Memoirs of Amrita including his seeking Sri Aurobindo's Darshan. This brief narrative, written in 1962 in Tamil, was translated into English in 1969.
EVOLUTION OF BEAUTY
I
Beauty standing motionless in meditation is beauty of form,
Beauty moving and shining in meditation is beauty of life,
Beauty thinking in meditation is beauty of thought—
The Spirit of beauty is thus standing, moving and thinking
from the far off beyonds.
II
Man first sought for the beautiful in the body of creation draped in all forms.
She was too unmoving for him and was standing wondrous and elusive.
Then defeated in his quest he sought for her in the quick life of all creation.
There too she was too quick for him and was moving wondrous and elusive.
Then again he sought for her in the animated thoughts of all creation.
There too she thought before him and was thinking wondrous and elusive.
Finally he found her shining wonderful at the giddy heights of the within
of man harmonised of body, life and mind.
DUTY, SACRIFICE, TRUTH
Duty is of the mental stuff; it is of the lower order. And truth is the outcome of the Supramental. The former is the coercive force of a lower order, a force of the mind which attempts to solve the perpetual conflict of variously moving forces found in the kshetra of man. The truth is of a superior origin and is the outcome of harmoniously moving forces whose home is where the gods take birth.
Duty is the will of the mental twilight trying to bring under its sway the several impulses of the vital or animal world. It has until now at the most partially succeeded in its object.
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In the effort to fulfil a duty — which is only a dry abstraction of the intellect, a way of conduct found by intellect in order to achieve a harmony — man willingly or unwillingly conjoins to his dry intellectual abstraction called duty another of his negative efforts known as sacrifice
In the world of truth there is no sacrifice. At his best a self-sacrificing man is only a self-pleased bankrupt trying to do charity by an entirely unsuccessful borrowing.
The multiple truths of the Supramental flow spontaneously as though in an infinite current of various channels moving in different directions, never colliding but enriching, embracing and kissing when met. They have the joy the self-fulfilment—altogether a new order yet to be discovered but already envisaged.
The joy of self-fulfilment is positive, harmonious and above-man; and the joy of self-sacrifice is troubled, uneven and is of the man.
Duty is the finely knotted and knuckled walking-staff of man groping and stumbling in the dimly lit vast forests of forces whose movements perpetually collide, clash, appear, disappear, rise. fall, and whose destiny and end are still unintelligible to hunch-backed, groping and ancient Man.
THE DEMANDS OF THE TRUTH-SOUL AND THE
LOWER NATURE
The title of this article consists of a contradiction in terms. There are demands of the lower nature and they are observed now and again by the Sadhakas; but to speak of the demands of the Truth-Soul is altogether untrue. For the Truth-Soul is a container of all things and there is not even the slightest chance for it to make any demand at any time. The Truth-Soul, to speak in the known simile of the lower
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nature, is a shell-covered seed which under proper climate and favourable weather breaks, comes out of the shell, grows, awakens out of the earth as a plant, buds, blossoms and finally falls as seed on the same earth out of which it came, as though getting involved again into inconscience only to come out again on a newer round and in newer forms. The Truth-Soul obeys its own law, its own rhythm and its own course, and its movements are dictated only by itself. There is a why for everything of the lower nature — movements and all — because there is a nature above the lower. But there is no such why for the Truth-Soul, and itself and its movements are its own joy, truth and power.
The lower nature is incomplete and finite. This very incompleteness and the stamp of finiteness form of themselves all the demands, not silent and peaceful but clamorous demands, that we face time and again surging in our lower nature. Almost at all times we identify ourselves in our ignorance with the demands of the lower nature, and consequently pain, misery, grief and all their accompaniments affect us willy-nilly. But for our identification with the demands, we could have safely steered through.
The demands of the lower nature are infinite in number and kind; and one cannot give a final satisfaction to any one of them in any way. Their satisfaction is not in the things they seek for. Not only a satisfaction but an innate joy will be attained only by the cessation of the demands, which is an impossibility under this cover of ignorance — the lower nature.
"Desire desiring defeats its own end" is a truth. The demands of the lower nature are a heap of chaotically moving desires. They do not cease to move even when they get the thing desired. Hence they are also an endless and aimless movement.
Now the only question is how to deal with them. The grace from above and a faith in its power of transformation and a complete śraddhā in us will take us a long way. Then a conscious yielding to
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the pressure of the Truth-Soul which is above us will slowly tend to break the cover of ignorance allowing the rays. of the Sun of Truth to enter into us. Under the transforming heat of the Sun of Truth, the demands of the lower nature will be transmuted into self-impelled movements of delight, and the lower nature itself will be transformed into that of which it is a mutilated and incomplete reflection.
WORK, FAITH, AND KNOWLEDGE
Work, faith and knowledge are interdependent principles of life. Work is the hammering that makes man, if not now, at least after a time, self-luminous. It is a necessary principle for perfection. If man had not-to work, he would not be what he is today. Work is nothing but an output of energy by the expense of which he profits more than he gives. The entire cosmos is a tremendous travail for the birth of something divine. That tremendous travail of the cosmos reflects itself as work in individuals. We are unconscious of that which is to be born; also we are unconscious of the divine meaning of what we do. From the spiritual height alone the things that are obscure grow clear. Even what are called works of no importance contribute to man's growth to perfection.
When man works, he works by faith. Faith is the unilluminated will in man. What is will in the spiritual consciousness is faith in the lower heights of mind, life and body. Will is the materialising power of consciousness. When consciousness vibrates, it vibrates to action. Vibration is the will that achieves the thing that is in the consciousness. What we see is the process which we call work. The will, the consciousness and what the will achieves, i.e. work, are one and the same thing in different aspects. That is Truth. The will brings down something from the consciousness of the Consciousness. This will is enmeshed in Matter. It rises above, i.e. it evolves from matter, accomplishing what is inherent in it. That inherent something is the real-idea of the consciousness. This real-idea is driven by its own force. It attains a partial awareness in its ascent into the mental-sheath. Then it is faith. The real-idea, the secret inherent something, in its ascent into the supermind becomes self-luminous. Then it is no more a secret something; for it stands self-revealed. There in the supramental plane, it is one of the multifarious groupings of the consciousness as real-ideas, aware of its own destined end, achieving its own end by the force that is itself. There consciousness and force are not two different things.
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There force is consciousness and consciousness is force. Hence particular groupings of consciousness that are real-ideas are will. That means a will that knows and a real-idea that is will. Now faith is the driving force of action which is soul going through several experiences for its own delight. When faith blossoms into knowledge then it is a case of I know and I act; until then it is a question of mental knowing, I try to act for what I want. Here faith disappears. In case of faith, in the first place, I do not try to act but I am simply driven to act for what is wanted of me. It is in this sense that faith moves mountains. In the supramental knowing also faith disappears. There the individual knows what is to be done. The individual is knowingly moved to action; but it may be — while he is yet at the lower heights of the supermind — at the expense of the individual's joy or grief. But it will be ultimately a self-luminous action moving in self-delight.
To start with, the faith; faith transformed into a self-aware will resulting in the divine action must be the object of sadhana, and that is the synthesis.
A VISION AND A VOICE
The Vision
A bright circular disc of water surging with something that it does not know, filled with ripples that break the thousand images of the Sun of Truth, appeared suspended in mid-air. And it looked too like a vast moon. Over this vast but finite disc a shower of rays, resembling the rays of the sun, and each and every ray carried in it a truth. The rays were brilliant near their source, the Sun; but they diminished gradually in their brilliancy as they descended down into the bright and rayless disc. All this was seen above the disc. Below from the fathomless depth arose a huge and thick surge of darkness, a darkness of various and many streams. The denseness of their shadows diminished gradually as they rose up higher and still higher. They, the several streams of the darkness of the fathomless night, seemed to carry along with them a mysterious something that they must needs deliver up to the angels of the Sun of Truth, who appeared to be awaiting that great but secret burden. Night below pregnant with the truth she hides, a mediating light between subdued to its mission, the
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perfect day of Truth above that is to be here and is there forever, Truth in her imperial and immortal beauty, Truth in her delightful and imperishable splendour.
The Voice
The ranges of the mind
The growing powers of the mind are covered by the lids of two infinities — one, a series of darknesses growing gradually in intensity below the mind; another, a series of light also growing gradually in intensity above the mind. The first blind the mind by the dark power of their ignorance; the others blind it too, but by the dazzling puissance of their luminous knowledge. The mind of a man may be likened to a buffer state, now enveloped by the beseiging powers of the darknessses and now overpowered by the strength of the luminous forces. It is a field where sometimes Dasyus, sometimes Devas, sometimes both wage their battles and play out their amusements according to their likes and their dislikes.
The field of mind is a field of finiteness — one side of this finite terminating in impenetrable ignorance, the other terminating in a knowledge as powerfully impenetrable. The powers of the mind — the power of perceiving and judging, the power of guessing and imagination, the power of reasoning and arranging and the power of remembering and piecing together — are all powers of the finite, of a partial ignorance, which are not sure of what they see, guess, arrange or remember. There is an amount of certainty because there is the play of light in the mind, and there is also an equal amount of uncertainty because there is the play of the darkness in it. The mind is a field where forces of various kinds that have their sources in opposite poles play their doubtful game and cause the powers of the mind to see, guess, arrange and remember doubtful issues. The mind is a vast but finite region where uncertain possibilities of many sorts, varying in kind and degree, float chaotically and pass and return for ever.
The mind perceives a portion of a truth whose head and feet are made invisible to it by the lids of the two opposing infinities. That little portion of the truth which the mind is able to see is imagined in a grotesque and fanciful form by one of its powers, and again it is
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cut into a thousand pieces and arranged in a series by another of its powers, and finally the missing link is supplied by its power of memory. At the end it generally happens that the partial truth which was caught by the mind is cut and arranged altogether out of shape — it is given a shape which it originally had not. At their best the powers of the mind know very well how to misrepresent the portions of the truth they perceive.
The self-effort of the powers of the mind leads them into a vague perception of the infinities that contain nothing if not the nothingness itself. But when they allow themselves to rest in the hands of the luminous truth beyond, they outgrow themselves and are transformed into powers of the truth-consciousness. In the hands of the forces of the lower darknesses, the powers of the mind grow either completely blind with the little light in them put out or grow animal in nature. When the powers of the mind find the upward urge that is within them and coalesce with it, then the power of perception of the mind will appear in its true nature stripped of its darkness as self-revelation; the power of imagination as inspiration; the power of reasoning as the rhythms and standards of the truth or truth in its various harmonies and orders; and the power of memory as the continued knowledge of the immortal truth in its eternity comprising in itself the past, the present and the future in an ordered and rhythmic succession without the break that blinds the mind and cuts up into sections the unity of the divine progression.
THE SEVERAL RHYTHMS
The Supreme God in His utter sleep — in one of His profoundest meditations — the Supreme Consciousness involved in its own substance — is the rhythm of the apparently dead matter that we see around us. The vast oceans roar over Him, the high mountains shoot up upon Him, but still that utter calmness continues undisturbed. For that supremely rhythmic equipoise is the main support of this entire ordered universe. God's complete withdrawal into Himself — a cessation of all His activities — an entire and thorough forgetfulness of His outer self seems to be a necessary price which He has willingly paid to bring out of Himself this vast manifestation — these many universes. And so too this great and grand dumbness of matter is the basic Principle by which the universe in which we live became possible.
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A divine ignorance is the divine earth out of which grow infinite things. Ignorance that is matter is but an involved sense.
When the supreme ignorance that is matter meets with the consciousness in its first tremor of waking, then the rhythm of the vital sense originates with all its beautiful and infinite ranges of plants, Shrubs and trees. The tremor of the God at his first waking from his stupendous trance is felt and seen in the pulsations of erectly growing trees with their outstretched upward arms, of crawling creepers, and of outspreading shrubs. This rhythm of 'the sense-world' is often, rather always overpowered by the all-absorbing and oppositely 'not-moving force' of the ignorance, the involved sense. Already here is seen the struggle between the two kinds of rhythms — a rhythm of perfect stillness and a rhythm of faintly pulsating dim wakefulness. This sense again is but an involved 'sense-mind'. The struggle is the cause of the deaths that occur in the plant world — the fading of flowers, the withering leaves, and the blasting away of fields of corn; a general death reigns behind this life. The law of the God in His all-absorbing meditation is too powerful for the individual plant to persist in the life-course. Still a collective rhythm of the sense-world continues in its course and is the parent of the rhythm of the sense-mind.
The sense delivers out of itself the sense-mind and a new rhythm bursts open in the animal world. All from the crawling insect to the full-fledged bird and the quadruped comes under this new world — a world where the rhythm is in a straight line. This straight and linear rhythm makes possible for the animal a constant prying into the well-covered store-house of memory:— it is a straight onward rhythm which admits of a straight backward glance. Animals succeed in remembering the place where they get their food; and the act of remembering turns with them into an unconscious habit. But theirs is the instinctive process of memory in the world of sense-mind; whether the movements are backward or forward,— the former represents the instinctive process of memory and the latter the instinctive process of living from moment to moment,— they are always in a straight line. Everything goes by instinct. The movements are not cyclic as in the mental process.
Plants, creepers, shrubs and trees are rooted to the mother Earth;
animals have succeeded in wrenching themselves away from the bosom of the earth and have a freer movement. The grip of ignorance that is matter is perforce a little slackened. Yet the all-pervasive and
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basic principle of ignorance pursues relentlessly the beings of the world of sense-mind and causes sleep, fatigue, disease and death. As in the plant, so in the animal world also, the individual animal dies, but the collective life-force, the total rhythm of the sense-mind continues. The plant world is more in consonance with the laws of its parent, the matter-world, and therefore the royal representatives of the plant-world, the huge trees in their forests of majestic symphonies enjoy a longer life than the animals which are the direct manifestation of a pronounced rebellion against the laws of the world of matter.
Under the pressure of the upward aspiration of the secret will-in-things the veil that lies over the sense-mind is lifted and a new world, a world where mind is the principal factor, peopled with human beings, emerges with its own characteristic laws quite different from those of the worlds of matter, sense and sense-mind. A new law means a new rhythm. If the world of matter were a plane figure, then the numberless beings of the sense-world are so many fixed points on that plane, and the animals of the world of sense-mind are so many moving points, and the human beings of the world of mind are so many points which revolve each on itself as they move or stand. Man comprises in himself all these, the standing, the moving and the self-revolving — these are represented in him by the four rhythms of matter, .sense, sense-mind and thinking mind. He is a field, broadly speaking, of these four great rhythms, of these four great movements, and each comprises many and various smaller movements giving rise to a complexity, a richness and variety that engenders a future of still greater possibility.
The greater the distance between ignorance and man, the more subtle are the ways invented by ignorance to prevent him from hastening onward. Fatigue, sleep, disease and death are partially circumvented by man. The world of mind would have given birth to that for which it is waiting so long,— but for the most subtle of all the weapons of the mother of the present manifestation, the ignorance of the physical consciousness, a power that binds man to the earth and makes him persistently stagnate in the same place, neither allowing him to go onward nor to retrograde. This mind of man is but the involved supermind. And the mind must perforce one day yield to the supermind under the supreme pressure of the upward urge in the secret will-in-things.
Out of the several rhythms and movements that are found in man the mental being,— the richest and the most complex of beings,— has
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yet to rise a harmony higher and greater than all those that went before. And that rhythm will be a key to all the others.
ON THE EVE OF THE COMING RHYTHM
A night burdened with many secret treasures, but covered with many layers of dreadful darknesses, was the beginning. Then layer after layer of the darkness began to feel, to answer to a touch of burning inward light and it revealed, it turned into something that it was apparently not. A series of darknesses, different in shade and colour, emerged out of this burning travail. First was the rhythmic dumb mighty material trance, a tenebrous womb of complete night. Then came another rhythm, a darkness of grey clouds, and that obscure vigil took form in the plant world. Thirdly, a dim emergence, a rhythm of starlit shadow, the animal world. And then there came a moon movement in the darkness, there came the epicycloidal movement of mind revolving as on a pivot around the involved supermind, a lesser circle turning on an arc of that greater hidden circle-,. And now what we see is the last whirlings of the mind moon, pale and languourous in a vast and bewildering sky because she has seen, silently announced by a ray of the star of hope, Hesperus, the approach of her Lord, because she has heard a far-off hint of the footfalls of His coming. Though she knows it is her Lord who approaches, yet is she shy of meeting Him in her borrowed garments of light, and therefore she resists and recedes from what she wishes, falls back on her own deficiencies and by her trepidations and sinkings seems to labour to put off the birth it was always her mission to precede and prepare. Already the East is reddening with the Dawn,— Dawn, the eternal handmaid of the pink and rosy blushes, who at every moment of her life, at every step of her constant journey, goes ahead of truth, clearing and rending the darknesses — her advent a sure sign of the approaching Lord, the rising Sun of Truth. The Sun of Truth shall burst open into the vast sky and the entire manifestation beginning; from now-dead matter pulsate with a luminosity that is at once power and joy.
The immediate rhythm that is waiting to appear here on this earth will make of man a passive channel for its vibrant and luminous play. And when it has fully descended, his illumined body and physical consciousness will be a source of puissant calm on which various other and supraphysical harmonies will be sounded. His body will not as before be a cause of fatigue, sleep, hunger, disease and death. At
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every moment it will be felt releasing out of its calmness that is strength, a series of impulsions strong with light and capable of carrying out that towards which they started. Now all his efforts and movements are perverted by ignorance, brought up by a check before they are completed and return baffled upon themselves, but then they will be unimpeded and luminous with knowledge. The self-revolving movements of the tired and exhausted mind and the mind itself will be entirely swallowed up by the thousand rays of the Sun of Truth, and there will be left only a bright disc with a power to pass on the rays of the Sun as they come without any diminution or distortion either of their power or of their light. This all from body up to mind with all their infinite intricacies and complications will be transmuted into the best possible channels and instruments of the supreme Truth and Beauty and stripped of their ignorance, egoism, incoherence, isolation. Different men will be conscious channels for different intents and purposes. This is but a small indication of that coming larger harmony — a key also to the present various and conflicting rhythms.
DANGERS IN SADHANA
Two kinds of movements only are left open to the sadhakas of the yoga — one towards the higher and another towards the lower being and nature. To remain in one place and to stagnate there is an impossibility for any sadhaka. Even when he seems to stagnate, it is only either to rest in the hands of the higher and gather strength for a further step in the beyond or to rest in the hands of the lower for a further step downwards, losing some more of his already gained strength and light.
The nature of the objects of desire of a sadhaka will explain more clearly the dangers to which he is liable. When one desires an object,— particularly if it is the desire for union with another soul,— it is to be seen definitely and clearly whether that soul or individual being has his potentialities, capacities, tendencies turned towards the higher or towards the lower or ordinary common life. Those who are not sadhakas generally move either lower and lower in the scales of existence or turn in the one plane in which they live in wider and wider circles or vegetate at one point neither widening nor moving high or low. To be drawn towards such individuals is a clear indication of tendency or tendencies that act or make an attempt to act in the sadhaka.
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The lower forces when they move towards forces that are higher than themselves, march always calmly with folded hands and with genuine reverence. But when an imperfect sadhaka feels tendencies towards the lower forces, he always goes towards them blindfolded and very often makes a rash, unhesitating and helpless surrender. It is supposed and truly that the sadhaka's fall is most often sudden, precipitate and tremendous and the collapse causes grievous hurt which takes time to become again whole. Forces are awake and at work around him gifted with powers and a strength which is difficult for him to detect and counter. He is a bold and seeing, an ascending sadhaka, who with the help of higher powers, is able to rightly manage these variously moving forces of overwhelming strength.
The sadhaka must take the necessary care and caution to see clearly the several directions of the variously moving, clamorous and complex lower forces to be able to be steady, unfailing, and fixed to the higher aims that are found in him. Dark clouds of lower forces that move downwards in several streams, will come and stand in between his half-seeing eyes and the object of his sight and make him feel confused for a while or longer, as though lost in a trackless wide ocean covered by a dark sky. Sadhakas must be able to generate in their being heat and light and luminous flames to disperse those thundering dark clouds.
The greater the height on which the sadhaka happens to be, the greater and more hurtful would be the fall if he continues still to depend on his own strength as he did when he began the sadhana. The more he ascends, the more must be the willing surrender to the Highest towards which he is destined and less and less the dependence on himself and his powers, if he wishes to avoid dangers and pitfalls, which are innumerable on the way.
THE SECRET OF THE PHYSICAL CONSCIOUSNESS
Behind the higher mind, the mind,—manas, chitta—prana and body, there is the strength of the physical consciousness. The womb of physical consciousness is always in travail to bring out the Something that is behind all these things — to bring it out in its various true forms and types which are immortal, luminous and eternal.
The pranic force delivered out of matter fails in its creation and mutilates the types; then the physical consciousness confers upon the
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pranic force the release of death and gives a new birth to it, opens to it a fresh trial in another manner. The anxiety of this consciousness to preserve the types with which the pranic force is endowed is actively visible in the instinctive force of self-preservation. Its preying upon others in order that it may continue to live and its effort to defend itself against other contrary forces are the principal forms that are taken by this instinctive process of self-preservation. Here is the place of the theory of "the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest". Both these ideas express a partial truth, but their true truth lies in the spiritual fact behind the physical manifestation. It is this that the true and right type-seed which came out of the womb of physical consciousness, will alone survive among the many possibles, and it endures till the fragrant flower of the truth within it blossoms in a perfect form of the physical existence.
The several truth-seeds are several distinct type-seeds. They are the concentrated, gathered and involved knowledge-will of an infinite and vast consciousness. They have therefore in them a law and a power of growing into their original states of being. The process of involution presupposes a process of evolution. Each truth-seed grows constantly in power and extension by a distinct instinct of self-reproduction which is seen in one form or another in all living things from plant to man.
In the world of mind, the physical consciousness preserves the type-seeds chiefly by the strong instinct of conservation. Even when the mind makes an attempt at a forward step, there comes clouding around it a thick vapoury smoke of doubt. That doubt springs from the dim partiality of the mind's envisaging of the truth beyond. There is then a battle between the forces that preserve already existing types and the forces that discover new types. The latter are very often. overbalanced by the former. But the tender new truth, the type-seed. grows in strength and extension outside the pale of the old established order of things, in the end either to devour it and be stronger or to transform it and grow richer.
The physical consciousness everywhere acts as the force that holds together. Out of it originates an instinct for order, law, rhythm, the dharma. The multiple truths will finally be revealed by the physical consciousness in their multiple order and rhythm which will be a free, vast and integral dharma, a non-clashing, harmonious, spontaneous, inalienable interplay of movements of beauty, truth and light ever vibrant with power and joy.
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The physical consciousness in its psychic movement is very near to the images of truth. The dark and concealed sense in plants, the covert and accurate instinct in animals and the stray flashing intuitions that come to man, are all psychic aspects of physical consciousness in its various grades and phases. If man is to discover any new and enduring truth-order, it must be only by the many concrete powers of the psychic consciousness in its most highly developed and transformed order and degree of status and action. The ever-enduring forms of the truth-seeds are seen by the psychic vision, not of a dark and lower, but of a higher and more illumined nature; they are established by the pure and lucent powers of the higher psychic consciousness, and they are set in motion by the energies of an ever-moving higher Life.
THE BIRTH OF THE SUN-LORD
The happy luminous tremors of the sky of this dark night which is passing away proclaim the birth of the Sun-Lord that is to be. The earth, at the thought of his immediate birth, is astir with a fresh and vigorous life like a young and swift horse ready to gallop and the heavens are aglow with the soft and radiant blush of the dawn. The two shining firmaments are fostering the Sun-Lord with the wine of their swift-moving waters of being. Every calmly hastening minute that quietly passes away is a throb, a sting of delight, a thrill of agonisingly poignant joy, the throes of travail that the firmaments endure before they bring out the Sun-Lord from their infinite and cavernous womb of dreadful night and darkness.
This infinite, cavernous and dark womb of night is vast and has seven portals, each one leading and opening into the other, and between runs a long and sinuous network of labyrinthine ways. The Sun-Lord takes seven births before he comes to the last of the portals. Each portal supported by beams and pillars of gold opens into a vast and infinite world balanced and held between two supporting and fostering firmaments. Thus these seven interpenetrating and intertwining worlds of different substances — the frames of the rhythmic dance of God's lila — have fourteen firmaments of various colours and shades creating the lines of their ordered existence. The Sun-Lord takes his birth in each and every one of the seven worlds, rends asunder their darknesses and diffuses through them the seven lights of his seven aspects. Enriching the firmaments he himself gets enriched in substance
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and power; and he establishes by his fiery roamings from firmament to firmament a unity in their diverse existence. The Sun-Lord is the suffused calm light of shanti — the profound peace of the world of matter and its fathomless silence; he is the vibrant light of movement and growth in the world of prana, he is the twilight of animated thought in the world of mind. And now he is moving away to climb the outskirts of the firmaments of supermind, the first and foremost of his many true homes. Thus ascends the Sun-Lord through the firmaments — every new ascent into a new firmament, a new birth and enrichment of the wide and opulent ranges of his being.
THE GREAT TITAN
God is substance-delight whose nature is consciousness that is force. The innateness of force is vibration. That is its inherent character in activity, vibration of consciousness, vibration of delight, vibration of substance. Matter in the present manifestation is the lowest vibration of the one densely packed consciousness — Spirit, the highest, the most intense vibration of the same densely packed consciousness — radiating the longest luminous waves. Between matter and spirit there intervenes a long series of waves of different lengths which radiate lights of different colours with infinite shades. Among them one can easily distinguish four broad major divisions—the vital, emotional, mental and supramental koshas, resultants of four great and distinct vibrations of the one densely packed consciousness.
Man has four principal centres in him through which he can put himself in connection with all these koshas. The higher vibrations are received by the brain-centre and the successively lower and lower .vibrations by the centres that descend in a series below the brain. The more he is responsive to any one of them, the more he comes in touch with the kosha with which that centre connects him.
The Purushottama, the inmost of all that is and all that is not, is the Supreme being of that transcendent and universal substance-delight whose nature is consciousness that is force. He is the divine Archer who is seated high in his own immensities far, far away from those koshas, above them in the mystic beyonds whence he shoots his arrows of light and power; and infinite in length are each of the shafts of the Eternal. These arrows of the divine Archer create by their contact various grades of vibrations in the consciousness, and
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each of them is a grand cosmic movement. Hence have these ordered universes come into being.
The present manifestation is governed by a deity and he has under him a legion. The deity and his legion are ensouled dark substances. He is capable of an enormous strength, but it is Titanic or Asuric in its Nature. He is ever-greedy in his strength, ever-absorbing, ever-devouring, mightily, fiercely, cunningly, forcefully, whatever he gets from whatsoever source. That which he annexes to his kingdom turns into the law and nature of this presiding deity — this great Titan. He is the Lord of the three kingdoms. He sets in motion mixed and disordered rhythms. He is a leader of many forces and does equally good, bad and indifferent things.
The brightest of his three kingdoms — the world of mind — is his indeed, but still not completely under his sway. Now he is victorious, now he is defeated, and always thus he goes on his way amid the paths of mind, advancing and flung backward, conquering and insecure, amid doubtful victories and momentary lordships. His laws are partially obeyed and sometimes disobeyed by the inhabitants of his half-lit, half-murky kingdom—this conflict-ridden world of mind. Its inhabitants are never sure of a peaceful existence even for one short moment. Their opulent riches are taken away from them as spoils by the Great Titan and they look on helpless, not masters of themselves and therefore not masters of their gains and possessions.
The mind is an empire of rich peoples who possess a dull and grey-coloured wealth — but an empire without an emperor. The Lord of the vital world is an aggressive ruler who rules his own peculiar kingdom mostly without a challenge. He goes a-hunting for more riches into other kingdoms also. The docile and peace-loving inhabitants of the mind gather wealth only to be forcefully deprived of them in the end by the Titan below who has always a purpose, an object, an aim in him and most often successfully carries it out by a relentless pressure. And if he sometimes yields to enemy forces, it is with an obstinate intention finally to circumvent them and be their lord or victor.
Behind this lower greyer mentality there is a greater and more luminous country—the higher mind. The beings of this region possess sufficient power to unsettle and overrule the workings of the Titan in part if not wholly, at times if not always; for a season hut not for ever. Here is found the more splendid wealth of ideas and ideals. And these are undying by-products cast up from the high and tense vibrations
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of the arrow-lights that are shot by the divine Archer seated far away in the mystic beyonds. The present state of human societies, whether in Europe or Asia, is based upon the inspirations of the vital world, but they are not given freedom for their full play because they are crossed, crippled, mutilated and maimed of their fullness in their movement by the disturbing and powerful vibrations of the arrow-lights shot by that great Archer. The cause of discontent, disharmony, failure and all their brood is to be sought for in the struggle between the Titan and his legion on one side and the descent of the higher vibrations into the lower world on the other.
The higher mind is peopled by a few leading beings, powers or forces—beings who are splendours of light, forces that are like sword-like flames. Or rather they are less self-existent forces than the principal aspects of the mother-force. One flames high, cool to the eye, wide and dense blue, like the starless and cloudless sky; it nourishes and protects whatever comes to it; it has an enormous strength; its foundation is the quiet calmness of the Eternal. There is another that flames up high. This force is bright white in colour. It has the mighty power to rend asunder the cavernous halls of the darknesses, and ever and anon it brings out of the secrecy of the inner caves and mountains the broods of creation. This too is wide; it is concentrated and bright in its immaculate whiteness. The third flame is lurid-red in colour, broad and mighty in strength and is based on a stupendous calmness like the other two flames; and this flame lives by destruction. There is an amity among the three and they work one at a time in the field of consciousness or, when one is in motion on one side, the other two play and work on the other two sides of this manifestation.
The three luminous flames or high gods descend at long intervals on this earth that is in possession of the great Titan, wage successful battles with him and establish their rule, but it is never permanent, it lasts only for a less or longer but always limited time. Each one of these gods has around him a thousand cohorts selected and chosen from the worlds below, where they have been endowed by their divine head and leader with great powers and heightened capacities. These are his cohorts, ganas, souls to the last moment of their life faithful to their resplendent lords.
These three great and bright flames of force of the blue, white and red hues have their different seats of power, the blue in his heart, the white in his head and the red in his shoulder-blades. The blue-tinged
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flame is ornate with bright gold and shining diamonds, the white flame is rich with wisdom; and the red-hued flame soars high with its thousand blazing tongues, each a force, a power of majestic destruction.
The goddess of opulence has chosen the heart of her lover as her permanent abode; the goddess of learning and wisdom finds a peaceful dwelling in the head of her lover; and the goddess of sustaining power and calmness has chosen to pervade and enshrine half the body of her lord. These gods and goddesses are inseparable either at work or at rest; together they sleep, together they labour.
Above and beyond these flames lies burning in splendour the region of the fourth kosha, the sheath of the supramental, the incandescent light, matrix and mother of three flames, of the world of the Titan and of all that is below him. Here are many pure fires and lucent flames, a magnificent multitude that evolve and involve, work and play and rest, each moving in its own and true way, delighted, unhindered and harmonious. When at rest, they are in luminous peace, unlike the lower forces who lapse into dull inertia when they have no work. And their work when they are in motion is ordered and harmonious, evolving of many truths in their own sufficient delight of tightness, in the kartavyam manner, quite unlike the forces below that grope and stumble, collide and clash in their half-lit or gloomy seekings. When the luminous knowledge comes, it comes from within the pure fires and lucent flames of truth, and they have no fear of losing it at any time like the powers of the nether regions, whose dimmer lustre of indirect and derived illuminations is a gleaning from outside their range and they have in them a continual fear of losing the earned treasure that is light and lapsing back into impotence and darkness.
Now there is one who has loosened himself from the tight and oppressive grip, the narrowing and perverting rule of the Titan, and long before, he threw himself entirely into the hands of the three principal flames or deities of the higher mind—Vishnu, Brahma, Siva—the three flames and forces of blue, white and red colours of the higher mind. They too like the Titan wanted only to utilise him instead of delivering him to their mother—Mahakali-Krishna, the Supramental. From this restraint and limitation too he has loosened himself away, he has proceeded even beyond the large precincts of the higher mind. And now he has gone into the true land of the Mother. He is the first chosen of the Mother; he is the emperor of the many
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kingdoms that are in him; such only are admitted by the Mother into the land of the Truth-Consciousness. He becomes the emperor of those that come to him. He is the centre of a small nucleus consisting of a few which is the beginning of the future, the seed of the coming race of Supermen. All the forces that are reigning in the present world will be out to combat it, to destroy the new creation if possible; but that is not to be.
At present he is working in dumb, profound and rich silences away from the immediate and near presence of the great Titan and his rulings. A series of circular rows of fences enring him; and these fences are made of sharp and shining swords of the Light pointing in all possible directions and ready to cut down and destroy any amount of enemy forces of whatever might and insolence. No danger, not even the Titan himself, can pierce the fences of Light that enring him.
To be accepted by him is to be accepted by the double personality of Mahakali-Krishna. The secret of acceptance by him — the guhyatamam or uttamam rahasyam is the secret of the old text, sarvakarmāni parityajya māmekam śaranam vraja. The secret is known but it is not easy of achievement; the land of the Truth-Conciousness is not near but still far away, and we are not far removed from the temptations of the present deity that is ruling us — the Great and Grand Titan.
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