Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1

Caesar Versus the Divine

"RENDER unto Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's." We do not subscribe to the motto. We do not admit that the world and the spirit are irreconcilables and incommensurables. On the contrary we assert their essential unity and identity. The spiritual force is not and need not be impotent or out of place in Caesar's domain. Rather it is the spiritual man who alone can possess the secret of mastering the forces that work out mundane things, perfectly and faultlessly.

But then, it may be asked, how is it that in the history of the world we find men of action, great dynamic personalities to be mostly not spiritual but rather mundane in their character and outlook? Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, Chandragupta, Akbar, even Shivaji, were not spiritual personalities; their actions were of the world and of worldly nature. And the force they wielded cannot be described as spiritual, and yet how effective it was, what mighty changes it brought about in the affairs of men! And do we not actually see in the lives of saints and true spiritual souls that the force of the spirit, if force it can be called, moves away from the field of dynamism, turns towards a plane or height where all incentives and impulses to action fall silent and vanish in the end? The spiritual force is applied to negate all mundane activity, to get out of the profane field of life. That is the skill of Yoga referred to in the Gita, that is how we are to understand the injunction to see "inaction in action", and "action in inaction".

Now there are several things to be distinguished here. First of all, even if it is accepted as true that in the past it is worldly men alone who were dynamically active in the world and that spiritual men were men of inaction whose role was to withdraw from the world, at least to be passive and indifferent with

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regard to mundane activities, that does not prove that it is an eternal truth and it is bound to be so ever and always. We must remember, if we admit the evolutionary character of Nature, of man and his growth and fulfilment, that spirituality in one of its forms at an early stage is and should be a movement of withdrawal, of diminishing dynamism in the sense of an "introversion". For when man still lives mostly in the vital domain and is full of the crude life urge, when the animal is still dominant in him (as the Tantrik discipline also points out), then a rigorous asceticism and self-denial is needed for the purification and sublimation of the nature. At that stage powers and dynamic capacities that often develop in the course of such discipline should also be carefully avoided and discarded; for they are more likely to bring down the consciousness to the ordinary level. But if that were the procedure and principle in the past, one need not eternise it into the present and the future. We Believe mankind – a good part of mankind in its inner consciousness – has advanced sufficiently on the vital level as to be able to give a new turn to his life and follow a different course of development. If he has not totally outgrown the animal, at least some higher element has been superimposed on it or infused into it and he can very well find the fulcrum of his nature in this superior station and order a new pattern of values and way of becoming. In other words, he need no longer altogether shun or avoid the so-called inferior forces – the physico-vital – in him, but try to control and utilise them for higher diviner purposes in the world, upon the earth. For the earth embodies after all the crucial complex. Whatever is to be done in the end has to be done here, effected and established here. The withdrawal was needed for a purification and husbanding of the forces so that they may be brought forth and applied at the proper time and place, it is reculer pour mieux sauter, to fall back in order to leap forward all the better.

In reality, however, to a vision that sees behind and beyond the appearances, spirituality-the force of the Spirit-is ever dynamic: the spiritual soul, even when it appears passive and inert, is most active not merely in the subtle psychological domain, but also in the material field. To the gross pragmatic eye Ramakrishna, for example, appears as a less dynamic personality, a less strong and heroic, if not positively weaker

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character than Vivekananda. Well, that is only face-value reading. Vivekananda himself knew and felt and said that he was only one of hundreds of Vivekanandas that his simple and, modest-looking Guru could create if he chose. Even so a Ramdas. Ramdas was not merely a spiritual adviser to Shivaji, concerned chiefly with the inner salvation and development of his disciple, and only secondarily with the gross material activities, the things of Caesar. The two domains are not separate at least in this case: the spiritual here directly and dynamically affects the physical. The spiritual guide is the dynamo – the matrix – of the power, the power spiritual; he wields and marshals the hidden, the secret forces that are behind the outward forms and movements. And the disciple by his attitude of obeisance and receptivity becomes all the better a channel and instrument for the actual play and fulfilment of that force. A Govind Singh is another instance of spiritual power made dynamic in mundane things. And we always have the classical instance of Rajarshi Janaka.

Only, in the future a yet greater source of spiritual power is destined to be tapped and brought into play, into the plane of happenings, so that the material domain, the pattern of our actual day to day life will put on a different aspect; for a radiant consciousness will have breathed a new life into our very bodily cells.

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