Isha Upanishad

Chapter I: God and Nature

[note] - situations requiring textual explication; all such information is printed in italics

[word] - word(s) omitted by the author or lost through damage to the manuscript that are required by grammar or sense, and that could be supplied by the editors

GOD AND NATURE - I

The Isha Upanishad opens with a monumental phrase in which, by eight brief and sufficient words, two supreme terms of existence are confronted and set forth in their real and eternal relation. Ish is wedded with Jagati, God with Nature, the Eternal seated sole in all His creations with the ever-shifting Universe and its innumerable whorls and knots of motion, each of them called by us an object, in all of which one Lord is multitudinously the Inhabitant. From the brilliant suns to the rose and the grain of dust, from the God and the Titan in their dark or their luminous worlds to man and the insect that he crushes thoughtlessly under his feet, everything is His temple and mansion. He is the veiled deity in the temple, the open householder in the mansion and for Him and His enjoyment of the multiplicity and the unity of His being, all were created and they have no other reason for their existence. Ishá vásyam idam sarvam yat kincha jagatyám jagat. For habitation by the Lord is all this, everything whatsoever that is moving thing in her that moves.

This relation of divine Inhabitant and objective dwelling-place is the fundamental truth of God and the World for life. It is not indeed the whole truth; nor is it their original relation in the terms of being; it is rather relation in action than in being, for purpose of existence than in nature of existence. This practical

Page 429

relation of the Soul to its world thus selected by the Seer as his starting point is from the beginning and with the most striking emphasis affirmed as a relation not of coordinate equality or simple interaction but of lordship and freedom on one side, of instrumentality on the other, Soul in supreme command of Nature, God in untrammelled possession of His world, not limited by anything in its nature or His nature, but free & Lord. For, since it is the object of the Upanishad to build up a practical rule of life here in the Brahman rather than a metaphysical philosophy for the satisfaction of the intellect, the Seer of the Upanishad selects inevitably the practical rather than the essential relation of God & the world as the starting point of his thought, use & subordination rather than identity. The grammatical form in vásyam expresses a purpose or object which has to be fulfilled,—in this instance the object of habitation; the choice of the word Ishá implies an absolute control and therefore an absolute freedom in that which has formed the object, envisaged the purpose. Nature, then, is not a material shell in which Spirit is bound, nor is Spirit a roving breath of things ensnared to which the object it inspires is a prisonhouse. The indwelling God is the Lord of His creations and not their servant or prisoner, and as a householder is master of his dwelling-places to enter them and go forth from them at his will or to pull down what he has built up when it ceases to please him or be serviceable to his needs, so the Spirit is free to enter or go forth from Its bodies and has power to build and destroy and rebuild whatsoever It pleases in this universe. The very universe itself It is free to destroy and recreate. God is not bound; He is the entire master of His creations.

The word Ishá, starting forward at once to meet us in this opening vibration of the Seer's high strain of thought, becomes the master tone of all its rhythms. It is the key to all that follows in the Upanishad. For not only does it contradict at once all mechanical theories of the Universe and assert the pre-existence, omnipotence, majesty and freedom of the transcendent Soul of things within, but by identifying the Spirit in the universe with the Spirit in all bodies, it asserts what is of equal importance to

Page 430

its gospel of a divine life for humanity, that the soul in man also is master, not really a slave, not bound, not a prisoner, but free—not bound to grief and death and limitation, but the master, the user of grief and death and limitation and free to pass on from them to other and more perfect instruments. If then we seem to be bound, as undoubtedly we do seem, by a fixed nature of our minds and bodies, by the nature of the universe, by the duality of grief and joy, pleasure and pain, by the chain of cause and effect or by any other chain or tie whatsoever, the seeming is only a seeming and nothing more. It is Maya, illusion of bondage, or it is Lila, a play at being bound. The soul, for its own purposes, may seem to forget its freedom, but even when it forgets, the freedom is there, self-existent, inalienable and, since never lost except in appearance, therefore always recoverable even in that appearance. This is the first truth of Vedanta assumed by the Upanishad in its opening words and from this truth we must start and adhere to it always in our minds, if we would understand in its right bearing & complete suggestion the Seer's gospel of life:—

That which dwells in the body of things is God, Self and Spirit; the Spirit is not the subject of its material, but the master; the soul in the body or in Nature is not the prisoner of its dwelling-place, but has moulded the body and its dharmas, fixed Nature and its processes and can remould, manipulate and arrange them according to its power and pleasure.

Idam sarvam yat kincha, the Seer has said, emphasising the generality of idam sarvam by the comprehensive particularity of yat kincha. He brings us at once by this expression to the Adwaitic truth in Vedanta that there is a multitude of objects in the universe, (it may be, even, a multitude of universes,) but only one soul of things and not many. Eko 'chalah sanátanah. The Soul in all this and in each particular form is one, still and sempiternal, one in the multitude of its habitations, still and unshifting in the perpetual movement of Nature, sempiternally the same in this constant ceasing and changing of forms. God sits in the centre of this flux of the universe, eternal, still and immutable. He pervades its oceanic heavings and streamings; therefore it endures. Nature is the multiplicity of God, Spirit is

Page 431

His unity; Nature is His mobility, Spirit is His fixity; Nature is His variation, Spirit is His constant sameness. These truths are not stated at once; the Seer waits for a later verse to arrive at them. In this opening phrase he limits himself to the statement of the unity of God, and the multiplicity and mobility of Nature; for this relation in opposition is all that is immediately necessary to base the rule of divine living which it is his one object in the Upanishad to found upon a right knowledge of God & existence.

The self then of every man, every animal and every object, whether animate or inanimate, is God; the soul in us, therefore, is something divine, free and self-aware. If it seems to be anything else,—bound, miserable, darkened,—that is inevitably some illusion, some freak of the divine consciousness at play with its experiences; if this Soul seems to be other than God or Spirit, what seems is only a name and a form or, to keep to the aspect of the truth here envisaged, is only movement of Nature, jagat, which God has manifested in Himself for the purpose of various enjoyment in various mansions,—it is an image, a mask, a shape or eidolon created in the divine movement, formed by the divine self-awareness, instrumentalised by the divine activity. Therefore He is "this man and yonder woman, a boy and a girl, that old man leaning on his staff, this blue bird and that scarlet-eyed". We have, asserted in the comprehensiveness of the phrase, not only an entire essential omnipresence of God in us & in the world, but a direct and a practical omnipresence, possessing and insistent, not vague, abstract or elusive. The language of the Sruti is trenchant and inexorable. We must exclude no living being because it seems to us weak, mean, noxious or vile, no object because it seems to us inert, useless or nauseous. The hideous crawling worm or snake no less than the beautiful winged bird and the strong or gracious forms of four-footed life, the dull stone and foul mire and evil-smelling gas no less than man, the divine fighter and worker, are motions of the supreme Spirit; they contain in themselves and are in their secret reality the living God. This is the second general truth of Vedanta which arises inevitably from the pregnant verse of the Seer and, always present to him in his brief and concentrated thinking, must also

Page 432

accompany us throughout our pursuit of his sense and doctrine.

God is One; Self, Spirit, Soul is one; even when It presents Itself multitudinously in Its habitations as if It were many souls and so appears in the motion of Nature, Its universality and unity are not abrogated nor infringed. In all there is That which by coming out of its absorption in form of movement, recovers its unity. As the soul in man, though seeming to be bound, is always free and can realise its freedom, so, though seeming divided, limited and many, it is always universal, illimitable and one and can realise its universality and unity.

This creature born in a moment of time and bound in an atom of Space, is really in his secret consciousness the universal Spirit who contains the whole universe of things and dwells as the self of all things in these myriad forms of man & bird & beast, tree & earth & stone which my mind regards as outside me & other than myself. In the name of myself God inhabits this form of my being—but it is God that inhabits and the apparent "I" is but a centre of His personality & a knot in the infinite coilings of His active world existence. My ego is a creation of the Jagati in a form of mind; my Self stands behind, possesses and exceeds the universe.

GOD AND NATURE - II

This is Spirit in relation to Nature, one in multiplicity, the Lord of nature and process, free in the bound, conscious in the unconscious, inhabitant, master and enjoyer of all forms and movements of life, mind and body. Nature in relation to Spirit is its motion and the result of its motion, jagatyam jagat, phenomenon and everything that exists as phenomenon, universe and everything that constitutes universe. There are two terms in this brief and puissant formula, jagati and jagat. The second, jagat, is particular and multiple and includes whatsoever is separate existence, individual thing or form of motion, yat kincha; the first, jagati, is general and indicates both the resultant sum and the formative principle of all these particular existences, sarvam idam yat kincha. Sarvam idam is Nature regarded objectively as

Page 433

the sum of her creations; jagati is Nature regarded subjectively and essentially as that divine principle, expressed in motion of being and observed by us as force or Energy, which generates all these forms and variations. For Existence in itself is existence in a state of repose or stillness; indeterminate, infinite, inactive, it generates nothing: it is movement of energy in Existence which is active, which determines forms, which generates appearances of finite being and brings about phenomena of Becoming as opposed to fixed truth of Being. Therefore every objective existence in the world and all subjective forms, being forms of Existence in motion, being inconstant, being always mutable and always changing, progressing from a past of change to a future of change, are not truly different beings at all, but becomings of the one and only Being; each is the result of its previous motion, stands by its continued motion and if that motion were pretermitted or its rhythm disturbed, must change, disintegrate or transmute itself into some other form of becoming. Spirit or God is eternal Being, Nature in its sum & principle is the becoming of God and in its particulars a mass of His becomings, real as becomings, falsely valued as beings. The knowledge of the Upanishads takes its stand on this supreme distinction of Being and its Becomings; we find, indeed, in this Upanishad itself, another and more convenient collective term used to express all that is here defined as yat kincha jagatyam jagat,—one which brings us straight to this great distinction. The soul is Atman,¹ Being; everything else is sarvabhútáni, all becomings or, literally, all things that have become. This phrase is the common Sanscrit expression for created beings and though often referring in ordinary parlance to animate and self-conscious existences only, yet must in its philosophical sense and especially in the Upanishads, be accepted as inclusive of all existences whether they are or seem animate or inanimate, self-conscious or veiled in consciousness. The tree, flower & stone no less than the animal, heaven and wind and the sun and rain no less than man, invisible gas and

Page 434

force & current no less than the things we can see and feel fall within its all-embracing formula.

God is the only Being and all other existences are only His becomings; the souls informing them are but one Spirit individualised in forms and forces by the play and movement of Its own self-consciousness.

We see, then, whose this energy is and of what the universe is the motion. But already from the little we have said there begins to emerge clearly another truth which in the Upanishad itself the Seer leaves in shadow for the present and only shapes into clear statement in his fourth and eighth couplets; he emphasises in the fourth couplet the unity of Soul & Nature, the stillness & the motion are not separate from each other, not one of them Brahman and the other an illusion, but both of them equally the one sole Existence, which moves & yet is still even in its motion, Tad ejati tannaijati, anejad ekam manaso javíyas. In the eighth verse he indicates that Brahman & the Lord² are not different from each other or from the motion, but are the reality of the motion as the motion itself is the play of the stillness; for to Tad ejati, That moves, comes as an echo & response, Sa paryagát, He went abroad. Nature is motion of the Spirit, the world is motion of God; but also Nature is Spirit in motion, the world is God at play.

All our inefficient envisagings of the world, all our ignorant questions fall away from this supreme Vedantic conception. We cannot ask ourselves, "Why has God brought about this great flux of things, this enormous and multitudinous worldmovement? what can have been His purpose in it? Or is it a law of His nature and was He under an inner compulsion to create? Who then or what compelled Him?" These questions fall away from the decisive & trenchant solution, Ishá vásyam jagat. He has no purpose in it except habitation, except delight, an ordered and harmonised delight,—therefore there is what we call universe, law, progression, the appearance of a method

Page 435

and a goal; but the order effected feels always its neighbourhood to the grandiose licence of the infinite and the harmony achieved thrills at once with the touch of the Transcendent's impulse to pass out of every rhythm and exceed every harmony. For this is a self-delight which in no way limits or binds Him; He has brought it about and He conducts it in perfect freedom; there is no compulsion on Him & none can compel Him, for He alone exists and Nature is only a play of time-movement in His being, proceeding from Him, contained in Him, governed by Him, not He by it or proceeding from it or coeval with it and therefore capable of being its subject, victim or instrument. Neither is there any inner compulsion limiting Him either as to the nature of the work or its method. The movement of the universe is not the nature of God, nor are its processes the laws of God's being; for Spirit is absolute and has no fixed or binding nature, God is supreme & transcendent and is not bound by state, law or process,—so free is He, rather, that He is not bound even to His own freedom. The laws of Nature, as we have seen, cannot be laws of being at all, since Nature itself is a becoming; they are processes which regulate the harmonies of becoming, processes which are, in the Vedic image, chhandas, rhythms of the movement and not in their own being rigid, inexorable & eternal because self-existent verities; they are results of the tendency to order & harmony, not sempiternal fetters on Existence. Even the most fundamental laws are only modes of activity conceived & chosen by Spirit in the universe. We arrive then at this farther all-important truth:—

Nature is a divine motion of becoming of which Spirit is the origin, substance and control as well as the inhabitant and enjoyer. Laws of Nature are themselves general movements & developments of becoming and conditions of a particular order, rhythm and harmony of the universe, but not inexorably preexistent or recognisable as the very grain of existence. The Laws of Evolution are themselves evolutions and progressive creations of the Spirit.

Since Spirit, transcendent and original of the universe, is the sole existence, the motion of the universe can only take place in

Page 436

the Spirit. Therefore the indwelling of the Spirit in forms is not only a free indwelling rather than an imprisonment, but also it is not the whole or essential truth of this mutual relation of God & Nature; indwelling but not confined, like the presence of the ether in the jar, it is symbolical and a figment of divine conception rather than the essential relation of body and spirit. We get the fuller statement of the truth in the fifth couplet of the Upanishad, Tad antar asya sarvasya tad u sarvasyásya báhyatah; That, the inexpressible Reality of things, is within this universe and each thing it contains, but equally it is outside of this universe and each thing that it contains,—outside it as continent, outside it as transcendent. The omnipresent Inhabitant of the world is equally its all-embracing continent. If form is the vessel in which Spirit dwells, Spirit is the sphere in which form exists & moves. But, essentially, It transcends form and formation, movement and relation, & even while It is inhabitant & continent, stands apart from what It inhabits and contains, self-existent, self-sufficient, divine and eternally free. Spirit is the cause, world is the effect, but this cause is not bound to this effect. Na cha mám táni karmáni nibadhnanti, says the Lord in the Gita; I am not bound by these works that I do, even while I do them. The soul of man, one with God, has the same transcendency and the same freedom.

Spirit contains, dwells in and transcends this body of things. It acts in the world but is not bound by Its actions. The same essential freedom must be true of this soul in the body, even though it may seem to be confined in the body and compelled by Nature's results and its own works. The soul in us has the inherent power not only of becoming in this outward & waking consciousness what it is in reality, the continent of the body which seems to contain it, but of transcending in consciousness all bodily relation and relation with the universe.

From the action of Nature in the Spirit, as from the action of the Spirit in Nature, the same formula of freedom emerges. I have, in God and by God, made myself and my world what we now are; I can, in God and by God, change them and make them what I would have them be. I am not the sport and puppet

Page 437

of Nature and her laws, but their creator and her master. She accommodates herself to me and pretends to herself & me that she is ruling my whole existence, when she is really following, however late, stumblingly and with feigned reluctance, the motion of my will. Instrument of my actions, she pretends to be the mistress of my being. The identity of the soul and God behind all veils is the Vedantic charter of man's freedom. Science, observing only the movement, seeing fixed process everywhere, is obsessed by what she studies and declares the iron despotism of mechanical Law. Vedanta, studying the Force that makes the movement and its cause, arrives at the perception and experience of Spirit everywhere and declares our eternal and indefeasible freedom. It passes beyond the Law to the Liberty of which the Law itself is the creation & expression.

GOD AND NATURE - III

It is not enough, however, to know the inner fact and the outer possibility of our freedom; we must also look at and take into account the apparent actuality of our bondage. The debit side of the human ledger must be taken into the reckoning as well as the credit account. The explanation and seed of this bondage is contained in the formula jagatyam jagat; for, if our freedom results from the action of Spirit in Nature and of Nature in Spirit, our bondage results from the action of Nature on all that she has created and contains. Every mundane existence is jagatyam jagat, not a separate and independent motion by itself, but part of and dependent on the universal movement. From this dependence by inclusion derives the great law that every form of things engendered in the motional universe shall be subject to the processes of that particular stream of movement to which it belongs; each individual body subject to the general processes of matter, each individual life to the general processes of vitality, each individual mind to the general processes of mentality, because the individual is only a whorl of motion in the general motion and its individual variation therefore can only be a speciality of the general motion and not contradictory of it.

Page 438

The multiplicity of God in the universe is only a circumstance of His unity and is limited and governed by the unity; therefore the animal belongs to its species, the tree, the rock and the star each to its kind and man to humanity. If machinery of existence were all, if there were no Spirit in the motion or that Spirit were not Ish, the Master, origin, continent and living transcendence of the motion, this law is of so pressing a nature that the subjection would be absolute, the materialist's reign of iron Law complete, the Buddhist's rigid chain of causation ineffugable. This generality, this pressure of tyrannous insistence is necessary in order that the harmony of the universe may be assured against all disturbing vibrations. It is the bulwark of cosmos against chaos, of the realised actuality against that inconstant & ever-pulsating material of infinite possibility out of which it started, of the finite against the dangerous call and attraction of the Infinite.

The unity of God governs His multiplicity; therefore the more general motion of Nature as representative of or nearest to that unity governs the multiple individual products of the movement. To each motion its law and to each inhabitant of that motion subjection to the law. Therefore Man, being human in Nature, is bound first by Nature, then by his humanity.

But because God is also the transcendence of Nature & Nature moves towards God, therefore, even in Nature itself a principle of freedom and a way of escape have been provided. Avidyayá mrityum tírtwá. For, in reality, the motion of Nature is only the apparent or mechanical cause of our bondage; the real and essential cause arises from the relation of Spirit to Nature. God having descended into Nature, Spirit cast itself out in motion, allows Himself as part of the play to be bewitched by His female energy and seems to accept on Himself in the principle of mind isolated from the higher spiritual principles, her absorption in her work and her forgetfulness of her reality. The soul in mind identifies itself with its form, allows itself apparently to float on the oceanic stream of Nature and envisages itself as carried away by the current. Spirit veils itself from Mind; Ish wraps Himself up in jagat & seems to its own outer consciousness to be jagat. This is the principle of our bondage; the principle of our freedom

Page 439

is to draw back from that absorption & recover our real self-consciousness as the containing, constituting and transcendent Spirit.

Spirit, absorbed in the motion and process of Nature, appears to be bound by the process of becoming as if it were law of being; it is therefore said to be bound by Karma, that is to say, by the chain of particular cause and effect, the natural chain of active energy and its results. But by drawing back upon itself & ceasing to identify itself with its form, it can get rid of this appearance and recover its lordship and freedom. Incidentally, the soul of Man by drawing more and more towards God, becomes more & more Ish and can more and more control the processes of becoming in himself and in others, in the subjective and in the objective, in the mental and in the material world.

This final conclusion of freedom & power in the world is of the last importance for our immediate purpose. Merely to draw back from all identification with form is to draw away towards the Stillness, the Infinity & the cessation of all this divine play of motion. Ever since Buddhism conquered Vedic India and assured the definite enthronement of the ideal of Sannyasa in opposition to the ideal of Tyaga, this consummation has been constantly praised and held up before us in this country as the highest ideal of man and his only path to salvation. But even if for the few this goal be admitted, yet for the majority of men it must still & always remain God's ultimate purpose in them to realise Him manifest in the world,—since that is His purpose in manifestation,—& not only & exclusively unmanifest in His transcendental stillness. It must be possible then to find God as freedom & immortality in the world and not only aloof from the world. There must be a way of escape provided in Nature itself out of our bondage to Nature. Man must be able to find in Nature itself and in his humanity a way of escape into divinity & freedom from Nature, avidyayá mrityum tírtwá. This would not be possible if God and Nature, Brahman and the Universe, were two hostile & incompatible entities, the one real and the other false or non-existent. But Spirit and Universe, God and Nature are one Brahman; therefore there must always be a point at

Page 440

which the two meet; their apparent divergence in consciousness must be somewhere corrected in consciousness, Nature must at some point become God and the apparently material Universe stand revealed as Spirit.

In the profound analysis of the human soul built by the ancient Vedantic thinkers upon the most penetrating self-observation and the most daring & far-reaching psychological experiments, this point of escape, this bridge of reconciliation was discovered in the two supramental principles, Ideal Consciousness & Bliss Consciousness, both of them disengaged from the confusions of the mind involved in matter. Just as modern Scientists, not satisfied with the ordinary processes & utilities of Nature, not satisfied with the observation of her surface forces & daily activities, penetrated further, analysed, probed, discovered hidden forces & extraordinary activities, not satisfied with Nature's obvious use of wind as a locomotive force, found & harnessed the unutilised propulsive energy of steam, not satisfied with observing the power of electricity in the glare & leap of the thunderflash, disengaged & used it for the lighting of our houses & thoroughfares, for the driving of our engines & printing presses, for the alleviation of disease or for the judicial murder of our fellow-creatures, so the old Vedantic Yogins, not satisfied with observing the surface activities and ordinary processes of our subjective nature, penetrated further, analysed, probed, discovered hidden forces & extraordinary activities by which our whole active mentality could be manipulated and rearranged as one manipulates a machine or rearranges a set of levers; pressing yet farther towards the boundaries of existence they discovered whence this energy proceeded & whitherward this stir and movement tended & worked. They found beyond the manifest & obvious triple bond of body, life & mind, two secret states & powers of consciousness which supported them in their works—beyond this limited, groping and striving mind & life which only fumble after right knowledge & labour after the right use of power & even attaining them can possess & wield them only as indirect & secondhand agents, they discovered a principle of ideal consciousness, vijnana, which

Page 441

saw Truth face to face & unerringly, looking on the sun with unshaded eyes, and a principle of all-blissful power & being which possessed in itself, by the very right of its eternal existence & inalienable nature, right joy, right awareness & right action as the very self-atmosphere of its manifestation in the universe. Above this inferior trilogy of matter, life & mind (Annam Prana Manas), there is a superior trilogy of Infinite Being, Force & Bliss (Sat, Chit, Ananda) accessible to us & working on us inhabitants of the lower spheres from the symbol of divine beatific consciousness, the Anandatattwa, as its throne of world rule, the home & fortress of the divine Master, and employing as its distributing & arranging minister the truth-seeing ideal mind to feed, supply & compel the activities of the lower being. They saw, then, being arranged in seven stairs, seven worlds, seven streams of world movement, seven bodies of things, seven states of consciousness which inform & contain the bodies. They saw this material consciousness & this material world as the lowest stair, the least in plenitude & power & joy of these seven divine rivers. Man they saw as a soul dwelling in matter, deriving his activities from mind & holding them in mind but going back in the roots of his being to the divine trilogy. Earth, in the language of their thought, was the footing & pedestal of the human unit, but the heavens of Ananda concealed the secret & ungrasped crown of his world-existence. This conception of the sevenfold form of our being & of world-being helps to constitute the very kernel of the doctrine in the Upanishads. It is the key to their sense in many passages where there is no direct mention or precise reference to any of its seven terms. It is because we miss these clues that so much in these scriptures comes to our mind as a mystery or even as a vague & confused extravagance of disordered mysticism.

In this septuple system of our Scriptures every individual body obeys the laws of matter, every life the processes of vitality, every mind the processes of mentality, every ideal being the processes of ideality and every free soul the processes of Beatitude. The seven worlds are indeed different kingdoms, each with its own nations & creatures, prajáh, bhútáni. But since God is

Page 442

always one, each separate motion contains in itself the presence and potentiality of all the others; moreover, since it contains the potentiality, it is irresistibly led to develop under its own conditions that which it contains. For this reason Matter in the world tends to manifest Life, Life in Matter to rise into Mind, Mind in vitalised body to be released into Pure Idea, Pure Idea in matter-housed Mind to be consummated in divine Beatitude. The pervading law, therefore, which confines each species to the rule of its kind is only one general rhythm of the movement; it is crossed by a higher upward and liberating movement which leads the becoming we now are to strive for development towards that other, freer & larger scale of becoming which is immediately above it. This fresh rule of Nature, then, appears & constitutes the rule of our freedom as the other was the rule of our servitude.

The principle, "To each motion its law & to each inhabitant of the motion subjection to the law" is crossed and corrected by this other principle, "Each motion contains a tendency towards the motion above it and to each type of becoming, therefore, there comes in the progress of time the impulse to strain beyond the mould it has realised to that which is higher than itself."

In this complex arrangement of Nature where is man's exact position? He is a mental being housed in a vitalised body & he tends through pure idea towards divine beatitude. Now just as matter informed with life, no longer obeys the processes of matter only, but, even while it affects life-processes, is also affected by them and finds its complete liberation in the conquest of matter by life, just as mind in a life body is affected, limited and hampered by vital & bodily processes, but still governs them and would find its own liberation and theirs in the perfect conquest of life & matter by mind, so, since this mental being is really a soul imprisoned in mind, its perfect liberation comes by rising out of the mould of mind through pure idea into beatitude; escaping into beatitude, this mental existence is able to liberate the whole lower system of being by renewing every part of it in the mould and subjecting every part of it to the process of that which we have now become. The mould and process of Ananda

Page 443

is freedom, God, bliss, immortality, universality, & these, therefore, are the laws of being, the dharmas, the sum of a divine beatific existence which we put on by rising out of mental ego into infinite Ananda. The motion of pure Idea, vijnana, is the door of our escape in Avidya; for it is the kingdom within us of Truth and Illumination, domain, in the Vedic symbol, of the god of the Sun, the prophetic Apollo, the burning and enlightening Surya. Sa no dhiyah prachodayát.

The base of our being is in Matter, its knot is in mentality, its escape into divine Bliss. Our aim as human beings must be to rise through the pure Idea into divine bliss and there freed from mental egoism & vital and material limitations spiritualise and beatify our whole existence from the base to the summit.

We are a double birth, God the Spirit, God in Nature, Ish and Jagat. In Nature we are bound in our consciousness, because we are there a whorl of its motion, a wave in its sea; in Spirit we are free, for there we are a part of nothing, but one with the indivisible Spirit. But this double is really biune. God, unbound by His divisibility, unbound by His indivisibility, weds the One to the Many in the play of His consciousness, in His ineffable beatitude. There God and Nature meet, Vidya and Avidya embrace each other, our real freedom governs and uses consciously our apparent bondage, the bliss of Transcendence joins hands with the bliss of manifestation, God shows Himself in humanity and man realises himself as divine.

The joy of that reconciliation dwells in the Immortality to which the Vedanta is our guide and its starting point is the recognition by mind of the one Lord in all bodies, the one Spiritual Being in all becomings, átmánam sarvabhúteshu. Since it is the all-blissful Lord who dwells within and Nature is for His habitation and enjoyment, then a state of Nature which is a state of bondage, sorrow-pursued, death-besieged, wrestling with limitations, is convicted of being only a temporary mask and a divinely willed starting-point for the Energy confined in the triple bonds of mortal Mind, Life & Matter to work out its own immortal freedom. The object of life is self-liberation, the only aim of human existence consistent with the dignity and

Page 444

fullness of our being is the escape through Nature to God, out of grief, bondage & death into joy, freedom and immortality. Avidyayá mrityum tírtwá vidyayámritam asnute.

APPENDIX

[The following passage, written on a loose sheet, seems to be related to the above section.]

In our observation of the workings of law & freedom in cosmic Nature we cannot fail to be struck by the principle of gradated and progressive freedom by which she climbs up from an apparent rigidity of law to an apparent elasticity of freedom. We observe that matter inert or informed only by an inert principle of motion is the field of rigid law & of fixed process. We observe next that in proportion as life develops in matter, the principle of variation, of flexible adaptability, even of instinctive, if unconscious self-adaptation manifests & increases in her workings. We observe that in proportion as mind develops in living matter this variation, this flexibility & self-adaptation grow into a conscious struggle with & partial domination of the life & matter in which mind operates. From this we arrive easily at certain large corollaries.

(1) Mind, life & matter are, in all probability, one essence, but not one principle. They are three different principles of Nature, each with its separate rhythm, principle of process & mode of working.

(2) Consciousness is the principle of freedom, form is the principle of law; the necessity of dealing with the rigidity of form and its processes is the cause of the limitations of the freedom inherent in consciousness.

(3) Consciousness and life evolve out of matter; they must then have been all the time inherent & involved in matter.

(4) Life itself seems to be an operation of involved consciousness working itself out of the imprisonment in matter. It is therefore conceivable that matter itself may be only a form of involved consciousness.

Page 445

(5) Mind is a principle of mental self-conscious sensation, action-comprehension, reaction, attraction-repulsion rising into a luminosity (prakasha) we call knowledge of which thought is only the partial system or formula. In Life we notice in the plant & metal a vital sensation, action-comprehension, reaction, attraction-repulsion, essentially the same as the mental but expressed in a different system of values,—values of involved consciousness. In Matter we do not observe sensation, but we do observe the other common activities of Nature. Experimental Yogic psychists assert that matter does also receive & store blind sensations & that the mind of man can discover records of past events in material objects & convert them into values of knowledge. Science even goes so far as to assert that all sensations are an activity of matter & are stored in the brain & can always be turned by memory under some stimulus into values of knowledge. We may say therefore that the essence of consciousness is at least present in matter, but it only organises itself by evolution, through life in mind.

We cannot assert that the present state of consciousness [which is] the consciousness of limited freedom & derived knowledge in man is the last possible evolution of consciousness. It is at least possible that an entirely free consciousness bringing with it a spontaneous instead of a derived knowledge & an entirely free mastery instead of a partially free manipulation of mind, life & matter is concealed in Nature & its unveiling is the final goal of her evolution.

If such a free consciousness exists, there must be a principle in Nature superior to mind as mind is superior to life & matter & this can be nothing else than the Vedic principle called vijnana.

This free consciousness, entire mastery, must be a power of cosmic Nature & cannot be acquired by the individual except by breaking down the habits of consciousness & exceeding the fixed processes by which the individual action is separated & differentiated from cosmic action.

The ultimate evolution must therefore end in the openness of the individual for cosmic or infinite consciousness-being, not limited by individual ego-sense, the workings of free infinite

Page 446

cosmic force, not limited by individual will; possessing entire freedom, knowledge & mastery it must be in its nature an infinite joy & bliss in oneself & in all the cosmic workings which enter into our experience. The highest state of Nature & goal of evolution must be infinite Sacchidananda.

So much we can reasonably infer from the facts of the cosmos as we see them. We then arrive at the Vedanta results without starting from Vedanta; but if we accept the Vedantic premise that all world is only a formation & operation of consciousness, these inferences become inevitable conclusions.

Page 447