Each year that passes should be—and is necessarily—a new conquest.
THE MOTHER
A casual passing phrase can change our life.
SRI AUROBINDO
April, 1963
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
XIV
THE AWAKENED
His victory cannot be vanquished, a victory none can attain in this world. Which path can lead to the Pathless, the Awakened who dwells with the Infinite ? (1)
No desire—which is entanglement and poisonous drink —can lead' him away. What path can lead to the Pathiess, the 'Awakened who dwells with the Infinite ? (2)
* Based on the Mother's Talks. .
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The gods even envy those who are wise and given to meditation, who are enlightened and take delight in the solitude of retirement. (3)
It is difficult to attain to human birth, difficult to live the mortal life, difficult to hear of the Right Law; difficult indeed is the advent of the Enlightened One. (4)
Never commit a sin, cultivate good, purify the mind— such is the teaching of the Buddha's. (5)
The Buddha's declare that forbearance whose other name is patience is the supreme austerity, Nirvana the highest station. That one is no monk who harms others, oppresses others. (6)
Do not blame anyone, do not hurt anyone. Concentrate upon the discipline according to the Law. Be moderate in your food, live apart, merged in the higher consciousness. (7)
A shower of gold coins brings no satisfaction to desires. The wise know that desires satiate little and cause only grief. (8)
The aspirant of the perfectly Enlightened does not go in search of even the pleasure in divine desires. His pleasure is in abolishing all desires. (9)
Driven by fear man takes refuge in hills and forests and groves and sanctuaries. (10)
But these are not the sure refuge, these are not the best. Toc take^refuge in them does not relieve you of grief. (11)
Take refuge in the Buddha, in the Law, in the Commune and observe with right knowledge the four High Truths that are : (12)
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Suffering, the Origin of suffering, the Transcendence of suffering and the Eightfold Noble Way leading to the Annihilation of suffering. (13)
This is indeed the surest shelter, this the best shelter. To come to it is to be freed from all suffering. (14)
A perfected Man is rare to find. He is not born everywhere. Wherever such a wise one is born, all his people attain happiness. (15)
Happy is the birth of the Buddha, happy the teaching of the True Law, happy the solidarity of the Commune, happy the united austerity of all. (16)
He who adores the adorable Buddha or his disciples, such as those who have passed beyond the creation, transcended grief and falsehood, such as those who are fearless and have found deliverance, for him indeed the merits cannot be measured in counts. (17) .
THE question here is about the four Truths and the eightfold Path that lead to the annihilation of suffering. Here are the details given in the text : The four noble Truths are :
(1) Life—'taken in the sense of ordinary life, the life of ignorance and falsehood—is indissolubly linked with suffering, suffering of the body and suffering of the mind.
(2) The cause of the suffering- is desire, due to the ignorance in the nature of separative life.
(3) There is a way of escape from the suffering, of cessation of pain.
(4) This liberation is obtained by following the discipline of the Eightfold Path which gradually purifies the mind from the ignorance. The fourth Truth is called the method of the Eightfold Path.
" The Noble Path consists in a training with the- following eight stages :
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(1) Correct seeing. To see things as they are, that is to say, a pure, accurate vision, the best vision.
Three conditions characterise existence : (a) pain, (b) impermanence, (c) the absence of a fixed ego. So the Dhammapada says. But it is not quite that, it is rather the absence of a fixed, durable and separate personality in the psychological bundle, the lack of true continuity in the personal consciousness. It is for this reason that, for example, in the ordinary state one cannot remember one's past lives nor have the sense of a conscious continuity through all the lives.
The first point then is to see correctly and to see correctly .is to see that pain is associated with ordinary life, that all things are impermanent and that there is no continuity in the personal, consciousness.
(2) Correct intention or desire. But the same word desire should not have been used, because we have just been told that we should not have desire. It is rather correct aspiration. The word desire should be replaced by aspiration.
"To be freed from attachments and to have benevolent thoughts "for everything that exists". To be constantly in a state of benevolence. To wish the best for all, always.
(3) Correct speech that hurts none. Never speak uselessly and avoid scrupulously all malevolent speech.
(4) Correct behaviour—peaceful, honest. From all points of view, not only materially, but morally, mentally. 'Mental honesty is one of the most difficult things to get.
(5) Correct way of living. Not to cause harm or danger to any creature. This is relatively easy to understand. There are people who push this principle to the extreme, against all good sense. It is those who put a kerchief on their mouth, for example, in order that they may not swallow microbes, who sweep their path in front of them in order not to put their feet on an insect. This seems to be a little excessive, because the whole of life is made of destruction, as it is at present. But if you understand the text correctly it means that one must avoid all possibility of doing- harm, must not cause willful danger to any creature. You can include here all living creatures and if you extend this
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precaution and this benevolence to everything that lives in the universe, it will be very favorable to your inner growth.
(6) Correct effort. Do not make useless efforts for useless things, rather preserve all your energy for the effort to surmount ignorance and freak yourself from falsehood. That you can never do too much.
(7) The seventh principle comes to confirm the sixth correct vigilance. You must have an active and vigilant spirit. Do not live in a half-somnolence, half-unconsciousness : usually you let yourself go in life, come what may I Everyone does that in the world. From time to time you wake up and you perceive that you have lost time, then you make a big effort to fall back. again, a minute after, into indolence. Better to have something less vehement but more constant.
(8) And finally, "Correct contemplation". Egoless thought concentrated on the essence of things, on the inmost truth and on the goal to reach.
How many times you have a sort of blank in life's current, one unoccupied moment, a few minutes, sometimes a little more. And what do you do ? Immediately you try to distract yourself, invent one foolishness or another to pass your time. That is a common general fact. Man, from the youngest to the oldest, passes most of his time in trying not to be bored. For him the black beast is boredom and the way to escape from boredom is to indulge in stupidities.
Well, there is one way better than that—to remember.
When you have a little time whether one hour or a few minutes, tell yourself, "At last, I have some time to concentrate, to gather myself, to live again the reason of my life-existence, offer myself to the Truth and the Eternal." If you take care to do this each time you are not worried by outward circumstances, you find out that you advance quick on the way. Instead of wasting your time in prattling, doing useless things, reading matters that lower the consciousness—this to choose "the best of the_ „cases, I do not speak of other imbecilities' much more serious—instead of seeking to go fast, to make your time that is already short still shorter and to find out at the end of your life
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that you have lost three-fourths of your chance—then you want to put in double morsels, but that does not work—better to be moderate, sedate, patient, quiet but never to lose the occasion when it is given to you, that is to say, to utilise for the sake of the true purpose the unoccupied moment that lies before you.
When you have nothing to do, you become restless, you run about, you rush to meet friends, you rush to take a walk—to speak only of the very best of things, I do not refer to things that are clearly not to be done—instead of that, sit down quietly in front of the sky, in front of the sea or under trees, whatever is possible (here you have all the opportunities) and try to realise .. one of these things,—to understand why one lives, to understand how one must live, to think over what one wants to do and what should be done, what is the best way of escaping from ignorance and falsehood and pain in which one lives.
NOLINI KANTA GUPTA
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THE exclusive pursuit of Yoga by men who seclude themselves either physically or mentally from the contact «of the world has led to an erroneous view of this science as something mystic, far-off and unreal. The secrecy which has been observed with regard to Yogic practices,—a necessary secrecy in the former stages of human evolution—has stereotyped this error. Practices followed by men who form secret circles and confine the--instruction in the mysteries strictly to those when have a certain preparatory fitness, inevitably bear the stamp to the outside world of occultism. In reality there is nothing intrinsically hidden, occult or mystic about Yoga. Yoga is based upon certain laws of human psychology, a certain knowledge about the power of the mind over the body and the inner spirit over the mind which are not generally realised and have hitherto been' considered by those in the secret too momentous in their consequences for disclosure until men should be trained to use them aright. Just as a set of men who had discovered and tested the uttermost possibilities of mesmerism and hypnotism might hesitate to divulge them feely to the world lest the hypnotic power should be misused by ignorance or perversity or abused in the interests of selfishness and crime, so the Yogins have usually preserved the knowledge of these much greater forces within us in a secrecy broken only when they were sure of" the previous ethical and spiritual training of the neophyte and his physical and moral fitness for the Yogic practices. It became therefore an established rule for the learner to observe strict reserve as to the inner experiences of Yoga and for the developed Yogin as far as possible to conceal himself. This has not prevented treatises and manuals from being published dealing with the physical or with the moral and intellectual sides of Yoga. Nor has it prevented great spirits
* Old writing.
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who have gained their Yoga not by the ordinary careful and scientific methods but by their own strength and the special grace of God, from revealing themselves and their spiritual knowledge to mankind and in their intense love for humanity imparting something of their power to the world. Such were Buddha, Christ, Mahomed, Chaitanya, such have been Ramkrishna and Vivekananda. It is still the orthodox view that the experiences of Yoga must not be revealed to the uninitiated. But a new era dawns upon us in which the old laws must be modified. Already the West is beginning to discover the secrets of Yoga. Some of its laws have revealed themselves however dimly and imperfectly to the scientists of Europe while others through Spiritualism, Christian Science, clairvoyance, telepathy and other modern-forms of occultism are being almost discovered by accident as if by men groping in the dark and stumbling over truths they cannot understand. The time has almost come when India can no longer keep her light to herself but must pour it out upon the world. Yoga must be revealed to mankind because without it mankind cannot take the next step in the human evolution.
The psychology of the human race has not yet been discovered by science. All creation is essentially the same and proceeds by similar though not identical laws. If therefore we see in the outside material world that all phenomena proceed from and can be reduced to a single causal substance from which m they were born, in which they move and to which they return, the same truth is likely to hold good in the psychical world. The unity of the material universe has now been acknowledged by the scientific intellect of Europe and the high priests of atheism and materialism in Germany have declared the "ekam evādvitiyam" in matter with no uncertain voice. In so doing they have merely re-affirmed the discovery made by Indian masters of the Yogic science thousands of years ago. But the European scientists have not .discovered, any sure and certain methods, such as they have in dealing with gross matter, for investigating psychical phenomena. They' can only observe the most external manifestation's of mind in action. But these manifestations the
mind is so much enveloped in the action of the outer objects and seems so
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dependent on them that it is very difficult for the observer to find out the springs of its action or any regularity in its workings. The European scientists have therefore come to the conclusion that it is the stimulations of outside objects which are the cause of psychical phenomena, and that even when the mind seems to act of itself and on its own material, it is only associating, grouping together and manipulating the recorded experiences from oat-side objects. The very nature of mind is, according to them, a creation of past material experience transmitted by heredity with such persistence that we have grown steadily from the savage with his rudimentary mind to the civilized man of the twentieth century. As a natural result of these materialistic theories, science has found it difficult to discover any true psychical centre for the multifarious phenomena of mind and has therefore fixed upon the brain, the material organ of thought, as the only real centre. From this materialistic philosophy have resulted certain theories very dangerous to the moral future of mankind. First, man is a creation and slave of matter. He can only master matter by obeying it. Secondly, the mind itself is a form of gross matter and not independent of and master of the senses. Thirdly, there is no real free will, because all our action is determined by two great forces, heredity and environment. We are the slaves of our nature, and where we seem to be free from its mastery, it is because we are yet worse slaves of our environment, worked on by the forces that surround and manipulate us.
It is from these false and dangerous doctrines of materialism which tend to
subvert man's future and hamper his evolution, that Yoga gives us a means of
escape. It asserts on the contrary man's freedom from matter and gives him a
means of asserting that freedom. The first great fundamental discovery of the
Yogins was a means of analysing the experiences of the mind and the heart. By
Yoga one can isolate mind, watch its workings as under a microscope, separate
every minute function of, the various parts of the "antahkarana", the inner organ, every mental and moral faculty, test its isolated workings as well as its relations to other functions and faculties and trace backwards the operations of mind to subtler and ever subtle sources until just as material
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analysis arrives at a primal entity from which all proceeds, so yoga analysis arrives at a spiritual entity from which all proceeds. It is also able to locate and distinguish the psychical centre to which all psychical phenomena gather and so to fix the roots of personality. In this analysis its first discovery is that mind can entirely isolate itself from external objects and work in itself and of itself. This does not, it is true, carry us very_ far, because it may be that it is merely using the material already stored up by its past experiences. But the next discovery is that the farther it removes itself from objects, the more powerfully, surely, rapidly can the mind work, with a swifter clarity, with a victorious and sovereign detachment. This is an experience which tends to contradict the scientific theory that mind can withdraw the senses into itself and bring them to bear on a mass of phenomena of which it is quite unaware when it is occupied with external phenomena. Science will naturally challenge these as hallucinations. The answer is that these phenomena are related to each other by regular, simple and intelligible laws and form a world of their own, independent of thought acting on the material world. Here, too, Science has this possible answer that this supposed world is merely an imaginative reflex in the brain of the material world and to any arguments drawn from the definiteness and unexpectedness of these subtle phenomena and their independence of our own will and imagination, it can always oppose its theory of unconscious cerebration and we suppose unconscious imagination. The fourth discovery is that mind is not only independent of external matter, but is master; it can not only reject and control external stimuli, but can defy such apparently universal material laws as that of gravitation and ignore, put aside and make nought of what are called laws of nature and are really only the laws of material nature, inferior and subject to the psychical laws because matter is a product of mind and not mind a product of matter. This is the decisive discovery of "Yoga", its final contradiction of materialism. It is followed by the crowning realisation that there is within us a source of immeasurable force, immeasurable intelligence, immeasurable joy far above the possibility of weakness, above the
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possibility of ignorance, above the possibility of grief which we can bring into touch with ourselves and, under arduous but not impossible conditions, habitually utilize or enjoy. This is what the Upanishads call the Brahman and the primal entity from which all things were born, in which they live and to which they return. This is God and communion with Him is the highest aim of Yoga—a communion which works for knowledge, for work, for "delight.
SRI AUROBINDO
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THE peace you feel is the basis, the foundation for the trans-lJ- formation, all the rest will be built on it. To open to the Divine Forces with a quiet and strong aspiration, to become conscious of their working, to allow quietly that working and calmly to contain it, seconding it with one's aspirations, getting more and more knowledge and understanding of what is being done as one goes on—this is the sound and natural way of the yoga.
The thing that happened about the post-cards [crossing] is not at all an accident, it is a normal happening and occurs very frequently in an ordinary life, but people do not notice it or do not give any value to it, dismissing it perhaps as an accident or coincidence. It is called Telepathy in English now-a-days—that is, to feel at a distance the thought, sentiment or experience (some event or reaction to an event) of another. There are people now-a-days in the West who practise thought exchange at a distance. When the yogic consciousness develops, this kind of telepathic knowledge becomes much more conscious and frequent and can be organised into a habitual action and well controlled instrumentation of the consciousness, a normal activity of the nature.
10-11-1932
SRI AUROBINDO
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READINGS IN THE BRIHADARANYAKA ,
UPANISHAD (VI)
THE TRIPLE MANIFESTATION*
THIS, then, is the Universe. It is a creation of the Divine, an ordered manifestation in Names, Forms and Movement, Action. It is a self-cast in the mould of a Triad of this triple truth of expression viz. Sound, Light and Power.
Of all names, Speech, Shabda, is the source. Each term of call, each word which stands for a thing and summons it in our consciousness the moment it is uttered, is derived from the basic Shabda which throws itself in a million jets. It is not only their source, but forms their community. All names partake of the fundamental truth of Shabda which endows each with its characteristic nature of creative stress. Shabda again is what bears diem up in existence.
In the order of creation, according to the ancients, the first to appear is the vibration of Sound, the nāda that vibrates and sends throbbing the waves of creative Impulse. The manifestation of Sound, Shabda, is followed by what the Shabda stands for. Shabda is followed by Artha. Sound by Form, nāma by rūpa. "What is this name ? It is word, it is sound, it is vibration of being, the child of infinity and the father of mental idea. Before form can be, name and idea must have existed/' (Sri Aurobindo : The Upanishad in Aphorisms)
Thus the second in the Triad is Form. If Sound is the basic source of Name, Light, tejas, is the source of Form, Shape. Or as the Upanishad puts it poetically, the Eye is its source. For the principle that actuates and sustains the Eye is Light. It is tejas that makes possible distinct forms *to outline themselves against the indeterminate and illimitable back-ground of the Brahmic Vast and it is again the tejas that makes it
1 1.6.
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possible for us to seize the form. Thus all forms, all shapes in line and colour, partake of the fundamental truth of tejas, the Eye, which endows each with its characteristic nature of luminosity. Thus the Eye, the Light that vivifies it, is the source, the community and the sustainer of all forms.
Both Form and Name, it must be remembered, are self-koncretisations of the Divine for purposes of manifestation. "Forms are manifestations, not arbitrary inventions out of nothing; for-line and colour, mass and design which are the essentials of form carry always in them a significance, are, it might be said, secret values and significances of an unseen reality made visible; it is for that reason that figure, line, hue, mass, composition can embody what would be otherwise unseen, can convey what would be otherwise occult to the sense. Form may be said to be the innate body, the inevitable self-revelation of the formless, and this is true not only of external shapes, but of the unseen formations of mind and life which we seize only by our thought and those sensible forms of which only the subtle grasp of the inner consciousness can become aware. Name in its deeper sense is not the word by which we describe the object, but the total of power, quality, character of the reality which a form of thing embodies and which try to sum up by a designating sound, a knowable name, Nomen. Nomen in this sense, we might say, is Numen; the secret Names of the Gods are their power, quality, character of being caught up by the consciousness and made conceivable. The Infinite is nameless, but in that namelessness all possible names, Numens of the gods, the names and forms of all realities, are already envisaged and prefigured, because they are there latent and inherent in the All-Existence." (Sri Aurobindo)1
However, Names and Forms only do not complete this Creation which is a manifestation in movement, jagat. There needs be activity, a movement to work out the purpose for which the numberless Names and Forms are projected. In a sense this working, Action, is more fundamental to the creation than anything else and that is why it is actuated by the very Atman who is
1 The Life Divine, Vol.
Page-18
at the-centre of all creation. The basic urge for action comes from the central Self of the Universe. It is that Self which. gives a common character to all Movement and it is the support of this Self that keeps all activity going.
In truth, not only Movement, Action, but even Name and Form are manifestations of this Central Divine that constitutes the Self of the Universe and of each individual. All the three - -derive from it and find their oneness in It. And the One Self formulates itself into these three fundamental modes of expression.
So all is divine. The Self within is the Divine unsullied in its immortal nature. The expression (triple) without is a formulation of the same Divine; it is the satya, Truth in manifestation. The Force of life, the dynamism that expresses itself into action springs from this core of immortality at the heart of creation. The Names, and the Forms answering to it, are equally thrown up by the Divine Truth at Work. Beneath the multitude of Names and Forms buoys up the deathless Force of the Divine carrying them on its bosom. The One Divine Soul moves into a Becoming of various extension in modes corresponding to the states of its Being. "All that takes form in itself will be the manifested potentialities of the One, the Word or Name vibrating out of the nameless Silence, the Form realising the formless essence, the active Will or Power proceeding out of the tranquil Force, the ray of self-cognition gleaming out from the sun of timeless self-awareness, the wave «f becoming rising up into shape of self-conscious existence out of the eternally self-conscious Being, the joy and , love welling for ever out of the eternal still Delight." (Sri Aurobindo)1
M. P. PANDIT
1 The Life Divine, Vol. I, Chap. XVII .
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CHAPTER III
THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION
(IV)
FRANCIS BACON (1561-1626)
FRANCIS Bacon, Lord Chancellor of England, was an ambitious, power-hungry philosopher, who made his mark as a towering statesman of his time. A deep and versatile scholar, and impelled by his genius to push forward in all spheres of knowledge, he felt inspired to "extend more widely", as he expressed it, "the limits of power and greatness of man" and map out a path - which would lead to the mastery of Nature by science. Bitterly "critical of the Aristotelian logic and the un tempered deductive rationalism of the Scholastics, he strove to inculcate a new method of inquiry for arriving at the certainty of general laws from an observational study of authentic facts and events. He was probably the first man of recognised -eminence to regard science as a cooperative adventure, overriding" all barriers of class and clime, and not as an isolated research of individual initiative. The Royal Society, "that mother-society of modern science", as H. G. Wells calls it, which received a Royal Charter in
1662, largely owed its inception to Bacon's inspiration. Bacon also profoundly
influenced the French Encyclopaedists of the eighteenth century. He has been
called the "Father of Experimental Philosophy", and an outstanding apostle of
the scientific method, which is the empirical, experimental method of observing
particular facts, and proceeding from them towards hypotheses and
generalisations, analysing with rigorous and meticulous care every one of them
by testing them afresh by more observation and experiment. In all this
conception and methodology, he
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was a true heir to the Renaissance spirit of unfettered curiosity and invention. But he was not only modern, he had in him much of the past, much that was vital and dynamic as well as much that was a fossilises relic of mediaeval custom and convention. He believed in astrology, divination, and witchcraft, and spurned the validity of the Copernican theory. Naive in his religious beliefs, and lacking in the intuitive perception of Galileo, he maintained towards the Church an attitude which outraged the very method he so passionately advocated in the field of Science. "The senses", he wrote, "are like the sun, which displays the face of the earth, but shuts up that of the heavens." In order to reach religious truths, we must "quit the small vessel of human reason and put ourselves on board the ship of the Church, which alone possesses the divine needle for justly shaping the course. The stars of philosophy will be of no further service to us. As we are obliged to obey the divine law, though our will murmur against it, so we are obliged to believe in the word of God, though our reason is shocked at it. The more absurd and incredible any divine mystery is, the greater honour we do God in believing it." What we find here is not only a superstitious faith in the infallibility of the Church, typical of the Dark Ages, but an unreflecting credulity, an unquestioning abdication of the reason, which accorded ill with the relentless empiricism he preached in science. In him the past and the present subsisted together in an unresolved antinomy, but undetected in the blinding glare of his prophetic ambition. However, there is nothing strange in this ambivalence of his mind. It is a common feature of most pioneers and apostles. Not by a total eradication of the past, but by an incorporation of its living and fertile elements, does the present progress towards the future. And it is not un often that along with the living. and the fertile, much else enters into the psychological composition of some of the pioneers, much that is stale and corrupt, and even putrid.1 Life knows the strange alchemy of reconciling the opposites,, and creating new harmonies out of discords and anomalies.
1 C . Luther, Calvin, Napoleon.
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Bacon is chiefly known for his method of induction to which we have already referred. He asserts it to be the only method of ascertaining and elaborating facts. "One method of delivery alone remains to us," he writes in his First Book of Aphorisms, "which is simply this: We must lead men to the particulars themselves, and their series and order; while men on their side richest force themselves for a while to lay their notions by and begin to familiarise themselves with facts....But then, and the only, may we hope well of the sciences, when in a just scale of ascent, and by successive steps not interrupted or broken, we rise from particulars to lesser axioms; and then to middle axioms, ' one above the other; and last of all to the most general..." It should be remarked here, as Whitehead has rightly done, that Bacon himself had a rather imperfect conception of the process of induction, and that he meant more than his words expressed. By the collection and observation of facts, he did not certainly mean the mere recording and sorting of the sense data, or an endless hunt after material objects in a flux of protean configurations. In the background of his mind lay the unresting quest of Forms, the substance as distinguished from the accidents, the real from the apparent. It is the old scholastic Formalism that he seems to be clinging to in spite of the irresistible drive of his nature to the atomistic approach to facts, which Galileo initiated with singular daring acid success. The drive was irresistible because it was , the dominant drive of the age to which he belonged, and which he helped to mould in no small measure. It was, in fact, the master drive of Renaissance Humanism, the intuitive impulsion which informed Leonardo's Naturalism, alike in art and science. But in Bacon's case, it is devoid of the rich undertones of Leonardo's mystic vision, and the illumined faith of Kepler and Galileo. Bacon illustrates the rush of the modern mind, away from "its old moorings in spiritual perception and existential unity, towards Democritan atomism and the fissioned world of fleeting objects.
In order to be able to go straight to the particulars, Bacon teaches the necessity of divesting the mind of its habitual "idols,', by which he means the rank overgrowths of the mind, which pervert and falsify all real experience. The mind must be swept clean
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of all "such accretions, and taught to approach the facts of nature and life without any bias or preconceived ideas. But*Bacon never knew how to free the mind of the "idols"—the idols of the tribe, the idols of the cave, the idols of the market etc., which, according to him, blocked the avenues to the secrets of Nature in the dialectic of the Schoolmen. He himself obeyed this salutary rule more in the breach than in the observance.
Bacon's attitude towards Nature is contained in his aphorism : "Knowledge is Power." It is true, indeed, that he sought knowledge, but knowledge, not for itself, but for the power it brings. He was too eager for the concrete results of his inductive empiricism, too avid of stimulating scientific enterprise and invention, t which was the universal urge of his time, too wrap up in his dreams of a scientific Utopia and conquest of Nature, to be bothered about a disinterested pursuit of truth and a simple quest of knowledge, un freighted with pragmatic preconditions and demands for immediate returns. It is this interested, pragmatic chase of practical knowledge which made him impatient of theories and indifferent to mathematics, and marked him out as distinct, from Descartes and the whole batch of his illustrious contemporaries. It was again this insistence on material results that imparted an electric impetus to natural science in its swing towards technology and a sensate, mechanical order of society. The problem of the why and the wherefore, first brushed aside by Galileo, is expelled from the field of science, and the how of mechanics begins to monopolise the attention of the modern mind. But the problem recurs, and clamours for solution. It refuses to be hushed into perpetual silence.
Bacon considered the question of teleology as one of the "idols" of the human mind, stifling its quickened curiosity and impeding all free inquiry. He set his face against all final causes, and occupied himself solely with formal or efficient causes, thus banishing metaphysics from philosophy and approximating philosophy to physics. He accelerated the developing trend to clamp science down 'co the narrow sphere of the apparent, the fleeting, and the phenomenal, excluding as moonshine all that lay beyond.
A balanced judgment on Bacon 'would proclaim him as a
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true child of his age, and, to quote Whitehead, as "one of the greatest builders of the mind of modern man." His greatness lay not so much in what he accomplished, as in what he made possible; not so much in what he definitely formulated and shaped, as in the direction he indicated. Natural science forged ahead on its lusty career, but not in a straight line. It looked before and after. The mind of man, as in Descartes and Boyle, Spinoza and Leibniz, felt a nostalgic attraction towards the eternal anchor-rage of spiritual support and solace, towards the freedom of the human spirit, and the identity of the part with the Whole in the organic unity of the universal substance or reality. But it was a passing, though essentially inextinguishable nostalgia; and the atomistic Matter of Galilean conception, the Matter of extension and mechanical motion, of weight and measurement, seemed to extend the frontiers of its empire. Man began to shrink to the proportions of a pitiful midget in the impassive immensities of the world of Nature, and his existence on earth suffer condemnation to a niggling, purposeless inconsequence.
RISHABHCHAND
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THIS intricate universe is full of voices of various kinds, tones and shades emanating from different sources of consciousness in the luminous heights of the spiritual superconscient or in the dark depths of the undivine subconscient and the inconscient or in the twilight regions of the triple web of the mind, vital and the physical of the subliminal and the surface. Man's power of audition of these voices depends on the degree and complexity of richness of sensitivity and sensibility he cultivates by the development of his inner life. Indeed the man completely imprisoned in his small ego can hear only his own voice and no other and very often hears his voice by self-projection in another's. By sympathy and imaginative identification of the surface mind and vital it becomes possible to hear the voices of the minds and feelings of others in one's consciousness. The development of the
subliminal awareness tunes man to occult ranges of consciousness" in men, animals, plants and the beings of the subtle worlds of mind and vital, from the pisācas at the one end to the ris his at the other. Vitiating all these voices in these levels can be heard an undertone of the subconscient
grumble if one listens from the bottom of the spine. only the planes above the Mind are the zones unaffected by this nether growl and when a man heightens his consciousness to these altitudes of being he can hear the music of the spheres of over mental heavens, first indeed reflected and translated in the levels of the Higher Thinking Mind, Illumined Mind and Intuition but finally directly in their own homes. Passing still beyond, one goes to the very source of all these rhythmic tunes, the Word of the Silence, the Supramental Creative Consciousness. Coming down from these levels of consciousness of the Upper Hemisphere to the Lower Hemisphere' of the triple world of the Ignorance, one shapes the mind, heart and the physical "consciousness in oneself to receive and assimilate and finally' manifest the Light, Love, Truth, Beauty and Ananda
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of the Higher Vast Consciousness. And Savitri has been doing this in this triple world, radiating the perfection and puissance and plenitude of her transformed consciousness. Her poise of contemplation, muse, is full of the felicity, Bhadram, of the Supramental depths. Even the physical contact of her lover has been transformed into an experience of the divine Ananda, for now every part and plane of being receives and radiates the Delight of Self-Existence proper to the Supramental. Her joy is now not the pleasure of limited sensation of the contact of the finite with the finite but the joy of union of the Spirit with the Spirit, the Brahman in the subject with the Brahman in the object. Only now the word, 'embrace', acquires its full meaning of the communion and identity of consciousness with conscious-: ness. So her joy on earth is a bridge between earth and heaven. The heavenly Ananda of the Supramental flows into the body of Savitri who lives on this earth.
But this could not be immediately made permanent for "a dark concealed hostility is lodged in the human depths, in the hidden heart of Time that claims the right to change and mar God's work." This is 'the secret enmity that ambushes the world's march'. So she could tread the golden path only for a while. The Everlasting Day could come only when 'this unseen adversary force, invader of the life of mortal man, the power that came in to veil the eternal Light' is slain." This is the 'power opposed to the eternal will, diverting the messages of the infallible Word and
contorting the contours of the cosmic plan'. This is the voice of the Inconscient audible only to one who has touched the Supramental. For the way up is the way down. The majority of even the spiritual explorers are not called upon to hear clearly this terrible voice, nor can they afford to do it. The cavernous depths of the subconscient are frightening enough and the highest wisdom has been declared to be the one which recommends an escape into some luminous Heaven beyond, shunning this incorrigible world with its subconscient ignorant base. Only the Light of the Supramental can pierce the veils of this Inconscient and so only the supramental Purusha can see into the heart of unconsciousness of things in this world. Again the Inconscient
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seems to wait for the Spiritual hero-warrior of the Supramental Transformation to attempt to pour into this world her riches for it to make the final assault. This dark Mother keeps the subconscient as a powerful intermediary, fighting agent to scale off any attack from the Spiritual planes from above. Normally indeed she sleeps her sleep of unconsciousness un disturbed by whatever spiritual ascents, descents or even transformations that might happen on the other shore of the subconscient. For even the over mental descent and transformation cannot penetrate the depths of the subconscient. Her trust in the subconscient ally has never been betrayed before this moment of the advent of Savitri, the Mother. But now the subconscient has-been challenged and subdued and Nature has forgotten in the presence of Savitri her normal, habitual law of conflict and turned into an area of harmony. Man, that trusted friend has begun to experience individually a greatening of his consciousness, and pain which has always been the tool to make him wish to pass into the unconsciousness of the Inconscient has begun to dissolve at her contact. This is the most critical situation in the history of the agelong battle between the Divine and the Un-divine. So the Inconscient makes its overwhelming and all-out attack in waves upon waves of opposition on Savitri's consciousness.
II
The Inconscient is essentially a Force of Negation of all positive conscious values. Thought, feeling and sensation have each a fixed though limited finite form and the impression of definiteness and concreteness given by these helps man to deal with them securely and with confidence. But the Inconscience has always a mysterious, oppressive vagueness and indefiniteness and therefore incomprehensibility about it. This vagueness is also a darkness without any end in space or time—a black infinity, a dark eternity. It would never submit to or respond to any attempt at interrogating it with any of the faculties in man. The only answer he might receive is a foreboding silence, and a
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silence with endless levels and depths in it and therefore, silences. The delight of self-existence, Ananda, which permeates every plane and poise of consciousness though with varying kinds of manifestation according to the limiting and conditioning concentration in each organisation of consciousness, at this level seems to have denied its birthright and remained only with a consciousness of being without its joy. Not only without joy, but even becoming incapable of feeling joy or the need for it at all. The normal attempt at trying to form an impression of another organisation in one's consciousness by trying to become aware by contact of consciousness with consciousness, thought, has stopped. There is here no attempt at awareness at all. It is empty of thought. That means that life whose essence is relationship based on mutual awareness by direct or indirect contact, has become a blank and so the living soul ceases to live and there is no personal organisation of consciousness. In its place there is some blind regardless self. A strong feeling of losing one's personal identity and immolating oneself to the point of annihilation—an abysmal deep of fear and the pain of self-destruction—that is its very nature. There is no assignable reason for this lure of heading towards Nothingness and so it is 'a nameless, formless Dread with shapeless endless wings, some sullen monstrous vast, an ocean of terror and of sovereign might'. Its grip is a powerful clutch, inescapable and at the same time impossible to give a fight to or face with any equanimity. How to face the Formless and how to touch the intangible ? It works with an inflexible determination 'to expunge the choked and anguished air and end the fable of the joy of life'.
"It seemed her very being to forbid
Abolishing all by which her nature lived
And laboured to blot out her body and soul."
This is "a darkness which has no parallel in the darkness of the mind, which is only a state where there is no thought, in the darkness "of the vital, which is only a state where there" is no feeling, or in the physical darkness where there is no physical sensation,
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"but this is one where all possibility of physical, vital, mental or any sensation is to be obliterated once and for all in a grand holocaust of all existence.
"A denser darkness than Night could bear."
Its power by its very unconsciousness and therefore brute mechanical indifference has a ruthlessness and overwhelming urgency and overpowering speed, a rush. Its infinity gives it the amplitude to extend and envelop all the entire universe in one mighty sweep and embrace. This is not the Rajasic violence of the vital forces but the blind inertia of the nether regions coursing_ with deliberate speed, majestic instancy with an absolute sense of mastery and inevitable victory. It has already begun the work of killing the consciousness, removing the life out of the mind, vital and physical. They are its half-slaughtered prey. Now it begins to complete the process and so appears like a wild beast dragging its half-slaughtered prey to the den of its native habitation. So Savitri feels the joy felt by her contact with her, layer now gives place to 'a vast and nameless fear dragging at her nerves'.
"An abyss yawned suddenly beneath her heart."
III
The voice of this Jada shakti is as inscrutable as its nature, bringing an inexpressible anguish to the human heart because of its ruthlessness and iron determinism. But Savitri, because of her supramental truth-vision and truth-audition completely understands the unspoken language and translates it to herself in her depths, in words. The self-empire and world-empire, Swarajya and Samrajya, of the immortal soul in this universe of Death, Mrityu, is a strange and incomprehensible ambition, in the eyes of the Inconscient. The claim of the spiritual crown in a material world and of perfection in an imperfect scheme of animal and human existence is untenable. There could be no exception to the deterministic law of mortality of the human
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being. No separate or exceptional birth could be claimed by Savitri. The soul's reality and immortality is only an illusion. Pain is the very nature of this world, Anityam Asukham Lokam, aim so it is idle to hope to be happy here. The Word of the Silence can never be made flesh. The radiant Light of the Higher hemisphere may dazzle the finite consciousness but can never manifest in the finite. It must always be the inexpressible Ray. The realm of the Superconscient is only mute and will not respond to the call of the mortal. The Beyond must always be unknown and even when known by a supreme effort of consciousness, an arduous Tapasya, it can never be coaxed to accept a human habitation and name, a body here and now. The heart in man can never receive and retain the Ananda of the Supreme. In fact the last word of wisdom or the end of spiritual Sadhana or concentration of consciousness is not Delight or Bliss but Peace or silent stillness. The ultimate Reality is a stark, naked, formless Impersonal Consciousness. Every other attribute is a modification and therefore an impurity and limitation in this ultimate Reality. And delight or bliss which is the result of one finite form compacting another is a perversion of this state and so the worst impurity. The superimposition, Adhydropa, of anything finite on the Infinite, the noise of Ananda in the stillness of the Absolute is a profanation of the formless sanctity and quality less-ness, bareness of the basic substratum. The Divine and the human are sharp opposites and their coexistence in the same body is an impossible chimera. For the final creator of all life and existence and worlds is not a personal God with power but an Inconscient Force of Death. Death creates all to devour all, and destroy all.
"I have created all, all I devour;
I am Death and the dark terrible Mother of life,
I am Kali black and naked in the world,
I am Maya and the universe is my cheat."
The only valid philosophy or the true realisation is Nihilism or Illusionist Adwaita. Only the featureless Eternal can be true.
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Everything else is an illusion created and maintained by Maya in the mind. Brahma Satyam, Jagat Mithya.
"For only the blank Eternal can be true.
All else is shadow and flash in Mind's bright glass,
Mind, hollow mirror in which Ignorance sees
A splendid figure of its own false Self
And dreams it sees a glorious solid world.
O soul, inventor of man's thoughts and hopes,
Thyself the invention of the moment's stream,
Illusion's centre or sub de apex point,
At last know thyself, from vain existence cease."
'The goal of life is the dissolution of all perception of finite appearances and the realisation of one's non-difference from the Blank Eternal.
IV
Listening to the voice of this force of Nothingness,, expunges from the consciousness all manifestation in the inner and outer worlds. For it is a shadow of the negating Absolute, the substance of the Absolute as Sachchidananda being taken away and in its place Nothing remaining. Not the self-luminous Light of the Chit of, the Supreme but an intolerable Darkness is its nature. But once in its powerful grip the heart loses all the , kingdom of delight and a barren silence weighs upon it.
"Only her soul remained, its emptied stage,
Awaiting the unknown eternal Will."
But the Supramental Sun is the master of the whole creation and the power of the Inconscient however formidable cannot assail the Truth-Conscious. So Savitri hears a greater voice answering, the nether voice
"Then from the heights a greater Voice came down,
The Word that touches the Heart and finds the soul,
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The Voice of Light after the voice of Night :
The cry of the Abyss drew Heaven's reply,
A might of storm chased by the might of the Sun."
This is the voice of fulfilment of life as opposed to the withdrawal and immolation of existence imposed by the Night. The heart so, wan and dry and the soul so clipped in its wings by the invasion of the vast fearful Fount now awaken and blossom to the touch of the Word which leaps forth from the Supreme Creative Consciousness. The reply is a grand strategy of dealing with the formidable Foe, realising the power of the opponent but at the .same time using all this power against it.
A divine life in the manifestation will remain incomplete and lack the perfect perfection so long as it is only an isolated achievement of a heroic and an exceptional individual. The way out is to establish a Gnostic community so that the Supramental gets established in the collective consciousness. The gnostic consciousness in the individual Savitri must 'grow part of a vaster empire.' Till then the golden wealth of the Supramental must be treasured in the sanctuary of the inner being. 'Behind the luminous ramparts of her depths' it must remain hidden from the thunderous knock of the Inconscient. This is not hoarding the wealth which must indeed be shared with all.
"But not for self alone the self is won.''
Savitri has come down not to enjoy the felicity of the Realm of Gold when the rest of the world is suffering under the iron yoke of Ananke.
"If for thy own sake only thou hast come,
An immortal spirit into the mortal's world,
To found thy luminous kingdom in God's dark,
In the Inconscient realm one shining star,
One door in the Ignorance opened upon light,
Why had st thou any need to come at all ?
Thou hast come down into a struggling world
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To aid a blind and suffering mortal race,
To open to Light the eyes that could not see,
To bring down bliss into the heart of grief,
To make thy life a bridge twixt earth and heaven;"
Not to be a splendid freak of golden splendour in an otherwise undifferentiated mass of thickening gloom but to chase all darkness away from this world and usher the Reign of Light, Love and Immortality here and now, is her work. She is the pathfinder for all her ignorant, erring children.
The problem therefore is one of transmission or extension of the realised Supermind in the cosmic consciousness of the mental, vital and physical levels. The solution suggested by the Voice of Light is to keep the realisation in the depths while at the same time emptying the outer consciousness of it and allowing all cosmos with all its present contents to pour itself into this. It is a process of identification in all completeness and sincerity, in grim earnestness with the human lot :
"Accept to be small and human on the earth,
Interrupting the new-born divinity,
That man may find his utter self in God."
'The day-bringer must walk in darkest night.' 'God must be born on earth and be as man that man being human may grow even as God.' To be one with all cosmos in all its areas and experiences and then to hold all in one's Infinite consciousness and expose all to the touch of the Transcendent Supramental and so to awaken the involved Supramental in all—that is the key indicated. "If it were possible to come definitively out of this external conscious ness, to take refuge in the divine consciousness....But that Thou hast forbidden and still and always forbidden: no flight out of the world; the burden of darkness and ugliness must be borne to the end, even if all divine help seems to be withdrawn. I must remain in the heart of the night and walk on, even without any inner compass, beacon-light or guide.
"I will not even implore Thy mercy, for what Thou wiliest Thou willets
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for me, I too will. All my energy strains solely to advance, always to advance, step by step, despite the depth of the darkness and the obstacles of the way; whatever happens, O Lord, it is with fervent and unchanging love that Thy decision will be welcomed." " And to renounce perfection in its apparent form is, part of an integral renunciation of the ignorance of the separate self." "Thou hast subjected me to a hard discipline; rung after rung, I have climbed the ladder which leads to Thee; and, at the summit of the ascent, Thou hast made me taste the perfect joy of identity with Thee. Then, obedient to Thy command, rung after rung, I have descended to outer activities and external states of consciousness, re-entering into contact with these worlds that I left to discover Thee. And now that I have come back to the bottom of the ladder, all is so dull, so mediocre, so neutral in me and around me, that I understand no more." "And the being enlarges itself immeasurably to become as vast as the universe." Arcturus, the fixed star of the first magnitude shining bright in its orange colour in the northern heavens in the constellation Bootes, and Belphegor, the 'arch demon who was appointed by Pluto and his council to undertake an earthly marriage but found his wife's insolence intolerable and therefore fled back to hell, are seen as parts in the vast arena of the Self's Infinity. The Yogini holds the whole Brahmanda in her boundless self. The monstrous cataclysm of the destruction of the world is felt in this state as a minor incident not at all disturbing the calm infinity of its essential spiritual nature.
Once the vast chain of the universe is loosened by drawing back or stepping back in active consciousness of cosmos then one becomes ready to see the secret origin of all. This universe is a translation of the over mental Idea which is itself a limitation of the Infinite and this Idea has been refracted by the mind and the senses". To go behind the 'mind's selection from the Infinite', and the 'senses' gloss on the In finitesimal's dance and to banish all thought, the formulating, delimiting iron curtain of ignorant consciousness—that is the way. To be God's void is the prelude to become God's plenty. "The whole thing gives an impression of a void which is full of light, peace and immensity, eluding all
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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.....Poor words which to say what silence itself cannot express."
"Then shalt thou uncover the Unknowable
And the Superconscient conscious grow on thy tops;
Infinity's vision through thy gaze shall pierce,
Thou shalt look into the eyes of the Unknown;
Find the hid Truth in things seen null and false,
Behind things known discover Mystery's rear.
Thou shalt be one with God's bare reality
And the miraculous world he has become
And the diviner miracles still to be
When Nature who is now unconscious God
Translucent grows to the Eternal's light,
Her seeing his sight, her walk his steps of power
And life is filled with a spiritual joy
And Matter is the Spirit's willing bride. . ,
Consent to be nothing and none, dissolve Timers work,
Cast off thy mind, step back from form and name.
Annul thyself that only God may be."
V
Name and form, when they are consciously achieved and not externally imposed
from without as a convenient label of reference, are a clear sign of
crystallisation of consciousness out of the amorphous ness of the general sub conscience. They denote the formation of an unique individual and conscious master and leader of* the members in his house. It is a great advance from the somnambulence of life and existence of the majority. And the more luminous the crystallisation, the better for the individuality.. When one becomes an inner Purusha, one indeed p'assesoinwardly beyond, the Ignorance of the outer nature. And when the Purusha receives more and more of the Higher Consciousness and change; himself into the Higher Purushas of the intuitive and Over mental
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poises, it becomes a glorious realisation. If he could cross the Over mind and allow the Supramental to shape him and help him become a Gnostic Purusha, it is perhaps one of the greatest peaks of spiritual experience. For all these higher organisation to be possible, each time the individuality is formed it has to be broken up so that it may give place to the next higher. In the majority of the spiritual seekers, the attachment to a newly achieved poise is so deep that they become great specimens to be put in glass cases and exhibited for the education and edification of the ignorant majority but at the same time they cease to evolve in the upward route. And even those very few who continue the adventure up to the orgnisation of the Supramental seem to have done it on a limited individual level for their own satisfaction. The call of the voice of Light, Chit-Shakti, to Savitri is to renounce even the greatest achievement of integration of personality on the supramental poise and offer it free and whole to the Divine Purushottama. This surrender of the highest formed individual is the Will of the Supreme for the full embodiment of the Supreme- Truth-Consciousness, in the universe. "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." "To feel Thee and aspire for Thee, we must have emerged from the immense sea of the subconscient; we must have begun to crystallise, to define and "so to know and - then to give ourselves as that alone can give itself which belongs to itself. And how many efforts and struggles are needed to attain to this crystallisation, to come out of the amorphous middle state; and how many efforts and struggles again to give ourselves, to surrender, once the individuality is constituted.
' "Few beings willingly consent to these efforts; then life with its brutality of the unforeseen compels men to make this endeavour against their will, because they cannot do otherwise. And little by little Thy work is accomplished in spite of all obstacles."
This extinction of individuality, Nirvana, can be done with two very different objects, for passing beyond all manifestation and the possibility of it into the unmanifest supreme ether of static
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existence, or for passing beyond the present manifestation in Ignorance into the not yet manifest dynamic levels of Sachchida-nanda. The first is the path of entering into the silence to plunge deeper into the static Impersonal. The second is the way of silence beyond the Silence which somehow combines all the Silence and all the movement simultaneously and in absolute fusion. "It is in these moments that the two consciousnesses are simultaneous and melt into a single consciousness, indescribable and ineffable, in which are united Immutable Eternity and Eternal movement. It is in these moments that the work of the present time begins to be accomplished."
The usual traditional path of Nirvana of the Indian Buddhists or Advaitins stressing either on the Sat or the Asat aspects of the Static Impersonal Brahman advises man who is wallowing in the mire of the vain round of existence in Ignorance, Samsdra-pankanimagna, to leave it and enter into Nirvana. To kill all individuality is to stop the willing and desiring movement which gives rise to all the turmoil of life. And that is the sure way of reaching the peace that passeth all understanding, Shanti.* The end of Samsara is Nirvana. The rare and not so easily understood path of Zen Buddhists of Japan stresses on the extinction of the individuality in the dynamic universal Life-Force or Mind-Force or Spirit-Force or all these as they choose to manifest through the liberated man.™For them Nirvana is not the end of Samsara, but the prelude to a more happy and efficient and blessed Samsara. Indeed for them Samsara and Nirvana are one. One moves with the wheel of life perfectly without any friction or resistance only when the individuality and personal desire which cause the psychological suffering are dissolved in Nirvana. But in both these paths Life in this world continues in the same old rut of Ignorance. Only the Sadhaka changes his poise of being and either looks at it from the high station of the Impersonal Consciousness and sees all the drama of life as a vain spectacle, or illusion -air ceases to evaluate with the personal standards of the individual arid participates by identification in the dynamic play of mind, life," physical and spiritual forces as the Impersonal
fanatic Consciousness chooses to work out.
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But the Nirvana of Savitri, the Mother, is a prelude to and is somehow taken up in the manifestation of the New Creation of the Supramental Sun. Here Nirvana leads to a greater and new kind of Samsara. The cyclic movement in Ignorance stops but the wheel of life begins to move in a new orbit of Divine Light, Love, Beauty, Truth and Ananda.
''To be the divine love, love powerful, infinite, unfathomable/ in every activity, in all the worlds of being—it is for this I cry to Thee, O Lord. Let me be consumed with this love divine, love powerful, infinite, unfathomable, in every activity, in all the "worlds of being ! Transmute me into that burning brazier so that all the atmosphere of earth may be purified with its flame."
O to be Thy Love infinitely."
References :
Savitri : Book Seven, Canto Six.
Prayers and Meditations of The Mother.
M. V. SEETARAMAN
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EDUCATION
XV
PHYSICAL EDUCATION—III
WE have already had a brief outline of the philosophy of the Mother's system of physical education. We have seen, that by the perfection of the body the Mother does not mean only the perfection of the human frame with its outer structure, muscular configuration and constructive metabolism, but the realisation of the untapped, subtle—I could have said spiritual—potentials of the body itself, including its inner harmony, its nervous poise and plasticity, and its psychological metabolism. It will be so moulded by the Supramental Consciousness as to remain no longer a decaying vesture of clay, but become, instead, full of the Light, Peace, Power and Joy of the Divine Inhabitant within it, and transparent and transfigured enough to express His Beauty in its own terms.
The question-which is likely to be put here, concerning the education of the body, is : what will be the nature of the physical exercises to be practised by the children and the youth, which will lead to this kind of harmonious perfection ? However important the question may appear, it had better be left to the discretion and judgment of the guide or teacher who has undertaken the job with a fairly workable understanding of the philosophy behind the physical education. It is the philosophy that must determine the practice. There are three factors directing the practice : an intelligent grasp of the philosophy, a firm will to translate the_ philosophy and the basic principles into systematic practice, and the helpful co" operation of the environment and material conditions in this- collective endeavour. If there is opposition in the beginning, it will wear down by the sustained will and effort of
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the physical culturists, fired by the lofty ideal. And the Divine Grace is always there to crown all sincere endeavour with success.
But as an indication of the general line of practice, calculated to promote the attainment of the purpose we have in view, I cannot do better than give some idea of the programme of physical education which is followed at the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education at Pondicherry.
I have already referred to some of the physical exercises; practised in the Ashram, in my last article on the physical education of the girls. There is a blend of Eastern and Western exercises in the programme, with a marked predominance of the latter. The Eastern exercises chiefly make for stamina, stability and balance, and the Western tend to develop, to a remarkable extent, the symmetry, beauty, and gracefulness of the limbs and features, and foster the growth of the vital (pranic) dynamis, agility, and suppleness of movement. Among the Eastern exercises, Asanas, Markham, Dans and Vaithaks, Jujutsu etc. are incorporated into the system, and of these Dans and Vaithaks are almost universally practised by the Ashram participants. The Western system is followed chiefly for the purpose of body-building, and realising a rounded perfection of the various parts and functions of the body.
To give a fuller idea of the aims and constituents of the programme of physical education, I propose to quote rather extensively from the Running Commentary During the Physical Demonstration, published on the 2nd December, 1962, by the Department of Physical Education, Sri Aurobindo Ashram:
"...It is not the aim of our Physical Education to produce champions or famous, winning athletic teams. Nor does Physical Education serve us as a pastime activity, an object of excitement or an opportunity for the fulfilment of one's ambition. We consider it as a means by which one's physical instrument may be trained "arid perfected, so that something higher than the physical, the Truth-Force, which seeks to manifest through the body may find it a. fit instrument for its self-expression.
"Under the guidance- and teaching of the Mother and Sri
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Aurobindo we are striving here for an Integral Transformation, for the perfection of our whole being. The body being the base of our integral existence claims a special care and attention, so that it may share in the Integral Transformation by realising its own harmony and perfection and thus be fit to express the Divine Beauty, which is its special mission. All our plannings, programmers and policies of Physical Education are based on this basic truth of cur existence.
"A rational and well conducted programme of Physical Education helps to produce and promote Physical Fitness with the 'development of discipline and moral and sound and strong character.' We believe that cultivation of these qualities through Physical Education, along with the practice of the inner programme given to us by the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, will help us ultimately to reach our goal of perfection in the body.
"Physical Fitness, when analysed, will be found to be basically composed of health, strength, endurance, and skill. Any systematic programme of Physical Training when practised with the strict observance of Health Rules, that is, proper diet, proper "sleep and rest, personal and environmental hygienic conditions^ suitable work for one's self-expression, and an inner poise, should lead one towards Physical Fitness with all its components. But certain activities go to develop certain special aspects of Physical Fitness. And there are as many kinds of skills as there are activities. Skill includes speed "and agility, suppleness, a good neuron muscular co-ordination and a good reflex, grace, harmony, etc., and the special knack that is developed while practising a particular type of activity. So, for an all-round physical development, we have included in our programme of Physical Education all the activities that are possible to introduce in our present circumstances and advise our members to follow an all-round training, as far as possible, instead of practising just one or a few activities only.
"About
750
members-men, women, and children of various.; ages,-from children of six to
grown-ups, even persons well advanced in age, take regular part in our programme
of Physical Education. These members are divided into twelve groups according to
age and capacity and programmers of Physical Education
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are provided to suit each group. Opportunities are also provided to the grow hop members who want to practise their activities of choice as Non-Group members. Each member is kept under strict medical supervision, children twice in a year, and grown-ups once in a year, and all the records of progress .are kept in proper order. Follow-up treatments are given when necessary. We prescribe the same programme to boys and to girls.
"Our new session starts in the middle of December. For the first three months we conduct our normal programme of Physical Education, when opportunities of Coaching and Practice are provided for all the activities. Members up to the age of twenty-five years are required to be occupied every afternoon with Physical Education activities. The weekly programme of the age-groups between twelve to twenty-five years includes, two days of games, two days of gymnastics, one day of Athletics, one day of swimming, and one day of combative sports. For the elderly groups the training is not so strict but they are also given an all-round programme according to their need and capacity. All the activities are supervised by capable teachers who are trained in the Ashram.
"After the normal programme, we have different seasons for the special practice of the similar group of activities, which begins with special coaching and ends with competitions. Thus we have the games season, the combative season, the aquatic season, the athletic season, and the gymnastic season. We also keep some days reserved for the practice of the Annual Physical Demonstration of the second of December and for the annual Picnics. All the composition of exercises for the Physical Demonstration are composed by our own teachers every year."
Regarding Mass Exercise, the Commentary says : "Apart from its Physical Fitness Value, Mass Exercise helps to promote a collective spirit. For here, all do the same thing, at the same time, for the same purpose, and under the same command. This united effort and unity of purpose has a great; effect on the development" of the collective spirit."
Eurhythmies are given an important place in the. Physical Education. "Music plays a very important roller the Physical Education programme of little children. When they "do movemerits
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with music and songs, they are completely lost in it, spontaneously express their inner feelings through their movements and enjoy it immensely. This has a great beneficial value upon their health."...
"Games provide a great enthusiasm and enjoyment to every participant by creating opportunities to meet many new, unforeseen and unexpected situations. They absorb all the attention of the players and make them use all their energies to give their best efforts and thus get a thorough exercise without even knowing it. Besides, these activities are ideal for the development of sporting spirit, which has a great value in individual and collective life. That includes good hum our and tolerance and consideration for all, a right attitude and friendliness to competitors and rivals, self-control and scrupulous observance of the laws of the game, fair play and avoidance of the use of foul means, an equal acceptance of victory or defeat without bad hum our, resentment or ill-will towards successful competitors, loyal acceptance of the decisions of the appointed judge, umpire or referee." "
The above long extracts clearly bring out three most salient features of the programme of physical education followed in the Ashram. The first is that it forms an integral part of the spiritual self-culture which aims at the transformation of our whole being, a transmutation of our animal-human nature into the Divine Nature. Physical education has never had such an exalted status and function assigned to it. The second, which will appear to our superficial mind as the very antithesis to the first, is its strictly scientific character, meant to meet the needs of modern man and make a ready appeal to his broadening, synthetic vision and his aspiration for' a harmonious fulfilment in life. Free and flexible in its methods, it combines all that is best in the East and the West, and gears it to a high spiritual purpose. The third feature is its insistence on— the perfection of all the parts of the body and all its fun
cleanings by infusing into them a higher than the human consciousness and Its radiant, supernal energies. A well-balanced neuro fhuscular system, brimming over with blissful, crystalline vitality, and
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trained to carry out in outer action every will and impulsion of the indwelling Spirit, without diluting or spilling the energies it receives from above or within, and bearing down all resistance of material conditions—something like this will be the nature of the perfection of the body. In its movements it will spontaneously follow the laws and rhythms of the Spirit, of the Truth, which seeks to manifest in Matter. It will be the signal triumph of the Godhead in man over his animal nature and material tabernacle, a revelation of the Divine Beauty in human form.
But the perfection of the body depends, in a great measure, on the perfection of the vital (prana), to which we have now to turn our regard. We have to see what kind of vital or pranic education the Mother prescribes for the transformation and integral perfection of our human nature.
RISHABHCHAND
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IT was only the other day that I was talking to a lady on a visit to our Ashram from abroad,—easily one of the most remarkable personalities that I have come across. Narrating one of her experiences she described how one day at noon in her garden she suddenly saw a great outburst of Light, Light from the trees, Light from the flowers, Light from everywhere. She experienced a manifestation of the Cosmic Divinity and was . totally overpowered. A new kind of Consciousness came over her and she could not relate herself to anything around. Her one prayer at that moment was that she should be left alone. But that was not to be. Her husband, her son, her family members —all came where she had poised herself and started questioning. She was dazed and with great difficulty told them to leave her to herself for the time being. But no, she must take food, she could not be left to starve that way. The doctor was called to see why she was behaving in that unusual manner. She was asked insistently and all she could say was : 'You won't understand.' That made them still more suspicious of some mental aberration and they took matters in their own hands. The result was that the poor lady had a very bitter time and hard struggle which could and should have been avoided at that hour of spiritual apocalypse.
This is a typical example of the risks of misunderstanding and mal-handling to which spiritual seekers are constantly exposed at the hands of the laity. It is a matter of common experience for us to see people in sadhana reacting at times in a most unpredictable manner. Persons who are normally sattvic flare up for no reason with a vehemence that would do credit to a demon. Hours of meditation would be followed by tornado of fury. The fact is that in sadhana, particularly in a path like ours which- insists on the change of one's nature, the sadhaka is subject- to an enormous pressure for change. Pressure from above by the Yoga-Shakti on the system to change, to adapt itself to the demands of
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the mounting aspiration and the responding Consciousness; pressure from below resisting the change from its accustomed routine of activity. There is no problem as long as man throws himself totally on one side or the other. He can wallow in the lower round of ignorance and as long as he is satisfied with it he goes on merrily. Or he should unreservedly transfer his allegiance to the Higher Call : then too there is no problem. But constituted as he is, man is a being of several parts, not all of which are agreed on what they want. Some parts of his being seek for the higher life, the others are content with the usual petty rounds of their activity and resist any change. That is why there is friction, there is struggle. The seeker is constantly exposed to this unseen pressure and it is this that is mostly responsible for his unexpected actions, unnatural behaviour. I remember how once, referring to a person behaving very erratically, the Mother said : 'She is under a tremendous pressure; she may do anything.' I was always intrigued, at first, at Her attitude to sympathy, indulgence even, towards such individuals, however disruptive and explosive their actions might be. It took time to realise that that was the only enlightened way to help them out. What persons under such circumstances need is an understanding, a sympathy, and if possible a little of love. But what happens usually is that the environment meets them with ridicule, provocation and self-justifying hostility. "Spiritual people ought to know better," "At least we have no pretensions to spiritual attainments",—how many times have we not heard such remarks ! Nobody bothers to pause and see what are the circumstances that have precipitated the poor man into what he is doing. And even with the best of intentions the course adopted by those around is usually the wrong one !
In a recent paper on the subject, Dr. Roberto Assagio'i of the Institute of Psycho synthesis (Rome), gives an admirable analysis of such situations as they develop and are normally tackled. It is interesting to follow him step by step, whether we do or do not agree with everything that he says. Here is his analysis :
In the first place, the writer—like the other parapsychologists of his line of thinking—make a distinction between self-actualisation
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and Self-realisation. The first covers the various stages in the psychological growth of the individual, the awakening of his latent faculties which add beauty, moral values etc. to his life. Self-realisation, on the other hand, pertains to the experience and realisation of his deepest Centre, the Self of which the personal is just a projection. A further distinction is made between the experience of the Self and the experience of the spiritual realpas of consciousness which generally include all the levels that are above these normally accessible to man. The way to the Consciousness of the Self lies through these several states of the higher consciousness which are broadly described as spiritual.
Now, says Dr. Assagioli, in each individual there is a certain stir of new impulses, new drives, before or at the moment of his awakening to the spiritual reality. These stirrings in the being may be compared to similar movements in the body at the time of adolescence : the one at the awakening of the soul, the other at the maturation of the body. "Man's spiritual development," he writes, "is a long and arduous journey, an adventure through strange lands full of surprises, difficulties and even dangers. It involves a drastic transmutation of the 'normal' elements of the personality, an awakening of potentialities hitherto dormant, a raising of consciousness to new realms, and a functioning along a new inner dimension. We should not be surprised therefore, to find that so great 'a change, so fundamental a transformation is marked by several critical stages, which are not infrequently accompanied by various nervous, emotional and mental troubles."
Such disturbances may show the same symptoms as of common physical illnesses but they are not to be dealt with in the usual clinical manner.
And these disequilibrium's are more today than at any time before. That is because—as the Doctor rightly observes—man today is a more complicated being than his forbear a few generations ago; his mind has developed complexes unknown before--his involvements are more varied and the development' has to proceed through a complex balancing of forces and factors. These disturbances may be studied under four convenient heads.
The first are the crises preceding the spiritual awakening : man
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begins to feel that the life he has been leading so long is hot all, nor the best possible. He senses a change in the poise of his mind and inner awareness. This may come about either as a result of unforeseen happenings or simply by the growing feeling of a 'void' somewhere. He begins to question many things he had taken for granted; old values crumble but no new ones are there to replace them. He is distracted, restless; he turns to philosophy, religion, metaphysics or other branches of Knowledge for support. He is dissatisfied with himself, with everything and at times this disequilibrium takes physical manifestations also.
The second stage is of crises caused by the spiritual awakening.
This awakening breaks the barrier and makes an opening between the normally active and conscious levels and the higher, super-conscious levels of the individual and there is a flood of experiences : light, joy, freedom, pour down or spread themselves from within. Some spiritual energy courses in the being. If at his stage these developments are related to the 'I', the ego-self, a number of paranoid delusions or dangerous obsessions ensue blocking true spiritual progress. The distinction between the 'personal self and the Basic Self shall not be lost sight of and what belongs and proceeds from one shall not be appropriated by the other. Emotionally too, with such sudden influx of spiritual energies in weaker systems there is a tendency for uncontrolled ebullience, reckless waste of oneself in some activity or other. In some there is an opening of the subtle vision, subtle audition and an unreserved submission to them brings its own dangers of mislead.
The third stage is of the reactions to the spiritual awakening. At first, following the inflow of the higher consciousness in its several workings, there is a sense of peace, a harmony, a joy that not only fills the being but flows out to all around. In the best of these moments one has an intense perception of the unity of all existence, a happy vision of the purpose of life and one's part in it.
—The old, narrow, angular personality seems like an evil dream and there is feeling of having arrived.
Such an exalted state of elation, however, does not last long. The system of man, physical and psychological, is not ready to hold and support the new charge beyond a certain limit. It lags
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behind; the old moorings begin to reappear; they had only been lost to view in the flood but not eliminated. After the flow, the ebb.
This period of reaction is almost universal. It is the valley of death, the 'dark night of the soul', when one becomes acutely conscious of one's imperfections. By contrast with the temporary experience of the high tide, things appear darker than they really are. People begin to bemoan their wretchedness, complain that they have deteriorated and have fallen into a state lower and drier than ever before, 'worse off than when I started the sadhana', they emphasise. Doubts, scepticism, cynicism, have a field day and the sense of direction seems to be lost. They can neither go . back to the old life because somehow their balance with it has been disturbed once and for all; nor can they live in the new state of consciousness which has receded before it could be normalized.
The only way out of this morass is to realise that this is but a stage, an inevitable period of inner assimilation and preparation for the next forward surge, an interval for the outer system to absorb and stabilise the inner change in its members. This is the fourth stage of understanding and participating in the phases of the process of transformation. This is a most significant period in which the seeker has to watch the workings of the spiritual Consciousness in him, submit to its demands by the needed regulation of his movements, 'removal of obstructions and disposing of his energies in the hands of the Superior Intelligence. Dormant faculties begin to open up and there is the inevitable unsettlement of the older functionings. It would appear as if the capacity to deal with situations in normal life was seriously impaired. But all this is only a period of transition; "an intermediate stage in which, as it has been aptly said, one is like a caterpillar undergoing the process of transformation into the winged butterfly. The insect must pass through the stage of the chrysalis, a condition of disintegration and helplessness. But the individual generally does not
hayed the protection of a cocoon in which to undergo the process of transformation in
seclusion and peace. He must—and this is particularly so nowadays—remain where he is in life and continue to perform his family, professional and social duties as well as he
.
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can as though nothing had happened or was still going on. His problem is similar to that which confronts engineers in the reconstruction of a railway station without interrupting the traffic even for an hour." (Dr. R. Assagioli)
Each night, however, is inevitably followed by a dawn and the succession of dawns—to use the Vedic figure—leads to the emergence of the full orb of the Sun of Truth.
This, I should think, gives a fairly correct account of the psychological and vital difficulties that every seeker has to face. Though each one, when he is subject to them, tends to think that his is an exceptionally hard lot, the truth remains that human nature being the same everywhere, every one who seeks to transcend that nature has to pay a price; and if the aim be not merely transcendence but even a transformation of that nature, the price is doubly great even as the achievement is doubly glorious.
PRADUDDHA
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(Rigveda—X. 51.)
THE gods are in a great fix. Where is Agni ? How is it that the comrade has disappeared all on a sudden ? The Sacrifice—the great work has to be undertaken. And he is to be the leader, for he alone can take up the burden. There is no time to be lost, everything is ready for the ceremony to start and just at -the moment the one needed most is nowhere. So the gods organise a search party to find out the whereabouts of the runaway god.
The search party consists of Varuna, Mitra and Yama. We shall presently understand the sense of the selection. They look about here and there—in ten directions, it is mentioned—and at last spot the defaulting god hiding within a huge thick strong cloak or caul. They hail him and ask him to come out and take up his charge. Agni refuses : he says he is not competent to undertake the burden; indeed that is why he ran away and they must not force him. The gods explain, entreat, encourage Agni. They say and assure him that no harm will come to him, rather he will flourish and prosper and become immortal. He is mighty and he will become almighty as he takes up his work and proceeds with it. Agni consents in the end and marches out with the gods.
What does this parable mean ? First of all then we must know what Sacrifice—a Vedic sacrifice—is. Sacrifice symbolises the cosmic labour, the march of the universe towards its goal, the conquest of Light over Darkness, the ascent of manhood to godhead, the flaming rise and progress of consciousness to its supreme expression and embodiment. It is the release out of Inconscience and Unconsciousness to consciousness and finally into the— superconscious ness.
Sacrifice consists essentially in lighting the fire and pouring fuel—offerings'—into it so that it may burn always and brighter and brighter. It calls the gods, also, it is said, ascends to them,
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brings them down here to live among men, in men. It lifts men from the ordinary life and consciousness, takes them to the abode of the gods. In other words its function is to bring down and infuse into the human vessel the godly consciousness and delight and power. Its purpose is to divinise human „ life. Through the sacrifice man offers his present possessions, his body and life and mind to the Deity and deities and by this surrender and submission, constant and unfailing (nomas) he awakens the Divine in him—the Agni that is to lead him to the divine consummation.
Fire then is the energy of consciousness secreted in the heart of things. It is that which moves the Creation upward, produces 'the unfolding evolution that is history, both individual and collective. It is kindled, it increases in volume and strength and purity and effectiveness, as and when a lower element is offered and submitted to a higher reality and this higher reality impinges upon the lower one (which is what the rubbing of the arani or the pressing of the soma symbolises); the limitation is broken, the small enters into and becomes the vast, the crooked is straightened and lengthened out, what was hidden becomes manifest. This is described as the progression of the sacrifice (Adhwara—advance on the path). That is also the victorious battle waged against the dark forces of Ignorance. The goal, the purpose is the descent and manifestation of the gods here upon earth in human vehicles.
But this Fire is not normally available. It is lost, imbedded in the thick petrified folds of unconsciousness arid inconscience. Man's soul is not an apparent reality. It has to be found out, called forth, brought to the front. Even so, in the normal consciousness, the soul, the divine fire is a flickering, twinkling, hesitating spark; it is not sure of itself, not certain of its destiny. Yet when the time is ripe and the call comes, the gods, the luminous forces from above descend with all their insistence and meet the hidden godhead : Agni is reminded of his work and destiny which -farthing can frustrate or cancel. He has to consent and undertake his sacrificial labour.
Agni feared and tried to escape from the burden of his responsibility. He wrapped himself in a thick and vast cloak "and hid in the depths of far waters. That is the parable way of describirig
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the difficulty, the apparent impossibility of the undertaking Agni has to shoulder. Curiously however he has taken shelter just in the spot, which seemed safest to him, from where begins his work, whose nature and substance he has to transform, that is to say, the nether regions of inconscience which is to be raised and transfigured into the solar region of the super consciousness.
One interesting point in the story is the choice of the gods who form the search party. They are Mitra, Varuna and Yama. Varuna is the god of the vast consciousness (Brihat), the wide universal, the Infinite. His eye naturally penetrates everywhere and nothing can escape his notice. Mitra is harmony and rhythm of the infinity. Every individual element he embraces and he_ holds them all together in loving union—his is the friendly tie of comradeship with all. Finally Yama is the master of the lower regions, the underworld of physical and material consciousness, where precisely Agni has taken refuge. Agni is within the dominion, jurisdiction of this trinity and it devolves upon them to tackle the truant god.
There is another point which requires clarification.- As a reason for his nervousness and flight he alleges that greater people who preceded him had attempted the work, but evidently failed in the attempt; so how can he, a younger novice, dare to go the same way ? Putting the imagery back to its psychological bearing, one may explain that the predecessors refer to the deities of the physical, vital and mental consciousness who ruled the earth before the emergence of the psychic or soul consciousness. It is -precisely because of the failure or insufficiency of these anterior —in the evolutionary movement—and inferior gods that Agni's service is being requisitioned.
Mythological also a parallelism is found in the Greek legends where it is said that the Olympian gods—Zeus and his company—were a younger generation' that replaced, after of course a bloody warfare, their ancestors, the more ancient race of Chronos, the Titans. Titans were the Asuras and Rakshasas who reigned upon earth before the
advert of the mental—sattwic—human being, Manu, as referred here.
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THE COLLOQUY OF AGNI AND THE GODS
THE GODS
I. Huge and firm was that covering with which you shrouded yourself and entered into the waters. . O Agni ! You are conscious from your very birth. The One God saw you in all your multiple universal body. »
AGNI
2. Who saw me ? Which of the gods saw my multiple body all around ? O Mitra ! O Varuna ! Tell me, where do they dwell—all the blazing fuel that move to the gods ?
THE GODS
3. O Agni ! god self-conscient, we seek you, you who have - entered variably into the waters and into the growths of the earth. You shine richly. Yama has seen you as you flame out of your ten seats.
AGIN
4. O Varuna ! I fled because I was afraid of the work of the priest. The gods must not yoke me to that work. That was why I embedded my body variably so that I as Agni may not know of that pathway.
THE GODS
5. Come, "O Agni ! Man, the mental being, desires to do the sacrifice, he has made everything ready, and you dwell in obscurity!
Make easy-going the path that leads to the gods, with .a happy mind carry the offering.
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AGIN
6. There were elders before Agni who covered the same path, even as charioteers do their way.
That is why, Q Varuna ! out of fear I have come away so far, even as an animal shrinks and shivers at a shooting arrow.
THE GODS
7. We shall make your life undecaying, O Agni ! so that no harm comes to you when engaged in the work.
So, carry to the gods their share of the offering; a happy birth -you have, a happy mind you must carry.
AGIN
8. Then bring to me my share of the mighty offerings, those that are given before, those that are given after and those that are simply given. - . O gods ! Long life to the being shining in the waters, to Agni himself lying in the growths of the earth.
THE GODS
9. The offerings that precede, the offerings that follow, offerings pure and simple—all forceful, may you enjoy. May this sacrifice be yours entirely. The four quarters bow down to you, O Agni !
NOLINI KANTA GUPTA
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THE soul is that which comes out of the Divine with-
out ever leaving Him and goes back to Him without
ever ceasing from manifestation.
The soul is the Divine made individual without
ceasing to be Divine. In the soul the individual and
the Divine are eternally one.
Thus to find one's soul is to be united with the Divine.
It can therefore be said that the role of the soul is to
make of man a true being.
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REVIEWS
The Concept of, Maya (From the Vedas to the 20th century) by Ruth Renya, M.A., Ph. D; Published by Asia Publishing House, Bornbay-r, pp. xiii + 120.
THE author gives an account of the evolution of the term Maya from its first appearance in the early Vedic literature to the 20 th Century. The entire work especially aims to clarify the erroneous notion held by Western and Eastern writers that Maya means " illus ion" in the sense of "imagination" or " hallucination". It presents Maya as a legitimate philosophical concept, as the explanation of the phenomenal world, and the relationship of existence to the Real. The evolution of various meanings given to the term is followed up with great care and one who goes through the work is bound to be touched with the earnestness of the author who has been as objective as possible.
From the Vedic hymns we find that there are two kinds of Maya, the divine and undivine, the formations of the truth and the formations of the falsehood. A few illustrations are given : Agni is said to overpass the workings of undivine and evil in their impulse (V 2-9). Mitra-Varuna are said to rain down the Heaven by the Power of Knowledge of the Mighty One, by the Maya, the divine truth-knowledge of the Lord (V. 63-3). Indra assumes many forms by Power of Knowledge, mdydbhih ; through Maya Indra triumphs over the mdyin demons and he has much Maya (X.54-2, 1-2-7, VI. 8-12). The author tells us that the origin of the word Maya with the meaning of "Cosmic Illusion" can be found in Svetasvatara Upanishad. Shankaracharya in his commentary on the Vedanta Sutras explains the use of Maya in the passage of Set. Upanishad and other simiter lines, as meaning both illusion and the Power of the Lord, saying "anything be side the Supreme self is illusory.. .the world is created by Maya, the in scriptable Power of the Lord, and is therefore ' unreal," and again "duality IS an illusion and Non-
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duality is ultimate Reality". Maya and Mayavada received various meanings and applications in course of time. But each time we think of Maya, Shankara stands before us. "one can expound Maya with Shankara or against Shankara, but none can expound Maya without Shankara ; there are doubtless various interpretations of the term by Agamas, Sutras besides Srutis and various Acharyas of philosophical systems but Shankara's influence has a tremendous power on Indian religion and general mentality."
"It is rather difficult to say nowadays what really was Shankara's philosophy : there are numberless exponents and none of them agrees with any of others... His philosophy is believed to be that the Supreme Reality is a space less and timeless Absolute (Parabrahman) which is beyond all feature or quality, beyond all action or creation, and that the world is a creation of Maya, not absolutely unreal, but real only in time and while one lives in time ; once we get into a knowledge of the Reality, we perceive that Maya and the world and all in it have no abiding or true existence. It is, if not non-existent, yet false, jaganmithyā ; it is a mistake of the consciousness, it is and it is not; it is an irrational and inexplicable mystery in its origin, though we can see its process or at least how it keeps itself imposed on the consciousness. Brahman is seen in Maya as Ishwara upholding the works of Maya, and the apparently individual soul is really nothing but Brahman itself. In the end, however, alho this seems to be a myth of Maya, mithyā, and not anything realty true." (p.43, On Yoga II, Tome I). Sri Aurobindo explains at length how this is unacceptable and incre dible in hi s Letters and Life Divine.
But a student of philosophy can legitimately ask how and why Mayavada arose. As if to answer this question, Sri Aurobindo writes that 'at the outset man lives in his physical mind which perceives the actual, the physical, the objective and accepts it as fact as self-evident truth beyond question; whatever is not .actual, not physical, not objective it regards as unreal or unrealised-only "to be accepted as entirely real when it has succeeded in becoming actual, becoming a physical fact, becoming objective... At- a certain point of this constant unrest and travail even the physical mind loses its conviction of objective certitude and
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enters' into agnosticism which questions all its own standards of life and knowledge, doubts whether all this is real or else whether all, even if real, is not futile ; the vital mind, baffled by life and frustrated or else dissatisfied with all its satisfactions, overtaken by a deep disgust and disappointment, finds that all is vanity and vexation of spirit and is ready to reject life and existence as an unreality, all that is hunted after as an illusion, Maya; the thinking mind, un building all its affirmations, discovers that all are mere mental constructions and there is no reality in them or else that the only reality is something beyond this existence, something Absolute and Eternal,—all that is relative, all that is of time is a dream, a hallucination of the mind or a vast delirium, -an immense cosmic Illusion, a delusive figure of apparent existence. The principle of negation prevails over the principle of affirmation and becomes universal and absolute. Thence arise the great world-negating religions and philosophies; thence too a recoil of the life-motive from itself and a seeking after a life elsewhere flawless and eternal or a will to annul life itself in an immobile Reality or an original Non-Existence." Shankara one feels the presence of a conflict, an opposition which this powerful intellect has stated with full force and masterfully arranged rather than solved with any finality, the conflict of an intuition intensely aware of an absolute transcendent and inmost Reality and a strong intellectual reason regarding the world with a keen and vigorous rational intelligence... Shankara takes up this contra diction, this opposition which is normal to our mental consciousness when it becomes aware of both sides of existence and stands between them; he resolves it by obliging the reason to recognise its limits, in which its impaired sovereignty is left to it within its own cosmic province, and to acquiesce in the soul's intuition of the transcendent Reality and to support, by a dialectic which ends by dissolving the whole cosmic phenomenal and rational, practical edifice of things, its escape from the limitations Constructed and .imposed on the mind by Maya." (ibid pp. .202-3)
P. V. RAGHAVA RAJU
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SANSKRIT
Sagarika—Published by Sanskrit Parishad, Sagour University Sagour (M. P.)—Price Rs.
Few indeed are the number of Sanskr. it journals in the country. The publication of a new Half-yearly by the Sanskrit Parishad, Sagour University, is a welcome addition. The idea, once held, that Sanskrit is a 'dead' language and that a study of same need be pursued only by small groups interested in the same, is no longer current. Saner minds have come to believe that the neglect of Sanskrit as a subject of genera] study will be at the cost of a cultural break with the past and of irreparable weakness in the moral fibre of the nation. Signs of renascence in Sanskrit are evident and the publication of this journal is one such.
The notable feature of the revival is a recognition, by the Sanskritists, of the need to use the language as a vehicle of expression of modern thoughts and ideas. That the language is capable of being so used was admitted, but the high-browed attitude 'of seeing sanctity only in 'ancient' metaphysical truths stood in the way of a wider acquaintance with, and acquisition of the language by the general reader. Sanskrit was more revered than studied.
The Editors of 'Sagarika' feel that they have something to contribute to the revival. Judged by the first issue, the claim, very modestly put forward, is amply justified. Within the short compass of 64 pages, a wide range of subjects has been covered like Vaidic Soma, linguistics, archaeology, literary criticism, the Witness in Sankhya Darsana, library-management, history of Sanskrit journalism, etc., etc. The contributors are all erudite scholars who have taken care to write in elegant, simple style. Remarkable is the article on Library for the ease and lucidity with' which a subject like Dewey's Decimal Classification -has been explained; so is the article on Sanskrit journalism for its wealth of facts.
The journal, with its pleasing get-up and interesting contents will have a wide appeal to all lovers of Sanskrit. '
I. K.
ROY
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