Vol. XXIV. No. 4. 

November, 1967

The Divine gives itself to those who give themselves without reserve and in all their parts to the Divine. For them the calm, the light, the power, the bliss, the freedom, the wideness, the heights of knowledge, the seas of Ananda. - Sri Aurobindo.

EDITORIAL

THE WORLD IS ONE

THE world is one, in fact and in potentia.

There is already a realised unity; that unity runs as the fundamental chord in and through differing and discordant notes. These different and discordant and even denying notes have to be re-conditioned, blended, harmonised; that is the effective and patent unity that lies in potential and has to be brought forth in front. The world is one at bottom; it is to be made one up to the brim.

The material world is a factual unity. For it is one matter that exists everywhere; the same fundamental elements constitute, although in different degrees, the earth, the sun, the stars, the distant galaxies and the extra-galactic rays. It is in the last analysis charges of electricity—infinitesimal and infinite charges of electric force, points of energy that form the entire creation—pullulating particles that fill the universe; but they are not isolated, disconnected, disunited, they are a continuum. This continuum was called 'ether' at one time, it is now called 'field'. This material unity consists in the one extension that turns and swirls into creases and

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eddies giving the impression of separative ness and disunity. The task of the scientist is to know how to recondition the swirling dispersing expanse so as to assimilarise, polarise the disparate elements. That is the meaning of what the scientists are now handling as the 'laser' or 'maser' beams.¹

Likewise, the vital world is also one. It is one life that pulsates in and through all living formations—one sea as it were, swaying and heaving and breaking into innumerable waves and ripples. In spite of infinite variations there is one over-all pattern that persists through the living creation. Anatomy and more clearly physiology links in a strange way even the plant and the animal and man. And in humanity if there is a great vital upsurge somewhere, it spreads its vibration far and wide like a seismic motion. And it is because of this vital unity that there arises the phenomenon known as contagion or pest and pestilence—that is to say, mass-movements are occasioned by one indivisible life-urge. A common suffering or a common elation is normal to human life.

This fundamental unity, here too, works through discord and disunion, battle and conflict, denial and negation. Here too the drive or purpose of progress and of evolution is towards the same polarisation, that is to say, reorientation, evocation of vibrations that are a pure or harmonious expression of the unity.

Coming next to Mind, the unity here too, is quite marked, clearly discernible. There is only one Mind that rules the myriad mentalities of this world. Thoughts and ideas are not in reality personal creations, they are various formulations of the one universal Mind; they enter into and possess individual minds as receptacles, and no doubt in the process undergo particular modifications in their general character. It is a very common experience to see the same or very similar ideas and thoughts expressed by individuals (or groups) living far from each other, having practically no mutual contact. We have known of "independent discoveries" of the same truth or fact and innumerable instances of this kind has history provided for us. It is not a freak of nature that we find Socrates and Buddha

¹ Laser : Light amplifications due to the stimulated emission of Radiation. Maser : Multiple amplifications, etc.

The result is that the light ray cuts diamonds, bores rocks, welds metals, and works as a surgeon's knife.

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and Confucius as contemporaries. Contemporaries also were India's Akbar, England's Elizabeth and Italy's Leo X. Also the year 1905 has been known as Annus Mirabilis, a year of seminal importance— the sowing of the seed of a new earth-life—significant for the the whole human race, for the East and for the West, particularly for India, for Japan, for Russia and even for England. And today's world has indeed become a world of compact unity in human achievement and also, alas, in human distress !

Now if one goes to the very source, the every root of the matter, the cardinal fact of unity is that of the supreme Consciousness, the original oneness of the one Divine Existence. It is the Ultimate One, inviolate, inviolable—ekam sat. That unity is transferred or translated or imaged on all the levels and strands of creation. That is the basic reality that holds together all tiered multiplicities. True, there has been side by side a movement of aberration, denial, disjunction in the multiple formulations and translations of the One. A re-union remains to be achieved conveying and embodying the basic unity.

The disturbing factor in the universal sway of unity is the sense of individualisation, the sense of ego. That is the dark ray that cuts across the radiant harmony and produces the apparent discordance and disunion with all its attendant and consequent evil and bale.

The sense of separated and isolated existence, the feeling of a closed system that one assumes in opposition to others is the Maya of which the Vedanta speaks. It is real so long as it is taken to be real. But it possesses no inherent or absolute reality. A re-orientation or a remodeling of the individual self is the way towards re-establishing in the forefront, the background unity. Egoism, as it happens to be now, is the broken-up and scattered unity. Polarisation means precisely re-ordering and re-orienting the dispersal movement of ignorance and bringing into a new purposeful existence the unity that already exists.

NOLINI KANTA GUPTA

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FROM THE KARMAYOGIN (1910)

INDIAN NATIONALISM :

(VI) THE EMERGENCE OF TERRORISM

NERVOUS ANGLO-INDIA

TIME was when Sri jut Surendranath Banerjea was held by nervous Anglo-India to be the crowned King of an insurgent Bengal, a very pestilent fellow flooding the country with sedition and rebellion. The whirligig of Time brings round with it strange revenges and at this moment Srijut Surendranath is returning to India acclaimed by English Conservatives as a pillar of British Empire. India's representative with a mighty organisation behind him pledged to loyalty, co-operation and the support of Morleyan reform. After Surendranath, Srijut Bepin Chandra Pal, reputed editor of Bande-mataram and the author of the great Madras speeches, loomed as the arch-plotter of revolution and the chief danger to the Empire. The same Bepin Chandra is now a peaceful and unsuspected journalist and lecturer in London acquitted, we hope, of all wish to be the Ravana destined to shake the British Kailash. But Anglo-India needs a bogeyman and by a few letters to the Times, Mr. Krishna-varma has leaped into that eminent but unenviable position. Who knows ? In another year or two even he may be considered a harmless, if inconvenient, idealist. What is it, one wonders, that has turned the firm, phlegmatic Briton into a nervous quaking old woman in love with imaginative terrors? Is it democracy ? Is it the new sensationalist Press run by Harms worth and Company? The phenomenon is inexplicable, but, it is to be feared, it is going to be permanent.

THE ANUSILAN SAMITY

The proclamation of the Anusilan Samiti in Calcutta is one of the most autocratic and unjustifiable acts that the bureaucracy have yet committed. The Calcutta Samiti has distinguished itself, since the beginning of its career, by the rigidity with which it has enforced

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its rule of not mixing as an association with current politics and confining itself to such activities as were not only objectionable, but of such a nature that even the most autocratic Government, provided it had the least sympathy with the moral and physical improvement of its subjects, must wholly approve. Its original and main motive has been the improvement of the physique in the race, and there has been no instance in which the Samiti has gone beyond its function as a physical training institution or tried to use the improved physique for any combined purpose. Beyond this the main activities have been turned to the help of the Police and the public on such occasions as the Ardhoday Yoga, to the organisation of famine relief, in which the Samiti has done a splendid work, and recently to other action recommended by the Government itself. We believe it has even to a certain extent enjoyed the approbation of high European officials. It is indeed an ironical comment on the demand for co-operation that the only great association born of the new movement which has shown any anxiety to depart from a line of strict independent activity and co-operate with the Government, should have been selected, at this time of peace and quiet, for proclamation on the extraordinary ground that it interferes in some undefined and mysterious way with the administration of the law. Advocates of co-operation, take note. Meanwhile what can the man in the street conclude except that the Government is determined to allow no organisation to exist among the Bengalis which has the least trace in it of self-help, training and patriotic effort? For no explanation is vouchsafed of this arbitrary act. In an august and awful silence the gods of Belvedere hurl their omnipotent paper thunderbolts, careless of what mere men may Ibink, confident in their self-arrogated attributes of omnipotence, omniscience and omni-benevolence, a divine, irresistible, an irresponsible mystery.

THE DAULATPUR DACOITY

The extraordinary story from Daulatpur of a daooity by young men of good family, sons of Government servants, is the strangest that has yet been handled by the detective ability of a very active police—more active, if not successful, we are afraid, in cases of this

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kind than those in which the dacoits are of a less interesting character. The details as first published read more like a somewhat gruesome comic opera than anything else. Dacoits who wear gold watches and gold spectacles on their hazardous expeditions, dacoits who talk English so as to give a clue to their identity, dacoits who turn up at a railway station wearing gold watches, bare-footed and stained with mud, decoits who carry in their pockets bloodcurdling oaths neatly written out for the police to read in case they are caught, are creatures of so novel and eccentric a character that they must have either come out of a farcical opera or escaped from the nearest lunatic asylum. The latter accounts modify some of the most startling features of the first but until the story for the prosecution is laid before the Courts, thoroughly known and thoroughly tested, sensational head lines and graphic details are apt to mislead.

THE INDISCRETIONS OF SIR EDWARD

The speech of Sir Edward Baker in the Bengal Council last week was one of those indiscretions which statesmen occasionally commit and invariably repent, but which live in their results long after the immediate occasion has been forgotten. The speech is a mass of indiscretions from beginning to end. Its first error was to rise to the bait of Mr. Madhusudan Das's grotesquely violent speech on the London murders and assume a political significance in the act of the young man, Dhingra. The theory of a conspiracy behind this act is, we believe, generally rejected in England. It is not supported by a scrap of evidence and is repudiated by the London police, a much more skilful detective body than any we have in India and, needless to say, much more reliable in the matter of scrupulousness and integrity. It is the opinion of the London police that the act was dictated by personal resentment and not by political motives. It is not enough to urge in answer that the young man who committed this ruthless act himself alleges political motives. His family insist that he is a sort of neurotic maniac, and it is a matter of common knowledge that natures so disturbed often catch at tendencies in the air to give a fictitious dignity and sensational interest to actions really dictated by the exaggerated feelings common

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to these nervous disorders. Mandala Dhingra evidently considered that Sri William Curzon-Wyllie was his personal enemy trying to alienate his family and interfere with his personal freedom and dignity. To an ordinary man these ideas would not have occurred or, if they had occurred, would not have excited homicidal feelings. But in disturbed minds such exaggerated emotions and their resultant acts are only too common. Unless and until something fresh transpires, no one has a right to assume that the murder was a political assassination, much less the overt act of a political conspiracy. Anglo-Indian papers of the virulent type whose utterances are distorted by fear and hatred of Indian aspirations, may assume that of which there is no proof,—nothing better can be expected of them. But for the ruler of a province not only to make the assumption publicly but to base upon it a threat of an unprecedented character against a whole nation is an indiscretion which passes measure.

THE DEMAND FOR CO-OPERATION

The second crying indiscretion in Sir Edward's speech is the extraordinary demand for co-operation which he makes upon the people of this country. It is natural that a Government should desire cooperation on the part of the people and under normal circumstances it is not necessary to ask for it; it is spontaneously given. The circumstances in India are not normal. When a Government expects co-operation, it is because it either represents the nation or is in the habit of consulting its wishes. The Government in India does not represent the nation, and in Bengal at least it has distinctly set itself against its wishes. It has driven the Partition through against the most passionate and universal agitation the country has ever witnessed. It has set itself to baffle the Swadeshi-Boycott agitation. It has adopted against that movement all but the ultimate measures of repression. Nine deportations including in their scope several of the most respected and blameless leaders of the people stand to their debit account unrepressed. Even in giving the new reforms, inconclusive and in some of their circumstances detrimental to the best interests of the country, it has been anxious to let it be known that it is not yielding to the wishes of the people but acting on its own

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autocratic motion. Against such a system and principle of administration the people of this country have no remedy except the refusal of co-operation and even that has been done only within the smallest limits possible. Under such circumstances, it is indeed a grotesque attitude for the ruler of Bengal to get up from his seat in the Council and not only request co-operation but demand it on pain of indiscriminate penalties such as only an autocratic government can inflict on the people under its control, and this with the full understanding that none of the grievances of the people are to be redressed. The meaning of co-operation is not passive obedience, it implies that the Government shall rule according to the wishes of the people and the people work in unison with the Government for the maintenance of their common interests. By advancing the demand in the way he has advanced it, Sir Edward Baker has made the position of his Government worse and not better.

WHAT CO-OPERATION?

The delusion under which the Government labours that the terrorist activities have a great organisation at their back, is the source of its most fatal mistakes. Everyone who knows anything of of this country is aware that this theory is a fabrication. If it were a fact, the conspiracy would by this time have been exposed and destroyed. The assassinations have in all instances, except the yet doubtful Maniktola conspiracy now under judicial consideration, been the act of isolated individuals, and even in the Maniktola instance, if we accept the finding of the Sessions Court, it has been shown by judicial investigation that the group of young men was small and so secret in their operations that only a few even of those who lived in their headquarters knew anything of the contemplated terrorism. Under such circumstances we fail to see either any justification for so passionate a call for co-operation or any possibility of an answer from the public. All that the public can do is to express disapprobation of the methods used by these isolated youths. It cannot turn itself into a huge Criminal Investigation Department to ferret out the half ar dozen men here and there who possibly contemplate assassination and leave its other occupations and duties after

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the pattern of the police who in many quarters are so busy with suppressing fancied Swadeshi outrages that real outrage and dacoity go unpunished. We do not suppose that Sir Edward Baker himself would make such a demand, but if he has any other co-operation in view it would be well if he would define it before he proceeds with his strenuous proposal to strike out right and left at the innocent and the guilty without discrimination. On the other hand the Anglo-Indian papers are at no loss for the definite method of co-operation which they demand from the country on peril of "stern and relentless repression". They demand that we shall cease to practise or preach patriotism and patriotic self-sacrifice and submit unconditionally to the eternally unalterable absolutism which is the only system of government Lord Morley will tolerate in India. That demand has only to be mentioned to be scouted.

SIR EDWARD'S MENACE

The final indiscretion of Sir Edward Baker was also the worst. We do not think we have ever heard before of an official in Sir Edward's responsible position uttering such a menace as issued from the head of the province on an occasion and in a place where his responsibility should have been specially remembered. We have heard of autocrats threatening the contumacious opponents with condign punishment, but even an autocrat of the fiercest and most absolute kind does not threaten the people with the punishment of the innocent. The thing is done habitually in Russia, it has been done recently in Bengal, but it is always on the supposition that the man punished is guilty. Even in the deportations the Government has been eager to impress the world with the idea that although it is unable to face a court of justice with the "information, not evidence" which is its excuse, it had ample grounds for its belief in the guilt of the deportees. Sir Edward Baker is the first ruler to declare with cynical openness that if he is not gratified in his demands, he will not care whether he strikes the innocent or the guilty. By doing so he has dealt an almost fatal blow at the prestige of the Government. If this novel principle of administration is applied, in what way will the Government that terrorizes from above be superior to the dynamiter who terrorizes from below?

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Will not this be the negation of all law, justice and government? Does it not mean the reign of lawless force and that worst consummation of all, anarchy from above struggling with anarchy from below? The Government which denies the first principle of settled society, not only sanctions but introduces anarchy. It is thus that established authority creates violent revolutions. They abolish by persecution all the forces, leaders, advocates of peaceful and rapid progress and by their own will set themselves face to face with an enemy who cannot so be abolished. Terrorism thrives on administrative violence and injustice; that is the only atmosphere in which it can thrive and grow. It sometimes follows the example of indiscriminate violence from above; it sometimes, though very rarely, sets it from below. But the power above which follows the example from below is on the way to committing suicide. It has consented to the abrogation of the one principle which is the life breath of settled governments.

THE PERSONAL RESULT

Sir Edward Baker came into office with the reputation of a liberal ruler anxious to appease unrest. Till now he has maintained it in spite of the ominous pronouncement he made, when introducing measures of repression, about the insufficiency of the weapons with which the Government was arming itself. But by his latest pronouncement, contradicting as it does the first principles not only of Liberalism but of all wise Conservatism all over the world, he has gone far to justify those who were doubtful of his genuine sympathy with the people. Probably he did not himself realise what a wound he was giving to his own reputation and with it to his chances of carrying any portion of the people with him.

MADANLAL DHINGRA

Madanlal Dhingra pays the inevitable and foreseen penalty of his crime. We have no wish whatever to load the memory of this unfortunate young mah with curses and denunciations. Rather we hope that in his last moments he will be able to look back in a calm

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spirit on his act and with a mind enlightened by the near approach of death prepare his soul for the great transit. No man but he can say what were the real motives for his deed. If personal resentment and exaggerated emotions were the cause of his crime, a realisation of the true nature of the offence may yet help the soul in its future career. If, on the other hand, a random patriotism was at its back, we have little hope that reflection will induce him to change his views. Minds imbued with these ideas are the despair of the statesman and the political thinker. They follow their bent with a remorseless firmness which defies alike the arrows of the reasoner and the terrors of a violent death. He must in that case go forth to reap the fruits in other bodies and new circumstances. Here his country remains behind to bear the consequences of his act.

PRESS GARBAGE IN ENGLAND

It is at least gratifying to find that the theory of conspiracy is exploded except in the minds of Anglo-Indian papers and perhaps of a few Anglo-Indian statesmen and officials. Not a single circumstance has justified the wild suspicions and wild inventions which journals like the Daily Mail and Daily Express poured thick upon the world in the first few days that followed the occurrence. These strange fictions are still traveling to us by mail. The most extraordinary of them is perhaps that launched by a certain gentleman who is bold enough to give his name in the World. It seems that long ago the redoubtable Krishna varma in a moment of benign and expansive frankness selected this gentleman and revealed to him the details of a gigantic plot he has been elaborating for the last eight years with a view to the murder, wholesale and retail, of Anglo Indian Officials. If the story were true, Krishnavarma's confidant ought certainly to-have been put in the dock as an accessory before the crime on the ground of criminal concealment. These romances sound ridiculous enough now that we read them three weeks afterwards when the excitement of the hour has passed, but the harm this kind of journalism can do was sufficiency proved at the time of the Chinese disturbances and the trouble which preceded the Biter War. That these daily voiding of impudent falsehood and fabrication should be

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eagerly swallowed by thousands shows the rapid deterioration of British dignity and sobriety.

SHYAMJI KRISHNAVARMA

The exaggerated view of Mr. Shyamji Krishnavarma as an arch conspirator of malign subtlety and power which has long been inculcating terrorist opinions among young men and building up a secret society, is one which none can accept who has any knowledge of this gentleman's past career. Mr. Shyamji Krishnavarma is an earnest, vehement and outspoken idealist, passionately attached to his own views and intolerant of all who oppose them. He first went to England to breathe the atmosphere of a free country where he could speak as well as think as he chose. He was then a strong constitutionalist and his chief intellectual pre-occupations were Herbert Spencer, Home Rule and the position of the Native States. When the new movement flooded India it carried Mr. Krishnavarma forward with it. He became an ardent Nationalist, a confirmed passive resister with an idealistic aversion to violent methods and a strong conviction that, whatever might be the case with other countries, India would neither need nor resort to them. His conversion to Terrorism is quite recent and has astonished most those who knew him best. We know that Srijut Bepin Pal went to England with the confident expectation of finding full sympathy and co-operation from the editor of the Indian Sociologist. The quarrel between the two resulting from the change in Mr. Krishnavarma's views is a matter of public knowledge. We refuse therefore to believe that Mr. Krishnavarma has been a plotter of assassination and secret disseminator of Terrorism or that the India House is a centre for the propagation and fulfilment of the ideas he has himself ventilated in the Times.

A FALSE STEP

Srijut Surendranath's maladroit reference to the outrages when speaking at Bombay was a false step which he has since made some attempt to recover. However it be put, it was maladroit and unnecessary. Any promise of co-operation in this respect implied an

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admission that we have the power to prevent these incidents and are therefore to some extent responsible either for bringing them about or for not stopping them before. It echoes the indiscretion by which Sir Edward Baker sought to make a whole nation responsible for these acts of recklessness and excuses vindictive and headstrong utterances in which Mr. Gokhale tried to protect his own party and invoke the fiercest repression against his Nationalist countrymen. The isolated instances of assassination during the last year or more have been the reaction, deplorable enough, against the insane policy of indiscriminate police rule and repression which was started and progressively increased in the recent stages of the movement. Not by a single word or expression ought any public man to allow the responsibility to be shifted from the right quarter and to rest in the slightest degree on the people who had no part in them, no power to detect and stop the inflamed and resolute secret assassination and no authority given them by which they can bring about the removal of the real causes of the symptom. To dissociate oneself is a different matter. That should be done clearly, firmly and once for all.

THE ALIPORE JUDGEMENT

The judgement of the Appeal Court in the Alipore Case has resulted in the reduction of sentences to a greater or less extent in all but two notable instances, and on the other hand, the maintenance of the finding of the Lower Court in all but six cases, on five of which there is a difference of opinion between the Chief Justice and Justice Carnduff. So long as these cases are still subjudice, we reserve our general comments on the trial. At present we can only offer a few remarks on special features of the judgement. The acquittal of the Maratha, Hari Balkirshna Kane, must give universal satisfaction as his conviction, in the absence of any evidence in the least establishing his guilt, would have been a gross miscarriage of justice. The rejection of Section 121 and the consequent elimination of the death sentences is also a result on which the Government and the country may both be congratulated. Even in the case of actual political assassins the infection of the death sentences, however legally justifiable, is bad policy. Death sentences for political crimes only provide martyrs

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to a revolutionary cause, nerve the violent to fresh acts of vengeance and terrorism, and create through the liberation of the spirits of the dead men a psychical force making for further unrest and those passions of political revolt and fierceness to which they were attached in life. The prolongation of terrorism is undesirable in the interests of the country; for, so long as young men are attached to these methods of violence, the efforts of a more orderly though not less strenuous Nationalism to organise and spread itself must be seriously hampered. We are glad to note that the Chief Justice has in no case condemned and accused on the evidence of the watch-witnesses alone. Such evidences, always suspect in the eyes of the people of this country, and the gross blunders, if they were no worse, committed by several of the police witnesses in this case deprive their identifications of all evidential value. Once the confessions were admitted as entirely voluntary and entirely true, the fate of the confessing prisoners and of those direcdy implicated by them as active members of the society was a foregone conclusion. The conviction of an, accused on such a serious charge where there is no clear incriminating evidence against him except the confessions of others, is no doubt permissible under ordinary jurisprudence when these confessions create a moral certainty in the mind of the judge; but if this rule sometimes prevents the escape of the guilty, it not seldom lends itself to the punishment of the innocent. Of more importance, however, and the one serious flaw we are disposed to find in the Chief Justice's judgement, is the exaggerated importance attached to familiarity and intimacy between the leaders of the conspiracy and those whose guilt was open to doubt. When there is a secret conspiracy, it is inevitable that there should be numbers of men intimately associated with the members, perhaps even co-operating with them in surface political action, who are yet in entire ignorance of the close and dangerous proceedings of their friends. It was a recognition of this obvious fact that largely governed Mr. Beechcroft's findings; but we cannot help feeling that neither he nor the Appeal Court, ignorant, like all Englishmen, of the actual workings of the National Movement, have given sufficient weight to this consideration. As a result, the benefit of the doubt has not been extended where it should have been extended. Already it was a general conviction in the public mind that one innocent man had

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been convicted and succumbed to the rigours of jail life, while two are hopelessly condemned to the brutal and brutifying punishments by which European society avenges itself on the breakers of its laws, —we refer to the Kabiraj brothers found by Mr. Beach croft to be innocent of conspiracy and therefore presumably innocent tools of conspirators. There is an uneasy sense that some at least have been added to the list by the judgement in appeal. Even if it be so, however, the judges have done their best, and the European legal system has always been a lottery by which it is easy, without any fault on the part of the judge, for the guilty to escape and the innocent to suffer. It is perhaps one of the necessary risks of joining in Nationalist movements to be liable to be confounded in one fate with secret conspirators who happen to be associates in social or legitimate political relations, and when the C. I. D. throws its nets with a generous wideness, we ought not to whine if such accidents bring us into the meshes. The State must be preserved at any cost. In any case, the whole country must be grateful to Sir Lawrence Jenkins for the courtesy, patience and fairness with which he has heard the case and given every facility to the defence, an attitude which might with advantage be copied by certain civilian judges in and outside the High Court and even by certain Judges, not civilians, in other provinces.

THE BOMB CASE AND ANGLO-INDIA

The comments of the Anglo-Indian papers on the result of the appeal in the Alipore case are neither particularly edifying nor do they tend to remove the impression shared by us with many thoughtful Englishmen that the imperial race is being seriously demoralised by empire. From the Englishman we expect nothing better, and in fact we are agreeably surprised at the comparative harmless-ness of its triumphant articles on the day after the judgement. Its reference to the nonsense about there being no sedition in India and no party of Revolution leaves our withers un wrung. We ourselves belong to a party of peaceful revolution, for it is a rapid revolution in the system of Government in India which is the aim of our political efforts, and it is idle to object to us that there have been no

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peaceful revolutions and cannot be. History gives the he to that statement, whether it proceeds from Mr. Gokhale or from Anglo-India. We have also always admitted that there is a Terrorist party, for bombs are not thrown without hands and men are not shot for political reasons unless there is a Terrorism in the background. All we have contended,—and our contention is not overthrown by the judgement in the Alipore appeal, which merely proves that the conspiracy was not childish and by no means that it was a big or widespread organisation,—is that the attempt of the Anglo-Indian papers to blacken the whole movement, and especially the whole Nationalist party, is either an erroneous or an unscrupuplous attempt, and the disposition of the police to arrest every young Swadeshi worker as a rebel and a dacoit is foolish, worng headed, often dishonest, and may easily become fatal to the chances of a peaceful solution of the dispute between the Government and the people. The Englishman, however, represents a lower grade of intellect and refinement to which these considerations are not likely to present themselves. The average respectable Englishman is better represented by the Statesman, and the one dominating note in the Statesman is that of regret that the Courts had to go through the ordinary procedure of the law and could not effect a swift dramatic and terror-striking vindication of the inviolability of the British Government. One would have thought that a nation with the legal political traditions of the English People would have been glad that the procedure of law had been preserved, the chances of error minimised and the State still safeguarded ; and that no ground had been given for a charge of differentiating between a political and ordinary trial to the prejudice of the accused. It is evident, however, that the type of Englishman demoralised by empire and absolute power considers that, in political cases, the Law Courts should not occupy themselves with finding out the truth, but be used as a political instrument for vengeance and striking terror into political opponents.

THE NASIK MURDER

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is difficult to believe that they will be until a more normal condition of things has been restored. The sporadic and occasional character of these regrettable incidents is sufficient to prove that they are not the work of a widespread Terrorist organisation, but of individuals or small groups raw in organisation and irresolute in action. The Anglo-Indian superstition of a great Revolutionary organisation like the Russian revolutionary Committee is a romantic delusion. The facts are entirely inconsistent with it. What we see is that, where there is sporadic repression of a severe kind on the part of the authorities, there is sporadic retaliation on the part of a few youthful conspirators, prefectly random in its aim and objective. The Nasik murder is an act of terrorist reprisal for the dangerously severe sentence passed on the revolutionary versifier Savarkar. It is natural that there should have been many meetings in Maharastra to denounce the assassination, but such denunciations do not carry us very far. They have no effect whatever on the minds of men who are convinced that to slay and be slain is their duty to their country. The disease is one that can only be dealt with by removing its roots, not by denouncing its symptoms. The Anglo-Indian papers find the root in our criticism of Government action and policy and suggest the silencing of the Press as the best means of removing the root. If the Government believe in this antiquated diagnosis, they may certainly try the expedient suggested. Our idea is that it will only drive the roots deeper. We have ourselves, while strongly opposing and criticising the actions and policy of the bureaucracy, abstained from commenting on specific acts of repression, as we had no wish to inflame public feeling; but to silence Nationalism means to help Terrorism. Our view is that the only way to get rid of the disease is to disprove Mr. Gokhale's baneful teaching that violence is the only means of securing independence, to give the people hope in-a peaceful and effective means of progress towards that ideal, which is now the openly or secretly cherished ideal of every Indian and to that end to organise peaceful opposition and progress within the law. If the Government can retrace their steps and remove the ban from lawful passive resistance and self-help and the Nationalist party, while holding its ultimate political aim,' will define its immediate objective within limits which a Radical Government can here-

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after consider, we believe politics in India will assume a normal course under normal conditions. We propose to do our, part; we will see whether the Government think it worth their while to respond. They ought to be able to understand by this time that Nationalism and not Aloderatism is the effective political force in India.

SRI AUROBINDO

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OLD BENGALI MYSTIC POEMS

IX

Even so he had pulled out the solid stake.

Broken all the bondages that encircle :

Kanhu revels drunk with the sweetest wine,

He enters heaven's lotus-grove and attains the calmness ;

Even like the elephant in rut for his mate

He rains Truth's own realities.

All the six fold movements in his nature are purified :

Whether in the Presence or in the Absence

even the hair's end does not stir.

From the ten sides the ten delightful treasures

have been gathered,

To capture the Consciousness, as one does an elephant,

with ease.

NOTES

All the ties of the world are broken. Kanhu is free, he is f the Supreme Ecstasy.

XI*

The central cord is set firm in its frame ;

And in the heart the soundless drum

resounds valiantly;

Kanhu the Kapali, the yogi, is engaged in his rites.

He wanders in the city of his body

in perfect identity ;

The duals—vowels and consonents—are like

tinkling bells and anklets on his feet;

The sun and the moon are his carvings.

Love and hate and delusion are burnt to ashes.

He has put on the pearl-necklace

of Supreme Liberation ;

* For X, see Advent : August 1966.

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He has slain the mother-in-law and the sister-in-law

who held the house—

Indeed he has slain maya and become Kapali.

NOTES

The central cord : the cords (nadi) are the lines or channels of psycho-vital forces that govern the human organism, control the general functions of the body. These lines or channels are sometimes identified with the nervous system but they are more subtle than the material substance, more vital than physical. Their effective expression, their principal agency in the physical is the respiratory system. Their numbers are variously counted, sometimes sixty-four, sometimes thirty-four, but the principal ones are three. These form a trinity and follow the line of the spinal cord. They are the famous 'Ida', 'Pingala' and 'Susumna.' Ida and Pingala are on either side of the spinal cord, the central one being the Susumna. The two on either side are the ascending and the descending lines, (sometimes they are represented as the twins, knowledge and power) ; the central holds the balance between the two, representing the consciousness of unity or synthesis. These are the triple forces that control the breath and are made use of in Hathayoga—the in taking, the outgoing and the holding in of the the breath (Purak, Rechak and Kumbhak); these are described as the means of controlling and mastering the life-force, Prana.

The two lines on either side of the central one form a circulatory system, distributing the forces through the body ; the central one, as I said, balancing the two, maintains the poise; it has also a special function of its own not only to guide the forces around itself but also to direct them upward. Along with the physico-vital movement . there is also psychological movement, a movement of consciousness that establishes harmony among the forces around and also rises upward and through the crown of the head goes beyond. The whole operation may be transcribed as a movement of consciousness or consciousness-force (chit-tapas) seeking to establish a new purified order in the human system in relation to a higher order.

NOLINI KANTA GUPTA

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THE YOGA OF NATURE

THERE are two different views of Nature in Indian spiritual philosophy. The main issue is whether Nature is conscious or unconscious. In order to understand the idea of the Yoga of Nature, it is necessary to determine the character of Nature, to decide whether Nature of which all life is said to be an universal yoga can be unconscious. The Samkhya, Yoga and Shankara Vedanta look upon Nature as unconscious, a Power of Ignorance. On the other hand we have in the Veda, the Upanishads, the Gita, the Tantric Texts, and the philosophies based upon these ancient scriptures, a most clear formulation of the concept of Nature as Chit Shakti, Conscious Force.

In the Samkhya and the Yoga philosophies Purusha is pure consciousness without any capacity for self-reflection, self-enjoyment and self-projection as the manifest world. Prakriti, the origin of the Universe, is an unconscious power which evolves all existence out of itself. True, she starts functioning only when Purusha gazes at her though without in any other way moving her to act. The works of Prakriti are reflected on the pure Consciousness which is Purusha which due to Ignorance mistakenly thinks them to be its own acts and experiences. These two philosophies do not give any arguments why Prakriti is not or cannot be conscious.

Shankara conceives Reality as a pure identity of Existence, Consciousness and Bliss. Any kind of power for him is and must be unconscious because it implies change which is foreign to the Nature of the Brahman ; change means difference of which Reality is completely free. The question of the relation of power and that which is endowed with power is also a difficult point. Shankara does not admit that any kind of relation can belong to Brahman because things which are related by whatever kind of relation it

1.2. Synthesis of Yoga 1955—p. 637.

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may be, must also be related to the relation itself and this will lead to infinite regress. Anyway whatever may be the logic, what we need to remember is that for Shankara, the power that projects the world is ignorant and unconscious. With regard to the relation between Maya and Brahman the answer is that Maya is the power of Brahman and yet cannot really be so. The point about relations can be answered by saying that a relation is something that can relate two things and in the very process is related with the relata (that is the things which are related). Regarding change, those who believe that Reality is dynamic, do not say that it itself undergoes transformation in such a manner that its nature itself is changed.

In the Veda That One, tad ekam, is said to have inherent strength. The Nasadiya-Sukta¹ says That One breathed without Air, because of its own strength.

This 'own strength' of the one is its self-nature. Vak is said be the One² and Brahma.³ We know that Vak is in the Veda as well as in the Tantras the dynamic aspect of the supreme Reality called either Purushottama or Parama Shiva. Vāgita tad Brahma,^4, Vak is that Brahman. And Vak and Aditi are identified.⁵ It is said that by Vak every thing is created.⁶ So is Aditi said to be "the heaven, the mid regions...all that has been and all that will be," heaven in this context meaning the mind and the mid-regions, the life-force and the worlds created by it. Aditi is the Conscious Force of the One the Knowledge and will of the Deva. The Purusha Sukta says that He is all that has been and all that is to be.⁷

The Upanishadic vision of Reality is most comprehensive. Like the Veda, the Upanishads formulate it as transcendent, cosmic and individual. As transcendent it is beyond all categories, even those of existence and consciousness. But as the base and the origin of the cosmos it is existence, consciousness and bliss. Tasya jñāna-

¹ Rv. X. 129.2.

² Rv. X. 81.7. X. 71.

³ Rv. I 3.21.

⁴ Jai up Br. II 9.6 cf Vag Brahma. Gopatha Brahnama II 10. (II) Vagghi brahaman. Ai-tareya Brahmana II 15.

⁵ Vagar ditih Satopatha Brahaman VI. 5.2.20.

⁶ 29 Vak Vai brahman, Ait. BR. VI. 3 ; S. B. II 1.4.15.

⁷ RV. X. 90.

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mayam tapah,¹ tasyaiva saktirvividhaiva srūyāte devātma-saktih— there are many similar phrases affirming that Power is inherent in the Divine, the Ishwara. The Gita in a similar manner speaks of Para-Prakriti which is other than Apara-Prakriti, the unconscious and eight fold nature.² Para Prakriti is the conscious-force of Puru-shottama and essentially spiritual in character. Their identity is clearly brought out in such statements, among others, like the 'Jiva is an eternal portion of Me' (Purushottama) and 'Paraprakriti has become the Jiva'. In the Tantras also we come across the idea of conscious force. It is described as the sdra hrdya, the essence and the heart of Shiva. Shakti is said to be in identity with Shiva without which it cannot be conceived. On the other hand Shiva without Shakti is Shava, dead as it were. In other words Shiva is never without Shakti. Shiva and Shakti are held in perfect equilibrium in Parama Shiva. The Consciousness Force is at once Shiva's power of Self-knowledge, Self-enjoyment and Self-manifestation as the Universe. In the school of Bengal Vaishnavism, Reality is conceived as jhdnam advayam, non-dual super-consciousness which is designated by seers and sages as Brahman, Paramatma and Bhagavan. The last is the highest of the three aspects. The distinction between the three aspects of the same Reality lies in the fact that in the last, the inherent own-shakti, Svarupa-Shakti, is fully manifest, in the second it is only partially so and in the first, it is unmanifest. Here again the Reality in its highest aspect has an inherent Conscious Nature. We see now that Nature in its essential character is Reality itself as dynamic. The precise nature of this dynamism is the Power of Self-knowledge, Self-enjoyment and Self-variation. In his book, The Mother, Sri Aurobindo writes "the Supreme transcendent Maha Shakti bears the Divine in Her consciousness". For him Cit is not only Consciousness but also Force of Consciousness. Due to this Force of Conscious ness, Reality cannot but be Self-aware. The whole of existence is the result of an inexhaustible Force which in the last analysis turns out to be conscious both by itself and of its works. For Sri Aurobindo also Cit is not only the power of Self-Consciousness of the Divine

¹ Mundaka I 1.9. see ibid I. 1.8 

² Abhinava Gupta—Ishwara Pratyabhignana Vimarshini. 1-5-14. Kshemarga Parapravcshika. h. I.

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but also of Self-enjoyment and Self-manifestation as the world.

The Yoga of Nature, now that we have seen that it is Conscious Power, can be understood on three different levels. Yoga means Union. And the first aspect of the Yoga of Nature is that it is in eternal union with the Divine. There is a dalliance, a sport of love which the Reality enjoys with itself as Nature, its own inherent Power. "Being one and alone, he did not enjoy the bliss of Union.... He wished for a second... He divided his own self and became pati and patni".¹ The Taittiriya Upanishad also describes the self as ānandamaya, blissful and ānandabhuk, enjoyer of bliss. Abhinav Gupta has said of Param Shiva 'this Lord is ever eager to enjoy the bliss of play with the Devi.'² One of the chief features of Shakti in the Tantric philosophies is that it is Vimarsha, the Force of the sentiment of Camatkriti, wondering. Shiva looks at himself in Shaktias if in a mirror and is filled with wonder. This gives rise to Ananda or self-enjoyment of Shiva, as the integral "I".

In Bengal Vaishnavism also Bhagavan with the help of his Svarupa-Shakti loves himself and enjoys the bliss of loving. Of svarūpa-sakti there are three aspects Sandhini which upholds Bhagavan's own existence and that of others, Samvit by which he knows his existence and that of others and Hladini by which he enjoys bliss and makes others enjoy it. All these are of course aspects of cit sakti which eternally exists in him in the relation of identity and is called antaranga sakti, that is intimate and inherent Power. Bhagavan or Krishna has two aspects. He is rasika, enjoyer of rasa, bliss of love and also rasa that can be enjoyed. He has Svarupa nanda, he enjoys the bliss of his own self. He has Saktyananda also, that is, the bliss of enjoying his Shakti. This really implies two forms of enjoyable bliss. Krishna enjoys himself by his own intimate inherent Shakti with the Power of enjoyment, Hladini dominating. Rupheri Apanar Krishner tage chamatkar alongside name the Kam, when he sees his form, Krishna is filled with wonder and he wishes to embrace it. Love splits itself as Lover and Beloved. Krishna is both male and female just as Lalita, who is Tripufa of Shakta Tantric Literature also is both female and male. The Tantraraja says, 'Lalita has the form of Krishna

¹ Br. U. p. r-4-3-2.

² Bodhapancadasika. 6.

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and is male and charmed the world by the flute.' Hladini, essentially delightful because of her connection with Ananda, becomes more enjoyable when Krishna throws her as it were into the hearts of his Parikaras. There it is transformed into devotion and love, bhakti and prema which are turned towards Krishna by the devotee in the act of service to him. And this is greatly enjoyed by the Supreme Lover. The devotees themselves also enjoy his intoxicating sweetness through prema.

All is a play of the Supreme.¹ In the tops gnosis and in the Ananda he (Purusha) is one with the Prakriti and no longer solely biune with her.......All is the conscious play of the Supreme and divine Shakti in its own and the infinite bliss-nature. This is the supreme mystery, the highest secret. And the Mother asks "But how to express certain silent secrets?"² These are the most hidden secrets of the oneness of each other enjoyed by the Supreme and the Parashakti.

Yoga also means supra-rational and mysterious Power. In the Rig Veda it is said that 'That One' concentrated into creation, downwards as the axis of the universe. This is Aja ekapdda, the Unborn One footed, who carries the cosmic design in his consciousness but himself does not move, acaram.³ And we have already seen that Purusha becomes everything, and yet he exceeds the universe by ten measures atyatisthat dasdngulam. This simultaneous capacity of the Reality to be beyond and in the universe is due to his own mysterious Power which baffles reason. It is this aspect of Paraprakriti which the Gita describes as My Yoga aicwara. "By the power of a Divine Yoga we have come out of his inexpressible secrecies into this bounded nature of phenomenal things".⁴ There is a Yoga of divine Power, by which the Supreme creates phenomenon of himself in spiritual, not a material self-formulation of his owe extended infinity, an extension of which the material is only an image."³ But "he is not in them... God is not the becoming... they are his becomings he is their being, and again "he sees himself as one

¹ Sri Aurobindo. On Yoga I. p.581 cf.p.573.

² The Mother—Prayers and Meditations June 22, 1914-

³ RV III. 56.2. 

⁴ Sri Aurobindo—Essays on the Gita, second series 1942, p. 65.5.6, ibid 276—cf p.277-305-306.

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with that, is identified with that and all it harbours. In that infinite self-seeing, which is not his whole seeing... he is at once one with all that is and yet exceeds it."

In the Tantric philosophies too Shiva is both Visvottarra and Visvatmaka, transcendent and immanent. While Shiva through Shakti becomes every] thing and knows his identity with all that Shakti manifests and enjoys integral I-ness, he yet has a status beyond the universe projected by his own inherent Shakti. Here again we see a reference to what the Gita calls Yoga maya and Yoga aisvra. The creation of the universe itself is through yoga of the Divine. He desired "May I be many. He concentrated in Tapas, by Tapas he created the world, creating he entered into it."¹

We have already made brief references to the concept of Cit Shakti as explained in Bengal Vaishnavism. While Bhagavan does not create, the Reality in its aspect of Paramatma does. And creation is carried out not by Hladini-Shakti but by Maya-Shakti which, a lower aspect of Conscious Force is described as bahirahga Shakti, external power. Yet the Tapas aspect is not absent in this concept and we find here again the Yoga of nature. For Sri Aurobindo Cit is the Divine's power of both self-reflection and of self-manifestation. "Cit is a power not only of knowledge but of expressive will, not only of receptive vision but of formative representation. The two indeed are one power. For Cit is an action of Being, not of the void. What it sees that becomes. It sees itself beyond space and time, that becomes in the conditions of space and time".² The concentration of Cit on itself gives rise to Ananda or bliss. In Ananda arises Ichha, will to extend itself in a world of self variation. The overflow of Ananda as and into the world is the origin of all. It is not necessary to explain Sri Aurobindo's idea of self-limitation which is the origin of the World. It may sound a paradox but creation is at once self-expansion and self-limitation of the Divine. The Tapas practised by the Lord of the universe to manifest the world of variety from his inalienable unity is the yoga of Nature.

Yoga we have said is Tapas or energising of Consciousness. It is spiritual effort which man has to make in order to find his true

¹ Tait. Up.II.6

² Sri Aurobindo—Isha Up. 1951-9 38.

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being and its ground and source. The Ground of all existence has many aspects, many facets. "It is the Zero which is all". Being, Consciousness, Force, Delight, the origin and support and moving power of all existence, it is in itself an unfathomable mystery. Yet it reveals a little of its secrets, partly unveils its nature by veiling its absoluteness. In other words by renouncing its own intrinsic ever unknown Mystery, it manifests itself to the enlightened intelligence of man. This self-revelation is varied and does not follow just one line of manifestation. Transcendent, Cosmic and Individual, detached from its own process of self-manifestation and yet freely engaged in it, the Reality becomes everything. Man thus may seek it in any one or more than one or all its aspects. And he does so according to his capacity and the particular aspect or aspects that attracts his soul. It is well known that there are many yogas or systems of spiritual discipline and culture. In some of these the idea of Conscious Nature is not present and they could not on the face of it be called Yogas of Nature. But even those are methods of concentration of man's powers which are ultimately powers of Nature or Prakriti. For example in Samkhya yoga it is the buddhi, purified intelligence, in which the disassociation of Purusha and Prakriti takes place. By definition, however, Purusha does nothing, it is buddhi which works towards a complete cessation of the modes of the mind stuff, citta-vrtti-nirodha. And Buddhi is the first evolute of Prakriti and it is therefore Prakriti which does the yoga. Truly, Prakriti works for the good of the Purusha, even to the extent of working out the Purusha's freedom from its involvement in Prakriti. The same might be said of Maya in Shankara-Vedanta, which whatever the technical difference in its metaphysical conception of Reality, has the same idea of Nature. Maya in it having the same character as that of Prakriti of Samkhya Yoga except that Maya is said to be neither real nor unreal while Prakriti is real. As far as practical spiritual effort is concerned it is again Buddhi that undertakes it and it is through that that the direct anubhava, intuition and experience is had. All Vrittis or psychological modes are restricted and the Buddhi concentrated exclusively on Brahman. This gives rise to the last mode the brahmākāravrtti, the mode of the form of Brahma. It burns itself out and what remains is pure consciousness. Maya in a sense breaks the false notion of a separate individual self

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and also gives rise to the true Knowledge of the absolute and the rejection of the world as unreal.

In the systems which accept Nature as Conscious Power, it is the Force that does the yoga in the seeker. Aditi carries the seeker of Beatitude like a faultless ship. "May we ascend Aditi for Beatitude, the divine ship endowed with quick propellers, faultless, intact without slits, a capable protector, spacious as earth, like heaven, to which no hurt can come, a happy shelter and skilful career."¹ In the Gita Paraprakriti is the true mover of all movements of Nature. All subjective becomings are ultimately her becomings, though these are distorted in the field of lower Prakriti. But the higher and nobler impulses also come from her. We have said that the creation is a result of the divine Yoga. "By a reverse movement of the same Yoga" says Sri Aurobindo, "we must transcend the units of phenomenal nature and recover the greater consciousness by which we live in the Divine and the Eternal."² And again, "he has manifested the world in himself in all these ways by his divine yoga.......To awaken to the revelation of him in all these ways together is man's side of the same divine yoga".

Parama Shiva has five eternal functions—Tirodhana or Nigraha, Sristi, Sthiti, Samhara and Anugraha, that is, self-veiling, creation, preservation, and disillution of the universe, and grace. Creation is the result of self-veiling or self-contraction of Paramashiva. Shiva through using his freewill limits himself and becomes Jiva which is atomic, ami.

Jiva is as truly Shiva which is its original status but does not know it. The atomic Jiva cannot by its own effort start on the spiritual path and attain Self-Knowledge. He must have the grace of Shiva for the opening of his consciousness towards liberation. The grace is nothing but the awakening of Shakti in, or from another side, the descent of Shakti on Jiva. Abhinava Gupta in his Tantrasara has even said that one who is hit by a tremendous avalanche of Shakti can have realisation instantaneously. It is Shakti which after the Jiva's initiation earries on the spiritual effort in him. True, the Jiva may not realise it and as long as he has the sense that he can and has

¹ Y.V.21.6.

² Essays on the Gita, 275.

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something to do, he must not be complacent and effect an inert surrender. But progress in Sadhana would reveal to him that Conscious Nature is doing the Yoga in him.

Grace is also a form and a function of Bhagavan without which Jiva cannot attain liberation according to Bengal Vaishnavism. And certainly there is no possibility whatsoever of Jiva's attaining devotion and love for Bhagavan without the work of Grace in him. It is said that Jivas must turn themselves as parts of Radha, who in the religious symbolism of Bengal Vaishnavism, is Svarupa-Shakti personified. For it is Radha alone who can approach and look up to Krishna. In the hearts of the devotees and lovers of Krishna Hladini-Shakti is transformed into Bhakti and Prema which find expression in loving services in Krishna's Lilas and is enjoyed by him. This is the Yoga of Nature in the most intense form of the religion of love.

It is however in the integral yoga of Sri Aurobindo that the idea of the Yoga of Nature is most prominent. There is in Nature a secret aspiration for perfection which Yoga essentially is. Nature is full of a Knowledge-Will which is now veiled and not capable of functioning with its sovereign Force in the field of the body, life and mind,— and the existence of man is a complex of these three. Sri Aurobindo has said, "here in the material world life is her reaching out from a first inconscience towards return to Union with a Conscient Divine from whom she proceeded. In religion the mind of man, her accomplished instrument becomes aware of her goal in him, and responds to her aspiration."¹ And what starts in religion is fulfilled in yoga. The capital difference of this yoga from others is that its aim is far more comprehensive than that of the traditional ones. It not only seeks liberation from Ignorance, not only aspires that man, Nature's chosen instrument, should realise all the aspects of the ultimate Reality which he is in his secret self; but its goal is that his whole existence and nature should be transformed into divine existence and nature. Instead of being as it is now, a structure of Ignorance dimly lit by knowledge, of power lame and limping of love which demands more than it gives, the mind, life and body of man ean and should be able to shed the hold of Ignorance on them and then open to

¹ Synthesis—p. 638.

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the integral Knowledge—Will—Love of the Divine. This in Sri Aurobindo's language is Supermind which is the true origin of mind, life and matter and can transform them purifying them of their ignorance, disturbances and desires, inertia and rigidity. They will not be dissolved or destroyed but, as a result of the transformation, manifest new qualities and capacities. The mind will become a mind of Light, Life a movement of Will and the body a form of spiritual substance. It is through the Supermind that Nature will attain the perfection of which it is in travail. "The aim of synthetic or integral yoga...is union with the being, consciousness and delight of the Divine through every part of our human nature separately or simultaneously but all in the long and harmonious and unified, so that the whole may be transformed into a divine nature of being —Not with the Knower in him alone, not with the will alone, nor with the heart alone but with all these equally and also with the whole mental and vital being in him he aspires to the God-head and labours to convert their nature into its divine equivalent".¹ The attainment in man of this integral union of Nature with the Divine will usher in a transformed world and the Life Divine for the manifestation of the Supermind in mind, life and matter will not be an individual achievement but will initiate the evolution of a gnostic community and ultimately a race of supermen. The following Meditation of the Mother, dated June 15th, 1913 describes the aim of the Yoga of Nature most beautifully and forcefully "Even he who might have arrived at perfect contemplation in silence and solitude could only have done so by extracting himself from his body, by making an abstraction of himself; and thus the substance of which the body is constituted would remain as impure, as imperfect as before, since he would have abandoned it to itself, by a misguided mysticism, by the attraction of supraphysical splendours, by the egoistic desire of being united with Thee for his personal satisfaction, he would have turned his back upon the reason of his earthly existence, he would refuse coward-like to accomplish his mission to redeem and purify matter. To know that a part of our being is perfectly pure, to commune with that purity, to be identified with

¹ Synthesis of Yoga, p. 670. 1955.

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it, can be useful only if we subsequently utilise this Knowledge for hastening the earthly transfiguration for accomplishing Thy sublime work."

But this aim can be attained only by the joint effort of two things— the aspiration of man and the responding Grace of the Divine. Even the aspiration is in the last analysis a movement of the Divine Shakti in man. The secret of this yoga is to have things done by the Shakti. Sri Aurobindo is perfectly clear on the point that the Sadhaka of his integral yoga is the Divine himself in man and the power of the Sadhana the Divine Shakti herself. The culmination of Sadhana of this Yoga of Nature in the sense of total conversion of existence and of life into a most perfect expression of the Divine being, Consciousness, force and delight is nothing short of the yoga of Nature as the bliss of the union of the Supreme with Mahashakti.........."Love becomes a movement by which the Divine Nature in man takes possession of and enjoys the delight of the universal and the Supreme Divine". This love is experienced and enjoyed not only by the soul of man but also by his mental, vital and physical consciousness. When Nature in all her levels and aspects including the material, will be in perfect union, Yoga, with her Master, that will be the fulfilment of the Yoga of Nature.

ARINDAM BASU

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THE SPIRITUAL DESTINY OF THE WAKING STATE

(Contd.)

VI. THE CRITIQUE OF THE Fivanmukti-SOLUTION

THE passage describes the state of consciousness when one is aloof from all things even when in their midst and all is felt to be unreal, an illusion. There are then no preferences or desires because things are too unreal to desire or to prefer one to another. But, at the same time, one feels no necessity to flee from the world or not to do any action, because being free from the illusion, action or living in the world does not weigh upon one, one is not bound or involved.

(Sri Aurobindo, On Yoga II, pp. 660-61)

When one sees a mirage for the first time, he mistakes it for a reality, and after vainly trying to quench his thirst in it, learns that it is a mirage. But whenever he sees such a phenomenon in future, in spite of the apparent reality, the idea that he sees a mirage always presents itself to him. So is the world of Maya to a Jivanmukta (the liberated in life).

(Swami Vivekananda, Collected Works, Vol. VI, p. 104)

I am neither the doer nor the enjoyer. Actions have I none, past or present or future. I possess no body nor does body lessness characterise my state. How can I say what is mine and what is not?

(Dattatreya, Avadhuta-Gita, 1.66)

We have seen in the previous chapter why the Yogic trance even if it be of the supreme sort, the Nirvikalpa Samadhi, fail to meet the demands of the Yoga of Transformation. As a matter of fact what we envisage for our goal is very much wider in base, far superior in scope and loftier in its flight than the attainments offered by the Nirvikalpa trance. In Sri Aurobindo's own words, "the realisation of this yoga is not lower but higher than Nirvana or Nirvikalpa

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samadhi."¹ For, we do not want to be satisfied with inner psycho-spiritual experiences alone, we seek also the total and complete realisation of the Divine in the outer consciousness and in the life of action.

But the detractor may interject at this point : "The waking realisation that you are aiming at—has it not been already possessed by those who have been variously termed jivanmukta ('liberated while still leading a bodily life'), sthitaprajna ('established in the true Knowledge and Wisdom'), ativarndsrami ('beyond all standards of conduct') or brahmavid ('one who has known and been the Brahman'²)?"—the implication of the question being that there is after all nothing essentially new in the ideal we pursue.

But a little reflection will suffice to show that the Jivanmukti realisation or realisations of the same genre fall far short of the goal of divinised waking physical existence that is the object of our own Yoga. After all, who is a Jivanmukta? And what essentially characterises his comportment vis-a-vis this world of dynamic manifestation? For a suitable answer let us fall back upon three citations, chosen at random from among a host of others and culled from ancient texts as well as from those of our day.

First from the great Monistic text Yoga-Vasishtha Ramayana:

"The Jivanmukta is one to whose consciousness only the undifferentiated Vyoma exists and this phenomenal world has lost all reality, although his organs may appear to function as before.... He maintains his body with whatever little comes to it naturally and effortlessly____ He is called a Jivanmukta who is no more awake to the world of senses although his sense-organs appear to be awake as ever... .He who has transcended the ego-sense and does not get involved in action, is indeed a Jivanmukta whether he is active or not."³ '

Now from Sri Ramakrishna : "He who has attained this knowledge of Brahman is a Jivanmukta, liberated while living in the body. He rightly understands that the Atman and the body are two separate things....These two are separate like the kernel and the shell of

¹ On Yoga II, p. 62. 

2 cf. "Brahmavid brahma eva bhavati" ("one who knows the Divine becomes the Divine").

3 Yoga-Vasishtha (Utpatti-Prakarand), sarga 9, sis. 4,6,7,9,

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the coconut while its milk dries up. The Atman moves, as it were, within the body.... The kernel of a green almond or betel-nut cannot be separated from the shell; but when they are ripe the juice dries up and the kernel separates from the shell. After the attainment of the Knowledge of Brahman, the 'milk' of worldly-mindedness dries up."¹

Finally a long excerpt from Swami Vivekananda: "....He has reached the perfection which the Advaitist wants to attain; and at that moment,...the veil of ignorance falls away from him, and he will feel his own nature. Even in this life, he will feel that he is one with the universe. For a time, as it were, the whole of this phenomenal world will disappear for him, and he will realise what he is. But so long as the Karma of this body remains, he will have to live. This state, when the veil has vanished and yet the body remains for some time, is what the Vedantist call Jivanmukti, the living freedom. If a man is deluded by a mirage for some time, and one day the mirage disappears—if it comes back again next day or at some future time, he will not be deluded. Before the mirage first broke, the man could not distinguish between the reality and the deception. But when it has once broken, as long as he has organs and eyes to work with, he will see the image, but will no more be deluded. That fine distinction between the actual world and the mirage, he has caught, and the latter cannot delude him any more. So when the Vedantist has realised his own nature, the whole world has vanished for him. It will come back again, but no more the same world..."²

[Italics ours]

The above three excerpts purporting to characterise the status of a Jivanmukta make it abundantly clear that prima facie Jivanmukti in the specific sense in which it is generally understood can by no means measure up to our ideal of the divinely dynamic transformation of the whole of our waking existence. But before we pass the final judgement it would be better for us to examine, in however brief a manner, some of the principal traits of the Jivanmukti-realisation.

¹ The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna (Advaita Ashram, Almora), p. 695.

² Swami Vivekananda, Complete Works, vol. I, p. 365.

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A. Jivanmukti and Videhamukti : Jivanmukti is never considered to be the goal in itself,; it is, so to say, no more than a stopgap arrangement, a wayside inn,—the ultimate goal, the goal par excellence, being always videhamukti or the liberation that is attained with the dissolution of the body. But this videhamukti or "disembodied liberation" is sought to be effected in two stages : the first stage, the penultimate attainment as it were, is reached when through the gaining of the true Knowledge of Reality of one's own being as well as of the world-existence, the propensity to future births in this phenomenal universe is altogether stamped out; the second and final stage being the dropping off of the current body-formation and the attainment to the status of videhamukti. Jivanmukti represents the status of that seeker who has already attained Self-Knowledge but is still leading the present bodily life awaiting the day when this will cease for good and he will become "liberated in body-lessness" (videhamukta).

It follows then that the Jivanmukti status is the more valued, the more it approaches the character of Videhamukti even while the siddha is still in his body. So the divine transformation of the bodily existence has here no relevance at all. As a matter of fact, the famous Vidyaranya Muni, one of the reputed authors of the Monistic Work Panchadashi, wrote a full treatise on Jivanmukti, called Jivanmukti-Viveka, only to prove at the end that after all Videhamukti is the summum bonum and Jivanmukti -is a step towards this supreme goal.

But if this is so, the question arises : why, then, even after the attainment of Self-Realisation, should the siddha agree at all to remain for some time in the body in the Jivanmukti status and not pass immediately and directly into Videhamukti when the latter is the real objective sought after ? The answer that is generally offered is in terms of the Theory of Karma which we have already discussed in Chapter I. Since Prarabdha Karmas¹ (that is to say, those that have started bearing their fruits) have produced our present body and since these cannot be in fructified except through their exhaustion by sufferance, even on the attainment of liberation, the body

¹ Vide Chapter I : The Bane of Oscillation.

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may continue to remain viable for some time, but for some time only. When the Prarabdha has are over, the body automatically disintegrates and the Jivanmukti status gives place to Videhamukti.

Thus the Jivanmukti realisation appears almost as the virtue of a necessity and the waking physical existence in this phenomenal universe cannot be considered in this view to be a field specially worthy of spiritualisation.

In order to substantiate the points that we have made above, we adduce below a few observations drawn from different sources.

"...After realising that state described in the scriptures, the saint sees the Self in all beings and in that consciousness devotes himself to service, so that any Karma that was yet left to be worked out through the body may exhaust itself. It is this state which has been described by the authors of the Shastras (scriptures) as Jivanmukti 'Freedom while living'." [Italics ours]

(Swami Vivekananda, Complete Works, vol. VII, pp.112-113)

"A DEVOTEE : 'Does the body remain even after the realization of God ?'

MASTER : 'The body survives with some so that they may work out their Prarabdha Karma or work for the] welfare of others....Of course, he...escapes future births, which would otherwise be necessary for reaping the results of his past Karma. His present body remains alive as long as its momentum is not exhausted ; but future births are no longer possible. The wheel moves so long as the impulse that has set it in motion lasts. Then it comes to a stop'." [Italics ours]

(The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishana, p.431)

"The ultimate liberation [from the chain of births] is attained with the dawning of the Knowledge itself." ("jñānasamakālamu-ktah kaivalyam yāti" : Sheshacharya, Paramārthasāra or Arya-pañcāsiti, 81).

"Once a Jivanmukta, one has no more future births", ("bhūyo-janmavinirmuktam jīvanmuktasya tanmanah" : Yoga-Vasishtha, Upashama-Prakarana, 90. 18).

"He that has Knowledge...reaches that goal whence he is not

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born again" ("yastu vijñānavān bhavati...sa tu tatpadamāpnoti yasmad bhūyo na jay ate" : Katha-Upanishad, in. 8).

"Even after attaining to the status of Jivanmukta, one continues for a while to remain in his body, merely to exhaust the momentum of the Prarabdha" ("prārabdhakarmavegena jīvanmukto yadā bhavet. Kañcit kālamathārabdhakarmavandhasya sanksaye": Shankaracharya, Vākyavritti, 52).

"He has to wait [for his Videhamukti] only so long as he is not released from his body. At the fall of the body he attains to the supreme status" ("tasya tāvadeva ciram yāvanna vimokse atha sampatsye" : Chhandogya-Upanishad, 6.14.2).

"Once the Prarabdhas are experienced and gone through, one acquires the supreme liberation" ("bhogena tvitare ksapayitvā sam-padyate" : Vyasa, Brahmasūtra, 4.1.19).

"Once the body gets consumed by Time, the Knower leaves his status of Jivanmukti and enters into the state of Videhamukti" ("jīvanmuktapadam tyaktvā svadehe kālasdtkrte, visatyadehamuktat-vam" : Yoga-Vasishtha, 11.9.14).

"...When he takes up his abode in it, he grieves not, but when he is set free from it, that is his deliverance"¹ ("anusthāya na socati vimuktasca vimucyate" :Katha-Upanishad, V. I.).

"The Jivanmukta, even while he is still alive, has in reality no body at all" ("jīvato'pi aśariratvam siddham" Shankar).

"The liberation that one gains at the fall of the body is indeed the highest one, for this liberation cannot be nagatived any more" ("pindapātena yā muktih sa muktirna tu hanyate": Yogashikho-panishad, 1.163).

"At the fall of his body the Yogi merges in his supreme self-being, just as the space inside an earthen pot vanishes in the great cosmic Space, when the pot is broken and gone" ("ghate bhinn ghatākāsa ākāse līyate yathd, dehdāhāve tathd yogī svarūpe para-mātmani" : Dattatreya, Avadhuta-Gita, 1.69).

"Once one attains to Videhamukti, there is no more return to this phenomenal world" ("punarāvrttirahitam kaivalyam prati-padyate" : Shankaracharya, Vākyavrtti).

¹ Sri Aurobindo's translation (Eight Upanishads, p. 77.)

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"There is no more coming back for them" ("tesām na punar-āvrttih" : Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, 6.2.15).

"No more wheeling in this human whirlpool" ("imam mānav-amāvartarh nāvartante" : Chhandyogya Upanishad, 8.15).

It is clear from what goes before that, contrary to our attitude to the body and physical existence, the Jivanmukti ideal does not attach much importance to any terrestrial realisation as such; it only tolerates the bodily life so long as it has to be borne and thus tries, if we may say so, make the best of a bad bargain.

But whatever the nature of the ideal sought, how does a Jivan-mukta behave so far as his waking state is concerned? Does his dynamic life satisfy the criterion of a divinely purposive and active physical existence? Here too the answer is an unambiguous NO.

B. Jivanmukta and the Dynamic Waking State : The goal we envisage for our sadhana is, as we have stressed so many times before, is "not only to rise out of the ordinary ignorant world-consciousness into the divine consciousness, but to bring the supramental power of that divine consciousness down into the ignorance of mind, life and body, to transform them, to manifest the Divine here and create a divine life in Matter."¹ It is thus almost an axiomatic truth that yoga by works should form an indispensable part of our sadhana and an essential element of our realisation if we would seek to transplant the fullness of the spirit in the field of life and action. But the Jivanmukta does not in the least manifest this divine dynamis and thus does not measure up to our ideal.

As a matter of fact he is altogether indifferent to action (kurvato' kurvatah²). For, although apparently still in his body, the Jivanmukta does not really participate in any of its workings. The world still appears before him, but he is no longer deceived by what he would call its may a. Indeed he looks upon his body "as if a corpse separated from his Self" ("svavapuh kunapamiva drsyate yatastadvapurapa-dhvastam" : Paramahamsa-Upanishad).

¹ On Yoga II, p. 478-

² Yoga-Vasishtha, III.9.9.

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The result is that a Jivanmukta is indifferent to his bodily life. "Just as a person intoxicated with liquor is altogether oblivious of the absence or otherwise of his dress, so is the Jivanmukta of the state and location of his ephemeral body. Whether the body remains stationary at a place or gets displaced from there or even stumbles down is equal to him."¹ Also, "the Brahmavid does never remember his body. It continues to be maintained by the Life-breath, prāna-vāyu, just as a trained horse goes on pulling the cart as ever even when the driver has withdrawn all his attention."²

Thus the bodily mechanism of a Jivanmukta may indeed continue to function because of the gathered force of Prakriti and he may apparently walk and speak and behave as before, but all this is like an empty machine in no way supported by any participating consciousness. The liberated spirit witnesses these actions (sāksyaham) but does not take part in them(" ksīyante cāsy a karmāni : Yoga-shikopanishad, IV.45). There is no sense of personal action (na kurve nāpi kāraye³) hence for the Jivanmukta there is no bondage or responsibility (na sa mudhavallipyate⁴; mamdkarturalepasya⁵).

As a matter of fact, it is the organs of sense and action that become automatically active for the continued maintenance of the body (caksurādīndriyam svatah pravartate vahihsvārthe⁶) and the Jivanmukta himself living all the while "in communion of oneness with the Transcendent" seems to the outward eye to be acting as a somnambuilst(suptabuddhavat'⁷). For "although he has eyes, he acts as the eyeless; although he has ears, he acts as the earless; although he has speech, he acts as the speechless; and although he has life, he acts as the lifeless."⁸

Thus there cannot be any dynamically purposive action in the life of a Jivanmukta. He participates, if at all, only in simple innocuous actions solely meant for the upkeep of the body (Kevalantsārīram karma⁹), or in those which are occasioned by his previous

¹ Bhāgavatam, XI. 13.36.

² Chhandyogya Upanishad, 8.12.3.

^{3 4 5} Avadhutopanishad, 25,6,22. 

6 Yoga-Vasishtha, III. 52.59.

7 Ibid., III. 118.19. III.9.7.,III. 16.22., III. 88. 13, VII.1.8.

⁸ "sacaksuracaksuriva sakarno' karna iva savāgavāgiva saprānd'prāna iva" (cited in Jivan-mukti-Viveka by Vidyaranya Muni).

⁹ Dattatreya, Jivanmukti Gita, 8.

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samskaras ("purvācārakramāgatam ācāramācaranti"¹) or at the most in those apparently significant actions which are brought about not through his personal initiation but only through the agency of the Prarabdha yathāprāptam hi kartyavyam, kuru kāryath yathdgatam²).

The foregoing consideration unmistakably shows that Jivanmukti as traditionally conceived cannot at all be equated to our ideal. What we aim at is something radically different from this liberated status.

JUGAL KlSHORE MUKHERJI

¹ Yoga-Vasishtha, III. 118.19.

² Ibid,. III. 88.11—13.

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TEACHINGS OF THE MOTHER

SERVICE OF HUMANITY (contd.)

WE have discussed the question of the service of humanity almost ™* threadbare. We have considered it from various angles. We have seen that the way we go about the business of serving humanity is not the right way, and that it does not contribute to any substantial improvement of its lot. Since we are ourselves in ignorance—ignorance of our real self, ignorance of the significance and purpose of our life, ignorance of what constitutes our essential well-being and the essential well-being of others—any altruistic or philanthropic work undertaken by us cannot but be a pretentious bungle. We have perforce to act in this state of ignorance, for life is action, but our conscious endeavour should be directed more and more towards achieving freedom from it. So long as we act in ignorance, so long as we do not know what our own good consists in, we should have the humility not to meddle with the affairs of others and presume to better their condition.

But this perception of our ignorance is veiled by our self-conceit, and it is this conceit that impels us to the so-called service of humanity. It gives us the sense that we are doing something, that we are superior to others, earnestly exerting ourselves to render help to those who stand in sore need of it. "That is what I meant when I said that it is ambition or egoism that makes you humanitarian," says the Mother, "of course, if it pleases you to do the work, if you feel happy in doing it, you are at perfect liberty to do the work and continue. But do not imagine that you are doing any real or effective service to humanity; particularly, do not imagine that by that you are serving God, leading a spiritual life or doing Yoga."!

If humanity does not reap any solid or substantial benefit and our only gain or reward is an inflated ego, what then, is the rationale of our humanitarian work ? Does it make us happy ? We have already pondered this point at some length and found that it

¹ The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo, Part 7 : Nolini Kanta Gupta.

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does not. Bertrand Russel's recipe for the conquest of happiness is a cheap distraction. It diverts our consciousness from the very thing which would lead us to eternal happiness. In ignorance, there is no possibility of conquering happiness ; what one gets is a fleeting pleasure or a precarious and delusive satisfaction. But the yearning for happiness, if it is not a mere craving for transient pleasures, is a profound and legitimate yearning, and it cannot rest till it is fulfilled.

What then, is happiness as distinguished from pleasures, and how to conquer it ? That is the last point we have to consider. The Upanishads give a very terse definition of happiness :

यो वै भूमा तत् सुखं नाल्पे सुखमस्पि

—that alone which is vast is happiness, there is no happiness in what is little. It means that happiness is found only in the infinite, and not in what is finite and Umited. The objects of the world are all finite. They can give us only finite, fugitive happiness, which is another name for pleasure; and pleasures are invariably followed by sorrows and suffering. Happiness, illimitable and unebbing, uncaused and unconditioned, inheres only in the Infinite, and we can enjoy this happiness only by renouncing all our attachment to to finite forms and identifying ourselves with the Infinite.

The Mother says, "True happiness has its origin in the Divine, it is pure and unconditional."¹ Here we get not only the Infinite, but the living, loving Infinite, the Author and Master of our being and of all beings, the Supreme, the Divine, as the sole origin of eternal happiness. In Him we fulfil our yearning for happiness. In Him we slake our thirst for love and beauty, peace and harmony, purity and perfection. All that we have been seeking for in vain in "the perishable forms of the world we realise at once and for ever in Him. That is happiness. That is Ananda. That is the luminous matrix of the whole universe. It is this eternal Mother of Love and Delight that the benighted souls have been searching for, life after life, in the obscurity of ignorance. Each cry they utter, each

¹ Gems from the Mother in The Mother of Love by M. P. Pandit.

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sigh they heave, acts as a lever of ascent to the supreme happiness. From Ananda they have come and to Ananda they must return. And it is this term less Ananda that they are destined to pour upon this sorrowful earth until earthly life itself is transmuted into the Divine Life and the tears and sighs of suffering melt into the everlasting Ananda of the Divine. Love and joy and beauty are the essence of the soul of man, and it is its eternal essence in the Divine that it seeks for.

How to conquer this happiness ? It cannot be conquered by the human ego. "The only way to a true and lasting happiness is a complete and exclusive reliance on the Divine Grace."¹ This Grace is but the dynamic aspect of the Divine's Love, creative and redemptive.

How can we realise the Divine's Love and receive the benediction of His Grace ? Love alone can invoke Love. Love is the master passion of human heart. If we can turn it from the finite forms of the world and direct it with all the intensity of our being towards the Divine Infinite, we are sure to be taken up into it. It will mean the end of all our anguished wanderings in the world of mortal forms and our rebirth into informality, even here on earth, in the human body.

We shall then realise that "Love alone can put an end to the suffering of the world".² In the service of the Divine lies the secret of the true service of humanity.

RlSHABHCHAND

¹ Gems from the Mother in The Mother of Love by M. P. Pandit.

² Ibid.

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THE LIFE DIVINE

(BRIEF SUMMARY)

CHAPTER XXVI

THE ASCENDING SERIES OF SUBSTANCE

THE materiality of Matter consists in a concentration of the density of substance and its resistance to the conscious-force of which through sense it becomes the object. An ascending scale of substance from Matter to Spirit must mean a diminution of resistance, division and bondage and an increasing subtlety, flexibility, power of assimilation, interchange, transmutation, unification.

There is such an ascending scale from the dense to the subdue even in material substance and beyond the subtlest material essence we have grades of other substance corresponding to the series of Matter, Life, Mind, Supermind and Spirit. Each, that is to say, is the basis of a world or other kind of existence in which these higher principles successively dominate the others and fulfil themselves with their aid. In each therefore there is an ever wider range of being, consciousness and force ascending from the in consciousness of spiritual. But all these principles are interconnected. Matter contains all of them and evolves them out of itself in obedience to the constant pressure of the higher worlds, and evolution which must continue until they are able to express themselves fully in the material principle.

Man is the fit instrument for this fulfilment. He has other bodies besides the physical in which he can become conscious and so enter into the supraphysical grades of substance and impose their law upon his material existence. Therefore his complete perfection is through the ascent to supermind and the conquest of the physical also by the supramental substance so that he will be able to command a diviner physical life and conquer death in a divine body.

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CHAPTER XXVII

THE SEVENFOLD CHORD OF BEING

There are, therefore, seven or else eight principles of being and the four which constitute divine existence, but in inverted order. The Divine descends from pure existence to Supermind to cast itself into cosmic existence, the creature ascends from Matter to Mind towards the Divine and meets it where mind and Supermind meet with a veil between them. By the rending of the veil each of the four divine human principles can find its transfigured self in its divine equivalent. This transfiguration is the only possible positive goal of the creative evolution.

The presence of the seven principles is the essential to all cosmic being. For cosmic being cannot exist except as the All-existence figuring itself in its self-conception as Time and Space, nor can this figuration take place except by an infinite Force which being of the nature of an all-determining and all-apprehending Will must repose on the action of an all-comprehending infinite Consciousness. Nor could the result be a cosmic but for a power of infinite knowledge and will determining out of the infinity in each figure of things their law, form and course through a self-limitation by Idea proceeding from a boundless liberty within. That power of Knowledge-Will, that Idea is the fourth name of the Divine; it is the Supermind or supreme Gnosis.

The lower trilogy is also necessary in some form however different it may be from our experience of Life, Mind and Matter. For there must be a subordinate power and action of Supermind measuring, creating fixed standpoints of mutual view and interaction in the universal self-diffusion as between an infinite number of centres of the one Consciousness; and such a power would be what we mean by Mind. So too, Mind once given, Life, which is the working of the will and energy and conscious dynamis of being dependent on such fixed standpoints of interaction, must accompany it and substance with differentiation of form must also be present.

It follows that in every cosmic arrangement the seven principles must be existent, either manifested in simultaneous apparent

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action or else all apparently involved in one of them which then becomes the initial principle, but all secretly at work and bound to evolve into manifestation. Therefore out of initial Matter latent Life and Mind have emerged as apparent Life and Mind, and latent Supermind and the hidden Spirit must emerge as apparent Supermind and the triune glory of Sachchidananda.

SRI AUROBINDO

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WORLD UNITY

IT was during the recent seminar of the World Union on Edu-cation for One World, that a friend asked me what was the meaning of the Mother's message that world unity is a fact and it is only to be manifested. Did it mean, he asked , that the Unity is on the supramental plane awaiting its translation on earth into human terms? I told him that was not how I had understood the message. There is a unity of being, a unity of consciousness, on all planes of existence including our physical world. Only, that unity is at present veiled by our Ignorance. When that veil is dissipated by conscious effort the underlying unity becomes patent. It is there naturally and does not have to be forged by our effort; the effort needed is to remove the obstruction of Ignorance in our consciousness and let that unity manifest.

Later I had an opportunity to ask the Mother about it. She confirmed and said that the Unity is there as a fact, a living truth behind the surface being. Man is not aware of it in his active consciousness because of its faulty looking. The moment he changes the standpoint of his consciousness, he sees the Unity as a self-evident truth, a dynamic fact which displaces the false sense of division that prevailed till then. The key lies in the proper placement of one's consciousness.

Speaking in the universal context, the Mother observed that the Mind has come to accept the truth of oneness of all being; even the Vital has come to have that feeling and experience; but the difficulty is in the Physical. The Physical is still under the load of past habit and even when it gets enlightened in parts, it shifts back to the old poise after a time. The cells have that perception, they embody it for a while but it is yet to be established.

This consciousness of oneness, the Mother continued, is dominant in plant-life. The plants are aware of it in a concrete way.

Has it been always so, or is that a result of the descent of the Supramental Force, I asked. 

It has been now expedited, the Mother replied, their consciousness

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has grown. She mentioned that She has been seeing many-remarkable things in this direction with flowers. Even in the animal world that consciousness is growing; though, of course,—the Mother added with a gesture of helplessness—animals, who live close to man, do not share in that growth; they have lost their capacity to progress in their own way.

As a whole, the Mother concluded, the general consciousness in the world at all levels is moving in the direction of Oneness, as an immediate result of the influx of the Higher Power of the Supra-mental. The awareness of Oneness is emerging from within outward. The movement is all round. For, She explained, the supramental change does not simply mean a change at the top, a new dimension added to evolving creation; it certainly means a change all over. The whole imbibes and breathes the vibrations of the New Power, the New Consciousness; the whole undergoes a consequent transformation in the very stuff of its being.

Thus the Unity of All, its Oneness, is not a truth that lies in some high plane of existence above, awaiting its transition to the earth below but a truth that underlies our life here as its substratum. And this truth is steadily pressing into the zone of our awareness as a result of the pressure of the Supramental Descent on our consciousness.

M. P. PANDIT

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PERSONALITY AND INTEGRAL YOGA*

MANY who are present here have known me as interested in psychology; and it was psychology, which concerns itself with the study and the growth of personality, that led me on to 'Yoga'. Yoga is indeed, nothing but a system of practical psychology, or an art of living which aims at the growth of personality. Personality is a subject very dear to the teacher in a double way. His aim is to help the growth of personality in the students that come under his charge. And to do that, he has himself to become a personality. But there is another reason why personality is an interest with all men. Lately there has been an interesting study of the subject by perhaps the profoundest of Western psychologists, viz., C. G. Jung. His book entitled "The Integration of the Personality" can be heartily commended to the study and careful consideration of everybody. An average human individual is far too much environment- determined and environment-dependent. He hardly lives independently. His thinking, his actions and his emotional reactions are mostly determined by the passing suggestion, the immediate example, and the catch-words of society. He is surely not a personality in any true sense of the word. A personality, in fact, comes into being only when an individual learns to live by himself. That is to say, when he knows himself as an individual centre of consciousness, an individual centre of existence, and seeks his direction and guidance from himself rather than from the ,environment . His reactions to the environment will then obviously be very different from that of an average man. He will not seek guidance for his decisions in life from other people's actions and precedents. He will also "not be guided by utilitarian considerations of more gain and less loss or things of the kind. He will act in a different manner. A situation comes. He will try to feel himself in that situation. He will be aware of himself as being in the situation. He will not allow himself to become situation-dominated. "He, in the situation, seeking a solution"

* A speech delivered at a teachers' gathering in Delhi.

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will be the position. If he is spiritually disposed he will seek his solution from the Universal Consciousness by an inner act of appeal and supplication, otherwise he will try to think out his solution and in doing so he might consider other people's experience, precedents and even statistical data, but he will not be governed by them. They will be his merest aids. The decision, in fact, will proceed from himself, his own self-conscious life and being.

We have referred above to Jung's study of personality. He presents this idea in another manner. He says that the average man lives by tradition. Now what is tradition ? Tradition is the established usage or custom of society. Society has tried and experimented with a number of reactions to different situations of life and has come to acquire certain established modes of responding to those situations. If we compare several societies, we will find that they have distinctive features regarding their mode of conduct in the different situations of life. Let us take the situation of war as an example. Surely all societies will not act in the same way. But Jung goes on to argue that tradition can never be an adequate guidance to meet all the situations of life. When, for example, an unprecedented situation arises, society seeks to fall back upon some previous usage, but since the situation is unprecedented, no usage comes to help. Then we get into a crisis. The society does not know what to do. Jung says it is in just a situation like this that personality shows its worth. Personality is an individual who is so evolved from within, rather than under the governance of external circumstances, that he can put forth a creative activity at every moment of his life. He can, therefore, meet a crisis, he can act in a situation to which no precedents exist. Evidently personality is a supreme value of life. But how is one to develop personality ? Jung simply says that one should so grow up that one does not act as a slave of tradition, "but as a master of it. But again, how is that to be done ? He does not give a method, but his analysis and facts are perfectly correct. Personality is a supreme value, personality alone is capable of acting in unprecedented situations and it involves a mastery of the situation and not a slavery to it. But how is such a value to be created ? It is just on this issue that the Indian mind has exercised itself in a very profound and tenacious manner. From times immemorial

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of Indian history, what appears to have interested man most is knowing himself. The watch-word of Indian culture has been "ātmānam viddhi". The ancient Greeks too had a parallel expression as the motto of their culture and that used to be on the porches of their temples.

In the West since Renaissance, the attitude to life has been of a complementary kind. That is to say, man has been interested in external nature. He has sought to study how plants grow, how a stone moves down an inclined plane, or what the laws of physical and chemical functions of material nature are. It is a most interesting thing that modern physics has come to conclusions which are comparable to those reached by Indian thinkers and seekers after knowledge by another approach. It affirms that what appears to be solid, impenetrable, hard matter, is in fact not so; that it is merely an appearance, that the reality behind this appearance is energy—electric energy—and there are some physicists who affirm that this energy ultimately must be of the nature of will, which we know by direct experience in our own personality. That was exactly the conclusion reached by the Indian seekers after knowledge. The ātman in the individual and the Brahman in the universe are in fact, such will and consciousness and the rest is the outer expression. Regarding human personality, they said that its thoughts and feelings, its instincts and sentiments and habitudes of body, constitute only the surface part of it. This is not the whole of it. They talked of personality as consisting of different concentric zones or kosas. The outermost is the material body. Next is the prdna, the different instincts and the habits built upon them. Then came the thoughts and feelings, the manas. These constitute the outer frame or the circumference of the personality. But there are also the kosas of vijñāna and ānanda, which are the more central facts of personality, and these control and govern its circumferential formations. We find parallel ideas in some modern psychologists too. James, for example, talks of the bodily self, the social self, and the intellectual self. He arranges them in a hierarchy too. Next to the bodily self stands the social self and then the intellectual self and beyond them all is the transcendental self. Modern and ancient studies of human personality seem to converge a good deal; and

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so far as Jung is concerned, this convergence becomes more evident. An important conclusion of his book is that all our explanations of personality in terms of heredity or environment or childhood conflicts prove to be inadequate. These are merest "psychological medicaments", which fail miserably in the case of genius and they fail in explaining average personality too. A centre hidden behind the apparent psychological facts seems to be a necessary supposition. A centre which integrates the diverse facts of experience and provides the true basis of uniqueness to personality.

If personality is really the supreme value in life then we are interested not only in a study of it but in finding out the ways and the means of helping its growth too. Our exposition so far confirms us in the conclusion that there is a centre in the personality, which is the true focal point of it, which constitutes its originality and its uniqueness. Now that has somehow to be made a dynamic force in life. One might ask, is it not already a dynamic force. May be, but let us see that for ourselves. Philosophers have called human personality a microcosm, a universe in miniature. It is indeed a universe and therefore a vast subject. It comprehends worlds or planes of existence and an individual has to find out for himself whether he lives at the centre of his personality or any of the outlying regions or zones of it. That requires a careful self-observation. If we live at any of the outlying parts, then evidently our identification is not with the centre of our personality. But how are we to test it ? By simple instances of our behaviour ? For example, when we ask somebody, what are you doing ? and he says, I am sitting in a chair, then we have to enquire, what does this 'I' refer to ? Does it refer to his body, to his mind or to any particular part of his body or mind ? Evidently here it refers to the body. It does not apply to the mind. On the other hand, when we ask some-body^why he looks rather down cast and he says that a letter had brought him bad news and he has felt very sad since then, the reference of the self is to the mind. If we thus examine our self-references, we will find very tew instances where the centre is at all in contemplation. It is somewhere on the circumference that we usually sit and regard that as 'our self'. And when we take our stand on the circumference we are, of necessity, subject to the environment. The reverse

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is also true. If, for example, we complain and suffer from the circumstances of life, if we complain (not dispassionately affirm) that the conditions are not good for congenial work, for the discharge of duties, surely we are taking a stand on the circumference. Once we take a stand at the centre we will find ourselves independent of the environment, master of it, even when we are not in a position to change it according to our will. But in no case shall we suffer from it.

The attitude of complaint, of grievance, or blaming the situation is widespread today. It is not necessary to go into the objective reasons and conditions of it. Psychologically and yogic ally we ourselves are responsible for our weal or woe. We suffer from circumstances when we submit to them. This is a great truth and what a vision of life and existence it gives. We can be the master of the environment, the whole realms of social tradition and of nature. We are, as it were, sufficient unto ourselves to be happy. In its fullness the vision involves the status and glory of spiritual personality.

But how is this quality of life to be achieved ? We might without much difficulty agree that the 'situation,' the external environment is primarily a field for human action and the growth of human personality. That it is essentially a means and material by which man can be helped to grow, and situations, both good and bad, can be useful. No situation, however severe and hard it may be, can kill a personality unless the personality agrees to be killed by it. Our general cultural attitude today is obviously wrong and should we be able to see the fallacy of it and choose to take the tight one, we would be making the greatest contribution to the solution of our problems, whether educational, social, economic £or political. Even the food problem would become less severe] than it is today. But how is this new attitude, the new cultural outlook to be acquired ? It _is in another form the same question of creating a new quality of personality and has obviously to be attempted at the first instance by the individuals who have clearly seen the need and the value of it. And the method of it is, in the hoary language of our country, Yoga.

But there is no time now to undertake an exposition of this method, of the technique of Yoga, to evolve the new quality of personality. We have primarily stated the problem, the true character

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of personality and the need for its growth. We have treated only one part of the matter. The other part is, how is the personality to be helped to grow ? How, is the centre or the inner kosas to be brought into play ? so that the supreme value of personality may be realised. That method, we have just said, is Yoga, and every system of it is good in some respects. However the system of Integral Yoga formulated and taught by Sri Aurobindo is a fresh and living synthesis of the best spiritual traditions of the past and an original creative impulse of present supramental experience. Sri Aurobindo's inspiration in life was primarily spiritual. When he returned from England after 14 years of study he felt a call to understand the culture of his own country, which by his father's planning had been denied to him. Those were the days when everybody was fond of English education and his father in particular had wanted that his children should grow up in that cultural atmosphere right from the beginning. And therefore Sri Aurobindo was sent to England when he was only 7 years of age. When he came back his mind turned with great vigour and energy to the understanding of Indian culture and before long he felt that the essential truth of it consisted in the perception of the spirit in life and existence. And he felt more and more drawn to it and sought a full practical experience of it. And since 1910, when he withdrew from politics, his one occupation had been the exploration and the full achievement of the spiritual truths of life and existence. And since 1926, when he achieved the status of consciousness he had aimed at, he had been engaged in helping others in the attainment of spiritual life and working for a general spiritual regeneration of mankind, in fact the realisation of divine life on earth. In the course of the long labours of this work he evolved and perfected his integral yoga. Integral yoga does not look upon samddhi a§ its sole objective. It seeks rather a change of life as a whole, in fact a change in consciousness, the outer setting of life will then automatically acquire a new meaning. Its basic principles are all psychological and the fundamental movement is aspiration for a higher, fuller and a more powerful life. But this aspiration must be sincere and must ever grow wider and deeper so as to permeate our entire conscious and subconscious life.

Evidently for a fuller understanding of the system one will have

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to turn to Sri Aurobindo's books on Yoga, and his letters on the subject are indeed the best to begin with. There are any number of people who have succeeded in re-creating themselves, in discovering the joy of their life by immersing themselves deeply in the thought and inspiration of these letters. And they are also the indication and the promise of the new quality of personality we cherish so heartily.

INDRA SEN

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REVIEW

THE AITAREYA UPANISHAD Tr. by Velury Chandrasekharam. Pp. 31. Price Re. i/-Personal Book Shop, 111 Mount Road, Madras 6 or the Ashram, Pondicherry.

VELURY Chandrasekharam certainly does not need introduction to students of Sri Aurobindo literature. Apart from his significant contributions in Telugu expounding the Thought of Sri Aurobindo in the light of the pristine tradition of the Veda and pure Vedanta—in which he was steeped—his Essays in English stand in a class by themselves. His brilliant summary of the Life Divine, within a hundred pages of inspired writing, won special appreciation from Sri Aurobindo and is easily the best book of its kind on the magnum opus so far. The present publication is a faithful and lucid translation of the Aitareya Upanishad (along with the text). The tone of the rendering is set in the Peace Chant itself :

"My speech is firmly held in my mind ; my mind is firmly held in my speech. O Thou who art Manifestation, be manifest unto me ! Guarding my knowledge like a lynch-pin the wheel, do not let fall away the truth taught to my ear ! By this knowledge ~ that I learn I shall firmly hold the days and the nights. I will utter the Reality, I will utter the Truth. May that nourish me, may that nourish the Teacher. Me may that nourish, the Teacher may that nourish. Let the Peace descend."

The entire translation is forceful and authentic with the note of the original in every line.

M. P. PANDIT

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