CHAPTER VIII Memory, Self-Consciousness and the Ignorance Some speak of the self-nature of things, others say that it is Time. Swetaswatara Upanishad.1 Two are the forms of Brahman, Time and the Timeless. Maitrayani Upanishad.2 Night was born and from Night the flowing ocean of being and on the ocean Time was born to whom is subjected every seeing creature. Rig Veda.3 Memory is greater: without memory men could think and know nothing.... As far as goes the movement of Memory, there he ranges at will. Chhandogya Upanishad.4 This is he who is that which sees, touches, hears, smells, tastes, thinks, understands, acts i

CHAPTER XV The Supreme Truth-Consciousness One seated in the sleep of Superconscience, a massed Intelligence, blissful and the enjoyer of Bliss.... This is the omnipotent, this is the omniscient, this is the inner control, this is the source of all. Mandukya Upanishad.¹ WE HAVE to regard therefore this all-containing, all-originating, all-consummating Supermind as the nature of the Divine Being, not indeed in its absolute self-existence, but in its action as the Lord and Creator of its own worlds. This is the truth of that which we call God. Obviously this is not the too personal and limited Deity, the magnified and supernatural

CHAPTER IV The Divine and the Undivine The Seer, the Thinker, the Self-existent who becomes everywhere has ordered perfectly all things from years sempiternal. Isha Upanishad.1 Many purified by knowledge have come to My state of being.... They have reached likeness in their law of being to Me. Gita.2 Know That for the Brahman and not this which men cherish here. Kena Upanishad.3 One controlling inner Self of all beings.... As the Sun, the eye of the world, is not touched by the external faults of vision, so this inner Self in beings is not touched by the sorrow of the world. Katha Upanishad.4 The L

CHAPTER XIX Life Pranic energy is the life of creatures; for that is said to be the universal principle of life. Taittiriya Upanishad.¹ We perceive, then, what Mind is in its divine origin and how it is related to the Truth-Consciousness,—Mind, the highest of the three lower principles which constitute our human existence. It is a special action of the divine consciousness or rather, it is the final strand of its whole creative action. It enables the Purusha to hold apart the relations of different forms and forces of himself to each other; it creates phenomenal differences which to the individual soul fallen from the Truth-Consciousness take the appearance of rad

CHAPTER XVI The Triple Status of Supermind My self is that which supports all beings and constitutes their existence.... I am the self which abides within all beings. Gita.¹ Three powers of Light uphold three luminous worlds divine. Rig Veda.² BEFORE we pass to this easier understanding of the world we inhabit from the standpoint of an apprehending Truth-Consciousness which sees things as would an individual soul freed from the limitations of mentality and admitted to participate in the action of the Divine Supermind, we must pause and resume briefly what we have realised or can yet realise of the consciousness of the Lord

CHAPTER XXVIII Supermind, Mind and the Overmind Maya There is a Permanent, a Truth hidden by a Truth where the Sun unyokes his horses. The ten hundreds (of his rays) came together—That One. I saw the most glorious of the Forms of the Gods. Rig Veda.¹ The face of Truth is hidden by a golden lid; that remove, O Fostering Sun, for the Law of the Truth, for sight. O Sun, O sole Seer, marshal thy rays, gather them together,—let me see of thee thy happiest form of all; that Conscious Being everywhere, He am I. Isha Upanishad.² The Truth, the Right, the Vast. Atharva Veda.³ It became both truth and falsehood. It became the Truth, even all

CHAPTER XVII The Divine Soul He whose self has become all existence, for he has the knowledge, how shall he be deluded, whence shall he have grief, he who sees, everywhere oneness? Isha Upanishad 1 He whose self has become all existences, for he has the knowledge, how shall he be deluded, whence shall he have grief, he who sees everywhere oneness? Isha Upanishad.¹ By the conception we have formed of the Supermind, by its opposition to the mentality on which our human existence is based, we are able not only to form a precise instead of a vague idea of divinity and the divine life,—expressions which we are otherwise condemned to use with looseness an

CHAPTER IX The Pure Existent One indivisible that is pure existence. Chhandogya Upanishad.¹ When we withdraw our gaze from its egoistic preoccupation with limited and fleeting interests and look upon the world with dispassionate and curious eyes that search only for the Truth, our first result is the perception of a boundless energy of infinite existence, infinite movement, infinite activity pouring itself out in limitless Space, in eternal Time, an existence that surpasses infinitely our ego or any ego or any collectivity of egos, in whose balance the grandiose products of aeons are but the dust of a moment and in whose incalculable sum numberles

CHAPTER V The Destiny of the Individual By the Ignorance they cross beyond Death and by the Knowledge enjoy Immortality.... By the Non-Birth they cross beyond Death and by the Birth enjoy Immortality. Isha Upanishad.¹ An Omnipresent Reality is the truth of all life and existence whether absolute or relative, whether corporeal or incorporeal, whether animate or inanimate, whether intelligent or unintelligent; and in all its infinitely varying and even constantly opposed self-expressions, from the contradictions nearest to our ordinary experience to those remotest antinomies which lose themselves on the verges of the Ineffable, the Re

CHAPTER XIV The Supermind as Creator All things are self-deployings of the Divine Knowledge. Vishnu Purana.¹ A principle of active Will and Knowledge superior to Mind and creatrix of the worlds 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