The change does not need our help to come, but we need to open ourselves to the consciousness so that its coming is not in vain for us.

THE MOTHER

The Mother of God is master of our souls.

SRI AUROBINDO

THE MOTHER WITHDREW FROM HER

PHYSICAL BODY ON 17-11-73

The Mother's body belonged to the old creation. It was meant to be the pedestal of the New Body. It served its purpose well. The New Body will come.

This is a test, how far we are faithful to Her, true to Her Consciousness.

The revival of the body would have meant revival of the old troubles in the body. The body troubles were eliminated so far as could be done while in the body—farther was not possible. For a new mutation, a new procedure was needed. "Death" was the first stage in that process.

NOLINI KANTA GUPTA

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

A REVIEW OF OUR ASHRAM LIFE

IN its early days, quite at the beginning, we may now say, long long ago, the Ashram from its very start and quite spontaneously and inevitably grew into a community life. That is to say, the individuals ceased to have any personal possessions. Whatever they had belonged not to themselves but to the group, rather to the Master of the group, the Guru, to the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. Whatever they had, they considered as having received from the Mother for use only. They were not proprietors or possessors of anything: whatever they needed or they thought they needed, they had to ask for it and the Mother decided what they should have or not. It was a joyous surrender of possessions and a grateful acceptance of gifts. One may yet remember the beautiful movement that impelled each one of those who were fortunate to be there at that time. One is reminded of a parallel movement, although on a different field, described by Tagore in his well-known lines:

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There was a scuffle and scramble

A great hurry as to who would be the first

to throw away his life.

Well, it was a picture worth-contemplating. Here is one carrying his trunk or valise or wallet, and placing it before the Mother, displaying all his possessions and receiving them back from her as her gift. She did not take away anything as superfluous or not necessary. It was for us to judge and decide what was really necessary and what was luxury. We had to be sincere. She was generosity itself.

The life of each one was directly linked with the Mother. The relation between individuals was founded on the relation each one had with the Mother. It did not depend on one's liking (or disliking), one's attraction (or repulsion) but it was as necessitated by the need of the common life as arranged by the Mother.

Such a life was possible because of two reasons: (i) a physical reason and (ii) a psychological reason. The physical reason was, the number of people forming the Ashram was very small: instead of the two thousand and odd that we are today, there were at that time (the time I am speaking of) barely fifty. And there were no children.¹ And of men, only those who were allowed, who had a real call for the spiritual life, those alone who were chosen by the Mother and Sri Aurobindo and permitted to live here. And here is the natural psychological reason: it was a select group who had already had an inner life and spiritual aspiration. And so they were ready for a life of surrender and self-giving, obedience and allegiance to the Guru. They did not come ignorant and innocent of the rudimentary elements of spiritual life.

The work that the Mother could do then and was doing, She has Herself described and explained to us. It was the creation of a world — a region at least — of the higher consciousness in which every one who participated had his own place, every one with his soul-being sufficiently in front; and this being She could connect or link up with a being of the higher sphere — a counterpart, an over-soul as it were for each soul. It was a kind of descent — a subtle incarnation of the Gods which the Mother's Grace occasioned or

¹ The first child that came was Anu, then five years old,

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brought about into the elevated and sublimated human level.

The ground had already been prepared, we may note, by the descent of the 24th November 1926, the descent of the Overmind or Krishna-consciousness into Sri Aurobindo's body-consciousness and thence generally into the earth-atmosphere and becoming its natural and permanent possession.

But arrived at one point Sri Aurobindo happened to make an observation which meant halt! The Mother narrates to us the story in an amusing way. One day Sri Aurobindo was telling the Mother: "What you are doing is very fine and very grand. It will bring you name and fame, you will become a world-figure and your work a marvel. It will be a grand succès." Well, that was sufficient. The whole thing dropped from the Mother's hands. The new creation vanished in a moment as it were, there was a pralaya.

The Gods withdrew, we came down with a thud upon earth — down to earth, earth to earth. We are still there, crawling, forward I hope, as best we can.

This creation of a luminous world in a higher sphere of the mind which Mother attempted could not be fully achieved; for the foundations were not properly laid, the basic ground was not prepared. Any higher structure of the mind and Overmind must be built upon man's vital being and physical life. The new creation left out of account these realities of basement, so one had to come down, forgetting for the moment the higher realisation, into these darker regions and make a thorough cleaning of them. The regions of the vital consciousness and the physical consciousness are, as we all know, full of human failings and dangerous complications. One had to leave the heavens and come down to these lower levels and tackle the problems that beset them, the crucial problems whose solution alone could lay a strong foundation for the final consummation, the supreme transformation. One had to face the stark realities there and master them before one could think of a heavenly ascent. So we all became once more ordinary human beings with human weaknesses and a modicum of aspiration perhaps. This was then the task given to all to battle through and conquer here below. The scene changed completely. A mid-summer night's dream turned almost into a sombre Hamlet-tragedy.

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The first sign of this Return, this resumption of life as it is, was the re-assertion of the individual, the freedom of the personal unit. Because of the increased number of people and because of the incursion of children, the earlier frame could no longer hold good. The willing surrender of individuality is a lesson that has to be acquired and achieved: it is not just God's gift, for the many. The many have to grow, grow by degrees, through toil and trouble, and slowly led into the mysteries of the higher realisation of surrender and self-giving. And towards that independence, freedom is the first step. And once the climb-down begins, it does not admit of an arrest, it becomes a slide-down, a continuous descent until you reach the very rock-bottom of the vale of tears. The Roman poet spoke of the easy descent from the hills towards the river Averno.

The realisation aimed at demands a wholesale change, an integral transformation; it does not rest content with a partial success, an attainment on one level, on one portion of the being. There is therefore a global shake-up, nothing is allowed to remain in its old status unnoticed, all must come out and declare themselves to the Light. Hence the darkness of it all. All the impurities, imperfections and vilenesses show themselves — the grass-roots as they say, that have to be extirpated and the ground ploughed and furrowed — prepared for the new seed. It is a difficult time, the heroic soul must bear and stand, know what it is and move bravely on.

I spoke of the community ideal that obtained among us at the outset of our life here, that broke to pieces. Individualism reared its gruesome head with all its inevitable consequence: egoism had uncontrolled sway, instead of submission and surrender and obedience, freedom attained complete freedom, liberty pushed to license.

Like individuals collective bodies also (in the matter of work and enterprises) were allowed freedom to grow — or perhaps not to grow — independently. Each group or section, each undertaking sought to depend upon itself, secured its own particular equipment and resources: its gains were its own; and naturally losses were bound to be more than the gains, the real gain was perhaps the experience. The experience is meant to develop the consciousness and it is hoped that the consciousness did make a gain.

The freedom, the devolution or departure from the central

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control went so far as to bring about, as I say, almost a real separation between the two: the same tendency, by the way, as we may notice in the play of world politics today.

The limbs declared their independence and sought and fought for this independence but that could only be at the cost of the Heart. The Calvary of the Divine lay precisely here: it is due to this sense of separation, an individual exclusive self-existence prevailing in his children, issues of his own body. The units in the cosmic body of the Divine in the Ignorance are indeed ignorant; and the force that compels them to be together apparently is the forced bond of ignorance, they seem outwardly to press towards inevitable disintegration and chaos.

In reality however this movement of dispersion out of bounds, a flight away from the centre, harbours a reverse movement in it, a self-conscious advance towards a re-awakening to the one central consciousness that is in all, that is all.

This is an intermediate stage when the faults, the imperfections in the creation, the wrong forces that issued from and were inherent in the original Ignorance and first separation had to be tracked and met, could not be allowed to lie dormant eternally; therefore they rose and declared themselves so that the Light can deal with it and swallow it.

One remembers the legend of the Vedic Rishi Agastya and his consort who once attempted a new and renovated creation. They were engaged in a tremendous and superhuman labour to discover the root of evil upon earth: they dug up, opened out its very bowels: they went deeper and deeper, layers after layers of obstructive darkness till they arrived at the very source of the Night. They brought in there with them a light that could produce a reversal of consciousness changing darkness into radiance.

The lower sphere of the vital and the physical is a mass of ignorant Nature (Prakriti) — all moving together helplessly, mechanically, bound together indissolubly to the one inexorable fate, and it stands on the rock of utter unconsciousness — the Incon-scient — which is the very basis and stuff of that sphere. Consciousness, the conscient Being has to come down or emerge and penetrate there, break the hard block of inert Matter, striking and scattering

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and throwing up as it were, its myriad disparate bits, turning them into particles of Light and Consciousness. These free sparks, the first-born of Consciousness at the outset became erratic, errant conscious units, free but fighting against each other, each exclusive in its unitary consciousness: but that was the way towards a purer, higher, wider, integrating consciousness. As the consciousness it works and moves forward, the dross, the grit is blown away and works towards a cleaner light and a harmonic weaving of all component units.

We are thus in a transition period, it is an interregnum, it is beset with great difficulties but they are also great opportunities. The calvary is not merely a passage of a pain and suffering, it is a purgatory, that is to say, a period or a zone, a process where the being and consciousness is cleaning itself, throwing off its scales, shuffling its old skin and in course of time it will come out in a rejuvenated body and in a harmonious setting.

Paradise Lost thus will have one day inevitably as its sequel and consummation Paradise Regained.

NOLINI KANTA GUPTA

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FRAGMENTS

THE KENA

THE first two words of the Kena, like the first two words of the Isha, concentrate into a single phrase the subject of the Upanishad and settle its bounds and its spirit. By whom is our separate mental existence governed, who is its Lord and ruler? Who sends forth the mind, kena presitam, who guides it so that it falls in its ranging on a particular object and not another (kena patati). The 'mind is our centre; in the mind our personal existence is enthroned: Manomayah prāna-śarīra-netā pratisthito'nne, a mental guide and leader of the life and body has been established in matter, and we suppose and feel ourselves to be that mental being. But what guides the mind itself? Is it the mental ego as the unreflecting thinker usually and naturally supposes? As a matter of fact it is perfectly within our knowledge and experience that the mental ego- guides our actions only partially and imperfectly; it is governed by other forces, it is driven often by impulses that it cannot understand, it receives indications from a superconscious sources; it is associated with an immense amount of subconscious action of which it is ignorant or over which it has only a partial control. Guide and leader perhaps, but certainly not the master. Who then is the master? Mind is not all we are. There is a vital force in us independent of mind, for although two work together, act upon each other, they are still different movements. Our life goes on or ceases, rests or is active, caring nothing after all about the mind and its notions. It serves it as a master whose interest it cannot afford to neglect but does not always obey it and insists on the rights of its own separate existence. Who sent out this life ,force, who yoked it or applied it to these bodies and these actions, kena praiti yuktah prānah prathamah, the epithet is used to indicate the essential life force as distinct from the particular life functions called in Vedantic psychology the five pranas.

^{1 2} Doubtful reading.

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The Kena Upanishad is remarkable for its omissions. It omits to tell us what in relation to the transcendent and immanent Brahman this mind, life, sense-activity really are. It omits even to mention one tattva which one would think as ·important as mind, life and sense-activity - there is no least reference to Matter. These omissions are remarkable; they are also significant. The Sage of the Kena Upanishad has a distinct object in view; he has selected a particular province of Knowledge. He is careful not to admit anything which does not bear upon that object or to overstep the strict limits of that province. Matter is beyond his immediate field, therefore he makes no reference to Matter. Careless of comprehensiveness, he keeps to the exact matter of his revelation - the working relations . between man's mental life and his Supreme Existence. With the same scrupulous reserve he abstains from the discussion of the nature of these organs and their essential relation to the Supreme Existence. For this knowledge we have to resort to other Scriptures.

The subject of the Talavakara Upanishad is indicated and precisely determined by its opening word, Kena, very much as we have seen the subject of the Isha Upanishad to be indicated and precisely determined by its opening words Isha Vasyam. To reveal the true master of our mental life, the real Force of the Vitality which supports it and of the sense activities which minister to it and of the mentality which fulfils it in this material existence, is the intention of the Upanishad.

 SRI AUROBINDO

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SRI AUROBINDO AND THE BHAGAVAD GITA

VII LOVE: THE CULMINATION

FOR a human being, to know and to do is not enough: the heart, the emotional nature remains unsatisfied — the deep centre of the being that, as observed by the keen logician Pascal, has reasons unknown to the mind. It is true that the mind is the most particular human development; but also in humanity the Soul grows large, and first comes forward in a leading capacity. Certainly, again, the Soul is not very active in the majority of mankind; indeed overall it is perhaps more evident in dogs; yet in man the capacity first arises, to make the deep central being the real centre, and guide to Divinity. For this he must overcome his animalism and his cruder emotionality, become psychically refined.

One should understand that this has nothing to do with what the "scientists" call "psychic phenomena"; the "phenomena" that they speak of are trivial mental tricks or activities of the subtle-physical or lower vital worlds, and have nothing to do with the true psyche; they are miscalled and misunderstood, not seen in context and perspective, because of the crude and dark psychology — the psychological ignorance — of those who are fascinated by them. Without a true inner, yogic knowledge one confuses everything, and makes his sacrifice to creations or manifestations of the ignorance, and his own feeble and wooden constructions. All this has nothing to do with the refinement either of the emotional or of the mental nature, and leaves one a prey to the clamant insistences of the unregenerate vital complex, even intensifying this hold.

The heart yearns and longs, and is never satisfied; the emotional nature surges and sinks, loves but with a mixture of hatred and self-clinging, is moved passionately by the flow and the waves of the vital impetus and substance, back and forth and up and down, ever between desire and aversion, exultation and despair, joy and grief and pain. Out of this the awakened, the noble heart will come free: it will love more and more, expand its love and find its worthiest object and its true being and meaning: while its love may be particularized, it also grows to embrace the world, and seeks and eventually

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finds its true centre, source and very life, in God. Then its Love is divine, and nothing like the human substitute and perversion, poor approximation and travesty.

The mysticism of divine Love, the sacrifice of devotion and adoration, has had a great and a flourishing development in the world. The majority of people of course are more emotional than mental, and naturally take the emotional course when they turn toward deeper and higher things. Their attachments become sublimated and refined, and eventually can merge in or give way to the one attachment of the lover for the Beloved: until at the very height of spiritual Love they are so at one with the Beloved that they love impartially all his world, his creation and all existence, his very being in its myriad aspects, masks and forms. Devotional mysticism has been a large element of the Islamic world, where it is brought to its fullest or at least its brightest and most fragrant flower in the Persian poets; and as we are told by Omar Khayyam (translated by Swami Govinda Tirtha), "The shell of heart contains the pearl of soul" — here being the kernel of the matter: by deepening the heart nature one comes to his true central being, that is linked and eventually united with Divinity. Christianity too has had its devotional mysticism, and the pierced and flaming heart of St. Teresa of Avila in that Castilian land of "saints and stones", the "transverberated" heart in which she died because she could not die, may be taken as the great emblem of the whole quest. But it is in India that the mysticism of Love has had its fullest and greatest flowering, and come to its consummate and all-embracing character; and here the Gita is the great pioneering scripture and moving power.

Arjuna is told positively and categorically that the greatest and completest path is that of the devotee, the lover of God. Only one who loves God, and surrenders everything to Him, can come to Him completely. The devotion, the adoration of the Gita is a calm and collected thing, it is tempered by knowledge and the disciplined will; it does not take any of the ecstatic forms that came later in Indian history. Neither does it penetrate to the true Psychic Being, which larger Yoga had to await the advent of Sri Aurobindo. But we are assured by Krishna that Devotion, Love, is the very crown of yoga and its greatest and highest intensity; and this Sri Aurobindo has

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reaffirmed, and made the key movement of the great Integral Yoga that he has brought to the world. Yoga is a turning to the Divine: the fullest and most complete and most intimate turn comes in the deep central being, the true Soul that is Love, ineffable sweetness and the rapture of divine Bliss, Ananda. It is this that leads and moves the evolution and brings all beings home, the Love that is God.

This, like all yoga, has many stages, and perfection is not won instantly or in a day. At first there is imperfect sincerity, and much intrusion, insistence, mixture of the vital dulness — ignorance and darkness, however keen and vivid, colourful and joyful it may be. Its joy sinks to desolation in the absence of the Beloved, even to abuse of the Beloved, and this is neither psychic nor spiritual. It is not an undisciplined emotionality that is required and divinely given, but a Bhakti Yoga: a progressive Union of the Bhakta, the devotee, with the divine peace and freedom that is Love. The complete Bhakti is also Knowledge, in which difficulties and differences are harmonized, integrated and reconciled and transformed in a larger being, and the great mystery of personality is given its due: in which there can be at once perfect union and identity and every possible difference and relationship. The fullness of this is missed by the mental path, and by Knowledge alone. Only in Love is the Sacrifice consummate, the mutuality brought to its culmination.

The yoga of the heart is the easiest yoga, because the most direct and the most intimately intense. The yoga of the will, of action, is more external, and requires constant collectedness and discipline; so too the yoga of the mind, of study and meditation: this is a long, strenuous and laborious path, and does not lead directly at all to the Fulness and the awakening of the Soul. And any idea that these paths and methods are greater because more difficult is only one of the countless delusions of the Ignorance. Whatever brings one most quickly and most completely to God is the greatest thing, even if one shall be carried along with no effort of his own. A Mozart who can write great music as naturally as other men breathe is greater than an endlessly laborious Salieri, in whose music there is only labour, and no breath of life; a copious Shakespeare is greater than any costive and laborious Modern that we might name. The parallel is not exact, for the other yogas do yield great fruits when persistently and successfully

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practised, rightly done,' by those competent and ready; while in art nothing can be done without inspiration; but the point is that the path of the devotee is the most direct path — that is to say, if one can take it. One may well have to proceed by one of the other paths; it is a matter of his individual nature and destiny. Then, while to be complete he must eventually quicken in his devotional nature, so too to be complete the yoga of the devotee must also include the yoga of the worker and the yoga of the knower. But if one can begin with the heart, he can bring the will and the mind after him with relative ease.

While the way of the heart is easiest, it is not necessarily very easy. There is the great jungle of the vital nature in which the emotions are entangled, and it is all too easy to stay there, and try to deal with the Beloved as one would with some human lover. Cultivated alienation and refined teasing and all the old love-sport that gives spice to the vital desires and activities of human lovers may lead to a deepening, but it is very likely to rest or rather to halt contented with itself, and give a kind of divine sanction and aura to the old ways. This kind of thing has been largely avoided among the Christians, who start from a theology that is against it. But they have their own difficulties, and St. John of the Cross has made familiar, at least in the Western world, the incidence of a "dark night" that overwhelms the devotee, when he is withdrawn from the senses and passions but not yet united with God. Dryness, dulness, arrestation of progress indeed are common to all yogas; not even the way of Love is exempt from them, and in fact it is in the heart that they are felt most intensely. But still they need not come to the lover with any commanding or desolating presence. St. Teresa for example had always "consolations", and commiserated with St. John of the Cross on his not having them: (not however in the human way of pity and tears and lamentation). The dryness, the dulness are overcome when one has gone deep enough and the influence of the Soul is felt sufficiently. Sri Aurobindo has said that when the Soul actually comes forward, the long path can be sunlit all the way, and a flow of the living waters and the sweetness of the Divine.

We all live in the flow of Tapas that is existence, and like all yoga the way of the Bhakta too requires discipline and withdrawing.

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But for him it is easiest, because the flame in his heart is kindled by a large preliminary withdrawal and turning to God, and so he is further ahead when he begins. When one loves God one naturally is withdrawn from the outer and the lesser movements, and all that would separate more from Him - or from her, for the Divine Shakti too is the Love of the devotee. She is not mentioned in the Gita, but there is no necessary exclusion of her in what is said there, and she has come forth fully, directly within humanity, in this time of the greater Kurukshetra, the struggle for the divine Advent and the decisive defeat of the hostile powers. Love too is a battle, and will not have the world less than Love. She who is the sweetness and Bliss of existence destroys as well as saves; and the true devotee is blessed in all circumstances; he is not just austerely resigned and mentally convinced, like Job, he is not alone equable as in the yoga of work and that of knowledge, the will and the mind: he is consumed undyingly in Love, and all is the movement, the pulsation of its rapture. Pain itself he can turn to Bliss, when he has come sufficiently to the ineffable being of the Love that is Brahman and his world.

To perform the Sacrifice of Love is not so easy as just to cry "Take me, sweet Jesus!" with an aroused and turbid emotionality. This in fact may be considered a kind of Protestantism that protests, as it were, against the real thing. The vital emotions must be replaced by the psychic and the spiritual. As in all yoga and all evolution there is a progressive development, that is there is a gradual unfolding, and not at once the full burst and bloom. The Divine is sought for different reasons by different natures, different men. Some, the least awakened, are bowed down by sorrow and suffering, grief and affliction and deprivation, the pain of the world: they turn toward God or some god or greater power for relief, still on a purely personal and egoistic level. Then there are those who seek after goods and riches and worldly benefits, not with true devotion but with worldly desire and the expansiveness of the vital ego. Here there is a progress from dulness and weakness to vigour and strength. Above this are the men of light, mental balance and harmony, who seek Knowledge and turn for it toward the. Divine. Last and greatest are those who, having Knowledge, adore God for his own sake. Indeed this last is the only true Bhakta, the one who adores the Supreme for

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no reason or motive ulterior to the sheer adoration; which is perfected in Knowledge, and is not only a rapture of the refined emotions — a spontaneous welling, not alone of the heart, but of the whole, integrated nature. The Lord however does not withhold support and sanction from the lesser stages; if he did the greater could not supervene, and there could be no culmination; there could be no evolutionary process. Having bewildered all beings in the Maya that is existence, the Divine does not utterly abandon them to find their own way. If he did, they would remain forever bound to the wheel. He accepts the lesser turning, the rudimentary devotion, and helps it grow. Those who worship lower powers and sacrifice to the flames of their own desire may take many life-times to come to the true sacrifice and turning, but the life-times are before them, and the Divine is always before them, and within them and above. He makes firm the faith of his devotee, however dark and narrow it is, however egoistic and deluded. "By the force of that faith in his cult and worship he gets his desire and the spiritual realisation for which he is at the moment fitted. By seeking all his good from the Divine, he shall come in the end to seek in the Divine all his good. By depending for his joys on the Divine, he shall learn to fix in the Divine all his joy. By knowing the Divine in his forms and qualities, he shall come to know him as the All and the Transcendent who is the source of all things."¹ To know him thus as the Transcendent that is the All is to have the fullest and surest foundation for the adoring, living flame of Love that is itself the true foundation and being of all things, and the return of the Lord to himself.

Love is at once knowledge and work, and indispensable to the devotee is the foundation of transcendent Knowledge and the spiritual stability and strength, vigour and power of the yoga that is God's work in the world. Then also loving truly is indispensable to the realization of Sachchidananda, the Supreme. That love without Knowledge is not enough we may see in the great Spanish mystics, and indeed St. Teresa, with her nature compact of devotion, high intellect and vigour of activity may be seen as a radiant promise of the full realization: her books in fact, inimitably charming yet clearsighted and firm-willed, steel-hard-and-keen, can be a good introauction,

¹ Essays on the Gita, II, 2. (Centenary ed. Pp. 273-4)

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not just for a Christian or one of predominantly devotional turn, not only to devotional mysticism but to mysticism itself. One must keep on, the path is never ending; and fullness of one discipline and way must eventually open out to the fullness of all the others. There is some indication that this woman, whom the Spanish have called the "great father", and who has strong claim to the distinction of the greatest Christian mystic, was close to exceeding the bounds .and bursting the bonds of Christian theology: the indication is strong in her last book, about the heavenly Mansions: that she was moving toward the true experience of the impersonal Atman — the real experience, and not just the intellectualized taste and hint of it that is exhibited by Meister Eckhart: this would have given the necessary foundation and fathomless support for the utmost development of her devotional nature; but the Inquisition was always there, to look over her indomitable shoulder, and death intervened. Every path leads eventually to the one God who opens out in all paths, every method is a true method, when followed truly. There is also a heart meditation, a concentration in the midst of the chest, and the inner centre there: one goes deep, on the movement of the Soul's influence he turns inward to seek the Soul, and find there the Lord and his equal, identical Shakti enthroned, sustaining and blessing his whole nature and leading it to perfection; but the true and the fullest method and the whole story is in complete Surrender, a complete offering and giving of all one's nature, without shade of reservation or slightest touch of insincerity or ego-holding, to the Divine. This, when it can be done, is the one thing needful; this alone can bring to the seas of Ananda, and the Beatitude that shall make humanity divine.

Prayer too can be a kind of meditation, and can be carried on without words or formulation, as a matter of giving, and not of asking. It is a development of the Faith that moves mountains. The old weight and looming immensity of sin, darkness and error is removed, and all the difficulties and the entanglements of this world that is not God. Faith indeed cannot be dispensed with, and is most fully developed by the devotion of the heart. Faith is not a belief in something irrational, certainly not a belief in something because it is irrational: it is a spiritually or psychically awakened assurance of divine being and presence and the divine meaning and order of the world, an assurance

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that rises, penetrates and expands to a knowledge, peace and union that is above the mental, and exceeds it on all sides. The true order, meaning and karma, the web of deed and consequence, compensation and interaction, the balance of the Sacrifice and the deathless harmony that makes an ever increasing harmony of the discords of the world, is neither logical nor sub-logical: it is what may be called a super logic of the Divine, the way of the Logos, the Word in which God breathes existence, and sings glory in the vibrance of the waters; the vast ocean and the mingling streams. This is felt in the Faith by which the world is glorified, the Sacrifice of Love. Here one finds the wings of swift liberation and entire fulfillment. The exclusive way to the Silence cuts off many of the living springs; it gives Peace but not Rapture; the all-embracing way of love and adoration opens all the springs for the sweetness and light, the radiant and ravishing flower and garden of the deepest nature that rises full to God. On the way the Silence and the Impersonality is found, but only as one aspect of the completeness. This indeed is the royal road, the Sovereign within the nature bringing the nature to the Sovereign of all existence. The unmanifest One, Brahman the Indefinable, offers no help to the arduous climber, gives him no relationship of sweetness and love; but the higher Brahman, the Lord, does this, for his devotee who is awakened to the inward and upward movement of .the Sacrifice. It is not truly the unmanifested and the withdrawn by which all things are known, but the Lord above, who gives alone to his devotee. The snares of the ego are loosened and the walls are broken down, and one ascends on Bliss to his eternal blooming; his Love is of God alone and thus embraces all.

In absolute silence sleeps an absolute Power.

Awaking, it can wake the trance-bound soul

And in the ray reveal the parent sun:

It can make the world a vessel of Spirit's force,

It can fashion in the clay God's perfect shape.

To free the self is but one radiant pace;

Here to fulfil himself was God's desire.¹

¹ Savitri, Book III, Canto II. (Centenary ed. Pp. 311-2)

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The fulfillment comes in the fulfillment of the entire nature, that alone is given in the Sacrifice of Love. It is the parent Sun that we want, and not just his aspects or his rays; the perfect forming of the world for God's inhabitation, not the knowledge alone that is a release, rather a still dark escape, from Nature and God's working and meaning there, his living presence and his progressive unfolding. For this one must be the Devotee, whose increase of knowledge is increase of love and power for working, which in turn increases his knowledge, in the process that does not end in transcendence but brings the world supported by the transcendence to its divine culmination.

The release into the non-dualistic, silent Brahman is essential; but also essential, for fullness and completion, is the following of the evolutionary nisus, and the living knowledge and understanding that there is always more to know and attain. To cut the knot does not end the process: it maims the seeker, and takes him from his consummation and his divine glory. To see all things in the Self and the Self in all things is only partly done in the aloof and featureless infinity: the knowledge must be intensified, made living, proved and perfected by a descent to the arena and the hard ground of growth, and brought to its full splendour in the divine unfolding of existence. The fathomless impersonal calm is the indispensable base and ground; but the base and foundation of all personal relationships in their manifold varieties: not just the transcending of the world but the inhabiting of it, not just that, but the complete mastery. This comes from the Supreme Himself, the Lord: and the Lord assures them that all are dear to him, but dearest is his Devotee, who abiding and embracing all surrenders to him with his whole nature. He alone who is God's perfect lover comes to God, and can be God's perfect instrument. The heart awakened in its depths will not accept rebuff or any difficulty: it does not struggle, it grows by the debilities and crosses of existence, and directs, though unknown, the struggling and the aspiration. Other ways stop short, but there is no stopping the progress of the Soul, the Guide in the evolution. The opening Flower is a Flame that redeems the world.

JESSE ROARKE

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THE RELEVANCE OF SRI AUROBINDO'S TEACHING

TO THE PRESENT TIME

WHAT is the main issue of Sri Aurobindo's teaching? In the last ^TV decade of the last century Sri Aurobindo had seen that a big change was about to come upon humanity and he felt impelled and called to prepare himself for it. This change he later defined as the corning of the Supramental age and the contemporary upheaval and disturbance as "the evolutionary crisis", the crisis tending to take man out of the stage of mind and lead him to that of the supermind or out of conflict and division into unity and wholeness.

This impending change had activated his search for the super-mind, a progressive self-opening to its influence, preparation of the inner consciousness to receiving it, a descent of it in due time and a progressive transformation of human nature. Of this a substantial part has already become a reality. A complete clarity as to what supermind is and its competence to change human nature and what is more important its actual descent which took place in 1956. Its progressive penetration into earth is now taking place and we clearly see on the one hand much break up of old formations and, on the other hand, clear indication of a new trend of creation, a seeking for the spiritual through Yoga and otherwise, an appreciation of the need of unity in mankind, an increasing recognition of the quality of wholeness in science and philosophy and a general rise of the psychological values in life and culture. These indications are often not sufficiency appreciated and enjoyed, because our attachment to the past is much and we feel the loss of the old more.

The stage of clear and effective transformation is yet ahead of us and we can only look forward to it. It is only when such transformation gets going that the work of Sri Aurobindo will get into its full swing. At the present we are really preparing for it.

Thus we are really in the middle of Sri Aurobindo's work and the great effects of it have been, as it were, well prepared for, but their occurrence has to be carefully seen to.

Such is the situation and, in view of it, how surprising will the feeling appear to us, the feeling which entertains the question of relevance of Sri Aurobindo's teaching to the present time.

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The feeling is perhaps born of certain physical appearances of things, that Sri Aurobindo is no more, that he passed away long back, that he is no longer at work and that we are left with his books and teaching to avail of for such use as we might make of them.

All this needs careful examination. We are here caught in a cobweb of superficial phenomena. We need to go deeper into things to the spiritual realities. We are not unfamiliar with the phenomena that the work of dedicated personalities becomes more powerful and effective after their passing. The fact is that the Soul conscious of itself and its work and its dedication to the work, continues to carry on its work in its disembodied form through spiritual support and inspiration to responsive individuals even more freely and intensively.

And the fact of the matter is that Sri Aurobindo's work has had a marvellous development and expansion since his passing. Besides there are quite a number of persons who have a vivid experience of repeated contact with the spiritual being of Sri Aurobindo and his persistent working.

Sri Aurobindo is therefore there and at his work. This spiritual reality of the matter we should be able to recognise and appreciate. We should at least put in a serious effort to do so and if we are able to get even a slight feeling for the Presence of Sri Aurobindo the entire question of the relevance of his teaching to the present time will get its basic clarification.

But another approach to this question is also possible. Let us consider Sri Aurobindo's important writings and their issues. Let us take The Life Divine Its issue is a philosophical or intellectual clarification of the possibility, nay the necessity of the emergence of divine consciousness and divine living in our ordinary material existence.

The evolving world of matter, life and mind must yet have higher levels of existence in the offing and unless the world has had all these latently present in it how could it bring them out in concrete form through progressive evolution. There are lots of details involved in this marvellous world progression from inert matter to blissful divine consciousness and all these are discussed in the large writing of The Life Divine,

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Will not this book then hold good while the terms and the context of the world progression hold good? Of course it will, if it embodies the essential truths of the situation.

In the long cultural history of India many writings have come up and inspired man for a time and then passed away. But the Upanishads have proved to be of undying freshness and inspiration. They were really born of an intense spiritual yearning and experience and. embodied the same and thus carry in this embodied form too the quality of the Spirit.

Sri Aurobindo's The Life Divine even as an intellectual exposition is really a transcript of his spiritual experience and gives a complete feeling of long validity and power of wide illumination over life's issues stretching over a long course of future evolution.

His The Synthesis of Yoga is the practical method of life, giving elaborate guidance as to how the ordinary ignorant life attached to appearances of things and involved in sorrow, suffering, error and incapacity, can rise to a status of divine consciousness. In fact having risen- to the status of supreme height to raise the entire life to the same through a persistent descent of the higher into the lower.

We can only try to imagine what must be the validity of this writing. It is a yogic system that takes cognizance of the contemporary conditions of life in the world, as also of the long course of future evolution in a clear and a vivid manner. Evidently it is intended for a long long availability and validity.

Then we might consider Savitri, his great poetical work. At the time of Sri Aurobindo's passing Savitri was read and enjoyed by just a few. Today it thrills quite a large number. It virtually combines Sri Aurobindo's philosophy as well as yoga. It gives to a sincere reader a view and a vision of truth at its various planes and also leads him progressively through repeated enjoyments to its realisation in actual experience and life. Such is the power of poetry and immense concentration that Sri Aurobindo bestowed on the perfection of his Savitri, a delightful companion to lead man to truth, God, Soul, immortal living.

Sri Aurobindo's writings can be read and felt by anybody today and heartily availed of for the joy and enrichment of his life. He will

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discover for himself the relevance of Sri Aurobindo's teaching to the present time.

This experience of the writings is an easier appreciation, but one should also try to discover the Presence of Sri Aurobindo in the present situation, make" a contact with him and see how he is directing our affairs and our evolution. This experience would be a marvellous enrichment of life.

INDRA SEN

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THE SYNTHESIS OF YOGA (AN OUTLINE)

Part I, Chapter 4

"THE SACRIFICE"

THE universe is a manifestation of One Self and Spirit. All individual existences survive and grow by a constant giving to and receiving from the larger whole of which they are a part. Nothing can exist without this interchange. This is the law of sacrifice. Ego-bound man thinks himself separate and independent. Though he is normally unaware of the law, still it governs the functioning of all his energies —physical, vital, mental and spiritual. But man can become conscious of the law, accept it gladly, and give of himself freely. The highest form of sacrifice is spiritual, an unreserved self-giving and union with the Divine. The true nature of that sacrifice is not self-immolation, self-effacement or self-mortification, but rather self-fulfilment through self-giving and a transformation of human into divine nature. The sacrifice may be made to the Divine in things and creatures or beyond all forms, yet always it is received and accepted by the One Supreme.

Every activity of our life — even the most common and material — must become a conscious offering to the Divine. Through this approach the paths of works, devotion and knowledge are unified in an integral whole. Our lives become a worship through consecrated service to the Master of Works, a constant remembrance, vision and communion with the Beloved, the One .Self as all, in all and embracing all.

Our sacrifice leads to experience of the Divine and a growing union not limited to a single type of identity but harmonising many aspects of the Infinite. The most fundamental experience is that of the eternal Self and Spirit behind, within, enveloping and transcending all manifestation in the universe. Knowledge may first come of the Divine as one's true Self or in oneself. Later the identity may include all the universe in or as that greater Self. Or there may be first the perception of the Divinity in the outer world dwelling in all and containing all. Later one realises this cosmic Spirit as one's own real Self. Or there may be an initial awakening to the Transcendent Divine above the individual and the world, a supreme Silence which later reveals itself as the Source of all manifestation. The Integral

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Yoga must not stop with these fundamental realisations but must also embrace other instrumental aspects of the Divine necessary for a complete knowledge of the Truth, and all these experiences must be reconciled with the manifest world so as to reveal the workings of the Spirit in life.

On each line of approach the seeker is confronted with a duality of two opposite terms of existence. On one line it is the opposition of Brahman and Maya: an infinite, eternal Self-Existence, Consciousness-Force, Bliss sustaining and informing all manifestation and a finite, transient, ignorant world of space and time. On another line it is the duality of Purusha-Prakriti, Soul-Nature: a silent, passive, witnessing Consciousness and an active executive Force and creative energy. Or there may be the experience of Ishwara and Shakti: One Supreme Being, Master, infinite Lord, illimitable Person and the World Mother, his conscious Force for manifestation and creation. There is still another duality which holds within itself the solution to the riddle of existence, the mystery of personality in an apparently impersonal universe. The seeker discovers a conscious Being within the inconscience of Matter as well as above the worlds, which manifests itself initially as impersonal mechanism of Nature, subconscient life and divided, limited mind. He sees the One Person expressing himself through innumerable personalities. In each of the dualities the seeker must know the One Divine Being manifesting itself as a biune reality and come to an integral knowledge in which all these complementary aspects are reconciled and unified.

The sacrifice is completed and the Integral Yoga achieves its goal by a threefold union with the Divine: a union in spiritual essence by identification of the individual soul with the One Spiritual Consciousness, a union by indwelling of our soul in love and beatitude in this highest Being, and a transformation of our human nature into the Divine Nature to serve as an instrument of Divine Works in the world.

The path is a dual movement of ascension of the soul and parts of nature to join their higher divine counterparts and a descent of the Divine Powers to transform and express themselves through the individual centre.

GARRY JACOBS

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SAVITRI — A DEPTH ANALYSIS

The Issue

(Book I: Canto 2)

'Her mind moved in a many-imaged past...

Dying, it lived imperishably in her;...

Invisible, a fateful ghost of self,

It bore the future on its phantom breast.

'The subliminal extends itself into an enveloping consciousness through which it receives the shock of the currents and the wave circuits pouring upon us from the universal mind, universal life, universal subtler matter forces. These unperceived by us on the surface are admitted by our subliminal self and turned into formations which can powerfully affect our existence without our knowledge.'¹

PAST is the father of the present and future the child of the now; the one fades away, feeding and ushering into existence the other; the fleeting hours sow the seeds of experience and build up an ever changing personality to meet the challenges of life; the shadowy images of the irrecoverable past reel off like a movie on the screen of the imagination of Savitri; they have proved as transitory and pleasing in their time as the waves that rise for a short while and sink; but she is already inured by a foreknowledge to the disaster threatening her; she is armed with a spirit of resilience and a capacity for endurance and she is prepared to avert the impending crisis by depending on the formations of the subliminal and deriving the might of a God from her psychic self.

As in a many-hued flaming inner dawn,

Her life's broad highways and its sweet bypaths

Lay mapped to her sun-clear recording view,...'

¹ Life Divine, p. 655.

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The surface personality which is pre-occupied with the immediate present and normally blocks the psychic entity within is shattered in a moment of stress; according to the exigency of the situation and the divine grace there descends a light by means of which a consciousness can pierce to the core, the roots of our being and bring in large drafts of strength: and with the help of such an inner vision she allows her mind to dwell on her career ever since she has accepted the mortal's lot. As clearly as in broad daylight, the salient facts of her life as well as the intricacies underlying them are mapped out in perfect clarity; her childhood days fast gliding on to a youthful paradise of Love, a passionate twelve month period and bringing her on to the precipice of doom, exposes her to a darkness; and in such a crisis, no artifice, no armour, can give the protection nor stave off the crisis except a resolute dependence on the un garbed entity within and its soul force.

'Her will must cancel her body's destiny____

Only the Self that builds this figure of self

Can rase the fixed interminable line...

Disown the legacy of our buried selves,

The burdensome heirship to our vanished forms...'

The physical mechanism of the mind, life and body are subject to the omnipotence of Nature, but man is not the body alone though he is under that mistaken impression. 'But body and mind are not creators of the spirit, the spirit is the creator of the mind and the body. The soul is not bound by the formula of the mental humanity; it did not begin with that and will not end with it; it had a pre-human past, it has a superhuman future.'¹ Therefore there is the potential within that can enable man to overthrow the yoke, the thraldom of Nature. 'Self-ignorance is therefore the root of all the perversity of our existence and that perversity stands fortified in the self-limitations, the egoism which is the form taken by that self-ignorance.'- We must learn to live within and no longer on the surface and be and act from the inner depths and from a soul that has become sovereign over Nature.³

¹ Life Divine, p. 677. ² Ibid, p. 152.  ³ Ibid, p. 653.

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The One becomes the Many; if the substratum on which the myriad play is staged is reached, destiny can not only be averted, but also conquered; the thread connecting the separative beads of individuations can be snapped and the stream of legacy or heritage flowing down from the previous to the present ego-formations can be effectively stemmed and the empire of the self established. It is in this way that the once living story' that has prepared and made our present fate can culminate in an emancipation by an uprooting of the possibilities for such repetitions. Savitri has got to remove such a road-block; make the passage smooth for the immortal; she must clear the ground; make it a clean slate for her to re-fashion her fate. She must disentangle herself, withdraw into herself; join issue on the borders of the unknown and not only vindicate her right to be 'but win back the love on extinction's verge'. She must rescue humanity from Nature's harsh economy; put an end to her usury, her Shylock Ian extortions in the shape of human suffering in pursuance of the past's bond executed in her favour; and this is possible by the spread of the divine consciousness which alone can effect the deliverance of humanity from the tyranny of the dualities such as life and death, pain and pleasure, shadow and darkness.

'The world unknowing, for the world she stood:'

Alone and unbefriended, concealing all her grief to herself, she is qui vive for the dolorous moment; the few hours between the now and the doom are marching off like a mailed battalion, crunching into an un-expressed but a self-contain ed grief, her heart; the way they march, the agony they cause aggravate the misery; but the destruction they fore-shadow make her feel that their movement is too quick; with her soul alert, and with ears tense, she listens for the foreseen tremendous step, the fatal movement of the enemy; several God messengers come and go, the world little recognising their ad vent or exit and here is another in Savitri who takes upon herself the burden of rescuing the world soul from the quagmire of mortality and grief.

With her mind a prey to the disquieting foreknowledge, she finds in the sylvan spot, the greenery, the hills, a milieu, an atmosphere and a silence which are a soul-stimuli, a solitude that puts

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her in communion with the divine; the austure sky above, the pointing hills below, the broad, deep-thoughted woods chequered with sun-beams and blithe flowers around, this is just the seclusion where the genius of the place, its titanic silence, calls for and responds to the deeps of silence in her; here in this abode of solitude and the smithy of silence, she forges her soul-strength; here the stillness felt the unspoken word and there is an ambience of divinity in the surroundings, a fecundity for communion with the sempiternal.

'Reduced the heavy framework of man's days...

To a first thin strip of simple animal wants,...

Had left in her deep room for thought and God.

There was her drama's radiant prologue lived.'

Man's lot cast in such nature's bounty, places him above want and the struggle for existence; it further teaches him a Spartan simplicity; gives him a plenitude of leisure; he can pursue the bent of his soul and Savitri lives the golden hours, the prologue of her life marked by the sweet felicities and the magnificent charms that are provided by nature.

'Here with the suddenness divine advents have,...

Love came to her hiding the shadow, Death....

Never a rarer creature bore his shaft,

That burning test of the godhead in our parts,

A lightning from the heights on our abyss.'

Acting from the surface consciousness, man plans, but God disposes off according to His dispensation and not the human calculation; this contretemps is not confined to man's actions alone; an element of suddenness, of unexpectedness, may be manifest also in the disclosure of the divine consciousness, to our narrow understanding; but what appears as abrupt has been long in gestation and bursts to view at the right time. We may quote from Life Divine. 'All nature's transformations do indeed wear the appearance of a miracle, but it is a miracle with a method; and her largest strides are taken over an assured ground, her swiftest leaps are from a base

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that gives security and certainty to the evolutionary saltus; a secret all wisdom governs everything in her, even the steps and the process that seems to be most unaccountable.'¹

In these picturesque surroundings of nature, she who has traversed the whole world in quest of a suitable mate makes her foredoomed choice being pierced with the shaft of love in the form of Satyavan little knowing that death is round the corner and that their conjugal felicities under its dark shadow are fated to be of short duration. Love is the only liberalising agent in a world where the narrow self is protected by the ego-walls from the impacts of the wider self; it is a Ray of its Love sent by the Divine Grace in response to the prayer of the Divine Spirit that has taken the plunge into the nescience and Love had never before a fitter habitation than in Savitri; it has a widening quality about it of inducing a self-expansion from its limits so as at least to embrace the family and to that extent to impose a self-abnegation; but in Savitri, 'Love finds its perfect shrine'.

'Near to earth's wideness, intimate with heaven,...

Her mind, a sea of white sincerity,

Passionate in flow, had not one turbid wave........

A body like a parable of dawn

That seemed a niche for a veiled divinity

Or golden temple door to things beyond.'

Though a mortal, she embraces the whole world in her consciousness; besides she is in direct colloquy or contact with heaven through her inner self; human redemption has become her passion, her mission; in the serene sea of her concern, solicitude for the human weal, there is not a trace, a disturbance of any selfishness; she looks a physical embodiment of a parable with emulsions of spiritual radiation; her body is a niche where the veiled goddess of cosmic consciousness is enthroned; she is a door, an ingress for the Beyond; she is like divine intoxicated priestess floating in the ecstasies of joy that is all the greater flowing as it does from the depths of her silence.

'A wide self-giving was her native act;

A magnanimity as of sea or sky...

¹ Life Divine, p. 829.

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Her kindly care was a sweet temperate sun,

Her high passion a blue heaven's equipoise.'

A spirit of self-sacrifice is her breath; the unfathomable depths of the sea or the inimitable expanse of the sky may be the measures of her self-offering; she is the temperate sun giving just the needed warmth and protection and the equanimity of her disposition is the serenity of the sky unmarred by any cloud.

'As might a soul fly like a hunted bird,...

In a haven of safety and splendid soft repose...

Recover the lost habit of happiness,

Feel her bright nature's glorious ambiance,

And preen joy in her warmth and colour's rule.'

Many a soul, haunted and harassed by the lacerating privations and cares of life, find in her proximity a secure anchorage; the composure of mind, lost, revisits them; they feel re-charged by the energising divinity reigning in her surroundings and they can re-enter the fields of activity like full-fledged birds.

'Love in her was wider than the universe,

The whole world could take refuge in her single heart.'

Love could not have a better abode than in Savitri; she does not have the restricting and the cramping walls separating her from the universal and shrinking her to no more than a dwarf doting upon the ego; in fact the whole cosmos is her soul and the world can easily take shelter in her heart; though descended to the earthly, she still retains her connection with her transcendent home and origin and it is no wonder if Love finds in her, a vastness congenial to him, a dwelling in which he can feel homely.

'The impunity of unborn Mights was hers.

Although she leaned to bear the human load,

Her walk kept still the measure of die gods.

Earth's breath had failed to stain that brilliant glass:

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Unsmeared with the dust of our mortal atmosphere

It still reflected heaven's spiritual joy.'

Though the spirit is lodged in her fleshy vessel and condemned to bear the cross, it has not lost its native brilliance and has retained the divine puissance; there is the majesty of the Gods in her gait; her soul-vision is undimmed by the smear of the earthly and the sordid; it emits still the spark celestial; standing apart from the fever and fret of life, the petty activities no more affect her than the picture projected by the arc-lamp in a theatre because she realises their evanescence and substantiality; and she grows under the protecting shield of the Transcendent.

'There is a darkness in terrestrial things

That will not suffer long too glad a note.'

Human happiness must needs be short-lived; the bliss that descends must ere-long be tainted; it has to struggle its way through the inconscience its base; even Savitri is no exception to the general rule and she too comes very soon within the orbit of the statute and the reach of the inescapable hand, the sway of inconscience and ignorance on Matter.

'The dubious godhead with his torch of pain...

And called her to fill with her vast self the abyss.'

Those born with a mission are subjected to a trial of strength with the giant of evolution before they can push the world to a further lap in the journey; they have to endure the darts of pain, the goads of suffering; forge an armour to resist; formulate new faculties for overcoming them; 'invoke new positives of knowledge' to open the line of advance; Savitri comes to the abyss that yawns before her; this chasm, this gulf in life is the dreadful death and she now feels called upon to bridge it, to span it with her self. The problem set is never beyond the calibre of man; the strength and the resourcefulness are readily available from the faith and the supreme confidence reposed in a protective Providence and the might to solve the problem is dowered to Savitri by the Lord.

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'For this she had accepted mortal breath;...

Whether to bear with Ignorance and Death

Or hew the ways of Immortality...

But not to submit and suffer was she born;

To lead, to deliver was her glorious part.'

The very advent of Savitri is highly purposeful; the issue before her is a cosmic issue affecting the entire humanity whether to abjectly bow to the tyranny of death and ignorance or to take up arms against them it is not an easy way; there is no ready-made path; she has to laboriously hew out, if necessary making herself a martyr, a way across the slippery, boggy, marshes of death; submission is not in her nature and she is born for leadership and the glory of human deliverance from that cold hand.

'Here was no fabric of terrestrial make

Fit for a day's use by busy careless Powers....

A chattel and a plaything of Time's lords,

Or one more pawn who comes destined to be pushed...

In the chess-play of the earth-soul with Doom,.....

She is not common clay; nor is she a form that comes up like a bubble and dissolves ere long; common mortals are they who are the formations according to a former determinism; by the very nature of their birth they are doomed to cyclic evanescence and Nature in her own heedless manner passes on to others, the more developed who can sub serve her purpose; they may appear like so many exhalations of a giant desire thrown up like floating baroques upon the ocean of life or they may appear like automatons without a will of their own, a sport for the Gods; they can be moved as they please; used like pawns on the vast chess-board of cosmic life; but Savitri is different and she is an emanation sent from the heavens.

'A conscious frame was here, a self-born Force.

In this enigma of the dusk of God,...'

This world presents the picture of an enigma where the dragon

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has not yet completely sloughed off the darkness of Ignorance, where there is the incompatibility of the boundless soul having to struggle within the cramping limits of a perishable body, where it has to submit to the dominance of Nature which appears to be inviolable and all-powerful; into such a world has descended the flame transcendent with an all-consuming power and though lodged in the mortal frame of Savitri, it has a force which is irresistible and invincible.

'This slow and strange uneasy compromise... .

Where all must move between an ordered Chance

And an uncaring blind Necessity,'

In this unequal partnership of soul and nature, Purusha and Prakriti a compromise seems unavoidable, a submission necessary; everything seems on one side a play of chance, a haphazard occurrence, but even there a method, a process is traceable; there is on the other side a compelling necessity making an event justified for lack of an alternative; there is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow and what appears to be a meaningless show, on a deeper look, seems to be pervaded, directed by a divine wisdom and necessity. 'Cosmic being is not a meaningless freak or a fantasy or a chance error, there is the divine significance and truth in it¹. 'This then is the necessity and justification of death, not as a denial of life, but as a process of life; death is necessary because eternal change of form is the sole immortality to which the finite living substance can aspire and eternal change of experience the sole infinity to which the finite mind involved in living body can attain'².

'Too high the fire spiritual dare not blaze.

If once it met the intense original Flame,

An answering touch might shatter all measures made

And earth sink down with the weight of the Infinite.'

In just proportions, the descent from on high should be, suited to the grade of the earthly vessel, lest it should break. 'The law of action of each grade in its emergence is determined not by its own

¹ Life Divine, p. 285. Ibid., p. 179.

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free, full and pure law of nature or vim of energy, but partly by its material organisation provided for it and partly by its own status, achieved degree, accomplished fact of consciousness.... Its effectivity is in some sort made up of a balance between the emergence and the countervailing grip of inconscience.'¹. 'Each grade of being exists in itself and by itself and is manifested according to its own character by its own proper energy and the gradations above or below it are not origins or resultant sequences but only degrees in the continuous scale of earth nature'².

'A gaol is this immense material world........

And the dual tables and the Karmic norm

Restrain the Titan in us and the God:

Pain with its lash, joy with its silver bribe

Guard the Wheel's circling immobility,...'

The world appears to be a vast prison-house where man has to complete his sentence of incarceration; wherever he turns there is an edict forbidding his free movements; he feels bound at every stage by the legacy of his actions pursuing him from the remorseless though buried past; he may be a giant or even a God, but he is not exempt; the law applies equally to all; the wheel goes its rounds perennially without making the slightest advance since it circles on an axle with a narrow periphery.

'Thus is the throne of the Inconscient safe...

And the Animal browses in the sacred fence

And the gold Hawk can cross the skies no more.'

Thus is the monarchy of the Inconscience secure and firm; any revolt subjects the rebel to the lash of pain or torture; he has to accept submission; be content with the present bribe of a pleasure oblivious of the pain lying in ambush; give up his grandiose plans; conform to the norms and the conventions; recant his ideals; give up the flights of a gold hawk into the ethereal and in a realistic fashion make of the body — an enclosure no doubt for the manifestation of

¹ Life Divine, p. 628. 2 Ibid., p. 739.

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the divine — a pasture of materialist hedonism, for him to browse upon.

'In her the superhuman cast its seed.

Inapt to fold its mighty wings of dream...

Compound with earth, struck from the starry list,

Or quench with black despair the God-given light.'

A spirit of temporising with the situation is not in her grain; she is least inclined to retract from her path of idealism; she does not allow despair like a frost to wilt her high-souled purpose of accomplishing human redemption; compromise is out of question and restitution of the earth in the starry list is her undaunted purpose. Nature strikes when its laws are violated; super nature can be established only when it overpasses its mechanism; the weak-willed who derive their strength from the earthly mechanism of the body dare not flout nature but Savitri who relies on a Godly puissance flowing to her from a soul that is independent of Nature, in a doughty hearted fashion, enters the lists against a deadly contestant. She defies the 'government of casual fact' and refuses to 'yield her high destiny up to passing chance'

'To stay the wheels of Doom this greatness rose....

A heart stood in the way of the driving wheels:...

Its stark conventions met the flame of a soul.

A magic leverage suddenly is caught...

A prayer, a master act, a king idea

Can link man's strength to a transcendent Force....

One mighty deed can change the course of things;

A lonely thought becomes omnipotent.'

The mechanism of the steam-roller death comes to a creaking halt seeing in the way, a greatness, the incandescence of the soul that makes all conventions curl up in flames; when flung against a mightier force man has to invoke a greater strength which comes by a surrender, an ego-abdication and a leverage is found in a silent invocation, a prayer which linking man with heaven fetches him the

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might of Gods to conquer the barriers of the soul's journey; then what happens may create the impression of a miracle because of the introduction of a new element; but when it becomes naturalised it ceases to be a miracle and the course of history may be changed by a single individual and his omnipotent thought.

'But wisdom comes and vision grows within;

He feels his witnessing self and conscious power

A Godhead stands behind the brute machine'

The clock-work regularity and the precision in the workings out of nature create the impression of a machine and even the human mind and thought as the products of its energy; sometimes the world may appear as a colossal blunder, a meaningless fantasy because of lack of sequence that can connect the events sometimes; 'out of an absolute chaos all paradox and absurdity can be born, and the world is such a paradox, a huge sum of contraries and puzzles, a huge error, a monstrous, an infinite delirium.'¹: the play of the unexpected and the unpredictable makes us attribute everything to dame luck or chance; we are tossed on the tide of speculation either of scientific materialism or ignorance till wisdom dawns on us by our retreat to our innermost sanctuary of our being where the witness spirit sits enthroned and it is then that everything becomes meaningful to us teaching us that everything is governed by a secret wisdom and guided by the directive hand of Almighty. 'Our surface being is only the deeper eternal self in us throwing itself out as the adventurer in time, a gambler and speculator in infinite possibilities limiting itself to the succession of moments so that it may have all the surprise and delight of the adventure, keeping back its self-knowledge and complete self-being so that it may win again what it seems to have lost, reconquering all itself through the chequered joy and pain of an aeonic passion and seeking and endeavour.'²

'The great World-Mother now in her arose:

Smote from Death's visage its dumb absolute'

 

¹ Life Divine, p. 508. ¹ Ibid., p. 455.

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'But if the fundamental truth of our being is spiritual and not mechanical, it must be our self, our soul that fundamentally determines our own evolution ... our self must be greater than its Karma ... for Prakriti is the field of law and process, but the soul the Purusha, is the giver of the sanction, anumati and even if it ordinarily chooses to remain a witness and concedes an automatic sanction, it can, if it wills, be the master of its nature, Ishwara.'¹

'The true central being is the soul, but this being is only the secret witness or one might say, a constitutional ruler who allows his ministers to rule for him, delegates his empire, silently assents to their decisions and only now and then puts in a word which they can at any moment override and act otherwise. But this is as long as the soul personality is not sufficiently developed; when this is strong enough for the inner entity to impose itself through it, then the soul can come forward and control the nature.'²

Savitri sees in her personal calamity a private sign of the world malady, nature's pitiless determinism; she stands single-handed against the gigantic cosmic machinery; traverses the inner being until the divinity concealed within layer after layer comes out well armed to meet Prakriti; from being a puppet or slave in her hands, she becomes the ruler; conquers nature; smites her; discovers super conscience who makes of death a process to informality and facilitates his passage to the fields of life to liberate them from the limitations and restrictions cramping them.

THE YOGA OF THE KING

THE YOGA OF THE SOUL'S RELEASE

(Book I ; Canto 3)

A world's desire compelled her mortal birth.

A thinker and toiler in the ideal's air,

Brought down to earth's dumb need her radiant power.

A colonist from immortality'

 

Savitri is an emanation, the gift of the Gods, in answer to the

¹ Life Divine, p. 720, ² Ibid., p. 801,

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prayers, the aspirations of mankind, gathered to a focal point in Aswapathy; there is a divine surge in the inconscient, an up throw of wave after wave of ever new and developed forces of consciousness for His self-expression; for a completer self-manifestation, the conditions must be favorable; sometimes there may be wrong evolutionary trends requiring a correction and such moments synchronies with a divine advent. A dweller on the higher reaches of the Spirit, Aswapathy is charged with a mission of paving the way for the descent of the Supreme; having been in the quest immemorial, after the unknown, it is clear to his truth perception how the Eternal lost in the void is struggling to rediscover himself, how the Divine is limiting himself in time just for a game of hide and seek; with this truth-vision before him, he sets out to fetch the radiant power to the dumb and the needy earth and thus wants to make of the earth a colony of the divine.

'A power was in him from the Unknowable.

He bore the stamp of mighty memories

And shed their grandiose ray on human life'

Knowing that a divine all-wisdom has breathed into existence the universe, he by his conduct becomes the beacon showing among the many tempting and bewildering paths, the correct one leading to the fulfilment of God's objectives; the evolutionary oestrus has embodied itself in him and has brought to the world a mind bearing the celestial imprint, an energy that is otherworldly, and a light of intelligence that makes a clean sweep of all doubts and difficulties.

His soul lived as eternity's delegate

Each action left the footprints of a God

The little plot of our mortality

Touched by this tenant from the heights became

A playground of the living Infinite'

Living entirely on a sustenance drawn from the within and not on the material energies provided by nature, he breaks through the narrow confines of the self and forges ahead on the journey of selfexpansion;

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his is a sun-lit path, cleared of all the jungle of the shrub and the bush of narrow mundane objectives by the scythe of a higher aspiration; his deeds bear the insignia of the source divine; his fragile casing of the body is not an index of the greatness hidden within and what appears as the narrow envelope is the playfield of the Supreme. /

'..................the person is a mask;

Hid deep in man celestial powers can dwell.

His fragile ship conveys through the sea of years

An incognito of the Imperishable'

Behind the flesh and body vesture, resides the all-energising spark; behind the mask of the body is the Lord; he has been the incognito voyager across the aeons on the tender baroque of life; and is bound to that far-off shore where he can have a safe landing, a full manifestation can throw off his disguise and reveal himself as the spirit that has hidden himself all along in Matter.

'This sculptor of the forms of the, Infinite

Hides in a small dumb seed his cosmic thought'

The supreme indwelling intelligence is the master artist, the sculptor; he casts into shape the myriad forms; the cosmic plan and economy are so supreme that they are compressed into a seed and planted in every being and they grow according to a pre-determined curve or line. 'Therefore each thing seems to do the works of intelligence even without possessing intelligence, because it obeys, whether subconsciously as in a plant or half consciously as in man, the real idea of the divine supermind within it. But it is not the mental intelligence that informs and governs all things; it is a self-aware truth of being in which self-knowledge is inseparable from self-existence; it is this truth consciousness which has not to think out things but works them out with knowledge according to the impeccable self-vision and the inevitable force of a sole and self-fulfilling existence.'¹

¹ Life Divine, p. 126-27.

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'He feels his substance of undying self

And loses his kinship to mortality'

In the tremendous flux initiated by himself, the indwelling inhabitant like a passenger travels from life to life, form to form; notices with satisfaction the emergence of life or sentience in a worm foreshadowing an early self-manifestation in more developed forms; like a sculptor, he sees with pleasure the icon of individuation growing in the shape of man; and this is but a prelude to man snapping all kinship with mortality by his progression towards super conscience.

'A beam of the Eternal smites his heart

His thought stretches into infinitude

Her face is seen through his face, her eyes through his eyes

Her being is his through a vast identity'

Smitten by the ray divine of supreme consciousness, he is no longer the narrow ego-self; feels released into the vast immensities of the real self; the infinitesimal embraces the infinitude; the creatrix makes him her base, her instrument; she gleams in his eyes and the expression of his face; and he develops a complete identity with her that comes of the merger of the individual in the universal.

'A static Oneness and dynamic Power

Descend in him.'

The divine in its dual aspect of the status and the dynamis reach and engulf him in their light. 'Moreover if it is by energy of Tapas that the dispensing of the force of being in the world action is accomplished, it is equally by the energy of tapas that the drawing back of that force of being is accomplished. The passive consciousness of Brahman and its active consciousness are not two different conflicting and incompatible things; they are the same consciousness, the same energy, at one end is a state of self-reservation, at the other end cast into a motion of self-giving and self-deploying, like the stillness of a reservoir and the coursing of the channels which flow from it. In fact behind every activity there is and must be a passive power

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of being from which it arises, by which it is supported which governs it from behind without it being totally identified with it.'¹

'There is no reason either why they should not be simultaneous; on the contrary simultaneity is demanded; for all energy, all kinetic action has to support itself on status or by status if it is to be effective or creative, otherwise there will be no solidity of anything created; only a constant whirl without any formation: status of being, form of being are necessary for kinesis of being'²

'A long dim preparation is man's life,

He seeks through a penumbra shot with flame

A veiled reality half-known, ever missed,...

And we break into the infinity of God'

The effort to seek and reach God is not confined to a single life; it is spread over several lives; it is like an ascent over an un-ending spiral where the climb has to continue in spite of many a stumble; the several failures on the way-up build the fibre of the soul, its stature; at long last through the aid of a flame, dispelling the partial shadow veiling the Reality in the innermost sanctuary of our being, we break into the great Presence.

'To turn this frail mud-engine to heaven-use

It beat his soil to bear a Titan's weight,

Refining half-hewn blocks of natural strength

It built his soul into a statued God'

Drawn into the arc of the super nature where there is no scope for darkness or imperfection, he becomes transmuted, the God-chosen; the mud engine while retaining its familiar outward appearance undergoes the required change within for being harnessed to advance the divine purpose; he is subjected to necessary pressure for the enlargement of his capacities for resistance and endurance and the half-developed blocks of his natural strength are replaced by full grown granite rocks to house the divine and become its instrument.

¹ Life Divine, p. 511.             ² Ibid., p. 411.   

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'A Seer was born, a shining Guest of Time

For him mind's limiting firmament ceased above,

The island ego joined its continent:...

The bounded mind became a boundless light...

Above mind's twilight and life's star-led night

There gleamed the dawn of a spiritual day'

Due to the influx of the divine, the king's consciousness embraces the whole universe; the dividing walls of the ego crumble down; the horizon of the mind acting as an obstructive lid is pierced; a passage is made for the egress of the aspiration and the ingress of the answering descent; the stream of his consciousness joins the ocean; the individual becomes one with the universal; it is then that his former subjections and limitations become matters of a dead past; he has finished his course of apprenticeship to ignorance, emerges from the limiting individual consciousness to the universal luminous consciousness; he finds admission into the mysteries of the soul; forsakes the narrow tracts because a wider empire stretches itself before him and he goes beyond the half lit passage of the intellect and he steps into the dawn of a fuller consciousness.

'As our consciousness changes into the height and depth and wideness of the spirit, the ego can no longer survive there; it is too small and feeble to subsist in that vastness and dissolves into it; for it exists by its limits and perishes by the loss of its limits. This disappearance of the ego does not bring with it the destruction of our true individuality, our spiritual existence, for that was always universal and one with the transcendent but there is a transformation which replaces the separative ego by the Purusha, a conscious face or figure of the universal being and a self and power of the transcendent divine in cosmic nature'¹

'Knowledge waits seated beyond mind and intellectual reasoning, throned in the luminous vast of inimitable self-vision.'²

'Humanity framed his movements less and less

In hands sustained by a transfiguring Might

He caught up lightly like a giant's bow

¹ Life Divine, p. 659.                       ² Ibid., p. 113.

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Left slumbering in a sealed and secret cave

The powers that sleep unused in man within.'

Aswapathy is no longer under the sway of the common motifs that may have a pull with the normal humanity; the boundaries set by the mind fail to hold out any check or terror; he has plumbed deep into the inner personality and discovered the giant bow with a quiver of arrows of power and strength lying there in desuetude and once thus equipped, all the dormant might comes crowding to him such as the luminous joy of pure perception and the ability to look through the crust of form and grasp the reality.

'Deceived no more by form he saw the soul—

It seized the idea in mind, the wish in the heart;

It plucked out from grey folds of secrecy

The motives which from their own sight men hide.

He felt the beating of life in other men

Invade him with their happiness and their grief

'In our outer being we are the children of the inconscience, our inner being makes us the inheritors of the higher heights of the mind and life and spirit, the more we open inwards, go inwards, live inwards, receive from within, the more we draw away from subjection to our inconscient origin and move towards all which is now super-conscient to our ignorance'¹

'The subliminal has the right of entry into the mental vital and subtle physical planes of the universal consciousness; it is not confined to the material plane and the physical world; it possesses means of communication with the worlds of being which the descent towards involution created in its passage and with all corresponding planes to serve the purpose of re-ascent from inconscience to super-conscience. It is into this large realm of interior existence that our mind and vital being retire when they withdraw from the surface activities or inward drawn concentration or by the inner plunge of trance.'²

'There is here a consciousness which has a power of direct contact

¹ Ibid., p. 490.        ² Life Divine, p. 383.

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with the universal unlike the mostly indirect contacts which our surface being maintains with the universe through the sense mind and the senses.'¹

It is obvious from the above, that Aswapathy by delving into the depths of his inner being, discovers the rich ore of super conscience and puts himself en rapport with the thought currents of the world; even before they are vocalised through the normal instrumentation of the senses, he is able to divine the thoughts of others; even the motives carefully guarded are an open book to him; his insight is as incisive and revealing as the X-ray which by penetrating the folds of the flesh helps locate an ailing part; their unspoken griefs and joys or loves and frustrations are shared by him or suffered by him as invasions on himself; he develops the self-extension of the vasts and feels that he is in them and they are in him; his consciousness is all-inclusive like the ocean; in his turn, it is the light of a sun that shines on all; with all this identity, he retains a serenity, an equanimity; is never perturbed by the external impacts; in an imperturbable manner he releases his own thought waves on them; sees the echoes of his own ideas in their minds and their shaping and guiding influence.

'..............................it made

The body's means the spirit's acolytes...

A world unseen, unknown by outward mind

Appeared in the silent spaces of the soul....

Where all things dreamed by the mind are seen and true

And all that the life longs for is drawn close.' ²

Having reached the summit of super conscience, he is no longer the drugged being of the surface consciousness; his senses become the officers not of the body but of the spirit; they become the recording stations of the messages received from the beyond; they are attuned to the subtle rhythms of the ethereal; he overpasses the subtle sheaths of the body; stands on the sill of a higher consciousness and lo! he beholds a world never seen before except in dream and vision and finds what all has been figured in imagination to be true and a veridical fact. That is the abode of the archetypes, of unalloyed

¹ Ibid., p. 383. ² Ibid., p. 383.

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perfection; the perfect beings wrapped in their imperishable forms enjoy the divine rapture from the immutable base of their stillness; it is here that thought and will are born without the instrumentation of the mind and they are helped to grow into appropriate forms on the milk of the eternal's strength; time also changes its face and becomes one vast continuum without the demarcations of the past present and future; in this larger consciousness attained by him the ego perishes and discloses knowledge by identity; the object to be known becomes one with him and there is no effort needed to know it since it is as intimate as a part of his body; 'thus all our mental knowing of things represents itself to us as objective, a truth imposed on us from outside; our knowledge is a reflection or a responsive construction reproducing in us a figure or picture or a mental scheme of something that is not in our own being. In fact it is a hidden deeper response to the contact, a response coming from within that throws up from there an inner knowledge of the object, the object being itself part of our larger self, but owing to the double veil, the veil between our inner self and our ignorant surface self and the veil between the surface self and the object contacted, it is only an imperfect figure or representation of the inner knowledge that is formed on the surface.'¹; he inhales a celestial fragrance, and tastes a paradisial sweetness; his highly subtilised ear becomes the audience of the 'creative nada, sustaining the worlds and their beings'²; and he catches the voice proclaiming that the unfulfilled demand of the earth for divine life will ere long meet with compliance.

'In the unceasing drama carried by Time...

And murmurings of desire that cannot die:

A cry came of the world's desire to be,

The grandeur and greatness of its will to live,

Recall of the soul's adventure into space,...

Its search for the mystic meaning of its birth...

Its taste of pangs and tears of ecstasy'

The world can be viewed from three different angles; from one it may appear as a meaningless drama or a journey without a goal

¹ Life Divine, p. 483.            ² M. P. Pandit, p. 258.

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for according to Sri Aurobindo, doubt should not arise and if it rises, there is no finis to it; from another it may be due to desire which is hydra-headed since no sooner is one desire fulfilled and thus slain than another bobs up; and yet from another it may be due to delight and the will to live; 'a vast universal self-delight must be the cause of existence and the object of cosmic existence.' 'If that were not' says the ancient seer 'this all-encompassing ether of delight of existence in which we dwell, if that delight were not our ether, then none could live none could breathe.'¹

'The murmur and whisper of the unheard sounds

Which crowd around our hearts but find no window'

Each soul has its own assigned mission which it seeks to discharge by developing its own powers and consciousness; unknown to him a number of forces crowd around seeking an entrance but being denied an admission they indirectly exercise their pressure impelling him into several activities; and he could realise only a few of the possibilities because of his insufficient instrumentation.

'The wide-world rhythms wove their stupendous chant

To which life strives to fit our rhyme-beats here'

The strivings and the struggles of man on this earth become meaningful if it is understood as a planned and gradual evolution, an individual rhythm sought to be attuned to the universal, an orchestration towards the divine harmony, an effort to melt the limits in the illimitable and turn the finite to infinity.

'All was revealed there none can here express;

Vision and dream were fables spoken by truth

Or symbols more veridical than fact,...

The kings of evil and the kings of good,...

Proclaimed the gospel of their opposites,...

Battled for his soul as for a costly prize'

¹ Life Divine p. 245.

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In answer to the inarticulate and incoherent longings expressed by the deeps of the inconscience, there is an answering response from the superconscience; due to an interaction of aspiration and the descending response, Aswapathy has the wider consciousness; the truths are unfurled before him without the coverings of restrictive language; wisdom in its pure essence dawns on him in a vision; he sees the kings long supposed to be dead; the casting aside of the mortal sheath does not mean that consciousness is also dead; it lives in another sheath; and the powers of good and evil lay siege to him, make him a battlefield, himself being the prize of contention.

'In every hour loosed from the quiver of Time

There rose a song of new discovery,...

Each day was a spiritual romance

As if he was born into a new bright world;...

And honeyed pleadings breathed from occult hps

To help the heart to yield to rapture's call'

Time is so full of potentialities that in this unceasing march of the universe, its progression, every hour leaves a mile-stone of advancement by new discovery; he feels that he is born in an enchanting world since everyday is fraught with a spiritual experience; there are however temptations not wanting; they plead with him in a honeyed language to give up his quest and share their bliss.

'...with a silver cry of opening gates...

He passed the border marked for Matter's rule

And passed the zone where thought replaces life.

Out of this world of signs suddenly he came...

Into a silent self where world was not...

And all was known by the light of identity'

There are several checkposts in the difficult stairway leading man to higher levels of consciousness and it is only on the production of an identity card containing genuine aspiration that the divine doors swing open; Aswapathy now lands on a region where the familiar contours of the world are lost; he sees the vastness of the silent immutable self; and there in that enormous self-extension knowledge

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is not something to be acquired by the senses but comes by identity. 'The last knot of our bondage is at that point where the external draws into oneness with the internal, the machinery of the ego itself becomes subtilised to the vanishing point and the law of our action is at last unity embracing and possessing multiplicity and no longer as now, multiplicity struggling towards some figure of unity.'¹

'There unity is too close for search and clasp

And love is a yearning of the One for the One

And beauty is a sweet difference of the Same

And oneness is the soul of the multitude'

In this super-consciousness that has been attained, there is no call for an intellectual exercise; everything to be known is close, so near that separate effort is not required; knowledge by identity is something like the proximity of the body and its different organs; the division is of the one becoming the many for a utility, a purpose of a playful emergence.

'There knowledge needs not words to embody Idea;

Idea seeking a house in boundlessness

Weary of its homeless immortality,

Asks not in thought's carved brilliant cell to rest

Whose single window's clipped outlook on things

Sees only a little arc of God's vast sky'

Thought in its purity cannot be embodied in words; in the very expression most of its force is lost; the garb of language given to it sometimes disfigures and even garbles; it is something like a translation missing the original fire and lustre; but here thought in its pure scintillation refusing the confines of words reaches the mind; as a result the knowledge that comes in its wake is not the narrow cramped outlook that is clamped when it is clothed in language, but the wide, the broad and the vast horizon of the luminous self that opens out before us.

¹ Life Divine, p. 17.

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'The human mind which relies mainly on thought, conceives that to be the highest and the main process of knowledge, but in the spiritual order thought is a secondary and not indispensable process. In its form of verbal thought, it can almost be described as a concession made by knowledge to ignorance, because that ignorance is incapable of making truth wholly lucid and intelligible to itself in all its extent and manifold implications except through the clarifying process of significant sounds; it cannot do without this device to give to ideas an exact outline and an expressive body.'¹

'Thought creates a representative image of truth; it offers that to the mind as a means of holding truth and making it an object of knowledge; but the body of truth itself is caught and held exactly in the sunlight to which the representative figure created by thought is secondary and derivative, powerful for communication of knowledge but not indispensable for reception and possession of knowledge.'²

'The clash of forces struggling to prevail

In the tremendous shock that lights a star

As in the building of a grain of dust,...

The torment edging the dire force of lust

That wakes kinetic in earth's dullard slime

And carves a personality out of mud,

The sorrow by which Nature's hunger is fed,

The oestrus which creates with fire of pain,

The fate that punishes virtue with defeat...

Ceased in a truth which lives in its own light'

The whole meaning and purpose of creation unravels itself as Aswapathy mounts the summit of consciousness; he perceives how the energy spent by the Almighty is no whit less in the creation of the small than in the creation of the great; how God uses both the good and the evil for promoting his own purpose as is evident in sometimes good coming out of evil; how out of the mud a kinetic, a vital personality is shaped slowly to give place to the mental personality and how in nature one is food to the other and how ultimately the eater is eaten.

¹ Life Divine, p. 839.                     ² Ibid., p. 840.

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'All matter according to the Upanishad is food, and this is the formula of the material world that the eater eating is himself eaten'.¹

'The evolutionary intention acts through the evil as through the good; it has to utilise all because confinement to a limited good would imprison and check the intended evolution; it uses any available material and does what it can with it; that is the reason why we see evil coming out of what we call good and good coming out of what we call evil.........Evolutionary nature, the terrestrial cosmic force, seems then at first to have no preference, for either of these opposites, it uses both for its purpose. And yet it is the same nature, the same force that has burdened man with the sense of the good and the evil and insists on its importance; evidently, therefore this sense also has an evolutionary purpose.'²

'The force of strength that goes to make the strong man is no whit greater than the force of weakness that goes to make the weak. The energy spent is as great in repression as in expression, in negation as in affirmation, in silence as in sound.'³

'In human life itself the vital man seems to have a stronger dynamis of action than the mental man because of his superiority in kinetic life: the intellectual tends to be effective in thought but ineffective in power over the world, while the kinetic vital man of action dominates life. But it is his use of mind that enables him to arrive at a frill exploitation of this superiority, and in the end the mental man by his power of knowledge, his science is able to extend the mastery of existence far beyond what life in matter could accomplish with his life-force and life-instinct without increase of effective knowledge. An immensely greater power over existence and over nature must come when a still greater consciousness emerges and replaces the hampered operations of the mental energy in our too individuahsed and res tricted force of existence.'⁴

'He abode at rest in indivisible Time....

In his present he held his future and his past

Felt in the seconds the uncounted years

And saw the hours like dots upon a page'

 

 

¹ Life Divine, p. 177.

² Ibid., p. 535.

³ Ibid., p. 69.

⁴ Life Divine, p. 920.

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Living in the physical body he shifts his centre of life to the higher consciousness; from that elevation he is in a position to command a conspectus of the whole stream of time; all its stages of the past, the present and the future unroll before him; in the seconds are read the experiences spread over innumerable years and the hours appear like negligible dots in the huge volume of its flow; in the state of ignorance experiences are picked up from moment to moment but at the superconscient level all experience becomes indivisible and is not received in parts. 'All experience or substance of becoming in time is a flowing stream or sea not divided in itself, but only divided in the observing consciousness by the limited movement of the ignorance which has to leap from moment to moment like a dragon-fly darting on the surface of the stream; so too all substance of being in space is a flowing sea not divided in itself but only divided in the observing consciousness because our sense faculty is limited in its grasp, can see only a part and is therefore bound to observe forms or substances as if they were separate things in themselves.'¹

'This huge material universe became

A small result of a stupendous force'

The world which appears so huge to us is only a speck among the myriad solar systems according to Sir James Jeans; further it is the product, the work of a little of the illimitable power of the Supreme; it is the manifestation of a fraction of the divine puissance. 'There is that unmanifest unknowable; there is this manifest know-able, partly manifest to our ignorance, manifest entirely to the divine knowledge which holds it in its infinity.'²

'His soul could sail beyond thought's luminous bar;...

He knew the source from which his spirit came:

He plunged his roots into the Infinite

He based his life upon Eternity'

Transcending the mind, he races beyond its limits, reaches the immobile status of the divine; knows that as the source, the matrix

¹ Ibid., p. 463.                ² Ibid., p. 570.

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from which his soul, his spirit has flown into his body; plunges his roots there and moulds his life on that basis and conviction.

'Only a while at first these heavenlier states,

..............................could endure....

As a child who learns to walk can walk not long,

Replace the titan will for ever to climb,

On the heart's altar dim the sacred fire.'

These heaven-sent moments, the glimmers of the divine, stay not for long; they are short-lived, for the gross animal body does not permit of the spirit taking a long leave for disporting itself on the high altitudes; it is just like the pitiful effort of the child who walks but gets tired too soon to continue the effort; similarly, hardly has the ember caught the glow before it is put out and the man falls back into his normal drab pace.

'This too the supreme Diplomat can use,

He makes our fall a means for greater rise....

The twin duality for ever one

Chooses its home mid the tumults of the sense'

But the supreme architect creates out of the very stuff of failure, the splendid figure of success; he does not allow man to pursue a supine career; on the contrary he goes on nagging and proding him by taking a dwelling in man's fleshy vessel; man thus becomes the abode of the duality of spirit and matter or Purusha and Prakriti; the one trying to regain the reins and rule over the other, till by rousing the necessary will and determination in the being, it brings the other under its guidance and eventual subjection.

'Else would the spirit reach alone its source

Leaving a half-saved world to its dubious fate.

Nature would ever labour unredeemed'

If the pull of gravitation is too strong for the spirit to evoke a response, then it has to depart to its own luminous source, abandoning

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man to wallow in the mud of matter; its work half-done it has to depart; and nature, thus abandoned has to continue in darkness.

'Call back to its dire need the divine Force'

There is no descent again till the lower trinity of the mind, life and body have realised the fatal mistake committed by them and send back once again a prayerful invocation for their emancipation also, and then once again the march of evolution has to start from the point where it has stopped.

'Always the power poured back like sudden rain,

Or slowly in his breast a presence grew;

It clambered back to some remembered height

Or soared above the peak from which it fell....

In this oscillation between earth and heaven,...

There grew in him as grows a waxing moon

The glory of the integer of his soul'

Victory is not a matter of minutes or even years in this long drawn-out struggle between the forces of Inconscience and Superconscience; it is bound to be protracted over aeons with accessions of strength on either side and the advance has always to be made consolidating the ground already gained; the higher consciousness descends on the parched soil of the aspirant to the measure of his capacity; it is followed by an interval during which the celestial rain sinks and germinates into the Presence of the divine in the core of the heart; the ground gained is sometimes lost to the overcoming hordes of darkness and it must be regained by a steadier effort; the battle goes on with the issue oscillating; every move forward must issue from an integrated territory and thus the divine flowering in the human heart is as gradual as the waxing of the moon.

'The soul may still be described as a traveller and climber who presses towards his high goal step by step, each of which he has to build up and make sure of the supporting stair so that it may not crumble beneath him; but the evolution of the whole consciousness has rather the movement of an ascending ocean of nature; it can be

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compared to a tide or a mounting flux, the leading fringe of which touches the higher degrees of a cliff or the hill while the rest is still below. Another image may be that of an army advancing in columns which annexes new ground, while the main body is still behind in a territory overrun but too large to be effectively occupied, so that there has to be a frequent halt and partial return to the traversed areas for consolidation and assurance of the hold on the occupied territory and assimilation of its people. A rapid conquest might be possible, but it would be of the nature of an encampment or a domination established in a foreign country; it would not be the assumption, total assimilation, integration, needed for the entire supramental change.'¹

'At last was won a firm spiritual poise,...

A safety in the Silence and the Ray

A settlement in the Immutable'

At last he reaches the stable base from which the whole play has sprung and on which it rests; he finds a lodging in the realm of the luminous self; he notes that the self is in all and all is in the self and discovers how the everlasting hides himself in several disguises in the time movement.

'Inspired by silence and the closed eyes' sight

His force could work with a new luminous art

On the crude material from which all is made...

As a sculptor chisels a deity out of stone

He slowly chipped off the dark envelope,

Line of defence of nature's ignorance.'

He sinks deep into the inner regions of the soul, with introverted senses, takes his stand on the poise of silence and develops faculties unknown before; makes of his body a material out of which with the art of a sculptor he could chisel out the divine; the envelope of the inconscience around the soul lashes furiously at the invasions of the infinite; but he overcomes it by clipping off the wings of the dragon.

¹ Life Divine, p. 849.

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'His soul, mind, heart became a single sun;...

Even on the struggling Nature left below

Strong periods of illumination came....

Air rippled round the argosies of the Gods,

Strange riches sailed to him from the Unseen;...

Rivers poured down of bliss and luminous force,

Visits of beauty, storm-sweeps of delight'

Status and dynamis are not opposed to each other; they are aspects of the same reality; transcending nature and taking his stand on the unmanifest and the stable, he makes himself a highly tuned instrument to drink in the higher harmonies; extends his influence on the other parts of nature that have to be developed; his highly seasoned and subtilised senses become the receiving ports for the argosies that sail from the superconscient; they are the receiving stations for the illuminations, the messages from the higher levels of consciousness; he is drenched in a downpour of ecstasy and bliss. 'He would feel the presence of the Divine in every centre of his consciousness, in every vibration of his life-force, in every cell of his body'.¹

'An inspired Knowledge sat enthroned within

Whose seconds illumined more than reason's years:

An ictus of revealing lustre fell

As if a pointing accent upon Truth,

And like a sky-flare showing all the ground

A swift intuitive discernment shone'

Knowledge is not something that comes from without; it comes from within; it is not acquired by learning but obtained by diving within; the dividing nature of the mind, instead of acting as a conveyor, proves a barrier to knowledge; it comes only in a jet of inspiration or intuition; like a sky-flare it illumines all that has been dark before; with a piercing light, with the clarity of a metrical accent it falls on the truth dispelling all ambiguity; and the treasure of the spirit which has been baffling the efforts of reason and intellect, over

¹ Life Divine, p. 863.

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the years, suddenly is ours in a split second of spiritual insight.

'Mind may divide, multiply, add, subtract but it cannot get beyond the limits of mathematics. If it goes beyond and tries to conceive a real whole, it loses itself in a foreign element; it falls from its own firm ground into the ocean of the intangible, into the abysms of the infinite where it can neither perceive, conceive, sense nor deal with its subjects for creation or enjoyment. Mind cannot possess the Infinite, it can only suffer it or be possessed by it; it can only he blissfully helpless under the luminous shadow of the Real cast down on it from planes of existence beyond its reach. The possession of the Infinite cannot come except by an ascent to those supramental planes, nor the knowledge of it except by an inert submission to the descending messages of the Truth-Consciousness-Reality.'¹

'Thus to live in mind and the things of the mind, to be an intelligence rather than a life and a body, is our highest position, short of spirituality, in the degrees of nature. The mental man is the normal summit of Nature's evolutionary formation in the human plane. To do more she has to use more amply the unseen material hidden below our surface, to dive inwards and bring out the secret soul, the psyche, or to ascend above our normal mental level into planes of intuitive consciousness dense with the light derived from the spiritual gnosis — in which we are in direct contact with the infinite, in touch with the self and highest reality of things, Sachchidananda.'²

'One glance could separate the true and the false...

Detect the magic bride in her disguise'

In this state of alt, when there is a flood of outpouring with a seeming origin from the divine and when all the ideas and inspirations wear alike the same face, it may not be possible to distinguish the true from the false; but a trained and purified discrimination can look through the false trappings and detect the real Simon pure.

'A rapture of the thrilled undying Word

Poured into his heart as into an empty cup

A repetition of God's first delight'

 

¹ Life Divine, p. 151.                ² Life Divine, p. 234.

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The characteristic and attendant evils on human nature such as the passions, the attachments and the turbidities have all been dispelled; the mind and the heart have become clean and empty; they are like cups contentions, now becoming brimful with the content of knowledge and the flow of delight; it is this delight that is responsible for creation and both the bliss and knowledge, the manifestation and the illumination are contained in the pregnant and reverberating word, the Mantra.

'All vision gathered into a single ray

As when the eyes stare at an invisible point

Till through the intensity of one luminous spot

An apocalypse of a world of images

Enters into the kingdom of the seer.

A great nude arm of splendour suddenly rose;....

Bared with a stab of flame the closed Beyond'

The practice of the ancient seers is to gather up all the threads of their consciousness and dwell the mind on an invisible point in the centre of the forehead; the veils covering up are rent and a vast inner world is disclosed; the layers of the subconscious and the unconscious are burnt by the flame of concentration and superconscience is reached by inspiration.

'She broke in with inspired speech for scythe

And plundered the Unknowable's vast estate'

Then there will be a jet of lightnings; their light cannot be captured in language of an intelligible kind; the vast estate of the Unknowable has therefore to be plundered and preserved in mystical and inspired utterances.

'A traveller between summit and abyss

She joined the distant ends, the viewless deeps,

Pursuing all knowledge like a questing hound,

A reporter and scribe of hidden wisdom talk'

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Like the hound of heaven the inspiration pursues its eternal and untiring quest after the Unknown; it is a pilgrim starting from, the deeps and reaching the peaks; it is a traveller between the two poles of involution and evolution and she like a reporter spells out the truth bridging the two opposites that the immanence has become the emergence, the potential, the actual

'She brought immortal words to mortal men,...

Broad spaces of a vision without line

Or limit swam into his spirit's ken...

Timeless domains of joy and absolute power

Stretched out surrounded by the eternal hush;

The ways that lead to endless happiness

Ran like dream smiles through meditating vasts'

The spirit reaches a higher landing where it feels frozen, benumbed, thinks that there is nothing further; sees only darkness; but a little of persistence shows that there is 'not a Nihil, not a void, for there is no such thing as an absolute void or real nullity and what we call by that name is really something beyond the grasp of our sense, our mind, our most subtle consciousness.'¹; and presently the voyaging spirit discovers before it vast domains of joy, undiluted power and imperishable happiness having their base in silence; even the thorough-fares in this vast dominion fit for meditation due to the tranquillity prevailing all over, are illumined with silence

'The magician order of the cosmic Mind

Coercing the freedom of infinity

With the stark array of Nature's symbol facts

And life's incessant signals of event,

Transmuted chance recurrences into laws'

In the gold moment's blaze of a revelation stands disclosed the divine manifestation with a precision and order that are beyond the human scope and hence appear the work of a magician; the infinity scatters itself in myriad forms containing their own self-determinations

¹ Life Divine, p. 234.

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governed by the immanent self-law; though concealed thus, He leaves in the universe eloquent symbols of his presence and even what appear to be chance occurrences convey a conviction that nothing can happen in a haphazard fashion in the universe and that everything transpires by means of a secret omniscience.

'A glimpse was caught of things for ever unknown;

The letters stood of the unmoving Word—

The trail of the Ideas that made the world,....

The seed of the Spirit's blind and huge desire,

From which the tree of cosmos was conceived'

He has a glimpse into the unknown whence as from an ocean, the Immutable sends forth several waves of Nama Rupa; each of them is charged with his spark; or he sees the seed of the great Aswattha, striking its roots above and outspreading its branches below, the seed containing the formulations of growth according to His will.

'The bodiless Namelessness that saw God born

And tries to gain from the mortal's mind and soul

A deathless body and a divine name'

It becomes clear to the closed eyes of Aswapathy leading to the inner vision, that the formless and the nameless has cast himself in manifestation so that in it can be read and revealed, his imperishability and limitlessness.

'Appeared of the architect who builds in trance,

The original Desire born in the Void

Peered out, he saw the hope that never sleeps,...

The radiant world of the everlasting Truth

Glimmered like a faint star bordering the night

Above the golden Over mind's shimmering ridge'

Creation ceases to be a mystery to the vision of Aswapathy; it becomes clear to him how the whole cosmos has emerged out of a trance, a self-absorption, Tapas of the Architect.

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'Tapas means literally heat, afterwards any kind of energism, askesis, austerity of conscious force acting upon itself or its object. The world was created by Tapas in the form, says the ancient image, of an egg, which being broken, again by Tapas, heat of incubation of conscious force, the Purusha emerged, soul in nature like a bird from the egg.'¹

The object behind the creation is to radiate His own glory; further there is the delight of the plunge into an opposite of himself the inconscience and the exhilarating game of self-emergence and self-discovery; this explains why in spite of the most discouraging and chilling circumstance there is always found a persistence of a will to survive and to exist: and all these truths shimmer through the veils hiding the overmind in whose golden lid they are confined. We may quote from the sage

'Behind there must be something much vaster, profounder, truer than the superficial consciousness which takes delight in all experiences; it is that delight which secretly supports the superficial mental being and enables it to persevere through all labour, suffering and ordeals in the agitated movement of becoming'²

'..........if a veil could fall between mind and supermind shutting off the light of the truth or letting it come through only in rays diffused, scattered, reflected but with distortion and division, then the phenomenon of Ignorance could intervene. Such a veil exists, says the Upanishad, constituted by the action of Mind itself: it is in Overmind a golden lid which hides the face of the supramental Truth but reflects its image; in Mind it becomes a more opaque and smoky-luminous covertures. That action is the absorbed looking downward of Mind on the diversity which is its characteristic movement and away from the supreme unity which that diversity expresses, until it forgets altogether to remember and support itself by the unity.... It becomes so far identified with that Energy as to... become totally oblivious in a trance of work which it still supports in its somnambulist action, but of which it is no longer aware. This is the last stage of the descent of consciousness, an abysmal sleep, a fathomless trance of consciousness which is the profound basis of the action of material Nature.'³

¹ Life Divine, p. 509.          ² Ibid., p. 97.            ³ Life Divine, p. 528.

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'Even were caught as through a cunning veil

The smile of love that sanctions the long game...

Silence the nurse of the Almighty' power,

The omniscient hush, womb of the immortal Word...

And the creative eye of Eternity.

The inspiring goddess entered a mortal's breast.'

The whole cosmic game goes on, with the Almighty parent looking on with a love and indulgence; the results of the play which are usually attributed to blind chance by ignorance are all carefully directed by the Supreme, serving the plan of his gradual self-emergence; silence is the seed-bed of all power; the Word containing the various creative formulations emanate from that stable poise; and the nodus of the entire creation can be found in the 'eye of eternity' the self-look of the Omnipotent at himself the 'spanda'¹; and the vagrant intuition in search of a dwelling place finds the same at last in the bosom of Aswapathy

'All was made wide above, all lit below

In darkness' core she dug out wells of light..........

Bore earthward fragments of revealing thought

Hewn from the silence of the Ineffable...

Lifted, it showed the riches of the cave.'

The journeying soul traverses beyond the outpost of reason, pierces the veil separating the mind and the overmind; there is a shower of light from above and an invasion of the nether caves of inconscience by Uumination and the long-hidden treasures of the spirit are in his possession.

'Where, by the miser traffickers of the sense

Unused, guarded beneath the Night's dragon paws,

In folds of velvet darkness draped they sleep

Whose priceless value could have saved the world'

Man is God in embryo; forgetful of this fact, he allows all his

¹ Pandit-355.

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faculties to sleep unused in the dark of ignorance; further the precious dower of his gifts are also guarded by the fierce coils of a python; he is too timid to put forth the effort; if only he has the courage, the world could have been saved by laying his hand of possession on his inheritance.

'And stolen by the robbers of the Deep

The golden shekels of the Eternal he...

Lest men should find them and be even as Gods'

Man is deprived of his inner treasures veiled from him and carefully guarded and sentries by the robber gang of the whales and the sharks of his extroverted senses, so that he may not achieve parity with Gods.

'A wiser word, a larger thought came in...

A secret sense awoke that could perceive

A Presence and a Greatness everywhere....

A mechanism no more or work of chance

But a living movement of the body of God....

The beauty and the ceaseless miracle

Let in a glow of the Unmanifest

The formless Everlasting moved in it

Seeking its own perfect form in souls and things.'

With an invasion of the sun-stuff of truth vision percolating even the inner depths of his being, new faculties are at his disposal; he perceives not a blind mechanism but a purpose and a regulated orderly development for its accomplishment; to his newly awakened sight even the bush is afire with God; the beauty manifested around serves only as a means of discernment for the unmanifest; the Almighty moves and breathes in all and is himself in quest of a suitable form for his full self-expression.

'In the struggle and upheaval of the world

He saw the labour of a godhead's birth

The All-Blissful sat unknown within the heart

Earth's pains were the ransom of its prisoned delight'

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In all the travail and the convulsions of the earth, its struggles and frustrations, Aswapathy, with his heightened consciousness, sees the attempt of the eternal to create favorable conditions and an opportunity for his fuller expression; the pains and pangs are the ransom that earth has to pay for the liberation of the indwelling spirit; but Aswapathy is divine-possessed and unlike others on whom time hangs heavy since they have no aim or object in life to pursue, catches it by the forelock to outgrow his narrow self and he makes the best use of his days by making them follow the charted route of making heavenly acquisitions and the nights for musings and meditations.

'The divine Dwarf towered to unconquered worlds,

Earth grew too narrow for his victory....

Life now became a sure approach to God

Existence a divine experiment

And cosmos the soul's opportunity'

The divine spark lodged within, grows from its pigmy dimensions to gigantic proportions; earth appears too small and tiny for his victory; life itself seems to be the experimental laboratory of God to throw out more and more finished and improved forms and existence itself an opportunity given to man to reach the divine.

'The world was a conception and a birth

Of Spirit in Matter into living forms

And Nature bore the Immortal in her womb'

He sees how matter is the mask of the divine, the body of the spirit and how what is enwombed out flowers, what is involved evolves, and how the universe is a stage for the play of the immortal. 'A mind, a will seems to have organised this universe, but it has veiled itself behind its creation; its first erection has been this screen of an in-conscient energy and a material form of substance, at once a disguise of its presence and a plastic creative basis on which it could work as an artisan uses for his production of forms and patterns a dumb and obedient material'¹

¹ Life Divine, p. 275.

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'Could raise the earthly parts towards higher things...

And lost life's incapacity for bliss'

The divine voltage is too much for the slender human machine; but Aswapathy's advancement towards the summits of consciousness gives such a fortitude to his frame that it is not only in a position to receive and house it, but every fibre, every cell of his body is charged with its force; all the parts of the material body or areas of consciousness which have been exiles from the divine felicity have now become sharers and are flooded by bliss supreme.

'A wide God-knowledge poured down from above

A new world-knowledge broadened from within...

His commonest doings welled from an inner Light...

He grew one with a covert universe.'

Rivers of knowledge flow into his being from the beyond; he is drenched in higher consciousness and his; he becomes the one in the multiplicity, and sees the multiplicity in himself; himself stable, he receives within himself the world currents and the knowledge conveyed by them.

Forms he descried our mortal eyes see not...

He saw the cosmic forces at work

And felt the occult impulse behind man's will

Time's secrets were to him an oft read book.'

He becomes aware also of the subliminal self and all the recordings left there by the flux of time without the knowledge of the surface self; he has not only risen to the peaks of the superconscience but dives into the subliminal; knows the origin of the impulses and knows the influence exercised over the mortals by the supraphysical forces and these not discernible to the human eye are seen by him and his inner subliminal layer keeps a memory of the past and a prescience of the future.

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'The human in him paced with the divine....

Apart he lived in mind's solitude

A demigod shaping the hives of men

One soul's ambition lifted up the race

A power worked, but none knew whence it came—

He drew the energies that transmute an age

He made great dreams a mould for coming truths...

Lonely his days and splendid like the sun's.'

His celestial pursuits isolate him from humanity; he is left alone but is ever companioned by the rays that come from the sun of the divine communion; though human, he keeps pace with the divine in ushering in a transformation of the earth nature; though single, by his lone effort he raises the whole humanity; the unmitigated effort put forth by him to live within, is a mile-stone, a jerk to the dullness and the inertia of the people; each saviour by his advancement brings about the general advancement and this they do because of their integral vision, their oneness and they can charge the whole universe with the intensity of their own light.

Y. S. CHANDRAN

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THE MEANING OF INDIVIDUALITY

SRI Aurobindo's philosophy of Integralism provides us with a view of the individual which not only synthesizes but transmutes the traditional Indian and the western ideas on the subject. The ideal of life which Sri Aurobindo holds forth to mankind is that of the fullest development of the individual, internally as well as externally; to attain the evolutionary promise of Superman hood in terms of individual life and to extend the impetus towards perfection in ever widening circles of community.

"... the development of the free individual is ... the first condition for the free development of the perfect society. From the individual therefore we have to start; he is our index and our foundation." (HC 94)

The history of political organization has revealed three possibilities:

"One asserts the state idea at the expense of the individual, — ancient Sparta, modern Germany; another asserts the supremacy of the State, but seeks at the same time to give as much freedom, power and dignity as is consistent with its control to the individuals who constitute it, — ancient Athens, modern France. But to these two has been added a third type in which the State abdicates as much as possible to the individual, boldly asserts that it exists for his growth and to assure his freedom, dignity, successful manhood, experiments with a courageous faith whether after all it is not the utmost possible liberty, dignity and manhood of the individual which will best assure the well-being, strength and expansion of the State. Of this type England has been until recently the great exemplar." (HC 385)

However, "In modern times the state idea has after a long interval fully reasserted itself and is dominating the thought and action of the world." (HC 387)

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The tendency towards the progressive extension of the authority of the State over the entire life of the individual is the general characteristic of the age. Totalitarian states proclaim and enforce the principle of communal control openly whereas other states succumb to this general trend under the pretext of necessity, for example, to remedy the inequalities of an individualistic and competitive type of society. With all the benefits that democracy has conferred on man it has failed to extend the principle of equality beyond the political sphere and has rested on the unstable bases of economic inequality in the name of individual initiative and enterprise.

"...instead of a harmoniously ordered society there has been developed a huge organised competitive system, a frantically rapid and one-sided development of industrialism and, under the garb of democracy, an increasing plutocratic tendency that shocks by its ostentatious grossness and the magnitudes of its gulfs and distances. These have been the last results of the individualistic ideal and its democratic machinery, the initial bankruptcies of the rational age.¹" (HC 267-268)

The "rational" remedy for the disharmonies of individualism would be to enthrone the principle of state regulation. Carried to its logical extreme, this corrective is fraught with equally disastrous consequences as the evil it seeks to eliminate.

"The only liberty left at the end would be the freedom to serve the community under the rigorous direction of the State authority; the only equality would be an association of all alike in a Spartan or Roman spirit of civic service with perhaps a like status, theoretically equal at least for all functions; the only brotherhood would be the sense of comradeship in a devoted dedication to the organised social Self, the State. In fact the democratic trinity stripped of its godhead would fade out of existence; the collectivist ideal can very well do without them, for none of them belong to its grain and very substance." (HC 274)

It is in the context of the inevitable dangers of extreme individualism

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and extreme collectivism that an enquiry into the nature of Individuality and collectivity becomes imperative. The idea of separate individuality is no more than a delusion, for the individual is the centre and concentration, inwardly as well as outwardly, of multiple forces, many of which may not be recognised by the ego sense but are nonetheless real.

"...inwardly too, no less than outwardly, we are not alone in the world; the sharp separateness of our ego was no more than a strong imposition and delusion; we do not exist in ourselves, we do not really live apart in an inner privacy or solitude². Our mind is a receiving, developing and modifying machine into which there is being constantly passed from moment to moment a ceaseless foreign flux, a streaming mass of disparate materials from above, from below, from outside. Much more than half our thoughts and feelings are not our own in the sense that they take form out of ourselves; of hardly anything can it be said that it is truly original to our nature. A large part comes to us from others or from the environment, whether as raw material or as manufactured imports; but still more largely they come from universal Nature here or from other worlds and planes and their beings and powers and influences; for we are overtopped and environed by other planes of consciousness, mind planes, life planes, subdue matter planes, from which our life and action here are fed, or fed on, pressed, dominated, made use of for the manifestation of their forms and forces.³" (O Y-I. 85-86)

Sri Aurobindo has expounded not only the temporal social context of Individuality but has revealed its spiritual meaning. In the analysis of individuality we are normally content with recognising the interrelations of individual and community and seek an explanation of such interrelationship in terms of the natural propensity of man to society and of the fact that no man is sufficient unto himself but needs the cooperation of others in order that even the bare necessities of existence may be secured. The idea of a good life follows as the next step in man's development. But the main question that remains to be answered is, what is the hidden and secret drive, of which the economic

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and psychological urges are the external manifestations, that drive man to seek satisfaction and fulfilment through such interaction and interrelationship? It is the spiritual unity of man with man and of man with God that is the unseen bond uniting individuals in society and in spiritual fellowship.

"However sharply he individualises himself in mental idea and mental or other action, he is inseparable from the universal being, his body from universal force and matter, his life from the universal life, his mind from universal mind, his soul and spirit from universal soul and spirit. The universal acts on him, invades him, overcomes him, shapes itself in him at every moment; he in his reaction acts on the universal, invades, tries to impose himself on it, shape it, overcome its attack, rule and use its instrumentation." (OY-I-731)

The individual is thus a centre — "...a centre of differentiation of the one personal consciousness, a centre of determination of the one total movement; his personality reflects in a wave of persistent individuality the one universal Person, the Transcendent, the Eternal." COY-1-216)

THE INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIETY

Sri Aurobindo has emphasised the interplay of the individualistic and communal principles in the shaping of man's life and personality; he has shown how each is incomplete without the other but has also laid down that while the process of individuality reflects the combined action of the factors of self and community, its perfection reflects the finality of the principle of individuality. Various influences may flow into the stream of individuality but the individual in his perfection not only has assimilated them but has transcended them and proclaims the uniqueness of selfhood.

"In the language of Indian philosophy the Divine manifests himself always in the double form of the separative and the collective being, vyasti, samasti. Man, pressing after the growth of his separate individuality and its fullness and freedom,

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is unable to satisfy even his own personal needs and desires except in conjunction with other men; he is a whole in himself and yet incomplete without others. This obligation englobes his personal law of conduct in a group-law which arises from the formation of a lasting group-entity with a collective mind and life of its own to which his own embodied mind and life are subordinated as a transitory unit. And yet is there something in him immortal and free, "not bound to this group-body which outlasts his own embodied existence but cannot outlast or claim to chain by its law his eternal spirit." (O Y-I 220-221)

The principle of collectivity which is thus an indispensable complement to the principle of individuality can, however, be fatal to the very soul of personality if it is pushed to an extreme for its own sake, for the sake of the perfection of the external mechanism of society. Systems of social philosophy which emphasize externality and institutionalism at the expense of the individual are dangerous half-truths which give a false lead to mankind by deflecting the communal life from the ideal of personal development. The aberration of the principle of the community is expressed in the formula of modern totalitarianism where everything is for the State and within the State and nothing is outside the State. When such formulae become the manifestos of greedy parties and self-seeking political adventurers, they are paraded as infallible propositions and the individuals are hypnotized and reduced to a state of utter subordination and lifeless-ness. The state or the dominant group assumes ascendancy, exterminating the principles of individuality and liberty. The group and the state are intermediate posts, marking the progress of the individual and cannot be taken to be his ultimate haven and resting place.⁴

INDIVIDUALITY AS PROCESS

The meaning of individuality has generally been discussed with reference to its spatial and temporal relations but Sri Aurobindo has expounded as perhaps no other philosopher has done, the historical and cultural dimensions of the concept. Individuahty is a phenomenon which develops not merely through its relations within the

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community of individuals: so interpreted, it might be a transient phase of the life movement. Society and the individual have to be viewed as developing together, mamtaining a line of continuity through the process of time.

"Mentally, vitally and physically I do not grow by a pure self-development from within in a virgin isolation; I am not a separate self-existent being proceeding from a past to a new becoming in a world of its own where no one is but itself, nothing works but its own inner powers and musings." (FIC 438)

"Time and its influences have not only passed over him, but carried him forward in their stream. We cannot go backward to a past form of our being, but we can go forward to a large repossession of ourselves in which we shall make a better, more living, more real, more self-possessed use of the intervening experience." (FIC 440)

As it is with the individual, so it is with the group; they must grow by a process of assimilation and integration of historical and contemporary experience into a future combining the richness of the past and the present and the promise of a brighter future, in accordance with their dharma, the innermost principle of their life and spirit. The individual cannot keep himself aloof in a shell of his own making whether that shell be that of the historical past or of a present satisfied and satiated with its own achievements and blind to the possibilities that await realisation.

INDIVIDUAL AND THE GROUP

Groups and associations are distinct points standing between the individual and the larger community. They originate in the need to crystallize concrete and defined objectives, and to strive collectively for their realization. The State is the largest of such groups in the social framework and thus occupies a position of preeminence in the scheme of individual and social life. But it is necessary to recognise that the groups and the State are impelled by a law of self-aggrandizement and that their overgrowth would result in the

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cramping and crippling of individuality. The danger of group self-aggrandizement has led philosophers to regard them as entrails within the body politic and to strengthen the State as against the groups with the hope that the State would redress the balance. But the result has been a state grown strong on the ruins of the groups and associations. Whatever might have been the hopes and intentions of such philosophers, they have consciously or unconsciously been the progenitors of the totalitarian creed. The true remedy, therefore, lies in restoring to the principle of individuality its due place in the pattern of social life and to establish its primacy in the scheme of human values.

The association is necessary for the fulfilment of individuahty but if it embarks on the development of its own power and mechanism, obvious of the principle of individuahty which it should serve or of the larger interests of the community which the State ought to serve, it would lead to the obliteration of personality and to its own obliteration, in turn, by the State. The State, instead of being the servant of the community, becomes its tyrant, having suppressed the principles of individuahty and Association.

"In India in the ancient times we had many kinds of association, for our life was much more complex and developed than it became afterwards. We had our poetical associations. We had our commercial associations, our educational, our religious associations. As in Europe, so in India men united together for many interests and worked in association for common ideals. But by the inroads of invasion and calamity our life became broken and disintegrated. Still, though we lost much, we had our characteristic forms in which we strove to achieve that ideal of association and unity." (Speeches: 96-97)

The impact of the west led to the creation of new types of association, largely based upon the patterns of the west. At this stage they were largely utilitarian in aim and were instruments for the exchange of thought and for the spread of knowledge. As they were not based on the tradition and genius of the soil they remained limited i in aim and accomplishment but with the rise of the flood of nationalism

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they were dynamized and recreated into new and potent instruments of the national spirit.

"Association means unity, association means brotherhood, association means binding together in one common work". (Speeches, 113)

"Unite, be free, be one, be great" — such was the ideal of association for the regeneration of the country that Sri Aurobindo placed before his countrymen.

It was the overwhelming spirit of association for national freedom that led the way to the independence of the country. The same spirit of association and the dedication to the values of personality and freedom have to be our guidelines for the future.

It is worth recalling in this connection how Sri Aurobindo has drawn an illuminating comparison between the ancient Indian social structure and the modern western social structure — the basis of the assignment of social functions in the ancient Indian polity being individual aptitude and fitness for the task whereas in western society the individual is expected to be versatile and to perform a multitude of functions:

"To the modern mind man is a thinker, worker or producer and a fighter all in one, and the tendency of the social system is to lump all these activities and to demand from each individual his contribution to the intellectual, economical and military life and needs of the community without paying any heed to the demands of his individual nature and temperament. The ancient Indian civilization laid peculiar stress on the individual nature, tendency, temperament and sought to determine by it the ethical type, function and place in the society. Nor did it consider man primarily as a social being or the fullness of his social existence as the highest ideal, but rather as a spiritual being in process of formation and development and his social life, ethical law, play of temperament and exercise of function as means and stages of spiritual formation." (EG-I, 69)

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The nature and purpose of social life was also an integration and synthesis of all the needs of man:

"The master idea that has governed the life, culture, social ideals of the Indian people has been the seeking of man for his true spiritual self and the use of life — subject to a necessary evolution first of his lower physical, vital and mental nature — as a frame and means for that discovery and for man's ascent from the ignorant natural into the spiritual existence."*

The place of the group and the association was well recognized and a free functioning of the caste, religious community, guild, village, township or the organic custom of the region or province was another important characteristic of the system.

"... in effect the Indian polity was the system of a very complex communal freedom and self-determination".**

"Individualism is as necessary to the final perfection as the power behind the group-spirit; the stifling of the individual may well be the stifling of the god in man. And in the present balance of humanity there is seldom any real danger of exaggerated individualism breaking up the social integer. There is continually a danger that the exaggerated pressure of the social mass by its heavy un enhghtened mechanical weight may suppress or unduly discourage the free development of the individual spirit. For man in the individual can be more easily enlightened, conscious, open to clear influences; man in the mass is still obscure, half-conscious, ruled by universal forces that escape its mastery and its knowledge". (O Y-I, 224)

This consideration leads us to recognise the possibility of a conflict between the individual and the community. It has always to be remembered that the level of advancement possible for an individual is higher than what society as a whole can attain. The average of

* The Spirit and Form of Indian Polity, pp. 20-21.

** Ibid. p. 33.

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attainment in a society may be regarded as the mean of many levels of individual accomplishment. In trying to answer the question how shall the individual conduct himself when his demands clash with the requirements of the social law, it is necessary to decide, first of all, how he measures up in relation to the society in which he is placed. While it may be stated as a general rule that the norms of society provide a safe guide for the individual, extraordinary situations call for a reversal of the normal truth.

"The communal mass is always conservative and static in its consciousness and only moves slowly in the tardy process of subconscient Nature. The free individual is the conscious progressive: it is only when he is able to impart his own creative and mobile consciousness to the mass that a progressive society becomes possible." (HC 683)

In his commentary on the Gita, Sri Aurobindo has provided a luminous answer to this problem:

"... the whole point of the teaching, that from which it arises, that which compels the disciple to seek the Teacher, is an inextricable clash of the various related conceptions of duty ending in the collapse of the whole useful intellectual and moral edifice erected by the human mind. In human life some sort of a clash arises fairly often, as for instance between domestic duties and the call of the country or the cause, or between the claim of the country and the good of humanity or some larger rehgious or moral principles. An inner situation may even arise, as with the Buddha, in which all duties have to be abandoned, trampled on, flung aside in order to follow the call of the Divine within. I cannot think that the Gita would solve such an inner situation by sending Buddha back to his wife and father and the government of the Sakya State, or would direct a Ramakrishna to become a Pandit in a vernacular school and disinterestedly teach little boys their lessons, or bind down a Vivekananda to support his family and for that to follow dispassionately the law of medicine or journalism. The Gita does not teach the disinterested performance

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of duties but the following of the divine life, the abandonment of all Dharmas, sarvadharmān, to take refuge in the Supreme alone, and the divine activity of a Buddha, a Ramakrishna, a Vivekananda is perfectly in consonance with this teaching. Nay, although the Gita prefers action to inaction, it does not rule out the renunciation of works, but accepts it as one of the ways to the Divine. If that can only be attained by renouncing works and life and all duties and the call is strong within us, then into the bonfire they must go, and there is no help for it. The call of God is imperative and cannot be weighed against any other considerations"." (EG-I 42-3)

One who deviated from and defies the social norm may be a mere rebel and law-breaker but one who transcends the prevailing code of conduct would be inspired by the knowledge of a higher law.⁸ This is the distinguishing mark of constructive or creative disobedience which quickens the pace of progress in the community whereas the usual forms of rebellion and protest spring from the unrestrained egoism of the individual. Very often the violent law breaker and iconoclast exhibits his destructive rage and parades his swelled ego as the Superman. He is the Asura who tears and shatters all that impedes the free expression of his savage and fierce will, the anarchist who brings in chaos and destruction. The normal individual must follow the discipline of the conventions, the śāstra of society until he is able to see beyond these and acquire the fitness denying the prevailing law in the name of a higher law.

Individuahty thus nurtured by the influences of group and society and by the dedication to the Divine in man, leads to the concept of superman hood as the final aim of individual self-development. Superman hood is a much misunderstood idea because of its associations with brute force and vital self-assertion. The true idea of superman hood would point to the divine possibilities of manhood as we know it now. The human stage represents the present point of evolutionary development but cannot be its culmination. The final promise of the evolutionary process would be the Gnostic being.

"...what has to emerge ...is a self-realised being, a

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building of the spiritual self, an intensity and urge of the soul and the deliverance and sovereignty of its light and power and beauty, — not an egoistic superman hood seizing on a mental and vital domination over humanity, but the sovereignty of the Spirit over its own instruments, its possession of itself and its possession of life in the power of the spirit, a new consciousness in which humanity itself shall find its own self-exceeding and self-fulfilment by the revelation of the divinity that is striving for birth within it. This is the sole true Superman hood and the one real possibility of a step forward in evolutionary Nature". (LD 946)

The gnostic life might be described as a "life of Spiritual and Supramental manhood." (LD 945)

Sri Aurobindo's promise of superman hood as the evolutionary promise of manhood and his view of the relation between the liberated individual and his fellowmen marks an advance over most of the familiar views on human development. The flowering of individuahty must inevitably be through social relationships but its perfection would remove it so far above these relations as to make it an isolated and unapproachable phenomenon. Such an individual may serve as an exalted ideal for mankind to imitate but would remain at a distance, far off from the limitations of earthly life. In Sri Aurobindo's view the Superman is of a different character. The Superman expresses the perfection of individuality, the curve of ascension which originates with man as he is and rises to the climax of gnosticism, to return again to the region of the temporal so as to elevate it to its own height. The individual in this sense represents the form which the Infinite assumes in the cosmic play, taking upon itself the limitations of the finite in order to lift it to its own level of completeness and perfection.... "the continuation of the Uumined individual in the action of the world is an imperative need of the world-play". (LD 38)

"To conquer the lures of egoistic existence in this world is our first victory over ourselves; to conquer the lure of individual happiness in heavens beyond is our second victory; to

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conquer the highest lure of escape from life and a self-absorbed bliss in the impersonal infinity is the last and greatest victory. Then are we rid of all individual exclusiveness and possessed of our entire spiritual freedom". (O Y-I. 506)

G. N. SARMA

ABBREVIATIONS:

1. FIC—Foundations of Indian Culture. American edition.

2. HC — The Human Cycle. Volume IX of the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education collection.

3. EG — Essays on the Gita — two volume edition.

4. LD — The Life Divine. American edition.

5. OY — On Yoga — Volume I. Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education collection.

REFERENCES AND NOTES:

1. The aberrations of Individualism have been well brought out in The Human Cycle 213-214

2. "The ego is not the true circle of the self; the law of mutuality which meets it at every turn and which it misuses, arises from the truth that there is a secret unity between our self and the self of others and therefore between our own lives and the lives of others" Ibid. 846

3. "Of the universe he is a part; in all but his deepest spirit he is its subject, a small cell in that tremendous organic mass: his substance is drawn from its substance and by the law of its life the law of his life is determined and governed." Ibid. 33

4. It is necessary to see that "we do not put the collectivity in place of the Divine, because collectivity, though a manifestation of the universal Divine, is not divine in its operation and because it is vast, its proportions do not reduce its ignorance. Because it is vast, it can be vastly ambitious; it can be vastly egoistic. It is only the imperfections of man increased to colossal size." Sri Aurobindo's Life Divine by A. B. Purani. 194

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5. See also On Yoga I 230 and also Sri Aurobindo's Letter to Srimati Mrinalini Devi, December 6, 1907

6. "You must be above the conventions to be able to break them, you must be above the conventions in order to be able to disregard them, you must be above all rules and regulations in order to be able to look down upon them and the purpose of this freedom must never be a selfish, personal thing, the satisfaction of an ambition or the aggrandizement of one's personality through a sense of superiority." Nolini Kanta Gupta in The Advent, November 1959, page. 7

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EDUCATION FOR ONE WORLD

IN any country the best education that can be given to children consists in teaching them what the true nature of their country is and its own qualities, the mission their nation is to fulfil in the world and its true place in the terrestrial concert.

To that should be added a wide understanding of the role of other nations, but without the spirit of imitation and without ever losing sight of the genius of one's own country."¹

What kind of world do we have in view when we speak of "one world"? A world in which the nations not only forget their differences but cease to exist altogether as separate entities, where all men think and speak alike, use the same language written in a common script, eternally do the same things, live in unmitigated peace? Such a world, even if it comes as a gift from the gods, would not be a place worth living in. Man demands variation, a certain amount of struggle is indispensable for his progress, he soon tires of sameness. We might keep in mind the deeper meaning of unity; we must not mistake uniformity and mechanical association for unity.

And how is the new world to come into being? Through a political adjustment or by an inner psychological change? In all recent speculations about the future of the world, those that is, which assume its continued existence, there is great faith in salvation through machinery. Create the necessary political and economic machine, allow it to work smoothly for an adequate length of time, rectify its defects and men will automatically become perfect as the machinery is perfected: this seems to be the credo of modern man.

When the blundering discords of the Concert of Europe failed to maintain the peace of the world, an American President conceived the idea of a League of Perpetual Peace. The League which was joined by most nations of the world was found to be a clumsy device and was thrown overboard in the frenzy of war. Governments of the "peace-loving nations" have since joined the UNO in the hope of lasting peace. But they too are not quite satisfied with it. Many think it needs overhauling, some would like even to scrap it and create a new machine in its place. Meanwhile, on both sides of the Atiantic a number of non-governmental organisations have been busy formulating

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plans for a World-state to be built on the federal pattern; if that be too ambitious they are ready to start with smaller regional groupings. The Council of Europe and the West European Union have been some of the concrete results.

"But", as Sri Aurobindo points out, "a world-state implies a strong central organ of power that would represent or at least stand for the united will of the nations. A unification of all the necessary powers in the hands of this central and common governing body — powers military, administrative, judicial, economic, legislative, social, educational would be indispensable. And as an almost inevitable result there would be an increasing uniformity of human life throughout the world in all these departments, even perhaps to the choice or creation of one common and universal language .... The difficulties in the way of arriving at this result are at present obvious, but they are perhaps not so great as they seem at first sight."² If mankind cannot find a better way to solve the problem of peace, Nature will insist on this far from ideal method.

What will be the advantage of this method ? A World-state will certainly not tolerate war, and since peace is the one thing of which we are most in need, it will be a very welcome change. "Peace assured, there would be an unparalleled development of ease and well-being .... The life of the race would steed down into an assured rational order comfortable, well-regulated, well-informed, with a satisfactory machinery for meeting all difficulties, exigencies and problems with the least possible friction .... And no doubt some chief poet of the age, writing in the common or official tongue — shall we say, Esperanto? — would sing confidently of the approach of the golden age or even proclaim its actual arrival and eternal duration. But after a time, there would be a dying down of force, a static condition of the human mind and human life, then stagnation, decay, disintegration. The soul of man would begin to wither in the midst of his acquisitions."³ Prophetic words these, from Sri Aurobindo, and we had better take careful note of them.

But it is possible to find a better way. So long as man remains what he is, a little ego full of desires and ambitions that continually clash with those of other egos, where is the safety in machinery? Science has put such terrible weapons in his hands that any kind of

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machinery can easily be turned into an instrument of destruction. The only safety lies in an inner change of heart, a psychological or spiritual revolution which changes the very basis of man's life, brings out the divine element hidden in his depths and makes him fit for a more decent individual and collective life. Fraternity is the secret, . and fraternity is of the soul.

When Bernard Shaw said, we cannot love our neighbour because we know the fellow too well, he was uttering a dangerous half-truth. We do not love our neighbour not because we know him too well but because we do not care to know him well enough. It should be our business to know our neighbours well. And this we cannot really do unless we know ourselves first. This applies to the individual as to the nation. Remove the root cause of disunity and strife and you will build a harmonious world. And the root cause of all is ignorance, as the ancient sages knew.

Ancient cultures sought to remove this ignorance through a systematic spiritual and ethical training. But the ancient world could not emanate strife because of the defects inherent in its system. The education was imparted to a select few and it was meant primarily as a preparation for the next world; it left little impress on the common man. Even a succession of great spiritual and rehgious leaders-could not remove the sense of pride and superiority, fear and hatred from the minds of men.

In modern times spiritual and ethical training has been neglected. The education given to youth insists on the greatness of the nation, its past achievement and the promise of future glory. War has been glorified, dominance over other peoples in the name of "civilisation" has been given the prestige of a mission. The ruling classes have been thoroughly imbued with the idea of race and cultural superiority. Dehberate attempts have been made to ignore other nations and other cultures whatever their contributions to the progress of man.

Certain intellectuals have recently reacted against this gospel of national egoism. They have wanted to make men forget that they owe sole allegiance to their own nation. They want them to belong to the world, to be sans patrie. They want to make Man the only godhead to be worshipped. This is the "religion of man" on which men like Tolstoy and Tagore have pinned their faith. But this religion

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of man has never yet touched the hearts of men. It has remained the intellectual profession of the few and it has not stood the test of war. Socialists and-Anarchists in every country who had professed to be the adherents of this faith forswore it immediately the Great War broke out; they rushed to the banners of their motherland.

A true religion of humanity is the obvious solution to the problem of international unity. But this religion must like all true religion be a matter of the heart, it must have its springs deep in the soul. Education has a part to play in bringing about this change. But education must have both its content and method radically altered if it is to play its part.

A first essential, at the academic or intellectual level, is to impart an education in school and college as would make the students familiar with the achievements of the different nations, including their own. This might mean a rewriting of history, with emphasis on the nations' interdependence, — a task which has already been included in the programme of UNESCO.

A related task is that of reconciling the present conflict between the claims of Science and Humanities as subjects of academic study. Science has annihilated distance and helped men know one another better; men of Science easily develop a tolerant spirit that can overpass all national barriers. As such, Science has a high claim to recognition, in spite of its misapphcation to the purposes of war. The Humanities too have played their part in war, witness the misapplication of Hegel in the writings of the historian Treitschke. But this cannot detract from the value of a wide humanitarian culture in any scheme of rational education.

But a mere intellectual training is not enough. Steps must be devised to make people abhor all violence; children must be taught from an early age that war is a rehc of barbarism. Both parents and teachers can help in this matter. Moral training should form part of the school curriculum. Habits of cooperative work both inside and outside school could be developed among the students with the help of their teachers and guardians. Aesthetic training and opportunities for aesthetic expression through the plastic arts, music, drama and pantomime should be given to children from an early age

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wherever possible. With an adequate moral and aesthetic training men would be less prone to violence than they are now.

But habits die hard, and it is idle to expect that mere academic training would eradicate them. Environment plays an important part in education, and unless we can provide suitable physical conditions for children as well as grown-ups, it may be difficult to produce results within a reasonable time. Hence the great importance of international centres of education, where people belonging to various nationalities can meet and work together and learn to know one another. In this context all schemes of interchange of students and teachers among the great centres of learning have an important bearing. The Auroville project now taken in hand by the Mother will it is hoped show the way to the future.

But no scheme of education or communal living will make men feel truly one, unless it helps in the emergence of the deepest soul in man. This was a task attempted in the past by aspirants to the religious life. If the future of humanity is to be assured, the aspirant must come out of the cloister and search for his soul in the turmoil of the world. Sri Aurobindo has shown the way to do it. The Mother has promised all assistance to those who sincerely try.

SANAT K. BANERJI

REFERENCES

1. The Mother, A Message, Bulletin of Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, April 1955.

2. Sri Aurobindo, The Ideal of Human Unity (Pondicherry, 1950),Chapter 23, p. 236.

3. Ibid., Chapter 27, pp. 288-289.

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Towards Eternity : Ed. V. Madhusudan Reddy. Institute of Human Study, Hyderabad-z. Price Rs, 50.00

AMONG the several publications that have come out during the Birth Centenary of Sri Aurobindo, this sumptuously produced Volume is perhaps the most comprehensive. In over 500 pages of closely printed text, this book covers such diverse aspects of the Master's life and teaching as Yoga and Poetry, Philosophy and Humour, Psychology and Polity, Education and Aesthetics etc. Notable writers, young and old, from the East and the West have paid their tributes to Sri Aurobindo in the form of studies in special fields ht by his genius.

Speaking of Sri Aurobindo as the creator of World-Philosophy, Dr. Indra Sen writes:

His education and natural endowment seem to have given him wide appreciation of different philosophies and ways and views of life and existence. Then his deep interest in integrality, whether in regard to personahty or experience or reality leading to the discovery of the true quality of integral experience, called by him the Supermind, enabled him to create such a broad based philosophy as presents the model of a world philosophy. This philosophy not only reconciles and explains different continental and racial philosophies, but gives them the perspective of a unity and affords to each assured room for richer growth along its own characteristic line. A world philosophy must first supply a sense of the whole which gives to each part a better feeling of its due place, as also wider room for future existence. Sri Aurobindo's philosophy does that for all philosophies. It seems, therefore, to be a fortunate inauguration of the era of world philosophy.

Comparative studies in this Philosophy, special appreciations of some of its central themes e.g. spiritual evolution, discussion of its implications to the society, are some of the other topics. Ananda

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Reddy's long essay on Auroworld is a must, though it would have been more readable with a lesser number of quotations. The Editor's paper on Towards Eternity is a learned and exhaustive piece of writing examining the role of Sri Aurobindo in the progressive un fold ment of the Divine Consciousness on Earth.

M. P. PANDIT

Personalism: An Evaluation of Hindu and Western Types By Dr. G. Srinivasan, 1972, pp. 144, Pub. Research: Delhi

Dr. Srinivasan defines Personahsm thus: "the view that the only way to arrive at the most coherent and reasonable account of the universe is to use the self as the key to the interpretation of reality. It behaves that everything is either a self or an experience of a self". He has chosen this concept for detailed study because it is employed by a number of thinkers not only of the west but also of Hinduism. A special advantage of this study is that he is able to offer fresh comments on the teachings of the former as well as the latter from a new point of view.

The Western Personalism, he shows, expresses itself in different forms — relativistic personahsm, ethical personahsm, pantheistic personalism. However he thinks that the Absolute Personalism of Josiah Royce and M. W. Calkins and the Theistic Personahsm of B. P. Bowne and A. C. Knudson are the two typical forms in the West. Likewise in Hinduism he distinguishes four main forms of personahsm—Dualistic Personahsm of Sankhya-Yoga, Pluralistic Personahsm of Nyaya-Vaisesika, Theistic Personahsm of Dvaita, and Organismic Personalism of Visistadvaita. After a detailed examination of the Western Personalism, Dr. Srinivasan concludes: "What we find in Western Personahsm is a limitation of the structure of the self to its empirical consciousness, and the synthesis of unity and plurahty, identity and change discovered in empirical consciousness always retains an element of 'dichotomy' as its ultimate or permanent feature". A similar study of Hindu philosophical systems brings to light the fact that they "do not limit the self to empirical

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consciousness nor do they accept the dichotomy of the empirical self as the foundation for the construction of a philosophical system. They posit the existence of a transcendent "I" (ātman or aham padartha) behind the veil of empirical consciousness and affirm that this transcendent "I" is in fact the basic reality in man". The significance of this differentia is that it not only helps him to assess the value of Hindu Personalism in relation to the Western but also provides a criterion to determine the relative merits of the schools of Hindu Personalism in relation to each other. The four schools (Sankhya-Yoga etc.), he observes, constitute a logically progressive enquiry into the nature of "Person", of which the culminating point is Visistadvaita. The last chapter of the book is devoted to a brief survey of contemporary Indian Personalism-Integral Personalism of Sri Aurobindo, Aesthetic Personalism of Tagore, and Ethical Personalism of Gandhi.

In this comparative and critical study of Personalism the author has convincingly brought out the fact that Hindu Personahsm is indeed very comprehensive and profound. In the fitness of things we are bonged to say a word about the 'Integral Personahsm' of Sri Aurobindo as outhunted by the author. He seems to think that the Personahsm of Sri Aurobindo is identical with that of Ramanuja, though he admits that there is some difference between the two. A careful study of Sri Aurobindo on the part of the author would have helped him to see what Sri Aurobindo actually stands for as distinguished from Ramanuja and, consequently, to avoid statements like: "Sri Aurobindo emphasises the possibihty and the need for an ascent from the Mind to the Supermind on the part of the finite soul as much as Ramanuja does". It would have helped him also to discover that the development of Personalism acquires a far greater dimension in the hands of Sri Aurobindo.

Apart from this, this interesting volume is a contribution to Philosophy chiefly because it brings to light a category of thought hardly taken note of or discussed by scholars engaged in comparative studies in Philosophy.

N.  JAYASHANMUKHAM

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The Great Descent, Sri Aurobindo, By Shyamadas Chatterji

The book is undoubtedly a valuable contribution to the literature on Sri Aurobindo's life and teachings and gives within a small compass of seven chapters in 317 closely printed pages a narration of his life and activities, his philosophy and yoga in particular. Though, as said by Sri Aurobindo, nobody can write about his life as it is not on the surface and most of his writings are based on spiritual experiences and realisations inaccessible to others, yet this reverent writing of an ardent devotee who has probed deep into his philosophy and yoga will prove to be edifying to most of us.

The book is divided into seven chapters. The first contains the main events of the resurgence of spiritual India during the nineteenth century, that is, the founding of the Brahma Samaj by Raja Rammohan Roy and that of Arya Samaj by Dayananda, the writings of Tilak on the Veda and the Gita, the advent and teachings of Paramahansa Ramakrishna and his heroic disciple, Swami Viveka-nanda and also of Sri Vijaykrishna Goswami. Chapter II deals with Sri Aurobindo's early life including that in England. Chapter III deals with his work and 'tapasya' at Baroda. It also contains his famous letter to his wife and some poems about his early spiritual experiences. Chapter IV deals copiously with Sri Aurobindo's activities in Bengal and contains summaries of some of his speeches and writings, including, "The Brain of India", "Introduction to the Gita" translated from the paper, "Dharma" in Bengali and "A System of National Education", and refers to the historic Alipore trial, excerpts from his statement and judgment of the judge, Beach-croft, and eventually, his realisation of 'Vasudeva Sarvam' in the Alipore Jail-Ashram, as called by him. Chapter V deals with his stay and work at Pondicherry from the day of his arrival on 4.4.1910 until the day of his Siddhi on 24. I 1.26. In this chapter are recounted Sri Aurobindo's pecuniary difficulties, is its of Sri Motilal Roy and Sri Aurobindo's trans latio n in English of Deshbandhu Chittaranjan, "Songs of the Sea" for hi s handsome contribution to Sri Aurobindo, the first ar rival of the Mother at Pondicherry and her meeting with Sri Aurobindo on 29.3. 1914, the publication of 'Arya' on 15.8.1914, that is, Sri Aurobindo's birthday. The Mother's statement on her

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first meeting with Sri Aurobindo is an event of far-reaching consequences in the life of the Ashram which really started functioning with her final arrival on 24.4.1920. In the "Arya" were published serially, "The Life Divine," "The Synthesis of Yoga", "The Secrets of the Veda", and the "Essays on the Gita". We get here a summary of Sri Aurobindo's commentary on "Isha Upanishad". Chapter VI deals with "The Life Divine" and "The Synthesis of Yoga" in relation to each other. The gist given of these two great works will prove to be of immense value to the readers in comprehending Sri Aurobindo's Integral Philosophy and Integral Yoga. The Seventh Chapter which is the last deals with Sri Aurobindo's monumental epic, "Savitri" which has been termed by Sri Aurobindo as a legend and a symbol. It also deals with the Mother's sadhana and her vast experiences which have come out from her talks and writings. The author has truly observed that no writing on Sri Aurobindo can be complete without the Mother's life, activity, compassion, grace and it has been quite appropriate that this chapter contains a brief life-sketch of the Mother and also some extracts from her writings about her spiritual experiences. The author has also shown that 'Savitri' in the Great Epic refers to the life and sadhana of the Mother and many yogic experiences of Sri Aurobindo have been revealed through Aswapathy. This chapter also recounts Sri Aurobindo's withdrawal in December, 1950.

The author has taken great pains in explaining Sri Aurobindo's philosophy and Yoga and has aptly observed that Sri Aurobindo's philosophy is "Darshan" which leads to the sight of God. It is not speculative philosophy as understood in the West but is based on actual spiritual experiences. There is no doubt that the book under review will be of immense help to the readers in knowing Sri Aurobindo's remarkable life and understanding his profound writings on politics, psychology, education, philosophy, Yoga and especially his three masterpieces, "The Lift Divine", "The Synthesis of Yoga" and "Savitri".

S. C. CHATIERJl

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