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 Parable of Sea-gulls

ON a sea-coast — a fairly large tract of land opening out on the vast sea and the infinite sky — among rocks and cliffs there lived a flock of sea-gulls, rather flocks of sea-gulls, — for they were almost innumerable, in hundreds and perhaps in thousands — a whole colony of them. Have you seen a sea-gull, at least in a picture? This beautiful bird spotlessly white end to end, and when in flight with outspread wings and its delicate supple body, so pleasing, so wonderful to look at! Do you know their routine, their daily preoccupation? Of course the first thing in the morning for them to do was to fly out and look for food. Their food is naturally fishes. So these birds used to go to a certain distance upon the sea and from above look down and spot the swimming fishes below and dart down, catch them and fly up again; then they came back to their places and shared their catch among themselves. Naturally there was a good deal of scrambling and fighting but that was part of life. And there after,

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most of the time, they passed in dozing or sleeping, or at times flying out again upon the sea for a forage. And of course there was the item of mating and begetting children. That was their life and they continued it day after day, year after year. They were, I suppose, quite content with the life they were leading.

Now it happened that one of these sea-gulls thought otherwise. Yes, a thought entered into him. Why should not a thought enter into the head of a bird? A new thought, a faith did enter into the heart of a human child as reported in the Upanishads; so this bird, with his questioning thought found the ordinary bird-life quite un-interest-ing. He thought: why so much stress upon food and sleep and quarrelling and increasing the population? He found flying itself a beautiful adventure. Why fly just a few miles, only to come back, flop down and roost? Why not fly out, out into the vast sea abroad, and the limitless sky overhead? He thought he had wings strong enough to fly him far and high, he would try.

So from then he separated from his tribe and went out on his own for the joy of a long journey and long flight. It was pure delight for him and he increased the distance of his flight from day to day, from a hundred to a thousand miles or more. And he found himself gradually incredibly stronger in body, unbelievably happy within. Food or sleep or rest did not trouble him any more. When he was thus practising on this new adventure, two or three of his comrades noticed it and became interested. So they approached him and asked what the matter was. He explained to them what he was about, he was not happy with the old common life, he wanted a new, broader, more vigorous life. The new-comers were allured to the project and they wanted to join the new adventure. They were gladly accepted.

So these three or four friends joined together and resolved to start a new life. The new-comers were first taught the lessons of long _% flight — perhaps how they could fly some thousands of miles at a stretch without rest. One day the pioneer bird — let us give him a name 'Shobhanaka'¹ for he was very fine to look at — told his comrades: long flight is not sufficient; not only a horizontal flight but a vertical flight should be also our asset. So they attempted to fly up and up, up into the clouds and beyond as much as possible, as much as the

¹ à la manure de Panchatantra, e.g., Damanaka, Karanaka, Bhasunaka

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earth's atmosphere and gravitation would allow. They achieved this feat also and in doing it they found another mystery. Shobhanaka said: a long-distance flight, whether horizontal or vertical is not sufficient, we must increase our speed, the speed of flight. And the way to increase the speed is to speed down from above — darting headlong towards earth. In this way in place of a bare fifty or sixty miles per hour, they calculated they could attain the speed of sound. To break the sound barrier is indeed an achievement for bodily speed. Now they wanted to go farther on. Added to the flight they now learnt all kind of acrobatic movements of the body — exactly as expert pilots do with their aeroplane, that is to say, with their gathering speed they went through all movements of vaulting, somersaulting, twirling, twisting and so on. They made their bodies a wonderful mass of supple energy and even radiant energy.

At this point one day, all on a sudden, they saw at a distance a bird of their kind but somewhat different, more beautiful, more glorious. They approached him, or perhaps he approached them, and said: "I was observing you and I found that what you were doing is wonderful. Your achievement is really marvellous. But there is something more yet to do. I am come to teach you what you have still to do for your true fulfilment. Till now you were moving on the same plane, all your progress has been made in one direction. You have to change over to another plane, acquire another dimension. I will explain." — "You have learnt 'moving flight'. You have to learn now unmoving or still flight. This is a contradiction in terms? In the new dimension you have to reconcile or unify the contradiction. Listen carefully. I give you the mystery of still flying. It is getting as I said into another dimension of space — or another kind of space — it is better I give you a practical demonstration." "Come," he said addressing Shobhanaka, "stand here on your legs straight, firm and unmoving, by my side. Normally when you fly first you have the will to fly, then that will you put forth into your body, into your muscles and nerves, spreading it out as it were into your wings, making your wings mobile. Now what you have to do is an opposite movement. Instead of sending your will and energy outward, as if throwing it out, you gather the will and energy within yourself, that is, concentrate within you your will and energy instead of spilling them out. The whole

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thing depends upon this concentration, this gathering up your energy and will on one point within you: and then just look, that is to say, with your thought or consciousness at the point where you want to go. It is like a strung bow with its arrow pointing at the target. And then let yourself go as it were. Indeed if your concentration is perfect you will leap straight into your target without it would seem, passing through the intermediate stages — telescoping as it were all the intervening steps into one single step — a long jump at a lightning speed. Now try to do what I told you. Feel what I am doing."

Miraculous it was. Shobhanaka saw the Elder-one who had been by his side but was now there on another cliff. At the next moment the expert flyer was back at his place as before, by the side of his pupil. The pupil exclaimed in admiration: "It is an impossibility, but since you have done it I will try to do it." "Yes," the Elder-one said, "I too did not succeed in one day or in one attempt. It takes time, even a long time. But persistence, perseverance and faith un-discouraged will bring you the victory."

"Here I give you the ultimate, the supreme secret," the Elder-one continued, "the inner core of the teaching. This body, this substance made of solid matter that seems so rigid, compact, hard, is really not so; you must have realised it by this time. You cannot even say that this body material is an encasement for the storage and play of energy which is the true reality behind: it is not so. The body, the physical structure is only an idea, it is a perception: you perceive that there is a body, it does not exist outside your perception, your perception is an immaterial thing. The whole body so neatly outlined, so concretely static is only a combination of ideas and perceptions, a projection of your mind: from tip to tip your outspread wings consist only of your thoughts as if strung together. If that is so, you can naturally manipulate thought by thought, in other words, your body, that is what appears as your body, is at your mercy, which means at the mercy of your thought. You can move the body as you like, for you can move naturally thought by thought. So what is needed is a withdrawal of the mind into its thought-stuff and control it, make use of it from that centre. I have shown you how one can be this inner motive-thought and not be obsessed by its apparent material formulation. It is difficult

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to understand but by practice as I have shown you you will understand."

A few days passed. Shobhanaka was practising the new technique and was on the way towards success. The Elder-one came another day and said to the group of three or four aspirant-birds: "My mission is ended, I have taught you what was intended to be taught and you are on a fair way towards success. A last word you must remember. Your achievements are not for yourselves alone. You must go back and try to instil these new virtues into your comrades left behind, they too must share the joy and the glory of this new life. I have to go; for there are works still for me to do, and other and higher dimensions of real living. But help will always come to you whether I come or another one comes, you will always be companioned by happy helpers." So saying the Elder-bird flew up and up and gradually turned into a blazing point and disappeared among the stars.

II

Now these transmuted sea-gulls met and consulted together. They had to go back in the midst of their old comrades but how could they? Naturally they could not go back to the old mode of life. Besides they would not be accepted by their old community. They were ostracised and they were now an outcaste group. If they ventured into the society of their old comrades they were likely to be violendy dealt with or perhaps even killed. However there was no option left, they were ordained and it was now their duty to go back and try to come in touch with their old friends and influence them, guide them with the new mode of life to whatever extent it was possible.

So they flew back to their old domain and as soon as they were in sight of their former friends, all those almost in a body rushed out and raised a hue and cry, sounded an alarm as it were: "the enemies are come!" But these new beings, a new type of sea-gulls were not daunted, they approached bravely and calmly without fear, without any intention of opposing or giving battle. They passed by over their ancient habitat sailing in a beautiful formation with their beautiful white, all-white body aglow with a new radiance, pulsating with a new charm. All who rushed out to engage in a fight and combat full of anger and

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fury halted, stood agape in confusion and wonder.

Thus the battle was won, marvellously peacefully. The older race, specially the younger generation, could mark and appreciate the gait and the manner of flight in these new-comers. They now found out that the old mode of life was not interesting enough, there was no special joy in flying to procure only food-stuff, in merely catching fishes and gobbling them up: doing that eternally, repeating over and over again the same dull routine. Instead there was the joy in flying simply for the sake of flying, in flying far, far into the distant horizon, far into the infinite spaces overhead, into the urrfamiliar and the unknown. Thus slowly the old community began to change its mode of life adding a new meaning to their movements — a new limb and dimension to their body and existence.

This healthy influence became more effective since they witnessed a strange and curious event happening in their presence.

A demonstration was being given by Shobhanaka of the art of flying, of all the difficult and artistic modes of flying. He was showing the speed with which one is capable of flying, literally lightning speed. A large crowd of spectators had gathered round an arena-like opening and was intently observing all the wonderful and almost impossible acrobatics and calisthenics. They suddenly saw the bird from one far corner of the sky speeding across to the other end and, as I said, beating lightning's speed, but suddenly one stray bird happened to be there up directly in the way of the speeding bird. In order to avoid dashing against the intruder, Shobhanaka swerved round but hurled himself straight upon... Oh! what horror! a cry of pity and pain rose up from the crowd — in swerving away from the bird upon his path, Shobhanaka in his incredible speed dashed and crashed against a cliff that was blocking the sides. Every one thought that was the end of the poor flying expert, he must have been reduced to a pulp now. But what a miracle! Hale and hearty he was there flying up slowly and at ease, then gracefully descending upon the earth as if nothing had happened. Well, his body did not seem to be made of flesh and bone but of some ethereal substance, so supple, so elastic, so resilient that nothing offered any resistance to it. It could pass through like a beam of invisible fight.

The upshot was that the old community gradually changed its

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habits, slowly but inevitably they took to adventure and far-flights, over the unknown waves into the infinite blues. Many became experts and given to this new life they formed gradually a community by themselves and found for themselves another habitat nearby. Those old experts, Shobhanaka's group, the masters, were with them as teachers and guides. And thus new guides and new teachers arose and community after community leading this new life, a life in which the old and unclean habits were eliminated and there was a life of exquisite beauty and harmony among all.

Here ends my story. It is the story, rather a vision and aspiration in a beautiful symbol of a pilot, a real pilot who was flying real aero-.planes. When he flew with his hard, rigid, mechanical wings into other regions free from the earth's gravitational controls, he imagined or aspired to fly with other wings, golden wings, into other regions, golden regions of another kind of consciousness, super-human consciousness.

The symbol used here is very appropriate and meaningful. The sea-gull has normally a very beautiful appearance: its snow-white body outspreading its wings, all spotless white and its gracefulness in flight is indeed a delightful spectacle for the eyes to contemplate. Even so man, even this earthly creature has within him a beautiful being, snow-white in its purity and exceedingly graceful in its gait and movement; that being has to be brought out and displayed even as the sea-gull transformed itself — transformed its very nature and substance into a vibrating mass of light with its diamond sheen, its material body itself a packet of intense and yet controlled radiating energy.

NOLINI KANTA GUPTA

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COLLABORATION AND SERVICE

"How to collaborate in all sincerity in showing to the world that man can be a true servitor of the Divine."

WE live today in a world which is "strongly marked with the stamp of inadequacy, suffering, evil."¹ Our life is inveigled in the triple web of the physical, vital, mental ego, and all our activities have the predominant motive of satisfying personal desires, of quenching vital passions and impulses. The entire globe is rocked by the wild dance of these unspiritual, egoistic, anarchic forces, which are striving to establish their supremacy over the world and the life of humanity. We are sinking in a whirlpool of our own making. If centuries of culture and its creations are to survive, a solution to this "evolutionary crisis," which has propagated itself in every sphere of human activity — politics, economics, education, morality, religion etc., — must be found soon. This can be resolved only if the fundamental cause of this disharmony can be first found.

The life of man has been one of vehement self-assertiveness — mental, vital and physical. The inner, spiritual life has been ignored, and thus instead of an upward ascent, the spiritual life has followed a curve of decadence. It is precisely this disequilibrium between the outer and the inner life that has infected humanity with this awful malady, and brought about a degeneration in the human consciousness.

Thus the most effective antidote to this imbalance would be a replacing of the old order of things by a new one, the supplanting of the old consciousness by a new superior consciousness. Man must realise that an inner spiritual conversion is the only cure, the only solution to the dismal state of human affairs. And it is precisely this realisation, this conviction that becomes the point de dèpart towards the manifestation of this new dimension of things - which seeks a spiritual deliverance in all the fields of human existence and strives to bring down the Divine Light, Knowledge, Power and Beatitude on the Earth. Mere mental conception or perception is not enough, it must be followed by an application of the idea into practice. How to work this idea out in life?

¹ The Riddle of. This World (P. 82)

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Sri Aurobindo's life is a perfect guideline, and His experiences should be strong enough to convince and inspire us and guide us to fulfil the mission. Life has to be embraced and not shunned, and with the new Knowledge and Light has to be transmuted and transformed. " That Power and Light, which will enlighten us and illuminate the difficult path, burns within each human being and waits to be discovered. The soul or the psychic being is the vehicle, the temple of the deepest Truth of our being — it holds the Infinite, the Truth, the Divine. Once man can establish contact with this mysterious Force within, all the guidance will be received by him, and he has but to follow the dictates of that Divine Will. This arduous link established, the key to success in the critical enterprise of World-Transformation has been found. The soul is the infallible spark of Divine Light — the "beautiful flower of Cosmic Energy." It carries within itself the Knowledge of the Divine Plan and knows the ways of divinising Life and bringing about the Supreme Manifestation. The more one tries to go inward, the more things become "profoundly luminous" and "intimately intelligible."

Aspiration is the spring-board towards this awareness of this Divine Guide. Aspiration can open our being to that Light and make us ready for the new adventure of consciousness, but it has to be absolutely sincere, i.e., it must be accompanied by a disinterested giving up of one's personal claims and preferences — both in the work and in the result — by a complete stop to the pampering service of the Prakriti in us, and a total surrender to the Divine Will. It is only by becoming conscious of the Divine in us that we can qualify as worthy collaborators in the Transformation. Sincerity is the basis of , all collaboration. As the Mother says, it is "the means, the way, and the goal, it is protection, safety, guidance, ultimately it is the transforming power". What is true sincerity?

Well, it is an intense centralisation of all the parts of one's being around the Truth of one's Ideal, and when we become strongly conscious of this, then the Transformation of human life becomes an inevitable necessity. The task seems less arduous.

The average humanity is lost in the din and clamour of material life and the pits and quagmires of the vitalistic world, but if even a small number of persons grasp the Supreme's Intention — aspire

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towards its realisation by a complete self-surrender into the hands of the Master, and become worthy servitors of the Alchemist to alchemize the earthly life of Falsehood and Ignorance into one of Truth and Light — it is sufficient to awaken the dormant humanity and completely change the course of events. For, then, each individual will rise from the petty, ego-centric roots of existence, discard all that belongs to the lower nature and recast his personality in the new Image. His activities will be performed in the Light of the New Consciousness. Everything will take new values, "not from itself, but from the consciousness that uses it." Whatever a man's work or vocation in life, if it is determined from within it will become a means of self-expression, of self-revelation and a sure and steady growth towards a greater perfection. The whole being will be directed towards the "conscious instrumentation" for the highest service to the Divine. Every individual will live in a Yogic Samata i.e., in an equality of the soul founded on "a sense of the one self, the Divine everywhere, seeing the One in spite of all differences, degrees, disparities in the Manifestation". This is what, I suppose, Sri Aurobindo meant when he said whatever life one leads, when it has before it this Ideal, all life becomes Yoga, i.e., an attempt at union with the true Personality of our Being and through it with the Divine. Thus the best way of collaboration is to equip oneself with a central, steadfast sincerity and a fundamental humility, in our service to the Divine. To become a true servitor, we must shed off all grossness of being — desire, mental bias and preference, attraction, disgust, sympathy or antipathy, attachment and repulsion — and arm ourselves for the difficult battle, with an indomitable courage, a perfect sincerity, and a sincere self-surrender without any reservations or egoistic motives (personal aggrandise ment, self-affirmation, material well-being and protection etc.).

When one becomes a Perfect Instrument of the Master, nothing can perturb us. The vision of life becomes spiritual — and everything is transmuted to that level of consciousness. Our consciousness widens and ultimately embraces all mankind in our seeking of the Divine. The Vedantic dictum tat tvam asi fulfils itself with sarvam khalu idam Brahma. Our consciousness heightens by the raising of all the levels of our being to that consciousness and the emancipation from the triple ignorance. This .double movement of widening and heightening is

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accompanied by the fundamental movement of deepening within, i.e. becoming more and more intimate with the Divine within.

The adventure is a perilous one, because the consequences will be disastrous if there is any loophole in the sincerity of our collaboration. The Path is strewn with thorns and the journey is painful and chequered, because "the Divine is concealed behind a thick veil of his Maya and does not answer at once to our call." Therefore a persistent will, perseverance and a patient labour are indispensable instruments in this adventure towards a purer Existence.

These are the necessary requirements for a sincere collaboration, and this sincere collaboration is the best example we can give to the .world, in our service to the Divine.

MAURICE SHUKLA

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SAVITRI: A STUDY IN DEPTH

Book I, Canto 4

The Secret Knowledge

'On a height he stood that looked towards greater heights.

Our early approaches to the Infinite

Are sunrise splendours on a marvellous verge

While lingers yet unseen the glorious sun'

ASWAPATHI rises high on the scale of consciousness but there are still greater heights to be climbed; he is just on the border where he catches a glimmer but that is not the whole light; in spiritual approaches it is quite possible to have a passing glimpse and the seeker may give up the quest satisfied that the goal is reached; but the marvellous still lies undisclosed; these are but the preliminary splendours that greet the eye before the sunrise.

'This world is a beginning and a base

Where Life and Mind erect their structured dreams;

An unborn Power must build reality.

A deathbound littleness is not all we are:

Immortal our forgotten vastnesses

Await discovery in our summit selves'

Matter is the first and the firm base on which have flowered in course of evolution life and mind; these in their turn proceed building up their little structures according to their dreams; these are impermanent and perishable; and the abiding and lasting edifice, the temple of God, has to be constructed by man on a self-realisation that he is not an evanescent creature that may at any moment become the prey to death but the immortal spirit with a plenitude of might and vastness lying undiscovered within.

'Neighbours of Heaven are Nature's altitudes.

....................................................

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Too far from surface Nature's postal routes,

....................................

Deep in us a forgotten kinship points

.....................................

Still we have parts that grow towards the light

.....................................

And Eldoradoes of splendour and ecstasy'

Cut off from all communications with the work-a-day surface self, there are the summits of the inner self as towering as the high altitudes of the mountains planted by nature on the earth; though unaware of them, there may be moments, when the kingdoms of bliss and splendour reveal themselves and establish their kinship.

'...sometimes when our sight is turned within

......................................

Our souls can visit in great lonely hours Still regions of imperishable Light'

The extroverted senses with their mundane preoccupations can be little useful in establishing communication with the hidden kingdoms; it is only by a withdrawal from the without to the within that the lost empire could be regained; this introversion comes in moments of solitude; in self-contemplation the self emerges; the narrow envelope in which it is confined is torn; the tether tying it down to a pasture of the earthly is broken and it finds an escape into the regions of imperishable light.

'Sometime the inexpressible Mystery

Elects a human vessel of descent.

...............................................

Stone-calm the body is a pedestal

Supporting a figure of eternal Peace.

...............................................

And Nature trembles with the power, the flame

A greater Personality sometimes

Possesses us which yet we know is ours.

.............................................

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Then the small bodily ego thins and falls:

.......................................

It leaves us one with Nature and with God'

The Divine has his own standards; by his grace and not by the self-vaunted qualifications someone on the earth is chosen as the God's elect; he is possessed; sometimes becomes stone-still and the whole body, the pedestal for the divine descent may quiver and tremble as in the trance on the flame pouring down on the tender vessel; he feels that he is other than himself by the new awakened energies and faculties but at the same time he recognises himself though a changed being due to the transformation wrought by the influx; he achieves a vast self-extension; sheds the ego and becomes one with God.

'A ray of the timeless Glory stoops awhile

To commune with our seized illumined clay

And leaves its huge white stamp upon our lives.

Revealed to the closed prophet eyes of trance

.....................................

We hear what our mortal ears have never heard,

.......................................

Our minds hush to a bright Omniscient'

When the surface self is withdrawn into the profound deeps of the inner subliminal self and when he is in a tranced meditation, then the whole clay of the being is transmuted by the touch of the illuminating ray; it leaves a mark of immaculate perfection of the Divine; there is a sublimation and sublimation of the senses which can hear' and see what is not possible for the mortal; and the stilled mind becomes the audience to the outpourings of the Omniscient. 'It is only by an opening to our inner being or an entry into it that a direct intimate awareness can be added to the outer indirect awareness. It is only by an awakening to our inmost soul that there can be a beginning of spiritual knowledge with identity as its base.'¹

¹ The Life Divine l, p. 493.

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'These signs are native to a larger self

That lives within us by ourselves unseen;

......................................

It follows the line of sempiternal birth

Yet seems to perish with its mortal frame.

.......................................

Great, patient, calm it sees the centuries pass,

Awaiting the slow miracle of our change'

Mostly engrossed in the round of the drab activities prescribed by the desire surface self, man loses all contact with the subliminal to such an extent that the impulses of an ennobling and elevating nature coming there from, are mistaken by him to be those hailing from a stranger; though concealed behind the veils of the ego, it exercises an uplifting influence by sowing in man the higher aspirations; though the form perishes, its work continues; it is a silent witness continuing the unfinished work across the centuries in a patient manner assured of the apocalypse and the miracle to happen of man becoming divine and recognising the concealed stranger to be none other than himself.

'A living image seated in the heart,

..................................

A Splendour in the tenebrous cloak

......................................

A burning witness in the sanctuary

...................................

And knows the goal of the unconscious world'

The Eternal seated in the lotus of the heart as the silent witness guides every movement of the man, furthering thus the course of evolution according to plan; it is his presence that lights up the body subject to decay; the sweets and the joys of life derive from that source; it is the guardian angel of man till the mission he is charged with, is discharged and knowing the curves and the lines of development, it remains unaffected taking mutation after mutation suitable for the advancement of his purpose in the endless stream of time.

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'It needs the intuitive heart, the inward turn,

...................................

Else to our waking mind's small moment look

A goalless voyage seems our dubious course

...................................

Our very being seems to us questionable

...................................

Ever surround our brief existence here

Grey shadows of unanswered questionings

...................................

And meets not understanding why it came

Or for what reason is the suffering here'

The whence and the why of existence are questions that naturally engage the attention of man because he alone has a thinking mind; but the answers to these questions are beyond the purview of a mere intelligence; the higher truths cannot be spelt out by reason; they must come as revelation or intuition. In the absence of this, everything is sought to be explained away as chance or mechanism; the suffering here and the fallibility of man's discoveries being displaced by the fresh ones after a time, suffer facile disposal.

'The Earth-Goddess toils across the sands of Time,

A Being is in her whom she hopes to know

...................................

Ever she nurses in her sleepless breast

An inward urge that takes from her rest and peace.

...................................

A few rare intimations come as guides

...................................

A vision meets her of supernal Powers

That draw her as if mighty kinsmen lost

...................................

Passionate she prays to invisible forms of Gods

What most she needs, what most exceeds her scope

...................................

A Strength not forced to stumble by its speed

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A Joy that drags not sorrow as its shade.'

The Divine has almost lost himself in the inconscience but for a single ray through which he wants to recover himself; it is this ray that makes life blossom in the inert matter and mind to appear in man; it is the same spark that creates up-lifting aspirations in man; mind which is a product of the clay sees the truth but sees it dimly and not from within and that is why its formulations of truth are shells deprived of the spirit; it feels the joy but it is the joy of a fleeting kind since it comes not from within but from the externals; the spirit within does not sleep; it drives the earth nature towards perfection; sends intimations of immortality and greater bliss; makes it strive not minding the frustrations; and this intense aspiration for powers beyond the human scope meets with an answering pull from the beyond by the supernal powers that recognise the earth as a long lost kinsman.

'It is a power within us the concealed divinity, that has lit the flame of aspiration, pictures the image of the ideal, keeps alive our discontent and pushes us to throw off the disguise and disclose the Godhead in the manifest spirit life and body of this terrestrial creature¹

'Heaven's privilege she claims as her own right.

...................................

Our intuitions are its title-deeds;

...................................

But few can look beyond the present state

Or overleap this matted hedge of sense

...................................

This mass of unintelligible results

Are the dumb graph of truths unseen

...................................

Yet a foreseeing Knowledge might be ours

If we could hear the muffled daemon voice'

All that man aspires for and which at present seems to belong to heaven, are indeed his; his claims and ownership to those higher possessions

¹ The Life Divine 2, p. 358.

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are indubitably established by the golden moments of inspiration and intuition that he has; it is a pity that all cannot have this insight or assiduity to look into their title-deeds; they are confined to the prison house of mind and feel amazed at the turn of events; but those who traverse beyond the hedge of senses, know all and can account for everything; and they can hear the voice of the genius seated within giving them a foreknowledge of what is to happen.

'Our range is fixed within the crowded arc

...................................

And rarely dawns the light of the Unknown

Waking in us the prophet and the seer.

...................................

Mind keeps the soul prisoner, we are slaves to our acts

We cannot free our gaze to reach wisdom's sun.

Inheritor of the brief animal mind

...................................

To a changing present is his narrow right

...................................

A struggling ignorance is his wisdom's mate

...................................

Only the Immortals on the deathless heights

...................................

Hear, while the world toils on with its deep blind heart,

The galloping hooves of the unforeseen event,

Bearing the superhuman rider near

...................................

As lightning leaps, as thunder sweeps, they pass

And leave their mark on the trampled breast of Life'

Functioning with only an infinitesimal drop of consciousness and that too fully engrossed in the preoccupations of the immediate present, man has hardly any leisure to keep companionship with the seer and the prophet that are neglected and kept aloof though near and inside; enveloped by inconscience, the mind finds a companion in the ignorance that cannot see beyond the senses; ignorant of the

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past he struggles in the precarious present eking out a fleeting experience from moment to moment; to him the future is a receding horizon since it flies the moment it is reached; he is in reasonable doubt whether he survives or perishes like the previous mammal "the mastodon; but the determinants of the evolution the Gods above, know the plan and watch its unfolding; sometimes they may come down to observe more closely; and to the surprise of the Gods and the mortals alike the evolutionary march may take a sudden jump, evident in the mark, the influence left on the world by a superhuman coming swift as a wave and disappearing as a lightning.

'Above the world the world-creators stand

...................................

They watch the Bliss for which the earth's heart has cried

On the long road which cannot see its end

...................................

And to meet it guide the un heedful moving world'

The Powers on the high, charged with the execution of the divine plan are little deflected from their purpose by the deceptive appearances below; they are undisturbed by the clamour and the confused scene presented by humanity; they notice how everything obeys and develops according to a self-law implanted within; they show the patience necessary; through their higher perceptions they see and hear what may be missed by men in the rough and tumble of life; they patiently await the hour of fulfillment of the earthly longing for the bliss supreme; and guide the world, unseen and from behind for its realisation.

'When darkness deepens strangling the earth's breast

...................................

As a thief's in the night shall be the covert tread

Of one who steps unseen into the house.

...................................

A power into the mind's inner chamber steal

...................................

And earth grow unexpectedly divine.'

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Urged by the aspiration from within and helped by the outstretched hands above, the masked inhabitant gradually rises up; with the surreptitious tread of a thief, he steals into the chamber; the earth nature feels invaded by a tide of bliss, charm and beauty and while the learned discourse on God, he suddenly descends, clinching all doubt by his presence.

'A consciousness that knows not its own truth,

...................................

Far from the original Dusk, the final Flame

In some huge void Inconscience it lives

...................................

A message misunderstood, a thought confused

Missing its aim is all that it can speak

...................................

For without context reads the cosmic page:

Its signs stare at us like an unknown script

...................................

It wears to the perishable creature's eyes

The grandeur of a useless miracle;

...................................

A river that can never find its sea,

...................................

A hyphen must connect Matter and Mind,

The narrow isthmus of the ascending soul;

...................................

Reconstitute the perfect word, unite

The Alpha and the Omega in one sound:'

Man is in the position of Lady Shallot; confined to the present only, he views the passing phenomenal world reflected on the dim glass of the mind; without the proper background he wants to read the cosmic page but does not understand the script; the several theories woven, conjectures made are more confusing than clarifying; beats about the bush and never arrives at the truth since he does not possess the context of the past and the future; unless he dives within, knows the origin and the goal of the existence, everything appears a

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paradox; the enigma can be explained only by the inner knowledge that matter is the body of the spirit and that there is no gulf between them and that being and becoming are aspects of one Reality. 'The inconscience is a sleep or a prison, the consciousness is a round of strivings without ultimate issue or the wanderings of a dream: we must wake into the super conscious where all darkness of night and half-lights ceases in the self-luminous bliss of the eternal. The eternal is our refuge."¹

'In a sense the whole of creation may be said to be a movement between two involutions, spirit in which all is involved and out of which all evolves downward to the other pole of matter, matter in which also all is involved and out of which all evolves upward to the other pole of spirit.'²

Thus by the very nature of his existence, a bubble on the infinity of time, he mistakes a wave for the ocean, a gleam for the sun, a fragment for the whole; he lacks the integral knowledge; truth ever eludes him: only partly conscious, he has not yet neared the goal of super conscience.

'The Spirit's free and absolute potencies

Burn in the solitude of the thoughts of God.

...................................

They bend not to the voices that implore.

...................................

A deep surrender is their source of might

...................................

They look on our struggle with impartial eyes

And yet without them cosmos could not be.'

These cosmic powers are the emanations of the Supreme; they derive their strength from him by a spirit of surrender; they are in charge of the evolutionary plan; they look on the whole cosmic drama without being moved in the slightest; they cannot be won over by petitions or prayers; are not pleased by virtue nor repelled by sin; they are the executors of the divine decree and the maintenance

¹ The Life Divine, p. 571.

² The Life Divine, p. 120.

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of the cosmos is largely due to them.

'Their aloofness drives man to surpass himself.

...................................

Acquiescing in the wisdom that made hell

And the harsh utility of death and tears

...................................

Careless they seem of the grief that stings the world's heart

...................................

The immortal sees not as we vainly see

...................................

He makes no haste to untie the cosmic knot

...................................

In Time he waits for the Eternal's hour'

The stings of suffering, the goads of pain are highly purposive; they are meant to make man shed his sloth, his inertia, to impel him to strive, to struggle and not to yield till the higher objectives are attained; the higher heights beckon him from the heights already reached by him; to reach the perfection, the transcendence of the higher cosmic powers, is the aim for attaining which he braves even death and tears; the Immortal does not precipitate his manifestation; he makes use of the good and the evil alike to serve his evolutionary design and patiently awaits his hour of manifestation. 'For the method chosen by her is a slow and difficult evolution of inconscience developing into ignorance and ignorance forming itself into a mixed modified partial knowledge before it can be ready for transformation into a higher truth consciousness and truth knowledge.'¹

'And through the bitterness of death and fall

An outstretched Hand is felt upon our lives

...................................

In its unshaken grasp it keeps for us safe

...................................

The crown of conscious Immortality.

...................................

¹ The Life Divine, p. 548.

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Our errors are his steps upon the way

...................................

A mighty Guidance leads us through all.'

The divine guidance is always there for the struggling humanity; in all the vicissitudes through which man unlike the rest of the creation consciously participates in quickening the process of evolution towards the higher goal, he sees the cup of immortality held safe in the hands of the Eternal; and even the errors committed by him are the footprints of the divine experiment on the pathway to progress: and when the fibers of his soul are sufficiently fortified, the ever-wise compassionate Brilliances above, leap down to bridge the gulf, the abyss, dividing mind and spirit, with an integral knowledge.

'Here meanwhile at the Spirit's opposite pole

...................................

In this tragicomedy of divine disguise

...................................

The conscious Force that acts in Nature's breast

...................................

Absolves from hour to hour her secret charge

...................................

Privy to a summit victory's vast descent'

Meanwhile the puissance of the divine, his deputy, who is taken into confidence of the entire cosmic design and the plan of His ultimate and complete manifestation, unflinchingly makes the necessary effectuations on the earth; witnesses the tragicomedy of the multitude seeking for the One, the prime source, forgetting the fact that it is nowhere else except within; a labourer concealed in the dark robes of our ignorance, it toils on, unseen amidst all our trials and tribulations and discharges its duty of removing the obstacles and creates here a readiness and preparedness to receive God's bliss and oneness on the date fixed in the calendar of the Unknown.

'An unseen Presence moulds the oblivious clay.

A playmate in the mighty Mother's game,

...................................

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To hide from her pursuit in force and form.

...................................

A shapeless Energy, a voiceless Word

He was here before the elements could emerge'

Even prior to the cosmos coming into existence, the stable being exists; it works out a division of itself just for the delight of it and the cosmic drama is on; the one becomes the many; the being becomes the omnipresent and the indwelling, to escape from the playmate who comes seeking after him.

'He is the substance, he the self of things;

...................................

Dreaming she chases her idea of him

...................................

He is the vision and he is the seer

He is himself the actor and the act

...................................

And light and darkness are their eyes' interchange

Our pleasure and pain are their wrestle and embrace

...................................

The universe is an endless masquerade

...................................

Author and actor with himself as scene

He moves there as soul, as nature she.'

The force of nature or Prakriti which has lost all track of her spouse unceasingly engages herself in making a number of figures and forms embodying her idea or image of him; He the Purusha is enshrined in every form; in fact he is the substance, the substratum of every figure; they exist in him; without him they have no existence; this is an endless masquerade since the divine puts on the mask of matter to elude detection by nature; even nature is a part of his force; and thus he is the subject and the object, the seer and the seen, the player and the play, the ignorance and the knowledge. 'God exists in Himself and not by virtue of the cosmos or of man, while man and the

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cosmos exist by virtue of God and not in themselves except in so far as their being is one with the being of God.'¹

'We know not how shall run the drama's course;

...................................

She has concealed her glory and bliss

...................................

He too wears a diminished Godhead here

He has forsaken his omnipotence

...................................

To her he abandons all to make her great.

Incarnate, wedding his infinity's peace

To her creative passion's ecstasy.

...................................

He leaves her the cosmic management

And watches all the witness of her scene.'

In this cosmic drama, all have their part to play without knowing the plot or the denouement; nature which is a part of the force, the shakti of the Eternal, hides the glory and the bliss that are hers allowing only a trickle to visit her creations; the divine forgets or abdicates his omnipotence in her favour to make her great; he sacrifices his infinity for the sake of satisfying her passion of creative ecstasy; and becomes the passive witness abandoning the cosmic management to his adored Prakriti who is now his regent of desire.

'He leans on her for all he does and is:

...................................

And trails his peacock-plumaged joy of life'

Not a prompter behind the scenes, not an actor on the boards, yet the Purusha or the silent witness may be considered as the unseen director of the entire play; he makes the great sacrifice of offering his being as the base for all her effectuations: he depends on her largess: her bounty of executing his will and design and in proportion to the same of her opening up the layer of consciousness proper to the grade,

¹ The Life Divine, p. 615.

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the spirit peacock-like evinces the delight and the many-hued plumaged joy of existence.

'Happy, inert he lies beneath her feet:

His breast he offers for her cosmic dance

...................................

A partner in her evil and good,

...................................

His sanctioning name initials all her works;

His silence is his signature to her deeds;'

He follows the course chalked out by her; she takes the initiative and he the line of obedience; her whim is a law to him and his breast is the firm stage that can stand the pressure of her dance; the being and the becoming, the status and the dynamis are both aspects of the one reality; but for the one there can be no multiplicity. 'World existence is the ecstatic dance of Shiva which multiplies the body of the God numberlessly to the view: it leaves that white existence precisely where and what it was, ever is and ever will be; its sole absolute object is the joy of the dancing'.¹ Though all powerful, he allows himself to be dominated by her; subjects himself to her caprice; divines and obeys her intentions manifest in her gestures; her deeds have his mute acquiescence and actions his signature of silence.

'She through his witness sight and motion of might

...................................

Her empire in the cosmos she has built

He is governed by her subtle and mighty laws.

His consciousness is a babe upon her knees

...................................

He is carried by her from Night to deathless Light

...................................

A creature made of perishable stuff

In the pattern she has set for him she moves

He is whatever her artist will can make.'

The Life Divine, p. 74.

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Deriving all her puissance from him and right under his observation she builds up a vast empire the marvel-weft of the Universe with Namarupa; his status, his immutability supplies her the necessary leverage for creating the several grades and forms; he is practically a babe in her hands having to grow from level to level of consciousness; he rises from inconscience of matter to life in plant, next to partial consciousness in man and thus he has to emerge slowly obeying the laws fixed for the cosmic progression and the pattern, the grade, and the mould set by her.

But the most agreeable feature so far of the evolution is that its tardy pace may be quickened by the appearance of man the most highly developed form of consciousness. We may quote from The Life Divine 'This was so because the evolution began from the Inconscience and the secret consciousness had not emerged sufficiently from it to operate through the self-aware participating individual will of its living creature.... Man has seen that there is a higher status of consciousness than his own; the evolutionary oestrus is there in his parts of mind and life, the aspiration to exceed himself is delivered and articulate within him ... the persistent endeavour in him is a sure sign of Nature's will for a higher way to fulfillment, the emergence of a greater status';'

'At play with him as with her child or slave,

To freedom and the Eternal's mastery

...................................

She moves her seeming puppet of an hour.

...................................

At last he wakes to a memory of Self

He sees within the face of deity

The Godhead breaks out through the human mould:

...................................

Till then he is a plaything in her game'

During the period of nonage, the spirit follows the line of fancy, the curve of caprice drawn by nature; immortal he suffers mortality in the perishable forms; but when he arrives on the sill of majority if

¹ The Life Divine, p. 750.

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not maturity on reaching the form of man, he begins a little of self-assertion; Prakriti in her turn is anxious for re-union with Purusha from whom she has been long back separated; she in her own way is helping him to transcend the limitations and discover himself; man too delves into the operations of nature; finds that his liberation is only in name and that he has to continue his dependence on nature whom he now discovers as his companion for making the necessary effectuation and giving the necessary will and strength for coming into the open from concealment.

'His chosen partner in a titan game

Her will he has made the master of his fate,

...................................

In all experience meets her blissful hands;

...................................

He revels in her, a swimmer in her sea,

...................................

Whatever she desires he wills to be:

The Spirit, the innumerable One

He has left behind his lone eternity,

He is an endless birth in endless Time'

During the period of nescience, Purusha is a puppet in the hands of Prakriti; but on coming of age in man, the spirit like Antony is in a state of infatuation with her; forgets his single blessedness of containing the many; becomes under her impulsion, the myriad; and is so completely under her despotism that he derives an equal Rasa from pleasure and pain alike. 'States of consciousness there are in which death is only a change in immortal life, pain a violent backwash of the waters of universal delight, limitation a turning of the Infinite upon itself, evil a circling of the good around its own perfection'¹. 'Thus in the duality of pleasure and pain, we have seen that pain is a contrary effect of the one delight of existence resulting from the weakness of the recipient, his inability to assimilate the force that meets him, his incapacity to touch the force of delight that would otherwise be felt in it; it is the perverse reaction of consciousness to Ananda; this is

¹ The Life Divine, p. 51.

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shown by the significant fact that pain can pass into pleasure and pleasure into pain and both resolve into original Ananda.'¹

'The master of existence lurks in us

And plays at hide and seek with his own Force

...................................

The Immanent lives in man as in his house:

He has made the universe his pastime's field,

A vast gymnasium of his works of might.

...................................

Immortal dallies with mortality.

The Omnipotent who is the ruler of the infinities of creation, shrinks to the smallest size; dwells as the immanent directive principle in all the forms, human and animal created by his force; he, the indwelling intelligence and she, Prakriti, his force together make the universe the field of their pastime, a gymnasium for the display of their marvellous power. 'The Purusha, the inner self, is no larger than the size of a man's thumb'² according to the Katha and the Shwetaswhatara Upanishads. 'In certain images of the Upanishads the divine Purusha is described as the one fire which has entered into all forms and shapes itself according to the form, as the one sun which illumines all impartially and is not affected by faults of our seeing.'³

'Space is himself and Time is only he,

...................................

His image in the human measure cast

That to his divine measure we might rise,

...................................

This transfiguration is earth's due to heaven:

A mutual debt binds man to the Supreme:

...................................

Our life is a paradox with God for key.'

The one who is the illimitable, the immeasurable contains himself in the several forms; what is contained within suffers a self expansion

¹ The Life Divine, p. 444.                    ² The Life Divine, p. 201.                  ³ The Life Divine, p. 353.

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in space and time; forsaking his glory and the splendour, he casts himself into the mould of man; for the sacrifice made by God, man should respond by an equal sacrifice of out-growing his earth nature; the mutual obligation of God's descent can be discharged by a return movement of man's ascent from the ignoble to lofty divine heights and the key for the paradox and the contradictions of existence, its dualities, can be found in the divine putting on the garb of man, the robe of ignorance so that man can discover his true identity in the divine. 'Space would be Brahman extended for the holding together of forms and objects; time would be Brahman self-extended for the deployment of the movement of self power carrying forms and objects, the two would then be a dual aspect of one and the same self-extension of the cosmic eternal.'¹

'He sits, unfelt by the form in which he lives

...................................

He turns in a chiaroscuro of error and truth

...................................

As one forgetting he searches for himself;

...................................

As a sojourner lingering amid alien scenes

He journeys to a home he knows no more

...................................

He explores the ceaseless miracle of himself'

The form enshrining the divine does not know the concealed presence; the supreme observes the rules of the game involved in his plunge into the inconscience; meanwhile existence appears a myth or a meaningless tale; man seeks for the divine in all the tracery of events; his intellect feels baffled for all his gropings; he is exactly in the curious position of ransacking the whole world for the transcendent who is in his possession; he is always on a voyage home, all track of which he has forgotten and wonders at the miracles wrought by himself.

'He is the explorer and the mariner

¹ The Life Divine, p. 325.

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On a secret inner ocean without bourne:

He is the adventurer and cosmologist

Of a magic earth's obscure geography.

...................................

An unattained perfection calls to him

From the distant boundaries in the Unseen'

The voyage is in the inner regions of the subliminal self which reveals itself to him as a boundless ocean; new powers come to him, new secrets of the complexity and the intricacy of nature stand revealed to him; but at no time is a certainty reached, the last word pronounced on the acquisitions made; the reached throws open the vistas of the higher reaches and there is no end to the experience and the journey: and the cosmos which appears a dream or a myth or a meaningless tale discovers a law of its own, a determinism and will imposed by the indweller.

'Timid initiate of its vast design

...................................

A trafficker in small impermanent wares

At first he hugs the shores and shuns the breadths

...................................

He hazards not the new and the unseen.

But now he hears the sound of larger seas

A widening world calls him to distant scenes

...................................

And open markets for life's opulent arts

...................................

And transient splendours won and lost by the days.

A timid initiate of his vast design of evolution, the spirit involved in matter, in the course of experimentation from crude beginnings, at last touches on the consciousness of man which has rich potentialities; he is an adventurer on the sea lines but ventures not into the depths; is close to the shores, trafficking in impermanent wares and is more of a vital kinetic man, lost in the lures of the senses. But in course of time he develops a distaste for the petty coastal traffic; hazards into

Page-35

the new and the unseen far-off perilous main; becomes the mental man feeling the call and yearning to visit distant shores and scenes; the narrow land-locked sea trade develops into the world's commerce in transient splendours by his becoming an adventurer on the perilous billows.

'Or, guided by a sure compass in his thought

He plunges through a bright haze that hides the stars

...................................

A seeker of the islands of the Blest

...................................

He has reached the world's end and stares beyond

At last he hears a chanting on the heights

He crosses the boundaries of the unseen

...................................

To a new vision of himself and things.'

He finds a new heaven in storm troubled isles; yet he lacks the courage to sail beyond the familiar into dream distances; but the spiritual turn comes over him; he becomes die seeker of the isles of the Blest; it is the celestial and no longer the worldly that has a sway over him; secrets of the material, world are won, but those relating to the spiritual still remain a mystery; he therefore now becomes an explorer of regions beyond thought; he sights the beyond and hears the music ethereal; a glance-back from the summit of consciousness reached, presents everything in a new revealingly perspective.

'He is a spirit in an unfinished world

...................................

His is a search of darkness for the light,

Of mortal life for immortality.

In the vessel of an earthly embodiment

...................................

He looks out on the magic waves of Time

Where mind like a moon illumines the world's dark.'

To the new vision that has awakened, the world movement discloses

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a purpose of a gradual development from insentience to sentience and from sentience to super-sentience; the mortal's struggle is a movement for the emancipation from the limitations imposed by the senses and the despotism of the dualities: the mind is but a feeble moon-light that can scarcely illumine the path full of briars and thorns.

'He voyages through a starry world of thought

On Matter's deck to a spiritual sun

...................................

But none learns whither through the unknown he sails

Or what secret mission the great Mother gave.

...................................

He carries her sealed orders in his breast.

...................................

He sails through life and death and other life

...................................

And never can the mighty traveller rest

...................................

Till the nescient dusk is lifted from man's soul

And the morns of God have overtaken his night.

As long as Nature lasts, he too is there;

...................................

There is a plan in the Mother's deep world-whim

...................................

To evoke a person in the impersonal Void

...................................

And the world manifest the unveiled Divine.

For this he left his white eternity

And laid on the Spirit the burden of the flesh

That Godhead's seed might flower in mindless Space'.

A voyage to the spiritual vasts, on the deck of inconscience the body is extremely trying and hazardous; but not counting the peril or knowing the whither, he pushes on through the thunder's roar and the windless hush, namely, the fogs and the hurdles of life, befriended only by the impulsions of the divine creatrix and the sure compass of his thought. This is a quest that keeps him sailing through life and

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death and other life; this dynamis that is sparked gives him no rest till the dusk of ignorance is lifted from man's soul; and the morn of God is ushered. Being and becoming are ever together; though they appear as two, the one stable and the other active, they are aspects of the one, indivisible and immutable; the game is there fore not a jest but an earnest; even as from the impersonal inconscience have arisen the vibrations of matter, life and mind, so these in their turn must lead to the higher rhythm; unveil the divine; it is for this that the supreme has assumed the double poise of the passive and the active, and the fulfillment of the Spirit laying on himself the burden of the flesh can be brought about by his self-disclosure, by casting off the mask, by the being, becoming his true self on the earth, and by revealing the plenitude of his consciousness.

Y. S. R. CHANDRAN

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THE SYNTHESIS OF YOGA (An outline)

Chapter V

THE ASCENT OF THE SACRIFICE - I

THE Integral Yoga is a sacrifice of knowledge, devotion and works. It results in union of our essential being and our becoming with the Divine Consciousness. It accepts all the activities of life, rather than seeking to withdraw from the field of works or limit action to traditional or religious forms. It strives not only to change the inner spirit and significance of all works, but also to change the outer form into a more perfect expression of the inner Truth. It aims at establishing a dynamic spiritual principle as the guide of outer life in place of a mental, ethical, religious or pseudo-spiritual formula.

This spiritual guidance comes by an opening of the human to the Divine Consciousness, an acceptance of the Divine's working in us, and a surrender to the will of His Shakti. But so long as there are stirrings of intellect, life impulses, physical needs and ego, there is always the possibility of being misled. The awakening of the light of the inmost soul, the psychic being, is the one sure illumination to guide us toward Truth during the transition period until the Divine Force has taken complete control.

THE WORKS OF KNOWLEDGE

Philosophy and Religion divide knowledge into two categories, the, supra-physical knowledge of the Transcendent and Immanent Divine and the outward knowledge of the Divine in its many forms of world manifestation. The Integral Yoga accepts all knowledge within its scope. In the arts and sciences and all other fields the yogin must reject the seeking of the ignorant mental consciousness interested in surface phenomenon for their own sake and the satisfaction of Desire or the Intelligence. His seeking must be a conscious sacrifice, a seeking of the higher spiritual consciousness to discover the Divine within and behind its manifestation, to understand His workings in the world and to give creative expression to that vision. He pursues these activities

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not out of necessity, duty or personal motivation but for the spiritual joy of creation and expression or as an example affirming the value of all worldly works.

Usually the yoga begins with the offering of our natural mental activities in service of the Divine. Then there is an ascent to a higher consciousness and the descent of the higher Light to spiritualise and illumine the outer activities of the mind. This descent may bring with it an opening of new capacities of mental creation and new realms of knowledge. As the mind is transformed there comes a growing direct experience of the Transcendent and Cosmic Divine. The Divine himself becomes the knower in the individual.

When the mind has been spiritualised and universalised and has accepted its true role as an instrument of the Divine, a further ascension is possible to the Illumined and Intuitive levels and the Over mind culminating in the attainment of the Supramental Truth-Consciousness. At each stage of ascent there must be a transformation of all activities of knowledge informing them with the growing light.

THE PSYCHIC BEING

The human heart has a dual nature. In front is the false soul of desire, a passionate, egoistic and blind mixture of emotive heart and hungering vital. Behind in the depths is the true soul, the psychic being, which develops around a little spark of Divinity and is in direct contact with the Divine Truth.

The Integral Yoga accepts all emotions coming from the true soul or which aid in its emergence and rejects all feelings turned toward the satisfaction of the unpurified vital. It is not limited to any narrow category of religious emotions, ethical standards or religio-ethical ideals such as universal compassion, goodwill, love, service. For at best these represent a compromise between the spiritual and mental consciousness. Though they can lead to a widening and purification of the ego, they are not truly lacerative or potent to change man's vital life and nature.

The psychic being in man is veiled by the functioning of the outer personality — the ignorant certitude of the mind, the desires and demands of the vital, the obscurity and inertia of the physical — and

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normally exerts only a weak influence on the life. But when these elements are purified and silenced and man turns toward the Divine, the soul can come forward and take up the lead. It acts as a sure guide and intense will for realisation. It insists on Truth, on Will, Strength and Mastery, on Joy, Love and Beauty. Its most intimate character is love of the Divine and to attain this it rejects all lower attractions and the mixture of even the highest religio-ethical motives. It aspires for the transcendent Ecstasy and for the descent of that Love and Beatitude to transform the world.

GARRY JACOBS

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OBJECTIVITY

HAVING written an introductory book on Sri Aurobindo for a certain American series — a book that succinctly surveys his life and his writing, and attempts to convey something of his magnitude and his importance for the world, — I have had good occasion to learn yet more of the character of the "intellectual", who is still culturally dominant among us. For the editors of the book have been thrown into confusion (which they consider "sober judgment") by my writing, not as an "objective scholar", but as a disciple: as one, that is, who accepts Sri Aurobindo and the Mother as the latest and greatest Avatars, and tries to see, grasp and follow their evolutionary yoga. It is contended with the most tamasic insistence that a man "committed" as I am, a man who "identifies himself" with his subject, cannot make that subject sufficiently an object, as it were, and see it in the round from a sufficient distance, with his critical capacities brought well into play. I do not convey anything, it seems, but my own enthusiasm: when I should be informative I am solipsistic
and bemused by my own literary cadences, just " poetical" and "knowing how to write" but without substance: and when I should be critical and analytical I am worshipful, burning incense and chanting from upon my knees.

It is true that I have chanted and burned incense in a Buddhist ambience; and if they knew this they would no doubt take it as an indication of my fickleness and my instability — additional reason for summarily turning away from any serious exposition of something outlandish, with something of its spirit, any powerful presentation of the fact that there are things for the grasp of which the presently accepted critical methods are inadequate. To refuse to try to see what is being" conveyed is the easiest reaction, and the least affront to complacency. It is in vain that I have offered them a disquisition on "objectivity", what it is and how it varies with the circumstances and the cases; they will have Sri Aurobindo treated in the usual mechanical externalist scholar's way, as a "subject" (or should I say "object"?) that has been "gotten up" by " research" . They are deaf when assured that in the case of Sri Aurobindo, indeed of any mystical writer, the "object" cannot be seen from the outside, but only in some degree by identity

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— at the least one must be beyond trying to intellectualize things, and cut them down to alien and lesser patterns and terms. One must understand that the mystics are not philosophers, to be criticized on the philosophical level, and that their writings are reports or attempt-fed reports of experience, which one responds to as one can, and which one not having the response or the intuitive acceptance must accept tentatively by an act of reasoned faith — for he cannot intelligently deny what is being said - or leave alone. This is not acceptable to the scholarly people who in all their industrious and responsible maturity have put out a book on St. John of the Cross that reduces him to an aesthete with a fine way with words, and will not (or cannot) Present his mysticism in its proper scope and terms, lest it "tum off" the modem reader - as it has perhaps already "turned off", or found unreceptive the man who has undertaken to write on something' all too evidently too far beyond him: the people who have put out a book on St. Teresa of Avila that concentrates wholly on her literary style, and leaves her mysticism out of account altogether. (Which is just as well, for it has been well treated elsewhere, and best of all in her own writings, and silence is preferable to bumbling, such as we usually get from scholars in such an area). To the objective judgment of such people, all I can do is fulsomely praise a man who cannot even prove that he is an Avatar and that there is a Supermind, and I do not even make clear - no more than he - what Nirvana may be, for heaven's sake! (And they apparently do not suspect that, with all the scholarly study that has been made of Buddhism this hundred years and more, there is no definition of Nirvana current among the scholars - because it is not an "object" to be seen from the outside). In fact, it has been conveyed to me that it is possible to read a chapter in which I have alt with The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga, The Problem of Rebirth, The Mind of Light and Essays on the Gita, and find nothing , concrete at all. I should "stand back" and say continually, "not proven," and "what does he mean by this", and "perhaps questionable", and "it may be found that the utility of Occam's Razor is salient here", and so on; then I might be accepted as a sober and trustworthy guide: not because I had grasped and conveyed anything of Sri Aurobindo, but because I had assumed the scholarly "discipline", as they call it: that is, brought myself shamelessly to mnanipulate,. or

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just to throw in, go through the motions of employing, as if any serious man could take them seriously, the terms of discourse now obligatory for one who is to gain acceptance and advancement in the universities.

Realization of the Silent Brahman? What can it mean ? Ami what about the Noisy Brahman? And then this Anandamaya stuff, and this Purushottama, all these unfamiliar words, and this multiplication of abstractions, just complicating things and throwing out veils of obscurity everywhere! Why Supermind, Higher Mind, Over mind and all that? Settle on one term and be precise, and stop maundering in repetition! And who the blazes is the Mother, how can she be a French lady and all that other stuff besides? And why try to tell us that the spiritual is neither the mental nor the emotional, anyway? What is it? So they react. It is lost on them that the book is not just a rhapsody of praise, but is an exposition of Sri Aurobindo, a presentation of what he has said, with suggestions on how to read him and what is required for understanding, and even the invitation to take it all as "just poetry" if one will: it still being the largest and most comprehensive world-view that any poet has ever given to mankind. A fundamental intellectual honesty is not always a prominent possession of the "intellectual", when he feels himself confronted with an alien largeness to which his judgments are not relevant; and nothing is easier than to tell someone that you do not understand what he is saying, that he is not clear and perhaps does not know what he means himself. It is a standard method, as it were, to dismiss anything the comprehension of which might require some effort; and the people most largely given to it are those who are capable of small clarity themselves. Living as I do in America, I shall not be surprised if by and by on some occasion I remark that there is a lamp-post on the comer, and my interlocutor professes not to know what I mean by that at all. Of course one can adjust and qualify terms and make serious effort at communication: but all effort is lost on one who does not want to understand; and when it comes to a phenomenon like Sri Aurobindo, and anyone who takes him seriously, the majority of the "intellectuals" are in that case.

And so, my editors. I do not know that they desiderate a perfect objectivity. In any case that is impossible, because "object" and

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"subject" are interrelated, and each is meaningless without the other. There is no "subject" without the "object" that delimits it; there is no "object" without the observing or impinging "subject". It is one of the "pairs of opposites" that one overcomes in a higher knowledge long before he comes to anything like the plenary knowledge that is Sri Aurobindo's. This being so, the "object" is always seen "subjectively". Everything humanity sees is seen according to the conditions of human vision, and by no two persons quite the same. There is also agreement of course, or there could be no community; the "tree out there" is about the same thing to most observers, "for all practical purposes". Even colour-blind people can get along pretty well in the "normal" world. And then again, "objectivity" does mean something, and there are degrees of it: from the scientist making a controlled experiment subject to the review of others or the manufacturing of things to precise and minute specifications set by a mind that has put any irrelevant personality out of the way, to the man who can see nothing in the world that is not a projection of his own small, self-seeking consciousness. But things like nuts and bolts, stone walls and chemical quantities are relatively easy to standardize, and find agreement upon; though even here the painter, with his trained eye, will tell us how little people are wont to see of such objects — and then painters themselves will show a remarkable divergence here, and what the "true" object is is a philosophical question not readily to be resolved, and a rule of thumb must serve. The point is that there is no object without the subject that observes, whatever its capacity; and the difficulties increase as the object becomes more complex and less palpable. If Leigh Hunt "saw Shelley plain", he did not communicate his vision; and no one else has claimed to have had it. Then there is Shakespeare, whose elusiveness not to say illusiveness has become almost an article of faith for the literary (though nevertheless there is pronouncement with confidence on disputed plays, which are his and which are not); he has been almost all things to all, men these many years, and his "subjectivity" is an object more for conjecture than for contemplation. Yet he has given us one of our great objects, the world of his creation. And — (is it not a wonder?) — to be "objective" about this is so problematical that every scholar has his own view and opinion of it: and moreover is required to have, for it seems

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that he would not be considered an "objective observer" if he agreed very much with someone else, and did not give his own view, in his own words. One almost suspects paradox. But then the pretty evident truth is that the object that Shakespeare gives us is not the world, or human nature per se and in perfect and exhaustive reportage, but a world of his own vision and creation, fed by his intimate knowledge of certain areas of the nature of humanity - some of the vital, a little of the mental, and none of the spiritual at all. Thus he gives us an abstraction, a selection artistically worked, and characters who are all facets of himself, projected with such freedom that they can be living powers of literature and thus formative influences upon one's life. Here there would be no objectivity at all, without the great subjectivity that informs it; and every man must take it as he can and make of it what he can. There can be no respectable pretence of having seen it fully and exhausted its meaning, and one who claimed to do so would be "subjective": which means that he would be locked in a subjectivity less than Shakespeare's, and that "objectivity" is a relative term, the difficulties of which are at least as great as its usefulness.

When we come to Sri Aurobindo and the world that he has given us, the difficulties become far greater. For he does understand human nature thoroughly, and thus makes many distinctions and expresses many things that are quite lost on those whose self-knowledge is primitive, and who think that Shakespeare had either an exhaustive knowledge of the "human heart", or at least' the greatest that any man has had. The range and magnitude of Sri Aurobindo puts him out of sight, and those who cannot both stand back far enough - from their accustomed ignorance and come close enough in intimate knowledge or awareness that expands their consciousness, most readily pronounce one who can see an object where they see nothing, to be seeing only himself. Their opinion of course is worthless; they do not know what he sees; and they can only complain that he insists that Sri Aurobindo, himself, really does see something. But nevertheless the competent reader of Sri Aurobindo (minimally competent, at least, for there are endless degrees) cannot doubt that he does so; and will find his vision expressed very eloquently, and as clearly as the nature of language, as presently constituted, allows. But language as an instrument largely of the logical mind allows but limited expression

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to things beyond logic; and if a more adequate language were invented, discovered or brought forward, it would be even less intelligible to unspiritual mankind than the expression of spirituality is now, in largely alien terms. Poetry can work wonders here, but only in those who are prepared to receive the working, and can and will seek it and co-operate with it. And people know enough not to go to Shakespeare without preparation, or expect to grasp him in all his entirety without labour; yet they seem to expect of a writer on Sri Aurobindo, rather they are capable of demanding of him, that he make everything perfectly crystalline to their indifferent and perfunctory gaze. Even hostility is awakened in them by the fact that he is so new, so large and so difficult, and they will have it that there is nothing there. In short, their own "judgments" are quite subjective, and are only a playing with ideas of their own excogitation, with which they replace the object that they cannot see. Despite such champions of the "critical-analytical" approach, one who is capable can at least report accurately the essentials of what Sri Aurobindo has said, and give an outline of his great evolutionary vision, which may help others to grasp it, or lead them to his own writings; and if he is moved so to write, he will do so for the "fit though few", and expect certain others to impugn his clarity and his objectivity and his integrity and almost everything about him, and end triumphantly, against him and Sri Aurobindo alike, with the sophomoric cry "not proven"! Poetry is "proven on the pulses", and Sri Aurobindo's vision becomes gradually clear and authentic to the awakening and growing consciousness.

A very concrete stumbling-block is the idea of "subjectivity" some people have, an object much in the way of their understanding. So mystical experience is pronounced "subjective", and thus not ontologically valid" and "cognitively certain" — something that can be set before others and tested by them, experienced by them and * thus accepted or rejected, according to the lesser terms that are quite irrelevant. But if they would listen to the mystics, they might catch some glimmering that the fact is otherwise. Spiritual experience is more solid, concrete and sure than the stones one treads upon or perhaps knocks one's head against, and the "subject" that experiences it is at once the "object" of the experience: that is of a reality, and is a reality, that is the identity of all separate and individual and disparate

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selves, and is ever beyond, the very possibility of further experience and divine growth. There is no question either of doubting it or of proving it; and while it can be conveyed in some degree to the fit, and expression of it can move others toward the finding of it, one must find it to know it, and it cannot be put into a simple formulation and made available to a non-spiritual consciousness. For those who are not sufficiently quickened in consciousness there is no "object" here, for there is nothing that can be seen from the outside, or so long as there is an outside. And this does not mean anything like "autistic withdrawal", or inability to function in "the world". But what it does mean is something that one must understand by a gradual growth, and not by reading a few (or a great many) words and learning to repeat a formulation. Words can be sign-posts and guides, for one who wants to be guided; and for one who wants to know what spiritual experience is, Sri Aurobindo has given the most comprehensive guidance that we have. But no guidance avails with people who do not want to be guided, and would rather say "I don't understand and you can't make me, and it's all your fault that I don't understand, too!", than tread the path. Nevertheless it remains a homely and quite concrete and objective fact, that one cannot enjoy a banquet by reading the menu; and that no description of unfamiliar food can give him any clear idea of its taste and substance. And in this area one must assimilate, as one assimilates food; he cannot stand back and observe only.

But hardly a scholar does want to do any such thing; and so among that breed a book that approaches such subjects (or objects) in the right way is not acceptable. And the fact that so many sterile and worthless books are now being perpetrated by university scholars may have something to do with this — (I should not say entirely worthless, for in the system that afflicts us they help the professors hold their jobs and gain promotion.) "Getting up" something by "research" is quite within the compass of a mediocre mind, without penetration, synthetic grasp or imaginative power; a mind that is "critical" and "analytical" naturally because it stands in externalist fatuity understanding nothing, and "objective" because it never comes into a living relationship with the things observed, whether doggedly or perfunctorily, in pure purblind ness. One thing is as good to it as

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another for "study", for it is not competent with anything or committed to anything beyond "the job", and is without the light and power that can make scholarship really perceptive, and of cultural significance and value.

We have taken some glance at the "objective" art of the dramatist. Both a dramatist of greatness and an acute philosophical critic was Schiller, who like most creative men suffered in school, and learned to have small respect for the "Brotgelehrten" — those whose "learning" was only their means of getting bread, and so to the student was a mechanical and deadly imposition. In the course of his aesthetic studies he made an acute division of the artist into three types or kinds. The great artist shows the object: he has enough creativity to present something real and living before us, formed by his artistic which is more than his jealously personal consciousness. The mediocre artist shows the subject: that is, too much of a lesser self and personality intrudes, to diminish the artistic power and cultural importance, replacing vision with self-assertion. But the bad artist (or one may say, the non-artist): he shows the material only, not being able to shape it even "subjectively" to anything of importance; the medium itself dominates him and overwhelms him. Here austerely I shall make no observations on modern art and literature: but will confine myself to suggesting that our scholarly preoccupation with "method" has gone further than should commend it to the cultured conscious ness. The "objectivity" of one without sufficient "subjectivity" is a negative value.

The good books, the ones that do have cultural power, are not constructions (or heaps) that make a fatuous pretence to " objectivity " at all costs, and would ideally, we suppose, not need the intervention of a particular con sciousness at all. T hey are books in which a subject .of sufficient magnitude has been at work, and has come into relation with an object of sufficient magnitude, that has or can be found to have human significance: a subject that has been influenced by the object, and given the influence of his own high and cultured consciousness to the object, in a really significant degree that is important for humanity. We see what we are equipped to see, and in a larger than "romantic" sen se we receive what we give; and the greater the magnitude and cultural significance of the object, the larger and more acute and refined

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the consciousness that is required for the adequate vision of it and the transmitting of it in some degree to others. It is the vision and the influence that the competent observer transmits, and not the object which itself is a focus and transmitter of light from beyond. The nature poet gives the poetry, not the nature itself; this is as true of the most "objective" haiku artist as it is of Wordsworth at his most "subjective", and daffodils are important not as daffodils but as they affect the inward eye; it is not a meticulously unimaginative reproduction of external features that the great painters give us, but vision in which these features have a part, and photography has become an art not by being able to "give the object", but by arrangement, selection and the manipulation of light - subjective things directed to the subjective response that is the only humanly important aspect of the object at all. And any book that will convey something of Sri Aurobindo must be a work of art; the job cannot be done "scientifically" at all, for there is nothing there to grasp with the measuring instruments th at are con;' fined to sense and logic, that is to the sensible world as the mind works upon it. And if he could be so treated, his great importance would be gone.

As for the validity of a large vision, that is not tested by weak eyes and small consciousness, and the bare fact th at something is not in accordance with one's prepossessions or feeling s of logical fitness or presumptions as to what is possible, all this raft and hassle of subjective things, is perfectly irrelevant. If one wants "objectivity" he will have to judge "objectively", and this cannot be a mechanical procedure, by rote and rule: he must himself know the subject at least as well as that object of his aversion, the writer in question. And he will have to have a certain humility that is not sufficiently in evidence among the professional "judges": he will have to understand that if he does not understand a thing the fault may not be the writer' s but rather his own and have the nice discrimination that shall tell him when the writer is abreast of a difficult subject and when he is only floundering. And thus few people who have only a "modern education " are equipped to read a competent book on Sri Aurobindo, or to recognize one when they see it. Whence comes it that certain scholarly people can compare Sri Aurobindo with Teilhard de Chardin, as if they were saying the same thing or very nearly so, and stood on the same footing

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— a fine instance of sheer inability to see Sri Aurobindo at all.

But leaving Teilhard and all his tentative and groping science-fiction out of the question, I could point to more than one or two essays at Sri Aurobindo by university scholars philosophically trained, that are the veriest farrago of incomprehension. Their only merit here, these professors, is that they speak in terms that are intelligible to their colleagues, whereas Sri Aurobindo and his fit expositors do not. The remedy here is to learn the true terms, which means an expansion of consciousness. Sri Aurobindo is so large and weighty that he would absolutely smash the bed of Procrustes, if he could be laid upon it.

The perforce subjective view of Sri Aurobindo's would-be loppers is not respectable, not because it is subjective, but because it is less the vision than the personal construction of natures not sufficiently developed. Everyone puts "himself" into what he offers the world, and the greatest selves most greatly of all. Thus Sri Aurobindo: he expresses his experience of Nirvana in his own way, and though it agrees with other expressions it is individually his own. Thus to the plane of subject-object, and within its terms, it brings some light, hint and clue of the transcendence, to the fit reader. But a scholar's compilation, with "critical commentary", on Nirvana and the various expressions of it will only divide what is one, raise and codify false distinctions, and confuse further the many readers who, with such books, feel themselves in safe and responsible hands, giving them perhaps the illusion of knowing something about this invisible and impalpable thing that they have not experienced; unless they prefer to dismiss it as a tissue of contradictions perpetrated by untrained minds, and so on. Which is not to say that a collection of quotations may not be valuable; or that its value may not be enhanced by commentary such as was provided by Aldous Huxley in his fine book that 'has done good service, The Perennial Philosophy: commentary written by a man with insight, before he degenerated into supposing that drugs can give spiritual enlightenment. The "intellectual" unfortunately is not easily amenable to discipline that would help him to rise above his intellect; and when he feels the call of something greater, or something "mysterious", he either stifles it with his "proper pride", or looks for the quickest, easiest and cheapest way,

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and the way that least unsettles his "thinking" from its mechanical grooves.

Perhaps one may write about Sri Aurobindo, with at least a minimum competence, without being a disciple of his; but one will have to be "on the path", or at the very least well acquainted with the fact that reports of experience are not to be denied by lack of experience, and that even for it to question them is futile. Knowing this and knowing something of the large field of mysticism with at least some intuitive sympathy or responding chords, one may see how much larger and more comprehensive Sri Aurobindo is than the rest, and how very great his import is for mankind at this present juncture. Not trying unintelligently to intellectualize things that are beyond the intellect, he will recognize that Sri Aurobindo, with his giant intellect, is as great a precision as is possible in these matters, and that he does not multiply his terms recklessly and without "technical competence", and call for Occam. But at the risk of repeating myself I should like to record my observation that what we have gotten from the professors who have essayed to approach him is most lamentable. They have not even made a beginning, and their "criticism" has been only a sad display of their own limitations and lack of grasp. And with this there goes a positive unwillingness to understand him: for the intellect hardly cares to relinquish its pride of place and assumption of leadership as the highest power; and its favourite activity of" criticism" for its own sake it will continue, though it is something not indulged in by the serious mind that is endeavouring to grow beyond such preoccupations and the illusion of understanding that is given by the familiar terms, and come to a direct vision of the truth and reality. The intellect does not want to believe that there is any such thing, beyond its own ideas and ways of thought and expression. So instead of trying to find this vision, under the guidance of one who has it-provisionally accepting that he does have it-the "intellectual" would "analyze" whether it is possible or not, analyzing if necessary his own ignorance in a vaccum, and forever demand "proof", as if one could "prove" the taste of coffee and so on and on, around in the circles to which he is accustomed. There is of course nothing that one cannot make countless and endless objections to, if one does not have better use for one's time and

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energy; but the mind that makes the objections is a would-be self-sufficiency that is never stable and really sure, and can be sure only by becoming the docile servant of a higher light.

G. K. Chesterton has acutely observed that Christianity arose, and finally triumphed, not among credulous and uncritical people, but among people who had grown tired of criticizing everything. And now, with the increasing recognition of the fact that our problems are not solved by the intellect playing with its own terms, or the "objectivity" of those without personal substance, kindling insight and mature engagement, the world may grow tired again, of the , , negativity that destroys every prospect either by flat denial or by corruption, and turn to the great source of Light that has now come among us. Not for a new religion, but for direct spiritual experience and growth, men may find the way to the solution of their most pressing and fundamental problems. Their souls (which are not their minds) will awaken with aspiration, and their critical faculties, not abrogated but given due place in the larger nature, will yield to the inspired synthetic vision that can lead them to the realization of their greatest possibilities. Sri Aurobindo tells us that a new world is at hand: it is the giving of some expression to this one great fact, that may help one to turn seriously toward Sri Aurobindo or move one to do so, that has been the primary object before me in the writing of the book. Certainly it expresses something of Sri Aurobindo's influence upon me, and I should be sorry if it did not; certainly it is my treatment of the material, and no attempt to give it "pure", as if no treatment, no arrangement were needed; but though its faults are my own, they are not those of a rhapsodist who has brought forth a god from his own fevered imagination, and bids the world fall down. If I could bid the world I should bid it to stand up, indeed, and stop groveling and wallowing, and walking the old treadmill of the unenlightened mind. Such a book is of course not for every man, much less for Everyman; it cannot speak to the majority, and least of all can it speak to those who will not hear, and will misunderstand, and the more the more explanation is given, ad infinitum: that will insist on clarification and reject every attempt to supply it, with cries of "sophistry!" and "tautology!" and "abstraction!" and "rationlization!" and "just poetry!" and anything that may conveniently

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come between the "critical analyst" and the development of his higher nature that is required for comprehension of the subject that he is unfortunately required to try to make an object of, by an anomaly like myself, without reputation or official position and thus without leverage in this land of promise.¹ But if the book is allowed to see the light, it will speak to those who can respond, in some degree, to the call of the evolutionary nature now given such an impetus as can make humanity greater than it has thought possible in its noblest dreams.²

What I have said here of course will not "communicate" anything to those to whom the book itself does not communicate; and if they were to read these my remarks, they would probably dismiss them as just a shriek of pain or a bellow of wounded pride; in any case as just a lot of special pleading without substance. They will not compromise their dignity as "intellectuals" (such as it is), come what may. I am not surprised by all this, for I know how limited even the intellectual development is of the "intellectual" just now, and somewhat more than two decades ago I elected, myself, not to put myself in danger of becoming one of that tribe — or in the unhappy position of trying to work in the midst of it — by pursuing a university career : for indeed the sterile externality had no attraction for me, of the "objectivity" of the preoccupations of that ambience. More and more, it seems, those who flourish there, when they attempt to approach something of genuine cultural importance, reveal themselves to be like the hunters of the snark, with whom "the bowsprit got mixed with the rudder sometimes." Sri Aurobindo has written for intellectual people certainly, for people whose minds are well developed; but unfortunately few of our "intellectuals" qualify in this area: and if he should be "taken up" by them — if the universities (which thought we may hope is preposterous) were to have a "boom" on the Avatar, it would no doubt be the veriest snark-hunt imaginable, or not so. There we might expect Sri Aurobindo to be fragmented more than Osiris; or rather replaced by fragments that did not belong to him at all. Yet we may hope, in this Hour of God, that that most unexpected

¹ America

² It has now seen the light in India, Published by the Sri Aurobindo Circle,

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of things shall happen: that a higher light shall penetrate Academia and that under its influence a real about-face shall come— before indeed Academia collapses under its accumulating weight of rubbish.

JESSE ROARKE

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SRI AUROBINDO'S CONCEPT OF HUMAN UNITY

IT is a matter of common experience that men are not satisfied with their present human situation. There are strifes and struggles, conflicts and clashes among individuals and individual groupings which make human life melancholy and miserable. It seems that there is something wrong more with the man himself rather than with the chaos or cosmos. Man's basic error has been not so much in seeing diversity as in his failure to see the unity. The history of mankind evinces a constant effort towards human unification but the failure to realise the same has been because the ideal of human unity is still a vague notion to be clearly thought out and attempted and also because the attempts so far made were more at political, administrative and economic levels rather than at the psychological and spiritual levels. To achieve this end what is required is not so much a change in the material circumstances but a change in the heart and mind of all human races.

The problem of human unity seems at first more or less an insoluble one. The individual wants freedom, the fullest possible freedom, for without freedom life would appear to lose most of its flavour. But he also wants security, which in effect means security for the aggregate of human beings, and which in fact puts a check on individual freedom. The problem is to effect a balance between these two poles of existence, freedom for the individual and security for the aggregate. The balance has to be effected or else either the individual dwindles into an automaton or the aggregate splits up into a million fragments . and thus perishes.

Sri Aurobindo tackles the problem of human unity both as a historian and as a social philosopher, both as a practical statesman and as an architect' of the future. He firmly believes that unity of mankind is a part of nature's eventual scheme and must come about. Referring to the inevitability of human unity he writes:

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"But the blind natural forces still have power;

And the ascent is slow and long is time;

Yet shall truth grow and harmony increase.

The day shall come when men feel close and one.

Sri Aurobindo bases his belief on metaphysical as well as practical grounds. He writes, "Unity is an idea which is not at all arbitrary or unreal, for unity is the very basis of existence. The oneness that is secretly at the foundation of all things, the evolving spirit in Nature is moved to realise consciously at the top, the evolution moves through diversity, from a simple to a complex oneness." Not only is mankind destined to achieve the unity, the present political turmoil's and the necessity of their immediate solution for the sake of the survival of man also make it utterly essential, even in spite of the opposing and antagonistic conditions.

Having thus begun with the thesis that human unity will be achieved as it is evidently a part of nature's eventual scheme, Sri Aurobindo traces the different stages in this urge towards unity, enumerates the failures, the partial successes and relapses with a view to erecting the future on a firm foundation both of accurate historical knowledge and spiritual insight into the true destiny of mankind. The ideal of human unity has sought in the past to realise itself first by the development of a central authority, second by bringing about a measure of uniformity in the administration and third by achieving to a greater or lesser extent the transformation of that authority from the governing class into that of a body whose proposed function was to represent the thought and will of the whole humanity. But the working out of this ideal has had an arrested and even a perverse development in the form of two world wars. The Hague Court and the League of Nations and the Kellogg Pact all have proved powerless to bring about the permanent outlawry of war and the U.N.O. also seems to be treading a similar path of futility.

Sri Aurobindo having closely watched the development of human history, diagnosed the causes for the failures of efforts at unification and pointed out that it was because these efforts were only at the physical level which did not provide lasting bonds for unity. That is why social, political and administrative unification of mankind has not been

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approved of by him as an ultimately desirable end. All external forms of unification crush human freedom, mar human variedness and result in stagnation. The State is only a clumsy convenience for our common development. It is not an organism but a machine operating without tact, taste, delicacy and intuition. It crushes human freedom and initiative and tends to uniformity, which is death and not life. A natural variation is impossible to its mechanical nature. All States and empires foster an external unity which is mechanical, lifeless and unreal. They owe their continuance not to human freewill but to a force imposed on their constituent elements or to a political convenience felt by them. The political unification is always based on force and compulsion and hence it endangers human liberty, introduces rigidity and enforces a mechanised and unprogressive system of life.

Sri Aurobindo points out that there are only two possible institutional means to effectuate the scheme of unity of mankind. First, there can be a centralised Unitarian world State but he rejects it because due to its mechanical orientation it leads to stagnation. If it is a strong federal organisation, it tends to destroy the spirit of national variation and multiple self-expression. A loose confederacy, on the other hand, may lead to eruption of centrifugal forces. It cannot be permanent much less desirable unity, and may end either in centralisation or disintegration. The idea of a world state, therefore, is inadequate as it will not unite humanity nor will it hold together its hegemony. Sri Aurobindo points out that such states or empires, founded on compulsion and ruled from centre have decayed and fallen throughout history. While it is true that in the 20th century because of closer communication, freer intellectual ideas, wider emotional sympathies and advance in mutual knowledge the possibilities of political, economic and administrative unification have increased, the bond of unity is only physical which does not provide a lasting basis. Of course such a unity is better than having no unity at all, but it is not and cannot be an ultimate end. It is only worth pursuing in so far as it provides a means and a framework for a better, richer and more happy individual and collective life.

As an alternative to the physical bonds of unity, Sri Aurobindo puts forth a spiritual bond of unity which is at bottom a psychological one. He terms it as a 'spiritual religion of humanity' or ' Vedantic

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nationalism' concerning the individual and the group life respectively. It consists of free groupings of mankind on the basis of their natural affinities and national sentiments. He points out that the true basis of the unification of mankind is the national unity which alone is real, internal and lively. Even if the national unity is broken up by circumstances at a particular point of time it never gets annihilated and preserves a tendency to recover and reassert itself. He firmly believes that the nation is a persistent psychological unit which nature has been busy developing throughout the world. Even there have been instances in world history where the political unity of a nation had been destroyed, yet the nation persisted and moved inevitably towards its realisation and therefore he puts forth the idea that a true unity of the human race should be achieved in the same fashion in which the unity of a nation is realised. In this unity, unlike the political unity which is unity only in outer life and body, there will be an inner unity of the soul.

Today the ideal of human unity is more or less vaguely making its way to the forefront of our consciousness. The same urge for unity, which joined the warring tribes in the larger aggregates of great nations is moving to join the nations of the earth in a world-union. The same process which worked to bring the ideal of union to the forefront of human consciousness will bring forward the ideal of world-union. That union when fully formed and realised will enjoy all the devotion once reserved to the nation, the latter not yielding in the process anything that will not be to its benefit. In it the individual and the groupings of individuals in the form of nation, society and world-union will live and be free in a diverse unity. The whole process of nature depends on a balancing and constant tendency to harmonise the two poles of life, the individual whom the whole or aggregate nourishes and the aggregate which the individual helps to constitute. Human life forms no exception to this rule. The perfect society will be that which most entirely favours the perfection of the individual and the perfection of the individual will be incomplete if it does not contribute towards the perfection of the social aggregate to which he belongs, and eventually to that of the largest possible human aggregate, the whole of a united humanity. According to Sri Aurobindo social evolution of the human race

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is necessarily a development of the relations between three constant factors, viz., individuals, communities of various sorts and mankind. Each seeks its own fulfilment and satisfaction but each is compelled to develop them not independently but in relation to the others. The first natural aim of the individual must be his own inner growth and fullness and its expression in the outer life but this he can only accomplish through his relations with other individuals and the various kinds of communities, religious, social, cultural and political to which he belongs and to the idea and need of humanity at large. The community must seek its own fulfilment but whatever its strength of mass-consciousness and collective organisation, it can accomplish its growth only through its individuals, other communities and humanity. Mankind as a whole has at present no consciously organised common life. It has only an incoherent organisation determined more by circumstances than by human intelligence and will. And yet the idea and fact of our common human existence, nature and destiny has always exercised its strong influence on human thought and action. Nature works always through these three terms and none of them can be abolished. She starts from the individual and its aggregates, from the totality and its constituent units and creates intermediary unities between the two without which there can be no full development either of the totality or of the units. She always creates the three terms of genus, species and individual. Unlike the animal groupings, human communities are formed not so much by the instinctive herding together of a number of individuals of the same genus or species as by local association, community of interests and ideas, and these limits tend always to be overcome in the widening of human thoughts and sympathies brought about by the closer intermingling of races, nations and cultures, thus displaying a unity in diversity. Thus the ultimate aim of nature is to develop the individuals to their fullest capacity and also all the communities to the fullest expression of that many-sided potentiality which their differences are created to express, and finally to evolve a full and integrally united life of mankind.

Sri Aurobindo warns us that 'unity the race moves towards and must one day realise' but unity should not be confused with uniformity. Uniformity is not the law of life. Life exists by diversity. Existence is only one in its essence and totality is its play. It is necessarily

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multiform. Absolute uniformity would mean cessation of life. Diversity is essential for power and fruitfulness of life, unity is necessary for its order, arrangement and stability. Unity we must aspire for but not uniformity. The vigour of the pulse of life is measured by the richness of the diversities it creates. If man could realise a perfect spiritual unity, no sort of uniformity would be necessary, for the utmost play of diversity would be securely possible on that foundation.

Referring to the nature of the ideas of human unity Sri Aurobindo writes that its realisation would mean that the problem of human unity would be approached at once on a rational and sound moral basis. It would be a recognition, on the one side, of the right of all natural groupings of man to live and to be themselves, on the other, an adequate sense of the need for order, help and a mutual participation in a common life of the united human race.

The unified progress of mankind would thus be realised by a general principle of interchange and assimilation between individual and individual, and again between individual and community, between community and community and again between smaller community and the totality of mankind, between the common life and consciousness of mankind and its freely developing communal and individual constituents.

As a matter of fact although this interchange is what nature even now contrives to bring about, life is far from being governed by such principle of free and harmonious mutuality. There is struggle, an opposition of ideas, impulses and interests, an attempt of each to profit by various kinds of wars on the others etc. This is the aspect of life which humanity in its highest thought and aspiration iaiows that it has to transcend but has either not yet discovered the right means or else has not had the force to apply it.

In spite of the failures of mankind to achieve a desirable unity Sri Aurobindo does not feel despaired because he firmly believes that the unity of mankind is a part of nature's eventual scheme and must come about. Only it must be under other conditions and with safeguards which will keep the race intact in the roots of its vitality. The only way to achieve a true social perfection and harmony lies through a deep and profound spiritualised understanding of the individuals

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and the communities culminating in spiritualised humanity, united in the internal consciousness by world brotherhood. Sri Aurobindo therefore taught the gospel of one world and inner oneness of man which can be called universalised nationalism. He calls it political Vedantism. He talks of Swadharma of each nation in the fashion of the Gita's ideal of Swadharma of each individual.

This religion of humanity has to make its home in the hearts of each and every individual and has to be a rule of life. Unless it becomes practically effective it cannot prevail over its principal enemy which is egoism, the egoism of the individual, of the class and the nation. Unless this egoism is won over, one cannot attain the spirit of universal brotherhood, which alone is the basis of the ideal of human unity. This brotherhood exists only in the soul and by the soul and it can exist by nothing else, for it is not a matter of physical kinship or of vital association or of intellectual agreement. It is the realisation of divinity in every man. There cannot be the realisation of equality of all men unless there is the recognition of the same soul and the same godhead in all beings. It is the same divine vision which Sri Krishna demanded of Arjuna in the Gita and which Sri Aurobindo also experienced in the Alipore Jail. Such a vision or cosmic consciousness alone can provide the basis for a religion of humanity or an equivalent sentiment, much more powerful, explicit and universal than the nationalist's religion.

All liberty, individual, national, religious, social and ethical takes its ground upon this fundamental principle of our existence. By liberty we mean the freedom to obey the law of our being to grow to our natural self-fulfilment, to find out naturally and fully our harmony with our environment. Order and not artificial regulation is the law of life, and the soundest order is that which comes from within, as the result of a nature that has discovered and found its own law and the law of its relations with others. Therefore the truest order is that which is founded on the greatest possible liberty, for liberty is at once the condition of self-finding as well as vigorous variation. Sri Aurobindo points out that nature secures variation by division into groups and insists on liberty by the force of individuality in the members of the group. Therefore the unity of the human race to be entirely sound and in consonance with the deepest laws

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of life must be founded on free groupings. The dangers and disadvantages of liberty, the disorder, strife, waste and confusion to which its wrong use leads are indeed obvious. But they arise from absence or defect of the sense of unity between individual and individual, community and community, which pushes them to assert themselves at the expense of each other instead of growing by mutual help. If a real, a spiritual and psychological unity were effectuated, liberty would have no perils and disadvantages. This is an ideal which it is certainly impossible to realise under the present conditions or perhaps in any near future of the human race, but it is an ideal which ought to be kept in view, for the more we can approximate to it the more we shall be on the right path.

Regarding the requirements of human unity, Sri Aurobindo declares that until the average and the aggregate man, becomes more of an intellectual, moral and spiritual being and less predominantly a vital and emotional half-reasoning human animal there cannot be any basis for lasting human unity. To conclude in his own words :-"The ideal of human unity would be no longer an unfulfilled ideal but an accomplished fact and its preservation given into the charge of the united human peoples. Its future destiny would he on the needs of the gods and if the gods have a use for the continued existence of the race, may be left to he there safe."

RAJNI CHHABRA

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A MENTAL PATTERN FOR THE PLANET¹

Far I dipt into the future, far as the human eye could see. Saw the vision of the world, and all the wonders that would be;

Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails, Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;

Heard the heavens filled with shouting, and there rained a ghastly dew

From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue;

Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm,

With the standards of the people plunging thro' the thunderstorm;

Till the war-drum throbb'd no longer, and the battle-flags were furl'd

In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.

There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,

And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.

I. P LANNING: SUBJECTIVE AND OBJECTIVE

TODAY man's conception of man is undergoing a major change. Out of the new concept of man will emerge the neo typal idea that will shape our new culture. In the world that is now in process, man is learning to think of himself, not in egoistic terms as an absolute entity, but as a part of a single, planetary being, with

¹ The present article constitutes Chapter One of the author's forthcoming book, Cosmic Humanism and World Unity, to be published this next year by Gordon & Breach Publ. Co., New York and London.

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the human race developing as the tip-end of the vast brain-nerve system of animate nature. Subtly united with his cosmic environment, man is moving toward a higher bio-social integration in which radio and television and satellite hook-ups appear as precursors of the circulatory processes of the emerging giant earth organism. Such, perhaps, is the new concept of humankind that man is framing of himself.

This conception not only adds a novel dimension to reality — it presents us also with a unique view of the meaning of history. This theory, as it unfolds, will reveal the "cross action" of the "magnetic , , moments" of human evolution — the pattern for the gradual emergence of the giant organism of which mankind is the developing cerebral cortex. In a sense, the embryonic form of this super-organism is the morphogenetic field of GAEA - Mother Earth, the first born of Chaos, according to Greek mythology - now coming into full consciousness.

According to the view here striving to become articulate, the meaning of history is to be found in the onward and upward spiral towards the appearance of something completely new in social evolution: the development of a "specific organ of civilization" for the mobilizing of our energies and the unification of our social purposes. In a word, human DNAs need to put together a marvelous new organ, the World Sensorium. All this is required if man is to give human evolution meaning, thrust, and a sense of direction.

There is no road back. We must face the future. Perhaps we are too timid. As William James once put it, men are continually putting themselves in prison. The tremendous shocks to human consciousness in the coming years will find us unprepared, unless we learn that our plans for the future must keep men's minds open to guided change. Today we fumble because we lack vision. And because we lack creative imagination, there is still much defeatism in the world, and we search for methods to boost the sagging "morale" of an exhausted humanity.

The truth is that, much as we talk about it, we have not thoroughly analysed the nature of morale. In the long run there is only one secure morale — the morale of enlightenment. This morale is not the phony stuff of the military mentality, nor the morale of the clergyman's

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incantations, nor yet the morale of the politician's promise of economic abundance. To build the morale of a planetary humanism — a super-national morale — requires time, and already the time is short for the job we have to do.

According to the theory of a cosmic humanism, the darkening clouds of social disaster curving over the great mass fields of the human drama cannot be dispelled until we synthesize a world outlook in which religion, science, art, and philosophy are coordinated with economic-political mechanisms to give common human life meaning and direction.

II. THE MORALE OF ENLIGHTENMENT

The cultural synthesis we have just referred to must provide a time-binding unification of the "magnetic moments" of history. The morale of enlightenment — planetism and global thinking — always seeks the threads of historical continuity: it recalls that at least twenty-five hundred years ago Mu-ti said, "Let one love another as one's self; let a nation love another as its own. Let a sovereign love his subjects as himself." This ethics, enunciated in the religion and the philosophy of the ancient East, was restated centuries later in the ethics of Jesus, wherein the divinity in man is transformed into the symbol, "The Father," and this, as the English critic Fausset realized, means "all the potentialities of the past."

Today the great masses of humanity no longer have a holding ground in the form of living memory. The "Christian" nations will hold on to Christmas; but then — in the absence of the GREAT VISION - there must eventually come the tidal down sweep, after which no one will listen to anyone, and we will have a "semantic suicide."

III. PLANETARY INTEGRATIONS

What we suffer from is a disintegration of culture arising from the fact that men have been made sick by too much revolving around their egocentric axes. Today the only axis worthy of its pivots is a global axis centered in a cosmic humanism. What the world needs

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are virtuosi who can evoke the manipulative genius of all mankind. If someone with creative vision could come along and dissolve old habits of thought, free men from their solidified mental patterns, he could emancipate the world from the financial and political prisons of our enslaved society.

If we could form the GREAT VISION, there could be a tremendous up rush to the cosmic humanism idea—the group upsurge to social creativity and unfoldment. The central difficulty with past humanisms is that they have tried to put an immensely simple message into WORDS, whereas such a message can best be written into the choreography of a universal picture language. The job is to find a -layout, a picture-kinesis basis, so simple and so huge that it is see-able by anyone who has mastered the movies or can punch a radio-television panel. If it were possible to use the full play of international techniques made possible by a United Nations Communications Satellite System (for example, The Prometheus-Krishna Project), an all-world drama could lift up the inner lives of peoples to their own transfiguration by sheer evocation of spiritual powers from within.

Our creative semanticists have said that "a magnificent humanity awaits upon a magnificent language"; but this language must be able to shrink all knowledge so that it can be put on an all-history, all-world basis for invariant transfer across the social wholes. Professor H. N. Wieman and Harold Rugg have tried to envisage a language whose devising shall constitute the major task of our great transition. In our topology of humanity this appears as a language of motion — a psycho-social motion or spiritual traveling. When this new language medium is created the energy of dynamic humanism — a group sublimation — will stream happily on its way, secure in the knowledge of the BIG IDEA behind it all.

IV. ORTHOSYNTHESIS AND SPHERICAL HARMONICS

This is a methodization for democracy whereby man may know what to yield to and what to resist, producing peaceful change and resolving the mountain-molehill patterns existing throughout life space as directed vectors of change. People have failed to realize that developments

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in theoretical physics, in psychical research, in semantics, are as compulsive as industrial, economic and political events — and indeed sometimes accelerate them — so that the new culture perforce must be a social-semantic no less than an economic-political unification.

The world that is coming towards us is one that will provide a maximum of freedom from special linguistic frameworks. Mental shackles are forged by verbal habits, and a higher mental-verbal world will come with a broadening language-logical emancipation. In Indo-European civilization the basic structure has provided a common logic, a limited two-valued logic of "true" and "false." All "Aryan" tongues are akin, and anyone born to one, such as English or French, is already cousin to another of the same family. But certain types of Oriental thought were never thus restricted to the either-or logic, and have in this respect possessed a greater measure of freedom from limitation.

But what is to be the new invariant symbolism, free from special linguistic frameworks? It is a curious fact that thus far mathematical symbolism and musical scoring are the only international "languages" that Western civilization has developed, and this suggests that perhaps music promises to satisfy better than any other medium the requirements of a universal aesthetic language. This is especially important if the object of the study of science, the Cosmos, and the object of emotional apprehension, music, turn out to be applications of a more fundamental science of mathematical logic, the study of abstract ordersystems.

An interesting application of this idea is afforded by the study of what Pythagoras, in the days of ancient Greek culture, called the "music of the spheres," but which in modern thought is studied under the general heading of spherical harmonics. For our part, we would like to see included in this our favourite musical-mathematical concept of ' the music logarithmic spiral. In spherical harmonics one studies how functions are spread over spherical surfaces. The result, in some cases, may look like a globe's lines of latitude and longitude in general, symmetrical patterns. This method not only has wide applications in electricity, but, as will someday appear, has possibilities of development through the treatment of electromagnetic fields of

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force at work in biological and other super-physical phenomena.

V. ENERGY FIELDS AND GLOBAL SEMANTICS

The formative figures of the future will be creative semantics. The problem of global semantics — that of social communication across the world-whole, speaking to all races and nations as one — is bound up with the problem of developing a technique for releasing one of those great energy-burstings, or social orgasms, necessary to the creation of a new World Form. This, we believe, is the problem of mobilising human energies and guiding them constructively through the head-heart-hand syntheses. Surely the endless stirrings of today are symptomatic of the accumulation of the tremendous emotional reserves of humankind. They are the forerunners either of a sadistic destruction of all existing forms, or the prelude to the coming into being of some giant form of the future. Which it is to be, man must decide.

To attain this new form, what is needed is wave on wave of "great striking acts" — energy-bursts that sweep over walls and tunnel through barriers and give history a new perspective. We must learn how to muster an authority capable of casting a spell over humanity and creating a new design for planetary existence. We are approaching the climax for which we have been building a rich memory bank and resources.

As an alternative to Marxism, we propose a more futuristic orientation — the theory of planetary humanism. Our view is that the coming universal civilization will have to fuse many of the features of a variety of political, economic, and religious systems. In this planetary culture the religions and the philosophies of the Orient will have their contributions to make. In its functioning the World Sensorium, the formal organ of integration for this planetary civilization, will transcend many of our present fragmented social mechanisms and concepts. For the present, our basic problem is that of envisaging the projective geometry capable of producing the synthesis of psycho-biological forces and social vectors. This is also, and more fundamentally, a matter of forming an imaginary map of a territory-to-be.

The Cosmic Humanists believe that they have some of the important

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pieces of this map. Their formulations, they hope, are a portent of the highly effective idealism that men must have, if the presently non-existent territory is to be brought into the domain of social reality. While this view takes as its point of departure a map of an actual territory, and in that sense rests upon a factual world as this is now revealed by science, it soon leaves the world as it is and moves into the world of ideals as sought-for realities. Cosmic Humanism seeks to create a space-time drama of epic proportions which shall embody and express the social analogue of Minkowski's space-time continuum in the geometry of a four-dimensional matrix. But Cosmic Humanism finds a need for higher meta-dimensional realities and concepts.

In brief, just as the physicist now interprets physical events in terms of field structures curling the space-time continuum, so in our psycho-dynamics social adjustments, like spatiotemporal relations, are also held to express curvature; no human act is isolated — it, too, is a part of a Psi field continuum and moves back upon itself through a kind of social karma. Following this conception, Cosmic Humanism seeks to discover those relations which, like public time, are transposable across the social whole, which in the broadest context is Humanity in its collective unity.

VI. THE SPIRAL OF HISTORY

The future of man rests with man in relation to cosmic guiding fields, and when man have mastered the art of bending the curve of the field continuum into the world-encircling spiral of a time-binding synthesis, he will, at long last, have brought into being the higher dimension of a giant world organism, the emergent World Sensorium that we shall be studying in the following chapters. To bring into being this world organism requires not only an ecstatic urge — an energy streaming as a form-creating social organism — but it requires also intelligent planetary planning to guide the embryological development of the organism-to-be. We repeat : in order to attain planetary goodness and beauty, we need VISION, a vision so wide and so compelling that it transcends all narrow limitations and triumphs over all separatist tendencies.

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When we get that vision, and the new balance of forces expressive of that wisdom, we shall have the psychological revolution to which all history is the build up. Once the consciousness of universal relationships is planetary established, we shall find that the idea of a common destiny for all mankind is no mere phantasy of wishful thinking, but a legitimate objective of human aspiration. Indeed, the vision already seems to have been proclaimed by Alfred Lord Tennyson in his famous lines in Locksley Hall (as quoted at this chapter's head), where, like Walt Whitman's bard "who walks in advance," the poet paints a vision of the future.

Tennyson's preview of the kindly earth resting under the reign of universal law will demand immense constructive work for its consummation. But surely one important step in the direction of the attainment of the "parliament of man" is a psychological revolution to sublimate and transmute the technological revolution. This is the task of the new alchemy. If history is to have any meaning at all, we humans must project creatively the curve of bionomic evolution and weave the fabric of a higher consciousness. Man's greatest mission is to salvage the pageant of history from the dark domain of frustration and insanity and give history a time-planning purpose—and this can be done only by cross-webbing the cultures of the peoples of the earth into the Federation of the World. How the globe's geophysical field-reversals have assisted in the weaving of the woof and the warp of the evolving patterns that are the "magnetic moments" is the problem and the challenge of our study. The meaning of history is not "writ in the heavens" — completely — it is also the lure of the "one, far-off divine event" toward which our own spinning galaxy is moving in time's logarithmic music spiral.

This would embody the Ideal of Human Unity as Sri Aurobindo envisioned it and help bring to fruition the objectives of Auroville as an international community. 

OLIVER REISER

(University of Pittsburgh)

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THE SECRET OF THE VEDA

VEDA IN INDIAN TRADITION

SRI Aurobindo, it may be remembered, began the Arya volumes with a series of essays on "The Secret of the Veda" along with those on "The Life Divine". This, one may venture to suggest, was no mere coincidence. A divine life on earth is the di stant promise contained as in a seed in the cryptic verses of the Veda; to reveal their secret was thus a necessity for the fulfilment of the promise.

Veda has been revered in Indian tradition, with certain notable exceptions as in the case of the Buddhists, the Jains and the materialists, as revealed scripture, śruti, the repository of the highest wisdom attainable by man. The word itself is derived from a root, vid, which means both to know and to find or obtain. Veda is thus knowledge, the supreme knowledge of God and man and the world; it is also the means to obtain whatever man desires, in this world and the next, spiritual gains or material riches and well-being.

It is this double aspect of the Vedic hymns, the mantra, that led the ancient Indian students of the Veda to make a distinction between Jnana kanda and Karmakanda, its power for knowledge and its efficacy in action; this corresponds in fact to the double entendre almost always implied at least in the hymns of the Rigveda, the sruti par excellence. The Rishis or seers of the hymns, as some of them expressly declare in the Veda itself, meant them to be and used them as hymns of prayer and God-attraction, hymns of praise and God-affirmation, hymns of God-attainment and self-expression. At the same time, the Rishi was also the priest and officiate in the public sacrifices of Vedic times and his hymns were meant to be sung or chanted as part of the Vedic ritual.

We may therefore easily surmise that the hymn served a double purpose: one, the spiritual progress of the seer himself or of his descendant and disciple whom he chose to initiate into its secret, and two, the obtaining of the material gains for which the ritual of the external sacrifice was gone through; jñāna and karma , spiritual enlightenment and ritual act, were both fulfilled through the mantra. What these two implied in their actual content we shall see as we

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proceed. Here it may suffice to say that owing to the progressive obscuration of the esoteric sense, — it was difficult enough in the beginning and became almost unseizable when the meaning of the symbols in which it was couched ceased to be intelligible owing to the legend and myth in which it came to be encrusted as early as the age of the Brahmanas, — the mantra came to be used exclusively for the ritual act and for obtaining material rather than spiritual riches, and Veda came to be regarded exclusively as Karmakanda. This " secularisation" of the sacred ancient hymnal became complete when the medieval commentator Sayana and the modern scholars from the West, with their vast array of verbal scholarship and little insight into things spiritual set the seal of finality on the meaning of the Veda.

But in spite of it all, the ancient tradition that the Veda contained sacred lore of the highest import persisted. Something of its secret was revealed to Swami Dayananda who founded a new religious order in the second half of the 19th century, the Arya Samaj, on the basis of what he could recover of the true Veda. It was left to Sri Aurobindo, combining in himself the highest spiritual attainment with a vast Sanskrit and classical European scholarship, to bring out the entire sense of the Veda, in its double aspect of jñāna and karma, understanding the terms in their widest connotation. We shall follow Sri Aurobindo giving here his main findings, and confine ourselves primarily to the inner esoteric sense of the Veda. As this esoteric sense is the dominant motif of the Rigveda, we shall in the main be referring to this particular compilation when using the more generic term; our justification will be that the other Samhitas, the Samaveda, the Atharvaveda and the Yajurveda, either derive their esoteric substance almost entirely from the Rigveda - this is the case of the Sarnaveda, - or else base themselves on the same body of spiritual or occult knowledge as the Rigveda.

As we shall see, Veda is the fruit of a long epoch of inner, spiritual seeking, confined, as was natural to expect at that early stage of human development, to a small elite, whose utterances, the fruit of this seeking, are recorded and have come down to us almost unaltered in metrical forms of great poetic merit or in rhythmic prose (as in the Yajurveda and parts of the Atharvaveda), known to Indian tradition as mantras. The Vedic Mantras not a "spell" or magic formula. It

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is, as the seers themselves describe it, — and we have to presume that they knew what they were talking about — a spontaneous utterance swelling up from the heart and taking shape in the mind; it is born of an inner revelation or inspiration, something intuitive and no construction of the thinking mind. And it is charged with power; the sound itself produces vibrations in the inner subjective world of the hearer as well as in the world of material forms.

VEDA IN THE MODERN VIEW

Veda, according to modern scholars, is the record of a primitive mentality, poor in knowledge, superstitious and full of awe for the vast Unknown that surrounds man, anxious to propitiate through prayer and praise and a complex ritual of sacrificial worship the Powers of the physical world, the Sun, Moon, Heaven and Earth, Fire, Wind, Rain and Storm, the Sacred Rivers and a number of other gods and goddesses who were supposed to preside over the workings of Nature. The boons that were demanded of these deities were purely material blessings, such as plenty of cows, horses, fighting men, sons, food, wealth of all kinds, protection, victory in battle, the rain of heaven, the free flowing of the seven rivers of the Punjab where it is supposed the scene was originally laid. The cult of the sacrifice dominated the scene. The people for whom the Veda was composed by their priests to be used as a prayer book for the sacrificial rites, had entered the Punjab through the north-western passes; they were an "Aryan" people kin in language and race with other such people whose descendants the Romans, the Greeks and the Persians were.

Here in India they found themselves face to face with a much more highly developed civilisation, the creation of Dravidians who were gradually driven by the Aryan onslaught beyond the Vindhya hills into the South. These Dravidians were black-skinned people whom the fairskinned Aryan despised as slaves or thieves, dāsa, dasyu. dasyu. It was to aid them in their constant war against these indigenous inhabitants of India that the Aryans invoked the aid of one of their principal gods, Indra, who would smite the enemy with his weapons, recover for the Aryan worshipper his cattle stolen by the

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Dasyu, wage war against the strongly fortified cities of the Dasa. It was partly in order to make their life and possessions safe against the enemy that the magician cast his spell, the medicine-man used his mumbo-jumbo, of which the Atharvaveda is full.

The Aryan people lived in village or farm, away from the Dravidian cities. They tilled the soil, tended their flocks of cattle, sheep and other domestic animals; the cow and the bull were their most precious possessions. They had developed handicrafts of sorts of which a long list is to be found in the Yajurveda, and knew some barter and trade; it is even suggested they could navigate the sea. Their political life was still in the tribal stage, with an elective kingship and free participation by all freemen of die tribe who also formed the hosts in war. Warfare was a constant feature of this political life, and the Atharvaveda leaves us in no doubt that the wars could be brutal enough with no quarters given to the defeated foe. Social relationships were based on certain well-recognised standards; the woman enjoyed a position of near-equality with men; and caste had not yet settled into shape. Life was joyous and for the most part quite uninhibited as many of the similes used in the Rigveda would go to show. In sum, the social institutions were in a state of fluidity and allowed a great freedom.

Of the high things of the spirit, there is little evidence according to the scholars, but for some isolated speculations in the later portions of the Rigveda and Atharvaveda. It is even suggested in some quarters that these may have been borrowed from the civilised Dravidians. The persistent Indian tradition that Veda is the repository of the highest knowledge, that it is śruti, revealed scripture, must in this view be dismissed as pure legend and moonshine.

"But it is just possible that the meaning of the Veda has not been grasped by the moderns in its entirety; it is in fact admitted on all 'hands that many passages in the Rigveda are not fully understood. We need not be surprised at this confession after a hundred years of painstaking study by a galaxy of acute minds. For, as the Veda itself says, it speaks "secret words, seer-wisdoms that speak out their sense to the seer", ninyā oacāmsi, nivacanā kavaye kāvyāni (Rigveda IV:3.16). The mantra which the Rishi or kavi of the Veda utters is described by one of them as existing in the supreme Ether "in which all the gods

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are seated", and he adds, "one who knows not That, what shall he do with the Rik" (Ibid. 164. 39).

How for an instance are we to understand verses like these (in Rigveda IV, 58. I, 5) which given their literal meaning would read as follows: "a honeyed wave climbs up from the ocean, ... that wave is the secret name of immortality. Streams of clarified butter (ghrta) move from the heart-ocean; penned by the enemy in a hundred enclosures they cannot be seen". Obviously, they do not mean that a wave or flood of wine comes mounting up out of the salt water of the Indian Ocean or even from the fresh water of a Punjab river and that this water is the secret name for clarified butter. Nor does the next verse suggest that rivers of ghee or of water either, rising from the heart-ocean or any ocean were caught on their way by the wicked Dravidians and shut up in a hundred pens so that the Aryans could not even catch a glimpse of them.

We may, in spite of the incongruities implied in the current interpretation of the Veda, — and Sayana the great medieval commentator has his full share of absurdities which in fact drove the modern European scholars to find their own meaning in the Veda based on philology, comparative religion and mythology, — accept in part the modern interpretation of Veda. Its aim was to use the Veda as the earliest available source book for social anthropology, a study of primitive man in his early historical setting. It must be conceded that the modern interpreters, no less than Sayana, have succeeded in their respective aims to a remarkable degree; for even though they have both missed the real purport of the Veda, the picture of primitive society reflected in the Veda which they so painstakingly present is on the whole a fairly accurate picture, in spite of certain glaring defects.

"The mass of men at the time, it is quite evident", suggests Sri Aurobindo, "lived entirely on the material plane, worshipped the Godheads of material Nature, sought from them entirely material objects."¹ This may not be palatable for those among us who would like to believe that the Vedic Age was the glorious Satya Yuga of ancient tradition; it was certainly not so if we consider only the life of the common man. It is to the credit of modern scholarship to have brought out the real facts, whatever be its misplacement of emphasis. But here too, one or two points need elaboration, in regard to the

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religious attitudes of the Vedic peoples. In the first place, fear played but a small part in their religion; the only god the Vedic worshipper feared was Rudra, with the rest he was on very friendly terms. As Sri Aurobindo observes, "over it all there was the "Aryan light", a confidence and joy and a happy, equal friendliness with the Gods which the Aryan brought with him into the world.... "² And secondly, even in this "primitive" form of religion, there were elements that prepared the masses for a higher stage of development. For example, the Rishis took particular care to train them "to develop their ethical nature, to turn towards some initial development of their psychic being, to conceive the idea of a knowledge and truth other than that of, the physical life and to admit even a first conception of some greater spiritual Reality which was the ultimate object of human worship or aspiration. This religious and moral force was the highest reach of the external cult and the most that could be understood or followed by the mass of the people."³

The most glaring defect from which the modern interpretation of Veda suffers, apart from its total want of appreciation of the esoteric or mystic element, is the theory of an "Aryan" invasion of a Dravidian India as the starting-point of the Vedic lore. This theory is now beginning to be discounted in India, though still in a very hesitating manner because of the array of a seemingly indisputable mass of philological evidence put forward in its support. We cannot here enter into a full discussion of the points involved. It may however be pertinent to observe with Sri Aurobindo that "the philologist has nothing to do with ethnology. The philologist has nothing to do with sociology, anthropology and archaeology. His sole business is or ought to be with the history of words and of the association of ideas with the sound forms which they represent."⁴ History must be based on verifiable facts, not on conjectures, and philology is still for the most part a ' conjectural "science".

The only certain fact that emerges from the Veda is that there were at the time two distinct types of culture and religion, which may for the sake of convenience be described respectively as "Aryan" and "Non-Aryan", without attaching any ethnic significance to the terms.

"The one thing that seems fairly established," says Sri Aurobindo in this connection, in an article written for the Arya in 1915-16, ," is

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that there were at least two types of culture in ancient India, the "Aryan" occupying the Punjab and Northern and Central India, Afghanistan and perhaps Persia and distinguished in its cult by the symbols of the Sun, the Fire and the Soma sacrifice, and the non-Aryan occupying the East, South and West, the nature of which it is quite impossible to restore from the scattered hints which are all we possess."⁵ Perhaps one may hazard a guess that the non-Aryan type of culture was that represented by the subsequent archaelogical finds at Mohenjodaro and Harappa in the West and latterly in the East (Buxar District of Bihar) and some places in the South. "We may," adds Sri Aurobindo, "if we like, suppose that there was a struggle between two different cults in India and that the Rishis took their images from the physical struggle between the human representatives of these cults and applied them to the spiritual conflict, just as they employed the other details of their physical life to symbolise the spiritual sacrifice, the spiritual wealth, the spiritual battle and journey."⁶

"It is urged that the Dasyus are described as black of skin and noiseless, in opposition to the fair and high-nosed Aryans. But the former distinction is certainly applied to the Aryan Gods and the Dasa Powers in the sense of light and darkness, and the word anasa does not mean nose less. [What it means in fact is 'devoid of life or power'] ... .Even if it did, it would be wholly inapplicable to the Dravidian races; for the southern, nose can give as good an account of itself as -any 'Aryan' proboscis."⁷ The distinction between Aryan and un-Aryan on which so much has been built, we may conclude with Sri Aurobindo, represents not a racial but a cultural difference.

 THE RISHI AND HIS ASPIRATION

Indian tradition ascribes the hymns of the Veda to men (there are some women too) whom they call Rishi. Many stories are told in the Great Epics and in the Puranas about some of these Rishis and their prowess, as of their failings. About three hundred names have come down in the traditional lists of the authors of the Vedic hymns.

What does the Veda say about the Rishi? He is known as kavi Seer-poet. The two powers of the Rishi, the Kavi, the Seer of the Truth, are drśti and śruti, truth-vision and truth-hearing: rsayah

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satyaśrutah, says a text.⁸ "Kavi", as Sri Aurobindo explains, "means possessed of the Truth-consciousness and using its faculties of vision, inspiration, intuition, discrimination'⁹

To what purpose these powers were applied we shall best understand if we keep in mind the aim of the Mystics and the ancient Mysteries everywhere, in Egypt, and Chaldea, in Persia and in Greece as in India. "The preoccupation of the Mystics was with self-knowledge and a profounder world-knowledge; they found out that in man there was a deeper self and inner being behind the surface of the outward physical man, which it was his highest business to discover and know.... They found also a Truth, a Reality behind the outward aspects of the universe and to discover, follow, realise this Truth was their great aspiration."¹⁰

"The superconscient, the sea of the subconscient, the life of the living being between the two, — this is the Vedic idea of existence."¹¹ Our ordinary unillumined sense-activities of life have their roots in the vast subconscient. The whole struggle of man is to replace this action by the luminous working of mind and life which comes from above through the mental existence. "The Vedic idea was that the subconscient darkness and the ordinary life of ignorance held concealed in it all that belongs to the divine life and that these secret riches must be recovered first by destroying the impenitent powers of ignorance and then by possessing the lower life subjected to the higher."¹² The conquest of the divine Truth, the superconscient world of Swar, is the real aim of the Vedic Rishis and the subject of their hymns. The two requisites on which the Vedic Rishis always insist are Light and Power, the Light of the Truth working in the knowledge, the Power of the Truth working in the effective enlightened will.¹³

"The life of man is represented as a sacrifice to the gods, a journey sometimes figured as a crossing of dangerous waters, sometimes as an ascent from level to level of the hill of being,... But the journey, if principally of the nature of a quest, the quest of the hidden light, becomes also by the opposition of the powers of darkness an expedition and a battle.... This journey or march proceeds along the path discovered by Sarama, the hound of heaven, the path of the Truth, rtasya panthāh, which leads to the

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realms of the Truth.... And it is effected by the Soma-wine and the sacred Word."¹⁴

At every stage of the journey, the Gods are invoked, their protection sought, their help obtained through the offering of all that the seeker has through the spontaneous utterance of his soul's deepest needs, by the power of the mantra.

(To be continued)

SANAT K. BANERJI

References

¹ Sri Aurobindo, On Yoga, Book Two, Tome One (1958), p. 5. 

² Sri Aurobindo, Ore the Veda, (1956), P- 547-

³ Sri Aurobindo, The Foundations of Indian Culture (1953), p. 161.

⁴ On the Veda, pp. 643-44.

⁵ Sri Aurobindo, Views and Reviews (Madras Edition), p. 41.

6 On the Veda, pp. 255-56.

7 Ibid., p. 30 fn.

⁸ Sri Aurobindo, Hymns to the Mystic Fire (1952), P- '

⁹ On the Veda, p. 89.

¹⁰ Hymns to the Mystic Fire, p. V.

^II On the Veda, p. 119.

¹² Ibid., p. 273.

¹³ Ibid., pp. 171, 88.

¹⁴ Ibid., pp. 208-9. " Ibid., p. 265.

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REVIEW

Integral Education: Pub. Integral Education Society, Bhubaneswari. Ed. Dr. R. N. Pant.

''AN integral education which could, with some variations, be adapted to all the nations of the world, must bring back the legitimate authority of the Spirit over a matter fully developed and utilised." Basing itself upon this Message of the Mother, the Integral Education Society at Bhubaneswari has commenced its mission to give a new direction to educational change and educational development. The first number of their Quarterly before us, a bilingual journal (English and Oriya), assembles in its pages some of the key-writings of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo on the true foundation of education, the right object of education and the science of living. In this approach the whole of life is considered an education, the training given in the classroom being only concerned with laying the right base for the development of the body, life, mind and soul of the individual. There are papers dwelling upon the course of studies followed in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram where this system is being perfected. Naturally the system developed at the Ashram is not expected to be copied in all details in every place outside. The necessary adaptations have to be made in keeping with the local conditions, state of development of the general life etc. It is also to be noted that this approach does not reject the high points of other systems but assimilates them in its wide scheme and adds more values to it keeping in mind the fuller destiny of man as the bridge between the Spirit and Matter.

This inaugural number of the journal makes a very good beginning in projecting the integral vision of new Education.

 M. P. PANDIT

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