The core of Sri Aurobindo's teaching, the central pivot on which his Yoga and his work rest is the mystery of the Divine Descent —Spirit descending into Matter and becoming Matter, God coming down upon earth and becoming human, and as a necessary and inevitable consequence, Matter rising and being transformed into Spirit and man becoming God and Godlike.

This is a truth, a fact of creation—giving the whole clue to the riddle of this world— that has not been envisaged at all in the past, or otherwise overlooked and not given the value and importance that it has. Poets and seers, sages and saints along with common men from the very birth of humanity have mourned this vale of tears, this sorrowful transient earthly life, anityam asukham lokam imam, into

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which they have been thrown: they have wished and willed and endeavoured to change or reform or re-create it, but have always failed, and in the end, finding it ultimately incorrigible, concluded that escape was the only solution, the only issue, either like the sage going out into Nirvana, spiritual dissolution, or like the atheist stoically going down with a crumbling world into a material disintegration. The truth of the matter is, however, different as Sri Aurobindo sees it. The spectacle is not so gloomy and irremediable. The world has a future and man has hope.

The world is not doomed nor man past cure; for it is not that the world has been merely created by God but that God has become and is the world at the same time: man is not merely God's creature but that he is made of God's substance and is God himself. The Spirit has shed its supreme consciousness, that is to say, overtly has become dead matter; God has veiled his effulgent infinity and has taken up a human figure. The Divine has clothed his inviolable felicity in pain and suffering, has become an earthly creature, you and me, a mortal of mortals. And thus, viewed in

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another perspective, because Matter is essentially Spirit, because man is essentially God, therefore Matter can be resolved and transformed into Spirit and man too can become utterly divine. The urge of the spiritual consciousness that is the essence of matter even, the massed energy embedded or lying frozen in it, manifests itself in the forward drive of evolution that brings out gradually, step by step, the various modes of the consciousness in different degrees and potentials till the original summit is revealed.

But there is a still closer mystery, the mystery of mysteries. There has not been merely a general descent, the descent of a world-force on a higher plane into another world-force on a lower plane; but that there is the descent of the individual, the personal Godhead into and as an earthly human being. The Divine born as a man and leading the life of a man among us and as one of us, the secret of Divine Incarnation is the supreme secret. That is the mechanism adopted by the Divine to cure and transmute human ills—himself becoming a man, taking upon himself the burden of the evil that vitiates and withers life and working it

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out in and through himself. Something of this truth has been caught in the Christian view of Incarnation. God sent upon earth his only begotten son to take upon himself the sins of man, suffer vicariously for him, pay the ransom and thus liberate him, so that he may reach salvation, procure his seat by the side of the Father in Heaven. Man corrupted as he is by an original sin cannot hope by his own merit to achieve salvation. He can only admit his sin and repent and wait for the Grace to save him. The Indian view of Incarnation laid more stress upon the positive aspect of the matter, viz., the role of the Incarnation as the inaugurates and establisher of a new order in life—dharmasansthapan-arthaya. The Avatar brings down and embodies a higher principle of human organisation, a greater consciousness which he infuses into the existing pattern, individual or collective, which has served its purpose, has become otiose and time-barred and needs to be remodelled, has been at the most preparatory to something else. The Avatar means a new revelation and the uplift of the human consciousness into a higher mode of being. The

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physical form he takes signifies the physical pressure that is exerted for the corroboration and fixation of the inner illumination that he brings upon earth and in the human frame. The Indian tradition has focussed its attention upon the Good—shreyas—and did not consider it essential to dwell upon the Evil. For one who finds and sees the Good always and everywhere, the Evil does not exist. Sri Aurobindo lays equal emphasis on both the aspects. Naturally, however, he does not believe in an original evil, incurable upon earth and in earthly life. In conformity with the ancient Indian teaching he declares the original divinity of man: it is because man is potentially and essentially divine that he can become actually and wholly divine. The Bible speaks indeed of man becoming perfect even as the Father in Heaven is perfect: but that is due exclusively to the Grace showered upon man, not because of any inherent perfection in him. But in according full divinity to man, Sri Aurobindo does not minimise the part of the undivine in him. This does not mean any kind of Manicheism: for Evil, according to Sri Aurobindo, is not coeval or coterminous with

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the Divine, it is a later or derivative formation under given conditions, although within the range and sphere of the infinite Divine. Evil exists as a stern reality; even though it may be temporary and does not touch the essential reality, it is not an illusion nor can it be ignored, brushed aside or by-passed as something superficial or momentary and of no importance. It has its value, its function and implication. It is real, but it is not irremediable. It is contrary to the Divine but not contradictory. For even the Evil in its inmost substance carries or is the reality which it opposes or denies outwardly. Did not the very first of the apostles of Christ deny his master at the crucial moment? As we have said, evil is a formation necessitated by certain circumstances, the circumstances changed, the whole disposition as at present constituted changes automatically and fundamentally.

The Divine then descends into the earth-frame, not merely as an immanent and hidden essence—sarvabhutantaratma—but as an individual person embodying that essence—manu-shim tanum ashritam. Man too, however earthly and impure he may be, is essentially the

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Divine himself, carries in him the spark of the supreme consciousness that he is in his true and highest reality. That is how in him is bridged the gulf that apparently exists between the mortal and the immortal, the Infinite and the Finite, the Eternal and the Momentary, and the Divine too can come into him and become, so to say, his lower self.

The individual or personal Divine leaves his home of all bliss—Vaikuntha—forgets himself and enters into this world of all misery; but this does not mean that he becomes wholly the Man of Misery: he encompasses all misery within himself, penetrates as well into the stuff and substance of all misery, but suffuses all that with the purifying and transforming pressure of his own supreme consciousness. And yet pain and suffering are real, cruelly real, even to the Divine Man. Just as the ordinary human creature suffers and agonises in spite of the divine essence in him, in spite of his other deeper truth and reality, his soul of inalienable bliss, his psychic being, the Divine too suffers in the same way in spite of his divinity. This double line of consciousness, this system of parallels running alongside

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each other, interacting upon each other (even intersecting each other, when viewed in a frame of infinity) gives the whole secret mechanism of creation, its purpose, its working and its fulfilment. It is nothing else than the gradual replacement or elimination, elevation or sublimation of the elements on one line that are transmuted into those of the other. The Divine enters into the Evil to root out the Evil and plant there or release and fructify the seed of Divinity lying covered over and lost in the depths of dead inconscience.

The Divine descends as an individual person fundamentally to hasten the evolutionary process and to complete it; he takes the human form to raise humanity to divinity. The fact and the nature of the process have been well exemplified in Sri Ramakrishna who, it is said, took up successively different lines of spiritual discipline and by a supreme and sovereign force of concentration achieved realisation in each line in the course of a few days what might take in normal circumstances years or even lives to do. The Divine gathers and concentrates in himself the world-force, the Nature-Energy—even like a dynamo—and

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focuses and canalises it to give it its full, integral and absolute effectivity. And mortal pain he accepts, and swallows the poison of ignorant life—even like Nilakantha Shiva—to transmute it into ecstasy and immortality. The Divine Mother sank into the earth-nature of a human body:

She made of her pangs a mystic poignant sword......

Hoping her greater being to implant That heaven might native grow in mortal soil.¹

But this is God's share—la part de Dieu; for man too as man has to do his part. Because the Divine descending and accomplishing the work does not mean either of two things: first, it does not mean that it is a sudden miracle, a deus ex machina, a fiat from the heaven which upsets and bears down everything before it and practically has no relation, logical or causal with what precedes and what follows. It is, on the contrary, as we have said, the culmination of a long process, the seal of fulfilment set upon a steady preparation and travailing

¹ Savitri by Sri Aurobindo. Book 1 Canto 1.

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growth. The Divine descends when the time is ripe, that is to say, when forces and instruments have been developed, refined, sharpened and tempered, so that they can harness and wield the Power from above. But for the preparation, the necessary conditions being there, the Grace would not have descended, although it is also true that but for the Grace, the culmination and the utter fulfilment would not have come about—there would have been only a vicious circle or an unending seesaw. Next, the Descent does not mean either that following upon it the whole business is done and completed automatically and immediately or nothing is left to be done any more. Not so. It means that what has been so long practically beyond reach, towards which one had to move with uncertainty and vague effort and in a roundabout way, as though through a trackless virgin forest or across an uncharted sea, has now been brought nearer and closer to human grasp, is now made part and parcel of earth's familiar atmosphere, so that any human being who genuinely aspires and looks for it can find it about him: there is just a thin veil which has to be put aside

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a little, into which a little opening is to be made and one comes in contact with or even enters into what one seeks. This means that the Grace has leaned down to man, but man too has at least to stretch his arms to touch and embrace it. Furthermore, to make that Grace permanently active and real in the normal consciousness, one has to labour, work out in fact what is given potentially: the seed is planted for him, it will grow and bloom and come to fruition provided necessary care and attention are given to the soil that bears it.

Thus then the embodied human person who has the embodied Divine Person before his eyes must know how to instal and incorporate the Divine Person in him, in his body and physical existence. That was perhaps the mystery sought to be conveyed in the Christian sacrament of transubstantiation. The bread and wine that the initiate has to take in represent— are or become actually and physically, as the Christian mystics assert—the flesh and blood of Christ. One has to become the Divine Person in flesh and blood, wholly and integrally. As the fossil is a transmutation in stone, grain by grain, of a living body—organic elements

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eliminated and replaced by the inorganic in the very atomic structure and constitution— even so, the living human structure, the mental, vital and physical formation will be translated, grain by grain, atom by atom into the divine substance by the infusion and imposition of the Divine figure.

The Christian mystics themselves, however, do not seem to have aimed at real physical transubstantiation—although that might have been at the back of the older Hebrew sacrament of the Eucharist; the perfection sought by them was to be enjoyed in Heaven in company of the Father and not on this earth and in this human body: it was more a sublimation than a transformation that was their goal. The flesh for them was always too weak.

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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

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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: (i) the Old Stone Age, (2) the New Stone Age, (3) the 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 he began shredding his, purely animal vesture. And when he not only chipped but succeeded in 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

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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

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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 notning 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—

Rolled round in earth's diurnal course

With rocks and stones and trees.

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 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

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instruments are symbolic of the first attempts of the brain to set its impress upon crude and brute nature. The history of man's artisan-ship, 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 inquired 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

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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 to wield 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, that is to say, the outer paraphernalia; but as regards culture a Plato, a Laotse, a Yajnavalkya are names to which we still bow down.

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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 and will not change. The paleolithic age, it appears, covered a period of 30 to 40 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 inquire 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

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is the modern or scientific thinking, the second the old-world mythopoeic 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 view the metamorphosis with anxiety. Gerald Heard vehemently declares that the rationalism of the modern age is a narrowing down of the consciousness

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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 it means 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

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coordinates 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.

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 mythopoeic 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 environment and the world and acting upon it as a free agent, exercising one's

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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 agrowing 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

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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 or intuitive than rational or

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intellectual. In that knowledge the result only, the end that is 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 it find 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 intel-lectualism 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?

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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 another thing and even

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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

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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 superconsciousness. 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.

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The ancient 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 enquiry and of alchemy in natural science—a period roughly equated with the Middle Age. The Scientific Age coming last seeks to re-establish a junction and coordination 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 turiya or the transcendent, in Indian terminology—is pregnant with a fateful crisis. The stage of self-

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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 superconsciousness 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

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pointed out, not merely or exclusively that, as Jung and his school seem to say. Certainly one has to see and recognise the aboriginal, the infra-rational elements embedded 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 corning 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.

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III

Consciousness as Energy

(1)

A live wire—through which an electric current, say of several thousand volts, is passing—looks quite innocent, motionless, inactive, almost inert. The appearance, needless to say, is deceptive. Even so the still life of a Yogin. Action does not consist merely in mechanical motion visible to the eye: intra-atomic movements that are subtle, invisible, hard to detect even by the most sensitive instruments, possess a tremendous potency, even to unimaginable degrees. Likewise in man, the extent of muscular flexions does not give the measure or potential of his activity. One cannot say that the first-line infantryman who rushes and charges, shoots, bayonets, kills and is killed is more active and dynamic than the general who sits quiet behind in

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a cabin and merely sends out orders. Vivekananda wandered about the whole of India, crossed the seas, traversed continents, undertook whirlwind campaigns—talking, debating, lecturing: it was a life superbly rich in muscular movements. By his side, Rama-krishna would appear quite tame—inactive, "introvert": fewer physical displacements or muscular exercises marked his life. And yet, ask anyone who is in touch with the inner life of these great souls, he will tell you, Vivekananda is only a spark from the mighty and concentrated Energy that Ramakrishna was.

What is this spiritual or Yogic Energy? Ordinary people, people with a modern mind, would concede at the most that there are two kinds of activity: (1) real activity—physical action, work, labour with muscle and nerve, and (2) passive activity—activity of mind and thought. According to the pragmatic standard especial, if not entire, importance is given to the first category; the other category, "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought", is held at a discount. The thoughtful people are philo-sophers at the most, they are ineffectual angels in this workaday world of ours. We need

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upon earth people of sterner stuff, dynamic people who are not thought-bound, but know how to apply and execute their ideas, whatever they may be. Lenin was great, not because he had revolutionary ideas, but because he gave a muscular frame to them. Such people alone are the pragmatic, dynamic, useful category of humanity. The others are, according to the more radical leftist view, merely parasitic, and, according to a more generous liberal view, chiefly decorative elements in human society. Mind-energy can draw dream pictures, beautiful perhaps, but inane; it is only muscular energy that gives a living and material body—a local habitation and name—to what otherwise would be airy nothing.

Energy, however, is not merely either muscular (physical) or cerebral. There are energies subtler than thought and yet more dynamic than the muscle (or the electric pile). One such, for example, is vital energy, although orthodox bio-chemists do not believe in any kind of vitalism that is something more than mere physico-chemical reaction. Indeed, this is the energy that counts in life; for it is this that brings about what we call success in the

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world. A man with push and go, as it is termed, is nothing but a person with abundant vital energy. But even of this energy there are gradations. It can be deep, controlled, organised or it can be hectic, effusive, confused: the latter kind expresses and spends itself often in mere external, nervous and muscular movements. Those, however, who are known as great men of action are precisely they who are endowed with life energy of the first kind.

The Yogi—the Hatha Yogi, the Raja Yogi, the Tantrik—seeks consciously to master this life energy, to possess and use it as he wills. The Yogi, the true Yogi, aims at a higher quality, a deeper potentiality of the life energy: it may be called the Inner Life Energy. This inner life energy is in a line with, is one with the universal life energy; therefore it is said when one possesses and controls this power one has command over the universal power. All other energies—visible, tangible, concretised and canalised—are particular formations and embodiments of this mother energy. Even the most physical and material energies— mechanical, electrical, nervous, etc.—are all derivatives and lesser potentials of this

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fount and origin. The mastery of the inner vital energy is the whole secret of what is known as occultism, even magic, black or white, spell and other allied powers or miracles. The eight siddhis well-known to the Yogis are the natural results of this mastery. With such a mastery the Yogi controls and guides his own destiny; he can also in the same way control and guide the destiny of others, even of peoples and humanity at large. That is the deeper meaning the great phrase of the Gita— lokasangraha—carries. Indeed, great souls are precisely they who move with the upward current of Nature, in and through whom Nature works out vast changes, prepares the steps of evolution in the world and humanity.

But what again is this universal vital energy? This also is an instrument, not the ultimate agent. After all, vital energy is blind by itself; it moves instinctively or intuitively, as Bergson would say; it does not know consciously beforehand the next step it is going to take. Consciousness then is the secret. This is "the power behind the throne", it is this to which the Upanishad refers in its analysis of the

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ultimate dynamics of things as the life of Life, Pranasya pranah.

It is the aim of all Yoga, spiritual discipline, finally to arrive at this consciousness, this supreme reality which is behind all existence, which is the source and the substance of all. It is in this Consciousness that the whole creation is rolled up and it is from this that it is rolled out. Only there are some paths of spiritual discipline that prefer and follow the movement of in-rolling and others that seek the one of out-rolling: the former is the path of nivritti, the latter that of pravritti.

Thus consciousness is not merely a status of being, but also a force of becoming. All that is to take form and be active, whether in the grossest, the material mode or in the most subtle, the ideative mode is originally a seed, a stress, a point of concentration of this consciousness. The Yogi becomes potentially all-powerful, because he is one with the All-Power, the Mother Consciousness. The perfect spiritual man not merely dwells with or close to the Divine (salokya), he is not merely made in the image of the Divine (sarupya), and again he is not merely unified

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and one with the Divine (sayujya) but what is most marvellous, he has the same nature, that is to say, he has the same powers and capacities as the Divine (sadharmya).

The dynamic becoming, becoming a power and personality of the omnipotent Divine, is a secret well-known to the Yogis and mystics. Only it has not been worked out in all its implications, not given the full value and importance rightfully due to it. The reason is that although the principle was discovered and admitted, the proper key had not been found that could release and manipulate the Energy at its highest potential and largest amplitude. Because the major tendency in the spiritual man till now has been rather to follow the path of nivritti than the path of pravritti, this latter path being more or less identified with the path of Ignorance. But there is a higher line of pravritti which means the manifestation of the Divine, not merely the expression of the inferior Nature.

(2)

The force of consciousness is not simply the force an idea or thought may have. The

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distinction between the two is not usually understood. In reality, however, thought or idea is a form of energy-action in the mind and mind is only one field or grade—not the most dynamic nor direct or immediate—among many for the play of consciousness, as I have already said. Mind energy, life energy, physical or material energy are various forms and stages in the expression of consciousness-energy (Chit-Tapas). The nature and function of consciousness-energy we may elucidate and understand in another way, by following a different line of its modus vivendi.

Consciousness has a fourfold potential. The first is the normal consciousness, which is predominantly mental; it is the sphere comprising movements of which man is usually and habitually aware. It is what the Upanishad names jagrat or jagaritasthana and characterises as bahihprajna: it is the waking state and has cognition only of external things. In other words, the consciousness here is wholly objec-tivised, externalised—"extravert": it is also a strongly individualised formation, the consciousness is hedged in, isolated and contoured by a protective ring, as it were, of a

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characteristically separative personality; it is a surface formation, a web made out of day-today sensations and thoughts, perceptions and memories, impressions and associations. It is a system of outward actions and reactions against or in the midst of one's actual environment. The second potential is that of the Inner Consciousness: its characteristic is that the consciousness here is no longer trenchantly separative and individual, narrowly and rigidly egoistic. It feels and sees itself as part of or One with the world consciousness. It looks upon its individuality as only a wave of theuniversal movement. It is also sometimes called the subliminal consciousness; for it plays below or behind the normal surface range of consciousness. It is made up of the residuary powers of the normal consciousness, the abiding vibrations and stresses that settle down and remain in the background and are not immediately required or utilised for life purposes: also it contacts directly energies and movements that well out of the universal life. The phenomena of clairvoyance and clairaudience, the knowledge of the past and the future and of other worlds and persons and

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beings, certain more dynamic movements such as distant influence and guidance and controlling-without any external means, well known in all yogic disciplines, are various manifestations of the power of this Inner Consciousness. But there is not only an outward and an inner consciousness; there is also a deeper or nether consciousness. This is the great field that has been and is being explored by modern psychologists. It is called the subconscious, sometimes also the unconscious: but really it should be named the inconscient, for it is not altogether devoid of consciousness, but is conscious in its own way—the consciousness is involved or lost within itself or lies buried. It comprises those movements and impulsions, inclinations and dispositions that have no rational basis, on the contrary, have an irrational basis; they are not acquired or developed by the individual in his normal course of life experience, they are ingrained, lie imbedded in man's nature and are native to his original biological and physical make-up. As the human embryo recapitulates in the womb the whole history of man's animal evolution, even so the normal man, even the

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most civilised and apparently the farthest from his ancient moorings and sources, enshrines in his cells, in a miraculously living manner, the memory of vast geological epochs, the great struggles and convulsions through which earth and its inhabitants have passed, the basic urges of the crude life force, its hopes, fears, desires, hungers that constitute the rudimental and aboriginal consciousness, the atavism that links the man of today not only to his primitive ancestry but even to the plant world—even perhaps to the mineral world—out of which his body cells have issued and evolved. Legends and fairy tales, mythologies and fables are a rationalised pattern and picture of the vibrations and urges that moved the original consciousness. It was a collective—a racial—and an aboriginal consciousness. The same lies chromosomic, one can almost say, in the constitution of the individual man of today. This region of the unconscious (or the inconscient) is a veritable field of force: it lies at the root of all surface dynamisms. The surface consciousness, jag-rat, is a very small portion of the whole, it is only the tip of the pyramid or an iceberg,

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the major portion lies submerged beyond our normal view. In reflex movements, in sudden unthinking outbursts, in dreams and daydreams, this undercurrent is silhouetted and made visible and recognisable. Even otherwise, they exercise a profound influence upon all our conscious movements. This underground consciousness is the repository of the most dark and unenlightened elements that grew and flourished in the slime of man's original habitat. They are small, ugly, violent, antisocial, chaotic forces, their names are cruelty, lust, hunger, blind selfishness. Nowhere else than in this domain can the great Upanishadic truth find its fullest application—Hunger that is Death.

But this is the seamy side of Nature, there is also a sunny side. If there is a nadir, there must be a corresponding zenith. In the Vedic image, if man is born of the Dark Mother, he is also a child of the White Mother (krishna and shveti). Or again, if earth is our mother, the Heaven is our father—dyaur me pita mata prithivi iyam. In other words, consciousness extends not in depth alone, but in height also —it is vertically extended, infinite both ways.

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As there is a subconsciousness or unconsciousness, so also there is at the other end super-consciousness.

Now this superconsciousness is the true origin of creation, although the apparent and objective creation starts with and is based upon Unconsciousness. All norms and archetypes belong to the superconsciousness; for the sake of material creation they are thrown down or cast as seed into the Unconscious and in this process they undergo a change, a deformation and aberration. All the major themes of dream myths and prehistoric legends which the psychologists claim to have found imbedded in man's subconscient Consciousness are in fact echoes and mirages of great spiritual —superconscient—realities reflected here below. The theme of the Hero, of the Dual Mother (Dark and Fair), of Creation and Sacrifice, these are, according to Jung, dramatisations of some fundamental movements and urges in the dark subconscient nature. Jung however throws a luminous suggestion in characterising the nature of this vast complex. The general sense, Jung says, is that of a movement forward, of a difficult

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journey, of a pull backward and downward, of yawning abysses that call, of a light that beckons. It is an effort, a travail of what lies imbedded and suppressed to come out into the open, into the normal consciousness and thus release an unhealthy tension, restore a balance in the individual's system. Modern psychology lays great stress upon the integration of personality. Most of the ills that human nature suffers from, they say, are due to this division or schism in it, a suppressed subconsciousness and an expressed consciousness seeking to express a negation of that subconsciousness. Modern psychology teaches that one should dive into the nether regions and face squarely whatever elements are there, help these to follow their natural bent to come up and see the light of the day. Only thus there can be established a unitary movement, an even consistency and an equilibrium throughout the entire consciousness and being.

So far so good. But two things are to be taken note of. First of all, the resolution of the normal conflict in man's consciousness, the integration of his personality, is not wholly practicable within the scope of the present

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nature and the field of the actual forces at play. That can give only a shadow of the true resolution and integration. A conscious envisaging of the conflicting forces, a calm survey of the submerged or side-tracked "libidos" in their true nature, a voluntary acceptance of these dark elements as a part of normal human nature, does not automatically make for their sublimation and purification or transformation. The tiling is possible only through another force and on another level, by the intervention and interfusion precisely of the superconsciousness. And here comes the second point to note. For it is this super-consciousness towards which all the strife and struggle of the under-consciousness are turned and directed. The yearning and urge in the subconsciousness to move forward, to escape outside into the light does not refer merely to the march towards normal awareness and consciousness: it has a deeper direction and a higher aim—it seeks that of which it is an aberration and a deformation, the very origin and source, the height from which it fell.

This superconsciousness has a special mode of its quintessential energy which is omnipotent

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in action, immediate in effectivity. It is pure as the purest incandescent solar light and embodies the concentrated force of consciousness. It is the original creative vibration of the absolute or supreme Being. Sri Auro-bindo calls this supreme form of superconscient consciousness-energy, the Supermind. There are of course other layers and strata of super-consciousness leading up to the supermind which are of various potentials and embody different degrees of spiritual power and consciousness.

We have spoken of the Inner Consciousness. But there is also, we must now point out, an Inmost Consciousness. As the Super-consciousness is a consciousness-energy in height, the Inmost Consciousness is a consciousness-energy in depth, the deepest depth, beyond or behind the Inner Consciousness. If we wish to put it geometrically, we can say, the vertical section of consciousness represents the line from the superconsciousness to the subconscious or vice versa; the horizontal section represents the normal waking state of consciousness; and there is a transverse section leading from the surface first to the Inner

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and finally to the Inmost. This inmost consciousness—the consciousness most profound and secreted in the cave of the heart, guhahitam gahvareshtham,—is the consciousness of the soul, the Psychic Being, as Sri Aurobindo calls it: it is the immortal in the mortal. It is, as has often been described, the nucleus round which is crystallised and organised the triple nature of man consisting of his mind and life and body, the centre of dynamic energy that secretly vivifies them, gradually purines and transforms them into higher functions and embodiments of consciousness. As a matter of fact, it is this inmost consciousness that serves as the link, at least as the most powerful link, between the higher and lower forms of consciousness, between the Super-conscient and the Subconscient or Inconscient. It takes up within itself all the elements of consciousness that the past in its evolutionary career from the very lowest and basic levels has acquired and elaborated, and by its inherent pressure and secret gestation delivers what was crude and base and unformed as the purest luminous noble substance of the perfectly organised superconscient reality.

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Indeed that is the mystic alchemy which the philosophers experimented in the Middle Ages. In this context, the Inner Consciousness, we may note, serves as a medium through which the action of the Inmost (as well as that of the Uppermost) takes place.

We can picture the whole phenomenon in another way and say in the devotional language of the Mystics that the Inmost Consciousness is the Divine Child, the Superconscient is the Divine Father and the Inferior Consciousness is the Great Mother (Magna Mater): the Inner and the Outer Consciousness are the field of play and the instrument of action as well of this Divine Trinity.

Man, we thus see, is an infinitely composite being. We have referred to the four or five major chords in him, but each one has again innumerable gradations of vibration. Man is a bundle or dynamo of energy and this energy is nothing but the force of consciousness. To different modes or potentials of this energy different names are given. And what makes the thing still more complex is that all these elements exist simultaneously and act simultaneously, although in various degrees and

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stresses. They act upon each other, and severally and collectively impress upon the nature and character of the individual being and mould and direct his physical status and pragmatic life. A man can however take consciously a definite position and status, identify himself with a particular form and force of consciousness and build bis being and life in the truth and rhythm of that consciousness. Naturally the limits and the limitation of that consciousness mark also the limits and limitation of the disposition he can effect in his life. When it is said that the spiritual force is not effective on the physical plane in mundane affairs—Buddha, it is said for example, has not been able to rid the earth of age, disease and death (although it was not Buddha's intention to do so, his purpose was to show a way of escape, of by-passing the ills of life, and in that he wholly succeeded)—it only means that the right mode or potential of spiritual energy has not been found; for that matter even the mightiest mundane forces are not sovereignly effective in mundane affairs, otherwise the Nazi-Force would have been ruling the world today.

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Still it must be remembered that all these apparently diverse layers and degrees of being or consciousness or energy form essentially one indivisible unity and identity. What is called the highest and what is called the lowest are not in reality absolutely disparate and incommensurable entities: everywhere it is the highest that lies secreted and reigns supreme. The lowest is the highest itself seen from the reverse side, as it were: the norms and typal truths that obtain in the superconsciousness are also the very guiding formulas and principles in the secret heart of the Inconscience too, only they appear externally as deformations and caricatures of their true reality. But even here we can tap and release the full force of a superconscient energy. A particle of dead matter, we know today, is a mass of stilled energy, electrical and radiant in nature; even so an apparently inconscient entity is a packet of Superconsciousness in its highest potential of energy. The secret of releasing this atomic energy of the Spirit is found in the Science of Yoga.

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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

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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 serious alternations 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.

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The spiritual is a typal domain, one may say, there is no room here for sudden unforseen 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 civihsation 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 purusha; then he raised himself and centred in the vital consciousness and so became fundamentally a pranamaya purusha; next he climbed into the mental consciousness and became a manomaya purusha; 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

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spiritual discipline: the animal (pashu 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 there are also levels in him. The spiritual consciousness rises tier upon tier and each spur has its own view and outlook.

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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 five 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,

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once one is beyond. The question, it is true, engaged the attention of the ancients too; but it was more or less an interesting enquiry, 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.

Thus, the highest and most comprehenisve 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 we must accept a reality which is neither Sat nor Asat—nasadasinno sadasit, says

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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 Over-mind 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

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mind with some infiltration from the Overmind 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, 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, a 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 veil, make of human nature a unified, a streamlined entity,

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a complete incarnation of the spiritual consciousness in the fullness of its own nature at its source and origin.

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The Freedom and the Force of the Spirit

The first thing that has to be learnt in life is that circumstances are not all in all: however powerful and overwhelming they may appear to be at a given moment, man can always react against them. If there is not an immediate success externally as desired, the will thus exerted does not go in vain. First of all, it declares and asserts the independence and autonomy of the inner man: something within is found and established which is not touched by the environment, which lives by its own authentic truth and reality and is ever contented and happy. It is in reference to such a poise of consciousness that the great poet says:

A mind not to be changed by place or time.

The mind is its own place, and in itself

Can make a Heaven of Hell......

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The soldier of an ideal, the martyr, bears testimony to the reality of this mental condition: the Yogi is he who is supremely indifferent to outside contacts (matrasparshah), fixed as he is in inner union with the Divine. Secondly, the freedom of the will not only liberates the inner person, but exerts a pressure on the outside also, upon the field and circumstances, obliging them to change or move in the direction and according to the demand of the will. Consciousness has this power: only all depends on the nature of the consciousness and the will it embodies. For consciousness-will has varying degrees and levels of its potential. A will belonging to the purely mental consciousness can have only a very limited result and may not even show itself at all in any external modification. For it is only one among a million contending forces and its effect will depend upon the allies it can count on its side. Similar is the case with a vital will or a physico-vital will: these are more effective apparently but always in a narrow field; the narrower the field, the greater the possibility of the effectiveness. Moreover a mental will affects chiefly the mental field, a vital will is directly operative

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in the vital world,- even as a physical force is effective on physical things: each is largely confined to its own domain, the effect on other domains is for the most part indirect and remote.

But the truly effective will, the will that can produce an all-round change, comes from a still higher or deeper source. Indeed, the will that never fails, that turns even the external circumstances, adverse and obstructive though they appear to be, to serve it is the will of the soul, the spiritual being in us. And man is man, not a mere animal, because he has been called upon to seek and find his soul, to get at his inner and inmost being and from there command his external nature and outside circumstances too. The orthodox name for this endeavour is spiritual discipline or Yoga.

On lower levels, a conscious will made up of a compound energy of the mental and vital and physical will, when in sufficient proportions, has considerable effective force: great men of action have this distinction. Even then, however, theirs is not that type which is absolute or never-failing, nor that especial category which will bring about a collective change, a fundamental change, intensive as well as

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extensive, needed at this evolutionary crisis of earth and humanity.

The ordinary average man is part and parcel of Nature's movement and his life is almost wholly moulded by circumstances: he has not developed an independent inner being that can react against the universal Nature's current, that is to say, the Nature as it is, as it is actually and dynamically expressed. He is the creature, described graphically in the Gita, as being moved helplessly on the circling wheel of Ignorance. But even among the average men there are many who are called men of will, they are not entirely submerged in Nature's current, but endeavour to have their own way even against that current. Their psycho-vital, aided often by their physical consciousness, has an independent formation, being a strong centre of self-driven force, and can impress upon the outer Nature and circumstances its own pattern and disposition. Naturally, all depends upon the degree and character of that consciousness.

But the true secret of the power to control and guide Nature's dispensation lies along a different line, not along the line of the normal

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activity of the mental and vital and physical consciousness. Body and life and mind belong after all, at least are closely affiliated, to one's environmental consciousness; they are indeed part of the circumstances in which one is born and lives and moves. It is when one by-passes them or passes through them beyond into one's soul, into one's true being and divine personality that one at last crosses mortality and attains immortality—mrityum tirtva amritam ashnute.

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To Be or not to Be

A moral problem, un cas de conscience (a case of conscience), as they say in French. To defend yourself against your attacker and kill him who comes to kill you or stand disarmed and let yourself be killed—which is better, which has the greater moral value? To fight your enemy is normal, is human. To preserve yourself, that is to say, your body, is the very first injunction of Nature. That is Nature's primary and fundamental demand. And to preserve one's life one has to take others' life. That is also Nature. But then, it is said, man is meant to rise above Nature, live (even if it means to die) according to a higher law—not the biological law, the law of tooth and claw. The higher law is for the preservation of life indeed, but others'-life, not one's own, if it comes to that; it is not self-centred, but wholly other-regarding,

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it is for harmony, for peace and amity, not violence and battle. If one demurs and points out that it requires two to be friends and at peace, the answer is that one side must begin, and the merit goes to him who begins. One need not worry about the other side, which may be left to follow its own law of life, which, however, can be gained over only in this way and not by compulsion or coercion or violence. Na hi verena verani samantidha kudachana. Never by enmity is enmity appeased, says the Dhammapada.

This is a way of cutting the Gordian knot. But the problem is not so simple as the moralist would have it. Resist not evil: if it is made an absolute rule, would not the whole world be filled with evil? Evil grows much faster than good. By not resisting evil one risks to perpetuate the very thing that one fears; it deprives the good of its chance to approach or get a foothold. That is why the Divine Teacher declares in the Gita that God comes down upon earth, assuming a human body, to protect the good and slay the wicked, slay not metaphorically but actually and materially, as he did on the field of the Kurus.

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It is a complex problem and the solution too is complex. The Gita—and Hinduism generally—does not posit a universal dharma,but a hierarchy of dharmas. Men have different natures; so their duties, their functions and activities, their paths of growth and development must naturally be different. A rigid rule does not fit in with the facts of life, and the more absolute it is, the less efficacy it possesses as a living reality. Therefore in the Indian social scheme, there is one dharma for the Brahmin and another for the Kshatriya, a third for the Vaishya and a fourth for the Shudra.

The Brahmin is he who represents in his nature and character the principle and movement of knowledge, of comprehension and inclusion, of peace and harmony—all the qualities that are termed sattwic. A Brahmin does not fight, the very build of his consciousness prevents him from wounding and hurting; he has no enemy; even if he is attacked or killed, he does not raise his arm to protect himself (although Ramakrishna would prescribe even for him a modified or mollified mode of resisting the evil, hissing at least if not biting). The Biblical injunction, we know,

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is to present the other cheek too to the smiter. This is for those who follow the Brahminical discipline. But a Kshatriya, who in his nature and consciousness is a warrior, has another dharma; he is the armed guard of knowledge and truth, he is strength and force. He has to resist the evil in the name of the Lord, he has to raise his arm to strike. He is the instrument of Rudra and Mahakali. Does not the mighty goddess declare—"I draw the bow for Rudra, I hurl the arrow to slay the hater of the truth"? If the Kshatriya does not follow his own dharma, but seeks to imitate the Brahmin, he brings about a confusion liable to disintegrate the society, he is then un-Aryan, inglorious, unworthy of heaven, deserving all the epithets which Sri Krishna heaped upon the dejected, depressed and confused Arjuna. So long as the world is held by brute force, so long as there is the sway of evil power over the material earth and the physical body, there will be the need to resist it physically: if I do not do it, other instruments will be found. I may say like Arjuna, overwhelmed with pity and grief, "I shall not fight", but God and the cosmic deities may

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refuse my refusal and compel me to do what in my ignorance and wrong-headedness I would not like to do.

Here lies the secret and the solution of the problem. It is indeed the solution given for all ages by the Gita. There will always be a problem, a difficult decision to make—a division in the consciousness—so long as one is in the realm of dualities, in one's mental being and consciousness, ruled by relativities and contingencies. There one cannot but have a divided loyalty. A part of you, for example, is loyal to your family, another to your country, a third to yourself or to some ideal which you have set up. And naturally man feels confused in the midst of their conflicting claims and is at a loss to choose. Therefore, the Gita says, the highest law, the supreme code of conduct, is the Divine Will. And the only work and labour for man is to discover and identify oneself with this Divine Will. "Abandon all other standards of conduct, take refuge in Me alone." That is the supreme secret of human life—as well as of the Life Divine.

To know the Divine Will and to be one with it is not easy, to be sure. But that is the only

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radical solution. That has got to be done, if one is to come out of the chaos he is in.

Once in this status of the divine consciousness, one passes beyond the three Gunas. That is to say, one bids good-bye to one's (the human sense of) freedom and option of choice. One can say no longer, I cannot do it, for it seems immoral, I have to do that, because that seems good. One goes beyond good and bad and awaits the divine command. One does what one is ordered to do from above, what is needed to fulfil the Cosmic Purpose. You do not act then, it is the Divine who acts in you.

It may be asked if even then there are not some types of activity and impulsion that are intrinsically evil, undivine—they can under no circumstances be godly or God's instruments, they have to be rejected, cast aside in the very beginning, also in the middle and naturally in the end. But it must be remembered that the human mind cannot be the judge of what is divine or undivine, there are things the Divine may sanction which the mental being fights shy of. It must leave it to the Divine to choose His instrument and His mode of activity— it is sufficient if the mental being knows by

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whom it is impelled and where it falls as an arrow shot to its mark: keneshitam patati preshitam.

Yes, there is one thing intrinsically evil and undivine and that has to be rejected and cast aside ruthlessly—that is nothing else than the egoistic consciousness. It is this that has passions and prejudices, likes and dislikes, ideas and ideals, formations of its own, other deities installed in place of the Divine Truth and Reality. The ego goes indeed and with it also those rhythms and stresses, lines and shades germane to it that bar the free flow of the Supreme Breath. But the instrument remains and the arms and the weapons—they are cleansed and sanctified: instead of the Asura wielding them, it is now the gods, the Divine Himself who possess and use them.

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VII

READINGS IN "SAVITRI"

(1)

A guardian of the unconsoled abyss

Inheriting the long agony of the globe,

A stone-still figure of high and godlilke

Pain Stared into space with, fixed regardless eyes

That saw grief's timeless depths but not life's goal.

Afflicted by his harsh divinity,

Bound to his throne, he waited unappeased

The daily oblation of her unwept tears.

Book 1 Canto 1.

The deepest and the most fundamental mystery of the human consciousness (and in fact of the earth consciousness) is not that there is an unregenerate aboriginal being there as its bed-rock, a being made of the very stuff of ignorance and inconscience and inertia that is

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Matter: it is this that the submerged being is not merely dead matter, but a concentrated, a solidified flame, as it were, a suppressed aspiration that burns inwardly, all the more violent because it is not articulate and in the open. The aboriginal is that which harbours in its womb the original being. That is the Inconscient Godhead, the Divinity in pain— Mater Dolorosa—the Divine Being who lost himself totally when transmuted into Matter and yet is harassed always by the oestrus of a secret flame driving it to know itself, to find itself, to be itself again. It is Rudra, the Energy coiled up in Matter and forging ahead towards a progressive evolution in light and consciousness. That is what Savitri, the universal Divine Grace become material and human, finds at the core of her being, the field and centre of concentrated struggle, a millennial aspiration petrified, a grief of ages congealed, a divinity lone and benumbed in a trance. This divinity has to awake and labour. The god has to be cruel to himself, for his divinity demands that he must surpass himself, he cannot abdicate, let Nature go her own way, the inferior path of ease and escape. The

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godhead must exercise its full authority, exert all its pressure upon itself— tapas taptva— and by this heat of incubation release the energy that leads towards the light and the high fulfilment. In the meanwhile, the task is not easy. The divine sweetness and solicitude lights upon this hardened divinity: but the inertia of the Inconscient, the 'Pani', hides still the light within its rocky cave and would not deliver it. The Divine Grace, mellow with all the tears of love and sympathy and tenderness she has gathered for the labouring godhead, has pity for the hard lot of a humanity stone-bound to the material life, yet yearning and surging towards freedom. The godhead is not consoled or appeased until that freedom is achieved and light and immortality released. The Grace is working slowly, laboriously perhaps but surely to that end: the stone will wear down and melt one day. Is that fateful day come?

That is the meaning of human life, the significance of even the very ordinary human life. It is the field of a "dire debate", "a fierce question", a constant struggle between the two opposing or rather polar forces, the will of aspiration "to be" and the will" of inertia "not

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to be"—the friction, to use a Vedic image, of the two batons of the holy sacrificial wood, ardni, out of which the flame is to leap forth. The pain and suffering men are subject to in this unhappy vale of tears—physical illness and incapacity, vital frustration or mental confusion—are symbols and expressions of a deeper fundamental Pain. That pain is the pain of labour, the travail for the birth and incarnation of a godhead asleep or dead. Indeed, the sufferings and ills of life are themselves powerful instruments. They inevitably lead to the Bliss, they are the fuel that kindles, quickens and increases the Fire of Ecstasy that is to blaze up on the day of victory in the full and integral spiritual consciousness. The round of ordinary life is not vain or meaningless: its petty innocent-looking moments and events are the steps of the marching Divinity. Even the commonest life is the holy sacrificial rite progressing, through the oblations of our experiences, bitter or sweet, towards the revelation and establishment of the immortal godhead in man.

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READINGS IN "SAVITRI"

(2)

Savitri, the Divine Grace in human form, is upon earth. The Divine Consciousness has abandoned its own supreme transcendental status to enter into the human consciousness and partake of the earthly life: it has taken up a mortal frame, to Jive and dwell here below. Only thus she can transform the lower animal nature into the divine nature, raise man to godhead, make of earth heaven itself.

A prodigal of her rich divinity,

Her self and all she was she had lent to men,

Hoping her greater being to implant

That heaven might native grow in mortal soil.

But the task is not easy. The flesh is weak: it is incapable of holding or receiving the breath of immortality. Not only so, it has a positive aversion, a bad will: it is refractory, antipathetic to the touch of the spirit. Matter is dull and dumb, dark and obdurate: mortality loves and clings jealously and exclusively to its mortal home. The earthly being does not know, cannot appreciate the gift, the boon that is brought to him, to his very door: he has only

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to receive and accept in order to be saved out of all ignorance and grief, impotence and death. The Divine Mother has forgotten herself, has made herself as small and as close and native to earth as any earthly creature, like any one of us, taken upon herself all limitations and indignities, the entire burden of an earthly life, graced with her presence this mortal atmosphere. But

Hard is it to persuade earth-nature's change;

Mortality bears ill the eternal's touch:

It fears the pure divine intolerance

Of its assault of ether and of fire;

It murmurs at its sorrowless happiness.

Almost with hate repels the light it brings...

As, however, "mortality bears ill the eternal's touch", the eternal too is intolerant of the mortal nature—only it is intolerant not in the ignorant blind squeamish weak human way, but in a divine way, for it is armed with weapons of light and knowledge, it assaults with its luminous force, the energy of ether and fire, the higher and nobler elements as against the dense dark dumb earth, the lowest element that clothes the human consciousness. Indeed,

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mortality is enamoured of the tangled beam of joy and sorrow, of laughter and tears, of light and shadow and cannot contemplate the unalloyed sheer delight in Eternity. It is out of breath in the serene rarefied air of immortality; it pines for the terra firma, the mud and slime. The human consciousness has been fleeing the Hound of Heaven down the corridors of Time, and yet it will be caught in the end and wholly transmuted in the divine embrace into the substance of the Divine Himself. All the unwillingness and protestation and revolt are meant to forge and hammer the final union into something perfect, faultless, absolute.

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ABOUT

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SIMILAR BOOKS

The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 4

The Divine Man

Human Progress

Consciousness as Energy

Evolution of the Spiritual Consciousness

The Freedom and the Force of the Spirit

To Be or not to Be

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Poems by Sri Aurobindo

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