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I
WE shall see how the thought of God works itself out in Life. The material world is first formed with the Sun as centre, the Sun itself being only a subordinate star of the great Agni, Mahavishnu. in whom is centred the Bhu. Mahavishnu is the Virat Purusha who as Agni pours Himself out into the forms of sun and star. He is Agni Twashta, Visvakarman, he is also Prajapati and Matariswan. These are the three primal Purushas of the earth-life, — Agni Twashta, Prajapati and Matariswan, all of them soul-bodies of Mahavishnu. Agni Twashta having made the Sun out of the Apas or waters of being, Prajapati as Surya Savitri enters into the Sun and takes possession of it. He multiplies himself in the Suris or Solar Gods who are the souls of the flames of Surya, the Purushas of the female solar energies. Then he creates out of this solar body of Vishnu the planets, each of which successively becomes the Bhumi or place of manifestation for Manu, the mental being, who is the nodus of manifest life-existence and the link between the life and the spirit. The present earth in its turn appears as the scene of life, Mars being its last theatre. In the Bhumi Agni Twashta is again the first principle, Matariswan the second, finally, Prajapati appears in the form of the four Manus, catvaro manavah. Not in the physical world at first, but in the mental world which stands behind the earth-life; for earth has seven planes of being, the material of which the scenes and events are alone normally visible to the material senses, the vital of which man's pranakosa is built and to which it is responsive, the mental to which his manahkosa is attached, the ideal governing his vijnanakosa, the beatific which supports his anandakosa, and the dynamic and essential to which he has not yet developed corresponding kosas, but only unformed nimbuses of concrete being. All the gods throw out their linga-rupas into these worlds of earth and through them carry on her affairs; for these lingas repeat there in the proper terms of life upon earth the conscious movements of the gods in their higher existences in the worlds above Bhu. The Manus manifested in the Manoloka of Bhu bring pressure to bear upon the earth for the manifestation of life and mind. Prajapati as Rudra then begins to form life upon earth, first in vegetable, then in animal forms. Man already exists but as a god or demigod in Bhuvarloka of Bhu, not as a man upon earth. There he is Deva, Asura, Rakshasa, Pramatha, Pishacha, Pashu or as Deva he is either Gandharva, Yaksha, Vidyadhara or any of the Karmadevas. For Man is a son of the Manu and is assigned his place in Div and Pradiv, in Heaven and in the Swargabhumis. Thence he descends to earth and thither from earth he returns. All that will be explained afterwards. When the human body is ready, then he descends upon earth and occupies it. He is not a native of earth, nor does he evolve out of the animal. His manifestation in animal form is always a partial incarnation, as will be seen hereafter. The animal proper is a lower type. Certain devas of the manasic plane in the Bhuvarloka descend in the higher type of animal. They are not mental beings proper, but only half-mental vital beings. They live in packs, tribes etc. with a communal existence. They are individual souls, but the individuality is less vigorous than the type soul. If they were not individual, they would not be able to incarnate in individual forms. The body is only the physical type of the soul. The soul, if it were only a communal soul, would manifest in some complex body of which the conglomeration of the different parts would be the sole unity; say, a life like that of the human brain. The animal develops the tribe life, the pack or clan life, the family life. He develops citta, manas, the rudiments of reason. Then only man appears. How does he appear? Prajapati manifests as Vishnu Upendra incarnate in the animal or Pashu in whom the four Manus have already manifested themselves, and the first human creature who appears is, in this Kalpa, the Vanara, not the animal Ape, but man with the Ape nature. His Satya Yuga is the first Paradise, for man begins with the Satya Yuga, begins with a perfected type, not a rudimentary type. The animal forms a perfect type for the human Pashu and then only a Manuputra or Manu. a human, a true mental soul, enters into existence upon earth, with the full blaze of a perfect animal-human mentality in the animal form. These are man's beginnings. He rises by the descent of ever higher types of Manu from the Bhuvarloka. — first he is Pashu. then Pishacha. then Pramatha, then Rakshasa, then Asura. then Deva. then Siddha. So he ascends the ladder of his own being towards the Sat Purusha. Manu, the first Prajapati, is a part of Mahavishnu Himself descended into the mental plane in order to conduct the destinies of the human race. He is different from the four Manus who are more than Prajapatis, they being the four Type-Souls from whom all human Purushas are born; they are Manus only for the purpose of humanity and in themselves are beyond this manifest universe and dwell for ever in the being of the Para Purushas. They are not true Manomaya Purushas. But Manu Prajapati is a true Manomaya Purusha. He by mental generation begets on his female Energies men in the mental and vital planes above earth, whence they descend into the material or rather the terrestrial body. On earth Manu incarnates fourteen times in each Kalpa and each of these fourteen incarnations is called a Manu. These fourteen Manus govern human destinies during the hundred caturyugas of the Pratikalpa, each in turn taking charge of a particular stage of the human advance. While that stage lasts he directs it both from the mental world and by repeated incarnations upon earth. When Manu Prajapati wishes to incarnate in a fresh form, he has a mental body prepared for him by evolution of births by a human vibhuti, Suratha or another, and takes possession of it at the beginning of his manvantara. Each Manwantara is composed of a varying number of Chaturyugas according to the importance and difficulty of the stage with which it is concerned. Once at least in each Chaturyuga the Manu of the Manwantara incarnates as a man upon earth, but this never happens in the Kali Yuga. The seventh and eighth Manus are the most important in each Pratikalpa and have the longest reigns, for in their Manwantaras the critical change is finally made from the type which was completed in the last Pratikalpa to the type which is to be perfected in the present Kalpa. For each of the ten Pratikalpas has its type. Man in the ten Pratikalpas progresses through the ten types which have been fixed for his evolution in the Kalpa. In this Kalpa the types, dasagu, are the ten forms of consciousness, called the Pashu, Vanara, Pishacha, Pramatha, Rakshasa, Asura, Deva, Sadhyadeva, Siddhadeva and the Satyadeva. The last three are known by other names which need not be written at present. The Pashu is mind concentrated entirely on the annam, the Vanara mind concentrated on the prana, the Pishacha mind concentrated on the senses and the knowledge part of the citta, the Pramatha mind concentrated on the heart and the emotional and aesthetic part of the citta, the Rakshasa is mind concentrated on the thinking manas proper and taking up all the others into the manas itself; the Asura is mind concentrated on the buddhi and in the Asura-Rakshasa making it serve the manas and citta; the Deva is mind concentrated on vijnana, exceeding itself, but in the Asura-Deva or Devasura it makes the vijnana serve the buddhi. The others raise mind successively to the Ananda, Tapas and Sat and are, respectively, the supreme Rakshasa, the supreme Asura, the supreme Deva. We have here the complete scale by which Mind ascends its own ladder from Matter to pure Being evolved by Man in the various types of which each of the ten principles is in its turn capable. To take the joy of these various types in their multifold play is the object of the Supreme Purusha in the human Lila.
II
A series of images and a number of intimations have been given yesterday in the citra-drsti to illustrate the history of the first two Manwantaras and the vicissitudes through which the human idea has gone in the course of these unnumbered ages. It is not at all surprising that there should be no relics of those vicissitudes in the strata of the present earth; for the present earth is not the soil of the planet as it was in the earliest Manwantaras. The detritions, the upheavals, the convulsions, the changes that it has undergone cannot be estimated by the imaginative and summary methods of the modern geologists, — men who think themselves advanced and masters of knowledge, but are only infants and babblers in their own sciences. It is unnecessary to go at present into the scene or habitat of the incidents and peoples shown in the drsti. The facts are sufficient. The first image was that of a young and beautiful woman fleeing, holding two children by either hand, preceded by a third — though this was not clearly seen — and followed by a little child, a girl with her cloth in her hand. All are of the female sex. In their flight they have upset a handsome and well-dressed young man, who was also fleeing across the line of their flight and now lies sprawling on his back. Behind the woman and her girls an elderly and bearded savage, naked and armed with some kind of weapon, runs at a distance of not many yards and but for the accident of the upset would soon overtake the fugitives. The second image showed the young man still supine with the savage upon him threatening him fiercely with his weapon, but the bhava shows that not slaughter, but prisoners and slaves are the object of the raid. The young man is evidently taken prisoner by the pursuer who has turned aside from the women to this, possibly, more valuable booty. In the third image the little girl of the first is seen captured by a young and handsome barbarian who has managed to comfort and soothe her and is persuading her to lead him to the secret refuge of the fugitives. By this device, it is now indicated, he is able to discover this refuge and capture the whole colony of the civilised people. The success raises him to the rank of a great chief among his people, for it is his section of the raiders who make the victory really profitable. The citra-lipi "Indigenous" just given shows that these barbarians are the original inhabitants of the country, the others colonists and conquerors. It is intimated by the vijnana that both assailants and assailed are in the Pashu stage and people of the first or second Manu, but the civilised have reached a kind of Devahood of the Gandharva type, the savages are a reappearance of the Asura-Rakshasa type of Pashu brought back into a more advanced age in order to re-invigorate the over-refined type that has been evolved. The young chief of the image is a sort of Caesar-Augustus or Alaric of the barbarians. He takes the lead of their revolt which is at first a disordered movement of indignation (lipi "Indignation" alternating with "Indigenous"), systematises it, conquers and enslaves the Gandharvas, learns from them their civilisation and modifies it by the barbarian manners. The new race evolved finally dominates the then world and fixes the next type of the Pashu evolution. But who are these Pashus? For this is not the first Pratikalpa of the Pashus, but the sixth of the Asuras, and it is indicated that none of these visions belong to any other Pratikalpa than the present. It follows that even these savages cannot be pure Pashus, but Asuras or Asura-Rakshasas starting from the Pashu stage, so far as the Asura can go back to that stage, and fulfilling the possibilities of a sort of Pashu-Asura before evolving his Asurahood in the higher types and arriving and shooting beyond the pure Asura. This is an important modification. It follows that each type of the Dasha-gavas goes. within the mould of his own type, through all the ten gavas from the Pashu to the Siddhadeva. The Pashu-Asura will be different from the pure Pashu or the Pashu-Deva. because he will always be first and characteristically an Asura, but he will weigh from the buddhi on the bodily experiences as Pashu, on the vijnana experiences as Deva and so in each type according to its particular field of activity. The Deva will do it, instead, from the vijnana. and the difference of leverage and point of action will make an immense difference both to the character of the activity and its results in the field. Moreover it is clear that the Pashu-Asura goes also through the various types within his mixed Pashuhood and Asurahood before he passes to the Pishacha-Asura, who has to undergo a similar development. The great variety of types that will result from this evolutionary system, is evident. The farther images seen in connection with this Pashu-Asura episode are three in number. First, the plain and desolate country with a hill in the distance, about which it is indicated by the vijnana that this was the appearance of the country not actually occupied by the barbarians before the colonists came in (by sea, it is suggested and then by movement from the coasts occupied to the inland tracts) and peopled it sparsely. The catastrophe came because of their haste to conquer the whole small continent before they were able to people all the unoccupied land and build themselves into a strong and irresistible power organised in great cities and populous nations. This haste was due to the superior fertility and attractiveness of the soil actually occupied by the barbarians who, being poor agriculturalists, had settled only on rich soil not demanding a skilful labour and left the rest unfilled. The contrast between the waterless soil first seen and the banks of the great river on which was the barbarian settlement is typical of the contrast between the two kinds of soil, utilised and unutilised. The premature attempts at conquest began with aggressions on the nearest barbarian villages and the raid seen was the first effective retaliation carried out in the absence of the fighting men of the colony, so that on the side of the attacked only women, children and peaceful unarmed men are seen fleeing to a habitual and secret place of refuge. For this colony was on the very borders of the barbarian country and always exposed to incursions. It is not clear why the colonist fighters were absent, whether on a raid on the barbarians or in a civil quarrel among themselves. The second image, the fortified city on the plateau, shown by the terraces cut in the slope of the plateau and the subsequent separate citra of one of the city domes to be a civilised and magnificent metropolis, shows the final result of the amalgamation of barbarians and colonists. The original barbarian settlement was on the bank of the great river seen with one of its ghauts not far from the foot of the plateau, but after the raid, in order to safeguard themselves and their booty, the savages retreated at the instance of the young victorious chief, now by common consent their leader, to the plateau, then steep in its slope and difficult of access. Afterwards a great city was built on the site of this barbarian stronghold. The construction on the river in appearance like a house, but apparently standing on the water, can have been nothing but a houseboat or rather a house-raft, and it is moored to a car in the river, a fact which suggested the first erroneous idea that it was a house on an island in the river. The third image, the large, high and spacious hut. built almost with elegance and with the great wide open door, was that of the chief and shows that the savages, in spite of their nakedness, were not on the lowest scale either of human immaturity or of human degeneration. The figure in clerical dress and hat is that not of a priest, but of an envoy, one of the elders of the colony come to negotiate for the restoration of the captives; the girl with whom he converses and from whom he turns in shocked despair, is one of the daughters of the woman seen in the earliest of this series of images, now a slave and concubine of the chief. At first, the colonists were unwilling to use violence lest the captives should be maltreated. The fact that one of the most important of them has already been subjected to irremediable indignity, has just come to the knowledge of the elder along with other facts, e.g. the unwillingness of the chiefs to make any reparation, and accounts for the action which indicates despair of peace or any fruitful negotiation. The series is not yet complete, but awaits the unfolding of farther events already very vaguely indicated by the vijnana. The other image has no connection with these events but belongs to a later Manwantara, that of the Pramatha-Rakshasa, of the sixth Manu in one of its most perfect and brilliant stages. It has to be kept vivid in the mind for future interpretation. III
The disposition of the Manwantaras may now be described. It will be remembered that there are fourteen Manus and ten gavas of the Dasha-gava. How are these divided among the Manus? In this Kalpa or rather Pratikalpa the type Pashu is the Vanara. but as in all Nature's movements, even in manifesting the Vanara, the others first make their appearance rapidly before the type "arrives"; those most germane to the matter are the lion, tiger, elephant, dog, wolf, cat, bull and cow. bear, fox. ass, horse, bee, ant, butterfly, fish, eagle (also kite, hawk and vulture), songbird, crow and cuckoo etc. In all these human egos readily incarnate and the human type absorbs them all. The first Manu takes all these totems and applies them to the general type of the Asura, driving at the evolution of a giant Vanara — Asura who has in him all these elements and combines them into an animal harmony dominated by curiosity, humour, adaptability and adaptiveness, the Ape virtues which bring that type nearest to man. This Vanara-Asura the first Manu hands on to the second, who takes the type, fulfils it and evolves it into the Pishacha-Asura. This he does by bringing the Ape curiosity uppermost and applying it to all the experiences of man's animal life, to play, work, domesticity, battle, pleasure, pain, laughter, grief, relations, arrangements etc. All the higher qualities, imagination, reflection, invention, thought, spirituality even, are turned towards these experiences and their possibilities, — cognitional not aesthetic, — exhausted so far as the human animal can exhaust them. This, however, is done only in the third Manwantara. In the second it is the Vanara who satisfies his humour, curiosity and adaptiveness in a far more elementary and summary fashion, but as he does so, he begins to refine and evolve in search of new sensations until the full Pishacha-Asura is born. This type is handed over to the third Manu to fulfil, and to it two Manwantaras are devoted; in the third the Pishacha-Pramatha of the Asura type evolves; in the fourth the Pishacha-Pramatha evolves into the full Pramatha-Asura. The curiosity ceases to be merely cognitional and practically scientific, it becomes aesthetic with an animal and vital aestheticism; the Pramatha seeks to extract their full emotional and aesthetic values, their full rasa out of everything in life, out of torture equally with ecstasy, death equally with life, grief equally with joy. That type is evolved by the fifth Manu into the Pramatha-Rakshasa of the Asura type, and by the sixth into the full Rakshasa-Asura The Rakshasa it is who first begins really to think, but his thought is also egoistic and turned towards sensation. What he seeks is a gross egoistic satisfaction in all the life of the mind, prana and body, in all the experiences of the Pashu, Pishacha, Pramatha and his own. But as this type is not a pure Rakshasa, but a Rakshasasura, the thought is there from the beginning, for the Rakshasa has already established it in the human mould in the fifth Pratikalpa. It now, however, in the Asura ceases to be subservient to the vital and animal instincts and becomes the instrument instead of a vigorous, violent and clamorous intellectual ego. As the main type is that of the Asura, there is always a tendency to subordinate the lower ego to the intellectual Aham, but the subordination is at first only a self' disciplining for a more intelligently victorious self-indulgence, like the tapasya of Ravana. This type evolved is fixed in the character of Ravana and takes possession of its field in the Manwantara of the seventh Manu, Vaivasvata. In that Manwantara it evolves into the Asura-Rakshasa in which the intellectual ego and the emotional, sensational ego enter into an equal copartnership for the grand enthronement and fulfilment of the human ahahkara. As the type of the sensational and emotional Rakshasa-Asura is Ravana, so the type of the more mightily balanced Asura-Rakshasa of the Asura type is Hiranyakashipu. In the eighth Manwantara this Asura-Rakshasa evolves into the pure Asura who serves his intellectual ego and subordinates to it all the other faculties. That type reigns with the ninth Manu and evolves into the Asuradeva of the Asura mould and in the tenth Manwantara into the Devasura who enthrones the vijnana and glorifies the Asura existence by the vijnanamaya illuminations playing on the whole of the triple mental, vital and bodily life of man. In the eleventh and twelfth Manwantras the Devasura evolves into the Sadhya, the Anandamaya Asura who at first with the pure Ananda, then with the Tapomaya Ananda, then with the Sanmaya Ananda dominates the reigns of the thirteenth and fourteenth Manus and completes the apotheosis of the Asura in man. With the Siddhadeva in the Asura the hundredth Chaturyuga of the sixth Pratikalpa comes to a glorious close. IV
Certain farther images have appeared which seem intended to show the nature of the Kaliyuga civilisation evolved by the intermixture of the barbarian and the Gandharva Pashus. One is that of a very wide road climbing up a steep incline: the comparative height of the trees on one side show its great width. This picture seems to be intended to confirm the impression created by the ensemble of the city on the plateau, by the dome and by another citra of a part of the hill with a (private?) house roofed like a modern church, that this civilisation had a certain bigness, massiveness and sharply cut variety. A low type of the Pashu in this age was also seen, bearded, hatted and visaged like a low-class modern American of the West. These resemblances have created some doubt as to either the genuineness of these images or their right interpretation; but the doubt is not justified by its cause. For throughout the fourteen Manwantaras, variations, permutations and combinations of the same type are bound to appear. This is the law of Nature's development in clay, plant and animal and applies equally to man, his manners, ideas, appurtenances and institutions. Given the truth of the Manwantara theory any other feature than this varied repetition would be more surprising than the repetition itself and lead to more legitimate distrust. There are plenty of variations and signs of immaturity or different tendency. In the image of the river, it is noticeable that there are no modern vessels. The houseboat is a house-raft and entirely different in structure from the modern houseboat; the craft in which the man and girl in another image are seen crossing the river is also a raft and not a boat. The Gandharvas, when first seen, are robed differently in the males and the women; the former have dresses like the older styles of European dress, the latter wear loose and light classical draperies — an arrangement which is after all sufficiently natural and might easily evolve in an artistic and aesthetically minded race. The Teutonic element in the character and civilisation of the new type Pashus is a result of the blending of the graceful, slight and artistic Gandharva with the plain, forceful and robust barbarian; the latter predominates in the blend and the former merely tones down his force and gives a few details of dress and manners much modified in the direction of rude and clear-cut plainness and strength. and is chiefly prominent but not predominant in the women as typified by the girl on the raft who has a native grace denied to the men of her blood. Their elegance is heavy and artificial, worn as a dress rather than possessed as a native characteristic. Sometimes the type goes very low as in the premature American; the ordinary type is higher but void of dignity or greatness, grace or beauty. They represent an early tendency towards the Asura-Rakshasa such as he manifests himself in the Kaliyugas of this Pratikalpa when he has compassed the first heavy self-restraint necessary for his evolution towards the Deva. In a later image the woman of the first, the captive of the barbarian Augustus, is seen in a later Incarnation at the turning point when this type dissatisfied with itself is trying to recover the grace, humour, artistry, fantasy, liveliness of their Gandharva blood, so as to develop again in themselves the Pashu-Deva. This fixes the period of these incidents. It is in the Kali of the fourth caturyuga in the reign of the first Manu when the Rakshasa-Asura of the Pashu-Asura type reigns and is attempting to turn full Asura with occasional overshootings to the Pashu-Deva. Every race that thus overshoots its mark and goes a step farther than their immediate next pace in evolution aids powerfully that evolution, but becomes unfit for survival and has to disappear. For this reason the Gandharva race of the Pashus disappeared and the Asura-Rakshasa type reappeared, then took up something of the Gandharva and advanced one step towards the Asura-Pashu of the Asura type. By such overleapings and re-coilings human evolution has always advanced.
V
There are certain images of animals dating from these early aeons which should be recorded here although they are not of the first Pashu period but fall before and after it. The first are images of a monstrous creature resembling the modern seal, but thicker and bulkier, seen in a region of ice; the other another animal of equally monstrous bulk, its skin a series of successive red and yellow bands, its face exceedingly long, rough, thin and snouted, a cross between bear, wolf and tiger in the face, rhinocerous-like, yet supple in the body, but in spite of its ferocious appearance, sufficiently harmless. These creatures, it is suggested in the vijhana, belong to the first caturyuga of the Pratikalpa previous to the appearance of man; for the fourteen Manus enjoy each a reign of seven caturyugas of varying lengths and the first and last of the hundred belong not to any Manu but the opening caturyuga to Brahma and Rudra, the closing to Kalki and to Shiva. Man in the first appears only tentatively at the end, in the last only as a survival at the beginning. The third image is that of a bear leaping on a smaller animal which it keeps under its paw while it wrests from it and devours some eatable for which the victim was pursued. The male of the captive is near unable to help, unwilling to flee. It is a small deer, only one third the size of the modern fallow deer. Suddenly the head of the bear sinks. It has been killed, it would seem, by the arrow, spear or other weapon of a human hunter. This scene belongs to the second Manwantara of the Vanaras. A fourth image is of a horse of the first Manwantara in one of its earlier caturyugas, a clumsy stiff-legged and long-eared animal squarish in its lines and most unlike the graceful modern equine species. The animal stands on the side of a river and with head raised and stretched sideways and ears pricked, listens to a sound amid the trees on the opposite bank. This image was preceded by another of a horse of the Pashu period in the later age when the civilised barbarian type was trying to recover the Gandharva. This type of horse, standing with a rider on its back and other human beings conversing near and at its head, is more equine, but is still stiff-legged and has not lost the asinine cast of head of its predecessor.
VI
Three images of the fourth in descent from the Chief of the Barbarians; the first showing him standing meditating on the great ghaut of the river, a figure and face like Napoleon's clad in a dress resembling the modern European; the second, his mother and stepmother, descendants of the captives of the first image; the third, the emperor again with his half-brother, irreproachably clad. Prefect of the city, consulting with regard to some palace intrigue in which the mother and step-mother are concerned. It is intimated that it is this fourth King of the line who establishes the dominance of the race in the then earth.
A BUTTERFLY comes flying over the garden, past a pepegach and two flower-trees which grow side by side. Ordinarily it will be attracted to one of these three objects of desire. It flies past without noticing them, reaches the wall in a straight flight, then contrary to all expectation turns suddenly back, turns aside while flying over the right-hand flower-tree to dally for two seconds with another butterfly, then flies off through the pepegach. What dictated its return and departure? First; it did not notice the flower-tree because its mind was fixed on some more distant object present to its instinctive memory, but by a law of the mind it received subconsciously the impression of the scent from the flowers. By the time it reached the wall this came up to the supraliminal mind as a vague but powerful sense of something missed and attractive on the way. Working through the vital instincts and cravings by vital impulse which dominantly determines the movements of the insect, this sense immediately enforced a backward flight. If the other butterfly had not intervened, it is possible that at the second contact with the scent of the flowers, the vague sense would have identified itself, consciously or subconsciously, with a definite supraliminal expression and the descent on the flowers would have been determined, but the diversion once made, the vagueness not only remained, but the impression was half obliterated and only the idea of return to something in the distance remained. This, however, was strong enough to divert the insect from its fellow, especially as the latter was concerned with the flowers and did not respond to the advances made. Hence the farther pursuit of the flight backward.
IV
Dear Biren, The idea that the Europeans have organised enjoyment just as the Hindus have organised asceticism, is a very common superstition which I am not bound to endorse merely because it is common. Say rather that the Europeans have systematised feverishness and the Hindus universalised inertia and mendicancy. The appearances of things are not the things themselves, nor is a shadow always the proof of a substance. I admit that the Europeans have tried hard to organise enjoyment. Power, pleasure, riches, amusement are their gods and the whirl of a splendid and active life their heaven. But have they succeeded? I think that nowhere is life less truly enjoyable than in brilliant and arrogant Europe. The naked African seems to me to be happier and more genuinely luxurious than the cultured son of Japhet. It is this very trying hard that spoils the endeavour. What a grotesque conception indeed is this of trying hard to be joyous! Delight, joyousness, ananda either are by nature or they do not exist; to be natural, to be in harmony with the truth of things is the very secret of bliss. The garden of Eden is man's natural abode and it is only because he wilfully chose to know evil that he was driven out of his paradise.
V
Dear Biren, I suspect that it is a malady of your intellect to demand figs from thistles and cry fie upon the thistle if it merely produces thorns. After all, would it not be a monotonous world that consisted only of roses and sweeting, of virtue and success? Thorns have their necessity, grief has its mission, and without a part of sin, suffering and struggle heaven might not be so heavenly to the blest. I am not prepared to deny a kind of beneficence to evil; I have sufficient faith in God's Love and Wisdom to believe that if evil were merely evil, it could not continue to exist. I will tell you all the evil, - since we must use these inadequate terms. — that I think about Europe and then I will tell you what a great work I see it beating out with difficulty for man's ultimate good. That there should be much that is wrong and perverse, that there should even be an infinite corruption, in Europe and Asia at this moment, was, it" you consider it, inevitable. It is the Age of Iron, not even thinly coated with gold, only splashed here and there with a counterfeit of the nobler metal. Kali at the lowest depth of one of his plumb descents, his eyes sealed, his ears deaf, his heart of bronze, his hunger insatiable, but his nerve relaxed and impotent, stumbles on through a self-created darkness with the marshlight and the corpse-light for his guides, straining out of those blind orbs after an image of Power that he cannot seize. Time was when he dreamed of love and prated of humanity, but though he still mouths the words, he has forgotten the things. He groped too after wisdom; he has grasped only Science. By that Science he has multiplied comforts till comfort itself has grown uncomfortable; he has added machinery to machinery, convenience to convenience, till life is cumbered and hampered with appliances; and to this discomfortable luxury and encumbered efficiency he has given the name of civilisation. At present he hungers only after force and strength, but when he thinks he has laid his hands on them, it is Death instead that puts his sign on the seeker and impotence and sterility mock at him under the mask of a material power. For my part I see failure written large over all the splendid and ostentatious achievements of Europe. Her costliest experiments, her greatest expenditure of intellectual and moral force have led to the swiftest exhaustion of creative activity, the completest bankruptcy of moral elevation and discouraging of man's once infinite hope. When one considers how many and swift her bankruptcies have been, the imagination is appalled by the swiftness of this motor ride to ruin. The bankruptcy of the ideas of the French Revolution, the bankruptcy of utilitarian Liberalism, the bankruptcy of national altruism, the bankruptcy of humanitarianism, the bankruptcy of religious faith, the bankruptcy of political sincerity, the bankruptcy of true commercial honesty, the bankruptcy of the personal sense of honour, how swiftly they have all followed on each other or raced with each other for precedence and kept at least admirable pace. Only her many-sided science with its great critical and analytical power and all the contrivances that come of analysis, is still living and keeps her erect. There remains that last bankruptcy yet to come and when that is once over, what will be left? Already I see a dry rot begun in this its most sapful and energetic part. The firm materialism which was its life and protection, is beginning also to go bankrupt, and one sees nothing but craze and fantasy ready to take its place. Europe is full of the noise and apparel of life, of its luxurious trappings, of a myriad-footed material clang and tread, but of that which supports life she is growing more and more empty. When they had less knowledge, her people had wiser and stronger souls. They had a literature, a creative intellectual force, a belief, a religion good or bad, a hope, a light that led onwards, a fixed path. Now they have only hungers, imaginations, sentiments and passions. The hungers are made decent, they are even disguised as "ideals" and "rights", the sentiments deftly intellectualised, even superficially moralised; the imaginations are tricked out to look like reason, the passions decorously masked and very well clothed. But a dress does not change truth and God is not deceived. They criticise everything subtly rather than well, but can create nothing — except machines. They have organised society with astonishing success and found the very best way to spread comfort and kill their souls. Their system of government is a perpetual flux. Its past looks back to a yet corrupter aristocracy, its future sinks to anarchic dissolution, or at best rests in a tyrannical materialistic socialism which seeks to level all that is yet high to the grade of the artisan instead of making the artisan himself worthy of a throne. A thousand newspapers vulgarise knowledge, debase aesthetical appreciation, democratise success and make impossible all that was once unusual and noble. The man of letters has become a panderer to the intellectual appetites of a mob or stands aloof in the narrowness of a coterie. There is plenty of brilliance everywhere, but one searches in vain for a firm foundation, the power or the solidity of knowledge. The select seek paradox in order to distinguish themselves from the herd; a perpetual reiteration of some startling novelty can alone please the crowd. Each favourite is like an actor from whom the audience expect from day to day the usual passion or the usual farce. Paradox and novelty therefore thrive; but the select have an easily jaded appetite, the multitude are fickle and novelties have their hour. Therefore even the favourite palls. But these people have a great tamasic persistence of habit and a certain loyalty to established names: much that they read is from habit rather than enjoyment. Otherwise there would be no stability in this chaos of striking worthlessness and this meteor-dance of ephemeral brilliance. For more than half a century the whole of Europe has not been able to produce a single poet of even secondary magnificence. One no longer looks for Shakespeare or Dante to return, but even Wordsworth or Racine have [...]1 become impossible. Hugo's flawed opulence, Whitman's formless plenty, Tennyson's sugared emptiness seem to have been the last poetic speech of modern Europe. If poetical genius appears, it is at once taken prisoner by the applauding coterie or the expectant multitude and, where it began, there it ends, enslaved in ignoble fetters, pirouetting perpetually for their pleasure round a single accomplishment. Of all literary forms the novel only has still some genius and even that is perishing of the modern curse of overproduction. Learning and scholarship are unendingly active over the dead corpse of creative power as in Alexandria and with the later Romans before the great darkness. Eccentricity and the hunting after novelty and paradox play in it over an ostentatious precision and accuracy. Yesterday's opinion is today exploded and discarded, new fireworks of theory, generalisation and speculation take the place of the old, and to this pyrotechnic rushing in a circle they give the name of progress. The possibility of a calm insight and wisdom seems to have departed from this brilliant mob of pushing, overactive intellects. Force there is, but force doomed to a rapid dissolution, of which the signs are already not wanting. The very churches and chapels are now only the theatres of a habitual stage performance of portentous and unnecessary dullness. With the exception of a small minority full of a grotesque, superficial but genuine passion, nobody believes, nobody feels; opinion, convention, preference and habit are alive and call themselves religion, but the heart that loves God is not to be found. Only a few of the undeveloped are really religious, the cast-backs and atavists of this European evolution. The moral nerve is equally relaxed. Immorality which does not know how to enjoy, impotence and dullness of the capacity for enjoyment masquerading as virtue, decorum and prudery covering a
1 Illegible word cesspool, the coarseness, appetite and rapid satiety of the imperial Romans combining in various proportions or associating on various terms with the euprepeia and looseness of the Greeks. But the Pagan virility, whether united to Roman coarseness or Greek brilliance, is only to be seen in a few extraordinary individuals. Society is cast in the biune mould of monogamy and prostitution. You will find such a Parisian, who keeps his wife and mistress and frequents his state-licensed harlots as well, shocked and pained at the idea of polygamous Indians enjoying the same rights as the virtuous sons of Europe. Some are even afraid that the resurgence of Asia may end in the lowering of Western morals. There can then be a descent from as well as to Avernus! In a word, the whole of Europe is now a magnified Alexandria, brilliant forms with a perishing soul in imitation of the forms of health, feverish activity with no capital but the energy of the sickbed. One has to concede however that it is not altogether sterile, for all Europe and America pullulate with ever multiplying machinery.
VI
Dear Biren, There are moments in the career of peoples, empires, continents, orders of things when the forces of life pause between a past vitality and a rapidly advancing decay, atrophy or dissolution. You have often heard me say this of our still persistent and reluctant mediaeval system in India and you have not wondered, but you are surprised when I give the same description of this vaunting and dominant Europe. Why? Because it is vaunting and dominant? I think so. There are two hypnotisms that work with an almost miraculous power upon men's minds, the suggestion of the habitually repeated word and the suggestion of the long-established or robustly accomplished fact. Men are almost entirely led or stayed by blind hopes or blind hopelessnesses. They are ever ready to cry, "As it was yesterday, as it is now, so it shall be for ever." or to sigh, "This thing is, has been, promises to be; how can I ever overcome it? In the centuries to come perhaps, but for me my limits are set and a wall has been built around me." My friend, the thing that looks so huge, mighty and impressive from without, wears a very different appearance when you look into its secret places and sound its walls and foundations. There are certain edifices, characteristic of European modernity, which lift a tremendous height and showy mass to the sky, therefore they are called vulgarly skyscrapers, for are they not truly abhramliha: — but some houses very showily built have an ugly habit of descending suddenly in ruin without any previous warning either to their inmates or to the envious huggers of the plain in the vicinity. Then they are said to have been jerry-built. Now. modern European civilisation is just such a jerry-built skyscraper.
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You have not misapprehended my meaning, though you wonder at it. These hollow worm-eaten outsides of Hinduism crumbling so sluggishly, so fatally to some sudden and astonishing dissolution, do not frighten me. Within them I find the soul of a civilisation alive, though sleeping. I see upon it the consoling sentence of God, "Because thou hast believed in me, therefore thou shalt live and not perish." Also, I look through the garnished outsides, gaudy, not beautiful, pretentious, not great, boastful, not secure, of this vaunting, aggressive, dominant Europe and I have seen written on the heart of its civilisation a sentence of death and mounting already from the heart to the brain an image of annihilation. O this Europe with its noise, its childish vanity, its barbarous material pomp and show, its puerile clashing of sabres and rattling of wheels, its foam and froth of a little knowledge, its mailed fist, its heart of lead, its tremulous, crying nerves, its sinews all unstrung with a luxury and debauch it is not great enough of soul to indulge itself in with the true ancient Titanism. One notes too its fear of the darkness of death, its clinging to life, its morbid terror of pain, its braggart tongue and coward action, its insincerity, dishonesty, un-faith, its romantic altruistic dreams so soon ended and changing into a selfish and cynical proclamation of interest, power and pleasure. — one sees its increasing brain, its perishing will. It is not in noble figures that she presents herself to my imagination, this sole enlightened continent, it is not fear or respect that they awaken in my mind, these civilised superior nations. I see a little girl wearing a new frock and showing herself off to Mamma and all the world, unable to conceal her pride and delight in the thought that never was a frock so new and nice or a little girl so pretty, — never was and never will be! I think of a very small boy to whom somebody has given a very big cane one can see him brandishing it, executing now and then an exultant war-dance, tormenting, tyrannising over and plundering of their little belongings all the smaller boys he can get within his cane's reach, not displeased if they show a little fight so that he can exhibit his heroic-strength of arm by punishing them. And then he adorns himself with glittering Victoria crosses and calls on all his associates to admire his gallant and his daredevil courage. Sometimes it reminds me of an old man, a man very early old, still strong in his decrepitude, garrulous, well-informed, luxurious, arrogant, intelligent, still busy toddling actively from place to place, looking into this, meddling in that, laying down the law dogmatically on every point under the sun ; and through it all the clutch already nearing the brain, the shaking of the palsy already foreshadowed in tremulous movement and uncertain nerve. Very true, Europe, your frock is the cleanest and newest, for the present, your stick the biggest, your war-dance a very frightening spectacle, — frightening even to yourselves — with Krupp and Mauser and machine gun what else should it be, you are indeed for a while the robust, enlightened oldster you seem. But afterwards. Well, afterwards there will be a newer frock, a bigger stick, a war-dance much more terrible and a real Titan grasping at the earth for his own instead of the sham. On the Yoga of Transformation and the Psychic
THIS is a Yoga of transformation of the being, not merely a Yoga of the attainment of the inner Self or the Divine, though that attainment is its basis without which no transformation is possible. In this transformation there are four elements, the psychic opening, the transit through [the] occult, the spiritual release, the supramental perfection. If any of the four is unachieved, the Yoga remains incomplete. I mean by the psychic the inmost soul-being and the soul-nature. This is not the sense in which the word is used in ordinary parlance, or rather, if it is so used, it is with great vagueness and much misprision of the true nature of this soul and it is given a wide extension of meaning which carries it far beyond that province. All phenomena of an abnormal or supernormal psychological or an occult character are dubbed psychic; if a man has a double personality changing from one to another, if an apparition of a dying man, something of his mere vital sheath or else a thought form of him, appears and stalks through the room of his wondering friend, if a poltergeist kicks up an unseemly row in a house, all that is classed under psychic phenomena and regarded as a fit object for psychic research, though these things have nothing whatever to do with the psychic. Again much in Yoga itself that is merely occult, phenomena of the unseen vital or mental or subtle physical planes, visions, symbols, all that mixed, often perturbed, often shadowy, often illusory range of experiences which belong to this intervening country between the soul and its superficial instruments, or rather to its outermost fringes, all the chaos of the intermediate zone, is summed up as psychic and considered as an inferior and dubious province of spiritual discovery. Again there is a constant confusion between the mentalised desire-soul which is a creation of the vital urge in man, of his life-force seeking for its fulfilment and the true soul which is a spark of the Divine Fire, a portion of the Divine. Because the soul, the psychic being uses the mind and the vital as well as the body as instruments for growth and experience it is itself looked at as if it were some amalgam or some subtle sub-stratum of mind and life. But in Yoga if we accept all this chaotic mass as soul-stuff or soul-movement we shall enter into a confusion without an issue. All that belongs only to the coverings of the soul; the soul itself is an inner divinity greater than mind or life or body. It is something that once it is released from obscuration by its instruments at once creates a direct contact with the Divine. |