If Supermind exists, if it descends, if it becomes the ruling principle, all that seems impossible to mind becomes not only possible but inevitable.
SRI AUROBINDO
November, 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
XVII
ON ANGER
Abandon anger; reject egoism; overcome all bondage. No suffering assails him, who has no attachment for name and form, who possesses nothing. (1)
I calf him -a charioteer who controls his anger that is like a Straying chariot; the others merely hold the reins. (2)
* Based on the Mother's Talks.
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Conquer anger by freedom from anger. Conquer the evil one by goodness, the miserly by generosity and the false by truth. (3)
Speak the truth, never be angry, give when asked even
if there be little. These are the three ways by which one approaches the gods. (4)
The sages who are self-disciplined, who have control over their body go to that un decaying status where one grieves no more. (5)
They who are wakeful, who train themselves day and night, who are open to Nirvana, will find their blemishes all disappearing. (6)
This is something unexampled; it is of yore, not of today : those who are silent are censured, those who speak much are also censured, even those who speak with moderation are also censured. There are none in the world who are never censured. (7)
There never was, there never will be, there never exists now anyone anywhere who is wholly censured or wholly praised. (8)
If the wise on a day to day observation praise someone as of flawless conduct, intelligent and endowed with knowledge and character, who then would dare to blame him who is as it were a coin of gold ? The gods praise him, even the Creator praises , him. (9-10)
Restrain the body from its upsurges, keep it under control. The body must reject bad habits, it must acquire good habits, (11)
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Restrain the tongue from its upsurges, keep it under control. The tongue must reject its bad habits, it must acquire good habits. (12) .
Restrain the mind from its upsurges, keep it under control. Mind must reject bad habits, it must acquire good habits. (13)
The wise who have control over their body, who have control over their speech, who have control over their mind are indeed wholly and perfectly controlled. (14)
I PROPOSE everyone of you should try—oh ! not for a long" time, but just for one hour per day—to utter nothing but the absolutely indispensable words. Not one more, not one less.
Get hold of one hour in your life, that which is most convenient for you, and during that time observe yourself closely and see that you utter only the absolutely indispensable words.
At the outset, the first difficulty will be to know what is absolutely indispensable and what is not. It is already a study and everyday you will do better.
Next, you will see that so long as one says nothing, it is not difficult to remain absolutely silent, but as soon as you begin to speak, always or almost always you utter two or three or ten or twenty useless words which were not at all necessary to say.
I give you this as an exercise till next Friday. We shall see how you succeed. You may, at the end of the week, give me a brief note telling me how far you have succeeded—those who have tried.
XVIII
ON IMPURITY
You are now like a yellow leaf. Death's emissaries are around you, you are about to make the exit. And you have no provisions for the way. (1)
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So make- an island of yourself, hasten and work hard and gain wisdom. When you have wiped off the blemishes, when you are free of taint, then will you reach the domain of the Noble Ones. (2)
Now you have arrived at your term. You are in the presence of Death. You have no shelter on the way nor have you provisions. (3)
So do you make of yourself an island, hasten, work hard and gain wisdom. When you have wiped off the blemishes, when you are freed of taint, then shall you come no more into birth and age. (4)
The wise man must from moment to moment, little by little, continue to purify his impurities, even as a silversmith purifies his silver. (5)
Rust rising out of iron eats up the iron out of which it rises. Even so one's own misdeeds lead one to his own perdition. (6)
The sacred word rusts if it is never recited, a house rusts if it is never cleaned, the fair body rusts if-it is slothful, a sentinel rusts if he is negligent. (7)
The rust in a woman is bad conduct, the rust in a man of bounty is vanity : whether in this world or in the other wrong action is the rust. (8)
But there is a worse rust than all these—the worst indeed is ignorance. Be pure of all rust, O Bhikkhu ! (9)
Life is easy for one who is shameless, who is audacious as a crow, who is destructive, aggressive, presumptuous and corrupted. (10)
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Life is difficult for one who is modest, always seeking purity, who has no attachment, who is free from arrogance, who leads a pure life and has a clear vision. (11)
He who takes another's life, tells lies, seizes things that are not given to him, runs after another's wife, (12)
He who is addicted to wines and drinks, such a man digs at the very roots of his being even in this life. (13)
Know then, O man, it is sinful to be uncontrolled. May neither desire nor vice bind you to unending sufferings. (14)
One gives according to one's faith or according to one's pleasure. If you object to what another eats or drinks, you can never, in the day or in the night, obtain concentration of mind. (15)
He in whom such a movement has been pulled out totally from the very roots obtains concentration whether it be day or night. (16)
There 'is no fire like lust, no gripping monster like hatred. There is no snare like delusion, there is no torrent like desire. (17)
It is easy to see another's fault, but it is very difficult to see one's own. One scatters widely another's fault as though it was chaff; but one's own fault one covers up even as a crafty gambler hides his foul throw. (18)
He who finds fault with others but is himself intolerant merely increases his own faults, remains far from 'eliminating them. (19)
There is no track in the sky. There is no disciple outside
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the Way. Creatures take their delight in the creation, but for the Blessed Ones creation has ceased. (20)
There is no track in the sky. There is no disciple outside the Way. Things conditioned do not endure. The illumined ones remain ever immutable. (21)
I have read your note on the control of speech. Some have attempted very seriously. I am satisfied with the result. I believe it will be better for everyone if you continue.
Someone has written to me something which is very true: it is this that when one begins, one sees no reason to stop, one begins with one hour per day, but this becomes a kind of necessity, a habit and one continues quite naturally.
If your exercise has truly this result, then it will be an excellent thing.
You may retain three things in what I have read this evening. The first is that you must persist in what you do if you want to get a result. Dhammapada tells us, for example, that if you have a mantra and you do not repeat it sufficiently, there is no use in having it and that if you are inattentive you lose the benefit of vigilance, also that if you do not continue the good habits that you acquire, they become useless—that is to say, you must persevere. Thus for example, about the exercise which I asked from you last time, I asked you with the idea that if you form the habit of doing it, that will help you much in overcoming your difficulties.
Already someone has told me, with a good deal of reason, that while practising this half-silence, at any rate this continence of the tongue, one comes to master quite naturally numerous difficulties in one's character and also one avoids considerably frictions and misunderstandings. This is true.
Another point to retain from our reading is concerning taints and Dhammapada gives the example of bad will and wrong action. Wrong action, says our text, is a taint in this world as well as in other worlds. In the next verse it is said that there is no greater impurity than ignorance, that is to say, ignorance is
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considered as the essential, the central fault, that which must be corrected urgently, and what is called ignorance is not simply not knowing things, not having the superficial knowledge, of things, it means forgetting the very reason of our existence, the truth that has to "be discovered.
There was a third thing ?...Yes, You must not lull yourself with the illusion that if you want to follow the right path, if you are modest, if you seek purity, if you are unselfish, if you want to remain alone and wish to have a clear judgment, things will
become easy.........It is quite the contrary ! When you begin to
advance towards inner and outer perfection, the difficulties start at the same time.
I have heard people very often saying : "Oh ! now that I am trying to be good, everybody seems to be bad towards me !" But this is precisely to teach you that one must not be good with an interested intention, one must not be good in order that others may be good towards him—one must be good in order to be good.
It is always the same lesson : one must do as well as one can, as best as one can, but without expecting a result, doing it in view of an ulterior result. Even this attitude, to expect a reward for a good action—to become good because one thinks that this will make fife easier—takes away all value from the good action.
You must be good for the love of goodness, you must be just for the love of justice, you must be pure for the love of purity and you must be unselfish for the love of unselfishness, then you are sure to advance on the way.
NOLINI KANTA GUPTA
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A QUESTION which has hitherto divided human thought and received no final solution, is the freedom of the human being in his relation to the Power intelligent or unintelligent that rules the world. We strive for freedom in our human relations, to freedom we move as our goal, and every fresh step in our human progress is a further approximation to our ideal. But are we free in ourselves ? We seem to be free, to do that which we choose and not that which is chosen for us ; but it is possible that the freedom may be illusory and our apparent freedom may be a real and iron bondage. We may be bound by predestination, the will of a Supreme Intelligent Power, of blind inexorable Nature, or the necessity of our own previous development.
The first is the answer of the devout and submissive mind in its dependence on God, but, unless we adopt a Calvinistic Fatalism, the admission of the guiding and overriding will of God does not exclude the permission of freedom to the individual. The second is the answer of the scientist; Heredity determines our Nature, the laws of Nature limit our action, cause and effect compel the course of our development, and, if it be urged that we may determine effects by creating causes, the answer is that our own actions are determined by previous causes over which we have no control and our action itself is a necessary response to a stimulus from outside. The third is the answer of the Buddhist and of post Buddhistic Hinduism. "It is our fate, it is written on our forehead, when our Karma is exhausted then alone our calamities will pass from us;"—this is the spirit of tamasic inaction justifying itself by a misreading of the theory of Karma.
If we go back to the true Hindu teaching independent of Buddhistic influence, we shall find that it gives us a reconciliation of the dispute by a view of man's psychology in which "both Fate and Free-will. are recognised. The difference between Buddhism
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and Hinduism is that to the former the human soul is nothing, to the latter it is everything. The whole universe exists in the spirit, by the spirit, for the spirit; all we do, think and feel is^ for the spirit. Nature depends upon the Atman, all its movement, play, action is for the Atman.
There is no Fate except insistent causality which is only another .name for Law, and law itself is only an instrument in the hands of Nature for the satisfaction of the spirit. Law is nothing but a mode or rule of action; it is called in our philosophy not Law but Dharma, holding together, it is that by which the action of the universe, the action of its parts, the action of the individual is held together. This action in the universal, the parts, the individuals is called Karma, work, action, energy in play, and the definition of Dharma or Law is action as decided by the nature of the thing in which action takes place,—swabhdva niyatam karma. Each separate existence, each individual has a swabhdva or nature and acts according to it, each group, species or mass of individuals has a swabhdva or nature and acts according to it, and the universe also has its swabhdva or nature and acts according to it. Mankind is a group of individuals and every man acts, according to his human nature, that is his law of being as distinct from animals, trees or other groups of individuals. Each man has a distinct nature of his own and that is his law of being which ought to guide him as an individual. But beyond and above the Se minor laws is the great Dharma of the universe which provides that certain previous Karma or action must lead to certain new Karma or results.
The whole law of causality may be defined as previous action leading to subsequent action, Karma and karmaphala. The Hindu theory is that thought and feeling, as well as actual speech or deeds, are part of Karma and create effects, and we do not accept the European sentiment that outward expression of thought and feeling in speech or deed is more important than the thought or feeling itself. This outward expression is only part of the thing expressed and its results are .only part of the karmaphala. The previous Karma has not one kind of result but many. In the first place, a certain habit of thought or feeling
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produces certain actions and speech or certain habits of action and speech in this life, which materialize in the next as good fortune or evil fortune. Again, it produces by its action for the good or ill of others a necessity of happiness or sorrow for ourselves in another birth. It produces, moreover, a tendency to persistence of that habit of thought or feeling in future lives, which involves the persistence of the good fortune or evil fortune, happiness or sorrow. Or, acting on different lines, it produces a revolt or reaction and replacement by opposite habits which in their turn necessitate opposite results for good or evil. This is the chain of Karma, the bondage of works, which is the Hindu "Fate and from which the Hindu seek salvation.
If, however, there is no escape from the Law, if Nature is supreme and inexorable, there can be no salvation; freedom becomes a chimera, bondage eternal. There can be no escape, unless there is something within us which is free and lord, superior to Nature. This entity the Hindu teaching finds in the spirit ever free and blissful which is one in essence and in reality with the Supreme Soul of the Universe. The spirit does not act, it is Nature that contains the action. If the spirit acted, it would be bound by its action. The thing that acts is Prakriti, Nature, which determines the swabhdva of things and is the source and condition of Law or Dharma. The Soul or Purusha holds up the swabhdva, watches and enjoys the action and its fruit, sanctions the law or Dharma. It is the king, Lord or Ishwara without whose consent nothing can be done by Prakriti. But the king is above the law and free.
It is this power of sanction that forms the element of free will in our lives. The spirit consents not that itself shall be bound, but that its enjoyment should be bound by time, space and causality and by the swabhdva and the Dharma." It consents to virtue or sin, good fortune or evil fortune, health or disease, joy or suffering, or
it refuses them. What it is
attached to that Nature multiplies for it; what it is weary of, has vairdgya for, that Nature withdraws from it. Only, because the enjoyment is in space and time, therefore, even after the withdrawal of consent, the habkual action continues for a time just as the locomotive continues to
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move after the steam is shut off, but in a little while it slows down and finally comes to a standstill. And because the enjoyment is in causality, the removal of the habit of action is effected not spontaneously and freely, but by an established process or one of many established processes. This is the great truth now dawning on the world, that Will is the thing which moves the world and that Fate is merely a process by which Will fulfils itself.
But in order to feel its mastery of Nature, the human soul must put itself into communion with the infinite, and universal Spirit. Its will must be one with the universal Will. The human soul is one with the universal Spirit, but in the body it stands out as something separate and unconnected, because a certain freedom is permitted it in order that the swabhdva of things may be diversely developed in different bodies. In using this freedom the soul may do it ignorantly or knowingly. If it uses it ignorantly, it is not really free, for ignorance brings with it the illusion of enslavement to Nature. Used knowingly, the freedom of the soul becomes one with surrender to the universal Will. Either apparent bondage to Fate in Nature or realised freedom from Nature in the universal freedom and lordship of the Paramatman and Para-mascara, this is the choice offered to the human soul. The gradual self-liberation from bondage to Nature is the true progress of humanity. The inert stone or block is a passive sport of natural laws, God ft their Master. Man stands between these two extreme terms and moves upward from one to the other.
(Karma yogurt)
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'THE philosophy and the personality of Sri Aurobindo have been before the world-public for well nigh quarter of a century. They have revealed meaning to us—the goal towards which mankind has been moving. That goal is the perfection of the individual in the context of world purposes. The dignity of the human individual which has received such great emphasis and ' attention in recent times has a source and goal other than the human individual as we know him in the history of human development. Man is seeking ends of perfection and peace, of unity and unified ness, of values and worthy nesses. The great ideals of mankind were stated again and again by the mystics on the one hand and perfectionists on the other. There have been men who have sought immortality in the physical body and held this to be the goal to be aimed at—alchemists and Sid has have been many. Evolutionists have added their own strength to this belief—mankind is to be transcended and the goal of evolution is the beyond-man, or the Superman. Man is the link towards godhood. The earth itself is the place for the making of the gods. The ideals of liberty for man, equality of all men, and the fraternity of all' have been adumbrated by the politicians following on the footsteps of religious mysticism. But how man himself could achieve these ideals or realise them has been the problem.
Religious ideals seem to demand the climate of renunciation of all life-values, such as wealth, power and comfort. Everywhere the saints preferred to go to the desert and attain their liberation as well as their communion with God or the Absolute of Religion. This is the wisdom (viveka) that supports the renunciation (vairdgya) and liberates from the bondage of the world, its fears and terrors and sorrows. But political life as well as ethical life demand the actualisation of the ideals in the context of the society —human society. Political ideals and religious ideals, seem' to need each other and in fact we have the great attempts to bring
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down the ideals of religion into the context of political and social life, this being thought of as the bringing down of the Kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven. A student of political history can discern this continuous process by which the mystic religious tradition has attempted to influence and modify the political and social life of peoples. The relation between the Church and the State has been characterised by unity, conflict and dictatorship of one or the other. There is however no solution to their problems—intractable is the one word by which their relationship could be characterised. This conflict could not be got over in any region of the globe. Modern studies of history on the global scale as. well as on the anthropological scale have only confirmed the law of inevitable conflict between the religious ideals and the political and social ideals. The reason has been shown to be the notion of power—its essential dialectic as well as its essential nisus towards indivisibility. Humane efforts to solve these tensions with the help of the reason which seeks unity and harmony of ethical and religious interests with the political power-interests have borne fruit undoubtedly in the several constitutions drafted. But the ideal seems to be receding all the while. Man has come to a point where something more than legalistic devices of mutual control of checks and balances is necessary to secure smooth social functioning. The entry of the economic into the field of politics boded the disappearance of the religious—the conflict finally had become the conflict between the economic (materialistic) ideals of equality and liberty and the religious (spiritual) ideals of equality, liberty and fraternity.
We are today striving to solve this conflict, easy enough as it should be because linguistically the ideals seem to be the same for t the materialist and the spiritualist (idealist). This however is not possible for we find today that the materialists themselves are betraying their inevitable tendency to disintegrate into sects and factions even as the religious institutions—the" materialistic products of rehgious aspirations have tended to divide and subdivide themselves. As Sri Aurobindo states this the flaw of the materialistic mind—of our intellect itself—which is following the curve of matter. So any attempt to solve the present conflict
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between the materialist and spiritual factors should have to seek the aid of a higher-than-intellect—namely, intuition and super-mind. Man's rationality which has been such a great help for his evolution has come to that point where it has to become transformed into a higher faculty or be substituted by it. Surely this appears to be almost an expression of a deep pessimism about the power of our reason and our consciousness. Many have been and are the critics who think that this call to a higher-than-reason is a betrayal of a most faithful ally and servant in our evolutionary struggle. These critics identify the intellect with man and his dignity and resolutely refuse to take the help of the more stable and satisfying function and power within man, that deeper and profoundly unifying force which lies within man himself, namely, the divine insight and inspiration which formulated in such blazing light the basic call to universal harmony and peace through the practice of fraternity, from which flow equality of opportunity and liberty of individual development.
L Today we are convinced that the deep and abiding function or power of our consciousness to seek ideals owes its strength to the Consciousness above it. It is cosmic consciousness, integral vision, and unifying insight. The utilisation of this Consciousness beyond our reason and intellect is the necessity. The discovery of this instrument of being is our present urgent concern. Its truth-nature has been testified to by scores of saints and prophets all the world over. Instead of depending on the divisive intellect or reason that creates more problems than it solves and is today at the service of lower instincts which are still more divisive, man must seek out this higher-than-intellect, the supermind, to solve his problems of living and being.
The ideal of human unity can be realised only when men begin to work in and through the higher-than-mind-and-intellect in all their work. Just as philosophers began by distrusting their senses .and depended on their reason for determining the nature of truth or truth itself and reality, so too man has, to realise more and more that
roll less than the senses the intellect does delude and create more illusory problems and solutions. The world of māyā is not only sovereignly ruled by sense but by intellect as well.
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Ignorance not only persists in the realms of intellectual thought but deepens out the shadows of illusion. As the Ishopanishad states knowledge leads to greater darkness as it were—tato bhūyaiva te vidyāyagm ratāh—.
The ancient 'thinkers had acknowledged the ultimate superiority of the Revelation knowledge contained in the Scriptures, .especially the Veda in India. Its paramount purpose was to reveal the Ultimate Reality in its eternal or true nature and also to help the attainment of freedom from death and immortality. These goals are the ultimate goals of man, everywhere. Sri Aurobindo acknowledges this primacy and sovereignty of the āpta-vacana or Veda. But what he really has done in modern times is to reveal that this mode of apprehension of Reality as it is in itself is not to be the peculiar and unique possession of saints but of all aspiring humanity. It is something that has to be sought after seriously. Even as the élan for survival through adaptation to the challenging environment has produced the evolutionary process up to man, it is possible to urge mankind itself onward by striving after this new organ on or instrument to transcend man. Human survival is possible only through this seeking of the higher-than-mind, to be divinised entirely in all one's parts. Not only should man be remade but also transformed into divine nature.
The dynamics of this process is Yoga through integral surrender or total dedication to the supermind or God Himself. This union with God through surrender and total offering of oneself immediately makes for the descent of this
super conscious or supramental force into one's nature and gradually begins to transform him. Similarly it brings about dynamic changes in the environment and relations through the unifying quality of its action. May be cooperation may be said to get first emphasis against competitive approach, peaceful co-existence or tolerance might replace fanaticism and bigotry and warfare. But this is undoubtedly due to the already present operation pf the higher type consciousness through the mental being—thanks to the work of the ancient 'seers and sages. The total change, is called for to-da because of the increased knowledge of science and the discoveries made by man. These too are due to the operations of the
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higher-than-intellect consciousness as even the scientists have stated. Intuition or the inventive unconscious, or what you will, has made for the leaps in our knowledge and techniques. The Religious would call it the act of grace of God, whereas the materialist would affirm that it is due to insight and intuition—natural operations of mind itself in its confrontation of matter and situation. May be even the mind itself is the operation of matter or otherwise. In any case in the fields of science intuition or the higher mind has been continuously operative. The stretch of this operation into fields of human behaviour or sociology would lead to formation of new associations or units of social organization which would abolish the lower-type associations of the beehive and anthill, or primitive clan and social colour-units or economic units or functional units or castes or patterns of culture. If at first the higher type associations seem to break up the lower ones it is only to erect a more dynamic and universal union. Thus at the beginning there was the rise of religions which sought unification of all mankind under the ideology or ritual of one creed or church. However this religious approach to the whole of mankind helped only to some extent. The unification of man took several steps and directions, and history is replete with the stories of these religious, political, national, sectional, unions or sects whose rivalry and struggle have littered it. Sri Aurobindo in his two seminal works The Human Cycle and The Ideal of Human Unity has canvassed this large area brilliantly. The progress of man however has nevertheless been maintained. The ideal has been often dimmed but never completely abolished from man's vision. Seers and saints, warriors of-knowledge have striven to un tarnish and uncover the ideal to man, so that he may be aware of
his large destiny. A world union is undoubtedly our goal, but it cannot be achieved either by the consuming zeal of baptismal religions or economic socialism such as communism that drives out the individual. It must be known that the real strength of communism is its drive towards human" worth and dignity of being for himself in and through the society. Nationalism, itself a unity, becomes 'at a later stage an obstacle to world unity. Racialism is itself confronting a hew dimension of human relationship. Only the souls in all strata and
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all religions and cultures who have listened to the call of the Superman and partaken of the supramental activity can forge the unity of man in Godhood, brotherhood and freedom. Our techniques of international cooperation in all fields are today informed unconsciously by the supramental goals and this itself is due to the descent of the supramental nature into every man 'awakened or un awakened to its ingression.
Sri Aurobindo chanted this great mantra of the Superman and held out the hope of a world-union through divine consciousness that is love or true fraternity and sharing. It is our duty to remember Him with gratitude on this day of our political and national, and spiritual freedom.
K. C. VARADACHARI
(Broadcast from A. I. R. Madras on 17.8.63)
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CHAPTER III
THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION (VI)
The Age of Reason
HOBBES AND LOCKE
THE seventeenth century is generally known as the Age of Reason. It is a century studded with a galaxy of bright geniuses whose contribution to the scientific thought of the West determined the very pulse and pattern of modern scientific civilisation. It really began with Bacon, if in history any hard line can be drawn between one period and another, and received its distinctive accent from Descartes. But, since I have already devoted two separate essays to these two forerunners of modern thought, I shall take up here the two philosophers, Hobbes and Locke, who, though more or less influenced by Galileo, Bacon and Descartes, struck out individual lines of their own, and formulated their philosophies in strictly scientific terms.
HOBBES (1588-1679)
With Hobbes philosophy elects to wash the hoary dust of theology off its soul and switch over to materialistic science. Whatever affiliation Bacon had with the old scholastic abstractions, traditional theological creeds, and mediaeval superstitions—and he had -not a little of them in spite of his scientific temper and staunch advocacy of empiricism—is swept clean out of the sphere of philosophy by the rigorous application of a tough„materialism,
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which the rugged and forceful personality of Hobbes first introduced into metaphysical thinking. He was influenced by Kepler and Galileo, and, to a certain extent, by Descartes, whom he criticised later for his dualism of mind and matter and his theory of "innate ideas." Rather late in life he developed a love for mathematics, and particularly for geometry and geometrical
^ mechanics, and based his philosophy, psychology and politics on Galileo's postulate of the sole reality of matter in motion. His obsession with geometrical mechanics led him to generalise that all thought must be in the form of axioms. He constructed a mechanical view of the universe, and held that there is nothing but matter in motion, and that everything we see within us and
° without is only the various modifications of mobile matter. Life is nothing but a series of sensations caused by the impact of material objects upon our senses. He accepted the Galilean dictum that the primary qualities of matter, that is to say, extension, motion, magnitude, weight etc. are real and the secondary qualities which we perceive in the objects, such as colours, sounds etc. are not in them, but are our own sensations which we attribute to them. This theory is the same as that propounded by Democritus. Berkley's subjective idealism is only Hobbes's materialistic metaphysics carried to its logical conclusion.
Discarding Descartes's dualism of mind and matter, Hobbes affirms the monism of matter, and deduces everything, subjective and objective,from its unceasing motion. "...The world...that is, the whole mass of all things that are, is corporeal, that is to say, body...that which is not body, is no part of the universe." "The cause of sense, is the external body, or object which pressed the organ proper to each sense..." Man, according to Hobbes, is only a machine, a thinking machine possessing the power of speech as the expressive medium of his thought. "If this be so, reasoning1 will depend on names, names on the imagination, and imagination, perchance, as I think, on the motion of the corporeal organs. Thus
1"...when a man reasoneth he does nothing else but conceive a sum total, from addition of parcels; or cortteive a remainder, from subtraction of one sum from another; which, if it be done by words, is conceiving of the consequences of the names of all parts, to the name, of the 'whole ."
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mind will be nothing but the motions in certain parts of an organic body." Man's reasons, thoughts, feelings, imagination, memory are all derived from motion, and are only an epiphenomenon: of matter. Imagination is "nothing but decaying sense"; "a man can have no thought, representing anything, not subject to sense". Hobbes has no interest in metaphysics as such, and not much in the1" theory of knowledge either. He turned Galileo's physics into a new type of materialistic metaphysics, and mechanical sensationalism into a theory of knowledge, and propounded a strict determinism by reducing human will to a mechanical response of the mind. Everything in the universe is mathematical, mechanical, and corporeal or material.
Hobbes considers all ideas as images, and all images as nothing -but names. All names are corporeal things. "Hence we have no idea, no image of God; we are forbidden to worship him in the form of an image, lest we should think we could conceive him who is inconceivable. Therefore it appears that we have no idea of God." If God exists—and Hobbes cannot altogether deny and dismiss Him out of hand—He must be corporeal. This nominalism is an echo from the later middle ages, but Hobbes was not perhaps aware of its origin. He derived it from his own theory of the sole reality of matter in perpetual motion.
Hobbes defines philosophy as knowledge of effects from causes, and of causes from effects by rational inference. He thus accepts the validity of both the deductive and indicative methods. He subscribes to Bacon's inductive method and empiricism, and Descartes's deductive method and rationalism, and stands midway between the two. His philosophy is a mere theory of body and motion. Knowledge is only an aggregate of sensations or perceptions, which are our subjective reactions to the stimuli of material objects. This theory of causality or rigid determinism exerted a great influence on subsequent scientific thought.
Hobbes's geometrical mechanism applied to ethics and the State led to "ethical and political naturalism. Good and evil are relative ideas—they do not conform to any absolute standard. What is pleasurable is good, and what is disagreeable" or unpleasant is evil. Absolute good is a fiction of the human mind. Hobbes
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thus brings, not only naturalism but hedonism into philosophical thought. He dismisses the concept of liberty both from politics and ethics. Man, in his natural state, is a fighting animal, not deserving individual freedom. It is the State which alone can guarantee his life and security; for might is right, and, wielding absolute might, the State should be the only authority enforcing .law and order. Its will must, therefore, command unchallenged power and absolute obedience. Hobbes's politics is, in a sense, a hybrid of some elements of the theory of Machiavelli, and a good chunk of Nietzschean gospel of power and authoritarianism, both of which he anticipated.
To sum up, we find Hobbes to be the precursor of many of the , 'main trends of modern scientific and philosophic thought. He ousted theology from metaphysics and philosophy, and installed scientific materialism on the vacant throne. He gave a decisive impetus to the germination of mechanical naturalism, epiphenomenalism, and hedonism. He applied his scientific determinism to psychology, and his nominalism anticipated Logical Positivism. He proclaimed his thorough-going materialism with all the rude vigour of his virile personality, and did not care to explain the emergence of life and consciousness from it.
LOCKE ( 1632-1704)
Locke, a 'gentle and amiable man, was humble enough to declare that his work consisted in "clearing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge". His main work was to attack the problem of epistemology from the scientific standpoint of modern philosophy. How can man, who is made of matter in motion, acquire knowledge? By knowledge, Locke does not mean any knowledge of the ultimate or higher values of existence, but only of what man senses and experiences by empirical means. Man has to remain content with a limited knowledge, and "sit down in a quiet ignorance of those things which, upon .examination, are found to be beyond the reach of our capacities-."
Locke accepts the empiricism of Bacon and the theory of ideas
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of Descartes-, but both with certain important reservations. His empiricism does not lead him, as Hobbes's did, to unqualified sensationalism, and he does not subscribe to the Cartesian view of the "innate ideas". He holds that the mind of the child is absolutely blank, a "white paper." He says: "Let us then suppose that the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas; how comes it to be furnished?...Whence has it all the. materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from experience; in that all our knowledge is founded, and from that it ultimately derives itself." Primarily and fundamentally, whatever we know we know by our senses. The impressions of our senses upon our understanding are ideas, and the grouping and organising of ideas into complex ideas is done by reflection. The outer perception and the inner perception form the warp and woof of our knowledge. It is important to note here that, while Descartes ascribed precedence to the mind and affirmed the awareness of the soul to be antecedent to the cognition of the reality of the body or matter, Locke affirms that it is our sensations or external perceptions that precede our awareness of our psychological movements. It is, in fact, a landmark in modern philosophy and represents the true spirit of modern science, this journey of the human mind from the material, the objective, the visible and phenomenal to what is subjective, invisible and immaterial, to what is unknown. And Locke was the first modern philosopher to confirm this typical scientific attitude.
Locke defines knowledge as the "perception of the connection and agreement, or disagreement and repugnancy" of two ideas, and truth as the "right joining or separating of signs, i.e., ideas or words." He classifies knowledge into three categories, the sensitive, the demonstrative, and the intuitive. Sensitive knowledge, which is the least certain of the three, is the knowledge of "the particular existence of finite beings". The demonstrative is that in which "the mind perceives the agreement or disagreement of any ideas, but not immediately." Intuitive knowledge is that which is the most certain, "for if we will reflect on out own. ways
of thinking, we shall find that sometimes the mind perceives 'the agreement or disagreement of two ideas immediately by
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themselves, without the intervention of any other.".." However crude and superficial Locke's idea of the intuitive knowledge may appear to us, we must remember that it was the first clear and lucid enunciation of the functions of the human mind in terms of a psychology which, unmoored from traditional philosophy, had declared itself an adjunct or branch of modern materialistic science. ' Hobbes had constructed a political science out of the physics of Galileo and Newton, which had undermined the Christian base of the old political theory of the divine right, and represented the State as a central authority, imposing law and order upon the anarchical and bellicose nature of the individual atoms of mankind.. But while his political thought seemed to favour despotism of some kind or other, the politics of Locke was a definite form of liberalism. He, too, rejected with scorn the theory of the divine right of kings, characterising it as a false principle, but contrary to Hobbes's view, he holds that the state of nature of the individual is rational, and not intrinsically bellicose. "The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it which obliges every one; and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it that, being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions." Locke thus anticipates Rousseau, and inculcates the spirit of optimism in his political thought as against the raw pessimism of Hobbes.
As a profoundly religious man, Locke believed in the existence of God, but insisted on the necessity of submitting the revelations, preached by the Church, to reason. This attitude of his angered the orthodox Christians. He attributed all-might, infinity and all-directing intelligence to God, forming his theistic views by the double process of reasoning and reflection from hi§ mental ideas of infinity and infinite power etc. The ideas were essentially born of sense perceptions, but underwent a change in the reasoning and reflective process. But his God, being infinite, is unknowable by the finite psychological apparatus available to man. His theism was, therefore, another name for agnosticism. The Uri known will always remain unknowable.
The philosophy, psychology, epistemology, and politics of Locke give a decisive turn and stimulus to the philosophical.
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ethical and political thought of the seventeenth century, and are even now active, though as an undercurrent, in the scientific and practical life of the present century. But his unknowable God is almost blotted out of existence, his ethics is much abused in actual practice, his reason is exploited for selfish and aggressive purposes, hi§ educational theory, which resembles to a certain extent that of Rousseau, is buried under heaps of mechanical and technological-imperatives; and it is the pessimistic voice of Hobbes that seems to re-emerge and resound in the confused din of hurtling forces.
Voltaire and Montesquieu were much impressed by Locke, and the latter popularised his thought all over Europe. Voltaire called Locke the "true philosopher", and praised him in glowing terms! "After so many speculative gentlemen had formed this' romance of the soul, one truly wise man appeared, who has, in the most modest manner imaginable, given us its real history. Mr. Locke has laid open to man the anatomy of his soul, just as some learned anatomist would have done that of the body."1 Locke's empirical psychology was, indeed, a signal triumph of modern thought, and modern analytical psychology has followed in its steps.
RISHABHCHAND
1 Quoted from the English Letters in The Western Intellectual Tradition by J. Bro-now ski and Bruce Mazlisrl, ,
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IS there any spiritual way of overcoming persistent hostility from any one"? was my question.
"Yes, there is", slowly the Mother spoke with a half-smile, "it is to love him".
I was completely taken aback. I could understand negative measures like indifference, aloofness, willed absence of reaction; I could even understand the proverbial turning of the other cheek., It is not difficult after all. I have known instances of the wronged party turning the cheek with gusto if for nothing at least to shame the other person and deriving a certain self-regarding satisfaction in the process. It is possible to go through the physical movements of giving the other cheek even when the mind is full of resentment. But to love the enemy ! You simply cannot do that unless you feel it inside. Here there is no question of deceiving others, no question of going through an outer ritual. Unless I am sincere to myself I cannot hope to apply the remedy. It set me thinking rather deeply and it did not take much time before I realised how self-evident and direct was the solution, as indeed all the ways taught by the Mother are.
Now, love" to answer to the Mother's definition of it, is something vastly different from what commonly goes under that name but what is really a fake sentimental product hiding behind itself a complicated set of self-centering calculations and bargaining. The love that can dissolve hostility can only be a kind of selfless love, a feeling and a reaching out of my soul to the soul of another, without any strings. If I have or develop a tenderness, a soft feeling for another, irrespective of what he may do or may not do, regardless of whether he responds or rejects, then that may be said to be the beginnings of true love.
And true" love is divine love. Love that is divine is self-existent and does not depend upon any external factor for its being and expression. Among us humans such a love can only
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be between soul and soul. This is the meaning of the famous declaration of Yajnavalkya that one loves another, one loves the wife, one. loves the son, not for the sake of another, not for the sake of the wife, not for the sake of the son, but for the sake of the Self. There is one Self, one Divine in all and the Divine in me, the soul, stretches out to what is Itself, the same Divine, in the other. Thus it comes to this : to love one truly, I must regard the Divine, in him. If I succeed in doing so, in how so small a manner, I simply cannot allow anything to stand between him and me, between my soul and his. All that he says or does is of small consequence. Before the eyes of the Beloved that beckon through his form, all . else pales away.
And such a pure love, reflecting something of the Divine Love," is a great power. It is a great dissolvent. Divine Love is a fundamental Power in the universe and if one imbibes even a little of it, nothing can withstand its boring force. Times without number I have seen—in myself and in others—life-long resistances crumbling before the dripping smile of the Mother pouring out endless streams of Her Love. Legion are the cases of individuals, hard-crusted, shut up in their self-esteem, closed to all movements of good-will and humanity—harboring on the other hand, definite ill-will in some cases—on whom we have seen the Mother, day after day, radiating Her melting smile, directing Her gaze of tenderness. And some day, in spite of all their resistance, conscious and unconscious, barriers have broken down and a smile lit in their hearts too.
Love, Divine Love, is a profound Power, in fact the greatest Power in Creation. That is why the gods in the Legend of the Ring of
Witan wisely chose to keep Love with them instead of the scepter of regal authority. Actually the whole of creation, all manifestation, is sustained by and grows on the Waters of the hidden springs of Love. It is because of Its Love for Its creatures that the Divine has descended in this creation marred by Ignorance and suffering, taken upon Itself the burden of their living. It is this Love that makes the Divine carry on its bosom the myriad selves in creation, through the many dolorous passages of
evolution, upward to the Light beyond darkness. It has chosen to station
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Itself for this purpose in the heart of every creature surrounded or even smothered by the smoke of ignorance and falsehood. It is again because of this Love at the heart of things, that men. are drawn together, associate themselves together and work for each other. Whatever may be the appearances, ultimately it is this Love at the core that truly impels; it expresses itself in a thousand forms, some totally contrary in appearance, others approaching it somewhat by reflection and so on.
That is why, the Mother says, one can take and make any kind of love that is given to him a sure door of entry into the realm of Divine Love. As they are, the different forms of love, among the human beings may be, and are, imperfect and inadequate. But they are openings all the same. If rightly used, they can deepen or broaden themselves and debouch into the sea of Divine Love. The first movement in love, of whatever kind, is to give up oneself to another,—the mother's self-giving for her child, the lover's for his beloved, the artist's for his object. One begins to think more of the other, concentrate more upon what concerns the other than on oneself. One learns to forget oneself. And this movement of self-forgetting can be developed into a movement of self-abnegation, self-annihilation till it melts into an utter self-giving where begins the Empire of Divine Love. It is on the lever of this self-denial, self-offering, self-consecration that ordinary love can exalt itself gradually into the nature of pure divine love.
Love is not a static quality. It is something dynamic in us because at its base it derives from the Psychic within which is the growing Divine in each. So whatever the initial formulation in us, whether the feeling we have for another is of genuine love or. not, the truth at the core will not rest content until it has either exposed successfully the game of the cunning vital that tries to trade in its name or prepared the way for its own emergence through the cultivation of the nobler elements in the lesser love.
Love transmutes. And Love has this power, is this power, because' Love in its essence is Truth. The acme af love is. oneness. The Truth of All is Oneness. Love acts as a magnet drawing all towards itself, into the folds of Oneness. "Towards him, verily,
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all yearn," say the Upanishads. In the presence of such Love all tends to unite, to merge in harmony. Spiritual tradition, all the world over, has it that even wild animals of the jungle, born enemies like the snake and the mongoose, forget their natural propensities of strife and gather together in the benign presence of one who embodies this Love.
But that is not all. Love is not merely Power. It is Delight, Ananda. Therefore, it is cherished and sought for by all beings. To love is a movement of joy; to be loved is another wave of joy. Love and Ananda are inseparable. I have wondered, again and again, if Love is cause of Ananda or Ananda the cause of Love. "For many times I have experienced that when there is an ebullition of Ananda within, there is felt a causeless love for all. It is also true that when one has the movement of love in him, everything impinges with a stamp of delight. So, I asked the Mother, which is prior, Love or Ananda? It depends, She replied, on whether one is used to offer, to give oneself to the Divine or one is used to receive things from the Divine. For him who offers, Love is the first; for it is out of Love that he offers and in the act of offering his being melts in Ananda. For him who seeks and receives from the Divine, the Divine reveals itself first as Ananda. Love gathers as a result.
Both Love and Ananda are the same Divine.
7-9-1963
PRABUDDHA
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THE characteristic note of Greek philosophy, when it was at the height of its glory, was knowledge of values, not love of facts. Again Renaissance saw the pursuit of the knowledge of values. Descartes' 'Cogito ergo sum' is man's discovery of his lost soul. It was Kant who helped to place philosophy on its high pedestal by showing that even facts are facts because there are values working in them. His real mistake lay, not in giving knowledge a lower status, but in not recognising any other knowledge than this. Hegel removed this defect of the Kantian philosophy and gave man unlimited possibilities of knowledge. The whole scheme was based upon the principle of continuity, which for Hegel was the principle of Reason. Unfortunately it did not satisfy the human mind. The leader of this romantic revolt was Schopenhauer. This revolt revealed to the world that the principle of reason with its apotheosis of continuity could not give a wholly satisfactory philosophy. Meanwhile science created a new philosophy and tried to build a Weltanschauung on the foundation of physics and biology.
The main fight in Western philosophy has been on the issue whether Reality is Existence or Reality is Value. Even philosophers of Values have accepted the view that Reality is Existence, and in order to maintain the difference of Value from Existence, have declared Value to be unreal. Another contest has been on the issue whether Reality is to be approached through the intellect or reason, or through some other channel, either infra-rational, life-feeling or the will, or supra-rational or spiritual, like intuition. Western philosophy has stood solidly by the intellect or reason, and even though in Greek philosophy the ultra rational standpoint was put forward, as in Heraclitus, Pythagoras or Plato", the rational standpoint was never abandoned. Even the forces of romanticism have not been able to shake its rationalistic foundation. Western philosophy is chiefly cosmic
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in outlook. it never dealt with the problems of individual salvation or individual happiness. Its interests have been chiefly theoretical and not practical. It is cosmic, rather than individualistic, it is existential, rather than axiological, it is intellectualistic rather than spiritual, and believes in change and evolution, rather than in static constancy.
Both Indian and Western thought have met in Sri Aurobindo. "This meeting is not a mere hand-shaking, but that there is a real synthesis of these two types of thought in him. There is even something more, a fulfilment of what each of them aims at but has not been able to realise."1 The West aims at a fuller realisation of the evolutionary and cosmic character of its thought. But it is hampered by its intellectualism and its existential outlook. What it requires is the acceptance of a spiritual standpoint, leading to the abandonment of its existential outlook and a modification of its extreme intellectualism. Similarly, Indian thought is spiritual but individualistic and static. It must break its narrow walls of individualism and acquire a dynamic and cosmic character. There lies its fulfilment. Sri Aurobindo fulfils this function by dealing with three main problems of his philosophy : the problem of Evolution, the problem of Yoga and the problem of the nature of Reality. And here we are concerned with the first of the three problems.
The idea of Evolution is certainly more prominent in Western philosophy than in Indian philosophy. Greek philosophy, as we have seen, is full of it. In Plato, although it was not given so much importance as in Aristotle, yet it did have a place in the antechamber of his philosophy, when he spoke of creation and dealt with natural philosophy as in the 'Timaeus'.
In Aristotle evolution was teleological; it was the gradual transformation of
the potential into the actual. The problem of creation has been in fact the
stumbling-block in Greek philosophy. Anaxagoras solved it by postulating the
existence of the Soul or Nous which, being not of the nature of material
objects, could impart motion to them. Parmenides cut the Gordian knot by saying
that there is no creation at all, for there is only the one immovable eternal
Being. Unlike Parmenides, however, Plato does not deny creation
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but assumes the existence of a second principle outside of the ideas but dependent upon them for the plan or scheme of creation. This second principle of Plato calls God or the Creator. Creation, according to Plato, is not a material process, but is mainly ideal and intellectual. Therefore, he speaks of the idea of creation existing prior to creation. We have in Plato, these fore, a double set of creators—the ideas which are the ultimate creators and God. God evidently has not got the power to create without getting the pattern from the ideas, and the ideas cannot also create directly because they have no power of generation.
The Greek mind is always at first directed outwards, and. it is only at a later stage, that it is directed inwards. Therefore, the approach from the standpoint of consciousness, was never fully established in Greek philosophy. This is the reason why Plato could not interpret the grades of reality in terms of the grades of consciousness. Indian philosophy from the beginning turned inwards. The highest reality was always conceived as Atman or Self. The interpretation of the universe was, therefore, always from the standpoint of consciousness. The different grades of reality were explained in terms of the different grades of consciousness. Sri Aurobindo looks at the whole universe from the standpoint of the highest consciousness, which he calls Sachchidananda. Plato's philosophy in haunted by a sense of its incompleteness : Its intuition and reason cannot be reconciled with each other. This is its great tragedy. Sri Aurobindo avoids Plato's tragedy not by lowering the intuitions, nor by raising the logic, as Aristotle does but by still further raising the intuitions. The highest intuitions create their own logic and do not have to wait for logic to come up to their level.
Plato's philosophy is rather static and has no theory of evolution. His Ideas are static and have no power of generation or creation. Spinoza's substance is also like the Ideas of Plato, static. Similar is the case with the Values of
Hart mania Again, there is nothing in Plato which gives us any indication of the whole world -marching to a higher goal. On the contrary, the nature of "the world has been determined beforehand by the manner of its creation, and_ consequently the possibility of such
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advance is ruled out. As regards Plotinus, his mysticism is quietistic and individualistic. In fact, Dean Inge emphatically declares the mysticism of Plotinus and his Christian imitators to be 'false Platonism and false mysticism.' His words 'the flight of the alone to the alone' which pithily express the nature of Plotinus' ecstasy, express abstractionism or isolationism, which throughout characterises his mysticism. It corresponds to the-nirbijā asamprajñātasamādhi of Patanjali, a state where consciousness itself vanishes. The contrast here with the position of Sri Aurobindo is very striking. It is not by removing himself from his body, mind and even his consciousness, that the individual can reach the highest state, but it is by the fullest development of the body, mind and consciousness—a development in' which their nature will undergo a complete transformation— that he can hope to attain this state. Moreover, it is only in an enlightened and ennobled world that the highest type of individual can dwell. The divinised man is a citizen of a divinised World.
Sri Aurobindo not only emphasises that all reality is con-- sciousness, but he
goes further and says that the measure of reality of anything is determined by
the nature of consciousness that is revealed in it. The higher the position of
anything in the scale of reality, the deeper and more unified is the
consciousness that is revealed in it. His conclusion, therefore, is just the
reverse of that of the Plotinus. The Absolute, far from being characterised by
the total absence of consciousness, is, on the contrary, the Highest
Consciousness. And the individual, if he is to attain union with the Absolute,
must possess the broadest, deepest and most unified consciousness.
Unconsciousness is the characteristic of Matter in its grossest form. Evolution
is from unconsciousness or nescience to Knowledge. Plotinus, in advocating the'
shedding of all consciousness, in fact, is unconsciously preaching a return
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to the condition of gross Matter. Moreover, there is not a word in Plotinus which suggests that he envisages salvation of the world or cosmic salvation.
Plotinus' theory of emanations states that creation is of the nature of an overflow or outpouring, the peculiarity of which is that that which outpours or overflows does not suffer any Miminuation or loss as a result of it. He also speaks of it as an irradiation. The second thing which he emphasises is the hierarchical order of created beings in which the grade of any existence is determined by its nearness or remoteness from the primal source. The whole scheme of emanation, in fact, is mechanical. 3and does not exhibit any purpose or design. The emanations, having no reference to time, have no connection with evolution either. There is no possibility, therefore, of any fresh emanations taking place in the future. Sri Aurobindo's conception of Divine Descent has an outward similarity with Plotinus' theory of Emanations. Like Plotinus, he also looks upon creation as the emergence from God of a hierarchically graded world, the emergent being of all grades of reality. But the whole conception of creation and the relation of the created world to God are totally different in his philosophy from what they are in the system of Plotinus. In calling creation a descent of God, Sri Aurobindo wants to emphasize it double significance. First, that the created world, even its lowest^levels, exhibits on its face the stamp of its Divine origin. Secondly, that it is a descent for the sake of ascent, so that the lowest order of existence has the promise and potency of reaching the Divine status.
The individual soul in Plotinus' system no doubt realizes God both as the
immanent principle working within and also as the transcendent Source which the
individual can reach through a long progression through a series of stages. But
for the rest of the universe God is only a transcendent principle, the Ultimate
Source of all emanations. In Sri Aurobindo's philosophy both these aspects of
Divinity are kept in mind, from the very beginning. Even in the lowest forms of
matter; the Absolute is present as in indwelling principle—as the Gita, puts it, a dweller within the heart—hrddese arjuna tisthati—pushing it continually
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forward. The impulse towards self-improvement, towards fuller and fuller self-expression, comes therefore from within. At the same time the progress is through a hierarchy of different grades of reality, the products of successive descents of the Absolute. It is not the individual alone who realises this double aspect of Divinity, but the whole universe shares this realization. The only limitation which Sri Aurobindo places upon the cosmic-realisation of the double aspect of Divinity is the circumstance that it rests with the Divine Will to choose the time and occasion for the Divine Descent, without which this realisation is impossible. But this is an inevitable consequence of the Divine transcendence.
For Hegel, Being is Thought, and Thought is Being, and the essential feature of the world-view of Thought is Continuity. He, therefore, has banished all absolute contradictions from the real world. For him antitheses exist for the sake of a higher synthesis, negations for the purpose of establishing a higher affirmation. Bradley, while trying to play Hegel against Hegel, has been instrumental in introducing a principle which offers a direct challenge to the Hegelian philosophy. This is the principle of Emergence. The fight on the philosophical front is no longer between Mechanical Evolution and Teleological Evolution, but between Continuous Evolution and Emergent Evolution. Bergson's creative Evolution is also a form of Emergent Evolution, because there lurk in his conception of creativity the ideas of surprise, uncertainty and incalculability. Evolution for all of them is made possible by the emergence of the new, which must be treated as a fundamental departure from the old, and must in no sense be regarded as a deduction from, or a continuation of, the old. Perennial philosophy in the West, observes Prof. S. K. Maitra, has held fast as its sheet-anchor, to the principle of continuity. Its last great champion was Hegel. The phenomenal rise in recent years of the philosophy of values has very much hastened its fall, for the philosophy of values is essentially a philosophy of emergence. Sri Aurobindo champions a form of Emergent Evolution which constitutes a far greater challenge than any attack it has had so far to face in the West.
According to the Purusha Sukta of the Rig Veda, the whole
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Purusha is not melted into the World.1 This is the*foundation of the emergent view of evolution in India. The evolution of the world can only be through successive emergences of higher' and higher consciousness from Him. These emergences are really descents of the Divine Consciousness. We thus come to the doctrine of Avatara. The Gita speaks of a double current in evolution. The first, which is the normal current, does not require any Divine intervention, and can flow on smoothly of itself. But it cannot do so for very long. A time comes when it meets with obstacles which it is beyond its power to remove. It is then that Divine intervention steps in, removes the obstacles , which blocked the progress of the world, and sets free the current of evolution. Such a crisis in the evolution of the world the Gita calls 'Dharmasya glen', deterioration of Dharma, because it describes every process in terms of its spiritual significance. This direct intervention by God and the resulting emergence of a new consciousness are for the Gita an absolute essential of world-evolution. This does not reject in to to the doctrine of continuity, but sets up, along with it, the principle of emergence, without which we cannot obtain a complete picture of evolution. Likewise it does not mean the elimination of thought from all effective share in the direction of the evolutionary process, but the setting of, definite limits to its effectiveness, and the supplementation of it by other types of consciousness which are more at home in a discontinuous world.
For Sri Aurobindo, therefore, the world does not evolve of itself in a continuous process, but it requires at every critical stage of its evolution Divine intervention in the shape of a direct descent of the Divine Consciousness. No radical change in the stage of evolution is for him possible without such a Divine Descent. This view of evolution assures man, in addition to his own resources, the Infinite Power of God in his aspiration to rise higher and higher in the scale of evolution. As for thought is chief organising agency, it no doubt confines it within well defy Tad limits, but within these limits, it certainly make Sit very .effective.
1 "The Purusha had a thousand hands, a thousand eyes, a thousand feet; he covered the earth on all-sides, and stretched ten, fingers length beyond it."
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The sweep and range of the principle of emergence are infinitely greater than that of the principle of continuity. Evolution on the lines of continuity is a very tame affair, compared with that based on the principle of emergence. "Its dance", Prof. S. K. Maitra observes, "is a marionette dance, not at all comparable to the world-shaking and word-shaping dance of Shiva which is envisaged by emergent evolution". Its chief defect is its self-centred isolation; it cuts us off from the spiritual forces which are shaping the destiny of the world. Continuity can function very well in a ready-made world, but it can give no guidance in a world which is constantly springing surprises upon us. The course of the world is not something that can be calculated beforehand, for it is a world of 'mysteries, prodigies, without end, without dimension'. But if we adopt the Hegelian principle of continuity, there is no escape for us from thought. It is only when we give up this and adopt the principle of emergence that we can abandon thought and take recourse to some other principle, such as intuition.
Unlike Bradley's, Sri Aurobindo's conception, is based not upon the suicide of the lower principles, but upon their transformation. This transformation we may call a rebirth to indicate the radical nature of the change that will come upon them. The new principle brings about a total change in the character of the world as it existed before its emergence.
In Alexander's, scheme of emergent evolution there is no change of the old principles for the emergence of a new one. The old principles remain as they were before; only a new one joins them. For Sri Aurobindo, however, evolution does not mean merely addition of some new principles to those which are already existent, but it means that the old principles, by reason of the emergence of the new ones, change their character. Life, for instance, as it was before the emergence of Mind, is very different from Life as we know it today, dominated as it is by Mind. So again, Sri Aurobindo. believes that when the principle of Supermind will emerge, all the principles which are existent today, such as Matter Life, Mind and Soul, will undergo a radical change. Even the physical universe will be very different from what' it is at present, for it will cease to offer any resistance to the Spirit,
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and on the contrary will work in perfect co-operation with it.
The real weakness of Alexander's theory, and indeed of all Western theories of evolution, is the absence of any true spiritual principle underlying it. His real Absolute is Space-Time. His God is a floating God that can neither be a metaphysical Absolute nor the God of religion.1
There is no place for any spiritual nisus in his theory of evolution. A Space-Time universe cannot develop any spiritual nisus. He gives us a purely materialistic view of evolution. Western theories are not sufficiently spiritual. They are cosmic. The naturalistic evolutionary theories of the Nineteenth Gentry were frankly mechanical. Even the Hegelian view of evolution in spite " of its vaunted spirituality, is not sufficiently spiritual. For it identifies the Spirit with Reason. But reason does not represent the highest type of spirituality. There are several rungs in the spiritual ladder above reason. Consequently, a truly spiritual view must transcend reason. Bergson again, in his anxiety to avoid mechanical rigidity, has gone to the extreme of eliminating, all teleology from his theory of evolution. This reduces it again to the same position of that mechanical evolution. Alexander tried most arbitrarily to foist a nisus towards spirituality upon a completely materialistic universe in his theory of evolution. Thus all these theories lack a spiritual element.
Bergson every strongly emphasises the hopelessness of the mechanical theory of evolution. He was equally anxious to destroy
1 "The picture which has been drawn of an infinite God", says Alexander, "is a concession to our figurative or mythological tendency and to the habit of the religious consciousness to embody its conception of God in an individual shape....But the infinite God is purely ideal or conceptual. The individual so sketched is not asserted to exist. As actual, God does not possess the quality of deity but is the universe as tending to that quality. The nisus in the universe, though not present to sense, is yet present to reflection upon experience. Only in the sense of straining towards deity can there be infinite actual God. For, again following the lines of experience, we can see that if the quality of deity were actually attained in the empirical development of the world in Time, we should have not one infinite being possessing deity but many (at least potentially many) finite ones. Beyond these finite- odds or angels there would be in turn a new empirical quality looming into view, which for the Ten would, be deity—that is, would be for them what deity is for us. If the possessor of deity were an existent individual humus be finite and not infinite. Thus there is no i^tual infinite being with the* quality flu deity; but there is actual infinite, the whole universe, with a nisus to deity, and this is the God of the religious consciousness, although that consciousness habitually forecasts the divinity of its object as actually realised in an individual form."
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all kinds of teleological evolution. Because teleological evolution ordinarily puts forward narrow human ends, the remedy does not "lie in its total abandoning but in substituting a higher for a lower teleology. Bergson's rejection of all teleology takes away from his creative evolution all its creativity and reduces it to that same dreaded mechanical evolution. Creative or spiritual evolution is one in which every movement bears on its face the stamp of its spiritual origin, in which every step in the process reveals its spiritual source. Here we have the fundamental difference between Bergson's theory of Evolution and that of Sri Aurobindo. Spiritual evolution does not mean for Sri Aurobindo merely self-generative movement but it means an evolution in which every step in the process is directed by the spirit. The spirit is also not a mere silent witness of evolution, as it is in Sankhya philosophy, but it actively guides and directs every little movement of it. Evolution, in fact, is the Spirit's return to itself. It is the inverse of that movement which is called involution or creation.
Returning to the chief contribution of Nineteenth Century philosophy, the theory of evolution, we find that it was developed from very different viewpoints, from even totally opposed standpoints, as for instance, that of Darwin and Spencer, on the one hand, and Hegel on the other. The Darwin-Spenserian theory of evolution was perfectly naturalistic. From the
spiritual point of view it was perfectly neutral; that is to say, evolution was no index at all of spiritual development. Spencer, however, most illogically claimed that the higher from the point of view of evolution must also be looked upon as higher from the point of the spirit. This was, in fact, his main contention in his ethical and sociological works, though he gave absolutely no convincing reason why we should accept this contention. In fact, the naturalistic theory of evolution makes it impossible to talk of any spiritual progress. Though an antidote to the naturalistic evolution the Hegelian-Ception is not completely spiritual, because it takes
into account only one aspect or facet of spiritual life, and elevates it to the position of the sole spiritual element. Reason no doubt is an important stage in the development of the life of the spirit. It liberates it
from the arbitrariness of sensations and perceptions,
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and gives it stability and order. But in itself creates a new kind of bondage—the bondage of stereotyped ways of looking at things —and, therefore, has got to be transcended in the interest of the higher spiritual life.
Evolution is not a mechanical movement without any purpose. It is a movement towards goal. If evolution means merely «the adaptation of the organism to a rigid physical universe, then there can be no talk of any moral or social evolution. Yet Spencer extended the idea of evolution to the social and moral domain by surreptitiously substituting for a purely physical environment a social or moral environment. In fact, with a purely physical en» velopment there could be no talk of any progress, and as such a mechanical evolution is a contradiction in terms. Evolution thus must be a spiritual evolution or it is no evolution at all. Bergson's theory of evolution, though totally different from that of Darwin and Spencer on the one hand, and that of Hegel on the other, strongly indicts the mechanical theory of evolution, and demolishes the teleological view which is unfortunate. A flow that is not a flow towards anything, a movement that is not directed by any end, is unrelieved mechanism. In fact, what Bergson has given us is a temporal mechanism, in place of the spatial mechanism of the nineteenth century biologists.
The answers to the questions, the 'why' of evolution, and why does God seek temporalisation of his conceptual realisations is given in Prof. Whitehead's theory of Creativity. Creativity is the urge for novelty. In the case of the actual entities of the world, the urge is from the physical pole of enjoyment to the mental pole of apparition. In the case of God, it is just the reverse : It is the passage from the mental pole of apparition to the physical one of enjoyment. "Creativity", Prof. Whitehead observes, "is without a character of its own in exactly the same sense in which the Aristotelian 'matter' is without a character of its own". The idea of teleological evolution is a direct importation for Aristotle, but it is grafted on a naturalism which he has borrowed from modern science. ;
V. MADHUSUDAN REDDY
(to continue)
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SRI AUROBINDO ON THE POETRY OF THE FUTURE
III
LET us now note what changes Sri Aurobindo foresees in the form and language of this poetry. Like several critics of today Sri Aurobindo also believes that "a change in the spirit of poetry must necessarily bring with it a change of its forms..."36 However, he thinks that "the opening of the creative mind into an intuitive and revelatory poetry need not of itself compel a revolution and total breaking up of the old forms and a creation of altogether new moulds; it may...be effected for the most part by an opening up of new potentialities in old instruments and a subtle inner change of their character".37 But remoulding of the old instruments may not prove quite sufficient in course of time, and it is more than probable that in order to embody the changed vision fully and satisfactorily there may take place "a considerable departure in all the main provinces of poetic creation, the lyric, the drama, the narrative or epic".38
According to Sri Aurobindo, it is the lyrical impulse which is "the original and spontaneous creator of the poetic form, song the first discovery of the possibility of a higher because a rhythmic intensity of self-expression."39 What is more, the lyrical spirit is capable of adapting itself to various modes of expression. It may find itself quite at home in the "clear spontaneities of song or else it may prefer to weight its steps with thought and turn to a meditative movement or, great-winged, assume an epic elevation, or lyrical the successive moments of an action, or utter the responses of heart to heart, mind to mind, soul to soul, move between suggestion and counter-suggestions of mood and idea and feeling and devise a lyrical seed or concentration of drama".40 As such, it is "the .widest in range" and "most flexible in form and' motive of all the poetic kinds",41 and, therefore, it is there that "a new spirit in poetry is likely to become aware of itself and feel out for
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its right ways of expression...before it works out victoriously its greater motions or ampler figures in narrative and drama".42 And "the turn to a more direct self-expression of the spirit must find out its way first by the emergence of a new kind of lyrical sincerity which is neither the directness of the surface fife emotions nor the moved truth of the thought mind seizing or observing the emotion and bringing out its thought significances. There are in fact only two pure and absolute sincerities here, the power of the native intuition of itself by life which has for its result a direct and obvious identity of the thing felt and its expression, and the power of identity of the spirit when it takes up thought and feeling and life and makes them one with some inmost absolute truth of their and , "our existence It is therefore a transition from the lyricism of life weighted by the stresses of thought to the lyricism of the inmost spirit which uses but is beyond thought that has to be made".43
Above all, what Sri Aurobindo would have us remember in this connection is that "the essential and decisive step of the future art of poetry will perhaps be to discover that it is not the form which either fixes or reveals the spirit but the spirit which makes out of itself the form and the word Nature creates perfectly because she creates directly out of life and is not intellectually self-conscious, the spirit will create perfectly because it creates directly out of self and is spontaneously supra-intellectually all-conscious"?14 The fact being so, "the decisive revealing lyrical outburst must come when the poet has learnt to live creatively only in the inmost spiritual sight and identity of his own self with the self of his objects and images and to sing only from the deepest spiritual emotion".45 And in the long run, the poet will realise that the poetry which is born from the inmost spirit cannot bind him to any "narrow theory of an intellectual art principle",46 for it is the creation at will "according to the truth of the spirit's absolute moments".47 The spirit itself will enable him "to discover infinite possibilities of new spiritual measure and .intonation in time-old lyrical rhythms or to find a new principle of rhythm and structure".48 .
The "dramatic motive and form will also undergo a similar spiritual change. Hitherto we have had "the drama of life, whether
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presenting only vivid outsides and significant incidents and morals and manners or expressive of the life-soul and its workings in event and character and passion, and the drama of the idea or, more vitally, of the idea-power that is made to work itself out in the life movement.. .use the character and the passion for its instruments and at its highest tension appear as an agent of the conflict of ideal forces that produce the more lofty tragedies of human action".19 But the drama of the future "will differ from the romantic play or tragedy because the thing which dramatic speech will represent will be something more internal than the life soul and its brilliant pageant of passion and character the movement that will throughout occupy the mind will be the procession of the soul phases or the turns of the soul action: the character... will not be mistaken for the person, but accepted as only an inner life notation of the spirit : the passions, which have hitherto been prominently brought forward as the central stuff of the drama, will be reduced to their proper place as indicative colour and way on the stream of spiritual self-revelation".50 Also, "the drama will be no longer an interpretation of Fate or self-acting Karma or of the simple or complex natural entanglements of the human life-movement, but a revelation of the Soul as its own fate and determiner of its life and its Karma and behind it of the powers and the movements of the spirit in the universe".61 Nor will it be limited "either by any old or new formal convention, but transmute old moulds and invent others and arrange according to the truth of its vision its acts and the evolution of its dramatic process or the refrain of its lyrical or the march of its epic motive".52
Similarly, the epic and other narrative forms of poetry will undergo a deeper change. Hitherto the poetical narrative has "a mental and moral significance at the basis with the story as its occasion or form of its presentation".53 It will now be replaced by "a soul significance as the real substance," and "the action will not be there for
its external surface interest but as a vital indication of. the significance".54
In place of the external narrative, there will be what Sri Aurobindo calls "an
intensive narrative; intensive in simplicity or in richness of significant
shades, tones and-colours ''55 Altogether, " me same governing vision will be
there as in lyric
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and drama; the method of development will alone be different according to the necessities of the more diffused, circumstanced and outwardly possessive form which is proper to narrative."56 As to the epic, it is sometimes asserted, says Sri Aurobindo, that it is "solely proper to primitive ages when the freshness of life made a story of large and simple action of supreme interest
As to the youthful mind of humanity, the literary epic an artificial prolongation by an intellectual age and a genuine epic poetry no longer possible now or in the future".57 As Sri Aurobindo himself is the author of a massive epic written with a wholly intuitive and revelatory consciousness of this and the other worlds, he cannot subscribe to such a view and is justified in denying its validity. 'His own view of the matter is that the epic "need not necessarily be a vigorous presentation of external action".58 On the contrary, "the divinely appointed creation of Rome, the struggle of the principles of good and evil as presented in the great Indian poems, the pageant of the centuries or the journey of the seer through the three worlds beyond us are as fit themes as primitive war and adventure for the imagination of the epic creator. The epics of the soul most inwardly seen as they will be by an intuitive poetry, are his greatest possible subject, and it is this supreme kind that we shall expect from some profound and mighty voice of the future".50 Above all, it will "reveal from the highest pinnacle and with the largest field ,of vision the destiny of the human spirit and the presence and ways and purpose of the Divinity in man and the universe".60
IV
It is not only the forms and frames of poetry which will undergo a deep change under the impact of the spiritual consciousness and power but also its word and rhythmic movement. As a matter of fact, Sri Aurobindo would have us remember that "the poetic word is a vehicle of the spirit," itself; it is "the chosen medium of the soul's self-expression",61 and, therefore, "any
profound modification of the inner habit of the soul, its thought atmosphere, its way of seeing, its type of feeling,...must reflect itself in a corresponding
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modification,' ...inner greatening and deepening of the word which it has to use,".62 "The old habits of speech", he continues to say, "cannot contain the new spirit and must either enlarge and deepen themselves and undergo a transformation or else be broken up and make way for another figure".63 Even much of serious modernist poetry clearly suggests that the governing spirit of the change overtaking human art and literature and thought "is a turn to a more intimate and directly or fully intuitive speech and rhythm".64 But "the thing is in itself so subtle that it can better be indicated than analysed, adequately described or made precise to the intelligence".65 Moreover, "all poetry except that of the most outward kind...is in its inmost inspiration and character intuitive, more a creation of the vision and feeling than of the intelligence"66 and so "the poet has to do much more than to offer a precise, a harmonious or a forcefully presented idea to the intelligence : he has to give a breath of life to the word and for that must find out and make full use of its potential power of living
suggestion....As in the Vedic theory the Spirit was supposed to create the worlds by the Word, so the poet brings into being in himself and us by his creative word fragmentarily or largely...an inner world of beings, objects and experiences".67 But then "all creation is a mystery in its secret of inmost process and it is only at best the most outward or mechanical part of it which admits analysis; the creative faculty of the poetic mind is no exception. The poet is a magician who hardly knows the secret of his own spell; even the part taken by the consciously critical or constructive mind is less intellectual than intuitive; he creates by an afflatus of spiritual power of which his mind is the channel and instrument and the appreciation of it in himself and others comes not by an intellectual judgment but by a spiritual feeling".68 And it is this intuitive spiritual feeling which will really guide him in the choice of his words, will tell him whether the word that comes to him is the "adequate" or "effective" or "illuminative or "inspired" or "inevitable" utterance of his vision. These, in fact, are the different poetic styles in keeping with the different grades of perfection in poetry which Sri Aurobindo has in view : the adequate, the effective, the illuminative, the inspired and-the inevitable. One may no doubt try to explain,
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analyse and illustrate these different styles, as he. does himself to the best of his capacity, but his warning that "these are things which one has to learn to feel, one can't analyse"69 no less holds good. Subject to this qualification, we may cast a glance here at these different styles as explained and illustrated by him in the pages of The Future Poetry, so that we are able to see for ourselves which of these poetic styles are likely to prevail most with the poets of the future. But in order to do full justice to the subject, Sri Aurobindo tries first to indicate the deeper psychological truth underlying human speech itself, particularly his poetic utterance. He says that if we look at the words we use in speech in their inmost psychological and not only at their external aspect" we shall see that "what constitutes speech and gives it its life and appeal and significance is a subtle conscious force which informs and is the soul of the body of sound : it is a superconscient Nature-Force raising its material out of our sub conscience It is this Force, this Shakti to which the old Vedic thinkers gave the name of Vak, the goddess of creative speech, and the Tantric psychics supposed that this Power acts in us through different subtle nervous centres on higher and higher levels of its force and that thus the word has a graduation of its expressive powers of truth and vision".70 And the fundamental difference between ordinary speech and poetic speech lies, broadly speaking, in this that the former "proceeds from and appeals to the conceiving intelligence while it is the seeing mind that is the master of poetic utterance".71 In this sense, too, therefore, the poet is the seer; he sees through his word the form and image and movement of his experience.
V
But this "seeing speech" is of different grades of expression in keeping with the different grades of consciousness and vision. The first and simplest power "is limited to a clear poetic adequacy and at its lowest difficult to distinguish from prose "statement except by its more compact and vivid force of presentation and the subtle difference made by the rhythm which brings in a living appeal and adds something of an emotional and sensational near-
Page-49
ness to what-would otherwise be little more than an intellectual expression."72 The following couplet of Dryden, for example, as quoted by him,
What're he did was done with so much ease,
In him alone 'twas natural to please,
may be taken to be a good example of it. Here the manner of expression is one of "terse prose statement, but made just poetical by a certain life and vividness and a rhythmic suggestion...just sufficient to make it a thought felt and not merely presented to the conception".73
But there may be in this adequate style "a higher and much finer quality"74 with "the power to make us not only conceive adequately, but see the object or idea in a certain temperate lucidity of vision".75 Quoting the following verses of Wordsworth which may be taken to be a good illustration of this "higher" manner of the adequate style :
"The waves beside them danced, but they
Outdid the sparkling waves in glee :
A poet could not but be gay
In such a jocund company",
he says that the thing sought to be described heft is something "seen and lived within us" and awakens "a satisfied soul response". The style has, therefore, "the native action of the seeing word and bears the stamp of a spiritual sincerity greater, profounder,' more beautiful than that of the intelligence".78
The effective poetic style "tries to go beyond this fine and perfect adequacy in its intensities, attempts a more rich or a more powerful expression, not merely sound and adequate to poetic vision, but dynamic and strongly effective"77, as for example, in the following verses :—
Her eyes as stars of twilight fair, .
Like twilight's too her dusky hair,
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But all things else about her drawn
from Maytime and the cheerful dawn :
(Wordsworth)
When hearts have once mingled,
Love first leaves the well-built nest,
The weak one is singled
To endure what it once possessed.
(Shelley)
Sri Aurobindo says that English poetry is specially rich in effective style and "gets from it much of its energy and power".78
The "illuminative" style, however, goes one step still further and contains "a more intimate vision, a more penetrating spiritual emotion, a more intense and revealing speech, to which the soul can be more vibrantly sensible".79 Here it is the inner mind which "sees and feels object, emotion, idea not only clearly or richly or distinctly and powerfully, but in a flash or outbreak of transforming light which kindles the thought or image into...a more profoundly revealing vision, emotion, spiritual response".80 This may come suddenly and rarely as in Dryden's
And Paradise was opened in his face
or it may sustain itself for sometime, as in the following verses of Shelley:
The heart's echoes render
No song when the spirit is mute—
No song but sad dirges,
Like the wind through a ruin's cell.
In this .stanza, it appears that the lyrical speech in which it occurs "Passes now beyond itself into an illuminative "closeness and then we feel, we bear, we ourselves live at the moment through
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the power of the poetic word the authentic identity of the experience".81
It may strike across a movement of strong and effective poetical thinking, as in Wordsworth's Ode to Duty:
Me this un chartered freedom tires
or "leap up at once to set the tone of a poem", as in the following verses of Wordsworth:
She was a phantom of delight
When first she gleam's upon my sight;
A lovely apparition, sent
To be a moment's ornament;
And in the following lines of Shelley and Wordsworth, we get "the pure illuminative speech of poetry not mixed with or arising out of the lucidly adequate or the richly or forcefully effective or dynamic manner, but changed into an altogether supra-intellectual light of intuitive substance and vision and utterance."82
The silent moon
In her interlunar swoon,
(Shelley)
They flash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude;
(Wordsworth)
But beyond this language of "intuitive illumination" "we arrive at a more uplifted range of an inspired poetic speech which brings to us not only pure light and beauty and inexhaustible depth, but a greater moved ecstasy of highest or largest thought and sight and speech and at its highest culminates in the inevitable, absolute and revealing word".83 For example, in the following verses
A voice so thrilling ne'er was heard
In spring-time from the cuckoo-bird,
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Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides—
(Wordsworth)
Sri Aurobindo discovers that the adequate manner of the poet has undergone "a magical transformation". Sometimes it is "the illuminative speech" which may get "powerfully inspired" and rise "suddenly into the highest revealing word", as in the following verses by Wordsworth :
The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep;
No more shall grief of mine the season wrong;
I hear the echoes through the mountains throng,
The winds come to me from the fields of sleep,
"Here", says Sri Aurobindo, "the inspiration takes up the effort of the poetic intelligence and imagination into a stirred concentration of the speech of sight and in its last movement seems to leap even beyond itself and beyond any pursuit or touch of the intellect into a pure revelatory spiritual vision".84
VI
Thus these are the different grades of the power of poetic language but there is no brute fixity or un transformable rigidity in either or all of them. As Sri Aurobindo says in one of his letters, "all the styles, 'adequate', 'effective', etc. can be raised to inevitability in their own line".85 That is to say, each one of these styles has a gradation of its own, and if the poet has the necessary ability, and inspiration in him, he may raise it to its own highest point which will be the point of "inevitability" as far as that particular style is concerned. And then there is also something like "supreme inevitability"86 of expression. It is "a speech overwhelmingly sheer, pure and true, a quintessential essence of convincingly perfect .utterance".87 But it is something which is both unclassifiable and unanalysable. Some of the instances in English poetry would, however, include, says he, such different kinds of style
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as we have in Keats's "magic casements", Wordsworth's line on Newton in The Prelude and his "fields of sleep", and Shakespeare's "Macbeth has murdered sleep".
When asked whether there was any very strictly close coordination between the differences of style and the different planes of inspiration, he said categorically that there was no such logical connection, unless, of course, "one can say that the effective style comes from the higher mind, the illumined from the illumined mind, the inspired from the plane of intuition".88
Looking at the matter aesthetically, his opinion is that "the genius of the poet can do work of a high beauty or of a considerable greatness in any of these degrees of poetic speech"89. But then it is no less self-evident that "it is the more purely intuitive, inspired-or revelatory utterance that is the most rare and difficult for the human mind to command",90 which the poetry of the future has to acquire if it is to make a truly solid and distinctive advance upon the achievements of the past. As a matter of fact, the greatest poets have always been "those in whom these moments of a highest intensity of intuitive and inspired speech have been of a frequent occurrence and in one or two, as in Shakespeare, of a miraculous abundance".91 Only, we have got to emphasize that though this kind of utterance has been "essentially the same always", yet it ''takes a different colour according to the kind of objective vision and subjective vision which is peculiar to the mind of the poet in its normal action".92 This can be seen through an illustration. Here is Shakespeare:
Life's but a walking shadow;.........
..............................it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing— ,
and here is Shelley expressing a similar idea of life's transience:
'"'Heaven's light for ever shines, Earth's shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass;
Stains 'the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments.
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Commenting upon them Sri Aurobindo says, "The one has the colour of an intuition of the life-soul in one of its intense moods and we not only think the thought but seem to feel it even in our nerves of mental sensation, the other is the thought-mind itself uttering in a moved, inspired and illuminative language an idea of the pure intelligence".93 , We may now take it that it will not be easily possible for "the present human mind "to recover the same spirit as moved Shakes-pear's speech," for "it is nearer to that of the later poets and their voice of the brooding or the moved poetic intelligence or of the intuitive mind rising out of the intellect and still preserving something of its tones" 94. Still we may take it that the manner of the coming poetry is likely to recover and hold as its central secret something akin to the older poet, "a greater straight impact and natural body of intuitive intensity". It will be more and more, the "language of a higher intuitive mind swallowing up the intellectual tones into the close nesses and identities of a supra-intellectual light and Ananda".95
Thus, if the object of the future poetry, as Sri Aurobindo feels it is going to be, is "to express some inmost truth of the things which it makes its subject'" 96 it is certain that it "must...express them in the inmost way, and that can only be done if, transcending the more
intellectualized or externally vital and sensational expression, it speaks Wholly in the language of an intuitive mind and vision and imagination, intuitive sense, intuitive emotion, intuitive vital feeling"97. Much of present-day English poetry is already moving in this direction, though with "less subtlety and a more forceful out ward ness of sight and tone"98. As Sri Aurobindo remarks very pertinently: "The old habits of poetic speech still cling around and encrust or dilute the subtler subtlety, the more luminous light'...the deeper depths sought for by the intuitive utterance"99. Nevertheless, there are definite signs that "a new manner of speech, a basis for the more inner and illumined poetic language of the future" is being increasingly shaped; and "it
fess this greaten-1ng, deepening and making normal of this kind that is likely to bring the perfect voice of the poetry of the future".100 Drawing upon the
Upanishad image of the golden lid which ultimately
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has to be rent by the aspiring human soul in order to obtain the highest, the absolute Truth, he says that that "speech also has to be found that shall come by the rending or removal of the golden lid between our intelligence and the effulgent supra-intelligence and effect a direct and sovereign descent and pouring of some absolute sight and word of the spirit into the moulds of human language"101.
We have in these words of Sri Aurobindo a whole world of aesthetic wisdom. And it is a world which both the practising poets and artists and the forward-looking talented critics of today and tomorrow can fruitfully and inexhaustibly draw upon.
SHREE KRISHNA PRASAD ·
REFERENCES
36,37. The Future Poetry, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, p. 362.
38,39. Ibid., p. 363.
40, 41, 42. Ibid., p. 364.
43. Ibid., pp. 367-368.
44. Ibid., pp. 369-370.
45. 46, 47, 48. Ibid., p. 370
49. Ibid., pp. 371-372.
50. Ibid., pp. 373-374.
51. Ibid., p. 374.
52. 53» 54- Ibid., p. 375.
55. Ibid., pp. 375-376.
56, 57. Ibid., p. 376.
58, 59, 60. Ibid., p. 377.
61, 62, 63. Ibid., p. 378.
64, 65, 66. Ibid., p. 379.
67, 68. Ibid p. 380.
69. Letters of Sri Aurobindo 3rd Series Sri Aurobindo Ashram Pondicherry p. 15.
70. The Future' Poetry, of Cit., p. 381.
71, 72. Ibid., p. 382.
Page-56
73. Ibid., p. 383.
74. Ibid., p. 382.
75. 76. Ibid., p. 383.
77. Ibid., pp. 383-84.
78. Ibid., p. 385.
79. 80, 81. 7Ibid., p. 386.
82. Ibid., pp. 387-88.
83. Ibid., pp. 388-89.
84. Ibid., p. 389.
85. Letters of Sri Aurobindo, 3rd series, Op. Cit., p. 15.
86. 87. Ibid., p. 16.
88. Ibid., pp. 16-17.
89. The Future Poetry, Op. Cit., pp. 389-90.
90. 91, 92. Ibid., p. 390.
93. Ibid., p. 391.
94. 95. 96, 97.98. Ibid., p. 392.
99, 100. Ibid., p. 395.
101. Ibid., p. 397.
Page-57
ON ART AND BEAUTY: THE LADDER OF
AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE
"Art is discovery and revelation of beauty.
The aim of Art is to embody beauty and give delight."
Sri Aurobindo: Future Poetry.
SRI Aurobindo, the great Yogi, besides being a great artist, is a great aesthete. He unhesitatingly gave a higher place to Beauty and Delight than even to Knowledge. He wrote: "The day when we get back to the ancient worship of Delight and Beauty will be our day of Salvation". He knew that the present age was rather far from the worship of beauty and delight. Art today is isolated from life. The modern European culture that dominates the world is "economic and utilitarian." The modern mind is complex and divided, it is governed by "practical reason." Sri Aurobindo warns: "Without it (the worship of beauty and delight) there could be no assured nobility and sweetness in Art; no satisfied dignity and fullness of life nor harmonious perfection of the spirit." And he adds "Beauty and Delight are also the very soul and origin of art and poetry." (Future Poetry).
The question may arise : what has spirituahty to do with Art-with beauty and delight? From the Indian Saint of view, spirituality is akin to Art. In fact, in ancient times, religion, philosophy and art were collateral activities and poetry, dance and music were allied to sculpture and painting. Religion affirms a Supracosmic Reality, a Creator of the Universe, and lays down rules to govern man's relation with Him and with his fellow beings. It attempts to bring a higher Truth into man's individual and collective life.
Art, too tried to reach out to the same Reality through aesthetic sensibility, creative urge and a sense of beauty. It created forms which attempted, to bring the invisible reality into-the realm of the senses. It makes the invisible visible; renders the Infinite 4n terms of the finite.
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Art enriches human life; its alchemy converts- the elements of gross matter into those of the Imponderable, turns stone or wood, metal or mere paper into something not only beautiful but Divine. Buddha's stone image embodies a state of consciousness, the ineffable peace of Nirvana.
The difference in the outlook of ancient and modern times is easily seen in the outlook towards Nature. Krishna Deva Raya ruled the country around Ellora. During his regime the construction of a temple to be carved from the rock was planned. It took 200 years to execute the plan. The Kailasa at Ellora is grand by any standard. Today the popular governments plan for industrial development. The difference between the dominating spirit of, the two ages is clear. In the past, Art was a part of life; today man wants to make science and industry a part of life. There is nothing wrong in it, so long as it is only one part and not the all-absorbing and dominating part. The capacity to utilise the resources of Nature should not promote in man the merely utilitarian view of life. To see this world as Nature's inexhaustible treasure house and to feel that the highest business of man is to rob as much of it as he can during the short span of his life is a very poor view of the world and of man. A balanced view is needed.
The story of Beauty and the Beast is well-known. In all cultures there are such symbolic stories. There is a very large element of the beast in human nature. Beauty has the power to change and elevate the beast in man. Life is full of needs, necessities, impulsions and even sub-conscious irresistible movements. Man has to eat, breathe and work for his bread : life is full of compulsions. Beauty frees man from these compulsions. A need touches man where he feels a want and when the want is satisfied the object that fulfils the want becomes burdensome. But "A thing of beauty is a joy forever," it is not meant to satisfy any outer "need,^-it does not touch us at a particular point, it embraces the whole of our being. After that man is able to look at the world free from the pressure of necessity, free from the veil of self-
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regarding ego and desires. Thus art-experience liberates the consciousness and brings into view a new dimension of perception in which harmony seems the established law.
The claim of science is (or rather was) that the knowledge of the external world which it obtains by using the senses and by experiments is the only valid knowledge : it is real, in opposition to the perception of the world by poetry, art, etc., which it characterised as "unreal," "imaginative," impractical." In fact, the knowledge of the world which science gives is only one side of Reality of which the experience of poetry and art is another, and even more important aspect. Beauty, in fact, is nearer to that ultimate supraintellectual Reality, for its knowledge is directly attained by an act of identity and is not indirect like that of science.
Sir Arthur Eddington in his Gifford lectures has discussed this question of validity of knowledge. He says that the claim of physical science that the rainbow exists to give the knowledge of the difference in the wave-lengths of light to man is not valid. When the poet says : "My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky", he expresses another aspect of the knowledge of the rainbow. The ripples in the lake do not merely indicate the force of surface-tension and the pressure of the wind, but the poet's image about them is not merely something unreal and therefore untrue.
Tagore in his book Sadhana says that a thing of beauty generally has two sides; one, outer or merely objective and another, inner or subjective. He takes the rose for an illustration; fortunately, there is unanimity about its beauty. Objectively, the beautiful rose is a hard-working labourer in Nature's workshop, it has no time to be a dandy. In order to live, the plant must draw the necessary elements from the soil, air and sunlight. It should absorb water in necessary quantity at the proper time. But the same rose, when it enters man's heart becomes a symbol of freedom, leisure and beauty. It seems to man a mystery of colour, form and fragrance. The soil which man looks upon as ugly and dirty hides within itself such a treasure of beauty. The very earth seems to find her joyful liberation in the form of perfume that-pervades the air. But in the work a day world, busy with humdrum life,
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man hardly finds time to perceive the beauty of the rose. In the homes of the well-to-do the vases are decorated with flowers, but it is a mere convention not a communion with beauty. Such a communion is likely, perhaps, in the silence of early morning while walking round the garden when you see the miracle of the opening rose-bud. Every thing around is calm, and in that solitude the beauty of the rose reveals itself to you. You have then the overwhelming shock of delight. You see, then what an infinite treasure of beauty is being "squandered" in the universe and how much of it runs to mere waste because of man's insensibility.
Sri Aurobindo says : "Art is discovery and revelation of beauty," and adds : "The aim of art is to embody beauty and give , delight." Explaining the nature of the 'delight', he says : "Delight or Ananda is not the pleasure of a mood or sentiment or a fine aesthetic indulgence of the sense in the attraction of form." (Future Poetry)
Today there is an insistence on the acceptance of life and "Art is expected to be directed to life. In fact, all human activities are for life. Only the question is : What is life ? Art also exists for life. Sri Aurobindo says : "Art is the rhythmic voice of Life —but a voice of inner life." (Future Poetry) Life is not what it appears. In fact, the outer aspect of life is a mask. To reach out to and express that which is behind the mask is the business of art.
We have to bear in mind that Art is not only expression, it can be creative, also.
EXPERIENCE OF BEAUTY
In ancient times religion encouraged the experience of beauty as an aspect of the Divine. There were puritanical religions like Protestant Christianity and some philosophical schools that condemned beauty, or encouraged renunciation as. indispensable to spirituality.
But in India the Upanishad speaks of the Supreme as "Raso vat Sah "He is of the nature of the sap "of Delight". Sri Aurobindo explains the word "Rasa" : "Rasa is concentrated
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taste, a spiritual essence of emotion, an essential aesthesis, the soul's pleasure in pure and perfect source of feeling" (Future Poetry).
Later in mediaeval times the Vaishnavite religion of the North and Shaivism of the South India have spoken of beauty not only as one, but the highest, aspect of the Supreme : The Divine to them is "bhuvan sundara", the All Beautiful. He is "nikhil rasdmrta sindhu", "the ocean of the entire ambrosia of delight"; He is "akhila saundarya nidhi"—"the treasure of all beauty". Tagore says : "vairdgya sddhane mukti, se dmdr nay." —"the liberation that is attained by renunciation is not for me"; I feel the embrace of freedom in thousandfold bonds of delight"-. He wants to keep the doors of the senses open and feel through them the universal delight.
So did Kabir sing a few centuries ago : "santo Sahaja samddhi bhali"; "O holymen ! spontaneous Samadhi is the best". He says further, "Since I got the vision of the Lord, my con-sciousness does not turn inwards. No longer do I close my eyes or ears, nor do I mortify my body; with eyes open and a smile on my lips, I behold the beautiful form of the Lord everywhere. In the centre of all forms stands the Formless, yet ineffable is the beauty of the "Form".1
To realise the universal beauty and also to see the Supreme as the All-Beautiful through the normal activities of the senses may be regarded as the highest experience of Beauty.
One has also to bear in mind the fact that all men always keep the doors of their senses open, and yet all do not have the vision of the divine beauty. There is needed a preparation, a sadhana, to perceive it.
Leaving aside the highest aspect of the experience of beauty one or two instances may be related here to help one to understand the nature of the experience of beauty.
1 ānkha na mundu, kāri na rundhu, kāyā kashta na dhāruh
Khule nayan me has has dekhun '
Sundar rupa nihārun ,
Sabahin murata bich amurata
murata ki balihari
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The first is an experience of Tagore during his childhood. A private school was run for the children of the Tagore-family. Among the subjects taught anatomy was also included. One, day, the teacher of anatomy brought the bone of a human hand isolated from the human skeleton for the lesson. Tagore felt terribly shocked at the sight of the bone unrelated to a human body ; He could not see it except as an organic part. Isolated from its natural place and function it appeared meaningless and was ugly.
Another experience of Tagore may be cited in his own words : "One day I was out in a boat on the Ganges. It was a beautiful evening in autumn. The sun had just set; the silence of the sky was full to the brim with ineffable peace and beauty. The vast expanse of water was without a ripple, mirroring all the changing shades of the sunset glow. Allies and miles of a desolate sandbank lay like a huge amphibious reptile of some antediluvian age, with its scales glistening in shining colours. As our boat was silently gliding by the precipitous river-bank, riddled with the nest-holes of a colony of birds, suddenly a big fish leapt up to the surface of the water and then disappeared, displaying on is body all the colours of the vanishing sky. It drew aside for a moment the many coloured screen behind which there was a silent world full of joy of life. It came up from the depths of its mysterious dwelling with a beautiful dancing motion and added its own music to the silent symphony of the dying day. I felt as if I had a friendly greeting from an alien world in its own language, and it touched my heart with a flash of gladness. Then suddenly the man at the helm exclaimed with a distinct note of regret "Ah, what a big fish !" (Sadhana). He saw the fish through the veil of his desire and so could not get the whole truth of it. (Sadhana). A beautiful river to a painter's view is not the same as it is to a thirsty man.
But what is the meaning of the experience of beauty ? What does a man. mean when he says : this thing is, beautiful. Words like 'beauty', 'art', 'poetry' are very difficult to define, though one feels what they mean and experiences -their action in
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oneself. Very often definitions fail to give the true idea of the thing defined.
Beauty is recognised, rather, by an instinct, a spontaneous intuition in man,—there is an inner eye that sees beauty. But all men do not perceive beauty in the same form or object. If the inner eye is not open, if the instinct is not active then beauty remains unperceived. That is what makes Wordsworth complain: "The world is too much with us." We are so engrossed in the outer and material aspect of our life, its needs, cares and preoccupations that we lose sight of the gift of beauty.
Something about beauty may be known by finding out how it acts on men. Suppose one says: "beauty captivates me"—then he is feeling the attraction and perhaps the charm of it without the perception of true beauty. Lord Vishnu is said to have assumed the form of the fatal charmer, Mohan, to deceive the titans. When one is enchanted or enthralled by a form then something like a spell is cast upon him, it almost seems as if one is caught into a net like a helpless victim.
That is not the nature of the experience of pure beauty. When one feels: "beauty liberates me, beauty raises me to the Infinite", then he has come in contact with the real thing. True beauty frees the soul from all self-regarding reactions, desires and impulses; it gives another view of the self and the world, and may reveal an aspect of the Divine, may inspire one to unconditional self-giving, may enable one to perceive the play of infinite delight as beauty.
These various grades of the experience of beauty show that beauty is relative; it can be arranged in a hierarchy.
But what is the content of the experience of beauty ? When a man says, "this thing is beautiful", he means : I feel this object rhythmic, it is well proportioned, its parts are harmoniously set, it is as it should be. Or perhaps that is not the correct way-of putting it, for a machine well made might satisfy those conditions —and though one may find a machine beautiful, yet it seems so mechanical, too utilitarian, too dry. The experience may be put in this way : "My inner soul and my nature both are attracted by this object which has spontaneous harmony". Generally in a thing that is felt as beautiful one wants to say that the inner truth
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which is trying to manifest itself in the object or form, has succeeded in its objective; the truth in it is expressed there, without distortion or diminution,—there is here a perfect accord between the inner truth or reality and the outer form. Thus beauty is the quality of an object or a form, which gives to the subjective consciousness that perceives it the sense of harmony, of perfect proportion, of appropriateness, a feeling of attraction. It can be said that at some unforgettable moment or condition, the relation between the two-subject and object, becomes so special, so unique that it satisfies the thirst for beauty in the heart.
One may question : Is there thirst for beauty in man ? The answer is : Yes; though ordinarily, such a need is not perceived yet unknown and unexpressed the need for beauty is always there in man. Man is an ignorant creature and fives in a world of disharmony, division and conflict, yet in his heart of hearts—there is a faith that in the centre of this vast, dynamic universe, self-exist-tent harmony is at work, a harmony that so satisfies him that even a glimpse of it makes him feel as if the very purpose of creation were fulfilled, that the whole labour of the Cosmos was justified.
Beauty is the language of the all-pervading delight of existence calling man to itself. Experience of beauty may be said to be the direct proof of the unity of all being and of the presence of the all-pervading delight which spills itself constantly into two jets of beauty .and delight. And this delight can manifest itself even in inconscieixt Matter to a soul encased in senses.
One can say that beauty is Nature's effort to awaken man to the universal harmony, or that beauty is a sign that Nature is not unconscious in its depth and that she waits to carry her message to man.
Sri Aurobindo defines beauty as "the intense impression, the concentrated form
of delight." The all-pervading Delight manifests at each point something unique
which endows it with a special quality of beauty. Beauty may be said to be the
power of the Supreme which acts when He turns to create the universe. There . is
an infinite content of beauty in the Supreme. This infinite content pf Beauty
can find expression in a small fraction of time, in an apparently insignificant
thing. Sri Aurobindo speaks about
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this in his poem, "In Horis Eternum". He says that the perception of this eternal beauty can occupy "a moment mere". There can be an instantaneous perception of beauty 'in a touch', 'in a smile'. Outwardly it may be something very insignificant but it is charged with burden of That which is behind all forms. The human soul through the senses catches not merely the vibration of the form but of That which is behind.
The experience of beauty can be independent of any outer equipment, ornamentation, or environment, the subjective state alone of the individual can make the form beautiful.
Sri Aurobindo clarifies the nature of the experience of beauty and its highest seeking :
"When it (the soul) can get the touch of this universal, absolute , beauty, this soul of beauty, this sense of its revelation in any slightest or greatest thing, the beauty of a flower, a form, the beauty and power of a character, an action, an event, a human life, an idea, a stroke of the brush or the chisel or a scintillation of the mind, the colours of a sunset or the grandeur of the tempest, it is then that the sense of beauty in us is really, powerfully, entirely satisfied. It is in truth seeking, as in religion, for the Divine, the All-Beautiful in man, in nature, in life, in thought, in art; for God is Beauty and Delight hidden in the variation of his masks and forms. When, fulfilled in our growing sense and knowledge of beauty and delight in beauty and our power for beauty, we are able to identify ourselves in soul with this Absolute and Diverge in all the forms and activities of the world and shape an image of our inner and our outer life in the highest image we can perceive and embody of the All-Beautiful, then the aesthetic being in us who was born for this end, has fulfilled himself and risen to his divine consummation. To find highest beauty is to find God; to reveal, to embody, to create as we say, highest beauty is to bring out of our souls the living image and power of God. (Human Cycle, p. 178).
(to continue)
A. B. PURANI,
(Lecture delivered at Benares Hindu University)
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THE One Transcendent Absolute Consciousness, the Divine Ground of all being and becoming, has diverse, infinite aspects, viswatomukha, and endless levels and depths in each front, ananta
agarāha mahimd. The sadhaka of each yoga following the rigid but safely macadamised path of its
Shastra succeeds in going behind the hard crust of the outer dimension of the universe and the manifestation, and glimpses that Face of the Absolute to which he has made himself ready by the particular kind of purification and method of concentration in his discipline. Very often this necessary and inevitable conditioning of the personality of the sadhaka entails a shutting off, quiescence or atrophy and sometimes even expunging of many elements of the being in the interests of heightening, sharpening and focussing of one part of the nature. No wonder when the sadhaka arrives at the goal of his path, the vision of the Absolute, he cannot but declare the one Face of That he has the privilege to experience as the sole or the only true one and all other Aspects as either false or secondary or only appearances on the way to the
scummy of his realisation. 'The Divine is indeed what each sadhaka expects of Him in his deepest aspiration.' He includes and transcends simultaneously all the Faces of His Being described by the spiritual explorers. If only the sadhaka remembers from the outset that the way he has chosen is but one of the many and if his aspiration is integral, he can after glimpsing the Eternal by the special path of his, proceed to fuse this realisation with other realisations and so make his vision of the Absolute more and more inclusive and complete. Nay he can raise his con-consciousness to a status higher than the mental, the very Supra-mental which sees the Absolute in the way of the Absolute. The, purified, mind, heart or the will has a vision of some Aspect of the Divine., "The Over mental consciousness
care hold "together many of these Aspects realising their simultaneous. validity. But
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the Supramental Vision sees the Divine in the Divine consciousness. Savitri's aspiration has been always integral and whatever path she takes up, she ends by arriving at the Supramental Gnostic realisation. First indeed she sees as the sadhaka of the exclusive path sees, but this is only a stage in the road to the Beatific Gnostic Vision. No sadhana depletes any part of her being and therefore circumscribes her view of the Ultimate Reality. No discipline cripples her aspiration and therefore prevents her from pushing beyond the frontiers of the mental consciousness. So we see her going through the experience of Nirvana in all its tremendous intensity and amplitude as felt by the most thorough-going ascetic but emerging from it to a larger and more inclusive spiritual consciousness, avoiding 'the perilous -refusal of the ascetic'.
II
Savitri is now approaching the Absolute by the method of discrimination and detachment, viveka and vairdgya, and so her realisation resembles very closely in its initial stages the experience of the ascetic Gnana Yogi. Her path has now been that of renouncing and rejecting all formations of the mind, thoughts, cittavrtti nirodha. As the classic text of the Vivpkaciidāmain declares, the world of names and forms, nāmarupajagat, is the object of perception of the thought-bound mind and a mind free from these impurities of thoughts becomes ready to glimpse and reflect and finally become the ultimate Reality, visuddha-buddheh paramātma-vedanam.
"In that absolute stillness bare and formidable «
There was glimpsed an all-negating Void supreme
That claimed its mystic Nihil's sovereign right
To- cancel Nature and deny the soul.
Even the nude sense of self grew pale and thin,.:
Impersonal; sign less, featureless, void of forms „
A blank„pure consciousness had replaced the mind."
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For this great experience to be possible, the stillness of the mind, its freedom from the limited mental movements called thoughts has to be absolute. All the conscious and subconscious layers of the chambers of the memory with their accumulations of thoughts of the past, present and the future have to be eliminated. Not only the existing store of thoughts has to be emptied, but, the possibility of its future formation either by a hidden impulsion from within, or by a sudden invasion from without has to be expunged. An impregnable fortress of Silence, formidable, causing fear to all small formations—that is what the mind has to become for the perception of the Infinite. The first impact of the Absolute is one of complete overwhelming of the individual. There is nothing finite here that the mind is accustomed to perceive and there is no limiting consciousness of individual formation called personality. Again there is no quality or sign by which it could be designated. It is an awful supreme Void, a mystic Nihil with an overwhelming power of engulfing all nature and soul-formation. The more the mind is steeped in That, the more it loses its mentalisings power and individuality till finally the blank pure consciousness replaces it.
Only when mentalisings is active in the consciousness, the subject and the object, the subjective and the objective are distinctly formed, separately perceived and realised as absolutely real. Once this stops, both these are realised as formations in a basic substratum of consciousness called the Nihil or the Void. That becomes the Real and so these become the substance of a name, a pictured symbol, a dream of images, an appearance, a semblance. The seer and the seen, drk and drśya, are essentially the Same Absolute Consciousness, kevalam ātmā. It is a state of Pure Vision without the aid or the conditioning media of the doors of perception, the thinking or the feeling parts, including the emotional, sensational and the nervous.
"A. sheer. self-sight was there, no thought arose.
Emotion slept deep down in the still heart
Or lay buried in a cemetery of peace :
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All feelings seemed quiescent, calm or dead,
As if the heart-strings rent could work no more .
And joy and grief could never rise again.
he heart beat on with an unconscious rhythm
But no response came from it and no cry.
Vain was the provocation of events ;
Nothing within answered an outside touch,
No nerve was stirred and no reaction rose."
There was no personal initiation of action by a personal will since there was no person at all to do it, but somehow the body "said whatever needed to be said', 'did whatever needed to be done', and 'understood without the aid of thought'.
"All wrought like an unerring apt machine.
As if continuing old habitual turns,
And pushed by an old unexhausted force
The engine did the work for which it was made :"
The Pure Consciousness, suddha caitanya, is only a spectator of this drama not taking part in it at all.
"A pure perception was the only power
That stood behind her action and her sight."
But its very presence, sānnidhya, is enough to bring order and ordered response to the 'incoherence that crosses the firm void.' But for this marvellous and august presence, the formation of the subject and the object, 'her private universe', 'the house that she had built with bricks of thought and sense In the beginning after the birth of Space' would cease to be.
As with the subject of all experience, so with the object, the world. The Pure Consciousness watches the figure of the cosmic game with an absolute equality and impartiality of vision and It knows all, not by the knowings or the methods of direct or
indirect contact of subject with the object, nor does Its awareness leave any residue as does the mental construction.
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"All seemed a brilliant shadow of itself,
A cosmic film of scenes and images:"
Even the solid hills with their rigidly fixed outline seemed a design sketched on the silent mind. The forest with its variegated colours appeared a painting's colours hiding a surface void-
"The blue heavens, an illusion of the eyes,
Roofed in the mind's illusion of a world.
The men who walked beneath an unreal sky
Seemed mobile puppets out of cardboard cut
And pushed by unseen hands across the soil
Or moving pictures upon Fancy's film :"
The movements of the brain, the nervous tremour and the heart's quiverings 'were twitchings of the body' which is itself 'a manufactured lie of Maya's make'.
"Its life a dream seen by the sleeping Void,
The animals lone or trooping through the glades
Fled like a passing vision of beauty and grace
Imagined by some all-creating Eye."
If Savitri had entrenched and limited herself to this stage of the experience of Nirvana as the traditional Sannyasins do, she would have echoed their great sentence of Wisdom : The Brahman alone is real, the world an illusion, Brahmaiva satyam, jaganmithyā.
III
The Way of Knowledge as macadamised for the Sannyasin has its beginning in the good aspiration, subhecchā, for the realisation of the Truth of one's being. This is the natural result of getting fed up with the life of fundamental
ignorance one shares with the majority and judging oneself by the standard set by the Scriptures, Shastra, and the wise who have set their eyes on the
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discovery of the Essential Truth, Sat. This leads to the next stage of the Quest for the Atman, vicāranā, by assiduously engaging oneself in right conduct, sadācāra which includes good action, satkarma, concentration on the Chosen Deity, istadevatā, with faith and devotion, upāsanā, and offering of the fruits of all one's work to the Devata, karmaphalatyāga. This slowly but surely reduces the clinging of the mind to the objects of the senses and leads to the state designated as tanu-mānasī (slender, refined Mind). Each succeeding state is at once the product of all the previous states and itself leads assisted by all the early states to the next higher state. Thus the higher , stage called sattwāpatti, attainment of luminous composure, is the cumulative effect of all the earlier movements of suāheccha, vicāranā and tanumānasi. This state of light, balance and peace of mind, manahprasāda, comes by the mind dwelling on the Real Self, Atman. And so the power of turning inward and catching by reflection the Peace and the Poise of the pure Self, suddha dtmd develops the next higher stage of complete absence of attachment to the Not-Self, asarhsakti. This very quickly makes for the next rung in the ladder of knowledge labelled paādrthd- bhāvana, non-dwelling on the objective. The mind at this stage has become ready for a complete dissolution in the Ultimate Reality, which is the seventh and the last ground of Wisdom, jnāñabhumikā. This is specially called the turiya, a state of consciousness which transcends the three usual states bf wakeful or jāgra, the dreaming or swapna and deeply asleep or susupti. What remains to be done for the sadhaka who has begun to experience the Turiya is to guard himself against the invasion of the habit of attachment to the Not-Self, vasand. The continuous vigilant practice in solitude and seclusion of the great formulae of the Higher knowledge,
mahd-vdkya—That thou aft, tattwamasi; This self is Brahman, Ayam
dtmd brahma; I am Brahman, ahapt brahmdsmi ; Luminous Consciousness is Brahmah, pjrajhansm brahma—will finally dissolve all the vdsands and establish the jndni in
Jivanmukti. The burden of the song of the' Jivanmukta is always his complete identity with Sachchidananda —ciddnanda-vilpa Hivo'ham sivo'ham. When even this feeling
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that one is identical with Brahman ceases and only the Absolute Chit exists, cinmdtrā, jīvan mukti has culminated in vidhema mukti. This complete extinction of the feeling of the Self and the Not-Self, Atma and anātmā, the appearance of the universe and the feeling of even Brahman, prapañca āhāna and Brahmākāra, in the sole supreme unmodified cit is the highest and the greatest goal possible for the consciousness—sā kāshtā sā parā gati. This state of Nirvana is designated in different ways by the followers of Vedanta and Siddhartha—śūnya by the śūnyavādins, Brahman by the knowers of Brahman, Vijñāna by the knowers of vijndna, purusha by the Sankhya, ishwaa by the Yogis and shiva by the followers of Agama.
IV
But Nirvana in Savitri's "liberated consciousness turns out to be the beginning of her realisation, a first step towards the complete thing, not the sole true attainment possible or even a culminating finale. Realisation adds itself to realisation and fuses itself with this original experience. At an early stage the aspect of an illusory world gives place to one in which illusion is only a small surface phenomenon with an immense Divine Reality behind it and a supreme Divine Reality above it and an intense Divine Reality in the heart of everything that had seemed at first only a cinematic shape or shadow. In fact it is not an illusion in the sense of an imposition of something baseless and unreal on the consciousness, but a misrepresentation by the conscious mind and sense and a falsifying misuse of manifested existence. And this is no reimprison ment in the senses, no diminution or fall from supreme experience, it comes rather as a constant heightening and widening of the Truth ; it is the Spirit that sees objects, not the senses, and the Peace, the Silence, the freedom in
Infinity -refrains always with the world or all worlds only as a continuous
incident in. the timeless eternity of the Divine. In the end, Nirvana
begins to disappear into a relater Super consciousness from above,"
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"Yet something was there behind the fading scene ;
Wherever she turned, at whatsoever she looked,
It was perceived, yet hid from mind and sight."
This Eternal Transcendent Reality is beyond Space and Time. 'It dwelt nowhere, it was outside the hours.' But It is not the opposite of the senses of sight and hearing. In fact, It is the mighty fulfilling Presence of all hearing and vision. The only pity is that It has not manifested Itself to the Eye and the Ear.
"This only could justify the labour of sight,
But sight could not define for it a form;
This only could appease the unsatisfied ear
But hearing listened in vain for a missing sound;"
The Truth which will assuage the mind's agelong quest, the Power that will dynamise and drive the vital to its delight, the Love that the secret heart in the mortal aspires for and the Bliss which the human soul seeks are found in their absolute perfection in the mighty womb of this Ultimate Reality. It is at the same time the negation of all that is finite and the fulfilment of all these. The eternal discontent of all that is limited is because of this August Presence.
"An endless No to all that seems to be,
An endless Yes to things ever un conceived
And all that is unimagined and un thought,
An eternal zero or un totaled Aught,
A spaceless and a placeless Infinite."
But how to describe in a language fashioned by the limited mind in its commerce with the finite, this sole Reality ? The words Infinity and Eternity are no description of the positive content of the essential nature of its consciousness but only indicate that That is not finite, nor bound by time. Even the opposition of the Eternal and the-temporal is not the truth of the matter for all this is only a, manifestation of that Reality.
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"The world is but a spark-burst from its light,
All moments flashes from its Timelessness,
All objects glimmerings of the Bodiless
That disappear from Mind when That is seen."
Its realm is one beyond all knowings with their formulations of the knower, known and knowledge, beyond all willings 'with their formations of the actor, action and the object acted upon, beyond all lovings with their separative organisation of the lover, beloved and the feeling of love and beyond all enjoying with their triple moulding of the enjoyer, the thing enjoyed and the act of enjoyment.
"A consciousness that saw without a seer,
The Truth where knowledge is not nor knower nor known,
The Love enamoured of its own delight
In which the Lover is not nor the Beloved
Bringing their personal passion into the Vast,
The Force omnipotent in quietitude,
The Bliss that none can ever hope to taste."
Its state is beyond the possible experience of any egoistic individual formation. Before its august and tremendous Reality all formation of self is annihilated. To have a glimpse of That one must completely efface oneself.
"A truth in nothingness was its mighty clue.
If all existence could renounce to be
And Being take refuge in Non-being's arms
And Non-being could strike out its ciphered round,
Some lustre of that Reality might appear."
"Beyond the Being and the Non-being, there is something which is, which manifests as Love supreme and which is at oaace Being and Non-being. And the first manifestation of That is the Ananda of Identity. In essence it is the Identity becoming conscious of itself in Ananda; and then that goes the whole way through the
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entire manifestation and all the forms that Love takes and it returns to the Unity through union. And this adds to the Ananda, the Ananda of union which would never have existed if the circuit had not been gone through." I
That is the Integral Supramental Truth-Consciousness holding in a simultaneous fused identity the apparent opposites of Being and Non-being, Personal and Impersonal, Force and Rest and even the Divine and the so-called Anti-Divine.
V
The consciousness of Savitri has made now an ascent from the physical, vital and mental, through the cosmic into the Supra-mental and even beyond to the very Summit of all Consciousness.
"A refugee from the domain of sense,
Evading the necessity of thought,
Delivered from Knowledge and from Ignorance
And rescued from the true and the untrue,
She shared the Super conceit's high retreat
Beyond the self-born Word, the nude Idea,
The first bare solid ground of consciousness;"
The realm of the Supramental is the zone of Vijnana or Knowledge but even that is passed through in Savitri's adventure into the Infinite. 'She was a point in the unknowable'. 'She was in That but still became not That'. 'Only some last annulment now remained'.
But all separative individual initiation having vanished, Savitri waits on the threshold of the Absolute, for That to
chose Its way of action. The individual realisation of gnostic purusha is also and unreservedly offered to the Transcendent Lord. That
may choose the shadow of herself that remains as the point of support to live and emerge from the state of almost .nothingness. Or That "might merge her into nothingness. Or she
might new-become the All. Or she might become the redeeming instrument
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of the world. Or she might be allowed to explore the mystic cipher by entering deeper into That and come out with her soundings. Or the so-called nothingness, the seeming exit or the closed end of all could be a blind and tenebrous passage, to the Ineffable. Or she might become the harbinger of the Love and Light and Truth to all mortals :
"Even now her splendid being might flame back
Out of the silence and the nullity,
A gleaming portion of the All-Wonderful,
A power of some all-affirming Absolute,
A shining mirror of the eternal Truth
To show to the One-in-all its manifest face,
To the souls of men their deep identity."
Or she might go beyond all cosmic manifestation in the realm of knowledge or ignorance, the cosmic day and cosmic night and rest in the white summit of eternity after all her voyages in the strange seas of consciousness. But everything is held as a mystic secret and all these possibilities even lose their importance or interest. There is only the great trance in waiting without the anxiety, expectation or trepidation of the waiting. In the absolute immobility and peace of consciousness of the Absolute, Savitri waits for That to choose and work Its way.
"A lonely Absolute negated all :
It effaced the ignorant world from its solitude
And drowned the soul in its everlasting peace."
REFERENCES
Savitri: Book Seven, Canto Six.
The Mother: Questions and Answers (February "1961) Sri Aurobindo on Himself and on the Mother.
M. V. SEETARAMAN
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EDUCATION
XV
EDUCATION OF THE VITAL (contd.)
TN the context of the education of the vital or prana, which we have been discussing, we should consider the ascetic method of austerities, practised so widely in spiritual life both in the East and the West. Ascetic practices are regarded as indispensable for an effective deliverance of the soul from the whirlpool of vital desires. But what are austerities ?1 Are they mortification and repression ? Are mortification and repression the right way ? Do they purify and transform the prana, and, liberating it from all egoistic pursuits and selfish cravings, render it a powerful and joyous instrument for the consecrated works of a divine life, for the service of the soul and the Divine ?
.The Mother strongly denounces ascetic practices and calls them "a sensual deformation of the spiritual discipline." "It is a perverse need for suffering that drives the ascetic to self-mortification. The Sadhak's 'bed of nails' and the Christian anchorite's whip and sackcloth are the results of a sadism, more or less veiled, un avowed and un avowable. It is an unhealthy seeking or a sub-conscient need for violent sensations. In reality, these things are very far from the spiritual life; they are ugly and 16w, dark and diseased. They have been invented and extolled by a sort of mental and vital cruelty inflicted on the body......"2 This is a revolutionary view, challenging all traditional conceptions—a new clarion note, sounding, sublime and serene, above the hallowed cackle of sadistic asceticism, and heralding the New Age of a healthy, happy, and radiant spiritual life.
There is a general impression that the extreme ascetic practices have been the invariable concomitant of spiritual life only in India, arid that the West has been, more or less, free from such
1 We shall see later what the Mother means by austerities.
2 All quotations, unless otherwise stated, are from Sri Aurobindo and 'the Mother on Education.
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hideous excesses. But it is far from being true. Writing about St. Catharine of Genoa's mortifications, Underhill quotes from Catharine's biography :l "In the first four years after she received the sweet wound from her Lord, she made great penances : so that all her senses were mortified...she wore harsh hair, ate no meat nor any other thing that she liked; ate no fruit, neither fresh nor dried...always sought to do all those things which were contrary to her own will..." Madame Guyon, another mystic, writes herself: "Although I had a very delicate body, the instruments of penitence tore my flesh without, as it seemed to me, causing pain. I wore girdles of hair and of sharp iron, I often held wormwood in my mouth." "If I walked, I put stones in my shoes."2 What is really strange about these deliberate acts of cruelty to oneself is that those who indulge in them delude themselves into thinking that it is God who is inspiring them to do so. "These things my God, Thou didst first inspire me to do, in order that I might be deprived even of the most innocent satisfactions", says Madame Guyon ! This form of self-inflicted brutality is a kind of sadism, which, by producing violent sensations of pain, serves as an anesthetic to the normal desires and pleasurable feelings of the vital. It serves also to swamp or submerge the normal sensations of the body. The senses which, according to the Mother, should be properly educated and trained to perform their legitimate functions and develop their potential capacities, which are finer and subtler, are this sought to be repressed, maimed, and even almost battered to death, as if they were the source of all frailties and infirmities of human nature.
It is true that the body and the senses are the immediate cause of most of the impurities of the prana, and that they offer the greatest obstacle to concentration and meditation and the establishment of the inner calm without which no definite advance can be made in spiritual life. But they are as much instruments of the soul in their own right as the mind and the heart, and should not be tortured3 or crippled in any dynamic, life-affirming spirituality.
1 Mysticism by* Underhill.
2 ibid.
3 The Gita denounces all such austerities as a torture to the indwelling Divine.
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The greatest difficulties are our greatest opportunities, and the conquest and conversion of the body and the senses will be the crowning triumph of our spiritual endeavours for perfection. It is our unconsciousness, our ignorance of the working of our composite nature that drives us to cruelty towards our own physical self, annamaya Purusha. Mere ardors of the heart or the up flamingos of the mind are not enough for integral self-fulfilment, they often lead to impatient exclusions, and leave a great part of our being at the mercy of unconscious forces. The Mother insists on our harmonious perfection which, however difficult it may be, is our ultimate destiny. "If one wants quick progress one must hot be afraid of difficulties; on the contrary, it is precisely by choosing to do the difficult thing each time the occasion presents itself that one increases the will and strengthens the nerves. Indeed, it is much more difficult to lead a life of measure and balance, equanimity and serenity than to fight the abuses of asceticism and the disintegration they bring about. It is much more difficult to secure a harmonious and progressive growth in calmness and simplicity in one's physical being than to ill-treat it to the point of reducing it to nothing. It is much more difficult to live soberly and without desire than to deprive the body of the nourishment and clean habits so indispensable to it, just to show off proudly one's abstinence. It is much more difficult again to avoid, surmount or conquer illness by an inner and outer harmony, purity and balance than to disregard and ignore it, letting it do its work of ruin. And the most difficult thing of all is to maintain the consciousness always on the peak of its capacity and never allow the body to act under the influence of a lower impulse."
The education of the senses is an important and indispensable part of the education of the child. "The sense organs may be so cultivated as to attain a precision and power in their
functioning far greater than what is normally expected of them." Ordinarily, we know the five senses, and even these we do not cultivate to their utmost perfection. They remain mostly undeveloped and defective in their functioning, because of a tacit or explicit indifference towards them, i£' not a positive neglect and aversion, as
ire the traditional spiritual life. In our educational institutions, there is hardly
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any planned effort to develop the powers and capacities of the senses of the child.
The science of Yoga teaches us that there are more senses than five in us. "Some ancient mystic knowledge declared that the number of senses that man can develop is not five but seven and in certain special cases even twelve." The subtle senses can also be cultivated and developed to their wonderful capacities by a conscious and sustained discipline. Evidences of clairvoyance, clairaudience etc. are so common and so well verifiable by a strictly scientific scrutiny that it is too late in the day to brush them aside as black magic or hallucination. "Among the many faculties that are often spoken of there is, for example this one : to widen the physical consciousness, project it out of oneself so as to concentrate on a definite point and thus get the sight, hearing, smell, taste and even the touch at a distance." Some of these abnormal powers can be studied in some animals, like cats and dogs. The modern materialist mind has only to open its eyes in order to discover that what it has denied with arrogant ignorance is its own potentiality, its own vast, unexplored range of latent powers. It is to be noted that the materialist's mind and the mind of the impatient religious fanatic sail in the same boat—the one denies its own intrinsic powers, and the other suppresses and represses even those that are developed and active in it, and both the denial and the repression stem from unconsciousness.
Along with the systematic education of the senses, the Mother advises the development of discrimination and the aesthetic sense in the child, the "capacity to choose and take up what is beautiful and harmonious, simple, healthy and pure." In this age of utilitarian pragmatism, man has banished beauty from his thought and life. He has become, in Matthew Arnold's word, a philistine, a worshipper of stark utility. Development of the sense of beauty forms no part of his education. The one thing which, short of the spiritual, could have imparted to his nature a perception and love of the harmonious and the beautiful has been denied him; and it is small wonder that his tastes have been debased, and he wallows in
the ugly, and the vulgar, the warped and the "'hideous, hardly suspecting that he has already forfeited his humanity by his
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crass insensitiveness to beauty, and lapsed to the level of the uncouth 'gigmanity', by which term Carlyle characterises the proliferating mass of philistine moderns.
Love of beauty and harmony must be inculcated to the child even from his very early years; and "as he grows in capacity and understanding, he should be taught, in the course of his education, to add aesthetic taste and refinement to power and precision. He must be shown, made to appreciate, taught to love beautiful, lofty, healthy and noble things, whether in nature or in human creation." This aesthetic education, this instilling of the sense of beauty and nobility at an impressionable age of the child is a prophylactic against the attack of vulgarity of taste, the exultant debauch in all that is crude and brutal and sordid in life, which is so rampant, not only in the average man of today, but even in many so-called artists and poets and men of letters. "A methodical and enlightened culture of the senses can, little by little, remove from the child whatever has been vulgar, commonplace and crude in him through contagion : this culture will have happy reactions even on his character."1 It would be impossible for a child of refined tastes and aesthetic sensibilities to think and act in a rude or vulgar manner. His whole being will spontaneously recoil from the squalid and the discordant. His fine sensibilities will be his armour against all darkening or degrading influences. They will elicit sweetness and nobility and generosity in him, and stimulate a dominating and discerning love of harmony and order. He would spontaneously shrink from indiscipline and disorderly conduct, for discipline is a natural outcome of a sense of order and harmony, and any violation of it would strike him as an outrage upon his aesthetic sense.
RlSHABHCHAND
1 The great efflorescence of art in the Buddhist and post-Buddhist periods in India was, in no" small measure, due to the Buddhist and Jaina insistence on ethical purity in character and conduct. The aesthetic sense refines character, and purity of character intensifies the aesthetic-sense.
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Lectures on Bhagavad Gita By Prof. M. Rangacharya. Vol. II (II ed). Pub. Educational Pub. Company, Madras 34. P..430, Price Rs.12.
IT is a tribute to the excellence of the exposition of the Gita by the author that these lectures delivered more than fifty years ago should be still running into fresh editions. Prof. Rangacharya had many interests but the one most dear to his heart was the cause of the ancient Indian spiritual heritage. As an experienced educationist he felt a certain lacuna in the equipment of modern young India brought up under the influence of western ideals, and it was his conviction that this could be filled up and things rectified only by an increasing awareness and propagation of the ethical, social and spiritual values embedded in the Vedic Religion. To this end he chose the Bhagavad Gita and gave a series of lectures expounding the scripture, verse by verse, and erecting out of it a whole Philosophy of Conduct for every progressive man.
The work is divided into three sections, each dealing with six chapters. The first, says the author, takes up the first six chapters which lay the foundation of Self-realisation; the second six deal with the God-realisation that should follow the first realisation; the third section covers the last six chapters 'concerned with several problems connected with the application of these realisations to individual and social life in human communities.'
The author draws upon his versatile learning and experience and does justice to the subject. He does not confine himself to any one school of interpretation. He presents the viewpoints of all important authorities on controversial points and tries to reconcile them as much as possible. He draws parallels between Vedantic lines of thought and those of modern Science in some directions and makes his treatment altogether interesting, educative and thought-provoking.
The glossary and index to verses at the end add to the reference value of the book. Well-produced, the book is priced very reasonably.
M. P. PANDIT
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