-03_The Advent 1965 Part Two

IT is not of today, not of yesterday, but also of the day before yesterday and the day before and the day before. The story is as old as human consciousness itself. Whether it will be the same tomorrow remains to be seen.

It is the fate of all spiritual endeavour to raise in its wake a contrary movement that declares and demands its negation. The Buddha says, surrounded as we are by enemies, let us not be inimical to them. The Christ, as we all know, when being led with a crown of thorns on his head and the cross on his back, heaved a sigh and prayed to the Lord to pardon all those who did not know what they were doing. In the early centuries of the Christian era when Rome sought to spread her gospel of Christendom and extend its frontiers, the vandals rose up against it and from their barbarian soil of Germania swept through

the countries like a hurricane, laying waste everything before them till they reached the Holy City itself pillaging and ravaging it, desecrating the basilica,—leaving their name as an immortal legacy to mankind for such deeds of theirs. And centuries later, the little maid of Orleans, Jeanne D'arc, was burnt alive, because she said that she saw the angels and heard their voices and conversed with God. And Mahammad—whose glory today rings reverberant in all the four corners of the globe—in his day was tracked from place to place like a hunted animal. Since then the situation seems to have worsened, not improved; for even as late as the enlightened nineteenth century, towards its end, we find a poignant picture, by the great dramatist Ibsen, of the social crisis of today, how the people, the masses, are not capable of recognizing their own secular good—not to speak of any higher spiritual welfare—and one who does or tries to do a really good turn to them is dubbed "An Enemy of the People".

Today the opposition is infinitely greater. The call now to humanity is for an infinitely greater change—an inner change in the consciousness and an outer change in life and material existence. Also the change is to be a radical change, that is to say, from the very root, not merely a superficial reform. The aim is not to leave the world as it is or just a little better in some way, if possible, but to remould it in the very substance and constitution of the Spirit. And the ultimate goal of earthly life is not the Divine's crucified body, but the perfected glorious body.

Naturally the old habits, the millennial forces, the ignorant and obscure movements of instinct and tradition cannot suffer such an upsetting. Earthly creatures, wherever they are, cannot bear the light that descends to illumine the earth. Its impact is too strong : the beings that abide in cool shades or cosy darkness struggle and wriggle, they fear to be dissolved; they desire no change. But the decree has gone forth. And earth moves...towards the Light.

Sri Aurobindo founded the Ashram to give a form to the descending light, to make of man an angel, not leaving him to remain an animal or half-animal as he now is.

The Mother's dream from her childhood was to find a place upon earth where men would be free, happy, wise, pure, one in love, above want, dwelling in the plenitude of prosperity, both inner and outer. She was building up, she is building up a structure in that direction, naturally under the restrictions and conditions of prevailing circumstances, seeking to open them out for the play of a higher order of consciousness, a superior status of being, a luminous mode of life.

Opposition from the stagnant order, opposition from domains that do not want man to be free from his past and present and become a being of the future, is inevitable in the nature of things. Opposition is also meant to be a tool, a test and a training for perfection. Through troubles, tribulations, through whatever accidents and incidents happen, we move un flamingly to the Divine Fulfilment.

Trials and tribulations are not new to the Ashram. From the first day Sri Aurobindo planted the seed here more than half a century, ago, it has been buffeted by bad weather. He was advised to quit, offered a cosy retreat in the Himalayas by the Imperial British The French regime offered him an equally agreeable resort, a peaceful haven on the Mediterranean coast of Africa. And even among well-wishers here, some were eager to take him out for a joy ride to...an unknown destination. But Sri Aurobindo had made his choice. This is the holy spot, this is the seat for his sadhana and siddhi—Pīhasthān. The Mother has not abjured his choice, she continues.

Even so the Buddha had taken his seat under the Bo-tree and declared : I am here and I do not move. Let my body dry up, ihāsane śusyatu me śarīram I sit firm and go through, to the end.

The passage to heaven, Sri Aurobindo says, lies through hell. Here is his warning and beckoning :

The nether forces can never divert or deflect the Divine Decree. That alone is carried out and fulfilled. And in His Will is our peace.

When a mountain surges up, lifts its peak high in the heaven, an opposite movement is generated that seeks to drag it down and bring it to the original level ground—the result being formidable glaciers and cataracts and land-slides hurtling down. But through these accidents and incidents—they are no more than that—the mountain remains firm, the living structure that is to be there abides in its integrality and greatness, although the accidents look like a tearing and a mauling of its body.

Through all contraries and adversities, through all that are broken and torn, through all that pass and disappear grows slowly and irrevocably that which the Supreme wills towards the final consummation. And one day we all shall see

THERE is no question so vital to the future of this nation as the spirit in which we are to set about the regeneration of our national life. Either India is rising again to fulfil the function for which her past national life and development seem to have prepared her, a leader of thought and faith, a defender of spiritual truth and experience destined to correct the conclusions of materialistic Science by the higher Science of which she has the secret and in that power to influence the world's civilization, or she is rising as a faithful pupil of Europe, a follower of methods and ideas borrowed from the West, a copyist of English politics and society. In the one case her aspira-tion must be great, her faith unshakable, her efforts and sacrifices such as to command the admiration of the world; in the other no such greatness of soul is needed or possible;—a cautious, slow and gradual progress involving no extraordinary effort and no unusual sacrifices is sufficient for an end -so small. In the one case her destiny is to be a great nation remoulding and leading the civilization of the world, in the other it is to be a subordinate part of the British Empire sharing in the social life, the political privileges, the intellectual ideals and attainments of the Anglo-Celtic race. These are the two ideals before us, and an ideal is not mere breath, it is a thing compelling which determines the spirit of our action and often fixes the method. No policy can be successful which does not take into view the end to be attained and the amount and nature of the effort needed to effect it. The leader of industry who enters on a commercial enterprise, first looks at the magnitude of his field and intended output and equips himself with capital and plant accordingly, and even if he cannot commence at once on the scale of his ideal he holds it in view himself, puts it before the public in issuing his prospectus and estimating the capital necessary, and all the practical steps he takes are conceived in the light of his original aspiration and ordered towards its achievement. So it is with the political ventures of a nation. To place before himself a great object and then to shrink in the name of expediency

from the expenditure and sacrifice called for in its pursuit is not prudence but ineptitude. If you will be prudent, be prudent from the beginning. Fix your object low and creep towards it. You fix your object in the skies, it will not do to crawl on the ground and because your eyes are sometimes lifted towards the ideal imagine you are progressing while you murmur to those behind, "Yes, yes our ideal is in the skies because that is the place for ideals, but we are on the ground and the ground is our proper place of motion. Let us creep, let us creep". Such inconsistency will only dishearten the nation, unnerve its strength and confuse its intelligence. You must either bring down your ideal to the ground or find wings or aero plane to lift you to the skies. There is no middle course.

We believe that this nation is one which has developed itself in the past on spiritual lines under the inspiration of a destiny which is now coming to fulfilment. The peculiar seclusion in which it was able to develop its individual temperament, knowledge and ideas;— the manner in which the streams of the world poured in upon and were absorbed by the calm ocean of Indian spiritual life, recalling the great image in the Gita,—even as the waters flow into the great tranquil and immeasurable ocean, and the ocean is not perturbed;— the persistence with which peculiar and original forms of society, religion and philosophical thought were protected from disintegration up till the destined moment;—the deferring of that disintegration until the whole world outside had arrived at the point when the great Indian ideal which these forms enshrined could embrace all that is yet needed for its perfect self-expression, and be itself embraced by an age starved by materialism and yearning for a higher knowledge;—the sudden return of India upon itself at a time when all that was peculiarly Indian seemed to wear upon it the irrevocable death sentence passed on all things that in the human evolution are no longer needed;—the miraculous uprising and transformation of weakness into strength brought about by the return;—all this seems to us to be not fortuitous and accidental but inevitable and preordained in the decrees of an overruling Providence. The rationalist looks on such beliefs and aspirations as mysticism and jargon. When confronted with the truths of Hinduism, the experience of deep thinkers and the choice spirits of the race through thousands of years,

he shouts "Mysticism, mysticism !" and thinks he has conquered. To him there is order, development, progress, evolution, enlightenment in the history of Europe, but the past of India is an unsightly mass of superstition and ignorance best torn out of the book of human life. These thousands of years of our thought and aspiration are a period of least importance to us and the true history of our progress only begins with the advent of European education ! The rest is a confused nightmare or a mere barren lapse of time preparing nothing and leading to nothing. This tone is still vocal in the organs of the now declining school of nineteenth century some of which preserve their influence in the provinces where the balance in the struggle between the past and the future has not inclined decidedly in favour of the latter. In Bengal it is still represented by an undercurrent of the old weakness and the old want of faith which struggles occasionally to establish itself by a false appearance of philosophical weight and wisdom. It cannot really believe that this is a movement with a divine force within and a mighty future before it. The only force it sees is the resentment against the Partition which in its view is enough to explain everything that has happened, the only future it envisages is reform and reversal of the Partition. Recently, however, the gospel of Nationalism has made so much way that the organs of this school in Bengal have accepted many of its conclusions and their writings are coloured by its leading ideas. But the fundamental idea of the movement as a divine manifestation purposing to raise up the nation not only for its own fulfilment in India but for the work and service of the world and therefore sure of its fulfilment, therefore independent of individuals and superior to vicissitudes and difficulties, is one which they cannot yet grasp. It is a sentiment which has been growing upon us as the movement progressed, but it has not yet been sufficiently pur forward by the organs of Nationalism itself, partly because the old idea of separating religion from politics lingered, partly because the human aspects of the Nationalist faith had to be established before we could rise to the divine. But that divine aspect has to be established if we are to have the faith and greatness of soul which can alone help, us in the tremendous developments the signs of the time portend. There is plenty of weakness still lingering in the land and we cannot allow it to take shelter under the cry of expediency

and rationality and seek to kill the faith and force that has been born in the hearts of the young. The Karma Yoga has taken its stand on the rock of religion and its first object will be to combat these reactionary tendencies and lead the nation forward into the fuller light for which the Bande Mataram and other organs of the new faith only prepared; the gospel of Nationalism has not yet been fully preached; its most inspiring tenets have yet to be established not only by the eloquence of the orator and inspiration of the prophet 'but by the arguments of the logician, the appeal to experience of the statesman and the harmonising generalisation of the scientist.¹

AS for the past one thousand years the progressive ideal in India has been that of Brahmin hood, so in the age upon which we are entering, the progressive ideal will be that of the Kshatriya or Knight. Purity will be accepted as implicit and courage will be demanded. The Rajput will be the type of aspiration rather than the saint. The whole preoccupation of society will be with manliness and strength rather than with subtle shades of refinement and social prestige. Criticism will be on the great scale, and the small uneasiness of the village circle will be put on one side as fit only for old wives' gossip.

This will not mean that Hinduism will have changed its goal, but only that the path marked out for the individual will be different. Infinite are the paths that lead to a single centre. Then as now "Mukti, Freedom, will be held the supreme good. But heroism, fearlessness and blazing energy will be the forms in which that Mukti shall be worshipped : "What is manliness" said the Swami Vivekananda in a private talk, "It is to know instinctively what should be the glory of a man."

The manly man knows when to strike. He also knows when to obey. There are times when disobedience is mere insubordination, mere unfitness for co-operation. There are times when obedience is cringing serfdom. No man should be able to count on me to aid him in doing wrong ! No man should be able shamelessly to speak of wrong in my presence. Even the Brahmin may have courage to strike : the Kshatriya knows also the moment when it comes.

But fearlessness and being feared though essential to the Knightly character, is only its foundation, not its crown. The last is found in the hatred of injustice, in the passion of pity and protection, in readiness instantly to give up life for the sake of the right. Herein lies the freedom of the Kshatriya, that he is free from fear for self. His own life is the pawn that he will cheerfully spend for the banner under which he fights. He will die with a shout of triumph. Nothing gloomy or resentful will mar the sun and serenity of his temper.

He is as generous as he is brave. He is as free from suspicion as from faintheartedness. He knows nothing of jealousy, nothing of mean exultation. His greatest joy is in the glory of his comrades. His own modesty protects him from a degrading ambition. Honour is his Dharma and the protection of the weak his Mukti. Only in the hearts of the sons of kings can the companion of the Avatars arise !

The true Knight is unflinching in his austerity, death generals sleep hard and eat sparingly. In armies the common soldiers are first served; their officers last. Even for games and sport, the play of Knighthood, the body has to be carefully trained. Ease and luxurious living soften the muscles and corrode the will. The Kshatriya keeps his sinews like iron, his armour bright, and his spirit ever tense for the ideal. Even in sleep his hand is on the sword-hilt, and his ear open for the cry that may ring forth at any hour, "Awake ! Arise ! Fight ye, and cease not till victory is won !" Loyalty to leader and comrade, devotion to banner and cause; the love and expectation of greatness and truth in others; the pride that makes noble; the playfulness of him who can never be selfish and narrow; these are the qualities of the ideal Knight.

The Kshatriya looks for strength, and not weakness, in woman. He seeks in her a comrade, not a toy. He reverences her soul, has regard for her highest aspirations, and never dooms her to feebleness or ineffectiveness because she is not man. Yet he worships at no false shrine, accepts no unreal subterfuge for greatness. Above all, he knows that woman, like man, has the right to self-sacrifice in some great cause. He looks to her for a clear vision of the goal, and makes her free to suffer and be strong. He supports her highest will with his thought and knowledge. But he offers no homage to mere vanity or weakness. He meets her with no-idle flattery or weak indulgence. Hand in hand, he treads with her the roadway of their common labour and common hope, in her eyes a noble sincerity, in his a tender reverence and unfaltering purpose. Highest of all the women of the past were the Satis who eagerly died for the sake of the beloved. Highest of those of the future will they be who live and die for the ideal itself, happy if in this they hold communion with their comrade's soul.

Lifted* high above the Maya of manhood and womanhood is the life of the ideal. Ideals are not accidents. They are the fruit of long tapas and of many lives. Human life is made great in proportion to their intensity. Few indeed are the souls who can live for an idea. In the age that is now dawning, the ideals of the past will not be cast aside. On the contrary, they will now, for the first time, find their true fulfilment. It is because of the great purity and sweetness of the Indian home that men can develop the strength and courage its defence requires. Only the perfect man is the true Kshatriya, and the perfect man is priest as well as Knight.

Let us think reverently of the task that is before us. Never in history has there been a greater age than now. Nothing in the past is too high for the present. Sannyas was not greater than the public service. No form of Ishwara could be higher than Bhumi Devi. This Devi we have to realise. Her Worship we have to. establish. And we may remember that in the form of Gandhari she sings still to the Duryodhana of this day, as of another, long ago "Yato dharmastato jayah !

ARCHITECTURE in Europe from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment follows the same curve of transition as painting. It was a gradual unmooring from the religious preoccupation of the Mediaeval age and a vigorous drive to the scientific and secular outlook of the modern times. There were the same swings and pulls "between two contrary polarities, the past ideals and the new emergent tendencies. The past was seeking to perpetuate itself and affirm its vital truths, and the forces of modern culture, fired with a new spirit of adventure and initiative, forged ahead towards a future of unfettered freedom for man and an uninterrupted progress for his individual and collective life. I shall not take the reader through the unfamiliar terrain of technical details, but indicate only the main steps of transition and the essential- achievements of the major architects who, each in his own way, contributed to the development of what we know as modern architecture.

The first trend of Renaissance architecture was towards the revival of the ideas which had inspired and informed Roman buildings. But the Gothic influence remained a persistent element in it—the Mediaeval tradition refused to be treated as stone dead. Filippo BRUNELLESCHI (1377-1446) was a Florentine who studied the Roman technique of construction. He built the dome of the Cathedral of Florence, the Foundlings Hospital, Sto Spirito, the Pazzi Chapel, the sacristies of San Lorenzo etc. which proclaim his greatness. In most of his constructions there is a mingling of many styles, Byzantine, Roman, Gothic, and his own, which was original and scientifically modern. Mathematics, 'which had been

from the beginning of the Renaissance, stamping its importance on the minds of the scientists, began also to colour and even control all artistic creation. Science and art joined hands in adopting the rule of the perspective, and the perspective gave to architecture the laws of anatomy and a scrupulous regard for precision and proportion in terms of scientific Naturalism. Naturalism as we know, was at bottom a drive towards individualism, which was the animating centre of Renaissance Humanism. It broke or ardently sought to break free of all trammels of frozen conventions and launch upon a career of adventure and enterprise. It determined the course and configuration not only of science but of all art, architecture and sculpture of the post-Renaissance times. It was the germinating seed of the subjectivism which has penetrated into the thought of the elite of the modern age. And it is this subjectivism which, with whatever aberrations and perversions incidental to its-initial growth, will bring in the new age of unity and harmony so passionately dreamt of by mankind even in its hour of agonised darkness.

Brunelleschi pioneered the architectural Renaissance and Michelozzo di Bartolommeo developed a new architectural style of palace construction in terms of that renaissance. The Medici palace, constructed by Michelozzo combines mediaeval inheritance with a pronounced Renaissance character in which the proportions are designed with mathematical order and simplicity.

The architect who gave a decisive classical turn to Renaissance architecture and applied Humanistic scholarship and archeology to the problems of building was Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472). A universal genius, he stands supreme for the perfectly harmonious proportions of his buildings and the introduction of the mode of central plan, which imparts an impressive homogeneity to all their parts. Alberti wrote extensively and with authority on the problems of Renaissance architecture, and many of his successors are indebted to him for expert guidance on the details of construction. Renaissance architecture, in thus being a symmetrical whole and confining the expression of might and mass to the human scale, achieves the distinctive humanised character which was the dominant trend of the times. Its conception, design and execution revolved round man

as the centre. Its perspective respected the bounds of time and space. But Gothic architecture, in spite of its flamboyancy and decorative excess, left ample scope for the spirit of man to soar beyond the confines of time and space and reach out towards the Eternal. Not man, but the Eternal, the Transcendent, was its centre of gravity. Its aspiration soared high in a vertical manner, whereas the fiery dream of the Renaissance extended horizontally, cherishing man, not God.

An architect who is ranked with or just next to Alberti is Dona to Bramante (1444-1514). He is particularly renowned for bearing a hand in the construction of St. Peter's Church in Rome, the most magnificent building in all Christendom. Influenced by Leonardo and the Milanese school, he brought into his art the massive greatness, the solemnity, and the harmony of classical art. Raphael, the great painter (1483-1520), was also an architect of no mean caliber. He followed Bramante in patterning his architecture upon ancient Roman style and steering clear of all religious or supernatural bias. The delicate grace and subtle suggestiveness of Gothic architecture which were, it is true, often buried under a load of pompous decoration, were gone, and in their place came the solemn sobriety, the austere Atticism, and the impressive but static volume of the art of antiquity. The sense of movement, of aspiration and progress towards transcendental heights, of self-projection into a the Invisible were replaced by an immobile stateliness, a magnificence, not of celestial but of the classical grandeur of Roman palaces and Roman baths. The brilliant sun-set glow of Renaissance architecture is best exemplified in the art of Palladium of Vicenza (died in 1580). In his architecture we find the order and balance of the classical model admirably knitted to lavish ornamentation, which catered to the luxurious taste of the closing phase of the Renaissance art. His buildings appealed to the popular mind which was tending more and more towards an atavistic return to the Gothic extravagance, not only in its ideas and inclinations, but in its life and habits.

Michelangelo, one of the supreme painters and sculptors of the High Renaissance, tried his hand at architecture and constructed the dome of St. Peter's Church. He disregarded the motif and

manner of Bramante and Raphael who had worked on the same Church before him, and constructed the dome and back of the church in his personal angular style, which reflected his towering genius, and had elements of the Roman, Gothic and late Renaissance styles fused together in it. He, like Bramante, is considered as a precursor of the Baroque architecture which was to be the vogue of the next generation.

Carlo Maderna (died in 1629) and Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) are among the outstanding names in this age of art and architecture. The classical gravity and structural rigidity of the previous style relax in the new manner into a sunny openness and smiling aesthetic freedom. The art of Bernini brings in the breath and breadth of Northern Italy. Baroque style now established itself with its colourful profusion and rich emotional appeal. Venetian and North Italian architectural techniques were adopted by other lands with certain regional modifications, though not without some conservative wobbling, and the humanistic mind of the epoch revels in a curious mixture of Roman balance with a love of exuberance and expansive enthusiasm, characteristic of the social life of the times.

Unlike painting, Renaissance architecture and sculpture in Florence had the signal advantage of deriving direct inspiration for their ideals, motifs and even styles from the large body of Roman ruins still extant. And yet they could not at once get rid of the ties of the Gothic tradition. It was only much later that the pure Renaissance manner emerged and established itself.

Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378-1455) showed in his sculpture a remarkable gift of Naturalism. His work glows with the idealistic humanism of Roman art set out with a delicious decoration. He knew th6 rule of the perspective and used it to a great effect in his art. His masterpiece was the double bronze eastern doors of the baptistery in Florence which are so magnificent in conception and craftsmanship that even Michelangelo, who was habitually chary of high praise, characterised them as "fit to adorn the entrance to heaven."

Donatello (died 1466) was the most "significant sculptor" of the fifteenth century in Italy. He was much influenced by classical ideas and strove to infuse them into his art, but he was not totally untouched by the growing realism of his times. His work unites humanism and realism in an exquisite manner. His equestrian portrait of Gattamelata is an impressive example of it. He imparted vitality and energy to sculpture which was lacking in the works of many of his contemporaries. He opened many a path of creative execution consistent with the realistic norms of the modern age, and many of his successors did nothing but follow him and mimic his style. The tendency to scientific realism prevailed and seemed to triumph over Gothic idealism.

Michelangelo can be called the greatest sculptor of the Renaissance. But his ideas were his own and his style followed no traditional model, neither Roman nor Gothic, nor of the Renaissance. His vision mounted beyond the reach of the classical ideal and his art took liberties with Nature. What he strove to do was to make his work express psychological truths of his own perception. His art can, therefore, be called distinctively individual. Massiveness, vigour and vitality, and a vivid sense of movement are the specific traits of his creation in sculpture as well as in painting and architecture. His colossal genius disdained to bow to any set ideas or canons, ancient, Gothic or modern. But genius without humility tends to become craggy and angular. And yet his work represents a landmark in Renaissance art, and even suggests the first figuration of the Baroque style.

Baroque sculpture revived something of the Gothic religiosity, the mediaeval exaltation of the saints, 'and the greatness of the church. The ghost -of the old overshadowed for a moment the youthful secular ardour of the Renaissance spirit. But only for a moment. The young spirit emerged again with its love of the world, love of the present, love of man and Nature and its confident reliance on the reason as the architect of human destiny and the leader of life's march. The dream of scientific humanism was to make earth the peer of the heaven of the mediaeval man.

Bernini was a sculptor as well as an architect and is considered the chief inspirer of the Baroque style. There is a throbbing intensity

of emotion is his art which contrasts with the cold rationalism of scientific humanism. His statue of Apollo and Daphne is a veritable tour de force. Bernini employed decoration, but the florid and ornate extravagance of the Baroque tradition has been slashed away by his keen sense of balance and harmony. His successors follow in his steps with more or less success, and Baroque decoration, toned down by him and combined with classical restraint and the geometric simplicity of scientific humanism, continues well into the eighteenth century. The transitions of art from the Early Renaissance to the Rococo period make an interesting study, showing as they do, how chequered was the course of the modern age, emerging from the criss-cross of antique, mediaeval and Renaissance traditions. Scientific rationalism had to pass through severe struggles before it could come off with flying colours.

IT is not possible to deal with the three subjects at length; for each of them might easily require a life-time for study. It is Sri Aurobindo's interpretations of these that can be attempted in outdone; for even a detailed exposition of one subject, like the Veda, would be outside the scope of the attempt. On the Veda alone he has written two Voluminous books : "On the Veda" and "Hymns to the Mystic Fire". It would be possible only to indicate in what particular respect Sri Aurobindo's interpretation is marked by his own Vision.

How Sri Aurobindo came to the study of the Veda : Sri Aurobindo is not a scholar who takes up the work of interpreting the Veda; his entry in the Vedic literature is best given in his own words :

"First, it seems to me advisable to explain the genesis of the theory in my own mind so that the reader may the better understand the line I have taken or, if he chooses, check my prepossessions or personal preferences which may have influenced or limited the right application of reasoning to this difficult problem".¹

"Like the majority of educated Indians I had passively accepted without examination, before myself reading the Veda, the conclusions of European Scholarship both as to the religious and as to the historical and ethical sense of the ancient hymns. In consequence, following again the ordinary line taken by modernised Hindu opinion, I regarded the Upanishads as the most ancient source of Indian thought and religion, the true Veda, the first Book of Knowledge..."

"My first contact with Vedic thought came indirectly while pursuing certain lines of self-development in the way of Indian Yoga, which, without my knowing it, were spontaneously converging towards the ancient and now unfrequented paths followed by our forefathers. At this time there began to arise in my mind an arrangement of symbolic names attached to certain psychological experiences which had begun to regularise themselves; and among them there came the figures of three female energies, Ila, Saraswati, Sarama, representing severally three out of four faculties of the intuitive reason-revelation, inspiration and intuition. Two of these names were not well known to me as names of Vedic goddesses, but were connected rather with the current. Hindu religion or with old Puranic legend, Saraswati, goddess of learning and Ila, mother of the Lunar dynasty. But Sarama was familiar enough. I was unable, however, to establish any connection between the figure that rose in my mind and the Vedic hound of. heaven, who was associated in my memory with Argive Helen and represented only an image of the physical Dawn entering in its pur suit of the vanished herds of Light into the cave of the Powers of darkness. When once the clue is found, the clue of the physical Light imaging the subjective, it is easy to see that the hound of heaven may be the intuition entering into the dark caverns of the subconscious mind to prepare the delivery and out-flashing of the bright illuminations of knowledge which have there been imprisoned."!

"It is my stay in Southern India which first seriously turned my thoughts to the Veda. Two observations that were forced on my mind, gave a serious shock to my second-hand belief in the racial division between Northern Aryans and Southern Dravidians. The distinction had always rested for me on a supposed difference between the physical types of Aryan and Dravidian and a more definite incompatibility between the Northern Sanskritic and the Southern non-Sans-kritic tongues.... I could not, however, be long in Southern India without being impressed by the general recurrence of northern or "Aryan" types in the Tamil race..."

"But what then of the sharp distinction between Aryan and Dravidian races created by the philologists? It disappears."

"...On examining the vocables of the Tamil language, in appearance so foreign to the Sanskrit form and character, I yet found myself continually guided by words or by families of words supposed to be pure Tamil in estabhshing new relations between Sanskrit and its distant sister, Latin and occasionally, between the Greek and the Sanskrit And it was through this Dravidian language that I came first to perceive what seems to me now the true law, origins and, as it were, the embryology of the Aryan tongues'.¹

"It was, therefore, with a double interest that for the first time I took up the Veda in the original, though without any immediate intention of a close or serious study. It did not take long to see that the Vedic indications of a racial division between Aryan and Dasyus and the identification of the latter with the indigenous Indians were of a far flimsier character than I had supposed. But far more interesting to me was the discovery of a considerable body of profound psychological thought lying neglected in these ancient hymns."²

I was helped in arriving at this result by my fortunate ignorance of the commentary of Sayana. For I was left free to attribute their natural psychological significance to many ordinary and current words of the Veda, such as dhī, thought or understanding; manas, mind, mati, thought, feeling or mental state; manisd, intellect, rtam, truth; to give their exact shades of sense to Kavi, seer, manisi thinker, vipra, oipascit, enlightened in the mind and a number of similar words;...³

"On one condition this transformation—into psychological complexion—is frequently complete, the condition that we should

admit the symbolic character of the Vedic sacrifice. We find in the Gita the word Yajna, sacrifice, used in a symbolic sense for all action, whether internal or external, that is consecrated to the gods or to the Supreme... I found in the Veda itself there were hymns in which the idea of the yajna or of the victim is openly symbolical, others in which the veil is quite transparent...... If the yajna is the action consecrated to the Gods, I could not but take the yajamana as the doer of the action Yajamana must be the soul or the personality as the doer. 'But there were also the officiating priests, hotā, ritwij, purohit, brahmā, adhvaryu...I found that the gods were continually spoken of as priest s of the offering and in many passages it was un disguisedly a non-human -power or energy which presided over the sacrifice."1

"...The Angirasa legend and the Vritra my thus are the two principal parables of the Veda; they occur and recur everywhere;...when we determine their sense, we have determined the sense of the whole Rik Samhita."²

"We have concluded that the Angirasa Rishis are bringers of the Dawn, rescuers of the Sun out of the darkness, but that this Dawn, Sun, Darkness are figures used with a spiritual significance. The central conception of the Veda is the conquest of the Truth out of the darkness of Ignorance and by the conquest of the Truth the conquest also of Immortality."³

"The seven divine Angirasas are sons or powers of Agni, powers of the Seer-Will, the flame of the divine Force instinct with divine knowledge which is kindled for the victory."⁴

1. Sri Aurobindo's interpretation of the Veda is psychological and spiritual. It unveils the mystic import of the Vedic symbols on

the basis of internal evidence. Sri Aurobindo argues that corresponding to the school of Vedic mysteries there were such schools in Egypt, Greece and Asia Minor.

II. That Sayana's Bhashya—commentary—is not the sole undisputed authority on the meaning of the Vedic hymns is amply proved by Yaska's Nirukta, the first attempt at preserving the Vedic knowledge current in Yaska's time. Yaska is prior to Sayana, and he admits triple interpretation of every hymn—ādhibhaulika, ādhidai-vika, ādhyātmika - and in the course of his exegesis mentions more than twenty schools and individuals who give different interpretation of the hymns.

Yaska in his introduction admits ten unknown—anavagatam -categories showing clearly the uncertainty that prevailed in his times about the meaning of the Veda.

The Western scholarship almost entirely relies on Sāyana and it is not so much interested in finding the meaning of the hymns as in interpreting the meaning assigned to them by Sayana. But as I ,have just shown the meaning of the hymns had become vague and uncertain even in Yaska's time. Sāyna: Bhashya could hardly be accepted as their most authoritative exposition. Besides the Western Schools are more interested in finding the history, social customs, institutions in the Vedas which might support their hypothesis of a primitive Indian world.

III. Much has been made of the word 'Arya'—by foreign scholars and their Indian followers. The word 'Arya' occurs 33 times in the Rig Veda : 22 times it is applied to Indra, 6 times to Agni. The remaining five references do not indicate any racial conflict. The Dāsa occurs 80 times, and Dasyu 70 times.

1) Internal evidence of the Vedic hymns. He regards Veda as of one piece; even a cursory glance would show that all the Mandalas deal with one subject-matter, and have a common form. It must therefore lead to one significance.

2) There are special words used in the Veda which are the keywords and have a double-meaning; this has grammatical justification.

3) Metrical development of the hymns indicates a high degree of cultural advance.'

4) All through the Veda symbols are used profusely—even the ceremony of sacrifice, yajna

5) The psychological words used in the Veda indicate a highly developed society, at least an intellectual oligarchy.

7) The legends in the Veda are also symbolic and capable of psychological interpretation.

go; aswa ; vrka; Vrka; Vamadeva; Dirghatamas ; Parashara; Angirasa; Angirastama; Gavisthira; Gotama; Viswāmitra; Vasistha; Bharadwaja; Bhaga; Dhenu; Vana; Dasyu; Vala; Panis; Vrsan; Brahma; Brhat; Barhi;'¹

Ex : go means both 'cow' and ray of light'; Parashara is regarded as a proper name; but in the hymns it carries its root-meaning-e-one who overcomes the enemies". It is used as an adjective of Indra in the, hymns. Gotama means "One most full of light". Dirghatamas, " One, who is or was long in darkness". Vrka "One who covers"; Vrka "One who tears"; Viśwāmitra " T he friend of all" "Universal friend"; Panis "The trafficker"; Dhenu "One who nourishes".²

Sacrifice—yajña in the Veda is symbolic. Sacrifice really is a means of interchange between men and the gods. Sacrifice in the Veda is Adhwara, a pilgrimage, and a battle. The officiating priests ; hota, one who calls; Adhwaryu, the priest of the journey; rtwik, one who sa crifices at the right season according to law; Brahma the voice of Rhythm-the reciter, of the word of creative power welling from the soul.

The fruits of the sacrifice—go, aswa, rayi, ratnam, Vira, prajd, tanaya-also are symbolic.

A small list of psychological words¹ used in the Rig Veda showing clearly that the Vedic Rishis were far from a primitive state of culture.

Satyam	:Truth of being
rtam	:Truth of movement, of action, a law
Brhat	:Vast, all-pervading
DM	:Intellect
Matt	:Thinking
Manisd	:Mentalisings
fñā	:To know
Budh	:To be aware, to awake
Cetana	:Consciousness
Cit	:To be conscious
Citti	:Consciousness
Acitti	:Unconsciousness
Dhā with Ava	:To place (the mind) upon (something)
Man	:To think
Vicetas	:One supremely conscious
Sumna	:One with a happy state of mind or thought
Siva	:The beneficent
Kalyana	:Welfare, state of spiritual attainment
Dhīra	:One who has the calm intellect
Vipra	:One who is illumined
Medhāvi	:One who is a genius (of quick comprehension)
Vicarsani	:One who has the illumined sight

Vipalcit	: One whose consciousness is illumined
Pracetas	: One whose consciousness is expanded, active
Kavi	: The Seer
Kratu	: Will
rsi	: One' with a vision
Daksa	: One with will or power
Hrdaya	: The heart
Mayas	: Bliss
Bhadram	: Happy beauty
Rayi	: Delight
Ratnam	: Shining joy
Moda	: Sweet-intoxicating-delight
Pramoda	: More intoxicating delight
Vid	: To know
Vidwān	: The knower
Swasti	: Happy state of being
Vāma	: Delight
Vana	: Delight
Sumati	: Happy state of mind

The use of these words containing various "psychological functions and even shades e.g., Dhi, Matt, Cetana

The first Sukta of the third Mandala (iii.I) of Viswamitra is symbolic; there the relation between Agni, Rivers "and Waters is stated indicating the symbolic nature of the god Agni as well as that of the Rivers and the Waters.

In I.26.2 Agni is said to be Sadā Yavistha manamabhih "Eternally," the most youthful by thought-forces", In 1.73.2 Fire is said to be Satya manma ''' One with truthful thoughts".

In IV.39. 1-6 Dadhikravan has only spiritual functions. So also in IV. 40 Dadhikaravan, a form of Agni, is spoken of as performing the functions of the Gods. In IV.40.5—the last Rik; Dadhikravan is so openly symbolic as to leave no doubt in the minds even of the most reluctant.

Saraswati, either the river or goddess, or both, is Sādhayantī Dhiyam nah "perfects our intelligence"; Usha, the goddess Dawn, is Yuvatīh purdni the "sempiternal young beauty"; and Agni, the god of Fire-representing the Divine Will-is "the Divine guest in the mortals".

III.32.12 Viswamitra says to Indra : "The sacrifice becomes thy increaser, O Indra, and the sacrifice in which Soma is pressed is dear to thee; thou, worthy of sacrifice, protect the sacrifice by the sacrifice; may this sacrifice guard thy thunderbolt in the killing of the coverer".

Also in I.31.1 Agni is not the material fire:, "Thou, O Fire, art the original Angirasa Seer, thou, a God, hast become the beneficent comrade of the gods". Further in 1.31.7. The Rishi says "O Fire, thou up holdest the mortal in the highest status of immortality for inspired hearing day after day; for him who desires the double birth, thou makest for him, the seer, delight and enjoyment".

"O Fire, thou art easy to sacrifice to for men, thee the Bhrigu established among men for (attaining) divine birth, beautiful like delightful wealth" I.58.6

Here the aim of the sacrifice is clearly stated to be the attainment of "divine birth" which would make man realise Immortality, the "Delight of the Eternal".

In I.62.2 the Rishi exhorts the gathering "to hold up powerfully a great surrender—a salutation; by that—surrender—our ancient forefathers, the Angirasas, knowers of the path, discovered the Ray-Cows". Here the effectivity of the salutation—surrender—to Indra is stressed and the Angirasas found out—not the animal—cows— but the Ray-Cows by pursuing the path he knew.

It has been argued sometimes that the Veda speaks of the gods but not of the One, Infinite, the Brahman, therefore the schools of monistic Vedanta are not really founded on the Veda, though they offer to the latter lip homage. This is not true—though it must be

emphasised 'that as the Vedic Seers are not laying down any school of philosophy, they speak not primarily about the One. But there are clear statements to show that to them the multiplicity of the gods was not a dividing bar, they hold that all the gods were the names and aspects of the One :

The Vedic legends at first sight appear to be historical or a mixture of myths and history, but on closer examination they are found to contain symbolic sense. The Angirasa legend, in particular, is one such.

¹ In IV.3.11 Angirasa seers are said to break open the hill— (mountain)—by the truth ! and they united themselves with the Ray-Cows; the heroes happily sat round the Dawn; when Fire was born then Heaven (higher mental world) became manifest.

The breaking open of the hill or mountain by the Truth indicates the symbolic nature of the mountain and that the action of the Angirasa seers.

² In V.i.8. Agni is clearly symbolic and so is Vrishabha, the Bull. "The purifier, he is rubbed bright and pure, he who is proclaimed by the seers, one who is the dweller in his own house, and is our benignant guest; the Bull of the thousand horns because thou hast strength of That, O Fire, thou precedest in puissance all others".

In VIII.9.4. The Rishi says that the Ashwins became concious of Vritra—the Coverer—by the sweet (or honied) Soma drink ! Thus Vritra and Soma must bear symbolic significance.

III.39.5 says "Indra with the ten Dashagwa Rishis found out the Sun living in darkness—That Truth". Here the finding of the Sun is the finding of that Truth.

In X.62.3 The Angirasa seers "make the Sun ascend in heaven by the Truth"—Riten sūryamārohayat divi". In VII.23.3 Indra is said to "have killed many Vritras" and he obstructs by his might both heaven and earth.

"The World lost its proper course, and the course it took only led it further astray. The World and the Way, being thus lost to each other, how could the men of the Way bring it again to the World? And how could the World rise to an appreciation of the Way? Since the Way had no means to make itself Conspicuous in the World,, and the World had no means of rising to an appreciation of the Way then, though sagely men might not keep to the hills, and forests, their virtue was hidden—hidden, but not because they themselves sought to hide it. The sages were under the compulsion of their times. When these conditions shut them up entirely from such action as they could do, they struck their roots deeper in themselves, were perfectly still—and they waited. It was thus they preserved the Way in their own persons".¹

..."The hypothesis I propose is that the Rig-veda is itself the one considerable document that remains to us from the early period of human thought of which the histric Eleusinian and Orphic mysteries were the failing remnants, when the spiritual and psychological knowledge of the race was concealed, for reasons now difficult to determine, in a veil of concrete and material figures and symbols which protected the sense from the profane and revealed it to the initiated. One of the leading principles of the mystics was the sacred-ness and secrecy of self-knowledge and the true knowledge of the Gods. This wi3dom was, they thought, unfit, perhaps even dangerous to the ordinary mind, or in any case liable to perversion and misuse and loss of virtue if revealed to vulgar and unpurified spirits. Hence they

favoured the existence of an outer worship, effective but imperfect, for the profane, and inner discipline for the initiate, and clothed their language in words and images which had, equally, a spiritual sense for the elect, a concrete sense for the mass of ordinary worshippers. The Vedic hymns were conceived and constructed on this principle. Their formulas and ceremonies are, overtly, the details of an outward ritual devised for the Pantheistic Nature-Worship which was then the common religion, covertly the sacred words, the effective symbols of a spiritual experience and knowledge and a psychological discipline of self-culture which were then the highest achievement of the human race. The ritual system recognised by Sayana may, in its externalities, stand the naturalistic sense discovered by European scholarship may, in its general conceptions, be accepted; but behind them there is always the true and still hidden secret of the Veda—the secret words, ninyā vacāmsi, which were spoken for the purified in soul and the awakened in knowledge. To disengage this less obvious but more important sense by fixing the import of Vedic terms, the sense of Vedic symbols and the psychological functions of the Gods is thus a difficult but necessary task, for which these chapters and the translations that accompany them are only a prepararion''.¹

"Their aim was illumination, not logical conviction, their ideal the inspired seer, not the accurate reasoner. Indian tradition has faithfully preserved this account of the origin of the Vedas. The Rishi was not the individual composer of the hymn, but the seer (drastā) of an eternal truth and an impersonal knowledge. The language of Veda itself is sruti, a rhythm not composed by the intellect but heart, a divine Word that came vibrating out of the Infinite to the inner audience of the man who had previously made himself fit for the impersonal' knowledge. The words themselves, drsti and sruti, sight and hearing, are Vedic expressions; these and cognate words signify in the esoteric terminology of the hymns, revelatory knowledge and the contents of inspiration.

In the Vedic idea of the revelation there is no suggestion of the miraculous or the supernatural. The Rishi who employed these faculties, had acquired them by a progressive self-culture."²

"We have, at any rate, the same notions repeated from hymn to hymn with the same constant terms and figures and frequency in the same phrases with an entire indifference to any search for poetical originality or any demand for novelty of thought and freshness of language. No pursuit of aesthetic grace, richness or beauty induces these mystic poets to vary the consecrated form which had become for them a sort of divine algebra transmitting the eternal formulae of the Knowledge to the continuous succession of the initiates."¹

"It is even possible that its most ancient hymns are a comparatively modern development or version of a more ancient² lyric evangel couched in the freer and more pliable forms of a still earlier human speech.. Or the whole voluminous mass of its litanies may be only a selection by Veda Vyasa out of more richly vocal Aryan past. Made, according to the common belief, by Krishna of the Isle, the great traditional sage, the colossal compiler (Vyasa), with his ,face turned towards the commencement of the Iron Age, towards the centuries of increasing twilight and final darkness, it is perhaps only the last testament of the Ages of Intuition, the luminous Dawns of the Forefathers, to their descendants, to a human race already turning in spirit towards the lower levels and the more easy and secure gains— secure perhaps only in appearance—of the physical life and of the intellect and the logical reason.³

"The Rig veda is one in all its parts. Whichever of its ten Mandalas we choose, we find the same substance, the same ideas, the same images, the same phrases. The Rishis are the seers of a single truth and use in its expression a common language. They differ in temperament and personality; some are inclined to a more rich, subtle and profound use of Vedic symbolism; others give voice to their spiritual experience in a barer and simpler diction, with less fertility of thought, richness of poetical image or depth and fullness of suggestion. Often the songs of one seer vary in their manner, range from the utmost simplicity to the most curious richness. Or there are rising and fallings in the same hymn; it proceeds from the most ordinary conventions

of the general symbol of sacrifice to a movement of packed and complex thought. Some of the Suktas are plain and almost modern in their language; others baffle us at first by their semblance of antique unity of spiritual experience, nor are they complicated by any variation of the fixed terms and the common formulae. In the deep and mystic style of Dirghatamas Auchathya as in the melodious lucidity of Medhatithi Kanwa, in the puissant and energetic hymns of Viswamitra as in Vasishtha's even harmony we have the same firm foundation of knowledge and the same scrupulous adherence to the sacred conventions of the Initiates."¹

"The internal evidence of the Riks themselves establishes that this significance is psychological, as otherwise the terms lose their fixed value, their precise sense, necessary connection, and their cons-tarn: recurrence in relation to each other has to be regarded as fortuitous .and void of reason or purpose.

"We shall find that the whole of the Rig-veda is practically a constant variation of this double theme, the preparation of the human being in mind and body and the fulfilment of the godhead or immortality in him by his attainment and development of the Truth and the Beatitude."²

"The Rishi next passes to the Vishvadevas, all the gods or the all-gods. It has been disputed whether these Vishvadevas form a class by themselves or are simply the gods in their generality. I take it that the phrase means the universal collectivity of the divine powers; for this sense seems to me best to correspond to the actual expressions of the hymns in which they are invoked".³

"They are fosterers or increasers of man and upholders of his labour and effort in the work, the sacrifice—omāsah carsanīdhrtah. Sayana renders these words protectors and sustainers of men. I need not enter here into a full justification of the significances which I prefer to give them; for I have already indicated the philological method which I follow. Sayana himself finds it impossible to attribute always the sense of protection to the words derived from the' root av, avas, ūti, ūma, etc. which are so common in the hymns; and is obliged

to give to the same word in difference passages the most diverse and unconnected' significances."

"Similarly, while it is easy to attribute the sense of "Man" to the two kindred words "carsani" and krsti" when they stand by themselves, this meaning seems unaccountably to disappear in compound forms like vicarsani, viuacorsani, visvakrsti. Sayana him self's obliged to render visvacarsani "all-seeing" and not "all-human". I do not admit the possibility' of such abysmal variations in fixed Vedic terms. av can mean to be, have, keep; contain, protect; become, create; foster, increase, thrive, prosper; gladden, be glad; but it is the sense of increasing or fostering which seems to me to prevail in the Veda. cars and krs were-originally derivate roots from car and kr, both meaning to do, and the sense of laborious action or movement still remains in krs, to drag, to plough. carsani and kr#i, mean therefore effort, laborious action or work or else the doers of such action. They are two among the many words, (karma, apas, kara, kri, duvas etc.) which are used to indicate the Vedic work, the sacrifice, the toil of aspiring humanity, the arati of the Aryan."¹

"The number seven plays an exceedingly important part in the Vedic system, as in most very ancient schools of thought. We find it recurring constantly—the seven delights, sapta ratnāni; the seven flames, tongues of rays of Agni, sapta arcisah, sapta jvālāh; the seven forms of the Thought-principle, sapta dihtayah; the seven Rays or Cows, forms of the Cow unslayable, Aditi, mother of the gods, sapta gavalz; the seven rivers, the seven mothers or fostering cows, sapta mātarah, sapta dhenaoah, a term applied indifferently to the Rays and . the Rivers. All these sets of seven depend, it seems to me, upon the Vedic classification of the fundamental principles, the tattvas, of existence. The enquiry into the number of these tattvas greatly interested the speculative mind of the ancients and in Indian philosophy we find various answers ranging from the One upwards and running into twenties. In Vedic thought the basis chosen was the number of the psychological principles, because all existence was conceived by the Rishis as a movement of conscious being. However merely curious or barren these speculations and classifications may seem to the

modern mind, they were no mere dry metaphysical distinctions, but closely connected with a living psychological practice of which they were to a great extent the thought-basis, and in any case we must understand them clearly if we wish to form with any accuracy an idea of this ancient and far-off system."¹

"The antique view of the world as a psycho-physical and not merely a material reality is at the root of the ancient ideas about the efficacy of the mantra and the relation of the gods to the external life of man; hence the force of prayer, worship, sacrifice for material ends; hence the use of them for worldly life and in so-called magic rites which come out prominently in the Atharva Veda and is behind much of the symbolism of the Brahmanas.² But in man himself the gods are conscious psychological powers. "Will-powers, they do the works of will; they are the think ings in our hearts; they are the lords of delight who take delight; they travel in all the directions of the thought.' Without them the soul of man cannot distinguish it s right nor it s left, what is in front of it nor what is behind, the things of foolishness or the things of wisdom; only if led by them can it reach and enjoy 'the fearless Light.' For this reason Dawn is addressed 'O thou who art human and divine' and the gods constantly described as the 'Men' or human powers (manusah, narah); they are our 'luminous seers', 'our heroes', 'our lords of plenitude.' They conduct the sacrifice in their human capacity (manusvat) as well as receive it in their high divine being. Agni is the priest of the oblation, Brihaspati the priest of the word. In this sense Agni is said to be born from the heart of man; all the gods are thus born by the sacrifice, grow and out of their human action assume their divine bodies. Soma, the wine of the world-delight, rushing through the mind which is its "luminous wide-extended" strainer of purification, cleansed there by the ten sisters, pours forth giving birth to the gods"³

"The Veda is a book of esoteric symbols, almost of spiritual formulae, which masks itself as a collection of ritual poems. The inner

sense is psychological, universal, impersonal; the ostensible significance and the figures which were meant to reveal to the initiates what they concealed from the ignorant, are to all appearance crudely concrete, intimately personal, loosely occasional and allusive. To this lax outer garb the Vedic poets are sometimes careful to give a clear and coherent form quite other than the strenuous inner soul of their meaning their language then becomes a cunningly woven mask for hidden truths. More often they are negligent of the disguise which they use, arid when they thus rise above their instrument, a literal and external translation gives either a bizarre, unconnected sequence of sentences or a form of thought and speech strange and remote to the uninitiated intelligence. It is only when the figures and symbols are made to suggest their concealed equivalents that there emerges out of the obscurity a transparent and well-linked though close and subtle sequence of spiritual, psychological and religious ideas., It is this method of suggestion that I have attempted".¹

'Confronted with the stately hymns of the ancient dawn, we are conscious of a blank incomprehension. And we leave them as prey to the ingenuity of the scholar who gropes for forced meanings amid obscurities and incongruities where the ancients bathed their souls in harmony and light."²

"The Vedic language as a whole is a powerful and remarkable instrument, terse, knotted, virile, packed, and in its turns careful rather to follow the natural flight of the thought in the mind than to achieve the smooth and careful constructions and the clear transitions of a logical and rhetorical syntax. But translated without modification into English, such a language would become harsh, abrupt and obscure, a dead and heavy movement with nothing in it of the morning vigour and puissant stride of the original. I have therefore preferred to throw it in translation into a mould more plastic and natural to the English tongue, using the constructions and devices of transition which best suit a modern speech while preserving the logic of the original thought; and I have never hesitated to reject the bald dictionary equivalent of the Vedic word for an ampler phrase in the English where

that was necessary to bring out the full sense and associations. Throughout I have kept my eye fixed on my primary object—to make the inner sense of the Veda seizable by the cultured intelligence of today."¹

"Who in this Age of Iron shall have the strength to recover the light of the Forefathers or soar above the two enclosing firmaments of mind and body into their luminous empyrean of the infinite Truth? The Rishis sought to conceal their knowledge from the unfit, believing perhaps that the corruption of the best might lead to the worst and fearing to give the potent wine of the Soma to the child and the weakling. But whether their spirits still move among us looking for the rare Aryan soul in a mortality that is content to leave the radiant herds of the Sun for ever imprisoned in the darkling cave of the Lords of the sense-life or whether they await in their luminous world the hour when the Marut shall again drive abroad and the Hound of Heaven shall once again speed down to us from beyond the rivers or Paradise and the seals of the heavenly waters shall be broken and the cavern shall be rent and the immortalising wine shall be pressed out in the body of man by the electric thunder-stones, their secret remains safe to them."²

"Our life is a horse that neighing and galloping bears us onward and upward; its forces are swift-hooved steed, the liberated powers of the mind are wide-winging birds; this mental being or this soul is the up soaring Swan or the Falcon that breaks out from a hundred iron walls and wrests from the jealous guardians of felicity the wine of the Soma. Every shining god ward Thought that arises from the secret abysses of the heart is a priest and a creator and chants a divine hymn of luminous realisation and puissant fulfilment. We seek for the shining gold of the Truth; we lust after a heavenly treasure.

"The soul of man is a world full of beings, a kingdom in which armies clash to help or hinder a supreme conquest, a house where the gods are our guests and which the demons strive to possess; the fullness of its energies and wideness of is being make a seat of sacrifice spread, arranged and purified for a celestial, session.

The -Rig-veda arises out of the ancient Dawn a thousand-voiced hymn lifted from the soul of man to an all-creative Truth and an all-illumining Light. Truth and Light are synonymous or equivalent words in the thought of the Vedic seers even as are their opposites, Darkness and Ignorance. The bated of the Vedic Gods and Tiatns is a perpetual conflict between Day and Night for the possession of the triple world of heaven, mid-air and earth and for the liberation or bondage of the mind, life and body of the human being, his mortality or his immortality. It is waged by the Powers of a supreme Truth and Lords of supreme Light against other dark Powers who struggle to maintain the foundations of this falsehood in which we dwell and the iron walls of these hundred fortified cities of the Ignorance."¹

NOW we come to a subject which the modern enlightened educationist will shrug off as an antique irrelevance. That there can be such a thing as psychic and spiritual education he is loath to concede. And that it can ever be regarded as the most important part or the hub of education he cannot bring himself to believe. He is content to treat the very idea with a sneering incredulity.

But the Mother considers psychic and spiritual education to be at once the core and crown of any integral system of education. The triple method we have already dealt with—physical, vital and mental—concerns purely human faculties. It contributes to the development of the normal potentialities of human nature. But, it is quite evident, even the perfection of this triple method does not lead to the perfection of man or to the integration of the various parts of his being. It does not engender a dynamic harmony in him. An absence of balance, of equilibrium, of a concerted and coordinated working in the nature is the all too common result of the education we provide for our children. An unstable and confused action of the three gunas, sattva, rajas arid tamas, and of the faculties of the mind, life and body creates a split personality in the child which becomes a prolific source of internal conflict and unhappiness. An artist or a poet leading a lax, bohemian life; a scientist developing the swelled head over his discoveries, or exploiting them for disreputable political or .commercial purposes; a philosopher in his ivory tower turned indifferent, or even callous in his attitude towards his fellowmen; or a moralist crassly stupid

in the rigidity of his puritanical nature, or ridiculous in his habitual priggishness, is not a rare example of the want of psychic and spiritual leaven in education. Disinherited of all higher values of life, despoiled of all sense of discipline and self-control, and innocent of all cohesive principles of human relations, modern man presents a sad picture of disintegrating humanity and a steady approximation to the beast. It is high time the soul of man, his psychic, was sought and discovered, and the spirit in him asserted its supremacy, if he is not to fall a victim to perpetual darkness and rampant anarchy.

The three lines of education, physical, vital and mental, help a child to develop his personality and create in himself a distinctive individuality out of the "amorphous subconscious' mass" from which he has evolved. He is no longer an indistinguishable unit among myriad units, like a stone among stones, a tree among trees, or an animal among animals of the same species. He is an individual man", separate and clearly distinguishable from all other men. But the centre of his individuality is an ego, a creation of Nature" which divides itself from all others and accentuates a separatist attitude in its dealings with them. His individuality is a prison in which he is self-enclosed and debarred from realising his unity with all. The triple education develops this egoistic personality of man, but does not help him to surpass it and recover his unity with all other .beings —it does not lead him to his own universal consciousness. But his universality, too, is not the terminus of his self-expansion. He has to realise his world-transcending existence, his utter, absolute infinity. The triple education falls pitifully short of these consummations, concerning itself, as it does, only with the changing, ephemeral personality of man. It brings him no message of importantly.

But life is no mere existence. Fugitive appearances are not the eternal Reality. Ignorance and suffering are not the permanent seal of human birth, and death is not its goal. There is a great meaning and transcendental purpose in human life, and a glorious culmination. The rush-light of reason is not the final achievement of our evolution on earth. Man is not what he seems to be.

The Mother's system of education offers a solution to this transcendental problem of life. It does not equip the child only for earning his livelihood, or pursuing some socio-economic ideal. It

does not only inspire him with the ambition to conquer and control physical Nature or explore the other material ranges of existence which have so long eluded our scientific observation and knowledge. It does, indeed, all this. It sets a great store by the development of the scientific spirit, the sharpening of the powers of accurate observation and scrupulous experiment, and the patient and persevering scrutiny of the secrets of Nature. It is more modern than the most modern of educational schemes in its grasp of the fundamentals of the material existence. But it stoutly denies the sole reality of this existence, and refuses to equate man with the petty round of his earthly career and crib him within the small orbit of reason and the bounded horizons of his mental vision. It opens doors upon vast, immeasurable expanses of consciousness and the invisible, infinite existence. It teaches us how to soar beyond time and space and annex to our consciousness and existence all the infinitudes that stretch beyond. It guides us to the discovery of our' soul which is the real pilot of our pilgrimage to Reality. To constrain education to the mental plane and consider intellectual development as its summit achievement is to deprive the child of his spiritual birth-right and condemn him to a death besieged life of dusky knowledge and rending discontent. To teach him how to learn the truth of his being and awake to the real purpose of his birth in the material world, to help him master himself and master his environment, to lead him to a dimension or dimensions of consciousness where ignorance and suffering melt away into knowledge and bliss and life becomes a dance of delight and death a mere passage to another existence of blessedness, is the true and highest function of education.

"Every human being carries within him the possibility of a greater consciousness beyond the frame of his normal life through which he can participate in a higher and vaster life____ What the human mind does not know and cannot do, this consciousness knows and does. It is like a light¹ that shines at the centre of the being radiating through the thick coverings of the external consciousness."²

This luminous consciousness is the crucial discovery to which the Mother's scheme of education is designed to lead. This is the unborn, ageless and undying consciousness to which the child has to be awakened within himself. Once it is uncovered and put in command, it takes charge of the life and nature of the child and makes of his evolution a natural out flowering of all the potentialities of his being. It raises his life above struggle and groping and leads it from light to light and harmony to harmony.¹

In some children, the Mother says, this light is not completely covered up in the beginning. It gleams out across their outer nature. It manifests in movements of faultless insight and simple, spontaneous instincts—"high instincts", as Wordsworth calls them. It is the "Eye among the blind". But their parents do not understand and appreciate them. They want to mould them to' their cherished social patterns. The child's visionary gleam is thus blindly quenched, his heaven-born freedom is chained by an enforced conformity to custom and convention, and his heart and mind are freighted with the trivial cares of a mere physical existence. All the education which most of the parents in their ignorance of their children's true nature, svabhāva, seek to impart end by eclipsing their inner perception and deadening their high instincts and subtle sensibilities. It is the greatest, though unsuspected, tragedy of a child's education, and the most brutal outrage upon his divine heritage. His soul is bartered away for a mere mess of pottage.

THE controversy over the question—Is India Secular ?—has arisen largely because of the prominence accorcled to the principle of secularism by the architects of our constitution and our policy makers. The declaration that our state is secular has naturally led to the question of how far it is effective in practice. Especially is this true when secularism is itself a controversial term which is capable of different interpretations in different contexts. Secularism, like democracy, ought to be regarded as a habit and value to be developed through the history of societies. They may not even be deliberately conceived ideals of growth, but gradual and largely unconscious products of a nation's evolution.

In the West the church-state controversy is now outmoded and no one would think of reviving it now. With us, however, the question of secularism, a modern version of the medieval controversy, is regarded as topical. The secularism of the West is a historical result of various forces active since the beginning of the modern age. "The ideal of human and social happiness, as proclaimed by the prophets and leaders of the French Revolution, has continued in the intervening period to mould the temper not only of the French bourgeoisie but also of larger and larger groups in all countries, Protestant and Catholic, who are resolved that mankind shall strive by the most enlightened methods at its disposal to establish the maximum^-of social justice and welfare in this world. The power of this secularised type of idealism derives in large part from its connection with science; and in this union of social and scientific secularism the movement which since the middle ages has been gathering increasing momentum finds its logical climax."¹

An eminent political thinker has contrasted the ancient and the Modern State thus : "All theocracy is repellent to the political

consciousness of modern nations. The modern State is a human constitutional arrangement—its politics aim at the welfare of the nation (commonweal), understood by human reason, and carried out by human means."

"The modern State "does not consider religion a condition of legal status (Recht). Public and private law are independent of creed. The modern State protects freedom of belief, and unites peacefully the different churches and religious societies..."¹

The nature of the problem of Secularism in relation to India can be understood only in the background of Indian History. We may say that secularism, like all social or political values must be understood, not as finalities or absolutes but as relative to particular times and societies. It is true that in modern times India has been exposed to western influences of a diverse character. If these influences alone could be trusted to work without resistance secularism as understood in the West might now have been an incontrovertible feature of our State. That it is still the subject of controversy shows that historically there are certain factors resisting the emergence of secularism in our country.

The connection of secularism and the scientific spirit in the West rendered the separation of religion and the State inevitable —modern Western civilization being the triumph of the scientific outlook on the world. To look upon western civilization in this historical light does not necessarily make one a supporter of the contrast between the "Spiritual East" and the "Materialistic West."

The problem in India has been complicated by the fact that (i) the foundations of Indian culture were spiritual—to be precise, culture, religion and spirituality were the several facets of the single life of the community; (2) that in recent times the Indian political problem was one of the relations between different communities —especially Hindu and Muslim. How much of it was a genuine religious problem one cannot easily establish. Religion was combined in proper proportions to render a political question so intractable as. to make partition of the country the only solution. After partition the new State called itself Pakistan and adopted Islamic

principles as the basis of the policy. The Preamble to the Constitution of Pakistan lays down that Pakistan should be a democratic State based on Islamic principles of social justice; that the principles of democracy, freedom equality, tolerance and social justice, as enunciated by Islam should be fully observed; and that Muslims of Pakistan should be enabled, individually and collectively, to order their lives in accordance with the teachings and requirements of Islam. The Preamble of to the Indian Constitution, .on the other hand, speaks of Liberty of thought, Expression, belief, faith and worship for all its citizens. Article 25 (1) of the constitution lays down that all persons are equally entitled to freedom of conscience and the right freely to profess, practise and propagate religion.Article 26 assures every religious denomination or any section thereof the right, (subject to public order, morality and health,) to establish and maintain institutions for religious and charitable purposes and to manage its own affairs in matters of religion. The State restricts its role to regulating or restricting any economic, financial, political or other secular activity associated with religious practice.

Does this mean that India abjured its connection with religion the foundations of its traditional culture ?. As religion was not institutionalized in India in the way it was institutionalized in the West, Secularism could not come to mean separation of State and Church. It acquired, on the other hand, the meaning of tolerance of faiths; the attitude of regarding various faiths as different pathways to a single Godhead.

He who worshipped as Shiva by the Shaivites, as Brahman by the Vedantins, as Buddha by the Buddhists, as Karta by the Naiyayikas (logicians) versed in reasoning,, as Arhat by those who are devoted to the teachings of Jinas, as Karma by the Mimamsakas—may that Hari, the Lord of the three worlds, fulfil, our desires.¹

Preserving such broad minded tolerance, there should be no danger to secularism even if India called herself a Hindu State. Danger of fanaticism and persecution could be visualized only when there is a powerful institutional religion to which the State could lend its arm. The spirit of our transitional policy could be regarded in this light. Its foundations were in Dharma—broad, tolerant and extensive. Instead of equating Dharma with religion in the narrow sense it would be more proper to regard it as constituting, a body of moral and spiritual principles capable of universal ( मानव ) application and of enduring value and truth ( सनातन ) "That which we call the Hindu religion is really the eternal religion, because it is the universal religion which embraces all others. If a religion is not universal, it cannot be eternal."!

"The Secular State is built on substantial historical foundations. The Hindu State of ancient, medieval or modern times was. not a narrowly sectarian State in any sense."² In the Indian context the debate on the question of secularism has to be related to the problem of the values for which the State may stand in the background of its history and culture rather than to the relation or want of relation between the State and religion in its institutional form. The alliance between State power and sectarian, institutional religion which is against modern sentiment and the relation between State and religion in the wider sense of Hinduism or Dharma may not be regarded as identical. Even in the most secular State the question of national character may be discussed and if it should be discussed in the Indian context one would realize how intimately it is connected with the cultural and religious problem.

The Church-State controversy of the West has therefore no parallel in our history. The result of the controversy in the West was the delimitation of the spheres of the State and the church and a State indifferent to or without direct and active interest in religion. Later the question arose as to whether the State ought to promote ethical and moral life, if not a "religious" life and there again the difficulty was to arrive at a universally acceptable moral standard which could be enforced by the State. The conclusion

of the problem was that the State should refrain from attempting to improve the morality of the community. The result is a Secular State without direct and active interest in the promotion of religion and morality.

The question with us would be whether we want secularism in this sense or whether we want a State maintaining its historic continuity with the Hindu tradition, a State without an established church following the ideal of tolerance or positive Secularism or a State uncommitted to religion and benevolently neutral in matter or. faith.

THE personality of the Avatar is a mysterious blending of humanity and divinity. At one pole of her being she is one with the Eternal Erode, the Blissful Infinite, Anandamaya Brahman, while at the other pole of her being she is one with the tangled coil of the evolving human consciousness. The identification with the human and the divine is so complete that the actions of the Incarnation baffle the logical intellect with its insistence on the one or the other as the sole possibility. Indeed man's conception of an expectation and demand from the divine embodiment is a series of miraculous fireworks violating or canceling the laws of physical and psychological Nature. 'Man wants to be dazzled in order to be impressed'. No miracle, no divinity ! But a miracle is only a sudden and temporary intervention of a higher consciousness into this world of ours resulting in the suspension of the norm of the consciousness established here. But it is neither normal nor natural. The Avatar comes not to perform miracles only. These could be done by extraordinary individuals who have got an opening to the Higher consciousness. Very often the powers and personalities, especially in the vital worlds, intervene in the actions of this world through mediums open to them. The Advent of the Divine here is not simply for the demonstration of the existence of the higher, more powerful levels of consciousness and their mastery of the forces of Nature. Magicians, white and black, filling the history of the world have done it too' well indeed. She comes to make divinity natural and normal in humanity. Her work is to help the evolution of man and even when she brings about or uses a revolution or miracle, she makes it eventually a permanent part of the consciousness here. All revolutions by the Divine contribute to and become part and parcel of the evolutionary ascent. Identifying herself completely with the human consciousness, she starts with the powers in man and pushes them inward and upward towards the divinity. Identifying herself with the Divine

Consciousness, she brings divinity close to humanity. This commerce between divinity and humanity bridges the gulf between the two and macadamizes the path to the Supreme. She experiences life as man experiences it, passing through the whole gamut with all its width and depth only to tune it to the rhythms of the Eternal.

The power of widening one's consciousness and identifying it so completely with another as to ultimately become one with the other in an indissoluble union or separation on the basis of that union only to enjoy the union all the more intensively and extensively and again the power of being so absolutely passive and open to another as to make the other flow into oneself and permeate and pervade all of oneself till the other lives in one—these are the two aspects of that greatest of the faculties in man—the faculty of Love. This essential and profound faculty is the unique gift of the Lord for the otherwise weary, stale and unprofitable uses of this world rooted in Incon-science. Here is the lever for transforming man and making him and the world in which he lives move in another orbit of harmony. But as with all the powers here on earth this power of Love is evolutionary and unless it is deepened and heightened, it becomes a victim of the iron law of determinism. Moments of felicity Love can always give at whatever level or part it manifests, but these splendid isolated glimpses of Light only serve to intensify the agony of life in darkness. 'The fiery hour of love' gives place to 'tragic hours of solitude'. The force of union is overshadowed by the force of division. Love is devoured by Death. So the Romantic Lover tries to mitigate the agony of mortality by his dream of an eternal paradise of Love and Lovers in a Heaven beyond. The Platonic and the Christian Lovers identify themselves completely with the immortal soul and become ready to reject the mortal parts in Death so that they can live eternally in communion with the Impersonal Love and Beauty or the Super-personal, All-Beautiful Lover. And there is the call of the ascetic to pass beyond all life, Love or relationship or the possibility of it in the extinction of Nirvana or Moksha. Not here on earth on this bank and shoal of Time is the field for Eternal Love. Amaranth is an exotic blossom which can never be transplanted in the earthly soil. The greatest Art of Life is the Art of Dying and the best life is thanatoid. These are the solutions (!) suggested and worked" out with tremendous

enthusiasm and patience by the complicated human wisdom. Savitri in her all-embracing humanity passes through all these experiences without committing herself to any of them exclusively but her divine intuition knows and prepares man's consciousness for the advent of the luminous simplicity of the Divine Grace waiting ready to act in the receptive vessels for the conquest of Death and Division by Divine Love and Harmony. "Above all the complications of the so-called human wisdom stands the luminous simplicity of the Divine's Grace, ready to act if we allow It to do so."

The physical and psychological members of man's being are accustomed to and capable of only a limited degree and quantum of excitement either by way of pleasure or pain and every experience of such excitement has to be followed by a period of relaxation or neutrality to make the being ready for another bout of the" same kind. But when the daemon of Love possesses manure would insist not only on an unusual intensity of ecstatic rapture but also on its being sustained for an almost unlimited duration. The result of this extraordinary impact is the feeling of a Flame burning and consuming his members. Again, Love itself is an intense Aspiration for union, eternal and all-embracing, and so is a kind of subtle Fire, Sukshma Agni which burns away all the dross of gross desires and itself burns with a greater intensity by this process. But the feeling of the heat and the scorching is only the reaction of the outermost parts of the personality, for the inner being which welcomes this Flame and nourishes it, experiences the joy of identity of consciousness, a reflection of the Ananda on the emotional level.

This Agni is a great purifying Force which cleanses the doors of perception when it is active and grants them the visionary glimpse of the Delight which permeates all creation all the time and for all time, 'the Joy that is in widest commonalty spread'. This vision of the Bliss interpenetrating Nature is a quite objective realization and should not be mistaken for the projection of a subjective mood of psychological ecstasy. Love bestows vigils of contemplation of the secret Beauty embodied in every aspect of Nature. 'All its voices are bards of happiness and all its scenes a smile of rapture's lips.'

The film of familiarity and custom which had bedimmed all the lustre and dried up the sparkle and the dew-drops, has been removed and the visionary gleam and glory in Nature are revealed.

In the presence of the Beloved, one feels the overmastering impact of His personality on all the parts of one's spacious being and on every object associated with oneself. The world within oneself, the world that one is and the whole world outside are dominated by the luminous consciousness and beauty and power of the Beloved. In the absence of the Lover, the memory of the experience of the contact with the Beloved remains an inexhaustible treasure to brood upon and imaginatively reconstruct and recapture.

In this great vision of the god in man to the exclusion of the human and the all too human elements, one feels so completely liberated and emancipated from subjection to the iron law of determinism and Karma. One becomes a free spirit escaping from the cage of fate and grief.

But this is only an escape and a very transient escape. The lyric of the inner being of love and bliss is interrupted by the voice of the mortal human members. The summer's ardent breath is disturbed by the titan voice of the storm, the thunder's fatal crash and the long unsatisfied panting of the wind.

This is the greatest ordeal of the foreknowledge of Death which makes one's life an agonising torture. All lovers have to face Death but Death usually takes them by surprise and therefore the pang is felt towards the very end of their lives. The life of Satyavan is not only short, only one more year. Ignorance of this terrible Fate might have been a bliss till the hour of Death. Savitri experiences the footsteps of the hours as dreadful.

The natural and human solution sought in this dire context is to plunge deeper and deeper into the source of joy one has got and try to forget the agony. But every attempt of this kind only intensifies the anguish.

foreboding's sombre waves. The agony becomes all the greater because it is not something which she can share with her fellow mortals. It is lodged deep within her solitary breast. It is no doubt true that all mortals are subject to the terrible fate of Death but most of them are blissfully unaware of the tragedy of human life. It would be the utmost cruelty to disturb this somnolent life of fellow human beings, for a mere knowledge of the problem without an awareness of the solution would only increase the pang. She saw

In her infinite mercy and compassion, the Mother enduring all the agony of mortal life finds out and builds a way out for man in obscurity, secrecy and solitude. The secret hours of-the ecstasy of the union in love give place to the tragic hours of solitude and lonely grief that none could share or know. In fact she presents before her fellow-beings the same personality of light, love and beauty of an unearthly divine kind. Foregoing the poise of the silent witnessing consciousness of the Atman, her heart experiences to the full the mortal agony by complete dynamic identification with the human consciousness. But, 'these she controlled, nothing was shown outside.'

'A strange divinity shone in all her acts. She could bring into the simplest movement a oneness with earth's glowing robe of fight, a lifting up of common acts by love.'

The Avatar .'works, struggles, suffers, hopes, endures, wills all, attempts ell, prepares and' achieves all for us' in solitude and obscurity keeping us, her fellow-beings all the time in an atmosphere of love and even laughter.

Inwardly battling with grief and fate but outwardly presenting a mask of 'still, sweet and calm visage and graceful daily acts', Savitri leads a 'strange divided life'. Her outer acts are no longer radiant manifestations of her inner being as before but acts of compassion wrought by a kind of momentum gathered by the past without the_ will or the passion of the individual supporting them. Where grief pressed too close, these things 'seemed meaningless to her, a gleaming shell, a round mechanical and void. In the arena of her heart two great combatants are struggling for mastery—Love and Fate, the principle of Bliss and the principle of Grief. Her Love is now of the inner emotional level. So it tries to answer for every onslaught of Grief by a greater and more intense possession of the Beloved.

'Hanging over the sleep-bound beauty of his brow, laying her burning cheek upon his feet, clinging her lips at morn endlessly to his, unwilling to lose his body from her breast'—these are some of the attempts at possession. They are the external manifestations of the inner desire to 'build a little room for timelessness even in mortal time by the deep union of two lives'.

She cannot express her need of revealing the foreknowledge of Fate to her lover though in her intense passion she often feels like doing so.

But Satyavan understands sometimes by a dim clairvoyance 'the un-plumbed abyss of her deep passionate want'. All the time he could spare after discharging his duties to his blind father and his own work in the forest

In spite of these intimacies of love 'All was too little for her bottomless need.'

The usual solution of romantic lovers is that of ending one's life simultaneously with the Beloved in the glorious act of suttee so that both become...'glad travelers Into the sweet or terrible Beyond'. Savitri rejects this...'vain imaginary bliss/ Of fiery union through death's door of escape',

The love & Savitri has always included society unlike the exclusive love of the romantics. In fact her own sorrow appears to her as the quintessential and crystallised form or symbol of the collective human sorrow through the ages, the still sad music of humanity.

A picture of extreme excruciating agony without any possibility of solution or termination except by the extermination in and by. Death.

But the Fire of Love is the immortal in mortals and grows in stature by the very pressure of circumstances and the challenge of mortal Grief and Fate.

The grief at the absence of the beloved only calls forth the power of extension and widening of consciousness in the subtle-physical level, of love. With the development of this new power Savitri could feel the presence of Satyavan even in his so-called physicalabsence.

Every challenge from the world outside is a call for a response from the depths. The greater the challenge, the deeper the response needed

to meet it. The proper requisites for bringing out the deepest response are a refusal to accept or succumb to the easy escapes or evasions from difficulties, a patient endurance of the agony consequent on the impact of the difficulty on the surface heart, mind, will, senses and body, and finally being passive and ready to allow the deeper or the higher consciousness to act. The power of the love born at first at the inner emotional level grows in stature by the opening of the deeper levels of consciousness, widens and heightens itself and even reaches the level of the highest Supramental divinity when it gets a power greater than the evil now dominating the world, the evil of Death.

Savitri feels the need for opening to the depths and heights of her consciousness and thereby increasing the power of Love. Here is the first step in the process—the power of widening the subtle-physical consciousness. Even this has its effect on grief.

Sorrow in the evolutionary scheme has only one purpose of turning the consciousness inward and upward and once this process of lateral penetration and vertical ascent has begun, its utility ceases and it has only to wait for the hour of descent of the Grace from above and behind to dissolve the last trace of its own precarious and temporary, though terrible and grim, existence.

The hour of struggle and battle now gives place to one of neutral, sombre waiting. Thunder and storm no longer rage. Grey, slow-drifting clouds shut in the earth.

This is the hour of transition to the search for the deeper soul and the entry into the inner countries. Love human has to be transformed into Love Divine by the process of Integral Yoga in order that Death might be faced and conquered. The work of Savitri, the Avatar, is to build "the Yogashakti for the growth of humanity into the divinity, even the Supramental Divinity of Love.

Kashmir Saivism (English). Sivasutragalu (Kannada). Pratyabhijna Hridaya (Kannada) by f. Rudrappa,112 Gandhinagar, Bangalorc 9.

Saivism in India is much more than a religion. It is not a sect. It ^ is a way of thought, belief and practice that is spread in large portions of the country, as Saiva Siddhanjan in Tamilnad, as Vira-saivism in Karnataka and as Kashmir Saivism in the North. While there are enough books on the first two forms of Saivism, intelligible works on Kashmir Saivism are not as many as one would desire. There are of course plenty in Sanskrit but they need a good deal of explaining. Sri Rudrappa's books on the subject are most welcome in as much as they are a popular presentation of an abstruse philosophy, replete with 'helpful quotations from allied works and analogies from modern science.

The key work of this system is the Sivasutras said to be revealed to Vasugupta. They lay down the main principles of this Realistic

Idealism and also give a practical method of realising the truth of this teaching in one's life. The origin of Creation, the gradation of the manifestation, the three types of mala, impurity, that bind the soul to ignorance of its own true nature and the three upāyas, means, whereby one awakes to the truth of one's real being as none other than the Lord Himself, are expounded systematically by Sri Rudrappa, both in his elaborate introduction and his explanations.

Pratyabhijnā Hrdayam is a later work by Kshemaiaja epitomising the teachings of the seers that followed Vasugupta, viz., Kallata, Utpaladeva, Abhinava Gupta and others. The central topic is the Doctrine of Self-recognition, T am He'. It consists of only 20 sutras but they are terse and the present author has drawn upon all the extant commentators in his exposition. A close study of both these works would show how our ancients reconciled conflicting philosophies. As the writer points out : "We find here the psychological practices of yoga, ākhyāti of the Mimamsakas, i.e. voluntary limitation of one's own powers, monism of the Upanishads, pragmatism and realism of nyāya-oāiseika and the twenty-five categories of Sankhya. We find the implications of qualified monism, admitting the attributes of the Supreme Being. Finally admitting absolute reality in the subjective and objective creation of this endless universe, it reconciles the opposition between being and becoming and the One and the many."

These books deserve a wider circulation than possible in their present garb of a regional language. We strongly urge upon the writer to render them in English so as to reach a larger circle of readers both in India and abroad. The little booklet on Saivism (in English) holds out a promise in this direction and we look forward to its fulfilment.