The Mother, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, Sri Kam ajar Nadar, Sm. Indira Gandhi and Sri Lai Bahadur Sastri at the Playground of Sri Aurobindo Ashram, on September 29, 1955
Even an hour of the soul can unveil the Unborn.
SRI AUROBINDO
August, 1964
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
DHAMMAPADA
XXIII
OF THE ELEPHANT
An elephant in battle endures arrows shot from a bozo. Even so, shall it endure censures, for men in the mass are, by nature, prone to evil. (1)
An elephant, when controlled, can be led to battle; him the king can ride. And among men the best is he who is controlled and endures censures. (2)
* Based on the Mother's Talks.
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Mules, when controlled, are excellent, so also are the pure bred horses of Sindhu, so indeed are the mighty tuskers. But best of all is the man who has controlled himself. (3)
With such conveyances you cannot go where none has gone. He who has controlled himself goes out as a controlled person on a controlled mount. (4)
The elephant, by name Dhammapada, is hard to control when in heat. Not a morsel would he eat, if bound; he remembers only his free forest herd. (5)
When one is slothful, when one is gluttonous, one grows in flesh, even like a sleepy pig rolling from side to side— thus the fool is called to birth time and again. (6)
Till now this mind of mine has moved about doing whatever, it desired, whatever pleased it. Henceforth I shall thoroughly hold it under control even as the driver with his hook controls an elephant in heat. (7)
Take delight in vigilance. Stand by your mind. Lift yourself out of evil, even like an elephant sunk in a bog. (8)
If you have as your companion one who is intelligent and wise and of perfect conduct, then you will overcome all obstacles and go forward with him, contented and courageous. - (9)
If you do not have as your companion one who is intelligent and wise and of perfect conduct, then live alone, even like a vanquished king who has lost his kingdom or like an elephani alone in the midst of the forest. (10)
Better to live alone, a fool is not a company. Live alone, do no evil, look not about, live like a lonely elephant. (11)
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A friend in need is a thing of joy, a more or less satisfaction here and there is a thing of joy, after death a good deed is a thing of joy; it is a joy indeed to have abandoned all grief's. (12)
In the world, it is a joy to serve one's mother, it is a joy also to serve one's father. And it is a joy to follow the path of the Bhikkhu, it is a joy to follow the path of the Brahmin. (13)
It is a joy to lead a pure life till old age, it is a joy to possess 'a firmly established faith, it is a joy to acquire wisdom and it is a joy not to do evil. (14)
THE first verse is a very wise advice : the war elephant who has been trained does not start running away as soon as he receives an arrow. He continues to advance and bears the pain that does not make him change his spirit of heroic resistance and even that of heroic attack. Those who wish to follow the true path will naturally be subjected to all kinds of malevolence from those who not only do not understand, but generally hate what they do not understand.
If you are worried, grieved or even discouraged by the malicious stupidities that men say about you, you cannot advance far on the way. And such things come to you, not because you are unlucky or because the odds are against you, but because, on the contrary, the divine Consciousness and the divine Grace takes your resolution seriously and allows the circumstances to become the touchstone on the way to see whether your resolution is sincere and whether you are strong enough to face the difficulties.
"Therefore, if anyone sneers at you or says something that is not very charitable, the first thing you should do is to look within yourself for whatever weakness or imperfection be there that allows such a, thing to happen and not to be disconsolate, indignant or aggrieved," because people do not appreciate you at what you think to be your true value; on the contrary, you must be thankful, to the divine Grace for having pointed out to you the weakness or imperfection or deformation that you must correct.
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Therefore instead of being unhappy, you can be altogether happy and derive advantage, a great advantage out of the evil that one wanted to do to you.
Besides, if you truly want to follow the way and do yoga, you must not do it for being appreciated or honoured, you must do it because it is an imperative demand of your being, because you cannot be happy in any other way. Whether people appreciate you or do not appreciate you, it is absolutely of no importance. You may tell yourself furthermore that the more you are away from ordinary men, foreign to the ordinary mode of being, the less the people will appreciate you, quite naturally, because they will not understand you. And I repeat, it has absolutely no importance.
True sincerity consists in advancing on the way for the reason that you cannot do otherwise, you consecrate yourself to the divine life because you cannot do otherwise, you seek to transform your being and come out into the light, because you cannot do otherwise, because it is the very reason of your existence.
When it is like that you may be sure that you are on the straight way.
NOLINI KANTA GUPTA
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THE whole burden of our human progress has been an attempt to escape from the bondage to the body and the vital impulses. According to the scientific theory the human being began as the animal, developed through the savage and consummated in the modern civilized man. The Indian theory is different. God created the world by developing the many out of the One and the material out of the spiritual. From the beginning the objects which compose the physical world were arranged by Him in their causes, developed under the law of their being in the subtle or psychical world and then manifested in the gross or material world. From kārana to sūksma, from sūksma to stile, and back again, that is the formula. Once manifested in matter the world proceeds by laws which do not change, from age to age, by a regular succession, until it is all withdrawn back again into the source from which it came. The material goes back into the psychical and the psychical is involved in its cause or seed. he is again put out when the period of expansion recurs and runs its course on similar lines but with different details till the period of contraction is due. Hinduism regards the world as a recurrent series of phenomena of which the terms vary but the general formula abides the same. The theory is only acceptable if we recognize the truth of the conception formulated in the Vishnu Purana of the world as vijñana-vifrmbhitani developments of ideas in the Universal Intelligence which lies at the root of all material phenomena and by its indwelling force shapes the growth of the tree and the evolution of the clod as well as the development of living creatures and the progress of mankind. Whichever theory we take, the laws of the material world are not affected. From aeon to aeon, from kalpa to kalpa "Narayan manifests himself in an ever-evolving humanity which grows in experience by a series of expansions and contractions towards its destined self-realisation in God. That evolution is not denied by the Hindu theory of yugas. Each age in the Hindu system has its own line of moral and spiritual evolution and the decline of dharma or
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established law of conduct from the Satya to Kaliyuga is not in reality a deterioration but a detrition of the outward forms and props of spirituality in order to prepare a deeper spiritual intensity within the heart. In each Kaliyuga mankind gains something in essential spirituality. Whether we take the modern scientific or the ancient Hindu standpoint the progress of humanity is a fact. The wheel of Brahma rotates for ever but it does not turn in the same place; its rotations carry it forward.
The animal is distinguished from man by its enslavement to the body and the vital impulses. Asanāyā
mrtyu, Hunger who is Death, evolved the material world from of old, and it is
the physical hunger and desire and the vital sensations and primacy emotions
connected with the prdna that seek to feed upon the world in the beast and in
the savage man who approximates to the condition of the beast. Out of this
animal state according to European Science, man rises working out the tiger and
the ape by intellectual and moral development in the social condition. If the
beast has to be worked out, it is obvious that the body and the prana must be
conquered, and as that conquest is more or less complete, the man is more or
less evolved. The progress of mankind has been placed by many predorninatingly
in the development of the human intellect, and intellectual develop-ment is no
doubt essential to self-conquest. The animal and the savage are bound by the
body because the ideas of the animal or the ideas of the savage are mostly
limited to those sensations and associations which are connected with the body.
The development of intellect enables a man to find the deeper self within and
partially replace what our philosophy calls the dehdtmaka buddhi, the sum of
ideas and sensations which make us think of the body as our self, by another set
of ideas which reach beyond the body, and, existing for their own delight and
substituting intellectual and moral satisfaction as the chief objects of life,
master, if they cannot entirely silence, the clamour of the lower sensual
desires. That animal ignorance which is engrossed with the cares and the
pleasures of the body and the vital impulses, emotions and sensations is
tdmasic, the result of the predominance of the third principle of nature which
leads to ignorance and inertia. That is the state of the animal. and the lower
forms of humanity which are called in the Purana the first or tamasic creation.
This animal ignorance
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the development of the intellect tends to dispel and it assumes therefore an all important place in human evolution.
But it is not only through the intellect that man rises. If the clarified intellect is not supported by purified emotions the intellect tends to be dominated once more by the body and to put itself at its service and the lordship of the body over the whole man becomes more dangerous than in the natural state because the innocence of the natural state is lost. The power of knowledge is placed at the disposal of senses sattwa serves tamas, the god in us becomes the slave of the brute. The disservice which scientific Materialism is unintentionally doing the world is to encourage a return to this condition; the suddenly awakened masses of men unaccustomed to deal intellectually with ideas, able to grasp the broad attractive innovations of free thought but unable to appreciate its delicate reservations, verge towards that reeling back into the beast, that relapse into barbarism which was the condition of the Roman Empire at a high stage of material civilisation and intellectual culture and which a distinguished British statesman declared the other day to be the condition to which all Europe approached. The development of the emotions is therefore the first condition of a sound human evolution. Unless the feelings tend away from the body and the love of others takes increasingly the place of the brute love of self, there can be no progress upwards. The organisation of human society tends to develop this altruistic element in man which makes for life and battles with and conquers aśanāyā mrtyu, It is therefore not the struggle for life, or at least not the struggle for our own life, but the struggle for the life of others which is the most important term in evolution,-for our children, for our family, for our class, for our community, for our race and nation, for humanity. An ever-enlarging self takes the place of the old narrow self which is confined to our' individual mind and body and it is this moral growth which society helps and organises.
So far there is little essential difference between our own ideals of human progress and those of the West except in this vital point that the West believes this evolution to be a development of matter and the satisfaction of the reason, the reflective and observing intellect, to be the highest term of our progress. Here it is that our religion parts company with Science. It declares the evolution to be a conquest
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of. matter by the recovery of the deeper emotional and intellectual self which was involved in the body and overclouded by the desires of the prāna In the language of the Upanishads the manahkosa .and buddhikosa are more than the prānakosa and annakosa and it is to them that man rises in his evolution. Religion farther seeks a higher term for our evolution than the purified emotions or the clarified activity of the observing and reflecting intellect. The highest term of evolution is the spirit. in which knowledge, love and action, the threefold dharma of humanity, find their fulfilment and end. This is the atman in the ānandakosa, and it is by communion and identity of this individual self with the universal self which is God-that man will become entirely pure, entirely strong, entirely wise and entirely blissful, and the evolution will be fulfilled. The conquest of the body and the vital self by the purification of the emotions and the clarification of the intellect was the principal work of the past. The purification has been done by morality and religion, the clarification by science and philosophy, art, literature and social and political-life being the chief media in which these uplifting forces have worked. The conquest of the emotions and the intellect by the spirit is the work of the future. Yoga is the means by which that conquest becomes possible.
In Yoga the whole past progress of humanity, a progress which it holds on a very uncertain lease, is rapidly summed up, confirmed and made an inalienable possession. The body is conquered, not imperfectly as by the ordinary civilized man, but entirely. The vital part is purified and made the instrument of the higher emotional and intellectual self in its relations with the outer world. The ideas which go outward ate replaced by the ideas which move within, the baser qualities are worked out of the system and replaced by those which are higher, the lower emotions are crowded out by the nobler. Finally all ideas and emotions are stilled and by the perfect awakening of the intuitive reason which places mind in communion with spirit the whole man is ultimately placed at the service of the Infinite. All false self merges into the true Self. Man acquires likeness, union or identification with God. This is mukti, the state in which humanity thoroughly realises the freedom and immortality which are its eternal goal.
SRI AUROBINDO
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CHAPTER III
THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION
(VIII)
The Age of Reason
NEWTON (1642-1727)
"I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."
— Newton
"If I have seen farther (than other men), it is because I have stood upon the shoulders of giants."
— Newton
THE illustrious discoverer of the universal law of gravitation and a contender with Leibnitz of being- the discoverer of the Integral Calculus, Newton rose into the scientific skies of the seventeenth century as a star of the greatest magnitude. He inaugurated a new age, and set the final seal on the pattern and fundamental process of science, which was to dominate Western thought for at least a hundred years to come. His vision, his achievement, and his influence have been probably the most powerful basic factors in the shaping of the modern times.
Newton reminds me of two other intellectual giants—one, who preceded him by about two hundred years and was even greater
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and, more universal in genius than he, and the other, who followed him a hundred years later and was not so great as a scientist as he. The first was Leonardo da Vinci, and the second, Goethe. The spiritual vision which inspired Newton's empirical and mathematical method of scientific investigation was first exemplified in Leonardo's Naturalism. His was also an empirico mathematical method, but it was not the crude, materialistic empiricism of the eighteenth and the nineteenth Century, nor was the mathematical law which he discovered in Nature the mechanical law of a brute necessity guiding the operations of a blind Nature. He saw, clearly and constantly, with the vision of a spiritual seer, the self-revelation of a living Reality, an omnipresent Being, in all that Nature creates and evolves. For him Nature was not an unconscious, unintelligent force, but an illimitable universal dynamism instinct with God's Presence. His naturalism was, in its essential significance, a return of the seer-vision of man from the Empyrean or Arcanum of the Spirit upon the world of Matter and material energy. It was an embracing of Matter by the Spirit and a washing away of the age-old stigma of impurity from the material Nature and material existence. Leonardo's pantheism was the finding of God in everything and every creature— yo mām pasyati sarvatra, sarvam ca mayipasyati. It can, therefore, be said that he embodied the deepest secret of the Renaissance and the ultimate destiny of the modern age. But the West saw in his naturalism nothing but the characteristic empiricism of the modern science and the seed of the inductive and experimental method propagated by Bacon. In Newton we have not, indeed, the direct, immediate vision of Leonardo, but a close approximation to it in the form of an intuitive perception.
Goethe was more a poet and dramatist than a scientist, though his scientific experiments' and findings were not inconsiderable. But his science was animated and irradiated by an intuitive perception t of the beauty and harmony of the Spirit in universal Nature. He had, 'to a remarkable degree, the same sense of mystery, awe and wonder at the sight of natural objects as we find later in Einstein and Plank, and, in fact, in every great scientific genius. Einstein says : "The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of the true art and true
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science. He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no logger feel amazement is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle." And Goethe expresses himself in the same strain : "The highest to which man can attain is wonder, and if the prime phenomenon makes him wonder, let him be content; nothing higher can it give him." "Man's loftiest experience is that of awe; and if the phenomenon as such can awe him, let him be satisfied..." But Goethe's intuition, because it was the intuition of a supreme poet, had something of a closer, more revealing insight into the eternal essence of existence.
""One, the deathless, manifested
In the Many—this I see;1
Small is great, great small, attested
Each by its own entity.
Ever changing, never-ranging,2
Near and far, and far and near,3
Forming now, and now transforming—
I to gaze in awe am here."
"No husk is Nature, no, nor kernel;
She is the All-in-One Eternal."
"In Nature there is a Knowable and an unknowable; we must distinguish between them, reflect upon them, and have respect for both." This is the characteristic attitude of Goethe towards God and Nature. And, as we shall see, Newton's is essentially identical. The preoccupation of both with natural science was the worship of the Formless in the Forms, of the Invisible in the visible and concrete.
. I must confess I am a little baffled when I find E. A. Burtt in his otherwise penetrating analysis of Newton's scientific thought and its metaphysical background, failing to see the pantheistic leaven of the very texture of Newton's mind and its sacramental approach to science. He taunts Newton with having led the way to the mechanisation of the cosmic order and reducing God to the position of an industrioris
1 Italics are mine-Cf. Ekastathā saruabhūtāntarātmā rūpam rūam Rratirūpo--Kathopanishacl
2 Tadejati tannaijati-Ishopanishad
3 Taddūre tadantike-Ishopanishad
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mechanic slaving away at the maintenance of it. "In the Newtonian world", he writes1 "following Galileo's early suggestion, all this further teleology is unceremoniously dropped. The cosmic order of masses in motion according to law is itself the final good. Man exists to know and applaud it; God exists to tend and preserve it. All the manifold divergent zeals and hopes of men are implicitly denied scope and fulfilment, if they cannot be subjected to the aim of theoretical mechanics...We are to become devotees of mathematical science; God, now the chief mechanic of the universe, has become the cosmic conservative. His aim is to maintain the status quo...
"Historically, the Newtonian attempt thus to keep God on duty was of the very deepest import. It proved a veritable boomerang to his cherished philosophy of religion, that as the result of his pious ransackings the main providential function he could attribute to the Deity was this cosmic plumbery, this meticulous defence of his arbitrarily imposed mechanical laws against the threatening encroachments of irregularity. Really, the notion of the divine as constantly roaming the universe in the search for leaks to mend, or gears to replace in the mighty machinery would have been quite laughable, did not the pitiful ness of it become earlier evident..."2
This light-hearted sarcasm in which a serious student of metaphysics and science like Burtt, indulges at the expense of Newton betrays an insufficient hold on the fundamentals of spiritual-intuitive experience, and a stubborn, vestigial affiliation to the presuppositions of modern materialistic science. I shall let Newton himself rebut Burtt's arraignments.
"...the true God is a living, intelligent, and powerful Being;3 and from his other perfections, that he is supreme, or most perfect. He is eternal and infinite, omnipresent and omniscient; that is,-his duration reaches from eternity to eternity; his presence from infinity to infinity; he governs all things,4 and knows all things that are or can be done...In him are all things contained5 and moved; ...he is all similar, all eye, all ear, all brain, all arm, all power to perceive, to
1 & 2 The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science —E. A. Burtt
2 Sat-Cittapas
4 Yah imānlokānisata isaniblili— Swetaswatar
5 Sarvanca mayi-Gita
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understand, and to act; but in a manner not at all human, in a manner not at all corporeal, in a manner utterly unknown to us."1
In his Optics, Newton's philosophy, rightly understood in all its implications, gives no grounds for deriving it from "his theological convictions", as Burtt does, or qualifying his conception of force as animistic. Nor is there any justification for fathering his apparent "inconsistency" onto his "concept of the Deity." It is a common inability of the modern mind to get the hang of the paradoxical language of spiritual experience or intuitive knowledge, and the subtle harmonisation of seeming anomalies and contradictions which it compasses. To discover inconsistency in the expressions of intuition is only to confess to a constitutional deficiency of the mental reason which cannot act except by the inveterate process of analysis and aggregation. To it light and darkness are opposite things, and stillness and mobility cannot exist, together in a force or object. Because it cannot perceive the -indivisible whole, it fails to apprehend the harmony of the universal movement. It judges the supra-rational By the standards of the rational, the organic whole by its knowledge of the discrete parts.
Though Newton is most known for his discovery of the Integral. Calculus and the Law of Gravitation, his achievements in mathematics,
1 Ma esa suvijñeyo —Kathopanishad
2 Avibhaktañca bhutesu vibhaktamiva ihthati —Gita—All these quotations testify to the unorthodox, un-Christian metaphysical convictions of Newton, which were an unfailing source, of inspiration to his scientific pursuit. He was emphatic in disowning all theological dogmas.
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optics, dynamics, chemistry, alchemy, astronomy, hydrodynamics and hydrostatics were not only considerable, but outstanding. The law of gravitation, the inviolable rhythm of attraction of mass to mass, joined earth and heaven in a happy nuptial of mobile existence on the bosom of universal Nature. Absolute time and space, according to him, is pervaded by the Presence of God. "This most beautiful System of the Sun, Planets and Comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being..." who, "endures for ever and is everywhere present, and by existing always and everywhere, he constitutes duration and space."
Describing the law of universal gravitation, Newton says : "Just give me the mass, the position and the motions of a system of heavenly bodies at any given moment and I will calculate their future positions and motions by a set of rigid and unerring mathematical calculations....I will calculate the tides and the motions of the water and the earth...For the earth attracts the moon and the moon attracts the earth...and the force of each in turn tends to keep them both, in a state of perpetual resistance. Attraction and reaction—reaction and attraction...The great masses of the planets and the stars remain suspended in space and retain their orbits only through this mysterious law of universal gravitation." (Note the word mysterious.)
What a marvellous universe of unimaginable beauty is revealed by this intuitive vision—a universe, organic and harmonious, one and yet multiple, moving in impeccable rhythm in absolute space and absolute time towards its appointed goal under the beneficent eye of the Eternal ! "The fact that the world is so beautifully designed", says Newton, "in accordance with such harmonious laws...must presuppose the existence of a Divine Wisdom, the hand of a Divine Creator."
Stoicism in the West, as historians of philosophic thought assure us, was influenced and nourished by Oriental thought, and there is ample evidence to prove that Newton came in contact with some of the writings of the Stoics and got from them hints on the law of gravitation. His advocacy of the theory of Design and his postulate of the Divine dynamic immanence in the universe may have been greatly conditioned by Oriental thought percolated through Stoicism. His utterances are, indeed, not only redolent of the aroma of the'
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thought of the Upanishads and the Gita, but actually ring-like . echoes from them. At the end of the third part of his Principia, he says : "There must be a certain most subtle spirit' which pervades and lies hid in the most gross bodies;" by the force and action of which the particles of bodies attract one another at near distances, and cohere, if contiguous."
In one of the verses composed by Newton in his boyhood he wrote :
"Earth's crown, thus at my feet I can disdain,
Which heavy is, and at the best but vain.
But now a crown of thorns I gladly greet;
Sharp is this crown, but not so sharp as sweet;
The crown of glory that I yonder see
Is full of bliss and of eternity."3
This boyhood poem breathes the promise which was so splendidly fulfilled in the maturity of Newton. His superb humility, his nobility, his contemplative absorption in the Divine Reality of the universe, unfolding before his intuitive vision, and his ungrudging readiness for sacrifice all earthly crowns in the interest of science are reflected in the poem. To overlook this basic truth of Newton's life and attribute to him the mechanical view of the universe, as many have done, is to be willfully blind to the true origin of science and its ultimate destiny.
The undeniable theistic auspices under which modern science launched upon its great adventure did not warrant any sudden lapse into atheistic materialism, nor the few supreme geniuses who shaped the two centuries, seventeenth and eighteenth, can be held responsible for it. Rather did they look on with alarmed disgust at the rapid loss of faith and fidelity to the roots of culture which characterise the heady current of modern thought. Stripped of the metaphysical bearings, of Newton's natural philosophy, science became in the hands of fais eighteenth-century followers a godless, soulless, mechanical system of rigorous physical observation and experiment. The horizons of
1 Sūksmātisūksinam, Sarvabhūtādhivdsah
2 & 3 Quoted in Living Biographies of Great Scientists by Thomas & Thomas
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true knowledge shrivelled and contracted, the eye of intuition closed, the faith in the heart wilted, and only the physical mind of man and its surface reason asserted their supremacy as the sole means of the discovery of truth and reality. Mathematics, which meant to the early pioneers of science the dynamic rhythm of the inviolable laws of Nature directed with providential purpose, became a lifeless, abstract method of computation making for the development of the practical sciences, but debarring any deeper and more flexible approach to the hidden realities of universal existence. Torn away from its spiritual roots, science went drifting in the mazes of mechanical processes, and man lost himself in the mechanism of Nature, forgetting his own Godhead and the Godhead of Nature, forgetting that
"No husk is Nature, no, nor kernel;
She is the All-in-One Eternal."
—Goethe
(To be- continued)
RISHABHCHAND
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READINGS IN THE BRIHADARANYAKA UPANISHAD
THE DOCTRINE OF HONEY
THE Satapatha Brahmana has an interesting legend. Dadhyan, son of Atharvan, was taught the madhu vidyā, Doctrine of Honey, by Indra. After communicating the secret knowledge, Indra charged Dadhyan with complete secrecy over it with the threat that should he ever reveal the knowledge to others, his head would be cut off with the famous thunderbolt Indra-Vajra, Now, the Aswins, the divine/physicians, overheard this conversation and came to know that Dadhyan, son .of Atharvan, had come into possession of a precious knowledge of Integrality. Swiftly they repaired to . the sage and entreated him to give them the secret knowledge. But he demurred: he explained that Indra had asked him not to speak of it to another and. had threatened to sever his head should he ever do so. That was why, he said, he was afraid.
'Oh', said the Ashwins, 'we shall save you from that.'
'How can you save me ?'
'When you come to instruct us, we shall sever your head, conceal it elsewhere and replace it with a horse's head. You will speak to us through the head of the horse. And Indra will indeed cut off the head —the head of the horse. Then we shall restore to you your own.'
The sage agreed, his head was severed and replaced by the head of a horse; he instructed the Ashwins through that special head of power. Irate Indra duly cut off the guilty head and the grateful Ashwins restored to Dadhyan his own. (S. Br. 14.1.1)
. What is this Knowledge which was so much guarded by the lord of the gods and so prized by the Ashwins who heal the sick and make full the maimed ?
The fifth section of the madhu kdnda1 devotes itself to an exposi-stion of this Knowledge which is aptly called the Doctrine of Honey, the Knowledge that holds the secret of oneness of life, of interdependence among all forms of life, of the Truth of the One Self, of One
1 The Kārida derives its name fro m this import ant subject of mad/Hi dealt with in this section .
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Delight that bases and holds the innumerable Many on its bosom. As Sri Kapali Sastriar notes in his profound study of the Vidyā1
"It gives fourteen illustrations to impress on us the truth that in this Creation everything and any part of it is Honey to the whole and the whole is Honey to every part of it; and that is because it is the Honey, the Secret Delight that abides in the whole creation and in every part and detail of it that manifests and makes possible the world-existence intact and enjoyable, bhogya."
This earth, says the text, is Honey for all beings and all beings are Honey for this earth. All that inhabits the mother-Earth draws its sustenance, its life-force from her. And the earth too is fed in a thousand ways by the energies flowing from its creatures. The one leans on the other, one draws from the other; and that is possible because the Inhabitant of both is the same. He who is in this earth, the effulgent, immortal Purusha and he who is within one's own being, in the body, the effulgent, immortal Purusha, are indeed the same —-He who is this Self, this Immortal, this Brahman, this All. .
This is the basic truth of all existence, whether looked at in its universal aspect or the individual. There is one Reality underlying both, forming the bridge between both and enabling the one to draw on the other. And the essential nature of that Reality is Bliss, Honey. This Reality reveals itself in several poises. It is experienced and realised as the Self, the one backbone of all existence; it is the Immortal standing for ever unaffected by the currents of birth and death, change and decay, that criss cross the sea of life; it is again the Vast Expansion, Brahman (br . to grow) of the Spirit covering every possible term of expression; it is All that is sp read out. And whichever th e aspect that is approached, it reveals itself at the core as Bliss.
Bliss, then, is the root-principle basing this manifold existence. For one who has this perception of the true nature of the universe and himself and orders his life-movements in accord with that knowledge, all is harmony, all is delight, all is Honey. But when we are not aware of this commonalty of support and sustenance between ourselves and the rest, we tend to regard ourselves as separate, as entities to be protected from the life-waves that continually rush on
1 Vide chapter on Vedic Wisdom in the Vedanta in the Lights on the Upanishads.
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us from 'outside'. We shut ourselves from the larger life that engulfs us. There is strain, friction, suffering. To gain in mind a knowledge of this underlying oneness of all manifested life in the form of Bliss, Honey and to translate that knowledge into practical terms of ones own life so as to arrive at a progressive realisation of the true character of all life as Honey, as Delight, is the object of Madhu Vidya.
This is a fundamental Truth that obtains at every level of Existence, in each organisation of the different principles that are manifest in the universe. Thus, proceeds the Upanishad :—
These waters are Honey for all beings and all beings are Honey for these waters; and he who is in these waters, the effulgent, immortal Purusha, and he who is within one's being, constituted of semen,1 the effulgent, immortal Purusha, are indeed the same—He who is this Self, this Immortal, this Brahman, this All.
This Agni (Fire) is Honey for all beings and all beings are Honey for this Agni; and he who is in this Agni, the effulgent, immortal Purusha, and he who is within one's being, constituted of Speech,2 the effulgent, immortal Purusha, are indeed the same—He who is this Self, this Immortal, this Brahman, this All.
This Wind is Honey for all beings and all beings are Honey for this Wind; and he who is in this Wind the effulgent, immortal Purusha, and he who is within one's being, constituted of life-force,' the effulgent, immortal Purusha, are indeed the same—He who is this Self, this Immortal, this Brahman, this All.
This Sun is Honey for all beings and all beings are Honey to this Sun; and he who is in this Sun the effulgent, immortal Purusha, and he who is within one's being, in the eye,4 the effulgent, immortal Purusha are indeed the same—He who is this Self, this Immortal, this-Brahman, this All.
These Quarters are Honey for all beings and all beings are Honey to these Quarters; and he who is in these Quarters the effulgent, immortal Purusha, and he who is within one's being, in the ear, at the-hearing, the effulgent, immortal Purusha, are indeed the same—
1 Corresponding (in the body) to the Water-principle
2 Corresponding to the universal Agni Principle
3 Corresponding to the universal Vayu Principle
4 Centre of activity for the Sun in the individual body
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He who is this Self, this Immortal, this Brahman, this All.
This Moon is Honey for all beings and all beings are Honey to this Moon; and he who is in this Moon, the effulgent, immortal Purusha, and he who is within one's being, in the mind, the effulgent, immortal Purusha, are indeed the same—He who is this Self, this Immortal, this Brahman, this All.
This Lightning is Honey for all beings and all beings are Honey for this Lightning; and he who is in this Lightning, the effulgent, immortal Purusha, and he who is within one's being, constituted of heat, the effulgent, immortal Purusha, are indeed the same—He who is this Self, this Immortal, this Brahman, this All.
This Thunder is Honey for all beings and all beings are Honey for this Thunder; and he who is in this Thunder, the effulgent, immortal Purusha, and he who is within one's being, constituted of sound and voice, the effulgent, immortal Purusha, are indeed the same—He who is this Self, this Immortal, this Brahman, this All.
This Space (ākāsd) is Honey for all beings and all beings are Honey for this Space; and he who is in this Space, the effulgent, immortal Purusha, and he who is within one's being, in the ether of the heart, the effulgent, immortal Purusha, are indeed the same He who is this Self, this Immortal, this Brahman, this All.
This Dharma, Law, is Honey for all beings and all beings are Honey for this Law; and he who is in this Law, the effulgent, immortal Purusha, and he who is within one's being, constituted of the Law of Truth, the effulgent, immortal Purusha, are indeed the same—He who is this Self, this Immortal, this Brahman, this All.
This Truth is Honey for all beings and all beings are Honey for this Truth; and he who is in this Truth, the effulgent, immortal Purusha, and he who is .within one's being, constituted of Truth itself, the effulgent, the immortal Purusha, are indeed the same —He who is this Self, this Immortal, this Brahman, this-All.
This Mankind is Honey for all beings and all beings are Honey for this Mankind; and he who is in this Mankind, the effulgent, immortal Purusha, and he who is within one's being, the human person, the effulgent, the immortal Purusha, are indeed the same—He who is this Self, this Immortal, this Brahman, this All.
This Atman, Self, is Honey for all beings and all beings are
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Honey for this Self; and he who is in this Self, the effulgent, immortal Purusha, and he who is within one's being, the self, the effulgent, immortal Purusha, are indeed the same—He who is this Self, this Immortal, this Brahman, this All.
And this Self, says the Upanishad, "does not merely represent the basic principle of Madhu, the Bliss that abides in the heart of things, but he is the Master and King of all things and beings and holds together—as the hub and felly hold the spokes—all beings, all gods, all worlds, all lives, all selves." (Sri Kapali Sastry)
Such is the Honey underlying all existence, the madhu, which the Upanishad declares to be the same as "the Madhu whose secret Dadhyan revealed to the Ashwins and is the same as the creative Spirit, the Purusha who 'made the two-footed cities (bodies), who made the four-footed cities (bodies) and who having become the Bird1 entered into them.' And it further removes possible misconceptions as regards the embodied souls as independent self-separate finite entities which they certainly appear to be to our experience, by an affirmation that 'This Purusha is the same as He who abides in all the cities (bodies) and there is nothing by which he is not enveloped, nothing by which he is not concealed.' The last part of the sentence is again significant, a reminder that this Purusha is immanent in everything as the secret madhu, the potent Delight that is wakeful holding in its basic unity all forms and things and beings, the madhu that is to be discovered in the smallest, in the biggest, in any part or whole of this manifested existence, which to instruct the section opens. And it gives a fitting close too . For in unequivocal terms it reiterates the Vedantic Truth that not only the Substance of all existences, the essential Delight in the all and in detail is the Ananda, Arman, Brahman, Purusha, but all Form also is himself, his creation, a mould of the Substance, a shape of his Being,-he is the "supreme Lord, the Divine Being, is active, many-formed he moves about, he is the divine counter part of every form, his countless life-powers are set in motion: for ever. Thus closes the section with a Rik of Bharadwaja : "To every form he has remained the counter-form: that is his Form for us to face and see. Indra by his Maya powers- (creative conscious
1 Bird here symbolises the supreme Soul.
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powers) moves on endowed with many forms; for yoked are his thousand steeds.'." (Sri Kapali Sastry)
And this Self, verily, is the steeds. He, verily, is tens and thousands,, many and endless. This Brahman is without an antecedent and without a consequent, without an inside and without an outside. This Self, the all-perceiving, is Brahman.
To conclude with the words of Sri Kapali Sastriar :
"This is the Madhu doctrine of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. It is significant that it comes close upon the Maitreyi Brahmana which concludes with famous passages often quoted in support of the lofty Idealism represented in Shankara's exposition of the Advaita doctrine of later times. It serves as a corrective to the metaphysical excesses to which the closing lines of the preceding section are often interpreted to lend support. It reconciles the Absolute Idealism to which the Maitreyi Brahmana tends with the relative Realism of World-existence in which an all-embracing dualism is the dominant note. It teaches that the secret Honey, kaksyam madhu, is the same as the Delight of the Purusha, the creative Spirit, the One and uncompromising Absolute of all dualisms, the unifying principle that balances, harmonizes and maintains its own variations for Self-expression.
"To realise the interdependence of things and beings, human and others is a necessary step towards a knowledge of the secret Delight that maintains the diversity for Self-expression and therefore for variations in form of the essential Self-delight. If it were a question of arriving at the Supreme Delight, the Ananda Brahman or Atman, the Self-delight, the doctrine of Madhu would not be necessary and the quoting of Riks devoted to the Ashwins would signify less than nothing. But the Madhu doctrine teaches that the diversity in creation is the manifestation of a secret Delight, that all things, howsoever heterogeneous and warring they may appear, are held together by a secret harmony effected in them by the hidden creative Self-delight of the Supreme, who is the effulgent Self, the Immortal. The Upanishad perceives the Vedic truth of Madhu and the Ashwins and teaches here the seeking of Madhu in the manifestation of all things and beings and not the delight that is unrelated to the Cosmic Existence." (Lights on the Upanishads)
M. P. PANDIT
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EDUCATION
XV
MENTAL EDUCATION—II
OF the five principal phases of mental education outlined by the Mother, we have treated of the first, which is the development of the power of concentration, the capacity for attention. Let us now take up the second phase, the capacities of expansion, wideness, complexity and richness.
The child has a natural curiosity to know the how and the why of things, to "understand what the world about him is. This healthy curiosity is the parent of all knowledge, and has to be sympathetically and intelligently fostered. It has, at the same time, to be directed along the lines of the child's inborn tastes and aptitudes. For, the child's mind is not a blank. There are behind its apparent blankness a whole mass of subconscious powers and capacities, impressions and sensibilities that can be systematically developed and brought to perfection. There are, besides, the germinal tendencies and specific propensities, native to his psychic or soul nature, which are independent of all hereditary and environing conditioning, and have to be provided with the most congenial atmosphere for an unimpeded flowering. His curiosity, whetted and nourished, the child will observe each thing, each person, and each incident as a glowing focus of particular interest, and every moment of his life will be a moment of thrilling revelation, as if the world was unfolding its marvels to his intent gaze. And this absorbed observation, issuing in revelation, will automatically lead to concentration, which is the one secret of gaining knowledge.
This action of expansive as well as intensive observation and concentration will soon shed the close intensity of its
United interest and flow over to enlarging spheres of sense objects, and seek to embrace
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the unexplored provinces of knowledge. It will make for a gradual enrichment of the mind and the growth of its powers and faculties. "As the child progresses, you will show him how everything can become an interesting subject for study, provided the question is approached in the right manner. The life of every day, of every moment is the best of all schools : it is varied, complex, rich in unforeseen experiences, in problems awaiting solution, in clear and striking examples and in evident sequences. It is so easy to rouse healthy curiosity in children, if you answer with intelligence and clarity the numberless questions they put. An interesting reply brings in its train others, and the child, his attention attracted, learns without effort much more than what he usually does on the school bench..."1
A judicious choice of books will start the student on an avid exploration of the countless countries of thoughts and ideas, and stimulate his appetite for knowledge. But he should be taught right from the beginning of this period that all real knowledge lies latent within him, and that, if he develops his own reflective and reasoning powers, he can arrive at original thinking and ideation. Contact with the outer objects can be a spring-board for a dive into one's own depths and an opportunity for a haul of unsuspected treasures. This habit of diving has to be acquired and persisted in. But the student must be given a timely warning against indiscriminate and excessive reading, which obscures mental perception, smothers the creative fire, and paralyses all originality. The teacher must discourage this kind of over-reading, and inculcate the spirit of independence which disdains to parrot others' views and strut in borrowed feathers. He should see to it that the student develops a will to self-reliance and a dislike of having to depend upon notes, commentaries, criticisms, and expositions, which stifle all original thinking. Thanks to the modern system of academic education, the student is driven to bolt and vomit out the notes with which he is lavishly supplied by his -teachers. This has led to an almost complete lack of original thinking in the intellectual field today. In the arts, in literature, in speculative thought,, and even in the other pursuits of life, there is
1 Sri .Aurobindo and the Mother on Education
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everywhere an easy tendency to imitation, to conformism, to, an unthinking submission to prevailing fashions, and an abject readiness to be moulded by extraneous influences. Even in the quest for scientific knowledge and the acquisition of worldly wisdom, the student must be taught to observe men and things dispassionately and without any distorting bias or prejudice. A love of independent observation, independent experimentation, independent thought and judge ment, . and independent self-expression has always been the proud distinction of most creative thinkers and artists.
In the context of the expansion and enrichment of the mind, the Mother very pertinently speaks of the cultivation of imagination. In fact, in mental education, nothing is more important than the development of imagination. Independent thinking and imagination are like the two wings of a bird—they are cooperative correlates. Imagination brings in indications, ideas and visions of new configurations of truths, it reveals unforeseen aspects of life and the world, and .thought' occupies itself with them and gives them novel forms, "...it is imagination that develops the creative mental faculty, and it is through that that study becomes a living thing and the mind grows in joy", says the Mother.1 "Imagination is, in reality, the capacity to project oneself out of realised things towards things realisable and pull them in by the very power of projection....It sends out, as it were, antennae into a world that is not yet realised, and they catch hold of something there and draw it here. Naturally it means an addition to earth's atmosphere, addition of things that tend towards manifestation...."2 It is one of the principal faculties - that should be developed and made serviceable. Indeed, without a proper development of imagination, man would remain tethered to his sense-mind and fail even to conceive of anything higher and nobler than the drab tenor of his dusky life. "With its (of the imagination) help you .can re-create your inner and outer life. You can wholly build your life, if you know how to use it....As a matter of fact, it is. the most ordinary and primary way of creating and forming things in the world...if one had not the capacity of imagination, one would
1 Sri Aurobindo and the Mother on Education
2 The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo by Nolini Kanta Gupta—Part Eight
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not make any progress. Your imagination always goes ahead of your life....Imagination opens the way to realisation. It is very difficult to move unimaginative people. They see only what is in front of their noses, they feel only what is there at a given moment. They cannot advance, they are blocked by the immediate present..."1 Sri Aurobindo defines imagination as "the mind's way or one of its ways of summoning out of Being its infinite possibilities, even of discovering or capturing the unknown possibilities of the Infinite."2
I have already spoken of the utter lack of encouragement to independent thinking in modern schools and colleges. There is an equal lack of encouragement, if not a positive aversion, to the faculty of imagination which the Mother credits with the power of creation and reconstruction. In the name of realism or positivism, and as a consequence of the universal sway of materialistic science, which swears by the brute facts of life, imagination is looked down upon as an idle fancy, or a kind of languorous day-dreaming. It is held to be a perennial foe of the practical or pragmatic spirit, and a crippling anachronism in the modern world of scientific civilisation. But the price modern man is paying for the extravagant exaltation of realism and pragmatism is a growing atrophy of the imagination and a resultant collapse of all higher visions and values of life. Life is losing all contact with its roots. Alienated and sapless, but profusely decked out, and embellished with flashy trinkets, it is steadily sliding into inanition. The outer glamour barely hides the corroding poverty within.
In order to promote the suppleness and comprehensiveness of the mind, the child has to be taught to attempt various approaches to the same subject of study. The very awareness that the same problem can be approached from various standpoints and that its solution, can also be more than one clear-cut formula, argues a considerable widen" ing of the mental horizon. It will make him realise that all truths are
1 The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo —Nolini Kanta Gupta—Part Eight
2 The Life Divine by Sri Aurobindo
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truths will generate in him tolerance and humility. He will learn to attach as much importance to the view-points of others as to his own. He will come to develop a generous broadness of outlook, and not only an attitude of ungrudging appreciation and accommodation, but a power of synthetic and harmonising thought. He will acquire the art of envisaging a truth in many of its aspects. And yet he will one day come to realise that even his comprehensive solutions are narrow and inconclusive, and his synthesis only a clumsy combination. Baffled by the besetting relativity of all mental knowledge, he will be driven to ask himself: "Is not there a way of getting beyond this incorrigible relativity and reaching the whole, the integral truth ?" This questioning will rouse in him an aspiration for a "truer source of knowledge." His inward eye will begin to open, and he will seek the true source of knowledge in the deeps of his being. The first step to the discovery of truth will have thus been taken. The child's mental education should be so designed as to lead naturally to this supreme discovery. Expansion, suppleness and richness, compassed by imagination and synthetic thought, will culminate in an unfettered play of intuition.
(To be continued)
RISHABHCHAND
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I
THERE is an inherent and self-existent law or force which governs the being and becoming, the rest and movement of every object and group of objects in each plane of consciousness. The law of the collective consciousness overrides and keeps in balance the forces of the individual units in the field and so each universe within the total universe, Jagatyam Jagat, remains a cosmos, an ordered whole. That is the reason why conflict among the units is not the norm but only a transition from one state of order to another. This is the mystery of Nature which binds and keeps together all its creatures in its various levels of manifestation. So in the plane of Matter we have the law of gravitation holding together the various bodies and in the plane of life we have the cohesive force of what may be termed as love. This is a realm of absolute and compelling, inevitable bondage and it is not felt as such so long as the individual unit remains without self consciousness. The creatures of the subhuman kingdom—animals, insects and plants—live in this blissful state of non-awareness of the grim necessity and iron determinism of the scheme of things. These are the children of Nature so completely subject to the laws of Nature and bound by them as not to realise that they are bound at all.
What Nature is in and to the so-called objective world, so is Fate in and to the so-called subjective world. For sensations, vital feelings like desires, emotions, mental vibrations like thoughts, .imaginations and will-formations have their own worlds with their own laws as rigorous and compelling as the laws of Nature. There is even .a vital substance corresponding to material substance, in which the feelings clothe and embody themselves, move and collide and undergo changes by mutual contact and friction. Form in the plane of feelings has not the rigidity of the material forms but a fluidity and flexibility all its own. So we have a corresponding mental substance and mental ether where thoughts are formed and move. The true explanation
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for all mental and vital affinities which go by the name of relationships . has to be sought in these hidden laws of the mental and vital levels of consciousness—the force of Fate. The realm of Fate is as completely conditioning and deterministic as the realm of Nature. As we have the children of Nature, so we have the children of Fate so completely bound by Fate as to be unaware of it. So the occultists have noted men and women inevitably meeting, parting and meeting again, bringing good fortune or evil fortune to each other. Sometimes indeed the mental and vital fate of an individual affects his natural belongings and even material objects in a manner quite inexplicable according to the laws of Nature.
As the world of Nature is a sphere, so are these inner worlds of Fate globes. And the consequence makes each movement within it terrible indeed. For each force generated at one point, after making its way through the space of that region has ultimately to come back to the source. This phenomenon intensifies the bondage of beings caught in them. So life in this world dominated by Nature and Fate is characterised as Samsara, a vicious cyclic movement and a vain futile round. Human beings are very graphically pictured as persons caught in the mire who only get more and more deeply entangled in it with every attempt of theirs to get out of it. Samsāra panka nor magna. Every movement within Fate is inevitably subject to Fate and by indulging in it with whatever force and doggedness, man only tightens the chain of his bondage.
The freedom of man's will is only an illusion. In his present organisation of consciousness, it is itself unenlightened about the nature of its instruments, the purpose for which they or it have been fashioned and the goal to which they are destined. It is again completely blind of the vast complex field in which its effort is only a petty movement. It is itself a slave of the desire-forces operating within man's consciousness, and very often it is unaware that it is being used by these nether forces. Man wills only what he
ardently hopes and yearns for and these yearnings are controlled by Fate whose habitual march in her macadamized road is insistent and unchanging. Will has very few alternatives to choose from and even the actual movement of choice in this fate-restricted field is directed by impulse.
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"Fate followed her foreseen immutable road.
Man's hopes and longings build the journeying wheels
That bear the body of his destiny
And lead his blind will towards an unknown goal.
His fate within him shapes his acts and rules;""Nature and Fate compel his free-will's choice."
II
What then is the origin of this Titanic Force of Fate which overmasters all the faculties in man including his so-called free-will ? Prakriti or instrumental nature is the field of operation of Fate. But there is a spiritual consciousness within the human being and behind the cosmos outside and the laws of inner and psychological being have their origin in this spiritual level.
"Its face and form already are born in him,
Its parentage is in his secret soul;"
Each man's fate is an objective representation and translation in the faculties of the soul's need and secret choice. The inner and outer environment, the psychological faculties and the physical circumstances in which man finds himself placed are precisely the exact conditions for the evolution of the soul and these are accepted and utilised by the soul within. Nature and Fate are not arbitrary forces unrelated to the secret evolutionary intention and objective of-the world's creation. They are the right instruments and the necessary conditions for that very evolution. "It is not the soul which feels humiliation and defeat but the ego." The complaint of the totalitarian tyranny of fate emerges from the ego or the desire-soul in man and not from his soul. Not only the general fines of the workings of Fate and Nature but all the particular and minute details of its operating design, its face and form, have their origin in the soul. The experiences which are interpreted by the surface ego as pleasure and
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pain, success and defeat, fulfilment and frustration are all assimilated by the soul. Essentially, each experience contributes a certain quality of vibration which is spiritual in character and this spiritual quality is the permanent and useful core of the experience. All the attendant vibrations of excitement in the mental, vital and physical levels of every experience are, though for the egoistic individual enormously important and even all-engrossing, only transient movements without any value for the individual. The problem of Fate, as are all the problems of life, is the problem of the ego. The soul has now accepted to be bound and so the so called tyranny of Nature and Fate.
"Here Matter seems to mould the body's life
And the soul follows where its nature drives".
This great truth is realised by man in seasons of calm weather when the tempestuous action of the restless mind, the battling vital and the turbulent senses gets temporarily suspended either by a process of wearing out or by the intervention of the Grace from above. In the luminous intervals of vision, the intolerable wrestle with the ego stops and the noisy years of feverish pursuits and mad endeavours in the bazaar of the mind and the senses seem moments in the being of the eternal silence of the spiritual consciousness. The odium and pain of bondage cease to trouble and lose all the edge of hurt when bondage is freely accepted.
Again, this bondage need not be eternal. The soul has the power to withdraw the sanction it has accorded for the so-called tyranny '. of Fate. Indeed, when the soul has grown sufficiently by assimilating the experiences in a life of bondage to Fate or when it feels a push to the Realm of Silence, it feels that Time must have a stop and so begins the reverse process of suspension of all outward-going movements and a plunge into the Static Substratum, the path of
Nivrtti or Moksha. One could thus go clean beyond all the planes wherein Fate can have a play, the Kingdom of the Peace of the Spirit, Afma Samrajya. This is indeed the well-known ascetic path of Renunciation, sanctified by hoary tradition, Sannyasa Yoga. Bondage is only a state of hypnosis of the soul in Time, Moha. Liberation is but an awakening of the soul into the Timeless Beyond, Udbohdana.
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A third and higher poise of the soul is possible because the soul has not only the power of withdrawing from all manifestation but it has the greater puissance of overmastering destiny progressively.
"But greater spirits this balance can reverse
And make the soul the artist of its fate."
This is the art of making the spiritual Shakti dynamic on the manifestation and therefore suspend, change or transform the working of Nature and Fate. The quality of Aspiration of the soul in man puts him in contact with the Higher Spiritual Consciousness whose very nature is a largeness and conscious freedom. According to the level of the ascent of man's consciousness into the Vast Consciousness of the Atman above, his mastery of Fate increases in amplitude and depth. The power of the ranges immediately above' the mental consciousness—the Higher thinking mind, Illumined mind and Intuition—is only adequate to mitigate and postpone the operation of the iron law. But the power of the Over mind is indeed able, when allowed to intervene into this scheme of Ignorance, to build a temporary heaven of light as a luminous though precarious island in this realm of darkness. The great saints and Vibhutis have established for themselves and those open to them such an oasis of retreat and bliss in this world of Fate. Miracles for them have been an hourly affair and the impossible has been made possible and even inevitable by their intervention in life.
"This is the mystic truth our ignorance hides :
Doom is a passage for our inborn force,
Our ordeal is the hidden spirit's choice,
Ananke is our being's own decree."
Each man carries with him a selected portion of the mental, vital and physical
consciousness with their resistances and weaknesses and together and'
simultaneous with these, deep buried within his inmost consciousness, all the
divine light, love and power to overcome
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and transform these very resistances and establish a diving life on earth. The choice of the quantum of Fate-dominated material is precisely that of the soul and it is guided by the Divine Guest behind the soul and His Power, the Antaryami Ishwara. This inborn force of the Divine seated in the heart of each individual makes the outer destiny and determinism as a field for its manifestation. Fate is therefore not an externally imposed law but the spontaneously . chosen field for the soul-force to work and work upon. The greater the man, the greater the soul-force. And when the man is a Vibhuti, a chosen vehicle for the manifestation here of the Higher Powers, the abrogation of Fate is on a larger scale, for a longer time and of greater spiritual Puissances. And when the Avatar comes, she unites the world of Fate with the World of the Divine Will and makes the passage between the two poles of existence clearly macadamised for all aspiring souls, for all time. Each Avatar chooses the most difficult and intense of the resistance and determinism of this world and makes the victory over these possible for all. And the Purna Avatar chooses the most central of the resistances, the fate of Death and forces Fate to come and show its power in all its intensity and width.
"All was fulfilled the heart of Savitri
Flower-sweet and adamant, passionate and calm,
Had chosen and on her strength's unbending road
Forced to its issue the long cosmic curve."
The heart of the Avatar has the sweetness of the flower in its capacity - . for complete and comprehensive sympathy for and empathy into the collective consciousness of humanity and
sub humanity. It combines this. tenderness, Kusumadapi Mridu, with the hardness of the adamant, Vajradapi kathora, in its insistence even' after the realisation of the grimness of the ordeal and the ruthlessness of Fate and Death, to face it squarely and even force it to manifest all is strength. It is, the great passion for man which makes her come and suffer all and achieve all for him. And with all the intensity of the passion is also an invincible peace which makes her bear all the ordeal with loving patience. The laws of the Inconscient which have- been dominating the world's history ever since its origin in Time, the long cosmic
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curve, are now receiving the challenge for the first time without any possibility of escape or evasion. She works to hasten the hour of God on earth and prepare the human consciousness for the Great Advent. With Savitri, the Mother are the Wisdom and Power to uplift completely man who is wallowing deep in the mire of fate-controlled world-existence, Sarhsara-panka-nirmagna-samuddharana pandita.
REFERENCE :
Savitri, Book VII, Canto I
M. V.
SEEARAMAN
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"THE LIFE DIVINE" : SOME ASPECTS
"Sri Aurobindo is both a poet and speculative thinker. The same is true of Rabindranath Tagore, but the thought of Sri Aurobindo appears to me more comprehensive and systematic than that of Tagore."1—G. H. Langley (Sri Aurobindo : Indian Poet, Philosopher, Mystic". Royal India Pakistan Ceylon Society David Marlowe Ltd.,)
"...I have never known a philosopher so all-embracing in his metaphysical structure as Sri Aurobindo, none before him had the same vision :...
I can foresee the day when the teachings which are already making headway of the greatest spiritual voice of India, Sri Aurobindo, will be known all over America and be a vast power of illumination..." (Prof. Fredric Spiegel berg of Stanford University, California, U.S.A.)
"Resurgent India has in The Life Divine a world-view worthy of its glorious past and formative of a more glorious future"
(CHANDRA SHEKHARAN)
1 I am inclined to give these quotations because we in India have hesitation and are slow in recognising greatness in our midst. Tagore got his place in our country after he won the Nobel Prize. But greatness does not depend upon its recognition : it is those who recognise it that stand to gain.
2 Doubt has been expressed in some academic quarters as to whether The Life Divine
Besides there arc philosophers and philosophers. Some are professionals who live in the old orthodox mould and whom no philosophy touches : they remain like the lotus leaf in water. There are others who are careerists and have an eye on promotion and position. Others there are who are interested in ideas—new ideas and even those who are attracted by the style and method. Only very few are earnest seekers of the Truth prepared to tread the unknown path and risk all the dangers of an adventure. What such people write is philosophy.
The Life Divine
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I SHOULD like to begin by giving some historical background. In the last decade of the last century there was a profound stirring of the spirit of India, Bharat Shakti. It was the beginning of the movement of independence. It might be difficult for a reader of The Life Divine, the great philosophic work, to imagine that its author was one of the very few nationalist leaders in those stormy days of Indian politics. It was during his detention as an un dertrial political revolutionary in 1908 that he got the second crucial experience of yoga that became the turning point of his life. In a certain sense, it was an epoch-making experience and he gave expression to it at a meeting in Uttarpara in 1909. This spiritual experience in jail turned his mind to a problem of far greater magnitude than winning the freedom of the country. Subsequently invited several times to lead the political movement, he politely declined the honour because of his single-minded devotion to the pursuit of the spiritual problem of man.
I give this historical background in order to bring to your minds the fact that The Life Divine is not an arm-chair philosophy, not a mere academic product; it is the result of a very earnest and single-minded search extending over forty long years by one of the foremost intellectuals of our times. It is important to note that the author not merely thought but lived his vision of the reality, and it is the solid work done for many years that has enabled him to make a lasting contribution to thought and life. It is necessary that the younger generation should be made aware of so varied and valuable a contribution because that would enable it to solve the problems of today and of the future.
The Life Divine ushers in the dawn of a new age. We are told by many leaders of thought that today we are living in the atomic age, in the space age, the age of Cosmonauts, the age of technical advance par excellence and it seems at first sight natural that our age should be so named because of the vast economic changes science has brought about and is even n0W bringing about in the individual and collective life of man.
It has given a new concept of collective life by showing the
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possibility of ameliorating the material condition of the masses all over the world. Man has established himself as the undisputed "king among creatures of the earth and he is expanding his physical consciousness to outer space claiming it as his domain. Mind has succeeded in mastering material energy by the knowledge of its processes.
Even with regard to mind's control over material energy, long ago Sri Aurobindo laid down a fundamental principle indicating the nature of the new age of conquest even of Matter—conquest not dependent always on gross physical means and processes but the conquest of Matter by the Spirit.
The control now attained by man is that of Mind and of the Life-Force which are themselves not final realities but instruments of the Spirit. He writes in The Life Divine : material field in the knowledge, the encumbrance of the material machinery in the power. But here also the latest trend is highly significant of a freer future. As the outposts of scientific knowledge come more and more to be set on the borders that divide the material from the immaterial so also the highest achievements of practical science are those which tend to simplify and reduce to the vanishing-point the machinery by which the greatest effects are produced. Wireless telegraphy is Nature's exterior sign and pretext for a new orientation. The sensible physical means for the intermediate transmission of the physical force is removed; it is only preserved at the points of impulsion and reception. Eventually even these must disappear; for when the laws and forces of the supraphysical are studied with the right starting point, the means will infallibly be found for mind directly to seize on the physical energy and speed it accurately upon its errand. There, once we bring ourselves to recognise it, lie the gates that open upon the enormous vistas of the future."
But. Man, the mental being, in spite of his scientific advance, is still a slave of his own nature, his blind desires, impulses, passions, ambitions, greed, ego—in short, the slave of ignorance. The advance in techniques has given rise to a tendency to increase his needs, "to raise the standard of living", as it is called, to multiply gadgets for his comfort; it is slowly changing the values of. life by promoting the false notion that the physical is the only reality. The exclusive
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concentration on mere material advance, it is clear, is not enough to create perfect men or a perfect society. Even in societies that have achieved a very high degree of material advance there are already signs of satiety, psychological malaise which manifests itself in increasing nervous disorders. We may ask ourselves whether this scientific advance with its utility to life and its mastery of sense-data is leading man towards the Truth. It is true, Science gives efficiency which is very essential but efficiency alone is not, or cannot be, the goal of life. To a strictly rationalistic, that is, scientific outlook Truth is unknowable.
What is urgently needed is not only mastery of material Nature but also self-mastery. The application of scientific advance to collective life has put into man's hand such a tremendous reservoir of material power that without a corresponding inner transformation of his nature man would not be able to make a real advance in his culture. It means the material advance by itself would not solve man's problems though the possibility of its misuse has instilled fear in his mind, and the fear makes him halt and think; but that fear would only deter him but not bring about the necessary inner change. That is what Billy Graham writes in Life1
"American genius has enabled us to change virtually everything but ourselves. It is absolutely impossible to change Society and reverse the moral trend unless we ourselves are changed from inside out."
This feeling, this perception is fairly widespread among the intelligentsia everywhere and I believe that it is symptomatic of the new psychological change that is trying to establish itself. The material advance itself, man's mastery over unlimited material energy, and simultaneously man's inner feeling of the need for changing his own nature are signs of the descent of a Power beyond the mind into earth evolution. Sri Aurobindo advocates the control of Matte-—that is, material energy—by the Spirit; but, in order to be able to do that, man must rise above his present state of Consciousness, —he must rise to the Supermind.
1 August 15, 1960
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In one of my lectures at the Friend's Hall at Cambridge,,1 I said : "Yours is an old seat of learning. It has the distinction of giving to the world great discoverers like Newton and Faraday. -I have come to tell you that here in King's College there was another distinguished discoverer Sri Aurobindo, from India, who laid bare the Supramental level of consciousness opening thereby an immense realm of spiritual experience to man. In the words of Dr. Gokak his work "opens up new horizons that spell new cultures upon earth."
The Life Divine meets the challenge of the agnostic and materialistic 'outlook now trying to dominate the world, but,. in a pro-founder view, it satisfies the deepest need of man—his aspiration for integral perfection. While it thus satisfies the spiritual need of mankind it is equally a characteristic contribution of India to the human culture of the future; for without those fundamental spiritual elements no human culture could be perfect. Sri Aurobindo's Works may be said to be the international form of Indian culture. My friend Sri Chandrashekharan, the Andhra poet, says : "No other philosophy or religion gives to life on earth such high significance."
Apart from the material advance there are purely psychological factors also that have emerged : (1) Internationalism; (2) A universal demand for a kind of Socialism; (3) The increasing prominence given to ethical values in international politics. The question is whether these new values with the help of the scientific advance would enable man to solve his problems. In fact, there is a great confusion with regard to the nature of the problem before man. It is supposed by some that a certain plan or programme, carried out by social, political and other outer means, would solve the problem.
- About that Sri Aurobindo says : "The advocates of action think that by human intellect and energy making an always new rush, everything can be put right; the present state of the world after a development of the intellect and a stupendous output of energy for which there is no historical parallel is a signal proof of- the emptiness of the illusion under which they labour. Yoga takes the stand that it is only by a change of consciousness that the true basis
1 November 1955
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of life can be discovered; from within outward is indeed the rule."1 Others think that a certain "thought" or 'ism' propagated by sincere persons, through the agency of speech, travel, radio, press, books, even Padayatras—would bring about the necessary inner and outer change. It is true, a system of thought, the ideal of service, some programme of social or economic change etc., are great powers for effecting a change in life. But the most important thing, very often forgotten, is that there is no mere outer problem. The problem is inner, the problem is man and his ignorance.
The next question is : is it possible to attain perfection with the faculties which man possesses at present ? Sri Aurobindo shows that man must ascend to the Supermind,—the Truth-Consciousness (above the Mind), if he is to attain perfection.
The general tendency is to regard such questions relating to the fundamentals as insoluble and if solutions are offered they are dubbed Utopian. This wrong attitude prevents a proper approach and retards the solutions of important problems. An" illustration might make the point clear.
If Mahatma Gandhi had consulted the statesmen and political leaders of his time to advise him about his contemplated resort to Satyagraha to secure independence for India, what do you think would have been their reaction ? With one voice they would have declared him crazy and advised him against any such Utopian method that would surely invite failure, if not political disaster. Granting that India does not owe its freedom entirely to Satyagraha, still it is clear that the Mahatma did right in trying his novel experiment for which he consulted only his own conscience : the World has a new weapon for setting right some of its political wrongs. What is or seems impossible at one time becomes possible after sometime. The sciences of medicine, physics, etc., have achieved many things that were once considered impossible. Sri Aurobindo writes his epic Savitri:
The high gods look on man and watch and choose
Today's impossible for the future's base.'
1 On Yoga, Tome I, p. 162.
2 Savitri, Book III, Canto 4. p. 308.
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In considering the solution offered by a great work like The Life Divine one has to keep the mind open, admit untried possibilities and undertake even the risk of experimenting in new directions. In this regard I am glad to find that Vinoba Bhave, though following a particular line of thought and action, has kept his mind open to other quite disparate kinds of possibilities. He is trying to live up to the ideal of "the world as one family"-"Vasudeavh Kutumbakam and he has been preaching the same in his "Padayatras pilgrimage on foot" . After years of experience of Padayatras he accepts the possibility of spreading the ' idea without resorting to any outer means. By attaining to a certain spiritual poise it is possible, he believes, to spread the ideas and work out its results in life sitting at one place. It would be like the launching of a ballistic missile from a previously prepared base directing it to the target.
The Life Divine propounds the possibility—indeed, the inevitability—of evolution of man from Mind to Supermind. Omnipresent Reality is the basis of the universe—its fundamental substance. This
Omnipresent Reality is active in the universe in three positions or, say, it is triple in its movement : the Individual, the Universe and the Transcendental. In all the three it is identical. The universe is the movement of evolution from an apparent Inconscience to a greater and greater degree of consciousness : this is a process in the opposite direction to involution in which there was the gradual descent covering the original Reality, creating a world at every downward step. The process of evolution has proceeded from Matter to Life, from Life to Mind. Man, the mental being, is transitional because he has yet to ascend to a higher Consciousness beyond Mind. This is the great spiritual Odyssey that man has now to undertake consciously. If material science lays open before man a wide—practically unlimited —field of adventure, research and experience in the outer interstellar space, the supramental is not without its own attractive elements.
The Life Divine is a call" . . to spiritual adventure, to a spiritual
exploration, it initiates a vision of heights of consciousness which have indeed
been glimpsed and visited but have yet to be discovered and mapped in their
completeness. The highest of these peaks or elevated plateaus of Consciousness,
the supramental, lies far beyond the possibility of any satisfying mental scheme
or map of it or any grasp of
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mental seeing and description".1 On those unexplored heights there lie inexhaustible treasures of Light and Power which can effectively help mankind to solve its problems. A call is upon young India to answer. The Life Divine
That this assertion is not a speculation unrelated to the so-called "hard realities" of life may be seen from a statement of Sri Aurobindo himself :
"This (his retirement from outer activity) did not mean, as most people supposed, that he had retired into some height of spiritual experience devoid of any further interest in the world or in life. It could not mean that, for the very principle of his yoga is not only to realise the Divine and attain to a complete spiritual consciousness, but also to take all life and all world activity into the scope of this spiritual consciousness and action and to base life on the spirit and give it a spiritual meaning. In his retirement Sri Aurobindo kept a close watch on all that was happening in the world and in India and actively intervened whenever necessary, but solely with a spiritual force and silent spiritual action; for, it is part of the experience of those who have advanced in yoga that besides the ordinary forces arid activities of the Mind and Life and body in Matter, there are other forces and powers that can and do act from behind and from above; there is also a spiritual dynamic Power which can be possessed by those who are advanced in the spiritual consciousness, though all do not care to possess or, possessing, to use it, and this Power is greater than any other and more effective. It was this force which Sri Aurobindo used at first only in a limited field of personal work, but afterwards in a constant action upon the world forces."
In his Savitri he wrote :
This world is a beginning and a base
Where Life and Mind erect their structured dreams : -
An unborn Power must build reality.-
Supermind brings to birth that unborn Power. Is it only Power ? It is much more; listen to the voice of the maternal Divine Love :
1 The Life Divine, p. 817. 2 Book I Canto 4.
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"O beloved children, sorrowful and ignorant, and thou, O rebellious and violent Nature, open your hearts, tranquillised your force, it is the omnipotence of Love that is coming to you..."1 -
In spite of the glib talk of there being no difference between the cultures of the East and the West it cannot be denied that the values dominating Western culture have created problems for new India. Old values are already broken up and one need not regret it if they had no contribution to make to human progress. But young men uprooted, psychologically, from their own culture are taking to the 'glamorous outer values of the powerful Western culture in their bewilderment. The civilisation of gadgets, with its aimless speed, senseless competition, fragmented living, commercialisation of culture, rising standard of living with no prospect of where it will stop, undermining of moral and spiritual values—all that poses a problem. There is a crisis in the cultural life of free India. It is for young India to decide. In a wider sense the choice is for humanity today.
As for India, return to the past is not only undesirable but impossible. Sterile repetition is not life; nor is slavish imitation of the West the solution. Does free India want to tread the same path of Industrialisation in the same way ? Our need today is growth— growth form within. The problem is how to assimilate the dynamic values of life—social, economic and political—prominently imposing themselves upon humanity, and yet to preserve the spiritual forces created by our culture; or, in other words : Is Indian spirituality capable of assimilating the elements of Western culture and giving humanity a new synthesis that might point the way out of the present crisis ?
It is spirituality that can give us guidance in the present crisis but there, are some leaders who regard this as not possible—though they have no knowledge of what spirituality is and they dub it 'escapism'.
This word 'escapism' is sometimes used to question and run down the value of spiritual life. Escpe from what? Life presents
1 Prayers and Meditations of the Mother : June 9, 1914, p. 131.
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so many problems and there is no one method of solving them. If, for instance, J. C. Bose retires into his laboratory to solve scientific problems and does not participate in a political demonstration or in a" jail-going programme, is he an escapist ? If Tagore continues his literary activities and does not ply the charkha or go to prison, can he be called an escapist ?
Ramdas, the great saint of Maharashtra, was a great patriot and wanted to remove the Mogul yoke. But he did not take to political orgnisation as his own work—he only prepared the ground and Shivaji organised the political activity. Was Ramdas an escapist ?
Ramakrishna after a long and arduous life of Tapasya gives out to the world that the sincere practice of every religion leads to the same experience—can he be called an escapist ? Does he not serve the highest need of mankind by giving to it a great truth ? If a culture worth the name of "Human Culture" is to arise some day in future it can only be on the basis of the truth announced by Ramakrishna.
And what about his being a living example of the attainment of profound knowledge by other more direct methods of inner culture than those that are in vogue ? Sometimes, it is forgotten that rushing into action itself may be attempt at escape !
I believe no one can escape—even if one wants to—because Nature will be always with oneself. What is called "escapism" may be the shifting of the point of interest of the individual. It may be also exclusive concentration on a particular subject of interest. Some of our leaders seem to think that there is only one method by which problems can be faced or solved. But that would be an arbitrary limitation—for there can be many methods. One may have to wait for conditions to be fulfilled to try his method. In fact, no true progress or gain by the individual in any field can remain personal,, it is always for all. As to methods, those who are one-tracked in their minds may be reminded of the line of the poet : "More things are : wrought by prayer than this world dreams of"; even prayer can be a method.
Some quotations from Sri Aurobindo's letters and other writings would be helpful in dispelling the notion that the attainment of the higher consciousness is something abstract and without any dynamic consequence.
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( I )
"I must remind you that I have been an intellectual myself and no stranger to doubts—both the Mother and myself have had one side of the mind as positive and as insistent on practical results and more so than any Russell can be. We could never have been contented with the shining ideas and phrases which a Rolland or another takes for gold coin of Truth... I think I can say that I have been testing day and night for years upon years more scrupulously than any scientist his theory or his method on the physical plane." (18-8-1932)1
(2)
"When I concentrate, I work upon others, upon the world, upon the play of forces." (19-12-1934)2
(3)
"The invisible Force producing tangible results both inward and outward is the whole meaning of the yogic consciousness Who would be satisfied with such a meaningless hallucination and call it power? If we had not had thousands of experiences showing that the Power within could alter the mind, develop its powers, add new ones, bringing in new ranges of knowledge, master the vital movements,... control the conditions and functionings of the body, work as a concrete dynamic Force on other forces, modify events, etc., etc., we would not speak of it as we do.?"
(4)
"Concrete ? What do you mean by concrete ? Spiritual force has its own concreteness; it can take a form (like a stream, for instance) of which one is aware and can send it quite concretely on whatever; object one chooses."4
1 Life of Sri Aurobindo, p. 281.
2. ibid .
3 On Yoga, Tome I, p. 237.
4 bid., p. 239.
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(5)
"I have always said that the spiritual force I have been putting on human affairs such as the War is not the supramental but the Over-mind force, and that when it acts in the material world is so inextricably mixed up in the tangle of the lower world forces that its results, however strong or however adequate to the immediate object, must necessarily be partial."1
(6)
"I have often used the Force alone without any human instrument or outer means..." (24-1-1936)2
(7)
"Certainly, my force is not limited to the Ashram and its conditions. As you know it is being largely used for helping the right development of the war and of change in the human world. It is also used for individual purposes outside the scope of the Ashram and the practice of yoga; but that, of course, is silently done and mainly by a spiritual action." (13-3-1944)3
Ramakrishna gave birth to the neo-spirituality in India by freeing it from all external forms and stressing "experience" as the acid test. On the basis of this experience—call it realisation—he declared the unity of all religions. Sri Aurobindo gives the link between the past and the future and asks humanity to build its life on the basis of the Omnipresent Reality, to him Life and God are absolutely compatible, earth is worthy of the divine manifestation. Separation of the human spirit from the Divine is the cause of the prevailing human ignorance which is a transitory or passing phase in cosmic unfold-ment—the growth of the human soul towards the Truth. He assures us that the Universe and the Reality are not static, but dynamic and
1 Life of Sri Aurobindo, p. 296.
2 ibid., p . 297
3 ibid. , p. 297
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that evolution is the process of un filament of the Divine that is involved in the Inconscient. "The animal is the living laboratory in which Nature has, it is said, worked out man. Man himself may well be a thinking and living laboratory in whom and with, whose conscious co-operation she wills to work out the superman, the god. Or shall we not say, rather, to manifest God P".1
1 Tire Life Divine, p, 5.
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Sanatana Dharma By Swami Bharati Krishna Tirtha. Publishers:- Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Chaupatty, Bombay. Pages 210. Price: Rs. 2.50
THIS cogent treatise on Sanatoria Dharma is an important addition to the growing literature on Hinduism. The author, late Swami Bharati Krishna Tirtha, brings to the study of the subject his profound learning and spiritual insight, and presents the salient features of Hindu Dharma with force and conviction. His lucid expositions which are interspersed with anecdotes and quotations from ancient texts give a .historic survey of Indian civilisation from the earliest times to the present day, and a succinct portrayal of. the many-faceted splendours of her ancient culture in diverse fields of art, literature, science, economics, politics, sociology, religion, philosophy, spirituality. He speaks of India's rich heritage, the high watermark of her past efforts and victorious achievements, the renaissance that has come upon her after a brief period of decline and the promise of her more luminous future.
Quite naturally, the author dwells at length on spirituality which has always been the basis of Indian culture, the leading motive and determining power of her civilisation. In fact, the chief characteristic feature of Hinduism which distinguishes it from all other religions and creeds is its keynote of spirituality and the infusion of spiritual element into every activity of human interest from the most trivial to the most sublime.
It is true that this emphasis on spirituality has given rise at a certain stage of India's long evolution to the development of some schools of exaggerated asceticism and illusionism, which made a sharp, unbridgeable opposition between the temporal and the Eternal and took a negative-and pessimistic view of terrestrial life. But it is a grave error to think or disparage, as some critics do, that Hinduism is an other-worldly religion, life-chilling, ascetic, stagnant, opposed
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to all reforms and progress. Nothing is farther from the truth. Hinduism is second to none in its right appreciation of the outer life of man. It has always recognised the four primary interests of mankind, kdma, artha, dharma, moksa. the highest ideal set before man, however, is the culmination of a series of graded efforts, through satisfaction and fulfilment of the first three mundane objectives and not, for the majority of men at any rate, a single precipitous climb. The ancient Hindu civilisation clearly saw the complexity of life and man's nature and realised that there could not be in the nature of things a single trenchant rule or guide for all men, for all time', Man at first and for long lives a vital, mental .life in the physical body, his soul gains experience through successive births and deaths until, arriving at a stage of fitness or preparedness, the individual awakes to the necessity of spiritual life and liberation. Sanatana Dharma visualised this law of graduality based on individual's capacity, adhi kdra, and individual's temperament, swabhūva, and established the system of four grades or classes of society, caturuar na, and four successive stages of human life, caturdsrama, providing a broad frame-work for the growth of the individual.
The author's vigorous defence of Hindu social laws and customs brings us to the interesting section of the book, for in this section he brings us in touch with modern scientific researches in mathematics, physiography, sociology, eugenics etc., and to their findings which bear corroboration of truths of many ancient sāsric injunctions. For instance, the customary fasting enjoined by satraps during the period of an eclipse finds corroboration in the experiment of Dr Thornton in the following words of the author :
"It seems that, after decades of research and investigations in the field of physiography, Dr. Thornton came to the conclusion that then an eclipse is on, especially a solar eclipse, the delicate nerves of the gastric region in the body of even the strongest man or animal got affected, and it was therefore desirable' to fast during an eclipse. Little children in India know it and we all do that."
A further example is on the the rapeutical value of betel leaf
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and the practice obtaining among the Indian ladies to take off the stem, the tip and the lines across of the leaf. The author tells us of Dr. Henderson's discovery of four different chemical constituents found in this edible leaf. The stem, we are told, contains a poison which interferes with the growth of oxihaemoglobin and is rightly avoided; the tip contains a very undesirable element (what the scientists call the 'aphrodisiac' of the third degree) which over-stimulates sexual power leading to harm; the lines across the leaf are said to contain a poison of a morphed nature which is injurious to the brain. The rest of the leaf is beneficial as ordinary tonic for the digestive system of married people leading a sexual life. "So", says the author, "I got light as to the principles on which the betel leaf was used in India, and also on Sanatana Dharma which prohibits the use of the betel leaf by sannyasis, brahmacharis and vidhavas.".
Then there is the instrument called oscillagraph, an invention of Dr. Abraham, which, we are told, is employed to determine certain crucial questions of heredity. By means of this instrument, the man's, woman's and child's blood are examined to know whether the child is the child of the particular parents. The author cites instances of a man's honour or a woman's fidelity vindicated by the results of this instrument the same being accepted by the law courts. We are also told that by analysing a single drop of blood Dr. Abraham is able to tell to what country, to what nationality, to what race and to what community the owner of that belongs, what his physical and mental characteristics are, and even the colour of his hair, of his eye-brows etc.
Here is an interesting description of the instrument itself:
"The Oscilloscope has two pendulum at the ends. When there is a couple of opposite sexes willing to marry, agreeing in other respects, satisfied with each other in other matters .and only j having a little doubt about the physical side, from the point of ' view of the offspring, they go to Dr. Abraham and each of them gives a drop of blood. The man's blood is put into one pendulum and compressed into a capsule shape and the woman's blood is put into the other pendulum and compressed. When the apparatus is set moving, the two pendulum move towards each other. Of
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the millions of cases tested, every one has invariably given one of the three results. In one case, the pendula come together, stick together and don't move off again; and if you want to move them off again, you must either break the apparatus or remove the blood capsules. In the second case the two pendula come together but repel each other and go off to their original corners and stay there. The third case shows that the pendula meet together, move off and meet again and this oscillation goes on alternately."
The conclusions of the foregoing experiments are given, as under :
"In the first case where the pendula meet together and stay intertwined inextricably, the instrument shows that the offspring will have signs of mental weakness and that if the process of such marriage is continued for generations, the result will be differ rant stages of mental weakness, reaching finally to the worst forms of insanity, idiocy, imbecility and the like. Secondly, where pendula meet and repel each other and stay apart, the instrument indicates physical deterioration in the child until at last, if the process is repeated, it will lead to impotency in the male and barrenness in the female. Thirdly, where the oscillation goes on continuously, the result is that the mental and physical characteristics of the child will be of envious type. An analysis shows that persons wishing to marry, whose blood is tested this way and who come under the first category are connected by blood, i.e., are related to each other; if they fall under the second classification, they are persons belonging to different communities; and if under the third, they are not blood relations but still belong to the same community."
What the modern science proves today through the oscilloscope says the author, has been laid down long long ago by the marriage laws of Sanatoria Dharma which prohibit vivarna marriage and enjoins savarṇa.a marriage only, and even in the latter case marriage is prohibited in the same gotra.
There is no doubt that the intrinsic and intuitive truths of many
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cultural and social forms of Hindu Dharma stand vindicated in the light of modern scientific investigations, but Hinduism cannot obviously rest solely or blindly on its past achievements. As Sri Aurobindo says :
"We have to look on our cultural ideas and our social forms and see where they have lost their ancient spirit or real significance. Many of them are now a fiction and no longer in accordance with the ideas they assume or with the facts of life. Others even if good in themselves or else beneficent in their own time, are no longer sufficient for our growth. All these must either be transformed or discarded and truer ideas and better formulations must be found in their place. The new turn we must give them will not always be a return upon their old significance. The new dynamic truths we have to discover need not be parked within the limited truth of a past ideal. On our past and present ideals we have to turn the searchlight of the spirit and see whether they have not to be surpassed or enlarged or brought into consonance with new wider ideals...If faith in ourselves and fidelity to the spirit of our culture are the first requisites of a continued and vigorous life, a recognition of greater possibilities is a condition not less indispensable. There cannot be a healthy and victorious survival if we make of the past a fetish instead of an inspiring impulse." (Foundations of Indian Culture)
One word more before we close; it is stated in the introduction as well as in the blurb that Sri Aurobindo had asked the Swamiji, the author, to organise a World Reconstruction Association. Obviously, there is a misunderstanding somewhere, for Sri Aurobindo, we are sure, never gave suggestions or directions to the Swamiji or to any one connected with his peetah to establish such a Sangha. Sri ,Au robin do's thinking on these questions and the methods of solving them were totally different.
KESHAVAMURTI
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