Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 3

1

WHEN a man dies, his soul or psychic being, after a time goes to the psychic world and takes rest there till the hour comes to take birth again in another body upon earth. There are then these two periods in the life after death. First, the passage and next the rest. The passage means the gradual shedding of all the other sheaths or envelopes that surround the psychic being and form its earthly frame. With the physical body has to go also the subtle body, then the vital and finally the mental too. The reason why one does not remember the past lives is this that one leaves behind the instrument of memory – the brain mind – with one's death. One does not carryover with the psychic being the other parts that constitute the terrestrial life. They are dispersed and dissolved in their respective cosmic spheres. The subtle body gives up its elements to the subtle physical plane, the vital elements are taken up into the vital world and the mental elements go into the mental world, – unless the psychic being is highly developed and has organised around itself as its instrument of self-expression any of these elements. In that case, as much of the terrestrial parts – namely, of the subtle body and life and mind – as have come into direct contact with the psychic and have allowed themselves to be moved and moulded by its consciousness, will alone persist and share in the immortality of the soul. Normally, the elements of the human vehicle form a loose and unorganised aggregate massed round the psychic centre. When the centre withdraws, they too fall off automatically and are scattered into the universal storehouse of Nature. Only when they have been organised and when

Page 201

they have attained a definite form and character expressing something of the psychic nature, can they maintain their identity, for this identity is part and parcel of the psychic identity.

I have said that the memory of past lives is effaced because of the effacement of the instrument. But there is a higher memory which is the attribute of the psychic consciousness. The psychic being is made of light and knowledge: it knows, rather it sees and can survey the whole curve of its past growth and development. Of course, it may not see or remember – very often it does not – all the physical details of things and happenings of an earthly life, the hundred incidents, accidents and contingencies that are not directly linked to its consciousness. But all things that have had its touch and have contributed to its growth and development and have in their turn received its influence – objects, persons, happenings or movements – find themselves harboured in the psychic memory. And thus the only sure way of remembering the past, remembering, that is to say, what is worth remembering, is to go into the psychic being, possess the psychic consciousness. There one has the whole panorama of the soul's odyssey revealed. Any other way leads only to imagination, conjecture and delusion.

2

The passage between death and the arrival at final rest in the psychic world is a most difficult and dangerous ordeal for the human being. He has left the protection of the body and has not yet found the refuge in the psychic: he is obsessed and pulled back by his past – the desires, the hungers, the attractions and repulsions, the plans unfulfilled, problematic schemes – all haunt him still, things done, things not done crowd around him and fetter his forward march. Not only his own Karma, but the Karma of others too pursues him: all persons with whom he has had relation, who think of him now, pity him, mourn for him, lament his absence, raise so many hurdles and obstacles in his path, oblige him to turn and look back. Again, there are forces and personalities in

Page 202

the intermediate worlds with whom the poor disembodied creature has now to come in contact, and not unoften he feels like one unskinned and all his nerves on edge open helplessly to rough and painful impacts.

Indeed, although it may sound somewhat strange and wonderful, nevertheless it is literally true that the body is the fortress par excellence for the individual being: it is not merely an ugly dirty clothing that has to be cast off so that one may go straight to the enjoyment of the beatitude of Paradise; on the contrary, it is, as it were, an armour, a steel-frame that protects the subtle body against the attacks or harsh and cruel touches of other worlds and their beings. Once outside the body, there is every danger for the individual to go astray and be hurt, unless he is guided and protected by a guardian angel, as Dante has had Virgil as his Maestro. We may note here that the passage of Dante from Hell through Purgatory to Heaven across their various levels is almost an exact image of what happens to a soul after death. The highest Heaven where Dante meets Beatrice may be considered as the psychic world and Beatrice herself the Divine Grace that bathes, illumines and comforts the psychic being.

If one has, however, within oneself an ardent and sincere and un flickering flame, one can go through more or less easily and unscathed; but that is rare. Even when alive, in sleep one goes out often into other worlds and the foreign and unpleasant contacts and experiences he has there are recorded in the brain-mind as nightmares: on such occasions the best way to escape is to rush back into the body, the best place of safety. Many have this experience of rushing headlong into the body-dropping into the body, as it were – in order to escape from a threatening danger in sleep and waking up all on a sudden to find to one's relief that all was illusion and hallucination.

An easy and quick passage to the place of rest, that is what the being needs and asks for after death. This is determined by one's Karma in life and the last wish and prayer at the moment of death – for the force of consciousness at this critical moment acts not only upon the character of the passage but also upon the character even of the next birth. Apart from one's own merit, one can be helped by others also who are

Page 203

still upon earth and who claim to be his friends and relatives and well – wishers not in the way they think they do at present, that is to say, by grieving and lamenting or even by performing rites and ceremonies, these often retard rather than accelerate the passage, but by an inner detachment and calm prayer and goodwill: oftener perhaps to forget the departed is the best way to help him. A truly conscious help can be given only by one who has the requisite occult power and spiritual realisation – the Guru, for example.

3

Once in its place of rest the soul enjoys profound peace and delight and is in a kind of luminous sleep. There it assimilates all the experiences of its last life, that is to say, imbibes out of them all the substance that goes to increase and strengthen its consciousness, the sap that lends itself to the growth of the build and stature of the being. These experiences are meant to bring the soul nearer – each life being one step nearer – to the fullness of its union with the Divine Consciousness out of which it came originally upon earth as a mere spark, a parcel yet apart. This process may be short or long according to the nature of assimilation undertaken. Here also the being prepares for the impending birth, that is to say, gathers all the elements that will be required for the play of the consciousness in that life. A broad planning too is made here, a scheme in outline of the kind of experiences that one will need for the particular growth of consciousness envisaged. Some forces of consciousness, out of the stock developed and assembled by the being, are kept back, in reserve, others are brought forward for immediate use in the life to be lived next. All this, however, is not the deliberate rational process of the mind, it is something spontaneous, involved, a luminous brooding and incubation, something like the trance of Brahman within which the seed of creation is about to germinate.

The psychic being is a packet of gathered power, a charged battery, as it were; when it comes down upon earth, it calls round itself elements of mind and vital and even subtle physical needed for the purpose of the particular life experience, and

Page 204

even those that would go to constitute the physical body. The psychic being usually picks up these elements of mind and life and body out of the universal store-house of earth's atmosphere as it needs them, in the same way as it returns them there on the journey back after death. But as I have already said, there are beings who have developed well-formed personalities of mind and life and even of the physical consciousness. These formations are not mere loose accretions, temporary arrangements for a life experience, but are welded, organised, given a more or less permanent shape, as the proper instrument of the psychic being, as its own expression. In such cases, the outer personality too continues to exist as an essential mode or vibration in and with the psychic consciousness itself and when the soul descends upon earth, is in contact with the earth's atmosphere, it projects out of I itself the external personality and formation. This does not I mean certainly that the personality remains something fixed and rigid, but that it has attained an essential fullness of form and yet retains the capacity for further change and growth through further growth of the psychic being in other life experiences.

Now the time and occasion for a particular birth of the soul depends naturally on the inner need of that being. But it must be noted – as it is a fact in the occult world – that the souls are not so many absolutely separate unrelated autonomous self-sufficient entities, each one coming and going as and when it chooses and likes: on the contrary, the souls form groups or families according to some secret affinity. And when they come down, they do so not unoften in company. A call goes, a bell is rung as it were intimating that the hour is come and they rush down. And it may even happen that in rushing down a psychic being is not too careful or fastidious about the instrument, the vehicle he chooses to inhabit; whatever is handy and nearest and on the whole suitable to his purpose he takes up and goes forward. He takes it all as an adventure and has the joy of battle and the warrior spirit that can taste of victory only when hard fought and won. That is how we meet not unoften a considerable discrepancy between the inner being of a man and his earthly tenement, his soul and his external character and physical nature. There is a

Page 205

meaning in the choice, a significance in the utilisation of unfavourable conditions: there is a method in the madness.

This grouping will appear natural and inevitable when we bear in mind the purpose of creation and the role of the psychic consciousness. For it is not a matter of individual salvation, of the unilateral growth and development and fulfilment of an individual psychic being. The soul is a luminous point in an inconscient universe and its role is to make it conscious, at least a representative portion of it. The psychic being's activity is the means of a new creation, the trans-mutation of the earth-consciousness, the growth and advent of a divine race, the manifestation and embodiment of the Divine and his play upon earth. The souls are the warriors, playmates, the beloved of the Lord. They have to assemble and move together for the interest of the play. They have to be in companies and regiments and battalions, in associations and concert and harmonised formations.

4

The souls group themselves into natural types according to the fundamental mode of consciousness and its dynamism. And they form a hierarchy: they exist and function in an organisation, the type and pattern of which is the pyramid. At the apex is the One Supreme, at the base the infinity of individual and disparate souls, earthly sparks, that are emanations, derivations, scattered condensations, parts and parcels of that One Supreme. In between, from the top towards. the bottom, lie in a graded scale formations more and more specialised, particularised and concretised: as we rise we meet the larger, vaster more comprehensive forms of the same entities till we arrive at the typal and original, the source being. Thus we can view a soul along its line of emanation from the central source as a series of beings, the higher enclosing and encompassing the lower. Not only so, a higher entity can have several lower emanations and each of these again can emanate several others. The number of emanations multiply as one goes down and they decrease as one goes up. We can understand now what is meant when we speak of

Page 206

kindred souls. When there is an inexplicable natural affinity or similarity between two souls, it happens in such a case that the souls are emanations of the same Over-Soul. And it happens also sometimes that the guardian angel or daemon whom one may contact is none other than one's own Over-Soul. The term Over-Soul takes thus a literal and a profound significance.

We may illustrate here a little. At the apex of the pyramid of existence is the Divine, the Supreme Person, the Purushottama. Even there as He begins to lean and look dawn, He expresses himself at the very outset as the dual personality of Ishwara and Shakti (the Divine Father and the Divine Mother) – sa dvitiyam aicchat, as the Upanishad says. That is still the Divine in His highest transcendent status, paratpara. Next, this dual or biune or divalent reality shows itself or throws itself further out in a fourfold valency of the dynamic truth consciousness, creating and leading the cosmic evolution. The Four Aspects of Ishwara, forming the male or purusa line, are the great names: Mahavira, Balarama, Pradyumna and Aniruddha. And the corresponding four aspects of Ishwari form the other great quaternary: Maheshwari, Mahakali, Mahalakshmi and Mahasaraswati. They embody the four major attributes of the Divine in his relation to the created universe: Knowledge, Power, Love and skill in work. They also represent thus a divine fourfold order. The first embodies the Brahmin quality of large wisdom, wide comprehension, a vast consciousness; the second has the Kshatriya quality of force, dynamism, concentration and drive of energy; the third possesses the Vaishya quality of harmony, beauty, mutuality and the fourth has the Shudra quality of perfect execution, thoroughness in detailed working, order and arrangement.

The higher Gods, like those, for example, envisaged in the Veda, may be considered each as an emanation of one or other of these Divine Aspects. They are dwellers of Swar or the Overmind. Varuna seems to be an emanation of Mahavira, a son of Maheshwari: for he is pre-eminently the god of the pure and vast consciousness who releases us from the triple bonds and shows us the winding way into the embrace of the infinite Mother. His associate, Mitra, is the lord of love and harmony, evidently an emanation of Pradyumna (or Mahalakshmi).

Page 207

Other gods of the same category are Bhaga and Soma. The Balarama or Mahakali aspect is manifested in Aryaman: Rudra being another form of the same. And Mahasaraswati (or Aniruddha) must have given birth to and inspired the Ribhus, who are artisans of divinity. The Puranic trinity – Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva – with lndra as the fourth member forms a parallel system embodying a similar conception.

Another tradition gives the Four Supernals as (1) Light or Consciousness, (2) Truth or Knowledge, (3) Life and (4) Love. The tradition also says that the beings representing these four fundamental principles of creation were the first and earliest gods that emanated from the Supreme Divine, and that as they separated themselves from their source and from each other, each followed his own independent line of fulfilment, they lost their divinity and turned into their opposites – Light became obscurity, Consciousness unconsciousness or the inconscient, Truth became falsehood and Knowledge ignorance, Life became death and finally Love and Delight became suffering and hatred. These are the fallen angels, the Asuras that deny their divine essence and now rule the world. They have possessed mankind and are controlling earthly existence. They too have their emanations, forces and beings that are born out of them and serve them in their various degrees of power. Men talk and act inspired and impelled by these beings and when they do so, they lose their humanity and become worse than animals.

But still the Pure Reality descends undeviated in its own line and man enshrines that within him, the undying fire that will clean him and bear him to the source from where he came. And there are luminous godheads that help him and wish themselves to participate in the terrestrial transformation. There is a pressure from above and there is an urge from below, between these two infinities all is ground and moulded and changed. Even the Lords of Denial will in the end change and learn to affirm, become again what they truly were and are.

Page 208

5

First then there are the supreme divinities, aspects or own personalities of the Divine in his supreme status, the Super-mind; next come the first emanations, the true or pure gods in the Overmind. Thence or simultaneously there is the line of deformation, that of the false gods and godheads, the Asuras and Titans. These too extend in a series of emanations down to the subtle physical; except when they themselves incarnate on the earth in an earthly body.

Man, the soul, we said, comes direct from the Divine and is thrown and almost stuck into the earth as a spark, as a point of luminous consciousness-force. This soul, as it develops, we find, belongs to one or other of the fundamental type of divine personality, it is a lineal descendant, as it were, of one of the quaternary and its growth means growing into the nature of that particular godhead and its fulfilment means. identification with that.

We may try to illustrate by examples, although it is a rather" dangerous game and may tend to put into a too rigid and' mathematical formula something that is living and variable. Still it will serve to give a clearer picture of the matter. Napoleon. evidently was a child of Mahakali; and Caesar seems to have been fashioned largely by the principle of. Maheshwari; while Christ or Chaitanya are clearly emanations in the line of Mahalakshmi. Constructive geniuses, on the other hand, like the great statesman Colbert, for example, or Louis XIV, Ie grand monarque, himself belong to a family (or gotra, as we' say in India) that originated from Mahasaraswati. Poets and artists again, although generally they belong to the clan of Mahalakshmi, can be regrouped according to the principle that predominates in each, the godhead that presides over the inspiration in each. The large breath in Homer and Valmiki, the high and noble style of their movement, the dignity and vastness that compose their consciousness affiliate them naturally to the Maheshwari line. A Dante, on the other hand, or a Byron has something in his matter and manner that make us think of the stamp of Mahakali. Virgil or Petrarch, Shelley or our Tagore seem to be emanations of Beauty, Harmony, Love – Mahalakshmi. And the perfect artisanship

Page 209

of Mahasaraswati has found its especial embodiment in Horace and Racine and our Kalidasa. Michael Angelo in his fury of inspirations seems to have been impelled by Mahakali, while Mahalakshmi sheds her genial favour upon Raphael and Titian; and the meticulous care and the detailed surety in a Tintoretto makes us think of Mahasaraswati's grace. Mahasaraswati too seems to have especially favoured Leonardo da Vinci, although a brooding presence of Maheshwari also seems to be intermixed there.

For it must be remembered that the human soul after all is not a simple and unilateral being, it is a little cosmos in itself. The soul is not merely a point or a single ray of light come down straight from its divine archetype or from the Divine himself, it is also a developing fire that increases and enriches itself through the multiple experiences of an evolutionary progression – it not only grows in height but extends in wideness also. Even though it may originally emanate from one principle and Personality, it takes in for its development and fulfilment influences and elements from the others also. Indeed, we know that the Four primal personalities of the Divine are not separate and distinct as they may appear to the human mind which cannot understand distinction without disparity. The Vedic gods themselves are so linked together, so interpenetrate one another that finally it is asserted that there is only one existence, only it is given many names. All the divine personalities are aspects of the Divine blended and fused together. Even so the human soul, being a replica of the Divine, cannot but be a complex of many personalities and often it may be difficult and even harmful to find and fix upon a dominant personality. The full flowering of the human soul, its perfect divinisation demands the realisation of a many-aspected personality, the very richness of the Divine within it.

Page 210