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CHAPTER XIV. THE SUPERMIND AS CREATOR All things are self expanding of the Idea. Vishnu Purana.
A principle of active Will and
Knowledge superior to Mind and creature of the wilds is then the intermediary
power and state of being between that self-possession of the One and this flux
of the Many. This principle is not entirely alien to us; it does not belong
solely and incommunicably to a Being who is entirely other than ourselves or to
a state of existence from which we are mysteriously projected into birth, but
also rejected and unable to return. If it seems to us to be seated on heights
far above us, yet are they the heights of our own being and accessible to our
tread. We can not only infer and glimpse that Truth, but we are capable of
realising it. We. may by a progressive expanding or a sudden luminous
self-transcendence mount up to these summits in unforgettable moments or dwell
on them during hours or days of greatest superhuman experience. When we descend
again, there are doors of communication which we can keep always open or reopen
though they should constantly shut. But to dwell there permanently on this last
and highest summit of the created and creative being is in the end the supreme
ideal for our evolving human consciousness when it seeks not self-annulment but
self-perfection. For, as we have seen, this is the original Idea and the final
harmony and truth to which
Page-65 our gradual self-expression in the world returns and which it is meant to achieve. Still, we may doubt whether it is possible, now or at all, to give any account of this state to the human intellect or to utilise in any communicable and cognizable way its divine workings for the elevation of our human knowledge and action. The doubt arises not only from the rarity or dubiety of any known phenomena that would betray a human working of this divine faculty, nor from the remoteness which separates this action from the experience and verifiable knowledge of ordinary humanity; it is strongly suggested also by the apparent contradiction in both essence and operation between human mentality and the divine Supermind.
And certainly, if this consciousness had no relation at
all to mind nor anywhere any identity with the mental being, it would be quite
impossible to give any account of it to our human notions. Or if it were in its
nature only vision in knowledge and not at all dynamic power of knowledge, we
could hope to attain by its contact a beatific state of mental illumination, but
not a greater light and power for the works of the world. But since this
consciousness is creature of the world, it must be not only state of knowledge,
but power of knowledge, and not only a Will to light and vision, but a Will to
power and works. And since Mind too is created out of it, Mind must be a
development by limitation out of this primal faculty and this mediatory act of
the supreme conscience and must therefore be capable of resolving itself back
into it through a reverse development by expansion. For always Mind must be
identical with Supermind in essence and conceal in itself the potentiality of
Supermind, however different or even contrary it may have become in its actual
forms and settled modes of operation. It may not then be an irrational or
unprofitable attempt to strive by the method of comparison and contrast towards
some idea of the Supermind from the standpoint and in the terms of our
intellectual knowledge. The idea, the terms may well be in adequate and yet
still serve as a finger of light pointing
Page-66 us onward on a way which to some distance at least we may tread. And first we may pause a moment and ask Ourselves whether no light can be found from the past which will guide us towards these ill-explored domains. We need a name, and we need a starting-point. For we have called this state of consciousness the Supermind; but the word is ambiguous since it may be taken in the sense of mind itself super eminent and lifted above ordinary mentality but not radically changed, or on the contrary it may bear the sense of all that is beyond mind and therefore assume a
It is the cryptic verses of the Veda that
help us here ; for they contain, though concealed, the gospel of the divine and
immortal Supermind and through the veil some illumining flashes come to us. The
inspired poets of the Veda speak of this Supermind as a vastness beyond the
ordinary firmaments of our consciousness in which truth of being is luminously
one with all that expresses it and assures inevitably truth of vision,
formulation, arrangement, word, act and movement and therefore truth also of
result of movement, result of action and expression, infallible ordinance or
law. Vast all-comprehensiveness; luminous truth and harmony of being in that
vastness and not a vague chaos or self-lost obscurity; truth of law and act and
knowledge expressive of that harmonious truth of being : these are the essential
terms of the Vedic description. The Gods, who are powers of this Supermind, born
of it, seated in it as in their proper home, are in their knowledge "
truth-conscious " and in their action possessed of the seer-will". Their
conscious-force turned towards works and creation is possessed and guided by a
perfect and direct knowledge of the thing to be done and its essence and its
law,—a knowledge which determines a wholly effective will-power that does not
deviate or falter in its process or in its result, but expresses and fulfils
spontaneously and inevitably in the act that which has been seen in the vision,
Page-67 Light is here one with Force, the vibrations of knowledge with the rhythm of the will and both are on£, perfectly and without seeking, groping or effort, with the assured result. The divine Nature has a double power, a spontaneous self-formulation and self-arrangement which wells naturally out of the essence of the thing manifested and expresses it original truth, and a self-force of light inherent in the thing itself and the source of its spontaneous and inevitable self-arrangement. There are subordinate, but important details. The Vedic seers seem to speak of two primary faculties of the "truth-conscious " soul ; they are Sight and Hearing, by which is intended direct operations of an inherent Knowledge describable as truth-vision and truth-audition and reflected from far-off in our human mentality by the faculties of revelation and inspiration. Besides, a distinction sterns to be made in the operations of the Supermind between knowledge by a comprehending and pervading consciousness which is very near to subjective knowledge by identity and knowledge by a projecting, confronting, apprehending consciousness which is the beginning of objective cognition. These are the Vedic clues. And we may accept from this ancient experience the subsidiary term truth-consciousness " to delimit the connotation of the more elastic phrase, Supermind.
We see at once that such a consciousness,
described by such characteristics, must be an intermediate formulation which
refers back to a term above it and forward to another below it ; we see at the
same time that it is evidently the link and means by which the inferior develops
out of the superior and should equally be the link and means by which it may
develop back again towards its source. The term above is the Unitarian or
indivisible consciousness of pure Sachchidananda in which there are no
distinctions; the term below is the analytic or dividing consciousness of Mind
which can only know by distinctions and has at the most a vague and secondary
apprehension of unity and infinity. Between them is this comprehensive and
creative consciousness, by its power of pervading and comprehending
Page-68 knowledge the child of that self-awareness by identity which is the poise of the Brahman and by its power of projecting, confronting, apprehending knowledge parent of that awareness by distinction which is the process of the Mind. Above, the formula of the One eternally stable and immutable; below, the formula of the Many which, eternally mutable, seeks but hardly finds in the flux of things a firm and immutable standing-point; between, the seat of all trinities, of all that is biome, of all that becomes Many in-One and yet remains One-in-Many because it was originally One that is always potentially Many. This intermediary term is therefore the beginning and end of all creation and arrangement, the Alpha and the Omega, the starting-point of all differentiation, the instrument of all unification, originative, executive and consummative of all realise or realisable harmonies. It has the knowledge of the One, but is able to draw out of the One its hidden multitudes; it creates the Many, but does not lose itself in their differentiations. And shall we not say that its very existence points back to Something beyond the ineffable Unity,—Something ineffable and inconceivable not because of its unity and indivisibility, but because of its freedom from tavern these formulations of our mind,—Something beyond both unity and multiplicity ? That would be it the utter Unknowable and Real which yet justifies to us both our knowledge of God and our knowledge of the world.
But these terms are large and difficult to grasp;
let us come to precisions. We speak of the One as Sachchidananda; but in the
very description we posit three entities and unite them to arrive at a trinity.
We say " Existence, Consciousness, Bliss," and then we say, " they are one". It
is a process of the mind. But for the Unitarian consciousness such a process is
inadmissible. Existence is Consciousness and there can be no distinction between
them; Consciousness is Bliss and there can be no distinction between them. And
since there is not even this differentiation there can be no world. If that is
the sole reality,
Page-69 then world is not and never existed, can never have been conceived; for indivisible consciousness is uninviting consciousness and cannot originate division and differentiation. But this is a reduction ad absurdum ; we cannot admit it unless we are content to base every thing upon an impossible paradox and an unreconciled antithesis. On the other hand, Mind can only conceive distinctions as real; it can conceive totality or the finite extending itself indefinitely, but the ultimate unity and absolute infinity are to its conscience of things abstract notions and unreal quantities, not something that is real to its grasp, much less something that is alone real. Here is therefore the very opposite term to the Unitarian consciousness; we have, confronting the essential and indivisible unity, an essential multiplicity which cannot arrive at unity without abolishing itself and in the very act confessing that it could never really have existed. Yet it was; for it is this that has found unify and abolished itself. And again we have a reduction ad absurdum repeating the violent paradox which seeks to convince thought by stunning it and the reconciled and irreconcilable antithesis.
The difficulty, in its lower term, disappears if
we realise that Mind is only a preparatory form of our consciousness. Mind is an
instrument of analysis and synthesis, but not of essential knowledge. Its
function is to cut out something vaguely from the unknown Thing in itself and
call its measurement or delimitation the whole, and again to analyse the whole
into its parts which it regards as separate mental objects. It is only the parts
and accidents that the mind can see definitely and, after its own fashion, know.
Of the whole its only definite idea is an assemblage of parts or a totality of
properties and accidents. The whole not seen as a part of something else or in
its own parts, properties and accidents is to the mind no more than a vague
perception; only when it is analysed and put by itself as a separate object, a
totality in a larger totality, can Mind say to itself. "This now I know." And
really it does not know. Its knows only its own analysis of the object and the
idea it has formed of it by a synthesis
Page-70 of the separate parts and properties that it has seen. There its characteristic power, its sure function ceases, and if we would have a greater, a profounder and a real knowledge—a knowledge and not an intense but formless sentiment such as comes sometimes to certain deep but inarticulate parts of our mentality—Mind ha; to make room for another consciousness which will fulfill Mind by transcending it or reverse and so rectify its operations after leaping beyond it: the summit of mental knowledge is only a vaulting-board from which that leap can be taken. The utmost mission of Mind is to train our obscure consciousness which has emerged out of the dark prison of Matter, to enlighten its blind instincts, random intuitions, vague perceptions till it shall become capable of this greater light and this higher ascension. Mind is a passage, not a culmination.
On the other hand, the Unitarian
consciousness or indivisible Unity cannot be that impossible entity, a thing
without contents out of which all contents have issued and into which they
disappear and become annihilated. It must be an original self-concentration in
which all is contained but in another manner than in this temporal and spatial
manifestation. That which has thus concentrated itself, is the utterly
ineffable, and inconceivable Existence which the Nihilist images to his mind as
the negative Void of all that we know’ and are but the Transcendentalist with
equal reason may image to his mind as the positive but indistinguishable Reality
of all that we know and are. " In the beginning " says the Vedanta " was the one
Existence without a second," but before and after the beginning, now, for ever
and beyond Time is that which we cannot describe even as the One;, even when we
say that nothing but That is. What we can be aware of is, first, its original
self-concentration which we end devour to realise as the indivisible One ;
secondly, the diffusion and apparent disintegration of all that was concentrated
in its unity which is the Mind’s conception of the universe ; and thirdly, its
firm self-extension in the Truth-conscious ness which contains and upholds the
diffusion and prevents it
Page-71 from being a real disintegration, maintains unity in utmost diversity and stability in utmost mutability, insists on harmony in the appearance of an all-pervading strife and collision, keeps eternal cosmos where Mind would arrive only at a chaos eternally attempting to form itself. This is the Supermind, the Truth-consciousness, the Real-Idea which knows itself and all that it becomes. Supermind is the vast self extension of the Brahman that contains and develops. By the Idea it develops the triune principle of existence, consciousness and bliss out of their indivisible unity. It differentiates them, but it does not divide. It establishes a Trinity, not arriving like the Mind from the three to the One, but manifesting the three out of the One—for it manifests and develops, and yet maintaining them in the unity,—for it knows and contains. By the differentiation it is able to bring forward one or other of them as the effective Deity which contains the others involved or explicit in itself and this process it makes the foundation of all other differentiations. And it acts by the same operation on all the principles and possibilities which it evolves out of this all-constituent trinity. It possesses the power of development, of evolution, of making explicit, and that power carries with it the other power of involution, of envelopment, of making implicit. In a sense, the whole of creation may be said to be a movement between two involutions, Spirit in which all is involved and out of which all evolves downward to the other pole of Matter, Matter in which a4so all is involved and out of which all evolves upward to the other pole of Spirit.
Thus the whole process of differentiation
by the Real-Idea creative of the universe is a putting {forward of principles,
forces, forms which contain for the comprehending consciousness all the rest of
existence within them and front the apprehending consciousness with all the rest
of existence implicit behind them. Therefore all is in each as well as each in
all. Therefore every seed of things implies in itself all the infinity o’
various possibilities, but is kept to one law of process and result by the Will,
that is
Page-72 to say by the Knowledge-Force of the Conscious-Being who is manifesting himself and who, sure of the Idea in himself, predetermines by it his own forms and movements. The seed is the Truth of its own being which this Self-Existence sees in itself, the resultant of that seed of self-vision is the Truth of self-action, the natural law of development, formation and functioning which follows inevitably upon the self-vision and keeps to the processes in" evolved in the original Truth. All Nature is simply, then, the Seer-Will, the Knowledge-Force of the Conscious-Being at work to evolve in force and form all the inevitable truth of the Idea into which it has originally thrown itself. This conception of the Idea points us to the essential contrast between our mental consciousness and the Truth-consciousness. We regard thought as a thing separate from existence, abstract, unsubstantial, different from reality, something which appears one knows not whence and detaches itself from objective reality in order to observe, understand and judge it ; for so it seems and therefore is to our all-dividing, all-analysing mentality. The first business of Mind is to render "discrete," to make fissures much more than to discern and so it has made this paralysing fissure between thought and reality. But in Supermind all being is consciousness, all conscious ness is of being, and the idea, a pregnant vibration of consciousness, is equally a vibration of being pregnant of itself; it is an initial coming out in creative self-knowledge of that which lay concentrated in uncreative self-awareness. It comes tout as Idea that is a reality, and it is that reality of the Idea which evolves itself, always by its own power and consciousness of itself, always self-conscious, always self-developing by the will inherent in the Idea, always self-realising by the knowledge ingrained in its every impulsion. This is the truth of all creation, of all evolution.
In Supermind being, consciousness of
knowledge and consciousness of will are not divided as they seem to be in our
mental operations ; they are a trinity, one movement with three effective
aspects. Each has its own effect. Being gives the effect of substance,
consciousness the effect of
Page-73 knowledge, of the self-guiding and shaping idea, of comprehension and apprehension ; will gives the effect of self-fulfilling force. But the idea is only the light of the reality illumining itself; it is not mental thought nor imagination, but effective self-awareness. It is Real-Idea. In Supermind knowledge in the Idea is not divorced from will in the Idea, but one with it—just as it is not different from being or substance, but is one with the being, luminous power of the substance. As the power of burning light is not different from the substance of the fire, so the power of the Idea is not different from the substance of the Being which works itself out in the Idea and its development. In our mentality all are different. We have an idea and a will according to the idea or an impulsion of will and an idea detaching itself from it; but we differentiate effectually the idea from the will and both from ourselves. I am; the idea is a mysterious abstraction that appears in me, the will is another mystery, a force nearer to concreteness, though not concrete, but always something that is not myself, something that I have or get or am seized with, but am not. I make a gulf also between my will, its means and the effect, for these I regard as concrete realities – outside and other than myself. Therefore neither myself nor the idea nor the will in me are self-effective. The idea may fall away from me, the will may fail, the means may be lacking, I myself by any or all of these lacunae may remain unfulfilled.
But in the Supermind there is no such paralysing
division, because knowledge is not solidified, force is not self-divided, being
is not self-divided as in the mind; they are neither broken in themselves, nor
divorced from each other. For the Supermind is the Vast ; it starts from unity,
not division, it is primarily comprehensive, differentiation is only its
secondary act. Therefore whatever be the truth of being expressed, the idea
corresponds to it exactly, the will to the idea,—force being,.; only power of
the consciousness,—and the result to the will. Nor does the idea clash with
other ideas, the will or force with other will or force as in man and his world
; for there is one
Page-74 vast Consciousness which contains and relates all ideas in itself as its own ideas, one vast Will which contains and relates all energies in itself as its own energies. It holds back this, advances that other, but according to its own preconceiving Idea-Will.
This is the justification of the current
religious notions of the omnipresence, omniscience and omnipotence of the Divine
Being. Far from being an ii rational imagination they are perfectly rational and
in no way contradict either the logic of a comprehensive philosophy nor the
indications of observation and experience. The error is to make an unbridgeable
gulf between God and man, Brahman and the world. That error elevates an actual
and practical differentiation in being, consciousness and force into an
essential division. But this aspect of the question we shall touch upon
afterwards. At present we have arrived at an affirmation and some conception of
the divine and creative Supermind in which all s one in being, consciousness,
will and delight, yet when an infinite capacity of differentiation that deploys
but does not destroy the unity,—in which Truth is the substance and Truth rises
in the Idea and Truth comes out in the form and there is one truth of knowledge
and will, one truth of self-fulfillment and therefore of delight; for all
self-fulfillment is satisfaction of being. Therefore, always, in all mutations
and combinations a self-existent and inalienable harmony.
Page-75 CHAPTER XIII. DAWN AND THE TRUTH. Usha is described repeatedly as the Mother’ of the Cows. If then the cow is a Vedic symbol for the physical light or for spiritual illumination the phrase I must either bear this sense that she is the mother or source of the physical rays of the daylight or else that she creates the radiances of the supreme Day, the splendor and clarity of the inner illumination. But we see in the Veda that Aditi, the Mother of the Gods, is described both as the Cow and as the general Mother; she is the Supreme Light and all radiances proceed from her. Psychologically, Aditi is the supreme or infinite Consciousness, mother of the gods, in opposition to Danu or Diti,* the divided consciousness, mother of Vritra and the other Danavas—enemies of the gods and of man in his progress. In a more general aspect she is the source of all the cosmic forms of consciousness from the physical upwards; the seven cows, ‘sapta gâvah, are her forms and there are, we are told, seven names and seven seats of the Mother. Usha as the mother of the cows can only be a form or power of this supreme Light, of this supreme Consciousness, of Aditi. And in fact, we do find her so described in I. 99, mâtâ devânâm aditeranîkam, .. Mother of the gods, form (or, power) of Aditi ,"
* Not that the word Aditi is etymologically the privative of Aditi ; the two
words derive from entirely different roots, ad and di. Page-76 But the illumining dawn of the higher or undivided Consciousness is always the dawn of the Truth; it Usha is that illumining dawn, then we are bound’ to find her advent frequently associated in the verses of the Rig-Veda with the idea of the Truth, the R’itam. And such association we do repeatedly find. For, first of all, Usha is described as " following effectively the path of the Truth ," r’itasya panthâm anveti sadhu. Here neither the ritualistic nor, the naturalistic ensue suggested for r’itam can at all apply ; there would be no meaning in a constant affirmation that Dawn follows the path of the sacrifice or follows the path of the water. We can only escape from the obvious significance if we choose to understand by panthâ r’itasya the path, not of the Truth, but of the Sun. But the Veda describes rather the Sun as following the path of Usha and this would be the natural image suggested to an observer of the physical Dawn. Moreover, even if the phrase did not clearly in other passages mean the path of the Truth, the psychological significance would still intervene ; for the sense would then be that the dawn of illumination follows the path of the True or the Lord of the Truth, Surya Savitri.
We have precisely the same idea
repeated but with still clearer and fuller psychological indications in I. 124.
3 ; r’itasya panthâm
anveti sâdhu, prajânativa
na diço minâti: "
She moves according to the path of the
Truth and, as one that knows, she limits not the regions." Diçah, we may
note, has a double sense ; but it is not necessary to insist upon it here. Dawn
adheres to the path of the Truth and because she has this knowledge or
perception she does not limit the infinity, the bright, of which she is
the illumination. That this is the true sense of the versa is proved beyond
dispute, expressly, unmistakably, by a Rik of the fifth Mandela (V. 50. 1 )
which describes Usha dyutad-yamanam br’ihatim r’itena r’itavarim svar avahantim, "of a luminous movement, vast with the Truth, supreme in (or
possessed of) the Truth, bringing with her Swar." We have the idea of the Vast,
the idea of" the Truth, the idea of the solar light of the Page-77 world of Swar; and certainly all these notions are thus intimately and insistently associated with no mere physical Dawn! We may compare VII. 75.1. vyushâ âvo divijâ r’itena, âvishkr’in’vânâ mahimânâm âgât; Dawn born in heaven opens out things by the Truth, she comes manifesting the greatness. Again we have Dawn revealing all things by the power of the Truth and the result described as the manifestation of a certain Vastness. Finally we have the same idea described, but with the use of another word for Truth, satyr which does not, like r’itam, lend itself to any ambiguity, satyâ satyebhir mahati mahadbhir devi devebhir. Dawn true in her being with the gods who are true, vast with the Gods who are vast. This " truth " of the Dawn is much insisted upon by Vamadeva in one of his hymns, IV. 51 ; for there not only does he speak of the Dawns " encompassing the worlds immediately with horses yoked by the Truth," r’itayugbhir açvaih (cf. VI. 05. 2 ) but he speaks of them as bhadrâ r’itajâtasatyâh, " happy, and true because born from the Truth"; and in another verse he describes them as " the goddesses who awake from the seat of the Truth." This close connection of bhadrâ and r’itam reminds us of the same connection of ideas in Madhuchchhandas’ Hymn to Agni. In our psychological interpretation of the Veda we are met at every turn by the ancient conception of the Truth as the path to the Bliss. Usha, the dawn of the illumination of the Truth, must necessarily bring also the joy and the beatitude. This idea of the Dawn as the bringer of delight we find constantly in the Veda and Vasishtha gives a very positive expression to it in V. 81. 3. yd vahasi puru spârham ratnam na dâçushe mayah, "thou who bearest to the giver the beatitude as a manifold and desirable ecstasy."
A common Vedic word is the word sunr’itâ which Sayana interprets as " pleasant and true speech " ; but it seems to have
often the more general sense of " happy truths. " Dawn is sometimes described as
r’itavari, full of the Truth, sometimes as sunr’itâvari. She comes
uttering her true and happy words, sunr’itâ irayanti. As she has
Page-78 been described as the leader of the radiant herds and the leader of the days, so she is described as the luminous leader of happy truths, bhâsvati netri sunr’itânâm. ( I, 92. 7.) And this close connection in the mind of the Vedic Rishis between the idea of light, of the rays or cows, and the idea of the truth is even more unmistakable in another Rik, I. 92.14, gomati açvâvati vibhâvari…sunr’itâvari, "Dawn with thy shining herds, with thy steeds, widely luminous, full of happy truths." A similar but yet more open phrase in I. 84. 2 points the significance of this collocation of epithets, gomatîr açvâvatir viçvasuvidah, Dawns with their radiances (herds), their swift nesses (horses), rightly knowing all things. "
These are by no means all the indications
of the psychological character of the Vedic Dawn that we find in the Rig Veda.
Dawn is constantly represented as awakening to vision, perception, right
movement. "The goddess" says Gotama Rahugana, "fronts and looks upon all the
worlds, the eye of vision shines with an utter wideness; awakening all late for
movement she discovers speech for all that thinks, " viçvasya vâcham avidan
manâyoh. ( 1.92 .9 ) We have here a Dawn that releases life and mind into
their fullest wideness and we ignore the whole force of the words and phrases
chosen by the Rishi if we limit the suggestion to a mere picture of the
reawakening of earthly life in the physical dawning. And even if here the word
used for the vision brought by the Dawn, chakshuh, is capable of
indicating only physical sight, yet in other passages it is ketuh which
means perception, a perceptive vision in the mental consciousness, a faculty of
knowledge. Usha is preached , she who has this perceptive knowledge.
Mother of the radiances, she has created this perceptive vision of the mind;
gavâm janitri akr’ita pra ketum (I. 124.5.) She is herself that vision,—"
Now perceptive vision has broken out into its wide dawn where naught was
before," vi nunam uchhad asati pra ketuh (I. 124.4). She is by her
perceptive power possessed of the happy truths, chikitvit-sunr’itâvari. Page-79 This perception, this vision is, we are told, that of the Immortality, amr’itasya ketuh (III.6l.3j ; it is the light, in other words, of the Truth and the Bliss which constitute the higher or immortal consciousness. Night in the Veda is the symbol of our obscure consciousness full of ignorance in knowledge and of stumbling in will and act, therefore of all evil, sin and suffering ; light is the coming of the illuminated higher consciousness which leads to truth and happiness. We find constantly the opposition of the two words duritam and suvitam. Duritam means literally stumbling or wrong going, figuratively all that is wrong and evil, all sin, error, calamity; suvitam means literally right or good going and expresses all that is good and happy, it means especially the felicity that comes by following the right path. Thus Vasishtha says of the goddess (V.78.2) " Dawn comes divine repelling by the Light all darkness’s and evils," viçvâ tamânsi duritâ; and in a number of verses the goddess is described as awakening, impelling or leading men to right going, to the happiness, suavity.
Therefore she is the leader not only
of happy truths, but of our spiritual wealth and joy, bringer of the felicity
which is reached by man or brought to him by the Truth, esha netri râdhasah
sunr’itânâm (V.76.5.)
This wealth for which the Rishis pray is
described under the figure of material riches ; it is gomad açvâvad viravad or it is gomad açvâvad rathavach cha râdhah. Go, the cow, açva,
the horse, praja or apatya, the offspring, nr’i or vîra,
the man or hero, hiran’ya, gold, ratha, the chariot, çravas,—food
or fame, according to the ritualism interpretation,—these are the constituents
of the wealth desired by the Vedic sages. Nothing, it would seem, could be more
matter-of-fact, earthy, material ; these are indeed the blessings for which a
race of lusty barbarians full of vigorous appetite, avid of earth’s goods would
pray to their primitive gods. But we have seen that hiran’ya is used in
another sense than that of earthly gold. We have seen that the cows " return
constantly in connection with the Dawn as a figure for the Light and we have
seen that this light is connected with mental vision and with the truth that
brings the bliss. And Page-80 açva, the horse, is always in these concrete images of psychological suggestions coupled with the symbolic figure of the cow: Dawn is gomati açvâvati. Vasishtha has a verse ( V. 77.3)
Devânâm châkshuh subhagâ. vahantî, çvetam nayantî sudr’içikam açvam; Ushâ adarçi raçmibhir vyuktâ chitrâmaghâ viçvam anu prabhutâ ” Happy, bringing the gods’ eye of vision, leading the white Horse that has perfect sight, Dawn is seen expressed entirely by the rays, full of her varied riches, manifesting her birth in all things." It is clear enough that the white horse (a phrase applied to the god Agni who is the Seer-Will, kahikatoa, the prefect’s seeing force of divine will in its works, V. 1.4.) is entirely symbolical * and that the ” varied riches " she brings with her are also a figure and certainly do not mean physical wealth. Dawn is described as gomati açvâvati viravati ; and since the epithets gomati and açvâvati applied to her are symbolical and mean not "cowful and horsed," but radiant with illuminations of knowledge and accompanied by the swift nesses of force, so lavation cannot mean "man-accompanied " or accompanied by heroes or servants or sons, but rather signifies that she is attended by conquering energies or at any rate is used in some kindred and symbolic sense. This becomes quite evident in 1.113.16.yâ gomatir ushasah sarvavirâh…sâ açvadâ açnavât somasutvâ. It does not mean "the Dawns that have cows and all men or all servants, those a man, having offered the Soma, enjoys as horse-givers." The Dawn is the inner dawn which brings to man all the varied fellnesses of his widest being, force, consciousness, joy ; it is radiant with its illuminations, it is accompanied by all possible powers and energies, it gives
* The symbolism of the horse is quite evident in the hymns of Dirge tamas to the Horse of the Sacrifice, the Hymns of various Rishis to the Horse Dadhikrâvan and again in the opening of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad in which " Dawn is the head of the Horse " is the Page-81 man the full force of vitality so that he can enjoy the infinite delight of that vaster existence.
We can no longer take gomad
açvâvad viravad râdhah in a physical sense; the very language of the Veda
points us to quite another truth. Therefore the other circumstances of this
god-given wealth must be taken equally in a spiritual significance ; the
offspring, gold, chariots are symbolical; çravas is not fame or food,
but bears its psychological sense and means the higher knowledge which comes not
to the senses or the intellect, but to the divine hearing and the divine vision
of the Truth; rayim dirghaçruttamam, rayim çravasyum is that rich state
of being, that spiritually opulent felicity which turns towards the knowledge,
(çravasyu) and has a far-extended hearing for’ the vibrations of the Word
that comes to us from the regions (diçah) of the Infinite. Thus the
luminous figure of the Dawn liberates us from the material, ritual, ignorant
misunderstanding of the Veda which would lead us stumbling from pitfall to
pitfall in a very night of chaos and obscurity ; it opens to us the closed door
and admits to the heart of the Vedic knowledge.
Page-82 CHAPTER X THE THREE MODES OF NATURE To transcend the natural action of the lower Prakriti is indispensable to the soul, if it is to be free in its works. Harmonious subjection to Nature, a condition of good and perfect work for the natural instruments, is not an ideal for the soul, which should rather lie subject to God, but master of its own nature and determine as an agent of the Supreme Will the use that shall be made of the storage of energy, the conditions of environment and the rhythm of combined movement which are provided by Prakriti for the labour of the natural instruments. But Nature can only be mastered if she is surmounted and used from above by the transcendence of her essential qualities and modes of action ; other wife we are subject to them and helplessly dominated by her.
The idea of the three essential modes is a
creation of the ancient Indian thinkers and was the result of a long and
profound psychological experience. Without experience and self-observation it is
difficult to grasp accurately ; but certain broad indications can be given which
may help the sadhaka of the Way of Works to understand and analyse practically
the combinations of his own nature. The names given to these modes in the Indian
books are, respectively, sattwaguna, rajoguna and tamoguna, the quality
of good and light, the quality of passion and action, the quality of inertia and
darkness. Though ordinarily used for psychological analysis these distinctions
are valid also
Page-83 in physical nature ; for all things in Nature are said to contain them and to be in process and form the result of their interaction. Psychologically we must regard every form of things, whether animate or inanimate, as a poise of natural forces subject to environing contacts from other combinations of forces that surround it. Our own separate being, our nature as distinguished from the soul, is nothing else but such a poise and combination. In the reception of the environing contacts three modes are possible to the subject. First of all, it may suffer them inertly without any responsive reaction, any motion of self-defense, any capacity of adjustment or assimilation; this is the mode of tamas or inertia; its effect, if uncorrected by other elements, can be nothing but disintegration of the form or the nature without any new creation or new equilibrium ; and at the heart of this impotence is a principle of ignorance, of obscurity, of inability to comprehend, seize and manage the experience. On the other hand, the subject may react; it may strive, resist, attempt to dominate or engross the contacts of its environment. This is the mode of rajas or action and passion; its effect is struggle and change and new creation, victory and defeat, joy and suffering, hope and disappointment; its nature is an imperfect or wrong knowledge which brings with it effort, error, misadjustment, desire and grief. But also the subject may receive the impact with comprehension, with self-poise, with the power to assimilate because it understands, sympathies, responds, but is not overpowered. This is the mode of satrap or light and good; its effect is happiness and harmony; its nature is a clearness of knowledge which is akin to sympathy and love. In inanimate Nature these modes work mechanically without any manifestation of their innate psychological results, as inertia and disk integration, as force and reaction and creation and as poise, status, adaptation, harmony and conservation. In the mental being they reveal their psychological values.
No natural existence is cast entirely in the
single mould of any one of these qualities; the three are
Page-84 sent in each being in a constant combining of shifting relations and even, in a way, of mutual struggle to dominate each other. Every one of us has his sattwic states of light, clearness, happiness, poise and sympathy with the environment, his raja sic moods of desire and passion and struggle, joy and sorrow, work and eager creation and reaction on the environment, his tama sic lapses of depression, ignorance, incapacity, obscurity, recoil from or dull submission to the environment. Not only is this always so, but each of us is sattwic in some directions of his energy or in some parts of his being, in others raja sic, in yet others tama sic. Only, according as one or other of the modes dominates in his general temperament and type of mind and action, we can say that he is the sattwic, raja sic or tama sic man. When once a man h is analysed himself and watched this play of the modes of nature within him, he sees very soon how mistaken he was in thinking of himself as the doer of his works. It was his nature that was acting all the while in its own modes, that is to say, the three general qualities of Nature disposed according to their particular combination and working in himself ; lie, the ego, was merely their subject and plaything; his moral qualities and hutment. in powers, his anger and his forbearance, his cruelty and his mercy, his love and his hatred, his sin and his virtue, his light and his darkness, his passion of joy and his anguish of sorrow were their play to which the soul, attracted, won and subjected, lent its passive concurrence. Still, the soul has a word in the matter. It can attempt by an inner will as the lord and giver of the sanction to determine in principle the general play and combination, although the particular act and impulse must always be Nature’s business. It may attempt to dictate a harmony for Nature to execute, and the plain way seems to be to insist on the sattwic quality at the expense of the others.
But there is this difficulty that no one of the
qualities can prevail by itself against its two companions. If, envisaging the
quality of desire and passion as
the cause of disturbance, suffering, sin
and sorrow, we seek to quell and subdue it, rajas sinks but trams rises. For,
the principle Page-85 of activity dulled, inertia takes its place. There may well be a quiet peace, happiness, knowledge, love, right sentiment, but the quiet in the soul tends to become a tranquility of inaction. The man has become sattwa-tama sic; mental and moral obscurity may be absent, but so are the intense springs of action, and this is another kind of incompetence, a hampering limitation. For tamas is a double principle; it contradicts rajas by inertia, it contradicts sattwa by narrowness and obscurity and, whichever of these is depressed, it pours in to occupy its place. If, to correct this imperfection, we call in rajas again and bid it ally itself to sattwic and get rid of the dark principle by a united agency, we find that we have elevated our action, but that there is again subjection to raja sic eagerness, passion, disappointment, suffering, anger; these movements may be more exalted in their scope and spirit and action than before, but they are not the peace, freedom, power and self-mastery at which we are aiming. Wherever desire and ego harbour, these passions harbour with them. If on the other hand we seek a compromise between the three modes with sattwa leading, we have only arrived at a more temperate action of the play of the Nature. We have taken a new poise; we have not achieved freedom and mastery. A radically different movement is necessary. We must avoid the error of accepting the action of the modes of Nature by which the soul is involved in their operations and therefore subject to their law. Sattwa as well as rajas and tamas must be transcended the golden chain must be broken as well as the leaden and that of a mixed alloy. The Gita therefore prescribes a new method of self-discipline. It is to stand back in oneself from their action and observe it as the Witness seated above this surge of the forces of our nature, watching it but impartially indifferent to it. As they rise and fall in their waves, they have to be watched, studied, but not either accepted or interfered with by the observing soul.
The first advantage of this process is that one
begins to understand oneself and to see entirely without the
Page-86 least blinding by egoism this play of Nature’s modes, to pursue it into all its ramifications, disguises, subtleties—for it is full of ruse and snare and treachery–until one becomes conscious of all action as their interaction, aware of all their processes and therefore incapable of being surprised or seized by their assaults. The second advantage is that we perceive the ego to be the knot of their interaction and perceiving it are delivered from illusions. We escape from the sattwic egoism of the saint and the thinker and the altruist as well as from the raja sic egoism of the self-seeker, the man of eager personal desires, passions and self-interest and from the tama sic egoism of the ignorant or passive soul attached dully and unintelligently to the common round. And the third advantage is that perceiving the essential egoism of all this action, we no longer seek to find in the ego or individual personality the means of self-correction and self-liberation, but look above beyond the instruments and the working of Nature to the Master who alone is pure, is free and rules.
In the progression to which this
detachment leads, we
first become superior to the three modes,—the soul separates itself from the
lower nature and takes its stand high above it. Nature continues to act; desire,
grief and joy attack the heart, the instruments fall into weariness, inaction
and obscurity, light and peace come back to the heart and mind; but the soul
stands unchanged and untouched by these changes, observing and unmoved by the
grief and desire of the lower members, smiling at their joys and their
straining, regarding and unveil powered by the dark nesses of the mind or the
weaknesses of the heart and nerves and body, uncompelled by and unattached to
the mind’s relief and sense of ease or of power in the return of light and
gladness. It throws itself into none of these things, it waits unmoved for the
know Ledge of a higher will and intention. Thus doing it becomes even" tally
free from the strife of the three modes and qualities. For the lower nature
feels progressively a compulsion from above; its habits, because they receive no
further sanction, begin steadily to lose their frequency and force of recurrence
;
Page-87 it understands at last that it is called to a higher action and a better state any , however slowly or relict, aptly, it submits, turns, prepares its-If for the change. Matter or body is in its nature predominantly tama sic, life and nervous force predominantly raja sic, mind predominantly sattwic. The mixture and uneven operation of the three modes in these three instruments acting upon each other leads to a confused, troubled and improper action which is now the normal condition of man. But there is another action possible, more truly right, normal and natural to the deepest relations of Purusha and Prakriti although supernatural to our present imperfect nature. Body should be a passive field and instrument; but capable of responding to every demand of force and of holding and supporting every variety and intensity of experience. The nervous and emotional being should be capable of tireless action and enjoyment of experience and relation, but self-possessed and self-poised, neither harried by desire and importunate impulses nor dulled by indolence and incapacity. Mind should be full of an essential light and peace, not a knowledge made up of mental constructions nor an ease that is dependent on release from the strenuous-ness of creative and active energy. All three should be the harmonised instruments of a higher force, bliss and knowledge possessing them from a source beyond themselves.
Such a condition would be the true
equality and unification of the three modes of Prakriti in that perfect temper
of being which belongs to the divine nature. There is no inertia or
obscurity; tamas is replaced by a divine repose, peace and tranquility out of
which is released as if from a supreme state of calm concentration the play of
knowledge and action. There is no desire, striving or troubled impulse of
action, creation and possession; rajas is replaced by the self-possessed act of
force which even in its greatest intensities does not shake the poise or stain
the peace of the soul. There is no restriction of a mind-constructed and
therefore insecure or else inactive light and ease ; sattwa is replaced by a
wide illumination and a profound bliss identical with the depth and infinite
existence of the soul
Page-88 and embracing in its amplitudes both deepest repose and in tensest action.
This supreme harmony comes by the
cessation of egoistic choice and action. The individual ego ceases to strive, to
select its aims and means or to initiate any act. In its place the real Master
of all our activities from the security of His divine will and knowledge gives
the sanction to a purified and exalted nature and the individual centre of
personality becomes only a servant, reflector and luminous participator in His
light, joy and power. Acting it acts not, nor is brand by any reaction. This is
the culmination of the Way of Works toward which the transcendence of the three
modes of Nature is a preparation and an important aid and condition.
Page-89 V The Upanishad, reversing the usual order of our logical thought which would put Mind and Sense first or Life first and Speech last as a subordinate function, begins its negative description of Brahman with an explanation of the very striking phrase, Speech of our speech. And we can see that it means a Speech beyond ours, an absolute expression of which human language is only a shadow and as if an artificial counterfeit. What idea underlies this phrase of the Upanishad and this precedence given to the faculty of speech ? Continually, in studying the Upanishads, we have to divest ourselves of modern notions and to realise as closely as possible the associations that lay behind the early Vedantic use of words. We must recollect that in the Vedic system the Word was the creature; by the World Brahma creates the forms of
All creation is expression by the Word ;
but the form which is expressed is only a symbol or representation of the thing
which is. We see this in human speech which only presents to the mind a mental
form of
Page-90 himself in the objects of sense and consciousness which constitute the universe, just as the human word expresses a mental image of those objects. That Word is creative in a deeper and more original sense than human speech and with a power of which the utmost creativeness of human speech can be only a far-off and feeble analogy. The word used here for utterance means literally a raising up to confront the mind. Brahman, says the Upanishad, is that which cannot be so raised up before the mind by speech. Human speech, as we see, raises up only the presentation of a presentation, the mental figure of an object which is itself only a figure of the sole Reality, Brahman. It has indeed a power of new creation, but even that power only extends to the creation of new mental images, that is to say of adaptive formations based upon previous mental images. Such a limited power gives no idea of the original creative puissance which the old thinkers attributed to the divine Word. If, however, we go a little deeper below the surface, we shall arrive at a power in human speech which does give us a remote image of the original creative .Word. We know that vibration of sound has the power to create—and to destroy—forms; this is a commonplace of modern Science. Let us suppose that behind all forms there has been a creative vibration of sound. Next, let us examine the relation of human speech to sound in general. We see at once that speech is only a particular application of the principle of sound, a vibration made by pressure of the breath in its passage through the throat and mouth. At first, beyond doubt, it must have been formed naturally and spontaneously to express the emotions created by an object or occurrence and only afterwards seized upon by the mind to express first the idea of the object and then ideas about the object. The value of speech would therefore seem to be only representative and not creative.
But, in fact, speech is creative. It
creates forms of emotion, mental images and impulses of action. The ancient
Page-91 Vedic theory and practice extended this creative action of speech by the use of the Mantra. The theory of the Mantra is that it is a word of power born out of the secret depths of our being where it has been brooded upon by a deeper consciousness than the mental, framed in the heart and not constructed by the intellect, held in the mind, again concentrated on by the waking mental consciousness and then thrown out silently or vocally—the silent word is perhaps held to be more potent than the spoken— precisely for the work of creation. The Mantra can not only create new subjective states in ourselves, alter our psychical being, reveal knowledge and faculties we did not before possess, can not only produce similar results in other minds than that of the user, but can produce vibrations in the mental and vital atmosphere which result in effects, in actions and even in the production of material forms on the physical plane. As a matter of fact, even ordinarily, even daily and hourly we do produce by the word within us thought-vibrations, thought-forms which result in corresponding vital and physical vibrations, act upon ourselves, act upon others, and end in the indirect creation of actions and of forms in the physical world. Man is constantly acting -upon man both by the silent and the spoken word and he so acts and creates though less directly and powerfully even in the rest of Nature. But because we are stupidly engrossed with the external forms and phenomena of the world and do not trouble to examine its subtle and non-physical processes, we remain ignorant of all this field of science behind.
The Vedic use of the Mantra is only a conscious
utilisation of this secret power of the word. And if we take the theory that
underlies it together with our previous hypothesis of a creative vibration of
sound behind every formation, we shall begin to understand the idea of the
original creative Word. Let us suppose a conscious use of the vibrations of
sound which will produce corresponding forms or changes of form. But Matter is
only, in the ancient view, the lowest of the planes of existence. Let us realise
then
Page-92 that a vibration of sound on the material plane presupposes a corresponding vibration on the vital without which it could not have come into play ; that again presupposes a corresponding originative vibration on the mental ; the mental presupposes a corresponding originative vibration on the supramental at the very root of things. But a mental vibration implies thought and perception and a supramental vibration implies a supreme vision and discernment. All vibration of sound on that higher plane is, then, instinct with and expressive of this supreme discernment of a truth in things and is at the same time creative, instinct with a supreme power which casts into forms this truth discerned and eventually, descending from plane to plane, reproduces it in the physical form or object created in Matter by enteric sound. Thus we see that the theory of creation by the Word which is the absolute expression of the Truth, and the theory of the material creation by sound-vibration in the ether correspond and are two logical poles of the same idea. They both belong to the same ancient Vedic system. This, then, is the supreme Word, Speech of our speech. It is vibration of pure Existence, instinct with the perceptive and originative power of infinite and omnipotent consciousness, shaped by the Mind behind mind into the inevitable word of the Truth of things; out of whatever substance on whatever plane, the form or physical expression emerges by its creative agency. The Supermind using the Word is the creative Logos. The Word has its seed-sounds—suggesting the eternal syllable of the Veda, A U M, and the seed-sounds of the Tantrums—which carry in them the principles of things; it has its forms which stand behind the revelatory and inspired speech that comes to man’s supreme faculties, and these compel the forms of things in the universe ; it has its rhythms,—for it is no disordered vibration, but moves out into great cosmic measures,—and according to the rhythm is the law, arrangement, harmony, processes of the world it builds. Life itself is a rhythm of God.
But what is it that is expressed or raised up before
Page-93 the consciousness by the Word in the world r Not Brahman, but forms and phenomena of Brahman. Brahman is not, cannot be expressed by the Word; he does not use the word to express himself, but is known to his own self-awareness and even the truths of himself that stand behind the forms of cosmic things are always self-expressed to his eternal vision. Speech creates, expresses, but is itself only a creation and expression. Brahman is not expressed by speech, but speech is itself expressed by Brahman. Therefore it is not the happenings and phenomena of the world that we have to accept finally as our object of pursuit, but That which brings out from itself the Wood by which they were thrown into form for our observation by the consciousness and for our pursuit by the will. In other words, the supreme Existence that has originated all.
Human speech is only a secondary expression and at its highest a shadow of the
divine Word, of the seed-sounds, the satisfying rhythms, the revealing forms of
sound that are the omniscient and omnipotent speech of the eternal Thinker,
Harmonist, Creator. The highest inspired speech to which the human mind can
attain, the word most unanalysably expressive of supreme truth, the most
puissant syllable or mantra can only be its far-off representation.
Page-94 THE CONQUEST OF TRUTH TO KNOW THE IMPERMANENCE OF THINGS. 1 Things mortal change their aspect daily; they are nothing but a lie. 2 The disciple should think that all things in this world are subject to a constant transformation…that all things in the past are like a dream, that all in the present are like a flash of lightning and all in the future like images that arrive spontaneously into existence. 3 Matter is like a stream in perpetual flow; the actions of Nature manifest by continual mutations and endless transformations. There is hardly anything that is stable. Behold near thee this immense abyss of the times that no longer are and the future in which all 4 things will disappear.—All is movement and nothing is fixed; we cannot cross over the same stream twice. 5 Everything that is composite is soon destroyed and, like the lightning in heaven, does not last for long. 6 What desolates my heart, is this sort of continual destruction throughout Nature; she has created nothing which does not destroy its neighbour or destroy itself. Thus, staggering and bewildered in the midst of these oscillating forces of earth and heaven, I move
1) Hermes: On Rebirth. —2) Açwaghosha.— 3) Marcus Aurelius.— 4) Heraclitus. 58.—5) Lalita-Vistara— 6) Goethe Page-95 forward seeing nothing but a world in which all devours and ruminates eternally. 7 It is a horrible thing to feel continually passing away everything which one possesses or to which one can attach oneself and yet to have no desire to seek out 8 whether there is not something permanent.—Therefore seek one thing only,—the kingdom of the permanent. 9 The contemplation of impermanence is a door which leads to liberation and dissolves the formations of 10 Illusion.—If one ponders well, one finds that all that passes has never truly existed. 11 With the comprehension of the nature, impermanent, void of reality in itself and subject to grief, of all things the sun of the true wisdom rises. Without this com- 12 pretension there can be no real light.—All aggregations are transient, all aggregations are subject to sorrow, all aggregations are without any substantial reality; when one is entirely penetrated with this fact, one is delivered from sorrow. This is the way of purification. 13 When thou hast recognised the impermanence of all formations, thou halt contemplate that which does 14 not perish and remains for ever.—The external forms are alone subject to change and destruction; for these 15 forms are not the things themselves.—Deliver thyself from the inconstancy of human things.
7) Pascal. —8) id.—9) Abhidhammatthasangaha.—10) Schopenhauer.— 11) Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king.—12) Dhammapada.—14) Giordano Bruno.— 15) Seneca: De Providentia. Page-96 THE DOCTRINE OF THE MYSTICS.
The Veda possesses the high spiritual substance of the Upanishads, but
lacks their phraseology ; it is an inspired knowledge as yet insufficiently
equipped with intellectual and philosophical terms. We find a language of poets
and illuminates to whom all experience is real, vivid, sensible, even concrete,
not yet of thinkers and system tiers to whom the realities of the mind and soul
have become abstractions. Yet a system, a doctrine there is ; but its structure
is supple, its terms are concrete, the cast of its thought is practical and
experimental, but in the accomplished type of an old and sure experience, not of
one that is crude and uncertain because yet in the making. Here we have the
ancient psychological science and the art of spiritual living of which the
Upanishads are the philosophical outcome and modification and Vedanta, Sankhya
and Yoga the late intellectual result and logical dogma. But like all life, like
all science that is still vital, it is free from the armored rigidities of the
reasoning intellect ; in spite of its established symbols and sacred formulae it
is still large, free, flexible, fluid, supple and subtle. It has the movement of
life and the large breath of the soul. And while the later philosophies r. re
books of Knowledge and make liberation the one supreme good, the Veda is a Book
of Works and the hope for which it spurns our present
Page-97 bonds and littleness is perfection, self-achievement, immortality. The doctrine of the Mystics recognise an Unknowable, Timeless and Unnameable behind and above all things and not sizable by the studious pursuit of the mind. Impersonally, it is That, the One Existence; to the pursuit of our personality it reveals itself out of the secrecy of things as the God or Deva,—nameless though he has many names, immeasurable and beyond description, though he holds in himself all description of name, and knowledge and all measures of form and substance, force and activity. The Deva or Godhead is both the original cause and the final result. Divine Existent, builder of the worlds, lord and begetter of all things, Male and Female, Being and Consciousness, Father and Mother of the Worlds and their inhabitants, he is also their Son and ours : for he is the Divine Child born into the Worlds who manifests himself in the growth of the creature. He is Rudra and Vishnu, Parapets and Hiranyagarbha, Surya, Agni, India, Vayu, Soma, Brihaspati,—Varuna and Mitra and Bhaga and Aryaman, all the gods. He is the wise, mighty and liberating Son born from our works and our sacrifice, the Hero in our warfare and Seer of our knowledge, the White Steed in the front of our days who gallops towards the upper Ocean.,
The soul of man soars as the Bird, the Hans, past the
shining firmaments of physical and mental consciousness, climbs as the traveler
and fighter beyond earth of body and heaver of mind by the ascending path of the
Truth to find this Godhead waiting for us, leaning down to us from the secrecy
of the highest supreme where it is seated in the triple divine Principle and the
source of the Beatitude. The Deva is indeed, whether attracting and exalted
there or here helpful to us in the person of the greater Gods, always the Friend
and Lover of man, the pastoral Master of the Herds who gives us the sweet milk
and the clarified butter from the udder of the shining Cow of the infinitude. He
is the source and out pourer of the ambrosial Wine of divine delight and we
drink it drawn from the sevenfold waters of existence or pressed out
Page-98 from the luminous plant on the hill of being and uplifted by its raptures we become immortal. Such are some of the images of this ancient mystic adoration. The Godhead has built this universe in a complex system of worlds which we find both within us and without, subjectively cognised and objectively sensed. It is a rising tier of earths and heavens ; it is a rising tier of earths and heavens ; it is a stream of diverse waters; it is a Light of seven rays, or of eight or nine or ten; it is a Hill of many plateaus. The seers often image it in a series of trios; there are three earths and three heavens. More, there is a triple world below,—Heaven, Earth and the intervening mid-region; a triple world between, the shining heavens of the Sun ; a triple world above, the supreme and rapturous abodes of the Godhead. But other principles intervene and make the order of the worlds yet more complex. These principles are psychological ; for since all creation is a formation of the Spirit, every external system of worlds must in each of its planes be in material correspondence with some power or rising degree of consciousness of which it is the objective symbol and must house a kindred internal order of things. To understand the Veda we must seize this Vedic parallelism and distinguish the cosmic gradations to which it leads. We rediscover the same system behind the late Puranic symbols and it is thence that we can derive its tabulated series most simply and clearly. For there are seven principles of existence and the seven Puranic worlds correspond to them with sufficient precision, thus :— .
Page-99
Now this system which in the Purina is simple enough, is a good deal more intricate in the Veda. There the three highest worlds are classed together as the triple divine Principle,—for they dwell always together in a Trinity; infinity is their scope, bliss is their foundation. They are supported by the vast regions of the Truth whence a divine Light radiates out towards our mentality in the three heavenly luminous worlds of Swar, the domain of India. Below is ranked the triple system in which we live. We have the same cosmic gradations as in the Purina’s but they are differently grouped,—seven worlds in principle, five in practice, three in their general groupings :
And as each principle can be modified by
the subordinate manifestation of the others within it, each world is divisible
into several provinces according to different arrangements and self-orderings of
its creative light of consciousness. Into this framework, then, we must place
all the complexities of the subtle vision and fertile imagery of the seers down
to the hundred cities which are now in the
Page-100 possession of the hostile kings, the Lords of division and evil. But the gods shall break them open and give them for his free possession to the Aryan worshipper ! But where are these worlds and whence are they created ? Here we have one of the profoundest ideas of the Vedic sages. Man dwells in the bosom of the Earth-Mother and is aware of this world of mortality only ; but there is a superconscient high beyond where the divine worlds are seated in a luminous secrecy ; there is a Subconscient or inconscient below his surface waking impressions and from that pregnant Night the worlds as he sees them are born. And these other worlds between the luminous upper and the tenebrous lower ocean ? They are here. Man draws from the life-world his vital being, from the mind-world his mentality ; he is ever in secret communication with them ; he can consciously enter into them, be born into them, if he will. Even into the solar worlds of the Truth he can rise, enter the portals of the Superconscient, cross the threshold of the Supreme. The divine doors shall swing open to his increasing soul.
This human ascension is possible because every being really holds in himself
all that his outward vision perceives as if external to him. We have subjective
faculties hidden in us which correspond to all the tiers and strata of the
objective cosmic system and these form for us so many planes of our possible
existence. This material life and our narrowly limited consciousness of the
physical world are far from being the sole experience permitted to man,—be he a
thousand times the Son of Earth. If maternal Earth bore him and retains him in
her arms, yet is Heaven also one of his parents and has a claim on his being. It
is open to him to become awake to profounder depths and higher heights within
and such awakening is his intended progress. And as he mounts thus to higher and
ever higher planes of himself, new worlds open to his life and his vision and
become the field of his experience and the home of his spirit. He lives in
contact and union with their powers and godheads and remould himself in their
image. Each ascent is thus a new birth of the soul, and
Page-101 the Veda calls the worlds " births " as well as seats and dwelling-places. For as the Gods have built the series of the cosmic worlds, even so they labour to build up the same series of ordered states and ascending degrees in man’s consciousness from the mortal condition to the crowning immortality. They raise him from the limited material state of being in which’ our lowest manhood dwells contented and subject to the Lords of Division, give him a life rich and abundant with the many and rapid shocks and impulsions from the dynamic worlds of Life and Desire where the Gods battle with the demons and raise him yet higher from those troubled rapid ties and intensities into the steadfast purity and clarity of the high mental existence. For pure thought and feeling are man’s sky, his heaven ; this whole vitality existence of emotion, passions, affections of which desire is the pivot, forms for him a mid-world ; body and material living are his earth.
But pure thought and pure psychic state are not the highest height of the
human ascension. The home of the Gods is an absolute Truth which lives in solar
glories beyond mind. Man ascending thither strives no longer as the thinker but
is victoriously the seer ; he is no longer this mental creature but a divine
being. His will, life, thought, emotion, sense, act are all transformed into
values of an all-puissant Truth and remain no longer an embarrassed or a
helpless tangle of mixed truth and falsehood. He moves lamely no more in our
narrow and grudging limits but ranges in the unobstructed Vast ; toils and
zigzags no longer amid these Crooked nesses, but follows a swift and conquering
straightness; feeds no longer on broken fragments, but is suckled by the teats
of Infinity. Therefore he has to break through and out beyond these firmaments
of earth and heaven ; conquering firm possession of the solar worlds, entering
on to his highest Height he has to learn how to dwell in the triple principle of
Immortality.
Page-102 This contrast of the mortality’ we are and the immortal condition to which we can aspire is the key of the Vedic thought and practice. Veda is the earliest gospel we have of man’s immortality and these ancient stanzas conceal the primitive discipline of its inspired discoverers. Substance of being, light of consciousness, active force and possessive delight are the constituent principles of existence ; but their combination in us may be either limited, divided, hurt, broken and obscure or infinite, enlightened, vast, whole and unhurt. Limited and divided being is ignorance; it is darkness and-weakness, it is grief and pain; in the Vast, in the integral, in the infinite we abuts seek for the desirable riches of substance, light, force and joy. Limitation is mortality ; immortality comes to us as an accomplished self-possession in the infinite and the power to live and move in firm vastnesses. Therefore it is in proportion as he widens and on condition that he increases constantly in substance of his being, brightens an ever loftier flame of will and vaster light of knowledge, advances the boundaries of his consciousness, raises the degrees and enlarges the breadth of his power, force and strength, confirms an intense beatitude of joy and liberates his soul into immeasurable peace that man becomes capable of immortality.
To widen is to acquire new births. The aspiring material creature becomes the
straining vital man ; he in turn transmutes himself into the subtle mental and
psychical being ; this subtle thinker grows into the wide, multiple and cosmic
man open on all sides of him to all the multitudinous in flowing of the Truth ;
the cosmic soul rising in attainment strives as the spiritual man for a higher
peace, joy and harmony. These are the five Aryan types, each of them a great
people occupying its own province or state of the total human nature. But there
is also the absolute Aryan who would conquer and. pass beyond these states to
the transcendental harmony of them all. It is the supramental Truth that is the
instrument of
Page-103 this great inner transfiguration. That replaces mentality by luminous vision and the eye of the gods, mortal life by breath and force of the infinite existence, obscure and death-possessed substance by the free and immortal conscious-being. The progress of man must be therefore, first, his self-expanding into a puissant vitality capable of sustaining all vibrations of action and experience and a clear mental and psychical purity ; secondly, an outgrowing of this human light and power and its transmutation into an infinite Truth and an immortal Will. Our normal life and consciousness are a dark or at best a starlit Night. Dawn comes by the arising of the Sun of that higher Truth and with Dawn there comes the effective sacrifice. By the sacrifice the Dawn itself and the lost Sun are constantly conquered out of the returning Night and the luminous herds rescued from the darkling cave of the Pains ; by the sacrifice the rain of the abundance of heaven is poured out for us and the sevenfold waters of the higher existence descend impetuously upon our earth because the coils of the obscuring Python, the all-enfolding and all withholding Virtual, have been cloven asunder by the God-Mind’s flashing lightning’s ; in the sacrifice the Soma wine is distilled and uplifts us on the stream of its immortalising ecstasy to the highest heavens. Our sacrifice is the offering of all our gains and works to the powers of the higher existence. The whole world is a dumb and helpless sacrifice in which the soul is bound as a victim self-offered to unseen Gods. The liberating Word must be found, the illuminating hymn must be framed in the heart and mind of man and his life must be turned into a conscious and voluntary offering in which the soul is no longer the victim, but the master of the sacrifice. By right sacrifice and by the all-creative and all-expressive Word that shall arise out of his depths as a sublime hymn to the Gods man can achieve all things. He shall conquer his perfection ; Nature shall come to him as a willing and longing bride; he shall become her seer and rule her as her King.
By she hymn of prayer and God-attraction, by the
Page-104 hymn of praise and God-affirmation, by the hymn of God-attainment and self-expression man can house in himself the Gods, build in this gated house of his being the living image of their deity, grow into divine births, form within himself vast and luminous worlds for his soul to inhabit. By the word of the Truth the all-engendering Surya creates ; by that rhythm Brahmanaspati evokes the worlds and Twister fashions them ; finding the all-puissant Word in his intuitive heart, shaping it in his mind the human thinker, the mortal creature can create in himself all the forms, all the states and conditions he desires and, achieving, can conquer for himself all wealth of being, light, strength and enjoyment. He builds up his integral being and aids his gods to destroy the evil armies ; the hosts of his spiritual enemies are slain who have divided, torn and afflicted his nature. The image of this sacrifice is sometimes that of a journey or voyage ; for it travels, it ascends ; it has a goal—the vastness, the true existence, the light, that felicity—and it is called upon to discover and keep the good, the straight and the happy path to the goal, the arduous, yet joyful road of the Truth. It has to climb, led by the flaming strength of the divine Will, from plateau to plateau as of a mountain, it has to cross as in a ship the waters of existence, traverse its rivers, overcome their deep pits and rapid currents; its aim is to arrive at the far-off ocean of light and infinity.
And this is no easy or peaceful march; it is for long seasons a fierce and
relentless battle. Constantly the Aryan man has to labour and to fight and
conquer; he must be a tireless toiler and traveler and
a stern warrior*, he must force open and storm and sack city after city, win kingdom after kingdom, overthrow and tread down ruthlessly enemy after enemy. His whole progress is a warring of Gods and Titans, Gods and Giants, Indra and the Python, Aryan and
Dasyus. Aryan adverse arise even he has to face. Page-105 in the open field; for old friends and helpers turn into enemies; the kings of Aryan states he would conquer and overpass join themselves to the Dasyus and are leagued against him in supreme battle to prevent his free and utter passing on. But the Dasyus is the natural enemy. These dividers, plunderers, harmful powers, these Donavan, sons of the Mother of division, are spoken of by the Rishis under many general appellations. There are Rachises; there are Eaters and Devourers, Wolves and Teasers; there are hurters and haters; there are dalliers; there are confiners or censurers. But we are given also many specific names. Virtual, the Serpent, is the grand Adversary; for he obstructs with his coils of darkness all possibility of divine existence and divine action. And even when Virtual is slain by the light, fiercer enemies arise out to him. Susana afflicts us with his impure and ineffective force, Mabuchi fights man by his weaknesses, and others too assail, each with his proper evil. Then there -are Vala and the Pains, miser traffickers in the sense-life, stealers and congealers of the higher Light and its illuminations which they can only darken and misuse,—an impious host who are jealous of their store and will not offer sacrifice to the Gods. These and other personalities—they are much more than personifications— of our ignorance, evil, weakness and many limitations make constant war upon man; they encircle him from near or they shoot their arrows at him from afar or even dwell in his gated house in the place of the Gods and with their shapeless stammering mouths and their. insufficient breath of force mar his self-expression. They must be expelled, overpowered, slain, thrust down into their nether darkness by the aid of the mighty and helpful deities.
The Vedic deities are names, powers, personalities of the universal Godhead
and the}’ represent each some essential puissance of the Divine Being. They
manifest the cosmos and are manifest in it. Children of Light, Sons of the
Infinite, they recognise in the soul of man their brother and ally and desire to
help and increase him by themselves increasing in him so as to possess his world
with their light,
Page-106 strength and beauty. The Gods call man to a divine companionship and alliance; they attract and uplift him to their luminous fraternity, invite his aid and offer theirs against the Sons of Darkness and Division-. Man in return calls that Gods to his sacrifice, offers to them his swift nesses and his strengths, his clarities and his sweet nesses,— milk and butter of the shining Cow, distilled juices of the Plant of Joy, the Horse of the Sacrifice, the cake and the wine, the grain for the God-Mind’s radiant coursers. He receives them into his being and their gifts into his life, increases them by the hymn and the wine and forms perfectly—as a smith forges iron, says the Veda—their great and luminous godheads. All this Vedic imagery is easy to understand when once we have the key, bat it must not be mistaken for mere imagery. The Gods are not simply poetical personifications of abstract ideas or of psychological and physical functions of Nature. To the Vedic seers they are living realities; the vicissitudes of the human soul represent a cosmic struggle not merely of principles and tendencies but of the cosmic Powers which support and embody them. These are the Gods and the Demons. On the world-stage and in the individual soul the same real drama with the same personages is enacted. To what gods shall the sacrifice be offered ? Who shall be invoked to manifest and protect in the human being this increasing godhead ?
Agni first, for without him the sacrificial flame cannot burn on the altar of
the soul. That flame of Agni is the seven-tongued power of the Will, a Force of
God instinct with knowledge. This conscious and forceful will is the immortal
guest in our mortality, a pure priest and a-divine worker, the mediator between
earth and heaven. It carries what we offer to the higher Powers and brings back
in return their force and light and joy into our humanity.
Page-107 Indra, the Puissant next, who is the power of pure Existence self-manifested as the Divine Mind. As Agni is one pole of Force instinct with knowledge that sends its current upward from earth to heaven, so Indra is the other pole of Light instinct with force which descends from heaven to earth. He comes down into our world as the Hero with the shining horses and slays darkness and division with his lightning’s, pours down the life-giving heavenly waters, finds in the trace of the hound, Intuition, the lost or hidden illuminations, makes the Sun of Truth mount high in the heaven of our mentality. Surya, the Sun, is the master of that supreme Truth, —truth of basing, truth of knowledge, truth of process and act and movement and functioning. He is therefore the creator or rather the manifester of all things—for creation is out bringing, expression by the Truth and Will—and the father, fosterer, enlightener of our souls. The illuminations we seek are the herds of this Sun who comes to us in the track of the divine Dawn and releases and reveals in us night-hidden world after world up to the highest Beatitude. Of that beatitude Soma is the representative deity. The wine of his ecstasy is concealed in the growths of earth, in the waters of existence; even here in our physical being are his immortalising juices and they have to be pressed out and offered to all the gods; for in that strength these shall increase and conquer.
Each of these primary deities has others associated with him who
fulfill
functions that arise-from his own. For if the truth of Surya is to be
established firmly in our mortal nature, there are previous conditions that are
indispensable; a vast purity and clear wideness destructive of all sin and
crooked falsehood,—and this is Varuna; a luminous power of love and
comprehension leading and forming into harmony all our thoughts, acts and
impulses,—this is Mitra; an immortal puissance of clear-discerning aspiration
and endeavor,—this is Aryaman; a happy spontaneity of the right enjoyment of
all things dispelling the evil dream of sin and error and suffering,—this is
Bhaga. These four
Page-108 are powers of the Truth of Surya. For the whole bliss of Soma to be established perfectly in our nature a happy and enlightened and unnamed condition of mind, vitality and body are necessary. This condition is given to us by the twin Açwins; wedded to the daughter of Light, drinkers of honey, bringers of perfect satisfactions, healers of maim and malady they occupy our parts of knowledge and parts of action and prepare our mental, vital and physical lying for an easy and victorious ascension. Indra, the Divine Mind, as the shaper of mental forms has for his assistants, his artisans, the Rebus, human powers who by the work of sacrifice and their brilliant ascension to the high dwelling-place of the Sun have attained to immortality and help mankind to repeat their achievement. They shape by the mind Indri’s horses, the Açwins, chariot, the weapons of the Gods, all the means of the journey and the battle. But as giver of the Light of truth and as Vritra slayer Indra is aided by the Maruts, who are powers of will and nervous or vital Force that have attained to the light of thought and the voice of self-expression. They are behind all thought and speech as its impellers and they battle towards the Light, Truth and Bliss of the supreme Consciousness.
There are also female energies; for the Deva is both Male and Female and the
gods also are either activating souls or passively executive and methodising
energies. Aditi, infinite Mother of the gods, comes first; and there are
besides five powers of the Truth-consciousness,—Maui or Bahrain, the vast Word
that brings us all things out of the divine source; Ilea, the strong primal word
of the Truth who gives us its active vision; Saraswati, its streaming current
and the word of its inspiration; Sarama, the Intuition, hound of heaven who
descends into the cavern of the Subconscient and finds there the concealed
illuminations; Dakshina, whose function is to discern rightly, dispose the
action and the offering and distribute in the sacrifice to each godhead its
portion. Each god, too, has his female energy.
Page-109 All this action and struggle and ascension is supported by Heaven our Father and Earth our Mother, Parents of the Gods, who sustain respectively the purely mental and psychic and the physical consciousness. Their large and free scope is the condition of our achievement. Vayu, Master of life, links them together by the mid-air, the region of vital force. And there are other deities,—Pajama, giver of the join of heaven; Dadhikravan, the divine warhorse, a power of Agni; the mystic Dragon of the Foundations; Trite Apatya who on the third plane of existence consummates our triple being; and more besides. The development of all these godheads is necessary to our perfection. And that perfection must be attained on all our levels,—in the wideness of earth, our physical being and consciousness; in the full force of vital speed and action and enjoyment and nervous vibration, typified as the Horse which must be brought forward to up bear our Endeavour; in the perfect gladness of the heart of emotion and a brilliant heat and clarity of the mind throughout our intellectual and psychical being; in the coming of the supramental Light, the Dawn and the Sun and the shining Mother of the herds, to transform all our existence; for so comes to us the possession of the Truth, by the Truth the admirable surge of the Bliss, in the Bliss infinite Consciousness of absolute being.
Three great Gods, origin of the Puranic Trinity, largest
puissance of the
supreme Godhead, make possible this development and upward evolution; they
support in its grand lines and fundamental energies all these complexities of
that? cosmos. Brahmanaspati is the Creator; by the word, by his cry he creates,—that
is to say, he expresses, he brings out all existence and conscious knowledge and
movement of life and eventual forms from the darkness of the Inconscient. Rudra,
the Violent and Merciful, the Mighty One, presides over the struggle of life to
affirm itself; he is the armed, wrathful and beneficent Power of God who lifts
forcibly the creation upward, smites all that opposes, scourges all that errs
and resists, heals all that is wounded and suffers and complains and submits.
Vishnu
Page-110 of the vast pervading motion holds in ‘his triple stride all these worlds; it is he that makes a wide room for the action of Indra in our limited mortality; it is by him and with him that we rise into his highest seat3 where we find waiting for us the Friend, the Beloved, the Beatific Godhead. Our earth shaped out of the dark inconscient ocean of existence lifts its high formations and ascending peaks heavenward; heaven of mind has its own formations, clouds that give out their lightning’s and their waters of life; the streams of the clarity and the honey ascend out of the sub-conscient ocean below and seek the superconscient ocean above; and from above that ocean sends downward its rivers of the light and truth and bliss even into our physical being. Thus in images of physical Nature the Vedic poets sing the hymn of our spiritual ascension.
That ascension has already been effected by the Ancients, the human
forefathers, and the spirits of these great Ancestors still assist their
offspring; for the new dawns repeat the old and lean forward in light to join
the dawns of the future. Kanwa, Kutsa, Atri, Kakshiwan, Goatama, çunaçepa have
become types of certain spiritual victories which tend to be constantly repeated
in the experience of humanity. The seven sages, the Angirasas, are waiting still
and always, ready to chant the word, to rend the cavern, to find the lost herds,
to recover the hidden Sun. Thus the’ soul is a battlefield full of helpers and
hurters, friends and enemies. All this lives, teems, is personal, is conscious,
is active. We create for ourselves by the sacrifice and by the word shining
seers, heroes to fight for us, children of our works. The Rishis and the Gods
find for lies our luminous herds; the Rebus fashion by the mind the chariots of
the gods and their horses and their shining weapons. Our life is a horse that
neighing and galloping bears us onward and upward; its forces are swift -hooded
steeds, the liberated powers of the mind are wide-winging birds; this mental
being or this soul is the up soar-ring Swan or the Falcon that breaks out from a
hundred iron walls and wrests from the jealous guardians of felicity
Page-111 the wine of the Soma. Every shining god ward Thought that arises from the secret abysses of the heart is a priest and a creator and chants a divine hymn of luminous realisation and puissant fulfillment. We seek for the shining gold of the Truth; we lust after a heavenly treasure. The soul of man is a world full of beings, a kingdom in which armies clash to help or hinder a supreme conquest, a house where the gods are our guests and which the demons strive to possess ; the fullness of its energies and wideness of its being make a seat of sacrifice spread, arranged and purified for a celestial session. Such are some of the principal images of the Veda and a very brief and insufficient outline of the teaching of the Forefathers. So understood the Rig Veda ceases to be an obscure, confused and barbarous hymnal; it becomes the high-aspiring Song of Humanity; its chants are episodes of the lyrical epic of the soul in its immortal ascension.
This at least; what more there may be in the Veda of ancient science, lost
knowledge, old psycho-physical tradition remains yet to be discovered.
Page-112 The first or superficial view which the observing mind takes of any object of knowledge is always an illusory view; all science, all true knowledge comes by going behind the superficies and discovering the inner truth and the hidden law. It is not that the thing itself is illusory, but that it is not what it superficially appears to be; nor is it that the operations and functioning’s we observe on the surface do not take place, but that we cannot find their real motive-power, process, relations by the simple study of them as they offer themselves to the observing senses. In the realm of physical science this is obvious enough and universally admitted. The earth is not flat but round, not still but constant to a double motion; the sun moves but not round the earth; bodies that seem to us luminous are in themselves non-luminous; things that are part of our daily experience, color, sound, light, air are quite other in their reality than what they pretend to be. Our senses give us false views of distance, size, shape, relation. Objects which seem to them self-existent forms are aggregations and constituted by subtler constituents which our ordinary faculties are unable to detect. These material constituents again are merely formulations of a Force which we cannot describe as material and of which the senses have no evidence. Yet the mind and the senses can live quite satisfied and convinced in this world of illusions and accept them as the practical truth—for to a certain extent they are the practical truth and sufficient for an initial, ordinary and limited activity.
But only to a certain extent; for there are possibilities of a wider life, a
more mastering action, a greater practicality
Page-113 which can only be achieved by going behind these surfaces and utilising a truer knowledge of objects and forces. The discovery of the secret operations of Nature leads to a contingent discovery, the possibility of a farther use of her forces to which she herself has not proceeded, not finding them necessary for the mere preservation of existence and its ordinary workings, but has left to man, her mental being, to discover and utilise for the amelioration of existence and for the development of its possibilities.
All this is easy to see in the realm of Matter; but mankind is not yet
entirely ready to recognise the same truth and follow up the same principle in
the realm of Mind. It is true that psychology has made an advance and has begun
to improve its method. Formerly’, it was a crude, scholastic and superficial
systematisation of man’s ignorance of himself. The surface psychological
functioning’s, will, mind, senses, reason, conscience, etc., were arranged in a
dry and sterile classification; their real nature and relation to each other
were not fathomed nor any use made of them which went beyond the limited action
Nature had found sufficient for a very superficial mental and psychic life and
for very superficial and or dial ‘workings. Because we do not know ourselves,
therefore we are unable to ameliorate radically our subjective life or develop
with mastery, with rapidity, with a sure science the hidden possibilities of our
mental capacity and our moral nature. The new psychology seeks indeed to
penetrate behind superficial appearances, but it is encumbered by initial errors
which prevent a profounder knowledge,—the materialistic error which bases the
study of mind upon the study of the body; the sceptical error which prevents any
bold and clear-eyed investigation of the hidden profundities of our subjective
existence; the error of conservative distrust and recoil which regards any
subjective state or experience that departs from the ordinary operations of our
mental and psychical nature as a morbidity or a hallucination,—just as the
Middle Ages regarded all new science as magic and a diabolical departure from
the sane and right limits of human capacity; finally, the error
of
Page-114 psychologist to study others from outside instead of seeing his true field of knowledge and laboratory of experiment in himself. Psychology is necessarily a subjective science and one must proceed in it from the knowledge of oneself to the knowledge of others. But whatever the crudities of the new science, it has at least taken the first capital step without which there can be no true psychological knowledge; it has made the discovery which is the beginning of self-knowledge and which all must make who deeply study the facts of consciousness,—that our waking and surface existence is only a small part of our being and does not yield to us the root and secret of our character, our mentality or our actions. The sources lie deeper. To discover them, to know the nature and the processes of the inconscient or Subconscient self and, so far as is possible, to possess and utilise them as physical science possesses and utilise the secret of the forces of Nature ought to be the aim of a scientific psychology. But here the first difficulty confronts us, the problem whether this other and greater self of which our waking existence is only a surface and a phenomenon, is Subconscient or inconscient. And thereon hinges the whole destiny of the human being. For if it is inconscient in its very nature, then we cannot hope to illuminate ourselves with the hidden light of these depths—for light there is none— or to find and to possess ourselves of the secret of its power. On the other hand if it is Subconscient, that is to say a concealed consciousness deeper, greater, more powerful then our superficial self, an endless vista of self-enlargement opens out before us and the human race marches towards infinite possibilities.
Modern psychological experiment and observation have proceeded on two
different lines which have hot yet found their point of meeting. On the one hand
psychology has taken for its starting-point the discoveries and the fundamental
thesis of the physical sciences and has worked as a continuation of physiology.
The physical sciences are the study of inconscient Force working in inconscient
Matter
Page-115 and a psychology which accepts this formula as the basis of all existence must regard consciousness as a phenomenal result of the Inconscient working on the inconscient. Mind is only an outcome and as it were a record of nervous reactions. The true self is the inconscient; mental action is one of its subordinate phenomena. The Inconscient is greater than the conscient; it is the god, the magician, the creator whose action is far more unerring than the ambitious but blundering action of the conscious mentality. The tree is more perfectly guided than man in its more limited action, precisely because it lives unambitiously according to Nature and is passive in the hands of the Inconscient. Mind enters in to enlarge the field of activity, but also to multiply errors, perversities, revolts against Nature, departures from the instinctive guiding of the Inconscient Self which generate that vast element of ignorance, falsehood and suffering in human life,—that ”much falsehood in us" of which the Vedic poet complains.
Where then lies the hope that mind will repair its errors and guide itself
according to the truth of things? The hope lies in Science, in the intelligent
observation, utilising, initiation of the forces and workings of the
Inconscient. To take only one instance,—the Inconscient operates by the law of
heredity and, left to itself, works faultlessly to in sure the survival of good
and healthy types. Man misuses heredity in the false conditions of his social
life to transmit and perpetuate degeneracy. We must study the law of heredity,
develop a science of Eugenics and use it wisely and remorselessly—with the
remorseless wisdom of Nature—so as to ensure by intelligence the result that the
Inconscient assures by instinctive adaptation. We can see where this idea and
this spirit will lead us,— to the replacement of the emotional and spiritual
idealism which the human mind has developed by a cold sane materialistic
idealism and an amelioration of mankind attempted by the rigorous mechanism of
the scientific expert, no longer by the profound inspiration of genius and the
supple aspiration of puissant character and personality. And yet what if this
were only another error of the
Page-116 conscient mind? What if the mistaking and the disease, the revolt and departure from Nature were itself a part, a necessary part of the w se and unerring plan of the profound Inconscient Self and all the much falsehood a means of arriving at a greater truth and a more exalted capacity? The fact that genius itself, the highest result of our developing consciousness, flowers so frequently on a diseased branch is a phenomenon full of troubling suggestions. The clear way of ascertained science need not always be the best way; it may stand often in the path of development of a yet greater and deeper Knowledge. The other line of psychological investigation is still frowned |upon by orthodox science, but it thrives and yields its results in spite of the anathema of the doctors. It leads us into by-paths of psychical research, hypnotism, mesmerism, occultism and all sorts of strange psychological groupings. Certainly, there is nothing here of the assured clearness and firmly-grounded positivism of the physical method. Yet facts emerge and with the facts a momentous conclusion,—the conclusion, that there is a "subliminal" self behind our superficial waking mind, not inconscient but conscient, greater than the waking mind, endowed with surprising faculties and capable of a much surer action and experience, conscient of the superficial mind though of it the superficial mind is inconscient. And then a question rises. What if there were really no Inconscient at all, but a hidden Consciousness everywhere perfect in power and wisdom of which our mind is the first slow, hesitating and imperfect disclosure, and into the image of which the human mentality is destined progressively to grow ? It" would at least be no less valid a generalisation and it would explain all the facts that we now know considerably better than the blind and purposeless determinism of the materialistic theory.
In pursuing psychological investigation upon this line we shall only be
resuming that which had already been done by our remote forefathers. For they
too, the moment they began to observe, to experiment, to look below the surface
of things, were compelled to perceive that
Page-117 the surface man is only a form and appearance and that the real self is something infinitely greater and more profound. They too must have passed through the first materialistic stages of science and philosophy. For we read in the Aitareya Upanishad that even in entering upon possession of the material world and the body, the Purusha, the Conscious Soul asks himself, " If utterance is by speech and life by the breath, vision by the eye, hearing by the ear, thought by the mind," if in short all the apparent activities of the being can be accounted for by the automatic functioning of Nature, " then what am I ? " And the Upanishad says farther, " He being born distinguished only the working of the material elements, for what else was there of which he should discuss and conclude ? " Yet in the end " he beheld this conscious being which is Brahman utterly extended and he said to himself, Now I have really seen." So too in the Taittiriya Upanishad Bhrigu Varuna meditating on the Brahman comes first to the conclusion that " Matter is Brahman " and only afterwards discovers Life that is Brahman,—so rising from the materialistic to the vitalistic theory of existence as European thought is now rising,—then Mind that is Brahman and then Knowledge that is Brahman,—so rising to the sensational and the idealistic realisation of the truth—and at last Bliss of Existence that is Brahman. There he pauses in the ultimate spiritual realisation which is the highest formulation of knowledge that man can attain.
The Conscient therefore and not the Inconscient was the Truth at which the
ancient psychology arrived ; and it distinguished three strata of the conscient
self, the waking, the dream and the sleep selves of Man,—in other words the
superficial existence, the Subconscient and the superconscient which to us seems
the inconscient because its state of consciousness is the reverse of ours: for
ours is limited and based on division and multiplicity, but this is " that which
becomes a unity"; ours is dispersed in knowledge, but in this other self
conscious knowledge is self-collected and concentrated ; ours is balanced
between dual
Page-118 experiences, but this is all delight, it is that which in the very heart of our being fronts everything with a pure all- possessing consciousness and enjoys the delight of existence. *Therefore, although its seat is that stratum of consciousness which to us is a deep sleep,—for the mind there cannot maintain its accustomed functioning and becomes inconscient,—yet its name is He who knows, Prajna. "This" says the Mandukya Upanishad, " is omniscient, omnipotent, the inner control, the womb of all and that from which creatures are born and into which they depart." It answers, therefore, closely enough to the modern idea of the Inconscient corrected by the other modern idea of the subliminal self ; for it is inconscient only to the waking mind precisely because it is superconscient to it and the mind is therefore only able to seize it in its results and not in itself. And what better proof can there be of the depth and truth of the ancient psychology than the fact that when modern thought in all its pride of exact and careful knowledge begins to cast its fathom into these depths, it is obliged to repeat in other language what had already been written nearly three thousand years ago ? We find the same idea of this inner control repeated in the Gita; for it is the Lord who " sits in the hearts of all creatures and turns all creatures mounted on an engine by his Maya." At times the Upanishad seems to describe this Self as the " mental being leader of the life and the body," which is really the subliminal mind of the psychical investigators ; but this is only a relative description. The Vedantic psychology was aware of other depths that take us beyond this formula and in relation to which the mental being becomes in its turn as superficial as is our waking to our subliminal mind. And now once more in the revolutions of human thought these depths have to be sounded; modern psychology will be led perforce, by the compulsion of the truth that it is seeking, on
* See the Mandukya Upanishad for these brief and profound definition*.
Page-119 to the path that was followed by the ancient. The new dawns, treading the eternal path of the Truth, follow it to the goal of the dawns that have gone before,—how many, who shall say ? For this knowledge was not first discovered in the comparatively late antiquity that gave us the Upanishads which we now possess. It is already there in the dateless verses of the Rig Veda, and the Vedic sages speak of it as the discovery of yet more ancient seers besides whom they themselves were new and modern. Emerging from the periods of eclipse and the nights of ignorance which overtake humanity, we assume always that we are instituting a new knowledge. In reality, we are continually rediscovering the knowledge and repeating the achievement of the ages that have gone before us,—receiving again out of the "Inconscient" the light that it had drawn back into its secrecies and now releases once more for a new day and another march of the great journey.
And the goal of that journey cannot be other than the "highest good" which
the ancient psychologists’ proposed to the life and growth of the soul, Man, the
mental being once aware that there is this deep, great and hidden self, the real
reality of his being, must necessarily seek to enter into it, to become
conscious in it, to make there his centre instead of dwelling on the surface,
to win and apply its diviner law and supreme nature and capacity, to make
himself one with it so that he shall become the Real instead of the Apparent
Man. And the sole debate that remains is whether this great conquest can be
achieved and enjoyed in this human life and terrestrial body or is only possible
beyond—whether in fact the human consciousness is the chosen instrument for the
progressive self-revelation of this "Inconscient", this real self within us, or
only a
Page-120 The Realisation of God in all things by the Vision of Divine Love. ( TRANSLATED FROM THE TAMIL LINES OF NAMMALWAR ) [ The poetic image used in the following verses is characteristically Indian. The mother of a love-stricken girl ( symbolising the human soul yearning to merge into the Godhead ) is complaining to her friends of the sad plight of her child whom love for Krishna has rendered "mad"—the effect of the "madness" being that in all things she is able to see nothing but forms of Krishna—, the ultimate Spirit of the universe. ] Seated, she caresses Earth and cries "This Earth is Vishnu’s;" Salutes the sky and bids us " behold the Heaven He runlet ;" Or standing with tear-filled eyes cries aloud " O sea hued Lord !" AU helpless am I, my friends, my child He has rendered mad. ( 1 )
Or joining her hands she fancies "the Sea where my Lord reposes !" Or hailing the ruddy Sun she cries: "Yes, this is His form," Languid, she bursts into tears and mutters Narayan’s name. I am dazed at the things she is doing, my gazelle, my
p; child shaped
god-like.; (2)
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cries " O Deathless ! " And she hugs the Wind; "’This my own Govinda," she tells us. She smells of the honied Tulsi, my gazelle-like child. Ah-me ! How many the pranks’ she plays for my sinful eyes to behold. (3)
The rising moon she showed, "’This the shining gem-hued Krishna!" Or, eyeing the standing hill, she cries: "O come, high Vishnu"! It rains; and she dances and cries out ”He hath come, the God of my love !" O the mad conceits He hath given to my tender, dear one ! (4)
The soft-limbed calf she embraces, for "Such did Krishna tend," And follows the gliding serpent, explaining " That is His couch " I know not where this will end, this folly’s play in my sweet one Afflicted, ay, for my sins, by Him, the Divine Magician’s; (5)
Where tumblers dance with their pots, she runs and cries ‘; Govinda ; " At the charming notes of a flute she faints, for "Krishna, He played." When cowherd dames bring butter, she is sure it was tasted by Him,— So mad for the Lord who sucked out the Demoness’ life through her bosom ! (6)
In rising madness she raves, " All worlds are by Krishna made " Page-122 And she runs after folk ash-smeared; forsooth, they serve high Vishnu ! Or she looks at the fragrant Tulsi and claims Narayan’s garland. She is ever for Vishnu, my darling, or in, or out of her wits. (7)
And in all your wealthy princes she but sees the Lord of Lakshmi. At the sight of beautiful colours, she cries, " O my Lord world-scanning " ! And all the shrines in the land, to her, are shrines of Vishnu. In awe and in love, unceasing, she adores the feet of that Wizard. (8)
All Gods and saints are Krishna—Devourer of infinite Space! And the huge, dark clouds are Krishna; all fain would she fly to reach them. Or the kine, they graze on the meadow and thither she runs to find Him. The Lord of Illusions, He makes my dear one pant and rave.(9)
Languid she stares around her or gazes afar into space ; She sweats and with eyes full of tears she sighs and faints away; Rising, she speaks but His name and cries, " Do come, O Lord." Ah, what shall I do with my poor child o’erwhelmed by this maddest love ?(10) Page-123 The surfaces of life are easy to understand; their laws, characteristic movements, practical utilities are ready to our hand and we can seize on them and turn them to account with a sufficient facility and rapidity. But they do not carry us very far. They suffice for an active superficial life from day to day, but they do not solve the great problems of existence. On the other hand, the knowledge of life’s profundities, its potent secrets, its great hidden all-determining laws is exceedingly difficult to us. We have found no plummet that can fathom these depths; they seem to us a vague indeterminate movement, a profound obscurity from which the mind recoils willingly to play with the fret and foam and facile radiances of the surface. Yet it is these depths that we must know if we would understand existence; on the surface we get only Nature’s secondary rules and practical byelaws which help us to tide over the difficulties of the moment and to organise empirically without understanding them her continual transitions.
Nothing is more obscure to humanity or less seized by its understanding,
whether in the power that moves it or the sense of the aim towards which it
moves, than its own communal and collective life. Sociology does not help us,
for it only gives us the history of the past and the external conditions under
which communities have survived. History teaches us nothing; it is a confused
torrent of events and personalities or a kaleidoscope of changing institutions.
We do not seize the real sense of all this change and this continual streaming
forward of human life in the channels of Time. What we do seize are current or
recurrent phenomena, facile generalisations, partial ideas. We talk of
democracy, aristocracy and autocracy, collectivism and individualism,
imperialism and nationalism, the State and the commune, capitalism and labour;
we advance hasty generalisations and make absolute systems which are positively
announced today only to be abandoned perforce tomorrow; we espouse causes and
ardent enthusiasms whose triumph turns to an early disillusionment and then
forsake them for others, perhaps for those
Page-124 that we have taken so much trouble to destroy. For a whole century mankind thirsts and battles after liberty and earns it with a bitter expense of toil, tears and blood; the century that enjoys without having fought for it, turns away as from a puerile illusion and is ready to renounce the depreciated gain as the price of some new good. And all this happens because our whole thought and action with regard to our collective life is shallow and empirical; it does not seek for, it does not base itself on a firm, profound and complete knowledge. The moral is not the vanity of human life, of its ardors and enthusiasms and of the ideals it pursues, but the necessity of a wiser, larger, more patient search after its true law and aim. To-day the ideal of human unity is more or less vaguely making its way to the front of our consciousness. The emergence of an ideal in human the might is always the sign of an intention in Nature, but not always of an intention to accomplish ; sometimes, she means only an attempt which is predestined to temporary failure. For Nature is slow and patient in her methods. She takes up ideas and half carries them out, then drops them by the wayside to resume them in some future era with a better combination. She tempts humanity, her thinking instrument, and tests how far it is ready for the harmony she has imagined; she allows and incites man to attempt and fail so that he may learn and succeed better another time. Still the ideal having once made its way to the front of thought must certainly be attempted, and this ideal of human unity is likely to figure largely among the determining forces of the future; for the intellectual and material circumstances of the age have prepared and almost impose it, especially the scientific discoveries which have made our earth so small that its vastest kingdoms seem now no more than the provinces of a single country.
But this very commodity of the material circumstances may bring about the
failure of the ideal ; for when material circumstances favor a great change,
but the heart and mind of the race are not really ready—especially the
heart—failure may be predicted, unless indeed men are wise in time and accept
the inner change along with
Page-125 the external readjustment. 13ut at present the human intellect has born so much mechanised by physical science that it is likely to attempt the revolution it is beginning to envisage principally or solely through mechanical means, through social and political adjustments. Now it is not by social and political devices, or at any rate not by these chiefly or only, that the unity of the human race can be enduringly or fruitfully accomplished. It must be" remembered that a greater social or political unity is not necessarily a boon in itself; it is only worth pursuing in so far as it provides a means and a framework for a better, richer, more happy and puissant individual and collective life. But hitherto the experience of mankind has not favored the view that huge aggregations of mankind closely united and strictly organised are favorable to a rich and puissant human life. It would seem rather that collective life is more at ease with itself, more genial, varied, fruitful when it can concentrate itself in small spaces and simpler organisms.
If we consider the past of humanity so far as it is known to us, we find that
the in tensest periods of human life, the scenes in which it has been most richly
lived and has left behind it the most precious fruits, were precisely those ages
and countries in which humanity was able to organise itself in little
independent centers acting intimately upon each other but not fused into a
single unity. Modern Europe owes two thirds of its civilisation to three such
supreme moments of human history, the religious life of the congeries of tribes
which called itself Israel and, subsequently, of the little nation of the Jews,
the many-sided life of the small Greek city states, the similar though more
restricted artistic and intellectual life of mediaeval Italy. Nor was any age in
Asia so rich in energy, so well worth living in, so productive of the best and
most enduring fruits as that heroic period of India when she was divided into
small kingdoms many of them no larger than a modern district. Her most wonderful
activities, her most vigorous and enduring work, that which, if we had to make a
choice, we should keep at the sacrifice of all else, belonged to that period ;
the second best
Page-126 came afterwards in larger, but still comparatively small nations and kingdoms like those of the Pallavas, Pandyas, Cholas and Cheras. In comparison she received little from the greater empires that rose and fell within her borders, the Mogul, the Gupta or the Maura,—little indeed except political and administrative organisations and a certain amount of lasting work not always of the best quality. Nevertheless, in this regime of the small city state or of regional cultures, there was always a defect which compelled a tendency towards large organisations. The defect was a characteristic of impermanence, often of disorder, especially of de fencelessness against the onslaught of larger organisations, even of an insufficient capacity for wide-spread material well-being. Therefore this earlier form of collective life tended to disappear and give place to the organisations of nations, kingdoms and empires. And here we notice first, that it is the gourmets of smaller nations which have had the richest life and not the huge states and colossal empires. Collective life diffusing itself in too vast spaces seems to lose intensity and productiveness. Europe has lived in England, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, the small states of Germany— all her later civilisation and progress evolved itself there, not in the huge mass of the Holy Roman or the Russian Empire. We see the same truth again when we compare the intense life and activity of Europe in its many nations acting richly upon each other with the great masses of Asia, her long periods of immobility in which great wars and revolutions seem to be small, temporary and usually unproductive episodes, her centuries of reverie, her tendency towards an increasing isolation and a final stagnancy.
Secondly, we note that in this organisations of nations and kingdoms those
which have had the most vigorous life have gained it by a sort of artificial
concentration of the vitality into some head, centre or capital, London, Paris,
Rome. By this device Nature, while acquiring the benefits of a larger
organisations and more perfect unity, preserves to some extent that equally
precious power of fruitful concentration in a small space and into a closely
packed activity which she had possessed in her more primitive
Page-127 system of the city state or petty kingdom. But this advantage was purchased by the condemnation of the rest of the organisation, the district, the provincial town, the village to a dull petty and somnolent life in strange contrast with the vital intensity of the urbs or metropolis. The Roman Empire is the historic example of an organisation of unity which transcended the limits of the nation and its advantages and disadvantages are there perfectly typified. The advantages are admirable organisation, peace, widespread security, order and material well-being; the disadvantage is that the individual, the city, the region sacrifice their independent life and become mechanical parts of a machine; life loses its colors, richness, variety, freedom and victorious impulse towards production. The organisation is great and admirable, but the individual dwindles and is overpowered and overshadowed; and eventually by the smallness and feebleness of the individual the huge organism slowly loses even its great conservative vitality and dies of an increasing stagnation. Even while outwardly whole and untouched, the structure has become rotten and begins to crack and dissolve at the first shock from outside. Such organisations, such periods are immensely useful for conservation, even as the Roman Empire served to consolidate the gains of the rich centuries that preceded it. But they arrest life and growth. We see, then, what would be likely to happen if there were a social, administrative and political unification of mankind such as some have begun to dream of now a days. A tremendous organisation would be needed under which both individual and regional life would be crushed, dwarfed, deprived of their necessary freedom like a plant without rain and wind and sunlight and this would mean for humanity, after perhaps one first outburst of satisfied and joyous activity, a long period of mere conservation, progressive stagnancy and eventual decay.
Yet, the unity of mankind is evidently a part of Nature’s eventual scheme and
must come about. Only it must be under other conditions and with safeguards
which will keep the race intact in the roots of its vitality.
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