Victory is certain if we persevere, and what price of difficulty and endeavour can be too great for such a conquest ?
April, 1962
The Divine gives itself to those who give themselves without reserve and in all their parts to the Divine. For them the calm, the light, the power, the bliss, the freedom, the wideness, the heights of knowledge, the seas of Ananda. - Sri Aurobindo.
THE MOTHER'S COMMENTARY
ON
THE DHAMMAPADA
VI
THE WISE
If you meet someone who shows you a thing to be cast out, even like one who tells you of a secret treasure, seek such a wise sage though he censures you. In such a seeking only good will come to you and not evil, (1)
He will rebuke, he will command, he will prevent wrong doing. Such a person is loved by the good, he is disliked by the wicked. (2)
* Based on the Mother's Talks.
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Seek not a friend who is full of evil, seek not a friend who is among the vilest of men, seek your friend who is to your good, who is among the best of men. (3)
One who drinks deep of the Divine Law lives happy in the serenity of his soul. The wise always finds delight in the Divine Law as declared by those who have the Realisation. (4)
The diggers bend the water to their will, the arrow-makers bend the arrow to their will, the carpenters bend the wood to their will, even so the wise bends his self to his will. (5)
As a solid rock is not shaken by the blast, even so the wise is not shaken by praise and blame. (6)
As a deep lake is serene and clear, even so the wise listens to the Divine Law and attains serenity. (7)
The wise may go anywhere, but being wise they do not prattle of desires and longings. Whether touched by happiness or sorrow, the wise do not show any ups and downs. (8)
Not for one's own sake nor for the sake of others, shall one desire for a son or wealth or a kingdom. One must not either through the evil path desire for one's prosperity. Then one becomes virtuous and wise and righteous. (9)
Few are they among men who reach the other shore, ordinary creatures run up and down along this shore only. (10)
And they who follow the Divine Law as ordained, reach the other shore beyond the impassable domain of Death. (11)
Leaving the way of darkness, the wise man must cleave to the way of light. Leaving home, homeless he must come into the solitude where there are no pleasures. (12)
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There he must seek happiness, abandoning desires, possessing nothing, the wise man must cleanse himself of all the impurities of the mind. (13)
Those whose mind is well grounded on all the degrees of Enlightenment, freed from all attachment, who delight in detachment, shorn of appetites, resplendent, in this world itself, attain the Supreme Nirvana. (14)
THERE is a sentence here which is particularly happy. It is the very first sentence which says, "one must seek the company of the wise man who shows our defects even as he would show us a hidden treasure".
In all Scriptures meant to help mankind progress, it is always said that you must be grateful towards those who show you your defects and so you must seek their company; but the form here used is particularly happy : if a defect is shown to you it is as if a treasure were shown to you, that is to say, each time that you discover in you a fault, incapacity, want of understanding, weakness, insincerity, all that prevents you from making a progress, it is as it were you discovered a wonderful treasure.
Instead of sorrowing and telling yourself, "oh, there again a defect", you should, on the contrary, rejoice for having made a wonderful acquisition, as it were. Because you have precisely caught hold of one of those things that prevented you from progressing and once you have caught hold of it, pull it out ! For they who practise a Yogic discipline consider that the moment you know that a thing should not be, you must have the power to remove it, discard it, destroy it.
To discover a fault is an acquisition. It is as though a flood of light entered into the place where there was a bit of obscurity which has just been driven out.
When you follow a Yogic discipline, you must not accept such weakness, looseness, unwillingness; that is the cause why the consciousness is not immediately followed by power. To know that a thing should not be and yet let it continue to be is a sign of weakness that is not admitted in any serious discipline; it means
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a lack of will that goes right down to insincerity. You know that a thing should not be and the moment you know it, you are the master and it shall not be. For knowledge and power are essentially the same thing—that is to say, you must not admit in any part of your being this shadow of bad will which is contradictory to the central will for progress and which makes you impotent, without courage, without strength in the face of an evil that you should destroy.
To sin through ignorance is not a sin; that is part of the general evil in the world as it is, but to sin when you know, it is serious. It means that there is hidden somewhere, like a worm in the fruit, an element of bad will that must be hunted out and destroyed at any cost, because any weakness on such a point is the source of difficulties that sometimes later on, become irreparable. So then the first thing is to be perfectly happy when someone . or some circumstance puts you in the conscious presence of a fault in you which you did not know. Instead of lamenting, you must rejoice and in this joy must find the strength to get rid of a thing which should not be.
VII
THE ADEPT
Pain exists not in him who has ended his journey, who has no grief, who is free in every way, released from all knots, (1)
The heedful ever strive, they delight not staying at home. As a swan quits his pond, even so he moves away from home to home. (2)
They who have no possessions, who live on measured food, who have realised the emptiness of things and the unconditioned freedom, their movement is hard to follow even as that of the bird in the air. (3)
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They whose longings have withered, who are indifferent to their food, who have realised the emptiness of things and the unconditioned freedom, their movement is hard to follow even as that of the bird in the air. (4)
Even the gods esteem such a person who has his senses tranquillised, even as a good charioteer has his steeds controlled, who has purged all pride and is free from taint. (5)
One who follows the discipline is unshakable even as the Earth, even as the heavenly Pillar. He is like a lake free from mud, he is free from the cycle of births. (6)
Calm is his mind, calm his words and acts. Perfect knowledge has freed him and all is calmed in him. (7)
He is the greatest of men, one who is not credulous, but has the sense of the Uncreated, who has cut away all the bonds, who has killed all chance of birth, silenced all yearning. (8)
Whether it is a village or a forest, whether it is a low land or an -upland, wherever the Adepts roam, that spot is indeed delightful. (9)
Delightful are the forests where the crowd do not take delight. It is they who are without passion that find delight there, for they are not in the pursuit of pleasures. (10)
There is a very interesting sentence here : "one who is not credulous, but has the sense of the Uncreated..."
One who is not credulous, you can put into this word all kinds of things. The first impression is that it refers to one who does not believe in invisible things without having an experience of them, as distinct from people who follow, for example, a particular religion and have faith in dogmas simply because these have been taught to them. "But he has the sense of the Uncreated...", that is to say, he is in contact, with invisible things
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and knows them as they are, by identity. The Dhammapada says at the very beginning that he is the greatest of men who has no faith in what is taught but has a personal experience of things that are not visible, he who is freed from all belief and has had himself the experience of invisible things.
Another explanation also can be given : one who is not credulous, it is he who does not believe in the reality of appearances, in things such as we see them, who does not take them for the truth, who knows that these are only misleading appearances and it is behind them that lies a truth that is to be found and known by personal experience and by identity.
And this makes one ponder over many things—countless number of things—that we believe without personal knowledge, simply because we have been taught that they are like that or because we are accustomed to think that they are like that, or again because we have around us people who believe that things are like that. If we look at all the things that we believe in and not only believe but assert with an undisputable authority, "This, it is like this", "That, but of course it is like that", "And this thing, yes, it is so"...in truth, however, we know nothing, it is simply because we have the habit of thinking that they are like that. What are the things that you have experienced personally, with which you have had a direct contact, of which you can say, at least, with sincerity, "I am convinced that it is like that, because I have experienced it." Not many, I am afraid.
In reality, if you want truly to have knowledge, you must begin by a very important study : verify the things that we have been taught, even the most common and the most insignificant. Then you will understand why the text says "the greatest of men", because I do not think that many have cultivated this experience.
Just to find out the number of things we believe in and assert, simply because it has been our habit to believe and assert them, is indeed a very interesting discovery.
Now go and look into your thought and consciousness for all the things that you assert without proofs. You will see !
NOLINI KANTA GUPTA
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IT is Prakriti or Nature that acts; the Divine does not compel people to do anything. Nothing can happen without the presence and support of the Divine. Yes, Nature or Prakriti is the Divine Force and it is this that works out things but it works them out according to the nature and thought or with the will of each man which is full of ignorance; that goes on until men come to the Divine and become conscious of Him and united with Him. Then only can it be said that all begins to be done in him by the direct Will of the Divine.
I5-5-1935
An inner (soul) relation means that one feels the Another's presence, is turned to her at all times, is aware of her force moving, guiding, helping, is full of love for her and always feels a great nearness whether one is physically near her or not. This relation takes up the mind, vital and inner physical till one feels one's mind close to the Mother's mind, one's vital in harmony with hers, one's very physical consciousness full of her. There are all the elements of the inner union, not only in the spirit and self but in the nature... .This is the inner close relation as opposed to an outer relation which consists only in how one meets her on the external physical plane. It is quite possible— and actual to have this inner close relation even if one sees her only at pranam and meditation and once a year perhaps on the birthday.
29-6-1935
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To be turned wholly to the Mother and have nothing but friendly relations with the sadhaks, the same for all, is a counsel of perfection; but not many can carry it out, hardly one here and there. Yet to have that tendency is to have the real turn towards the one pointed ness of sadhana; but people take time to arrive at it.
12-7-1935
It is a matter of mechanism of the nature only and it is no use getting afflicted or depressed over it. That is the wrong attitude. You have to remain perfectly quiet and get the habit of calling in the Light and Force until you are able at will to set the mechanism right whenever it goes wrong by bringing back the higher condition. It has taken time, but you must have the patience to go on till it is done.
I5-7-I935
It is an ordinary experience in sadhana that when the sex is rejected from the lower vital, it does not go at once, but descends lower and falls back on the physical—the body consciousness itself. There is no reason to feel disturbed by that. You have to keep yourself detached and separate from it and reject it from there also. That will finally have its effect after a time on the dream state also.
18-7-1935
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There are always two sides to every human being. In Western Occultism they call them the good and the evil Persona (personality).
The past acts count so long as the man does not change.
*
* *
What is Brahmacharya ? In the old language it meant chastity in thought, word and act.
*
* *
You do not know what is in others and why they fail. You know what is in yourself and you have to have the sincere will to overcome it. If you do that then you can progress, until you arrive.
25-7-1935
*
* *
The reason why you turn against the Divine is because it is not your psychic being that is wounded in its ideals or not that only, but your vital ego which is hurt in its feelings, disappointed in its hopes, offended because it is not treated in the way it expected. If it had been the psychic it would have turned from men and from human nature to the Divine. As it is the vital, it turns in egoistic anger against both men and the Divine.
6-9-1935
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It is equally ignorant and one thousand miles away from my teaching to find it in your relations with human beings or in the nobility of the human character or an idea that we are here to establish mental and moral and social Truth and justice on human and egoistic lines. I have never promised to do anything of the kind. Human nature is made up of imperfections, even its righteousness and virtue are pretensions, imperfections and prancings of a self-approbatory egoism....What is aimed at by us is a spiritual truth as the basis of life, the first words of which are surrender and union with the Divine and the transcendence of ego. So long as that basis is not established, a sadhak is only an ignorant and imperfect human being struggling with the evils of the lower nature____
What is created by spiritual progress is an inner closeness and intimacy in the inner being, the sense of the Mother's love and presence etc.
7-9-1935
SRI AUROBINDO
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(Mandala IX.113. Rishi : Marcicha Kashyapa.)
1. May Indra, the killer of the coverer-demon, drink Soma in this bowl (of Sharyana) founding strength in the self, achieving a mighty hero-power; O moon-flow ! stream forth from all sides for Indra's sake.
2. Flow pure to us, O Lord of regions, from the un crooked strainer, O bountiful Soma, flow impelled by the right word, by the Truth, by faith and by askesis; O moon-flow ! stream forth from all sides for Indra's sake.
3. Him the mighty one, nourished by the rains of plenty, the daughter of the Sun bore on every side, him the protectors of the Ray-Cows seized and gave the essential Sap to Soma—O moon-flow ! stream forth from all sides for Indra's sake.
4. O thou, shining with lustre, voicing the Right, O thou whose law of action is the Truth, speaking the Truth, voicing faith, O Soma, O shining King, purified by the Ordainer (or creator), O moon-flow ! stream forth from all sides for Indra's sake.
5. The streams of the potent Truth, of the Vast (or, the Vats potent Truth) flow together, the juices of him who is full of them meet together purified by the sacred word, O shining One ! O moon-flow ! stream forth from all sides for Indra's sake.
6. O Soma, being strained pure, where the creative word gives expression to rhythmic utterance giving birth to delight by the sacred wine, where men increase in Soma-wine by the pressing stone bringing to birth the delight—O moon-flow ! stream forth from all sides for Indra's sake.
7. Where the Light is unhampered, the plane wherein is founded the Solar World in that undecaying and immortal world establish
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me, O thou, strained pure; O moon-flow! stream forth from all sides for Indra's sake.
8. There where reigns the brilliant Solar King, Vivaswat, where there is descent of the Heaven, where unto these mighty waters flow—there make me immortal; O moon-flow! stream forth from all sides for Indra's sake.
9. On the third highest step of the Triple Heavens where movement (is force, unfettered) fulfills all desires, where the worlds are full of Light, there make me immortal. O moon-flow ! stream forth from all sides for Indra's sake.
10. Where are found all longings and supremely desirable ends, where is found the summit of the Sun-world, where self-nature and where contentment are, there make me immortal. O moon-flow ! stream forth from all sides for Indra's sake.
11. There where sit delights and exhilarations, glad nesses, happy nesses and intense ecstasies, where desires attain their ends, there make me immortal. O moon-flow! stream forth from all sides for Indra's sake.
Notes
A. B. PURANI
Arjika : Belonging to the country of Rijik—particular Soma vessel.
Gandharva : Here Sayana equates to Vishwa-vasu. Literally it means "protectors of the Ray-Cow". Their habitation generally is the sky and heavenly waters. One of their duties is to guard heavenly Soma. Soma is obtained for the human race by Indra who conquers the Gandharvas and, takes it by force.
Nikāma : Plentiful; to one's satisfaction.
Vitfapa : Top, Summit, hump.
Mahisam : Great, powerful; Sun.
Ugra : Powerful, mighty, strong, violent, fierce, passionate.
Rasinah : Juicy, liquid, impassioned, good in taste.
Avarodhanam : (I ) Hindrance, obstruction, injury or harm; besieging, a fence; siege or
blockade. (2) Moving down, descent.
Anukāmam : Unfettered in desire; free.
Trinake, Tridive : Heaven.
Naka: Firmament or sky; without pain.
Bradhna : Pale, red, Sun, world of the Sun.Moda : Joy, delight, gladness, pleasure, exhilaration, gratification.
Pramudah : Exhilaration, delight; happiness, pleasure, excessive delight, ecstasy.
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CHAPTER II
THE CATHOLIC REFORMATION
WE have seen that the Protestant Revolt split asunder the unity " and universality of the Mediaeval Church, and reared its religious structure on the basis of rationalistic individualism. It thus helped, in its own way, the essential Renaissance spirit to thrive and expand. But it could not maintain its rationalism pure and free from the mixture of Mediaeval tradition. In fact, as I have already shown, its very birth was from the urgent need of Luther's soul to anchor its life in faith and the grace of God. This was, in itself, the very negation of rationalism, not as the Middle Ages, but as the Renaissance, understood it. Its rationalism lay only in its individual initiative to break out of the meshes of effete religious conventions and, by sheer force of spiritual urge and ethical ardour, discover faith as the sole and supreme leverage to salvation. The strengthening of the moral fibre of the Western man, and the clearing of his path to religious life were its principal dual contribution to the Modern Age, apart from its stimulation of the secular spirit by its bold repudiation of the outworn convention of celibacy and asceticism among the monks, its encouragement of Nationalism, and the impetus it gave to the politico-economic life of the times, which was being hammered into a new shape by the Renaissance Humanism. But the faith, which was, in Luther, the keystone of Protestantism, soon lost its kernel of mysticism, which melted away under the glare of rationalistic ethics.1 Calvin had no mysticism in him. His arid brand of Protestantism was a compound of an inflexible ethics and a monolithic solidity of theocratic regimentation. His Protestantism
1 It reappeared in George Fox about a century later.
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was, therefore, a departure from the individualistic trend of the age of Humanism.2 Rather, in some respects, it receded not a little to the Mediaeval sacrosanct authoritarianism of the Church.
A close study of the cross currents and the constant ebb and flow of the emergent forces of the Modern Age through which the Reformation epoch fumbled its way forward, seeking to assimilate what was creatively alive in the past, so that it could transfuse it into its own fructifying norms and make it dynamic for the construction of the future, reveals the fact that what Protestantism tended to lose of its original impulse in its precarious career through politics and practical expediency, was absorbed by the orthodox Church, and became the germinating seed of a vivified, reformed and consolidated Catholicism. In course of time, while Protestantism drifted towards secular ethics, or ethical humanism, Catholicism helped the rise of a few advanced souls to the heights of mystic experience, or lapsed again into the old ruts of self-indulgence, moral laxity, and abuse of power, from which Protestantism had scourged it out. In one respect, however, it scored a splendid success : it restored the emotional and institutional approach to religion. Protestantism flourished among the intellectual, rationalistic, and modem-minded men, but Catholicism easily enlisted the active sympathy and ministered to the religious needs of the masses who could not do without the traditional sustenance of the sacerdotal authority, its guidance and solace in the struggles and stumbles of their daily existence, and its aid in the development and direction of their emotional life towards higher values. This was, undoubtedly, a strong democratic feature of the Catholic Reformation.
Thus we find that the Modern Age was being at once helped and hindered now by Protestantism, and now by the Catholic Reformation, and often by both of them together in their tangled interaction, and that it made its way towards self-realisation through multiple factors which defy rational analysis. It was a chequered progress through a swinging polarity of contrary forces.
2 But there was an undercurrent of democracy, especially in that its ministers had to secure the approval of the people before their appointment.
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The central figure and the main source of dynamic inspiration and direction of the Catholic Reformation was St. Ignatius of Loyola, even as Luther was of the Protestant Revolt. Not that the movement originated with him, any more than Protestantism had originated with Luther. But it was reborn in him with all the revolutionary fire and force, which directly precipitates a probability into a historic actuality. It found in him its living focus, its first ringing voice, its impetuous evolutionary drive. A hurried survey of his life will furnish us with the best illustration of this fact.
Ignatius, as a boy and youth, had received schooling in knighthood. Romantic chivalry had filled his dreams and moulded his temperament. He returned wounded from a battle with the French. While convalescing, he happened to read a biography of Jesus Christ and the lives of some saints. He was fascinated by the knighthood of the Spirit, which he found in them. A new light flashed across his mind's eye. An unforeseen vista of religious knight-errantry and martyrdom tempted his ardent soul, and his life powerfully gravitated towards that beckoning ideal.
Like the Buddha, he gave away his rich attire to a beggar, donned a "rough sack-cloth garment", and set out to become a knight of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Christ. An anguished sense of wasted youth burned like a consuming fire in him. He went to Manresa and stayed at a hospice to nurse the ailing and the afflicted. There, in the solitude of a hill-side cave, he plunged into the most severe austerities, even as Luther had done, in the fevered hope of releasing his soul from the yoke of the flesh. This discipline, undergone with an intense spiritual aspiration, resulted in a complete conversion of the philandering gallant to an inspired saint, who emerged from the fires of an inner baptism, glowing with an urgent sense of his high calling. He had several visions, in which he saw Mother Mary, the Christ, and the Trinity. He wrote his Manual of Exercise, which was a book of guidance for drilling oneself, mentally and physically, into a soldier of the Spirit. Chastity and poverty were the cardinal rules inculcated in the book, and afterwards obedience was added to them, an absolute and ungrudging obedience to the authority of the leader. It was
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these rules that knit together in a close hierarchy the Society of Jesus, which he founded later. He insisted on the imperative need of subduing the flesh and its hungers to the will to self-mastery.
He went to Palestine, but as proselytising was forbidden there, he had to return to Europe. On his return, he thought of equipping himself with some education, of which he had acquired precious little in his early life. At the age of thirty-five he began to study Latin, but the passion for preaching and the urge to convert the heretics to the ways of God was too strong in him to let him apply himself seriously to his studies. For his radical views and aggressive preaching, he was summoned by the Inquisition, tried and imprisoned. Disgusted with Spain, he went to Paris. But he fared no better there. His education was again crossed by his overmastering zeal for preaching. It was in Paris that he gave the finishing touches to his Manual of Exercise.
By this time, his ascetic practices, enthusiastic and amiable temperament, and transparent sanctity drew a knot of disciples to him, and with them he intended to tramp again to Palestine to meet the challenge of Islam. He had at that time no notion of opposing Protestantism. All that he really cared for was a life in Christ, a life of irreproachable purity, and the service of the spiritually starving and suffering humanity. When he reached Venice, walking all the way and begging his food, he learned that Venice was at war with the Turks; and so he was debarred from proceeding. One day, as he was praying, he saw a vision of Christ. Christ said to him : "In Rome I shall be favorable to you". That decided him, and he trudged along, with his disciples, towards Rome, calmly bearing all the hardships of the journey, and sustained and impelled by the certainty of their ultimate victory.
In Rome, he and his disciples, who were now a close-knit band of eleven, pledged to chastity, poverty and obedience, served in a hospital, tending the sick, and catching hold of the youths and shaking up them into holy living. The Pope, Paul III, was impressed by the zeal and earnestness of Ignatius. Ignatius was distressed to find the Papacy rocked to its foundations by the
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surging tide of Protestantism, and resolved to save it and reinstate it in its ancient sovereignty. He would now stake his all the for triumph of the Catholic Church. After some hesitation, the Pope gave the seal of his approbation to the order of Ignatius, which was called the Society of Jesus. Later they came to be called Jesuits by their opponents. Thus was launched the Society, manned and mobilised by Ignatius,—a society rarely excelled by any band of religious crusaders in Christendom in the dauntless militancy of its spirit, its superb organising skill, its self-denying beneficence, and its unquestioning obedience to the commands of its leader. A new constitution was drawn up for the administration of the Society. The Society imparted education of a superior kind to what was current at the time. Their gentle, painstaking, persuasive ways brought back many a wandering soul to the Catholic Church, and helped restore much of its ancient glory. They traveled to far off lands—to America and Africa, and India, and China, and Japan—and, imbued with the religious fervour of Ignatius, lived and preached the gospel of the Bible, and converted millions of heathens to Christianity. Sworn to the service of the Christ and the Mother Church, they were ever ready to embark upon any forlorn, hopeless endeavour, if only they knew that it might bring a lost sheep back to the fold, or a benighted heathen into the light of the Christian gospel. And all their activities reflected the personality of their great leader and general, Ignatius of Loyola.
Ignatius, as the general of his religious militia, was stern and severe in the framing of rules and the training of his followers. But, as a man, he was kind and amiable, generous and tolerant to all. In nature and character he was quite unlike Luther and Calvin. As a general he could be strict and exacting, because he exercised the greatest strictness upon himself. For sixteen long years he piloted his Society of Jesus with a rare devotion and unfailing practical wisdom. He set an example of humble service by working as a kitchen boy. Accustomed to the simplest of fares, inured to the harshest of material conditions, and sustained by a faith which burned like a white flame within him, this inspired leader of the Catholic Reformation was alone able to stay with
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one hand the whole edifice of the Roman Church, which the Protestant Revolt had left with gaping fissures and rocking foundations. He did not concern himself with doctrines and dogmas so much as with holy living, fighting for his faith, and serving the Christ by sowing broadcast the seeds of religious regeneration. But for the energetic help rendered by his Society, the Council of Trent, which met intermittently from 1545 to 1563, could not have achieved the success it did. It set the Catholic house in order. It eliminated the glaring abuses which had corroded and disgraced the clergy. It re-defined the basic doctrines of the Roman Church, and consolidated its hierarchy. It made no compromises with heresy, and gave it no quarter. A mighty resurgence of true Christian piety thus quickened a hoary institution into a fresh lease of life and more devoted and solicitous ministrations of the heathen, the humble and the destitute.
The outstanding contribution of the Catholic Reformation to the Modern Age can be summed up as follows : 1) It rekindled the spirit of mysticism," which is the core of religion, by the fire of Ignatius's soul. It had been recovered by Luther in his personal experience-Erasmus and Wycliffe had no trace of it in them -but suffered to be dried up and stifled" by secular, puritanical ethicism. It is true that moral purity paves the way to spiritual progress, but, more often than not, it bars it by its bland satisfaction with itself. The restoration of the mystical tension and fervour in the visions and experiences of Ignatius gave a general spur to the same tendency lying dormant in some contemporary evolved souls. 2) It gave rise to the spirit of aggressive self-assertion in the purified and regenerated Church, and an ardent will to the vindication of the truth it represents-a militant force which clove through all opposition of Protestant heresy and conquered a sizable portion of its lost territory. Orthodoxy, so long as it remains only on the defensive against its enemies, nurses the germs
1 Mention may be made of St. Francois de Sales, St. Vincent de Paul, St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross. The seventeenth century repeated the mystical outburst of the fourteenth.
2 It revived in some German mystics, particularly in Jacob Bohme and George Fox, the founder of the Society of Friends or the Quakers, as they are commonly known.
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of decay, and ultimately dodders into disintegration. It is only when it shakes off its torpor, and stands forth to meet its assailant by rousing and mobilising its own inherent powers of aggressive self-assertion, that it can retrieve its position, reorganise its institutional life, and liberate its creative impulse. An institution that fails to expand and move forward towards new conquests, sinks into sterility and stagnation. And stagnation is death. 3)
As Protestantism was born in the travailing soul of Luther, so did the Catholic
Reformation come into being from an upsurge of the soul of Ignatius. It sprang,
therefore, from a spiritual need, as do most of the historical revolutions,
whether we perceive the secret matrix or not. Though it was, in a way,
responsible for the revival of the Inquisition, the introduction of the Index,
and the thirty years' war, which made a great part of Europe run with rivers of
blood, it saved Christianity from wilting by rationalised ethics, and freezing
by the scepticism of the age. 4) It promoted the cause of Nationalism,
especially in France, by working for the freedom of the local churches. 5) It
fostered the spirit of democracy by its appeal to the masses of people in their
own tongues, by the refinement and direction of their emotional life, and,
particularly, by its system of education, which made no distinction of high and
low, rich and poor, clergy and laymen. Some of the greatest
minds of the age were products of its educational institutions. 6) It encouraged
arts and science, philosophy, poetry and general literature, and, toning down
the original rigour of ascetic and formalistic rules, led to the development of
the secular spirit of Humanism.
The latent vitality of the Catholic Church, released into aggressive self-assertion, rehabilitated its orthodox evangel in power and authority. But only for a short time. Papacy lapsed again into abuse of power, and extravagance of luxury and pleasure, and got involved in political intrigues and crafty diplomacy. The surging politico-economic forces of the Modern Age sapped its authority. But the valiant order of the Jesuits carried on its
2 "As for the pedagogic part----consult the; schools of the Jesuits, for nothing better has been put in practice."—Francis Bacon.
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founder's work at home and abroad. The cultural tide turned now in the direction of the Enlightenment, which tended to define more and more clearly the shape and lineaments of the Modern Age. The sun of the Roman Church had set.
RISHABHCHAND
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READINGS IN THE BRIHADARANYAKA UPANISHAD
(2)
IN the last section we spoke of the Force of Enjoyment which consumes while it enjoys, the characteristic feature of this order of Creation. This Brahmana enlarges upon its role in the birth and the evolution of the material world. Leaving aside the obviously ritualistic elements which are not, germane to our present study which is confined to the Brahmavidya, the Science of the Soul, the central burthen of the Upanishad, we shall now follow the text in its account of the creation of the World with which the second section commences.
In the beginning nothing whatsoever was here.1 All was covered with a Hunger, a Hunger that is Death. It was a Hunger, a Desire2 to spread out and enjoy in its bliss, a Lust to manifest that was the origin of this world. This Desire sought an embodiment; it needed a body for the organisation and working out of its Impulse. It dwelt upon itself i.e. upon the Truth in itself in an adsorptive contemplation and there ensued the Waters, the streams of Consciousness-Force which uphold all creations.3 From these Waters, following a process of self-condensation, there came to be the Earth, the solid base for the manifesting Force to stand upon and act. And then came Fire, the Energising-Force at the centre of the evolution of this creation. This force of dynamism, the Agni, is the very life-essence, innate power of the manifesting Godhead. And, says the Upanishad, this Godhead active in the form of Desire or Hunger that is Death, at the root of all creation divided Itself into three, each a God presiding over a different formulation of His Force : as Adityas, the Sun (presiding
1 Cf Asat vā idamagra āsit, In the begriming All this was the Non-Being. (Taitti. Up.
11.7) Nāsad āsit na sad āsit, Then existence was not nor non existence. (Rv. X.I29)
2 Evam ime 10Mb apsu antah, Thus do these worlds lie in Water! (Shatapatha Br. X.V.4.3)
3 Kāmah tadagre samavartata, That moved at first as Desire (Rv.X.129)
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over the Heavens of the Mind), Vayu (over the Mid-region of the Life-Force) and Agni (presiding over the Earth—the Material extension). He is not only at the base and the centre, but He stands spread out entire in the cosmic extension, manifest on each level in a different and appropriate form, but active everywhere for the same end, for and advancing and self-fulfilling career of the Divine Being on the move.
He then desired to multiply. For this purpose He activated His Word-Potential by the conscious force of His Intelligence, And Time was conceived. Ere this there was no duration of Time. He held the Time-seed in incubation for a full period and then was Time born. And out of Time errupted the Speech, vāk. Still there was not yet a multiplicity for the enjoyment of a varied manifestation and relation . So from the depths of this revealed Word He brought out the whole world : the creative rhythms of the Veda, the mode of Sacrifice to sustain the world with its myriad creatures—men and animals. And after this Creation of His self-projection was complete, He commenced to eat it i.e. to enjoy it. For indeed, all this is created, manifested, for His Delight, for His Lila. Infinite, He eats infinitely, sarvam va atti it aditi.
Again, He desired to sacrifice, to lend Himself for further becoming. To the exclusion of His other self-formulations, He concentrated and brooded upon his developing body to render it fit for the great Sacrifice. And with the maturity of Time He sacrificed His own Body to Himself the Godhead presiding over this creation. And lesser creatures He offered to the emanations of the Godhead, the gods participating in the Manifestation.
Thus are Fire, the Sacrifice (of the embodied World-Force,) the Horse and Death one Divinity. He who knows, he who realises this truth in himself becomes that very God with death for his limb, a process of his living.
M. P. PANDIT
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SRI AUROBINDO AND INDIAN CULTURAL RENAISSANCE*
WHEN I think of the subject my mind goes back to the nineties of the last century and the first decade of our century. The urge for political freedom was becoming irresistible. In my memory I still see my old uncle scolding my elder brother, the late Sri C. B. Purani, for holding nationalist views as against the philosophy of moderatism; his arguments were logically sound.
The incident and the subsequent trend of events that followed brings home to us a great truth that intellect is not always able to give correct guidance, especially in moments of individual or national crisis. Something else, some other power in man alone can give the Light.
The stalwarts, like Sir P. M. Mehta, the lion of Bombay, G. K. Gokhale, of the Servant of India Society, the disciple of M. G. Ranade, and others, men who certainly were patriots, were moderates. Their logic was indubitable, their premises were not mistaken; only their conclusion was wrong, their method effete, and foredoomed to failure. India, they argued, had never been a nation politically; it is a subcontinent of many groups, speaking two dozen languages, unorganised, enslaved, disunited, poor. A disarmed people without a living national consciousness could only slowly march to the temple of freedom, particularly, when it has to challenge an empire over which the sun never sets. So, their method was "prayer, petition and protest". As it turned out, and it always turns out in such great causes..."not failure but low aim was crime".
It was not a time for logic, there are times in the history of nations when logic of material facts has to be laid aside. And Sri Aurobindo in those days did concede to the moderate argument and wrote : "Yes, externally we are nothing"; but he argued "spiritually we are everything."
* Lecture delivered at the Banares Hindu University, in December 1961.
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It was the time when there was a call,...a call to every one in the nation,—it was a time when the Mother called. And thank God, there were her children who disregarding all logic of facts responded to her call and ran to her rescue taking, as we say, their life in their hands. The feeling has been vividly preserved in the, now famous, letter to Mrinalini Devi by Sri Aurobindo fortunately brought to light unintentionally by the Police in the Vande Mataram trial. He wrote :- "whereas others regard the country as an inert object, and know it as consisting of some plains, fields, forests, mountains and rivers I look upon my country as my Mother, I worship and adore her as mother. What would a son do when a demon is sitting on the breast of his mother and drinking her blood ? Would he sit down content to take his meals and go on enjoying himself in the company of his wife and children, or would he rather, run to the rescue of his mother ? I know I have the strength to uplift this fallen race; it is not physical strength, I am not going to fight with sword or with gun, but with the power of knowledge. The strength of the warriors is not the only kind of strength, there is also the power of the Brahmin, which is founded on knowledge". This was the logic of the soul of India which the small number of the nationalists, like Sri Aurobindo, followed.
After the nine nationalist leaders were deported from East Bengal the Jhalakati Conference was held in 1909 A photo of Ashwini Kumar Dutt, the deported leader, was placed in the presidential chair and Sri Aurobindo, the only leader who happened to be out being acquitted from Alipur case, declared from the platform :-"...Great as he is, Aswini Kumar Dutt is not the leader of this movement, Tilak is not the leader,...God is the leader". He assured the audience; "God is within you... An immortal Power is working in you". This faith was common to all the Nationalist leaders. They strengthened the faith in the ultimate victory, taught the nation self-reliance, self-sacrifice and organisation.
Their patriotism had the fervour of religion. The farewell message which Sri Aurobindo gave to the students of the First National College in India in 1906
remains true, even to-day, for
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the whole student world of India : Said he, "Work that she (India) may prosper; suffer that she may rejoice."
But it was no narrow patriotism or collective ambition, for even in those days of political subjection he declared the aim of the political struggle.
"It was to save the light, to save the spirit of India from lasting obscuration and .debasement"; Sri Aurobindo said : "God was raising the nation. Something must come from you which is to save the world". That "something" was further made clear in the following words; "That something is what the ancient Rishis knew and revealed". In the international field they saw "beyond the unity of the nation and envisaged the ultimate unity of mankind". (Speeches)
It was the time when the national consciousness lying dormant for centuries suddenly awoke and in its dawn automatically emphasised the fundamental elements of her culture, a spiritual attitude towards life, a dynamic faith in the guiding Divine Spirit.
Culture which is a collective creation is not like a house built of bricks; it is a mould of collective consciousness that organises life round values which it evolves during the course of its history. Culture is, more truly, a living organism that must change according to changing conditions. When a culture becomes rigid, i.e. unable to change, it becomes what Tagore calls 'Achalayatana' ...inert, a dead mass.
Like all organisms, a culture lives, grows, matures, decays and dies. But there is a difference which endows culture with a power of longevity; it is the power of revival. A culture that is vitally weak goes down and is either destroyed or changed beyond recognition by the impact of a more powerful culture. India came in contact with European culture and was dominated by it during the period of her decline. But the very impact of European ideas and literature, its political and social ideals, set into movement a powerful and many-sided revival of Indian culture.
The most important elements of the revival were : (1) the awakening of the religious spirit in new and vigorous forms; (2)
the challenge to the political domination of England. Of course, there were
literary and other revivals also. In those early years
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the only support on which the political movement could count was that of the spirit, a faith in the spirit of Indian culture, a living faith in her destiny.
The need for political freedom is not merely for securing material well-being. The chief aim is to have freedom for the expression of the nation's Soul. Just as the individual has a soul so the collectivity or nation has a soul. Nearly thirty years after the movement Sri Aurobindo wrote : "Each nation is a Shakti, or power of the evolving spirit in humanity, and lives by the principle which it embodies. India is the Bharat Shakti, the living energy of a great spiritual conception, and fidelity. to it is the very principle of her existence". (Foundations of Indian Culture)
It was the feeling and living out this great spiritual truth,... the feeling of a living spirit of India, Bharat Shakti...that enabled the small band of Nationalist leaders to fire the imagination of the masses, in fact, to transmit the flame from their hearts to the people and capture the political organisation from the Moderates. And later on the same movement broadened out by emphasising, through the great personality of Mahatma Gandhi, some salient ethical elements of our spiritual culture and applying them to political and social problems led India to freedom and gave a new ethical weapon to the world for the solution of international problems.
What is culture ? ... We have partly answered the question, but a further consideration is needed to make clear the foundations of a culture. There are two sides to a culture; one, political, social and external, consisting of religious institute; the other, basic inner factors, the spiritual elements of a living culture. The external forms must go on changing and adapting themselves to changing historical conditions.
The inner elements remain the same. The persistence of these inner element it is that gives permanency and maintains the individuality of a culture and
make it grow. An example would make the point clear. Let us consider the forms
which the "will to freedom" assumed in the course of Indian history. In the 17th
Century, at the time of Shivaji, the movement for freedom started with the cry
of "Swadharma" and "Swaraj" and the
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method adopted was guerilla warfare. After three centuries the same 'will to freedom' burst forth with the cry of "Vande Mataram" with a vision of free Mother India and satyagraha was the method or the technique. The earlier movement ended in the establishment of the Maratha confederacy falling short of a united India and now the latest movement has given us a republic and a united India (though paradoxically, it has also brought the division of India along religious lines). Sri Aurobindo enumerates the essential elements of a culture : "The Culture of a people may be roughly described as the expression of a consciousness of life which formulates itself in three aspects : First, there is a side of thought, of ideal, of upward will and the soul's aspiration; then, there is a side of creative self-expression and appreciative aesthesis and intelligence and imagination, thirdly, there is a side of practical and outward formulation."
The content of History may be said to be man's "search for harmony". Culture is a "harmony of spirit, mind and body". Some form of harmony was attained by certain cultures' in the past. We shall consider only three : (1) The Greek, (2)
The Modern European, (3) The Ancient Indian. The Greek culture was the harmony
of disinterested intellectual curiosity, flexible aesthetic temperament, a sense
of form, a strong and beautiful body. The modern European culture is the harmony
of practical reason, scientific efficiency, and economic capacity of man. It
takes these powers as the whole truth of the human being. The Greek mind was
"philosophical, aesthetic, political", the modern mind is "scientific, economic,
utilitarian". The ancient Indian culture arrived at the harmony of "the
spiritual mind, intuitive reason informed by a religious spirit, a living sense
of the Eternal and the Infinite". (Foundations of Indian Culture) During the
struggle for independence in India very few leaders saw beyond the political
horizon. But there were some who saw that freedom was only a means and not an
end, that a new India should emerge as a natural sequel. They saw that new India
would have to meet the challenge of European culture with its vital drive, its
scientific discoveries and economy-centric outlook. Indian culture is vast and
complex : it has been constantly building new forms adopting
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them, adapting old forms, changing some and even destroying some. At one time it completely gave up outer forms of Buddhism which it had created.
There is an all-round meeting, mixing and clash of values in the world today based on difference of cultures. And if Indian culture is not merely to survive but make 'its contribution to humanity today it must rebuild the life of new India on her own spiritual foundation adapted to the needs of the scientific age. This is the reason why Sri Aurobindo with his cosmic vision of human history writes at length about Indian culture which contains some values that are indispensable to the conception of a perfect human culture.
There have been various attempts to rebuild life in India on a new basis. A few of them may be mentioned here : (1) Raja Rammohan Rai, (2) Swami Dayanand Saraswati, (3) Sri Ramakrishna Paramahansa, (4) The Theosophical Society, (5) Rabindranath Tagore, (6) Jawaharlal Nehru, (7) Sri Aurobindo. These great men have tried to live, according to their faith, the aspect of Indian culture which appeared to them the most important. An outline of their approach and its appraisal is all that can be attempted here.
Swami Dayanand began his reformist movement, really, when at the age of 13,
seeing the rats going over the image of Shiva on a Shivratri night, he ran away
from his house in Saurashtra in search of the truth of Indian religion. Becoming
a Sannyasi, he studied the Vedas and courageously founded the Arya Samaj on the
basis of the Veda, the first book of humanity, and the fountainhead of Indian
Culture. He gave a new interpretation of the Veda, discarded untouchability,
encouraged widow re-marriage and tried to stop the mass conversions of the poor
in India to Christianity. He wanted to revive the old Vedic Society and Culture
as he understood them and though he introduced many reforms in Hindu religious
practice and society, he could not, (not being fully familiar with the elements
and forces of Western Culture) see the necessity and the form of the synthesis
that was necessary. That Indian Culture was far more elastic and capable of
absorbing and assimilating new elements and even forces of a
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true culture did not strike him. The life of this bold genius was cut short at forty-eight as he was poisoned by his enemies while serving the cause of Vedic Religion. Sri Aurobindo has paid a glowing tribute to Swami Dayanand. Arya Samaj is the reformist religious organisation spread out not only in India but in many foreign countries. The Guru-Kula system of education is an attempt to mould the future generations into Vedic Aryans. The attempt has not succeeded in overcoming the stress of modern European culture on the minds of Indians even after freedom, perhaps because of its insistence on externals of Indian Religion.
Rammohan Rai may be called an imitative reformer, if Dayanand is a protestant reformist. He was among the first to oppose the blind orthodoxy of Hindu Religion and to found the Brahmo Samaj based on some ideas of the Unitarian Church and Upanishad Vedanta. He worked, even at great risk, for the emancipation Indian womanhood, one of his outstanding achievements being the abolition of the satī. "Fatherhood of God and Brotherhood of man" was the inspiring ideal of his life.
More than Dayananda and Rammohan Rai, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa represents the neo-spirituality of modern India and marks a stage in the evolution of Indian spirituality. Sri Aurobindo paid a tribute to Sri Ramakrishna in 1908 :
"In Bengal there came a flood of religious truth. Certain men were born, men whom the educated world would not have recognised if that belief, if that God within them, had not been there to open their eyes, men whose lives were very different from what our education, our Western education, taught us to admire. One of them, the man who had the greatest influence and has done the most to regenerate Bengal, could not read and write a single word. He was a man who had been what they call absolutely useless to the world. But he had this one divine faculty in him, that he had more than faith and had realised God......He was a man without intellectual training...such a man as the English-educated Indian would ordinarily talk of as one useless to society. He will say, "This man is ignorant, what does he know ? What
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can he teach me who have received from the West all that it can teach ?" But God knew what he was doing. He sent that man to Bengal and set him in the temple of Dakshineshwar in Calcutta, and from North and South and East and West, the educated men, men who were the pride of the University, who had studied all that Europe can teach, came to fall at the feet of this ascetic. The work of salvation, the work of raising India was begun".
In another book on Yoga Sri Aurobindo wrote about Ramakrishna as one "with a colossal spiritual capacity taking the kingdom of heaven by storm".
Ramakrishna taught the modern world that religion is a matter of experience, not of professing or believing and that experience in all religions, ultimately, is the same. This is one of the fundamental truths on which any future world culture would have to be founded. A man without literary education, he is a standing challenge to the modern world, its scepticism, atheism and materialism. Through him the power of Indian spirituality, in its pure form, was effectively brought to the notice of the modern world. Ramakrishna and Vivekananda inspired nearly two generations of Indians when they were in bondage with self-confidence and pride in their culture. Ramakrishna Mission organised by Vivekananda carries out the work.
It is unfortunate that in recent years the spiritual work of Ramakrishna is put into shade and the emphasis of outer social work for its own sake has gained ground.
Tagore's cultural contribution consists of his unique literary output and his educational institution, the 'Santiniketan'. He burst into world fame with the Nobel Prize for the "Gitanjali". From the vast literature he has created, it is possible to get an idea of his philosophy and his interpretation of Indian culture. The Upanishads, the works of the saints and mystics of the Middle Ages, like Kabir and aspects of Vaishnavism have influenced his outlook. He was a firm believer in international peace and
Santiniketan was started to promote it, he pointed out the dangers of exclusive nationalism. In his Gifford lectures he has worked
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out the conception of Vishwamanava, the collective man, a conception of growing perfection of the human being through collective effort. His influence has largely been active in the field of creative literature and fine arts.
Mahatma Gandhi through his long and active fife tried what might be called, an ethico-politico-economic integration of Indian culture. Ethics is the basis of his outlook. His book 'Hind-Swaraj' gives most of his fundamental ideas on fife and philosophy. Simplicity, non-possession (of wealth), self-control and service are some of the elements on which India would rebuild her life. Among religions, Jainism, Vaishnavism and Christianity influenced him. Among leaders of thought Tolstoi inspired him. The rejuvenated India should, according to him, build her life on (1) rejection of machinery, (2) naturopathy, (3) acceptance of absolute non-violence as the one method for the solution of all human problems. He equates non-violence with Truth. His contribution to the winning of India's freedom is very great, for, he led the Congress for thirty years in the political struggle with non-violence as the creed. His influence on Indian public life is far- reaching and his political philosophy of non-violence has attracted the attention of the world in this atomic age.
The cultural integration attempted by the Mahatma stressed the social aspect of ethics and religion, and created a demand for purity and integrity in public life which the ruling party in the country is not able to satisfy. Fasting as a method of achieving public welfare has found its limitations. Gandhi lays stress on the observance of Yama and Niyama and wishes to activate ethical values in collective life. One may mention one result of the Gandhi-an outlook which seems to overlook some fundamental values of Indian culture. In the stress for "doing" the more important fact of "being" is neglected. For instance, there are many today whom Ramakrishna does not strike as a "phenomenon", a characteristic product of Indian culture, one who actually demonstrated that there is a divine element in man which is superior to his intellect and all other faculties, that knowledge can be acquired by a more direct method than the indirect, unsatisfactory
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and imperfect method of intellectual training. In the insistence on outer action the need for rising to a higher consciousness is often totally forgotten.
Jawaharlal Nehru, our great Prime Minister, has certainly put an indelible stamp upon our country, perhaps unintentionally. I say 'perhaps' because it may be equally true that he may have arrived at not a stable integration, but a working, or a workable outlook which may be called "Secular Socialist" or "Economic Socialist" or "Economic Secularist". His 'Discovery of India' and 'Glimpses of World History' give his vision of India and the world in modern context. He is a peculiar amalgam of the East and the West. To those like the Late Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya or even, perhaps, to Rajendra Babu, it would sound strange that an Indian has to 'discover' India.
His acquaintance with an understanding of spirituality is limited, that is why though he is highly impressed by its popular manifestations like the Kumbha Mela at Prayag; he does not find it possible to canalise that tremendous energy for rejuvenating Indian Culture or building a new India. It may be due to the urgent need of industrialisation and his earnest desire to remove poverty from India that his mind is constantly turned to other countries whose technical and economic aid is indispensable.
India under his leadership may be said to have definitely given up the Mahatma's opposition to machinery, and embarked upon a historic programme of phenomenal proportion to rebuild Indian economy on the modern European model. His great service to the country is the promotion of scientific knowledge and research. This is a crucial step fraught with immense consequences to the culture of India and that of the World.
Of the three great men, Tagore, Gandhi and Nehru none believes in renunciation of life. Tagore seeks aesthetic harmony and delight in life. To Gandhiji life is austerity, penance, tapasya, an opportunity to serve others. To Nehru, life is an adventure, a new discovery every moment. Some of these attempts at cultural rejuvenation seem to lack the very central springs of Indian culture. These may be regarded as three independent approaches to" the problem of Indian renaissance.
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Sri Aurobindo's synthetic vision is cosmic and has the merits of comprehensiveness and clarity. It points the way to a new creation (may I say, a world culture ?...) on sound foundations of our culture. Is he a mere revivalist, or only a proud nationalist who glories in the past ? Is he merely an enthusiastic exponent of our culture, a mere intellectual ?
He himself expresses his attitude to all human cultures : "There is here no real question between barbarism and civilisation, for all masses of men are barbarians, labouring to civilise themselves" (p. 93, Foundations of Indian Culture) He does not assert that Indian culture is the highest and others are not needed or useful: "There is a need of divergent lines of advance until we can raise our heads into that infinity of the spirit in which there is a light broad enough to draw together and reconcile all highest ways of thinking, feeling and living". ((ibid.) He admits the imperfections of our culture: "Certainly, it was not perfect or final or complete; for that can be alleged, of no past or present cultural idea or system....These structures in which he (man) lives are incomplete and provisional". (p. 123, Foundations of Indian Culture) still he says "Each (culture) has achieved something of special value to humanity." Further he observes: "Mankind is no more than semi-civilised and it was never anything else in the recorded history of its present cycle." (p. 199, Foundations of Indian Culture)
As for reviving the past or living on its capital he says, "But to live on our capital without using it for fresh gains is to end in bankruptcy and pauperism". Further he adds : "To shrink from enlargement and change is, too, a false confession of impotence. It is to hold that India's creative capacity in religion and in philosophy came to an end with Shankara, Ramanuja, Madhwa and Chaitanya". (p. 25 Foundations of Indian Culture)
He evaluates the two cultures and their achievements in following terms : "From the view of evolutionary future European and Indian Civilisations at their best have only been half achievements, infant dawns pointing to the mature sunlight that is to come"'.(Foundations of Indian Culture,
p.37)He can forecast a severe judgment of the future against the present: "The
coming ages
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may look on Europe and Asia of today much as we look on savage tribes or primitive people" (Foundations of Indian Cultures'). "Not only are there everywhere positive, ugly, even 'hideous' blots on the life of man, but much that we now accept with equanimity, much in which we take pride, may well be regarded by a future humanity as barbarism or at least as semi-barbarous and immature". (Foundations of Indian Culture, p. 38) He looks at the future and says "But the real and perfect civilisation yet waits to be discovered; for the life of mankind is still nine-tenths of barbarism and one tenth of culture". (Foundations of Indian Culture, p. 44).
In his great epic Savitri his vision rise to prophetic heights :
Ever the centuries and millenniums pass. The aeons ever repeat their changeless round, The cycles all rebuild and ever aspire. Huge revolutions of life's fruitless gyre, The new-born ages perish like the old." (Savitri Book III Canto 4)
As to man : "Nothing has he learnt from Time and its history"; (Savitri Book VI Canto 2)
"A growing register of calamities Is the past's account, the future's book of Fate The centuries pile man's follies and man's crimes Upon the countless crowd of Nature's ills; (Savitri Book VI Canto 2)
Holding that all human cultures are imperfect why, it may be asked, why does he take so much trouble to lay bare the foundations of Indian culture ? Because, Indian culture stands for a truth, an indispensable truth of human life and its perfection. In spite of India having achieved freedom there is still need for the defence and preservation of its fundamental values, for there
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is danger of their being neglected or destroyed. Other externally more powerful cultures have arisen and have challenged the basis of Indian culture. I believe there was a second reason also. Even great leaders are puzzled by the baffling complexity of Indian culture and are at a loss to find its true foundations. There was a need for a clear exposition of the integral foundations which would, in effect, be the international form of Indian culture. He declares : "The living aim of culture is the realisation on earth of the Kingdom of Heaven". (Foundations of Indian Culture, p. 8)
In Sri Aurobindo the element of Tapas is not lacking—for it needs a concentrated power of will. He advocates the need of international unity and peace. Harmony and beauty are, according to him, the highest attributes of the Divine. In addition to all these elements that are common to the great leaders there is one element —the most fundamental, I believe, to our culture—in which Sri Aurobindo stands apart: it is in his insistence on founding life with the Divine as the centre. That is the element he has in common with Ramakrishna and I believe that is the central stone in the arch of our ancient culture.
Sri Aurobindo has put the ideal before the whole humanity because he sees it as the rational, nay inevitable, culmination of the process of cosmic evolution and he points out that it is man's special privilege to be called upon to participate consciously in his own self-exceeding.
About the foundation of Indian culture Sri Aurobindo says : "Spirituality is, indeed, the master-key of Indian culture". Nowadays the word 'Spirituality' is being used in a vague sense and it is interpreted variously including at times, intellectual idealism, ethical effort, even social service. It is true that' all elevating activities of man do contain some element of spirituality. But with regard to Indian culture it carries a definite sense.
Sri Aurobindo gives the meaning: What is spirituality ?
"Spirituality has meant hitherto a recognition of something greater than mind and life, the aspiration to a consciousness pure, great, divine beyond our normal mental and vital nature, a surge and rising of the soul in man out of the
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littleness and bondage of our lower parts towards a greater thing secret within him".
(Foundations of Indian Culture, pp. 74-75)
"The Indian idea of the world, of Nature and of existence is not physical, but psychological and spiritual. Spirit, soul, consciousness are not only greater than inert Matter and inconscient Force, but they precede and originate these lesser things. All force is power, or means of a secret Spirit; the force that sustains the world is a conscious Will, and Nature is its machinery of executive power. Matter is body or field of a consciousness hidden within it, the material universe a form and movement of the Spirit. Man himself is not a life and mind born of Matter and eternally subject to physical Nature, but a Spirit that uses life and body. It is an understanding faith in this conception of existence,. ..and it is the aspiration to break out in the end from this mind bound to life and matter into a greater spiritual consciousness that is the innermost sense of Indian Culture.
(Foundations of Indian Culture, pp. 110-111)
"The Indian believes that the ultimate truths are truths of the Spirit and that truths of the Spirit are the most fundamental and most effective truths of our existence, powerfully creative of the inner, solitarily reformative of the outer life."
(Foundations of Indian Culture, p. 66)
"Indian culture...has held up the goal of a supreme and arduous self-'exceeding as the summit of human endeavour."
(Foundations of Indian Culture, p. 80)
"Indian spirituality in its greatest eras and in its inmost significance has not been a tired quietism or a conventional monasticism, but a high effort of the human spirit to rise beyond the life of desire and vital satisfaction and arrive at an acme of spiritual calm, greatness, strength, illumination, divine realisation, settled peace and bliss. The question is...whether
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such an endeavour is or is not essential to man's highest perfection." (Foundations of Indian Culture, p. 86)
"It must therefore be emphasised that spirituality is not a high intellectuality, not idealism, not an ethical turn of mind or moral purity and austerity, not religiosity or an ardent and exalted emotional fervour, not even a compound of all these excellent things; a mental belief, creed or faith, an emotional aspiration, a regulation of conduct according to a religious or ethical formula are not spiritual achievement and experience. These things are of considerable value to mind and life; they are of value to the spiritual evolution itself as preparatory movements disciplining, purifying or giving a suitable form to the nature; but they still belong to the mental evolution,—the beginning of a spiritual realisation, experience, change is not yet there. Spirituality is in its essence an awakening to the inner reality of our being, to a spirit, self, soul which is other than our mind, life and body. An inner aspiration to know, to feel, to be that, to enter into contact with the greater Reality beyond and pervading the universe which inhabits also our own being, to be in communion with It and union with It, and a turning, a conversion, a transformation of our whole being as a result of the aspiration, the contact, the union, a growth or waking into—a new becoming or new being, a new self, a new nature."
(Life Divine, p. 763)
Sri Aurobindo warns :
"The danger is that the pressure of dominant European ideas and motives, the temptations of the political needs of the hour, the velocity of rapid inevitable change will leave no time for the growth of sound thought and spiritual reflection and may strain to bursting-point the old Indian cultural and social system, and shatter this ancient civilisation."
(Foundations of Indian Culture, p. 22)
"There is need to emphasise this aspect of our culture, for, even though India is politically free the danger to her culture is, perhaps, greater than ever before."
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Jawaharlal after signing the third five-year plan said it was a challenge to India,—I believe in more than one sense,—it is a challenge. At this critical time of history, India stands at the cross-roads. She has embarked upon a huge programme of economic reconstruction, a programme which may be said to be befitting her greatness. We all want to banish poverty from the land. Let more food, more goods of all kinds be produced. But the whole effort poses a question of supreme importance. Are we to be victims of the age, helplessly driven to be like others or have we some contribution to make to the world's culture ? Do we import problems with our plans or do we accept the material advance and find solution for the problems it creates? Let us produce more steel because it is necessary, but in the process of producing it the higher values evolved by our culture should not suffer. Let us not produce steel at the expense of the precious golden ore of the human material.
Man, today, is trying to overcome the Units of outer space without overcoming the limitations of his consciousness. Man seems to be on the point of being overcome by his own achievements unless he changes himself.
Forty years ago Sri Aurobindo saw that mere political, economic, social or any other external changes would not solve the problems of life—though all may be attempted by man in his present state. The change required is psychological—an inner change. And he pointed out long ago that the inner change needed was far more radical than merely embodying ethical values. Living up to ethical values and ideals can be a stage, an important step, in the direction of the required change which is radical. A radical transformation of man's nature is needed. Such a radical change can come by putting spirituality in the centre of all human activities.
Sri Aurobindo sees the course of Indian history as a gradual and chequered growth towards a complete spiritual living. "It is her founding of life upon this exalted conception and her urge towards the spiritual and Eternal that constitute the distinct value of her civilisation. And it is her fidelity, with whatever shortcomings, to this highest ideal that has made her people a nation apart in the human world."
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He therefore wants free India to accept boldly the challenge of the age and give the world a lead in solving problems of collective life by applying her spiritual ideals (in the light of her spiritual ideals). He states: "A widest and highest spiritualising of life on earth is the last vision of all that vast and unexampled seeking and experiment in a thousand ways of the Soul's outermost and innermost experience which is the unique character of her past; this in the end is the mission for which she was born and the meaning of her existence".
"There are deeper issues for India herself, since by following certain tempting directions she may conceivably become a nation like many others evolving an opulent industry and commerce, a powerful organisation of social and political life, an immense military strength, practising power-politics with a high degree of success, guarding and extending zealously her gains and her interests, dominating even a large part of the world, but in this apparently magnificent progression forfeiting its Swadharma, losing its soul. Then ancient India and her spirit might disappear altogether and we would have only one more nation like the others and that, would be real gain neither to the world nor to us." (p. 9)
"It would be a tragic irony of fate if India were to throw away her spiritual heritage at the very moment when in the rest of the world there is more and more a turning towards her for spiritual help and a saving Light."
"A new creation of the old Indian Swadharma, transmutation to some law of the Western nature, is our best way to serve and increase the sum of human progress. Either India will be rationalised and industrialised out of all recognition and she will be no longer India or else she will be the leader in a new world-phase, aid by her example and cultural infiltration the new tendencies of the West and spiritualise the human race. That is the one radical and poignant question at issue. Will the spiritual motive which India represents prevail on
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Europe and create there new forms congenial to the West, or will European rationalism and commercialism put an end for ever to the Indian type of culture ?"
"Creative assimilation" is needed, a mastering and helpful assimilation of new stuff into eternal body has always been in the past a peculiar power of the genius of India.
"The renaissance of India is inevitable as the rising of tomorrows' sun, and the renaissance of a great nation of three hundred millions with so peculiar a temperament, such unique traditions and ideas of life, so powerful an intelligence and so great a mass of potential energies cannot but be one of the most formidable phenomena of the modern world."
He has lived the great spiritual Truths about which he has written; he is the embodiment of the Spiritual Reality which he affirms in his great works. He has contributed a body of vast literature embodying his vision of the Reality and man's destiny on earth. He has built up, in collaboration with the Mother, an Ashram which has grown into an international centre for the seekers of Spirituality and he has started an International Centre of Education where the younger generation is being moulded for the future human culture.
A. B. PURANI
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EDUCATION
XIV
ANOTHER salutary advice given by the Mother to the parents of children is : "Do not scold your child except with a definite purpose and when quite indispensable. A child too often scolded gets hardened to rebuke and comes to attach little importance to words or severity of tone. Particularly, take care not to rebuke him for a fault which you yourself commit. Children are very keen and clear-sighted observers : they soon find out your weaknesses and note them without pity."
Beating or thrashing has been almost totally banned in modern educational institutions. If it persists anywhere, it is more as a lingering momentum of a confirmed habit than a deliberately adopted means of correction. It must, however, be regretfully admitted that with parents, particularly Indian parents, this anachronistic barbarity is still common. But scolding is rampant, both in our homes and schools. Not that it is found fruitful, but because the parents and teachers have not practised self-control. Any fault, real or fancied, great or small, on the part of the child at once makes them flare up and lose their balance, and the almost inevitable result is either beating or scolding. The measure, which is wrongly considered corrective, is resorted to, not after calm thought and judgment, but in helpless submission to a heady impulse, which, being utterly instinctive and irrational, is pitifully pathological, and merits nothing better than severe reproach and chastisement. It is not applied in the interest of the child. Rather, in most cases, it gives rise in it to a sense of revolt, hardens its nature, and may even warp and pervert it. These instinctive, aboriginal impulses have to be whipped to heel by those Who take upon themselves the sacred duty of bringing up and educating
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children. If we scrutinise our own nature with an honest objectivity, we shall find that our violent outbursts against the faults of our children are, more often than not, a reflex action of our own unavailing struggle against the same faults lodged within us.
What, then, is to be done when a child has committed a serious fault ? Has it to be passed over ? That would not be correction, but a tacit confirmation. A parent or a teacher cannot certainly be expected to turn a blind eye to the defects and delinquencies of the child. The Mother has the following advice for him : "When a child has made a mistake, see that he confesses it to you spontaneously and frankly; and when he has confessed, make him understand with kindness and affection what was wrong in the movement and that he should not repeat it. In any case, never scold him; a fault confessed must be forgiven." There are two things in the Mother's advice, which should be carefully noted. The first is, that the confession must be spontaneous and frank. The child must not be maneuvered, threatened, or cajoled into a confession : the confession must be spontaneous. And the child must, of himself, make a clean breast of all that it has done, withholding or minimising nothing. This kind of frank and spontaneous avowal is possible on one and only one condition : that the teacher or parent maintains a limpid atmosphere of love and affection within and around him. So, the second thing to be noted in the Mother's advice is : "make him understand with kindness and affection what was wrong in the movement" Kindness and affection drive away all fear and prompt a
spontaneous confession; for, the child who has committed something wrong naturally feels—unless it has developed a defiant perversity, born of long persistence in a fault—a pang of repentance or remorse. It feels a gnawing sense of guilt within it. It is unhappy and uncomfortable, and yearns to unburden itself, in the tremulous hope of getting sympathy and solace, and perhaps also strength and courage to resist further attacks of the same proclivity. But this it cannot do if there is something forbidding and discouraging in the atmosphere of its parent or teacher. Fear freezes all frankness and spontaneity. It puts up a wall between the child and its guardian. "You should not allow any fear to slip
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in between you and your child; it is a disastrous way to education : invariably it gives birth to dissimulation and falsehood." It lands the child in a vicious circle. Unable to get kindness and affection, love and sympathy, solace and strength, the child helplessly sways between fault and falsehood, to the great detriment to its nature and character. The fear which the parent or the teacher excites in the child harms both of them, and hamstrings the method of education. "An affection that sees clear, that is firm and gentle, and a sufficiently practical knowledge will create bonds of trust that are indispensable for you to make the education of the child effective."1 Real understanding comes only out of love, for, love leads not only to sympathy but empathy, an intuitive perception that what appears as a delinquency in the child is nothing worse than that some elements of his nature are not in their proper place, that there is a disorder, a confusion among some tendencies and energies in it. If the elements are put in their right place and sequence, the same nature will put on a different aspect and the child will be cured of the defect. This insight is a gift of love, which is a kind of inner identification. That parent or teacher alone can correct the child's defect best who is not repelled or angered by it, but with the vision of love sees what has gone awry, and, with understanding, patience and forgiving kindness, sets himself to put it right. It is a common experience that when we probe beneath the child's delinquency, we discover that it is sometimes a dark shadow or a slight disfigurement of something behind it, which is of sterling quality.2 An apparent frailty
1 Sri Aurobindo and the Mother on Education—All quotations, unless otherwise mentioned, are from this book.
2 ".. .. behind every surprising response on the part of a child, lies an enigma to be deciphered; every form of naughtiness is the outward expression of some deep-seated cause, which cannot be interpreted as the superficial, defensive clash with an unsuitable environment, but as expressing a higher, essential characteristic seeking manifestation." Montessori (The Secret of Childhood)
In this connection, it is reassuring to the parents and teachers alike to be told that Newton, as a boy, was very weak in Mathematics and preferred flying kites, swimming etc. to studying; that Darwin was known as an idiot in his school life and that his teachers had given up all hope of his success in life; that Sir Walter Scott was known in his boyhood as 'the king of idiots'; and that Einstein was so shy and listless that his teachers despaired of his success in life—in fact, he failed in the Entrance examination of the Polytechnic School at Zurich. There are innumerable instances of this kind in the lives of great men. They prove
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sometimes veils a rock-like strength and firmness, a mulish obstinacy may hide an uncommon power of will. Our weaknesses are but strengths in the making, even as our pains and sufferings are in travail of an un ebbing Bliss and Blessedness. Human nature has to be dug deep, if its secret springs are to be discovered. A precipitate, self-justifying moral surgery may often prove fatal to the child-soul.
But the love, which the teacher should employ as the sole means of educating the child, must not be something maudlin or mawkish, but, as the Mother says, "firm yet gentle". True love is not emotional attachment. It is not a weak, woolly tenderness, or a jealous feeling of possession. It is not swayed by outer considerations, moral principles, social conventions or the reactions of our senses. It springs from the soul of man—free, unattached, clairvoyant, and impeccable in its working. It sees what has to be done, and has the firmness to do it. It has power because it has knowledge.
How can this love come ? It cannot come by any of the means prescribed by Montessori. Though she advises the teacher to "prepare himself inwardly", and to "begin by seeking out his own defects, and such tendencies in himself as are not good," and ridding himself "of the inner obstacles which make the child incomprehensible to him", she has nothing better to offer him as a means to his purification than some moral discipline coupled with an effort at self-observation. This remedy has been tried by thousands of men down the ages of human history with little substantial and enduring result. Even when it succeeds, it brings about a modicum of relative but precarious freedom from the cruder forms of desires and prejudices, not the unconditioned freedom of the soul. It would, indeed, be idle to expect that it can evoke that love which sees oneness everywhere, and operates on the basis of that stable vision and knowledge. It cannot come in any of the ways the rational mind adopts in its humanitarian and altruistic bias. Humanitarian or altruistic love is a fine flower
that to be able to discern the germ of genius in the dull and listless boy Einstein is the mark of a true teacher.
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of the ethical mind, a shining product of our developed mental and emotional being. It is, therefore, essentially, though exaltedly human. But it is not this love which the Mother has in view when she speaks of it in connection with the education of the child. What she means is psychic love, the love which spontaneously flows out in a pellucid stream from the soul of man, radiant with the joy of self-finding in an unstinted self-giving. It springs from a sense of oneness and identity. It is this love that can eliminate the old leaven of egoism from our nature and make an inalienable sense of oneness the base of all our relations and dealings with others.
It goes without saying that the Mother does not expect every parent to realise this psychic love overnight, and make it their guide in their task of bringing up and educating their children. The thing is not so easy. But she does expect them to wake up to the seriousness of their responsibility and set out on the path of "surmounting themselves". However long and rugged the path, they have to tread it, if they love their children, and mean to help them salvage whatever is precious in modern culture, and become the creators of a better world for humanity than the sorry one we live in.
But, so far as teachers are concerned, the Mother is uncompromising in her demand : they must prepare themselves, by a sustained spiritual culture, to realise their own psychic being and guide their students towards the same realisation, which is an indispensable pre-condition of integral self-fulfilment. The psychology of the child is not that of the adult. The world in which the child mostly lives is a world of dreams and fantasies, of signs and symbols, of sudden thrills and magic glimmers. It is a world, of the wonders of which modern psychology has discovered something, and bids fair to discover more, Montessori has caught some important secrets, and the supreme poets of all ages and climes have sung in haunting music. This world of enchantment and mystery can be explored, and the hidden founts of the child's life can be unsealed, only by those who have the psychic or occult vision developed in them, and by none else. That is why the Mother tells the teachers to be without ego, and go about
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their sacred task with the light of their liberated soul leading them.
There is another point of great importance, which must be remembered by the teachers. It is that every child is unique in its intrinsic nature, even though sharing the common human nature with others. There is something distinctive, something sharply individual in him—his swabhava and swadharma. He has some traits, tendencies, or capacities, which are specific to that swabhava, and are not found in others in the same texture and pattern. And it is precisely these individual powers and potentialities of the child that the teacher has to foster and help evolve. But how will he be aware of the child's individuality, his swabhava, which is still buried behind the child's frontal nature, unless he has the psychic vision, which can penetrate beyond the crust of the outer personality and discover the central reality and the truth of its evolutionary self-expression ? And if he cannot do it, the education of the child will fail of its purpose, and the child's swabhava and swadharma will remain un evolved and unexpressed, however distinguished and successful its adult life may be in the world's eye.
To the parents also the Mother says : "You have to surmount yourself always and constantly so as to be able to be at the height of your task and truly fulfil the duty which you owe towards your child by the mere fact of your having brought him into existence." To surmount oneself is to transcend one's normal humanity, "to create a new plane of being", as says Keyserling, to rise into a higher dimension of consciousness. It is only a higher than the normal human consciousness that can create a new world, a new order of dynamic harmony and happiness.
These are the prior conditions the Mother lays down for the education of the child. And unless they are fulfilled, education will go on bungling through its solemn charge in a groping, desultory manner, hustled in different directions by the exigencies of the hour. What it is doing now is nothing better than playing with the divine potentialities of the children, who are the makers of the destiny of the race. It is blindly sacrificing the glorious possibilities of the future to the petty, passing, haphazard demands of the present.
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We shall proceed to an exposition of "the five principal aspects (of education) relating to the five principal activities of the human being : the physical, the vital, the mental, the psychic and the spiritual," which constitute the integrality of the system of education, propounded by the Mother.
(To be continued)
RISHABHCHAND
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(A Letter)
YOU have written that you are only an ordinary man, not out of the ordinary like me. You do not dare to be above the average, for you believe that you are wanting in capacity and power that make a man extraordinary. And therefore you have to go through life as others. However, I ask you one thing, who has told you that you are a mere nobody ? How are you so positive about the limits of your power without exercising it in the field of work ? Have you understood yourself entirely ? No, you will say, and you will add that your shortcomings and aberrations are the proof. How can one be great with such imperfections ? In order to be great, one has to aspire and that aspiration you lack. But I see at the very outset that you have formed a wrong conception about yourself. May it not be that under cover of your despair there lies hidden the fire of your aspiration ? But you have found no chance to give it a practical form. It is there lying repressed. You are only cherishing a feeling of self-depreciation. Well, have you probed it ? You are wide awake to your shortcomings. Have you ever tried to see your good qualities ? Before you jump to a conclusion about your own capacities, do not look only at your faults, but also at your good qualities. Truth to tell, I see in you a number of good qualities. Faults you have, but have you no virtues ? You will ask, to what extent ? Well, look at both the extremes of your merits and demerits, and form no estimate of yourself in advance. Man is an amalgam of good and bad. As there is in him an ādhāra for good qualities, even so there is another for bad. You call me an extraordinary man, but if you had seen me when I was of your age you would have simply said, "What a miserable fellow you are ! You have gone to dogs. There's no hope for you." And if you go through history you will find that no great personality was born with a unique genius. All of them like us came into the world filled with hope and despair, desire and frustration. To me the tall talk that you hear about their childhood and boyhood is no better than a cock-and-bull
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story. People fabricate such stories to attract our attention to them after they have become great. Before they rose to greatness they had passed unnoticed. Be sure, you too will hear many such stories about your early life the moment you grow into a great personality. You may, however, say that all and sundry cannot become great. It is only a few that are actually great and it is God's Grace or the results of their actions in their previous lives that have made them so. There's no building on the sand. But who says that there is no power dormant in you ? Or that you have no virtues acquired in your past lives ? Or that you have no Grace of God ? Who says that you are only sand ? So I tell you, first try to know yourself. And before trying to do so bear in mind the words of St. Paul : "I know not what I am." Start fife with this approach. 'I know nothing about myself. I do not know whether I am an ordinary or extraordinary personality. I will come to know of it at long last.' Just begin the experiment on you to know yourself. Scrutinise yourself with a bold heart. Experiment on yourself like a scientist. Try to discover all your virtues and vices. As a matter of fact, the more you bring to the fore your vices, the more will you automatically see your virtues.
Man is a bottomless mine of gems. Above, there are many layers of sand, stone, clay and coal intermixed. The deeper you dive, the more you glimpse the real gems. The deeper still you go, you will find less and still less of mixture—there's only the gem. You have lost heart at the sight of sand, stone and coal that are on the surface. Man, as man, is such a mine. I don't say that diamonds are found in every mine. But be sure, something useful and valuable can be found in it. To an individual this precious thing is his individuality, I mean, his specialty. You will be a great personage, but that does not mean that you will grow into a Napoleon or a Buddha. And even if you could, I think, you must not try to be so. For to be a mere Napoleon or a mere Buddha is not the ideal of the world. Everybody must be his own self. Your whole greatness lies in what you should be.
You have to recognise that you are a mass of energy. Indeed, you have potentiality, whatever be your failure to manifest it fully and integrally. To be conscious of this power, to make it dynamic,
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to awaken this potentiality is to manifest your own individuality, your own uniqueness. Only you are not to measure this power, this potentiality by something else. Do you know the limit of the power that resides within you ? In other words, this hidden power, this specialty of yours is the divine quality, is God himself. And surrender to the Divine means to let the hidden power act according to its will within you to make you calm and quiet and free your inner being from all limitations.
One more word and I stop for the moment. Just observe that our society lays great stress on modesty. If the word modesty means only to belittle oneself, to make nothing of oneself, one need not be modest at all. But what is the true meaning of modesty ? It is simply to keep off pride and vanity. But pride, i.e., to boast, to give oneself airs, to look upon oneself as a big gun —all these we generally call vanity. Besides these, pride has other forms. There is a rājasic way of displaying one's pride. Truly, to think oneself poor, sinful, miserable, inferior to all, is also a sign of pride. All this is called tāmasic pride. The word pride actually means I am aloof and unique, other than all you people.
Man is a bundle of virtues and vices. The root of pride either rājasic or tāmasic must be pulled out, for it does not allow us to see or manifest the Truth. Besides, there is another kind of pride called sāttwic pride (Illumined pride). We must rise above all the three modes of pride. We do not want any kind of pride. What we want is self-surrender. Behind your modesty there lies the pride of your ignorance and self-debasement. The rājasic pride is better than this tamasic one. For tāmas makes you absolutely inactive, and owing to the influence of rajas you become full of life, full of dynamism and self-confidence. What is wanted, is that you should purify this self-confidence. I hope, you will gradually be aware of all the forms of pride and you will be able steadily to remove them so that your whole being may be filled with the glory of your own true Self that resides deep within you.
NOLINI KANTA GUPTA
(Translated from Bengali)
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SUPRAMENTAL METAPHYSICS AND THE LOGIC OF THE INFINITE
PHILOSOPHY in Sri Aurobindo is quite different from what passes for it in the academies. It is in a sense a return to the point of view left behind by men whose pragmatically and social interests had made it useless. Man's divisive existence has made global and integral vision and perception and consideration and action impossible and abstract.
The integral conception of Reality or the perception of Reality as one Whole or Unity or in intellectual language system, has however been the enduring instinct among philosophers. After all it has been found that even those who know only a fragment of reality seek to conceive of the entire Reality in terms of the known fragment. Generalisations from the partially known have grave defects and are almost false. It is true that the Upanishad does speak of 'that being known all things are known', and if one finds the taste of a crystal of sugar he can conclude that all sugar will taste sweet, or if one tastes a drop of the ocean then he can conclude that the Ocean's waters are selfish. But these analogical inferences have limits and have to be interpreted in the contexts of the original revelations.
Nor does it mean that the integral view is a composite view in which all the possible points of view are fitted in to form a coherent whole as such. For the fitting in of all to form a coherent whole may prove to be a zig-saw puzzle.
Intellect has been used for the purpose of constructing a whole by both
idealists and realists, monists as well as pluralists. For all the fundamental
laws of thought are acceptable. The laws of identity, of contradiction and
excluded middle had proved basic to any construction. Whatever impugns these
laws in any manner must be deemed to be wrong. The law of non-contradiction
between items of experience is a very effective instrument for putting together
experiences of the most evanescent and fleeting
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kind in a systematic way. Though sensations are the material of system-building it must be clear that the same material may not form the material for all individual constructions. Thus we are led to construct several individual logical systems of reality, subjective, unverifiable and yet good enough for oneself. But a subjective reality created or constructed by one's mind on the single formula of non-contradictoriness is even when operating with universal reason unsatisfactory. And yet it is true that one never can step over one's own shadow. To use Plato's imagery it is a construction made out of impressions not in their real nature but of shadows. Indeed to deal with effects solely even when aided by an almighty reason can never take us to the cause. Sesavat anumāna, reasoning to the cause from the effect can never in these cases lead us to conjecture the nature of the Reality. We can never recapture the nature of Reality from appearances even when the latter are bene fun datum.
The goal of idealistic philosophy is a coherent reality, for its axiom is that the coherent is the real, the incoherent cannot be the real, and even a little coherence grants reality, and as such there are in our constructions degrees of reality corresponding to degrees of coherence. But since such coherences are seriously handicapped by empiricist elements being the material for our constructions such a perfect whole of the Absolute is forever beyond reason, though fervently cherished as an Ideal. It is a goal that never becomes actual or realised. Thus the dream of constructing a coherent whole out of sensate fragmentary ideas even with the help of the so-called Absolute Reason is utopian, if not Sysypian.
The empiricistic ideal similarly whether it is radical or otherwise, rational or just associational, can never lead to a proper metaphysic of Reality. At best it is provisional, at worst it is
sceptical. It would appear that to deny any metaphysic of Reality was the
natural consequence of the uncritical acceptance (i) of ideas being the
constituents of reality or knowledge, and (ii) of denying that there are other
ways of knowing or getting at the constituents of Reality than sensations or
sense-impressions. A logic of the human mind, or the finite mind as we shall
call it, as well as the psychology of the sensate mind conspired to make all
idealism and
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realism phenomenalistic and self-contradictory. A paradoxical result as it were arising from a consistent and allround application of the principle of non-self contradiction. But who pray would like to use any other criterion ?
At the time Sri Aurobindo was writing his Magnum Opus, the Life Divine, this idealistic theory was the established thought, though its high respectability was being challenged by pluralistic and pragmatist and evolutionary thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic. Despite the thundering guns of irrational empiricism and abstract pluralism that threw to the winds the principle of non-self-contradiction officially, they could only substitute in its place a concealed version of the same, namely a logic of continuity or time or evolution or process. For there has hardly been an attempt to restore to Reality its most fundamental feature, its integral oneness in many ness, in which opposites are not only necessary to each other but are each other not by implication but by being or existence.
There is however nothing so very embarassing to philosophers of the high a priori road as the clear enunciation of their own fundamental assumptions, which remain irrational or inexplicable. Continuity does not mean that contradiction is the essence of all process; a contradiction between the past and the present and the present and the future is
atomistic ally considering irresolvable. It is not even or through any system of calculus that we can restore or construct an image of the Reality that constantly overflows all definitions of the finite mind or perceptions of the sensate mind. A rational dialectic of Hegel, logical and neat, culminated in the irrational dialectic of evolutionisms, and the march of the Absolute was not by means the construction of a coherent One reality, but a terrible dance of irrational categories that proliferated in a life and death struggle with one another, a dialectic that revealed the discontinuity and incoherent leaps of opposites in a Dionysic frenzy. However it was exciting to find that the finite mind, so very general or universal, was by a fate made to bless itself with irrational continuities and rational discontinuities. Thus arose a supreme discontent among philosophers and verily some had cried a halt to philosophising, perhaps to give
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time to recover from the breath-taking culmination of Rational irrationality.
The first quarter of the century ended and the second quarter saw the emergence of pragmaticism and empiricism to respectability. Later absolutists ignominiously fell thanks to its politicalism; and pluralistic concepts began to be entertained. We found that the synthesis of the encyclopedias was sedulously analysed, and several sciences, had begun to seek independent existence even like the disected earthworm seeking a double existence. Thus economisms, psychologisms, linguistically and mathematical logistics, and positivisms separated from the main stream of philosophical synthesis and began to grow apart from each other. Similarly we find this development in all sciences also. All unities got severed and there was a feeling of comfort in the minds of these specialists that they had a circumscribed finite field for experiments and expertness. Philosophy however is something that is so vast and wide and too abstract and generalised to be expert in. The finite mind found pleasure in its little well, and was content to be sovereign there.
We have surely moved away from the synoptic thinkers. Is it not after all a realisation that our mind cannot cope up with the magnitude of knowing and acting in a reality, commensurate with its needs. Sciences found themselves at once triumphant and defeated.
Sri Aurobindo emerged into the philosophic field 'un philosophically' so to speak, as synthetise of many movements of thought and expression and experience, both eastern and western. He was as he himself put it no academic 'philosopher' in one of his letters. But as was recognized fully he had that same intensity of synoptic perception and comprehensive intuition that informed Plato, and Hegel, too, and he was much nearer the former than the latter. The profound belief in the possibility of a metaphysic of Reality informed his most near-omniscient perceptions. The Reason in him had transcended very much the limits of finite reason. Kalajñāna (knowledge of the parts however perfect) had yielded place to vrijinani or pūrñājfidna or (kalajñāna).
It is not as a comparative philosophy of Religion would have
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us believe a thinking so very compendiously and hard that results in an erudite piece of scholarship, informed by many views. Modern thinkers consider that a study of comparative philosophy or religion or rather a comparative study of these would yield us general laws of thought and faith. Modernism hugs to the discipline of the inductive method in this as in others; legitimate within certain limits, the synoptic is beyond its grasp. Intuition can never arise from the intensity or hardness of intellectual thinking, analytical or syncretical or synthetical. It is nowhere found that finite reason expires in the Infinite reason, for the latter is forever beyond it. The true vijñāna is not a finite reason restored to its infinity being relieved from the limiting conditions of ignorance which have so to speak 'inverted it or refracted it so many times or so much as to present a distorted version of reality albeit a reality. The Spiritual Vision is more truly the reason lifted above its finite confines, from its perceptions of distortions of reality and experience. Such a reason is a different kind of reason, with a definite logic of its own, with its own perceptions and apprehensions, of which the known world of our perceptions may well be reflections. The reflections however are not unreal, in the sense, not existent experiences, but experiences which are verifiable to that consciousness and plane of being. Such experiences are different from such stuff as dreams are made up of. The realistic approach to the multiplicity of many ness in the Aurobindonian conception is what bridges the gulf raised by an idealistic metaphysics that converts all appearance to illusion proceeding from a beginning less and inexplicable Maya or power of illusion.
I. PRINCIPLE OF DIRECT REALISM
The logic of the Supermind then is firstly the acceptance of the levels of reality each of which has its own limited autonomy of being and is not contradicted by any higher level or even the highest level. This makes it possible for the Highest Mind "or consciousness or Existence to support and reveal or veil the lower
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on their own terms, and laws of being. Unity or identity holds the many ness and diversity and does not annihilate it.
2. Principle of Intrinsic Value of the Many
The multiphcity has a perfection in its own being which can not be annulled by the aggregation of the many nor by the One in which the many have their basic being. The meaning of the many lies in the One even as the meaning of the many is realised in each one of the many. Thus the promise of the immortality and intrinsic value of the many is indispensable to the logic of real infinity.
3. Principle of Radical Inclusiveness of Opposites
(a) It is not true to say that the law of contradiction is a characteristic of Reality, for the law undergoes a reformulation that it is possible for opposites to co-exist when they are both real and not abstract. This law very much reminds us of the view of contingent facts which are contradictory-can co-exist but not when the contradiction is between being and non-being and other such categories.
(b) The law of the excluded middle makes an unnatural exclusion for the sake of simplification of our ideas. Practical utility is at the back of disjunction. We are usually expected to choose either this or that. But in higher ways of appreciation or should be say in certain kinds of selection, we find that we do not wish to accept either or but either/and. We have however to see that this entails the appreciation of the complementariness and harmony of opposites or contradictoriness, both being aspects of the Totality of Reality.
4. Principle of Transcendental Immanence
Transcendence of the human valuations may entail giving up many formulations of the human mind. The emergence of new
valuation concepts of instruments is a fact that we cannot lose
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sight of. For this purpose too it is necessary neither to relegate to unimportance the human values for the sake of the higher nor deny them any validity as false values. The integral Reality holds much that is transcendent to the human, even includes the subhuman, but in its concrete vision and activity it transforms their ignorance or rather their autonomy and unites them in the experience of the whole as a dynamic creative process.
5. Principle of Integral Diversity or Plurality
The relation of immanence to transcendence has been one of the problems of philosophy in so far as how the immanent can itself have the energy to transcend itself. For the Infinite this is indeed the crux of manifestation and causal relationship. The positing of the poises of the Infinite simultaneously descending into its other poises and ascending through them to itself explains the problem of the immanent effect and originative creation. The unity of the integrative process is explained along with the divergent multiplicity by one principle of integrative transcendence of the Sachchidānanda.
6. Principle of Dynamic Integration
If dialectical thought as the strongest form of intellectual intuition as we have found it in Hegel and Henri Bergson (who has formulated it as two-fold frenzy), in Sri Aurobindo's logic of the Infinite it is the simultaneous reality of the many ness in play with oneness that is the strongest form of the Super mental intuition. Thus it becomes possible to perceive not the static or about static Absolute, but the Absolute in its creative or divine Evolutionary nature. The one is in the many even as the many are in the one. Indeed it is even possible to suggest that this truth is what makes one perceive the Whole in every part and every part in the Whole.
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7. Principle of Integral Apprehension
A logic of negations can be said to be principle behind most illusionist intellectual processes. A logic of determinations cannot of course be excluded in any consideration of the former. The logic of the Infinite would require a reformulation of the two principles so as to grant significance to the individual and determinations pertaining to him. In terms of the Infinite then the determinations of the individual would be of the order of mutual implication of all in its nature, and not as usually conceived that it is the subject of all judgment, as in idealistic logic. A mere organic relation will not help. Perhaps the nearest approach to it may be conceivably the 'mirroring of the whole in each and every part of Leibnitzian conception.
8. Principle of Integral Play & Harmony of the Integrative Dialectic
To the logic of the Infinite, the evolutionary order is not a contradiction as in the logic of the finite mind postulating a perfection as completing or completed and as such static. Evolution is not merely ascent of life nor 'a continuity of shooting out' nor a process of moving from homogeneity to heterogeneity, but a basic expression of the infinite play of oneness and many ness in a myriad ways. We do come across degrees of oneness at the one extreme and degrees of many ness at the other and intellect has identified the former with God and the latter with matter. But the logic of the infinite would discern the occult secret of the One is its many ness and the occult secret of the many is its oneness. To the super mind then the two terms do not bear the contradiction that intellectual monism's and pluralisms see in such a formulation.
9. Principle of Integral Monistic Evolution
Speaking of a metaphysical theory of evolution that shall explain all the biological theories, as Divine
Evolutionism, it
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breathes the aroma of a theism. Here even the concept of God in his manifold statuses in evolutionary descent and ascent does justice to the multiple unity of the different poises of the Nature known as matter, life and mind and others intermediate. It explains the emergence of the finite mind, out of the ignorance (concealed wisdom of the one in the many) and the integration of the levels that actually occurs in the organic being of man and in the superman after emancipation from the unconscious instinct and intellect. Ignorance becomes not the contradiction or negation of knowledge but an unconscious intelligence that organizes and induces a unity of the many, by contradiction, opposition, assimilation and struggle. The Divine Evolutionism is not a conjunctive formula satisfying the demands of the organic evolution up to man but precisely a dynamic logic of the Infinite in life as in thought where thought and life, culminate in a single pulse of eternal Being.
K. C. VARADACHARI
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THE Mother is the gate and the way and she comes to fulfil, not to destroy the great classical approaches and paths to the Supreme. So in her epic ascent to the Supramental all aspirations of the human consciousness are taken up, purified of their customary imperfections and wrong directions, fused and uplifted to the heights. Her sadhana macadamizes and makes secure the Sunlit Path. "It seems to me that it is Thy will to make me pass successively through all the experiences that are generally put at the summit of a Yoga as its culmination and the proof of its perfect accomplishment. The experience is intense, complete, striking, carrying in it the knowledge of all its effects, all its consequences; it is conscious and willed, it comes out of a methodical effort and not by an unexpected chance; and yet it is always unique, like the milestones placed along a path and separated from each other by a long ribbon of road; and, moreover, the milestones which stake out the infinite ascent, are never alike; ever new, they appear to have no connection with one another____
"Will a moment come when Thou wilt make this being capable of synthetising all these innumerable experiences so as to draw out of them a realisation new, more complete, more beautiful than all those gone through up to this day ?"
One such line of Yoga is the Way of Negative Comprehension spoken of in Christian Mysticism as The Dark Night of the Soul. Similar, though not identical, are the Turiya Sadhana of the monistic Vedantins and Mahayanists, the Sunya Marga of the nihilistic Buddhists and Taoists. To these sadhaks, the Divine, whether ultimately felt as Personal or Impersonal, is always the Unmanifest, Avyakta and however much the human consciousness penetrates this higher zone it always recedes its grasp in an endless unmanifest ness, Avyaktaparamavyaktam. So they speak of the divine Darkness, the Cloud of the Unknowing. And the way to the Dark is in the dark and through the dark, a complete
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shedding of all mental knowledge and untouched by mental lights. In the words of St. John of the Cross : "In order to arrive there, you must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy. In order to arrive at what you do not know, you must go by a way which is the way of ignorance. In order to possess what you do not possess, you must go by the way of dispossession. In order to arrive at what you are not, you must go through the way in which you are not. When thy mind dwells upon anything, Thou art ceasing to cast thyself upon the All. For, in order to pass from the all to the All, Thou hast to deny thyself wholly in all. And, when thou comest to possess it wholly, Thou must possess it without desiring anything. For, if thou wilt have anything in having all, Thou hast not thy treasure purely in God." As Lao Tze puts it : "The further one travels, the less one knows. Learning consists in adding to one's stock day by day. The practice of Tao consists in subtracting day by day : subtracting and yet again subtracting until one has reached inactivity." Manonāsa, mindlessness, is the necessary prelude to ātma bodha of the Advaitins or the nibbāna of the Buddhists. The only positive thing in this way is the silent aspiration, wordless, thoughtless, desireless and free from the outer willings. 'A meek stirring of love', 'a sudden stirring and as it were unadvised, speedily apiring unto God as a sparkle from the coal', 'a sharp dart of longing love', 'a privy love pressed in cleanness of spirit', 'to hang up one's love and longing desire in this cloud of unknowing', mumuksutva, ardent longing for liberation, are the phrases employed to describe this state.
"On a dark night, kindled in love with yearnings—oh, happy chance !—
I went forth without being observed, my house being now at rest. In darkness and secure, by the secret ladder, disguised—oh,
happy chance !— In darkness and in concealment, my house being now at rest. In the happy night, in secret, when none saw me, Nor I beheld aught, without light or guide, save that which burned in my heart.
This light guided me more surely than the light of noonday
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To the place where he (well I knew who ?) was awaiting me— A place where none appeared."
One possible consummation of this kind of sadhana is the dissolving of the individual consciousness in the Unmanifest Supreme Ether, avyakta vyoma, or some kind of Light of God, while the mortal members of mind, life, and body are left to the temporary play of the lower universal Prakriti till their final lapse into the Inconscience. A more inclusive culmination is brought about when the instruments of the mind, life and body become the delegates of the Higher Consciousness. "Your very body is not your own. It is the delegated image of God. Your life is not your own. It is the delegated harmony of God. Your individuality is not your own. It is the delegated adaptability of God. Your posterity is not your own. It is the delegated exuviate of God. You move, but know not how. You are at rest, but know not why. You taste, but know not the cause. These are the operations of God's laws." Thus the Bodhisattva acts on the world around him in the spontaneous inner consciousness of a divine compassion, wisdom, peace and bliss. The man of God reflects and radiates something of the light, love and mercy of the Lord.
But the majority of the followers of this path are satisfied with some reflection of the Higher Consciousness or Light in their minds and hearts. The twofold process of emptying the instruments of all their contents and associations and purifying them by the inner silent aspiration often brings about a spiritualisation of the mind and heart which become mirrors of the planes above. The Peace and the Light of the planes of the Higher Thinking Mind, Illumined Mind, or Intuition are themselves overwhelming even in their reflections and very often refractions in the spiritualised mind An ascent of the mental consciousness into these heights and a complete steeping and living in the ambience of the above or a total descent of these into the mind is extremely rare. A disregard of all these lights from above and a preoccupation with complete mergence in the Transcendent, bypassing all the dynamic planes beyond, are part of the received and accepted tradition of oriental and occidental mysticism. The few who have felt the over mental
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lustres reflected in or descending into their minds seem to have mistaken them as the very highest. Hence the principle of the Sadhana of the Dark Night has been deployed at its highest for the realisation or the ascent to the Over mind or the laya in the static Super conscience.
But the Yoga of Savitri does not arise by a personal need of liberation or salvation or mergence in the Ultimate Beyond.
"To wrestle with the Shadow she had come
And must confront the riddle of man's birth
And life's brief struggle in dumb Matter's night.
Whether to bear with Ignorance and Death
Or hew the ways of Immortality,
To win or lose the godlike game for man,
Was her soul's issue thrown with Destiny's dice.
But not to submit and suffer was she born;
To lead, to deliver was her glorious part."
Her quest is for the Truth, the Light and the Shakti which can victoriously handle earth-nature and bring into this world of Death the Immortal Ananda. She had already reached the Over mental World-Mother's triple Soul-Forces and realised them as emanations from her secret soul. And so she does not require the entry into the Dark Night for the Over mental ascent. Her sadhana up to this stage has been the positive road of entry into the subliminal by inner aspiration and concentration and an upward ascension by heightening of the integrated and homogeneous human consciousness. So she steps into a night of God after reaching the Over mind. Her secret soul is the Transcendent Chit-Shakti and the quest of her soul points beyond the global, cosmic over mental consciousness. "There is sometimes need of night to prepare a greater dawn." Sometimes, not always. The entry into the dark night of the soul is not imperative for all or at all times. The sunlit path of the discovery and identification with the inmost Psychic being, chaitya purusha and a progressive psychic transformation of the mind, life and body which leads inevitably and
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spontaneously to the spiritual and finally supramental ascent and descent, is open to all. Once the Supramental has got itself established as a permanent part of the world-consciousness, the sadhana of those who aspire will be from light to light. But Savitri is preparing the way for it and she has reached the very verge or the peak of the established Over mental Consciousness, the source of the present organisation of the universe with its basis of multiple consciousness. If she remains identified with this level of consciousness she can only repeat the same creation with its Inconscient base.
So we find her emptying herself of all lights—the vital, the emotional, the mental and the over mental with its delegates of the higher mental, illumined mental, and the intuitional. The Wisdom, Knowledge and the Idea of all these intermediate ranges fail to satisfy her aspiration and withdraw from the arena of her consciousness, which can give room only to the Truth, the Vast Truth-Consciousness, Ritam, Satyam, Brihat—a Truth which has rarely been conceived by the highest flights of human thought or uttered by the greatest poet. 'Truth is eternally outside all that we can think or say of it. The reality, in spite of the greatness, beauty and perfection of a mental formula, will always elude all formula.' 'Her mind knelt down before the unknowable in an innocent and holy Ignorance, in a simple purity of emptiness.' "Then thou hast broken all my thought-forms and I found myself before Thee destitute of all mental construction, as ignorant in this respect as the child that has just been born; and in the darkness of this void was recovered the sovereign peace of Something which is not expressed in words, but which is." There is now only the sharp dart of longing love and self-giving aspiration. The feeling of one's self is lost and gone with it the feeling of belonging to the highest evolved human consciousness and if anything, the utter inadequacy of the human to embody the divine is brought home to such a clear degree that humanity seemed now too proud a state. She is steeped in the Night of God and "before this immense night full of promise, she feels, more than she has ever felt before, infinitely free and vast."
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"This Void held more than all the teeming worlds.
This blank felt more than all that Time has borne,
This dark knew dumbly, immensely the Unknown."
"The whole thing gives an impression of a void which is full of light, peace and immensity, eluding all form and all definition. It is the nihil, but a nihil which is real and which can endure eternally, for it is, even while having the perfect immensity of that which is not "A shadow walking in a shadowy scene, a night of person crossing an impersonal Night, a small naught passing through a mightier Naught. The individual is lost in the Self's Infinity and the Wide Consciousness is establishing itself in the mortal awareness.
II
The secret of ascending to the heights is to get the wideness proper to the level aspired for and the wideness needed for the Supramental ascent is nothing short of the very infinity of the space less vast, the cidākāia. When the consciousness is soaked in the Vastness without any movement, spanda, there is an infiltration of That into fins, which gets established in the sequel. With this wideness the powers and presences proper to and hidden in it begin to reveal themselves, while at the same time it awakens the involved faculty of vision for the perception and realisation of these lofty verities. The utility of the dark night is over and it gives place to the Dawn, the prelude to the Day. 'However high one goes one can always return, unless one has the will not to do so.'
"At last a change approached, the emptiness broke;
A wave rippled within, the world had stirred;
Once more her inner self became her space.
There was felt a blissful nearness to the Goal;
Heaven leaned low to kiss the sacred hill,
The air trembled with passion and delight.
A rose of splendour on a tree of dreams,
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The face of Dawn out of mooned twilight grew.
Day came, priest of a sacrifice of joy
Into the worshipping silence of her world:
He carried immortal lustre as his robe,
Trailed heaven like a purple scarf and wore
As his vermillion caste-mark a red sun."
Till this moment of the decisive crossing of the over mental border into the Upper Hemisphere of Vignana, one dawn is succeeded by another in a long progression, often indeed with .long intervals of night in between so that dawn does not lead to the Day. But "This time Thou hast put us in front of a Dawn that does not cease !" The light of the Vignana Surya, the Supramental Sun beyond the Darkness, tamāsah parastāt, has begun to play on the Hill of Consciousness, mahāmeru. The mortal emerges from the region of the reflected lights of the Over mind and its delegates, the mooned twilight which has prepared him to widen his vision and acclimatise himself to the gaze of the Sun. And Mitra, the Sun of Light and Love progressively reveals Himself, sending first
the Rosy Light with its intimations and subtle inner glimpses, dreams, of the
coming Day. From the sleep of Ignorance, through the dreams of Dawn, to the
Great Wakefulness of the Day, Maha
Jagra. This Day is the officiator and preceptor of the great yajna of dissolving
the Cosmic Ignorance and calling and establishing the Supramental Gods in the
altar of the earth-consciousness, so that the Immortal Ananda rains here, now,
always. Since Love is His weapon there is not going to be a battle but a silent
transformation by His alchemic touch, a sacrifice of Joy. In the centre of His
forehead the centre of Vision, He has the Sun, with whom Wisdom and
Truth-Consciousness are natural and inborn, jātavedas. "In Silence is the
greatest respect" and Savitri opens all her inner being, her world, to this
great Guru in a worshipping silence.
The vision of the Upper Hemisphere, the own home, swam dama, of Savitri is not so much a new perception or cognition of a hitherto undreamt of Region arrived at after an exciting adventure into
the Unknown, but a recognition of an old familiar home to
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which the exile returns after long wanderings in strange seas and stranger shores. The imperishable lustre of that sky, the tremulous sweetness of that happy air and the mystic cavern in the sacred hill are felt as the natural atmosphere of one's dwelling, cherished in very profound dreams so long, amidst the sojourn in other lands and waters. The picture in the prophetic, visionary mind revives again.
This cavern is hidden from all profane eyes, an inmost sanctuary, garbhagrha, where the Transcendent and the Supermind are installed. It is covered from mind's view and life's approach; their outward gaze dwells in the outer rampart, bāhya prākdra, and is satisfied with mental refractions of moonlight. It lies withdrawn even from life's inner sense; this occult and spiritual inward look reveals only in the inner court, antah prākdra, and is contented with the moonlit enchantment. But the inmost sanctum is seen and entered into only by the purified initiate of this Great Mystery of Sun-Gazers. Its door is an untrodden region of an awful dimness, a holy stillness with a marvellous brooding twilight. The door to the Supermind is a plane of absolute immobility of concentrated Peace, the solid blocks of granite peace. On the stone pillars on either side two golden serpents curled, enveloping it with pure and dreadful strength and looking out with wisdom's deep and luminous eyes. These are the mahākundalini, the great dynamic wisdom-forces and energies of the higher consciousness, the divine supramental counterpart of life-force of the lower hemisphere and so the true divine life-energies of the right and the left, the masculine and the feminine, the creative and the constructive, the analytic and the synthetic, the active and the passive. An eagle, the Garuda, the Divine Supramental Mind-Force, covers it with wide conquering wings of sweeping and all-embracing and all-effectuating power of comprehension and apprehension, willing and knowing fused at the highest intensity.
Flames of self-lost immobile reverie,
Doves crowded the grey musing cornices
Like sculptured postures of white-bosomed peace. '
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This is 'the fire-screen of peace guarding the mystic loneliness of nude ecstasy of the white summit of eternity', the divine counter-part of the psychic aspiration, peace, sweetness and light. The doves, serpents and the eagle live in complete harmony with each other and together contribute to the divine beauty of the temple. The divine psychic, the divine mental and the divine vital are one perfect concord, a complete consort dancing together. The threshold of this temple is entered only in a complete sleep, sushupti, of the distorting mental, vital and physical, even the subliminal and the over mental ways of cognition and experiencing. Crossing the threshold one sees the Archetypes of all movements, things, persons and planes below. For this is the Causal World, kārari jagat, a World of Predetermination where all the happenings and creations in Time are in their seed-state. Nay, this is the plane where all the past, present and future are one eternal present. All the powers behind the movements in Time, the gods, are here, and the whole plan of evolution of the life-scene of man in the human world, and the history of all other worlds are etched on the walls of this temple. All cosmic philosophy, psychology, geography and history are eternally present and revealed here. The ladder of existence from Superconscient Sachchidananda above, to the Inconscient jada below, with the intermediate rungs of vijñāna, Over mind and its delegates and the triple world of Mind, Life and Body and the Sub-conscient, with its descending involutionary movement and the ascending evolutionary progression is seen here.
"In their immensities signing infinity
They were the extension of the self of
God And housed, impassively receiving all,
His figures and his small and mighty acts
And his passion and his birth and life and death
And his return to immortality.
To the abiding and eternal is their climb,
To the pure existence everywhere the same, '
To the sheer consciousness and the absolute force
And the unimaginable and formless bliss,
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To the mirth in Time and the timeless mystery
Of the triune being who is all and one
And yet is no one but himself apart."
III
The darshan of this Temple of the Eternal on the summit of the hill of spiritual Consciousness is possible only by the development of a Knowledge by Identity of the Self. The deep sees the deep; the similar perceives the similar.
All this she saw and inly felt and knew
Not by some thought of mind but by the self.
A light not born of sun or moon nor fire,
A light that dwelt within and saw within
Shedding an intimate visibility,
Made secrecy more revealing than the word :
Our sight and sense are a fallible gaze and touch
And only the spirit's vision is wholly true.
'There the sun cannot shine and the moon has no lustre : all the stars are blind : there our lightnings flash not, neither any earthly fire. For all that is bright is but the shadow of His brightness and by His shining all this shines.' The physical, vital, mental and over mental lights are but shadows of this Light and how can they illuminate That ? How to measure the measuring rod except by self-identification ? The dwelling in the Infinity and Wide-ness awakens the Supramental way of perception and realisation by becoming and being one with the object. Subject and Object are fused in a complete oneness, sohambhāvanā . Not the doors of perception of the instruments and vehicles of the Spirit but the inmost Essential Spiritual Perceptiveness can alone see the Essence of all. "In my Father's House are many mansions." The Infinite is the Infinite.
"Through room and room, through door and rock-hewn door, She felt herself made one with all she saw.
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A sealed identity within her woke;
She knew herself the Beloved of the Supreme :
These Gods and Goddesses were he and she :
The Mother was she of Beauty and Delight,
The Word in Brahma's vast creating clasp,
The World-Puissance on almighty Shiva's lap,—
The Master and the Mother of all lives
Watching the worlds their twin regard had made,
And Krishna and Radha for ever entwined in bliss,
The Adorer and Adored self-lost and one."
So Savitri perceives and realises her identity with all the Powers of the Supermind. "The One is Four for ever in his supramental quaternary of Being, Consciousness, Force and Ananda.
Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, Krishna, these are the eternal Four, the Quadruple Infinite.
Brahma is the Eternal's Personality of Existence, from him all is created, by his presence, by his power, by his impulse.
Vishnu is the Eternal's Personality of Consciousness; in him all is supported, in his wideness, in his stability, in his substance.
Shiva is the Eternal's Personality of Force; through him all is created, through his passion, through his rhythm, through his concentration.
Krishna is the Eternal's Personality of Ananda; because of him all creation is possible, because of his play, because of his delight, because of his sweetness.
Brahma is Immortality, Vishnu is Eternity, Shiva is Infinite; Krishna is the Supreme's eternal, infinite, immortal Self-play— self-issuing, self-manifestation, self-finding." "The Ishwara as Lord of the cosmos does come out of the Mother who takes her place beside him as the cosmic Shakti—the cosmic Ishwara is one aspect of the Divine." Radha is the Mother's 'Personality of that mysterious and powerful ecstasy and Ananda which flows from a supreme divine Love, the Ananda that alone can heal the gulf between the highest heights of the supramental spirit and lowest abysses of Matter, the Ananda that holds the key of a wonderful divinest Life and even now supports from its secrecies the work of
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all the Powers of the universe.' From these Powers or Emanations Savitri passes on to the identification with the source of all these, The Divine Supramental Gnosis : the Sun whose rays are all Gods and Goddesses, Rasmimala :
"In the last chamber on a golden seat
One sat whose shape no vision could define.
Only one felt the world's unattainable fount,
A Power of which she was a straying Force,
An invisible Beauty, goal of the world's desire,
A Sun of which all knowledge is a beam,
A Greatness without whom no life could be."
All these dynamisms depart into the silent Self, the static Sachchidananda :
"Thence all departed into silent self,
And all became formless and pure and bare.
Then through a tunnel dug in the last rock
She came out where there shone a deathless sun.
A house was there all made of flame and light
And crossing a wall of door less living fire
There suddenly she met her secret soul."
This is the Home of the Adi Shakti, the Chit-Shakti, the Transcendent Mother of All in the Upper and Lower Hemispheres, Parardha and Aparardha. Savitri, the Divine Mother, meets her secret soul in a 'breathless ecstasy's surprise.' She is the Divine in its consciousness-force, Chit-Tapas, the way and the Goal of all.
Reference :
Savitri: Book Seven, Canto Five;
Prayers and Meditations of The Mother.
M. V. SEETARAMAN
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Shree Narayana Ashram Silver Jubilee Souvenir. Pub. Sri Narayana Ashram Managing Committee, Bajwada, Khatriple, Baroda. (pp. 296).
T3ESIDES giving an account of the life, teaching and work of the founder of Sri Narayana Ashram in the Himalayas, this brochure contains a good number of selections from the writings of various saints, yogins, thinkers and poets, in English and in Hindi. The chapter on Mount Kailas and lake Manasa-sarovar from Swami Pranavanandaji is indeed remarkable. It breathes something of the sublime air of the sacred Kailas and evokes an imagery which lingers long in the mind.
The selections are made mostly with an eye to their value in sadhana, practical spiritual life, which is a very different thing from discussions in Philosophy. About the latter the readers would find the observations of Khalil Gibran (reproduced in these pages) interesting : "Said a philosopher to a street sweeper, 'I pity you. Yours is a hard and dirty task.' And the street sweeper said, 'Thank you, sir. But tell me, what is your task ?' And the Philosopher answered, saying, 'I study man's mind, his deeds and desires.' Then the street sweeper went on with his sweeping and said with a smile, 'I pity you too.'"
M. P. PANDIT
Published by P. Counouma
Printed at Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, Pondicherry - 2
To be had of:
Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry-2
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