, Pramatha & his own. But as this type is not a pure Rakshasa, but a Rakshasasura, the thought is there from the beginning, for the Rakshasa has already established it in the human mould in the fifth pratikalpa. It now, however, in the Asura ceases to be subservient to the vital & animal instincts & becomes the instrument instead of a vigorous, violent & clamorous intellectual ego. As the main type is that of the Asura, there is always a tendency to subordinate the lower ego to the intellectual Aham, but the subordination is at
1332 first only a self-disciplining for a more intelligently victorious selfindulgence, like the tapasya of Ravana. This type evolved is fixed in the character of Ravana and takes possession of its field in the Manwantara of the seventh Manu, Vaivasvata. In that Manwantara it evolves into the Asuro-Rakshasa in which the intellectual ego & the emotional, sensational ego enter into an equal copartnership for the grand enthronement & fulfilment of the human ahankara. As the type of the sensational & emotional Rakshasa-Asura is Ravana, so the type of the more mightily balanced Asura Rakshasa of the Asura type is Hiranyakashipu. In the eighth Manwantara this Asura Rakshasa evolves into the pure Asura who serves his intellectual ego & subordinates to it all the other faculties. That type reigns with the ninth Manu & evolves into the Asuradeva of the Asura mould & in the tenth Manvantara into the Devasura who enthrones the vijnana and glorifies the Asura existence by the vijnanamaya illuminations playing on the whole of the triple mental[,] vital & bodily life of man. In the eleventh & twelfth manwantaras the Devasura evolves into the Sadhya, the Anandamaya Asura who at first with the pure Ananda, then with the Tapomaya Ananda, then with the Sanmaya Ananda dominates the reigns of the thirteenth & fourteenth Manus & completes the apotheosis of the Asura in man. With the Siddhadeva in the Asura the hundredth Chaturyuga of the sixth Pratikalpa comes to a glorious close.
IV. Certain farther images have appeared which seem intended to show the nature of the Kaliyuga civilisation evolved by the intermixture of the barbarian & the Gandharva Pashus.4 One is that of a very wide road climbing up a steep incline; the comparative height of the trees on one side show its great width. This picture seems to be intended to confirm the impression created by the ensemble of the city on the plateau, by the dome & by another chitra of a part of the hill with a (private?) house roofed like a modern church, that this civilisation had a certain bigness, massiveness & sharply cut variety. A low type of the Pashu in this age was also seen,
4 These images are mentioned, in a different order, in the Record of 24 March 1914; see pages 403-4.—Ed.
1333 bearded, [hatted]5 & visaged like a lowclass modern American of the West. These resemblances have created some doubt as to either the genuineness of these images or their right interpretation; but the doubt is not justified by its cause. For throughout the fourteen Manwantaras, variations, permutations & combinations of the same type are bound to appear. This is the law of Nature’s development in clay, plant & animal & applies equally to man, his manners, ideas, appurtenances & institutions. Given the truth of the Manwantara theory any other feature than this varied repetition would be more surprising than the repetition itself & lead to more legitimate distrust. There are plenty of variations & signs of immaturity or different tendency. In the image of the river, it is noticeable that there are no modern vessels. The houseboat is a houseraft & entirely different in structure from the modern houseboat; the craft in which the man & girl in another image are seen crossing the river is also a raft & not a boat. The Gandharvas, when first seen, are robed differently in the males & the women; the former have dresses like the older styles of European dress, the latter wear loose & light classical draperies—an arrangement which is after all sufficiently natural & might easily evolve in an artistic & aesthetically minded race. The Teutonic element in the character & civilisation of the new type Pashus is a result of the blending of the graceful, slight & artistic Gandharva with the plain, forceful & robust barbarian; the latter predominates in the blend & the former merely tones down his force & gives a few details of dress & manners much modified in the direction of rude & clear cut plainness & strength, & is chiefly prominent but not predominant in the women as typified by the girl on the raft who has a native grace denied to the men of her blood. Their elegance is heavy & artificial, worn as a dress rather than possessed as a native characteristic. Sometimes the type goes very low as in the premature American; the ordinary type is higher but void of dignity or greatness, grace or beauty. They represent an early tendency towards the Asura Rakshasa such as he manifests himself in the Kaliyugas of this Pratikalpa when he has compassed the first heavy self-restraint necessary for his evolution towards the
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1334 Deva. In a later image the woman of the first, the captive of the barbarian Augustus, is seen in a later incarnation at the turning point when this type dissatisfied with itself is trying to recover the grace, humour, artistry, fantasy, liveliness of their Gandharva blood, so as to develop again in themselves the Pashu deva. This fixes the period of these incidents. It is in the Kali of the fourth chaturyuga in the reign of the first Manu when the Rakshasa Asura of the Pashu Asura type reigns & is attempting to turn full Asura with occasional overshootings to the Pashu deva. Every race that thus overshoots its mark & goes a step farther than their immediate next pace in evolution aids powerfully that evolution, but becomes unfit for survival & has to disappear. For this reason the Gandharva race of the Pashus disappeared & the Asura Rakshasa type reappeared, then took up something of the Gandharva & advanced one step towards the Asura-Pashu of the Asura type. By such overleapings & recoilings human evolution has always advanced.
V. There are certain images of animals dating from these early aeons which should be recorded here although they are not of the first Pashu period but fall before & after it.6 The first are images of a monstrous creature resembling the modern seal, but thicker & bulkier seen in a region of ice; the other another animal of equally monstrous bulk, its skin a series of successive red and yellow bands, its face exceedingly long, rough, thin & snouted, a cross between bear, wolf & tiger in the face, rhinoceroslike, yet supple in the body, but in spite of its ferocious appearance, sufficiently harmless. These creatures, it is suggested in the vijnana, belong to the first chaturyuga of the pratikalpa previous to the appearance of man; for the fourteen Manus enjoy each a reign of seven chaturyugas of varying lengths and the first & last of the hundred belong not to any Manu but the opening chaturyuga to Brahma & Rudra, the closing to Kalki & to Shiva. Man in the first appears only tentatively at the end, in the last only as a survival at the beginning. The third image is that of a bear leaping on a smaller animal which it keeps under its paw while it wrests from it & devours some
6 These images are mentioned in the Record of 24 March 1914; see page 404.—Ed.
1335 eatable for which the victim was pursued. The male of the captive is near unable to help, unwilling to flee. It is a small deer, only one third the size of the modern fallow deer. Suddenly the head of the bear sinks. It has been killed, it would seem, by the arrow, spear or other weapon of a human hunter. This scene belongs to the second Manwantara of the Vanaras.7 A fourth image is of a horse of the first Manwantara in one of its earlier chaturyugas, a clumsy stiff-legged & long-eared animal squarish in its lines & most unlike the graceful modern equine species. The animal stands on the side of a river, & with head raised & stretched sideways & ears pricked, listens to a sound amid the trees on the opposite bank. This image was preceded by another of a horse of the Pashu period in the later age when the civilised barbarian type was trying to recover the Gandharva. This type of horse, standing with a rider on its back & other human beings conversing near & at its head, is more equine, but is still stiff-legged & has not lost the asinine cast of head of its predecessor.
VI. Three images of the fourth in descent from the Chief of the Barbarians; the first showing him standing meditating on the great ghaut of the river, a figure & face like Napoleon’s clad in a dress resembling the modern European; the second, his mother & stepmother, descendants of the captives of the first image; the third, the emperor again with his halfbrother, irreproachably clad, Prefect of the city, consulting with regard to some palace intrigue in which the mother & stepmother are concerned.8 It is intimated that it is this fourth King of the line who establishes the dominance of the race in the then earth.
7 This image is mentioned in the Record of 25 March 1914; see page 407.— Ed. 8 These three images are mentioned in the Record of 25 March 1914; see page407.—Ed. |