-04_The Life Divine

The Life Divine

Chapter V

THE SOUL, CAUSALITY AND LAW OF NATURE

What then of this causality that we see everywhere? What then of this law and fixed process in all Nature which is at least the indispensable condition of all human activities? How can the supposed freedom of the soul be reconciled with the actual despotism in fact of an ordered Cosmic Energy?

Vedanta does not deny either Law of Causality or Law of Nature nor their fixity nor their imperative control over individual activities; it rather affirms them categorically and, as we shall see, with an inexorable thoroughness far more unsparing than the affirmations of modern Rationalism. But it states these laws in a formula far wider than the rationalist's; it sees not only law of life and law of matter, but law of mind and law of supermind; and it bases the stability and imperative force of all law in the world on an ultimate truth and source of freedom. It is this ultimate conclusion that gives to the Vedantic conception of Causality and Law of Nature an entirely different force and essential meaning from the vast generalisation of mechanical Energy popularised by modern Science. Law of Nature is to Science the tyranny of a self-existent habit in mechanical World-Force which Intelligence, the indulged and brilliant youngest child of material Energy, can use indeed, can convert in its forms or divert in its processes, but from which it has no door of escape. Law of Nature in Vedanta is the normality of a regular or habitual process in self-intelligent World-Force; in other words,— for Chit-Shakti, self-intelligent World-Force can mean nothing else than this,—in the cosmic Will-Power of universal self-existent Being,— of God, of Brahman. The process of Force, then, however fixed, however imperative, is neither mystically self-existent nor mechanically self-determined. On the contrary it depends upon certain relations, exists in certain conditions, amounts to certain fixed motions of the cosmic Will-Power which have been selected from the beginning in the universal Wisdom and, once selected, are manifested, evolved, established and maintained in the workings of cosmic Energy until the fixed moment

arrives for their variation or for their temporary or final dissolution. Laws of Nature are, in the pregnant phrase of the Rig-Veda, adabdha vrata dhruva ya deva akrnvata; they are the rules fixed and unovercome of active world-being which the gods have made and which they maintain eternally against the powers of dissolution. For the world in the old Vedic conception is a rhythm of action and movement in God's conscious being; or rather it is a combination and concord of rhythms; it is chandas, it is metre, it is a choral symphony of Jagati and Gayatri, Brihati and Pankti, Tristubh and Anustubh; it is Vak, a formation of His Word, a formal harmony of His self-expressive consciousness, a harmony discovered and selected out of God's infinite possibilities and exposed therefore to the perpetual attack of those infinite possibilities. Therefore even the most well-established laws of Nature, the most general, persistent, apparently eternal and unvariable processes of World-Force, being formations of Jagati, being rhythms and harmonies of God's active Energy, truths of recurrent motion and not truths of eternal status, are none of them indestructible like the sempiternal Being out of which they emerge, but alterable and dissoluble and, since alterable and dissoluble, therefore ever attacked by powers of disorder and world-dissolution, ever maintained by the divine Powers consciously obedient to eternal Will and expressive of It through whom Ishwara has manifested Himself in material, moral and spiritual Nature.

Law of Nature is in God's being what social Law is in man's action and experience, not indestructible essence of that being or indispensable condition of that action, but formed, evolved and willed condition of a regular, ordered, complex and intricately combined self-expression in a harmony of various relations and grouped workings of energy. All existing natural conditions express a realised status and frame and base a farther evolution out of realised status.

Nature itself is Prakriti, working (literally, forward working) of World-Force, called by us Shakti, the cosmic or divine Power of cosmic or divine Will. And because that Shakti is, in the phrase of the Shwetashwatara Upanishad, devatmasaktih svagunair nigudha, the self-power of Divine Being hidden by the modes of its own workings, because it is, to use another Sanskrit formula, Chit-Shakti of the Sat-Purusha, Conscious Power of Conscious Being, and because that Conscious Being is infinite, absolute and unlimited in its possibilities

and its Conscious Power infinitely, absolutely and inimitably a Free Will choosing freely Its own harmonies and not bound in their rhythms as though in fetters imposed by an alien will, forming, observing and using Its own laws and not compelled, enslaved and used by them, therefore is Prakriti or working of Nature in its laws a self-imposed system, a mighty and ordered Wisdom and not an eternal and inexplicable mechanical necessity. Its laws are formed and fixed processes of World-Force, selected and "loosed forth" by God, srsta (created, as we loosely say), out of the illimitable potentialities of self-existence, brought into play out of the depths of His self-being as a rhythm of music is brought out, manifested and arranged, srsta, vyakta, vihita, out of the infinite possibilities of indefinite sound. Self-luminous Conscious Being precedes, contains and manifests in self-intelligent and self-effective Force; self-intelligent and self-effective Force at once conceals and manifests itself in the mask of Prakriti, the mask of a motional and mechanical working of Nature. We arrive then at this formula of the conception of Law in Nature.

Law of Nature is a fixed process formed by the universal self-conscious Will of Ishwara; it is in its nature a particular or a general movement of that Force. So long as it is maintained, it is binding on things in Nature, but not binding except by His own Will on Ishwara. Fundamental or "eternal" Laws of Nature are those general processes or movements in Conscious Being in which the rhythm of the universe is framed and they would naturally endure unabrogated so long as that rhythm itself is sustained, as it is, in the Will and Being of God.

The Vedantic conception of Causality is equally determined by this initial and fundamental idea of the relation between mechanical process of Nature and the living Will of God. Cause, to the Vedantin, is nimitta, determining means, special determining factor: it is the particular manipulation, impact or application of motive force which brings out of a preexistent arrangement or condition of things new or modified condition and arrangement, the difference effected constituting result. Oxygen and hydrogen as separately manifest gases, the atmosphere, the ether,—or to put it in the old concrete symbolical language of Indian philosophy, the combined presence of Agni, Vayu and Akasha, form in their arranged shapes and relations the preexistent condition; contact and mixture of the two forces with the new vibrations set up by the new relation, sparsa and sabda, are the

nimitta, the determining means; the new apparent condition of things, the rupa, shape of water, is the result. Agni latent in the ether and atmosphere is the preexistent condition; friction of the two aranis and the resultant vibrations, sparsa and sabda, are the nimitta; the sacrificial fire is the result. A seed planted in favourable ground is the preexistent condition, sun and rain, agni and jala, are the nimitta; the appearance of an oak tree is the result. In each case what has really happened is that in a certain arrangement of the current workings and a certain relation of the worked out shapes of Force—in this case of the active Life-Energy in the material world — a new arrangement was always potential and latent, water involved in hydrogen, fire involved in the tinder-wood, the oak tree involved in the seed and a particular process, that is to say a particular working (karma or apas) of the same Force, the same Life-Energy, has been used to evoke the new shape of things out of latency, out of avyakta, and bring it into manifestation, into vyakta. The previous existence of the oak tree in the seed is not admitted by us because it is not there in realised form and to our erroneous notions realised form is alone reality. But realised form is only the material appearance of a truer reality which is not shaped in matter but only in consciousness: the oak tree is in the seed not in form but in being; for the form is only a circumstance of being and it is contained and latent in the being out of which it is born and which it expresses to formal vision. This latency and this process of manifestation in varying time and place by varying nimitta is, says Vedanta, the whole sense of phenomenal existence.

All cause and result are merely the evocation of a latent and potential shape or condition of things out of the previous condition or status in which it was latent, by some particular movement of a Conscious Force which is progressively passing from status to status and thus manifesting in form all that it holds in itself in being. Cause is only a means of manifestation and not itself a creative power. The real cause is only the Will of God working through its own fixed and chosen processes.

Are we to say, as it is often said, that the preexistent condition of things or arranged sum of force is the real cause out of which the event, the change, the new appearance must inevitably come and the advent of the nimitta a sort of accidental or at least subordinate and

variable factor by which the inevitable result happens actually to be induced to manifest itself in outward eventuality? We have no right to say so; for it is not true as a matter of perceived fact that a given preexistent condition of things must lead inevitably in its own nature to a fixed result. In all the cases we have cited the preexistent condition did not necessitate the result and could not have produced it but for the interference of the nimitta or determining factor, just as the determining factor could not have produced the result but for the preexistent condition. Shall we say, then, that granted a given preexistent condition and a given determining factor we shall have with mechanical certainty a given inevitable result? Again, we have no right to say so. The formula seems at first to hold good where the material of the workings of Force is the most rigid and unpliable and the workings themselves are the most mechanical and regular in their recurrence. But even there the inevitability of things is illusory. The aranis may be to hand, the friction occur, yet the sacrificial fire may never be lit; the seed may be planted, the soil favourable, sun and rain perfectly adjusted in their bounty, but the oak tree may not appear. We cannot even say that any given preexistent condition of things is the sole condition under which a given result can be effected. We say, indeed, taking actual fact for necessary fact, that only by the incubation of favourable soil on the right seed can an oak tree appear; but what we are justified in saying is only that, as yet, we know no other conditions under which an oak tree has appeared. So also we thought that only by the incubation of the earth on the carbon could the diamond be produced; now, other conditions have been found under which this rare formation can be effected. Where the material which the force of Nature uses is more pliant and flexible, the idea of a mechanical Necessity becomes still less credible, is even more feebly substantiated by facts or is directly contradicted. A nation is in its last stage of moral and material decline; the preexistent conditions are precisely the same as in a score of instances in which destruction has followed or are even worse and more favourable to dissolution; the same determining nimitta is applied; but whereas in the previous score of cases the shock of the new impact has determined the anticipated result of destruction, in this worse case the selfsame shock, baffling anticipation, determines the entirely contrary result of rejuvenation, restored strength, energy of expansion, energy even of

domination. Either some new factor has entered in unexpectedly or was already existent and even active, but concealed, or else a latent potentiality, which in the other cases remained latent, has here unexpectedly reacted, risen into the active superficial movement and become its dominant and deciding factor. Looking at these things, we are tempted sometimes to say that the whole sum of the past and the whole sum of the present was necessary for any given result in the world to be brought about; we are tempted to speculate that the whole cumulative stream of past active forces, past Apas or Karma, is the one real and inevitable cause of the future. But this is really only a statement of our ignorance; it is only an assertion that what has been, has been and since it has been, must, in any case, have become. It is an attempt to disguise from ourselves a fact that it really confesses, the fact that an infinite possibility of negation or modification, of non-happening or otherwise happening pursues and surrounds every actuality and eventuality in the universe and that we can relate how and under what conditions a thing has happened once or repeatedly and may be expected, if nothing interferes, to happen again, but we cannot fix inevitable cause to inevitable effect.

All event and all process of event is a selection out of infinite possibility which surrounds the actual past as the Might Have Been and the actual future as the May Be. Of every cause, process and result we can say justly that the result might have been otherwise or the same result spring from some other cause or be effected by some other process. This perception in mind of an omnipresent infinite possibility is a shadow of the soul's perception of the infinite freedom of God.

What then is it that in any given working of result out of precedent condition by nimitta, fixes the combination of the forces at work, governs their manipulation, selects in one case to be the determining factor a force which in other cases was impotent to decide the eventuality? Is it Chance? Is it Fate? Is it some inexplicable mechanical self-guidance? Or is it supreme intelligent Will, Will that is in its nature Intelligence? Is there a conscious Will or rather a Will-Consciousness which contains, informs, constitutes these apparent forces and objects, but is hidden from our eyes by their multitudinous whirl of motion, by their clamorous demand on the attention of the mind and senses, by their insistent claim that we should submit in thought and act to the tyranny of their workings? This last answer is the

solution proposed by Vedanta. It rejects the concept of Chance as only a specious name covering our self-satisfied ignorance of the cause and process of things; Chance is really the free action, not pursuable by us in its details, of a mighty cosmic Providence which is one with cosmic Force. It accepts the reality of Fate, but rejects as a void and baseless imagination the idea of an inexplicable mechanical Necessity; Fate is merely the inevitable working out in itself by a cosmic Will of its own fixed and predetermined self-perceptions. It accepts the idea of a principle of unerring self-guidance in Nature, but is unable to regard that principle as in any way a mysterious agency or an inexplicable birth; Nature guides itself unerringly only because Nature is the self-working of a Self-luminous conscious Existence formulating its Will in fixed processes of things and combined arrangement of event actualised in its own eternal and illimitable being. Nature to Vedanta is only the mask of a divine cosmic Will, devatmasaktih svagunair nigudha; Prakriti of Vedanta is no separate power, no self-existent mechanical entity, but the executive force of the divine Purusha at once self-revealed and self-concealed in the mechanism of its own workings. Purusha, conscious Soul, is the divine Poet and Maker; Nature, conscious Force, is His poetic faculty; but the material of His works is always Himself and their stage and scene are in His own conscious being.

Pre-ordered selection out of infinite possibility is the real nature of the power we call Fate. Chance is a secret Providence and Providence the constantly active Self-Knowledge of cosmic Existence and cosmic Will always fulfilling in actuality its foreseen selection of event and means,—-foreseen in knowledge,—and preventing the pressure of infinite possibility from disturbing that pre-ordered arrangement. So a poet might work out in execution the original plot and characters as arranged in his mind and reject at every step the infinite possible variations which suggest themselves to him as he writes.

Law of Nature is the fixed system of conventional or habitual relations under which the Purusha has agreed with Himself to work out His pre-ordered selection and harmony. Causality is the willed arrangement of successive states and events and the choice of particular means in accordance with this fixed system of relations by which pre-ordered Fate of things is worked out in actual event.

Fate. Law and fixed Causality bind things in the movement of the

Jagati; they do not bind the Purusha or conscious Soul but are the modes and instruments of His free self-working.

We must be on our guard against the idea that in this statement of the problem of predestination the infinite possibility we assert is an otiose and practically non-existent conception,—a thing that Is Not, a mere mental perception,—or that because the course of the world is fixed, the infinite freedom of God which supports and contains that fixity, is an abstraction of no practical moment or no practical potency. Among the many superficial fallacies of the practical man, there is none more superficial or fallacious than the assumption that in face of what has been, it is idle to consider what might have been. The Might Have Been in the past is the material out of which much of the future is shaped. It would not be so if the material life were a self-existent thing, proceeding out of itself, sufficient to itself, ending with itself. But the material life is only a selection, a formation, a last result of an infinite conscious life behind, which far exceeds the sum of all that actually exists in form and happens in event. Infinite Possibility is a living entity, a positive force; it is the material out of which God is constantly throwing up the positive and finite actuality. It is therefore all-important for a full and real knowledge of the world to know and see this infinite material as well as the actual finite result and ultimately determined shape of things. God Himself in His foreknowledge foresees the infinite possibilities that surround the event as well as the event itself. The forces that we spend vainly for an unrealised result, have always their ultimate end and satisfaction, and often form the most important determinants of a near or a distant future. The future carries in it all the failures of the past and keeps them for its use and for their success in other time, place and circumstance. Even our attempts to alter fixed process, when that process seems to be a fixed and unalterable law of Nature, are not lost and vain; they modify the active vibrations of the fixed current of things and may even lead to an entire alteration of the long-standing processes of things. The refusal of great minds to accept the idea of impossibility, with which they are not unoften reproached by the slaves of present actuality, is a just recognition of the omnipotence divinely present in us by right of the one supreme Inhabitant in these forms; nor does their immediate failure to externalise their dreams prove to the eye that sees that their faith was an error or a self-delusion.

The attempt is often more important than the success, the victim more potent than the victor, not to the limited narrowly utilitarian human mind fixed on the immediate step, the momentary result, but to God's all-knowing Fate in its universal and millennial workings. From another standpoint, it is the infinite possibilities that surround the act or the event which give to act and event their full meaning and value. It may be said that Arjuna's hesitation and refusal to fight at Kurukshetra was of no practical moment since eventually he did take up his bow and slay the Dhritarashtrians and the otiose incident might well have been omitted by God in His drama; but if it had not been possible for Arjuna to hesitate, to fling down the bow Gandiva or to have retired from the fight but for the command of the incarnate God beside him, then his subsequent action in fighting and slaying would have had an entirely different value, the battle of Kurukshetra would have meant something entirely different to humanity and its results on the future life of the nation and the world would have been, comparatively, almost a zero. We can see this truth even with regard to slighter incidents. The fatality which in Shakespeare drama wills the death of Romeo and Juliet as the result of a trivial and easily avoidable accident, receives all its value from the possibilities surrounding the actual event, the possibilities of escape from fate, reconciliation and for these tragic lovers the life of an ordinary conjugal happiness. These unrealised possibilities and the secret inevitability — of Spirit, not of matter, — which prevents their realisation, which takes advantage of every trivial accident and makes use of it for the swift and terrible conclusion, make the soul of the tragedy. A mechanical fatality must always be a thing banal, dead, inert and meaningless. It is their perception of these things behind the veil, their transcendence of the material fact, their inspired presentation of human life that ranks the great poets among the sophoi. kavis, vates, and places poetry next to the Scriptures and the revelations of the Seer and the prophets as one subtle means God has given us of glimpsing His hidden truths.

The unrealised possibility is as much a part of Fate as the actual event. The infinite possibilities surrounding an event are not only the materials out of which the event is made and help to modify or determine the more distant future, but alone give its true and full value to every human or cosmic action.

God or Spirit then is the Master of His processes and their results;

He is the law of natural law, therefore free from that law, nityamukta, the cause of Fate, therefore not bound by Fate but its ruler. Action is the free play in His eternal Being, therefore that Being is not bound by the action. Action does not compel in Him any results which He is not free to accept or to avoid; it does not entail fresh action unless He so chooses, nor does it produce any modification either in His conscious existence or in the modes and phenomena of His conscious existence except so far as He allows those modes or phenomena to be affected or varied. In His essential being God or Spirit is ever immutable, since nothing ever essentially changes even in the universe, much less beyond the universe; and it is only phenomena in the cosmic motion of consciousness that seem to change. Here too sages have perceived that the change is not really a change, but only a successive presentation of ever recurrent phenomena to the Time-governed eye of conscious Mind. These changes are a play of self-ideas in Conscious Being existing for ever beyond Time and Space, but represented for us in the symbols of Time and Space. Such as they are, the succession of these changes affected by action of man or action of Nature are not binding on Spirit, not an inexorable stream of cause and result which Spirit has passively and helplessly to endure, but a harmony or progressive rhythm of successive states which Spirit has freely arranged in itself. Na karma lipyate.

God acts or rather produces action. produces, that is to say, process and succession of manifested energies in His own being without being bound either by the action itself or by its process or by its succession or by its causes or by its results. In action or out of action He is entirely, infinitely and absolutely free.

But then there arises the difficulty caused to our darkened minds by the false conception that God and world. God and the human soul are different entities. From this division of the indivisible there arises the notion, the fatal noumenal error, the illogical logic, that God beyond the world is free but God in the world is bound, bound to action, bound to sorrow, bound to death and birth,— the great fundamental error which seals our eyes and creates needlessly the insoluble problem of suffering and evil and death and limitation,—insoluble because we have created a false first premise for all our conclusions about the world. God in the world is not bound, but only pretends to mind that He is bound. Mind so envisages Him because it sees

Him observing freely the arrangements and processes that He has made and, always associating fixed observance in Nature with inevitable observance, supposes Him to be observing His own laws inevitably, helplessly, not freely. All the more then is man, apparently limited, apparently bound in the meshes of a hundred woven laws, supposed to differ precisely in this from the transcendental Being that That is free and untouched by the world and its works, he a slave and moulded by their pressure into what he is now and will hereafter become. Thence the conclusion of so many philosophies that man here can never be anything but a suffering victim of his works and slave of illusion and only by annulling his existence in cosmos can become free,— free not in the cosmos but from the cosmos. But it is not so. For man is the Lord inhabiting His human temple, enjoying his own play in this mortal mansion built by himself out of his own cosmic being; he has determined what he is and is determining now by his play in works as he has previously determined by his play in internal consciousness what he shall become.

God in the world is not different in nature from God beyond the world but the same. Yad amutra tad eveha. God beyond is eternally free; God here is also eternally free. Spirit in all things and spirit in man are one spirit and not different entities or natures; therefore all spirit being eternally free. the soul of man also is eternally free. Mind in its multiple and dual play is, by its non-illumined state, the creator of this illusion of bondage.

We have in the Gita a striking illustration of God's workings in man which raises in a concrete instance and drives home to the mind the whole difficulty with an incomparable mastery and vividness. The armies of the Pandava and the Kaurava stand facing each other on the sacred plain of Kurukshetra; the whole military strength of India and all its political future have been thrown down upon that vast battlefield as upon a dice board. On one side we see the eleven mighty armies of Duryodhana, greatly superior in numbers, led by the three most renowned warriors and tacticians of the day; on the other the lesser host of Yudhisthira commanded indeed by notable fighters but fixing all its hope of eventual victory on the strong arm and invincible fortunes of Arjuna, with Krishna, the incarnate Lord of the world, as his charioteer. But Arjuna, their supreme hope, is on the point of failing them; he is overcome by the magnitude of

the approaching slaughter; afflicted by the fratricidal nature of the conflict he has cast down his bow; he has refused to fight. In the great colloquy that follows and forms the substance of the Gita, the incarnate Master of things, among a host of profound and subtle reasonings, uses also this striking exhortation which has become a commonplace of Indian thought, mayaivaite nihatah purvam eva nimittamatram bhava savyasacin. "By Me are these already slain and dead, do thou become only immediate means and determining cause, O Savyasa-chin." The Universal Will has seen and arranged from the beginning of this great world-act, this vastly planned cycle of natural happenings, the bodily destruction of Duryodhana and his mighty captains; the bow Gandiva in the hand of Arjuna is only the predestined nimitta. By the stream of successive events it has brought about an arrangement of forces in which the nimitta can become operative. There is the preexisting condition; there is the arranged result; there is the determining factor. But supposing this human intrument Arjuna, rejecting the command of the Lord of all things, preferring some hope of spiritual weal, preferring his own moral self-satisfaction, obstinately refuses to be the engine of God's will in him, in a work so thankless, bloody and terrible. What if he listens only to the natural cry of the human heart, kim karmani ghore mam niyojayasi kesava, "Why dost Thou appoint me, O Lord, to a dreadful work?" We say, from our human standpoint, that even then the Will of God can and will inevitably be fulfilled by Bhima, by the combined exaltation of the Panchala heroes, by the sudden greatness, even, — for "He makes the dumb man eloquent and the lame to overpass the hills". — of some inferior fighter; and, in the thought and language of the great infinite Potentiality that stands behind the material actuality of things, this would be the truth. — but not in the actuality itself. For in the God-foreseen actuality of things not only the event but the nimitta is fixed beforehand. The Cosmic Being is no blind and chance bungler who misses His expected tool and has gropingly to improvise another. Arjuna, too, is the vessel of the universal Will and can only act as It chooses. "The Lord is seated in the heart of all existences, O Arjuna, and He whirls round all existences mounted upon a machine by Maya." Even if Arjuna's mind resists, even if his heart revolts, even if his members fail him. eventually there is a Force greater than the individual and mental will which will, if so destined.

prevail upon his mind, his heart, his members. What is that Force? "Prakriti", answers the Gita, prakrtis tvam niyoksyati. The phrase is nowadays ordinarily interpreted to mean that Arjuna's warrior nature will whip him back to the fight. But the thought of the Gita is more profound and far-reaching. By Prakriti is meant the executive World Force, agent of the will of the Ishwara seated in the heart of all existences, that compels the tree to grow, man to think, the king to rule, the poet to create, the warrior to fight. The character of Arjuna is only one means towards her action, and even that acts not by itself, but in conjunction with the character of Duryodhana, of Karna, of Bhisma, of a million others even to the meanest soldier in either army. Yet left to itself the warrior nature of Arjuna might drive him back indeed to the fight, but too late to determine its issue; even it might be his personal nature, were that God's will, would abdicate its functions, seized and overcome by universal Nature, by pity, by vairagya, by fear of sin, and the fateful battle lose its fated nimitta. What is it that, not in free universal potentiality, but in the fixed fact must inevitably determine his return to his normal action? It is the executive Force of the universal Will which not only fixes personal nature, svabhava or sva-prakrti, but fixes too its working in each individual case, not only prepares the circumstance and the means but determines the action and the event. We seem to have here an overriding Fate, an ineluctable Ananke, even a self-acting mechanism of Nature; but it is not a mechanical inevitability, the result of the sum of our and others' past actions, not even a natural inevitability, the result of either a habitual or an ingrained working of our individual nature moved complexly by internal impulses, outward events and the action of others; but a willed inevitability, seen beforehand in Its universal pre-knowledge by that sole Existence which is expressing itself here in mind and body, in event and circumstance, and executed by It as its own Will-Force and universal Nature which works out automatically through arranged process and perfectly managed interaction of individual forces that which was foreseen by It and fixed from the beginning of things, vyadadhac chasvatibhyah samabhyah.

Causality consists merely in the successive conditions of things in the world, one emerging out of another, and the successive groupings, relations and interactions of forces and processes, by which the

Will acts out its rhythm [of] prearranged eventualities. The mechanism is a mechanism of self-possessed and continually working consciousness] that knows its whole future, present and past. The fixity of things and events is merely the term of practical executive wisdom in an original and inalienable freedom.

We see then that working of Law of Nature and succession of cause and effect are the process of fulfilment of a Will, a self-effective Intelligence which is superior to working of law and governs, not obeys, succession of cause and effect. That Will is the Lord who inhabits all these animate and inanimate existences, hrddese tisthati, the one universal Soul, and is master of the Jagati, not bound by her motions and actions. Na ca mam tani karmani nibadhnanti dhananjaya. All these actions, O Arjuna, of which I am the cause, bind me not at all; actions do not cleave to me, na mam karmani limpanti. Still, in the universal Soul of things, we can understand such a freedom and omnipotence; but the affirmation of the Seer has reference not only to the universal Ishwara, but to the individual soul, na karma lipyate nare, action fastens not on the man. How can it be affirmed that man, the individual soul, has any control over the activity of the universal Prakriti of which his action is a part, if that action is predetermined, as the Gita asserts it to be determined, by a higher all-knowing Will? And if he has no control of any kind, what freedom can he have from his actions, from their subjective pressure, from their objective results except the inner freedom of renunciation, of quietism, of indifference? Man, it would seem, can only be free by sitting still in his soul and allowing the great executive World-Force to act out the predestined Will of God, himself caring not for it and in no way mixing himself in the action. Is it not this freedom that the Gita recommends and is not this the action that the Upanished enjoins,— action worked out mechanically by Prakriti while the soul watches only and knows that it is not the actor? And as for any other and greater freedom, it can only be the freedom by self-extinction of Nara in Narayana, of the individual man in the universal all-inhabiting Ishwara—if indeed the real goal be not some transcendental Impersonality in which man and world and God are all and for ever extinguished.

We might accept this conclusion but for the distinct injunction of the Seer, bhunjithah, thou shouldst enjoy. Divine Ananda in God

at play and God at rest, not loss of interest and a quietistic indifference is the human fulfilment contemplated by the Upanishads. The first error of the human mind is to suppose that because our emotions, our desires, our personal will have an apparent effect upon event and fruit of action, they are themselves the real determinants of these events and the sufficient winners of that fruit; they are neither of these things ; they are only one spring of the machinery, only one subordinate working of the universal Will. It is what the universal Will beyond all mentality decides and works out, not what the personally acting will in the material brain and heart hungers after, that determines event. Karmanyevadhikaras te, says the Gita, ma phalesu kadacana, Thou hast a right to action, but no claim at all on the fruits of action; for the fruits belong to God, they belong to the world-working, they belong to the universal Will, they belong to the great purposes of the cosmos and not to any clamorous individual hunger. The second error of the human mind when it perceives itself to be the instrument only of a supreme universal Force or Will, its action to be only a whorl in the stream of universal energy and result to be a predestined event of universal Will partly executable by us, but not independently governable or alterable by our effort, is to argue falsely, confusing the Purusha with the Prakriti, that because our action is subject to universal Nature, therefore the soul also is subject to law of Nature and its only refuge is in quietistic renunciation, in indifference or in the withdrawal from phenomenal living. The real refuge is altogether different; it is the blissful withdrawal from personal hunger and desire, it is the detached but joyous contemplation of individual will as a working of divine or universal Will, it is the withdrawal from egoistic being and the perception of the individual as only a convenient term of the universal Ishwara, of the Jiva as only a form in consciousness of the Ishwara, it is the equal enjoyment of the fruits favourable or adverse not only of individual will, but of the universal Will, not only our own joys, but the joys of all creatures, not only those sins¹ which come to our minds and bodies, but those which come to the minds and bodies of all existences; it is to make the joy and fulfilment of God in the world our joy and fulfilment, it is to see one Lord seated in all creatures. This is the delight-filled equality of mind.

1 Doubtful reading.

anandamaya samata, that is in the world our ultimate prize and supreme state in mortal nature, fulfilling itself in a divine freedom equally from desire for the fruit of the action and from attachment to the action itself; the fruit is to be what the Lord has willed, the action is God's action in us for His great cosmic purpose. God Himself, the Gita tells us, has essentially this immortal freedom from desire, and yet He acts entirely; He has this divine non-attachment to the work itself and yet He works and enjoys in the universe and the individual, na me karmaphale sprha, asaktam tesu karmasu, varta eva ca karmani; for in Purusha He contemplates, blissful and free, Himself in Prakriti executing inevitably His own eternal will in the universe known to Him before the ages began in that timeless, time-regarding Conscious self of which we all are the habitations. So is the divine attitude towards existence constituted, the attitude of the Ishwara; a perfect and blissful calm and quietism of the divine soul harmonised and become one with a colossal activity of the divine Power driving before it the ordered whirl of myriad forces occupying limitless Space and Time towards an eternally predestined end.

It may be objected that while the divine Purusha standing back from the workings of His Prakriti, not only can be the free upholder, enjoyer and giver of an original and continued sanction to the world-workings, bharta, bhokta. anumanta, but also, by His eternal immanence as Master of the Will everywhere, is the present Ishwara. the controlling Lord of the action, man. by standing back from the Prakriti as the Soul or Purusha, may be indeed, secondarily to God, the upholder of his individual system. — that formal vessel, adhara, of his soul-states,— may be, in some sort sanction-giver to its activities, may be, secretly always and here eventually, the free enjoyer of all world-activities that come within its experience, but is not and because of his individuality cannot be or ever realise in himself the Ishwara, the present Lord and master of Nature. He has freedom, not lordship, — the passive freedom of God in the unmoving Brahman he may indeed acquire or share, but not His active lordship in the moving Brahman. To be mukta but never is would seem to be his destiny. Yet the Gita asserts that the Jivatman also is the Ishwara and the Upanishad declares the identity of the human soul with the divine Lord who inhabits all these motion-built forms of Nature.

In this disparity there is no contradiction. There are two aspects

of all existence, the Being and the Becoming, Atman and Sarvabhutani. According as the soul of man either stands out in its human becoming and lives in the twisted triple strand of the mind, body and vital being, of which we are conscious now and here, or, on the contrary, stands back in the divine unity of Sachchidananda, it enjoys either of two states of conscious experience, the individual self-consciousness of the separate Jivatman or the universal divine consciousness of the Jivatman merged or dwelling in God. In the former and inferior self-poise, our status is that of a separate soul, different from the Ishwara and always in some personal relation with Him — a type usually of our human connections with each other and the world, connection of child with parent, servant with master, teacher with taught, friend with friend, enemy with enemy, mechanist and instrument, harp and harpist, or a combination of several kinds of interplay at once, answering to the tangled relations we see in our human existence. This relation, created by the fundamental duality of God's play with His becomings, can be realised by us in our waking consciousness or exist [.........]² in our secret souls; but in any case it is a condition of subjection, conscious or unconscious, to the sole Ishwara. since even as enemy or rebel we can act after all only as He chooses, however much for the delight of the play. He gives us a certain length of rope, a certain range of subjective freedom and lets us believe that we are acting independently of Him or in opposition to His will. But what is it that builds up or constitutes in us these relations of the duality? It is not the soul itself but the activities of the mind, life, body, our thoughts, emotions, sensations; it is not the Purusha but our parts of Nature or parts of Prakriti. The soul or Purusha enjoys these relations because it identifies itself with the activities of Nature working in a special name and form and regards all her other workings from that centre of special consciousness; but since that nature, subject to the universal mechanism and a part of it, is anis, not lord, the soul in mind identifying itself with it is also to its outward consciousness anis, not lord. Nevertheless all the time the soul itself is aware,— not in mind, but beyond it, superconsciously in the veiled, secret and higher parts of our nature where it lives guhahita,— of playing a play, of being itself universal, one with God and lord of Nature as well as

2 Three illegible words; one or two other words in this sentence are doubtful.

its enjoyer. The more we detach ourself from Nature, the more, even in Nature itself, our lordship over her increases, our lordship first over her in our own being, our lordship, secondly, over her in her world-actions. We become more and more in our outward consciousness what the soul really is in the secret caverns of its luminous self-concealment, svarat samrat, Self-Ruler and Emperor of existence. Still, until the veil is entirely removed, we are indeed the Ishwara by the present immanence of our will in Life, but partially only, and not only secondarily to God, but in a limited degree. We are indeed always subject entirely to the universal Will or Shakti in Prakriti even when we are increasing our individual control over the processes of her individual and universal working. Still as we become purer channels, more and more of the divine Power pours through us and our motions are invested with a more swift, easy and victorious knowledge and effectiveness upon their environment. But it is only when we stand entirely apart from Nature, yet entirely immanent in her by conscious identification with the universal being, power and bliss of God that we become also entirely Ishwara; for then all walls break down, then with the false separation of individual being and God-being, breaks down also the false separation of individual power from God-power and it becomes possible for that divine Knowledge-Will working in us to fulfil infallibly and inevitably its foreseen and intended result, as it fulfils it in the universal working of Nature,—foreseen and intended in our waking consciousness, always indeed with a less extended working, but still essentially and typically as God works, with a partial divine science if not the extended divine omniscience, a partial divine victoriousness if not the extended divine omnipotence.

We shall be able to arrive at the precise and practical meaning of this identification and this separation, this detachment and freedom and shall discover the secret of action and rebirth if we look at the actual facts of material life and then at the Vedantic explanation of our conscious existence. We have, to start with, this fundamental divergence already noted between ordinary psychology and the psychology of Vedanta,— the former recognising only three principles, Mind, Life and Matter, or adding at most a fourth, Soul or Spirit, while the latter, with a deeper inlook, a wider outlook, a firmer foundation on daring experiment and probing analysis, distinguishes between various workings of the supra-mental or spiritual principle and encounters

in its search seven in the place of three prime elements of conscious being. Sat, Chit, Ananda, Vijnana, are four divine [.........]³ principles; they constitute the divine being, divine nature and divine life, and are called in their sum Amritam, Immortality; Manas, Prana, Annam, Mind, Life and Matter, are inferior and modifying principles, constituting in their sum in this material world mortal being, mortal nature, mortal life and are called Mrityu or Martya, mortality. The doctrine and instruction of the possibility, the means and the necessity for man of climbing from Mrityu to Amritam, out of Death into divine Life, mrtyum tirtva amrtam asnute, is Veda and Vedanta.

The world in which we live seems to our normal experience of it to be a material world; matter is its first term, matter is its last. Life-energy and mind-energy seem to exist as middle terms; but though their existence and activity cannot be denied or ignored, so omnipresent, insistent and victorious is the original element out of which they have emerged that we are led to view them as terms of matter only; originating out of matter, formulated in matter, resolved back into matter, what else can they be than modifications of the sole-existing material principle? The human mind seeks a unity always, and the one unity which seems reasonably established here, is this unity of matter. Therefore, in the fine and profound apologue of the Taittiriya Upanishad, we are told that when Bhrigu Varuni was bidden by his father Varuna to discover, entering into tapas in his thought, what is Brahman, his first conclusion was naturally and inevitably this that Matter is the Sole Existence, Annam Brahma. "For verily out of Matter are these existences born, by Matter they live, into Matter they pass away and enter in." We arrive, then, by reason considering only the forms of things and the changes and developments and disintegrations of form, at the culmination of Materialistic Rationalism and a Monism of Matter. Annam brahma vyajanat.

But here we cannot rest; driven by the Tapas, the self-force of the eternal Truth within to an ever-increasing self-knowledge and world-knowledge, we begin to analyse, to sound, to look at the insides of existence as well as its outsides. We then find that Matter seems to

3 Two or three illegible words.

be only a term of something else, of Force, we say, or Energy which, the more we analyse it, assumes a more and more subtle immateriality and at last all material objects resolve themselves into constructions and forms of this subtle energy. Hoping to reconcile our old conceptions and our new results, we make, at first, a dualism of Force and Matter, but we know in our hearts that the two are one and we are driven at last to admit that ultimate unity. But what is this energy? It is, says the Vedanta, Prana, Matarishwan, Life-Force or Vital Energy, that which organises itself in man as nervous energy and creates and carries on the processes and activities of life in material form. We find this same nervous and vital energy present also in the animal, the plant; it exists obscurely, it has been discovered, even in the metal. We have, therefore, in the world we inhabit, a unity of Life-Energy in its actions as well as a unity of matter in its formal changes. For modern thinking the problem is complicated by the narrow restriction of the idea of life first, popularly, to the material vessels of a conscious nervous activity, man, the animal, the insect, and then, more widely, to all forms of which organic growth and nervous response are the characteristic activities. Vedantic thought sees, on the contrary, that all energy apparent in matter is one Life-Energy; nervous force, electric force, even mental force so far as it works in matter are different forms of one working, which it calls Pranashakti. Energy of Life, formulated force of Existence throwing itself out in the currents and knotting itself into the vessels of its self-adaptive material workings. Life, as we know it, is the characteristic fulfilment of this stream of being. According to the Vedantic idea the characteristic form of any energy is to be recognised by us not in its lowest, but in its highest expression. The higher form is not a new creation of something previously non-existent out of the lower form,—for such a principle is essentially Nihilistic and leads inexorably to Nothingness as the starting-point of existence, and to the Vedantic idea nothing can be created which does not already exist, nothing can be evolved which is not already involved. Life-energy of man is involved in life-energy of plant, metal and sod; it is that which manifests itself by veiled and obscure workings in these more imperfect vessels. We see, then, by closer scrutiny, Matter as only a form of Life, organic or inorganic, perfected in nervous action or obscure in mechanical energies. Obsessed by this discovery, living in this medial term of

our consciousness, seeing all things from our new standpoint we come to regard Mind also as a term or working of Life. Bhrigu Varuni, bidden by his father back to his austerities of thought, finds a second and, it would seem, a truer formula. He sees Life as the Sole Existence, Pranam Brahma. "For from the Life, verily, are all these existences born; being born they live by the Life, to the Life they pass away and enter in." Our physical body at death is resolved into various forms of energy; the mind which inhabits the nervous system dissolves also and is or seems to be no more, except in its posthumous effect on others, an organised active force in the material world. We arrive, then, by reason considering the energies of things in their forms and the movement [of] the forces that constitute their changes, activities, development and disintegration, at the culmination of Vitalistic Rationalism and a Monism of the Life-Energy. Prano brahmen vyajanat.

Here too the mind of man. after finding this second goal of its journeyings. discovers that which it took for a final haven to be only a resting place. Life-Energy and Material Form or Substance of Life-Energy constitute together the outward body of sensible things, the sthula sarira or gross body of Brahman. But. as we pursue our analysing and probing, we begin to suspect that Mind is an entity different from either Matter or Life-Energy. Matter and Life reveal themselves to the mind through the senses. Mind, self-existent, self-perceptive. has on the contrary two evidences of its existence; it knows itself by the senses through its own results and outward workings, — it knows itself also both independently of the workings and in their more subtle movements, by itself, in itself, atmanyatmanam atmana. We perceive, besides, that man is essentially a mental and not a vital being; he lives for himself in the mind, is aware of his existence through the mind, knows and judges all things only as they form themselves to his mind. The speculation then inevitably arises whether as we found Life to be concealed in apparently inert matter and eventually knew Life to be the parent and constituent of material forms, we shall not. as the next step of knowledge, find Mind to be concealed in apparently unconscious forms of life-matter, the parent, constituent and motor impulse both of all life-energies and of ail forms and forces in which Life here is either formulated or embodied. But there are difficulties in the way of this conception. First, mind knows itself by itself only in the individual body which possesses it; it is unable.

normally, to watch itself in other bodies or perceive there, directly, its own presence and workings, it only knows itself there by analogy, by deduction, by perceiving through the senses the outward or formal effects of its presence and workings. All that is outside the individual form it inhabits, my mind knows by the senses only, and its own workings seem to consist simply of the nervous reception of this sense knowledge, the nervous reaction to it, the formulation of this experience in mental values and the various arrangement and rearrangement of the values formulated. Secondly, these values do not appear to be fixed independently by mind, as they would be if mind were the creator of forces and objects; mind appears to us to be not their master but their servant, although sometimes a rebellious servant, not their creator, poietes, but their translator and interpreter. Thirdly, mind seems unable to create life or to create or change material forms by its direct action. I cannot, by willing, add to my stature or change my features, much less alter forms external to my own. Just as it knows only by the senses, the jnanendriyas, so mind seems able to effect life and matter only through its bodily instruments of action,— the karmendriyas. The instances to the contrary are so exceptional, obscure and fragmentary that no conclusion can be formed upon such scattered and ill-understood data.

Nevertheless Vedantic thought insists. Knowledge, taught by experience, distrusts all first appearances and looks always behind them for the true truth of things. What is exceptional we must examine, what is ill-combined we must arrange, what is obscure we must illuminate. For it is often only by pursuing and examining the obscure and exceptional action of a force that we can come to know the real nature of the force itself and the rule of its obvious and ordinary action. It is not through the leap of the lightning, but through the study of the electric wire and the action of the wireless current that we get near to the true nature and the fixed laws of electricity. As life is obscure and imperfect in the plant and metal and its full character only eventually appears in man, so also mind is imperfect, if not obscure in man's present mental workings; its full character can emerge either⁴ in a better evolved humanity or else in a more developed and, to present ideas, an abnormal and improbable working of its now hampered

4 Can and either doubtful.

forces even in our present humanity. The ancient Vedantins therefore experimented as daringly and insatiably with mind as modern scientists with life-force; they deployed in this research an imaginative audacity and a boundless credulity in the possibilities of mind as extreme as the imaginative audacity and the boundless credulity in the possibilities of force working in matter deployed by the modern in his more external experiments and researches; they had too the same insatiable appetite for verification and more verification,— for without this harmony of boundless belief and inexorable scrutiny there can be no fruitful science; reason in man cannot accomplish knowledge without force of faith; faith cannot be secure in knowledge without force of reason.

Thus experimenting, the Vedantin discovered above mind in life the principle of pure Mind. He found that mind exists in the cosmos pure and untrammelled, but manifests in material forms imprisoned and trammelled. Mind subject to life and matter, erring in the circle of life and matter, he perceived as mortal mind, martya or mantis of the Veda, the human thinker; mind pure and free he perceived as divine mind, deva or daivya ketu of the Veda, the divine seer and knower. He found, first, that mind really exists in man in its own self-sufficient consciousness, independently of the sense life turned upon the outer material world, even when it can only work or actually only works through the senses. Secondly, he found that mind in one form or body subconsciously and superconsciously knows and can watch mind and mind's working in other bodies directly or by means independent of sense-communication and the watching of speech and action, and can, more or less perfectly, bring this subconscious and superconscious knowledge into the field of our waking or life-consciousness. He found, thirdly, that mind can know external objects also without using the ordinary channel of the senses. He found, fourthly, that the values put by mind upon outer impacts and its reactions to them are determined not by the impacts themselves but by the general formulations and habitual responses of Mind itself in the universal Being and these fixed and formulated values and reactions can be varied by it. can be suspended, can be entirely reversed, can be infinitely combined at will in the individual vessel called the human being. Fifthly, mind can and does by will, ketu can by kratu, used actively or passively, consciously, subconsciously

or superconsciously, without the aid of the karmendriyas modify even life-forms and action of life-forces and does it even now, swiftly or slowly, to a greater or less degree, — as is evident from the phenomena of heredity and hypnotism, — can determine directly the action of energy in other bodies, animate or even inanimate, can modify existing forms of things and can even arrive, though with much greater difficulty, at the direct creation of forms by the mental will. All these powers, however, are powers of the pure or divine mind and can only be consciously exercised in our mortality, so long as they are abnormal to it, if and so far as the universal Being originates and sanctions their use in the individual; they can be possessed as normal faculties only by a humanity which has climbed out of its present struggling entanglement in mortal being and the subjection of the motion of mind to the motion of life and matter, by a humanity in other words which has divinised itself and reached the high and free term of its evolution. If these ancient results are at all correct— and the whole trend of modern scientific experiment, as soon as it consents at all to dissect practically and analyse and manipulate experimentally mind as a separate force, tends, however dimly and initially, towards their confirmation,— then we can enter on a third stage of the march of knowledge. The intellectual difficulties in the way of our surpassing the vitalistic conception of world have disappeared. We begin to move, at first, towards a noumenistic monism of the universe. For if mind in man can determine, manipulate, modify and create not only the sensational values of forms and forces and impacts, but the forms and forces and impacts themselves, it is because in the universe these values, these forms, these forces have, originally and secretly, been fixed, created and moved by universal mind and are really its evolutions and formations. All forms of life-energy in this world are [. . .]⁵ formations of mental force in which the principle of mind broods self-absorbed in work of life and concealed in form of life to emerge in man, the mental being. Just as life, working but form-absorbed and concealed in the clod and metal, has emerged in the plant and the animal to organise its full character and activity, so it is with mind. Mind is omnipresent: it does mechanically the works of intelligence in bodies not organised for its self-conscious workings;

5 Illegible word.

in the animal it is partly self-conscious but not yet perfectly able to stand apart from its works and contemplate them, for the animal has more of sanjna than of prajna, more of sensational perceptive con-ciousness than of contemplative conceptual consciousness. In man first it stands back, contemplates and becomes truly "prajna", knowledge working with its forms and forces placed before it as objects of its scrutiny. But this evolution is the result and sign of a previous involution. Mind in the universe precedes, contains and constitutes life-action and material formation. Bhrigu Varuni, once more bidden by his father back to his austerity of thought, perceives a third and profounder formula of things. He sees Mind as that sole Existence. Mano Brahma. "For from mind these existences are born, being born by mind they live, into mind they pass away and enter in." For as all forms that dissolve go back into the life-forces that constitute and build their shapes, so all forces that dissolve must go back into the sea of mental being by which and out of which they are formulated, impelled and conducted. We arrive, by reason investigating the essential causes, governance and constituting intelligence of all these energies and forms which determines and manifests in their functions, methods and purposes, at the culmination of pure Idealistic Rationalism and the Monism of mind. Mano brahmeti vyajanat.

But Vedanta is not satisfied with the noumenal conception of being; it journeys yet farther back. Studying and experimenting with mind it perceives that mind, too. is a special force manifested out of being and not itself the ultimate nature of being. Moreover it sees that we have crudely put together in the single confused concept of mind a number of very different principles of which the one common characteristic is the possession of a luminous instead of a darkened consciousness informing its waters, not hidden in the cell of its own forms and motions. We have then still to analyse and probe the nature and limits of mind, and we have to sound and discern the nature and limits, if any, of what is beyond mind. Carrying the conception of knowledge far beyond the mental principle, discovering a Force more puissant and essential than mind-force, arriving at an essential existence other and purer than the mental self-consciousness which is, at present, man's ordinary and common subjective experience of himself, Vedanta finds that Life and Matter are not so much developments of universal Mind, as the subordinate formations and movements,

cooperative with it, although evolved out of it and formed by it, of a supramental, supravital, supramaterial Something which no terms we have yet understood can describe to our intelligence. In the noumenal conception, the formula of the mental Brahman, we have not, then, yet reached the essential term of the reality of things.

Still, we have already in this triple formula of Mind, Life and Body, corrected by the statement of a more real and potent existence behind them, a sufficient present clue, at least, to the nature, the workings and the goal of mental life in this material universe. The basis of our existence here is Matter, but Matter with life and mind involved in it. Every cell of the human body, every fibre of bark and leaf, every grain of earth treasures in itself a secret life and mind, is the hiding-place of Prajapati, the cocoon of the eternal butterfly. In the lowest inert or inanimate status of matter just so much nature⁶ of life-energy has been at work as is sufficient for the creation of its different forms and their maintenance and functioning in the convergent and divergent whirl and shock of all these cosmic forces, and this multiform correlation of an inert substance of energy and an apparently inanimate driving force of energy, has constituted material being and established for its purposes both a general nature, svabhava or own-being of matter and particular fixed processes of inherent self-action, the vratani of the Veda, which present themselves to us as the eternal laws of physical Nature.

But since Life is involved in Matter, things cannot rest here: the Truth within things, the pure Idea at work in the world which, secret also as well as mind and life in force of matter and form of matter, originates and guides evolution, demands and compels, perhaps by the pull from a higher world where life is the predominant power and basic principle, the evocation of an organised and self-fulfilling Life out of this inert substance and inanimate Life-force. That Life then eventually appears, but naturally and necessarily, it comes as a stranger into its surrounding. Confronted there with a set of laws imposed by the native sovereign, not at ease with them as it would be with the processes of a world of which it was itself, from the beginning, the sovereign and omnipresent ruler and lawgiver, it has to work on the unfit and rebellious material, to raise, vitalise and

6 Doubtful reading.

fit it for its own workings as a slave power or a subordinate energy. It has come in that process, like an alien invader and conqueror, to give and take, to make concessions, to conciliate its stubborn material in order eventually to dominate and use it. By slow processes, by long evolution, by multitudinous experiment Life arrives at the creation of a myriad forms of organised vitality in matter, in which the form has been trained and accustomed to bear and to answer to the workings of life in many varying degrees of intensity or complexity. But, in the end, Life itself has come to be fettered by its material. The processes of matter pursue it, enter into its action, encase and limit its processes. They are intolerant of any attempt to increase the complexity of the life-workings or to raise the intensity of its shocks beyond the limit of the rhythm already established between the form and its inhabitant. As a result of this resistance, the form tends to deteriorate or break in any upward or excessive endeavour. Ordinarily also it comes about that the more intense and organised the life, the more brittle and easily disturbed in its functions becomes the the material form which contains it, unless and until a new harmony is established, a new and higher or subtler rhythm effected.

But the upward evolutionary movement has only begun with the appearance of life; it is not ended. The Truth of things, the pure Idea at work in matter knows that Mind also is involved in Matter and the Truth of things demands and compels its evolution. It procures, again perhaps by the pull from a higher world where mind is the predominant power and basic principle, the liberation of this second and greater prisoner. Mind, like Life, appears but as a stranger and invader in a world in which it has to deal with already established processes of matter and already established processes of life in matter, and is not at ease with them as it would be with the processes of a world in which it was from the beginning a sovereign and omnipresent ruler. Mind, like Life, has to raise its material, mentalise it and make it fit for its own workings, Mind, like Life, to make concessions and conciliate its material. By long evolution, by slow process and multitudinous experiment it arrives at the creation of manifold forms of organised mind consciousness in vitalised matter, which have been trained to harbour and bear its workings. But in the process Mind, like Life, has become to a large extent a slave to its instruments; the processes of matter and material life enter into

its action, encase, condition and limit its workings, are intolerant of increasing complexity and intensity, tend to damage or break the form and the functions when subjected to the increasing demand, resist rapid progress. Here too, ordinarily, the more intense the mental action, the more highly organised its faculties, the more brittle and easily disturbed in their functions become the material form and the nervous life, its case and instruments, unless and until a new harmony is established and a new and higher or subtler rhythm effected.

It is now clear that the entire freedom and lordship in Nature of life over matter or of mind over living body can only come if one or more of three essential conditions is satisfied. The inhabitant principle must either develop such a form or establish such an essential harmony with its case and instruments or else get such a hold upon the lower principles that it can at once maintain them in perfect undisturbed existence and compel them to bear a wide, vast, richly filled, even perhaps an infinite intensity and complexity of the functionings of cosmic life-energy or cosmic mind-energy rushing upon its instrument, informing it and using it for its own delight of self-fulfilment. Such a form, such a harmony, such a hold, life would presumably possess in a world where it was the dominant factor, mind in a world similarly subject to its sovereignty. The Veda supposes such worlds to exist; it perceives several births, dwelling-places, kingdoms, jana, ksitayah, rajamsi, — to the kingdom of matter it gives the name of Bhu, to the kingdom of Life or Life-Consciousness the name of Bhuvar, to the kingdom of pure Mind the name of Swar. It supposes also that the powers of the higher worlds, figured in the three and thirty gods of the Veda and their subordinate deities, support their representative and instrumental beings in Bhu and favour their attempt to establish an increasing and ultimately perfect similar mastery here for Life or Mind over the material world. For such a growth, such a perfection, the invasion [and] subjection of the lower by the higher principle is the first necessity. For we see that Matter here only realises its highest and most complex potentialities even of material development and organisation when it is invaded, possessed and raised by life, life its highest and most complex potentialities even of vital development and organisation when it is invaded, possessed and raised by mind, and,— although, owing to our clumsy conceptions about mind, this is not so apparent to us,— mind also

can realise its highest and most complex potentialities even of mental development and organisation only when it is invaded, possessed and raised by that which is higher than itself.

Man is, here, the typical mental being. Imprisoned in the vitalised matter he has invaded, and struggling, with his real being in Swar and aided by the gods of Swar, to impose the mastery of Mind on the material world, he has, for the achievement of his object, two alternative principles to follow, either to conquer matter by matter, life by life or else to get behind both of them, discover pure mind and its powers and apply them to his eternal object. His achievements in the struggle with the laws of physical Nature on the physical plane itself are even now considerable; he has been able to seize on her physical forces and harness them to processes and results which she with all her large and gigantic movements has never attempted,— and these processes and utilities are all of them stamped with the subtlety, regularity, and conscious purposefulness of liberated mind. Modern man has not yet succeeded in discovering or using the laws of Life, but there is no reason to suppose that he will not one day make that discovery also. The day must inevitably come when he will be able even to originate no less than to modify freely both plant life and animal life in matter and govern them for his purposes as he now originates mechanisms of material force and modifies and governs its currents, combinations and separate workings so as to abridge distance, to invade the air, to economise the expenditure of his own life-energies or to serve a hundred other purposes of human construction, destruction or development. All these efforts are marked, however, by one characteristic and pregnant limitation — they proceed on the assumption that we can only master physical Nature by manipulating and turning against her laws, movements and processes which she herself has originally established for very different objects and to suit a very different status of world-existence. Even, therefore, in conquering, he is compelled to obey and to confine his achievement within the limited capacities of the physical instruments and the physical processes. Having passed in a curiously imperfect and illegitimate fashion beyond his original slavery to her simple and elemental workings, he is menaced with a worse slavery to his own monstrous mechanisms and in danger of missing the path of the Gods, following only the path of the Bhutas. The true process of enfranchisement

is rather, having discovered [and] separated the life-principle and its workings from the material processes in which they are fettered so that our vital life and forces may be raised into a sufficient instrument for infinite Mind, having the true pranayama or control of his vital being, to discover and separate also the principle and workings of pure mind from both life and matter and use them for the attainment of an entire mastery over our internal and our external world. In the eyes of the Vedantin a little progress, a minor achievement on the real path is of more value in the end than the vastest and most airy achievements of modern Science. For the latter is only clanking of gymnastics in self-multiplied chains by a strong and agile prisoner; the former is a step, however faltering, on the true path of freedom.

Nevertheless, even if we could so master the laws of mind as to entirely control our vital and physical being and its environment, the end of God in man is not achieved; for we ought not only to control life and matter by mind, but mind by a higher principle. Mind can only become free by self-subjection to God above mind and without freedom there is no true mastery. Samrajya is unreal without Swa-rajya. Mind that has mastered its inferior principles without obeying the law of a higher Truth is figured for us in epos and Purana as the victorious Titan, Hiranyakashipu or Ravana,— victorious but doomed in the end to a sudden successful revolt of the lower principles or to direct destruction by Power descending from on high because the mastery it holds is artificial, mechanical, not the aim of Nature in the world and therefore, if eternalised, bound to obstruct the higher destinies of the race. What though it has enslaved the god to its will and compels fire to come at its need or wind to blow where it lists, what though it can control despotically men and things and events, it is not for all that divine nor free nor supreme. Essentially, it is doing with higher instruments what modern man is now accomplishing with lower instruments; it is using a mental instead of a physical machinery to establish a precarious, temporary and apparent mastery over Nature which only veils a more subtle and tyrannous form of subjection. He who depends upon machinery is bound by his engines, often destroyed by them and in any case limited and shackled, and his gains of one kind balanced by pauperisation in other directions. Not until we have gone beyond machinery can we gain self-power.

self-being, self-bliss of God, can we hold ourselves secure in the right path and fulfilled in the right object of our ascension. And for this reason, that mind is in its nature bound up with limitation and form and dependent on the centre from which it works. Universal Manas, like universal Life and universal Matter, exists indeed and contains all things in itself, but it contains without comprehending. Its nature is not comprehension, but division, and what it calls comprehension is merely the seizing on details, on fractions and arriving by addition or multiplication at their sum. The integer as mind sees it is not a true integer, for mind is essentially manas, that which measures, contains and is bound by its function of containing. It can by itself arrive only at a pluralist, not an essential unity, or else at a zero. If it passes out of limitation, out of its form, out of its centre, it must be either dissolved into Nirvana, dispersed into the chaos of its unformed and discriminate mental nature or reduced to quietism and immobility. Mind can either rest voiceless and actionless. lost to itself, in the santam brahma, or it can find itself in the ejad brahma; but it cannot combine the two opposites, it cannot at once live in the silent stability of God and throw itself into the voiceful motion of things. That is a privilege of the divine and not of the mortal nature. Acting, mind must use the machinery of the triloka, the triple system of mind, life and matter and must submit to it while using it; it can get behind life and matter, it cannot get behind itself into the true and essential infinity. Therefore, of the soul seated in the triple principle. Shankara's dictum is entirely true that it can escape from bondage only by action-less quiescence of the mental self; Buddha's dictum is entirely justified that it cannot find any ultimate solution except by denying and annulling itself in an ineffable Nirvana. Bhrigu Varuni was not allowed by his father Varuna to rest in the formula of the mental Brahma. Sent back to the austerity of his self-contemplation he had to arrive at the perception no longer of the mind but of the pure Idea as the Sole Existence, Vijnanam Brahma.

We arrive, now, at states of being, consciousness and living experience which are far remote from ordinary human life and thinking, for the expression of which human language has neither been framed nor yet adapted. These higher states of being are the guha, the cavern or secret place, of Vedic imagery, and to express the knowledge and experience of them men have always been compelled to

resort to arbitrarily conventional word symbols, parables or concrete metaphors which can only serve as hints, signposts, hieroglyphic figures, not as a means of adequate expression. Those who can divine and follow these signposts find the path for themselves and arrive in experience at the truths the figures are meant to indicate. We can only form some idea of the Vijnana by the use of language and terms which properly belong to mental being and thinking and may therefore when applied to another order of facts quite as easily mislead as help to right understanding. Experience is here the only sure means of knowledge; for we have reached a kingdom of being where already nature of knowledge is beginning to pass into nature of identity, separate consciousness of things into luminous oneness with things, basis of external or sensuous observation into basis of internal self-identification and comprehension in a common self-existent and self-same truth of things.

Vijnana, like mind, is a principle fundamentally of knowledge, and not like life a principle of force, or like matter a principle of substance. Force, knowledge and substance of being are the trinity constituting the activity of the divine Bliss of Being and Will to Becoming in the universe. In the system of Vedanta, pure Being exists as the background, beginning and foundation of all cosmic existence, containing in itself in eternal latency and potentiality of becoming all things that become or do not become in this universe. Becoming, or becoming of any form or force in the cosmos, is subject to the will of God or Brahman, that Unknowable which has manifested Itself in this fundamental term of Atman, Pure Being, Sad Brahman. Pure Being is Pure Self-Awareness; Sat-Chit, — this is the first formula on which becoming depends. Atman extends itself in the secondary terms of Space and Time, which are conscious values of this biune Being that is Consciousness, Space in this formula representing the term of Being, Time the term of Consciousness; but when analysed or realised, they inevitably reduce themselves back into mere figures of extension of this Being-Consciousness and are seen to have no real existence in themselves. In an universe of consciousness-symbols, they are the first symbols. Chit or Self-Awareness of Brahman has again a double status, a status of rest in self-conscious being and a status of apparent motion in self-conscious being. In this double status it has the value in Conscious Being of a self-existent omnipotent

Will manifesting in the extension of Brahman or retaining, concealed in its unextension; whatever it choses in whatever process or order of things it prefers. Nimitta,7 process or order, figured in relation, succession and causality, is the third symbol of consciousness by which cosmos is rendered possible; for it makes possible arrangement of things in the idea of Space and arrangement of happenings in the idea of Time. Will is in its nature Power of Knowledge or Act of Knowledge; therefore, when analysed and realised, divine or cosmic Will is perceived to be Chid Brahman, self-conscious Being, Chaitanya, Conscious Spirit, which takes into its possession in being of cosmic self-knowledge and effects in force of self-knowledge figures of Its own concealed and unknowable reality. We see, then, that all becoming in universe is a formal or symbolic manifestation of unknowable God or Brahman effected by Tapas, by the dwelling of self-knowledge on latent truth of being and the consequent forcing it out of its latency in figure of truth for the joy of God's cosmic self-knowledge. That which is to us unknowable and beyond thought and sensation is expressed here by Tapas of cosmic consciousness in theorem and formula of progression constituting the order of forms in the universe. The loosing of the latent out of latency by Tapas is the whole nature of creation in the idea of the Vedantin. The symbol of the creative Ishwara is always the Kavi, the poet-seer who by Tapas, by concentration of self-knowledge figured as creative Will, brings out from latency in his infinite unmanifest consciousness varied forms of himself. Therefore, it is said that when Brahma the Creator was born on the sea of essential substance, the ksirasamudra, it was in answer to a cry of OM Tapas, pealing out over the moveless ocean, that he set himself to the work of creation. The Kavi creates for his self-delight in self-expression and for no other reason. For when we say that the Will chooses, the Will prefers, when we speak of the icchasakti or omnipotent Will of God, we are expressing in terms of Force what is fundamentally in consciousness a movement of Delight or Ananda. For the nature of Conscious-Being is bliss. That which the pure unrelated Sad Brahman, not looking towards cosmic self-expression, is aware of about Itself is unrelated self-Bliss; that which the creative Chid Brahman, looking towards cosmos, is aware of in

7 The word nimitta means literally, measured arrangement; ordering in time and space is the essence of the concept of nimitta. [Sri Aurobindo's note]

the Sat, is the cosmic delight of self-expression in general and in particular symbols of consciousness, in extension of infinite being and conscious force and in their concentration into determined form of being and determined action of force. When we say that Brahman as Chaitanya, as Consciousness, dwells upon a figure of Itself and brings it out of its latency there where it dwells cavern-housed, guhahita, we imply, — Chaitanya and Ananda, Consciousness and Bliss being one entity, — that Brahman as Ananda, as Self-Delight, fixes on that figure for Its symbolic self-expression. What God delights in, that is His will-to-be in cosmos, that becomes. In the more ancient Vedic terminology this divine principle of Ananda was designated sometimes as mayas, a word which means both love or joy and creative comprehension and sometimes as jana, a word which means at once delight, especially the delight of procreation, productiveness, birth, and world. God's delight in things is their birth, their seed of production, their coming into world. Chit Tapas, Consciousness working as Will, is the condition and agent of cosmic existence, Ananda is its cause.

Still, we do not yet see clearly what it is that brings about the difference between self-being and symbolic being or becoming. Where is the principle that bridges the gulf between the pure and the figured Brahman? Or what power of consciousness enables the formless to pour itself into forms? It is, says Vedanta, a special principle, a selective power of pure consciousness which all Being possesses, the principle, the faculty of Vijnana. Sachchidananda is a Trinity; Being is in its very essence Bliss Consciousness, Consciousness is in its very essence Being and Bliss, Bliss is in its very essence Consciousness and Being. It is the faculty of Vijnana which, while always resting in their eternal, indefeasible and indivisible oneness, yet casts them into triune figures of being and originates in world their mutual play and their multiplicity. It is Vijnana that expresses and arranges the cosmic self-expression of being by looking at Brahman now predominantly in one aspect, now predominantly in another aspect even while it perceives all the others inherently contained in the predominant self-conception. When the Vijnana in us dwells thus on the principle of divine Ananda, we see and we work out all things in terms of Ananda; still we are aware all the time of the nature of Ananda as infinite Conscious-Being and the idea of Consciousness and Being attends and supports the Ananda and works itself out through its workings.

When the divine Idea dwells rather on the principle of divine Force or Will in us, then we see and we work out all things in the terms of Force or Will; still the idea of Consciousness and Bliss always attends and supports Will and works itself out through its workings. We see, then, that essentially Vijnana when analysed and realised reduces itself to the selective and disposing self-action of Chit-Tapas omni-sciently aware of the eternally stable unity and eternally potential multiplicity of Brahman and omnipotently able to arrange the terms of that multiplicity from any and every standpoint of Brahman's self-consciousness. It is essential act of knowledge in an essential status of knowledge; its movement is not in the veiled objective manner of mental knowing, but a primary and comprehensive subjective movement in which universal Knowledge sees objects of itself within itself without any veil by reason of an essential identity in motional difference, self-aware self-existent inalienable identity manifested and not contradicted or abrogated [by] difference of form and action, just as a man sees his thoughts and his actions as movements of himself, as self-expression of himself in his own being. There are therefore three essential attributes of the Vedantic conception of Vijnana. Vijnana is satyam; it is knowledge proceeding out of an essential identity of being and consciousness between the known and the knower. — the true ideal knowledge may come to a man either through identity of being with the object contemplated or through unity in consciousness with the object or through self-delight in the object, but always it will be self-revealing truth of fact, self-existent truth of being and not formed truth of thought or opinion. Vijnana is also brhat; it is knowledge comprehensive of and containing the object of knowledge in the knower; it possesses, it does not approach, it is in process, it moves from the essence to the appearance, from the unit to the parts, from the greater unit to the lesser unit, not from the attribute to the thing, from the fraction to the integer. Vijnana is rtam, is knowledge perfectly self-arranged and self-guided; spontaneously self-arranged in perception and in action spontaneously self-fulfilled through the law of inevitable manifestation of the Truth in its own nature and by its own force, it is the faultless instrument of an unerring omnipotence and omniscience. Satyam rtam brhat, the True, the Right, the Large, describes God in His being of pure ideal knowledge and self-efficiency.

What is the practical value of this conception of Vijnana? The thing we call mind is the knowledge of the individual about himself and of the world only as it affects or reaches his individual consciousness. It is the view of things which a man shut up in a dungeon with glazed and coloured windows may have about the world and his own dwelling-place. In the colours of the senses he sees the objects outside; in the light of the few objects it sees through its small and scanty windows and by reasoning from their appearances, mind forms its idea of the world; even of this house which it inhabits, it knows only one room with a locked door and all that is outside that door it can only guess at by analogy or infer from the sounds, smells, vibrations which come to its senses from the rest of the building or the occasional visits, messages and descriptions which it may receive from its other inhabitants. For it is now an ascertained truth even to modern psychological observation and experiment, — and was known thousands of years ago to the Vedantin, — that only a small part of our active conscious being is revealed to our waking mental consciousness; a vast amount of work of action, work of impulse, work of knowledge goes either under or above the lower and the upper level of our waking existence and faculty. In the nature of things, therefore, mental knowledge starts from limitation, lives in limitation and ends in limitation. It is dabhram, alpam, says the Veda, not, like the Vijnana, brhat; in its nature truncated, oppressed, little. We know nothing certainly except that certain phenomena present themselves in a certain regular way to our senses and are valid within certain limits for our life; on the basis of that sensational experience we can make out a practical rule and order of living. All the rest of mental knowledge may be described [as] a selection of probabilities out of a mass of possibilities. But because mental knowledge is limited and subject to mixed truth and error, therefore also the feelings and impulses of mind in man are subject to falsehood, error, wrong placement, corruption and perversion, in a word, to evil and sin. And since action is only a mechanical expression of mind and feeling, his action also is subject to a resulting falsehood and wrong placement, to evil and sin. Ignorance of self and world is the original error; out of that seed proceeds all evil and suffering. Man, born as a mental being, cannot arrive at right action, right feeling, right knowledge; he can only struggle towards them and approximate to some blundering, limited

and imperfect standard of right and truth formed by him out of his fixed notions arid habitual feelings. These standards he is continually changing according to the shiftings of his knowledge and the circlings of his knowledge in pursuit of that eternal self-existent Truth and Right which the soul in him knows to exist but the mind and body in him fail to find and accomplish. For mind cannot see the Truth,— the goal and the condition of our journey, — it has to grope after it and feel it; for it has sense of things but not vision of things, mati, not drsti. It does not know the right, the way of our journey, but has to seek for it; therefore it cannot proceed straight to its goal, but follows a devious and wandering journey. The lower mental life is not only dabhram and alpam, says the Veda, it is hvaras and vrjinam, [. . .]⁸ in action of knowledge and action of heart and action of [. . .]⁹a crooked going, not, like the action of Vijnana, rju, straight-moving

We distinguish then between vijnana and manas. Vijnana is brhat, limitless and comprehensive in its nature and process, because free from individuality, apauruseya, and universal in its movement and origin; therefore it is true, satyam, in essence and true, rtam, in arrangement. Mind is alpam, limited in its nature because proceeding from an individual centre [and] standpoint and bound in its movement and origin; therefore it admits of asatyam and anrtam, error and falsehood or misplacement,—for all falsehood and error is misplacement of truth, all manas diverted action of vijnanam— in the essence and arrangement. Vijnana is, because rtam, therefore rju, right is rectum, the straight—because it is in its nature right arrangement in right being, therefore it proceeds straight by the right way to the right goal with an assured, luminous and self-existent Tightness of impulse, Tightness of feeling and Tightness of action. Mind is hvaras; not knowing but seeking; it gropes and circles through falsehood either to truth or a worse falsehood; through sin and stumbling either to righteousness or to a worse sinfulness. Vijnana has for its process of knowledge drsti; thought of Vijnana sees, it does not search; it starts from knowledge, it does not start from ignorance; it starts from the essence, not from the appearance; it begins with the essential truth, Brahman, and sees in it the general truth, the idea, the kavya of the kavi, which creates the mental, vital and material symbol,

8 Illegible word. 9 Illegible word.

from the general truth it proceeds to detail and particular, from the idea to the working out of the idea in process, attribute, quality and variation. Reasoning in Vijnana is only an arranged statement of already possessed knowledge; it is not a means of arriving at truth, but only of orderly stating of truth. Mind has for its process mati; mind feels and senses, it does not see, for what it calls sight is only a form of touch or contact with its object from outside, not the internal knowledge of the object as a thing contained in the knower. It starts from ignorance and struggles towards knowledge, it grasps only appearance and can do no more than speculate about essence; starts from the fragments and pieces the whole, starts from the particular and perceives the general as a mental abstraction, not a living reality; proceeds from its abstract generalisation and infers essence but cannot come into the real presence of Being. Reasoning in mind is a statement of successive perceptions of data to arrive at a conditionally valid inference, not at a self-existent and for ever indubitable truth. Mind starts with a dark ignorance in the shape of [. . .]¹⁰ knowledge or false knowledge and ends with a twilit ignorance in the shape of agnostic uncertainty.

Clearly, then, if this faculty of Vijnana exists, is of this nature and has these relations to mind, then the path of our evolution and, consequently, also the right direction of our efforts is clear; it is, having exceeded nervous life and body, to exceed mind also and arrive at the culmination of right knowledge, right feeling, right works in the spontaneous and infinite mastery and liberty of the Vijnana. It is rational to suppose that such a principle exists ; for, given the existence of a self-existent Truth at all, supposing that all is not, as the Nihilistic Buddhist contends, a sensation-troubled void, then a self-acting faculty of knowledge responding to and perceptive of the self-existent Truth is at least probable and seems to be demanded. If, moreover, we consent to the Vedantic idea of the world as a creative form and rhythm of consciousness, this logical probability becomes an obvious and inevitable necessity. Self-existent Truth of things can in that theory be nothing else than self-perceptive Truth of conscious being. The existence of a world of objects of universal consciousness arranged in fixed relations and processes presupposes the existence of this

10 Illegible word.

principle of Vijnana and therefore of the faculty of Vijnana. It may. however, be reasonably questioned whether, even if the faculty exists, it is not a divine privilege denied to man as much as to the tree and the insect. Is not man unchangeably a mental being, not only at present fixed in mind as his centre, but eternally imprisoned in it as his element, continent and condition of existence? But such a rigid limitation is inconsistent with what we know of man and of Nature. Nature moves by steps and gradations out of one stream of her movement into a higher law. She has established a rudimentary reason in the animal which has perfected itself in the supreme animal, man. Equally she has established a rudimentary form of Vijnana in man which has to be perfected in the inevitable course of her evolution, and must perforce be perfected here in no other being than a supreme humanity or supreme man. She has first arranged an illegitimate form of Vijnana in the intellect, the mental buddhi or human reason, Which has all the movements of the Vijnana, perception, arrangement, synthesis, analysis, but is unable to arrive at its proper methods and results because it limits itself [to] the province of the senses and has for its one right function to train these mental servants and purify them from the control of yet lower elements of our being, the grosser life functions, the body, the nervous heart-movements. Above the reason and sending down its higher rays into the human intellect she has seated the vijnana-buddhi, the intuitional mind. Animals have an intuitional sense, they have not the intuitional intellect; man has access to a true intuitional mentality, and there is his right door to release from subjection to the sensational mentality he shares with the lower creatures. When he has fulfilled reason,— not before, — he has to surmount reason, to silence it just as reason has silenced the brute passions, and lift up its faculties nearer to their true nature, mode and function, to the intuitional mind, which then, unbesieged by the sense mind and the erring intellect, can receive the pure rays from above of the luminous and divine Vijnana.

The evolution of Vijnana out of mind is inevitable for the same reason that the evolution of life out of matter was inevitable or the evolution of mind out of life, because the Vijnana or pure Idea, already involved in matter, life and mind, demands and will procure, perhaps by the pull from a higher world where the Idea would be the dominant power and basic principle, its own release out of the limitations of

sensational mentality. Just as we found matter to be a formation out of life-energy, and life-energy to be a formation out of mind, so mind is a formation out of Vijnana. That which has constituted and governs stone or tree, animal or man, is not matter, nor life, nor mind, but the Idea involved in these three masks of conscious being. The idea of the tree in Brahman's consciousness is hidden involved in that form of life-energy which our senses see as a seed. In reality, the seed of the oak tree holds at the back of its intended evolution the potential seminality of all trees that have existed or can exist, because the Idea, the Brihat, by which it exists, is the Brahman in all Its vastness, Brahman whose process in Nature is to dispose variously one seed of things so as to form a myriad various existences. Ekam bijam bahudha vidadhati. But by successive selective processes of Vijnana the form specially fixed in the seed, inherent and latent in it and bound to develop out of it, is first tree and then oak tree. For this reason and no other, an oak tree and no other existence must develop out of the seed the earth has received. It is the involved Idea, is the Vijnana Consciousness of God, which dwells in the seed, has chosen and prepared this form and supports, governs and directs by the mere fact of its inherent existence there the processes, arrangements, life and functionings of the oak tree. We do not see this truth because the form God takes is still a material form without an organised mental consciousness. It is only when we arrive at human life that, a little more clearly, and yet still very dimly, this truth begins to show itself. To our lower or material mind, for instance, a nation is an intellectual fiction; the reality is only a number of men agreeing for certain material ends to call itself a nation and living in an artificial idea of unity created by the associations born of a mere word. But, first, the intuition-sense we share with the animals by means of the emotional heart, then the reason seeking to find a cause, a formula and justification for the vitality of the nation-idea and, finally, the intuitive mind, looking behind the phenomena of the senses, begin to draw near to the real truth. In real truth a nation is an existence in the universal Consciousness, an Idea-Force in the universal Will that is knowledge, not constituted by geographical boundaries, nor by a given sum or combination of human units, nor by a common language, religion, custom, laws, government,—for all these conditions may be satisfied without a nation existing or dispensed with or exceeded without the nation

ceasing to exist,—but created by the idea and living in the idea. Born of the idea in the Brahman, it exists by the force of the idea and only so long as that force supports it and needs the form for its self-fulfilment: the force withdrawn, the form departs into the general Idea-Force which is constantly grouping men and animals, plants and worlds into figures of corporative Brahman-consciousness and entering into it either there dissolves or waits for fresh emergence in other time, place and conditions. What is true of the corporate mind-life of the nation is true of the individual mind-life also, of man. the animal, tree, stone, insect. "From the Idea all these existences were born; being born, by the idea they live; to the idea they pass away and enter in." But not till man appears in the material world, does it begin to be possible for the Idea to produce a form of mind, life and body which will be able to house and express the vijnanamaya ideal being, the god in the universe, and can be prepared to bear the activity of a divine force and divine joy and, breaking the walls of the mental -ego. enlarge into the wideness of a cosmic consciousness. The gods, it is said in the Upanishad. presented by the Spirit with successive forms of animal life for their habitation, returned always the answer. "This is not enough for us." Only when human life appeared, did they utter the cry of assent. "This indeed is well and wonderfully made," and enter satisfied into their fit dwelling. But to fulfil the great purpose of its being, humanity has first to learn how to break down the dungeon of mind and, unlocking the doors of the one room in its dwelling-place, vindicate for himself a free movement in his seven-storied mansion. By passing from mind to Vijnana. he will possess in his nature that toward which he now only gropes and aspires, a being that has conquered the limitations of ego a cosmic-knowledge that looks at truth direct and unveiled, a perfectly tuned heart whose emotions and impulses are in harmony with the diviner truth of things, an inner and outer action which, free from the duality of sin and virtue, is unstumbling in its spontaneous movement, confident in its pure and inalienable joy. self-effective of its own God-given objects without passing through the pangs of personal desire, straining and disappointment born of wrong aim, wrong method or wrong emotional reaction. Human life and being will then be moulded into the forms of the satyam, rtam, brhat. For man knowing himself and the world, man will work out his life spontaneously as the sun

moves or the oak tree grows, by the force of the idea working out the svabhava, own nature, own or proper becoming. For dharma, right life and action in man and in every other existence, is svabhavaniyatam karma, works directed and governed by the inborn nature to fulfil the divine idea symbolised in the type and embodied in the individual. But in the sun and oak tree it works mechanically without an organised consciousness and joy of the work expressed in the form inhabited. Man fulfilled will enjoy consciously the perfect workings of God's Prakriti in him.