According to Sri Aurobindo : At present Humanity is undergoing an evolutionary crisis….
At present mankind is undergoing an evolutionary crisis in which is concealed a choice
of its destiny; for a stage has been reached in which the human mind has achieved in certain directions an enormous development while in others it stands arrested and bewildered and can no longer find its way. A structure of the external life has been raised up by man’s ever-active mind and life-will, a structure of an unmanageable hugeness and complexity, for the service of his mental, vital, physical claims and urges, a complex political, social, administrative, economic, cultural machinery, an organised collective means for his intellectual, aesthetic and material satisfaction. Man has created a system of civilisation which has become too big for his limited mental capacity and understanding and his still more limited spiritual and moral capacity to utilise and manage, a too dangerous servant of his blundering ego and its appetites. …A greater whole-being, whole-knowledge, whole-power is needed to weld all into a grater unity of whole-life.
Two forces which
can help are , Internationalism and the religion of humanity. However the force
of internationalism may be contradicting another truth and force that is
nationalism and this can block the move to internationalism unless nation soul
idea and spiritual universal idea of India takes the lead.
Krunvanto Vishwam
Aryan,
Ettdeshe prasutasya
sakashat …
To awaken soul in
man, to make him live by soul and not by ego is the inner meaning of religion.
To this religion of humanity is progressing. Here again Sanatana Dharma, the
mother of religion to use term by Swami Vivekananda is going to be the religion
of humanity as that which is eternal can only be universal and vice versa.
As a part of this crisis, and as an aid to
the higher choice that can be made by humanity, Sri Aurobindo perceives two
important phenomena of the modern world which present a great sign of hope.
These two phenomena are those of internationalism and of religion of humanity.
But these two phenomena need to be understood in their inner implications. For
internationalism seems to oppose the truth and force of nationalism, and this
opposition can be fatal to a harmonious transition to a new world of harmony.
There is today a sentiment helped and stimulated by the trend of forces that
favours the creation of an international world organisation that may ultimately
result in a possible form of unification. This sentiment is a cosmopolitan and
international sentiment. At one stage, it came to be presented concretely in the
conception of the League of Nations. As Sri Aurobindo points out, this conception was not well inspired in its form or destined to
have a considerable longevity or a supremely successful career. But the very
fact that this idea was presented and even manifested in a concrete form, even
though for a short term, was in itself an event of capital importance and meant
the ushering in of a new era in world history. ( Kireet Joshi )
If this is not
solution then there is no solution. If this is not the way then there is no
other way. The terrestrial evolution must pass beyond man and the form of life
must be born that is nearer to the divine.
Sri Aurobindo affirms forcefully:
… if this is not the solution, then there is no solution; if
this is not the way, then there is no way for the human kind. Then the
terrestrial evolution must pass beyond man as it has passed beyond the animal
and a greater race must come that will be capable of the spiritual change, a
form of life must be born that is nearer to the divine. After all there is no
logical necessity for the conclusion that the change cannot begin at all
because its perfection is not immediately possible. A decisive turn of mankind
to the spiritual ideal, the beginning of a constant ascent and guidance towards
the heights may not be altogether impossible, even if the summits are
attainable at first only by the pioneer few and far-off to the tread of the
race. And that
beginning may mean the descent of an influence that will alter at once the
whole life of mankind in its orientation and enlarge for ever as did the
development of his reason and more than any development of the reason, its
potentialities and all its structure.
A decisive turn, a
constant ascent to the heights even if the ascent is possible only for few now
and not for race is the inevitable turn to the future and in that process India’s march to her destiny is going to
play a key role.
India’s central conception and Her
ceaseless pursuit of it
The concept of India on the March has
to be seen also from the perspective of the foundations of Indian culture, how
through millenium this vast nation clinged to its central idea, the Nation soul
and then progressed through the cycles of society. Also how role of India has
to be crucial in this march of mankind to the next future through this
evolutionary crisis. What is India’s central conception and theme of evolution?
India’s central conception is that of Eternal and involution and evolution of
Spirit in Matter and how a material man grows and through rebirth raises to be
mental man and then above.
In the words of Sri Aurobindo,
“India’s central conception is
that of the Eternal, the Spirit here encased in matter, involved and immanent
in it and evolving on the material plane by rebirth of the individual up the
scale of being till in mental man it enters the world of ideas and realm of
conscious morality, dharma.”
India is a living culture. The
peculiarity is a living culture with harmony and reconciliation of spiritual
and temporal: We need to rediscover key to this harmony and the repair of the
key, if needed has to be from within.
“Spiritual and temporal have
indeed to be perfectly harmonised, for the spirit works through mind and body.
But the purely intellectual or heavily material culture of the kind that Europe
now favours bears in its heart the seed of death; for the living aim of culture
is the realisation on earth of the kingdom of heaven. India, though its urge is
towards the Eternal, since that is always the highest, the entirely real, still
contains in her own culture and her own philosophy a supreme reconciliation of
the eternal and the temporal and she need not seek it from outside.”
The form of interdependence of mind,
body and spirit in a harmonious culture
On the same principle, the form
of the interdependence of mind, body and spirit in a harmonious culture is
important as well as the pure spirit; for the form is the rhythm of the spirit.
It follows that to break up the form is to injure the spirit’s self-expression
or at least to put it into grave peril. Change of forms there may and will be,
but the novel formation must be a new self-expression or self-creation
developed from within; it must be characteristic of the spirit and not
servilely borrowed from the embodiments of an alien nature.
Difference is
making spirituality leading motive and determining power and being obstinately
recalcitrant to it
…
Spirituality is not the monopoly of India; however, it may hide submerged in
intellectualism or hid in other concealing veils, it is a necessary part of
human nature. But the difference is between spirituality made the leading
motive and the determining power of both the inner and the outer life and
spirituality suppressed, allowed only under disguises or brought in as a minor
power, its reign denied or put off in favour of the intellect or of a dominant
materialistic vitalism.
India alone, with whatever fall or
decline of light and vigour, has remained faithful to the heart of the
spiritual motive. India alone is still obstinately recalcitrant; for Turkey and
China and Japan, say her critics, have outgrown that foolishness, by which it
is meant that they have both grown rationalistic and materialistic. India alone
as a nation, whatever individuals or a small class may have done, has till now
refused to give up her worshipped Godhead or bow her knee to the strong
reigning idols of rationalism, commercialism and economism, the successful
iron gods of the West. Affected she has been, but not yet overcome. Her surface
mind rather than her deeper intelligence has been obliged to admit many Western
ideas, _ liberty, equality, democracy and others, – and to reconcile them with
her Vedantic Truth; but she has not been altogether at ease with them in the
Western form and she seeks about already in her thought to give to them an
Indian which cannot fail to be a spiritualised turn.
India will lead or will be self
oblivious
Either India will be rationalised and industrialised
out of all recognition and she will be no longer India or else she will be the
leader in a new world-phase, aid by her example and cultural infiltration the
new tendencies of the West and spiritualise the human race.
The
basic difference between European mind and Indian mind:
The
tendency of the normal Western mind is to live from below upward and from out
inward. A strong foundation is taken in the vital and material nature and
higher powers are invoked and admitted only to modify and partially uplift the
natural terrestrial life. The inner existence is formed and governed by the
external powers. India’s constant aim has been, on the contrary, to find a
basis of living in the higher spiritual truth and to live from the inner spirit
outwards, to exceed the present way of mind, life and body, to command and
dictate to external Nature. As the old Vedic seers put it, "Their divine
foundation was above even while they stood below, let its rays be settled deep
within us," nicinah sthur upari budhna esam asmen antar nihitah
ketavab syuh. Now that difference is no unimportant subtlety but of a
great and penetrating practical consequence.
But if the
spiritual ideal points the final way to a triumphant harmony of manifested
life, then it is all-important for India not to lose hold of the truth, not to
give up the highest she knows and barter it away for a perhaps more readily
practicable but still lower ideal alien to her true and constant nature.
A new creation is a must..with Shakti
within
A new creation of the old Indian svadharma, not
a transmutation to some law of the Western nature, is our best way to serve
and increase the sum of human progress.
…the forms of a culture are the right
rhythm of its spirit and in breaking the rhythm we may expel the spirit and
dissipate the harmony for ever. Yes, but though the Spirit is eternal in its
essence and in the fundamental principles of its harmony immutable, the actual
rhythm of its self-expression in form is ever mutable. Immutable in its being
and in the powers of its being but richly mutable in life, that is the very
nature of the Spirit’s manifested existence. And we have to see too whether the
actual rhythm of the moment is still a harmony or whether it has not become in
the hands of an inferior and ignorant orchestra a discord and no longer
expresses rightly or sufficiently the ancient spirit.
…on our capacity of response to the
eternal Power and Wisdom and the illumination of the Shakti within us and on
our skill in works, the skill that comes by unity with the eternal Spirit
we are in the measure of our light labouring to express; yogah karmasu
kausalam.
Compensated
in later ages by other powers:
If the high spiritualised mind and stupendous
force of spiritual will, tapasya, that characterised ancient
India were less in evidence, there were new gains of spiritual emotion and
sensitiveness to spiritual impulse on the lower planes of consciousness, that
had been lacking before. Architecture, literature, painting, sculpture lost the
grandeur, power, nobility of old, but evoked other powers and motives full of
delicacy, vividness and grace. There was a descent from the heights to the
lower levels, but a descent that gathered riches on its way and was needed for
the fullness of spiritual discovery and experience. The greatness of the
ideals of the past is a promise of greater ideals for the future. A continual
expansion of what stood behind past endeavour and capacity is the one abiding
justification of a living culture.
The double
principle of persistence and mutation
double principle of persistence and mutation or
bear the penalty a decay and deterioration that may taint even its living
centre.
Evolutionary push forward keeping the spirit same
and reshaping forms:
Political system of its own design
It is true that India never evolved either
the scrambling and burdensome industrialism or the parliamentary organisation
of freedom and self-styled democracy characteristic of the bourgeois or Vaishya
period of the cycle of European progress. But the time is passing when the
uncritical praise of these things as the ideal state and the last word of
social and political progress
was
fashionable, their defects are now visible and the greatness of an oriental
civilisation need not be judged by the standard of these western developments.
Indian scholars have attempted to read the modem ideas and types of democracy
and even a parliamentary system into the past of India, but this seems to me an
ill-judged endeavour. There was a strong democratic element, if we must use the
western terms, in Indian polity and even institutions that present a certain
analogy to the parliamentary form, but in reality these features were of
India’s own kind and not at all the same thing as modem parliaments and modern
democracy…It was a clan
or tribal system, kula, founded upon the equality of all the
freemen of the clan or race; this was not at first firmly founded upon the
territorial basis, the migratory tendency was still in evidence or recurred
under pressure and the land was known by the name of the people who occupied
it, the Kuru country or simply the Kurus, the Malava country or the Malavas.
After the fixed settlement within determined boundaries the system of the clan
or tribe continued, but found a basic unit or constituent atom in the settled
village community. The meeting of the people, visah, assembling
for communal deliberation, for sacrifice and worship or as the host for war,
remained for a long time the power-sign of the mass body and the agent of the
active common life with the king as the head and representative,
-- The later
development out of this primitive form followed up to a certain point the
ordinary line of evolution as we see it in other communities, but at the same
time threw up certain very striking peculiarities that owing to the unique
mentality of the race fixed themselves, became prominent characteristics and
gave a different stamp to the political, economic and social factors of Indian
civilisation. The hereditary principle emerged at an early stage and increased
constantly its power and hold on the society until it became everywhere the
basis of the whole organisation of its activities.
The Democratic ideal:
Almost all the types of political
systems viz Anarchy, Socialism, democracy, Capitalism have been tried all
across globe and we have our own Indian model of decentralised democracy which
is as per Indias mission and swabhava. We mus not
imitate models of others as the fallacy
of imitated models is glaring and self destructive.
Sri Aurobindo has detailed writing on
the imitattion, failure and right approach to Polity, history on Polity, the
examples from the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Puranas, the Shastras and the
Smritie, Janapadas, Vishas, Kula, Shreni, Panchyat, Samaj
Chakravartins, and empire builders as protectors of Dharma,
not destroying the local models. The emphasis on the local polity after
independence in panchayat raj is thus going back to roots of Indian polity as
we see still living polity models surviving even in tribal India since ages.
The world is moving on the principles leveraging technologies. The persistent
principle of regional autonomy: the grand ideal and backbone of Indian Polity
reasserted itself whenever central rule was weak.
A Rishi putting spiritual stamp on all:
A peculiar figure for some time was the
Rishi, the man of a higher spiritual experience and knowledge, born in any of
the classes, but exercising an authority by his spiritual personality over all,
revered and consulted by the king of whom he was sometimes the religious
preceptor, and In the then fluid state of social evolution able alone to
exercise an important role in evolving new basic ideas and effecting direct and
immediate changes of the socio-religious ideas and customs of the people. It
was a marked feature of the Indian mind that it sought to attach a spiritual
meaning and a religious sanction to all, even to the most external social and
political circumstances of its life, imposing on all classes and functions an
ideal, not except incidentally of rights and powers, but of duties, a rule of
their action and an ideal way and temperament, character, spirit in the action,
a dharma with a spiritual significance. It was the work of the Rishi to put
this stamp enduringly on the national mind, to prolong and perpetuate it, to
discover and interpret the ideal law and its practical meaning, to cast the
life of the people into the well-shaped ideals and significant forms of a
civilisation founded on the spiritual and religious sense. And in later ages we
find the Brahminic schools of legists attributing their codes, though in
themselves only formulations of existing rule and custom, to the ancient
Rishis. Whatever the developments of the Indian socio-political body in later
days, this original character still exercised its influence, even when all
tended at last to become traditionalised and conventionalised instead of moving
forward constantly in the steps of a free and living practice.” (FOIC)
The cycle of society and the truth of
collective being:
“A people, a great human collectivity, is in
fact an organic living being with a collective or rather—for the word
collective is too mechanical to be true to the inner reality—a common or
communal soul, mind and body. The life of the society like the physical life of
the individual human being asses through a cycle of birth, growth, youth,
ripeness and decline, and if this last stage goes far enough without any arrest
of its course towards decadence, it may perish,—even so all the older peoples
and nations except India and China perished,—as a man dies of old age. But the
collective being has too the capacity of renewing itself, of a recovery and a
new cycle. For in each people there is a soul idea or life idea at work, less
mortal than its body, and if this idea is itself sufficiently powerful, large
and force-giving and the people sufficiently strong, vital and plastic in mind
and temperament to combine stability with a constant enlargement or new
application of the power of the soul idea or life idea in its being, it may
pass through many such cycles before it comes to a final exhaustion. Moreover,
the idea is itself only the principle of soul manifestation of the communal
being and each communal soul again a manifestation and vehicle of the greater
eternal spirit that expresses itself in Time and on earth is seeking, as it
were, its own fullness in humanity through the vicissitudes of the human
cycles. A people then which learns to live consciously not solely in its
physical and outward life, not even only in that and the power of the life idea
or soul idea that governs the changes of its development and is the key to its
psychology and temperament, but in the soul and spirit behind, may not at all
exhaust itself, may not end by disappearance or a dissolution or a fusion into
others or have to give place to a new race and people, but having itself fused
into its life many original smaller societies and attained to its maximum
natural growth pass without death through many renascences. And even if at any
time it appears to be on the point of absolute exhaustion and dissolution, it
may recover by the force of the spirit and begin another and perhaps a more
glorious cycle. The history of India has been that of the life of such a
people.
Dharma governs all
The master idea
that has governed the life, culture, social ideals of the Indian people has
been the seeking of man for his true spiritual self and the use of life—subject
to a necessary evolution first of his lower physical, vital and mental nature
—as a frame and means for that discovery and for man’s ascent from the ignorant
natural into the spiritual existence. This dominant idea India has never quite
forgotten even under the stress and material exigences and the externalities of
political and social construction. But the difficulty of making the social life
an expression of man’s true self and some highest realisation of the spirit
within him is immensely greater than that which attends a spiritual
self-expression through the things of the mind, religion, thought, art,
literature, and while in these India reached extraordinary heights and
largenesses, she could not in the outward life go beyond certain very partial
realisations, and very imperfect tentatives,—a general spiritualising
symbolism, an infiltration of the greater aspiration, a certain cast given to
the communal life, the creation of institutions favourable to the spiritual
idea. Politics, society, economics are the natural field of the two first and
grosser parts of human aim and conduct recognised in the Indian system, interest and hedonistic desire
: Dharma, the higher law, has nowhere been brought more than
partially into this outer side of life, and in politics to a very minimum
extent; for the effort at governing political action by ethics is usually
little more than a pretence. The coordination or true union of the collective
outward life with moksa, the liberated spiritual existence,
has hardly even been conceived or attempted, much less anywhere succeeded in
the past history of the yet hardly adult human race. Accordingly, we find that
the governance by the Dharma of India’s social, economic and even, though here
the attempt broke down earlier than in other spheres, her political rule of
life, system, turn of existence, with the adumbration of a spiritual
significance behind, —the full attainment of the spiritual life being left as a
supreme aim to the effort of the individual,—was as far as her ancient system
could advance.
Three
stages of evolution of society in India and the next step
Human society
has in its growth to pass through three stages of evolution before it can
arrive at the completeness of its possibilities. The first is a condition in
which the forms and activities of the communal existence are those of the
spontaneous play of the powers and principles of its life. All its growth,
all its formations, customs, institutions are then a natural organic
development,—the motive and constructive power coming mostly from the
subconscient principle of the life within it,—expressing, but without
deliberate intention, the communal psychology, temperament, vital and physical
need, and persisting or altering partly under the pressure of an internal
impulse, partly under that of the environment acting on the communal mind and
temper. In this stage the people is not yet intelligently self-conscious in the
way of the reason, is not yet a thinking collective being, and it does not try
to govern its whole communal existence by the reasoning will, but lives
according to its vital intuitions or their first mental renderings. The early
framework of Indian society and polity grew up in such a period as in most
ancient and mediaeval communities, but also in the later age of a growing
social self-consciousness they were not rejected but only farther shaped,
developed, systematised so as to be always, not a construction of politicians,
legislators and social and political thinkers, but a strongly stable vital
order natural to the mind, instincts and life intuitions of the Indian people.
A second stage
of the society is that in which the communal mind becomes more and more
intellectually self-conscious, first in its more cultured minds, then more
generally, first
broadly, then more and more minutely and in all the parts of its life. It
learns to review and deal with its own life, communal ideas, needs, institutions
in the light of the developed intelligence and finally by the power of the
critical and constructive reason. This is a stage which is fall of great
possibilities but attended too by serious characteristic dangers. Its first
advantages are those which go always with the increase of a clear and
understanding and finally an exact and scientific knowledge and the culminating
stage is the strict and armoured efficiency which the critical and
constructive, the scientific reason used to the fullest degree offers as its reward and consequence. Another and
greater outcome of this stage of social evolution is the emergence of high and
luminous ideals which promise to raise man beyond the limits of the vital
being, beyond his first social, economic and political needs and desires and
out of their customary moulds and inspire an impulse of bold experiment with
the communal life which opens a field of possibility for the realisation of a
more and more ideal society. This application of the scientific mind to life with
the strict, well-finished, armoured efficiency which is its normal highest
result, this pursuit of great consciously proposed social and political ideals
and the. progress which is the index of the ground covered in the endeavour,
have been, with whatever limits and drawbacks, the distinguishing advantages of
the political and social effort of Europe.
On the other
hand the tendency of the reason when it pretends to deal with the materials of
life as its absolute governor, is to look too far away from the reality of the
society as, a living growth and to treat it as a mechanism which can be
manipulated at will and constructed like so much dead wood or iron according to
the arbitrary dictates of the intelligence. The sophisticating, labouring,
constructing, efficient, mechanising reason loses hold of the simple principles
of a people’s vitality; it cuts it away from the secret roots of its life. The
result is an exaggerated dependence on system and institution, on legislation
and administration and the deadly tendency to develop, in place of a living
people, a mechanical State. An instrument of the communal life tries to take
the place of the life itself and there is created a powerful but mechanical and
artificial organisation; but, as the price of this exterior gain, there is lost
the truth of life of an organically self-developing communal soul in the body
of a free and living people. It is this error of the scientific reason stifling
the work of the vital and the spiritual intuition under the dead weight of its
mechanical method which is the weakness of Europe and has deceived her
aspiration and prevented her from arriving at the true realisation of her own
higher ideals.
It is
only by reaching a third stage of the evolution of the collective social
as of the individual human being that the ideals first seized and cherished
by the thought of man can discover their own real source and character and
their true means and conditions of effectuation or the perfect society be
anything more than a vision on a shining cloud constantly run after in a
circle and constantly deceiving the hope and escaping the embrace. That will be
when man in the collectivity begins to live more deeply and to govern his
collective life neither primarily by the needs, instincts, intuitions welling
up out of the vital self, nor secondarily by the constructions of the reasoning
mind, but first, foremost and always by the power of unity, sympathy,
spontaneous liberty, supple and living order of his discovered greater self and
spirit in which the individual and the communal existence have their law of
freedom, perfection and oneness. That is a rule that has not yet anywhere found
its right conditions for even beginning its effort, for it can only come when
man’s attempt to reach and abide by the law of the spiritual existence is no
longer an exceptional aim for individuals or else degraded in its more general
aspiration to the form of a popular religion, but is recognised and followed
out as the imperative need of his being and its true and right attainment the
necessity of the next step in the evolution of the race.
Preserving
smaller aggregates, past forms and the remarkable way of controlling Intellect
in its later dominant age :
The small early
Indian communities developed like others through the first stage of a vigorous
and spontaneous vitality, finding naturally and freely its own norm and line,
casting up form of life and social and political institution out of the vital
intuition and temperament of the communal being. As they fused with each other
into an increasing cultural and social unity and formed larger and larger
political bodies, they developed a common spirit and a common basis and general
structure
allowing of a great freedom of variation in minor line and figure. There was no
need of a rigid uniformity; the common spirit and life impulse were enough to
impose on this plasticity a law of general oneness. And even when there grew up
the great kingdoms and empires, still the characteristic institutions of the
smaller kingdoms, republics, peoples were as much as possible incorporated
rather than destroyed or thrown aside in the new cast of the socio-political
structure. Whatever could not survive in the natural evolution of the people or
was no longer needed, fell away of itself and passed into desuetude; whatever
could last by modifying itself to new circumstance and environment was allowed
to survive; whatever was in intimate consonance with the psychical and the
vital law of being and temperament of the Indian people became universalised
and took its place in the enduring figure of the society and polity.
This
spontaneous principle of life was respected by the age of growing intellectual
culture. The Indian thinkers on society, economics and politics, Dharma Shastra
and Artha Shastra, made it their business not to construct ideals and systems
of society and government in the abstract intelligence, but to understand and
regulate by the practical reason the institutions and ways of communal living
already developed by the communal mind and life and to develop, fix and
harmonise without destroying the original elements, and whatever new element or
idea was needed was added or introduced as a superstructure or a modifying but
not a revolutionary and destructive principle. It was in this way that the
transition from the earlier stages to the fully developed monarchical polity
v/as managed; it proceeded by an incorporation of the existing institutions
under the supreme control of the king or the emperor. The character and status
of many of them was modified by the superimposition of the monarchical or
imperial system, but, as far as possible, they did not pass out of existence.
As a result we do not find in India the element of intellectually idealistic
political progress or revolutionary experiment which has been so marked a
feature of ancient and of modern Europe. A profound respect for the creations
of the past as the natural expression of the Indian mind and life, the sound
manifestation of its Dharma or right law of being, was the strongest element in
the mental attitude and this preservative instinct was not disturbed but rather
yet more firmly settled and fixed by the great millennium of high intellectual
culture. A slow evolution of custom and institution conservative of the principle
of settled order, of social and political precedent, of established framework
and structure was the one way of progress possible or admissible. On the other
hand, Indian polity never arrived at that unwholesome substitution of the
mechanical for the natural order of the life of the people which has been the
disease of European civilisation now culminating in the monstrous artificial
organisation of the bureaucratic and industrial State. The advantages of the
idealising intellect were absent, but so also were the disadvantages of the
mechanising rational intelligence.
The Indian mind
has always been profoundly intuitive in habit even when it was the most
occupied with the development of the reasoning intelligence, and its political
and social thought has therefore been always an attempt to combine the
intuitions of life and the intuitions of the spirit with the light of the
reason acting as an intermediary and an ordering and regulating factor. It has
tried to base itself strongly on the established and persistent actualities of
life and to depend for its idealism not on the intellect but on the
illuminations, inspirations, higher experiences of the spirit, and it has used
the reason as a critical power testing and assuring the steps and aiding but
not replacing the life and the spirit—always the true and sound constructors.
From Kali yuga to Satya Yuga :
Vasudevam sarvam iti
The spiritual
mind of India regarded life as a manifestation of the self: the community was
the body of the creator Brahma,
the people was
a life body of Brahman in the samas%t%i, the
collectivity, it was the collective Narayana, as the individual was Brahman in
the vyas%t%i, the
separate Jiva, the individual Narayana, the king was the living representative
of the Divine and the other orders of the community the natural powers of the
collective self, prakr%tayah%. The agreed conventions, institutes,
customs, constitution of the body social and politic in all its parts had
therefore not only a binding authority but a certain sacrosanct character.
The right order
of human life as of the universe is preserved according to the ancient Indian
idea by each individual being following faithfully his svadharma, the
true law and norm of his nature and the nature of his kind and by the group
being, the organic collective life, doing likewise. The family, clan,
caste, class, social, religious, industrial or other community, nation, people
are all organic group beings that evolve their own dharma and to follow it is
the condition of their preservation, healthy continuity, sound action. There is
also the dharma of the position, the function, the particular relation with
others, as there is too the dharma imposed by the condition, environment,
age, yugadharma, the universal religious or ethical dharma,
and all these acting on the natural dharma, the action according to the svabhāva, create
the body of the Law. The ancient theory supposed that in an entirely right and
sound condition of man, individual and collective, —a condition typified by the
legendary Golden Age, Satya Yuga, Age of Truth,—there is no need of any
political government or State or artificial construction of society, because
all then live freely according to the truth of their enlightened self and
God-inhabited being and therefore spontaneously according to the inner divine
Dharma. The self-determining individual and self-determining community living
according to the right and free law of his and its being is therefore the
ideal. But in the actual condition of humanity, its ignorant and devious nature
subject to perversions and violations of the true
individual and the true social dharma, there has to be
superimposed on the natural life of society a State, a sovereign power, a king
or governing body, whose business is not to interfere unduly with the life of
the society, which must be allowed to function for the most part according to
its natural law and custom and spontaneous development, but to superintend and
assist its right process and see that the Dharma is observed and in vigour and,
negatively, to punish and repress and, as far as may be, prevent offences
against the Dharma. A more advanced stage of corruption of the Dharma is marked
by the necessity of the appearance of the legislator and the formal government
of the whole of life by external or written law and code and rule, but to
determine it—apart from external administrative detail—was not the function of
the political sovereign, who was only its administrator, but of the
socio-religious creator, the Rishi, or the Brahminic recorder and interpreter.
And the Law itself written or unwritten was always not a thing to be new
created or fabricated by a political and legislative authority, but a thing
already existent and only to be interpreted and stated as it was or as it grew
naturally out of pre-existing law and principle in the communal life and
consciousness. The last and worst state of the society growing out of this
increasing artificiality and convention must be a period of anarchy and conflict
and dissolution of the Dharma,—Kali Yuga,—which must precede through a red-grey
evening of cataclysm and struggle a recovery and a new self-expression of the
spirit in the human being.
Three
aspects of culture:
India, the ancient possessor of the truth of the
spirit, must resist It arrogant claim and aggression and affirm her own deeper
truths in spite of heavy odds and against all comers. For in its preservation
lies the only hope that mankind instead of marching to a new cataclysm and
primitive beginning with a constant repetition of the old blind cycles will at
last emerge into the light ..d accomplish the drive forward which will bring
the terrestrial evolution to its next step of ascent in the progressive
manifestation of the Spirit.
There is a side of thought, of ideal, of upward
will and the soul’s aspiration;
there is a side of creative self-expression and appreciative aesthesis,
intelligence and imagination; and there is a side of practical and outward
formulation. P51
The three powers and the innermost sense of Indian
culture:
There are three powers that we must grasp in order
to judge the life value of a culture. There is first, the power of its original
concept of life; there is, next, the power of the forms, types and rhythms it
has given to life, there is last the inspiration, the vigor, the force of vital
execution of its motives manifested in the actual lives of men and of the
community that flourished under its influence… The peculiarity of the Indian
will in life is that it feels itself to be unfulfilled, not in touch with
perfection, not permanently justified in any intermediate satisfaction if it
has not found and does not live in the truth of the spirit. The Indian idea of
the world, of Nature and of existence is not physical but psychological and
spiritual. Spirit, soul, consciousness are not only greater than inert matter
and inconscient force, but they precede and originate these lesser things. All
force is a power or means of a secret spirit; the force that sustains the world
is a conscious Will, and Nature is its machinery of executive power. Matter is
a body or field of consciousness hidden within it, the material universe a form
or a movement of the Spirit. Man himself is not a life and mind born of Matter
and eternally subject to physical Nature, but a spirit that uses life and body.
P97 It is an understanding faith in this
conception of existence, it is an attempt to live it out, it is the science and
practice of this high endeavor, and it is the aspiration to break out in the
end from this mind bound to life and matter into a greater spiritual consciousness
that is the innermost sense of Indian culture. It is this that constitutes the
much talked of Indian spirituality.
The spiritual idea governed, enlightened and
gathered towards itself all the other life motives of a great civilized people.
In the history of all great cultures there is
passage through three stages: there is large and loose formation, in second
there is fixing of forms, moulds and rhythms, and there is third period of
superannuation, decay, disintegration. If it cannot transform itself, it moves
to death and decay. It has to take rebirth and renaissance. India passed
through these stages in own leisurely way. From Vedas to the last centuries. To
shastras, arts, sculptures..at this point it stopped short of its full
flowering and developing of the true spirit . And now is the still confused
movement…. This is only the
substructure : it is of a pressing importance indeed, but still not the last
and greatest thing. When you have paid your debt to society, filled well and
admirably your place in its life, helped its maintenance and continuity and
taken from it your legitimate and desired satisfactions, -there still remains
the greatest thing of all. There is still your own self, the inner you, the
soul which is a spiritual portion of the Infinite, one in its essence with the
Eternal
The trained
minds by centuries of culture
The ordinary
materialised souls, the external minds are the majority in India as every
where. How easy it is for the superior European critic to forget this common
fact of our humanity and treat this turn as a peculiar sign of the Indian
mentality ! But at least the people of India, even the "ignorant
masses" have this distinction that they are by centuries of training
nearer to the inner realities, are divided from them by a less thick veil of
the universal ignorance and are more easily led back to a vital glimpse of God
and Spirit, self and eternity than the mass of men or even the cultured elite
anywhere else. Where else could the lofty, austere and difficult teaching
of a Buddha have seized so rapidly on the popular mind? Where else could the
songs of a Tukaram, a Ramprasad, a Kabir, the Sikh Gurus and the chants of the
Tamil saints with their fervid devotion but also their profound spiritual
thinking have found so speedy an echo and formed a popular religious
literature? This strong permeation or close nearness of the spiritual turn,
this readiness of the mind of a whole nation to turn to the highest realities
is the sign and fruit of an agelong, a real and a still living and supremely
spiritual culture.
Instinct for Order and freedom at once
..a sign of superior natural capacity
The instinct
for order and freedom at once in any field of human activity is always a sign
of a high natural capacity in that field, and a people which could devise such
a union of unlimited religious liberty with an always orderly religious
evolution, must be credited with a high religious capacity, even as they cannot
be denied its inevitable fruit, a great, ancient and still living spiritual
culture. It is
this absolute freedom of thought and experience and this provision of a
framework sufficiently flexible and various to ensure liberty and yet
sufficiently sure and firm to be the means of a stable and powerful evolution
that have given to Indian civilisation this wonderful and seemingly eternal
religion with its marvellous wealth of many-sided philosophies, of great
scriptures, of profound religious works, of religions that approach the Eternal
from every side of his infinite Truth, of Yoga-systems of psycho-spiritual
discipline and self-finding, of suggestive forms, symbols and ceremonies, which
are strong to train the mind at all stages of development towards the Godward
endeavour.
Creation is
the only sign of life and great creation is sign of great life:
To develop to the full the intellectual, the
dynamic and volitional, the ethical, the aesthetic, the social and economic
being of man was an
important
element of Indian civilisation,—if for nothing else, at least as an
indispensable preliminary to spiritual perfection and freedom. India’s best
achievements in thought, art, literature, society were the logical outcome of
her religio-philosophical culture.
India has been
as much a home of serious and solid realities, of a firm grappling with the
problems of thought and life, of measured and wise organisation and great
action as any other considerable centre of civilisation. The widely different
view these perceptions express simply show the many-sided brilliance and
fullness of her life. The colour and magnificence have been its aesthetic side;
she has had great dreams and high and splendid imaginations, for that too is
wanted for the completeness of our living ; but also deep philosophical and
religious thinking, a wide and searching criticism of life, a great political
and social order, a strong ethical tone and a ‘ persistent vigour of individual
and communal living. That is a combination which means life in all its
fullness, though deficient, it may be, except in extraordinary cases, in the
more violent egoistic perversities and exaggerations which some minds seem to
take for a proof of the highest vigour of existence.
In what field indeed has not India attempted, achieved, created, and in
all on a large scale and yet with much attention to completeness of detail ? Of
her spiritual and philosophic achievement there can be no real question. They
stand there as the Himalayas stand upon the earth, in the phrase of Kalidasa, prthivyā
iva mānadandah, "as if earth’s measuring rod," mediating
still between earth and heaven, measuring the finite, casting their plummet far
into the infinite, plunging their extremities into the upper and lower seas of
the superconscient and the subliminal, the spiritual and the natural being. But
if her philosophies, her religious disciplines, her long list of great
spiritual personalities, thinkers, founders, saints are her greatest glory, as
was natural to her temperament and governing idea, they are by no means her sole
glories, nor are the others dwarfed by their eminence. It is now proved that in
science she went farther than any country before the modern era, and even Europe
owes the beginning of her physical science to India as much as to Greece,
although not directly but through the medium of the Arabs,
And even if she had only gone as far, that would have been sufficient
proof of a strong intellectual life in an ancient culture. Especially in
mathematics, astronomy and chemistry, the chief elements of ancient science,
she discovered and formulated much and well and anticipated by force of
reasoning or experiment some of the scientific ideas and discoveries which
Europe first arrived at much later, but was able to base more firmly by her new
and completer method. She was well-equipped in surgery and her system of
medicine survives to this day and has still its value, though it declined
intermediately in knowledge and is only now recovering its vitality.
In literature, in the life of the mind, she lived and built greatly. Not
only has she the Vedas, Upanishads and Gita, not to speak of less supreme but
still powerful or beautiful work in that field, unequalled monuments of
religious and philosophic poetry, a kind in which Europe has never been able to
do anything much of any great value, but that vast national structure, the
Mahabharata, gathering into its cycle the poetic literature and expressing so
completely the life of a long formative age, that it is said of it in a popular
saying which has the justice if also the exaggeration of a too apt epigram,
"What is not in this Bharata, is not in Bharatavarsha (India)," and
the Ramayana, the greatest and most remarkable poem of its kind, that most
sublime and beautiful epic of ethical idealism and a heroic semidivine human life,
and the marvellous richness, fullness and colour of the poetry and romance of
highly cultured thought, sensuous enjoyment, imagination, action and adventure
which makes up the romantic literature of her classical epoch. Nor did this
long continuous vigour of creation cease with the loss of vitality by the
Sanskrit tongue, but was parallelled and carried on m a mass of great or of
beautiful work in her other languages, in Pali first and Prakrit, much
unfortunately lost,1 and Tamil,
1 e.g., the once famous work in Paisachi of which the Kathāsaritsāgara is
an inferior version afterwards in Hindi, Bengali, Marathi and other tongues. The long
tradition of her architecture, sculpture and painting speaks for itself, even
in what survives after all the ruin of stormy centuries : whatever judgment may
be formed of it by the narrower school of western aesthetics,—and at least its
fineness of execution and workmanship cannot be denied, nor the power with
which it renders the Indian mind,—it testifies at least to a continuous
creative activity. And creation is proof of life and great creation of
greatness of life.
Even
expression in outward life, the polity, trade and commerce was excellent
But these things are, it may be said, the things of the mind, and the
intellect, imagination and aesthetic mind of India may have been creatively
active, but yet her outward life depressed, dull, poor, gloomy with the hues of
asceticism, void of will-power and personality, ineffective, null. That would
be a hard proposition to swallow; for literature, art and science do not
flourish in a void of life. But here too what are the facts? India has not only
had the long roll of her great saints, sages, thinkers, religious founders,
poets, creators, scientists, scholars, legists ; she has had her great rulers,
administrators, soldiers, conquerors, heroes, men with the strong active will,
the mind that plans and the seeing force that builds. She has warred and ruled,
traded and colonised and spread her civilisation, built polities and organised
communities and societies, done all that makes the outward activity of great
peoples.
Throws
out the most vivid part of itself: The Rishi, Saint, Sage
A nation tends to throw out its most vivid types in that line of action
which is most congenial to its temperament and expressive of its leading idea,
and it is the great saints and religious personalities that stand at the head
in India and present the most striking and continuous roll-call of greatness,
just as Rome lived most in her warriors and statesmen and rulers. The Rishi in
ancient India was the outstanding figure with the hero just behind, while in
later times the most striking feature is the long uninterrupted chain from
Buddha and Mahavira to Ramanuja, Chaitanya, Nanak, Ramdas and Tukaram and
beyond them p18 to Ramakrishna and Vivekananda and Dayananda. But there have been also
the remarkable achievements of statesmen and rulers from the first dawn of
ascertainable history which comes in with the striking figures of Chandragupta,
Chanakya, Asoka, the Gupta emperors and goes down through the multitude of
famous Hindu and Mahomedan figures of the middle age to quite modern times. In
ancient India there was the life of republics, oligarchies, democracies, small
kingdoms of which no detail of. history now survives, afterwards the long
effort at empire-building, the colonisation of Ceylon and the Archipelago, the
vivid struggles that attended the rise and decline of the Pathan and Mogul
dynasties, the Hindu struggle for survival in the south, the wonderful record
of Rajput heroism and the great upheaval of national life in Maharashtra
penetrating to the lowest strata of society, the remarkable episode of the Sikh
Khalsa. An adequate picture of that outward life still remains to be given;
once given it would be the end of many fictions. All this mass of action was
not accomplished by men without mind and will and vital force, by pale shadows
of humanity in whom the vigorous manhood had been crushed out under the burden
of a gloomy and all-effacing asceticism, nor does it look like the sign of a
metaphysically minded people of dreamers averse to life and action. It was not
men of straw or lifeless and will-less dummies or thin-blooded dreamers who
thus acted, planned, conquered, built great systems of administration, founded
kingdoms and empires, figured as great patrons of poetry and art and
architecture or, later, resisted heroically imperial power and fought for the
freedom of clan or people. Nor was it a nation devoid of life which maintained
its existence and culture and still lived on and broke out constantly into new
revivals under the ever increasing stress of continuously adverse
circumstances. The modern Indian revival, religious, cultural, political,
called now sometimes a renaissance, which so troubles and grieves the minds of
her critics, is only a repetition under altered circumstances, in an adapted form, in
a greater though as yet less vivid mass of movement, of a phenomenon which has
constantly repeated itself throughout a millennium of Indian history.
‘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—(Nolini Kanta : Page 95) 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
(Ibid Page 96)
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 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 (Page 98) 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 (Page 99) 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.
|
To sum up then. Man progresses through cycles of
crest page 106 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 (Page 107) 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.
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. 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.
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 (Page 54) 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. As we say, there are not only aspects of the Divine,
but (Page 55) 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.
The Renaissance
in India
To understand
this further we are studying Sri Aurobindo’s thoughts on the Renaissance in
India. Here are some important points from his essays. Sri Aurobindo
said, ‘It is unlike others, has genius of a different nature and not like the
mentality which has governed the modern idea in mankind. Although not so far
from that which is preparing to govern the future. (p1) The resemblance is to
Celtic movement in Ireland recovering Celtic culture from English influence.
In India, the turn was after the 1905 outburst. The whole is a confused chaos
at the present with few lighthouses and torchlights as pioneers. A giant
Shakti reawakening, finds herself in shackles, and bonds both self-woven and
imposed. Whether the word renaissance actually applies to India is a doubt
for spirituality was always there and it kept the soul alive even in decline.
But for the children of her who are still suffering from the ill effects
which came in 18th and 19th century when creative
spirit in Science, Arts, Philosophy reduced to only scholastic punditism.
‘India will certainly keep her essential spirit, will keep her characteristic
soul, but there is likely to be great change of body (p4) Forms not
contradictory to the age old spirit but expressive of those truths, restated,
cured of defects, completed. European writers wrote about metaphysical
thinking of India saying that she was great in it but failed in all other
fields. But this one sided praise was false. Like they mistook Germany’s soul
and then got a brutal shock, so will they get, not brutal, but definitely a
startling shock when they will know India’s real power. Spirituality is
indeed the master key of Indian mind, the sense of infinite is native to it.
India saw from the beginning and throughout her long history she never lost
hold of the insight that life cannot be lived only in its externalities.
Material laws, physical forces and physical science were known to her and
they were used well for organizing physical life. But she saw that
physical cannot get her full sense unless it stands in the right relation to
the supra physical. The complexity of the universe cannot be understood by
the present superficial sight. That there are
other powers within man himself and he is unaware of them. Invisible
surrounds physical, supra sensible surrounds sensible and infinite engulfs
finite. That there are myriads of gods, beyond them the god and beyond is his
own ineffable eternity. Then she could see that the present life, mind and
spirit is only fragment of the ranges of life, ranges of mind and ranges of
spirit which exceed and are beyond. And then with that calm audacity of
her intuition which knew no fear and littleness and shrank from no act
whether of spiritual or intellectual, ethical and vital courage, she declared
that there are none of these things which man could not attain if he trained
his will and knowledge. So, since ages
this insight was ingrained in her spirituality – this constant yearning after
the infinite to grapple it, that was the constant turn of her religion, art
and spirituality. But spirituality
does not flourish in void. So, the next to spirituality was her stupendous
vitality. love and joy of life and prolific creativity. She creates and
creates inexhaustibly, incessantly, lavishly- republics and kingdoms,
sciences, arts, yoga, psychic sciences, temples, administrations, trade,
commerce, ... and is yet unsatisfied, needs no rest, has no inertia. There is
superabundance of energy – ‘Infinite fills every inch of space with the
stirring of life and energy because it is the infinite.’ (p7) But this is
not a confused splendour of rich tropical vegetation, for the third power of
the ancient Indian spirit is strong intellectuality-austere, rich, robust,
minute, massive in principle and curious in details. (p8) The order was found
on inner law and truth of the things. The practice of the same was documented
as India is a land of dharma and Shastra. There were successive but mutually
inclusive periods of spirit, dharma and Shastra. From Ashoka to Mohammedan
epoch there was massive creation only a glimpse of which is still surviving.
Despite lack of printing and other means by technology, it transmitted for
several centuries only on memory and vocal recitation. Literature, theology,
philosophy, yoga, logic, languages, politics, science, drama, medicine, arts
like painting, dancing, sculpture, architecture, -all that is ‘useful to life
and interesting to mind’ was covered by this ‘opulent, minute, and thorough
intellectuality. (p9) insatiable curiosity and a spirit of organization and
order. ‘Thus, an
ingrained and dominant spirituality, an inexhaustible vital creativeness and
gust of life and mediating between them a powerful, penetrating scrupulous
intelligence combined of the rational and aesthetic mind each at a high
intensity of action created harmony of the ancient Indian culture. ‘(p9) The Buddhist and
illusionist denial is only one of philosophic tendencies which assumed
exaggerated proportions in the period of India’s decline. ‘Without a fine
excess, we cannot break limits and so such philosophic tendencies were
carried to the extreme. Not just idealism but even atheism and materialism
was treated in this way. Self-assertion and self-abnegation, opulence and poverty,
splendour and ‘satisfied nudity’ -all are attempted at extreme of pendulum
stroke only to come back to the balance of the ‘middle path.’ Even caste
system was originally the idea of Varnashram dharma in which it was clear
that each one is great in his own place and each one can become god. ‘Yet it
is notable that this pursuit of the most opposite extremes never resulted in
disorder and its most hedonistic period offers nothing that at all resembles
the unbridled corruption which a similar tendency has more than once produced
in Europe…for both the rule of the intellect and the rhythm of beauty are
hostile to the spirit of chaos.’ (p12) So India
is not monotone of metaphysical abstraction, rather it is a many phased, many
faced multi-coloured endeavour of spiritual realization with supple
adaptability and high pitches. The first stage was spiritual, with
intuitive mind, spiritual experiences and realizations, passion for truth in
physical and psychical. This was the age of Veda and Upanishads. That stamp
is still unforgettable, was never lost by her even in the decline and was
always enriched by fresh spiritual experience and discovery. The second
stage is the stage of intellect, age of dharma. Then thirdly was the age when
the whole lower life was lifted, as in the age of Purana, Bhakti sampradayas
and Tantra. It was the ‘last flower of the Indian spirit. The decline was in
stages- sinking of vital energy, cessation of old intellectual activity, a
slumber of the scientific and critical mind and creative intuition, and
finally spirituality losing its clear synthetic flame and remaining only as
sporadic jets. With great beginning and development, Indian culture fell
short of spiritualising mind and life. The essence remained same but then it
was in smoke of confusing and momentary helplessness in face of unprecedented
conditions. At that moment, Europeans swept over India and destroyed much of
the remnants which had no power to stand. India’s first reaction was that of
awe and blind imitation of the west, she survived such onslaught only because
of the energy of her life. But this onslaught served a purpose, of reviving
intellectuality, rehabilitating life and creativity, and reviving her spirit,
while facing the novel systems and conditions. Indian renaissance is arriving
out of this vision and impulse. It has following
works:
The spirit is a
higher infinite of varieties, life is the lower infinite of possibilities,
which seek to grow and fulfil themselves in the light of the higher. Our
intellect, aesthetic being, ethical being are mediators and reflectors. While
the West’s method is to call down as much as possible to stimulate and
embellish life- the east or Asia /India’s method is to discover the spirit
within, to evoke the higher powers to dominate life, and to make this spirit
responsive and expressive of the spirit. The work of
renaissance is to make this spirit, the higher view of life once again the
creative and dominant power in the world. But at present it is half awakened
and most of the action is under the European impress and because it is
foreign to the spirit within so the action is poor in will, feeble in form
and ineffective in results. (p17) The action must come from the roots with a
greater light and be more generalised to make renaissance possible not only
in prospect but also in fact. (p17)
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