Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 1

THE QUEST AND THE GOAL

Man and the Gods

1

THE Earth symbolises and epitomises material Nature. It is the body and substance, the very personification, of uncon­sciousness-Ignorance carried to the last limit and concretised. It represents, figures the very opposite of the Reality at the summit. The supreme and original Reality is the quaternary: (1) Light, (2) Truth, (3) Love and (4) Life. They are the first and primal godheads with whom creation starts and who preside over the whole play of the manifestation. These gods that emanated out of the supreme consciousness of the Divine Mother as her fundamental aspects and personalities had automatically an absolute freedom of action and movement, otherwise they would not be divine personalities. And this freedom could be exercised and was in fact exercised in cutting the tie with the mother consciousness, in order to follow a line of independent and separate development instead of a merger life of solidarity with the Supreme. The result was immediate and drastic-the precipitation of a physical life and an earthly existence which negated the very principles of the original nature of the godheads and brought forth exactly their contraries: instead of Light there brooded Darkness and Inconscience, Truth turned to Falsehood, Love and Delight gave place to Hatred and Suffering and finally, instead of Life and Immortality there appeared Death. That was how separation, "the disobedience" of the Bible, caused the distortion that turned the gods into Asuras, that was how Lucifer became Satan.

And that was how Paradise was lost. But the story of Paradise Regained is yet more marvellous. When the Divine Mother,

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the creative infinite Consciousness found herself parcelled out and scattered (even like the body of Sati borne about by Shiva, in the well-known Indian legend) and lost in unconsciousness, something shot down from the Highest into the lowest, something in response to an appeal, a cry, as it were, from the depth of the utter hopelessness in the heart of Matter and the Inconscient. A dumb last-minute S O S from below – a De profundis clamavi-went forth and the Grace descended: the Supreme himself came down and entered into the scuttled dead particles of earth's dust as a secret core of light and flame, just a spark out of his own conscious substance. The Earth received the Grace and held it in her bosom. Thus she had her soul born in her – the psychic being that is to grow and evolve and bring about her redemption, her transmutation into the divine substance.

This is the special privilege accorded to earth, viz., she has a soul, a spark consciousness imbedded in her unconscious substance that came from the highest summit, from the supreme Divine himself. And thus earth became the representative, the personified form of the material universe; she became the mouthpiece of the extended universe, the head and front of creation, so that in and through her the supreme manifestation, the incarnation of the Divine may take place.

The Earth has come out of the universe, has evolved out of it as a distinct entity, carrying and developing within it the end, the purpose for which God created the world out of Himself. And as the earth epitomises the universe and becomes the instrument and channel of an evolutionary manifestation, even so man takes up within himself the earthly life and leads it to the high fulfilment intended for it. Earth is there as the home of man, as his mother and nurse; she has fashioned man out of her substratum and is seeking through him the release, the growth and expression of her secret consciousness.

2

The purpose of man's existence upon earth is the growth of his consciousness. Each human being is a soul, a psyche, a spark from the Spirit sent down into Matter, a ray from the

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Divine Light descended upon earth and housed in a physical body. The spark, the ray is to attain the amplitude and splendour of its original form in the divine consciousness, to express that plenitude here below. This original, the archetype of each and every individual embodied upon earth is the central being, Jivatman. At the beginning the individual soul in terrestrial evolution is just a tiny particle of consciousness: it evolves, that is to say, grows and increases in stature and potency, through a series of lives upon this earth, each life bringing its quota of experience that serves to tend the flame. When the soul has thus grown and finally reached its optimum, and is in union with its original and archetype in the fullness of self-expression, what next? What is its destiny thereafter, how does it live or move henceforward?

Three courses are open to the perfected and completely developed soul. First, it may remain, contented with its fullness, self-gathered and self-sufficient, dwelling in its own domain – the psychic world – and enjoying the even, equal, undisturbed felicity and beatitude of union with the Divine. This status may perhaps not be chosen by many or for a long time. The second line that the Psyche can adopt is to come down or remain upon earth and take a share in the fulfilment of the Divine Purpose in the world. That purpose is the transformation of the physical, making the material an embodiment of

the divine Light and Power and Bliss and Immortality. A third development also may take place; this is not strictly speaking normal, not the logical and inevitable happening in the course of things, nor does it depend wholly upon any personal choice of the psychic being, so to say. It occurs when the force of a higher destiny operates, for a special work and at a special time. It is when the psychic being is contacted with, made to identify itself with, a godhead under a higher dispensation, when, in a word, a divinity descends into a human soul.

The gods are especial powers and executive agents of the one Divine. They move and act in a special way with a special end in view. They are, we may say, highbrow entities: they carry things with a high hand. That is to say, what they have got to do, they seek to do without any consideration or computation of the means, without regard to the pauses and hindrances that naturally attend all terrestrial and human

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achievements. God said, let there be light, and there was light. That is also the way of the gods. There is here an imperial majesty and grandeur, a sweeping mastery and sovereign indifference,

Remote from the Force that cries out in its pain,¹

and

Above joy and sorrow is that grandeur's walk:²

The gods possess this high quality of crystal purity, of a concentrated seeing will in which vision and execution form one single simultaneous movement, of the taut yet perfectly serene rhythm of a hero-consciousness. Something of that grandiose sweep of godly march – the Virgilian gradus divi – is echoed in these Vedic lines hymned to Varuna:

Adabdhāni varunasya vratāni vicakaśaccandramā naktameti

"The moon comes out in the night revealing the inviolable workings of Varuna."

Such are the gods, such is their nature:

The Spirit's free and absolute potencies Burn in the solitude of the thoughts of God.³

and

Unmoved by cry of revolt and ignorant prayer

They reckon not our virtue and our sin,

They bend not to the voices that implore.⁴

Human nature, human movement, is, however, different. Man, the terrestrial creature, has developed as the result of a slow growth, through struggle and suffering, the sturm und drang of an arduous ascent. He knows of things which the gods do not. He has an experience which even they, strange to say, covet. First of all, it must be borne in mind that the gods

1 Sri Aurobindo: Savitri-Book 1, Canto 4

2 ibid

3 ibid

4 ibid

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represent only one mode of consciousness, a fixed and definite type – a god is bound by his godhood; but man embodies all the modes of consciousness, he is an ever growing and changing type. Man is an epitome of creation, he is coterminous with Nature. If he is that within which is wholly divine – consciousness and bliss, truth and immortality – phenomenally he is also quite the opposite – earthly, unconsciousness, pain and suffering, ignorance and falsehood, incapacity and death. If heaven is his father, the earth is his mother – dyaur me pitā mātā Prthivīriyam. And all the gradations in between he has in him and can become any.

Man possesses characters that mark him as an entity sui generis and give him the value that is his. First, toil and suffering and more failures than success have given him the quality of endurance and patience, of humility and quietness. That is the quality of earth-nature – earth is always spoken of by the poets and seers as all-bearing and all-forgiving. She never protests under any load put upon her, never rises in revolt, never in a hurry or in worry, she goes on with her appointed labour silently, steadily, calmly, unflinchingly. Human consciousness can take infinite pains, go through the infinite details of execution, through countless repetitions and mazes: patience and perseverance are the very badge and blazon of the tribe. Ribhus, the artisans of immortality – children of Mahasaraswati – were originally men, men who. have laboured into godhood. Human nature knows to wait, wait infinitely, as it has all the eternity before it and can afford and is prepared to continue and persist life after life. I do not say that all men can do it and are of this nature; but there is this essential capacity in human nature. The gods, who are usually described as the very embodiment of calmness and firmness, of a serene and concentrated will to achieve, nevertheless suffer ill any delay or hindrance to their work. Man has not perhaps the even tenor, the steadiness of their movement, even though intense and fast flowing; but what man possesses is persistence through ups and downs-his path is rugged with rise and fall, as the poet says. The steadiness or the staying power of the gods contains something of the nature of indifference, something hard in its grain, not unlike a crystal or a diamond. But human patience, when it has formed and taken shape, possesses a

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mellowness, an understanding, a sweet reasonableness and a resilience all its own. And because of its intimacy with the tears of things, because of its long travail and calvary, human consciousness is suffused with a quality that is peculiarly human and humane-that of sympathy, compassion, comprehension, the psychic feeling of closeness and oneness. The gods are, after all, egoistic; unless in their supreme supramental status where they are one and identical with the Divine himself; on the lower levels, in their own domains, they are separate, more or less immiscible entities, as it were; greater stress is laid here upon their individual functioning and fulfilment than upon their solidarity. Even if they have not the egoism of the Asuras that sets itself in revolt and antagonism to the Divine, still they have to the fullest extent the sense of a separate mission that each has to fulfil, which none else can fulfil and so each is bound rigidly to its own orbit of activity. There is no mixture in their workings – na methate, as the Vedas say; the conflict of the later gods, the apple of discord that drove each to establish his hegemony over the rest, as narrated in the mythologies and popular legends, carry the difference to a degree natural to the human level and human modes and reactions. The egoism of the gods may have the gait of aristocracy about it, it has the aloofness and indifference and calm nonchalance that go often with nobility: it has a family likeness to the egoism of an ascetic, of a saint – it is sāttwic; still it is egoism. It may prove even more difficult to break and dissolve than the violent and ebullient rājasic pride of a vital being. Human failings in this respect are generally more complex and contain all shades and rhythms. And yet that is not the whole or dominant mystery of man's nature. His egoism is thwarted at every step – from outside, by, the force of circumstances, the force of counter-egoisms, and from inside, for there is there the thin little voice that always cuts across egoism's play and takes away from it something of its elemental blind momentum. The gods know not of this division in their nature, this schizophrenia, as the malady is termed nowadays, which is the source of the eternal strain of melancholy in human nature of which Matthew Arnold speaks, of the Shelleyan saddest thoughts: Nietzsche need not have gone elsewhere in his quest for the origin and birth

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of Tragedy. A Socrates discontented, the Christ as the Man of Sorrows, and Amitabha, the soul of pity and compassion are peculiarly human phenomena. They are not merely human weaknesses and failings that are to be brushed aside with a godlike disdain; but they contain and yield a deeper sap of life and out of them a richer fulfilment is being elaborated.

Human understanding, we know, is a tangled skein of light and shade – more shade perhaps than light – of knowledge and ignorance, of ignorance straining towards knowledge. And yet this limited and earthly frame that mind is has something to give which even the overmind of the gods does not possess and needs. It is indeed a frame, even though perhaps a steel frame, to hold and fix the pattern of knowledge, that arranges, classifies, consolidates effective ideas, as they are translated into facts and events. It has not the initiative, the creative power of the vision of a god, but it is an indispensable aid, a precious instrument for the canalisation and expression of that vision, for the intimate application of the divine inspiration to physical life and external conduct. If nothing else, it is a sort of blue print which an engineer of life cannot forego if he has to execute his work of building a new life accurately and beautifully and perfectly.

3

We have spoken of the stability, the fixity, the rigidity even, of the god type and we contrasted it with the variability, the many-sidedness, the multiple character of the human consciousness. In another view, however, the tables are turned and the opposite appears as the truth. Man, for example., has a physical body and nothing is more definite and fixed and rigid than this material sheath. The gods have no body, but they have a form which is supple and changeful, not hard and crystallised like the human figure. Gods, we said, are cosmic forces – lines (or vectors, if we wish to be scientifically precise) of universal forces; this does not mean that they have no shape or form. They too have a form and can be recognised by it even as a human being is recognisable

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by his body. In spite of variability the form retains its identity. The form changes, for a god has the capacity to act in different contexts at the same time; within his own universe a god is multi-dimensional. The Indian seer and artist often seeks to convey this character of the immortals by giving them a plurality of arms and heads. In modern times the inspiration behind the surrealist movement lies precisely in this attempt to express simultaneity of diverse gestures and activities, a synthetic close-up of succeeding moments and disparate objects or events. But in spite of all changes Proteus remains Proteus and can be recognised as such by the vigilant and careful eye. The human frame, we have said, is more fixed and rigid, being made of the material substance. It has not evidently the variability of the body of a god. And yet there is a deeper mystery: the human body is not or need not be so inflexible as it appears to be or as it usually is. It has considerable plastic capacities. We would say that the human body holds a marvellous juste milieu. By its solid concreteness it acts as a fortress for the inner consciousness to dwell in safe from easy attacks of the hostiles: it acts also as a firm weapon for the same inner consciousness to cut into the material world and indent and impress its pattern of truth upon an otherwise hard and refractory material made of ignorance and obscurity and falsehood. Furthermore, it is supple enough to receive and record into its grain the pattern and substance of the higher reality. The image of the transubstantiation of bread and wine into the flesh and blood of Christ is symbolic of the alchemy of which the human body is capable when one knows how to treat it in occult knowledge and power. The human body can suffer a sea-change which is not within the reach of the radiant body of an immortal.

4

Divine Love is something aloof, apart, beyond. Even then it is there behind supporting, animating, helping all and everything. It is indeed the secret Delight in things. It is the sense of utter identity of Self and self. Its status is in the Transcendent where Love and Life and Light are fused together

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into one single absolute reality. When it expresses itself, that is to say, when it makes its presence felt as such in its supreme nature, it seems almost like indifference, so calm and tranquil and poised it is, wide and vast and far and away, unlike anything human. Indeed human consciousness would view it almost as heartlessness. It has the non-humanity of which A.E. speaks in those famous lines:

Like winds or waters were her ways:

They heed not immemorial cries;

They move to their high destinies

Beyond the little voice that prays.

or to which Victor Hugo gives a very similar expression:

Nos destins ténébreux vont sous des lois immenses

Que rien ne déconcerte et que rien n'attendrit.

Vous ne pouvez avoir de subites clémences

Qui dérangent le monde, ô Dieu, tranquille esprit!¹

This is the divine love, love proper to Maheshwari. But there is another love more intimate, close, human-the love of Mahalakshmi. This is the love that comes down here upon earth and takes on an earthly quality, a terrestrial vibration. In other words, it has what we call the psychic quality that characterises the human feeling with its peculiar charm and sweetness and intensity and magic. It goes with­out saying that by human we do not 'mean here the gross human thing which is more animal than human, a matter of the external heart, made up of crude passion and egoistic demand, but that which is the truth of all this deviation and deformation, lying behind in the inner heart. The psychic being is a special creation in and for earth, in and for man, the earthly creature. It is, as we have said, divine Grace imbedded in Matter.

The gods are glorious beings; they are aspects and personalities of the Divine, presiding and ruling over the cosmic laws, each with his own truth and norm and dominion,

¹ Our dark destinies move under vast laws that nothing diverts, nothing softens. Thou canst not have sudden clemencies that disturb the world, 0 God, Spirit tranquil!-Victor Hugo, A Villequier.

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although, in the higher status, all work together and harmoniously. Even then they do not possess a soul, a psychic core of being. They are forms and powers of consciousness organised round a divine truth, a typal Idea; but they do not have this exquisite presence secretly seated in the heart, which is the privilege of the terrestrial creature.

And the exquisiteness, the special quality of this inner Heart is mostly if not wholly derived from a particular factor of terrestrial evolution. For the journey here is a sacrifice, a passage through pain and suffering, even through frustration and death. The tears that accompany the mortal being in his calvary of an earthly life serve precisely as a holy unction of purification, give a sweet intensity to all his urges in the progressive march to Resurrection. This is the Immanent Divine who has to be worshipped and realised as much as the Transcendent Divine, if man is to fulfil himself wholly and earth justify its existence.

The legend of the great ascetic Sankaracharya going straight to the realisation of the Supreme knowledge in Brahman but obliged to come down and enter into another earthly body for the experience of love, even earthly love, in order to complete his realisation is instructive and illustrates our point.

As the human aspiration is to reach out towards divinity, the gods too at times are not satisfied with their closed divine status. They lean down to help humanity, to bring it up into their consciousness; but also they seek this contact and unification for their own sake, for a change and transformation in themselves; they may seek to rise further in a higher status of consciousness or they may wish to participate in the earthly travail, in the human endeavour. In either case the channel lies through the human consciousness. In the Vedas the gods always look to men, almost depend upon them for their own fulfilment and enrichment. Men ask the gods for wealth and plenty – material as well as spiritual – the gods too ask from men the sacrifice, the sacrifice that pours out the substance of the human reality upon which they feed and grow. The Gita speaks of the same covenant – the interchange of gifts between the two, each increasing the other and both attaining the highest good.

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