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A Fragmentary Chapter for a Work on Vedanta
[.....] Each of the great authoritative Upanishads has its own peculiar character and determined province as well as the common starting point of thought and supreme truth in the light of which all their knowledge has to be understood. The unity of universal existence in the transcendental Being who alone is manifested here or elsewhere forms their common possession & standpoint. All thought & experience here rest upon this great enigma of a multiplicity that when questioned resolves itself to a unity of sum, of nature & of being, of a unity that when observed seems to be a mere sum or convention for a collection of multiples. The mind when it starts its business of experience in sensation and thought, finds itself stumbling about in a forest of details of each of which it becomes aware individually by knocking up against it, like a wayfarer in a thick and midnight forest stumbling & dashing himself against the trees,—by the shock & the touch only he knows of them. Mind cannot discriminate & put these details into their place except, imperfectly, by the aid of memory—the habit of the [mind] of sensations. Like the women imprisoned in the magic forests of the old Tantra the mind is a prisoner in the circle of its own sensations wandering round & round in that narrow area and always returning to the original source of its bondage,—its inability to go beyond its data, the compulsion under which it lies of returning to the object it meets merely the image of that object as mirrored through the senses & in the mind. It is reason, the faculty that can discriminate as objects, that first attempts to deliver mind from its bondage by standing apart from the object and its mental reflection and judging them in its own terms & by its own measurements and not in the terms & measurements of the senses. The knowledge which the mind gives is sanjna, awareness not passing beyond contact with and response to the thing known, the knowledge which reason gives
Page – 424 is prajna, awareness placing the object in front of it and studying it as a thing affecting but yet apart from and unconnected with the feelings & needs of that which experiences. Therefore it is, according to our philosophy, in buddhi & not in manas that ahankara, the discriminative ego-sense is born. Mind like matter has an inert unity of all things in experience born of non-discrimination; the perception of an object outside & a sensation within it stand on the same footing to sanjna. We must discriminate and reflect, in order to be aware of separate multiplicity as distinguished from a multitude [of] sensations in the unity of our consciousness. Afterwards when we rise through reason but above it, to Veda, we recover, however rudimentarily, the original unity, but discriminating, knowing the tattwa of things, perceiving them to be circumstances not of an individual & sense bound [but] of universal & sense delivered consciousness. This consummation of knowledge & the ordering of life on that knowledge is man’s summit of evolution, the business for which he is here upon the earth. To climb to it from the animal mentality [sentence left incomplete] The first thing that this discriminating reason effects is to put each detail in its place & then to arrange the details in groups. It travels from the individual to the group, from the group to the class, from the class to the kind, from the kind to the mass. And there until help arrives it has to pause. It has done much. It has distinguished each individual tree in the magical forest from its neighbour; it has arranged them in groves and thickets; it has distinguished & numbered the various species of trees and fixed their genus. It has mapped them out collectively & known the whole mass as the forest. But it is not yet free. It has not escaped from the ensorcelled gyre of the Almighty Magician. It knows every detail of its prison, nothing more. It has discovered the vyashti & the samashti; it has arrived only at a collective & not at a real unity. It has discovered the relations of unit to unit, the units to the smaller group and the smaller group to the larger group & the whole to the mass. It has its laws of life fixed upon that knowledge, its duties of individual to individual, of man to the family, of the man & family to the class, of [all] three
Page – 425 to the nation, of the nation & its constituents to humanity. It has ordered excellently our life in the prison house. But it still travels in the magic circle, it is still a prisoner & a [......] It has even discovered one pregnant truth that the farther we travel from the many, the nearer we draw to the one, the less is the transience, the greater the permanence. The family outlasts the individual, the class endures when the single family has perished, the kind survives the disappearance of the class, the collective whole endures & outlives all the revolutions of its component parts. Therefore a final law and morality is found, the sacrifice & consummation of the less in the greater, of the few for the many,—an evolutionary utility, a consummate altruism. And when all is said and done, we are still in the prison house. For even the most permanent is here transient, the world perishes as inevitably as the midge & the ant & to our ranging vision seems hardly mightier in its ultimate reality or the importance of its fate. For who has made individual follow individual & nation follow nation & world follow world through the brilliant mirage of life into the incomprehensible mystery of death; and when all is ended, what profit has a man had of all his labour that he has done under the sun? Reason cannot deliver us. The day of our freedom dawns when we transcend reason, not by imagination, which is itself only an intellectual faculty, not [by] the intuition even, but by illumination. The intuitive reason can do much for us, can indicate to us the higher truth. The intellectual reason can only arrive, as we have seen, at a collective unity; it is still bound by its data. The intuitive reason first suggests to us a unity which is not collective but essential, the Brahman of the Veda [....................................................] It is intuitive reason that [..............] infinity. We [....................................] its nonexistence to the observing intellect. [None] has ever [travelled] beyond the uttermost limit of the stars and assured [himself that] there is always a beyond, or lived from all time before the stars shone out in the heavens so that he can say, Time never began. The imagination can indeed add tract to tract of Space and millennium to millennium of Time and, returning tired &
Page – 426 appalled, say “I at least find no end and infinity is possible.” But still we have no proof—there are no data on which we can stand. Infinity remains to the intellect a surmise, a hypothesis, a powerful inference. Reason is essentially a measuring & arranging faculty & can only deal with the finite. It is ensorcelled within the limits of the forest. Yet we have an intuitive perception of the truth of infinity, not collectively, not as a never ending sum of miles or moments but as a thing in itself not dependent on that which it contains. We have, if we examine ourselves, other such intuitive perceptions, of immortality although we cannot look beyond the black wall of death, of freedom although the facts of the world seem to load us with chains. Are we yet free by the force of this intuitive reason? We cannot say so,—for this reason that it gives us suggestions, but not realisations. It is in its nature what the old psychologists would have called smriti, a memory of truth, rather than a perception. There is a suggestion to us in ourselves of infinity, of immortality, of freedom and knowledge in us replies, Yes, I know that to be true, though I do not see it, there is something in me that has always known it, it is in me like some divine memory. The reason of this movement is that the intuitive reason works in the intellect. It is the memory of freedom coming to the woman in the forest which tells her that there is something outside this green & leafy, but yet to her dark, fatal & dismal forest of imprisonment, some world of wide & boundless skies where a man can move freely doing what he wills, kamachari. And because it works in the intellect, its movement can be imitated by the other inhabitants of the intellect, by the brilliancy of imagination, by the fond thought that is only the image of our wish. The rationalist is right in distrusting intuition although it gave him Newton’s theory of gravitation and most of the brilliant beginnings of Science & Free Thought,—right, yet not right; right from the standpoint of a scepticism that asks for intellectual certainty, wrong from the standpoint of ultimate truth & the imperative needs of humanity. Faith rests upon the validity of this faculty of intuitive reason, and faith has been the great helper and consoler of humanity in its progress, the indispensable staff on which he
Page – 427 supports his thought & his action. But because the divine smriti is aped by the voices of desire & fancy, faith has also been the parent & perpetuator of many errors. It is knowledge that loosens our bonds, that snaps asunder the toils of sense & dispels the force of the world-enchantment. In order to be free, we must pass from intuition to illumination. We must get the direct perception of the knowledge of which intuitive reason is the memory. For within us there are unawakened folds in folds of conscious experience which we have yet to set in action in order to fulfil our nature’s possibilities. In these inner realms we are sushupta, asleep; but the whole movement of humanity is towards the awakening of these centres. Science is in error when it imagines that man is from all time & to all time a rational animal & the reason the end & summit of his evolution. Man did not begin with reason, neither will he end with it. There are faculties within us which transcend reason and are asleep to our waking consciousness, just as life is asleep in the metal, consciousness in the tree, reason in the animal. Our evolution is not over, we have not completed even half of the great journey. And if now we are striving to purify the intellect & to carry reason to its utmost capacities, it is in order that we may discourage the lower movements of passion and desire, self-interest and prejudice and dogmatic intolerance which stand in the way of the illumination. When the intellectual buddhi is pure by vichara & abhyasa of these things, then it becomes ready to rise up out of the mind into the higher levels of consciousness and there lose itself in a much mightier movement which because of its greatness & perfection is called in the Rigveda mahas and in the Vedanta vijnana. This is what [is] meant in the Veda by Saraswati awakening the great ocean. Pavaka nah saraswati maho arnash chetayati. This is the justification of the demand in our own Yoga that desire shall be expelled, the mind stilled, the very play of reason & imagination silenced before a man shall attain to knowledge,—as the Gita puts it, na kinchid api chintayet. The illumination of the vijnana, when it is complete, shows us not a collective material unity, a sum of physical units, but a
Page – 428 real unity. It reveals to us Space, Time and the chain of apparent circumstance to be merely conventions & symbols seen in His own being by One Seer and dependent purely on a greater transcendental existence of which they are not separate realities & divisions but the manifold expressions of its single Truth. It is this knowledge that gives us freedom. We escape from the enchanted forest, we know once more the world outside this petty world, see the boundless heavens above & breast the wide & circumambient air of our infinite existence. The first necessity is to know the One, to be in possession of the divine Existence; afterwards we can have all the knowledge, joy & power for action that is intended for our souls,—for He being known all is known, tasmin vijnate sarvam vijnatam, not at once by any miraculous revelation, but by a progressive illumination or rather an application of the single necessary illumination to God’s multiplicity in manifestation, by the movement of the mahat & the bhuma, not working from petty details to the whole, but from the knowledge of the one to the knowledge of relation & circumstance, by a process of knowledge that is sovereign & free, not painful, struggling & bound. This is the central truth of Veda & Upanishad & the process by which they have been revealed to men. This free & great movement of illumination descending from above to us below and not like our thought here which climbs painfully up the mountain peaks of thought only to find at the summit that it is yet far removed from the skies to which it aspires, this winged & mighty descent of Truth is what we call Sruti or revelation. There are three words which are used of illumined thought, drishti, sruti & smriti, sight, hearing and remembrance. The direct vision or experience of a truth or the thought-substance of a truth is called drishti, and because they had that direct vision or experience, that pratyaksha not of the senses, but of the liberated soul, the Rishis are called drashtas. But besides the truth and its artha or thought-substance in which it is represented to the mind, there is the vak or sound symbol, the inevitable word in which the truth is naturally enshrined & revealed & not as in ordinary speech half concealed or only
Page – 429 suggested. The revelation of the vak is sruti. The revealed word is also revelatory and whoever has taken it into his soul, though the mind may not understand it, has the Truth ready prepared in the higher or sushupta reaches of his being from whence it must inevitably descend at a future date or in another life to his lower & darkened consciousness in order to liberate & illumine. It is this psychological truth which is the foundation of the Hindu’s trust in the Name of God, the vibrations of the mantra and the sound of the Veda. For the vak carries, in the right state of the soul, an illumination with it of the truth which it holds, an inspiration of its force of satyam which is less than drishti but must in the end lead to drishti. A still more indirect action of the vijnana is smriti; when the truth is presented to the soul and its truth immediately & directly recognised by a movement resembling memory—a perception that this was always true and already known to the higher consciousness. It is smriti that is nearest to intellect action and forms the link between vijnanam & prajnanam, ideal thought & intellectual thought, by leading to the higher forms of intellectual activity, such as intuitive reason, inspiration, insight & prophetic revelation, the equipment of the man of genius. But what proof have we that this illumination exists? how can we say that this illuminated sight, this revelatory hearing, this confirming remembrance of eternal knowledge is not a self-delusion or a peculiarly brilliant working of imagination and of rapid intellectuality? To those who have the illumination, the question does not arise. The prisoner released from his fetters does not doubt the reality of the file that undid their rivets; the woman escaped from the forest does not ask herself whether this amazing sunlight & wide-vaulted blue sky is not a dream and a delusion. The scientist himself would not be patient with one who began the study of science by questioning the reality of the revealing power of microscope and telescope and suggesting that the objects as seen underneath were so presented merely by an optical illusion. Those who have experienced & seen, know [.....................................] sceptic. “Learn how to use the instruments [.........] yourself, study all these wonders invisible to
Page – 430 the ordinary eye, examine their constancy, coherency, fidelity to fixed wide & general laws, and then judge; do not vitiate inquiry from the beginning by denying on a priori grounds its utility or the right to inquire.” It is only by faith in the instruments of our knowledge that we can acquire knowledge,—by faith in the evidence of the senses that we can think at all, by faith in the validity of reason that we can deduce, infer and argue. So also it is only by faith in illumination that we can see truth from above & come face to [face with God.] It is true that all faith must have its limits. The faith in the senses must be transcended & checked by the faith in our reason. The faith in the reason itself is checked by agnosticism [and] will one day be transcended & checked by the faith in the vijnana. The faith in the vijnana must be checked & harmonised by a faith in a still higher form of knowledge,—knowledge by identity. But within its own province each instrument is supreme and must be trusted. In relying, therefore, upon the vijnana, in asserting and demanding a preliminary faith in it, the Yogin is making no mystic, irrational or obscurantist claim. He is not departing from the universal process of knowledge. He claims to exceed reason, just as the scientist claims to exceed the evidence of the senses. When he asserts that things are not what they seem, that there are invisible forces and agencies at work about us and that the whole of our apparent existence and environment is only phenomenal, he is no more departing from rationality or advancing anything wild or absurd than the scientist when he asserts that the earth moves round the sun and the sun is relatively still, affirms the existence of invisible gases or invisible bacilli, or finds in matter only a form of energy. Nor are faith in the Guru & faith in the Sruti irrational demands, any more than the scientist is irrational in saying to his pupil “Trust my expert knowledge, trust my method of experiment & the books that are authoritative and when you have made the experiments, you can use your intellect to confirm, refute, amend or enlarge whatever scientific knowledge is presented to you in book or lecture or personal instruction,”—or than the man of the Indian village who has been to London is irrational in expecting his fellow villagers to accept his statement
Page – 431 of the existence, sights, scenes and characteristics of London or in supporting [it] by any book that may have been written with authority on the subject. If the Indian Teacher similarly demands faith in himself as an expert, faith in the Sruti as the evidence of ancient experts, drishti as revealed truth coming direct to them by vijnanam from the divine Knowledge, he is following the common, the necessary rule. He has the right to say, Trust these, follow these, afterwards you will yourself look on the unveiled face of Truth & see God. In each case there is a means of confirmation,—the evidence of the observation & deduction has to be confirmed by observation & deduction; the evidence of the senses by the senses, the evidence of the vijnanam by the vijnanam. One cannot exceed one’s instrument. There is also the evidence of common experience—there is this eternal witness to the truth of the vijnana, that men who have used it, in whatever clime & whatever age, however they may differ in their intellectual statement or the conclusions of the reason about what they have seen, are at one in the substance of their experience & vision. Whoever follows in these days the paths indicated, makes the experiments prescribed, goes through the training needed, cannot go beyond, in the substance of his knowledge, or depart from what the ancients observed. He may not go beyond [sentence left incomplete]
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