Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 3

THE first thing that has to be learnt in life is that circums­tances are not all in all: however powerful and overwhelming they may appear to be at a given moment, man can always react against them. If there is not an immediate success externally as desired, the will thus exerted does not go in vain. First of all, it declares and asserts the independence and autonomy of the inner man: something within is found and established which is not touched by the environment, which lives by its own authentic truth and reality and is ever contented and happy. It is in reference to such a poise of consciousness that the great poet says:

A mind not to be changed by place or time.

The mind is its own place, and in itself

Can make a Heaven of Hell, . .¹

The soldier of an ideal, the martyr, bears testimony to the reality of this mental condition: the Yogi is he who is supremely indifferent to outside contacts (matrasparsah), fixed as he is in inner union with the Divine. Secondly, the freedom of the will not only liberates the inner person, but exerts a pressure on the outside also, upon the field and circumstances, obliging them to change or move in the direction and according to the demand of the will. Consciousness has this power: only all depends on the nature of the consciousness and the will it embodies. For consciousness-will has varying degrees and levels of its potential. A will belonging to the purely mental consciousness can have only a very limited result and may not even show itself at all in any external modification. For

¹ Milton: Paradise Lost. Bk. 1. 253

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it is only one among a million contending forces and its effect will depend upon the allies it can count on its side. Similar is the case with a vital will or a physico-vital will: these are more effective apparently but always in a narrow field; the narrower the field, the greater the possibility of the effectiveness. Moreover, a mental will affects chiefly the mental field, a vital will is directly operative in the vital world, even as a physical force is effective on physical things: each is largely confined to its own domains, the effect on other domains is for the most part indirect and remote.

But the truly effective will, that can produce an all-round change, comes from a still higher or deeper source. Indeed, the will that never fails, that turns even the external circums­tances, adverse and obstructive though they appear to be, to serve it, is the will of the soul, the spiritual being in us. And man is man, not a mere animal, because he has been called upon to seek and find his soul, to get at his inner and inmost being and from there command his external nature and outside circumstances too. The orthodox name for this endeavour is spiritual discipline or Yoga.

On lower levels, a conscious will made up of a compound energy of the mental and vital and physical will, when in sufficient proportions, has considerable effective force: great men of action have this distinction. Even then, however, . theirs is not that type which is absolute or never-failing, nor that especial category which will bring about a collective change, a fundamental change, intensive as well as extensive, needed at this evolutionary crisis of earth and humanity.

The ordinary average man is part and parcel of Nature's movement and his life is almost wholly moulded by circums­tances: he has not developed an independent inner being that can react against the universal Nature's current, that is to say, the Nature as it is, as it is actually and dynamically ex­pressed. He is the creature, described graphically in the Gita, as being moved helplessly on the circling wheel of Ignorance.¹ But even among the average men there are many who are called men of will, they are not entirely submerged in Nature's current, but endeavour to have their own way even against that current. Their psycho-vital, aided often by their physical

¹ Bh ramayan sarvabhutani yantrarudhani mayaya–XVIII.61

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consciousness, has an independent formation, being a strong centre of self-driven force, and can impress upon the outer Nature and circumstances its own pattern and disposition. Naturally, all depends upon the degree and character of that consciousness.

But the true secret of the power to control and guide Nature's dispensation lies along a different line, not along the line of the normal activity of the mental and vital and physical consciousness. Body and life and mind belong after all, at least are closely affiliated, to one's environmental consciousness; they are indeed part of the circumstances in which one is born and lives and moves. It is when one bypasses them or passes through them beyond into one's soul, into one's true being and divine personality that one at last crosses mortality and attains immortality – mrtyum tirtva. . .amrtam asnute.¹

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