|
The Life Divine
[Draft B]
Part II The First Movement
Chapter I God and Nature
I
The Isha Upanishad opens with a monumental phrase in which, by eight brief and sufficient words, two supreme terms of existence are confronted and set forth in their real and eternal relation Ish is wedded with Jagati, God with Nature, the Eternal seated sole in all His creations with the ever-shifting Universe and its innumerable whorls and knots of motion, each of them called by us an object, in all of which one Lord is multitudinously the Inhabitant From the brilliant suns to the rose and the grain of dust, from the God and the Titan in their dark or their luminous worlds to man and the insect that he crushes thoughtlessly under his feet, everything is His temple and mansion He is the veiled deity in the temple, the open householder in the mansion and for Him and His enjoyment of the multiplicity and the unity of His being, all were created and they have no other reason for their existence Isha vasyam idam sarvam yat kincha jagatyam jagat For habitation by the Lord is all this, everything whatsoever that is moving thing in her that moves. This relation of divine Inhabitant and objective dwelling-place is the fundamental truth of God and the World for life It is not indeed the whole truth; nor is it their original relation in the terms of being; it is rather relation in action than in being, for purpose of existence than in nature of existence This practical
Page – 430 relation of the Soul to its world thus selected by the Seer as his starting point is from the beginning and with the most striking emphasis affirmed as a relation not of coordinate equality or simple interaction but of lordship and freedom on one side, of instrumentality on the other, Soul in supreme command of Nature, God in untrammelled possession of His world, not limited by anything in its nature or His nature, but free & Lord For, since it is the object of the Upanishad to build up a practical rule of life here in the Brahman rather than a metaphysical philosophy for the satisfaction of the intellect, the Seer of the Upanishad selects inevitably the practical rather than the essential relation of God & the world as the starting point of his thought, use & subordination rather than identity The grammatical form in vasyam expresses a purpose or object which has to be fulfilled,—in this instance the object of habitation; the choice of the word Isha implies an absolute control and therefore an absolute freedom in that which has formed the object, envisaged the purpose Nature, then, is not a material shell in which Spirit is bound, nor is Spirit a roving breath of things ensnared to which the object it inspires is a prisonhouse The indwelling God is the Lord of His creations and not their servant or prisoner, and as a householder is master of his dwelling-places to enter them and go forth from them at his will or to pull down what he has built up when it ceases to please him or be serviceable to his needs, so the Spirit is free to enter or go forth from Its bodies and has power to build and destroy and rebuild whatsoever It pleases in this universe The very universe itself It is free to destroy and recreate God is not bound; He is the entire master of His creations. The word Isha, starting forward at once to meet us in this opening vibration of the Seer’s high strain of thought, becomes the master tone of all its rhythms It is the key to all that follows in the Upanishad For not only does it contradict at once all mechanical theories of the Universe and assert the pre-existence, omnipotence, majesty and freedom of the transcendent Soul of things within, but by identifying the Spirit in the universe with the Spirit in all bodies, it asserts what is of equal importance to
Page – 430 its gospel of a divine life for humanity, that the soul in man also is master, not really a slave, not bound, not a prisoner, but free—not bound to grief and death and limitation, but the master, the user of grief and death and limitation and free to pass on from them to other and more perfect instruments If then we seem to be bound, as undoubtedly we do seem, by a fixed nature of our minds and bodies, by the nature of the universe, by the duality of grief and joy, pleasure and pain, by the chain of cause and effect or by any other chain or tie whatsoever, the seeming is only a seeming and nothing more It is Maya, illusion of bondage, or it is Lila, a play at being bound The soul, for its own purposes, may seem to forget its freedom, but even when it forgets, the freedom is there, self-existent, inalienable and, since never lost except in appearance, therefore always recoverable even in that appearance This is the first truth of Vedanta assumed by the Upanishad in its opening words and from this truth we must start and adhere to it always in our minds, if we would understand in its right bearing & complete suggestion the Seer’s gospel of life:— That which dwells in the body of things is God, Self and Spirit; the Spirit is not the subject of its material, but the master; the soul in the body or in Nature is not the prisoner of its dwelling-place, but has moulded the body and its dharmas, fixed Nature and its processes and can remould, manipulate and arrange them according to its power and pleasure. Idam sarvam yat kincha, the Seer has said, emphasising the generality of idam sarvam by the comprehensive particularity of yat kincha He brings us at once by this expression to the Adwaitic truth in Vedanta that there is a multitude of objects in the universe, (it may be, even, a multitude of universes,) but only one soul of things and not many Eko ‘chalah sanátanah The Soul in all this and in each particular form is one, still and sempiternal, one in the multitude of its habitations, still and unshifting in the perpetual movement of Nature, sempiternally the same in this constant ceasing and changing of forms God sits in the centre of this flux of the universe, eternal, still and immutable He pervades its oceanic heavings and streamings; therefore it endures Nature is the multiplicity of God, Spirit is
Page – 431 His unity; Nature is His mobility, Spirit is His fixity; Nature is His variation, Spirit is His constant sameness These truths are not stated at once; the Seer waits for a later verse to arrive at them In this opening phrase he limits himself to the statement of the unity of God, and the multiplicity and mobility of Nature; for this relation in opposition is all that is immediately necessary to base the rule of divine living which it is his one object in the Upanishad to found upon a right knowledge of God & existence. The self then of every man, every animal and every object, whether animate or inanimate, is God; the soul in us, therefore, is something divine, free and self-aware If it seems to be anything else,—bound, miserable, darkened,—that is inevitably some illusion, some freak of the divine consciousness at play with its experiences; if this Soul seems to be other than God or Spirit, what seems is only a name and a form or, to keep to the aspect of the truth here envisaged, is only movement of Nature, jagat, which God has manifested in Himself for the purpose of various enjoyment in various mansions,—it is an image, a mask, a shape or eidolon created in the divine movement, formed by the divine self-awareness, instrumentalised by the divine activity Therefore He is “this man and yonder woman, a boy and a girl, that old man leaning on his staff, this blue bird and that scarlet-eyed” We have, asserted in the comprehensiveness of the phrase, not only an entire essential omnipresence of God in us & in the world, but a direct and a practical omnipresence, possessing and insistent, not vague, abstract or elusive The language of the Sruti is trenchant and inexorable We must exclude no living being because it seems to us weak, mean, noxious or vile, no object because it seems to us inert, useless or nauseous The hideous crawling worm or snake no less than the beautiful winged bird and the strong or gracious forms of four-footed life, the dull stone and foul mire and evil-smelling gas no less than man, the divine fighter and worker, are motions of the supreme Spirit; they contain in themselves and are in their secret reality the living God This is the second general truth of Vedanta which arises inevitably from the pregnant verse of the Seer and, always present to him in his brief and concentrated thinking, must also
Page – 432 accompany us throughout our pursuit of his sense and doctrine. God is One; Self, Spirit, Soul is one; even when It presents Itself multitudinously in Its habitations as if It were many souls and so appears in the motion of Nature, Its universality and unity are not abrogated nor infringed In all there is That which by coming out of its absorption in form of movement, recovers its unity As the soul in man, though seeming to be bound, is always free and can realise its freedom, so, though seeming divided, limited and many, it is always universal, illimitable and one and can realise its universality and unity. This creature born in a moment of time and bound in an atom of Space, is really in his secret consciousness the universal Spirit who contains the whole universe of things and dwells as the self of all things in these myriad forms of man & bird & beast, tree & earth & stone which my mind regards as outside me & other than myself In the name of myself God inhabits this form of my being—but it is God that inhabits and the apparent “I” is but a centre of His personality & a knot in the infinite coilings of His active world existence My ego is a creation of the Jagati in a form of mind; my Self stands behind, possesses and exceeds the universe. II
This is Spirit in relation to Nature, one in multiplicity, the Lord of nature and process, free in the bound, conscious in the unconscious, inhabitant, master and enjoyer of all forms and movements of life, mind and body Nature in relation to Spirit is its motion and the result of its motion, jagatyam jagat, phenomenon and everything that exists as phenomenon, universe and everything that constitutes universe There are two terms in this brief and puissant formula, jagati and jagat The second, jagat, is particular and multiple and includes whatsoever is separate existence, individual thing or form of motion, yat kincha; the first, jagati, is general and indicates both the resultant sum and the formative principle of all these particular existences, sarvam idam yat kincha Sarvam idam is Nature regarded objectively as
Page – 433 the sum of her creations; jagati is Nature regarded subjectively and essentially as that divine principle, expressed in motion of being and observed by us as force or Energy, which generates all these forms and variations For Existence in itself is existence in a state of repose or stillness; indeterminate, infinite, inactive, it generates nothing: it is movement of energy in Existence which is active, which determines forms, which generates appearances of finite being and brings about phenomena of Becoming as opposed to fixed truth of Being Therefore every objective existence in the world and all subjective forms, being forms of Existence in motion, being inconstant, being always mutable and always changing, progressing from a past of change to a future of change, are not truly different beings at all, but becomings of the one and only Being; each is the result of its previous motion, stands by its continued motion and if that motion were pretermitted or its rhythm disturbed, must change, disintegrate or transmute itself into some other form of becoming Spirit or God is eternal Being, Nature in its sum & principle is the becoming of God and in its particulars a mass of His becomings, real as becomings, falsely valued as beings The knowledge of the Upanishads takes its stand on this supreme distinction of Being and its Becomings; we find, indeed, in this Upanishad itself, another and more convenient collective term used to express all that is here defined as yat kincha jagatyam jagat,—one which brings us straight to this great distinction The soul is Atman,1 Being; everything else is sarvabhutani, all becomings or, literally, all things that have become This phrase is the common Sanscrit expression for created beings and though often referring in ordinary parlance to animate and self-conscious existences only, yet must in its philosophical sense and especially in the Upanishads, be accepted as inclusive of all existences whether they are or seem animate or inanimate, self-conscious or veiled in consciousness The tree, flower & stone no less than the animal, heaven and wind and the sun and rain no less than man, invisible gas and
1 The scholars hold erroneously that Atman meant first breath, then self; it meant, on the contrary, being, from the old root a, to be, still extant in Tamil, and the suffix tman, which expresses substance or substantial embodiment
Page – 434 force & current no less than the things we can see and feel fall within its all-embracing formula. God is the only Being and all other existences are only His becomings; the souls informing them are but one Spirit individualised in forms and forces by the play and movement of Its own self-consciousness. We see, then, whose this energy is and of what the universe is the motion But already from the little we have said there begins to emerge clearly another truth which in the Upanishad itself the Seer leaves in shadow for the present and only shapes into clear statement in his fourth and eighth couplets; he emphasises in the fourth couplet the unity of Soul & Nature, the stillness & the motion are not separate from each other, not one of them Brahman and the other an illusion, but both of them equally the one sole Existence, which moves & yet is still even in its motion, Tad ejati tannaijati, anejad ekam manaso javiyas In the eighth verse he indicates that Brahman & the Lord2 are not different from each other or from the motion, but are the reality of the motion as the motion itself is the play of the stillness; for to Tad ejati, That moves, comes as an echo & response, Sa paryagat, He went abroad Nature is motion of the Spirit, the world is motion of God; but also Nature is Spirit in motion, the world is God at play. All our inefficient envisagings of the world, all our ignorant questions fall away from this supreme Vedantic conception We cannot ask ourselves, “Why has God brought about this great flux of things, this enormous and multitudinous world-movement? what can have been His purpose in it? Or is it a law of His nature and was He under an inner compulsion to create? Who then or what compelled Him?” These questions fall away from the decisive & trenchant solution, Isha vasyam jagat He has no purpose in it except habitation, except delight, an ordered and harmonised delight,—therefore there is what we call universe, law, progression, the appearance of a method
2 The Mayavadins hold that God is only the first myth of Maya & not the truth of Brahman,—the language of the Upanishad shows that this was not the view of the old Vedantic Rishis
Page – 435 and a goal; but the order effected feels always its neighbourhood to the grandiose licence of the infinite and the harmony achieved thrills at once with the touch of the Transcendent’s impulse to pass out of every rhythm and exceed every harmony For this is a self-delight which in no way limits or binds Him; He has brought it about and He conducts it in perfect freedom; there is no compulsion on Him & none can compel Him, for He alone exists and Nature is only a play of time-movement in His being, proceeding from Him, contained in Him, governed by Him, not He by it or proceeding from it or coeval with it and therefore capable of being its subject, victim or instrument Neither is there any inner compulsion limiting Him either as to the nature of the work or its method The movement of the universe is not the nature of God, nor are its processes the laws of God’s being; for Spirit is absolute and has no fixed or binding nature, God is supreme & transcendent and is not bound by state, law or process,—so free is He, rather, that He is not bound even to His own freedom The laws of Nature, as we have seen, cannot be laws of being at all, since Nature itself is a becoming; they are processes which regulate the harmonies of becoming, processes which are, in the Vedic image, chhandas, rhythms of the movement and not in their own being rigid, inexorable & eternal because self-existent verities; they are results of the tendency to order & harmony, not sempiternal fetters on Existence Even the most fundamental laws are only modes of activity conceived & chosen by Spirit in the universe We arrive then at this farther all-important truth:— Nature is a divine motion of becoming of which Spirit is the origin, substance and control as well as the inhabitant and enjoyer Laws of Nature are themselves general movements & developments of becoming and conditions of a particular order, rhythm and harmony of the universe, but not inexorably preexistent or recognisable as the very grain of existence The Laws of Evolution are themselves evolutions and progressive creations of the Spirit. Since Spirit, transcendent and original of the universe, is the sole existence, the motion of the universe can only take place in
Page – 436 the Spirit Therefore the indwelling of the Spirit in forms is not only a free indwelling rather than an imprisonment, but also it is not the whole or essential truth of this mutual relation of God & Nature; indwelling but not confined, like the presence of the ether in the jar, it is symbolical and a figment of divine conception rather than the essential relation of body and spirit We get the fuller statement of the truth in the fifth couplet of the Upanishad, Tad antar asya sarvasya tad u sarvasyasya bahyatah; That, the inexpressible Reality of things, is within this universe and each thing it contains, but equally it is outside of this universe and each thing that it contains,—outside it as continent, outside it as transcendent The omnipresent Inhabitant of the world is equally its all-embracing continent If form is the vessel in which Spirit dwells, Spirit is the sphere in which form exists & moves But, essentially, It transcends form and formation, movement and relation, & even while It is inhabitant & continent, stands apart from what It inhabits and contains, self-existent, self-sufficient, divine and eternally free Spirit is the cause, world is the effect, but this cause is not bound to this effect Na cha mam tani karmani nibadhnanti, says the Lord in the Gita; I am not bound by these works that I do, even while I do them The soul of man, one with God, has the same transcendency and the same freedom Spirit contains, dwells in and transcends this body of things It acts in the world but is not bound by Its actions The same essential freedom must be true of this soul in the body, even though it may seem to be confined in the body and compelled by Nature’s results and its own works The soul in us has the inherent power not only of becoming in this outward & waking consciousness what it is in reality, the continent of the body which seems to contain it, but of transcending in consciousness all bodily relation and relation with the universe. From the action of Nature in the Spirit, as from the action of the Spirit in Nature, the same formula of freedom emerges I have, in God and by God, made myself and my world what we now are; I can, in God and by God, change them and make them what I would have them be I am not the sport and puppet
Page – 437 of Nature and her laws, but their creator and her master She accommodates herself to me and pretends to herself & me that she is ruling my whole existence, when she is really following, however late, stumblingly and with feigned reluctance, the motion of my will Instrument of my actions, she pretends to be the mistress of my being The identity of the soul and God behind all veils is the Vedantic charter of man’s freedom Science, observing only the movement, seeing fixed process everywhere, is obsessed by what she studies and declares the iron despotism of mechanical Law Vedanta, studying the Force that makes the movement and its cause, arrives at the perception and experience of Spirit everywhere and declares our eternal and indefeasible freedom It passes beyond the Law to the Liberty of which the Law itself is the creation & expression.
III
It is not enough, however, to know the inner fact and the outer possibility of our freedom; we must also look at and take into account the apparent actuality of our bondage The debit side of the human ledger must be taken into the reckoning as well as the credit account The explanation and seed of this bondage is contained in the formula jagatyam jagat; for, if our freedom results from the action of Spirit in Nature and of Nature in Spirit, our bondage results from the action of Nature on all that she has created and contains Every mundane existence is jagatyam jagat, not a separate and independent motion by itself, but part of and dependent on the universal movement From this dependence by inclusion derives the great law that every form of things engendered in the motional universe shall be subject to the processes of that particular stream of movement to which it belongs; each individual body subject to the general processes of matter, each individual life to the general processes of vitality, each individual mind to the general processes of mentality, because the individual is only a whorl of motion in the general motion and its individual variation therefore can only be a speciality of the general motion and not contradictory of it
Page – 438 The multiplicity of God in the universe is only a circumstance of His unity and is limited and governed by the unity; therefore the animal belongs to its species, the tree, the rock and the star each to its kind and man to humanity If machinery of existence were all, if there were no Spirit in the motion or that Spirit were not Ish, the Master, origin, continent and living transcendence of the motion, this law is of so pressing a nature that the subjection would be absolute, the materialist’s reign of iron Law complete, the Buddhist’s rigid chain of causation ineffugable This generality, this pressure of tyrannous insistence is necessary in order that the harmony of the universe may be assured against all disturbing vibrations It is the bulwark of cosmos against chaos, of the realised actuality against that inconstant & ever-pulsating material of infinite possibility out of which it started, of the finite against the dangerous call and attraction of the Infinite. The unity of God governs His multiplicity; therefore the more general motion of Nature as representative of or nearest to that unity governs the multiple individual products of the movement To each motion its law and to each inhabitant of that motion subjection to the law Therefore Man, being human in Nature, is bound first by Nature, then by his humanity. But because God is also the transcendence of Nature & Nature moves towards God, therefore, even in Nature itself a principle of freedom and a way of escape have been provided Avidyaya mrityum tirtwa For, in reality, the motion of Nature is only the apparent or mechanical cause of our bondage; the real and essential cause arises from the relation of Spirit to Nature God having descended into Nature, Spirit cast itself out in motion, allows Himself as part of the play to be bewitched by His female energy and seems to accept on Himself in the principle of mind isolated from the higher spiritual principles, her absorption in her work and her forgetfulness of her reality The soul in mind identifies itself with its form, allows itself apparently to float on the oceanic stream of Nature and envisages itself as carried away by the current Spirit veils itself from Mind; Ish wraps Himself up in jagat & seems to its own outer consciousness to be jagat This is the principle of our bondage; the principle of our freedom
Page – 439 is to draw back from that absorption & recover our real self-consciousness as the containing, constituting and transcendent Spirit Spirit, absorbed in the motion and process of Nature, appears to be bound by the process of becoming as if it were law of being; it is therefore said to be bound by Karma, that is to say, by the chain of particular cause and effect, the natural chain of active energy and its results But by drawing back upon itself & ceasing to identify itself with its form, it can get rid of this appearance and recover its lordship and freedom Incidentally, the soul of Man by drawing more and more towards God, becomes more & more Ish and can more and more control the processes of becoming in himself and in others, in the subjective and in the objective, in the mental and in the material world. This final conclusion of freedom & power in the world is of the last importance for our immediate purpose Merely to draw back from all identification with form is to draw away towards the Stillness, the Infinity & the cessation of all this divine play of motion Ever since Buddhism conquered Vedic India and assured the definite enthronement of the ideal of Sannyasa in opposition to the ideal of Tyaga, this consummation has been constantly praised and held up before us in this country as the highest ideal of man and his only path to salvation But even if for the few this goal be admitted, yet for the majority of men it must still & always remain God’s ultimate purpose in them to realise Him manifest in the world,—since that is His purpose in manifestation,—& not only & exclusively unmanifest in His transcendental stillness It must be possible then to find God as freedom & immortality in the world and not only aloof from the world There must be a way of escape provided in Nature itself out of our bondage to Nature Man must be able to find in Nature itself and in his humanity a way of escape into divinity & freedom from Nature, avidyaya mrityum tirtwa This would not be possible if God and Nature, Brahman and the Universe, were two hostile & incompatible entities, the one real and the other false or non-existent But Spirit and Universe, God and Nature are one Brahman; therefore there must always be a point at
Page – 440
which the two meet; their apparent divergence in consciousness must be somewhere corrected in consciousness, Nature must at some point become God and the apparently material Universe stand revealed as Spirit. In the profound analysis of the human soul built by the ancient Vedantic thinkers upon the most penetrating self-observation and the most daring & far-reaching psychological experiments, this point of escape, this bridge of reconciliation was discovered in the two supramental principles, Ideal Consciousness & Bliss Consciousness, both of them disengaged from the confusions of the mind involved in matter Just as modern Scientists, not satisfied with the ordinary processes & utilities of Nature, not satisfied with the observation of her surface forces & daily activities, penetrated further, analysed, probed, discovered hidden forces & extraordinary activities, not satisfied with Nature’s obvious use of wind as a locomotive force, found & harnessed the unutilised propulsive energy of steam, not satisfied with observing the power of electricity in the glare & leap of the thunderflash, disengaged & used it for the lighting of our houses & thoroughfares, for the driving of our engines & printing presses, for the alleviation of disease or for the judicial murder of our fellow-creatures, so the old Vedantic Yogins, not satisfied with observing the surface activities and ordinary processes of our subjective nature, penetrated further, analysed, probed, discovered hidden forces & extraordinary activities by which our whole active mentality could be manipulated and rearranged as one manipulates a machine or rearranges a set of levers; pressing yet farther towards the boundaries of existence they discovered whence this energy proceeded & whitherward this stir and movement tended & worked They found beyond the manifest & obvious triple bond of body, life & mind, two secret states & powers of consciousness which supported them in their works—beyond this limited, groping and striving mind & life which only fumble after right knowledge & labour after the right use of power & even attaining them can possess & wield them only as indirect & secondhand agents, they discovered a principle of ideal consciousness, vijnana, which
Page – 441 saw Truth face to face & unerringly, looking on the sun with unshaded eyes, and a principle of all-blissful power & being which possessed in itself, by the very right of its eternal existence & inalienable nature, right joy, right awareness & right action as the very self-atmosphere of its manifestation in the universe Above this inferior trilogy of matter, life & mind (Annam Prana Manas), there is a superior trilogy of Infinite Being, Force & Bliss (Sat, Chit, Ananda) accessible to us & working on us inhabitants of the lower spheres from the symbol of divine beatific consciousness, the Anandatattwa, as its throne of world rule, the home & fortress of the divine Master, and employing as its distributing & arranging minister the truth-seeing ideal mind to feed, supply & compel the activities of the lower being They saw, then, being arranged in seven stairs, seven worlds, seven streams of world movement, seven bodies of things, seven states of consciousness which inform & contain the bodies They saw this material consciousness & this material world as the lowest stair, the least in plenitude & power & joy of these seven divine rivers Man they saw as a soul dwelling in matter, deriving his activities from mind & holding them in mind but going back in the roots of his being to the divine trilogy Earth, in the language of their thought, was the footing & pedestal of the human unit, but the heavens of Ananda concealed the secret & ungrasped crown of his world-existence This conception of the sevenfold form of our being & of world-being helps to constitute the very kernel of the doctrine in the Upanishads It is the key to their sense in many passages where there is no direct mention or precise reference to any of its seven terms It is because we miss these clues that so much in these scriptures comes to our mind as a mystery or even as a vague & confused extravagance of disordered mysticism. In this septuple system of our Scriptures every individual body obeys the laws of matter, every life the processes of vitality, every mind the processes of mentality, every ideal being the processes of ideality and every free soul the processes of Beatitude The seven worlds are indeed different kingdoms, each with its own nations & creatures, prajah, bhutani But since God is
Page – 442 always one, each separate motion contains in itself the presence and potentiality of all the others; moreover, since it contains the potentiality, it is irresistibly led to develop under its own conditions that which it contains For this reason Matter in the world tends to manifest Life, Life in Matter to rise into Mind, Mind in vitalised body to be released into Pure Idea, Pure Idea in matter-housed Mind to be consummated in divine Beatitude The pervading law, therefore, which confines each species to the rule of its kind is only one general rhythm of the movement; it is crossed by a higher upward and liberating movement which leads the becoming we now are to strive for development towards that other, freer & larger scale of becoming which is immediately above it This fresh rule of Nature, then, appears & constitutes the rule of our freedom as the other was the rule of our servitude. The principle, “To each motion its law & to each inhabitant of the motion subjection to the law” is crossed and corrected by this other principle, “Each motion contains a tendency towards the motion above it and to each type of becoming, therefore, there comes in the progress of time the impulse to strain beyond the mould it has realised to that which is higher than itself.” In this complex arrangement of Nature where is man’s exact position? He is a mental being housed in a vitalised body & he tends through pure idea towards divine beatitude Now just as matter informed with life, no longer obeys the processes of matter only, but, even while it affects life-processes, is also affected by them and finds its complete liberation in the conquest of matter by life, just as mind in a life body is affected, limited and hampered by vital & bodily processes, but still governs them and would find its own liberation and theirs in the perfect conquest of life & matter by mind, so, since this mental being is really a soul imprisoned in mind, its perfect liberation comes by rising out of the mould of mind through pure idea into beatitude; escaping into beatitude, this mental existence is able to liberate the whole lower system of being by renewing every part of it in the mould and subjecting every part of it to the process of that which we have now become The mould and process of Ananda
Page – 443 is freedom, God, bliss, immortality, universality, & these, therefore, are the laws of being, the dharmas, the sum of a divine beatific existence which we put on by rising out of mental ego into infinite Ananda The motion of pure Idea, vijnana, is the door of our escape in Avidya; for it is the kingdom within us of Truth and Illumination, domain, in the Vedic symbol, of the god of the Sun, the prophetic Apollo, the burning and enlightening Surya Sa no dhiyah prachodayat. The base of our being is in Matter, its knot is in mentality, its escape into divine Bliss Our aim as human beings must be to rise through the pure Idea into divine bliss and there freed from mental egoism & vital and material limitations spiritualise and beatify our whole existence from the base to the summit. We are a double birth, God the Spirit, God in Nature, Ish and Jagat In Nature we are bound in our consciousness, because we are there a whorl of its motion, a wave in its sea; in Spirit we are free, for there we are a part of nothing, but one with the indivisible Spirit But this double is really biune God, unbound by His divisibility, unbound by His indivisibility, weds the One to the Many in the play of His consciousness, in His ineffable beatitude There God and Nature meet, Vidya and Avidya embrace each other, our real freedom governs and uses consciously our apparent bondage, the bliss of Transcendence joins hands with the bliss of manifestation, God shows Himself in humanity and man realises himself as divine. The joy of that reconciliation dwells in the Immortality to which the Vedanta is our guide and its starting point is the recognition by mind of the one Lord in all bodies, the one Spiritual Being in all becomings, atmanam sarvabhuteshu Since it is the all-blissful Lord who dwells within and Nature is for His habitation and enjoyment, then a state of Nature which is a state of bondage, sorrow-pursued, death-besieged, wrestling with limitations, is convicted of being only a temporary mask and a divinely willed starting-point for the Energy confined in the triple bonds of mortal Mind, Life & Matter to work out its own immortal freedom The object of life is self-liberation, the only aim of human existence consistent with the dignity and
Page – 444 fullness of our being is the escape through Nature to God, out of grief, bondage & death into joy, freedom and immortality Avidyayá mrityum tîrtwá vidyayámritam asnute.
APPENDIX
[The following passage, written on a loose sheet, seems to be related to the above section ]
In our observation of the workings of law & freedom in cosmic Nature we cannot fail to be struck by the principle of gradated and progressive freedom by which she climbs up from an apparent rigidity of law to an apparent elasticity of freedom We observe that matter inert or informed only by an inert principle of motion is the field of rigid law & of fixed process We observe next that in proportion as life develops in matter, the principle of variation, of flexible adaptability, even of instinctive, if unconscious self-adaptation manifests & increases in her workings We observe that in proportion as mind develops in living matter this variation, this flexibility & self-adaptation grow into a conscious struggle with & partial domination of the life & matter in which mind operates From this we arrive easily at certain large corollaries (1) Mind, life & matter are, in all probability, one essence, but not one principle They are three different principles of Nature, each with its separate rhythm, principle of process & mode of working (2) Consciousness is the principle of freedom, form is the principle of law; the necessity of dealing with the rigidity of form and its processes is the cause of the limitations of the freedom inherent in consciousness (3) Consciousness and life evolve out of matter; they must then have been all the time inherent & involved in matter (4) Life itself seems to be an operation of involved consciousness working itself out of the imprisonment in matter It is therefore conceivable that matter itself may be only a form of involved consciousness
Page – 445 (5) Mind is a principle of mental self-conscious sensation, action-comprehension, reaction, attraction-repulsion rising into a luminosity (prakasha) we call knowledge of which thought is only the partial system or formula In Life we notice in the plant & metal a vital sensation, action-comprehension, reaction, attraction-repulsion, essentially the same as the mental but expressed in a different system of values,—values of involved consciousness In Matter we do not observe sensation, but we do observe the other common activities of Nature Experimental Yogic psychists assert that matter does also receive & store blind sensations & that the mind of man can discover records of past events in material objects & convert them into values of knowledge Science even goes so far as to assert that all sensations are an activity of matter & are stored in the brain & can always be turned by memory under some stimulus into values of knowledge We may say therefore that the essence of consciousness is at least present in matter, but it only organises itself by evolution, through life in mind. We cannot assert that the present state of consciousness [which is] the consciousness of limited freedom & derived knowledge in man is the last possible evolution of consciousness It is at least possible that an entirely free consciousness bringing with it a spontaneous instead of a derived knowledge & an entirely free mastery instead of a partially free manipulation of mind, life & matter is concealed in Nature & its unveiling is the final goal of her evolution. If such a free consciousness exists, there must be a principle in Nature superior to mind as mind is superior to life & matter & this can be nothing else than the Vedic principle called vijnana. This free consciousness, entire mastery, must be a power of cosmic Nature & cannot be acquired by the individual except by breaking down the habits of consciousness & exceeding the fixed processes by which the individual action is separated & differentiated from cosmic action. The ultimate evolution must therefore end in the openness of the individual for cosmic or infinite consciousness-being, not limited by individual ego-sense, the workings of free infinite
Page – 446 cosmic force, not limited by individual will; possessing entire freedom, knowledge & mastery it must be in its nature an infinite joy & bliss in oneself & in all the cosmic workings which enter into our experience The highest state of Nature & goal of evolution must be infinite Sacchidananda. So much we can reasonably infer from the facts of the cosmos as we see them We then arrive at the Vedanta results without starting from Vedanta; but if we accept the Vedantic premise that all world is only a formation & operation of consciousness, these inferences become inevitable conclusions
Page – 447 Chapter II
The Golden Rule of Living— Enjoyment & Renunciation
The first line of the Seer’s first couplet has given us very briefly and suggestively the base & starting point of the whole thought of the Upanishad; the second line of the same couplet opens to us, with equal brevity, with equal suggestiveness the consummation of the whole thought of the Upanishad The rest of the eighteen shlokas fill out, complete, play variations; they add much thought that is necessary to avoid error, to perceive supplementary and collateral truths or to guide oneself aright in the path that has been hewn out or to walk with unstumbling footsteps through the doors that have been opened to us; but all the practical need of man and the central gist of the Seer’s thought about human life is compressed into these two lines with their few brief words and their thousand echoes. All the underlying Vedantic conceptions which we have had to bring out in our first chapter, have had reference to the three great practical factors of the human problem as it presented itself to Vedantic thinkers, the reality of spiritual freedom, the appearance of material bondage and the means of escape out of the appearance and into the reality, out of matter into Spirit, out of Nature into God But these expressions, freedom and bondage, are intellectual, ideal or spiritual terms This human being though he lays hold on intellect as a guide and aspires to ideality and spirit, does not live centred in those superior movements of consciousness; brain leads his thought when it can, but he lives in the heart & lives in it, too, besieged by the nerves and body His mentality is, therefore, emotional, sensational and temperamental, not intellectual or ideal, and the practical aspect of his own problem is not limitation or infinity, but the pressure of pain, grief, sorrow and suffering and the possibility of escape from these his ruthless and omnipresent persecutors He could even be content for a while with death and limitation if, free from this admixture of pain & suffering, his short span of life & circumscribed sphere of
Page – 448 action could be assured of that limited happiness which the race at large is vainly pursuing It was the agony of this problem that seized on Buddha and drove him from his kingly home & rich domestic joys to wander through the world as a beggar and ascetic; to escape from the insistent pain, grief and suffering of the world the Lord of Pity discovered for man the eightfold path, the law of compassion & self-sacrifice, the heavenly door of renunciation and the silent and blindly luminous haven of Nirvana The Seer of the Upanishad sets before himself the same problem but arrives at a very different solution; for he proceeds not from pity, but from a clear strength and a steady knowledge, perceiving the problem but not overpowered by it, samahita, dhíra. Dwelling in a world of grief, pain, death and limitation, anityam asukham imam lokam prápya, yet irresistibly impelled by Nature to aspire after joy, immortality and freedom, bound not to renounce that apparently impossible ideal on peril of forfeiting our highest, most consoling and most exalting impulses, how are we to reconcile this ineffugable contradiction or to escape from this unending struggle? This is the problem which the Seer solves in three brief words, tena tyaktena bhunjítháh, again a monumental phrase whose echoes travel the whole of existence It is because it provides the true practical basis for the solution he is going to suggest that he has preferred to announce at the outset the immediate and active relation of our twofold existence, God inhabiting Nature, rather than the remoter essential relation, God and Nature one Brahman For the first practical step towards freedom must always be to distinguish between the Inhabitant and the habitation and withdraw from the motion towards the Lord of the motion It is in the motion that these shadows of limitation, grief and death appear; the Inhabitant is free, blissful and immortal To escape, then, we must turn from the world to the Master of the world; in ordinary religious parlance, we must renounce the world in order to find and possess God So also the Gita, after describing our condition, arrived in this transient and troubled world, anityam asukham imam lokam prápya, immediately points out the remedy, bhajaswa Mám. Turn & cleave rather to me, the Lord But the world was made by its Lord for
Page – 449 divine habitation & possession; the object of the renunciation, therefore, cannot be to turn away utterly from the world after abandoning it in itself & in the lower consciousness, but to conquer and repossess it through the divine Krishna and in the supreme & all-blissful conscious being of the Lord Nivasishyasi mayyeva Thou shalt dwell in Me utterly, in My illimitable being & not in a limited & mortal experience of the world To form the basis of the rule of life which the Seer enunciates, we have, then, this practical corollary from the language of his first line:— To escape from grief, death and limitation we must renounce the world, to enjoy bliss, freedom & immortality we must possess ourselves in the Lord; but since His object in manifesting is habitation of the universe and not its destruction, the bliss must be enjoyed in this universe, through the Lord, and not in the Lord apart from and exclusive of life in the universe. This is the difference, the capital difference between the Buddhistic solution—with all those later solutions affected & governed by Buddhistic thought, such as Mayavada & monastic Christianity—and the ancient answer of Hinduism to the problem put to man by life These say, “Abandon life, put away all possession & enjoyment; absolute asceticism is your only salvation”; that said “Abandon the world that you may possess and enjoy it ” One is an escape, the other a recoil and an aggression; one is a divorce, the other a reconciliation Both solutions are heroic; but one is a mighty heroism of difficult retreat and flight; the other a mightier heroism of self-perfection and conquest The one is the retreat of the Ten Thousand; the other is Caesar’s movement from Dyrrhachium to [Pharsalus] One path culminates in Buddha, the other in Janaka and Srikrishna The language of the Seer is perfectly framed, as in the first line, to bring about a confrontation of two giant opposites Tyaktena in the instrumental case suggests a means, and the very first word after tyaktena, undivided from it by any other vocable or particle, the word which gives the object and work of this instrument, the word which sets ringing from the outset the conclusive note and culminating cry of the Upanishad and is suggested again and again in jijivishet, in ko mohah kah shokah, in amritam,
Page – 450 in kalyanatamam, in raye, is the magnificent bhunjithah, Thou shouldst enjoy Tyaga and bhoga, renunciation and enjoyment, have always been presented to us as the two conflicting ideals of human life & thought,—inevitably, for they are the two master impulses of Nature—both of them eternal—and through the ages they have perplexed and tormented humanity by their perpetual companionship in an always unfinished and inconclusive strife, dividing us into Puritan and Pagan, Stoic and Epicurean, worldling and ascetic, & perpetuating an opposition that rests on a false division of a double unity, maintaining a strife that can lead to no final victory The Seer has deliberately brought these two great opposites & enemies together and using a pointed and unequivocal language, has put them side by side no longer as enemies but as friends and mutual helpers; his aim is by a fearless and puissant confrontation to reconcile and wed them eternally to each other, as he has already in the first line confronted, reconciled and eternally wedded the two apparent opposites, Spirit and world-Nature Had he said not “Tyaktena” but “Tyagena bhunjithah”, from which we might have concluded that he pointed us to renunciation of the world for the enjoyment of God aloof from the world, there would then have been no real confrontation & no great monumental phrase but only a skilful verbal turn of words pointing a contrast rather than effecting a reconciliation But the instrument of the enjoyment is not renunciation in itself and for itself but the world we have renounced, tena, & the enjoyment is not the self-sufficient joy of renunciation & escape, but the enjoyment of Spirit in the world, the Lord in the motion By means of all that is thing of world in this moving universe we are to enjoy God &, through Him, no longer as now apart from Him, to enjoy His universal motion,—all this that is moving thing in her that moves becomes the instrument of a divine delight, because the world is God and part of His totality, so that by possessing & enjoying Him we possess and enjoy world also Enjoyment is to be reconciled then to renunciation & even wedded to it, made to depend upon it as the effect depends upon the cause, to stand upon it as a statue stands upon its pedestal or the roof of a house on its foundations,
Page – 451 walls and pillars Renunciation the means, enjoyment the end, but renunciation of the world as mere undivine, ignorant & fettered motion & becoming, enjoyment of God in Himself & of the world only as a symbol, a formal expression of God; this reconciliation founded on a knowledge of the true nature & purpose of existence is the gospel of the Seer. The ascetic gospel of renunciation is incomplete by itself; the Pagan gospel of enjoyment is incomplete by itself Renunciation and enjoyment of the world must be reconciled by substituting inward for outward bliss, the bliss that goes from within outward for the pleasure which seeks to appeal from without inward, joy of God in the form & name of things for joy of the finite appearance and the isolated idea The reconciliation is to be effected through the consummate experience of Ananda, the divine beatitude at which we arrive by true seeing in the kingdom of the pure Idea, satyadharmena drishtyá. Let us examine successively this renunciation and this enjoyment We see, first, that tena refers back to the expression in the first line, so wide, so carefully comprehensive, idam sarvam yat kincha jagatyam jagat, by which the absolute unity of the Inhabitant is affirmed We are to abandon utterly the world; we are to renounce every least or greatest detail of phenomenal existence, whether held by us in possession or aimed at in our desire; we are to surrender everything whatsoever that we have or may hope to possess or dream of possessing in the universe We see that the demand in this second line is as sweeping and unsparing as the all-comprehensive description in its base & predecessor We are to keep back nothing; all that is dearest to us in our outward environment, wife, children, home, friends, wealth, country, position, fame, honour, success, the respect of men, the love of those we cherish,—all that is dearest to us in our inward life; our loves, hates, jealousies, ambitions, sins, virtues, principles, opinions, tastes, preferences, ideals,—these and all we are, our body, life, mind, soul, personality, ego, all, all have to be sacrificed and laid upon a single altar We must keep back nothing either of our outer or of our inner wealth; for if, professing to make the complete surrender, we consciously
Page – 452 & willingly keep back one doit or farthing, we are thieves before God, committing the Biblical sin of Ananias & Sapphira,—stena eva sah,—conscious or half-conscious hypocrites,— mithyáchárah sa uchyate,—and, even if the holding back be unwilled or unconscious, still are we imperfect sadhakas not yet having the right to grasp our crown For the natural principle of this surrender is precise:— As one gives so one receives God is All & he who would gain all, must give all The final sacrifice admits of no reservation and even a slight defect of renunciation, however seemingly lofty the scruple, vitiates the purity and effectiveness of the sacrifice. But since the renunciation asked of us is not the objective renunciation,—although that too is not excluded so far as it is necessary for the real surrender,—since it is not an outward process of flight from the objects of pleasure, it can only be, in essence, an inner sacrifice to the Master of the world, to Ish, the Lord Since there is only One Lord in multitudinous bodies & to Him the entire world belongs, everything that is offered to the enjoyment not of the one Lord of the world, but to the mind, senses, body as part of the motion, the jagat, is an ignorant sacrifice on a false altar It may be justified by the great cosmic ignorance so long as that principle of consciousness keeps its hold on us, but it can never bring the supreme good or the divine bliss A perverse & broken movement, it brings a perverse and broken result.3 So long as we feel ourselves to be at all separate existences from God and others, anyán, we are here as His deputies and instruments to receive out of what the world possesses so much as the Lord of the world sends or brings to us, and to offer them up not to our mind and senses but to the Master of the Universe seated in ourselves and in others, bhoktáram yajnatapasám sarvalokamaheshwaram He is the true enjoyer of all sacrifices and works of askesis, the mighty lord of all the worlds For this reason the Gita directs us to offer up as an utter sacrifice to the Supreme all our actions, all our efforts, all our enjoyments, yat tapasyasi, yat karoshi yad
3 Gita
Page – 453 aśnási Demanding nothing for ourselves, but receiving for Him all that He wills to give us through the action of others or our own, we are to refer them all to Him again for His acceptance Even what we do, we are to do not for our sake, but for God’s sake, not for our personal & self-regarding aims, but for what we see, rightly or wrongly, in the light we have, to be His aim in us, concentrating on the action, not reaching out to its fruit This rule of life is the greatest we are capable of while still at work in the ignorance and moving subject to the dualities; but if we wish to go beyond, we must proceed to a yet more unsparing sacrifice The Gita begins with the sacrifice to God of our desires and the fruits of our action; but it goes on to the giving up into God, mayi sannyasya, of action itself and even the least internal or external movement towards action, sarvarambhah; it insists, above all & to the end, on the supreme renunciation of the ego-sense, the ahankara, as the one all-satisfying and divine sacrifice demanded by the ego-transcendent Universal Being from the ego-besieged and ego-ridden human soul We must, in this consummation, fall perfectly passive in mind, life & body & allow the Divine Power to use them from above, as a man uses a machine, wields a sword or hurls a ball to its mark These formulae of the Gita are, also, the true sense of the inner sacrifice imposed on the seeker by the Isha Upanishad It is the sacrifice of the lower or motional parts of our being to the higher or divine part—the offering of jagat into the Lord. The renunciation demanded of us is an inner sacrifice, effected in the surrender to God of all desire and attachment, of all self-will and self-action, and of all ego-sense and separate personality Desire & attachment to possessions have to be cast & dissolved into the mould of a desireless and all-possessing bliss (Ananda or Jana); self-will & self-action cast & dissolved into the mould of a divine action of the universal Shakti or World Force (Chit or Tapas) which shall use the mind, body and life as a passive, obedient and perfected instrument; ego-sense cast and dissolved into the mould of divine & undivided being (Sat) which regards itself as one in all things & the multiplicity of minds, lives & bodies as only a varied motion of its own divine
Page – 454 unity This divine being, force & bliss constitute the higher part of man’s being centred in the principle of Ananda; they represent the direct, unveiled and unperverted action of the free & blissful Sacchidananda To this last and supreme Immortality (Amrita) these lower mortal parts of man must be given up as the victims of a high & ultimate spiritual sacrifice in the upward movement of world-Nature. Renunciation once determined for us in its spirit & type, we arrive naturally at the other term of this great reconciliation, the enjoyment pointed at in bhunjítháh To understand the place and relation of the Seer’s gospel of divine immortality & bliss in the thought and development of Hinduism, we must return for a moment to the fundamental Hindu idea of sacrifice For it is in the light of this original idea of sacrifice that we must understand the ancient transition from Veda to Vedanta Sacrifice to the gods was from the earliest times the central idea of the Hindu religion, under the name of renunciation, sacrifice to God still remains its whole spirit and teaching The gods, Masters of natural forces, act in Nature under God in the motional being of the Master of all and distribute their energies to individual movements and creatures; from their store, the individual receives whatever he possesses of capacities, desires & enjoyments; at their hands he must seek whatever, not possessing, he desires firmly to acquire But the principle of Nature, that great motion and complex rhythm, stands in the harmony & interdependence of the individual & general, jagatyam jagat; the individual, therefore, can neither gain what he has not nor keep what he has except by sacrifice of his personal energies & possessions into the world-substance & the world-energies By expenditure of what he has, offering it into the general stream of the corresponding force or substance in the perpetual flux and movement of Nature, he is kept safe by the gods or he increases If it is my purpose to improve my muscular strength, I must first consent to an output, an expenditure in exercise of the strength I already have, allowing it to escape as energy into the world-sum of energy, sacrificing to Vayu and Prithivi; I must accept temporary loss of power, weariness and exhaustion, losing a little that I may gain
Page – 455 more; then, what I have given is taken up by the deities in the Jagati and, if the sacrifice has been properly conducted, returned increased, doubled, trebled or even decupled to the giver As it is in our physical, so it is in our mental & emotional being I must pour love from myself in feeling & action into the world-stream of love, sacrificing to Mitra; then only what I have given may return to me increased, doubled, trebled, decupled in the love and affection of others or in my own enlarged capacity for loving The rule, being fundamental & universal, holds good with all internal & external possessions and holdings, the dhanani of the Rigveda “Foster by sacrifice the gods,” says the Gita, “and let those gods foster you; fostering each other ye shall attain the supreme good,—param sreyah ” Attaining the supreme good we pass beyond the gods and come to God; we leave Veda to arrive at Vedanta or, rather, fulfil Veda in Vedanta Then we are no longer content to sacrifice this or that possession, giving a share, making reservations, but offer unreservedly & unconditionally the supreme sacrifice, yielding up on the highest of all altars all that we are and possess; we give no longer to Agni, Indra, Varuna or Mitra, but to the supreme & universal Lord, bhoktáram yajnatapasám Then, too, we receive in return not wealth, nor cattle nor horses nor lands nor empire, not joys nor powers nor brilliances nor capacities, but God Himself & the world with all these things in them as trifles and playthings for the soul to enjoy as God enjoys, possessing them and yet not possessing, wholly unbound by possession. Renunciation of some kind, voluntary or involuntary, is the condition of all growth and all existence; by expenditure acquisition, by sacrifice security, by renunciation enjoyment, this is God’s universal law of sacrifice The gods who are Powers of Nature, receiving our due sacrifice, give us the partial gains & enjoyments which come within their jurisdiction; God, receiving our due sacrifice, gives us Himself and in Himself everything that exists in Nature or beyond it. There is a common agreement in the different schools of Hinduism that to the man who has renounced, God gives Himself in return for his renunciation; our difficulty has been
Page – 456 to settle among our many conflicting conceptions what that is in soul existence which God intends to reveal as His very self and to what, therefore, we are called to aspire The ascetic sees Him in impersonal Being and actionless peace; he believes therefore that we receive in return for renunciation release from phenomena and the bliss of the unconditioned Brahman The devotee sees Him in divine Personality; he hopes to get, in return for what he offers, Shiva or Rama, Krishna or Kali Some aspire to the Pure & Bright Stillness beyond, others like the Tantriks, seeing Him as Universal Power, attempt to acquire & feel Him here in a superior & divine power and mastery, yet others would have God in Himself and yet God playing also in His garden of the universe The reason of these differences lies in our human variation of temperament—for we live in heart and temperament—and therefore of knowledge and approach—for with us mental being seated in the heart temperament determines our knowledge & action,—variations produced by the differently distributed motion in us of Prakriti, of Jagati, of the process of our world-nature According to our nature we seek God It is always, in fact, by some principle in Avidya itself that we are moved to exceed Avidya Even as a man approaches me, says the Gita, precisely in that spirit & in that way I accept and possess him Ye yathá mám prapadyante tans tathaiva bhajámyaham The spirit in which the Seer would have us approach the Lord, is an all-embracing universality and the way he chooses for us is to embrace the all-blissful One in the world and in transcendence of the world, as the unity and as the multiplicity, through Vidya & through Avidya, in the Spirit and in the world, by God above Nature and by Nature in God Ishwara, Brahman, the Life-principle Matariswan, the Bright and Pure Stillness, the supreme & absolute Personality, the triple Purusha, Surya, Sachchidananda, Agni,—successively he presents to us in the course of his thought these names, aspects or images of the Eternal, not that we may accept one and exclude others, but for our soul experience to embrace them all in a multiple & blissful unity Everywhere he reconciles, everywhere he includes, seeking to understand and not to divide In this
Page – 457 world he gives us the supreme felicity and in that world our joy shall not be other Why should we refuse to God in ourselves any form of His divine sweetness? There is no dragon watching at the gates of God to deny to us any of the fruits of Paradise; the law of divisibility and opposition ceases when we have shaken from our necks His leaden yoke of Avidya But in these initial couplets the Seer is insisting especially on a divine life in this world, iha, as the necessary basis of the fulfilment which is held in store for us at the end of the utter & perfect sacrifice All that we have renounced to Him, action and struggle, thought and knowledge, the rose and the breeze and the moonlight, bird and beast & human being, man and woman and children and land and houses and gold and silver and oxen and raiment, books and poetry and learning and science, mind, body and life are, when renounced, to become the material, instrument and medium of a divine enjoyment, objectively, by all that he keeps for us or gives back to us physically during and after the discipline of renunciation, subjectively, by the whole universe and all that it contains, possessed through a man’s senses so far as God in him accepts their action and in a man’s soul by sympathy and identity with all beings & with universal Nature Still, these things will always remain the instrument of enjoyment; the object of the enjoyment, the true object of all bhoga, for the liberated soul, is God,—not Nature, although God in Nature & through Nature We shall enjoy God in & through His universal manifestation, but always God and never the universe falsely experienced as a thing existent & enjoyable for its own sake, apart from God and different from Him. The possession of God in the world-transcending height of His being does not exclude possession of God in His world-containing wideness To the liberated soul there is no high and base, but only one equal divine bliss and perfection. In the ideal of the Seer we do not cast away life and mind and body into an eternal sleep; removal from universe is not prescribed as a necessary condition before we can take possession of the supreme & ineffable bliss of the Brahman The Seer asserts on the contrary a liberated bliss in the world and
Page – 458 in human life “He whose Self has become all existences, how shall he be deluded, whence shall he have grief”, so rings his cry of triumphant freedom; it does not run “He whose Self is dead to the knowledge of all becomings” The most powerful support and argument of purely ascetic philosophies is the Buddhistic idea, foreign to Vedic Hinduism, that true freedom and true bliss are impossible in the universe and can only become possible if we escape out of it into some world-shunning secrecy of being, whether Nihil or Nirvana The soul handling objects, it is thought, must be attracted to them; or else the freedom from attraction is so difficult and so rare that it is presumptuous to reckon on it as a practical possibility; in Samadhi the spirit is blissful & free, awaking from Samadhi it is bound to feel or be always susceptible to touches of limitation and of grief; the duality of pain & grief is an irrevocable law of the universe and where there is bliss in the world, there must also be as its companion grief in the world, for unmixed bliss is only possible where mind and its laws are excluded These are the fundamental ideas of Asceticism and if they were true with this scope and this force, the very foundations of the thought in the Isha Upanishad would be vitiated and annulled; but, although generally held and insisted on by numbers of great saints and lofty thinkers, they are an instance of partial truths, perfectly valid, even perfectly general in their own province, carried in practice beyond their province and so by a false extension becoming, like all exaggerated truths, the foundation of error They are perfectly true in the field where they apply but they apply only in the limits of mind & so long as the soul is subjected in the world to mind and its processes But it is not a fact that mind is the supreme principle in the world and its movement & processes the dominant & ineffugable motion and process of the universe It is only true that mind is the present centre of humanity & to humanity therefore seems, falsely, the supreme principle of the active universe It is no doubt extremely difficult, without divine aid, for man to escape from mind & living in the world, yet to remain superior to the mental duality of joy & grief, pleasure & pain, which is the
Page – 459 ordinary law of our mundane existence The difficulty of the escape is the justification of Sannyasa But the escape, though difficult, is not only possible, it is the one real road to our self-fulfilment as the human type of God-existence upon this earth, evam twayi nanyatheto’sti It is possible because the supreme principle and movement of the universe is not mind; the supreme principle is Sat working out through Chit in Ananda, Infinite Being working out through Infinite Force in Infinite Beatitude The Upanishads demand of us, and not only the Isha but the Taittiriya & other Upanishads, not to dwell in mind untouched by its laws, which would be a laborious & improbable achievement, but to raise ourselves beyond mind through Surya or pure Idea into Ananda and live centred in that principle From this superior centre, seated free, imperial, Swarat, Samrat, in the mountain citadel of our existence, we can, remaining in the universe, yet govern our use of a subject and no longer rebellious mind, life & body by the process and laws of our blissful spirit and our divine Nature The superior movement then controls and uses the lower for its own purposes But since the principle of the superior movement is unmixed bliss, our purposes and activities also must be purposes & activities of unmixed bliss If we are released only on the levels of mind, then indeed sleep of Samadhi is our one safe & perfect state, for coming out of that sure refuge & retreat, we are again naked in mind and exposed to the efforts of mind to recover its natural supremacy in its own kingdom Rising to Ananda, liberated in Ananda, living in Ananda, there is no such peril The kingdom of heaven imposes the will of God on the kingdom of earth, the parardha takes possession of the aparardha, Sacchidananda seizes & revels in the ecstasies of a liberated Manas, Prana and Annam In opposition, therefore, to the Buddhistic declaration of the omnipresence of grief & pain outside Nirvana, we have in the Vedanta the soul’s declaration of its ultimate & eternal independence:— To live in the world is not necessarily to live in the duality of grief and joy The soul seated in Ananda, even though it lives the life of the universe, possesses as its dominant principle unmixed
Page – 460 bliss and can use in this world & this human life mind, life & body, sarvam idam, as instruments of God-enjoyment without enduring the dominion of their dualities. For the rest, these truths are a matter of experience Those who have attempted to enjoy the universe before renunciation and, escaping from that error & delusion, have afterwards enjoyed God in the universe after renunciation, know, know with a silent & inexpressible rapture, the alteration & seizing revolution, the immense and ineffable change, the seated sublimity and all-penetrating intensity of that bliss of the Brahman towards which the Upanishad points our faltering and doubt-besieged footsteps Before renunciation we enjoyed Nature ignorantly as a thing in itself and we worshipped mind and the things of the mind, followed after body and the things of the body, indulged in life and the things of the life; after renunciation we enjoy with knowledge, not the rose, but God in colour and petal and perfume, not a poem but God in the beauty of sound and the beauty of words, not food, but God in taste and in vital satisfaction That which before renunciation was pleasure, has become after renunciation bliss; pleasure which was transient, mutable and fading, has become bliss lasting and inalienable; pleasure which was uncertain, because dependent on circumstances & objects, has become bliss self-existent and secure; pleasure which was uneven, strained towards preferences, balanced by dislikes, has become bliss equal and universal; pleasure which was even at its highest impure and haunted, held with difficulty and insecurely against a background of loss, deficiency and pain, has become bliss pure, satisfying and perfect as God Himself Before renunciation we besought objects to yield us a petty joy we did not ourselves possess; after renunciation we perceive in the object & receive from it the immeasurable bliss eternally seated in ourselves Before renunciation, we enjoyed with desire, seeking and effort; after renunciation we enjoy desirelessly, not in the satisfaction of desire, but in eternal possession, not as anish, struggling to gain possession of what does not belong to us, but as ish, already possessing all that the world contains Before renunciation we enjoyed, with egoism, only what the greedy
Page – 461 but easily tired mind and senses could grasp, possessing for ourselves and that too only with our own lame, limited and selfish enjoyment; after renunciation we enjoy, without ego-sense, all that we outwardly possess, all that others possess and all that none but God possesses, and we enjoy it not only with our own enjoyment but with the individual and collective enjoyment of all our fellow beings animate and inanimate and with the divine enjoyment of God in the universe Finally, we enjoyed before renunciation many separate things all of a limited pleasurableness; after renunciation we enjoy one thing in its multiplicity which is all-blissful everywhere Such is the enjoyment in the world to which the Seer points us in the word, bhunjítháh; and we have always in addition,—for that transcendence is the condition of this secure universality,—the bliss of the Lord’s pure being in His self-existence beyond and above the motion of the universe
Page – 462 Chapter III
The Golden Rule of Life— Desire, Egoism and Possession
Ma gridhah kasyaswid dhanam
Immediately after this great fundamental reconciliation, the Seer proceeds to a phrase which under a form of familiar commonness conceals an immoderate wealth of spiritual suggestion “Lust not after any man’s possession ” Ma gridhah kasyaswid dhanam. We seem to have stumbled out of deep and strange waters into a very familiar shallow Read superficially and without an eye to the words that precede or to the whole serried thought of the Upanishad, this closing cadence of the Seer’s opening sloka would suggest only a commonplace ethical suggestion identical in form & spirit with the last of the Mosaic commandments,—just as read superficially and apart from the coherent & interwoven thought of the Upanishad tyaktena bhunjítháh need not go beyond a rule of moral self-discipline in which the aim of the Epicurean finds itself married to the method of the Stoic But the Upanishads are never, like Greek epic & Jewish scripture, simply ethical in their intention Their transcendence of the ethical plane is part of their profounder observation of life & soul-experience The Greeks sought always for a rule of moral training & self-discipline; the Mosaic Law imposed always a rule of outward conduct; and both aimed at an ethical balance of mind or an ethical balance of action; but the Vedanta rejects all mere balancing and arrangement The Vedic thinkers went straight towards the soul and an inner rebirth A radical change of outlook on life was their motive force for the change, if any, of outward conduct; a complete revolution & renovation of the soul was its demand on the inner life of man Troubling themselves little with the management of conduct & feeling always for the springs of life & action, they left the care of ethics to other Shastras; neglecting comparatively the regulation of temperament, they
Page – 463 searched for that within from which temperament proceeds and by which it can be automatically regulated When once that secret spring is touched, when once the soul is found & the lord of the temple manifests himself, ethics with its outer intellectual & emotional sanctions becomes superfluous; the outward life then flows spontaneously out of the sweetness, power & fullness of a supreme inner change To the Vedantin the ethical stage is only important as a preliminary clearing in the jungle of desires & passions which prevents us from even attempting seriously to find our way through to the temple of the Lord. Is there here the indication of such a preliminary ethical self-preparation? No; for it is the constant literary principle of these inspired writings that each phrase in Veda, as in the motion of the universe itself, lives not to itself but goes back to all that has gone before and reaches out to all that is coming; all moreover obey an unexpressed central unity which once grasped, illumines the whole text, but without which these writings break up into a mass of disconnected thoughts In this Upanishad the one central thought is multiplicity of existence unified and freed from the sense of the dividing ego The Seer does not allow himself for a moment either to ignore or to deny the multiple existences of the universe, but neither will he for a moment allow us to forget that all these many are really one, all this variety exists in its own unity, Jagat in Ish, the moving Brahman in the stillness, sarvabhutani in Atman, the many Purushas in the One The present phrase, understood as an ordinary ethical rule, would be a contradiction and not an affirmation of the one ever-present and unifying thought of the Isha Upanishad It would provide us with a preliminary rule of life founded upon the acceptance & not the denial of the dividing ego-sense The ethical rule against covetousness is an ordinary human rule and stands on a strong affirmation of the ego-sense & it has no meaning in a gospel of divine life & universal consciousness The phrase can only stand here, not as an ethical rule, but a rule of the inner life, tending not to the confirmation but to the annulment of the ego. The Mosaic commandment is consistent in itself & with the spirit of the Decalogue These Judaic moral Ten Tables start from
Page – 464 an uncompromising dualism; their conception of righteousness is the straight road decreed for our walking by a personal Deity as different from His ephemeral creatures as the great eternal ocean from the soon-dried & inconsiderable puddles in a rainswept highway The particular prohibition of covetousness stands partly on the idea of the morally seemly, the epieikes of the Greeks; much more (and in the Jewish temperament entirely) it rests on the stronger & more mechanical conception of legal justice between man and man, the Greek dikaion In either case, it proceeds, like all ethics, from an original acceptance of the egoistic outlook on the universe; starting from the symbols I and thou, mine and thine, its aim and business is not to get rid of the ego-sense but to regulate and check those of its fierce and disorderly movements which poison individual peace and disturb social well-being Even altruistic ethics starts from this fundamental recognition of egoism Except in the Vedantised teachings of the Buddha, it does not seek to annul,—rather altruism lives & satisfies itself by an inverse satisfaction of the ego But the whole aim and spirit of the Vedanta is to annul, to kill, to root out the ego-sense Similarly ordinary ethics seeks to check, scold and limit desire, as an unruly servant, but would shrink from killing it as an enemy We are, indeed, allowed by some systems to extend and pasture this eternal hunger, others permit us to satisfy it under severe restrictions; but always we must satisfy desire ethically, with justice & decency, with the sense of measure of the Greeks, avoiding the aischron, the adikon, the perversion, or with the religious enthusiasm of the Jews, shunning offence to the Lord of Righteousness We must indulge it [in] what we possess or can lawfully acquire, our own wives, not the wives of others, our own wealth, not others’ gold and silver and horses and cattle But in Vedanta, it is wholly improbable that we should have any such ethical & social preaching of the epieikes & the dikaion The principle of the Vedanta is to make no compromise with the inner enemy, but rather merciless war ending in its utter extinction, jahi shatrum durásadam. In this Upanishad we have just had a tremendous and sweeping exclusion of all desire, an inexorable demand to give up
Page – 465 the whole world spiritually to the Lord It is incredible that immediately, without transition, warning or explanation of his purpose the Seer, this great master of language & its effects, should immediately weaken his thought & hamstring the great impulse he has created by the intrusion of a shallow and minor injunction, that he should say in effect, "Seeing God everywhere, abandon the whole world in Spirit that thou mayst enjoy the whole of divine existence,—but take care not to lust after other people’s property " Such an interjection would be either a grotesquely unneeded warning to a soul free from desire and already enjoying the whole world in a free and pure satisfaction, or the suggestion of a preliminary discipline so awkwardly introduced as to break the effect of the great rule towards which it was intended to lead We could have understood if the Seer had written, reversing the order of the clauses, "Covet not any man’s possession, nay, abandon the whole world and all it contains", or even, though this would be contrary to his effective & cumulative style, "Abandon the whole world &, first of all, abandon the desire for other men’s possessions " But he could not have written as it must stand now without link or clue; "Abandoning the whole world, enjoy by the whole world; covet not any man’s possession " Even if permissible in any other style, such a vicious stumble is impossible to the divine Muse The moment we read the line in the light of the whole structure & thought of the Upanishad, the difficulty at once vanishes, the real meaning of the clause emerges Like all the others it is a smooth and clear surface covering many waters In the careful structure of the Upanishad it starts naturally from the opening Isha vasyam and its conclusion tyaktena bhunjítháh and points forward to átmaivábhút sarvabhútáni of the seventh couplet.4 Thus understood in its right place as a link between this
4 I have written on this point at a perhaps disproportionate length as an example of the great care necessary in studying the Upanishads It is not enough to have a correct verbal rendering, everything must be understood in the spirit of the entire unity, not as a separate text apart from its setting It is only by a strict adherence to this rule that we can really get the secret of the Upanishads
Page – 466 starting point and the yet deferred conclusion, the thought of the Seer is seen, as he intended it, perfectly simple & straightforward in substance, admirably rich in suggestion “All forms are various dwelling-places of one self; sorrow proceeds out of desire and egoism contradicting this truth of oneness, ekatwam, from the consequent lust of possession, from the sense that he is he, I am I, his is not mine, the sense that others are kaschid anyah and objects kasyaswid dhanam This sorrow misbegotten of desire disappears if the mind’s outlook on world can be remoulded in a form of the truth of things & not their false appearance, if it can be made to see that these others, anye, are not at all others, but entirely myself in the world-supporting reality, &, here in world, becomings of myself Átmaivábhut sarvabhutani The decisive mental step to the true perception and practical sign of the true realisation is the selfless purity of the once impure & desiring heart when, possessing by abandonment of desire and by realisation of the one Inhabitant in all persons & bodies,—for person is only persona, a mask, a dramatic role of the sole & universal Personality,—it has ceased to hunger & thirst after what others have in their keeping from the false idea that they are different from myself and their possessions are not already my possessions ” The difference of ideas between the Jew & the Indian becomes at once palpable “Lust not after thy neighbour’s goods,” says the Jewish lawgiver in effect, “for he is he, thou thou, and thou hast no righteous claim to another man’s possessions ” “Lust not after thy neighbour’s possessions,” cries the Vedantic Seer, “for he is not thy neighbour other than thou, he is thyself & in him it is thy own self that already possesses Thou hast no need for this desire & this lust ” The object of the injunction is not to accept right ego-sense & discourage greed as wrong ego-sense, but to persuade & lead us to denial of the whole attitude of egoism implied in the lusting after possessions which this particular mind & body do not in the apparent movement of Nature possess, but which are so possessed by us in another mind & body, another habitation of our indwelling Self In the words of men the letter is nothing It is the spirit, the supporting stress of thought & the
Page – 467 temperament behind which give to the spoken symbol its import & its effect. Let me observe in passing, for the observation is needed in these days of the siege of our religion and philosophy by inadequate European conceptions, that we have here the key to an important difference between Vedantic & Western thought, which is not to the discredit of our great national Scripture We need not be too sensitive to the reproach that the Vedanta is non-ethical or too eager to vindicate an ethical intention for its teachings Non-ethical may be either infra-ethical or supraethical Let us beware lest in vindicating the claim of Vedanta to an European eminence & elevation, we bring it down from its own heaven touching domain upon its Asiatic and Himalayan mountain tops Ancient Indian thought and life regularised in teaching a practical difference which the West admits in practice and denies in theory; it admitted three distinct standards determinant of conduct, the customary law, ethical rule and spiritual state; the mass of our pre-classical literature with its greatness of law & custom, its rich abundance & delicacy of moral aspiration & perfection & its great spiritual altitude faithfully reflects this triple recognition But in the many provinces, the varying levels of human conduct the Vedanta seeks always the summits; its consistent search is for spiritual truth and spiritual standards Seeking always that which exceeds & includes the lower life, it exceeded also the limits of ethics, finding Brahman in the all & not in the part, anyatra dharmád anyatrádharmát, otherwhere than in virtue and otherwhere than in unrighteousness, & it fixed its eyes only on so much of conduct as helps us to realise the universality of God, the divine oneness of mankind & the unity of all existences Avoiding these modern pitfalls, we find the full and profound sense of this final phrase disengaging itself naturally by the light of its surroundings. In this path the cessation from all lusting after things as the possessions of others is the sign of the dissolution of ego in the heart; for it proceeds from the heart’s recognition of the truth that one Lord inhabits all bodies It shows that the truth is no longer only an idea in the intellect but is being lived in the whole
Page – 468 being The possessions of the one and only Self in one body are also his possessions in all other bodies; what the self in Shyama owns, that the self in Rama possesses. The exhortation to freedom from the desire of the heart, Ma gridhah, is the answer to all practical difficulties that may arise from the initial teaching of the Seer Enjoyment by the world precludes physical abandonment of the world; yet physical abandonment is what we usually contemplate when we use the term renunciation; for although we are mental beings, yet ours is a mentality emmeshed in matter and impelled by that physical Maya to give a materialised or sensible value and a material expression to all our mental conceptions We hardly admit a truth until we see it cloaked in an outward form or in an outward event & action What then is this new rule of abandonment which impels not to denial and cessation of world-life, but to a free and perfect enjoyment? We have, at once, the answer in this phrase of the Seer, Ma gridhah Thou shalt not have the greed of desire in thy heart,—that is the practical effect of the call to renunciation Mental beings, souls throned in mind, it is in mind our centre not in matter which is to us a mere case, circumference and result of mind, that we should seek our secret of bondage and our means of deliverance All outward material action is in itself Maya, a thing without self-existent reality Action is effected only as the outflow and physical symbol of mind; it has no inherent moral or spiritual value, but is capable only of bearing such values as are put on it by the manomaya purusha, the spirit centred and veiled in mind Humanity still imprisoned in its surroundings, servilely reflects in its mind the habitual impact of outward things, the bahyasparshah, & gives to them a fixed & conventional mental value The more humanity moves towards freedom & perfection, the more it will live in the mind itself, use outward circumstances of life & matter only as symbols of a free mental existence & fix their values by the mentality they express and not by some conventional standard determined by the action itself in its outward appearances Therefore tyaga, the inner renunciation, is preferable to sannyasa, the physical renunciation; for the latter
Page – 469 takes resignedly account of the present weakness of humanity and its false preoccupation with body and helps indeed that weakness to pass out from itself by the extinction of active existence, freeing us from life, but not freeing life for us; but the inner renunciation leads us through our real nature as mental beings, takes account of our strength and teaches us to insist upon it and realise its perfection in God Sannyasa is a rapid road of escape for our self-accepted weakness; tyaga is a path of fulfilment, the strait and narrow road, for our slowly-realised divine strength By this road, supathá, Agni Vaisvanara, God’s pure force in man, leads us to our felicity Nayati ráye asmán. Bodily action is useful as a pressure on the materialised mind, but the better way is to act from within outwards, not from outwards within To the man who lives the inner life, mind-state is all-important, bodily action only a variable symbol or a theatrical demonstration Great spirits have yearned after Sannyasa as a symbol of inner renunciation and freedom; but the truth that has to be symbolised is selflessness in God, not renunciation, which is only a means towards that selflessness. When desire is driven from the heart, the only necessary renunciation is already accomplished; all other self-mortification is, then, a superfluous austerity which may be severely lofty or even gracious, but can no longer be serviceable for the perfect aim of human existence. The main intellectual difficulties opposed to the practice of renunciation disappear before this but there is also a more concrete obstacle We have this high doctrine that the soul in itself is free and God, but bound and divided in world-motion; in the sense of division from God and its fellows it is bound and by its realisation of oneness with God and all beings it recovers its freedom,—ekatwam anupashyatah But in practice some obscure obstacle interposes itself and baffles of their expected results the intellectual recognition and the emotional surge towards unity Mankind has constantly been groping for this obscure and elusive knot of our bondage; but though it plucks at this twist and loosens that complexity, it reaches no better result than a temporary easing of the strings of that disastrous net in which the
Page – 470 world-Magician has caught our labouring minds In the midst of our unprofitable labour we hear the inspired voice and receive the illuminating word of the Vedantic Seer, "Ma gridhah Desire founded on egoism is the knot of your bondage; cut through that complexity, undo that twist and you are free " All other loosening of knots is a fumbling search or an incidental labour; desire and egoism slain, every other knot is of itself dissolved and collapses We have seen that by our very nature as human beings, the knot must be hidden somewhere in our minds, and, particularly, it should be sought in the emotional part of our minds For where the centre of our active being is, there must be the knot of our bondage, and there also must we seek for the secret of its unloosing If we had been material beings or centred in matter, the knot would have been in some material habit and the release dependent on a material adjustment; for the individual, perhaps, Hathayoga and the conquest of the body by the physically effective Will would have been the one effective instrument If we had been vital beings or centred in vitality, the knot would have been some vital obstruction and the release dependent on a vital adjustment; perhaps, then, Pranayama and the conquest by the vitally effective Will of the dualities which affect the nervous life and energy of man would rather have been the true instrument of our freedom But our centre is mind and especially that part of mind which is sensational in its reaction to outward things & emotional in its valuation of them & in its moral response We live in that subtle heart in us which taking up into itself the lower bodily and nervous impacts turns them into objects and media of dislike and desire, pleasure and pain and bringing down into itself the higher formations of thought and reason makes them subservient to the same imperative emotional & sensational dualism We get therefore this law of disciplinary practice:— Although ego-sense is the cause of the soul’s bondage, yet the knot of the bondage in man is in the subtle heart where his active being is centred and it consists in the emotional egoism of desire To get rid of ego-sense, we must, practically, labour to get rid of desire, for until that liberation is accomplished, the mere intellectual rejection of ego-sense, from which we have to start,
Page – 471 cannot be perfectly operative upon the lower mentality and the vital and bodily existence. Desire, the cause of our pain, has itself its cause or rather its secret essence in the ego-sense transferred from the discriminating mind to the responsive heart Vedantic psychology sums up the motion of the Jagati in our mentality,—the complex thing we call mind,—in a quadruple knot;—the nodus of sense-forming mind reactive to outward impacts, the nodus of discriminating mind receptive and critical of these reactions, the nodus of responsive & formative heart or temperamental mind setting in motion waves of emotional or temperamental consciousness which first forms the stuff of the others & shapes itself out as their reaction and their criticism, the nodus of ego-sense which centralises & relates to one mental self-idea all these functionings;—buddhi, manas, chitta, ahankara Formed in the discriminating mind, egoism enslaves its creator & descends to dominate the heart “I am I” cries the discriminating mind, enslaved by egoism, “he is he; mine is mine & not his; his is his & so long as I cannot have or take, I can never regard it as mine ” Thus discriminative ego shuts up man in his one bodily habitation and prevents him from enjoying his proper estate, the rich universe, rajyam samriddham, full of beautiful and noble possessions Egoistic reason turns man into a sort of monomaniac emperor self-confined & limited who fancies himself a prisoner in his single palace, although, really, & if he chose, the wide earth is freely his and all that it contains The heart accepts from the discriminating mind this false limitation & delusion, undergoes sense of want, sense of confinement, sense of difference & is tortured by their evil emotional results While desire is our counsellor, pain and suffering must always be our heritage. We must always remember that if ego were the truth of our being, limitation would not be painful, grief would not be the reaction of our activity The heart, incapable of excessive yearnings, would rest in its proper circle But we are capable of excessive yearnings because we ourselves exceed our bodies & circumstances We are driven by an infinite stress towards
Page – 472 increase, because we are ourselves elastic and really infinite There is always something within us which is dissatisfied with the Is & gropes for the May be, something which is soon tired of present accomplishment & possession & reaches out for something larger, better or at the lowest new It is the universe, it is infinity that the hidden Angel within us seeks The Self within us knows its own infinity & sees itself as the lord of its [creation] [............................] the heart, more passive & therefore more responsive, receives dimly & without understanding—for it is not its function to understand, but to feel—the silent message Hence it has this striving, this dissatisfaction, this torture of pain, unease & grief God puts the heart upon the rack of desire so that it may not be satisfied with smallness He forces it to aspire towards the greatness & infinity of the Spirit, the mahat, brihat, bhuma “Nalpena sukham asti, bhumna sukham asti,” cries the Upanishad There is no abiding happiness in the small; happiness comes by the vast & free. From the strife of this secret truth & this open falsehood desire in the heart contracts its disquieting double nature of wants terribly unlimited & capacities for enjoyment & satisfaction terribly limited & soon exhausted The Nature-force available to the individual through his ego-centre is normally confined to the small amount of energy necessary for the maintenance of body, life & mind in their habitual & indispensable activities; there is no real provision in this limited nature for the greater things to which man in his expansion aspires That he must seek from the infinite; that he must acquire from God or the gods, by effort, by sacrifice The sound, sane, normal, animal man hardly aspires, perhaps would not aspire at all, but for the stress of hunger, the irritation of other men pressing upon his little share of the world & above all the stimulus of that class of beings just above him whom God has partially or entirely awakened to the beyond But when we strain beyond the normal circle of our energies,—unless we have sought refuge in God first,—then, after the first fervent joy of struggle and partial success, our instruments begin to fail us, the pleasure we are seeking loses itself or turns into pain, pain of effort, pain of longing, pain of
Page – 473 disappointment, pain of incapacity We advance by suffering, & water the tree of our growth with our blood & tears. All this pain would be unnecessary, the journey as well as the goal would be Ananda, not suffering but delight, if the ego-sense had not taken possession of our heart & reason We seek our infinity not only through the finite, but by insisting on the conditions of the finite & exaggerating them Physical, vital & mental man, acting & striving under these conditions, must always be limited in his realisation and in his best satisfactions never entirely or permanently satisfied He reaches towards physical, vital and emotional satisfactions which, in the quantity, range or intensity he covets, are & must be forbidden or opposed by his habitual capacities, by his imprisoning & determining environment and by his constant clash with the equally outreaching egoistic desires of other men He escapes perhaps into mind and seeks an unlimited satisfaction in the enjoyments belonging to that more elastic principle, in art, science or literature; but there too, though freer & better satisfied, he is both fettered by his nerves and body and hedged in by the limitations of the mind itself The mind in sensational & vital man, incapable of an universal catholicity of possession and enjoyment, measures, divides, erects standards & hedges, rooted customary habits of capacity, fixed associations of enjoyment and fixed associations of failure in enjoyment, till we have built up a whole system of conventional values of pleasant and unpleasant, good and bad, beautiful and ugly, attractive and repellent, and in this mighty forest of conventions, this jungle of dualities move & live; as the forest is unseen for its trees so the fictions of mind,—mind, the purblind stumbler among details,—obscure from us the truth and real bliss of existence The mentalised body, too, has its own habitual standards of contacts which it can bear and contacts which it cannot or does not wish to bear; therefore we are divided between bodily pleasure and pain and those neutral sensations which conform decidedly to neither of these values The mentalised nervous energy has, no less, its standards of contacts which it can assimilate and contacts which it wishes to reject, and we have, therefore, to reckon among the links of our
Page – 474 life-chain vital enjoyments & vital sufferings, these also divided by their neutral borders Even when busy with its own proper experiences, the mind has its standard of contacts with which it can harmonise itself and contacts with which it is at discord or else remains unattracted,—grief, joy and indifference are the resultant emotional responses Based upon these standards each individual or species has built up its own system of habitual wants & cravings and its own arrangement of accumulated conventions So has grown the huge tree of desire and its associations, sanskaras as they are termed in our philosophies, which has grown out of the seed of ego-sense in the heart and conceals that seed in every part of its flowerings and branchings Nor is the uprooting of that upas tree a facile undertaking For desire does not perish easily by enjoyment; it seeks always to renew enjoyment or go beyond; hardly it perishes by surfeit, for it revives or it seeks other objects; nor is it, either, readily slain by coercion, for it sulks concealed in some invisible den awaiting for a treacherous or violent re-emergence and revenge To finish with desire altogether by attacking & destroying its seed of ego-sense in the heart, is our only escape from present pain and our only safety from renewed suffering. Man desires because he is infinite Self seated in the ego-ridden heart The self is one in being and its nature is bliss; therefore the heart confined by ego seeks to reach out to the unity & to realise the bliss but it seeks, mistakenly, through physical and emotional enjoyment in the jagat Man desires illimitably because he is universal and illimitable; he cannot satisfy his desires illimitably because egoistic self-division persuades him to limit himself to his individual mind, life and body Man desires with pain & weeping because by creating habitual wants, conventional dualistic standards of delight and false values of grief and joy, pleasure and pain he has bound himself not to recognise infinite Ananda in the world, not to perceive that to the secret self, because it is unegoistic, all things are delight, even those touches which to the mind and body present themselves falsely & unnecessarily as grief and pain While he persists in these conditions, desire, failure, discontent & pain must be always his
Page – 475 portion He must recognise the Truth, for the Truth only can set him free. Throughout the human ages we seek an escape or a remedy, but all our solutions fail because either they seek escape from the results of ego by affirming the ego or else deny or unduly limit God’s purpose in the ego “Accept your limitations, work and enjoy as perfectly as you may within boundaries,” is the creed of a practical Paganism For a century or two it may serve man’s need indifferently, but he is infinite and universal and after a time Nature in him heaves restlessly and strains out towards its element She accepted the Greek ideal for a century, then rose up and broke it to pieces “Recognise that you are yourself, others not yourself, and make a rule of life out of the moral consequences of that distinction; desire only that to which you have a right,”—this is the solution of ordinary ethics But still man remains universal; if egoistic vice is the poison of his life, egoistic virtue is not its fulfilment; he breaks back towards sin and unregulated desire or forwards towards something beyond vice and virtue “Desire what you please, enjoy what you can, but without violating my laws and conventions,” is the dyke raised by society; but man is a universal as well as a social unit and the societies he creates are a Procrustean bed which he moulds and remoulds without ever finding his measure He supports himself on social conventions, laws & equities, but cannot limit himself by his supports “Desire is sinful; observe duty and the Shastra, discourage & punish enjoyment,” is the Puritan’s law of self-repression; but duty is only one instinct of our nature and duty satisfied cannot eradicate the need of bliss Asceticism digs deeper into the truth of things, “Compromise will not do” it cries; “flee utterly from the objects of desire, escape from the field of ego, shun the world ” It is an escape, not a solution; God in man may admit escape for the few, but He denies it to the many, for He will not allow His purpose in life and world to be frustrated Religion digs still deeper: “Replace many desires by one, drive out the desires of this miserable earth by the desire of God and of a future world not besieged by these unsatisfied yearnings ” But to postpone the problem to another
Page – 476 life is not to solve it; and to desire God apart from life and not in life is to divide the unity of His being He will indulge a few in that evasion, but not the mass of mankind; therefore the many have to return with hearts still hungry from the doors of the temple; therefore the successive moulds of religion fail, lose their virtue and are cast away and broken For Truth is imperative and demands inexorably its satisfaction And the truth is always this that man is universal being seeking an universal bliss and self-realisation and cannot repose permanently on the wayside, in hedged gardens, or in any imperfect prison whatsoever or bounded resting place. Universal Ananda & possession is our secret nature, to move towards it till it is reached, God’s inexorable impulse in His creation All solutions that deny or conflict with our nature, can only be palliatives, evasions or individual remedies. It remains, therefore, to accept the two factors of the problem in their entirety and work out a solution on the basis of a reconciliation This is the aim of the Seer By the enjoyment of the whole of universal being in God, the legitimacy of the secret demand in us is recognised, by the renunciation of the attempt to enjoy through egoistic desire and in physical possession, the stumbling-block in the way of fulfilment is distinguished and removed Mind and heart desire the universe; Self alone can possess it and already possesses it Therefore the whole secret is to shift our centre from mind and heart to the all-blissful Self, from Jagat to Ish, from our temporary place in Nature besieged by the movement, to our eternal seat in the Godhead possessing, overtopping and controlling the movement We can take the universe and all it contains into our self and possess it,—nay, we need not take, for it is already there; we have only to reveal it to ourselves; but we cannot take it into our hands or permanently keep any slightest part of it in our personal possession It is too vast for our grasp and too slippery We can possess the joy of the whole world physically, mentally & emotionally only by possessing it in the Spirit and through the Spirit; the desire to possess its form instead of its joy, or to claim it for the heart, mind & body in us and not for God
Page – 477 in heart, mind and body, indriyartham and not atmartham, is the capital error of our egoism The remedy therefore is to get rid of this desire of false possession and ascend into the truth of real possession Were we to put this in modern language we should say: Man is evolutionary, not evolved; his present state of mentality in heart guided by reason is a transition, not his final nature; in mentality he is tied to desire, in body to limitation and in both to suffering, but when he evolves from the mental into the spiritual being, he will be free from grief because, living in infinite Spirit, he will have done with desire and limitation In the true Vedantic view of things we must express it otherwise. Man is Anandamaya Purusha not yet or always manifested, but in course of manifestation At present he is manomaya, tied to mind and living by desire; he is besieged therefore by pain and limitation, from which, so long as he remains on the mental level, he can only escape entirely by Sannyasa But if he has the will, he can even in this life and body manifest his true anandamaya self and become in Nature all-possessing & in life all-blissful. Since then desire is the knot of our bondage and the seat of our sorrow, the seat must be abolished, the knot cut through or loosened Chidyate hridaya-granthih, says the Upanishad, speaking of the state of liberation, “the knot of the heart is cut asunder ” For the heartstrings are the cords that bind us through emotions of love and hate, attraction and repulsion, to the desire-created falsehoods of the world and hold back the soul from rising to its throne in the Vastness, the natural Righteousness of things, the Love, the Bliss Desire binds to sorrow because it is the sentinel of egoism, the badge of the soul’s subjection to its self-created environment and the veil of our absorption in the limited and fleeting Egoism is the cause of sorrow, but desire is its seat “I am I, thou art thou, mine is mine, thine is thine”; this false conception of things is the seed of all evil; but its hold would be transitory, if there were not this compelling emotion of desire which adds, “Thou art not I, therefore thee I must control or possess; mine is mine, therefore mine I must cling to and keep; thine is not mine, therefore thine too I must acquire or seize ” If this reaching out to our not-selves is inevitable because
Page – 478 our nature is a seeming particularity reaching out to its own real universality, if desire is the sign of the soul emerging out of matter and articulating, with whatever falsehood and stammering, its secret sense that it is the Lord of the universe, yet must it deny & transform itself, if it is to effect its grandiose object The mighty Asura, Hiranyakashipu or Ravana, Attila, Alexander, Napoleon or Jenghiz, reaching out to possess the whole world physically as the not-self, is the Godhead in man aiming at self-realisation, but a godhead blind and misdirected The Seer seeks instead to possess in the Spirit and through the Spirit; afterwards what shall be physically possessed or not possessed, is the Lord’s business The first step therefore must always be to get rid definitely of this craving for objects as the not-self in the possession of not-selves Ma gridhah kasyaswid dhanam. Egoism, seated in the sense of personal difference, is the first element of the heart’s error that has to be eliminated Kasyaswid in the Seer’s phrase is absolute and all-embracing like yat kincha and tena; there can be no limitation, no casuistry, no question of legal right or social justice, no opposition of legitimate claims and illegitimate covetings Nor does dhanam in the Vedic sense include only physical objects, but all possessions, courage, joy, health, fame, position, capacity, genius as well as land, gold, cattle and houses If we wish to understand the spirit of the rule, we may recall the example of the great Sannyasin who ran after the frightened thief with the vessels dropped in his flight, crying, “Lord, pardon me & take them; I knew not Thou hadst need of them ” It is not, indeed, the form of this action that has to be observed and imitated,—the form is a mere symbol,—but the spirit it symbolises; for it breathes of the sense that there is one Lord only in all these habitations and nothing belongs to this body or to that mind or to the mental ego in which their motions are summed and coordinated; but all only to the Lord, one in all bodies Isha vasyam idam sarvam It is immaterial whether a particular object belongs physically to myself or another, is kept with me or stolen from me, surrendered by me or recovered by me; that shall be according to the Lord’s play and pleasure Whether He plays in me outwardly the part of a beggar or the
Page – 479 part of a king, of the philanthropist or the conqueror, is not the essential; the essential is that I should know Him in myself and others and live seated in His being and not in my mental ego Then instead of coveting, enjoying with egoism & sorrowing over loss and disappointment, I shall desire nothing and possess everything in myself, in God and in others, freely, perfectly and universally. Subjection, seated in the sense of non-possession, is the second element that has to be eliminated The Lord, the Ish, does not desire, He possesses; desiring objects, we are anish, not lord, pursued by the false dream of non-possession; we see things withheld, things to be acquired, anaváptam aváptavyam Regarding the object as not-myself, we struggle to possess it, against men, against circumstances, against forces of Nature in the midst of which our body is a straw in a whirlwind, our life an insect fluttering candlewards, our mind a bubble in an eddy All the while, we are in our souls the Lord and possess everything; all this is our estate Therefore we have to correct our false idea of not having and, shifting our centre from the anish to the Ish, replace temporary acquisition by eternal possession Ma gridhah dhanam Liberated in Ananda, I cannot fail to possess all things in myself inalienably and eternally, without being bound to possession or loss as are those who seek & acquire only with personal possession & through the physical body. The concentration of our vision on the form of things & in the outward motion of desire is the third element of error that has to be eliminated We desire and suffer because we mistake form and name for essential existence; we fix on the perishable parts of things, a rose, a piece of gold, an acre of land, a horse, a picture, fame, lordship, reputation All this is jagatyam jagat, myself an object in Nature reaching out to objects in Nature But the principle of form and name in Nature is motion, separation, flux; therefore my desire & enjoyment in Nature must necessarily be limited, mutable & transient It is only by shifting the motion of desire to whatever is eternal in the form and name that I can escape from this limitation and this mutability But the eternal in the form & name of all objects is the eternal in myself
Page – 480 & need not be desired outside myself, or in each thing separately, since it has only to be found in myself to be possessed in all beings & objects Once more, the universal spiritual possession proves to be all and to include or render immaterial the particular physical possession Ma gridhah kasyaswid dhanam The treasure you have to seek is in yourself; its possession includes all other possessions Not only the kingdom of heaven, but all the riches of the earth are within you. At the same time we must not from this great & vital truth stride forward by a false rigidity of logic into the error of asceticism Because universal spiritual possession renders immaterial and dispensable the material possession, we must not presume that material possession is worthless & evil On the contrary by rendering it dispensable and immaterial, it renders it also good and worth having For so long as the material possession is to our desires & knowledge indispensable for enjoyment, it becomes a bondage & renders life to us a curse & action in the world an evil; but once spiritual possession becomes the root of the matter to us, we become free in the material enjoyment of the object It no longer binds us, since we no longer either strain after it or suffer by its absence or loss By that abandoned we enjoy Even our pursuit of objects becomes a play, the racing or wrestling of boys in a meadow in which there is no evil thought, no harm intended, no possibility of sorrow experienced Material possession & enjoyment also is intended by God in the human being; for material enjoyment & possession He created this world and made matter its formal basis; but eventually He intends the enjoyment of the object as a symbol of the spirit in the spirit, freely God in us is the poet, is the musician who throws out some few forms of the infinite world within him into symbols of word or sound, so that the material enjoyment of the sound ceases to be material & becomes a form of spiritual enjoyment and an extension of spirit into matter I am free at any moment to begin it, at any moment to suspend it; & even when I throw away the temporary outward form of the enjoyment, I keep always the inward eternal form of it in my spirit So a man who has once seen the Matterhorn rising into the Swiss heavens,
Page – 481 keeps always that for which he was sent by the spirit within him to the toils & perils of Alpine climbing; he keeps in his soul the image of the white and naked peak, hard, firm and detached, a supreme image of matter which seeks to persist by solidity, yet is transient in the end like the rose and the insect, which rises towards but never attains that vaulted azure form above of the unsubstantial, unseen but eternal ether in which & by which it lives He has done that for which the world of form was created He has seen & enjoyed God in the symbol of the material object He has embraced & possessed in his soul through the material organ one becoming of the only & eternal Being
Page – 482 Chapter IV
The next stride of the Upanishad brings us to one of the greatest and most resounding controversies in Indian metaphysics, the quarrel between pragmatism & quietism, action and inaction, as the goal of man’s existence or the condition of his highest self Here, as always, the Seer solves the problem by a reconciliation of the two opposites The substance of his teaching may be summed up in three mutually complementary & indispensable formulae, the one fulfilling utterly the pragmatic instinct in man, the other fulfilling utterly his quietistic instinct, & the third reconciling these ancient enemies. In enjoyment continuance of action, in renunciation continuation of action; for continuance of action is the continuance of God’s will in the universe. The secret Spirit in man is always infinitely calm and free from the touches of its action; the sphere of disturbance is always on the surface only of the ocean of being in the waking consciousness We should attain in waking mind, too, to that stillness; for without it there can be no freedom in our outward living We should be perfectly & consciously still in the soul even though a whirlwind of action outwardly. Since we are in the spirit inalienably free & untouched by action, but in the mind seemingly bound and subject to its stains, our true and only way is not to renounce action but to vindicate that secret spiritual freedom hidden within us as a possession for our outward and active mental consciousness So shall a man be free, calm & joyous and yet through action accomplish God’s purpose in him in the motional universe. The strife between quietism and pragmatism in philosophy and religion is the intellectual symbol of an unaccomplished harmony in man The universe and all things in it are the manifest Brahman and in the manifest Brahman there are always two eternal aspects, the aspect of incessant and all-pervading action and energy and the aspect of sempiternal and inalienable stillness and peace The world of matter in which the mental being called man finds himself dwelling is a sensible manifestation of the principle
Page – 483 of energy supported by the secret and non-manifest presence of the principle of rest and stability This world is a manifestation of Force which is never at rest and even the apparent stabilities of Nature prove when analysed to be whorls of motion All here is jagatyam jagat, motion in her that moves Yet invisibly filling all her motion, supporting her activities and inspiring them, imposing an essential stability on the apparent flux and reflux of her infinite movement we perceive, not discoverable by the analysing reason, but real enough to the synthetic vision and the perceiving mind, the Sthanu, the eternal, imminuable immutable on which & from which all this motion works and in which all its actions result Because this Eternal & Immutable is there, the parts & constituents of Nature vary, but its sum is unalterable; its appearances are a whirl of mutable forms, its essence is stable and immutable Nature herself, manifest to the senses & the material reason only as motion and knowable only in the terms of motion, is equally manifest to the poised & considering soul, dhîra, samahita, as an infinite power of peace & stillness On a basis of eternal stability the world exists, to the expression of the stable Eternal it feels itself to be proceeding Imperfection is its apparent starting point & medium, and the essential term of imperfection is mobility; perfection is its aspiration & goal and the essential term of perfection is acquired status Through imperfection therefore Nature moves, in perfection it rests But the perfections which are attainable in the movements of Nature are only perfections of the part and therefore their stability is temporary, illusory and precedent to a fresh motion Only in an infinite perfection can there be an eternal stability This perfection is a concealed completeness in us which we have to manifest; we are already an infinite perfection in our being, we have to manifest that hidden thing in our becoming It is towards this infinite perfection that all things in Nature are, consciously or unconsciously, by her inborn tendency and movement irresistibly impelled The whole problem of existence therefore resolves itself into some harmony or at least some settlement between these two terms Whatever ignores either term, be it victorious Science or be it supreme Buddhistic Nihilism, has
Page – 484 not understood the terms of the problem and cannot find its solution Man dwelling in Nature is compelled towards action and demands rest, lives in imperfection and progresses towards his ungrasped perfection; for action & motion are convertible terms Action is the motion of man, motion is the action of Nature All mobility, all change, all play of cause & effect, whether in the mind or the body, whether in animate or inanimate Nature, is therefore karma, action or work,—work is the essential characteristic of Jagati, universal Nature, infinite Force in its universal play But where then in Nature shall man find rest? Lassitude is not the rest he seeks, sleep is not the rest he seeks; all lassitude, all inertia is still movement but movement of disintegration; sleep is a mass of dreams, sometimes half lit by fugitive and incoherent perceptions, sometimes shut up in a dark shell of bodily unconsciousness Neither in his bodily nor in his subjective being is a man ever at rest while he lives in this body; what he calls rest is only a change of occupation or a shifting of the action from the waking to the subliminal sleep-consciousness which is always at work behind the waking self Neither is death the rest he seeks; for death, like sleep, is only a shifting of the habitation, a transference of activity to another field It is no more rest than the passing of a labourer reaping in a field of corn to work in a field of barley His temporary & partial realisations of that he seeks are also not man’s rest, for from these halting places he moves forwards towards a new activity and a continued journey Like everything else in Nature man’s motion, known to him or unknown, moves towards rest in a perfection which shall be eternal and really stable, not partial and apparently stable To seek this higher perfection he is eternally moved and if he ever tries at all to rest in the material and temporary, he is soon driven forward again by the inexorable law of his nature to the old imperative endeavour The frequent attempt of man to escape from his own soul by plunging his head into the running waters of Matter, is one of the recurrent jests, one of the constantly laughable mysteries of the universe He cannot keep his head down in that alien medium; after some moments he must come
Page – 485 up gasping for the necessary breath of his natural existence. Since we cannot find a real & ultimate peace in material world, that great flux & whirl of movement, we are driven to look within for a principle of eternal stability To look within is to look behind the veil of our material life The very movement supposes that material existence is not everything, that our waking consciousness is not the whole field of our consciousness, but only one outward movement of our being & there is something more in us that is curtained and can be unveiled This attempt necessitates in practice our acceptance of all subjective experiences as realities, not hallucinations,—as much realities as our experience, which is after all itself subjective, of life & death, of hunger & thirst, of wind & sun & rain All experience, called by us subjective or called by us objective, corresponds in this view to some reality whether of this world or of another or of something beyond world, to some fact which it represents or misrepresents, and the truth of which has, in either case, to be discovered Now in this inward looking, as we proceed from experience to yet deeper experience, we do come across a principle of eternal stability, a principle of eternal peace within ourselves which we perceive also to be omnipresent and pervasive of all time & space & to exceed & go beyond all time & all space, a principle we can not only perceive, feel & possess but in which we can live Hallucination or no hallucination, this is a thing which can be seen, can be grasped, can be sensed by the mind, can be entered into, can be lived Fact of material existence or no, it is an indubitable fact of spiritual experience and seems for a time to be the only wholly blissful fact, the one thing of which we can say Anandam Brahma, Delight is the eternal Reality, Bliss is Brahman It is as described in the Upanishad, shukram akáyam avranam asnáviram shuddham apápaviddham, luminous, bodiless, invulnerable, without sinews of force & action, pure, unpenetrated by evil,—whether evil of sin or evil of suffering The soul in this state has for the world, at first & inalienably, either a peaceful or a joyous indifference,—not a repugnance, but an equal-souled acceptance or an equal-souled rejection of all things in the world which it regards not as binding fact but as
Page – 486 vision of form and name in itself What has happened when the soul enters into this stable peace & quiet bliss? It has risen out of action into that principle of Brahman manifest in us which is essentially the principle of transcendent self-stability, Sthanu, anejad, fixed and unmoving, in which & by which this world of apparent motion exists Passing into that inexpressible peace & stillness, we are liberated from the world; we have entered out of the whirling universe of Nature into Brahman’s eternal calm. The whole of our later Hindu philosophy is full of this mighty realisation of the still, self-luminous & inactive Brahman In those preBuddhistic ascetics, naked of the world and utterly calm, whom the unresting Macedonian found in the Asiatic ultima Thule of his insatiable march, in the all-conquering soul of Buddha, in the victorious intellect of Shankara, in the aspiration and self-fulfilment of a million saints and hermits before and afterwards our race has aspired with an ultimate and limitless sacrifice, with a sovran self-giving, to the boundless Master of peace Even the latest of the mighty Ones, the great Vivekananda, who was in outward seeming a storm of speech and thought & force and action, was yet reaching always to the rare, remote & icy-pure linga of Amarnath, the still & silent Mahadeva, as his inmost self & goal; in him too the millennial endeavour, the irresistible yearning endured But is then this sacrifice really the ultimate sacrifice, this yearning the supreme human tendency, this goal the final & unsurpassable resting-place? If so, the gospel of the Isha Upanishad is either a vain message or a halting place for inferior souls But the Seer will not have it so Thou shalt act, he says; for thus has God made thee & not otherwise; other is the fruit of Vidya alone & not the supreme gain, the param sreyah Nor is he in this insistence departing from the highest teaching of Vedanta For this sacrifice is not really the ultimate sacrifice; the ultimate sacrifice is the renunciation even of mumukshutva, the giving up to God even of the desire for stillness & peace and of the attachment to inaction and the acceptance in its place, no longer with desire, attachment and passion, but with a free soul, of the Lila as well as the Silence, the great eternal play of the Ishwara no
Page – 487 less than his vast eternal peace, the complex and progressively self-fulfilling movement of the Jagati no less than the single & ever-fulfilled immutability of the Ish, the joy of the ejad as well as the calm of the anejad Brahman That, say the sages, is the final perception of the Vedantin and the supreme consummation of his knowledge when he discovers that there is none bound, none freed, none desiring freedom, but only Brahman variously manifesting, only God in the infinite rest & play of His own Being & becomings,—God & Brahman whom none can bind & who, therefore, even when figured to Himself as man in this apparent cage of a mind and body is still in Himself free—infinitely and for ever The yearning towards stillness and peace is not then man’s supreme tendency; not peace is his goal but divine Ananda of which peace is only the flooring and the threshold If our ordinary world-existence is that of the Kshara Brahman, which seems to move & change, to be born & grow and perish, & our ordinary soul-state that of the Kshara Purusha who seems to lose himself in the world and to move and change with it, to be born and grow and pass with the mind and body, if the higher existence beyond the mutability of the world is that of the Akshara Brahman, calm, still, unmoving, indifferent, at peace and the soul-state through which we move subjectively to freedom is that of the Akshara Purusha who sits above all this flux & reflux of world-energy at its work, careless of it & untouched by it, udásínavad ásínah, yet is not that the last goal nor the unsurpassable resting-place Beyond & containing the Kshara and the Akshara Brahman we perceive the supreme existence of the Param Brahma which, transcendent, realises in Itself the harmony of [the] stillness & the movement; beyond and containing the Kshara & the Akshara Purusha we arrive at & inhabit the supreme soul-state of the Purushottama, the Para Purusha, Ishwara & Bhagavan, who, transcendent, is the possessor, user and sovran reality of the movement and the eternal self of the stillness In Him we find our rest and in Him simultaneously we find our active self-fulfilment; for He alone is our complete and utter being Buddha and Shankara and our immense ascetic impulse of three thousand years are not the last word of our race
Page – 488 nor of humanity; they are the expression of a salutary and violent necessity seizing on man & driving him to abandon utterly the world in its false appearances, by renunciation of all that here we perceive only as motion of Nature, sarvam idam yat kincha jagatyám jagat, they are a divine inspiration and a compelling impulse which will have us by any means and at any cost open our eyes to the truth that not in besotted attachment to the name and form of things, not in the blind, unillumined or falsely-illumined movements of the Jagati, not in that ignorant state of the soul in which it seems to the mind to be anish & not Ish and acts as anish, not Ish, subject and not Lord of the Jagati, is the ultimate fulfilment God intends for us, but there is a stillness beyond the movement which we have to reach, a self-luminousness of the soul in its true peace, freedom & wideness to which we have to aspire Anyad áhur Avidyayá But when we have obeyed the impulse, it should, normally, lead us beyond itself; for when we have conquered & transcended the movement, we have yet to surpass and transcend the stillness Beyond the Kshara & Akshara we rise into the comprehensive infinity of the uttama; lifted above Buddha & Shankara stand Janaka & Krishna, the supreme Yogin & the entire Avatar; they in full action are in entire possession of peace and, conquerors of desire & ego or eternally superior to them, keep their hold on the real and divine bliss of God’s triple self-manifestation; they know and exercise the simultaneous & harmonious enjoyment of His transcendent being, His universal Self and His individual play of becoming. This then is the fundamental position assumed by the Seer, not denying the realisations of the quietistic sages but exceeding the goal of quietism, not preaching attachment to the world, but fulfilling desirelessly & happily, as eternal inhabitant & possessor, God in the world, it asks us to live in God’s peace while embracing God’s action Kurvanneveha karmani; thou shalt verily do actions in the world and not abstain from them; thou shalt not renounce thy human activity among these many kinds of races of thy fellow beings, for God’s will in thee is towards action, kurvanneva, not inaction Evam twayi nányathásti Therefore, jijívishet shatam samáh, doing all human actions one should
Page – 489 accept the full term of human life, not seek to flee untimely from the sambhuti, the birth & becoming in this world or in the human body, not, like the Nihilist, mistake freedom for a silent nothingness, not blindly & impatiently cut short by physical or spiritual means one’s full term of life or full measure of human activity For those who do these things are, inasmuch as they maim the fullness of God’s intended self-fulfilment in man, átmahano janáh, self-slaying births,—not less, but in a way even more so, bhúya iva, than the more numerous herd of beings who by an ignorant attachment to bodily life and outward objects maim that self-fulfilment on its other necessary side To renounce the condition of self-fulfilment is no less a blind darkness, andham tamas, than to be bewildered by the condition and by attaching oneself to the path, sacrifice the goal All exclusive knowledge is a form & manner of ignorance; all narrow seeking is a mutilation of our secret and ultimate vastness and infinity. The emphasis with which the Seer enounces the necessity of life and action, kurvanneva, nanyatheto’sti, is demanded from him by the truth of things as a necessary counterpoise to the emphasis with which he has declared the necessity of renunciation and the abandonment of desire in the immediately precedent phrases For the first natural result of renunciation and the abandonment of desire is a tendency to pure peace and stillness, a disinclination to action as the source of all grief & disturbance and an attachment to inaction as the condition of peace, the sango akarmani of the Gita Desire, in the ordinary machinery of our nature, is the motive-spring to action; by the touch on this spring the whole machine is set and kept working Nor does God slacken or destroy that human spring till the machine has written out for Him in dual letters of pleasure & pain, joy & grief, sin & virtue, success and failure, upward evolution and backward sliding, the harmony of His inferior rhythms and His lila as the Ego in the kingdoms of Ignorance But if the spring is destroyed or if the divine finger no longer falls upon it, then the machine no longer works Egoistic action, the only activity to which mortal mind is habituated or which it understands, is
Page – 490 impossible without desire or at least without its essential feature, liking and disliking, emotional, sensational and intellectual preference and rejection Hence, the first result of unsparing inner renunciation, is not only peace & calm, but inaction If, departing from that calm of inaction, we seek again to act, the force of habit in past Nature associates with that rhythm of action its old triple gamut, ego, desire and suffering It is the old keys that again are struck, the old painful music that again quivers through our being This force of habit in past Nature mistaken for ineluctable law of eternal Nature, this obstinately persistent experience mistaken for ultimate and imperative experience is the root and basis of the quietistic gospel which declares action incompatible with peace & joy in Brahman, the false music of an original Illusion, the morbid throb of a great cosmic disease or, in its law, the ordering link of an incoherent series of sensations and to an unreal soul in its whirl of births a rigorous double chain It is these phantasms that the Seer of the Isha Upanishad has to conjure,—phantasms of an overhasty metaphysical generalisation, imperfect conclusions of the soul escaping from its fever & mistaking the inactive repose of convalescence for its ultimate state of health Not inaction & inert repose, but a healthful activity is our final state & release We escape from this fever and struggle in which we live not by the drastic remedy of extinction but by emergence into right form of action and our true life in God The Seer justifies God in the world to man by declaring His whole purpose in it, His complete action behind & beyond material appearances and our true infinite & cosmic being The whole error arises from mistaking the root of our suffering and bondage; the doctors of metaphysics have deluded themselves and us with a false diagnosis This error the Seer sets right in one of [his] brief, mighty and ample phrases, Na karma lipyate nare, Action cleaveth not to a man. Action is not the cause of our bondage; attachment is the cause of our bondage Inaction binds as much as action, if it is stained with attachment; action binds no more than inaction, if we are free from attachment to our works. The constant association of ego & desire with action is due
Page – 491 to the relapse of the mind back into its egoistic workings, sahankara, sakama It is this twin relapse which the seeker after perfection has entirely to overcome We have not either to descend back from non-ego into ego or to take refuge in world-oblivion, but to ascend into God’s infinity whose action is eternally unegoistic, cosmic & purely self-fulfilling, nirahankara and nishkama There we shall find & repeat in our own lives at once the utter reality of His self-collected calm and the perfection of His divine force at work, shama & tapas united in an action which is the fulfilment of a mighty Silence expressing itself in waves of power & bliss That harmony & oneness of divine calm & divine work is man’s ultimate experience & the true nature of God active in the world. This high teaching of the Seer, na karma lipyate nare, seems to contradict violently the great current doctrine of the bondage of Karma which Buddha found as an important but subordinate tenet of our early Vedantic philosophy and brought forward from the second to the first plane of our current metaphysical ideas, impressing it in the process so forcibly on the general Indian mind that it has left a dominant and indelible mark on all our subsequent thinking In order, therefore, to recover the early thought of Vedanta, it is necessary to understand precisely the intellectual basis of the great Buddhistic doctrine and the point at which it separated from the lesser idea of Karma we find indicated in the Brahmanas and Upanishads In the world as we see it, there are two fundamental aspects or faces in which existence presents itself to our ultimate mental perceptions, first, self-conscious, self-governing existence, secondly, mechanical Force According to our view of the mutual relation of these two grand entities will be the nature of our philosophy and our outlook on life If we hold the self-conscious, self-governing existence to be subordinate to mechanical Force, contained in it and one of its appearances and results, then we are naturally & inevitably driven towards the conception of a tyrannous self-existent Necessity as the true nature & governing force of existence; the self-conscious, self-governing entity dwindles into a side play of that Necessity, governed by it & not really self-governing;
Page – 492 conscious only of its movement by that movement itself and not inherently, it yet mistakenly erects one nodus or one stream of mechanical Nature into the false idea of a self This is the attitude towards life and existence of Buddhism, of materialistic Rationalism and, with one all-important modification, of Mayavada On the other hand, if we hold the mechanical Force to be subordinate to the self-conscious, self-governing existence, contained in it and one of its appearances and conscious creations, then we are naturally & inevitably guided towards the conception of an all-constituting Self-Conscious Existence & Power,—Brahman, Ish, popularly conceived as Bhagavan, as God, which is the true being & governing force of existence,—then the apparent mechanical Force reveals itself as no blind or mechanical movement of dead life, that insoluble riddle, that ultra-Eleusinian mystery of modern Rationalism, but the conscious Will of the Sole Existence, its Tapas, its Atmashakti or Chit-Shakti which formulates itself freely into laws and processes—the daivyá adabdhá vratá of the Rigveda—for the ordering of the universe This is the attitude towards life & existence of the Veda & Upanishads All other philosophies are halting-places or compromises between these two master-conceptions of existence The wide divergence between the Vedic & the Buddhistic conceptions of Karma arises as the inevitable result of this direct opposition between their fundamental conceptions of existence itself Both admit that all active existence is of the nature of energy or work Vedanta uses the terms Shakti, Force, Power, or Prakriti, Processive Working, for the energy, Karma, Apas, work, or the plural Karmani, works, for the activities & effects of the energy; Buddha ignores Shakti & Prakriti, because he denies the existence of God and soul or of any essential unity, but he sums up the work done in the general singular word Karma and elevates this ever indeterminate, ever increasing sum of work, into a determining conception which governs & constitutes our phenomenal existence He is bound to this position by his idea of the world as void of unity & existence as consisting of a successive continuity of habitual subjective sensations,—sanskaras,—not an inherent continuity of self-existent Being,—whether that being be
Page – 493 a self-conscious existence or unconscious Force For Buddha therefore all phenomenal existence is determined by Karma, the sum of previous works; for the Vedanta all phenomenal existence is determined by the working of Shakti or Prakriti, Force of Nature, under the will & choice of Soul, Self or Spirit This Soul or Spirit, variously termed Deva, self-luminous conscious Being behind the Force of Nature, or Purusha, informing Male inhabitant and possessor of this female executive Energy, or Ishwara, omnipresent Lord of this Will Power, this Shakti formulated in Force of Nature, is the beginning & end, the continent & inhabitant, the source & material of all objects & existences; for this Shakti, Prakriti or Nature produces all its works, objects & happenings only in the Ishwara’s self-extended conscious existence So, the Swetaswatara Upanishad defines Prakriti as Devátmashaktim swagunair nigúdhám, Self-Power of the Divinity concealed by its own modes of working The Self in Vedanta is not only Swayambhu, self-existent; it is Swarat and Samrat, self-governing and world-governing The Ishwara is master and user of his works, not Himself their slave, creature or instrument Therefore, while Vedanta accepts the law of works as a subordinate and external instrument of rebirth and prolonged phenomenal existence, a bond unreal in itself & even in its action many-sided, elastic and flexible, Buddhism imposes it as the one cause of rebirth & a mechanical and in its action an ineluctable Necessity & rigid chain; while Vedanta becomes by its fundamental conception the gospel of a recovery by self-realisation in outward consciousness of an always existing freedom & mastery in a world which is secretly anandamaya, all-blissful, Buddhism becomes by its fundamental conception a gospel of escape by self-extinction from a sorrowful, intolerable & otherwise ineffugable bondage. When we go behind metaphysical conceptions and look at the concrete facts of existence on which they stand, we shall find that the law of Karma is nothing else than a statement of the soul’s entire subjection to the law of cause and effect The idea belongs both to ancient Buddhism and modern Rationalism, but is stated in either philosophy on different grounds Buddhism
Page – 494 denies the real existence of soul, Rationalism denies it existence altogether, trenchantly & simply To the modern rationalist the whole world is simply a working out of material Force and mind itself is a particular working of matter Mind, in this conception, is a sort of automatical electrical apparatus which receives so many various kinds and degrees of shock, beats out mechanical responses & converts them, also mechanically, into so many forms of sound and idea Ideas themselves must then be entirely material phenomena, although because they do not assume any of the ordinary visible objectual forms of matter, they falsely appear non-material to our consciousness That consciousness itself is, indeed, only a subjective & quite subordinate activity of matter Since the machine is automatic, there is no need to suppose the existence of an intelligent operator Ego is a fiction of the mind, the soul an ignorant theory invented by the uninformed intellect to explain to itself its own existence What then is the cause of these thinkings, doings, happenings? Obviously, they must be the workings of material Force of which the chief process is a mechanical causality Previous workings produce as causes by an unchanging, inherent law of action other workings of Force which stand to them as effects; they in their turn join the general sum of causation, helping to produce new effects The sum of past workings of Force yet in operation,—so far at least as they are concentrated round the object,—are figured for man as heredity, environment, education, past actions and produce a parent state of things or predisposing condition; its present workings, acting as immediate cause, or the sum of immediate causes, produce out of that condition all new states, actions & events, not intentionally but mechanically, by the joint force or interplay of cumulative and special causes This is the modern materialistic theory of Karma to which, I presume, the majority of modern thinkers would give some kind of assent Denying the survival of personality after death, it perceives no need to fathom deeper complexities or enter into more subtle problems The bondage of Law is inexorable but need not greatly trouble us, since death after a short span of activity acts automatically as a release To ego in the mind, to our falsely self-imagined soul,
Page – 495 even if that ego be so foolish as to chafe and resent the bondage & limitation which is the law of all being, there is always this consolation of a speedy self-extinction in the sum of Matter But any such resentment is a morbid folly of our intellect To accept our chains, manipulate, rearrange and use them for our own welfare & that of the race is the gospel of scientific rationalism. Buddhism views the same set of facts from the other end of thought Not self-working material force, but a mass of subjective sensations is its reading of the universe Material existence & action only exist in sensational consciousness and as terms of sensational consciousness; and sensational consciousness only exists as a phenomenon in the void But behind this sensation-troubled void, there is another state, entity or what you will, Nirvana, in which there is neither this continual birth in phenomena, nor the sensational activity of which continual birth is the nodus Later Buddhistic schools have supposed Nirvana itself to be void or Nihil, but it does not appear that this was the actual teaching of the Buddha He left the ultimate metaphysical question aside and fastened only on the practical fact of this bound & troubled sensational existence and that ineffable bliss of release & escape To escape, that is the goal & end of man But who escapes? Buddhism denies God, denies the existence of the Atman There is no one who escapes, only the escape itself Buddha avoided always the logical difficulty & seized on the practical fact There is here, undeniably, the phenomenal existence of something which feels, desires, sins & suffers, and the great principle of divine Compassion in him which far more than reason & logic was the master key of his thinking, compelled him only to take hold of this great sufferer, this tormented self-deluder & turn it into that path by which alone it could escape from its own false existence The path of escape is that moral & intellectual discipline which leads it out of the dual stream of good and bad Karma To Buddha also the sum of past workings still operative on us is the great preexisting condition which is causal of continued state, action & happenings, past working as cause produces fresh working as effect which again constitutes itself into fresh cause From this chain there is no escape in
Page – 496 Nature except by perceiving existence as a streaming activity of successive sensational associations or sanskaras and climbing out of the stream by a supreme act of knowledge For, unlike the modern Rationalist, Buddha’s problem was complicated by the belief inherited from Vedic Hinduism that death is not a release; personality survives & in other states, other births, continues to suffer & enjoy, enjoy & suffer through unending Time unless & until the knot is cut, the renunciation of the self-idea envisaged and effected Then we escape from these running figments of heaven & earth & hell, pleasure & pain, life & death, self & not-self into the shoreless & streamless peace of Nirvana Shankara, one of the mightiest of metaphysical intellects, a far greater intellect than the Buddha, though a less mighty soul, built up by his intuitions and reasonings a third position which reconciles Vedic Brahmavada and the Karmavada of Buddhistic rationalism & Rationalistic materialism Shankara asserts the real existence of the Atman, self or soul which alone exists and is indeed the essential substratum & continent of this phenomenal universe But he admits with Buddha the absolute rule of Karma, of the law of works, the law of cause & effect over the conscious soul immersed in the phenomenal universe Is then the soul eternally coerced by its own phenomena, eternally bound to the revolving wheel of its own phenomenal manifestations? No, for freedom is the ultimate spiritual experience Where then is the point of escape, the door, the egress? The point of escape is for Shankara, as for Buddha, in an ultimate act of knowledge which denies the real existence of the phenomenal world He erects a rigid antagonism between essential truth and practical truth, paramartha & vyavahara, the one alone we must admit to be true truth, the other we must reject as only apparent truth This world is a world of action, of karma, & in a world of action the governing practical truth is the law of karma which drives the soul through the endless chain of birth & death & rebirth, whirling for ever betwixt heaven & earth & hell, tossed from good to evil & evil to good, pain to joy & joy to pain, like a tennis ball kept continually at play between two equally skilful players But all action depends upon and is only rendered
Page – 497 possible by relation, and all relation depends upon and is only rendered possible by self-division, by bheda, by dwaita, by the false conception in the soul of itself as not one, but many, by Avidya therefore, by Maya, a great original sin of Ignorance, a mighty cosmic self-deception Where there are many, relation and action are possible; where there is one, there can be no relation and therefore no action Atman or Soul is one, therefore relationless and actionless, shantam avyavaharyam, therefore free from karma, from rebirth, from Maya The rest is a phenomenon of creation produced by the play of active consciousness, jagati, & cast by it like a shadow or reflected image on the surface of the still, actionless & relationless soul This play, this jagati is Maya which is and is not,—is in itself, for its works are there, but is not, for those works are unrealities; they are a mass of self-deceptions starting from an original self-deception rooted in the principle of mind What the mind sees is a reality, it is Atman, Brahman, but the ideas, the terms in which mind sees it are falsehoods.5 All practice therefore, however true for practical purposes in world, is really the plausible & well-arranged play of a falsehood; & practical truth & action are only so far useful that out of them, properly handled, emerges the impulse which leads to cessation from action & the knowledge which denies practical existence In that cessation, in that denial is man’s only escape from his false mental self into the calm essential reality, objectless bliss & relationless self-knowledge of the Atman We see then that Shankara has practically transmuted or replaced Buddha’s vague & undefined Nirvana by this actionless & peaceful Atman, the shanta akriya Sacchidananda, substituted for Buddha’s false world of subjective sensations a false world of erroneous ideas starting from the original self-deception of duality, and accepting Buddha’s law of karma as applicable only to this false world and Buddha’s means of escape
5 The explanations given by modern Adwaitins of Shankara’s views, their interpretations in modern thought of his philosophical formulae, are so various & mutually contradictory, that it is becoming as difficult to know the real truth of his views as to know the real & original teaching of Buddha I give what seems to me to be his teaching & at any rate it is the only logical basis for Mayavada
Page – 498 by an ultimate act of knowledge, substituted knowledge of real self for Buddha’s knowledge of non-self as the essence of that act & the true culmination of inner experience & meditative reason Shankara like Buddha refuses to explain or discuss how active consciousness came at all to exist on the surface of a sole Self-existence which is in its very being shanta and inactive; he drives, like Buddha, straight at the actual fact of our bondage, the practical cause of bondage and the most direct path of escape from the bondage These he states for us as he holds them to be established by Scripture, experience & reason & then, the fact once thus triply established, our business is not to account for its existence, which, moreover, must in the nature of things be inexplicable to the mind, since Maya is an original mystery & therefore incapable of solution, but to grasp at the one means of escape, of release, of the great & final liberation The intellectual difference between the two systems is immense, their temperamental kinship is close Yet we have this curious result, due to Buddha’s stress on the means of self-denial provided by life & its ethical & altruistic possibilities as a preliminary training, that Shankara’s system, less intellectually Nihilistic than Buddha’s, has been practically more fatal to the activities of the divine power & joy in life in the nation which has so largely accepted his teachings By denying God in life, by withdrawing the best souls from life, by discouraging through their thought & example,—the thought & example of the best, yad yad acharati sreshthah,—the sraddha of life, the full confident self-acting of Matariswan even in those who have practically accepted & cling to the burden of worldly existence, he has enlarged the original Vedantic seed of ascetic tendency into a gigantic growth of stillness & world-disgust which has overshadowed for centuries the lives & souls of hundreds of millions of human beings On one side the race & the world have gained immensely, on the other it has suffered an immense impoverishment The world-fleeing saint & the hermit have multiplied, the world-helping saint & the divine warrior of life come rarely & fail for want of the right atmosphere & environment The Avatars of moral purity & devotional love abound, the Avatars of life, Krishna
Page – 499 & Balarama, manifest themselves no more Gone are Janaka & Ajatashatru, Arjuna & Vyasa, the great scientists, the great lawgivers The cry of OM Tapas with which God creates has grown faint in the soul of India, the cry of OM Shanti with which He withdraws from life alone arouses & directs the best energies of a national consciousness to whose thought all life is sorrow, self-delusion & an undivine blunder Chilled is that marvellous & mighty vigour which flowed out from the Veda & Upanishads on the Indian consciousness & produced the grand & colossal forms of life eternally portrayed for us in the fragments of our ancient art & history & in the ideal descriptions of the Epics. In Buddhism & modern Rationalism we have the denial of God, the grand negation, remedied for the purposes of life by a subordinate or substitutory conception which encourages the active impulses in humanity; in Rationalism the negation is corrected by a covert reaffirmation of Him in the disguise of a blindly purposeful Nature full of a supreme mechanical intelligence and working out an evolutionary intention in humanity, in Buddhism, by the strong & fruitful affirmation of Karma and of Dharma or ethical religion as the indispensable first condition of escape from Karma; in Mayavada we get back to the affirmation of God, but an ill-balanced affirmation ending for the purposes of life in a practical negation, since God in the world is presented to us as a dream of Maya and God aloof from the world as the only real reality To get back to the full affirmation we have to return to the ancient Veda There, we find stated or indicated in every Upanishad, but most succinctly and practically in the Isha Upanishad, Ish, Purusha, Deva as the supreme good; we recover there the perfect affirmation of God & return to the grand, original & eternal negation of all these succeeding negations There can be no more direct contradiction to the negative element in Shankara’s teaching than the uncompromising phrases of the Isha Upanishad, kurvanneveha karmani, nanyatheto’sti, na karma lipyate nare Both Shankara and the Seer of the Upanishad start from the same premises, the universality of Brahman, the bondage of desire and ignorance,
Page – 500 the necessity of escape through the dissolution of the dividing ego-sense in our mentality; but the practical conclusions they draw from these premises reveal somewhere an abyss of divergence Abstain from actions, cries Shankara, except, for a time, from those that are indispensable and Shastra-enjoined,—and even these do with a view to their early cessation; for action is the master-key of the chain of Maya and only by ceasing from action can a man escape from the grand Illusion of things; only by cessation in relationless knowledge & the eternal stillness of the actionless Brahman can there come the great release from good & evil, from joy & pain, from birth & death, from living & non-living Verily do actions, cries the ancient Seer, accept thy full term of human life and endeavour; for action is not in itself a chain nor a result of ignorance, but rather a manifestation of the Most High Action cleaveth not to a man The difference arises from a divergence in the fundamental conception of God in the world To the Mayavadin, Ishwara, God in relation to the world, is a supreme term of Maya and therefore like all things in Maya existent yet not existent; to the Seer God is an eternal reality standing behind Chit-Shakti in its works, embracing it, possessing it, fulfilling Himself in it through the world rhythm Action to the Mayavadin can only be motived by individual ignorance and must always be a knot of that ignorance; action to the Seer can even in our outward consciousness be motived & in the secret consciousness of God always is motived by the divine & universal Force & Bliss at free play in the divine & universal Being The world is to the Mayavadin a freak of knowledge, an error on the surface of Self, a misconception of mind about Brahman; the world to the Seer is a running symbol of God and a means for His phenomenal self-manifestation in His own active being & to His own active knowledge God, being unbound by His own activity and its free lord & disposer, man also, being one in self with God, is unbound by his works and, in God, their free master and disposer Na karma lipyate nare. Yet, in this divergence of views the dominant sense of our later Indian spirituality has been with the conclusion of Shankara and against the conclusion of the early, the inspired,
Page – 501 the suprarational Vedanta To the modern Indian mind unaffected by European pragmatism it has been untrue that action cleaveth not to a man,—na karma lipyate nare—; & it has been true that all action results imperatively in bondage,—yah karoti sa lipyate, whoever acts is entangled in his action The reason for this preference is obvious Bondage & sorrow in the world are a fact of our daily experience, withdrawal from life an obvious and logical escape; freedom & bliss in the world are only a statement of Scripture, an experience abnormal to ordinary humanity and if eternally existent, then existent in our supraliminal self and not in our waking consciousness Therefore India failing in the ancient power of Vedic tapasya has inertly accepted & combined the Buddhist Law of Karma & Rebirth & Shankara’s gospel of cosmic Illusion & actionless Peace. We have seen that the statement of the law of Karma is, at bottom, an assertion of the supremacy, complete & effectual in all forms of activity, of the grand cosmic principle of cause & effect It formalises the subjection of the human life or even the human soul, at least in all its active parts, to the ineluctable dominion of an unending causality If it can be shown that the dominion is not ineluctable or man himself is or may be above causality, its master and not under its control, then the whole elaborate chain forged for us by outward world-appearances crumbles in a moment to pieces For Indian philosophy the main practical application for man of the chain of causality was the Law of Rebirth,—a law of the Soul in Nature; for modern Science, which denies the soul and knows nothing about rebirth, its practical application for man as for plant & stone & animal is, simply, the invariable working of material Force or, using a more popular language, mechanical Law of Nature Even if the soul exists & rebirth be proved a fact, the Law of Rebirth can be to modern conceptions nothing but a particular working of Force, one, therefore, of the many subordinate Laws of Nature As locomotion is the effect, electricity or steam the cause or motive force, so rebirth, continuity of personality in a material form, is the effect, past action is the cause; it is a law of Nature,
Page – 502 on a par in the psychological field with the law of gravitation in physical Nature, that the soul which acts shall be subjected to rebirth as the ineluctable result of its actions. So stated, and given the necessary premise that individual personality is itself no eternal mystery but only a result and a nodus of natural energies working through the mind, the Buddhists’ ineffugable law of Karma becomes a luminous, simple, rational, rigidly logical solution of the problem of personal existence, and like all that is simple and trenchantly logical, it attracts sovereignly at the first glance & tempts the thought to find rest in its symmetry & security But to a mind on the alert for the infinite surprises of our complex world-existence this simplicity, this rigid logic is itself a danger signal, a warning of error The more largely & patiently we consider existence, the more we perceive its extraordinary complexity, the multitude of its strands and the variability of its formulae, the more we begin to distrust all simple & onesided conclusions Even though the world be one in substance and unitarian in principle, it is always infinitely manifold in manifestation and infinitely complex in working When therefore we have arrived at a conclusion which, attracting by its simplicity, convincing by its force of logical dogmatism, coerces all these complexities to fit a single formula, yet we shall do wisely if we survey our position once again, if we ask ourselves what side of the truth we have omitted from our review of things and whether there are not somewhere incompatible facts which we have too forcefully dismissed or too dexterously got rid of in the haste to reach some goal As Buddhism by logical dexterity got rid of the human perception of self-existence or Mayavada of the human perception of world-existence or Rationalism of the human perception of a psychic life in us & outside us that overtops our material and bodily activities, our thought can only arrive at the whole truth of things when it learns to ignore and evade nothing, to leave out nothing that God has included but rather to give patiently, justly, dispassionately every fact & every aspect of existence its right value and full place in His scheme of things If we do not perform the necessary work of self-criticism for ourselves,
Page – 503 mankind will eventually do it for us and cast away as falsehoods those exclusive religions or those onesided philosophies which on their too narrow pedestals we have erected with so much & so immature a fervour of self-satisfaction For Truth in the end is invincible and gets the better of all mankind’s temporarily triumphant violences upon her There are already signs that the mind of the race in India is beginning to react against the exaggeration of the Buddhistic generalisation of Karma to which modern Hinduism has been so long subjected both in life & in thought The weakness of the Karma theory lies in its absolutist & exclusive generalisation of a great, a fundamental, but still a partial truth,—its overstress on outward human action as a determining factor of the soul’s experiences, its insufficient stress on those vaster & more subtle workings of God in man of which outward action is only the partial symbol and the external machinery It is here that the Upanishads recall us to a wider & sounder view of God in the world & His purpose in action & birth. Not action but our past soul-states are the womb of our future; not action but desire, attachment and self-immersion of the individualised Soul in mind in a limited stream of the workings of its own executive Nature form the knot in the bondage of rebirth; action, whether of the thought, the speech or the body, is only an outward mechanical process by which the soul-state shadows out or symbolises itself in material life It has no essential value of its own, but only the value of what it expresses; it can therefore have no binding power upon the soul which originates & determines it What it does and can help to alter, are merely the mental & emotional values & terms in which soul-state expresses itself and even this function it performs as a partial agent and not as the real determining factor. If that be true, then we have been grossly exaggerating the power of our actions over our souls, grossly & wilfully accepting in our mental & outward life the tyranny claimed over us by our individual nature, when our hidden relation to her & God’s open ultimate intention in us is the very opposite of such a submission to the brute & despotic control of Matter The relation of the
Page – 504 Swarat to his being, of the Samrat to his environment is our secret & true relation To conquer one’s own nature & fulfil God in world-nature, standing back from her in the soul, free & desireless, but not turning utterly away from her, is the true divine impulse of God in humanity Life of Nature is intended to be to the soul of man as the Indian wife to her husband, not all in all, for it is to God that he should turn supremely & live in God perpetually, but yet always the half of himself through whose help alone as his sahadharmini, his comrade in works, he can fulfil the divine purpose of his living The soul to Prakriti is intended to be as the Indian husband to his wife, the image of God in life, for whom she lives & through whom she arrives at the Divinity We should seek first & live always in God beyond Nature, but God as Nature we should also cherish & enjoy as His symbol of that which is beyond & the appointed means of His active self-manifestation. In Vedanta, therefore, the true & early Vedanta, the practical freedom of the soul is not to be gained as in Buddhism by self-abolition,—for the ego alone can be abolished, the soul is eternal, began not and cannot end,—nor, as in Mayavada, only by extinction of its activities in actionless self-knowledge,—for God expresses Himself in action no less than in rest;—but rather the soul is eternally free in its nature and its freedom has only to be entirely realised by the mind in all its parts in order to be possessed, whether in action or in inaction, in withdrawal from life or possession & mastery of life, by this outer consciousness which we call our waking self as it is eternally possessed in our wide & true effulgent spiritual being which lives concealed behind the clouded or twilit shiftings of our mental nature and our bodily existence
Page – 505 Chapter V
The Soul, Causality and Law of Nature.
What then of this causality that we see everywhere? What then of this law and fixed process in all Nature which is at least the indispensable condition of all human activities? How can the supposed freedom of the soul be reconciled with the actual despotism in fact of an ordered Cosmic Energy? Vedanta does not deny either Law of Causality or Law of Nature nor their fixity nor their imperative control over individual activities; it rather affirms them categorically and, as we shall see, with an inexorable thoroughness far more unsparing than the affirmations of modern Rationalism But it states these laws in a formula far wider than the rationalist’s; it sees not only law of life & law of matter, but law of mind and law of supermind; and it bases the stability and imperative force of all law in the world on an ultimate truth & source of freedom It is this ultimate conclusion that gives to the Vedantic conception of Causality and Law of Nature an entirely different force and essential meaning from the vast generalisation of mechanical Energy popularised by modern Science Law of Nature is to Science the tyranny of a self-existent habit in mechanical World-Force which Intelligence, the indulged & brilliant youngest child of material Energy, can use indeed, can convert in its forms or divert in its processes, but from which it has no door of escape Law of Nature in Vedanta is the normality of a regular or habitual process in self-intelligent World-Force; in other words,—for Chit-Shakti, self-intelligent World-Force can mean nothing else than this,—in the cosmic Will-Power of universal self-existent Being,—of God, of Brahman The process of Force, then, however fixed, however imperative, is neither mystically self-existent nor mechanically self-determined On the contrary it depends upon certain relations, exists in certain conditions, amounts to certain fixed motions of the cosmic Will-Power which have been selected from the beginning in the universal Wisdom and, once selected, are manifested, evolved, established and maintained in
Page – 506 the workings of cosmic Energy until the fixed moment arrives for their variation or for their temporary or final dissolution Laws of Nature are, in the pregnant phrase of the Rig-Veda, adabdhá vratá dhruvá yá devá akrinvata; they are the rules fixed and unovercome of active world-being which the gods have made and which they maintain eternally against the powers of dissolution For the world in the old Vedic conception is a rhythm of action and movement in God’s conscious being; or rather it is a combination and concord of rhythms; it is chhandas, it is metre, it is a choral symphony of Jagati & Gayatri, Brihati & Pankti, Tristubh & Anustubh; it is Vak, a formation of His Word, a formal harmony of His self-expressive consciousness, a harmony discovered and selected out of God’s infinite possibilities and exposed therefore to the perpetual attack of those infinite possibilities Therefore even the most well-established laws of Nature, the most general, persistent, apparently eternal and unvariable processes of world-Force, being formations of Jagati, being rhythms and harmonies of God’s active Energy, truths of recurrent motion and not truths of eternal status, are none of them indestructible like the sempiternal Being out of which they emerge, but alterable and dissoluble and, since alterable and dissoluble, therefore ever attacked by powers of disorder and world-dissolution, ever maintained by the divine Powers consciously obedient to eternal Will & expressive of It through whom Ishwara has manifested Himself in material, moral and spiritual Nature. Law of Nature is in God’s being what social Law is in man’s action & experience, not indestructible essence of that being or indispensable condition of that action, but formed, evolved and willed condition of a regular, ordered, complex and intricately combined self-expression in a harmony of various relations and grouped workings of energy All existing natural conditions express a realised status and frame and base a farther evolution out of realised status. Nature itself is Prakriti, working (literally, forward working) of world-Force, called by us Shakti, the cosmic or divine Power of cosmic or divine Will And because that Shakti is,
Page – 507 in the phrase of the Swetaswatara Upanishad, Devátmashaktih swagunair nigúdhá, the self-power of Divine Being hidden by the modes of its own workings, because it is, to use another Sanscrit formula, Chit-Shakti of the Sat-Purusha, Conscious Power of Conscious Being, & because that Conscious Being is infinite, absolute and unlimited in its possibilities and its Conscious Power infinitely, absolutely and illimitably a Free Will choosing freely Its own harmonies and not bound in their rhythms as though in fetters imposed by an alien will, forming, observing and using Its own laws and not compelled, enslaved and used by them, therefore is Prakriti or working of Nature in its laws a self-imposed system, a mighty and ordered Wisdom and not an eternal and inexplicable mechanical necessity Its laws are formed & fixed processes of world-Force, selected and “loosed forth” by God, srishta, (created, as we loosely say,) out of the illimitable potentialities of self-existence, brought into play out of the depths of His self-being as a rhythm of music is brought out, manifested and arranged, srishta, vyakta, vihita, out of the infinite possibilities of indefinite sound Self-luminous conscious being precedes, contains and manifests in self-intelligent & self-effective Force; self-intelligent and self-effective Force at once conceals and manifests itself in the mask of Prakriti, the mask of a motional and mechanical working of Nature We arrive then at this formula of the conception of Law in Nature. Law of Nature is a fixed process formed by the universal self-conscious Will of Ishwara; it is in its nature a particular or a general movement of that Force So long as it is maintained, it is binding on things in Nature, but not binding except by His own Will on Ishwara Fundamental or “eternal” Laws of Nature are those general processes or movements in Conscious Being in which the rhythm of the universe is framed and they would naturally endure unabrogated so long as that rhythm itself is sustained, as it is, in the Will and Being of God. The Vedantic conception of Causality is equally determined by this initial and fundamental idea of the relation between mechanical process of Nature and the living Will of God Cause, to the Vedantin, is nimitta, determining means, special determining
Page – 508 factor; it is the particular manipulation, impact or application of motive force which brings out of a preexistent arrangement or condition of things new or modified condition and arrangement, the difference effected constituting result Oxygen & hydrogen as separately manifest gases, the atmosphere, the ether,—or to put it in the old concrete symbolical language of Indian philosophy, the combined presence of Agni, Vayu and Akasha, form in their arranged shapes & relations the preexistent condition; contact & mixture of the two forces with the new vibrations set up by the new relation, sparsha and shabda, are the nimitta, the determining means; the new apparent condition of things, the rupa, shape of water, is the result Agni latent in the ether & atmosphere is the preexistent condition; friction of the two aranis and the resultant vibrations, sparsha & shabda, are the nimitta; the sacrificial fire is the result A seed planted in favourable ground is the preexistent condition, sun & rain, agni & jala, are the nimitta; the appearance of an oak tree is the result In each case what has really happened is that in a certain arrangement of the current workings and a certain relation of the worked out shapes of Force—in this case of the active Life-Energy in the material world—a new arrangement was always potential and latent, water involved in hydrogen, fire involved in the tinder-wood, the oak tree involved in the seed and a particular process, that is to say a particular working (karma or apas) of the same Force, the same Life-Energy, has been used to evoke the new shape of things out of latency, out of avyakta, and bring it into manifestation, into vyakta The previous existence of the oak tree in the seed is not admitted by us because it is not there in realised form and to our erroneous notions realised form is alone reality But realised form is only the material appearance of a truer reality which is not shaped in matter but only in consciousness: the oak tree is in the seed not in form but in being; for the form is only a circumstance of being and it is contained & latent in the being out of which it is born & which it expresses to formal vision This latency and this process of manifestation in varying time and place by varying nimitta is, says Vedanta, the whole sense of phenomenal existence
Page – 509 All cause and result are merely the evocation of a latent and potential shape or condition of things out of the previous condition or status in which it was latent, by some particular movement of a Conscious Force which is progressively passing from status to status and thus manifesting in form all that it holds in itself in being Cause is only a means of manifestation and not itself a creative power The real cause is only the Will of God working through its own fixed and chosen processes. Are we to say, as it is often said, that the preexistent condition of things or arranged sum of force is the real cause out of which the event, the change, the new appearance must inevitably come and the advent of the nimitta a sort of accidental or at least subordinate & variable factor by which the inevitable result happens actually to be induced to manifest itself in outward eventuality? We have no right to say so; for it is not true as a matter of perceived fact that a given preexistent condition of things must lead inevitably in its own nature to a fixed result In all the cases we have cited the preexistent condition did not necessitate the result and could not have produced it, but for the interference of the nimitta or determining factor, just as the determining factor could not have produced the result but for the preexistent condition Shall we say, then, that granted a given preexistent condition and a given determining factor we shall have with mechanical certainty a given inevitable result? Again, we have no right to say so The formula seems at first to hold good where the material of the workings of Force is the most rigid & unpliable and the workings themselves are the most mechanical & regular in their recurrence But even there the inevitability of things is illusory The aranis may be to hand, the friction occur, yet the sacrificial fire may never be lit; the seed may be planted, the soil favourable, sun and rain perfectly adjusted in their bounty, but the oak tree may not appear We cannot even say that any given preexistent condition of things is the sole condition under which a given result can be effected We say, indeed, taking actual fact for necessary fact, that only by the incubation of favourable soil on the right seed can an oak tree appear; but what we are justified in saying is only that, as yet, we
Page – 510 know no other conditions under which an oak tree has appeared So also we thought that only by the incubation of the earth on the carbon could the diamond be produced; now, other conditions have been found under which this rare formation can be effected Where the material which the force of Nature uses is more pliant and flexible, the idea of a mechanical Necessity becomes still less credible, is even more feebly substantiated by facts or is directly contradicted A nation is in its last stage of moral and material decline; the preexistent conditions are precisely the same as in a score of instances in which destruction has followed or are even worse and more favourable to dissolution; the same determining nimitta is applied; but whereas in the previous score of cases the shock of the new impact has determined the anticipated result of destruction, in this worse case the selfsame shock, baffling anticipation, determines the entirely contrary result of rejuvenation, restored strength, energy of expansion, energy even of domination Either some new factor has entered in unexpectedly or was already existent and even active, but concealed, or else a latent potentiality, which in the other cases remained latent, has here unexpectedly reacted, risen into the active superficial movement and become its dominant and deciding factor Looking at these things, we are tempted sometimes to say that the whole sum of the past and the whole sum of the present was necessary for any given result in the world to be brought about; we are tempted to speculate that the whole cumulative stream of past active forces, past Apas or Karma, is the one real and inevitable cause of the future But this is really only a statement of our ignorance; it is only an assertion that what has been, has been and since it has been, must, in any case, have become It is an attempt to disguise from ourselves a fact that it really confesses, the fact that an infinite possibility of negation or modification, of non-happening or otherwise happening pursues and surrounds every actuality & eventuality in the universe and that we can relate how and under what conditions a thing has happened once or repeatedly and may be expected, if nothing interferes, to happen again, but we cannot fix inevitable cause to inevitable effect. All event and all process of event is a selection out of infinite
Page – 511 possibility which surrounds the actual past as the Might Have Been and the actual future as the May Be Of every cause, process & result we can say justly that the result might have been otherwise or the same result spring from some other cause or be effected by some other process This perception in mind of an omnipresent infinite possibility is a shadow of the soul’s perception of the infinite freedom of God. What then is it that in any given working of result out of precedent condition by nimitta, fixes the combination of the forces at work, governs their manipulation, selects in one case to be the determining factor a force which in other cases was impotent to decide the eventuality? Is it Chance? Is it Fate? Is it some inexplicable mechanical self-guidance? Or is it supreme intelligent Will, Will that is in its nature Intelligence? Is there a conscious Will or rather a Will-Consciousness which contains, informs, constitutes these apparent forces and objects, but is hidden from our eyes by their multitudinous whirl of motion, by their clamorous demand on the attention of the mind and senses, by their insistent claim that we should submit in thought and act to the tyranny of their workings? This last answer is the solution proposed by Vedanta It rejects the concept of Chance as only a specious name covering our self-satisfied ignorance of the cause and process of things; Chance is really the free action, not pursuable by us in its details, of a mighty cosmic Providence which is one with cosmic Force It accepts the reality of Fate, but rejects as a void and baseless imagination the idea of an inexplicable mechanical Necessity; Fate is merely the inevitable working out in itself by a cosmic Will of its own fixed and predetermined self-perceptions It accepts the idea of a principle of unerring self-guidance in Nature, but is unable to regard that principle as in any way a mysterious agency or an inexplicable birth; Nature guides itself unerringly only because Nature is the self-working of a Self-luminous conscious Existence formulating its Will in fixed processes of things and combined arrangement of event actualised in its own eternal and illimitable being Nature to Vedanta is only the mask of a divine cosmic Will, devátmashaktih swagunair nigúdhá; Prakriti of Vedanta is no separate
Page – 512 power, no self-existent mechanical entity, but the executive force of the divine Purusha at once self-revealed and self-concealed in the mechanism of its own workings Purusha, conscious Soul, is the divine Poet and Maker; Nature, conscious Force, is His poetic faculty; but the material of His works is always Himself and their stage & scene are in His own conscious being. Pre-ordered selection out of infinite possibility is the real nature of the power we call Fate Chance is a secret Providence and Providence the constantly active Self-Knowledge of cosmic Existence and cosmic Will always fulfilling in actuality its foreseen selection of event and means,—foreseen in knowledge,—and preventing the pressure of infinite possibility from disturbing that pre-ordered arrangement So a poet might work out in execution the original plot and characters as arranged in his mind and reject at every step the infinite possible variations which suggest themselves to him as he writes. Law of Nature is the fixed system of conventional or habitual relations under which the Purusha has agreed with Himself to work out His pre-ordered selection and harmony Causality is the willed arrangement of successive states & events and the choice of particular means in accordance with this fixed system of relations by which pre-ordered. Fate of things is worked out in actual event Fate, Law and fixed Causality bind things in the movement of the Jagati; they do not bind the Purusha or conscious Soul but are the modes and instruments of His free self-working. We must be on our guard against the idea that in this statement of the problem of predestination the infinite possibility we assert is an otiose and practically non-existent conception,—a thing that Is Not, a mere mental perception,—or that because the course of the world is fixed, the infinite freedom of God which supports and contains that fixity, is an abstraction of no practical moment or no practical potency Among the many superficial fallacies of the practical man, there is none more superficial or fallacious than the assumption that in face of what has been, it is idle to consider what might have been The Might Have Been in the past is the material out of which much of the
Page – 513 future is shaped It would not be so if the material life were a self-existent thing, proceeding out of itself, sufficient to itself, ending with itself But the material life is only a selection, a formation, a last result of an infinite conscious life behind which far exceeds the sum of all that actually exists in form and happens in event Infinite Possibility is a living entity, a positive force; it is the material out of which God is constantly throwing up the positive and finite actuality It is therefore all-important for a full and real knowledge of the world to know & see this infinite material as well as the actual finite result and ultimately determined shape of things God Himself in His foreknowledge foresees the infinite possibilities that surround the event as well as the event itself The forces that we spend vainly for an unrealised result, have always their ultimate end and satisfaction, and often form the most important determinants of a near or a distant future The future carries in it all the failures of the past and keeps them for its use and for their success in other time, place and circumstance Even our attempts to alter fixed process, when that process seems to be a fixed & unalterable law of Nature, are not lost & vain; they modify the active vibrations of the fixed current of things and may even lead to an entire alteration of the long-standing processes of things The refusal of great minds to accept the idea of impossibility, with which they are not unoften reproached by the slaves of present actuality, is a just recognition of the omnipotence divinely present in us by right of the one supreme Inhabitant in these forms; nor does their immediate failure to externalise their dreams prove to the eye that sees that their faith was an error or a self-delusion The attempt is often more important than the success, the victim more potent than the victor, not to the limited narrowly utilitarian human mind fixed on the immediate step, the momentary result, but to God’s all-knowing Fate in its universal and millennial workings From another standpoint, it is the infinite possibilities that surround the act or the event which give to act and event their full meaning and value It may be said that Arjuna’s hesitation and refusal to fight at Kurukshetra was of no practical moment since eventually he did take up his bow and slay the Dhritarashtrians & the otiose
Page – 514 incident might well have been omitted by God in His drama; but if it had not been possible for Arjuna to hesitate, to fling down the bow Gandiva or to have retired from the fight but for the command of the incarnate God beside him, then his subsequent action in fighting & slaying would have had an entirely different value, the battle of Kurukshetra would have meant something entirely different to humanity & its results on the future life of the nation & the world would have been, comparatively, almost a zero We can see this truth even with regard to slighter incidents The fatality which in Shakespeare’s drama wills the death of Romeo & Juliet as the result of a trivial and easily avoidable accident, receives all its value from the possibilities surrounding the actual event, the possibilities of escape from fate, reconciliation & for these tragic lovers the life of an ordinary conjugal happiness These unrealised possibilities & the secret inevitability—of Spirit, not of matter,—which prevents their realisation, which takes advantage of every trivial accident and makes use of it for the swift & terrible conclusion, make the soul of the tragedy A mechanical fatality must always be a thing banal, dead, inert and meaningless It is their perception of these things behind the veil, their transcendence of the material fact, their inspired presentation of human life that ranks the great poets among the sophoi, kavis, vates, and places poetry next to the Scriptures & the revelations of the Seer and the prophets as one subtle means God has given us of glimpsing His hidden truths. The unrealised possibility is as much a part of Fate as the actual event The infinite possibilities surrounding an event are not only the materials out of which the event is made and help to modify or determine the more distant future, but alone give its true & full value to every human or cosmic action. God or Spirit then is the Master of His processes and their results; He is the law of natural law, therefore free from that law, nityamukta, the cause of Fate, therefore not bound by Fate but its ruler Action is the free play in His eternal Being, therefore that Being is not bound by the action . Action does not compel in Him any results which He is not free to accept or to avoid;
Page – 515 it does not entail fresh action unless He so chooses, nor does it produce any modification either in His conscious existence or in the modes & phenomena of His conscious existence except so far as He allows those modes or phenomena to be affected or varied In His essential being God or Spirit is ever immutable, since nothing ever essentially changes even in the universe, much less beyond the universe; and it is only phenomena in the cosmic motion of consciousness that seem to change Here too sages have perceived that the change is not really a change, but only a successive presentation of ever recurrent phenomena to the Time-governed eye of conscious Mind These changes are a play of self-ideas in Conscious Being existing for ever beyond Time & Space, but represented for us in the symbols of Time & Space Such as they are, the succession of these changes affected by action of man or action of Nature are not binding on Spirit, not an inexorable stream of cause & result which Spirit has passively & helplessly to endure, but a harmony or progressive rhythm of successive states which Spirit has freely arranged in itself Na karma lipyate. God acts or rather produces action, produces, that is to say, process & succession of manifested energies in His own being without being bound either by the action itself or by its process or by its succession or by its causes or by its results In action or out of action He is entirely, infinitely & absolutely free. But then there arises the difficulty caused to our darkened minds by the false conception that God & world, God & the human soul are different entities From this division of the indivisible there arises the notion, the fatal noumenal error, the illogical logic, that God beyond the world is free but God in the world is bound, bound to action, bound to sorrow, bound to death and birth,—the great fundamental error which seals our eyes & creates needlessly the insoluble problem of suffering & evil and death and limitation,—insoluble because we have created a false first premise for all our conclusions about the world God in the world is not bound, but only pretends to mind that He is bound Mind so envisages Him because it sees Him observing freely the arrangements & processes that He has
Page – 516 made &, always associating fixed observance in Nature with inevitable observance, supposes Him to be observing His own laws inevitably, helplessly, not freely All the more then is man, apparently limited, apparently bound in the meshes of a hundred woven laws, supposed to differ precisely in this from the transcendental Being that That is free & untouched by the world & its works, he a slave and moulded by their pressure into what he is now & will hereafter become Thence the conclusion of so many philosophies that man here can never be anything but a suffering victim of his works & slave of illusion & only by annulling his existence in cosmos can become free,—free not in the cosmos but from the cosmos But it is not so For man is the Lord inhabiting His human temple, enjoying his own play in this mortal mansion built by himself out of his own cosmic being; he has determined what he is and is determining now by his play in works as he has previously determined by his play in internal consciousness what he shall become. God in the world is not different in nature from God beyond the world but the same Yad amutra tad eveha God beyond is eternally free; God here is also eternally free Spirit in all things & spirit in man are one spirit and not different entities or natures; therefore all spirit being eternally free, the soul of man also is eternally free Mind in its multiple and dual play is, by its non-illumined state, the creator of this illusion of bondage. We have in the Gita a striking illustration of God’s workings in man which raises in a concrete instance and drives home to the mind the whole difficulty with an incomparable mastery and vividness The armies of the Pandava and the Kaurava stand facing each other on the sacred plain of Kurukshetra; the whole military strength of India & all its political future have been thrown down upon that vast battlefield as upon a dice board On one side we see the eleven mighty armies of Duryodhana, greatly superior in numbers, led by the three most renowned warriors & tacticians of the day; on the other the lesser host of Yudhisthira commanded indeed by notable fighters but fixing all its hope of eventual victory on the strong arm and invincible fortunes of Arjuna with Krishna, the incarnate Lord of the
Page – 517 world, as his charioteer But Arjuna, their supreme hope, is on the point of failing them; he is overcome by the magnitude of the approaching slaughter, afflicted by the fratricidal nature of the conflict he has cast down his bow; he has refused to fight In the great colloquy that follows & forms the substance of the Gita, the incarnate Master of things, among a host of profound & subtle reasonings, uses also this striking exhortation which has become a commonplace of Indian thought, Mayaivaite nihatáh púrvam eva, Nimittamátram bhava, Savyasachin “By Me are these already slain & dead, do thou become only immediate means & determining cause, O Savyasachin ” The Universal Will has seen and arranged from the beginning of this great world-act, this vastly planned cycle of natural happenings, the bodily destruction of Duryodhana and his mighty captains; the bow Gandiva in the hand of Arjuna is only the predestined nimitta By the stream of successive events it has brought about an arrangement of forces in which the nimitta can become operative There is the preexisting condition; there is the arranged result; there is the determining factor But supposing this human instrument Arjuna, rejecting the command of the Lord of all things, preferring some hope of spiritual weal, preferring his own moral self-satisfaction, obstinately refuses to be the engine of God’s will in him, in a work so thankless, bloody & terrible What if he listens only to the natural cry of the human heart, Kim karmani ghore mám niyojayasi Keshava, “Why dost Thou appoint me, O Lord, to a dreadful work?” We say from our human standpoint, that even then the Will of God can & will inevitably be fulfilled by Bhima, by the combined exaltation of the Panchala heroes, by the sudden greatness, even,—for “He makes the dumb man eloquent & the lame to overpass the hills”,—of some inferior fighter; and, in the thought & language of the great infinite Potentiality that stands behind the material actuality of things, this would be the truth,—but not in the actuality itself For in the God-foreseen actuality of things not only the event, but the nimitta is fixed beforehand The Cosmic Being is no blind & chance bungler who misses His expected tool & has gropingly to improvise another Arjuna, too, is the
Page – 518 vessel of the universal Will and can only act as It chooses “The Lord is seated in the heart of all existences, O Arjuna, and He whirls round all existences mounted upon a machine by Maya ” Even if Arjuna’s mind resists, even if his heart revolts, even if his members fail him, eventually there is a Force greater than the individual & mental will which will, if so destined, prevail upon his mind, his heart, his members What is that Force? “Prakriti”, answers the Gita, “Prakritis twám niyokshyati ” The phrase is nowadays ordinarily interpreted to mean that Arjuna’s warrior nature will whip him back to the fight But the thought of the Gita is more profound & far-reaching By Prakriti is meant the executive World Force, agent of the will of the Ishwara seated in the heart of all existences, that compels the tree to grow, man to think, the king to rule, the poet to create, the warrior to fight The character of Arjuna is only one means towards her action, & even that acts not by itself, but in conjunction with the character of Duryodhana, of Karna, of Bhishma, of a million others even to the meanest soldier in either army Yet left to itself the warrior nature of Arjuna might drive him back indeed to the fight but too late to determine its issue; even, it might be, his personal nature, were that God’s will, would abdicate its functions, seized & overcome by universal nature, by pity, by vairagya, by fear of sin, and the fateful battle lose its fated nimitta What is it that, not in free universal potentiality, but in the fixed fact must inevitably determine his return to his normal action? It is the executive Force of the universal Will which not only fixes personal nature, swabhava or swa-prakriti, but fixes too its working in each individual case, not only prepares the circumstance & the means but determines the action & the event We seem to have here an overriding Fate, an ineluctable Ananke, even a self-acting mechanism of Nature; but it is not a mechanical inevitability, the result of the sum of our & others’ past actions, not even a natural inevitability, the result of either a habitual or an ingrained working of our individual nature moved complexly by internal impulses, outward events & the actions of others; but a willed inevitability, seen beforehand in Its universal pre-knowledge by that sole Existence which is expressing itself
Page – 519 here in mind & body, in event & circumstance, and executed by It as its own Will-Force & universal Nature which works out automatically through arranged process & perfectly managed interaction of individual forces that which was foreseen by It & fixed from the beginning of things, vyadadhách chháswatíbhyah samábhyah. 6 We see then that working of Law of Nature & succession of cause & effect are the process of fulfilment of a Will, a self-effective Intelligence which is superior to working of law & governs, not obeys, succession of cause & effect That Will is the Lord who inhabits all these animate & inanimate existences, hriddeshe tisthati, the one universal Soul & is master of the Jagati, not bound by her motions & actions Na cha mám táni karmáni nibadhnanti Dhananjaya All these actions, O Arjuna, of which I am the cause, bind me not at all; actions do not cleave to me, na mam karmani limpanti Still, in the universal Soul of things, we can understand such a freedom & omnipotence; but the affirmation of the Seer has reference not only to the universal Ishwara, but to the individual soul, na karma lipyate nare, action fastens not on the man How can it be affirmed that man, the individual soul, has any control over the activity of the universal Prakriti of which his action is a part, if that action is predetermined, as the Gita asserts it to be determined, by a higher all-knowing Will? And if he has no control of any kind, what freedom can he have from his actions, from their subjective pressure, from their objective results except the inner freedom of renunciation, of quietism, of indifference? Man, it would seem, can only be free by sitting still in his soul and allowing the great executive world-Force to act out the predestined Will of God, himself caring not for it & in no way mixing himself in the
6 The following paragraph was written at the top of the manuscript page Its place of insertion was not marked: Causality consists merely in the successive conditions of things in the world, one emerging out of another, & the successive groupings, relations & interactions of forces & processes, by which the Will acts out its rhythm [of] prearranged eventualities The mechanism is a mechanism of self-possessed & continually waking consciousness that knows its whole future, present & past The fixity of things & events is merely the term of practical executive wisdom in an original & inalienable freedom
Page – 520 action Is it not this freedom that the Gita recommends & is not this the action that the Upanishad enjoins,—action worked out mechanically by Prakriti while the soul watches only & knows that it is not the actor? And as for any other & greater freedom, it can only be the freedom by self-extinction of Nara in Narayana, of the individual man in the universal all-inhabiting Ishwara—if indeed the real goal be not some transcendental Impersonality in which man & world & God are all & for ever extinguished. We might accept this conclusion but for the distinct injunction of the Seer, bhunjítháh, thou shouldst enjoy Divine Ananda in God at play & God at rest, not loss of interest and a quietistic indifference is the human fulfilment contemplated by the Upanishads The first error of the human mind is to suppose that because our emotions, our desires, our personal will have an apparent effect upon event & fruit of action, they are themselves the real determinants of those events & the sufficient winners of that fruit; they are neither of these things; they are only one spring of the machinery, only one subordinate working of the universal Will It is what the universal Will beyond all mentality decides & works out, not what the personally acting will in the material brain & heart hungers after, that determines event Karmanyevádhikáras te, says the Gita, má phaleshu kadáchana, Thou hast a right to action, but no claim at all on the fruits of action; for the fruits belong to God, they belong to the world-working, they belong to the universal will, they belong to the great purposes of the cosmos & not to any clamorous individual hunger The second error of the human mind when it perceives itself to be the instrument only of a supreme universal Force or Will, its action to be only a whorl in the stream of universal energy and result to be a predestined event of universal Will partly executable by us, but not independently governable or alterable by our effort, is to argue falsely, confusing the Purusha with the Prakriti, that because our action is subject to universal Nature, therefore the soul also is subject to law of Nature & its only refuge is in quietistic renunciation, in indifference or in the withdrawal from phenomenal living The real refuge is altogether different; it is the blissful withdrawal from personal
Page – 521 hunger & desire, it is the detached but joyous contemplation of individual will as a working of divine or universal Will, it is the withdrawal from egoistic being & the perception of the individual as only a convenient term of the universal Ishwara, of the Jiva as only a form in consciousness of the Ishwara, it is the equal enjoyment of the fruits favourable or adverse not only of individual will, but of the universal will, not only our own joys, but the joys of all creatures, not only the gains which come to our minds & bodies, but those which come to the minds and bodies of all existences; it is to make the joy & fulfilment of God in the world our joy & fulfilment, it is to see one Lord seated in all creatures This is the delight-filled equality of mind, anandamaya samata, that is in the world our ultimate prize & supreme state in mortal nature, fulfilling itself in a divine freedom equally from desire for the fruit of the action and from attachment to the action itself; the fruit is to be what the Lord has willed, the action is God’s action in us for His great cosmic purpose God Himself, the Gita tells us, has essentially this immortal freedom from desire, & yet He acts entirely; He has this divine non-attachment to the work itself & yet He works & enjoys in the universe & the individual, na me karmaphale sprihá, asaktam teshu karmasu, varta eva cha karmani; for in Purusha He contemplates, blissful & free, Himself in Prakriti executing inevitably His own eternal will in the universe known to Him before the ages began in that timeless, time-regarding conscious self of which we all are the habitations So is the divine attitude towards existence constituted, the attitude of the Ishwara; a perfect & blissful calm & quietism of the divine soul harmonised & become one with a colossal activity of the divine Power driving before it the ordered whirl of a myriad forces occupying limitless Space & Time towards an eternally predestined end. It may be objected, that while the divine Purusha standing back from the workings of His Prakriti, not only can be the free upholder, enjoyer & giver of an original & continued sanction to the world-workings, bharta bhokta anumanta, but also, by His eternal immanence as Master of the Will everywhere, is the
Page – 522 present Ishwara, the controlling Lord of the action, man, by standing back from the Prakriti as the Soul or Purusha, may be indeed, secondarily to God, the upholder of his individual system,—that formal vessel, adhara, of his soul-states,—may be in some sort sanction-giver to its activities, may be, secretly always & here eventually, the free enjoyer of all world-activities that come within its experience, but is not & because of his individuality cannot be or ever realise in himself the Ishwara, the present Lord and master of Nature He has freedom, not lordship,—the passive freedom of God in the unmoving Brahman he may indeed acquire or share, but not His active lordship in the moving Brahman To be mukta but never ish would seem to be his destiny Yet the Gita asserts that the Jivatman also is the Ishwara and the Upanishad declares the identity of the human soul with the divine Lord who inhabits all these motion-built forms of Nature. In this disparity there is no contradiction There are two aspects of all existence, the Being & the Becoming, Atman & Sarvabhutani According as the soul of man either stands out in its human becoming & lives in the twisted triple strand of the mind, body & vital being, of which we are conscious now & here, or, on the contrary, stands back in the divine unity of Sacchidananda, it enjoys either of two states of conscious experience, the individual self-consciousness of the separate Jivatman or the universal divine consciousness of the Jivatman merged or dwelling in God In the former & inferior self-poise, our status is that of a separate soul, different from the Ishwara & always in some personal relation with Him; a type usually of our human connections with each other & the world, connection of child with parent, servant with master, teacher with taught, friend with friend, enemy with enemy, mechanist & instrument, harp & harpist, or a combination of several kinds of interplay at once, answering to the tangled relations we see in our human existence This relation, created by the fundamental duality of God’s play with His becomings, can be realised by us in our waking consciousness or exist unconscious in our secret soul; but in any case it is a condition of subjection, conscious or
Page – 523 unconscious, to the sole Ishwara, since even as enemy or rebel we can act after all only as He chooses, however much, for the delight of the play, He gives us a certain length of rope, a certain range of subjective freedom and lets us believe that we are acting independently of Him or in opposition to His will But what is it that builds up or constitutes in us these relations of the duality? It is not the soul itself but the activities of the mind, life, body, our thoughts, emotions, sensations; it is not the Purusha but our parts of Nature or parts of Prakriti The soul or Purusha enjoys these relations because it identifies itself with the activities of Nature working in a special name & form & regards all her other workings from that centre of special consciousness; but since that nature, subject to the universal mechanism and a part of it, is anish, not lord, the soul in mind identifying itself with it is also to its outward consciousness anish, not lord Nevertheless all the time the soul itself is aware,—not in mind, but beyond it, superconsciously in the veiled, secret & higher parts of our nature where it lives guhahita,—of playing a play, of being itself universal, one with God and lord of Nature as well as its enjoyer The more we detach ourself from Nature, the more, even in Nature itself, our lordship over her increases, our lordship first over her in our own being, our lordship, secondly, over her in her world-actions We become more & more in our outward consciousness what the soul really is in the secret caverns of its luminous self-concealment, Swarat Samrat, Self-Ruler & Emperor of existence Still, until the veil is entirely removed, we are indeed the Ishwara by the present immanence of our will in Life, but partially only, and not only secondarily to God, but in a limited degree We are indeed always subject entirely to the universal Will or Shakti in Prakriti even when we are increasing our individual control over the processes of her individual and universal working Still as we become purer channels, more & more of the divine Power pours through us & our motions are invested with a more swift, easy & victorious knowledge & effectiveness upon their environment But it is only when we stand entirely apart from Nature, yet entirely immanent in her by conscious identification with the universal being,
Page – 524 power & bliss of God that we become also entirely Ishwara; for then all walls break down, then with the false separation of individual being from God-being breaks down also the false separation of individual power from God-power and it becomes possible for that divine Knowledge-Will working in us to fulfil infallibly & inevitably its foreseen & intended result, as it fulfils it in the universal working of Nature—foreseen & intended in our waking consciousness, always indeed with a less extended working but still essentially & typically as God works, with a divine science if not the extended divine omniscience, a partial divine victoriousness if not the extended divine omnipotence. We shall be able to arrive at the precise & practical meaning of this identification & this separation, this detachment & freedom & shall discover the secret of action & rebirth if we look at the actual facts of material life & then at the Vedantic explanation of our conscious existence We have, to start with, this fundamental divergence already noted between ordinary psychology & the psychology of Vedanta,—the former recognising only three principles, Mind, Life and Matter, or adding at most a fourth, Soul or Spirit, while the latter, with a deeper inlook, a wider outlook, a firmer foundation of daring experiment and probing analysis, distinguishes between various workings of the supra-mental or spiritual principle and encounters in its search seven in the place of three prime elements of conscious being Sat, Chit, Ananda, Vijnana are four divine unmodifiable principles; they constitute the divine being, divine nature & divine life, and are called in their sum Amritam, Immortality; Manas, Prana, Annam, Mind, Life & Matter, are inferior & modifying principles constituting in their sum in this material world mortal being, mortal nature, mortal life and are called Mrityu or Martya, mortality The doctrine and instruction of the possibility, the means and the necessity for man of climbing from Mrityu to Amritam, out of Death into divine Life,—mrityum tírtwámritam asnute, is Veda & Vedanta. The world in which we live seems to our normal experience of it to be a material world; matter is its first term, matter is its last Life-energy and mind-energy seem to exist as middle
Page – 525 terms; but though their existence and activity cannot be denied or ignored, so omnipresent, insistent & victorious is the original element out of which they have emerged that we are led to view them as terms of matter only; originated out of matter, formulated in matter, resolved back into matter, what else can they be than modifications of the sole-existing material principle? The human mind seeks a unity always, and the one unity which seems reasonably established here, is this unity of matter Therefore, in the fine & profound apologue of the Taittiriya Upanishad, we are told that when Bhrigu Varuni was bidden by his father Varuna to discover, entering into tapas in his thought, what is Brahman, his first conclusion was naturally & inevitably this that Matter is the Sole Existence,—Annam Brahma “For verily out of Matter are these existences born, by Matter they live, into Matter they pass away and enter in ” We arrive, then, by reason considering only the forms of things and the changes & developments and disintegrations of form, at the culmination of materialistic Rationalism and a Monism of Matter Annam Brahmeti vyajanat. But here we cannot rest; driven by the Tapas, the self-force of the eternal Truth within, to an ever increasing self-knowledge & world-knowledge, we begin to analyse, to sound, to look at the insides of existence as well as its outsides We then find that Matter seems to be only a term of something else, of Force, we say, or Energy which, the more we analyse it, assumes a more & more subtle immateriality and at last all material objects resolve themselves into constructions & forms of this subtle energy Hoping to reconcile our old conceptions & our new results, we make, at first, a dualism of Force & Matter, but we know in our hearts that the two are one & we are driven at last to admit that ultimate unity But what is this energy? It is, says the Vedanta, Prana, Matariswan, Life-Force or Vital Energy, that which organises itself in man as nervous energy & creates & carries on the processes & activities of life in material form We find this same nervous & vital energy present also in the animal, the plant; it exists obscurely, it has been discovered, even in the metal We have, therefore, in the world we inhabit, a unity of Life-Energy
Page – 526 in its actions as well as a unity of matter in its formal changes For modern thinking the problem is complicated by the narrow restriction of the idea of life first, popularly, to the material vessels of a conscious nervous activity, man, the animal, the insect, & then, more widely, to all forms of which organic growth and nervous response are the characteristic activities Vedantic thought sees, on the contrary, that all energy apparent in matter is one Life-energy; nervous force, electric force, even mental force so far as it works in matter are different forms of one working, which it calls Pranashakti, Energy of Life, formulated force of Existence throwing itself out in the currents & knotting itself into the vessels of its self-adaptive material workings Life, as we know it, is the characteristic fulfilment of this stream of being According to the Vedantic idea the characteristic form of any energy is to be recognised by us not in its lowest, but in its highest expression The higher form is not a new-creation of something previously non-existent out of the lower form,—for such a principle is essentially Nihilistic & leads inexorably to Nothingness as the starting point of existence, and to the Vedantic idea nothing can be created which does not already exist, nothing can be evolved which is not already involved Life-energy of man is involved in life-energy of plant, metal and sod; it is that which manifests itself by veiled and obscure workings in these more imperfect vessels We see, then, by closer scrutiny, Matter as only a form of Life, organic or inorganic, perfected in nervous action or obscure in mechanical energies Obsessed by this discovery, living in this medial term of our consciousness, seeing all things from our new standpoint we come to regard Mind also as a term or working of Life Bhrigu Varuni, bidden by his father back to his austerities of thought, finds a second and, it would seem, a truer formula He sees Life as the Sole Existence, Pranam Brahma “For from the Life, verily, are all these existences born; being born they live by the Life, to the life they pass away and enter in ” Our physical body at death is resolved into various forms of energy, the mind which inhabits the nervous system dissolves also and is or seems to be no more, except in its posthumous effect on others, an organised active
Page – 527 force in the material world We arrive, then, by reason considering the energies of things in their forms & the movement [of] forces that constitute their changes, activities, development & disintegration, at the culmination of Vitalistic Rationalism and a Monism of the Life-Energy Prano Brahmeti vyajanat. Here too the mind of man, after finding this second goal of its journeyings, discovers that which it took for a final haven to be only a resting place Life-Energy & Material Form or Substance of Life-Energy constitute together the outward body of sensible things, the sthula sharira or gross body of Brahman But, as we pursue our analysing and probing, we begin to suspect that Mind is an entity different from either Matter or Life-Energy Matter & Life reveal themselves to the mind through the senses Mind, self-existent, self-perceptive, has on the contrary two evidences of its existence; it knows itself by the senses through its own results & outward workings,—it knows itself also both independently of the workings & in their more subtle movements, by itself, in itself, atmanyatmanam atmana We perceive, besides, that man is essentially a mental and not a vital being; he lives for himself in the mind, is aware of his existence through the mind, knows & judges all things only as they form themselves to his mind The speculation then inevitably arises whether as we found Life to be concealed in apparently inert matter and eventually knew Life to be the parent & constituent of material forms, we shall not, as the next step of knowledge, find Mind to be concealed in apparently unconscious forms of life-matter, the parent, constituent & motor impulse both of all life-energies & of all forms & forces in which Life here is either formulated or embodied But there are difficulties in the way of this conception First, mind knows itself by itself only in the individual body which possesses it; it is unable, normally, to watch itself in other bodies or perceive there, directly, its own presence & workings, it only knows itself there by analogy, by deduction, by perceiving through the senses the outward or formal effects of its presence & workings All that is outside the individual form it inhabits, my mind knows by the senses only, & its own workings seem to consist simply of the nervous reception of this
Page – 528 sense knowledge, the nervous reaction to it, the formulation of this experience in mental values & the various arrangement & rearrangement of the values formulated Secondly, these values do not appear to be fixed independently by mind, as they would be if mind were the creator of forces and objects; mind appears to us to be not their master but their servant, although sometimes a rebellious servant, not their creator, poietes, but their translator and interpreter Thirdly, mind seems unable to create life or to create or change material forms by its direct action I cannot, by willing, add to my stature or change my features, much less alter forms external to my own Just as it knows only by the senses, the jnanendriyas, so mind seems able to affect life & matter only through its bodily instruments of action,—the karmendriyas The instances to the contrary are so exceptional, obscure and fragmentary that no conclusion can be formed upon such scattered & ill-understood data. Nevertheless Vedantic thought insists Knowledge, taught by experience, distrusts all first appearances & looks always behind them for the true truth of things What is exceptional we must examine, what is ill-combined we must arrange, what is obscure we must illuminate For it is often only by pursuing & examining the obscure & exceptional action of a force that we can come to know the real nature of the force itself & the rule of its obvious & ordinary action It is not through the leap of the lightning, but through the study of the electric wire & the action of the wireless current that we get near to the true nature & the fixed laws of electricity As life is obscure & imperfect in the plant & metal & its full character only eventually appears in man, so also mind is imperfect, if not obscure in man’s present mental workings; its full character can emerge only in a better evolved humanity or else in a more developed &, to present ideas, an abnormal and improbable working of its now hampered forces even in our present humanity The ancient Vedantins therefore experimented as daringly & insatiably with mind as modern scientists with life-force; they deployed in this research an imaginative audacity & a boundless credulity in the possibilities of mind as extreme as the imaginative audacity &
Page – 529 the boundless credulity in the possibilities of force working in matter deployed by the modern in his more external experiments & researches; they had too the same insatiable appetite for verification & more verification,—for without this harmony of boundless belief & inexorable scrutiny there can be no fruitful science; reason in man cannot accomplish knowledge without force of faith; faith cannot be secure in knowledge without force of reason. Thus experimenting, the Vedantin discovered above mind in life the principle of pure Mind He found that mind exists in the cosmos pure & untrammelled, but manifests in material forms imprisoned and trammelled Mind subject to life & matter, erring in the circle of life & matter, he perceived as mortal mind, martya or manu of the Veda, the human thinker; mind pure & free he perceived as divine mind, deva or daivya ketu of the Veda, the divine seer & knower He found first that mind really exists in man in its own self-sufficient consciousness, independently of the sense life turned upon the outer material world, even when it can only work or actually only works through the senses Secondly, he found that mind in one form or body subconsciously & superconsciously knows & can watch mind & mind’s working in other bodies directly or by means independent of sense-communication & the watching of speech & action, and can, more or less perfectly, bring this subconscious & superconscious knowledge into the field of our waking or life-consciousness He found, thirdly, that mind can know external objects also without using the ordinary channel of the senses He found, fourthly, that the values put by mind upon outer impacts & its reactions to them are determined not by the impacts themselves but by the general formulations & habitual responses of Mind itself in the universal Being and these fixed & formulated values & reactions can be varied by it, can be suspended, can be entirely reversed, can be infinitely combined at will in the individual vessel called the human being Fifthly, mind can & does by will, ketu can by kratu, used actively or passively, consciously, subconsciously or superconsciously, without the aid of the karmendriyas, modify even life-forms &
Page – 530 when analysed and realised, divine or cosmic Will is perceived to be Chid Brahman, self-conscious Being, Chaitanya, conscious Spirit, which takes into its possession in being of cosmic self-knowledge and effects in force of self-knowledge figures of Its own concealed & unknowable reality We see, then, that all becoming in universe is a formal or symbolic manifestation of unknowable God or Brahman effected by Tapas, by the dwelling of self-knowledge on latent truth of being & the consequent forcing it out of its latency in figure of truth for the joy of God’s cosmic self-knowledge That which is to us unknowable X beyond thought & sensation is expressed here by Tapas of cosmic consciousness in theorem & formula of progression constituting the order of forms in the universe The loosing of the latent out of latency by Tapas is the whole nature of creation in the idea of the Vedantin The symbol of the creative Ishwara is always the Kavi, the poet-seer who by Tapas, by concentration of self-knowledge figured as creative Will, brings out from latency in his infinite unmanifest consciousness varied forms of himself Therefore, it is said that when Brahma the Creator was born on the sea of essential substance, the kshirasamudra, it was in answer to a cry of OM Tapas, pealing out over the moveless ocean, that he set himself to the work of creation The Kavi creates for his self-delight in self-expression and for no other reason For when we say that the Will chooses, the Will prefers, when we speak of the icchashakti or omnipotent Will of God, we are expressing in terms of Force what is fundamentally in consciousness a movement of Delight or Ananda For the nature of conscious-Being is bliss That which the pure unrelated Sad Brahman, not looking towards cosmic self-expression, is aware of about Itself is unrelated self-Bliss; that which the creative Chid Brahman, looking towards cosmos, is aware of in the Sat, is the cosmic delight of self-expression in general & in particular symbols of consciousness, in extension of infinite being & conscious force & in their concentration into determined form of being & determined action of force When we say that Brahman as Chaitanya, as Consciousness, dwells upon a figure of Itself & brings it out of its latency there where it dwells cavern-housed, guhahita, we
Page – 541 imply,—Chaitanya & Ananda, Consciousness & Bliss being one entity,—that Brahman as Ananda, as Self-Delight, fixes on that figure for Its symbolic self-expression What God delights in, that is His will-to-be in cosmos, that becomes In the more ancient Vedic terminology this divine principle of Ananda was designated sometimes as mayas, a word which means both love or joy and creative comprehension and sometimes as jana, a word which means at once delight, especially the delight of procreation, productiveness, birth and world God’s delight in things is their birth, their seed of production, their coming into world Chit Tapas, Consciousness working as Will is the condition & agent of cosmic existence, Ananda is its cause. Still, we do not yet see clearly what it is that brings about the difference between self-being & symbolic being or becoming Where is the principle that bridges the gulf between the pure & the figured Brahman? Or what power of consciousness enables the formless to pour itself into forms? It is, says Vedanta, a special principle, a selective power of pure consciousness which all Being possesses, the principle, the faculty of Vijnana Sacchidananda is a Trinity; Being is in its very essence Bliss [&] Consciousness, Consciousness is in its very essence Being & Bliss, Bliss is in its very essence Consciousness & Being It is the faculty of Vijnana which, while always resting in their eternal, indefeasible & indivisible oneness, yet casts them into triune figures of being & originates in world their mutual play & their multiplicity It is vijnana that expresses & arranges the cosmic self-expression of being by looking at Brahman now predominantly in one aspect, now predominantly in another aspect even while it perceives all the others inherently contained in the predominant self-conception When the vijnana in us dwells thus on the principle of divine Ananda, we see & we work out all things in terms of Ananda; still we are aware all the time of the nature of Ananda as infinite Conscious-Being and the ideas of Consciousness & Being attend & support the Ananda & work themselves out through its workings When the divine Idea dwells rather on the principle of divine Force or Will in us, then we see & we work out all things in the
Page – 542 terms of Force or Will; still the ideas of Consciousness & Bliss always attend & support Will & work themselves out through its workings We see, then, that essentially Vijnana when analysed & realised reduces itself to the selective & disposing self-action of Chit-Tapas omnisciently aware of the eternally stable unity & eternally potential multiplicity of Brahman and omnipotently able to arrange the terms of that multiplicity from any & every standpoint of Brahman’s self-consciousness It is essential act of knowledge in an essential status of knowledge; its movement is not in the veiled objective manner of mental knowing, but a primary & comprehensive subjective movement in which universal Knowledge sees objects of itself within itself without any veil by reason of an essential identity in motional difference, self-aware self-existent inalienable identity manifested & not contradicted or abrogated [by] difference of form and action, just as a man sees his thoughts & his actions as movements of himself, as self-expression of himself in his own being There are therefore three essential attributes of the Vedantic conception of vijnana . Vijnana is satyam; it is knowledge proceeding out of an essential identity of being & consciousness between the known & the knower,—the true ideal knowledge may come to a man either through identity of being with the object contemplated or through unity in consciousness with the object or through self-delight in the object, but always it will be self-revealing truth of fact, self-existent truth of being & not formed truth of thought or opinion Vijnana is also brihat; it is knowledge comprehensive of & containing the object of knowledge in the knower; it possesses, it does not approach—its process moves from the essence to the appearance, from the unit to the parts, from the greater unit to the lesser unit, not from the attribute to the thing, from the fraction to the integer Vijnana is ritam, is knowledge perfectly self-arranged & self-guided; spontaneously self-arranged in perception & in action spontaneously self-fulfilled through the law of inevitable manifestation of the Truth in its own nature & by its own force, it is the faultless instrument of an unerring omnipotence & omniscience Satyam ritam brihat, the True, the Right, the
Page – 543 Large, describes God in His being of pure ideal knowledge and self-efficiency. What is the practical value of this conception of vijnana? The thing we call mind is the knowledge of the individual about himself and of the world only as it affects or reaches his individual consciousness It is the view of things which a man shut up in a dungeon with glazed & coloured windows may have about the world and his own dwelling place In the colours of the senses he sees the objects outside, in the light of the few objects it sees through its small & scanty windows & by reasoning from their appearances mind forms its idea of the world; even of this house which it inhabits, it knows only one room with a locked door & all that is outside that door it can only guess at by analogy or infer from the sounds, smells, vibrations which come to its senses from the rest of the building or the occasional visits, messages & descriptions which it may receive from its other inhabitants For it is now an ascertained truth even to modern psychological observation & experiment,—and was known thousands of years ago to the Vedantin,—that only a small part of our active conscious being is revealed to our waking mental consciousness; a vast amount of work of action, work of impulse, work of knowledge goes either under or above the lower & the upper level of our waking existence and faculty In the nature of things, therefore, mental knowledge starts from limitation, lives in limitation & ends in limitation It is dabhram, alpam, says the Veda, not, like the vijnana, brihat; in its nature truncated, oppressed, little We know nothing certainly except that certain phenomena present themselves in a certain regular way to our senses and are valid within certain limits for our life; on the basis of that sensational experience we can make out a practical rule and order of living All the rest of mental knowledge may be described [as] a selection of probabilities out of a mass of possibilities But because mental knowledge is limited & subject to mixed truth & error, therefore also the feelings & impulses of mind in man are subject to falsehood, error, wrong placement, corruption & perversion; in a word, to evil & sin And since action is only a mechanical expression of mind and
Page – 544 feeling, his action also is subject to a resulting falsehood and wrong placement, to evil and sin Ignorance of self & world is the original error; out of that seed proceeds all evil & suffering Man, born as a mental being, cannot arrive at right action, right feeling, right knowledge; he can only struggle towards them and approximate to some blundering, limited & imperfect standard of right & truth formed by him out of his fixed notions and habitual feelings These standards he is continually changing according to the shiftings of his knowledge & the circlings of his knowledge in pursuit of that eternal self-existent Truth & Right which the soul in him knows to exist but the mind & body in him fail to find and accomplish For mind cannot see the Truth,—the goal & the condition of our journey,—it has to grope after it & feel it; for it has sense of things but not vision of things, mati, not drishti It does not know the Right, the way of our journey, but has to seek for it; therefore it cannot proceed straight to its goal, but follows a devious & wandering journey The lower mental life is not only dabhram & alpam, says the Veda, but it is hvaram & vrijinam, in action of knowledge & action of heart & action of body a crooked going, not like the action of vijnana, riju, straight-moving. We distinguish then between vijnana & manas Vijnana is brihat, limitless & comprehensive in its nature and process, because free from individuality, apaurusheya, and universal in its movement and origin; therefore it is true, satyam, in essence and true, ritam, in arrangement Mind is alpam, limited in its nature because proceeding from an individual centre [and] standpoint and bound in its movement and origin; therefore it admits of asatyam and anritam, error & falsehood or misplacement,—for all falsehood & error is misplacement of truth, all manas diverted action of vijnanam—in the essence & arrangement Vijnana is, because ritam, therefore riju, right or rectum, the straight—because it is in its nature right arrangement in right being, therefore it proceeds straight by the right way to the right goal with an assured, luminous & self-existent rightness of impulse, rightness of feeling & rightness of action Mind is hvara; not knowing but seeking, it gropes & circles through falsehood
Page – 545 either to truth or a worse falsehood; through sin & stumbling either to righteousness or to a worse sinfulness Vijnana has for its process of knowledge drishti; thought of vijnana sees, it does not search; it starts from knowledge, it does not start from ignorance; it starts from the essence, not from the appearance; it begins with the essential truth, Brahman, & sees in it the general truth, the idea, the kavya of the kavi, which creates the mental, vital & material symbol, from the general truth it proceeds to detail & particular, from the idea to the working out of the idea in process, attribute, quality & variation Reasoning in vijnana is only an arranged statement of already possessed knowledge; it is not a means of arriving at truth, but only of orderly stating of truth Mind has for its process, mati; mind feels & senses, it does not see, for what it calls sight is only a form of touch or contact with its object from outside, not the internal knowledge of the object as a thing contained in the knower It starts from ignorance & struggles towards knowledge, it grasps only appearance and can do no more than speculate about essence; starts from the fragments & pieces the whole, starts from the particular & perceives the general as a mental abstraction, not a living reality; proceeds from its abstract generalisation & infers essence but cannot come into the real presence of Being Reasoning in mind is a statement of successive perceptions of data to arrive at a conditionally valid inference, not at a self-existent and for ever indubitable truth Mind starts with a dark ignorance in the shape of non-knowledge or false knowledge & ends with a twilit ignorance in the shape of agnostic uncertainty. Clearly, then, if this faculty of vijnana exists, is of this nature & has these relations to mind, then the path of our evolution and, consequently, also the right direction of our efforts is clear; it is, having exceeded nervous life & body, to exceed mind also and arrive at the culmination of right knowledge, right feeling, right works in the spontaneous & infinite mastery & liberty of the vijnana It is rational to suppose that such a principle exists; for, given the existence of a self-existent Truth at all, supposing that all is not, as the Nihilistic Buddhist contends, a sensation-troubled void, then a self-acting faculty of knowledge
Page – 546 responding to & perceptive of the self-existent Truth is at least probable and seems to be demanded If, moreover, we consent to the Vedantic idea of the world as a creative form & rhythm of consciousness, this logical probability becomes an obvious and inevitable necessity Self-existent Truth of things can in that theory be nothing else than self-perceptive Truth of conscious being The existence of a world of objects of universal consciousness arranged in fixed relations & processes presupposes the existence of this principle of Vijnana & therefore of the faculty of Vijnana It may, however, be reasonably questioned whether, even if the faculty exists, it is not a divine privilege denied to man as much as to the tree and the insect Is not man unchangeably a mental being, not only at present fixed in mind as his centre, but eternally imprisoned in it as his element, continent and condition of existence? But such a rigid limitation is inconsistent with what we know of man and of Nature . Nature moves by steps & gradations out of one stream of her movement into a higher law She has established a rudimentary reason in the animal which has perfected itself in the supreme animal, man Equally she has established a rudimentary form of vijnana in man which has to be perfected in the inevitable course of her evolution, and must perforce be perfected here in no other being than a supreme humanity or supreme man She has first arranged an illegitimate form of vijnana in the intellect, the mental buddhi or human reason, which has all the movements of the vijnana, perception, arrangement, synthesis, analysis, but is unable to arrive at its proper methods & results because it limits itself to the province of the senses and has for its one right function to train these mental servants & purify them from the control of yet lower elements of our being, the grosser life functions, the body, the nervous heart-movements Above the reason & sending down its higher rays into the human intellect she has seated the vijnana-buddhi, the intuitional mind Animals have an intuitional sense, they have not the intuitional intellect; man has access to a true intuitional mentality, and there is his right door to release from subjection to the sensational mentality he shares with the lower creatures When he has fulfilled reason,
Page – 547 —not before,—he has to surmount reason, to silence it just as reason has silenced the brute passions, and lift up its faculties nearer to their true nature, mode and function, to the intuitional mind, which then, unbesieged by the sense mind & the erring intellect, can receive the pure rays from above of the luminous & divine Vijnana. The evolution of vijnana out of mind is inevitable for the same reason that the evolution of life out of matter was inevitable or the evolution of mind out of life, because the vijnana or pure Idea, already involved in matter, life and mind, demands & will procure, perhaps by the pull from a higher world where the Idea would be the dominant power & basic principle, its own release out of the limitations of sensational mentality Just as we found matter to be a formation out of life-energy, & life-energy to be a formation out of mind, so mind is a formation out of vijnana That which has constituted & governs stone or tree, animal or man, is not matter, nor life, nor mind, but the Idea involved in these three masks of conscious being The idea of the tree in Brahman’s consciousness is hidden involved in that form of life-energy which our senses see as a seed In reality, the seed of the oak tree holds at the back of its intended evolution the potential seminality of all trees that have existed or can exist, because the Idea, the Brihat, by which it exists, is the Brahman in all Its vastness, Brahman whose process in Nature is to dispose variously one seed of things so as to form a myriad various existences Ekam bíjam bahudhá vidadháti But by successive selective processes of vijnana the form specially fixed in the seed, inherent & latent in it & bound to develop out of it, is first tree and then oak tree For this reason and no other, an oak tree & no other existence must develop out of the seed the earth has received It is the involved Idea, is the Vijnana Consciousness of God, which dwells in the seed, has chosen and prepared this form and supports, governs & directs by the mere fact of its inherent existence there the processes, arrangements, life & functionings of the oak tree We do not see this truth because the form God takes is still a material form without an organised mental consciousness It is only when we arrive at
Page – 548 human life that, a little more clearly, & yet still very dimly, this truth begins to show itself To our lower or material mind, for instance, a nation is an intellectual fiction; the reality is only a number of men agreeing for certain material ends to call itself a nation and living in an artificial idea of unity created by the associations born of a mere word But, first, the intuition-sense we share with the animals by means of the emotional heart, then the reason seeking to find a cause, a formula and justification for the vitality of the nation-idea and, finally, the intuitive mind, looking behind the phenomena of the senses, begin to draw near to the real truth In real truth a nation is an existence in the universal Consciousness, an Idea-Force in the universal Will that is knowledge, not constituted by geographical boundaries, nor by a given sum or combination of human units, nor by a common language, religion, custom, laws, government,—for all these conditions may be satisfied without a nation existing or dispensed with or exceeded without the nation ceasing to exist,—but created by the idea & living in the idea Born of the idea in the Brahman, it exists by the force of the idea and only so long as that force supports it & needs the form for its self-fulfilment; the force withdrawn, the form departs into the general Idea force which is constantly grouping men and animals, plants & worlds into figures of corporative Brahman-consciousness, and entering into it either there dissolves or waits for fresh emergence in other time, place & conditions What is true of the corporate mind-life of the nation is true of the individual mind-life also, of man, the animal, tree, stone, insect “From the Idea all these existences were born; being born, by the idea they live; to the idea they pass away & enter in ” But not till man appears in the material world, does it begin to be possible for the Idea to produce a form of mind, life and body which will be able to house & express the vijnanamaya ideal being, the god in the universe and can be prepared to bear the activity of a divine force & divine joy and, breaking the walls of the mental ego, enlarge into the wideness of a cosmic consciousness The gods, it is said in the Upanishad, presented by the Spirit with successive forms of animal life for their habitation, returned always the answer, “This is not enough
Page – 549 for us ” Only when human life appeared, did they utter the cry of assent, “This indeed is well & wonderfully made,” and enter satisfied into their fit dwelling But to fulfil the great purpose of its being, humanity has first to learn how to break down the dungeon of mind and unlocking the doors of the one room in its dwelling-place vindicate for himself a free movement in his seven storied mansion By passing from mind to vijnana, he will possess in his nature that toward which he now only gropes & aspires, a being that has conquered the limitations of ego, a cosmic knowledge that looks at truth direct & unveiled, a perfectly tuned heart whose emotions & impulses are in harmony with the diviner truth of things, an inner & outer action which, free from the duality of sin & virtue, is unstumbling in its spontaneous movement, confident in its pure & inalienable joy, self-effective of its own God-given objects without passing through the pangs of personal desire, straining and disappointment born of wrong aim, wrong method or wrong emotional reaction Human life & being will then be moulded into the forms of the satyam, ritam, brihat For man knowing himself & the world, man will work out his life spontaneously as the sun moves or the oak tree grows, by the force of the idea working out the swabhava, own nature, own or proper becoming For dharma, right life & action in man and in every other existence, is swabhavaniyatam karma, works directed & governed by the inborn nature to fulfil the divine idea symbolised in the type & embodied in the individual But in the sun & oak tree it works mechanically without an organised consciousness & joy of the work expressed in the form inhabited Man fulfilled will enjoy consciously the perfect workings of God’s Prakriti in him.
Page – 550 |