The Indian Spirit and the World's Future

Vivekananda and Our Spiritual Future

WE who live in this day of India's reawakening to the Yogic secrets of her own past cannot but pay homage to the mighty figure of Vivekananda. Together with his guru, Rama-krishna, he was the most potent early shaper of the resurgence of our national genius. His also was a tremendous impact on the mind of the West. And yet, if we are to work for a complete spiritual fulfilment, we must see that Vivekananda's philosophy, though a golden torch of truth when compared to the conjectural ingenuities of metaphysicians who are not Yogis, falls short of what we may term the integral God-view and world-view. No more inspiring mouth-piece can be found for a particular type of spiritual realisation; but this realisation, necessary and grand as it is, could be overstressed, and Vivekananda did overstress it because of a certain division between his deeply dedicated heart and his powerful yet not untroubled intellect.

The most momentous event in his life was the great act of Ramakrishna, a little before Ramakrishna's own death, which endowed Vivekananda with the divine energy to carry out his mission on earth. "I have become a fakir," cried the Master after imparting to the young disciple by means of a long intimate meditation his own abiding sense and thrill of the divine World-Mother's presence within and without. The subsequent march of the homeless sannyasi, possessed of the Mother, is part of Indian history. Throughout his life, Vivekananda worshipped the Mother as only a few souls have done; still, his final philosophical word is against the worship of a personal divinity. Surely here is a paradox.

The only explanation is that the paradox is due to his never having succeeded in solving the time-old riddle as he propounded it to himself: "Why under the reign of an almighty and all-loving God of the universe should diabolical things be allowed to remain? Why so much more misery than happiness and so much more wickedness than good?... The question remains to be answered

Page 159

and it cannot be answered." In other words, if God is omnipotent, He is not benevolent, since He has deliberately and not unavoidably caused the cosmic wheel to revolve, and if He is either not omnipotent or benevolent He is not God at all! This dilemma in one form or another always pursued Vivekananda; it is a purely intellectual difficulty dissolved the moment we are humble enough to acknowledge that our puny human standards of benevolence cannot be applied to the Ultimate Being. Indeed our intuitive aspiration after absolute Good, after the final law of righteousness, is indicative, as all feeling-out towards absolutes is, of something in the constitution of the Ultimate Being, but we have to realise that God is not good in our sentimental human way: His is a benevolence which surpasses our notions of it just as much as our notions would exceed those of, say, the most altruistic ape!

Vivekananda, however, never definitely struck upon this truth nor has, for that matter, any intellect which has been too acutely alive to the "still sad music of humanity" and forgotten or at least underrated the beatific harmonies of the superhuman wisdom of God. Has not H. G. Wells, an idealist of our own day, uttered the crashing blasphemy that he would spit in the face of a God who did not utilise His almightiness to lend a fiat to "the Open Conspiracy" by which a "Capitalist-ridden" world is to be saved? The same humanitarian conscience anxious to spare an almighty Maker the responsibility of an imperfect world has compelled Bernard Shaw to conceive his Life Force as a blind stumbling experimenting urge towards perfection. Vivekananda being a true Indian, could not be Wellsian or Shavian and forego the Supreme and the Perfect: he had a gigantic hunger for the immaculate Infinite. But the only way which seemed open to him, in order to reconcile the Perfect with the suffering world and its baffling problems of sin and ignorance, was to turn Shankarite.

This he did without flinching: he called himself an Adwaitin and held Adwaita to be the ultimate both in philosophy and Yoga. Still, he could not shake off the synthetising influence of his guru who followed Bhakti and Jnana with equal fervour. So he accepted the worship of the personal Godhead who creates, preserves and destroys the cosmos, as a preparatory training for the higher

Page 160

ecstasy of the absolute union in which the whole cosmos is blotted out from the Yogi's consciousness. What he did not see was that the sealed trance of non-duality is only a sort of sublime sleep, and could logically as well as pragmatically mean not the annihilation but merely the oblivion of phenomena.

He, no doubt, endorsed the common-sense of Ramanuja's contention that so long as the soul is aware of Nature and its own individuality it needs must believe in a Lord and Originator of them both. But he unmistakably said that the presence of Nature and the individuality of the soul were a bar to the highest realisation since the One alone truly existed and could not suffer any multiplicity in Its all-consuming Ananda. Confronted with the question how, if the One alone existed, the many had ever come to be, he sought refuge in Shankara's indescribable Maya. Not that he entirely rejected the aspect of the world as Lila - it was indeed the play of Ishwara, the personal divinity, but then Ishwara himself was no more than the most marvellous play of the original Phantasy or Ignorance, the Shankarite Illusion which at once is and is not. The love of Ishwara was, in Vivekananda's eyes, a splendidly cathartic emotion, cleansing the being of much egoism, yet not sufficiently, since the "I" of the lover remained over against the "Thou" of the beloved. But, seizing upon the profound mystery of love by which the lover and the beloved are somehow one though apparently divided, he said that the highest intensity of Bhakti was not different from the non-dual union of Jnana. Unfortunately, he overlooked the other side of the matter -namely, that if this is true the union of Jnana could never be exclusively non-dual, since Bhakti even in its intensest fusion of "I" and "Thou" implies, as all love must, a difference-in-unity. Thus his very tribute to Bhakti was the result of the pro-Jnana temper of his intellect and based on a philosophical misunderstanding of the ultimate essence of love.

This misunderstanding helped to soothe somewhat the dominant conflict of his spiritual life - the unresting sense of the incompatibility of the One Perfect with the imperfect many. And it is characteristic of him to have made the significant remark that the bhakta must never argue. Love is an emotion which embraces

Page 161

its object blindly and without question. In order, therefore, that the bhakta should reach the climax of his Yoga he should set aside his intellect and yield completely to the psychic urge which does not ask whether God is almighty and also benevolent but adores Him just because He is the Vision Splendid and the Beauty of Ancient Days that is yet ever new. Love, according to Vivekananda, is a maddening intoxication with Beauty: Bhakti must be rapt with the Supreme as Beauty, must take Beauty as an end in itself and ask no questions as to whether it is good or bad, omnipotent or weak.

The truth, however, is that in genuine Bhakti Yoga the attributes of omnipotence and goodness are almost as prominent as that of beauty. God is the most lovely of all objects because His is the superhuman power of an unimaginable love and benevolence. All quibbles about His perfection are vain for the born devotee because they amount to measuring with little wit the supreme wisdom. But, according to Vivekananda, when his intellect put the personal God on the horns of a dilemma, the horns were fatal to such a God's existence: hence his misconception of the soul of true Bhakti. The same idea is again responsible for the sorry reducing of Devotion to a superb kind of art for art's sake with reference to the Highest, ignoring the final necessity that the Highest should also be an infinite or inconceivable yet real goodness and righteous power. But for Vivekananda the philosopher, a personal Creator could never be that, and if love is to be valuable as a step in spiritual life it must at least forget if not disbelieve that its object is a creative Person. Otherwise, it must go by the board; and in any case Jnana was deemed surer ground inasmuch as it tried to do away with creation and divine personality by means of the theory of Maya - without exactly emptying the baby with the bath-water. The divine Child still remained but in a bit abstract form: it became the divine Childhood, the unageing Bliss, just as the divine Existent became the sole Existence and the divine Knower the pure Consciousness. What is more, the unageing Bliss was conceived as so lost in childlike super-sleep that for it the world ceases, as it were, to exist, and with its cessation the old conflict is permanently dissolved, though yet never satisfactorily accounted for.

Page 162

This, in general, was Vivekananda's philosophy in which Dualism was regarded as a superficial truth and qualified Monism as a phenomenal edition of the authentic truth which was stark and utter Monism. In all his lectures, this threefold division is either explicit or implicit, and though he admits the provisional efficacy of the first two methods of the soul's progress, he is set like flint against their claim to finality. "Brahma satyam, jagan mithya" remains his philosophical motto.

Mark now the inconsistency between this philosophy and his own spiritual career. He was an undeviating worshipper of the Shakti - that is to say, of the same creative Force which his intellect riddled with argument. He was a most zealous devotee of Ramakrishna as an Incarnation - that is to say, of a real manifestation of the Supreme Essence without that Essence's ceasing to be supreme for a moment. For him to look upon the Divine Mother and upon Ramakrishna as illusions to be renounced would have been to make a mockery of his own holiest feelings. And the fact stands that he did not deem them illusions: his every thought was an act of adoration at their feet, every moment of his sadhana was filled and glorified by his acceptance of them as realities. The personal God, sovereign of his being, was the secret of his entire spiritual adventure, whether at Dakshineswar, at Amarnath or at the Parliament of Religions. His whole dynamic Yoga was shaped and guided by this one living motif, this pure psychic realisation. Why, then, did he not preach the name of Kali, the beloved Shyama of his Bengali poems, instead of letting Her be sick-lied over with the appellation of Maya? Why did he not raise a temple of philosophy to Her instead of pointing with so splendid a gesture of finality towards Brahman and Atman? Why did he depreciate the personality of the Divine as being a phantom, though the most glorious one, of the illogical mind instead of inspiring men to surrender themselves to the mighty love of Her who gave them birth? Why did he refuse to see in the universe a divine design rather than a futile and blind mechanism which had somehow taken form out of a nothingness of delusion? If he had not thus intellectually refused, he would not have inconsistently preached as he did the gospel of aggressive Hinduism and dynamic

Page 163

spirituality in the same breath in which he declared that the supreme Spirit was eternally passive, eternally aloof from this phantasmagoric universe. If he had spent even half his energy of prophet to humanity as the soldier of the Divine Mother just as he spent so much of his energy of sadhana as Her son and devotee, his philosophy would not have been such a Pyrrhic victory of the trenchant intellect over the illumined soul.

He was right in holding that each finite is necessarily a front and face of the whole Infinite which is hidden behind it and is its Self of self; but the obvious conclusion from it would be that the Infinite possesses, owing to Its omnipotence, the power of appearing divided and imperfect in spite of remaining essentially one and unsullied. To say that It cannot and does not have such a power and yet to believe that somehow the illusion of division and imperfection comes to be, even phenomenally, is to deny the Divine Its omnipotence. Besides, if spiritual realisation is to be at all real, it must be the soul of the individual that achieves and attains it, so that even when it unites with the Supreme it must still possess a sort of distinct reality. If there is no unity, no basic identity between the two, there can be no union; but if there is no difference there can be no progressive attainment of union either. And if the experience of the attainment is to be real, then the bondage from which the individual soul escapes must also be real - else there is no actual self-liberation, no realisation by the individual of his basic identity with the Highest. But if bondage has a reality, however phenomenal, the sealed trance of so-called exclusive non-duality must be only an oblivious spiritual slumber and no negation of the cosmos, and therefore Nature and the individual soul must always be conceived as necessarily coexisting with the Divine, and the Divine as not a vast void but as an inexplicable yet genuine unity-in-multiplicity; for otherwise there would be no ground of truth in the Ultimate to support and correspond to Its phenomenal manifestation.

It is this ground of truth or perfection that It brings out of Its stability not only to support but also to govern this lower manifestation, which is our world, by a higher manifestation or perfect harmony of what Sri Aurobindo calls Real-Ideas. The Real-Ideas

Page 164

constitute an organised play of supernal archetypes or truths of what is here expressed and worked out by a course of difficult evolution. They are a faultless cosmos in which no division of ignorance is made between the One and the many contained in It and which guides covertly or overtly this evolutionary mould of itself where the Divine has set up by Its all-might the figure of a great initial nescience as if in a wager with Itself in order to manifest the Truth in the terms of all that begins as its utmost contradiction. In that faultless cosmos there is no absence of the individual soul and its instruments of mind, life and matter. A supreme individual selfhood is there the counterpart of the evolving spark of the Divine that is here our soul; it is measured out and distinguished from its likes by a movement of ideative definition which is the supreme counterpart of what we know here as mind, while the dynamis which sustains the differentiation and interplay of ideative soul-nature is the supreme counterpart of the life-force of our experience, and finally the form taken by the soul's idea force, that which substantialises distinctions and energy patterns, is the supreme counterpart of matter. It is the sense of these ideal realities behind everything and of the great wager, that Vivekananda lacked and that sums up the advance made by Sri Aurobindo on the traditional Yogas. But the sense is possible only if the human intellect stops sitting in judgment on the character of God and understands that the evolutionary working out of the full supramental Truth which can make man perfect and solve at length all the jarring riddles of his mortality is the grand aim set up by the Divine.

The Truth is being manifested here by a process and play of possibilities through repeated births, in which each of us has to behave as if he were free to choose and act; for such indeed seems to be the law of evolution, that the prevision of our supreme selves is to be worked out by the exertion, effort and experiment of our earthly souls, aspiring after the Divine and, without questioning or criticising Its design, calling It down to possess them and all their members, so that body, life and mind may be converted into luminous figures of their own archetypes of Truth. This direct calling down of the Truth, constantly and persistently, with full

Page 165

self-surrender to Its demands is what Sri Aurobindo terms the Integral Yoga by which the very body will also be transformed into an incorruptible vehicle of the immortal Bliss, Consciousness and Power of the Divine - the Divine that is conscious of Its manifestation and capable of holding relations with what It manifests and hence personal in the highest sense of that word -the Divine which is the one yet multiple ground of truth of all that constitutes our humanity and which possesses on the plane of ideal realities the one yet multiple symbol of the perfected human form. Thus even the anthropomorphic con-ceptions of Shiva and Kali are justified as types of the living divine reality which is to be incarnated in us and to whose infinity of essence, conscious force and beatitude we have to ascend. If, therefore, we are to profit by the example of Vivekananda, we must turn from the rigid mental heights of his Shankante meta-physics to the psychic depths of his sublimely childlike disciple-ship. Else we shall fail to avoid the intellectual pitfall which made his philosophy a voice from the Mayavadin past and we shall miss that in him which bears most luminously on the issues of our spiritual future.

Perhaps the psychic depths of his mighty nature - a nature keenly conscious of the anomalies of existence and aware of the especially hard lot of a spiritual hero destined to revive a fallen nation's soul - perhaps those depths never found tongue with such perfection as in a little known poignant lyric of his which expresses the brave confidence of the luminous warrior-child of the Supreme Mother and at the same time the tragic puzzlement of one whose intellect discovered not the master-key to life's riddle. A quintessence of the Vivekananda who inherited the world-enlightening mission of Ramakrishna in a mind avid of immurement in the illimitable Formless where no questions arise, this lyric which we may well regard as one of the treasures of English poetry makes the Divine Being utter to him the Wisdom beyond thought:

Page 166

THE CUP

This is your cup - the cup assigned to you

From the beginning. Nay, My child, I know

How much of that dark drink is your own brew

Of fault and passion, ages long ago.

In the deep years of yesterday, I knew.

This is your road - a painful road and drear.

I made the stones that never give you rest.

I set your friend in pleasant ways and clear,

And he shall come, like you, unto My breast -

But you, My child, must learn to travel here.

This is your task - it has no joy nor grace,

But 'tis not meant for any other hand,

And in My universe hath measured place.

Take it. I do not bid you understand.

I bid you close your eyes to see My face.

Page 167