In his essay ‘The Soul of a Nation’ Nolini
Kanta Gupta says,
‘A Nation is a living
personality; it has a soul, even like a human individual. The soul of a nation
is also a psychic being, that is to say, a conscious being, a formation out of
the Divine Consciousness and in direct contact with it, a power and aspect of
Mahashakti. A nation is not merely the sum total of the individuals that
compose it, but a collective personality of which the individuals are as it
were cells, like the cells of a living and conscious organism. The psychic
being or soul of a nation is indeed conscious; it knows its raison d'être, its
life purpose, its destiny, the role it has to play in the divine scheme as the
divine instrument. And its will - for it has a will, the expression of its
consciousness, the Divine's impulse in and through it - is inevitable, sooner
or later it will fulfil itself. Even like the soul of a man, the nation's soul
is behind all the movements that form its external life, supporting, building,
guiding its political, economic, social or cultural make up. The individual can
know of and come in contact with the nation's soul in and through his own soul.
When one becomes conscious of his psychic being then only one is in a condition
to be conscious of the psychic being of the collective person of his nation or
the nation with which he has inner affinity.
There are periods in the life cycle of a nation, critical moments, when it is in deadly peril, when its very existence is threatened, attacked by enemy forces either from within or from without. Such was the case when, for example, Britain was invaded by the Spanish Armada or when France was being subjugated by England. Those were very anxious times, but in each instance the soul of the nation came forward and inspired the nation to react and go through the ordeal and survive. Jeanne d'Arc may be considered as the embodiment of France's national soul, as on a still earlier occasion that same soul embodied itself in St. Geneviève. But a nation may fall on much more evil days, namely, when it loses contact with its very soul, goes astray, its life movement taking a wrong curve. A nation can deny its soul, even as an individual may and the result is disaster. Germany is a terrible example of such a tragedy in our own day.
India is offering a spectacle of another tragedy. What is happening here is the attack of a disease that is convulsing the body politic: it seems to be a cancerous disease, the limbs seeking to grow independently at the expense of each other. The patient is passing through a very critical period and it is indeed a question of life and death. But we hope - we are sure -that the soul of this ancient nation will assert itself and through whatever vicissitudes reestablish health and harmony: for that soul's mission is yet to be done. Like the individual a nation too dies. Ancient Greece and Rome, Egypt and Babylon and Chaldea are no more. What has happened to their souls, is may be asked. Well, what happens to the soul of the individual when the body falls away? The soul returns to the soul-world.
Like the individual Psyche the collective Psyche too goes and retires into the womb of peace and light with all its treasures, its beauty and glory gathered in, like a bird that goes to sleep within its folded wings. What the Greek culture and civilisation was still continues to exist in its quintessential reality in a world, to which one has access if one has the requisite kinship of consciousness and psychic opening. That soul lives in its own domain, with all the glory of its achievement and realisation at their purest; and from there it sheds its lustre, exerts its influence, acts as living leaven in the world's cultural heritage and spiritual growth.
When however the soul withdraws, when a nation in a particular cycle of its soul manifestation has fulfilled its role and mission, the body of the nation falls gradually into decadence. The elements that composed the organic reality, the living consistency of national life disintegrate, lose their energy and cohesive capacity; they die out and are dispersed or persist for a time as a confused mixture of disconnected and mechanically moving cells. But it may happen too that in an apparently dying or dead nation, the soul that retired comes back again, not in its old form and mode of life for that cannot be Egypt, if it lives again today cannot repeat the ages of the Pharaohs and the Pyramids but in a new personality, with a fresh life purpose. In such a case what happens is truly, a national resurrection a Lazarus coming back to life at the touch of the Divine.
We do not believe that India was ever completely dead or hopelessly moribund: her soul, although not always in front, was ever-present as a living force, presiding over and guiding her destiny. That is why there is a perennial capacity for renewal in her and the capacity to go through dire ordeals. And to live up to her genius, she too must know how to march with the time, that is to say, not to cling to old and past forms to be faithful, to the ancient soul does not mean eternising the external frames and formulas that expressed that soul one time or another. Indeed the soul becomes alive and vigorous when it finds a new disposition of the life plan which can embody and translate a fresh reative activity, a new fulfilment emanating from the depths of the soul. ‘[1]
There are periods in the life cycle of a nation, critical moments, when it is in deadly peril, when its very existence is threatened, attacked by enemy forces either from within or from without. Such was the case when, for example, Britain was invaded by the Spanish Armada or when France was being subjugated by England. Those were very anxious times, but in each instance the soul of the nation came forward and inspired the nation to react and go through the ordeal and survive. Jeanne d'Arc may be considered as the embodiment of France's national soul, as on a still earlier occasion that same soul embodied itself in St. Geneviève. But a nation may fall on much more evil days, namely, when it loses contact with its very soul, goes astray, its life movement taking a wrong curve. A nation can deny its soul, even as an individual may and the result is disaster. Germany is a terrible example of such a tragedy in our own day.
India is offering a spectacle of another tragedy. What is happening here is the attack of a disease that is convulsing the body politic: it seems to be a cancerous disease, the limbs seeking to grow independently at the expense of each other. The patient is passing through a very critical period and it is indeed a question of life and death. But we hope - we are sure -that the soul of this ancient nation will assert itself and through whatever vicissitudes reestablish health and harmony: for that soul's mission is yet to be done. Like the individual a nation too dies. Ancient Greece and Rome, Egypt and Babylon and Chaldea are no more. What has happened to their souls, is may be asked. Well, what happens to the soul of the individual when the body falls away? The soul returns to the soul-world.
Like the individual Psyche the collective Psyche too goes and retires into the womb of peace and light with all its treasures, its beauty and glory gathered in, like a bird that goes to sleep within its folded wings. What the Greek culture and civilisation was still continues to exist in its quintessential reality in a world, to which one has access if one has the requisite kinship of consciousness and psychic opening. That soul lives in its own domain, with all the glory of its achievement and realisation at their purest; and from there it sheds its lustre, exerts its influence, acts as living leaven in the world's cultural heritage and spiritual growth.
When however the soul withdraws, when a nation in a particular cycle of its soul manifestation has fulfilled its role and mission, the body of the nation falls gradually into decadence. The elements that composed the organic reality, the living consistency of national life disintegrate, lose their energy and cohesive capacity; they die out and are dispersed or persist for a time as a confused mixture of disconnected and mechanically moving cells. But it may happen too that in an apparently dying or dead nation, the soul that retired comes back again, not in its old form and mode of life for that cannot be Egypt, if it lives again today cannot repeat the ages of the Pharaohs and the Pyramids but in a new personality, with a fresh life purpose. In such a case what happens is truly, a national resurrection a Lazarus coming back to life at the touch of the Divine.
We do not believe that India was ever completely dead or hopelessly moribund: her soul, although not always in front, was ever-present as a living force, presiding over and guiding her destiny. That is why there is a perennial capacity for renewal in her and the capacity to go through dire ordeals. And to live up to her genius, she too must know how to march with the time, that is to say, not to cling to old and past forms to be faithful, to the ancient soul does not mean eternising the external frames and formulas that expressed that soul one time or another. Indeed the soul becomes alive and vigorous when it finds a new disposition of the life plan which can embody and translate a fresh reative activity, a new fulfilment emanating from the depths of the soul. ‘[1]
Evolution of the Spiritual
Consciousness
EVEN the Vedic Rishis used to refer to the ancients, more
ancient than they themselves. "The ancients", they said,
"worshipped Agni, we too the moderns in our turn worship the same
godhead". Or again, "Thus spoke our forefathers";
or, "So have we heard from those who have gone before us" and so on.
Indeed, the tradition in the domain of spiritual
discipline seems to have been always to realise once again what has already
been realised by others, to rediscover what has already been discovered, to
re-establish ancient truths. Others have gone before on the Path, we have only
to follow. The teaching, the realisation is handed down uninterruptedly through
millenniums from Master to disciple. In other words, the idea is that the
fundamental spiritual realisation remains the 'same always and everywhere: the
name and the form only . vary according to the age and the surroundings. The
one reality is called variously, says the Veda. Who can say when was the first
dawn! The present dawn has followed the track of the infinite series that has
gone by and is the first of the infinite series that is to come. So sings Rishi
Kanwa. For the core of spiritual realisation is to possess the consciousness,
attain the status of the Spirit. This Spirit may be called God by the theist or
Nihil by the Negativist or Brahman (the One) by the Positivist (spiritual). But
the essential experience of a cosmic and transcendental reality does not differ
very much. So it is declared that there is only one goal and aim, and there
are, at the most, certain broad principles, clear pathways which one has to
follow if one is to move in the right direction, advance smoothly and attain
infallibly: but these have been well marked out, surveyed and charted and do
not admit of
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serious alterations and deviations. The spiritual
aspiration is a very definite and unitary movement and its fulfilment is also a
definite and invariable status of the consciousness. The spiritual is a typal
domain, one may say, there is no room here for sudden unforeseen variation or
growth or evolution.
Is it so in fact ? For, if one admits and accepts the
evolutionary character of human nature and consciousness, the outlook becomes
somewhat different. According to this view, human civilisation is seen as
moving through progressive stages: man at the outset was centrally lodged in
and occupied with his body consciousness, he was an annamaya purusa; then
he raised himself and centred in the vital consciousness and so became
fundamentally a pranamaya purusa; next he climbed into the
mental consciousness and became a manomaya purusa; from that
level again he has been attempting to go further beyond. On each plane the
normal life is planned according to the central character, the law—dharma—of
that plane. One can have the religious or spiritual experience on each of these
planes, representing various degrees of growth and evolution according to the
plane to which it is attached. It is therefore that the Tantra refers to three
gradations of spiritual seekers and accordingly three types or lines of
spiritual discipline: the animal (pasu bhava), the heroic (vira
bhava) and the godly or divine {deva bhava). The
classification is not merely typal but also hierarchical and evolutionary in
character.
The Divine or the spiritual consciousness, instead of
being a simple unitary entity, is a vast, complex, stratified reality.
"There are many chambers in my Father's mansion", says the Bible:
many chambers on many stories, one may add. Also there are different levels or
approaches that serve different seekers each with his own starting-point,
his point de repaire.When one speaks of union with the Divine or of
entering into the spiritual consciousness, one does not refer to the same
identical truth or reality as any other. There is a physical Divine, a vital Divine, a mental Divine; and beyond the mind , —from where one may consider that the region of true spirit begins—there are other innumerable modes, aspects, manifestations of the Divine.
identical truth or reality as any other. There is a physical Divine, a vital Divine, a mental Divine; and beyond the mind , —from where one may consider that the region of true spirit begins—there are other innumerable modes, aspects, manifestations of the Divine.
As we say, there are not only aspects of the Divine, but
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there are also levels in him. The spiritual consciousness
rises tier upon tier and each spur has its own view and outlook, rhythm and
character. Now, as long as man was chiefly preoccupied with his physico-vital
or mentalised physico-vital activities, as long as the burden of his body and
life and even mind lay heavy on him and their gravitational pull was normally
very strong, almost irresistible, the spiritual impulse in him acted generally
and fundamentally as a movement of escape from them into some thing
beyond. It was a negative movement on the whole and it was enough to
dissociate, reject, sublimate the lower status and somehow rise into something
which is not that (neti): the question was not important at
that stage of the human consciousness about a scientific scrutiny of the Beyond,
its precise constitution and composition.
But once there is the possibility gained of a more
normalised, familiar and wider reconnaissance of the Beyond, when the human
being has been mentalised to a degree and in a manner that makes it inevitable
for him to overpass to a higher status and live there habitually, then it
becomes an urgent matter of concern to know and find out where one goes
exactly, on which level and in what domain, once one is beyond. The question,
it is true, engaged the attention of the ancients too; but it was more or less
an interesting inquiry, a good part speculative and theoretical; it had not the
reality and insistence of the need of the hour. We have today chalked out an
almost exhaustive science of the inferior consciousness, of the lower
hemisphere—of course, so far as it is possible for such a science to be
exhaustive moving in the light of the partial and inferior consciousness. In
the same way we need at the present hour a complete and precise science of the
Divine
Consciousness. As there is a logic of the finite, there is also a logic of the infinite, not merely its magic, and that too has to be discovered and laid out.
Consciousness. As there is a logic of the finite, there is also a logic of the infinite, not merely its magic, and that too has to be discovered and laid out.
Thus, the highest and most comprehensive description of
the Divine is perhaps the formula Sat-chit-ananda. But even so, it is a very
general and, after all, an inadequate description. It has to be filled in and
supplemented by other categories as well, if one may say so. For
Sat-chit-ananda presents to us the Sat Brahman. There is also the Asat Brahman.
And again
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we must accept a reality which is neither Sat nor Asat—nasadasinno
sadasit, says the Veda. And as for the filling up of the details in an
otherwise almost blank and featureless infinity, Sri Aurobindo's charting of
that vast unknown—with the categories of the Supermind and its various levels,
of the Overmind and its levels too, all forming the Divine Status and
Consciousness—is a new, almost a revolutionary revelation, just the required
science which the present world needs and demands and for which it has been
prepared through all the cycles of evolution.
This means to say that with the knowledge that is given
us today, one can determine more or less definitely the altitudes to which the
various spiritual realisations of the past rose and one can see also the
degrees or graded stages of the evolution of the spiritual consciousness. A
broad landmark can be noted here which concerns us at the present moment. The
spiritual consciousness has been rising to higher and higher peaks and
possessing them one after another. At the present moment we are at a crisis, at
a crucial crossing. The spiritual consciousness attained till now and securely
held in human possession (in man's inner nature) is confined to the highest
level of the mind with some infiltration from the Over-mind and through that,
as a springing board, a leap into an indefinite, almost a blank Beyond. Now the
time is come and the conditions are ready for the spiritual consciousness in
humanity to arrive at the status above the Overmind to the Supermind, and make
that a living reality and build in and through that its normal consciousness.
A progressive revelation of higher .and higher and more
integral states of the spiritual consciousness in and through the realisations
of mystics and sages and seers—divine men— —of all ages, such is the process of
evolution that marks the life of man upon earth. This spiritual evolution,
however, may not be obviously visible in the external life and character of
man: it has been a phenomenon more in his inner being and consciousness, an
occult phenomenon. Hence there has intervened a veil, wall of separation
between the two. The veil has not been rent precisely because the very highest
spiritual potential has not been reached and brought into play. The call of the
present age is just to do away with this
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veil, make of human nature a unified, a streamlined
entity, a complete incarnation of the spiritual consciousness in the fullness
of its own nature at its source and origin.
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The Intuition of the Age
ALL
movements—whether of thought or of life, whether in the individual or in the
mass—proceed from a fundamental intuition which lies in the background as the
logical presupposition, the psychological motive and the spiritual force. A
certain attitude of the soul, a certain angle of vision is what is posited
first; all other things—all thoughts and feelings and activities are but
necessary attempts to express, to demonstrate, to realise on the conscious and
dynamic levels, in the outer world, the truth which has thus already been
seized in some secret core of our being. The intuition may not, of course, be
present to the conscious mind, it may not be ostensibly sought for, one may
even deny the existence of such a preconceived notion and proceed to establish
truth on a tabula rasa; none the less it is this hidden bias that judges, this
secret consciousness that formulates, this unknown power that fashions.
Now, what is the
intuition that lies behind the movements of the new age ? What is the intimate
realisation, the underlying viewpoint which is guiding and modelling all our
efforts and achievements—our science and art, our poetry and philosophy, our
religion and society? For, there is such a common and fundamental note which is
being voiced forth by the human spirit through all the multitude of its present
day activities.
A new impulse is
there, no one can deny, and it has vast possibilities before it, that also one
need not hesitate to accept. But in order that we may best fructuate what has
been spontaneously sown, we must first recognise it, be luminously conscious of
it and develop it along its proper line of .growth. For, also certain it is
that this new impulse or intuition, however true and strong in itself, is still
groping and erring and miscarrying; it is still wasting much of its energy in
tentative
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things, in mere
experiments, in even clear failures. The fact is that the intuition has not yet
become an enlightened one, it is still moving, as we shall presently explain,
in the dark vital regions of man. And vitalism is naturally and closely
affianced to pragmatism, that is to say, the mere vital impulse seeks
immediately to execute itself, it looks for external effects, for changes in
the form, in the machinery only. Thus it is that we see in art and literature
discussions centred upon the scheme of composition, as whether the new poetry
should be lyrical or dramatic, popular or aristocratic, metrical or free of
metre, and in practical life we talk of remodelling the state by new methods of
representation and governance, of purging society by bills and legislation, of
reforming humanity by a business pact.
All this may be
good and necessary, but there is the danger of leaving altogether out of
account the one thing needful. We must then pause and turn back, look behind
the apparent impulsion that effectuates to the Will that drives, behind the
ideas and ideals of the mind to the soul that informs and inspires; we must
carry ourselves up the stream and concentrate upon the original source, the creative
intuition that lies hidden somewhere. And then only all the new stirrings .that
we feel in our heart—our urges and ideals and visions will attain an effective
clarity, an unshaken purpose and an inevitable achievement.
That is to say,
the change has been in the "soul of man himself, the being has veered
round and taken a new orientation. It is this which one must envisage,
recognise and consciously possess, in order that one may best fulfil the call
of the age. But what we are doing instead is to observe the mere external signs
and symbols and symptoms, to fix upon the distant quiverings, the echoes on the
outermost rim, which are not always faithful representations, but very often
distorted images of the truth and life at the centre and source and matrix. We
must know that if there has been going on a redistribution and new marshalling
of forces, it is because the fiat has come from the Etat Major.
Now, in order to
understand the new orientation of the spirit of the present age, we may
profitably ask what was the inspiration of the past age, the characteristic
note which has failed to
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satisfy us and
which we are endeavouring to transform. We know that that age was the
Scientific age or the age of Reason. Its great prophets were Voltaire and the
Encyclopaedists or if you mount further up in time, we may begin from Bacon and
the humanists. Its motto was first, "The proper study of mankind is
man" and secondly, Reason is the supreme organon of knowledge, the highest
deity in man—la Deesse Raison. And it is precisely against these
two basic principles that the new, age has entered its protest. In face of
Humanism, Nietzsche has posited the Superman and in face of Reason; Bergson has
posited Intuition.
The worship of
man as something essentially and exclusively human necessitates as a corollary,
the other doctrine, viz.the deification of Reason; and vice versa.
Humanism and Scientism go together and the whole spirit and mentality of the
age that is passing may be summed up in those two words. So Nietzsche says,
"All our modern world is captured in the net of the Alexandrine culture
and has, for its ideal, the theoretical man, armed with the most powerful
instruments of knowledge, toiling in the service of science and whose prototype
and original ancestor is Socrates." Indeed, it may be generally asserted
that the nation whose prophet and sage claimed to have brought down Philosophia
from heaven to dwell upon earth among men was precisely the nation, endowed
with a clear and logical intellect, that was the very embodiment of rationality
and reasonableness. As a matter of fact, it would not be far wrong to say that
it is the Hellenic culture which has been moulding humanity for ages; at least,
it is this which has been the predominating factor, the vital and dynamic
element in man's nature. Greece when it died was reborn in Rome; Rome, in its
return, found new life in France; and France means Europe. What Europe has been
and still is for the world and humanity one knows only too much. And yet, the
Hellenic genius has not been the sole motive power and constituent element;
there has been another leaven which worked constantly within, if intermittently
without. If Europe represented mind and man and this side of existence, Asia
always reflected that which transcends the mind—the spirit, the Gods and the
Beyonds.
However, we are
concerned more with the immediate past,
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the mentality
that laid its supreme stress upon the human rationality. What that epoch did
not understand was that Reason could be overstepped, that there was something
higher, something greater than Reason; Reason being the sovereign faculty, it
was thought there could be nothing beyond, unless it were deraison. The
human attribute par excellence is Reason. Exactly so. But the fact is that man
is not bound by his humanity and that reason can be transformed and sublimated
into other more powerful faculties.
Now, the
question is, what is the insufficiency of Reason? How does it limit man ? And
what is the Superman into which man is asked or is being impelled to grow ?
Reason is
insufficient and unsatisfactory because, as Bergson explains, it does not and
cannot embrace life as a whole, seize man and the world in an integral
realisation/The greater part of the vast mystery of existence escapes its envergure.Reason
is that faculty which is for analysing, defining, classifying and fixing
things. It is a power that has grown in man in order that he may best
manipulate the things of the world. It is utilitarian, practical in its nature
and outlook. And as practical dealing requires that things should be stable and
separate entities, therefore Reason cannot but see things in solid and in the
fragments of a solid. It cuts up existence into distinct parts and diverse
elements; and these again it seeks to relate and aggregate, in accordance with
what it calls "laws". Such a process has been necessary for man in
conducting life and action successfully. Originally a bye-product of active
life. Reason gradually separated itself and came finally to have an independent
status and function, became or sought to become the instrument of knowledge, of
Truth.
But although
Reason has been and is useful for the practical, we may say almost, the manual
aspect of life, life itself it leaves unexplained and uncomprehended. For life
is mobility, a continuous flow that has nowhere any gap or stop and things have
in reality no isolated or separate existence, they merge and mingle into one
another and form an indissoluble whole. Therefore the forms and categories that
Reason imposes upon existence are more or less arbitrary; they are shackles
that seek to bind up and limit life, but are often rent asunder in the very
effort. So the civilisation that has its origin in Reason and
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progresses with
discoveries and inventions—devices for artfully manipulating nature—has been
essentially and preeminently mechanical in its structure and outlook. It has
become more and more efficient perhaps, but less and less soul-inspired, less
and less endowed with the free-flowing sap of organic growth and vitality.
So instead of
the rational principle, the new age wants the principle of Nature or Life. Even
as regards knowledge Reason is not the only, nor the best instrument. For
animals have properly no reason; the nature-principle of knowledge in the
animal is Instinct—the faculty that acts so faultlessly, so marvellously where
Reason can only pause and be perplexed. This is not to say that man is to or
can go back to this primitive and animal function; but certainly he can replace
it by something akin which is as natural and yet purified and self
conscious—illumined instinct, we may say or Intuition, as Bergson terms it. And
Nietzsche's definition of the Superman has also a similar orientation and
significance; for, according to him, the Superman is man who has outgrown his
Reason, who is not bound by the standards and the conventions determined by
Reason for a special purpose. The Superman is one who has gone beyond
"good and evil," who has shaken off from his nature and character
elements that are "human, all too human"—who is the embodiment of
life-force in its absolute purity and strength and freedom.
This then is
the mantra of the new age—Life with Intuition as its guide and
not Reason and mechanical efficiency, not Man but Superman. The right mantra has
been found, the principle itself is irreproachable. But the interpretation, the
application, does not seem to have been always happy. For, Nietzsche's
conception of the Superman is full of obvious lacunae. If we have so long been
adoring the intellectual man, Nietzsche asks us, on the other hand, to deify
the vital man. According to him the superman is he who has (1) the supreme
sense of the ego, (2) the sovereign will to power and (3) who lives
dangerously. All this means an Asura, that is to say, one who has, it
may be, dominion over his animal and vital impulsions in order, of course, that
he may best gratify them—but who has not purified them. Purification does not
necessarily mean annihilation but it does mean sublimation and trans
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formation. So if
you have to transcend man, you have to transcend egoism also.
Human Progress
CREATION has evolved. That is to say, there has
been a growth and unfoldment and progress. From nebulae to humanity the march
cannot but be called an advance, a progress, in more senses than one. But the
question is about man. Has man advanced, progressed since his advent upon earth
? If so, in what manner, to what extent ? Man has been upon earth for the last
two million years, they say. From what has happened before him in the course of
Nature's evolution, it is legitimate to infer that man too, in his turn, has
moved forward in the line towards growth and development. In fact, if we admit
that man started life as a savage or jungle-man or ape-man, and look at him as
he is today, we have perforce to acknowledge that he has not merely changed but
progressed too. The
question to be answered is in what sense this progress has been made.
question to be answered is in what sense this progress has been made.
Modern knowledge has taught us that what marks the
growth of man is his use of tools. An animal has nothing else than its own
limbs as its all-serving tool. Man emerged as man the day he knew how to use
tools as an extension of his limbs. And the cycles of human growth have, in
consequence, been marked off by the type of tools used. As we all know,
anthropologists tell us, there have been four such cycles or ages: (1) the Old
Stone Age, (2) the New Stone Age, (3) the
Bronze Age and (4) the Iron Age.
Bronze Age and (4) the Iron Age.
In the first age, which is by far the longest
period, a period of slow and difficult preparation, man had his first lessons
in a conscious and victorious dealing with Nature. The day when he first
started chipping a stone was a red-letter day for him; for, by that very
gesture be began shredding his purely animal vesture. And when he not only
chipped but succeeded in
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grinding and polishing a piece of stone, he moved
up one step further and acquired definitely his humanity. Again, ages
afterwards when his hand could-wield and manipulate as it liked not only a
stone but a metal, his skill and dexterity showed a development unique in its
kind, establishing and fixing man's manhood as a new emergent factor. In this
phase also there was a first period of training and experiment, the period of
craftsmanship in bronze; with the age of iron, man's arms and fingers attained
a special deftness and a conscious control directed from a cranium centre which
has become by now a model of rich growth and complex structure and marvellous
organisation. The impetus towards more and more efficiency in the making and
handling of tools has not ceased: the craftsmanship in iron soon led to the
discovery of steel and steel industry. The temper and structure of steel are
symbolic and symptomatic of the temper and structure of the brain that commands
the weapon—strong, supple, resistant, resilient, capable of fineness and
sharpness and trenchancy to an extraordinary degree.
This growing fineness and efficiency of the tool
has served naturally to develop and enrich man's external possession and
dominion. But this increasing power and dominion over Nature is not the most
important consequence involved; it is only indicative of still greater values,
something momentous, something subjective, pregnant with far-reaching
possibilities. For the physical change is nothing compared with the
psychological change, the change in the consciousness. In taking up
his tool to chip a stone man has started hewing out and moulding entire Nature: he has become endowed with the sense of independence and agency. An animal is a part and parcel of Nature, has no life and movement apart from the life and movement of Nature—even like Wordsworth's child of Nature—
his tool to chip a stone man has started hewing out and moulding entire Nature: he has become endowed with the sense of independence and agency. An animal is a part and parcel of Nature, has no life and movement apart from the life and movement of Nature—even like Wordsworth's child of Nature—
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.1
With rocks, and stones, and trees.1
An animal does not separate itself from Nature,
exteriorise it and then seek to fashion it as he wants, try to make it yield
things he requires. Man is precisely man because he has just
1"A slumber did my spirit seal", Miscellaneous
Poems
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this sense of self and of not-self and his whole
life is the conquest of the not-self by the self: this is the whole story of
his evolution. In the early stages his sense of agency and selfhood is at its
minimum. The rough-hewn flint instruments are symbolic of the first attempts of
the brain to set its impress, upon crude and brute nature. The history of man's
artisanship, which is the history of his civilisation, is also the history of
his growing self-consciousness. The consciousness in its attempt to react upon
nature separated itself from Nature, and at first stood over against it and
then sought to stand over and above it. In this process of extricating itself
from the sheath in which it was involved and fused, it came back upon itself,
became more and more aware of its freedom and individual identity and agency.
The question is now asked how far this
self-consciousness—given to man by his progress from stone to steel—has
advanced and what is its future. The crucial problem is whether man has
progressed in historical times. Granted that man with an iron tool is a more
advanced type of humanity than man with a chipped stone tool, it may still be
enquired whether he has made any real advance since the day he learnt to
manipulate metal. If by advance or -progress we mean efficiency and
multiplication of tools, then surely there can be no doubt that Germany of
today (perhaps now we have to say Germany of yesterday and America of today) is
the most advanced type of humanity—indeed they do make the claim in that
country.
So it is argued that man may have built up more and
more efficient organisation in his outer life, he may have learnt towield
a greater variety and wealth of tools and instruments in an increasing degree
of refinement and power; but this, does not mean that his character, his nature
or even the broad mould of his intelligence has changed or progressed. The
records and remains of Predynastic Egypt or of Proto-Aryan Indus valley go to
show that those were creations of civilised men, as civilised as any modern
people. The mind that produced the Rig Veda or the Book of the Dead or
conceived the first pyramid is, in essential power of intelligence, no whit
inferior to any modern scientific brain. Hence a distinction is sometimes made
between culture and civilisation; what the moderns have achieved is progress
with regard to civilisation,
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that is to say, the outer paraphernalia; but as
regards culture a Plato, a Lao-tse, a Yajnavalkya are names to which we still
bow down.
One can answer, however, that even if in the last
eight or ten thousand years which, they say, is the extent of the present
cycle, the civilised or cultural life of humanity has not changed much, this
does not mean that it cannot, will not change. The paleolithic age, it appears,
covered a period of thirty to forty thousand years; the neolithic age also must
have lasted some fifteen thousand years. The metal age is now not more than ten
thousand years. So it does not seem to be too late; perhaps it is just time for
another radical and crucial change to come as the chronological scheme would
seem to demand.
We propose, however, to reopen the question and
enquire if there has not been some kind of radical change or progress in the
make-up of human nature and civilisation even within the span of historical
times. This reminds us of the remarkable conclusion or discovery made by the
much maligned and much adulated Psycho-analysts.
Jung speaks of two kinds or grades of thinking: (1)
the directed thinking and (2) the wishful thinking; one conscious and
objective, the other automatic and subjective. The first is the modern or
scientific thinking, the second the old-world mythoposic thinking. These two
lines of mental movement mark off two definite stages in the cultural history
of man. Down to the Middle Ages man's mental life was moved and coloured by
his libido—desire soul; it is with the Renascence that he began to
free his mind from the libido and transfer and transform the libido into
non-egoistic and realistic thinking. In simpler psychological terms we can say
that man's mentality was coloured and modulated by his biological make-up out
of which it had emerged; the age of modernism and scientism began with the
development of a rigorous rationalism which means a severance and transcendence
of the biological antecedent.
In other words, it can be said that the older
humanity was intuitive and instinctive, while modern humanity is rationalistic.
Now it has been questioned whether this change or reorientation is a sign of
progress, whether it has not been at the most a mixed blessing. Many idealists
and reformers frankly
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view the metamorphosis with anxiety. Gerald Heard
vehemently declares that the rationalism of the modern age is a narrowing down
of the consciousness to a superficial movement, a foreshortening, and a
top-heavy specialisation which means stagnation, decay and death. He would
rather release the tension in the strangulation of consciousness, even if itmeans
a slight coming down to the anterior level of instinct and intuition, but of
more plasticity and less specialisation: it is, he says, only in conditions of
suppleness and variability, of life organised yet sufficiently free that the
forces of evolution can act fruitfully. It has also been pointed out that homo
sapiens is not a direct descendant of homo neanderthalis who
was already a far too specialised being, but of a stock anterior to it
which was still uncertain, wavering, groping towards a definite emergence.
Now, these two positions—of Jung and of Heard—offer
us a good basis upon which we can try to estimate the nature of man's progress
in historical times. Both refer to a crucial change in human consciousness, a
far-reaching change having no parallel since it invented the metal tool. The
change means the appearance of pure intelligence in man, a change, as we may
say, in modern terms, in the system of reference, from biological co-ordinates
to those of pure reason. Only Jung
thinks that the reorganisation of the human consciousness is to happen precisely round the focus of pure reason, while Gerald Heard is doubtful about the efficacy of this faculty— of "directive thinking", as Jung puts it—if it is to lead to overspecialisation, which means the swelling of one member and atrophy of the rest; a greater and supreme direction he seeks elsewhere in a transcendence of intelligence and reason which, besides, is bound to happen ,in the course of evolution.
thinks that the reorganisation of the human consciousness is to happen precisely round the focus of pure reason, while Gerald Heard is doubtful about the efficacy of this faculty— of "directive thinking", as Jung puts it—if it is to lead to overspecialisation, which means the swelling of one member and atrophy of the rest; a greater and supreme direction he seeks elsewhere in a transcendence of intelligence and reason which, besides, is bound to happen ,in the course of evolution.
We characterise the change as a special degree or
order of self-consciousness. Self-consciousness, we have seen, is the sine
qua non of humanity. It is the faculty or power by and with which man
appears on earth and maintains himself as such, as a distinct species. Thanks
to this faculty man has become the tool-making animal, the artisan—homo
faber. But on emerging from the original mythopœic to the scientific
status man has become doubly self-conscious. Self-consciousness means to be
aware of oneself as standing separate from and against the
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environment and the world and acting upon it as a
free agent, exercising one's deliberate will. Now the first degree of
self-consciousness displayed itself in a creative activity by which
consciousness remained no-longer a suffering organon, but became a growing and
directing, a reacting and new-creating agent. Man gained the power to shape the
order of Nature according to the order of his inner will and consciousness.
This creative activity, the activity of the artisan, developed along two lines:
first, artisanship with regard to one's own self, one's inner nature and
character, and secondly, with regard to the external nature, the not-self. The
former gave rise to mysticism and Yoga and was especially cultivated in India,
while the second has led us to Science, man's physical mastery, which is the
especial field of European culture.
Now the second degree of self-consciousness to
which we referred is the scientific consciousness par excellence. It
can be described also as the spirit and power of experimentation, or more
precisely, of scientific experimentation: it involves generically the process
with which we are familiar in the domain of industry and is termed
"synthetic", that is to say, it means the skill and capacity to
create the conditions under which a given phenomenon can be repeated at will.
Hence it means a perfect knowledge of the process of things—which again is a
dual knowledge: (1) the knowledge of the steps gradually leading to the result
and (2) the knowledge that has the power to resolve the result into its
antecedent conditions. Thus the knowledge of the mechanism, the
detailed working of things, is scientific knowledge, and therefore scientific
knowledge can be truly said to be mechanistic knowledge, in the best sense of
the term. Now the knowledge of the ends and the knowledge of the means (to use
a phrase of Aldous Huxley) and the conscious control over either have given
humanity a new degree of self-consciousness.
It can be mentioned here that there can be a
knowledge of ends without a corresponding knowledge of
means, even there can be a control over ends without a preliminary control over
means—perhaps not to perfection, but to a sufficient degree of practical
utility. Much of the knowledge—especially secular and scientific—in ancient times
was of this order; what we mean to say is that the knowledge was more
instinctive
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or intuitive than rational or intellectual. In that
knowledge the result only, the end that it to say, was the chief aim and
concern, the means for attaining the end was, one cannot perhaps say, ignored,
but slurred or slipped over as it were: the process was thus involved or
understood, not expressed or detailed out. Thus we know of some mathematical
problems to which correct solutions were given of which the process is not
extant or lost as some say. Our suggestion is that there was in fact very
little of the process as we know it now—the solution was reached per
saltum, that is to say, somehow, in the same manner as we find it
happening even today in child prodigies.
One can point out however that even before the
modern scientific age, there was an epoch of pure intellectual activity, as
represented, for example, by scholasticism. The formal intellectualism which
was the gift of the Greek sophists or the Mimansakas and grammarians in ancient
India has to be recognised as a pure mental movement, freed from all life value
or biological bias. What then is the difference? What is the new characteristic
element brought in by the modern scientific intellectualism ?
The old intellectualism generally and on the whole,
was truly formal and even to a great extent verbal. In other words, it sought
to find norms and categories in the mind itself and impose them upon objects,
objects of experience, external or internal. The first discovery of the pure
mind, the joy of indulging in its own free formations led to an abstraction
that brought about a cleavage between mind and nature, and when a harmony was
again attempted between the two, it meant an imposition of one (the Mind) upon
another (Matter), a subsumption of the latter under the former. Such scholastic
formalism, although it has the appearance of a movement of pure intellect, free
from the influence of instinctive or emotive reactions, cannot but be, at
bottom, a mythopoeic operation, in the Jungian phraseology; it is not truly
objective in the scientific sense. The scientific procedure is to find Nature's
own categories—the constants, as they are called. —and link up mind and
intellect with that- reality. This is the Copernican revolution that Science
brought about in the modern outlook. Philosophers like Kant or Berkeley may say
Page 86
another thing and even science itself just nowadays
may appear hesitant in its bearings. But that is another story which it is not
our purpose to consider here and which does not change the fundamental
position. We say then that the objectivity of the scientific outlook, as
distinguished from the abstract formalism of old-world intellectualism, has
given a new degree of mental growth and is the basis of the
"mechanistic" methodology of which we have been speaking.
Indeed, what we lay stress upon is the methodology
of modern scientific knowledge—the apparatus of criticism and experimentation.
We have said that this
"methodologism"—the knowledge of means and the consequent control
over means—the hall- mark of modern scientific knowledge—is a new degree of
self-consciousness which is the special characteristic of the human
consciousness. Put philosophically, we can say that the discovery of the subject and
its growing affirmation as an independent factor in a subject-object relation
marks the evolutionary course of the human consciousness.
A still further unveiling seems to be in progress
now. The subject has discovered itself as separate from the observed object and
still embracing it: but a given subject-object relationship in its turn again
is being viewed as itself an object to another subject consciousness, a
super-subject. That way lie the ever widening horizons of consciousness opened
up by Yoga and spiritual discipline.
In other words, the self-consciousness which marks
off man as the highest of living beings as yet evolved by Nature is still not
her highest possible instrumentation. As has been experienced and foreseen by
Yogins in all ages and climes and as it is being borne in upon the modern mind
more and more imperatively, this self-consciousness has -to be consciously
transcended, lifted, transmuted—worked out into the super-consciousness. Such
is Nature's evolutionary nisus and such is the truth and fact
man is being driven to face in his inner individual consciousness as well as
outer collective life.
We can thus note, broadly speaking, three stages in
the human cycle of Nature's evolution. The first was the period of emergence of
self-consciousness and the trials and experiments it went through to establish
and confirm itself. The ancient
Page 87
civilisations represented this character of the
human spirit. The subject freeing itself more and more from its environmental
tegument, still living and moving within it and dynamically reacting upon
it—this was the character we speak of. Next came the period when the free and
dynamic subject feeling itself no more tied down to its natural objective
sphere sought lines of development and adventure on its own account. This was
the age of speculation and of scholasticism in philosophy and intellectual
inquiry and of alchemy in natural science—a period roughly equated with the
Middle Ages. The Scientific Age coming last seeks to re-establish a junction
and co-ordination between the free and dynamic self-consciousness and the mode
and pattern of its objective field, involving a greater enrichment on one
side—the subjective consciousness —and on the other, the objective
environment, a corresponding change and effective reorganisation.
The present age which ushers a fourth
stage—significantly called tunya or the transcendent, in
Indian terminology—is pregnant with a fateful crisis. The stage of
self-consciousness to which scientific development has arrived seems to land in
a cul-de-sac, a blind alley: Science also is faced, almost helplessly, with the
antinomies of reason that Kant discovered long ago in the domain of speculative
philosophy. The way out, for a further growth and development and evolution,
lies in a supersession of the self-consciousness, an elevation into a
superconsciousness—as already envisaged by Yogis and Mystics everywhere—which
will give a new potential and harmony to the human consciousness.
This super consciousness is based upon a double
movement of sublimation and integration which are precisely the two things
basically aimed at by present-day psychology to meet the demands of new facts
of consciousness. The rationalisation, specialisation or foreshortening of
consciousness, mentioned above, is really an attempt at sublimation of the
consciousness, its purification and ascension from baser—animal and vegetal
—confines: only, ascension does not mean alienation, it must mean a gathering
up of the lower elements also into their higher modes. Integration thus
involves a descent, but it has to be pointed out, not merely or exclusively
that, as Jung and his school seem to say. Certainly one has to see and
recognise
Page 88
the aboriginal, the infra-rational elements
imbedded in our nature and consciousness, the roots and foundations that lie
buried under the super-structure that Evolution has erected. But that
recognition must be accompanied by an upward look and sense: indeed it is
healthy and fruitful only on condition that it occurs in a consciousness open
to an infiltration of light coming from summits not only of the mind but above
the mind. If we go back, it must be with a light that is ahead of us: that is
the sense of evolution.
Page 89
**
The Creative Soul
THE difference between living organism and dead matter is
that while the former is endowed, with creative activity the latter has only
passive receptivity. Life adds, synthetises, new- creates—gives more than what
it receives; matter only sums up, gathers, reflects, gives just what it
receives. Life is living, glad and green through its creative genius. Creation
in some form or other must be the core of everything that seeks vitality and
growth, vigour and delight. Not only so, but a thing in order to be real must
possess a creative function. We consider a shadow or an echo unreal precisely
because they do not create but merely image or repeat, they do not bring out
anything new but simply reflect what is given. The whole of existence is real
because it is eternally creative.
So the problem that concerns man, the riddle that
humanity has to solve is how to find out and follow the path of creativity. If
we are not to be dead matter nor mere shadowy illusions we must be creative. A
misconception that has vitiated our outlook in general and has been the most
potent cause of a sterilising atavism in the moral evolution of humanity is
that creativity is an aristocratic virtue, that it belongs only to the chosen
few. A great poet or a mighty man of action creates indeed, but such a creator
does not appear very frequently. A Shakespeare or a Napoleon is a rare
phenomenon; they are, in reality, an exception to the general run of mankind.
It is enough if we others can understand and follow them—Mahajano yena
gatah— let the great souls initiate and create, the common souls have
only to repeat and imitate.
But this is not as it should be, nor is it the truth of
the matter. Every individual soul, however placed it may be, is by nature
creative; every individual being lives to discover and to create.
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The inmost reality of man is not a passive receptacle, a
mere responsive medium but it is a dynamo—a power-station generating and
throwing out energy that produces and creates.
Now the centre of this energy, the matrix of creativity
is the soul itself, one's own soul. If you want to create—live, grow and be
real—find yourself, be yourself. The simple old wisdom still remains the
eternal wisdom. It is because we fall off from our soul that we wander into
side-paths, paths that do not belong
to our real nature and hence that lead to imitation and repetition, decay and death. This is what happens to what we call common souls. The force of circumstances, the pressure of environment or simply the momentum of custom or habit compel them to choose the easiest and the readiest way that may lie before them. They do not consult the demand of the inner being but the requirement of the moment. Our bodily needs, our vital hungers and our mental prejudices obsess and obscure the impulsions that thrill the hidden spirit. We hasten to gratify the immediate and forget the eternal, we clutch at the shadow and let go the substance. We are carried away in the flux and tumult of life. It is a mixed and collective whirl—a Weltgeist that moves and governs us. We are helpless straws drifting in the current. But manhood demands that we stop and pause, pull ourselves out of the Maelstrom and be what we are. We must shape things as we want and not allow things to shape us as they want.
to our real nature and hence that lead to imitation and repetition, decay and death. This is what happens to what we call common souls. The force of circumstances, the pressure of environment or simply the momentum of custom or habit compel them to choose the easiest and the readiest way that may lie before them. They do not consult the demand of the inner being but the requirement of the moment. Our bodily needs, our vital hungers and our mental prejudices obsess and obscure the impulsions that thrill the hidden spirit. We hasten to gratify the immediate and forget the eternal, we clutch at the shadow and let go the substance. We are carried away in the flux and tumult of life. It is a mixed and collective whirl—a Weltgeist that moves and governs us. We are helpless straws drifting in the current. But manhood demands that we stop and pause, pull ourselves out of the Maelstrom and be what we are. We must shape things as we want and not allow things to shape us as they want.
Let each take cognisance of the godhead that is within
him—for self is God—and in the strength of the soul-divinity create his
universe. It does not matter what sort of universe he creates, so long as he
creates it. The world created by a Buddha is not the same as that created by a
Napoleon, nor should they be the
same. It does not prove anything that I cannot become a Kalidasa; for that matter Kalidasa cannot become what I am. If you have not the genius of a Shankara it does not mean that you have no genius at all. Be and become yourself—ma gridhah kasyachit dhanam, says the Upanishad. The fountain-head of creative genius lies there, in the free choice and the particular delight—the self-determination of the spirit within you and not in the desire for your neighbour's riches. The world has become dull and uniform and mechanical, since everybody
same. It does not prove anything that I cannot become a Kalidasa; for that matter Kalidasa cannot become what I am. If you have not the genius of a Shankara it does not mean that you have no genius at all. Be and become yourself—ma gridhah kasyachit dhanam, says the Upanishad. The fountain-head of creative genius lies there, in the free choice and the particular delight—the self-determination of the spirit within you and not in the desire for your neighbour's riches. The world has become dull and uniform and mechanical, since everybody
Page 78
endeavours to become not himself, but always somebody
else. Imitation is servitude and servitude brings in grief.
In one's own soul lies the very height and profundity of a
god-head. Each soul by bringing out the note that is his, makes for the most
wondrous symphony. Once a man knows what he is . and holds fast to it, refusing
to be drawn away by any necessity or temptation, he begins to uncover himself,
to do what his inmost nature demands and takes joy in, that is to say, begins
to create. Indeed there may be much difference in the forms that different
souls take. But because each is itself, therefore each is grounded upon the
fundamental equality of things. All our valuations are in reference to some
standard or other set up with a particular end in view, but that is a question
of the practical world which in no way takes away from the intrinsic value of
the greatness of the soul. So long as the thing is there,
the how of it does not matter. Infinite are the ways of manifestation and all of them the very highest and the most sublime, provided they are a manifestation of the soul itself, provided they rise and flow from the same level. Whether it is Agni or Indra, Varuna, Mitra or the Aswins, it is the same supreme and divine inflatus.
the how of it does not matter. Infinite are the ways of manifestation and all of them the very highest and the most sublime, provided they are a manifestation of the soul itself, provided they rise and flow from the same level. Whether it is Agni or Indra, Varuna, Mitra or the Aswins, it is the same supreme and divine inflatus.
The cosmic soul is true. But that truth is borne out,
effectuated only by the truth of the individual soul. When the individual soul
becomes itself fully and integrally, by that very fact it becomes also the
cosmic soul. The individuals are the channels through which flows the Universal
and the Infinite in its multiple emphasis. Each is a particular figure,
aspect— Bhava, a particular angle of vision of All. The vision
is entire and the figure perfect if it is not refracted by the lower and denser
parts of our being. And for that the individual must first come to itself and
shine in its opal clarity and translucency.
Not to do what others do, but what your soul impels you
to do. Not to be others but your own self. Not to be anything but the very
cosmic and infinite divinity of your soul. Therein lies your highest freedom
and perfect delight. And there you are supremely creative. Each soul has a
consort—Prakriti, Nature —which it creates out of its own rib. And
in this field of infinite creativity the soul lives, moves and has its being.
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Lines of the Descent of
Consciousness
The world has been created by a descent of consciousness;
it maintains itself, it proceeds and develops through a series of descents. In
fact, creation itself is a descent, the first and original one, the descent of
the supreme Reality into Matter and as Matter. The supreme Reality—the fount
and origin of things and even that which is beyond—although essentially
something absolute, indescribable, ineffable, indeterminable, has been, for
purposes of the human understanding, signalised as a triune entity of Existence,
Consciousness and Bliss. That is to say, first of all, it is, it exists always
and for ever—invariably, in unbroken continuity; secondly, it exists not
unconsciously, but consciously, in and as full consciousness; thirdly, it
exists in delight—through delight and for and as delight; it has no other
reason for existence but the pleasure and joy of simply existing. This primal,
this original truth or reality transcends creation and is beyond and antecedent
to it. What then is creation, what is its nature and character? Strange to say,
it is the very opposite of the primal reality. First of all, it is not really
existent: its existence is only another name for non-existence, as, in its
phenomenal constitution, it is variable, ephemeral, transient and fragmentary
or even seems made, as it were, of the stuff of dream. Secondly, it is not
conscious; on the contrary, it is unconsciousness. And lastly it is not
delight; there is an original insensibility and much undelight, grief and
sorrow. That is the actual physical creation; or so, at least, it appears to
be. How is this paradox to be explained? What is the significance of this
riddle ?
Descent is the master-key that unravels the mystery—that
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is to say, the descent of the delightful conscious existence
as the material world. But why this descent at all? What was the necessity ?
What was the purpose ? The why of a thing is always difficult,
if not impossible, to gauge. But we shall try to understand the how of
the phenomenon, and in so doing perhaps we may get at the why of it also. At
present let us content ourselves by saying that such was His will—la sua
voluntade—such was His wish—sa aicchat. For once perhaps
instead of saying, "Let there be light", He (or something in Him)
must have said, "Let there be darkness", and there was Darkness.
But the point is, this darkness did not come all on a
sudden but arrived gradually through a developing process—we do not refer to
physical time here but something antecedent, something parallel to it in another
dimension. Let us see how it all came about.
The absolute in its triple or triune status (not in its
supreme being but as we see it prior to manifestation) is in essence and
principle an infinity and unity. Indeed, it is the infinite
unity, and its fundamental character is a supreme and utter equality —samam
brahma. It is then a status or statis, that
is to say, a state of perfectly stable equilibrium in which there is ho
movement of difference or distinction, no ripple of high and low or ebb and
flow, no mark of quantity or quality. It is a stilled sea of self-identity, a
vast limitless or pure consciousness brooding in trance and immobility. And yet
in the bosom of this ineffable and inviolable equality, in the 'very hush and
lull there lies secreted an urge, a pressure, a possibility towards activity,
variation and even an eventual inequality. For the presence and possibility of
dynamism is posited by the very infinity of the Infinite, since without it, the
Infinite would be incapable of motion, expression and fulfilment of its Force.
There is thus inherent in the vast inalienable equality
of the absolute Reality, a Force which can bring out centres of pressure,
nuclei of dynamism, nodes of modulation. It is precisely round these centres of
precipitation that the original and basic unity crystallises itself and weaves
a pattern of harmonious multiplicity. Consciousness, by self-pressure,— tapas
taptva—turns its even and undifferentiated pristine equanimity into ripples
and swirls, eddies and vortices of delight, matrices of creative activity. Thus
the One becomes
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Many by a process of self-concentration and
self-limitation.
At the very outset when and where the Many has come out
into manifestation in the One—here also it must be remembered that we are using
a temporal figure in respect of an extra-temporal fact—there and then is formed
a characteristic range of reality which is a perfect equation of the one and
the many: that is to say, the one in becoming many still remains the same
immaculate one in and through the many, and likewise the many in spite of its
manifoldness—and because of the special quality of the manifoldness—still
continues to be the one in the uttermost degree. It is the world of fundamental
realities. Sri Aurobindo names it the Supermind or Gnosis. It is something
higher than but distantly akin to Plato's world of Ideas or Noumena (ideai,
nooumena) or to what Plotinus calls the first divine emanation (nous).These
archetypal realities are realities of the Spirit, Idea-forces, truth-energies,
the root consciousness-forms, rta cit, in Vedic terminology.
They are seed-truths, the original mother-truths in the Divine Consciousness.
They comprise the fundamental essential many aspects and formulations of an
infinite Infinity. At this stage these do not come into clash or conflict, for
here each contains all and the All contains each one in absolute unity and
essential identity. Each individual formation is united with and partakes of
the nature of the one supreme Reality. Although difference is born here,
separation is not yet come. Variety is there, but not discord, individuality is
there, not egoism. This is the first step of Descent, the earliest one—not, we
must remind ourselves again, historically but psychologically and logically—the
descent of the Transcendent into the Cosmic as the vast and varied Supermind—citrah
praketo ajanista vibhwa—of the Absolute into the relational manifestation
as Vidyasakti (Gnosis).
The next steps, farther down or away, arrive when the
drive towards differentiation and multiplication gathers momentum becomes
accentuated, and separation and isolation increase in degree and emphasis. The
lines of individuation fall more and more apart from each other, tending to
form closed circles, each confining more and more exclusively to itself,
stressing its own particular and special value and function, in
contradistinction to or even against other lines. Thus
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the descent or fall from the Supermind leads, in the
first instance, to the creation or appearance of the Overmind. It is the level
of consciousness where the perfect balance of the One and the Many is disturbed
and the emphasis begins to be laid on the many. The source of incompatibility
between the two just starts here as if Many is not-One and One is not- Many. It
is the beginning of Ignorance, Avidya, Maya. Still in the higher hemisphere of
the Overmind, the sense of unity is yet maintained, although there is no longer
the sense of absolute identity of the two; they are experienced as complementaries,
both form a harmony, a harmony as of different and distinct but conjoint notes.
The Many has come forward, yet the unity is also there supporting it—the unity
is an immanent godhead, controlling the patent reality of the Many. It is in
the lower hemisphere of the Overmind that unity is thrown into the background
half-submerged, nickering, and the principle of multiplicity comes forward with
all insistence. Division and rivalry are the characteristic marks of its
organisation. Yet the unity does not disappear altogether, only it remains very
much inactive, like a sleeping partner. It is not directly perceived and
envisaged, not immediately felt but is evoked as a reminiscence. The Supermind,
then, is the first crystallisation of the Infinite into individual centres, in
the Overmind these centres at the outset become more exclusively individualised
and then jealously self-centred.
The next step of Descent is the Mind where the original
unity and identity and harmony are disrupted to a yet greater degree, almost
completely. The self-delimitation' of consciousness—which is proper to the
Supermind and even to the Overmind, at least in its higher domains—gives way to
self-limitation, to intolerant egoism and solipsism. The consciousness
withdraws from its high and wide sweep, narrows down to introvert orbits. The
sense of unity in the mind is, at most, a thing of idealism and imagination; it
is an abstract notion, a supposition and a deduction. Here we enter into the
very arcana of Maya, the rightful possession of Ignorance. The individualities
here have become totally isolated and independent and mutually conflicting
lines of movement. Hence the natural incapacity of mind, as it is said, to
comprehend more than one object simultaneously. The Supermind
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and, less absolutely, the Overmind have a global and
integral outlook: they can take in each one in its purview all at once the
total assemblage of things, they differentiate but do not divide—the Supermind
not at all, the Overmind not categorically. The Mind has not this synthetic
view, it proceeds analytically. It observes its object by division, taking the
parts piecemeal, dismantling them, separating them, attending to each one at a
time. And when it observes it fixes itself on one point, withdrawing its
attention from all the rest. If it has to arrive at a synthesis, it can only do
so by collating, aggregating : and summing. Menta}
consciousness is thus narrowly one- pointed: and in narrowing itself, being
farther away from the source it becomes obscurer, more and more outward
gazing [parafici khani) and superficial. The One Absolute in
its downward march towards multiplicity, fragmentation and partiality loses
also gradually its subtlety, its suppleness, its refinement, becomes more and
more obtuse, crude, rigid and dense.
Between the Overmind and the Mind proper, varying
according to the degree of immixture of the two, according to the degree of
descent and of emergence of one and the other respectively, there are several
levels of consciousness of which three main ones have been named and described
by Sri Aurobindo. The first one nearest to the Overmind and the least
contaminated by the Mind is pure Intuition; next, the intermediary one is
called the Illumined Mind, and last comes the Higher Mind. They are all powers
of the Overmind functioning in the Mind. The higher ranges are always more
direct, intense, synthetic, dynamic than the lower ones where consciousness is
slower, duller, more uncertain, more disintegrated. The lower the consciousness
descends the more veiled it becomes, losing more and more the directness, the
sureness, the intensity and force and the synthetic unity native to the highest
ranges of our consciousness and being.
A further descent into obscurity occurs when
consciousness passes from Mind to Life. Darkness is almost visible here: there
is a greater withdrawal on the part of each unit from its surrounding reality,
a narrower concentration upon one's own separative existence—shades of the
prison-house have gathered close around. The light, already dulled and faint in
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the mind, has become a lurid glare here. Passion has
arisen and desire and hunger and battle and combat.
Here also in the vital three ranges can be distinguished—
the lower becoming more and more turbid and turbulent and fierce or more and
more self-centred and selfish. These levels can. best be seen by their impact
on our vital being and formations there. The first, the highest one, the
meeting or confluence of the Mind and the Vital is the Heart, the centre of
emotion, the knot of the external or instrumental vehicle, of the frontal
consciousness, behind which is born and hides the true individualised consciousness,
the psyche. The mid-region is the Higher Vital consisting of larger (egoistic)
dynamisms, such as high ambition, great enterprise, heroic courage, capacity
for work, adventure, masterfulness, also such movements as sweeping violences,
mighty hungers, intense arrogances. The physical seat of this movement is, as
perhaps the Tantras would say, the domain ranging between the
heart and the navel. Lower down ranges the Lower Vital which consists of small
desires, petty hankerings, blind cravings—all urges and impulses that are more
or less linked up with the " body and move to gross physical
satisfactions.
But always the Consciousness is driving towards a yet
greater disintegration and fragmentation, obscuration and condensation of
self-oblivion. The last step in the process of transmutation or involution is
Matter where consciousness has wiped itself out or buried itself within so
completely and thoroughly that it has become in its outward form totally dark,
dense, hard, pulverised into mutually exclusive grains. The supreme luminous
Will of Consciousness in its gradual descent and self-obliteration finally ends
in a rigid process of mere mechanised drive.
This is, so far then, the original and primal line of
descent. It is the line down which the absolute Reality, the absolute
Consciousness and the absolute Delight have turned into unreality and
unconsciousness and undelight. But it is not all loss and debit. There is a
credit side too. For it is only in this way, viz, by the manifestation of utter
Ignorance, that the supreme Absolute has become concrete, the Formless has
entered into form, the Bodiless has found a body: what was originally an
indeterminate equal Infinity of pure consciousness,
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has become determinate and dynamic in the individual
multiplicity of corporeal consciousness. What is the sense in all that, what is
the gain or upshot ? We shall presently see.
When consciousness has reached the farthest limit of its
opposite, when it has reduced itself to absolutely unconscious and mechanical
atoms of Matter, when the highest has descended into and become the lowest,
then, by the very force of its downward drive, it has swung round and begun to
mount up again. As it could not proceed farther on the downward gradient,
having reached the extreme and ultimate limit of inconscience, consciousness
had to turn round, as it were, by the very pressure of its inner impetus.
First, then, there is a descent, a gradual involution, a veiling and closing
up; next, an ascent, a gradual evolution, unfoldment and expression. We now
see, however, that the last limit at the bottom—Matter—although appearing to be
unconscious, is really not so: it is inconscient. That is to say, it holds
consciousness secreted and involved within itself; it is, indeed, a special
formulation of consciousness. It is the exclusive concentration of
consciousness upon single points in itself: it is consciousness throwing itself
out in scattered units and, by reason of separative identification with them
and absorption into them, losing itself, forgetting itself in an absolute
fixation of attention. The phenomenon is very similar to what happens when in
the ordinary consciousness a worker, while doing a work, becomes so engrossed
in it that he loses consciousness of himself, identifies himself with the work
and in fact becomes the work, the visible resultant being a mechanical
execution.
Now this imprisoned consciousness in Matter forces Matter
to be conscious again when driven on the upward gradient. This tension creates
a fire, as it were, in the heart of Matter, a mighty combustion and whorl in
the core of things, of which the blazing sun is an image and a symbol. All this
pressure and heat and concussion and explosion mean a mighty struggle in Matter
to give birth to that which is within. Consciousness that is latent must be
made patent; it must reveal itself in Matter and through Matter, making Matter
its vehicle and embodiment. This is the mystery of the birth of Life, the first
sprouting of consciousness in Matter. Life is half-awakened consciousness,
consciousness yet in a dream state. Its earliest
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and most rudimentary manifestation is embodied in the
plant or vegetable world. The submerged consciousness strives to come still
further up, to express itself to a greater degree and in a clearer mode, to
become more free and plastic in its movements; hence the appearance of the
animal as the next higher formulation. Here consciousness delivers itself as a
psyche, a rudimentary one, no doubt, a being of feeling and sensation, and
elementary mentality playing in a field of vitalised Matter. Even then it is
not satisfied with itself, it asks for a still more free and clear
articulation: it is not satisfied, for it has not yet found its own level.
Hence after the animal, arrives man with a full-fledged Mind, with intelligence
and self-consciousness and capacity for self-determination.
Thus we see that evolution, the unfolding of
consciousness follows exactly the line of its involution, only the other way
round: the mounting consciousness re-ascends step by step the same gradient,
retraces the same path along which it had descended. The descending steps are
broadly speaking (1) Existence-Consciousness-Bliss, (2) Supermind and its
secondary form Overmind, (3) Mind—(i) mind proper and (ii) the
intermediary psyche, (4) Life, (5) Matter. The ascending consciousness starting
from Matter rises into Life; passes on through Life and Psyche into Mind,
driving towards the Supermind and Schchidananda. At the present stage of
evolution, consciousness has arrived at the higher levels of Mind; it is now
striving to cross it altogether and enter the Overmind and the Supermind. It
will not rest content until it arrives at the organisation in and through the
Supermind: for that is the drive and purpose of Nature in the next cycle of
evolution.
Physical Science speaks of irreversibility and entropy in
Nature's process. That is to say, it is stated that Nature is rushing down and
running down: she is falling irrevocably from a higher to an ever lower potential
of energy. The machine that Nature is, is driven by energy made available by a
break-up of parts and particles constituting its substance. This katabolic
process cannot be stopped or retraced; it can end only when the break-up ceases
at dead equilibrium. You cannot lead the river up the channel to its source, it
moves inevitably, unceasingly towards the sea in which it exhausts itself and
finds its last repose and—extinction. But whatever
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physical Science may say, the science of the spirit
declares emphatically that Nature's process is reversible, that a growing
entropy can be checked and countermanded: in other words, Nature's downward
current resulting in a continual loss of energy and a break-up of substance is
not the only process of her activity. This aspect is more than counterbalanced
by another one of upward drive and building up, of re-energisation and
re-integration. Indeed, evolution, as we have explained it, is nothing but such
a process of synthesis and new creation.
Evolution, which means the return movement of
consciousness, consists, in its apparent and outward aspect, of two processes,
or rather two parallel lines in a single process. First, there is the line of
sublimation, that is to say, the lower purifies and modifies itself into the
higher; the denser, the obscurer, the baser mode of consciousness is led into
and becomes the finer, the clearer, the nobler mode. Thus it is that Matter
rises into Life, Life into Psyche and Mind, Mind into Overmind and Supermind.
Now this sublimation is not simply a process of refinement or elimination,
something in the nature of our old Indian nivrtti or pratyahara, or
what Plotinus called epistrophe (a turning back, withdrawal or
re-absorption) : it includes and is attended by the process of integration
also. That is to say, as the lower rises into the higher, the lower does not
cease to exist thereby, it exists but lifted up into the higher, infused and
modified by the higher. Thus when Matter yields Life, Matter is not destroyed:
it means Life has appeared in Matter and exists in and through Matter and
Matter thereby has attained a new mode and constitution, for it is no longer
merely a bundle of chemical or mechanical reactions, it is instinct with life,
it has become organic matter. Even so, when Life arrives at Mind, it is not
dissolved into Mind but both Life and Matter are taken up by the mental stuff,
life becomes dynamic sentience and Matter is transformed into the grey
substance of the brain. Matter thus has passed through a first transformation
in Life and a second transformation in Mind; it awaits other transformations on
other levels beyond Mind. Likewise, Life has passed through a first
transformation in Mind and there are stages in this transformation. In the
plant. Life is in its original pristine mode; in the animal, it has become
sentient and centralised
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round a rudimentary desire-soul; in man, life-force is
taken upby the higher mind and intelligence giving birth to idealism and
ambition, dynamisms of a forward-looking purposive will.
We have, till now, spoken of the evolution of
consciousnessas a movement of ascension, consisting of a double processof
sublimation and integration. But ascension itself is only one line of a yet
another larger double process. For along with the visible movement of ascent,
there is a hidden movement of descent. The ascent represents the pressure from
below, the force of buoyancy exerted by the involved and secreted
consciousness. But the mere drive from below is not sufficient all by itself to
bring out or establish the higher status. The higher status itself has to
descend in order to be manifest. The urge from below is an aspiration, a
yearning to move ever upward and forward; but the precise goal, the status to
be arrived at is not given there. The more or less vague and groping surge from
below is canalised, it assumes a definite figure and shape, assumes a local
habitation and a name when the higher descends at the crucial moment, takes the
lower at its peak- tide and fixes upon it its own norm and form. We have said
that all the levels of consciousness have been created—loosened out—by a first
Descent; but in the line of the first. Descent the only level that stands in
front at the outset is Matter, all the other levels are created no doubt but
remain invisible in the background, behind the gross veil of Matter. Each
status stands confined, as it were, to its own region and bides its time when
each will be summoned to concretise itself in Matter. Thus Life was already
there on the plane of Life even when it did not manifest itself in Matter, when
mere Matter, dead Matter was the only apparent reality on the material plane.
When Matter was stirred and churned sufficiently so as to reach a certain
tension and saturation, when it was raised to a certain degree of maturity, as
it were, then Life appeared: Life appeared, not because that was the inevitable
and unavoidable result of the churning, but because Life descended from its own
level to the level of Matter and took Matter up in its embrace. The churning,
the development in Matter was only the occasion, the condition precedent. For,
however much one may shake or churn Matter, whatever change one may create in
it by a shuffling and reshuffling of
Page 40
its elements, one can never produce Life by that alone. A
new and unforeseen factor makes its appearance, precisely because it comes from
elsewhere. It is true all the planes are imbedded, submerged, involved in the
complex of Matter; but, in point of fact, all planes are involved in every
other plane. The appearance or manifestation of a new plane is certainly
prepared, made ready to the last—the last but one —degree by the urge of the
inner, the latent mode of consciousness that is to be; still the actualization,
the bursting forth happens only when the thing that has to manifest itself
descends, the actual form and pattern can be imprinted and established by that
alone. Thus, again, when Life attains a certain level of growth and maturity, a
certain tension and orientation—a definite vector, so to say, in the
mathematical language—when it has, for example, sufficiently organised itself
as a vehicle of the psychic element of consciousness, then. it buds forth into
Mind, but only when the Mind has descended upon it and into it. As in the
previous stage, here also- Life cannot produce Mind, cannot develop into Mind
by any amount of mechanical or chemical operations within itself, by any amount
of permutation and combination or commutation. and culture of its constituent
elements, unless it is seized on. by Mind itself. After the Mind, the next
higher grade of consciousness shall come by the same method and process, viz,
first by an uplifting of the mental consciousness—a certain. widening and
deepening and katharsis of the mental consciousness—and then by a descent,
gradual or sudden, of the level or levels that lie above it.
This, then, is the nature of creation and its process.
First,. there is an Involution, a gradual foreshortening—a disintegration and
concretisation, an exclusive concentration and self-oblivion of consciousness
by which the various levels of diminishing consciousness are brought forth from
the plenary light of the one supreme Spirit, all the levels down to the
complete eclipse in the unconsciousness of the multiple and disintegrate
Matter. Next, there is an Evolution, that is to say, embodiment in Matter of
all these successive states, appearing one by one from the downmost to the
topmost; Matter incarnates, all other states contribute to the incarnation
Page 41
and uphold it, the higher always transforming the lower
in a new degree of consciousness.
Creation, the universe in its activity, is thus not
simply a meaningless play, a pointless fancy. It has a purpose, an end, a goal,
a fulfilment, and it follows naturally a definite pattern of process. The goal
is the concretisation, the materialisation (which includes, of course,
vitalisation and mentalisation) of the Spirit and the spiritual values. It
means the establishment of divine names and forms in terrestrial individuals
leading a divine life, individually and collectively here below.
We have so far spoken of two lines of descent. But in
either case the descent was of a general and impersonal character.
Consciousness was considered as a mere force, movement or quality. There is
another aspect, however, in which the descent is of a particular and personal
character and consciousness is not force or status only but conscious being or
Person.
The various movements or forces of consciousness that
play in the various fields or levels of creation are not merely states or
degrees and magnitudes, currents and streams of consciousness: they are also
personalities with definite forms and figures—not physical indeed, yet very
definite even when subtle and fluidic. Thus the supreme Reality, which is
usually described as the perfect status of Existence-Consciousness-Bliss, is
not merely a principle but a personality. It is the Supreme Person with his
triune nature (Purushottama). It is the Divine as the supreme Knower and Doer
or Creator and Lover. The creation in or from that status of consciousness is
not simply a play or result of the force of consciousness, it is even more
truly the embodiment of a conscious Will; it is the will of the Divine Father
executed by the Divine Mother.
Now, as the Reality along with its consciousness, in the
downward involutionary course towards materialisation, has been gradually
disintegrating itself, multiplying itself, becoming more and more obscure and
dense in separated and isolated units, even so the Person too has been
following a parallel course of disintegration and multiplication and
obscuration
Page 42
and isolation-At the origin lies, as we have said, the
Perfect Person, the Supreme Person, in his dual aspect of being and nature, appearing
as the supreme purusa and the supreme prakrti, our
Father and our Mother in the highest heaven.
Next is the domain of the Supermind with which the manifestation of
the Divine starts. We have said it is the world of typal realities, of the
first seed-realities, where the One and the Many are united and
fused in each other, where the absolute unity of the Supreme maintains itself
in undiminished magnitude and expresses and formulates itself perfectly in and
through the original multiplicity. Here take birth the first personalities,
absolute truth-forms of the Divine. Here are the highest gods, the direct
formations of the Divine himself. Here are the Four Powers and Personalities
of iswara whom Sri Aurobindo has named after the Vaishnava
terminology: (z) Mahavira, embodying the Brahmin quality of Knowledge and Light
and wide Consciousness, (n) Balarama, embodying the Kshatriya quality of Force
and intense dynamism, (w) Pradyumna, embodying the quality of love and
beauty—the Vaishya virtue of mutuality and harmony and solidarity, and (iv)Aniruddha,
embodying the Sudra quality of competent service, of organisation and execution
in detail. Corresponding with these Four there are the other Four Powers and
Personalities of the Divine Mother—Iswari: (i) Maheshwari, (ii)
Mahakali, (iii) Mahalakshmi and (iv} Mahasaraswati. Next in
the downward gradient comes the Overmind where the individualised powers and
personalities of the Divine tend to become self-sufficient and self-regarding;
their absolute unity is loosened and the lines of multiplicity begin to be more
independent of each other, each aiming at a special fulfilment of its own.
Still the veil that is being drawn over the unity is yet transparent which
continues to be sufficiently dynamic. This is the abode of the gods, the true
and high gods: it is these that the Vedic Rishis appear to have envisaged and
sought after. The all gods (visve devah) were indeed
acknowledged' to be but different names and forms of one supreme godhead (devah): it
is the one god, says Rishi Dirghatamas, who is called multifariously whether as
Agni or Yama or Matariswan; it is the one god, again, who is described as
having a thousand heads and a thousand feet. And yet they are separate
entities,
Page 43
each has his own distinct and distinctive character and
attribute, each demands a characteristic way of approach and worship. The
tendency towards an exclusive stress is already at work on this level and it is
the perception of this truth that lies behind the term henotheism used
by European scholars to describe the Vedic Religion.
The next stage of devolution is the Mind proper. There or
perhaps even before, on the lower reaches of the Overmind, the gods have become
all quite separate,—self-centred, each bounded in his own particular sphere and
horizon. The Overmind gods—the true gods—are creators in a world of balanced or
harmoniously held difference; they are powers that fashion each a special
fulfilment, enhancing one another at the same time (parasparam
bhavayanta). Between the Over-mind and the Mind there is a class of
lesser gods—they have been called formateurs; they do not
create in the strict sense of the term, they give form to what the anterior
gods have created and projected. These form-makers that consolidate the encasement,
fix definitely the image, have most probably been envisaged in the Indian dhydnamurtis. But
in the Mind the gods become still more fixed and rigid,
"stereotyped"; the mental gods inspire exclusive systems, extreme and
abstract generalisations, theories and principles and formulae that, even when
they seek to force and englobe all in their cast-iron mould, can hardly
understand or tolerate each other.
Mind is the birth-place of absolute division and
exclusivism —it is the "own home" of egoism. Egoism is that ignorant
mode—a twist or knot of consciousness which cuts up the universal unity into
disparate and antagonistic units: it creates isolated, mutually exclusive
whorls in the harmonious rhythm and vast commonalty of the one consciousness or
conscious existence. The Sankhya speaks of the principle of ego coming or
appearing after the principle of vastness [mahat). The Vast
'is the region above the Mind, where the unitary consciousness is still intact;
with the appearance of the Mind has also appeared an intolerant self-engrossed
individualism that culminates, as its extreme and violent expression, in
the asura—Asura, the mentalised vital being.
The Asura or the Titan stands where consciousness
descends
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from the Mind into the Vital or Life-Force. He is the
personification of ambition and authority and arrogance, he is the intolerant
and absolute self-seeker—he is Daitya, the son of division. The Asura belongs
to what we call the Higher Vital; but lower down in the Mid Vital, made wholly
of unmixed life impulses, appear beings that are still less luminous, less
controlled, more passionate, vehement and. violent in their self-regarding
appetite. They are the Rakshasas. If the Asura is perverse power, the Rakshasa
is insatiate hunger.
All the ancient legends about a principle—and a
personality —of Denial and Ignorance, of an Everlasting Nay—refer to this fact
of a descending consciousness, a Fall. The Vedantic mayd, spoken
of sometimes as the Dark Mother, seems to be the personification of the lower
Overmind, Jehovah and Satan of the Hebrews, Olympians and Titans of the Greeks,
Ahriman and Ahura Mazda of old Iran, the sons of Diti and Aditi the Indian
Puranas speak of, are powers and personalities of consciousness when it has
descended entirely into the mind and the vital where the division is complete.
These lower reaches have completely lost the unitary consciousness; still there
are beings even here that have succeeded in maintaining it as a memory or an
aspiration, although in a general way the living reality of the oneness is
absent. It is significant that the term asura which came to
mean in classical and mythological ages a + sura, not-god,
the Titan, had originally a different connotation and etymology, asu +
ra, one having force or strength, and was used as a general attribute
of all the gods. The degradation in the sense of the word is a pointer to the
spiritual Fall: Satan was once Lucifer, the bringer or bearer of light. We may
mention in this connection that these beings of which we are speaking, dwelling
in unseen worlds, are of two broad categories—(1) beings that are native to
each plane and immutably confined and bound to that plane, and (2) those that
extend their existence through many or all planes and assume on each plane the
norm and form appropriate to that plane. But this is a problem of individual
destiny with which we are not concerned at present.
We were speaking of the descent into the Vital, the
domain of dynamism, desire and hunger. The Vital is also the field of some
strong creative Powers who follow, or are in secret
Page 45
contact with the line of unitary consciousness, who are
open to influences from a deeper or higher or subtler consciousness. Along with
the demons there is also a line of daimona, guardian angels,
in the hierarchy of vital beings. Much of what is known as aesthetic or
artistic creation derives its spirit from this sphere. Many of the gods of
beauty and delight are denizens of this heaven. Gandharvas and Kinnaras are
here, Dionysus and even Apollo perhaps (at least in their mythological
aspect—in their occult reality they properly belong to the Overmind which is
the own home of the gods), many of the angels, seraphs and cherubs dwell here.
In fact, the mythological heaven for the most part can be located in this
region.
All this is comprised within what we term the Higher or
the Middle Vital. In the lower vital, we have said, consciousness has become
still more circumscribed, dark, ignorantly obstinate, disparately
disintegrated. It is the seed-bed of lust and cruelty, of all that is small and
petty and low and mean, all that is dirt and filth. It is here that
we place the pisacas, djinns, ghouls and ghosts, and vampires,
beings who possess the "possessed".
Further down in the scale where life-force touches
Matter, where Life is about to precipitate as Matter, appear beings of a still
lower order, of smaller dimensions and magnitudes— imps, elfs, pixies, goblins,
gnomes, fairies or dryads and naiads. There are even creatures or entities so
close to Matter that they come into being and pass away with the building up
and breaking of a definite pattern of material organisation. This
individualisation of consciousness as beings or persons seems to disappear altogether
when we enter the strictly material plane. There is here only an agglomeration
of uniform dead particles.
We have thus far followed the course of the break-up of
Personality, from the original one supreme Person, through a continuous process
of multiplication and disintegration, of parcellation and crystallisation into
more and more small self-centred units, until we reach the final pulverisation
as purely material physico-chemical atoms. Now with the reversal of
consciousness, in its return movement, we have again a process of growth and
building up of individuality and personality, with the awakening and ascension
of consciousness from level
page 46
to level on the physical plane and in the material
embodiment, there occurs too an evolution of the personal aspect of the
reality.
We say that at the lowest level of involution, in
Matter,. where consciousness has zero magnitude, there is no personality or
individuality. It is all a mechanical play of clashing particles that
constantly fly apart or come together according to the force or the resultant
of forces that act upon them. An individuality means a bounded form as its
basis of reaction and a form that tends to persist and grow by assimilation; it
means a centre of a definite manner and pattern of reaction. Individuality, in
its literal sense, designates that which cannot be divided (in+
dividus). Division is only another name for death for the particular
entity. Even in the case of cell-division or self-division of some lower
organisms, in the first instance the original living entity disappears and,
secondly, the succeeding entities, created by division, always re-form
themselves again into integral wholes. A material particle, on the other hand,
is divisible ad infinitum. We have been able to divide even an
atom (which means also that which cannot be divided) to such
an extent as to reduce it to a mere charge of energy, nay, we have sublimated
it to a geometrical point. Individualisation starts with the coming of life. It
is a ganglion of life-force round which a particular system of action and
reaction weaves. itself. The characteristic of individuality is that each one
is unique, each relates itself to others and to the environment in its own way,
each expresses itself, puts forth its energy, receives impacts from outside in
a manner that distinguishes. it from others. It is true this character of
individuality is not very pronounced in the earlier or rudimentary forms of
life. Still it is there: it grows and develops slowly along the ladder of evolution.
Only in the higher animals it attains a clear and definite norm and form.
In man something else or something more happens. For man
is not merely an individual, he is also a personality. He is the outcome of a
twofold growth and revelation. He has outgrown the vital and climbed into Mind,
and he has dived into the Heart and touched his inner soul, his true psychic
centre. It is this soul that is the source of his personality.
The formulation or revelation of the Psyche marks another
Page 47
line of what we have been describing as the Descent of
Consciousness. The phenomenon of individualisation has at its back the
phenomenon of the growth of the Psyche. It is originally a spark or nucleus of
consciousness thrown into Matter that starts growing and organising itself
behind the veil, in and through the movements and activities of the apparent
vehicle consisting of the triple nexus of Body (Matter) and Life and Mind. The
extreme root of the psychic growth extends perhaps right into the body, consciousness
of Matter, but its real physical basis and tenement is found only with the
growth and formation of the physical heart. And yet the psychic individuality
behind the animal organisation is very rudimentary. All that can be said is
that it is there, in potentia, it exists, it is simple being: it
has not started becoming. This is man's especiality: in him
the psychic begins to be dynamic, to be organised and to organise, it is a
psychic personality that he possesses. Now this flowering of the psychic
personality is due to an especial Descent, the descent of a Person from another
level of consciousness. That Person (or Super- person) is the jivatman, the
Individual Self, the central being of each individual formation. The Jivas are
centres of multiplicity thrown up in the bosom of the infinite Consciousness:
it is the supreme Consciousness eddying in unit formations to serve as the
basis for the play of manifestation. They are 'not within the frame of
manifestation (as the typal formations in the Supermind are), they are above or
beyond or beside it and stand there eternally and invariably in and as part and
parcel of the one supreme Reality—Sachchidananda. But the Jivatman from its own
status casts its projection, representation, delegated formulation—"emanation,"
in the phraseology of the neo-Platonists—into the manifestation of the triple
complex of mind, life and body, that is to say, into the human vehicle, and
thus stands behind as the psychic personality or the soul. This soul, we have
seen, is a developing, organising focus of consciousness growing from below and
comes to its own in the human being: or we can put it the other way, that is to
say, when it comes to its own, then the human being appears. And it has come to
its own precisely by a descent of its own self from above, in the same manner
as with the other descents already described. Now, this "coming to its
own"
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means that it begins henceforth to exercise its royal
power, its natural and inherent divine right, viz, of consciously and directly
controlling and organising its terrestrial kingdom which is the body and life
and mind. The exercise of conscious directive will, supported and illumined by
a self-consciousness, that occurs with the advent of the Mind is a function of the
Purusha, the self-conscious being, in the Mind; but this selfconscious being
has been able to come up, manifest itself and be active, because of pressure of
the underlying psychic personality that has formed here.
Thus we have three characteristics of the human
personality accruing from the psychic consciousness that supports and inspires
it:—(1) self-consciousness: an animal acts, feels and even knows, but man knows
that he acts, knows that he feels, knows even that he knows. This phenomenon of
consciousness turning round upon itself is the hallmark of the human being; (2)
a conscious will holding together and harmonising, fashioning and integrating
the whole external nature evolved till now; (3) a purposive drive, a deliberate
and voluntary orientation towards a higher and ever higher status of
individualisation and personalisation,—not only a horizontal movement seeking
to embrace and organise the normal, the already attained level of
consciousness, but also a vertical movement seeking to raise the level, attain
altogether a new poise of higher organisation.
These characters, it is true, are not clear and
pronounced, do not lie in front, at the beginning of the human personality. The
normal human person has his psyche very much behind; but it is still there
as antaryamin, as the secret Inner Controller. And whatever
the vagaries of the outer instruments or their slavery to the mode of
Ignorance, in and through all that, it is this Inner Guide that holds the reins
and drives upward in the end.
Thus naturally there appear gradations of the human
personality; as the consciousness in the human being rises higher and higher,
the psychic centre organises a higher and higher—a richer, wider,
deeper—personality. The first great conversion, the first turning of the human
personality to a new mode of life and living, that is to say, living even
externally according to the inner truth and reality, the first attempt at a
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conscious harmonisation of the psychic consciousness with
its surface agents and vehicles, is what is known as spiritual initiation. This
may happen and it does happen even when man lives in his normal mental
consciousness. But there is the possibility of growth and evolution and
transformation of personality in higher and higher spiritual degrees through
the upper reaches of the higher Mind, the varying degrees of the Overmind and
finally the Supermind. These are the spheres, the fields, even the continents
of the personality, but the stuff, the substance of the personality, the inner
nucleus of consciousness-force is formed, first, by the flaming aspiration, the
upward drive within the, developing and increasing psychic being itself, and
secondly, by the descent, to a greater and greater degree, of the original
Being from which it emanated. The final coalescence of the fully and integrally
developed psychic being with the supreme splendour of its very source, the
Jivatman, occurs in the Supermind. When this happens the supramental
personality becomes incarnate in the physical body: Matter in the material
plane is transformed into a radiant substance made of pure consciousness, the
human personality becomes a living form of the Divine. Thus the wheel comes
full circle: creation returns to the point from which it started but with an
added significance, a new fulfilment.
The mystery of rebirth in the evolution of the human
personality is nothing but the mystery of the developing psyche. At first this
psyche or soul is truly a being: "no bigger than the thumb"—it is the
hardly audible "still small voice". The experiences of life—sweet or
bitter, happy or unhappy, good or bad, howsoever they may appear to the outward
eye and perception—all the dialectics of a terrestrial existence contribute to
the growth and development of the psychic consciousness. Each span of life
means a special degree or mode of growth necessitated by the inner demand and
drive of the divine Individual seated within the heart. The whole end in view
of this secret soul is to move always towards and be united again with its
Oversoul, its original and high archetype in the Divine Consciousness: the
entire course of its earthly evolution is chalked out and patterned by the
exact need of its growth. Whatever happens in each particular life, all the
Page 50
currents of all the lives converge and coalesce, and
serve the psychic consciousness to swell in volume and intensity and be one
with the Divine Consciousness. Or, in a different imagery, one can say that the
multifarious experiences of various lives are as fuel to the Inner Fire—this
Psychic Agni which is just a spark or a thin tongue at the outset of the human
evolutionary course; but with the addition of fuel from life to life this Fire
flames up, indeed, becomes ultimately a conflagration that burns and purifies
the entire outer vehicle and transforms it into radiant matter—a fit
receptacle, incarnation of the supernal Light. The mounting Fire (the
consciousness-energy secreted in the earth-bound heart of Matter) finally
flares up, discloses itself in its full amplitude and calls and attracts into
it the incandescent supramental Solar Sphere which is the type and pattern it
has to embody and express. This is the marriage of Heaven and Earth, of which
the mystics all over the earth in all ages spoke and sang—to which the Vedic
Rishi refers when he declares:
Dyaur me pita mata prthivi [yam?
The supramentalisation of the personality which means the
perfect divinisation of the personality, is yet not the final end of Nature's
march. Her path is endless, since she follows the trail of infinity. There are
still higher modes of consciousness, or, if they cannot properly be called
higher, other modes of consciousness that lie in waiting to be brought out and
placed and established in' the front of terrestrial evolution. Only,
supramentalisation means the definite crossing over from Ignorance, from every
trace and shadow of Ignorance, into the abiding and perennial Knowledge and
Freedom. Thence-forward the course of Nature's evolution may be more of the
kind of expression than ascension; for, beyond the Supermind it is very
difficult to speak of a higher or lower order of consciousness. Everything
thereafter is in the full perfect light— the difference comes in the mode or
manner or stress of expression. However, that is a problem with which we are
not immediately concerned.
We have spoken of four lines of Descent in the evolution
1 The Heaven is my Father and this Earth my Mother.
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and organisation of consciousness. There yet remains a
fifth line. It is more occult. It is really the secret of
secrets, the Supreme Secret. It is the descent of the Divine
himself. The Divine, the supreme Person himself descends, not indirectly
through emanations, projections, partial or lesser formulations, but directly
in his own plenary self. He descends not as a disembodied force acting as a
general movement, possessing, at the most, other objects and persons as its
medium or instrument, but in an embodied form and in the fullness of his
consciousness. The Indian word for Divine Incarnation, avatara, literally
means he who has descended. The Divine comes down himself as a
terrestrial being, on this material plane of ours, ,in order to raise the
terrestrial and material Nature to a new status in her evolutionary course—even
so He incarnated as the Great Boar who, with his mighty tusk, lifted a solid
mass of earth from out of the waters of the Deluge. It is his purpose to effect
an ascension of consciousness, a transmutation of being, to establish a truly
New Order, a New Dharma, as it is termed—dharmasamsthapanarthaya. On
the human level, he appears as a human person—for two purposes. First of all,
he shows, by example, how the ascension, the transmutation is to be effected,
how a normal human being can rise from a lower status of consciousness to a
higher one. The Divine is therefore known as the Lord of Yoga—for Yoga is the
means and method by which one consciously uplifts oneself, unites oneself with
the Higher Reality. The embodied Divine is the ideal and pattern: he shows the
path, himself walks the path and man can follow, if he chooses. The Biblical
conception of the Son of God—God made flesh—as the intermediary between the
human and the Divine, declaring, "I am the Way and the Goal",
expresses a very similar truth. The Divine takes a body for
another—occult—reason also. It is this: Matter or terrestrial life cannot be changed—changed
radically, that is to say, transformed—by the pure spiritual
consciousness alone, lying above or within; also it is not sufficient to bring
about only that much of change in terrestrial life which can be effected by the
mere spiritual force acting in a general way. It looks as if the physical
transformation which is what is meant by an ascension or emergence in the
evolutionary gradient were possible only by a physical impact embodying
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and canalising the spiritual force: it is with his physical body that
the Divine Incarnation seems to push and lift up physical Nature to a new and
higher status.
The occult seers declare that we are today on the earth
at such a crisis of evolution. Earth and Man and man's earthly life need to be
radically transfigured. The trouble and turbulence, the chaos and confusion
that are now overwhelming this earth, indicate the acute tension before the
release, the detente of a NEW MANIFESTATION.
Page 53
**
The March of
Civilisation
WE are familiar with the phrase "Augustan
Age": it is in reference to a particular period in a nation's history
when its creative power is at its highest both in respect of quantity and
quality, especially in the domain of art and literature, for it is here that
the soul of a people finds expression most easily and spontaneously. Indeed,
if we look at the panorama that the course of human evolution unfolds, we see
epochs of high light in various countries spread out as towering beacons or
soaring peaks bathed in sunlight dominating the flat plains or darksome
valleys of the usual normal periods. Take the Augustan Age itself which has
given the name: it is a very crucial and one of the earlier outflowerings of
the human genius on a considerable scale. We know of the appearance of
individuals on the stage of life each with a special mission and role in
various ages and various countries. They are great men of action, great men
of thought, creative artists or spiritual and religious teachers. In India we
call them Vibhutis (we can include the Avataras—Divine Incarnations—also in
the category). Even so, there is a collective manifestation too, an upsurge
in which a whole race or nation takes part and is carried and raised to a
higher level of living and achievement. There is a tide in the affairs not
only of men, but of peoples also: and masses, large collectivities live on
the crest of their consciousness, feeling and thinking deeply and nobly,
acting and creating powerfully, with breadth of vision and intensity of
aspiration, spreading all around something that is new and not too common, a
happy guest come from else-where.
Ancient Greece, the fountainhead of European
civilisation —of the world culture reigning today, one can almost say—
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found itself epitomised in the Periclean Age. The
light— grace, harmony, sweet reasonableness—that was Greece, reached its
highest and largest, its most characteristic growth in that period. Earlier,
at the very beginning of her life cycle, there came indeed Homer and no later
creation reached a higher or even as high a status of creative power: but it
was a solitary peak, it was perhaps an announcement, not the realisation of
the national glory. Pericles stood as the guardian, the representative, the
emblem and nucleus of a nation-wide efflorescence. Not to speak of the great
names associated with the age, even the common people—more than what was
normally so characteristic of Greece—felt the tide that was moving high and
shared in that elevated sweep of life, of thought and creative activity.
Greece withdrew. The stage was made clear for Rome. Julius Caesar carried the
Roman genius to its sublimest summit: hut it remained for his great nephew to
consolidate and give expression to that genius in its most characteristic
manner and lent his name to a characteristic high-water mark of human
civilisation.
Greece and Rome may be taken to represent two
types of culture. And accordingly we can distinguish two types of elevation
or crest-formation of human consciousness—one of light, the other of power.
In certain movements one feels the intrusion, the expression of light, that
is to say, the play of intelligence, understanding, knowledge, a fresh
outlook and consideration of the world and things, a revaluation in other
terms and categories of a new consciousness. The greatest, at least, the most
representative movement of this kind is that of the Renaissance. It was
really a New Illumination: a flood of light poured upon the mind and
intellect and understanding of the period. There was a brightness, a
brilliance, a happy agility and keenness in the movements of the brain. A
largeness of vision, a curious sensibility, a wide and alert consciousness:
these are some of the fundamental characteristics of this remarkable New
Birth. It is the birth of what has been known as the scientific outlook, in
the broadest sense: it is the threshold of the modern epoch of
humanity. All the modern European languages leaped into maturity, as it were,
each attaining its definitive form and full-blooded individuality. Art and
literature flooded in their magnificent creativeness all nations
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and peoples of the whole continent. The Romantic
Revival, starting somewhere about the beginning of the nineteenth century, is
another outstanding example of a similar phenomenon, of the descent of light
into human consciousness. The light that descended into human consciousness
at the time of the Renaissance captured the higher mind and intelligence— the
Ray touched as it were the frontal lobe of the brain; the later descent
touched the heart, the feelings and emotive sensibility, it evoked more
vibrant, living and powerful perceptions, created varied and dynamic
sense-complexes, new idealisms and aspirations. The manifestation of Power,
the descent or inrush of force—mighty and terrible—has been well recognised
and experienced in the great French Revolution. A violence came out from
somewhere and seized man and society: man was thrown out of his gear, society
broken to pieces. There came a change in the very character and even nature
of man: and society had to be built upon other foundations. The past was
gone. Divasa gatah. Something very similar has happened
again more recently, in Russia. The French Revolution brought in the
bourgeois culture, the Russian Revolution has rung in the Proletariate.
In modern India, the movement that led her up to
Independence was at a crucial moment a mighty evocation of both Light and
Power. It had not perhaps initially the magnitude, the manifest scope or
scale of either the Renaissance or the Great Revolutions we mention. But it
carried a deeper import, its echo far-reaching into the future of humanity.
For it meant nothing less than the spiritual awakening of India and therefore
the spiritual regeneration of the whole world: it is the harbinger of the new
epoch in human civilisation.
These larger human movements are in a sense
anonymous. They are not essentially the creation of a single man as are some
of the well-known religious movements. They throw up great aspiring souls,
strong men of action, indeed, but as part of themselves, in their various
aspects, facets, centres of expression, lines of expansion. An Augustus, a
Pericles, a Leo X, a Louis XIV, or a Vikramaditya are
not more than nuclei, as I have already said, centres of reference round
which their respective epoch crystallises as a peak culture unit. They are
not creators or originators; they are rather organisers. A
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Buddha, a Christ or a Mohammed or even a Napoleon or
Caesar or Alexander are truly creators: they bring with them something—some
truth, some dynamic revelation—that was not there before. They realise and
embody each a particular principle of being, a unique mode of consciousness—a
new 'gift to earth and mankind. Movements truly anonymous, however, have no
single nucleus or centre of reference: they are multinucleur. The names that
adorn the Renaissance are
many, it had no single head; the men through whom the great French Revolution unrolled itself were many in number, that is to say, the chiefs, who represented each a face or phase of the surging movement.
The cosmic spirit works itself out in the world
and in human affairs in either of these forms : (1) as embodied in a single
personality and (2) as an impersonal movement, sometimes through many
personalities, sometimes through a few outstanding personalities and
sometimes even quite anonymously as a maps movement. Either mode has each its
own special purpose, its function in the cosmic labour, its contribution to
the growth and unfoldment of the human consciousness upon earth as a whole.
Generally, we may say, when it is an intensive work, when it is a new truth
that has to be disclosed and set in man's heart and consciousness, then the
individual is called up and undertakes the work: when, however, the truth
already somehow found or near at hand is to be spread wide and made familiar
to men and established upon earth, then the larger anonymous movements are
born and have sway.
Indeed, these movements, the appearance of great
souls upon earth and the manifestation of larger collective surges in human
society, are not isolated happenings, having no reference or point of contact
with one another. On the contrary, they are two limbs of a global
evolutionary process. In and through them across countries and centuries the
spirit of humanity moves towards greater and greater fulfilment. Evolution
means the growth of consciousness. In man in his.collective existence the
growth continues: it lies in two directions. First of all, in extension. A
sufficiently large physical body is needed to house the growing life and
consciousness: therefore the unicellular organism has developed into the
multicellular. In the same way, in the earliest stages of human
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society, the light and power of consciousness,
characteristic of that age, found expression among a few only: it was the age
of representative individuals, leaders—Rishi, Magi, Patriarch, Judge, King.
Next a stage came when the cultural consciousness widened and, instead of
scattered individuals or some families, we have a large group, a whole class
or section of society who become the guardian of the light: thus arose the
Brahmin, the elite, the cultured class, the aristocracy of
talents. The light and culture filters down further and embraces larger
masses of people who take living interest and share in the creative
activities of man, in the higher preoccupations of mind and thought; this is
the age of enlightened bourgeoisie. In comparatively recent times what is
familiarly known as the "middle class" was the repository and
purveyor of human culture.
The light sinks further down and extends still
more its scope seeking to penetrate and encircle the whole of humanity. The
general mass of mankind, the lowest strata of society have to be taken in,
elevated and illumined. That must be the natural and inevitable consummation
of all progress and evolution. And that is the secret sense and justification
of the Proletarian Revolution of today. Although, the many names and forms
given to it by its violent partisans do not bring out or sufficiently honour
the soul and spirit that informs it.
This then is the pattern of cultural development
as it proceeds in extension and largeness. It moves in ever- widening
concentric circles. Individuals, small centres few and far between, then
larger groups and sections, finally vast masses are touched and moved (and
will be moulded one day) by the infiltrating light. That is how in modern
times all movements are practically world-wide, encompassing all nations and
peoples: there seems to be nothing left that is merely local or parochial. It
is a single wave, as it were, that heaves up the whole of humanity.
Political, social, economic and even spiritual movements, although not exactly
of the same type or pattern, all are interrelated, interlocked, inspired by a
common breath and move from one end of the earth to the other. They seem to
be but modulations of the same world- theme. A pulse-beat in Korea or Japan
is felt across the Pacific in America and across that continent, traversing
again
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the Atlantic it reaches England, sways the old
continent in 1 its turn and once more leaps forward through the Asiatic
vastnesses back again to its place of origin. The wheel comes , indeed
full circle: it is one movement girdling the earth. What one thinks or acts
in one corner of the globe is thought and acted simultaneously by others at
the farthest corner. Very evidently it is the age of radiography and
electronics.
In the early stages of humanity its history
consists of the isolated histories of various peoples and lands:
intercommunication was difficult, therefore all communion was of the nature
of infiltration and indirect influence. The difference between countries far
distant from each other were well marked and very considerable in respect of
their cultures and civilisations. To put it in a somewhat scholarly yet
graphic manner, we can say, the isometric chart of the tides of civilisation
in various countries over the globe in those days presents a very unequal and
tortuous figure. On the other hand, a graph depicting the situation in modern
times would be formed by lines that are more even, uniform and straight. In other
words, the world has become one, homogeneous: a consciousness has grown same
or similar on the whole in out- look and life-impulse embracing all peoples
and races in a tight embrace. The benefit of the descending or manifesting
Light is now open equally and freely to each and every member of
the human kind.
Not only in extension but the growth or evolution
has progressed in another direction. There has not only been a quantitative
but also a qualitative development. Culture movements have grown in intent,
in depth or elevation, in the meaning and significance of the consciousness
involved. And they have converged towards a single aim and purpose. That
purpose is not only the establishment of the global consciousness, but the
expression and embodiment of the highest, the supreme consciousness. The
process here too, as in the domain of extension, is one of graduation,
advance by stages. The light, the light of awakening consciousness first
touches the more easily accessible parts of human nature, the higher domains
that are not too much involved in the gross material or animal nature. It is
the realm of thoughts and ideas, of idealism,
imagination and aspiration: it is man's mind, which
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is the least heavily weighted or ballasted by a
downward gravitational pull and the most buoyant and supple—the Ariel in him.
It is his head that first receives the glow of the morning sun.
If we look at Europe once again and cast a glance
at its origins, we find at the source the Greece-Roman culture. It was
pre-eminently a culture based upon the powers of mind and reason: it included
a strong and balanced body (both body natural and body politic) under the
aegis of mens sana (a sound mind). The light that was Greece
was at its zenith / a power of the higher mind and intelligence, intuitively
dynamic in one—the earlier—phase through Plato, Pythagoras, Heraclitus and
the mystic philosophers, and discursively and scientifically rational through
the Aristotelian tradition. The practical and robust Roman did not indulge in
the loftier and subtler activities of the higher or intutive mind; his was
applied intelligence and its characteristic turn found expression in law and
order and governance. Virgil was a representative poet of the race, finely
sensitive and yet very self-conscious —earth-bound and mind-bound—as a
creative artist: a clear and careful intelligence with an idealistic
imagination that is yet sober and fancy-free is the very hall mark of his
poetic genius. In the post-Roman age this bias for mental consciousness or
the play of reason and intellectual understanding moved towards the
superficial and more formal faculties of the brain ending in what is called
scholasticism: it meant stagnation and decadence. It is out of this slough
that the Renaissance raised the mind of Europe and bathed it with a new
light. That movement gave to the mind a wider scope, an alert curiosity, a
keener understanding; it is, as I have said, the beginning of that modern
mentality which is known as the scientific outlook, that is to say, study of
facts and induction from given data, observation and experience and
experiment instead of the other scholastic standpoint which goes by a
priori the orising and abstraction and deduction and dogmatism.
We may follow a little more closely the march of
the centuries in their undulating movement. The creative intelligence of the
Renaissance too belonged to a region of the higher mind, a kind of
inspirational mind. It had not the altitude or even the
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depth of the Greek mind nor its subtler
resonances : but it regained and re-established and carried to a new degree
the spirit of inquiry and curiosity, an appreciation of human motives and
preoccupations, a rational understanding of man and the mechanism of the
world. The original intuitive fiat, the. imaginative brilliance, the spirit
of adventure (in the mental as well as the physical world) that inspired the
epoch gradually dwindled: it gave place to an age of consolidation,
organisation, stabilisation—the classical age. The seventeenth century Europe
marked another peak of Europe's civilisation. That is the Augustan Age to
which we have referred. The following century marked a further decline of the
Intuition and higher imagination and we come to the eighteenth century terre
a terre rationalism. Great figures still adorned that age— stalwarts
that either stuck to the prevailing norm and gave it a kind of stagnant
nobility or already leaned towards the new light that was dawning once more.
Pope and Johnson, Montesquieu and Voltaire are its high-lights. The
nineteenth century brought in another crest wave with a special gift to
mankind; apparently it was a reaction to the rigid classicism and dry
rationalism of the preceding age, but it came burdened with a more positive
mission. Its magic name was Romanticism. Man opened his heart, his higher feeling
and nobler emotional surge, his subtler sensibility and a general sweep of
his vital being to the truths and realities of his own nature and of the
cosmic nature. Not the clear white and transparent almost glaring light of
reason and logic, of the brain mind, but the rosy or rainbow tint of the
emotive and aspiring personality that seeks in and through the cosmic
panorama and dreams of
A light that was ne'er on sea or land...
A glory that hath passed away from earth.
The Romantic Revival was a veritable source
movement:
it was, one can say, a kind of watershed from
where various streams of new creation and fresh adventure flowed down in all
directions. Its echoes and repurcussions are met with even today and
continue. The next stage that followed naturally and inevitably was man's
preoccupation with his sense being,
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his external, his physical and material
personality. It is the age of Naturalism, Realism, Pragmatism, Scientism: it
proclaims the birth of the economic man. From the heart and emotions we drop
down into the field of the nervous and sensuous existence, from the vital
sphere into the sphere of the body. And that is where we are today. It means
that we have been made more than ever self-conscious on this plane and of
this personality of ours. We have been given and are being given greater
knowledge of its mechanism; we are intensively (and extensively too) getting
familiar with all the drawbacks and lacunae that are there so that we can
remedy them—and discover new latent forces too,—and re-create and possess a
truly "brave new world".
That is how the spirit of progress and evolution
has worked and advanced in the European world. And one can take it as the
pattern of human growth generally; but in the scheme described above we have
left out one particular phase and purposely. I refer to the great event of
Christ and Christianity. For without that European civilisation loses more
than half of its import and value. After the Roman Decline began the
ebb-tide, the trough, the dark shadow of the deepening abyss of the Middle
Ages. But even as the Night fell and darkness closed around, a new light
glimmered, a star was born. A hope and a help shone "in a naughty
world". It was a ray of consciousness that came from a secret cave, from
a domain hidden behind and deep within in the human being. Christ brought a
leaven into the normal manifest mode of consciousness, an other-worldly mode
into the worldly life. He established a living and dynamic contact with the
soul, the inner person in man, the person that is behind but still rules the
external personality made of mind and life and body consciousness. The Christ
revelation was also characteristic in the sense that it came as ' a large,
almost a mass movement—this approach of the soul personality to earthly life.
The movement faded or got adulterated, deformed like all human things; but
something remained as a permanent possession of man's heritage.
This episode links up with the inner story of
mankind, its spiritual history. The growing or evolving consciousness of-man
was not only an outgoing and widening movement: it was also a heightening, an
ascent into ranges that are not normally
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perceived, towards summits of our true reality.
We have spoken of the Graeco-Roman culture as the source and foundation of
European civilisation; but apart from that there was a secret vein of life
that truly vivified it, led it by an occult but constant influence along
channels and achievements that are meant ' to serve the final goal and
purpose. The Mysteries prevalent and practised in Greece itself and Crete and
the occult rites of Egyptian priests, the tradition of a secret knowledge and
discipline found in the Kabbalah, the legendary worship of gods and
goddesses—sometimes confused, sometimes identified with Nature forces—all
point to the existence of a line of culture which is known in India as Yoga.
If all other culture means knowledge, Yoga is the knowledge of knowledge. As
the Upanishad says, there are two categories of knowledge, the superior and the
inferior. The development of the mind and life and body belongs to the domain
of Inferior Knowledge: the development of the soul, the discovery of the
Spirit means the Superior Knowledge.
This knowledge remained at the outset scattered,
hidden, confined to a few, a company of adepts: it had almost no direct
contact with the main current of life. Its religious aspect too was so
altered and popularised as to represent and serve the secular life. The
systematisation and propagation of that knowledge—at least the aspiration for
that knowledge—was attempted on an effective scale in the Hebrew Old
Testament. But then a good amount of externalities, of the Inferior Knowledge
was mixed up with the inner urge and the soul perception. The Christ with his
New Testament came precisely with the mission of cleaning the Augean stables,
in place of the dross and coverings, the false and deformed godheads, to
instal something of the purest ray of the inner consciousness, the unalloyed
urge of the soul, the demand of our spiritual personality. The Church sought
to build up society on that basis, attempting a fusion of the spiritual and
the temporal power, so that instead of a profane secular world, a mundane or
worldly world, there may be established God's own world, the City of God.
The drive towards the building of Heaven upon
earth and with earth, the materialisation of the Spirit on a cosmic scale,
the remodelling of the whole human society in spiritual terms
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was the secret inspiring the other Semitic Revelation,
that of Mohammed. The Arab Master sought to bring down and establish and
express in life-force what the Rabi of Bethlehem saw and felt in the inner
heart—one was a lover, the other a servant warrior of God.
Turning to India we find a fuller and
completer—if not a global—picture of the whole movement. India, we may say,
is the spiritual world itself: and she epitomised the curve of human progress
in a clearer and more significant manner. ^ Indian history, not its political
but its cultural and spiritual history, divides itself naturally into great
movements with corresponding epochs each dwelling upon and dealing with one
domain in the hierarchy of man's consciousness. The stages and epochs are
well known: they are—(1) Vedic, (2) Upanishadic, (3) Darshanas—roughly from
Buddha to Shankara, (4) Puranic, (5) Bhagavata or the Age of
Bhakti, and finally (6) the Tantric. The last does not mean that it is the
latest revelation, the nearest to us in time, but that it represents a kind
of complementary movement, it was there all along, for long at least, and in
which the others find their fruition and consummation. We shall explain
presently. The force of consciousness that came and moved and moulded the
first and the earliest epoch was Revelation. It was a power of direct vision
and occult will and cosmic perception . Its physical seat is somewhere behind
and or just beyond the crown of the head: the peak of man's manifest being
that received the first touch of Surya Savitri (the supreme Creative
Consciousness) to whom it bowed down uttering the invocation mantra of
Gayatri. The Ray then entered the head at the crown and illumined it: the
force of consciousness that ruled there is Intuition, the immediate
perception of truth and reality, the cosmic consciousness gathered and
concentrated at that peak. That is Upanishadic knowledge. If the source and
foundation of the Vedic initiation was occult vision, the Upanishad meant a
pure and direct Ideation. The next stage in the coming down or propagation of
the Light was when it reached further down into the brain and the
philosophical outlook grew with rational understanding and discursive
argumentation as the channel for expression, the power to be cultivated and
the limb to be developed. The Age of the Darshanas or Systems
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of Philosophy started with the Buddha and
continued till it reached its peak- in Shankaracharya. The age sought to give
a bright and strong mental, even an intellectual body to the spiritual
light/the consciousness of the highest truth and reality. In the Puranic Age
the vital being was touched by the light of the spirit and principally on the
highest, the mental level of that domain. It meant the advent of the element
of feeling and emotiveness and imagination into the play of the Light, the
beginning of their reclamation. This was rendered more concrete and more
vibrant and intense in the next stage of the movement. The whole emotional
being was taken up into the travailing crucible of consciousness. We may name
it also as the age of the Bhagavatas, god-lovers, Bhaktas. It reached its
climax in Chaitanya whose physical passion for God denoted that the lower
ranges of the vital being (its physical foundations) were now stirred in man
to awake and to receive the Light. Finally remains the physical, the most
material to be worked upon and made conscious and illumined. That was the
task of the Tantras. Viewed in that light one can easily understand why
especial stress was laid in that system upon the esoteric discipline of the
five m's (pancha makara), all preoccupied with the handling
and harnessing of the grossest physical instincts and the most material
instruments. The Tantric discipline bases itself upon Nature Power coiled up
in Matter: the release of that all-conquering force through a purification
and opening into the consciousness of the Divine Mother, the transcendent
creatrix of the universe. The dynamic materialising aspect of consciousness
was what inspired the Tantras: the others forming the Vedantic line, on the
whole, were based on the primacy of the static being, the Purusha, aloof and
withdrawing.
The Indian consciousness, we say, presented the
movement as an intensive and inner, a spiritual process: it dealt with the
substance itself, man's very nature and sought to know it from within and
shape it consciously. In Europe where the frontal consciousness is more
stressed and valued, the more characteristic feature of its history is the
unfoldment and metamorphosis of the forms and expressions, the residuary
powers, as it were, of man's evolving personality, individual and social.
To sum up then. Man progresses through cycles of
crest
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movements. They mark an ever-widening circle of
the descent of Light, the growth of consciousness. Thus there is at first a
small circle of elite, a few chosen people at the top, then
gradually the limited aristocracy is widened out into a larger and larger
democracy. One may describe the phenomenon in the Indian terms of the Four
Orders. In the beginning there is the Brahminic culture, culture confined
only to the highest and the fewest possible select representatives. Then came
the wave of Kshatriya culture which found a broader scope among a larger
community. In India, after the age of the Veda and the Upanishad, came the
age of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata which was pre-eminently an age of
Kshatriya-hood. In Europe too it was the bards and minstrels, sages and
soothsayers who originally created, preserved and propagated the cultural
movement: next came the epoch of the Arthurian legends, the age of chivalry,
of knights and templars with their heroic code of conduct and high living. In
the epoch that followed, culture was still further broad-based and spread to
the Vaishya order. It is the culture of the bourgeoisie: it was brought about,
developed and maintained by that class in society preoccupied with the
production or earning of wealth. The economic bias of the literature of the
period has often been pointed out. Lastly the fourth dimension of culture has
made its appearance today when it seeks to be coterminous with the
proletariate. With the arrival of the Sudra, culture has extended to the very
base of the social pyramid in its widest commonalty.
This movement of extension, looked at from the
standpoint of intensiveness, is also a movement of devolution, of
reclamation. The Brahminic stage represents culture that is knowledge; it
touches the mind, it is the brain that is the recipient and instrument of the
Light. The Kshatriya comes into the field when the light, the vibration of awakening,
from the mind comes down into the vital energies, from the brain to the heart
region. The Vaishya spirit has taken up man still at a lower region, the
lower vital: the economic man that has his gaze fixed upon his stomach and
entrails. Lastly, the final stage is reached when physical work, bodily
labour, material service have attained supreme importance and are considered
almost as the only values worth the name for a human being. To walk
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and work firmly upon Earth the Light needs a
strong pair of feet. Therefore, the Veda says, Padbhyam sudro
ajayata, out of the feet of the Cosmic Godhead the Sudra was born.
That is how man has become and is becoming
integrally conscious—conscious in and of all parts of his being. He is
awakening and opening to the light that descends from above: indeed the true
light, the light of truth is something transcendent and it is that that comes
down and slowly inhabits the world and possesses humanity. Its progress marks
the steps of evolution. It means the gradual enlightening and illumining of
the various layers of our being, the different strands of consciousness from
the higher to the lower, from the less dense to the more dense, from mind to
the body. It means also in the same process a canalisation, materialisation
and fixing upon earth and in the physical being of the increasing powers of
the Light.
The Light as it descends from its own home above
to the lower levels of our being expresses itself no doubt in one way, but
also gets diminished, modified, even deformed in another respect. The work of
purification certainly goes on and until that is complete and there comes the
fullest expression, it will continue. The action of light on the physical
plane, for example, on the body of the Cosmic Being is so blurred and
confusing apparently that it looks almost like the action of Darkness. And
yet the Dark Night of the soul is not simply the obscurity of Ignorance. It
is only the mud that lay' diffused or settled in the being which has come up
in its gathered mass in the process of churning and cleaning and appears like
an obscure screen.
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EDUCATION IS ORGANIZATION
Education is organisation. Mind's education means
organisation of mental faculties. Organisation naturally involves development.
The faculties in the normal and natural state are an undeveloped disorganised
lot, a confused mass,—unformed, ill-formed ideas, notions, thoughts, form a
jumble. They have no purpose, no direction, no common impulse or end, each runs
in its own way. The mind's faculties such for example as attention, memory,
discrimination, reasoning, cogent thinking have to be clear and efficient and
learn how to work harmoniously for a common objective. In the process and for
that purpose they have to be developed, that is to say each of them has to be
strong, able, ample, concentrated. They have to present a united front and
function towards an ever-increasing consciousness and knowledge.
As for the mental faculties so for the faculties of the
vital. The normal vital being in man is in a greater and perhaps more dangerous
chaos. The impulsions, emotions, upsurges that belong to this domain have not
so much to be developed or increased as to be purified, made conscious, yoked
together in a common drive towards a harmonious dynamic realisation in life and
life's achievements. And lastly the organisation in the physical body. The
limbs of the body have not even growth, they do not move together in a balanced
and rhythmic way. Some are unhealthy, some do not work, some others are
overworked. These too have to be co-ordinated, each set in its place and made
to function in unison with others. That is physical education and that too
means perfect organisation.
We have said that organisation means working for a common
end and common purpose. That comes from an opening into a deeper and higher
level of being. We name it the soul.
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The soul's purpose, the soul's destiny has to be achieved
and fulfilled. An organised and educated mind and life and bodymeans
to be the best and the most perfect vehicle for the expression upon earth of
the soul's consciousness.
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