All work must be play, but a divine play, played for the Divine, with the Divine.
THE MOTHER
And yet I know my footprints' track shall be A pathway towards immortality,
SRI AUROBINDO
August, 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
XV
ON HAPPINESS
Let us live happily without enmity among enemies; Among men inimical let us dwell without enmity. (1)
Let us live_ happily without affliction among the afflicted; ' Among men afflicted let us dwell without affliction. (2)
* Based on the Mother's Talks.
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the advent Let us live happily without greed among the greedy: Among greedy men let us dwell without greed. (3)
Let us live happily we who have nothing, nothing at all: We shall feed upon delight even like the gads. (4)
Victory breeds enmity, the victim lies in distress; The tranquillised soul dwells in happiness abandoning victory and defeat. (5)
There is no fire like lust, no viper like hatred; There is no misery like life's yoke.
And happiness there is none like the Supreme Calm. (6)
Hunger is the worst malady, life-will the worst calamity : Knowing this perfectly, one knows that Nirvana is the supreme Felicity. (7)
'Health is the supreme gain, contentment the supreme wealth; Faith is the supreme kinsman, Nirvana the supreme Happiness. (8)
He has tasted the sweetness of solitude, lie has tasted the sweetness of the final Peace; '
So he is become fearless and sinless, he has (trunk of the devotion to the Law. (9)
It is good to meet the Noble Ones, it is always a happiness to live with them; And it is always a happiness not to have sight of the ignorant. (10)
One who moves with the ignorant, goes grieving a long way, T& live with the ignorant is as painful as to live always with the enemy; .
To live with the wise is happiness even like the company of one's own kinsmen. (11)
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Therefore seek the steadfast, the wise, the learned, the
patient, the perseverant, the Noble Ones,
Seek such high souls, illumined intelligences even as the moon follows the path of the stars. (12)
ONE of the verses is very fine. We could translate it thus: Happy is he who possesses nothing, he will feed up tin the delight of the luminous gods. To possess nothing does not mean not to use, not to utilise anything. Happy is he who possesses nothing; it is he who has no sense of possession, who can make use of things when they come to him, knowing that they are not his, that they belong to the Supreme, and also who, for the same reason, does not regret when things go away from him; he finds it quite natural that the Lord who gave him these things should take them away from him to give to others. Such a man finds equal joy in the possession of things as in the absence of things. When you have them at your disposal, you receive them as gifts from the Grace and when they leave you, when they are withdrawn from you, you live in the joy of destitution. For it "is the sense of ownership that makes you cling to things, makes you their slave, otherwise one could live in constant joy and ceaseless movement of things that come and go and pass, that bring with them at the same time the sense of fullness when they are there and, when they go, the sense of detachment.
Delight! Delight means to live in the Truth, to five in communion with Eternity, with the true Light, with the Light that fails not. Delight means to be free, free with the true freedom, the Freedom of the constant, invariable union with the Will Divine.
Gods are those that are immortal, who are not bound to the vicissitudes of the material life in all its narrowness, pettiness, unreality and falsity.
The gods are they who are turned to the Light, who live in the Power and the Knowledge; that is what the Buddha means to say, it does not mean the gods of religion. They are beings who have the divine character, who may live in human bodies," but free from ignorance and falsehood.
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When you possess nothing, you may become as vast as the universe.
XVI
OF THE PLEASANT
One who yokes himself to things unworthy, one who unyokes himself from things worthy,
One who abandons the goal for the sake of the pleasant, will envy those who are yoked to their soul. (1)
Never seek the pleasant, nor even the unpleasant; It is painful not to see the pleasant and it is painful to see the unpleasant. (2)
Therefore regard nothing as dear, for the loss of what is
dear is painful; No bondage exists for those who have neither likes nor dislikes. (3)
The pleasant gives rise to grief, the pleasant gives rise to fear; One who is freed from the pleasant has no grief, and what is he to fear ? (4)
Love gives rise to grief, love gives rise to fear : One who is freed from love has no grief and how shall he have fear ? (5)
Attachment gives rise to grief, attachment gives rise to fear; One who is freed from attachment has no grief and how shall he have fear? (6)
Desire gives rise to grief, desire gives rise to fear ; One- who is freed from desire has no grief and how shall he have fear? ' (7)
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Hunger gives rise to grief, hunger gives rise to fear; One who is freed from hunger has no grief and how shall he have fear? (8)
One who has-the right conduct and the right vision, who
follows the Law, who is truthful, Who fulfils his duties, such a person one would hold dear to oneself. (9)
One who yearns for the Ineffable, one who is awakened in his mind,
One whose consciousness is not entangled in desires, is spoken of as mounting up the stream. (10)
When a man safely returns from a long sojourn in far off foreign lands,
His relatives and friends and comrades welcome him with jubilation. (11) ,
Even so, when a man who has done good deeds and leaves
this world for the next, His virtues receive him there warmly as their own kinsman. (12)
It always seems to me that the reasons usually given for becoming wise are poor reasons. "Don't do this, it will give you suffering don't do that, it will bring fear into you"...and the con-sciousness dries up more and more, it gets hardened, because it becomes afraid of grief, afraid of pain.
' I would prefer it to be said rather that there is a certain state of consciousness—which one can acquire by aspiration and a persistent inner effort—in which joy is unmixed and light shadow less, where all possibility of fear disappears. It is a state in
which one doe not live for oneself but where whatever one does, whatever one
feels, all the movements are an offering made to the Supreme; in an absolute
trust, freeing oneself of all responsibility
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for oneself, handing over to Him all this burden which is no longer a burden.
It is an inexpressible joy not to have any responsibility for oneself, no longer to think of oneself. It is so dull and monotonous and insipid to be thinking of oneself, to. be worrying about what to do and what not to do, what will be good and what will be bad, what to shun and what to pursue, oh, how wearisome it is! But when one lives like this, quite open, like a flower opening towards the sun, open to the supreme Consciousness, the supreme Wisdom, the supreme Light, the supreme Love that knows all, can do all, takes charge of you and you have no more worry, that is the ideal condition.
And why one does not do it ?
One does not think of it, one forgets to do it, the old habits come back. And particularly, there is behind, somewhere hidden in the inconscient, or even in the subconscient, this insidious doubt that just whispers into your ears : "Oh ! if you do not take care some calamity will happen to you. If you forget to watch over yourself you do not know what may happen to you"...and you are so dull, so obscure, so stupid that you listen and you begin to pay attention to yourself and the whole thing is demolished.
You have to begin again to infuse into your cells a little wisdom, a little common sense and learn again not to worry about yourself.
NOLINI 'KANTA GUPTA
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THE Karmayogin comes into the field to fulfil a function which an increasing tendency in the country demands. The life of the nation which once flowed in a broad and single stream has long been severed into a number of separate meagre and shallow channels. The two main floods have followed the paths of religion and politics, but they have flowed separately. Our political activity has crept in a channel cut for it by European or Europeanised-.minds; it tended always to a superficial wideness, but was deficient in depth and volume. The national genius, originality, individuality poured itself into religion, while our politics were imitative and unreal. Yet without a living political activity national life cannot, under modern circumstances, survive. So also there has been a stream of social life, more and more muddied and disturbed, seeking to get clearness, depth, largeness, freedom, but always failing and increasing in weakness or distraction. There was a stream too of industrial life, faint and thin, the poor survival of the old vigorous Indian artistic and industrial capacity murdered by unjust laws and an unscrupulous trade policy. All these ran in disconnected channels, sluggish, scattered and ineffectual. The tendency 'is now for these streams to unite again into one mighty invincible and grandiose flood. To assist that tendency, to give voice and definiteness to the deeper aspirations now forming obscurely within the national consciousness is the chosen work of the Karmayogin.
There is no national life perfect or sound without the catur-varnya. The life of the nation must contain within itself the life of the Brahmin,—spirituality, knowledge, learning, high and pure ethical aspiration and endeavour; the life of the Kshatriya,—manhood and strength moral and physical, the love of battle, the thirst for glory, the sense of honour, chivalry, self-devotion, generosity,
* Editorial in the Karmayogin.
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grandeur of soul; the life of the Vaishya,—trade, industry, thrift, prosperity, benevolence, philanthropy; the life of the Sudra,— honesty, simplicity, labour, religious and quiet service to the nation even in the humblest position and the most insignificant kind of work. The cause of India's decline was the practical disappearance of the Kshatriya and the dwindling of the Vaishya. The whole political history of India since the tyranny of the Nandas has been an attempt to resuscitate or replace the Kshatriya. But the attempt was only partially successful. The Vaishya held his own for a long time, indeed, until the British advent by which he has almost been extinguished. When the cāturvarnya disappears, there comes varnasankara, utter confusion of the great types which keep a nation vigorous and sound. The Kshatriya dwindled. The Vaishyp dwindled, the Brahmin and Sudra were left. The inevitable tendency was for the Brahmin type to disappear and the first sign of his disappearance was utter degeneracy, the tendency to lose himself and while keeping some outward signs of the Brahmin to gravitate towards Sudra hood. In the Kaliyuga the Sudra is powerful and attracts into himself the less vigorous Brahmin, as the earth attracts purer but smaller bodies, and the Brahmatej, the spiritual force, of the latter, already diminished, dwindles to nothingness. For the Satyayuga to return, we must get back the Brahmatej and make it general. For the Brahmatej is the basis of all the rest and in the Satyayuga all men have it more or less and by it the nation lives and is great.
All this is, let us say, a parable. It is more than a parable, it is a great truth. But our educated class have become so unfamiliar with the deeper knowledge of their forefathers that it has to be translated into modern European terms before they can understand it. For it is the European ideas alone that are real to them and the great truths of Indian thought seem to them mere metaphors, allegories and mystic parables. So well has British education done its fatal denationalising work in India.
The Brahmin stands for religion, science, scholarship and the higher morality; the Kshatriya for war, politics and administration; the Vaishya for the trades, professions and industries, the Sudra for labour and service. It is only when these four great
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departments of human activity are all in a robust and flourishing condition that the nation is sound and great. When any of these disappear or suffer, it is bad for the body politic. And the two highest are the least easy to be spared. If they survive in full strength, they can provide themselves with the two others, but if either the Kshatriya or the Brahmin go, if either the political force or the spiritual force of a nation is lost, that nation is doomed unless it can revive or replace the missing strength. And of the two the Brahmin is the most important. He can always create the Kshatriya; spiritual force can always raise up material force to defend it. But if the Brahmin becomes the Sudra, then the lower instinct of the serf and the labourer becomes all in all, the in stinc, to serve and seek a living as one supreme object of life, the instinct to accept safety as a compensation for lost greatness and inglorious ease and dependence in place of the ardours of high aspiration for the nation and the individual. When spirituality is lost all is lost. This is the fate from which we have narrowly escaped by the resurgence of the soul of India in Nationalism.
But the resurgence is not yet complete. There is the sentiment of In dianism, there is not yet the knowledge. There is a vague
ideate there is no definite conception or deep insight. We have yet to know ourselves, what we were, are and may be; what we did in the past and what we are capable of doing in the future; our history and our mission. This is the first and most important work for which the Karmayogin sets for itself, to popularize this knowledge. The Vedanta or Sufism, the temple or the mosque, Nanak and Kabir and Ramdas, Chaitanya or Guru Govinda, Brahmin and Kayastha and Namasudra, whatever national asset we have indigenous or acclimatised, it will seek to make known, to put in its right place and appreciate. And the second thing is how to use these assets so as to swell the sum of national life and produce the future. It is easy to appraise their relations to the past; it is more difficult to give them their place in the future. The third thing is to know the outside world and its relation to us and how to deal with it. That is the problem which we find at present most difficult and insistent, but its solution depends on the solution of the others,
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We have said that Brahmatej is the thing we need most of all and first of all. In one sense, that means the preeminence of religion; but after all, what the Europeans mean by religion is not Brahmatej which is rather spirituality, the force and energy of thought and action arising from communion with or self-surrender to that with us which rules the world. In that sense we shall use it. This force and energy can be directed to any purpose God desires for us ; it is sufficient to knowledge, love or service; it is good for the liberation of an individual soul, the building of a nation or the turning of a tool. It works from within, it works in the power of God, it works with superhuman energy. The reawakening of that force in three hundred millions of men by the means which our past has placed in our hands, that is our object.
The European is proud of his success in divorcing religion from life. Religion, he says, is all very well in its place, but it has nothing to do with politics or science or commerce, which it spoils by its intrusion; it is meant only for Sundays when, if one is English, one puts on black clothes and tries to feel good, and, if one is continental, one puts the rest of the week away and amuses oneself. In reality, the European has not succeeded in getting rid of religion from his life. It is coming back in socialism, in the Anarchism of Bakunin and Tolstoi, in many other isms ; and, in whatever form it comes, it insists on engrossing the whole life, on moulding the whole society and politics under the law of idealistic aspiration. It does not use the word God or grasp the idea, but it sees God in humanity. What the European understood by religion had to be got rid of and put out of life, but real religion, spirituahty, idealism, altruism, self-devotion, the hunger after perfection is the whole destiny of humanity and cannot be got rid of. After all God does exist and if He exists, you cannot shove Him into a corner and say, "That is your place and as for the world and fife it belongs to us." He pervades and returns. Every age of denial is only a preparation for a larger and more comprehensive affirmation.
The Karmayogin will be more of a national review than a weekly newspaper. We shall notice current events only as they
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evidence, help, affect or resist the growth of national life and the development of the soul of the nation. Political and social problems we shall deal with from this standpoint, seeking first their spiritual roots and inner causes and then proceeding to measures and remedies. In, a similar spirit we shall deal with all sources of national strength in the past and in the present, seeking to bring them home to all comprehensions and make them applicable to our life, dynamic and not static, creative and not merely preservative. For if there is no creation, there must be disintegration ; if there is no advance and victory, there must be recoil and defeat.
SRI AUROBINDO
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CHAPTER III
THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION
(V)
RENE DESCARTES (1596-1650)
WHILE Bacon represented the precipitate advance of the physical mind of man towards the Democritan atomism of the natural science by means of rigorous empiricism, he neglected the conceptual side of knowledge, and had little notion of the value of mathematics upon which Galileo' had based his whole scientific outlook. But empiricism without conceptualisation would have led directly and immediately to a hypertrophy of technology and a total atrophy of the reason—an abrupt break with the past, which is not the way Nature proceeds from the present to the future. Rationalism, not, indeed of the mediaeval type, but the modern, with a revolt against convention and tradition , and reliance on radical and systematic doubt as the sole means of sweeping away the clutter of the past, had to assert its sway and hold the physical mind in leash, lest in its rabid rush towards atomism, it should jettison the very element which gave the Renaissance its liberating impulse. It is a common principle of Nature that she never lets go any of the essential elements, either of the past or of the present, which are likely to promote the construction of the future.
It was to cure the imbalance, and restore the one principal element of enlightenment to the scientific mind of man that Descarte came with his outstanding genius for mathematics and his unwavering faith in the reason. He set little store by the empiric method and the Baconian process of induction, and
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employed deduction and the a priori dialectic of reasoning to discover truth and reality—another swing of the mental pendulum to the other extreme, exemplifying Nature's incalculable seesaw movement. He followed Galileo in his conception of the world as spatial and not spiritual, and emphasised the quantitative aspect of it. The world being flawlessly mathematical in its structure and operations, its determinations were perfectly amenable to the mathematical method of investigation. Inventor of analytical geometry, he thought he could handle it as a tool par excellence for a mathematical study and exploration of Nature. To quote from his Discourse : "Those long chains of reasoning, quite simple and easy, which geometers are wont to employ in " the accomplishment of their most difficult demonstrations, led me to think that everything which might fall under the cognisance of the human mind might be connected together in the same manner." Like Galileo, he accepted the primary qualities of Nature, extension, motion, shape, magnitude etc., as indubitably true, being clearly demonstrable by the apparatus of mathematics, and questioned the validity of the reports and registrations of the senses by means of which alone can we know the secondary qualities. "In truth we perceive no object such as it is by sense alone (but only by our reason exercised upon sensible objects," he states in his Principles of Philosophy. We must discover "certain principles of material things...not by the prejudices of the senses, but the light of" reason, and which thus possess so great evidence that we cannot doubt of their truth." About a century later it was Bishop Berkley's feat to try to turn the tables on Descartes by reasoning that the primary qualities which both Galileo and Descartes swore by were equally illusive and illusory, being based on our sense perceptions. Descartes stuck to his overweening faith in the reason and disdained the empirical, inductive method.
But how to purify and enlighten the reason, which is shot through with prejudices and prepossessions ? Descartes adopted and strongly advocated the method of relentless doubt, the "methodic cloubt", as it has been called. Doubt is the crux of the Cartesian method. Precise and penetrating in analysis, he cast aside
.
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the Aristotelian conception of the world being more subtle and incomprehensible than it appears on the surface, and looked upon it as a machine, strictly mathematical in its form and movements, and which the human mind of reason could analyse with clearness and comprehend. He rejected also the teleological view held right from the days of Pythagoras and Plato to the mediaeval times that God has created the material universe so that in man, the finest flower of the evolutionary process, the world may return to God. He did accept God as the Creator of the material world, but absolved Him from all responsibility of its day-to-day management. A mathematical determinism, deriving effect from cause, and faultlessly mechanical in its steps, ruled the universe of material events and happenings. "Nature is a book written by God in the language of mathematics", but absolutely autonomous and deterministic in its movements after the original writing is done. This quantitative, analytical approach to Nature by the deductive process of "the natural light" of the reason was the key, according to Descartes, to unlock all the secrets of Nature. Here we find an exclusive insistence on the power of the reason, which set the very tone of contemporary and later French thought and has dominated French philosophy and science since. It is only when we look at Descartes' attitude towards the reason that we understand why he has been hailed as the Father of modern philosophical thought. The French Encyclopaedists inherited his method of thinking by radical doubting, and even his lucid but dry style, though they differed from him in their philosophical aims and objectives.
It must be noted that doubt, according to Descartes, was not for the sake of doubt, or the luxury of iconoclastic scepticism, but for the sake of reaching the bed-rock of certainty, which is beyond all shadow of doubt. "My first rule was to accept nothing as true which I did not clearly recognise to be so; to accept nothing more than what was presented to my mind so clearly and distinctly that I could have no occasion to doubt." By ruthless and persistent doubt, one attains to the intrinsic reality of a thing. In his Rules, Descartes speaks of the double process of discovering truth : intuition and deduction. He does not believe in the
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inductive method, as I have said above, the method,-which, since the time of Bacon, has been the accredited method of scientific inquiry. In this, as also in many other particulars, Descartes betrays his scholastic affiliations. "By intuition," he writes, "I understand...the conception which an unclouded and attentive mind gives us so readily and distinctly that we are wholly freed from doubt about that which we understand." The "innate ideas" of the mind are known by this intuition or immediate, lucid perception, and so are the ultimate characteristics of physical nature, such as extension, motion, figure, size etc. The world of forms, resections, is opposed to the realm of thought, recognitions, though both are truly known to the reason, purified and refined" by doubt.
When we begin the exploration of reality by means of doubt, we simply mean that we are using our thought and its analytical powers to strip reality of all that is not real, but only an accretion. Doubting is thinking. And when I think, I know that it is I who am thinking. Therefore the thinker must exist before he can think. This chain of reasoning led Descartes to formulate his oft-quoted phrase : cogito ergo sum—I think, therefore, I am. By radically doubting everything in the world, de omnibus dubitandum, he reaches the haven of his indubitable existence, his thinking I, the mind.
Pursuing the same fine of incisive, analytical reasoning, he discovers that he has in his mind ideas and thoughts of his own imperfection, his own incapacities and insufficiencies. These ideas and thoughts imply that there must be a deep-rooted conception of perfection and omnipotence which is intrinsic to his being. Without an innate idea of perfection, there could not have arisen any thought and perception of imperfection. This perfection Descartes attributes to God. God -thus becomes to him an indubitable truth and reality. A devout Catholic that he was, he arrives at a clear perception of the existence of God by the dialectic of logical thought. In the same way, by the same rigorous .dialectic, he comes down from God to the world, which is created by God, and finds it real too. But this God, discovered and established by analytical reason is a "remote and impersonal God," an absentee Architect of the material universe.
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He is the First Cause, who has endowed the world with motion at the time of creation, and left it to run its own course. Only, in some mysterious way, which Descartes's reason did not specify, God's Will upholds the whole stupendous movement. The world is material, mechanical, dead, and inert, running its course by the initial motion imparted to it by God. It has no purpose behind its movement, and no end or goal. The imponderables of Nature are thus conjured away by the powerful spell of a mechanistic theory and mathematical formula, and God is conceived as only a Master Mathematician and Craftsman. "You can substitute 'the mathematical order of nature' for God," Descartes happened to remark once, "whenever I use the latter term."1
Descartes's conception of the soul was equally exact and logical, but devoid of the glow of life and marked by superficiality. He identified his soul with the thinking mind, the cogitating "I", and thus opened himself to the charge of solipcism.
Descartes had a sort of mystical experience when he was twenty-three years old. It was revealed to him in that experience that the material world was a machine, a mathematical and logical mechanism, constructed by God and distinct from the human soul or mind. He could not possibly doubt the reality of the world, because God, the Creator, could not surely have created something which was unreal or illusive. Instead of starting from Nature to the existence of God, which was the method of the Schoolmen, Descartes intuited the existence of God by the "innate ideas" of his mind and the conception of perfection intrinsic to it. From God he descended to consider the reality of the material universe. The soul was conscious, But Matter was .spatial and mechanical. This dualism between soul and body, mind and Matter was the most important contribution of Descartes to the philosophy of the seventeenth century. But however much it influenced the thought of the subsequent schools of philosophy, in Descartes- this dualism was not so sharp and logical as his reason would have him believe. He found in himself the existence of obscure and confused ideas, passions and emotions and irrational
1 Quoted by Crane Brinton in his Ideas and Men.
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impulses, which ran counter to the clarity and order of the reason he swore by. Where did these perturbations come from ? This was the problem before him. They could not have come from God any more than they could be intrinsic to his soul or refined mind of reason. They must have, then, come from the body, the gross corporeality in man. But again a new problem arises : how could dead Matter act upon the conscious soul and impose its own reactions upon it ? Descartes solves the problem by dividing Matter into two categories : a fine "first matter", which pervades all space like boundless ether, and the dense Matter of which material forms are made. The first matter "has been divinely shaped into innumerable vortices or whirlpools", and "each solid body rides on its own vortex." The "fine matter" cradles the dense Matter and establishes an "exceptional relation" between mind and matter. It is through this exceptional relation that the reactions of the senses, the irrational passions and impulses invade the mind. It is evident that the rigour of the Cartesian dualism goes by the board on account of the admission of the "exceptional relation." Exceptional or not, a relation is a relation, and it cuts across the very basis of dualism. It leads in the philosophy of Spinoza to its own corrective, the universal immanence of the one, indivisible substance. Descartes, too, believed that the material substance was an infinite and infinitely divisible continuum, but his sharp differentiation between the self-consciousness of the mind or the still and the extension and motion of Matter inspired him to erect a clear-cut division between the two. This dualism dominated Western philosophy and science for a long time, till it led inevitably to pluralism and atomism (compare Hobbes and Leibnitz) to which Descartes could have never subscribed. As Descartes had sundered philosophy from theology, so now his influence created a gulf between philosophy and science—philosophy occupying itself with the cogitating "I" and its subjective movements, and science with the extension and motion of mechanical Nature.
Descartes" has been rightly called the father of modern philosophic. His method of radical doubt has been accepted as the best means of clearing away the accumulated cobwebs of the mind,
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which, even in men of developed intellect, remains, more or less, yoked to extraneous authority and conventional formulas. His new rationalism fostered the subjective trend in philosophical inquiry which was, since Bacon and Galileo, being threatened with submergence. He laid an exclusive stress upon the reason as the only means for the discovery of truth, and thus stayed the blind rush of the physical mind of man towards mechanisation, as I have said above. His third achievement was a trenchant dualism between mind and Matter, soul and body, which supplanted the unitary view of man and Nature. His philosophy exerted less influence in Germany and England than elsewhere. Indeed, he was severely criticised -by Leibnitz and Hobbes, though both of them were indebted to him for certain aspects of their philosophies. And, if we probe-deeper, we shall find that the materialistic, mechanistic philosophy of Hobbes was nothing but an inverted form of Descartes's philosophy. It is rather ironical that his solid contributions to science and philosophy were exploited by the Time-Spirit to sub serve the prevailing trends and the eventual ends which were contrary to his own. His theory of the "innate ideas" led to sensational psychology, which is but a travesty of his apotheosis of the reason. His refusal to consider the problem of the final cause, and his dogmatic characterising of all desire to know the purposes of God as audacious, generated agnosticism. His systematic, methodical doubt promoted the spirit of scepticism, though it was farthest from his own theory and idea; and scepticism could only end in atheism. His dualism provided a field-day to the materialists like Hobbes, who clinched their position by his bold, categoric assertion : "Give me extension and motion, and I will construct the universe," and felt free to derive all subjective faculties, and functions, including the purified and pampered reason of Descartes, from the sole, unitary reality of gross Matter.
We can now see how Descartes indirectly helped the birth and growth of the eighteenth century Enlightenment, which, in its turn, paved the way for the Godless, soulless, crude scientific materialism of the nineteenth century. The stage was finally set for the 'unchallenged sovereignty of Matter and the. machine, and the progressive reduction of man to the conditioned and
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mechanised efficiency of the automaton, and of his .mind to the endless fidgets and fevers of a darkened and dispossessed monarch. An illustrious rebel and nonconformist, who made no secret of his contempt for the muddled philosophical thinking of his predecessors, and had the ambition to blaze a new trail in philosophy, held aloft the torch of rationalism against the chill winds of the atavistic forces of reaction, and the intermittent hot blasts of the atheistic, hedonistic, mechanistic science, which he had himself unwittingly nourished. This is the paradoxical achievement of the constructive genius of Rene Descartes.
RISHABHCHAND
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READINGS IN THE BRIHADARANYAKA UPANISHAD
(VII)
KNOWLEDGE OF BRAHMAN*
THOUGH Brahman, the Supreme Reality, unattainable by our senses, is ineffable and transcendent, He is yet revealed through ^His myriad manifestations. For He not only puts out so many forms from Himself but enters into them as their immanent Reality. Thus Brahman can be approached and realised through any of His formulations. Particularly through certain of His special forms which are, we may say, concentrated manifestations in which the Brahman is more gathered and more patent than in other forms, for purposes of the Manifestation. The Upanishad focuses attention on this aspect of the truth of Brahman in the form of a story which incidentally throws considerable of light on the social and cultural milieu of those times.
Bālāki, son of Balākd of Garga descent, was a Brahmin who was learned in the knowledge and science of Brahman and was proud of his attainments. Those were the days when the kings bowed low to men of learning and askesis, gave away wealth, princesses and even kingdoms for the gift of the saving Knowledge. Janaka the monarch was celebrated for his devotion to such exemplars of enlightenment to whom he offered bejewelled cows in thousands. Not to be outdone, other members of the Royalty vied with each other in honouring these knowers of Brahman with gifts and owning allegiance to them.
So one day Gārgya Bālāki, proud of his knowledge, eloquent speaker that he was, called on Ajatashatru, king of Kashi, and said: "I will tell you of Brahman." Ajatashatru was indeed happy that he got an opportunity to hear of Brahman and also because it
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was an occasion to outmatch the more famous Janaka, noted for his endowments. He replied : "We shall give a thousand cows for such a speech. All people rush saying 'Janaka', 'Janaka'."
Gargya Balaki spoke of the Sun in the skies and said : "The Person who is yonder in the Sun,1 him indeed I meditate upon as Brahman." For the light which is concentrated in the physical sun is really the material garb of the Celestial Light, the supreme Form of the Divine which is bhārūpah. The Being who ensouls this orb is none other than Brahman Himself and is to be worshipped as
But that was nothing new to Ajatashatru who replied : "Don't you speak to me of him. For I know and I already meditate upon him as
For as the Shruti says, one becomes exactly as one meditates upon Him.2
Next Gargya spoke of the Person in the Moon3 as Brahman. But that was not new either. The king had already known to meditate upon Him as the Vast, the White-robed, radiant Soma who covered the whole creation in his immense spread of life-giving Delight which excelled in its radiance in the measure of the white purity of its forms. To one who so meditates, the king added, the abundant yield of the essence of all life-experience, soma, is constant; his sustenance 'does not decay.
Gargya pointed to the Person in the flash of Lightning4 as Brahman. But Ajatashatru already knew of this manifestation of Brilliance and knew also that he who meditates upon this Brilliance of Brahman becomes brilliant and his progeny too becomes brilliant.
" Gargya pointed to the Person in the Sky5 of self-extension as Brahman. But Ajatashatru already knew of this manifestation
1 and consequently in the eye, for the Sun has a presiding relation*with the eye. The Spirit manifests both in the macrocosm and the microcosm. .
2 Satapatha Br. X.5.2.20
3 and in the mind
4 and in the skin
5 and in the heart
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of the Full and the Immovable and knew also that he who meditates upon this Fullness and Immutability of Brahman is blessed with the progeny of opulence, an opulence that is never extinct from this world.
Gargya pointed to the Person in the Vayu,1, the wind of Life-Force as Brahman. But Ajatashatru already knew of this manifestation of the Lord, the Irresistible and the unvanquished host of Maruts and knew also that he who meditates upon this Brahman becomes indeed victorious, invincible and conqueror of the adversaries.
Gargya pointed to the Person in Agni,2 the effectuating Will, -as Brahman. But Ajatashatru already knew of this manifestation of the Vanquisher and knew also that he who meditates-upon this Brahman becomes himself a vanquisher and his progeny too becomes vanquishing.
Gargya pointed to the Person in Water3, the stream of consciousness-Force, as Brahman. But Ajatashatru already knew of this manifestation of the corresponding Form of Brahman and knew also that he who meditates upon this Brahman comes upon what is corresponding to him and not what is contrary; what is born of him is also the corresponding.
Gargya pointed to the Person in the mirror4 as Brahman. But Ajatashatru already knew of this Shining manifestation of Brahman and knew also diet he who meditates upon this Shining Brahman becomes himself shining, his progeny too becomes shining and he outshines all company.
Gargya pointed to the Sound5 that follows after one as he goes, as Brahman. But Ajatashatru already knew of this sound as Life-manifestation of Brahman6 and knew also that he who meditates upon Brahman as the Life lives a full length of life in this world and life does not leave him before time.
1 and in the -prāna
2 and in speech
3 and in retas (vital fluid)
4 and in what is bright
5 and in life which sustains the body
6 because of Life he walks and the sound issues
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Gargya pointed to the Person in the Quarters of Space1 as Brahman. But Ajatashatru already knew of this manifestation as the Double and Inseparable and knew also that he who meditates upon this manifestation of Brahman as the Double Inseparable has always a companion and his company is not separated from him.
Gargya pointed to the Person who consists of shadow,2 as Brahman. But Ajatashatru already knew of this dark figure as the Brahman in the form of Death (following Brahman in the form of Life) and knew also that he who meditates upon this manifestation of Brahman lives a full length of life in this world and death does not come to him before time.
Gargya pointed to the Person who is in the body,3 as Brahman. But Ajatashatru already knew of this manifestation of Brahman as the Embodied One and knew also that he who meditates upon this manifestation becomes himself embodied and his progeny becomes embodied.
Gargya remained silent.
For more he did not know.
Asked Ajatashatru : Is that all?
Gargya : That is all.
Ajatashatru : But Brahman cannot be known by knowing only that much.
Gargya realised that he had not known all about Brahman. There was evidently something more of Brahman which was not covered by the manifestations of which he spoke so proudly. He aspired to know what he did not know. But one can know of Brahman only from a teacher. So with becoming humility he said : Let me come to you as a pupil.
A Brahmana coming to a Kshatriya as a student to a teacher was not regular. It is the Brahmana who normally teaches. So Ajatashatru hesitated : Verily, it is contrary to the course of things that a Brahmana should come to a Kshatriya, thinking
1 and in the ears
2 and of the veiling ignorance within
3 and in the intelligence
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'he will teach me of Brahman'. However, I shall cause you to know Him.
So saying, de chining to be the instructor who makes one know, he took him by his hand (as a friend) and rose.
Both went up to a man who was asleep. He called him out by various terms: " a Great one," "white-robed," "Soma," ''king". But the man did not get up. Then Ajatashatru woke him up by pulling with his hand.
And Ajatashatru asked : When this man was al seep where was the conscious being and whence did it come back now ?
Gargya did not know.
Ajatashatru explained : When the man was asleep, the conscious being taking in itself by the consciousness of the senses by means of its own consciousness, rests in the sky which is within the heart i.e. within its own Self. When thus is absorbed the prāna (life-force), absorbed the speech, absorbed the eye, absorbed the ear, absorbed the mind, the being who so absorbs them is said to be asleep (lit. rests in his own Self, svameva dtmdnam apiti apigaccati).
In the dream-condition, the being moves in these worlds of its making. Taking all the senses in itself, it moves about in its body as freely as a king in his domain with his subjects. It assumes different states, high and low as it pleases.
Now when it falls sound asleep and knows nothing, the being having crept back through the seventy-two thousand subtle nerve-channels (called hits) which lead from the heart to the pericardium, rests in the pericardium. As a baby or an emperor or a great Brahmana might rest when he has attained the acme of bliss, so the being now rests.
This is where the conscious being is when man sleeps. It rests in its own Self which transcends all the senses, all the organs, all their functions. It transcends all the modes of manifestation, aye, the very
manifestation itself. And that too is Brahman. This that is manifest is Brahman. That which is not in manifestation is Brahman. Both are Brahman. One derives from the other.
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As a spider moves along the thread1 it produces, and as from the fire tiny sparks fly forth, even so from this Self emanate all vital energies, all worlds, all gods, all beings.
The secret name1 of this Self is the Truth of truth, satya sya satyam. Prdnas (vital energies), verily, are the truth. And of them the Self is die Truth.
Life-currents are indeed real but these reals are put out by their One Real that is the Self which is no other than Brahman.
M. P. PANDIT
1 Upanishad.
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THE PROBLEM OF COLLECTIVE LIFE
Unity of Mankind, a Spiritual Necessity.
I MAY fitly begin today's subject by referring to one or two facts which have hitherto escaped the public notice. The term "Co-existence" which is now extensively used in international politics was first used by Sri Aurobindo in the postscript chapter to his book The Ideal of Human Unity. He wrote : "If much of the unease, the sense of inevitable struggle, the difficulty of mutual toleration and economic accommodation still exists, it is rather because the idea of using the ideological struggle as a means for world domination is there and keeps the nations in a position of mutual apprehension and preparation for armed defence and of attack than because the coexistence of the two ideologies is impossible, (ibid p. 387)
The second point to which I may draw the attention of the audience is the possibility of Chinese aggression about which he wrote in 1949 when, probably, the visit of Chou-en-Lie and the Panchashila declaration made almost everyone feel that a new era of co-operation had dawned between India and China after practical isolation of fifteen hundred years. He wrote :
"In Asia a more perilous situation has arisen, standing sharply across the way to any possibility of a continental unity of the peoples of this part of the world, in the emergence of communist China. This creates a gigantic block which could easily
englobes the whole of Northern Asia in a combination between two enormous communist Powers, Russia and China, and would overshadow with a threat of absorption South-Western Asia and Tibet and might be pushed to overrun all up to the whole frontier of India, menacing her security and that of Western Asia with the possibility of an invasion and an overwhelming military force to an unwanted ideology, political and social institutions arid
dominance of this militant mass of communism whose push might easily prove irresistible." (p.395 ibid).
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I belive everyone in India is able to understand and accept philosophy and Yoga as legitimate fields for Sri Aurobindo's ? work, —though, I must add, many people fail to understand his Yoga because it has no external renunciation like the orthodox paths. But the greatest difficulty is encountered by Indians in regard to his ideals of collective life and international unity. What has a Yogi to do with these things ? It is likely that his two books «n the subject of collective life—The Human Cycle and The Ideal of Human Unity—appeal more easily to European minds.
Sri Aurobindo tackles the problem of man's destiny on earth and the nature of perfection man can attain. He finds that all the problems, difficulties, imperfections in man's life arise out--of man's ignorance. The word "Ignorance" is to be understood in the sense given to it in Indian culture. Our ancient culture recognises two kinds of Knowledge : Vidya and Avidya. Vidya is the Knowledge of the Self,—identity with our real Being, with One that is the World, with the Supreme. Avidya means Ignorance which includes all the branches of intellectual knowledge.
If an Omnipresent Reality, the One, is the truth of life then one would expect harmony, love and delight everywhere in life ; on the contrary, division, disharmony, conflict and suffering are more in evidence. The question is : how to eliminate them from life. Also can the Omnipresent Reality, of which Sri Aurobindo speaks as the highest and dynamic truth help us in the solution of this problem ?
In answer it may be said that the all-pervading principle of Unity is all the time active whether man is conscious about it or not. Even then, the question how did the division and disharmony arise remains to be answered. It is true that in all the operations of the present mental consciousness of man the element of duality and division is present. But man is not bound to remain confined to his mental consciousness; it is possible for him to rise to a Truth-consciousness which is now beyond—and "above— Mind. it is the Rit-Chitin—Truth-Consciousness—of the Veda, to "which Sri Aurobindo has given the name Super mind. In the Supermind Unity is the law and therefore harmony is the dynamic
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con sequence of its working. Man's destiny is to rise to that plane and bring its Light and Power into his nature which would enable him to solve all his problems.
It is necessary that the 'ego' in man should be replaced by the new Consciousness. Most of our philosophers thought ignorance to be an individual problem whereas to Sri Aurobindo it is a collective problem; in fact, it is a cosmic problem. Very often it is seen that the ignorance of the collectivity is far more dangerous than that of the individual. The Indian Puranas speak of the Asuras and Rakshasas, the titans, who symbolise the inordinate ignorance of the collectivities. The abnormal ambition of an individual may harm himself and a few persons around him but a nation outstripping the limits of normal ambition creates world-wars with all the horrible consequences.
In the old way of thinking the problem of collective life was relegated to ethics, and religion and later on to sociology. They have tried to bring high idealism and religious attitude in the conduct of collective life,—but there was no question of working out collective ignorance. But they did not succeed in solving the basic problems of collective life which arise out of individual and collective egoism. Unfortunately, clear thinking about the right principles and methods of solving problems of collective life is not much in evidence even among leaders.
The problem of the collective life of man brings us to the interpretation of history. History is not the record of man's collective life under the mechanical stress of economic, environmental or political forces, though these play their part in it. History is the gradual revelation of the Soul of the collective being of man.
It is true, history was regarded at one time as the chronicle of dynasties of kings and a story of their conquests and defeats. Then it became the story of peoples, their growth and evolution. The economic interpretation of history then came and the philosophy of history began to be attempted. Spengkr in his book,— "Decline of the West" tried to read the working of "Destiny" in history. He takes a pluralistic view of history which makes Dr. S. K. Maitra put the question: "Is history destiny without destination" ? Sri Aurobindo gives us the reorientation of the philosophy of
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history. Spangler equates time with destiny and sees history as a cyclic movement of about two thousand years after which the dominating culture must petrify itself into civilization, gradually decline, and die. Sri Aurobindo posits a spiritual principle, the collective soul in place of destiny and sees history moving towards the fulfilment of the collective spirit of man. Man's destiny, according to him, is to attain divine life on earth i.e. to attain and manifest the Truth-Consciousness which would take the place of his mental consciousness and recreate life—individual and collective—in the mould of that higher reality.
That brings in the question of the place of collective life in Sri Aurobindo's vision. He affirms the Omnipresent Reality as the basis of the universal manifestation. That Reality occupies three positions, or is triple in its view of man : (1) the Transcendental, (2) the Universal, (3) the Individual. Collective life of man is the manifestation of the Universal aspect of the Reality and the perfection of man's collective life has, therefore, a place in his scheme of integral human perfection. The divinity in the individual when realised in the collectivity and made dynamic would lead it to collective perfection.
It is the universal aspect of the Omnipresent Reality which is behind the drive for collective expression in Nature. Life is the field for the working out of this impulse and it takes two lines in the human being. One is the creation of a distinct individual, say, an ego-centre, from physical, vital and mental elements and second is the creation of greater and greater, larger and larger' units of collective life.
But the drive towards collective living is not confined to the human race; the animal and the insect world have the same trend : the bee-hive and the ant-hill are typical examples of perfectly organised societies. The difference is that in the lower kingdom there is no individuality except perhaps functional in devitalisation of the groups into workers and .fighters etc. In the case of man his collective life is seen to be evolutionary, starting from .small units and tending to create ever larger aggregates..
It is important to note that the first unit of collective life, the
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family, was not based on economic but on strong psychological elements in man's nature. It has slowly gone on evolving larger aggregates that assimilated the smaller ones destroying what could not be assimilated. To-day man has attained to the nation as the larger unit of collective life.
In some of the social philosophies the opposition between the individual and the collective life is accepted as the basic. Hence in all the applications of these outlooks the individual is pitted against the group. It is argued that the individual is only a temporary cell of the collective body and therefore not entitled to independent self-fulfilment. The collectivity being eternal, it is by living and sacrificing for it that the individual has his fulfilment.
Sri Aurobindo's vision does not accept the 'isms' in which the collective life is the Ultimate Reality of existence. He affirms the fundamental Divinity of the individual and accepts it as the indispensable brick in the building up of any perfection. Collective fife at present is not free from ignorance and cannot, therefore, lay claim to perfection. All the values that act in the collective life derive from the present imperfect state of man and can be, at most, passing. No collective perfection can result by crushing the individual. On the contrary, it is the individual alone that can contribute to the advance and perfection of collective life.
THE NATURE OF THE UNITY
He has called this Unity the 'Omnipresent Reality' in his book, the Life Divine. "The same can be expressed in old formula of the Upanishad 'All this, indeed, is the Brahman, the Infinite'. But our actual experience based on our sense-evidence and mind is not that of the Omnipresent Reality but of infinite multiplicity and every where we perceive disharmony and division and conflict. This is due to the separative action of the Mind which introduces the element of error in all human knowledge : each individual, instead of
functioning as one centre of the Universal Soul, acts and behaves as if it was the centre of the cosmos. In-
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stead of experiencing itself as one centre of the Omnipresent Reality 3 it acts as a separate individuality."
And yet the mental knowledge acquired by the ego-consciousness is not absolutely false; it is a partial or distorted view, behind which the unity is present and active. Let us take Matter, for instance,—All Matter is one in its essential constitution but the objects it gives rise to are innumerable and infinitely various.
In the same way, Energy is one yet there are many forms of it, like heat, light, electricity, etc. Life is one but there are so many types of it and each type further deploys itself in innumerable forms. Mind, as an instrument of knowledge is one yet each mind is separate and has so many different states. Humanity as a race is one and is composed of so many nationalities. Seed is one yet sprouts in a thousand different ways giving rise to an infinite variety of the same kind. Unity in the midst of an infinitely varied diversity may be said to be the plan of the universe. The many that we see are the self-multiplication of the One. It -is the self-extension of the Omnipresent Reality.
The Omnipresent Reality is Infinite, but the infinite is not the sum or multiplication of finite things. It is that which is the All and more. The Veda expresses it by saying : atyatis that dasdngulam—"It pervades the whole universe and ten fingers' measure remained over". In spite of all apparent divisions it is the occult, Secret Identical but the "Identical is not immutable" : The Identical is not "a monotone of changeless sameness incapable of variation". The unity of the Ultimate Reality, the true, dynamic unity of Sachchidananda, is not a monotony, an incapacity to assume innumerable variations, its infinity is not incapable of assuming multiple self-formations.
Thus, existence is One but its unity is infinite, universal —transcendental. There is, in fact, "infinite multiplicity of the One and eternal unity of the many" at work. Oneness is' everywhere : differentiation is everywhere : Oneness is the basic security, .multiplicity is the same Oneness "finding itself infinitely". It is "really an inexhaustible diverse display of Unity". The drive towards multiplicity—which is variation on the basis of
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unity—is so strong that no two leaves of the same tree are completely identical and men are identified by variations in their finger-marks. As we observed above, the unity gives to the universe the basic security : for, without it it would be heading for disorganisation, dissolution and anarchy; ana the multiplicity gives field for the eternal play of oneness which keeps the universe always fresh and beautiful.
But still, mind constantly feels duality, a constant opposition between two mutually contradictory elements in life : good and evil, God and Satan, Light and Darkness, Matter and Spirit, conscient and inconscient, form and formless, infinite and finite, —these appear to the mind to be fundamental and therefore eternal antinomines. But it is the nature of Mind that is responsible for setting up these trenchant divisions and oppositions; Mind divides the One, infinite Reality for its own convenience and then, instead of seeing the divisions as complimentaries, takes them for mutually exclusive realities as if they had dividing walls between them. In order to assure ourselves about the soundness of this metaphysical position let us look at the working of universal Energy. Taking the problem of dualities created by the mind, e.g. Matter and Spirit—the opposition between them tends to become less and less as we ascend in the scale of evolution, Matter giving rise to more and more conscious physical organisation; and we then discover that even the Inconscient in its mechanical operations seems to behave as if it had a will of its own, an inherent knowledge in its very constitution.
At the first surface-view of the plane of life we find not only division but conflict, struggle, distinction, struggle for existence, as it was once called, almost the prevailing law. But that is only one side of it; the elements of co-operation, sympathy, service and even sacrifice are not wanting. If there are in life ego-asserting and ego-expanding impulses no less are there ego-exceeding and ego-exceeding and go deotroyihg impulses also at work.
At this point it is necessary to look at life and find out whether it is anti-divine. in its ultimate constitution, Is it committed to
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remain for ever what it is at present ? In case it is anti-divine and inexorably condemned to her present state, it is futile to apply any spiritual remedy however successful it may be in case of exceptional individuals. The question really is that of the possibility of the collective 4ife of man.
Leaving aside the attainment of the Divine or any great spiritual Truth, the question may be asked : does Life really care even for high ideals ? Is it concerned with Truths' with God, with Beauty, with any high ideal ? If we observe the working of Life we find it is rather concerned with physical needs, desires, vital instincts, greed, ambitions, impulses. These are real to it the rest is shadowy. It is true that society gives these ideals a place in its life, but its heart is not there, e.g. ethics has a place in collective life but no society lives for ethics. It is for the satisfaction of vital needs, utility, and desires of the body that a society lives : society lives for desire, neither for religion nor for beauty. Only special individuals follow these high things—the saint, the ethical man, the artist, the thinker. Life seems to devote itself to efficiency in satisfying its vital desires.
Life is a power of Being and its impulse is not merely to last but to assert, increase, expend, possess, to enjoy : it seeks growth, power, pleasure. "Collective life has come into being from the dynamic character of life." (Human Cycle). It has brought into play two contradictory tendencies : mutual strife, and assistance, competition and co-operation. European culture has given to the world the practical, dynamic man, the vital man.
Life in a society consists of three kinds of activities : (1) Domestic and social life, (2) Economic activity as producer and consumer, (3) Political status and action.
In Asia also these were regarded as first but not chief business of' man in society.
But the main question is : What is the aim of society ? Does it exist only for satisfying the practical and
vitalistic impulses of man ? Is it for giving comfort and for securing economic and political-efficiency of the group life ? Modern collective life organised as the nation has two gods, (1) Life and (2) Practical Reason organised under the name of Science.
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But life is much more intensely individualistic, for family, society etc. are only a means for greater satisfaction of the individual vital being : society, or any collective unit however large is only the" larger ego for the individual.
The relation of the vital being of man to the higher activities of collective life is one of opposition. In fact, the individual's vital being has to be subjected to discipline in order to maintain society.
If the collective life presses too much the vital being of the individual, it may go on strike, discourage life itself as seems to have happened in case of Buddhism in India.
Life in the collectivity is Infra-Rational in the beginning,— even religion and ethics of primitive societies are infra-rational.. Then a stage comes when it becomes rational i.e. Reason tries to organise and govern life.
Whenever Reason has tried to do it in the past it has not succeeded. It is because Life is not merely Mind or reason, Life is "the imprisoned supra-rational" (Human Cycle) and therefore Reason cannot succeed in governing it completely and permanently. Take Love for instance; it is not an element that can be governed by Reason; in fact, it is not rational in its origin and working. It holds infinite possibilities within itself. Not only there is love of man and woman but there is maternal and filial love, love of comrades, of country, of humanity. Love seeks only its Absolute in life. Even economics is not merely the seeking for satisfaction of personal desires and comforts but is meant to remove poverty and squalor from mankind when it would seek its true aim. If Nature has ego-affirming instincts so she has ego-enlarging and ego-exceeding instincts and movements also : there is love, sympathy, self-denial, self-sacrifice.
Therefore it seems that "there is the pressure of an infinite on human life which will not allow it to remain too long in any formation." Life seeks the Absolute and not the rational. Reality is already there working in Life as Cosmic Self or Spirit and it can be discovered by the individual here. At its. summit the Reality is the eternal and infinite Being.
But what we actually see here is the Inconscient—inconscient
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Energy, a void, out of which Existence comes. This Existence does the work of supreme Intelligence in Matter and in Life. It seems, therefore, that the Inconscient is only a mask assumed by the Spirit that is involved in it and it imposes the law of difficult emergence on the process of slow unfolding of the Spirit. It begins from Matter in which the law of fragmentation in the form of atom seems to reign; it organises Life round a cell, and a Mind round an ego, and must in time pass from Mind to the Spirit.
The working of the Universal Energy shows that man is not the final product of evolution, that he is a transitional being, he is more than himself, he contains within him a higher than human —a divine—potentiality. The drive of Universal Energy points" to a level of consciousness beyond Mind,—what the Vedic Seers call—Ratchet, Truth-Consciousness. The bringing down of this Truth-Consciousness would make individual and collective perfection possible. The indispensable item in collective perfection is the attainment of human unity. Is the time now ripe for it ?
The primary unit of collective life is the family. Then the class, the tribe, the race, the nation gradually came into being. It is evident that Nature begins with small aggregates and develops greater and greater ones—even resorting to force and destruction in the process. The Nation is so far the largest attained unit of collective life. What is a nation ? Is it a mere geographical unit of land, or merely a sum of smaller units like the family and society etc. ? All these really are parts of the nation, instruments for the evolution of the collective soul. "Each nation is a Shakti, or power of the evolving spirit of humanity and fives by the principle it embodies." Where such national consciousness awakens the nation is able to regenerate itself even from adverse external conditions like foreign domination. Italy, Greece and Poland were under foreign domination but subsequently freed themselves as the result of awakened national consciousness. When Ireland and India launched the movement for political freedom the demand was not based on economic or political rights only but on the
need of free dam to express 'the national soul'. The collective consciousness awoke under the name of 'Bharat-Shakti' or 'Bharat-Mata' when the national movement started in India.
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The collective life of nations has been dominated by the vital-ego of the collectivity,—not by its deeper soul. It is in Europe that the nation-units were first organised and all of them were dominated by economic greed and political ambition. The organisation of the nation-unit took place round the vital ego "of the collectivity. That inevitably led to clashes with other collective egos culminating in" two devastating World-Wars. If the vital-ego leads the nation hardly any other result is to be expected.
Yet, paradoxical though it may sound universal Nature is pressing forward to the unity of mankind notwithstanding the' two World-Wars. The only unit of collective life that remains to be achieved is mankind. Once the unity of mankind is attained a major step will have been taken towards human perfection. Three factors seem to be driving towards that culmination: (1) Scientific progress that has reduced time and space and helped in removing outer barriers between man and man. (2) Drive towards economic unification throughout mankind : collective-life today, all over the world, centres round economy; far greater economic interchange is taking place between nations today than at any other time in history. It is planned economic interchange on a gigantic scale. Such economic unification needs peace and peace may bring unity nearer. (3) Increasing stress on socialism,—what is called, "Socialist Pattern", in the organisation of collective fife—throughout the world. These are external means making for unity of mankind.
Bertrand Russell in his broadcasts from London—"Living in an atomic age" proposes that by a rational utilisation of the atom-energy it is possible to solve the problems of humanity. He seems to think that the problem is only external, touching only the economic life of man. I am afraid he oversimplifies the problem. Tracing man's evolution up to now he puts it in three heads : (1) Man Vs. Nature, (2) Man Vs. Man, (3) .Mail' divided in his own self,—a state of a psychological dichotomy.-
The first of these, Man Vs. Nature, is only a half truth.
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Nature is not always antagonistic to man. Tagore is -more correct when he says that the effort to divide man and Nature is artificial like that of dividing the plant from the flower, and is therefore wrong. It is Nature that supports man giving him food, water and air, and even When she seems to oppose man it is to bring out the potential powers of man which might lead him to conquer her. There are, besides, many problems over and above economics and politics.
Russell's third point about the self-division of man's consciousness into two parts betrays, I am afraid, very poor knowledge of human personality. It is far from true to say that man projects "Sin" from within himself on to the enemy. The enemy is not" sin personified, at least no soldier ever thinks in that way.
After the two World-Wars there have been efforts to create larger than nation-units of collective life, e.g. The British Common Wealth, (2) The French entant, the vague formation of the Arab League.
But in the day to day flow of events one hardly sees signs that might encourage optimism about the ideal of human unity. The difficulties seem to be Himalayan. The highest realised unit of international unity, the U. N. O., is divided into two ideological camps and cold-war is already in progress in Korea and Berlin, China is divided into two parts; Laos is the battle-ground for the two rival powers, German unification is not yet in sight—after 13 years. Tibet is swallowed by China, India's borders are threatened by China and Pakistan, Portugal and India, South Africa and the free world have very little in harmony. Last but not least, the U. N. O.' s initial policy in Congo has not borne fruit.
Unity of mankind, seems as far away as ever.
But on the other hand signs that indicate the progress towards human unity are not altogether wanting. 1. During the second World-War Mr. Churchill actually had proposed common citizenship between France and England. It was .symptomatic of the drive towards unity of mankind. The very fact that it was put with" all seriousness during a great crisis in the nation's life shows the. direction towards which nations must move to solve problems of collective life and if the idea could not be entertained
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during a War far more easy should it be to make it a success during peace.
2. The unique fact of Indian political independence ushers in some new factors in international politics and contributes to the growth of collective life towards human unity. The Indian political movement has stressed the importance of ethical ideals, economical and political factors have been subordinated to them. It has put a new non-violent instrument in the hands of unarmed nations struggling to be free.
Another fact worth noting is the influence which free India exerts in international life, quite disproportionate to her economic and military power. It seems that the age of economic and military domination is passing from international life and slowly ethical ideals e.g. justice, equality, freedom, self-determination etc. are taking the place.
3. Up to the end of the 17th century nations defeated in War had to face the ruin not only of their political life but had to pay the victors the penalty of the War. The economic life of the vanquished was ruined for generations. After the two World-Wars there has been a radical change in that attitude. The shattered life of the defeated nation has to be helped to stand on its own feet by economic help from the victors. And now, the idea of helping even the under-developed nations to make economic progress has become a dynamic factor in international life. It may be that it is due to enlightened self-interest or to the fear that the poor nations would offer easy ground for communism, but the fact is significant of the growing feeling of unity of mankind.
4. Moreover, the recent withdrawal of French and British armies from the Suez-Canal region without firing a shot indicates how powerful imponderable forces (like world opinion) have now become. It is a sign of the increasing dynamic character which the unity of mankind is gradually achieving.
The Bhoodan movement sponsored by Vinoba Bhava, is a practical effort to live the religion of humanity in actual conditions of life in India. It puts into practice the motto : "The whole humanity is one family"—in short, "One World" is its inspiring
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ideal. That in a conservative country like England the movement of Vinoba should have found an echo under the leadership of intellectuals like Russell shows how the level of international life is rising from military and economic factors to ethical ideals Values in international life are being transformed. The whole trend brings human unity nearer.
THE POSSIBLE FORM OF UNITY OF MANKIND
The question of the form that the unity of mankind is likely . to take has been dealt with by Sri Aurobindo. The efforts to establish empires in the past were crude efforts at realising unity of mankind by force. As it was brute force on which they depended for their success they were foredoomed to failure lacking the psychological basis. They were crude attempts ; the first serious and conscious attempt for estabhshing unity of mankind was made after the first World-War and it took the form of the League of Nations. Its constitution and procedure lacked all the elements necessary to bring about real international unity. It insisted on unanimity as a rule which reduced its power of effective action and as Russia and America did not join it lacked the representative character also. It was an oligarchy of four or five big Powers that used the League to further their own policies. The principle of equality of nations was not accepted. There is no reason to be sorry for the League's failure—as it represented the ambitions of Imperial nations and not the aspirations of humanity.
THE U. N. O.
After the second World-War the need of some machinery to prevent such Wars and to solve other international problems was actutely felt and the U. N. O. was born. It is divided into two main parts': Political and Social and Cultural. The second part seems the more important of the two so far as evoking of psychological factors for promoting human unity is concerned.
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The constitution of the U. N. O. is not perfect, particularly because the oligarchic element is present in the right of the veto reserved for the five big Powers. It had some justification at the time of the start because of the great sacrifices the five nations had made in winning the War and they 'might have rightly feared being outvoted in a house where all votes were equal. But after four or five years of running the U. N. O. the voluntary surrender of the veto by one or more of the great powers would have gone a long way in creating the psychological atmosphere necessary for the real unity of mankind. If international unity has any meaning all the nations participating in the U. N. O. should be free and equal—irrespective of their size and power. The inherent strength of a nation would make itself felt without such artificial devices. The veto is artificial and keeps alive inequality and breeds bitterness.
Unfortunately the U. N. O. got split up into two ideological camps and each group got busy with canvassing support for its stand in the U. N. O. Unity of mankind, peace and security with justice, disarmament, promotion of one-world citizenship etc. which are the real concern of the U. N. O. were left aside or given a secondary place. India has tried to create an independent block based on neutralist attitude and as a result conditions are created in the U. N. O. where the smaller nations can express their opinion freely. A ground of fearlessness, equality and freedom is necessary to bring about the real unity of mankind.
POSSIBILITY OF A WORLD STATE
We have seen that the nation unit, when well established, organises its life under a state. The question then arises as to the form which the unity of mankind would take. Would it be a world statp ?
Recently Lord Atlee has said that time is ripe for a world state. It is high time that sovereignty of nations was restricted and an international authority, effective enough to carry out the decisions of the United Nations was brought into being.
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Sri Aurobindo envisaging the possibilities saw several forms which world-union could assume. The first business of such an organisation would be to establish uniformity of control in international life—a thing very badly needed at the present time. Two principles are fundamental to any such constitution; one, freedom or self-determination and second, feeling of unity with mankind. Will the world state be unitary or federal ? In order that it may succeed it is best if it is a loose federation based on the ideal of unity and on the need of preserving peace and working out plans for the well-being and progress of humanity. It would be something like the British Commonwealth—a federation of diverse nations with common aims and conventions but without "any rigid constitution.
The drive of universal Nature is towards human unity and if man can move in harmony with the intention of Nature much waste of time, energy and material could be avoided. The first task of such an international organisation would be to make peace secure in the world. That might require control of national armaments or complete or partial disarmament. The idea' of one world, one humanity, would have to be stressed frequently till it gets established and becomes a common part of the psychology of the majority of mankind. That is a very difficult task. The sovereignty of nation states might present it with a formidable resistance.
Unity of mankind and sovereignty of each Nation are two things which are not compatible. Nations will have to reduce their sovereignty to a considerable extent. It might even be questioned whether the Nation Unit will remain when unity of mankind has become a dynamic factor in international life. But it is possible that before the world-state comes into existence effectively the national egoism will try to create situations of world's strife and thus put off the day of realisation of world unity. Patriotism in the sense of narrow national egoism pan be a great obstacle in the path of the unity. It is also possible that the world unity
may be attained externally, mechanically, i.e. without any life in it. Such a thing is not impossible. Nations might come together by a sort of compromise of interest and ,it might lead
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only to rise of a constitution for execution without an impelling sense of unity behind. Such a World-State may concentrate all powers in its hands and may dictate unity under compulsion to the nations. A World-State which is a centre of military or economic power would not only wield dictatorial powers over the nations but would hardly leave room for the freedom of mind. In fact lacking all moral and spiritual elements it would be a titanic mechanical constitution in which there will be hardly any room for the experiments of the type carried on by a Gandhi or a Vinoba.
Such a World-State would have to control the life of the whole world and in order to arrive at such a control it might be obliged to become too unwieldy, too red-tape and lack crea-' tive elements. Greater the State greater would be complexity of the constitution and the need of multiple rules. An example may make this point clear. The small city-States of Greece have exhibited greater creative power than many great nations and some empires ; so also the Small republics of ancient India or Small States under Kings were more creative than extensive Empires.
One could question in face of all these difficulties : Is it that the unity of mankind is not going to be attained or even if it is attained would it only be a half success almost amounting to failure ? Perhaps the prospect is not so bleak, but it is necessary to take count of all the contingent factors and possibilities and the difficulties when we think about the problem. The crux of the difficulty is that a radical change is necessary in human nature if the unity of mankind is to be truly established. As Sri Aurobindo says, the question is of converting an animal collectivity into a divine one. Man has failed to live his religion in his life but if mankind today can make a religion of human unity and live it in its-life then the unity of mankind would be attained much sooner. The world is already one; mankind is one—unity of mankind is not to be created; it is already there; only man has to become conscious of it and make it a living reality in his thoughts and actions.
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We have used the word "religion of mankind" hut religion is not to be understood in the narrow sense of external social religion. It is a kind of spiritual religion that is meant. In the last century some thinkers and poets had accepted this spiritual religion of humanity. It was a microscopic minority at that time. It was that which inspired that poem of Leigh Hunt— "Albumen Adam may his tribe increase Rose one day from a deep dream of peace." The idea in the poem is that the lover of humanity is foremost amongst the lovers of God. Same idea is embodied in the verse of Yoga Vasistha :
येन केन प्रकारेण यस्य कस्यापि देहिनः |
संतोषं जनयेद्नाम तदेविरवर णूजनम् ||
"By whatever means to satisfy a human being is the highest worship of God". So long as the inner unity is not felt all efforts at political, economic, and cultural unity of mankind—all external efforts should be continued till the inner unity is attained. Sri Aurobindo in one of his books "The Ideal of Human Unity" has given the following conception of the religion of mankind.
"A religion of humanity means the growing realisation that there is a secret Spirit, a divine Reality, in which we are all one, that humanity is its highest present vehicle on earth, that the human race and the human being are the means by which it will progressively reveal itself here. It implies a growing attempt to live out this knowledge and bring about a kingdom of this divine Spirit upon earth. By its growth within us oneness with our fellow-men will become the leading principle of all our life, not merely a principle of co-operation but a deeper brotherhood, a real and inner sense of unity and equality and a common life. There must be the realisation by the race that only on the free and the full life of the individual can its own perfection and permanent happiness be founded. There must be too a discipline and a way of salvation in accordance with this religion, that is to say, a means by which it can
be developed by each man within himself so that it; may be developed in the life
of the race.
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But still in order to accomplish all its future, this idea and religion of humanity has to make itself more explicit, insistent and categorically imperative. For otherwise it can only work with clarity in the minds of the few and with the mass it will only be a modifying influence, but will not be the rule of human life. And so long as that is so, it cannot entirely prevail over its principal enemy. That enemy, the enemy of all real religion, is human egoism, the egoism of the individual, the egoism of the class and nation. But the higher hope of humanity likes in the growing number of men who will realise this truth and seek to develop it in themselves so that when the mind of man is ready to escape from its mechanical bent,—perhaps when it finds that its mechanical solutions are all temporary and disappointing,—the truth of the Spirit may step in and land humanity to the path of its highest possible happiness and perfection".
(Lecture delivered at the Banaras Hindu University on 8-12-1961)
A. B. PURANl
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THE fetters of ignorance are forged and strengthened by the identification of the consciousness with the finite faculties and formations on the surface. They are therefore relaxed and loosened by a process of withdrawal of the consciousness from these mortal members. Instead of becoming one with and participating in the movement of the universal Nature, man can be a witness of the whole spectacle of the panorama. If identification is a stepping out into the surface, this poise of the witness is a stepping back or a standing back from the whole scheme of universal manifestation. This is the art of going behind and behind the layers of sensation, emotion, volition and thought and passing beyond the efforts of the intellectual reason to look on, introspect and speculate upon the drama of life and body. Not mere dwelling in the chambers of the memory with its storage of idea-lumber, but an inward penetration to a state of watchfulness, jāgrata, of the entire framework of thought, feeling, willing, desiring and sensing—that is the secret of liberating oneself from the grip of the Prakriti. Nature dominates man and keeps
him a slave by self-entrenchment and the key to lessen and dissolve the tyranny is not to allow the self or the separative individual consciousness to form but prevent it by inward detachment and vision. This art of lateral penetration and witnessing awareness has quite a number of stages and finally leads to the poise of the Passive Brahman or the samam brahma or the Self which is extended equally everywhere. Stationing in this poise is the necessary prelude for becoming the mediator between the Transcendent Supramental and the triple mental, vital and physical world. Not only to see all as a spiritual witness with the vision of samam brahma but to soak all with the positive spiritual Peace of this Brahman "in all that the Active Brahman has chosen to manifest —this is the necessary preparation for receiving the onrush and descent of the Supramental. The Silence of the Passive Brahman
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and even the Silence of the Nihil of the Supreme Void behind It are needed for the safe entry of the Puissance of the Supreme Truth-Consciousness. When one waits on the threshold of the Nihil without making a crass plunge into it with the object of self-mergence and dissolution of all manifestation or the possibility of it, one finds the Silence or the Void pointing beyond Itself after the preparation of the mortal members for the play of the Purushottama in their being is completed. Thus the sadhaka of Integral Yoga pushes into the Silence of Static Being and even into the Silence of the Non-Being only to emerge out of these into the world of the Supreme Felicity and the Supramental Truth-consciousness. The experience of the All-Negating Absolute negates all that could be negated and should be negated before the interpenetration of the Supreme Truth which is beyond all negations, is rendered possible. This is the greatest utility of Nirvana for the Integral Yoga. The sadhana of Savitri, the Mother, takes up this stage of the Yoga and macadamizes it for human beings. For the only way and aim of entering the Void in the past spiritual disciplines were the complete annihilation of not only all formation or the possibility of formation of the individual self but the cessation of all possibility of cosmic creation, play or manifestation. The momentum gathered by the sadhana of Nirvana is so compelling and powerful that every seeker who has only taken a few steps in it is inevitably drawn into the .vortex of world-shunning or world-escaping asceticism and very soon finds himself passing beyond all cosmos and manifestation. No wonder that the paths of world-embracing spiritual disciplines and life-fulfilling sadhana have denounced the path of Nirvana and warned their votaries to keep away, miles away from it. To transform the road paved in the past for cosmic lay a or pralaya into, the road for the cosmic regeneration and re-creation in the Light of the Supreme—that is the work of Savitri, the Mother.
II
The technique of dissociation of the consciousness from the movements of Prakriti has often two sides to it—the one negative,
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of not imposing the will with a view to controlling or regulating Nature but allowing it complete freedom to exercise itself in all and in all manner of things, and the other positive, of trying, to discover the source or origin of all these. The negative aspect helps to see the whole of Nature for it can and would show itself fully, only when allowed to exhibit itself completely without restraint. The positive aspect makes the entry into the inner kingdoms of Nature at all possible. Again the concentration on the source of something releases one self from the tyranny of the surface for it is precisely the struggle with Nature which tightens its grip on the soul in man.
"All she allowed to rise that chose to stir;
Calling, compelling nought, forbidding nought,
She left all to the process formed in Time
And the free initiative of Nature's will.
Thus following the complex human play
She heard the prompter's voice behind the scenes,
Perceived the original libretto set
And the organ theme of the composer Force."
Human life on the surface is only an arena for the play and interplay of hidden forces emerging from the subconscient below or the Superconscient above. The heart, the vital and the nervous mechanism in man are at the mercy of the animal instincts, the impulses and the passions lying in wait or lurking ready to seize anyone unguarded but to them opportune moment and sweep, dominate and exhaust, while at the same time corrupting and polluting it. Often their onrush has the violence, instantaneousness, unpredictability and completely overwhelming devastation of thunder. Or they are found to be insinuating in an unceasing persuasive whisper craving persistently for entry and possession, reminding of the past experiences of all the small pleasures and self-gratifications that were the result of housing them. The life-parts in man are "exposed to the Powers of Hell below in their bottomless aggressive-pit, the Abyss, and to the Shaktis of Heaven above in their infinite silent heights. The hellish powers fix their gaze
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steadily, con contractedly and wildly, stare, waiting to pounce and pervade and annex human nature to their territory. The heavenly energies wait in a luminous silence to pour into the receptive vehicle the liberating force.
"She saw the Powers that stare from the Abyss And the wordless Light that liberates the soul."
Perhaps the most interesting spectacle for the mental being that man or woman is, is the realm of the mind. 'The passion and the toil of life' are either grand or terrible but to hear 'the unceasing tread and passage of thoughts in the crowded thoroughfares of the mind' is a more absorbing experience for the thinking man.
"But most her gaze pursued the birth of thought."
III
Mind is a vast region of thought-consciousness and is not exhausted or even fully represented by the brain. The brain is only a formation on the surface of the mind, having its utility in dealing with the physical and vital-physical levels of life but it has assumed such a powerful place as an intermediary ^station between all the depths of the mind within and even the heights above that these greater, more luminous Ideas have to pass through it and assume a brain-formation and stamp and even stuff if they are to be effective at all for outer life. It is 'an office issuing thought-forms', a 'factory of thought-sounds and soundless words', a
repository of 'voices unheard by men' by their outer ear but intelligible to and decipherable by a mind capable of extension of its consciousness and identification with another brain. The constructions of the brain are the bright coins minted and stored by it to transact its business with the world outside. But every brain-formation is only a symbol, a sign, a cipher, a code, a film or disc getting its full value and significance by the something deeper which it represents and embodies.
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"These were but counters in mind's symbol game,
A gramophone's disc, a reproduction's film,
A list of signs, a cipher and a code."
Thought is not generated but only recorded in the brain. It is itself a vibration in the larger area of mind in response to some movement or influence or impact from planes of consciousness deeper, wider or higher than the mind itself.
"In our unseen subtle body thought is born
Or there it enters from the cosmic field."
The deepest Psychic plane of being established in the secret heart behind the centre of emotional response in man, nihatah guhāyām, often sends out a vibration with its characteristic sweetness and light, aspiration and faith, beauty and grace. It is naked, free from all the conditioning and cramping influence or taint of the finite faculties of sensation, vital feeling or impulsion. It is an intimation of immortality to the mortal and carries with it the charge of the atmosphere of unknown, infinite modes of being, mysterious realms, full of the magic and wonder of its zones of light without shadow.
"Oft from her soul stepped out a naked thought
Luminous with mysteried lips and wonderful eyes;"
The Psychic thought has a flaming aspiration eager to consume all the dross of the outer life and establish here and now the ideal life, love and truth of the upper hemisphere, the heavens above. It can and would, if only allowed, pervade and embrace all the parts and planes of being of this small world and lift them all towards the heights. By its magic touch man's imagination can soar in the beautiful sky of faith and certitude in the advent of the golden Sun of Supramental Perfection. "Doubt is an universal impurity" which vitiates all the chambers of the mind but this Psychic
Thought in the mind is the 'one living rose'" of faith, love, light and truth, 'laughing in a golden vase' in an otherwise
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'dingy room, of flower prints.' For the Psychic Being is the great wonder-worker concealed in the depths, urging all the faculties to partake in the adventure of the Infinite, and raise the consciousness to the wide worlds of Felicity above so that there is a rebirth of wonder in the awakened heart and all life pulsates with a new hope of transformation and regeneration in the image of the Supreme Plenitude :
"A thaumaturgies sat in her heart's deep,
Compelled the forward stride, the upward look,
Till wonder leapt into the illumined breast
And life grew marvellous with transfiguring hope."
The Light of this Psychic Being can touch all the centres of a man's personality and every such influence manifests a new, undreamt-of perfection on earth. The centre of will between the eyebrows becomes a pondering, dynamic seeing will. The centre of thought behind the brain becomes a generator of holy thoughts of devotion transmitting the radiance of the higher regions of Light. The centre of the vital and imaginative mind in the upper regions of the breast is now the seat of unearthly beauty, surpassing joy and plans of miracles, dreams of delight. The centre of the lower vital, the navel lotus, is now clustered thick with large sensations inspired by the vision of the world of Archetypal Ideas above. The centre of the externalising mind, the small sensitive flower of the throat, is now invaded by the figures of a heavenly speech. The centre of the vital-physical, below the navel, the swādhisthāna houses longings of physical sweetness and ecstasy. And even the physical consciousness responds to the touch of the Psyche and sends strong currents of nervous vibrations to the 'mystic crown', 'where Nature's murmurs meet the Ineffable'. But all these Psychic and subliminal vibrations are easily mistaken by the outer mind as manufactures of the brain and only the inner mind recognizes them for what they are in their origin and substance.
But the Psychic is not the only source of influence on the surface "mind and personality of man. The Superconscient and the Subliminal send their emanations into the mortal mind.
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"Thoughts leaped down from a superconscient field
Like eagles swooping from a viewless peak,
Thoughts gleamed up from the screened subliminal depths
Like golden fishes from a hidden sea."
These thoughts enlarge the range of aspiration of the mortal consciousness, infuse a new courage to the drooping soul of man, relight the sinking torch of faith and make him look to the Infinite in and through the finite. The awakening of the subliminal extends and widens the consciousness into the subtle worlds of the cosmic Mental, Vital and Physical planes :
"A sight opened upon the invisible
And sensed the shapes that mortal eyes see not,
The sounds that mortal listening cannot hear,
The blissful sweetness of the intangible's touch,
The objects that to us are empty air
Are there the stuff of daily experience
And the common pabulum of sense and thought."
The forces and beings of these hidden worlds reveal themselves to the gaze of the subliminal mind ; the far becomes and is felt as near; the past is felt as always present and the individual mind gets the power and right of entry into the other minds in even other worlds. But simultaneously with the precipitations of the subliminal and the Superconscient, the subconscient too reveals itself:
"The dim subconscient incoherent hints -
Laid bare a meaning twisted deep and strange,
The bizarre secret of their grumbling speech,
Their links with underlying reality."
The mystery of the human personality is the housing in the same organisation of consciousness the Superconscient and the subconscient, the subliminal and the surface :
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"This world is a vast unbroken totality,
A deep solidarity joins its contrary powers.
God's summits look back on the mute Abyss.
So man evolving to divinest heights
Colloquies still with the animal and the Djinn ;
The human godhead with star-gazer eyes
Lives still in one house with the primal beast.
The high meets the low, all is a single plan."
Thought has therefore many births in all these realms and the witnessing consciousness of Savitri is looking on at all these different kinds of thoughts. Not only these thoughts from the Psychic, superconscient, subliminal and subconscient, but the surface and the all too petty but none-the-less powerful outer physical mind are seen by her :
"This mind is a dynamic small machine
Producing ceaselessly till it wears out,
With raw material drawn from the outside world,
The patterns sketched out by an artist God.
Often our thoughts are finished cosmic wares
Admitted by a silent office gate
And passed through the subconscient galleries,
Then issued in Time's mart as private make.
For now they bear the living person's stamp ;
A trick, a special hue claims them his own.
All else is Nature's craft and this too hers."
IV
The practice of the art of the witnessing consciousness "becomes possible for man because in his personality there are not only the formations of universal Nature or Prakriti of the mental, vital arid physical levels in the outer surface and the inner subliminal, but there are corresponding to these nature-formations, soul-poises or Purushas. Thus we have the Inner Physical Purusha, the Inner Vital Purusha and the Inner Mental Purusha.
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A successive identification with these inner Purushas gives a release from the bondage of the Prakriti and helps the process of looking on. Thus the Sadhaka of this Yoga of Witnessing Awareness realizes that all thinking, willings, sensing and impulsions in man are the work of Universal Prakriti and the individual is only an accepting medium and not the sole originator or executor as he mistakenly conceives himself to be, in his Ignorance:
"Our tasks are given, we are but instruments;
Nothing is all our own that we create;
The Power that acts in us is not our force :"
'This is the truth not only about all average and mediocre men but it is also true of the great men of genius. The only difference is in the source from which they receive. The ordinary man receives from the lower Nature of Ignorance while the exceptional man gets his ideas from the Super nature above :
"The genius too receives from some high fount
Concealed in a supernal secrecy
The work that gives him an immortal name.
The word, the form, the charm, the glory and grace
Are missioned sparks from a stupendous Fire;
A sample, from the laboratory of God
Of which he holds the patent upon earth,
Comes to him wrapt in golden coverings;"
Every great idea is the priceless gift delivered by the postman called Inspiration into the corridors of the mind. Only the receiving mind spoils it a little or mixes it with some manufacture of the surface brain :
"When least defaced, it is most divine."
It is only man's egoism which arrogantly claims this working of Prakriti, higher or lower, as its own.
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"Although his ego claims the world for its use,
Man is a dynamo for the cosmic work ;
Nature does most in him, God the high rest : "
Only his soul's acceptance is his own."
Man is bound by Nature and is her slave because his soul has accepted this bondage and the right of withholding or withdrawing the sanction is always there with him. Once that is done he becomes 'Nature's freed man or God's slave.'
V
The method of the dissociation of the Purusha from the" Prakriti naturally results in a liberation of the individual from the conditioned limited awareness of the egoistic life on the surface. But a still higher realisation becomes possible when one is not contented with the poise of the Manomaya Purusha but pushes beyond and ascends into the Realm of the Spiritual Consciousness above the Mind :
'But only when we break through Matter's wall
In that spiritual vastness can we stand
Where we can live the masters of our world,
And mind is only a means and body a tool..
For above the birth of body and of thought
Our spirit's truth lives in the naked self
And from that height, unbound, surveys the world."
This profound desire for liberation from all mentalisings, mumu-ksutwa, is such a rare quality that it is spoken of as the greatest achievement and indispensable prerequisite for the final liberation or Moksha. *
"Out of the mind she rose to escape its law "
That it might sleep in some deep shadow of self
Or fall silent in the silence of the Unseen."
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The basic difference between Savitri's ascent into the Realm of the Spirit and the Ascetic's plunge into That, lies in the aim of the former to arrive at the fulfilment of life as contrasted with the withdrawal from all manifestation of the latter. So we find Savitri at every step not losing the thread or connection with life or even the wakeful awareness. We do not find the exclusive emphasis on the Samadhi of Trance so characteristic of the traditional Advaita Sadhana. For the Sannyasi, the art of being in the Laya of the Atman is the greatest art and privilege of human life. To minimise the moments of wakeful awareness and increase the periods of Samadhi are the ways of wisdom. On the other hand the Sadhana of Savitri becomes a peculiar kind of Jagrat Samadhi and the only discipline which comes near it and resembles it to a certain extent is the Sahaja Samadhi spoken of by some Advaita Yogis. Even in their case, they declare the repeated experience of the Samadhi of Trance as a necessary prelude to the experience of Sahaja Sthithi. The Samadhi of Trance tries and succeeds in losing connection with the mind and the world. The Sahaja Samadhi aims at spiritualising the mind and therefore acclimatising it as best as" it can be done to the Spiritual Vision. Though this is one of the greatest achieved peaks of Spiritual Realisation, it falls far short of the aim of Savitri, the Mother. So her attempt is characterised neither by the method of the severing of the connection or link with the mind, nor by the slow spiritualising of the mind by alternate returns, to the mind after bouts of Trance. But she enters the Spirit consciously and having risen above, she takes up the mind, life and body and dedicates them to the Spirit, so that Brahman could take them up and transform them into Its spiritual substance. The Spiritualised mind remains yet the mind however influenced by the Spirit. But Savitri aims at a new creation of the triple world in the full Light of the Supreme Spirit:
"High she attained and stood from Nature free
And saw creation's life from far above,
Thence upon all she laid her sovereign will
To dedicate it to God's timeless calm:"
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This is not die mere ascent of the traditional Yoga of Advaita but it is always accompanied by the descent. The positive puissant Peace of the Spirit is pushed into the receiving mind and life. The first stage in receiving the Spiritual Peace is "that all grew tranquil in her being's space."
"Only sometimes small thoughts arose and fell
Like quiet waves upon a silent sea
Or ripples passing over a lonely pool
When a stray stone disturbs its dreaming rest.
Yet the mind's factory had ceased to work,
There was no sound of the dynamo's throb,
There came no call from the still fields of life."
The next stage is when even these occasional small vibrations or spanda of the mental lake stop :
"Her mind now seemed like a vast empty room
Or like a peaceful landscape without sound."
This is a state of complete suppression of all mental movements, all feelings and thoughts not finding indeed any response from the silenced brain however violently they may cry, but they are 'effervescing like a chaos under a lid.' The possibility of an explosion at any moment is not yet ruled out. This yields under the pressure of the descending Peace of the Spirit to the next stage when the 'body seems a stone' and 'all now becomes a wide mighty vacancy'. This is certainly a state of absolute freedom from all individual thought or feeling. The mind, heart, vital, vital-physical and the body are no doubt steeped in silence. But even now some thoughts could cross her solitude. "Thy silence is not yet deep enough; something is in movement in thy mind." They are the thoughts from the Cosmic Mind, moving silently in the Cosmic Spiritual Ether surrounding and enveloping the individual consciousness. The individual mind being but a part of Cosmic Mind, any vibration in the Universal, naturally comes to the part but,, of course, the individual has acquired the power of rejection of any finite -
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thought-formation and so the thought which comes so confident of gaining its entry in the individual mind 'meets a barring will, a blow of force and sinks vanishing in the immensity' :
"After a long vacant pause another appeared
And others one by one suddenly emerged.
Mind's unexpected visitors from the unseen
Like far-off sails upon a lonely sea."
This transaction between the Cosmic mind and the individual stops after a time :
"But soon that commerce failed, none reached mind's coast.
Then all grew still, nothing moved any more :
Immobile, self-rapt, timeless, solitary
A silent spirit pervaded silent Space."
Savitri begins to experience the 'repose of the Absolute' and the 'ocean silence of Infinity'.
REFERENCES :
Savitri, Book VII Canto VI.
Prayers and Meditations of the Mother.
M. V. SEEARAMAN
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EDUCATION XV
EDUCATION OF THE VITAL
THE vital or prana is the seat of power and energy. It is in the vital that our thought assumes the aspect of will, and its conceptive faculty is transformed into a directive and executive force. Without the collaboration of the vital, human thought is incapable of realising anything in life. All its idealism, all its lofty dreams of progress and perfection, would remain mere shining chimeras, beckoning and tantalising him from above, but devoid of the means of translating themselves into the realities of the physical life. It is the vital whose aid is indispensable for any kind of practical fulfilment in the world, be it secular or spiritual.
This is a truth which we in India have to wake up to after many a long century of deliberate suppression of the vital under the spell of the delusive theory of Mayavada. Life is unreal; it is a lie or a snare; the activities of the worldly life, except only the few prescribed by the sacred books for the purification of the psychological being, are a bondage, entailing an endless chain of birth and death, and the only way out is the renunciation of the world, and an exclusive concentration on the extinction or merger of the individual self in the featureless infinity of the immutable Spirit. This teaching with all its life-negating implications cast a perpetual blight upon the dynamic springs of the life-force in man and his entire vital being, and inevitably led to the damping down of the creative fire and the enfeeblement of the nation.1 India lost in strength and will-power, and fell a prey to a succession of foreign invaders. Gone were the days of her military prowess, Kshetra virya, which was the priceless inheritance of her culture
1 "When there is that division between life and the spirit, sentence of condemnation is passed upon human life. Either it is left to circle in its routine or it is decried as worthless and unreal, a vanity of vanities, and loses that confldence in itself and inner faith in the value of its terrestrial aims, śraddhā, without which it cannot come to anything.'' Sri Aurobindo- The Human Cycle, Chapter XXI.
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from ancient glory; gone her political power and economic abundance, her creative genius and organising talent. When its prana or the vital being languishes and withers, a nation sinks into tamas, the obscurity of inert emasculation, and advances towards disintegration. But fortunately for India, she escaped that final disaster by the timely impact of the West, whose robust gospel of life-affirmation and scientific material efficiency quickened her vitality, and brought about her rebirth. It neutralized the traditional lure of the cave and the ochre robe, and induced India to revise her philosophy of life, deepen her inner vision, and arrive at a grand synthesis of the higher values. A new era began. The perilous lure melted away. A profounder vision revealed the "untapped potentialities of life, and the material existence received its due respect and freedom to grow and to create.
But there is here, in the freedom given to the vital, a danger which has to be guarded against. And it is a tragedy of history that the West, whose gospel of life-affirmation contributed to the rebirth of the soul of India, itself fell a prey to this danger, and has been tossing about in the stormy sea of the unredeemed vital. The prana or the vital being is not the real man, but an instrument for his self-expression in the material world. To regard it as the whole man, and suffer it to possess the human consciousness for its own satisfaction is to run the grave risk of corrupting life at its grass-roots. That is what has happened in the West. Vital gratification of every kind; fulfilment of desire and realisation of ambition; pursuit of vital comfort, luxury and ease; predominance of the economic element over the higher values; and the deification of the commercial and industrial magnates, the tycoons, as the Americans call them, as ideal citizens, the shining exemplars of life's success—this has been almost the sole preoccupation of modern man. Sri Aurobindo describes it as economic barbarism. The vital as the fount of power and energy has certainly to be fully developed and given unfettered scope for free creation, but it must be subject to the soul of man, its real master. It is' for the self-expression and self-fulfilment of the soul or the Divine in the soul that she vital exists, and not for itself, and it attains its perfection only when it serves the soul with its purified will and chastened
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and sublimated power. It is a common feature of the economy of Nature that the greatest potentialities are always beset by the greatest dangers and difficulties.
The normal human vital nourishes in itself the canker of desire and self-will. So long as it is unpurified and egoistic, it is "the seat of desires and passions, of violent impulses and equally violent reactions, of revolt and depression." Indeed, most of the sufferings of human life can be traced to the unruly behaviour of the vital and its stubborn refusal to submit to any discipline and restraint. It pursues its desires, impelled by the blind drive of its energies, and creates clashes and conflicts with the equally unruly vital of others. "The vital in man's nature is a despotic and exacting tyrant. Moreover, since it holds within itself power, energy, enthusiasm, effective dynamism, many have a feeling of timorous respect for it and try always to please it. But it is a master that is satisfied by nothing and its demands have no limit."1
What is the psycho-physical modality of the normal action of the vital? It is nourished by sensations. All its contacts with the outside world are through sensations generated in it by sense-objects. And the sensations give rise to emotions and feelings. It likes, it dislikes; it loves, it hates; it is attracted and repelled, it resents and repents, and is constantly rocked and torn by these actions and reactions. This is the melodrama to which the vital is passionately attached, and without it, it loses all its zest for life, it becomes insipid and insensitive.
It is this restless, wearing life of sensations with its interminable chain reactions of pleasure and pain, joy and grief, attraction and repulsion that sometime or other, awakens the human mind to its inherent vanity and vexation, and launches it upon the quest of something which is abiding and stably satisfying. Even its most intoxicating pleasures leave a bitter taste in the mouth. Its desires are fickle and flighty, its passions up heaving and exhausting. Withdrawal from this life of sensations has, therefore, been preached as the only means of discovering the stable, self-
1 All quotations are from The Mother on Education (Chapter IV) in Sri Aurobindo and the Mother or Education.
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existent, self-satisfying reality. In some ascetic forms of this withdrawal, sensations have been suppressed and even stifled, in order to clear the way to concentration on the reality. "The usual remedy is to strangle it, to starve it by depriving it of sensations."
The right remedy is not to starve the vital by rejecting all sensations, or even whittling them down or dulling their edge. Sensations are the legitimate functions of the senses, and deserve a rightful place in the economy of our nature. They are, like all the other functions of our composite being, indispensable to the fullness and perfection of human life. They are, as the Mother says, "an excellent instrument for knowledge and education. To make them serve this purpose, they should not be used with an egoistic purpose, as a means of enjoyment, in a blind and ignorant seeking for pleasure and self-satisfaction." "They must be utilised with discrimination and discernment."
What supports and sustains the life of sensations, in spite of its feverish pursuits and its vicious circle of fugitive satisfactions, trailing regrets and sufferings, is the notion, which has possessed the modern mind, particularly the Western mind, that the goal of life is happiness. This idea or notion is, as the Mother points out, "a crude deformation of a very profound truth : It is that all existence is based upon the delight of being, and without the delight of being there would be no life." But this delight of being, Atmananda, Brahmananda, is not the fleeting pleasures we feel in the life of sensations. These pleasures depend upon outer objects, outer touches, upon chance happenings and uncertain circumstances, which only dole out wretched crumbs to us from time to time. Pitiable beggars that we are, we, who have fallen from the majesty of our soul, sustain ourselves with these crusty crumbs. But the outer objects cannot give us eternal and infinite happiness for which our beings are really athirst. They only tickle our senses and pass away, leaving us pining for more and more. They are conditional, and very limited, and afflicted with a maddening insufficiency. They are a goad, a lash, an impetuous spur to drive us, distracted. and hungering, for more and ever more of them in a blind infatuation.
But the delight of being is unconditional and unconditioned and unconditioned
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—it is infinite and everlasting, self-existent and independent of any external cause and object. It never comes and goes, nor waxes and wanes, but endures in itself, and, even in revelling in self-variation, remains eternally master of itself.
"The conviction that makes one believe that one has the right to be happy leads, as a matter of course, towards the will to live one's life at any cost." It is at the root of the pernicious philosophy of "getting on" which is the dominant factor in shaping modern life. "This attitude in its obscure and aggressive egoism brings about every conflict and misery, deception and discouragement, ending often in a catastrophy." The goal of life is not personal happiness, secured by struggles with others, but an ascent to the Truth-Consciousness, and realisation of the unity of existence. It is the separative and 'alienated' consciousness of our ignorant mind that divides each one of us from the world and makes us concentrate on our individual happiness. As well might each wave of the sea, or each star in the heavens concentrate on its individual fulfilment. This ego-centric consciousness is the basic cause of all disharmony and conflict. It is a violence against the very truth of existence. Not happiness, but constant strife and clash, disquiet and misery stem from this frenzied chase after personal happiness. The individual is dependent upon the world for everything that he calls his own. His body is made up of the substance of universal Matter, his vital receives its energy and power, its very sustenance from the universal vital, and his mind is nourished by thoughts and ideas, flowing into it from the environing universal mind. Is it not crass ingratitude to disown such a prodigious debt to the world, and pit oneself against one's never-failing benefactor ? But the ingratitude brings upon itself its own nemesis. The world-forces against which it wages an egoistic war are too powerful for its paltry strength to withstand—they knock him down at every step. This is the cause of his suffering. It is, therefore, by a conscious recovery of his unity with all, and a living in unity, and even oneness, that the individual can attain to harmony and happiness everlasting.
(To be continued)
RISHABHCHAND
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SRI AUROBINDO ON THE POETRY OF THE FUTURE
I
THE Future Poetry of Sri Aurobindo is as much a work of major and far-reaching importance in the field of literary criticism as The Life Divine is in the realm of philosophy, or The Human Cycle is in the domain of sociology. As the title indicates, it gives us an idea of the poetry, destined to be written in future. Though Sri Aurobindo says with his characteristic modesty that "To attempt to presage the future turn or development of mind or life in any of its fields is always a hazardous occupation"1, yet we may take it that when he has undertaken, as in this book, to give us a glimpse of the future form and expression of poetry, it is with a clear and comprehensive vision of the
spiritual and not merely imaginative mind that he would do it. As such, one is hardly aware of any streak of doubting hesitancy or fumbling uncertainty or, on the contrary, any tendency towards an exaggerated flight of some over-colour full imagination, while going through the pages of the book. It is true, as he says again, that "life and mind are not, like physical Nature which runs in precise mechanical grooves", these beings "more mobile and freer powers", and "It is
there fore impossible to predict what the poetry of the future will actually be like."2 All that he would attempt to do in the circumstances is "to distinguish for oneself some possibilities that lie before the poetic mind of the race and to figure what it can achieve if it chooses to follow out certain great openings which the genius of recent and contemporary poets has made free to us."3 But what will be the actual or precise forms and features, or lines of movement, of that poetry, Sri Aurobindo would not determine with any logical rigidity of thought or scientific or, for the matter of" that, poetic bent of mind, though the general picture of the future is clear and vivid enough in his critical vision. Better it is that the "path" which the poetic mind of the future ".will actually
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choose to tread", or the "new heights" it will seek to scale are left "for its own yet undecided decision."4
, This had been stated in the second decade of this century when The Future Poetry was being published in The Arya from Pondicherry as a series of essays from 15-12-1917 to 15-7-1920. At that time Sri Aurobindo was hardly in actual touch with the contemporary English or, for the matter of that, Western poets and poetic trends. As far as English poetry was concerned, it was the time when the Georgian movement had reached the state of decadence and the "modernist" movement under the leadership of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot had not yet made its influence felt. And it was not long afterwards that sensitive critical minds had begun to declare that poetry mattered little to the modern world or that the age of poetry was gone. Despite the absence of any actual personal contact with what was happening in the literary world of contemporary Europe, he felt, as if through some unerring critical intuition, the very pulse of that world and raised the question with an unambiguous clarity as well as the determination to face it squarely: are we in for poetic decadence or new birth?
To state the truth, this still remains a crucial question of our times. And it is a question which concerns not merely poetry and literature and art but philosophy, religion, thought and culture in general, nay, our very life and civilisation. It is a question vital to the future of mankind itself. However, we are concerned here with the future of poetry alone. There are people, says Sri Aurobindo, who think that "...since the modern mind is increasingly scientific and less and less poetically and aesthetically imaginative, poetry must necessarily decline and give place to science,—for much the same reason, in fact, for which philosophy replaced poetry in Greece" 5. On the other hand, there are others who suggest that "...the poetic mind might become more positive and make use of the materials of science or might undertake a more intellectual though always poetic criticism of life and might fill the place of philosophy and religion" 6. But this means more or less the same thing, even "a more protracted decadence", for it equally means "a deviation from the true law of aesthetic creation". The large fact is that
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"The pure intellect cannot create poetry. The inspired or imaginative reason does indeed play an important, sometimes a leading part, but even that can only be a support or an influence...it is the spirit within and not the mind without that is the fount of poetry."7 However, Sri Aurobindo does not think that we are heading towards only more and more of intellectualism, more and more of science. On the contrary, "...the human intelligence seems on the verge of an attempt to rise through the intellectual into an intuitive mentality; it is no longer content to regard the intellect and the world of positive fact as all or the intellectual reason as a sufficient mediator between life and the spirit, but is beginning to perceive that there is a spiritual mind which can admit us to a greater and more comprehensive vision....A first opening out to this new way of seeing is the sense of the work of Whitman and Carpenter...of Tagore and Yeats and A. E., of Meredith and some others of the English poets."8 Sri Aurobindo is aware that there are critics who regard this tendency as only "... another sign of decadence; they see in it a morbid brilliance, a phosphorescence of decay"9 He also admits that "There is much that is morbid, perverse or unsound in some recent poetry"10. But then he would like us also to see that "...this comes from an artificial prolongation of the past or a temporary mixed straining, it does not belong to that element in the new poetry which escapes from it and turns firmly to the things of the future"11 His own opinion is that decadence sets in "...when the poetic mind settles irretrievably into a clumsy and artificial repetition of past forms and conventions or can only escape from them into scholastic or aesthetic prettiness or extravagance. But an age which brings in large and new vital and spiritual truths, truths of our being, truths of the self of man and the inner self of Nature and opens vast untrod ranges to sight and imagination, is not likely to be an age of decadence, and a poetry which voices these things...is not likely to be a poetry of decadence"12.
Sri Aurobindo has, therefore, no doubt in his mind that poetry is not heading towards decadence. On the contrary, it is 'going to be written with a newly developing "intuitive mentality", resulting in "a greater and more comprehensive vision", "a luminous totality". Since the age breaking upon us will, as years pass by,
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more and more aim at "...neither materialism nor an intuitive vitalism nor a remote detached spirituality., but a harmonious and luminous totality of man's being" 13, we may safely presume that to the poetry of this new age "...the whole field of existence will be open for its subject, God and Nature and man and all the worlds, the field of the finite and the infinite. It is not a close, even a high close and ending in this or any field that the future offers to us, but a new and higher evolution, a second and greater birth of all man's powers and his being and action and creation".14
II
Believing, as he does, in the truth of evolution, it is no wonder -if Sri Aurobindo relates the various phases of the evolution of Western poetry with those of the evolution of man himself. Man's poetry is shown to be very closely linked with the level of consciousness and fife and culture attained by him at the time. In this connection, Sri Aurobindo gives us a theory of poetry which is truly remarkable for both its novelty and profundity. He remarks: "...poetry is a
psychological phenomenon, the poetic impulse a highly charged force of expression of the mind and soul of man, and therefore in trying to follow out its line of evolution it is the development of the psychological motive and power, it is the kind of feeling, vision, mentality which is seeking in it for its word and idea and form of beauty and it is the power of the soul through which it finds expression or the level of mind from which it speaks which we must distinguish to get a right idea of the progress of poetry. All else is subsidiary, variations of rhythm, language, structure; they are the form, the vehicle; they derive subtly and get their character and meaning from the psychological power and the fundamental motive"l5. It is self-evident, therefore, that "If poetry is a highly-charged power of aesthetic expression of the soul of man, it must follow in its course of evolution the development of that soul".16 "And then follows a very felicitous and picturesque description of the evolution of the soul of man by Sri Aurobindo. He deals- with this favourite subject of his at various places both in prose and poetry but the beauty is that every time the expression
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or treatment is fresh, striking and delightfully readable and sound. The same thrill of novel charm we get here too; and there is, in addition, the rasa of poetic beauty which good critical prose can wear like an easy, natural garment in the heat of creative intensity. The passage is long but it deserves to be quoted almost in full:
"I put it that from this point of view the soul of man like the soul of Nature can be regarded as an unfolding of the spirit in the material world. Our unfolding has its roots in the soil of the physical life; its growth shoots up and out in many directions in the stalk and branches of the vital being; it puts forth the opulence of the buds of mind and there, nestling in the luxuriant leaves of mind and above it, out from the spirit which was concealed in the whole tprocess must blossom the free and infinite soul of man, the hundredpetalled rose of God. Man indeed, unlike other forms of being in terrestrial Nature, though rooted in body, proceeds by the mind and all that is characteristic of him belongs to the wonderful play of mind taking up physicality and life and developing and enriching its gains till it can exceed itself and become a spiritual mind, the divine Mind in man. He turns first his view on the outward physical world and on his own life of outward action and concentrates on that or throws into its mould his life-suggestions, his thought, his religious idea, and, if he arrives at some vision of an inner spiritual truth, he puts even that into forms and figures of the physical life and physical Nature.*Poetry at a certain stage or of a certain kind expresses this turn of the human mentality in word and in form of beauty. It can reach great heights in this kind of mental mould, can see the physical forms of the gods, lift to a certain greatness by its vision and disclose a divine quality in even the most obvious, material and outward being and action of man; and in this type we have Homer. Arrived to a greater depth of living...man begins to feel more sensitively the passion and power of fife, its joy and pain, its wonder and terror and beauty and romance, to turn everything into moved thought and sentiment and sensation of the life-soul, the desire-soul in him which first forces itself on his introspection when he begins to go inward,
* As in the hymns of the Vedic Rishis ;
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Poetry too takes this turn, rises and deepens to a new kind of greatness; and at the summit in this kind we have Shakespeare".17 However, the vital way of seeing and creating, in which "thought is involved in life", cannot permanently satisfy the mental being that is man, and he outgrows this stage in order to get "a clear detached idea" of the passion, the emotion, "the thought-suggestions of-life" and "see with the calm eye of his reason", and "...probe, analyse, get at the law and cause and general and particular rule of himself and Nature".18 And poetry, too, responds to this mental growth in man and "...takes on the lucid, restrained, intellectual and ideal classic form, in which high or strong ideas govern and develop -the presentation of life and thought"19. And herein, according to Sri Aurobindo, lies the greatness of the Greek and Latin poets. But. this is not the end of the intellectual development of either man and his poetry, for "afterwards the intelligence sets more comprehensively to work, opens itself to all manner of the possibilities of truth...an endless succession of pregnant generalisations. This is the type of modern intellectualism"20. The poetry which arises out of this phase of intellectual growth of man is "full of a teeming many-sided poetic ideation", blends "the classical and romantic motives" and combines together "...the realistic, aesthetic, impressionist, idealistic ways of seeing and thinking, makes many experiments and combinations, passes through many phases".21 In such a situation neither "the true classic form" nor the "pure and genuine romanticism of the life-spirit" is possible, and all attempts to return to either of these are apt to fail. The truth, according to Sri Aurobindo, is that "The poetry of an age of many-sided intellectualism can live only by its many-sidedness and by making everything as it comes a new material for the aesthetic creations of the observing, thinking, constructing intelligence."22
The future of poetry is, thus, according to this view, interlinked with the future phase of modern man's consciousness and culture. Sri Aurobindo's sound spiritual optimism leads him to feel that the future of both is bright enough. There may be some among us who may not share his optimism and may hold the" view .that our civilisation and art and literature and thought arc all doomed to reach or have already reached a dead end, since mankind cannot
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go any further. Indeed, it cannot go any further if. it continues to cling like a leech to its present-day limited, intellect-bound mentality but if its consciousness can undergo a real spiritual change, bringing about a radical transformation of his whole nature and life, his physicality, vitality and mentality, definite signs of which are increasingly emerging both in the East and the West, modern man need not five under the fear of complete annihilation. The only thing needed is the desire to exceed himself, at first, internally, spiritually and then, with the help and under the guidance of this inner change, to transcend all those limits which hamper the growth of his external life and action.
Sri Aurobindo, on his part, has tried to indicate and stress in so many ways and through so many of his writings, with all the power of the certitude of seer-vision, the belief that humanity is again moving towards a new intuitive mentality and the age of the spirit after passing through the cycles of physical, vital and intellectual or rational modes of thinking and living. If we accept this belief—and there is no reason why we should not —, it is clear, he says, that it is to "...something very like the effort which was the soul of the Vedic or at least the Vedantic mind that we almost appear to be on the point of turning back in the circle of our course. Now that we have seen minutely what is the material reality of the world in which we live and have some knowledge of the vital reality of the Force from which we spring, we are at last beginning to seek again for the spiritual reality of that which we and all things are".23 But there will be, he says, quite a substantial difference between our new vision of the spiritual reality and the one which obtained in the old times. In the old days, the spiritual godheads of Truth, Freedom, Unity, Love, Beauty, Delight, Harmony etc. were "...mysteries, which men left to the few, to the initiates and by so leaving them lost sight of them in the end, but the endeavour of this new mind is to reveal, to divulge and to bring near to our comprehension all mysteries...and this turn towards an open realisation may well lead to an age in which man as a race jail try to five in a greater Truth than has yet governed our "kind...His creation too will then be moved by another spirit and cast on other lines".24
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If all this takes place even to some definite extent, poetry may recover its old hieratic prestige and power. Of course, quite a good deal of it will continue to be written along the old lines and in accordance with the old commoner aesthetic motives, but what is hopeful and more than probable is that conditions will be there for the emergence of "the poet who is also a Rishi", "the poet-seer and seer-creator", "...master singers of Truth, hierophants and magicians of a diviner and more universal beauty".25 As a matter of fact, "there is already the commencement", Sri Aurobindo says, of such a possibility; "...the conscious effort of Whitman, the tone of Carpenter, the significance of the poetry of A. E., the ' rapid immediate fame of Tagore are its first signs."26 The poet is already becoming the Rishi. "Mankind satiated with the levels is turning its face once more towards the heights, and the poetic voices that will lead us thither with song will be among the high seer voices".27 We are not to forget that he said this in the early decades of this century when the name of Tagore was spreading all over the world and a new ferment of thought and consciousness had begun to change the face of things and life, both in the East and the West, including the face of literature and art.
What is more, this new poetry of the future, Sri Aurobindo emphasised, will more and more reveal to us that "...the spirit and life are not incompatible, but rather a greater power of the spirit brings a greater power of life".28 Reminiscent almost of Matthew Arnold but with an entirely new outlook and visitor Sri Aurobindo declared that, while philosophy often lost itself in abstractions and religion turned to "an intolerant other-worldliness", the function of poetry had always been to bring about a union between "...the immaterial and the concrete, the spirit and life"29 and this function of poetry, he held with a prophetic certitude, would gain in strength and intensity in the years to come.
The new poetry, he said, would also deepen our experience of beauty and delight by increasingly revealing to us how these things "are really spiritual in origin and purpose. He reminded us that "...the ancient Indian idea is absolutely true that delight, Ananda is the inmost expressive and creative nature of the' free self because it is the very essence of the original being of there
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Spirit"30; and that "...the highest kinds of delight and beauty are those which are one with the highest Truth, the perfection of life and the purest and fullest joy of the self-revealing Spirit",31 Thus, this poetry will seek to provide us with something like "...a supreme harmony of five eternal powers, Truth, Beauty, Delight, Life and the Spirit"32 in a manner un attempted and unrealised before. And its mode of apprehension of these things will be predominantly intuitive and psychic and not merely vitally and intellectually imaginative. As he says : "It will be first and most a poetry of the intuitive reason, the intuitive senses, the intuitive delight-soul in us, getting from this enhanced source of inspiration a more sovereign poetic enthusiasm and ecstasy, and then, it may even be, rise towards a still greater power of revelation nearer to the direct vision and word of the Over mind from which all the creative inspirations come."33 But this does not mean that it will be something so high and remote and intangible that we of the earth cannot feel at home in it. On the contrary, it will not only seek to make "...the highest things near, close and visible"34 but "...sing greatly and beautifully of all that has been sung, all that we are from outward body to very God and Self, of the finite and the infinite, the transient and the Eternal,...with a new reconciling and fusing vision that will make them other to us than they have been even when yet the same".35 It will be, thus, in the best possible sense both original and traditional, individual and universal, 'classical and romantic, realistic and idealistic.
(To Continue)
SRIKRISHNAPRASAD
REFERENCES
1. The Future Poetry, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry,
I953, P- 279.
2,3,4. Ibid., p. 279.
5,6.Ibid.-p. 273.
7. Ibid., pp. 273-274.
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8. Ibid., pp. 275-276.
9,10,11. Ibid., p. 276.
12. Ibid., pp. 276-77.
13. Ibid., pp. 277-78.
14. Ibid., p. 278.
15,16. Ibid, p. 266.
17. Ibid., pp. 266-68.
18,19,20. Ibid., p. 268.
21.Ibid., p. 269.
22. Ibid., p. 270.
23.Ibid, p. 282.
24. Ibid., pp. 283-84.
25. Ibid., p. 284.
26,27. Ibid., p. 285.
28,29. Ibid., p. 288.
30,31. Ibid, p. 289.
32. Ibid., p. 286.
33. Ibid., p. 291.
34,35. Ibid., p. 292.
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NOTHING is proved by reason. Reason is only an instrument or a weapon. Any man can use it with the same skill for his own end. Satan too has his advocate.
According to the demand and need of our ideal or experience or inner impulse and in order to furnish them with proofs, we engage reason and its company.
Therefore the authority of the proof lies not in any power of reasoning; but in the reality behind the ideal, the secret feeling, the profound impulse and impetus.
What is truth is existent, that is, it is true only because it has existence. It is independent of any proof. That has to be seen directly and perceived immediately.
The proof of the tree before you consists in your seeing it. There is God, Self, Immortality, Eternity, the Life Divine. The proof of each of these entities too lies in its direct vision.
You can say, "I see the tree, you see it, he sees it—everybody sees or may see it. But God, Self, Immortality, the Life Divine —even if you have seen them I have not done so. Every one has not seen or cannot see them."
Not all but many have realised them—in different ages and in different climes. It is open to you and me also to have the realisation if we go through the adequate procedure.
If one wants to see London one has to go to London by a ship (by air, nowadays.) It cannot be said that there is no London because it is not seen from my room. Have you seen a positron? Have you seen a neutron? How many have seen them? To see them one has to go to the laboratory and a special procedure one has to follow.
The mystery that brings the direct vision of God, Self, Immortality and the touch of the Divine Life is called the practice of Yoga.
NOLINI KANTA GUPTA
(Translated from the original Bengali.)
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Sanskrit-French
Mrigendragama (Kriyapada et Caryapada) Edition critique par N. R. Bhatt. Institut Francais d'Indologic. Pondicherry.
CONTINUING their good work in securing rare manuscripts of the old Agamas, editing them with scrupulous care and publishing them at regular intervals, the French Institute of Indology have now brought out this excellent edition of the Mrgendrāgama, conforming to the high standards they have set for themselves.
The Mrgendrāgama, one, one of the Sivāgamas which are twenty-eight in number, is classified under Kamika1 agamas. Like all Agamas, the Mrgendra has four parts : vidya (jñāna), kriyā, yoga and caryā pādas. Of these the vidya and yoga pādas are already in print and the present volume comprises the kriyā pāda (551 verses) and a portion of the first patala of the caryā pāda (129 1/2 verses) which was all that the Institute could find so far. The text is printed along with an explanation, vrtti, by Bhatt Narayana Kantha. Profuse quotations from this Agama are found in many other works, especially those of Sri Aghora Sivacharya, and some of the verses quoted do not find a place in our text. Such verses which are quoted elsewhere but not found in this text are separately listed in the Appendix.
Coming to the name Mrgendra, the Tantrāvatāra which deals with such topics is silent on its derivation. Bhatta Narayana Kantha explains the significance as follows : Indra killed Vritras ra with his vajrq (thunderbolt) and afraid of the sin of brahma-hatyā, bralimihicide, he propitiated Vishnu. Vishnu gave him a nāra-simha kavaca and wearing that kāvaca (armour) Indra did further
1 which fulfil one's desires, kāmadatvāt
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penance for a thousand years to please Siva. Siva duly appeared and communicated this Agama to Indra who had the nārasimha kavaca. And in as much as the recipient of this Knowledge had a nara-simha kavaca, the Agama came to be known as mrgendra, a synonym for sithha, lion. Whether we accept this explanation as adequate or not1, it is enough to note that Mrgendra is an exact equivalent of Pasupati, Lord of the Pasus, Siva who revealed die Agama to Indra. Indra communicated to Bharadvaja; Bharadvaja to Harita; and so on it has come down from Guru to Sisya.
The Kriya Pada consists of eight Patalas, dealing with the selection of Mantras, purifying baths, worship, up sand, Mudras, ritual of Fire, Diksha (initiation), anointing etc. and pre Uminaries of Yoga. In the first Patala is given the genesis of the form of Mahesa :
In the beginning His Shakti, from Shakti proceeds the Nāda (sound) then Bindu, then the immutable Omkāra, then the alphabet covering all objects, the first Form of Mahesa. (Verse 2)
The second Patala deals with seven kinds of bath. It is interesting to note that it mentions (Verse 6) gaurava-snāna, sancti-fication by the sheer touch of the feet of the Guru, as one of the purifying baths. A method of doing the kumbhaka inside water with pranava-japa is described in verse 12.
The next two Patalas deal with ritual and sadhana of worship while the fifth dwells upon Mudras, gestures used in worship. They are the mudras that seal, blockade the onrush of obstacles.2 The descriptive plates of the Mudras are a great help in understanding this complicated technique in ritual.
The sixth Patala is on worship through Agni. The laksanas of vessels used in Homa, various kinds of samit (fuel) are elaborately dealt with. The seventh describes the pre Uminaries done a day before the Yoga with special reference to kalasa sthāpana and pūjā.
The last and the longest Patala deals with yaga-diksā-vidhi, initiation for performing the Yoga. Diksha occupies a very' important
1 mrgendra would really mean
2 vighnaugha mudranāt, vighnasanghafānām mudrānāt asvatantri karanāt
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place in the sadhana—inner and outer—of the Tantras. As the commentator points out, diksā is that which yields knowledge and truth-state (dīyate jñāna-sadbhāvah), and by which is destroyed the legacy of karma (ksiyate karmavāsanā). It is described here as being of two kinds : i) leading to worldly opulence, bhautiki; and 2) leading to liberation, nairvdniki. It is again sāksepd, dependent on other auxiliaries like fitness, observances and the like, or nirdksepd, independent of every other factor, self-fulfilling.1
In a significant verse (68) the Agama speaks of an occult way2 by which the Guru draws into himself the jiva of the sisya, unites it with his own consciousness and then releases it back to the disciple. The latter is thereby charged with the sakti of the Guru. (P. 142)
In an interesting passage on dreams portending good and evil, we are told that riding on a peacock, cow, horse, elephant, ascending the hill, towers etc., crossing expanses of water, rivers, wells, lakes and marshes, obtaining of gold, silver, costly jewels, fine flowers, fruit etc. indicate attainment of what is desired. So too the sight of Siddhas, Devas, sacrificial Halls. Contrarily, riding over a mule, camel, pig, falling into pit, dipping in cow-dung, wet mud, wearing of red or dark hues, encounter with jackal, bee, crow, snake, sight of the falling of the sun, moon, drying up of the ocean and the tremor of the mountain are signs of misfortune. The portents that appear at the end of the night are the strongest; what appear at mid-night are middling; and what appear in the early part are weak. (Verse 22).
The Charya Pada portion in the volume deals with the normal ācāras, conduct of the devotees of Siva, their diet, their daily routine, outer and inner etc. Detailed instructions are given to the disciple regarding his relations with the Guru.
An interesting work, ably edited with critical notes and indices.
M. P. PANDIT
1 demanding profound knowledge of the technique of mantra, mādis
2 This is again of two kinds : fulfilling immediately or in its own time.
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