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 wide-ness, the heights of knowledge, the seas of Ananda. Sri Aurobindo

A COLLOQUY

KING

What a formidable wild spot, a desolate land

Have we chosen to live in! Pressed under hard rules we are;

We have discarded our fondness for our native land; forbidden for us

To look upon cherished faces. Is it true then

That this world is someone's play, to whose eyes the bondage of rules

Is only an image of his fancy? True then that there is someone

Under whose direction we — blinded by illusion —

Wander in a field hemmed in by delusion on an unreal earth?

There glimmers a city of mirage, light is but the rays of darkness,

The wisdom of the wise is a dream's orderliness.

A dense woodland is the earthly life,

Thoughts there fly about like fireflies

In the darkness. Vainly did we think then

That this utterance was the musing of hopelessness

Of one conquered in the battle of life, only a wailing of the weak.

Now I see that wailing is true; it is the ultimate vision.

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Go hence, O happy dream; come thou, sorrow!

An invincible teacher art thou, own brother of wisdom,

The first-born from the womb of the great Delusion.

Come, let me embrace you. It is just meet

You play with me in this dense forest,

It is a fitting playground for the sorrow you are.

In vain the human being dances about

With the short-lived couple, pain and happiness.

Death will come and stay the dance.

PRIEST

Just at this hour art thou defeated in the battle of life,

O King! In your burning heart is the utterance of hopelessness.

The cry of grief is in your voice and not the Knowledge of Brahman.

Other is that acquisition beyond the reach of the weak,

A great truth attained by heroes only, hidden in the cavern.

True it is that it is a dance, the earthly life.

Whose dance is it? The Lord of the people is the master of dancing.

Embrace not sorrow but him, O King,

Carry him with you, in battle after battle, flood with frenzy

Your body and soul, the home of delight.

Victory and defeat, the battle-field aloud with wailings

Are various footsteps only of the dancer

On a varying background. The king and the kingdom

Are for the sake of the decorative beauty of the dance

Upon the arena of the stage.

KING

With empty words you comfort me.

The heart knows its own sorrows. Narayana dances?

The demoniac nature dances in the chamber of illusion,

It is the demon-girl's doll's play — she builds and breaks

Always the living dolls. When she sees a broken heart,

She laughs, her curiosity satisfied. Illusion is true,

True this desolate spot, true also the defeat,

Sorrow is true. Happiness is not true upon this earth,

Nor true is the kingdom. True it is that ignorance is punished,

Love is not true in this world filled with lamentation.

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PRIEST

Delve then into your sorrowing heart and wallow in its slime, Probe into your suffering soul and there find the secret of sorrow. Finally you will recognise Krishna, full of delight, full of love. It is the play of the great Lover, this life upon earth.

KING

The love that kisses with the lips of thunder,

The love that burns always with the agony of diseases,

The love whose guise is sorrow and hate and death,

That is of the lowest kind. Compassion is there in the human heart;

Creation is not kind, nor Nature, nor God.

Man builds an image of his own compassion, a fanciful idol

In his own heart. That shadow he worships as God. There is Brahman.

 

God is but a dream, another kind of dream,

A false consolation created by the imagination of the miserable.

PRIEST

O King, through your utterance, I am witnessing Krishna-play

And my body shivers in delight; I hear

As though Radha, the beloved, is chiding in the words of your mouth:

Never shall I see his face nor hear his name,

Nor shall I know that he exits any more.

Such utterance in the mouth of a mother is the vain fancy of an atheist,

 

I understand. So I say it is not a mere consolation,

O King! You will surely see my Krishna

Manifesting again in a befitting guise:

[Here one line of the Bengali manuscript is illegible. —Editor]

THE VOICE OF KRISHNA

The toy is mine. I have snatched it away and I have given it back again

Only to teach you that I am your Master.

KING

My heart has not trust in these empty words.

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Vainly human intelligence creates wordy brilliance

In order to dazzle one's own eyes. Have done with these words.

PRIEST

I obey, but remember, O great King, What the Vaishnava says.

KING

In vain is such an address.

The tiger is the king of this forest, not I.

As to a beggar, the forest deity doles out

Scanty fruit and roots — just to appease the hunger.

I roam about without my army, abandoned by relatives.

The name king sounds a taunt to my ears.

He is not a king who is abandoned by friends in danger,

One who lies tired in this desolate spot.

PRIEST

There are your subjects, we are there. Always everywhere

You are the king, you are my father,

In no other terms will you hear me address you,

Neither in the woods nor in the city.

(Incomplete)

SRI AUROBINDO

Translated from the original Bengali by Nolini Kama Gupta

By the courtesy of

Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives

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IN PRAISE OF POETRY

(With respects to Sir Philip Sidney and Shelley)

It ist he worshippers of beauty, after all, who have done the real pioneer work of the world.

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

ONLY recently has man's frame of reference become large enough to assess the last enemy other than subjectively. The aim of this brief essay is to try to place age-old subjective insights within the new objective, empirical frame of reference. The spiritual findings of such as Sidney and Shelley — which reflect a primordial cumulative heritage — receive abundant confirmation. But now they can be expressed as hypotheses with tangible evidence for verification. This process should make them eventually as irrefutable as the boiling temperature of water. As scientific hypotheses can be verified by repeated experiments, so the spiritual hypotheses may be verified by repeated experience.

Astronomers such as Fred Hoyle tell us that in the beginning there was nothing but very thinly spread atoms and simple molecules comprising largely hydrogen. Out of this was to come everything else — including men and machines. This thin gas seems to be the nearest we can approach the Creator physically. But, of course, it is everywhere. Its Composition is now considered to be mostly hydrogen, helium, some carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and a few metals. These are the raw materials on the many benches which are the galaxies of the workshop of the universe itself.

However, for about every cubic mile of this gas exist about one thousand particles of cosmic dust. This dust is not spread evenly but concentrated here and there in clouds. Each cloud has enough material to produce about four hundred stars like the sun. This original matter has become the matter with us. Etymological significances of the word matter or material are Latin mater and Greek meter meaning mother. So with this matter we have the body of the universe. Einstein 's theory of relativity seems to confirm that the universe is indeed one verse; the meter is inherent in the motion. Here is the body from which all offspring must come.

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The offspring must come because this body is in motion and has intercourse with a charge. This charge or magnetic field is vital. It aligns the dust particles, thus giving direction. Its origin is still unknown. Here we again seem to be as physically near the Creator as we can come. This union of magnetism, motion, and matter involving needle-like dust particles anticipates the fertilisation of eggs by spermatozoa — a process still dependent on personal magnetism. As the Matter is the body of the mother, the charge seems to embody the injected psychic energy or libido of the Father. For us it was certainly to produce the father and mother of a predicament.

In other words, in the workshop of the universe, along with the raw materials there is also a controlling 'and directing force. Where the matter is passive, the charge is active. Together in motion they give birth to galaxies of stars and planets. All remain inter-related.

The core of the earth is largely iron; its motion converts it into a giant dynamo making a magnetic field; this interacts with high-speed particles streaming from the sun and oscillating between the earth's poles. Sun, moon, earth, and stars all remain intimate. Their relationships produced a series of effects first chemical, then biological. As these effects constitute consistent and unidirectional growth they could be fully and precisely calculated. In fact, they seem to be the rudiments of external necessity. This was to be regarded later as the gods, fate, or that divinity which shapes our ends. Now it is seen as immanence producing evolution possibly given a specific direction in a process of calculated creation.

As we ourselves are sexually differentiated only on the biological bisexual foundations of chromosomes as illustrated in the early embryo in the womb, as Eve was made from Adam, as the neutron is neither positive nor negative in charge, so this matter, motion and force could derive from a bisexual Creator. Thus the symbolism of Hermes and Aphrodite would be objectively verified. As the concept of immanence makes clear, God and the Devil are one and the same. This further reduction to genuine Monotheism shows that if the Devil is the subservient jester, God shares the joke. Yet when male and female of necessity get together, osculation for cleansing eventually becomes an act of love. What the Creator ultimately derives from the matter may be the matter of most concern to us, His creations.

However strong the scientist may be on cortical functions, he

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may still be dangerously weak when it comes to diancephalic or emotional functions. No one can compare with him, perhaps, among the denotations; but sometimes he is not so happy among the connotations. He is fine on the edge of the wood but not so good in the middle. Thus Fred Hoyle, having stripped the bark so magnificently, states that "we still have not the smallest clue to our own fate."¹

There are many clues. The sap of the matter may be approached closer through a law promulgated by the scientific philosopher Herbert Spencer in First Principles (1862).

All manifestations are of the one cosmos whether chemical, biological, historical, or individual. Spencer seems to have formulated a theory which renders these manifestations consistently intelligible as parts of a whole. The law expresses the continuous redistribution of Matter and Motion as derived from Persistent Force in alternating processes of concentration and diffusion. It states that the concentration of Matter implies the dissipation of Motion while the absorption of Motion implies the diffusion of Matter. This could be called the Law of the Pendulum. It makes all the difference in the world. Spencer claims that this law governs the entire cycles of change of every existence and applies to every detail of change. It is as if the largest pendulum of continuous creation contains ever smaller ones down through the solar system, ice-ages, and political change to the phases of an individual's life and the ultimately infinitesimal process of metabolism in a total process of metamorphosis. The etymological significance of the word psyche is "butterfly".

In the light of quantum physics, Spencer's fundamental propositions may not now be fundamental enough. Even Bertrand Russell is prepared to gamble on the persistence of matter if not on the law of gravity — so Spencer's "Indestructibility of Matter" may hold good, bearing in mind that matter is only patterned energy. However, his "The Continuity of Motion" may not be quite right if energy at its smallest, in quantum's or photons, is discrete when looked at bit by bit. Yet the effect is of continuous motion. Similarly, perhaps his "The Persistence of Force" should be replaced by "The Distribution of Energy", a distribution leading to very forceful effects.

If quantum physics appear rooted in Chaos or Chance, they soon seem to yield to law and order aiming at stability. It is rather as if a

¹ Concluding line to The Nature of the Universe (Oxford, 1960 edit.).

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heap of indeterminate iron filings were being subjected to a strong magnet turning their chaos into order. It is unfortunate that Hitler and Mussolini still have so much magnetism leading eventually to apparent chaos again. By the time we get to biology, the organism seems very ingenious in dodging any random effects. Professor C.R. Frisch, F. R. S., in a talk on Causality on the B. B. C. (A Few Ideas, 1964) said:

"Indeed, the more we study living organisms, the more we admire the cunning with which they exploit those features of quantum physics which make for stability, and avoid the consequences of those uncertainties that go with it.

The looseness which is inherent in quantum physics may account for an occasional involuntary twitch; but my will is free — that is, free to act on all the information I have — only so far as my brain is subject to causality."

So Spencer's superstructure, his law of the pendulum seems to remain valid. As Einstein said, an unbelievably high Intelligence must be at work putting Himself or Itself into His or Its creation as novelist into his novel. The odds against Chance arranging the proper chemicals into proteins are so high the earth just isn't old enough to permit Chance to do it. And then the proteins still have to be animated.

Spencer's law both predicted and is corroborated by Professor Martin Ryle's recent discovery of the diminishing numerical density of radio stars (cf. The Oscillating Universe by Ernst. J. Opik, N.Y. 1961). If we tum from the infinite to the infinitesimal what do we find? According to a medical psychologist in an article "The Chemistry of Mind" (The Listener, London February 16, 1961): "Temperament is mainly controlled in the mid-brain by what must be a balancing action between stimulation ... and relaxation... . The balancing mechanism must be capable of regulating and timing itself so that it produces energy in a rhythmical manner and gives rise to the right activity of the appropriate degree in the right place at the proper time." In addition, Dr. Fleiss, a German physiologist and psychologist, has recently ascertained three overlapping cycles of biological rhythm in human beings. One is of physical endurance over 23 days; one is of nerves, or emotional and creative, of 28 days;

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one is of intellect, involving memory and alertness, of 33 days. These cycles correlate with dates of birth (note the evolved transformation of superstitious astrology into the magic of science) and are to be computed to predict pilots' off-days. Here seems to be further most substantial confirmation for Spencer's Law of the Pendulum. As Hamlet said to Ophelia, we are machines — but the important fact is that we are vehicles of evolving spirit or soul, the etymological meaning of which, through Old English and Greek, is 'light, colour and mobility'. After all, according to the Quantum theory, particles seem most intelligible as waves. Thus the whole Universe could be a manifestation of "Soul".

The opposite processes of disintegration and intergration are simultaneous but give a balance to one or the other so that each will dominate alternately. Spencer identifies important secondary effects. As the pendulum swings upwards to rest or peace and harmony, the matter absorbing motion has become more complex and its parts further differentiated and individualised whether this matter is Hamlet out of tune and harsh, or a multiplying universe. When the Pendulum swings down again and matter again goes into motion, that motion itself becomes more functionally complex particularly in war. Again this seems objective verification for the rule of Heraclitus that everything must produce its opposite.

Thus disintegration is merely the means to further growth at ever more complex or higher levels — where the water supply is not cut off.

Spencer's law, which seems to be the vital clue to a process which started from star dust and produced man, first instinctive and now cognitive, does not appear to be outdated. The fundamental particles still accord adequately with the Laws of the conservation of mass-energy, charge and spin as do the giant, spinning, spiral galaxies. Problems such as matter and anti-matter, and the apparent no conservation of parity in the decay of "strange" particles seem resolved with further knowledge. In fact, as the charge known as strangeness seems the only one not giving rise to force it could be another vital clue to the growth of psychic energy or spiritual reserves; it could be what the Creator gets out of his work — the distinction between life and death, a kind of spiritual residuum of evolved psychic energy. Spencer points out that nothing can be finally interpreted

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until placed within this evolutionary frame of reference. He also indicates that integration or God and dissolution or the Devil work to the same end; that all religion and philosophy is moving towards a further reduction of monotheism to be replaced by the concept of an immanent Creator expressing Himself from within his creations

Thus we could be simply embodiments of the Creator's imagination in which [History is His story, matter being no more than patterned energy. We are ourselves a kind of colour television. We are being lived by Something which needs billions like us to express Itself.

Putting 2 and 2 together, it is as if life is a kind of grandiose Cosmic television show or film, the sun a kind of filament, the iron-cored magnetic earth with its attendant ionosphere a kind of anode in a vast infinitely complex tube. Every thought and feeling, from the mother's lullaby to rape and genocide is predetermined as the Creator manipulates all from genetic codes to volcanoes.

James B. Beale, an American aerospace engineer, wrote in No. 12 (Summer, 1974) of Fields Within Fields, Within Fields, N.Y., in an article entitled "How Fields Affect Us" (p . 56) : " ... as a product of the Cosmos we are all "tuned in" and our biorhythms react accordingly to EM and ES fields, low frequency radiation, ions, and other as yet unknown
factors." In the same issue (p. 58), in an article entitled "Light and the Human Environment", Henry L. Logan wrote : "Human beings are electromagnetic organisms operating in a mesh of inter-related and interacting field patterns principally generated by ... the Sun."

Attributes of dissolution in the interests of increasing functional complexity are, at the highest level, analysis of fresh evidence, and also representational art; lower down will be a multiplication of effects as in ostentatious expenditure or conspicuous consumption; also will be loss of values as earlier syntheses disintegrate and promiscuity of judgment and conduct lead to intensifying violence.

Attributes of integration will be, on balance, the syntheses of romanticism instead of realism; liberal legislation of these syntheses; more general well-being in an era of peace. The two processes are simultaneous but give a balance to each alternately. The swings are clearly discernible in the alternations of romanticism, and realism, deductive subjective philosophy, and liberal or reactionary government — all parallel manifestations. The nineteenth century, the

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romantic age of ideology, disintegrated into the twentieth century, the age of analysis and violence, but also of greater objectivity, and higher standards of social welfare.

The scientist and the scientific philosopher supply valuable clues. These bring us to man himself and the philosopher-historian. Toynbee's A Study of History establishes the primary principles of motivation responsible for the rise and fall of civilisations . Life emerges as a challenge to which various responses are possible in a process of conflict. The conflict is necessary to put matter into motion , to pro vide th e tension correlative to growth. The responses are conditioned partly by th e environment. If th e response is adequate, survival results.

Practical considerations must predominate initially. Here are the beginnings of conscious or directed thinking. But survival alone is not enough. It needs to be enjoyable. So man's inner desires operate to adapt the environment itself in the interests of pleasure. When the cave is safe, warm, and possessed of food, the murals on the wall or television screen become the centre of attention. The practical considerations are conditioned by environment; the desires released by and for mastery of the environment come from within. The former developers the frontal lobe or conscious mind and cognitive ability; the latter flows up instinctively from the sub-conscious depths on the carrier-wave of rhythmic emotion.

We are only too aware of practical considerations — more or less synonymous with expediency and compromise. We have almost forgotten these ideals which mould the environment for enjoyable survival. As Toynbee illustrates, if man cannot go beyond practical considerations his survival itself is relatively short-lived. A breakdown occurs and his civilisation passes away or becomes fossilised.

However much the tree is pruned, the sap cannot flow if the roots are starved. This requires man to remain in contact with his ideals. These are within his sub-conscious in images of conflict. They are embodied in healthy art and show what leads to evolution and what to dissolution as in Prometheus and Jupiter, Jesus and Pilate, Hamlet and Claudius. Both sides are necessary — all problems of beauty and morality are resolved by this frame of reference as beauty still embodies truth but at last resolves the ambiguities of good and evil — good being what integrates, bad what disintegrates. Toynbee's

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truly great achievement was to show that the environment was not, ultimately, the controlling factor but simply contributive, that the controlling factor is a judgement by but also upon man. Every day is Judgment Day. It is man's disadvantage that to survive he must be practical yet nothing diffuses integrity like expediency.

On the other hand, the artist who integrates will grow in sincerity, and consequently become more physically vulnerable as, for example, when Tolstoy practised what he preached sincerely enough to be excommunicated. But without the artist and the poet man becomes arrested. To be arrested is to go to gaol. To be in gaol is to be in hell?

Toynbee illustrates a fundamental rhythm or cycle of three and a half beats in the general process of disintegration in societies which lose their ideals. Still we have one verse with a consistent meter illustrating Spencer's law. Still we have the same material, the same technique, and the outcome of the same primary motives in man as at the start. As it was in the beginning ...

However, as the scientist could see no clue, as the scientific philosopher concentrated chiefly on external manifestations, so the historian, when he does at last objectively bring us to the psyche, misplaces the emphasis by elevating the conscious above the sub-conscious. For Toynbee concluded that man has a measure of freedom of choice during periods of growth. He considered¹ that to be free is to keep the sub-conscious under the control of the con scions will or reason; thus and only thus could man hope to control the law of Nature and be free from destruction. This was a natural error as the dominant psychology of the time was Freud's which regarded the sub-conscious rather like a refuse bin for the unwanted.

Now, however, the findings show otherwise. For an understanding of the psyche or spirit itself we must turn to the psychologist not of disintegration but of growth, to Carl Jung and his followers. Anyway, as Tolstoy insisted in the second epilogue to War and Peace, Matter is either under complete control or it is, in fact, not controlled. jung confirms Tolstoy's reasoning that we must give up a freedom that does not exist and recognise a control of which we are unconscious. As soon as we do this and can work harmoniously with

¹ A Study of History, Abridged. Vol II pp. 287, 288.

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this inner necessity we feel free, as Milton showed in Samson Ago-nistes.

But Toynbee has shown empirically that man makes one of four responses to the challenge of life. Two of these are negative and produce disintegration. They are symbolised by such as Jupiter, the Devil, Claudius, Nicodemus, or self-interest. Two are positive, produce integration, and are symbolised by Prometheus, God, Hamlet, Jesus, or self-sacrifice. All of us have some of each of these. Both sides are necessary. The lowest and most childish response is the inability to recognise and correlate significant experience, with a consequent loss of orientation and passive acquiescence or drift as in Hamlet's mother. This is the response of the overwhelming majority of people at our present dangerously early stage of development. Its active but negative counterpart is when the conscious mind cannot distinguish among its sub-conscious instincts and gratifies the carnal ones in a process of abandon. Pindar and Tennyson's eagle of power is then the Nazi eagle. Marlowe's Faustus sums up the cause and the effect at this level.

The two positive responses also consist of one passive response and one active. Here the passive involves withdrawal to analyse and understand — as with Hamlet and his words. If understanding is fully achieved then the highest-most childlike stage of growth is reached and an active return is made to transform the society in the light of understanding for integration and growth. Concomitants of the negative responses are fear and belief in chance or superstition; concomitants of the positive are an increasing sense of lean or freedom, and belief in the virtues of necessity in an increasingly conscious perception of the Creator's aims and methods in a process of disciplined responsibility. Each one of us is making one of these four responses; in accordance with the majority, so is our society for better or for worse.

Since the end of the last phase of growth in the nineteenth century with its affirmative romanticism, the two inductive business-men, Faustus and Falstaff, have ruled triumphant. Matthew Arnold articulated the situation in Dover Be anticipate ting Dunkirk. Inevitable accompaniments have been violence and war, fear , objective philosophy, realistic analytical or merely representational art , and ever faster motion. All culminated in th e damnation of financial, spiritual, ach,

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social, and artistic bankruptcy; as Western Civilisation hardened its heart like Faustus it risked the same rejection as met Falstaff. All his poetry came from lust and rage said Yeats, adding that night after night he could never get the answers right as he exploited the fragments of his own personality; all represented and articulated T. S. Eliot's Waste Land of hollow men undone by death.

In his book Crisis in English Poetry (Hutchinson, London, edition 1958, p. 123) Vivian De Sola Pinto wrote of, " T he bewilderment and despair of an age which has lost the traditional clues to th e labyrinth of the inner life . . .". Writing of Wallace Stevens in Poets of Reality (Harvard and Oxford U. P.'s 1966, p219 ) J . Hillis Miller wrote, " T he vanishing of The Gods, leaving a barren man in a barren land, is the basis of all St evens' thought and poetry."

The psychologist shows that the neurosis of behavioral disintegration, the sense of futility which makes the world flat, stale, and unprofitable, can be cured only by reconnection with the roots of being embodied in symbols below consciousness. These express themselves individually in dreams, collectively in art. Where Toynbee followed the mythological clue as far as man's conscious mind, Jung follows it into the thick, strangely populated, dark but sun-splashed forest of primordial continuity. Here are all man's personified emotional drives, a great surge of instinctual libidinous energy, the tiger in the night, the horse that must be tamed, the serpent of discord, and the squawking ravens of darkness. Here also are Spenser's silver moon and Milton's sun bright sword. Here are all those laws we cannot consciously accept, making us suffer until we can accept and obey. Monkeys are t rained for space travel by giving them shocks until they make th e correct response to signals or images.

To climb Toynbee's or Jacob's ladder of etherialisation is to remain in harmonious union with this primal force and to do its will constructively in fashioning the external world. Man comes from his conscious external self to his sub-conscious eternal Self. This Self is the Creator. The union is still that of the male or conscious intellect with upwelling fantasies from what Jung calls "the maternally creative side of the masculine spirit."¹

¹ Modern Alan in Search of a Soul (1933), Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd. p. 76. This has been taken much further in The Origins and History of Consciousness by Erich Neumann, 1954, Princeton, & Routledge & Kegan Paul.

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The union of directed thought with upwelling "female" emotion forms imagination. With this the poet analyses experience to identify its meaningful aspects and communicates his understanding in recreated forms for greater effect and durability. He does this for pleasure; in doing this he grows towards his inner Self; in doing this he moulds the environment in accordance not with mortal self-interest but with a larger and more lasting Self interest. The poet is simply that form of life sufficiently evolved, strong, and impersonal — Thoreau's "toughest son of earth and Heaven" — to seek and find the signposts of the sub-conscious. However tumultuous his search he finds also, as Dylan Thomas said, a moment's peace in resolving the discord of his search by articulating, more or less profoundly, the forces in his conflict which bar him from his Self. As the psychologist shows, all his cries still concern water, alarm, or mating as he tries to communicate to the family. The poet is the sap, but the sap is life.

The definition of imagination of such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, were in effect confirmed objectively by Spencer when he said that the highest level of knowledge is when generalisations previously separate give a new meaning when juxtaposed. Now there is further objective verification from Medical Science as Sir Russel Brain notes in his essay "Words" in "-Some Reflections on Genius" (1960) that recent enquiries suggest that the frontal lobe of the brain has a main task of integrating " the cortical function which we may broadly call 'knowledge' with the diancephalic function which we may broadly call ' feeling'. " Poetic genius would appear to be the highest simply because it requires an even union of both these two functions in an advanced but simplified state of evolved complexity.

The highest quality both of general and specific factors of intelligence select, co-ordinate, and direct root desires which keep the horses of "id, ego and super-ego" harmoniously in harness. Only the great poet is at all really capable of this. Only he can articulate the universal forces echoed in his own journey to his Self. Yet all are committed to the descent to Demo gorgon, the climb to the summit of this spiritual Everest. Without the words of the poet and artist there are no signposts; without direction there is futility; with futility is fear; with fear is guilt; with guilt is violence; with violence there is the opposite of growth. There is disintegration. But can there

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be death? What is there to destroy? The psyche is everywhere, one and the same, a means in whatever form for further growth when, with the next swing, the unacknowledged legislator is again heard by spirits in better shapes. It is at least a valid possibility.

As the psychologist shows, the sub-conscious provides us with an internal necessity. This works through the senses and eyes to unite with the external necessity. Necessity is the Mother of invention. By successive returns to the Mother or her substitute for renewals, rebirths, or resurrection, the poet becomes more or less divine, even if led by the devil. Only the poet's divinations lead to a golden world, giving direction to the inventions. Medical science has revealed, in operations with electrical probes deep into the brain, that the past is as if stored on a film. Many have accurate dreams of future happenings they live out in fact. It is as if all life is contained in the brain to be lived out as the stored inner images coincide with that external environment which elicits electrically the relevant images which trigger off responses for action. So we puppets dance. In proportion as the images become symbols — through preciser observation — a hidden pattern of cause and effect emerges which makes life increasingly intelligible; intuition may well be simply an efficient brain almost simultaneously juxtaposing the relevant past experience with the present to supply an instantaneous judgement.

A spade is a spade in an image. With this we dig, plant, and exist. A cross is not a cross but a symbol. With this we return to the Maker. Where something has been made there must be a maker? With the compulsive apprehension of symbolic intelligence the imagination enters the garden of mysticism. As Wordsworth said, we see into the life of things. We can watch the strings being pulled. As Jesus said to Nicodemus : Think not carnally or thou art carnal, but think symbolically, then art thou spirit.

Our clues suggest that we are such stuff as dreams are made of. The process of life would be a metamorphosis towards a state first of Paradise then of wings; that is, to a greater, more mobile subjective intensity which is more colorful, in a state of unbelievably heightened responses or ecstasy.

If intellect makes words and words intellect, then it follows inevitably that any society evolving instead of declining must express a flourishing tradition of imaginative poetry. In other words it is

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always good when the ship of state has a major poet — as with Pindar, Virgil, Dante, and Milton — checking the plumb line.

This attempt to juxtapose some of man's more recent fundamental propositions is not the place to dwell on the suffering involved. But surely a Creator who paralyses the pianist, blinds the painter, deafens the composer, maddens the poet, and disintegrates inexorably with cancer, must needs make of death a very great reward. Perhaps He too is subject to Necessity. But let us not hesitate to praise poetry — in proportion as it says something.

So let us spare a penny for the Poet. In exchange, he, most of all, will give us, to the best of his powers, pennies from heaven. His could be the only currency accepted for admission at any Golden Gates.

DESMOND TARRANT

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SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE MYTHICAL

CONSTRUCTION OF DEATH IN

SRI AUROBINDO'S SAVITRI

IN Sri Aurobindo's poetics, a poet is expected to transmute the external experiences into a vision of eternity, and archetypes are the means to transmute the personal destiny, into the destiny of mankind. Poets with archetypal vision use myths and images as very real, "not as an imaginative indulgence, but as living parables". Archetype is Real-Idea, the creative aspect of the Supermind or the Truth-Consciousness that expresses itself in various modes with infinite potentialities.¹ The poetic experience communicated through the structure and framework of a poem is timeless and impersonal: "it has at once a universal and an individual character, creating itself anew in different minds by virtue of those universal emotional energies to which it gives expression."² As the spiritual experiences of Savitri, the result of nearly four decades (1914-1950) of mythopoeia concentration, are at once individual and collective, the epic has an archetypal significance.

Myth, in the archetypal design of the poet, turns into the structural principle rather than the psychoanalyst's collective unconscious expressing itself in dream. It is an intellectual strategy rather than a philosophical proof of human behaviour in a particular way. To articulate the cultural values of a race, it may be considered as the "primitive habit of mind". It is an "aesthetic creation of the human imagination" as Richard Chase suggests, and as such, it has a fictional character which is imaginatively true. As a product of the poetic faculty, it is a thing in itself, single, whole, complete and without ulterior purpose. In its purest form it is the closest verbal approach to an immediate intuition of reality. Northrop Frye observes that myth is expressive of the total vision of human situation, human destiny, human inspirations and fears.

In Aristotle's Poetics the word myth (muthos) is used for the plot of a play: "Muthos" itself means 'utterance', something one says in the form of a tale or a story, commonly understood by the ancient Greeks as "traditional tale". G. S . Kirk points out that myth is a narrative with a dramatic structure and a climax and bears an "important message about life in general and life-within-society in particular."3

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As an aesthetic means to explore and recreate the individual experience and to apprehend the contemporary man's response to the central question of his time, myth is a mode of expression of the complex interaction of the self and the world. It provides "an essential matrix" to poetry. Referring to this mythical matrix, Frye writes : "literature is only a part, though a central part of the total mythopoeia structure of concern which extends into religion, philosophy, political theory, and many aspects of history, the vision a society has of its situation, destiny, and ideals, and of reality in terms of those human factors."⁴ In Savitri myth is the principle of construction of th e language of argument and the crux-factor that dominates the entire process of structure . It is the fundamental way of apprehending the world.

The literary exploitation of mythology is not new : Aeschylus' Oresteion, Virgil's Aeneid, Dante's Divine Comedy, Shakespeare's A Midsummer-Night's Dream and The Tempest, Milton's Paradise Lost are some of the notable examples. The mythic perception in the poetry of Savitri has not only a legendary origin but a future association, the future of the humanity as a whole. The Vana-Parva legend of the Mahabharata, "the great epic of the soul "? of the Indian people, is the "original pattern" from which the all-imbibing symbol of Savitri is carved. The Savitri-Satyavan legend is transmuted to recover th e human wholeness. The poet-innovator's mythic mode of awareness reorg anises the life and culture with the sense of th e total past as now. His adventure is directed towards the realisation of human unity, universal peace and happiness, based on a spiritual foundation, which ensure th e orderly progress and fulfilment of man's destiny.

Savitri constructs a character and event which has archetypal bearings. Sri Aurobindo concerns himself with archetypal subjects like love and death in an archetypal situation which depicts the tension between the higher and the lower levels of consciousness in a person, the conflict of the male-female relationship, the search for the mother etc. Savitri, the heroine herself, is conceived as an archetypal character, a mythic image. She assumes a personality overwhelmingly supernatural and her awareness is the glorification of the divinity of the soul. The poet's artistic programme of self-discovery and world-discovery through Savitri turns the legend into

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a mythologies, a universal symbol. The transformation of the legend on which evolves the symbolic contexture of the epic to sum the emotional, intellectual, aesthetic and spiritual experiences emanating from his personal concern with self-preservation, spiritual evolution and quest for knowledge reflects, as is the nature of myth, his "persistent desire for extra-ordinary power, vision and control."⁶ The ritual of yoga that drapes the mythical framework of the epic is the human conquest of the divine : the symbol of the past gets "a new emotional-spiritual dimension, and the process is a search, for reassurance, an answer to some 'overwhelming question' ".⁷

The chief problem of the epic hero has been his confrontation with mortality, the end of his fallen existence with a view to proceeding toward self-transcendence. The heroine, Savitri, is educated in the self and in otherness by observing herself, her other half, her opposite, her false self, and finally, her whole transcendental being. Her yogic movement is the ritual to enact the ancient story with new motifs. The action is all internal, shifting back and forth on the various planes of consciousness and manifesting a spiritualised uplifting of thought, feeling and sense. The inner mind, the repertory of myth, is the focal point of the whole poem, the battleground of the two mighty opposites, Love and Death, Knowledge and Ignorance.

In the character of Savitri, close to Gilgamesh's, we find "the revolt of mortal man against the laws of separation and death."⁸ Her stupendous task is to discover her own Timeless Being and her heroic qualities lie in internal struggle and victory: she faces the Lord of Death (Books Nine, Ten and Eleven of Savitri) not for her sake but for the sake of the human race. Satyavan as husband was her own choice, her "self-chosen Doom?"; she knew that he is destined to live only for one year, yet she chose him, arguing:

I am stronger than death and greater than my fate; My love shall outlast the world, doom falls from me Helpless against my immortality.¹⁰

Death and grief are nothing to her and as she has seen God in Satyavan, she cannot part with him.¹¹

Savitri is born with a mighty mission, to wrestle with Death, to "confront the riddle of man's birth". The issue is: "Whether to bear

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with Ignorance and Death/Or hew the ways of Immortality."¹² She is boom "not to submit and suffer" but "to lead, to deliver". She is a self-born Force and her strength is the World-Mother who resides in her and who has to be awakened in order to "stay the wheels of Doom".¹³ It is this problem that sets the theme of the epic: "In the world's death-cave uphold life's helpless claim/And vindicate her right to be and love." Her desire to undo the fated death of her husband, in other words, to conquer death, is an archetypal desire: her task is not only personal but universal, her problem is the problem of everyone.

The poet of Savitri conceives death and suffering as part of and process of immortality, and not something alien and frightful: "Death is our road to immortality"¹⁴ says Savitri's father while approving of her choice of Satyavan as husband. Even Fate, as Narad explains, "is Truth working out in Ignorance"¹⁵, a power from the gods that imposes itself on men against all their will and endeavours, and drives them on. As the decreed death of Satyavan is the beginning of a greater life¹⁶ and Savitri is destined to bring about a spiritual change in man, Narad persuades her parents not to come between "her spirit and its force But leave her to her mighty self and Fate."¹⁷

In the universalised and philosophic drama of Savitri the heroine undergoes the fated sufferings and changes her doom by destroying it with her spiritual mind that strives' through yogic illumination to reach up ward and free the individual from the bond of individuality, and by extension , liberate the whole mankind. She resigns to the divin e power in her inner being, and controls her nature by a yogic withdrawal wit him. Her quiet inner action leads her to achieve Knowledge about the immortality of the spirit which emboldens her to face death of anyone, even of Satyavan, as an event in her. Her conflict is inner per se, initiated and resolved in her consciousness. Her inner liberation through God-realisation, her meditation quest, her progress through "inner countries" turns her to elevate man, to save him from the clutches of death, passion, and darkness. The realisation of an earthly immortality is her bold attempt.

She is unperturbed on encountering the Lord of Death. In the original story she scores over Yama by her chastity and love for the husband, while in Sri Aurobindo's scheme she is turned into a human-divine character facing Death like Eternity, "stripped of the girdle of

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mortality", a cosmic symbol of light defeating darkness. Her evolution to the higher planes of awareness does not mean any severance of the mind or life or body but their complete transformation; it is not withdrawing from life or mind but conquering them by the power of the spirit. She sees the problem of death not as an inherent characteristic of life's rhythm but only as subject to the operation of mind. As long as life is subject to the control of mind, the fear of death is bound to remain but as soon as life is freed from the control of mind, giving way to supermind controlling it, there will be no death.

Savitri's lone and crucial wrestle with Death in his own regions, which is the climactic building-block of structure, holds the weight of the whole epic. Her confrontation with the Lord of Death is intensely dramatic with the ironic sternness of the dark power gradually yielding to the power of love in the heroine. She bravely repudiates his authority as he is Mind's creation and, conscious of immortality as she is, she cannot stoop "with the subject mob of minds".¹⁸ She unveils her being as a sun and her coming as "a wave from God" to conquer Death with the arms of Love. Death ultimately admits the archetypal relationship of Savitri and Satyavan as "the eternal bridegroom and eternal bride", and releases Satyavan from his clutches. As a result of the confrontation, he is himself transformed into an amiable figure before Satyavan rises at the touch of Savitri, vaguely recollecting his separation from her by death and the "vision seen in a spiritual sleep".¹⁹

Implied in Savitri's rise to the apex of spiritual height through the yogic ritual is the wish to attain something unattainable: the inner movement of Savitri is directed toward the supreme force of God and Death; her quest is for the establishment of man's right to immortality on earth. Her action, in the main, centres round the vital issue of the death of Satyavan and transformation of the earth-life into the life divine. The attempt is to understand the "spiritual paradox" that this world is. T. S. Eliot's Ash Wednesday (1930), though it betrays the modern man's self-deception and confusion, is hi s search for spiritual discipline: hi s prayerful submission - "Teach us to care and not to care", "to sit still " , to feel the essential oneness with the divine as also with everyone, "Suffer me not to be separated"; his ascent to redeem the time and hear the Word, to seek peace in His will; his inner struggle for moral and spiritual values amidst the ironic

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helplessness of his time, his desire to climb the staircase for "raising" oneself spiritually or becoming purified, all is echoed by the poet of Savitri.

Savitri's argument consists in the Upanishadic statement that "God must not be sought as something far away, separate from us, but rather as the very inmost of us, as the higher Self in us above the limitations of our little self. In rising to the best in us we rise to the Self in us, to Brahman, to God himself."²⁰ The action in the silence of the soul that Savitri presents is the Upanishadic concept of God who is silence and whose reality is apprehended in a consciousness of joy. The light of the soul which is love, the eternal joy, shines in the inner quietude of Savitri and lead s her to God, to that centre in her which is beyond time and space, to the Sun of the Spirit. Having liberated her self by becoming one with the Spirit, she assumes the role of the sovereign and protector of all beings as she knows she possesses spirit-wisdom.

She evokes her mythical similitude in the Sumerian Gilgamesh, who rises against the decree of his destiny and goes to the Land of Humbaba to destroy the evil. His success, as in Savitri, is characterised by a descent-ascent pattern. Like Savitri, he desires immortality and undertakes the quest, journeying through oppressive darkness and overcoming temptations. Death is analogous to the demonic power s of the lower world while Savitri turns out to be the deliverer, coming from the upper world.

She explores the darkness of Inconscience to bring out the Supreme Truth, rather it is turned into a means of transformation of Death. Her inner quest glorifies the concept of love and eternal life as advanced by Yajnavalkya in the Brihad-Aranyaka Upanishad: it is not for the love of his body that Satyavan is dear to her but for the love of the Soul in him .²¹ Moreover, her marriage with Satyavan, the result of an explicit quest, is " a representation of their integration with and ultimate responsibility for social continuity" .²² Death appears as treme nodus obstruction in the establishment of a continuing an harmonious society. Aft er removing the obstruction, rather transforming it , she returns to the society to re-create it. The movement from Death's Law to Spirit's Liberty abolishing all bondages points to the strong ' comic' tendency in the quest-with- . conflict structural pattern of the epic. The creation of a new world

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order, a divinised society — analogous to the Aeneid's theme of the building of the new city, the move from Troy to New Troy — by destroying Ignorance and Death in oneself is mythical.

The primeval creator, Prajapati, creates Death as a woman to preserve distinction between mortals and immortals²³. The Japanese myth of Izanagi and Izanami, the original couple whose marriage produced various deities, can also be cited to explain the feminine motif related to death. After Izanami dies, she goes to Yomi, the land of the dead, not wanting anyone to see how ugly she had become. Filled with grief of separation Izanagi, however, visits her there but is frightened by the decayed state of her corpse and runs away. He is pursued by Izanami and other creatures of Yomi but somehow he manages to escape. While he flees, the dead wife in hatred calls to him and says that she will each day strangle to death one thousand of the populace of Izanagi's country.²⁴ In one of his own poems, The fear of Death, Sri Aurobindo presents death as a female figure. Thus, fighting Death, Savitri fights against herself and her confrontation with him is internalised in her consciousness.

The transformation of Death from the ugly, terrifying, dark power that frustrates life and freedom of the soul into the friend of mankind reminds one of the Buddhist legend of transformation of the fierce robber Angulimala, who, confronting Buddha, turned a monk. In the Bible also, death is not something to be feared but as Christ testifies, the glory of eternal life is the fruit of death since it is to follow the resurrection of the Son of Man. Christ descends into the grave for the sake of mankind and his lifting up is fraught with comfort for the whole humanity. Satyavan, the symbolic soul of the World redeemed by the Divine Mother who descended in Savitri as Power that can defeat Death, is the archetype of rebirth: his death is very much like the Mariner's death-in-sleep in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Savitri, with the "original Shakti" of the Supreme Divine in her, is the woman-image who brings to man glory and eternity . Death, as in the Vedas and Upanishads, is world's ignorance of its own divine self. Savitri turns this ignorance into knowledge.

The death and resurrection of Satyavan is characterised by a displacement: it is the shifting over from the old psyche to a new one, the disintegration and sloughing of the ignorance-bound old consciousness and formation of a new consciousness. His is a 'mock death' in that

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he dies the death of ignorance, heedlessness, unbelief; and is resurrected to the birth of spiritual life, entering into love of God, living the life of Spirit, which is deathless. In other words, he is transformed into a new consciousness through death.²⁵ He becomes a "new sun", and his death, as Narad says, "is a beginning of greater life."²⁶

R. K. SINGH

REFERENCES

¹ K. D. Sethna, Sri Aurobindo — The Poet (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, 1970), pp. 294-95.

² Quotation in Maud Bodkin, Archetypal Patterns in Poetry (London: Oxford University Press, I97*)> P- *3*«

⁸ G. S. Kirk, The Nature of Greek Myths (Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1974), pp. 28-9.

⁴ Quoted in William Willeford, "Myth Criticism," Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger, et. al. (London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1975), p. 955.

⁵ Rabindranath Tagore, Creative Unity (Madras: Macrriillan and Company limited, 1971), p. 137.

⁶ Lillian Feeder, Ancient Myth in Modern Poetry (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 11..

⁷ Ibid., p. 16.

⁸ N. K. Sandars, The Epic of Gilgamesh (Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 22.

⁹ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, I973)> P- 432.

¹⁰ Ibid.

¹¹ Ibid., p. 436.

¹² Ibid., p. 17.

¹³ Ibid., p. 19.

¹⁴ Ibid., p. 424. ^M Ibid., p. 458. ¹⁸ Ibid., p. 459.

¹⁷ Ibid., pp. 461-62.

¹⁸ Ibid., p. 588. ¹⁸ Ibid., p. 717.

²⁰ Juan Mascaro (tr.), The Upanishads (Middlesex, England: Penguin Book, 1975), p. 12. ³¹ Ibid., p. 130.

⁸² Quoted from Derek Brewer, "The Nature of Romance," Poetical, No. 9 (Spring, 1978).

²³ Wendy Doniger O' Flaherty, Hindu Myths (Middlesex, Penguin Books, 1975), p. 37.

²⁴ Daisaku Ikeda, On the Japanese Classics (New York and Tokyo: John Weather hill, Inc., 1979), PP- 62-3-

²⁵ Cf. the Greek Isis-Osiris Myth: Isis rescues her husband Osiris from the Underworld just as Savitri rescues Satyavan from Death. The death of Satyavan is very much like the death of-Osiris: in the Egyptian Book of the Dead a reference is made to any man of good repute becoming an Osiris "by being purified of all uncleanness and undergoing a mock death." See Robert Graves, The Greek Myths: 2 (Middlesex, England: penguin Books, 1977), pp. 166-57.

²⁶ Sri Aurobindo, op. cit., p. 459.

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THE INDIAN RENAISSANCE

A POINT OF VIEW

HISTORY is less a matter of facts than of interpretation. Also not what happened but what we do to what happened is what makes the difference, makes history. This involves, willy-nilly, a subjective factor, even if objective criteria are professed. The mournful history of our days, since the Partition miscalled Independence, has caused a sharp change in mood. Today when we look back at the Elders it is usually in anger. The tradition of the new tramples on idealism as but an illusion. For the majority today the Indian Renaissance is a thing of the past. They could not care less. The metaphor is dead. But perhaps neither enthusiasm nor disillusionment is the best way to understand. And that there was nothing like a Renaissance and that the Renaissance has come to very little are quite separate propositions. If the second, the likelier version, is the truer version, there is reason for being critical no less than self-critical. If the Renaissance has come to very little the fault may be with us. That we have betrayed it, or, to put it mildly, failed to live up to it.

But, first, about the view that would like to dispense with the Indian Renaissance as little more than a myth. What is the argument like? To begin with, a dependant country, the critics hold, a colony cannot claim a genuine Renaissance. That is the privilege only of free nations. In any case, the devil's advocate continues, what we call Renaissance was no more than reform and revival. There was hardly any new creation, at best some beginnings. Some, like the sociologist Motwani, feel constrained to observe that instead of a renaissance the core of Indian culture is in the process of disintegration. Further, the argument accumulates, the so-called Renaissance was almost wholly confined to the middle-class intelligentsia or Bha-dralog, a tiny fraction. It did not really touch the life of the masses. (This was to be the aim and work of Mahatma Gandhi though here too one must admit a sense of failure, especially in view of what has been happening since his departure from the Indian scene.) Finaliy, apart from a certain chauvinism and self-complacence there has been little clarification of motives, of our life-style or policies. Drift and

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opportunism are as rampant as ever while the elite is almost indistinguishable from the expatriate. In spite of tall talk modern India has achieved precious little and the modern Indian continues to be a schizoid, who belongs nowhere. If these be the results of the Renaissance, so much the worse for it.

These charges have to be met and not merely ignored. As for the first objection, about political dependence, it may be said that in a sense, the Indian had never lost his selfhood or identity. The loss of political freedom did not mean a loss of cultural self-determination. Thus, for a politically subject nation the Renaissance is not an a priori impossibility. Friendly western observers like James Cousins, John Woodroffe, Evans-Wentz and others have expressed the view that India needs no awakening because where deeper issues of life are concerned, she has always been wide awake. "Throughout the Orient the Promethean fire was never allowed to die out." (Evans-Wentz, Tibet's Great Yogi, Milarepa, p. I). This is a flattering thought and should be taken with a pinch of salt. Secondly, that the Renaissance was confined to social political, religious reform and revival cannot be denied. But behind the reform and the revival there were other implications and possibilities. To be innocent of these is to be unaware of the larger, basic issue of the Indian Renaissance. As for the middle-class origin and orientation of the movement, that, again, has to be admitted. But the creative role in a society or history has rarely been shared by all classes or peoples alike. The middleclass ethos may have carried disabilities but it is not the same thing as saying that it achieved nothing. As for the incongruities of present- day India, the 'crisis of India', the fault may not be those of the pioneers but of those that have come after. It is precisely this, a scrutiny of what passes for leadership in modern India, that is called for. If the Renaissance compels us to the critical frame of mind, to be critical of the leadership, the Fuhrerprinzip, small gain. Our solutions fail because the problem of India has not been grasped in its entirety, because we fail to see the 'Indian problem' in the context of a world-crisis and its solution is, therefore, part of a universal resolution of the world problem (Vidyarthi, Indian Culture Through the "Ages; p. 345).

The Indian Renaissance was no doubt a result of the western impact. But for the British Raj there would have been no Indian

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Renaissance. As Sri Aurobindo has shown, the process may be analysed, logically and historically, into three processes : i) The earliest represented an uncritical reception of the Western impact, a more or less wholesale rejection of ancient Indian values; ii) The second was, in many ways, the opposite of the first, and stood for an equally uncritical rejection of nearly everything that the West had brought. But in truth even behind this apparent rejection a movement of assimilation was under way and the champions of conservatism were not slow in borrowing from the enemy's armoury, iii) The third process, an ongoing process, has been a more or less conscious attempt to master the modern needs and influences, to create a new harmony or world-culture. The first was rootless and radical; the second, though conservative, was compelled by the Time-Spirit, to modify some of its negative and irrational stances; the third, not yet over, remains tentative but integral by choice. Needless to say, each of these was needed, though what they add up to has often been missed, even by the protagonists themselves. Before turning to the latent content of the unfinished Indian renaissance or revolution, a birds'-eye-view of the prominent socio-religious revivals, the work of a numerically small family of radicals, might help us to see some lines of that emergence.

II

The first of these movements was the work of that truly capacious and comprehensive spirit, Raja Rammohan Roy. The polyglot, polemic Raja, almost a free-thinker, heralded the spirit of modern India. Though well-versed in the Hindu (as well as other) scriptures, he encouraged the New Learning. One of the first to engage in a comparative study of religions, he later founded or developed a lofty monotheistic treed, Brahmadharma, based mostly on ancient Hindu insights and speculations. The Raja personally preferred the Formless aspect of the Unknown and was severe with all forms of idolatry, bigotry and outmoded socio-religious practices. His group, or Samaj, of which he remained the informing spirit, declared itself in favour of the emancipation of women and stood against the caste system. The Brahmo Samaj which had a brief but brilliant career proved to be a major factor in steaming the tide of Christian missionary

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activity. In fact, at different periods Raja Rammohan Roy had to engage in debates with the Christian missionaries as well as the orthodox Hindus of the day. And yet, the leaders of the Brahmo Samaj — especially the eloquent, emotional, syncretic Keshub-chandra Sen — were hospitable to a variety of religious experiences and formulations. The Raja had a soft corner for the monotheism of Islam while Keshub took generous helpings from Christianity, Vaishnavism, even the Shakti cult. The fact could not but fill the old guards of the Brahmo Samaj with misgivings. Some indeed feared his conversion. And of course he remained loyal to the Crown and sang glories to Queen Victoria. The attempts of the Samaj to bring in a modern note of social reform and its insistence on niceties of etiquette had a touch of the exotic and haute couture - so easy to parody - have helped to set this enlightened group somewhat apart from the rest of their countrymen. Paradoxically, this western accent itself might have saved many Indians from going completely West.

All told, the Brahmo Samaj had been an elite enterprise, a 'polite society', à la européenne. There was the need and scope for something more direct, vital, indigenous. This was the work of Swami Dayananda. A Hindu ascetic, " the Indian type", a competent Vedic scholar, the Swami delighted in controversies. He toured all over the country trouncing the heretics and the missionaries alike. Dayananda carried the war into the enemy's camp. With the Vedas as stand-by he opposed the inroads of both the foreign missionary and the fanaticism and intolerance of Islam (from which he himself was not quite immune). Dayananda was harsh with the leaders of the Brahmo Samaj since it did not subscribe to the infallibility of the Vedas, the doctrine of rebirth, etc. In some respects archaic, Dayananda extolled the past and turned "back to the Vedas" into a slogan . This did not save him from contradictions, since he translated the Vedas - a thing not to be done - and offer ed individual interpretations. For the post-Vedic developments of Hinduism he -was out of sympathy an d hi s iconoclastic zeal helped to keep the Arya Samaj more or less on the outskirts of the larger Hindu society . The Arya Samaj has, however, a fair record in social reforms. It has stood for widow re-marriage and opposed child marriage and untouchability, has been active in reclaiming the Depressed Classes and in proselytizing

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non-Hindus (which may or not be Vedic in spirit).

The third important movement, Theosophy (Greek for Brahmavidya), had a somewhat curious and more colorful history. Product of the labour of non-Indians, primarily of two remarkable European ladies, Madame Blavatsky and Annie Besant, it found a congenial soil in the Indian climate. A Russian émigré, Madame Blavatsky was deeply interested in the occult. Drawing her material heavily from Tibetan Buddhism and other esoteric, mystical traditions, Platonic, Pythagorean, Hermetic and Egyptian, she formed a common denominator with which to fight modern, materialistic ideas. The Theosophical Society had a New York christening and premiere and, in its early days, was able to make converts in the West. At one time successful in buttressing the Hindu faith and intelligentsia — like Sister Nivedita, Annie Besant found nothing wrong with Hinduism — the Society has published translations of many Sanskrit texts, of which it has a rich library. Eclectic, the Theosophical Society has every right to be considered as part of the Indian Renaissance and the re-affirmation of ancient insights.

But all these movements — the Brahmo Samaj, the Arya Samaj, and the Theosophical Society — were somewhat of fringe movements that left the core of Hindu society on the whole unaffected. The general masses continued, as always, "preferring to stand or fall by the entirety of Hindu traditions". What was called for was a dramatic enactment of the ancient ideals and practices to which even the common people could respond but without in any way denying the demands of the new spirit, yugadharma. The twin- heroes, cast in contrary moulds, of this Renaissance high drama, were Ramakrishna Vivekananda.

Ramakrishna or Gadhadhar Chatterji's life had little to show from the outside. Perhaps its strength lay precisely there. A humble, unlettered (but not unintelligent) village lad, with an astonishing insight into folkways, the officiating priest of a Calcutta suburban temple, a man of moods as of racy, homely speech — that is what the world saw and knew. Till the charisma could not be contained and took Calcutta by storm. Ramakrishna's career, a story of "religion in practice", was a kind of summing up of India's and the world's religious evolution before the spirit in man takes another saltus or leap. That inner meaning has, however, been little understood

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or acted upon. In the meantime Hindu orthodoxy has not been slow to capitalize upon his extraordinary career.

But Ramakrishna's greatest work, or proof of genius, lay in the choice of Narendranath or Swami Vivekananda as his St. Paul. A trail-blazer, the young Swami's resounding speech at the Chicago Parliament of Religions went round the world. It gave Hinduism a boost such as it had never before and many have cashed in upon it since then. A fiery, moody, sensitive, patriotic soul, Vivekananda is the spirit of eternal youth whom we have learned to venerate rather than emulate. But Vivekananda was more, much more than a meteor that flashed across the Indian sky. We do him wrong by looking upon him as only a royal rhetorician of 'aggressive Hinduism', the 'redeemer of India's honour' or as one who added evangelism to modern asceticism and set in motion a chain of international Vedanta centres. His vision of India and the future is still unfulfilled.

III

And now to sum up nearly a century's unfinished work.

Reform movements like the Brahmo Samaj, the Arya Samaj, Theosophical Society, etc., the lives of saints and sages known and unknown to fame, above all, the complimentary-contradictory genius of Ramakrishna-Vivekananda form a remarkable chapter in national recovery. The question: "Is India Civilized?" has perhaps been answered once for all. The men and women of the Indian Renaissance brought back self-respect and self-confidence when it was sorely needed. But for them we would have gone under long back. The warrant of her high civilization, wrote Sir John Woodroffe, which may yet bear fruit not only in India but throughout the world, justifies her claim to be the Karmabhūmi.

In the nature of things the nineteenth century left certain areas of life and thought untouched. In an objective survey these have to be noted. They have a moral for us who have come after, provided we are willing and capable of learning.

The men behind the reform and religious activity no doubt represented the cream, "the ascending element in humanity". Exceptional characters, they were easily raised into cult figures. But in most cases there was no apostolic succession worth the name.

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Behind the glorification of sects and individuals little of the progressive spirit was left, except as an exercise in nostalgia. Is it surprising that the Renaissance has so little relevance in present-day India? The secret of creative continuity was not fully grasped and we allowed the Renaissance to be a still-birth.

Why and how did this happen?

As we have said, there were areas where the religio-theological movements did not penetrate. In the religious experience the inner life is no doubt of the first importance. Unfortunately, it also tended to be other-worldly. Maharshi Devendranath, a cultured landlord, speaks of his spiritual experience thus: "Now He reveals Himself to my spirit within; I beheld Him within my soul." In the soul rather than in the world outside, where his poet son would seek Him, among the tillers of the soil and the road menders. Our religious bent has often blunted the revolutionary social ardour. On his part Shri Ramakrishna did not believe in doing good, the popular forms of philanthropy, though Vivekananda would give the Mission a tremendous pull towards social service. "Up India, and conquer the world with spirituality!... Now is the time to work.... There is no other alternative, we must do it or die."

This of course is not a child's work. It calls for long and subtle preparation, for energy and understanding, not only of the situation in India but of the world. Essentially, it is a problem of education, for wholeness and the future. Here, except some theorisings, the Renaissance has little to show. True, the Arya Samaj and the Theosophical Society took up educational work in keeping with their tenets. But the Arya Samaj was, and still is, orthodox, while the Theosophical Society's schools and colleges, psychologically and aesthetically much sounder, seemed not to have made much mark in the nation's life. This may not be the Society's fault. In its earlier days the Ramakrishna Mission was more concerned with organising monastic orders than schools for the young. No wonder Ananda Coomaraswamy had cried: National education is our top priority. For all the tall talk it still isn't.

Another serious gap, or lacuna, of the nineteenth-century movements was that they could do little to improve the lot of the people, except to watch helplessly, the calculated ruin going on all round. Or make fervent appeals, like Dadabhai Naoroji's patient and praline

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memoranda on the 'drain' of India's wealth and resources. As for the rising middle-class, its eye on the main chance, it was not too bothered, at least not while the going was good. As a result interest in economic affairs tended to be minimal or favoured the status quo. In this respect the Indian Renaissance was not rational or revolutionary enough. Religious revivalism and middle-class opportunism could provide no cure for the decay of Indian economy. The people themselves left it to fate

Also while in religion liberal views prevailed, generally speaking outmoded rituals and superstitions continued, as they do to this day. Whether India is the land of cultural synthesis or not, it takes the cake for cultural co-existence, which may or may not) be creative. We tolerate even intolerance.

The biggest gap in the Indian Renaissance lay perhaps in that most intractable area of human behaviour or misbehavior called politics. "For the next fifty years let politics be your only religion," the speaker was a world-renouncing young ascetic. If only he could have seen what fifty years of a religion of politics would bring to India, what bitter harvest! It is here, under the most mistaken leadership, that the Indian Renaissance has gone down the drain. For our present wretchedness we cannot hold the Indian Renaissance responsible. It is our so-called leaders who are the wanted men of history. The debacle of the Indian National Congress is its latest Q. E. D.

But in spite of the chaos and the loss of self-confidence there is no reason to lose heart. "Never should we think of failure." (Sir John Woodroffe, Is India Civilized? p. 275). We have not seen the last of the Indian Renaissance. It is more a matter of the future than of the past tense. .Its essential, animating ideas wait their hour. Among these essential, animating ideas of the Indian Renaissance the following may be singled out: that spirituality is wider than any religion; that spirituality without body and mind is not the ideal; that the earthly life is not a vanity; that nationalism is not enough and that a world community, viśva-samāj, is the answer to our time of troubles. Unless we can see the Renaissance in the light of these forward-looking ideas we do it injustice.

And when we do so we find there is work for us to do. In keeping with the vitality and sense of order of the old Indian culture we have to learn once more that man is more than reason, more not less, that he

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is not exhausted by externalities, by manipulation of superficial factors which is what science has to offer. This Vedantic psychology or image of man has no quarrel with science or reason. In fact, it is itself a science, the science of the self. It is only by utilising, simultaneously, a science of self and a science of things that we can hope to build a supra-national culture which is the cry of the world's unborn soul. India, we love to say, is the guru of the world. But the guru will have to learn a few things. Among these is the nature of an industrial society. It will have to provide for a trans- and not a sub- or anti-industrial order. You can't put the clock back. This search for a new world of freedom — or gnostic society, sādhunām rājyam, it is to carry the age-long effort of man towards a new consciousness and race, an age of the Spirit. This is the heart of Indian wisdom, the Indian experiment, not of course of "India as she is today but of India as an idea," "It is this India that needs to be discovered by every man for himself." (Kewal Motwani, India: A Synthesis, p. 4) This, we repeat, is the latent content of the Indian Renaissance as well. "A greater India shall be reborn for self-fulfilment and service of humanity," that leitmotif can never be forgotten. The recognition of such a purpose is likely to give us the power to use the present crisis as an opportunity. This is a task for the young and adventurous in spirit, to carry on the unfinished renaissance or evolution.

The idea that "All Life is Yoga" has not yet gained firm ground except here and there. But precisely this may be the key to the Indian Renaissance, that will unlock the future of her potential creativity. In the words of Arnold Toynbee, to give a fair chance to potential creativity is a matter of life and death for any society. Fortunately, as James Cousins (The Renaissance in India, Preface) and others had seen it, the Indian renaissance is not retrospective and finished, but contemporary and therefore happily incomplete. Truly speaking, there has been but one renaissance since man began his chequered history, the Vedic Dawn. The Vedic cry, fanaya daivyam janam, create a divine race, points to that noon of the future. The bungling of a few decades or generations does not matter and cannot alter the workings of the larger law. The new India can, "if she will; give a new and decisive turn to the problems over which mankind is labouring and stumbling, for the clue to their solutions is there in her ancient

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knowledge. Whether she will rise or not to the height of her opportunity in the renaissance is the question of her destiny", of "a higher history than any history hitherto". We have not seen the best of her yet.

So long as we have pride in the past and faith in the future it is better to believe that, appearances notwithstanding:

The journey of our history has not ceased....

The metaphor still struggles in the stone.

SISIRKUMAR GHOSH

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SRI AUROBINDO AND THE MOTHER'S CONCEPT OF

INTEGRAL EDUCATION

SRI Aurobindo was a versatile universal genius whose writings reveal the range, consistency and integrality of his living thought and his long labour for a new India and a new world. As an educationist, his theory of Integral Education provides an answer to the contemporary educational crisis in India and the world. He has written with first hand experience calling for a revival of the basic values of the ancient system of education though in changed forms suited to the new conditions of the day. His and the Mother's writings on education are seminal books which if studied with attention could give much food for thought to those today who are concerned with the deterioration in the educational standards all over the world. They are unique in the field for the thoroughness with which they tackle the problem of education and invest it with an altogether new content and significance.

According to the Mother, real education starts even in the prenatal stage and continues up to the very day of the death of the physical body. Experiments are being made on these lines in the International Centre of Education run by the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry. Here the students and the teachers from over fifteen countries in the world are participating in the project. Sri Aurobindo was quite careful to note that, in truth, the real and only Guru is the inner Guide, the luminous Dweller in the heart, the Divine within, of whom the human Guru is but the representative or external manifestation. It is said, "The teacher shows the way: the Guru is the way". Sri Aurobindo fulfilled wonderfully the description of the Guru. Perfectly manifesting the truth of his own teachings, his external life remained simple, natural, human to the end. The divine light burned quietly: the life divine was lived for all who had eyes to see, a fact which can be recalled in the following lines from Savitri:

"God shall grow up while the wise men talk and sleep

For man shall not know the coming till its hour

And belief shall be not till the work is done." 

(Book I, Canto IV)

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According to Sri Aurobindo, "The true secret, whether with child or man, is to help him to find his deeper self, the real psychic entity within." He was a critic of the European system of education as it was introduced in India. He was a champion of national education suited to Indian traditions and conditions. He presented a new approach to the problem of education from the standpoint of Indian psychology. He emphasized the spiritual aspect in the development of the individual. He found fault with the English system of education which had disastrous effects on the body, mind and character of the youth of the country. He attributed these defects to the insufficient knowledge of human psychology and corresponding evils of strain and cramming on the minds of pupils. He described the western style of education in India as 'the practice of teaching by snippets' resulting in the shallowness, discursive lightness and fickle mutability of the average Indian youth. He deplored the lack of emphasis on the literature and history of the nation in the curriculum. The main defects of the prevailing system of education are too much emphasis on examinations, their faulty structure and defective working, the over-burdened curricula, the emphasis on cramming and reproduction of memorized answers, lack of mental, physical and moral training to the young students. All this results in the growing indiscipline in the student community, the meaninglessness of educational qualifications and certificates, the mental and moral corruption of the so-called educated classes. Since our educational system is big and large, slavishly copied from the western models, a rethinking about it has become quite imperative in the changed context.

The Aurobindonean concept of Integral Education envisages the training of the senses, of moral and mental habits, and finally of the logical faculty among the young students. A healthy body and a healthy moral character form the essential ingredients of this scheme of national education. Sri Aurobindo considered the true basis of education as the study of human mind, infant, adolescent and adult. In the Indian context he epitomized the problem of education asjto give an education as comprehensive as the European and more thorough, without the evils of strain and cramming. The chief aim of such a scheme of education is to help the growing soul to draw out the best and make it perfect for a noble use. The role of the teacher

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here is not as an instructor or a task master but as a helper and a guide. The spontaneous urge to develop the faculties of mind is the first principle of education. Greatest emphasis is placed on the ability of the individual mind to rouse interest, sharpen intellect and find out knowledge for himself. He believed that everyone has in him something divine. He visualized individual mind as a particle of universal cosmic mind. Greatest stress is laid on the right use of all the senses by co-ordination of various sense organs. Psychic or spiritual education is the unique feature of this scheme. Concern for the spirit remained the most important element of Aurobindonean thought and forms the corner stone of the system of Integral Education. The Aurobindonean ideal of education is to prepare the individual ultimately for the highest objects of existence — the life of individuality, humanity and divinity.' It devotes the early period of childhood for the mastery over the mother-tongue, development of the faculty of imagination, instinct for words, dramatic abilities, ideas and fancy. Its main concern is to train the mind to be a seeker of true knowledge. Yogic practices, therefore, form an essential element of this national system of education.

Sri Aurobindo's scheme of national education contains extremely valuable suggestions for the re-orientation of the whole system of primary and secondary education. His theory and practice of integral Education includes all the five aspects of educational life — the physical, the vital (moral), the mental, the psychic and the spiritual. It is high time now that his ideals on education should be taken up seriously and made the basis of educational reconstruction in India and the world. The prophetic vision of Sri Aurobindo — the educationist, provides the sure and practical remedy for the disillusionment with the existing set up of education everywhere.

O. P. MALHOTRA

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BOOKS AND FOUNALS REFER RED :-

 

1. Bandemataram, Sri Aurobindo (1/3 and 8/3/1908).

2. Karmayogin, Sri Aurobindo, 1910.

3. Arya, Sri Aurobindo (1920, 21).

4. A Preface on National Education, Sri Aurobindo (1920, 21).

5. A System of National Education, Sri Aurobindo (1924).

6. Sri Aurobindo and Education, S. K. Banerjee (Mother India, Vol. XIII. No. 2, 1961),

7. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother on Education— Sixth Ed. 1978.

8. The Vision of Sri Aurobindo, G. N. Sarma (Marathwada Univ., Aurangabad 1973).

9. Bulletin of Physical Education later called the Bulletin of Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education (February, April, 1949, 1952 & April, August, i960).

10. Education and the aim of human life, Pavitra.

11. The Ideal Child— 1953.

12. Sri Aurobindo — A Garland of Tributes, April, 1972.

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REVIEW

People of the Lake : Man; his Origins, Nature and Future by Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin, Col/ins, 1979-223 pages, £ 6.50.

MAN AT THE CROSSROAD

IN the last ten years there has been much activity in many disciplines searching into man's past as a guide to the present and future.

The two authors of this book are well placed to make a significant contribution to the developing understanding of our place in our environment. Richard Leakey, aged 34, is the son of Louis and Mary Leakey who took him with them from his birth on their exploration of archaeological sites in Kenya and Tanzania. He is now head of the Kenyan Museum and Chairman of the New York based Foundation for Research into the Origins of Man.

Roger Lewin, also 34, is a biologist, now deputy editor of New Scientist; he has been collaborating with Richard Leakey since 1975, visiting many research sites in East Africa.

The lake is Lake Turkana in the extreme north of Kenya with Uganda to the west, Ethiopia to the north, Tanzania to the south and the Indian Ocean to the east.

In the early part of the book they deal with the "bare bones" of evolution, the biological structure, and the basic economy and social organisation of the gathering and hunting people, and speculate about the origins of these characteristics. Then they move on to intelligence and language in their social and cultural contexts and this brings them to the difficult matter of sex and sex roles. Finally, they tackle the political aspect of human prehistory and ask the essential and vital questions—are humans innately aggressive? Are war and oppression inevitable wherever man is to be found?

At the beginning we are told (p. 25) that already some 40 million years ago an apparatus that is important to us now — grasping hands, stereoscopic vision, and the gift of seeing in colour — existed, establishing the evolutionary secret of humanity: to keep equipment simple and adaptable, and not to become specialised into a biological, dead-end.

Then came the monkeys to dominate and a change of diet from

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insects to leaves and fruit. The monkeys did not rule for long; some 30 million years ago came the apes, bigger than the monkeys and exploiting a whole range of ecological opportunities. Between 15 and 12 million years ago (p. 30) changes in the environment opened a new ecological niche for a woodland animal that could survive on tough food; between 3 and 12 million years ago, there were important advantages in walking on 2 rather than 4 legs. With the forests shrinking, the competition of natural selection would make the discovery of new environments and adaptation to them very necessary. Hence a move by many, including our ancestors, into a more open savanna on the basis of the businessman's opportunism.

On p. 35 is stated that the most dramatic thing that happened to man is that he learned to walk upright. "By about 3 million years ago our ancestors walked around the Pliocene landscape in much the same way as modern humans walk around modern cities." Desmond Morris suggested that man stood up to improve his "prey-killing powers", while Branko Bokum in his interesting book , Man: the Fallen Ape, (p, 51), suggests that the upright posture was adopted because it was better for carrying the increased weight of the brain.

The writers suggest (p. 46) that between 2 and 3 million years ago there were at least 3 different early humans or hominids living on earth. Only homo hailers ('able man'), between 4 ft. and 5 ft. tall with a notably largee cranium, survived to give rise to homo sapiens. The others lost out and became extinct.

Homo erectus (p. 66) was the evolutionary progeny of homo hailers and he lived in many parts of Europe and Asia until as recently as half a million years ago. Homo erectus has a culture good enough to enable him to escape the climatic constraints of the tropismcs and migrate to cooler areas so that something over a million years ago, groups of African -born homo erectus moved into Asia and th en into Europe, evolving into homo sapiens in the process, inventing a hunting and gathering economy.

Humans started making stone tools (p. 73) to ^ea purposeful and organised pattern' at least two-and-a-half million years ago in specific camp sites. This constituted a tremendous social and mental revolution involving planning and fore sight .

In Chapter 6, p. 80, the authors deal with the ancient way of life itself, noting that agriculture first arose as recently as 10,000 years

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ago, marking the slow demise of the hunting and gathering existence that had dominated for at least 2 million years.

An important point is that, 'The forces of evolution that... moulded the human mind and shaped our psychology and our social responsiveness are those embedded in the hunting and gathering way of life... we look out on a technologically sophisticated and socially divided world with the brains of hunter gatherers in our heads.''

However, it is pointed out (p. 82) that the network that held different and overlapping bands of people together, both within and between them, is kinship, sharing, and co-operation, and that flexibility was socially and ecologically adaptive. On p. 99, it is stated, after a survey of communal life involving gathering and hunting, 'co-operation must be a very basic motivation in human nature.' The whole way of life was based on a 4 year interval between children, the size of 25 for the band, within a tribe of some 500, formed by biological necessity for 'the cutting edge of evolutionary pressure' carving out the most efficient systems based on the mixed altruism economy of gathering vegetables, etc., hunting flesh, and sharing (reciprocal altruism) using a division of labour (p. 112).

The authors consider (p. 113) that this economy gave rise to plenty of leisure and the first affluent society. A basic biological aim was the preservation and perpetuation of the immortal genes, the 'engines of evolution' (p. 121).

On p. 138 in Chapter 8, dealing with "Intelligence and Tools", we find that 'the really special feature of the human brain is its use of language to question our place in nature.' Next comes self-awareness and then death-awareness and so, long ago, was founded ritual burial and the seeds of embryo religion and philosophy. The 'pressures of social life (p. 148) were an important engine in the evolution of intelligence, both in the higher primates and ourselves.' Between 3 million to one million years ago, under these pressures and including stone tool-making and social intercourse, our ancestors' brains virtually doubled while dealing, on the basis of genuine reciprocal altruism, with the qualities of cheating, bluff, trust, and suspicion - the whole range of early emotions, good and bad, and the tricks of the trade involved in natural selection as man evolved and survived on his way to the present.

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Dealing with language and culture, the authors note that our group culture became possible only with the advent of language. Conformity plays an important part in this (p. 160), and it makes wars easier to organise by power-motivated leaders. The ultimate improvement in tool-making reflected the better social structure that came with language (p. 165), which thus appears vital to the whole of evolving life for humanity, particularly from as recently as 50,000 years ago.

The subject of Chapter 10 is "Sex and Women's Liberation". Here we see the vital importance of the genes. The writers say (p. 173), 'Through the long eons of biological time there is a slow but steady drift in animals' genetic makeup so that the behavioral effects of new or modified genes are "tried out" against prevailing conditions: if the new genes are advantageous they survive and thrive, if not they disappear.' This is how new species arise while others become extinct.

Sexual relations between animals and between early humans are examined and male dominance in the latter confirmed also in the modern world. Early male dominance was in proportion to then-hold over the meat supplies (p. 188). The writers believe this will yield to genuine female equality only very slowly on the basis of increasing social justice giving rise to better values.

In the final Chapter 11, the authors say, "Hunter to Farmer": and they ask 'giant leap or fatal step?' The agricultural revolution began about 12,000 years ago and it led to a population explosion. All this has produced a very unusual animal (p. 195) and the only one to wage organised murder on its own kind.

However, the authors conclude (p. 209) that our past is not unduly violent and that blood lust and organised murder is not necessarily innate in our genetic imperatives. They put their hope in the need for co-operation as applied in peace and not in war. 'It is the right political motivation that is needed.' (p. 213).

This book is well written and easy to understand. The authors handle the evidence carefully and are cautious about their conclusions, not rashly hazarding ones that are merely sensational or dramatic. It makes a very worth while and helpful contribution to the understanding of our human predicament, building on the past to point the way ahead to a viable future, even if it is on a razor's edge.

DESMAND TARRANT

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The Spiritual Nature of Man — A Study of Contemporary Religious Experience by Sir Alister Hardy, F. R. S. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1979. 162 pages, £ 6.95

Sir Alister Hardy was a Professor of Zoology in Oxford from 1946 to 1961 and he has written scientific books about marine life; so he approaches the problem of religious experience as a scientist. He founded the Religious Experience Research Unit at Manchester College, Oxford in 1969 and was its Director until 1976.

He is well known for his books The Living Stream, The Divine Flame and The Biology of God, all of which reflect the spiritual insights of an imaginative pioneering scient ist.

The present book is based on the fact that a large number of people have an awareness of a "benevolent" non-physical power or force that seems to be partly or completely beyond and greater than the individual self. It is maintained that the experience of this power is profound and not always identified with religion. Sir Alister's aim in founding his research unit was to make an ordered and objective study of this phenomenon.

The book is based on eight years of research by a small team and it draws on some 3,000 - 4,000 first-hand accounts collected and classified. It must be stressed that the aim is not to find support for any kind of institutional religion or doctrine, and certainly not "to prove" that God exists, but to understand man's spiritual feelings in general and to ascertain the effect these emotions may have on the individual's life, the approach being that of an inquiring naturalist.

Sir Alister is a Darwinian convinced that man's spiritual nature must tie in with the evolutionary process. He also believes in the fundamental concept of immanence, the indwelling of the Creator within all created, but above all in his research he is the impartial scientist as far as this is humanly possible with such touchy material.

The book looks first at spiritual feeling in a scientific age and (p. 8) maintains that scientific study of religion is vital as without it religion may disappear as a moral force and if this happens our civilisation could die.

On p. 11, Sri Alister notes, in what seems to be a general shift of interpretation today, that, 'It is a fallacy to suppose that chance random changes in the DNA molecules control the course of evolution; they

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provide the almost infinite range of variation among members of any population of animals and plants for natural selection to act upon, but it is selection

The book deals with the written samples broken down for classification and analysis. These categories range from sensory or quasisensory experience, visual, auditory, touch and smell, through cognitive and affective elements such as sense of security, protection, peace and sense of new strength, guidance, awe, reverence, and wonder, to antecedents or "triggers" of experience such as natural beauty, creative work, illness, crisis, and silence or solitude. Finally, the categories are rounded off by looking at the consequences of experience, such as sense of purpose or new meaning to life and changes in attitude to others. There were twice as many females among the respondents as males.

Nearly all the recorded experiences were good ones but not quite all. On p. 63, we see, 'Among our first 3,000 records there were 125 which described the appalling sense of fear that people may experience.'

Just a few accounts seem to support Carl Jung's process of Individuation, the approach to an Inner Self which dominates the Outer Self or ego in the later part of life, e.g. (p. 77) 'Progressively I found by experience that the little ego (conscious "/") was only part of a more all-inclusive "Self" with the increasing awareness that, if I would allow it, this "Self" lived me, and lived me far more wisely than could my limited ego.'

Also (p. 91), 'The number of people who have come to find a greater spiritual awareness through states of depression forms indeed a relatively large proportion.'

So the whole exercise can be seen as thorough and painstaking even if it is only a beginning in a difficult field. The first and larger part of the book is based on qualitative research; with Chapter 8, p. 124, the emphasis is on quantitative research. This was based on 'Hardy's question', i.e. 'Do you feel that you have ever been aware of or influenced by a presence or power, whether you call it God or not, which is different from your everyday self?' Of those asked in a nationwide survey, 69% of males said "never" out of 853 asked; 58% said "never" of 1,012 females asked; total was 63.6% saying "never" out

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Finally, Sir Alister writes about Spirituality itself — what is it? He answers (p. 131), "It seems to me that the main characteristics of man's religious and spiritual experiences are shown in his feelings for a transcendental reality which frequently manifest themselves in early childhood; a feeling that 'Something Other' than the self can actually be sensed; a desire to personalize this presence into a deity and to have a private I-Thou relationship with it, communicating through prayer''

Sir Alister notes that his findings are similar to those of that other pioneer, William James, in his The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). What worries me is that the immanent or indwelling Creator responsible for all this also arranged for napalm bombs to be dropped on Vietnamese children..... but Sir Alister asks for an experimental faith, a trial approach which may, if sincerely attempted, put one in friendly touch with the Maker who is all things.

This book is a very fine attempt at an objective evaluation of religion and, as it points out, there may well be a new and better awareness of these matters if this kind of research is taken seriously and added to in the future 'before it is too late'.

DESMOND TARRANT

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